Hacker News Reader

Comment by TechBro8615 | Hacker News Reader

SAT scores are also pretty useless, when Harvard has enough applications with perfect scores to fill their class multiple times.

View on HN

Ignoring the results of a test seems like the wrong solution to this problem. Why not make the test harder instead, so that a perfect score could be a ticket to the school of your choice?

Depends on what they want from their students.

Any kid with an excellent (but not necessarily perfect) SAT score will likely be able to complete the coursework and graduate. After that point, why not judge on other aspects of the students lives? Test taking is a skill and outside of academia, not terribly useful.

But now they aren't going to only have applications with perfect scores. They are going to have applications with people that would have had perfect scores and a lot of people that would not have had perfect scores. For this new pool of applicants, that score would be meaningful.

How does that make SAT scores useless?

If every candidate has the same score, the score itself becomes meaningless. Imagine getting 200 identical applications for a job,where all you see is John Smith with x years at corp Y. How do you select the best candidate on this info?

Right so you’re saying they could randomly pick from their applicant pool because right now only perfect scores apply.

But wouldn’t that cease being the case once scores are not taken into account? Presumably (retroactively speaking) I could have applied or my friends could have applied... now if they do a random selection they could get one of us...

This is an excellent question--that should be answered by data. Is there a thresholding effect? It could be that say there's not much difference in a hundred points in the SAT. But, maybe GPAs actually are more predictive. I assume that rec letters are useless to first approximation unless the recommender writes something about the student that raises flags.

>Right so you’re saying they could randomly pick from their applicant pool because right now only perfect scores apply.

This would actually be a reasonable way to go. Set a cut off ACT/SAT/GPA and just do a lottery for kids that are above it. Actual fairness. Of course thats not what HPY + Stanford etc. are interested in. They are still just finishing schools for the elite. If you want actual meritocracy go to MIT or Caltech

Reply on news.ycombinator.com