Why has this goal been malformed and twisted around to the point where people are coming up with any solution that doesn't involve tackling the cost and the career issue?
Not really. Lets say every student scores within 10 percentage point of their true "merit". So if you only pick the top 1% scorers you actually could get students down in the top 11%. So why not just pick top 11% by random? Because when you pick a top 11% scorer you extend your range so you now could get as low as top 21%. Ranking them still matters quite a lot even if error range is larger than their pick range.
It could be true that there is no correlation between true "merit" and test scores when you get to, say, the 99%th percentile. Especially since the predictive ability of these tests must be suspect now that you can study strategies for them.
In that situation, Harvard shouldn't value a 1600 any more than a 1540.
If they’re smart and have potential to succeed, a meritocratic measure should rank them favourably. The problems with tipping the scales too far are (1) it’s inefficient, in that the total likely production of the student body is lowered and (2) it can backfire, by visibly creating a two-tier student body between those admitted on their own merits and those admitted for other reasons.
In the United States, we tend to tip the scale towards privilege through legacy admissions and institutional advancement programs. We also tip them towards social goals through affirmative action.
Based on my non-statistical observational view, these programs are insanely effective at helping these students. Hell, some of the best students in the uni are exactly these poor students. The most successful student from my batch grew up in a village in the middle of nowhere and went to MIT for a physics PhD.
I have seen very little evidence of two-tier because some of the privileged are lazy and don't achieve much in uni.
We have to this point been unable to produce such a measure, despite more than a century of trying.
We have not been able to produce a precise measure. But we’re able to e.g. identify quartiles. Compressing the measure to “likely to graduate” tends to take care of a lot of the lifting.
That’s why a random selection component makes sense. It is honest about our limitations. And it removes the stigma from those who met the fuzzy threshold but didn’t get admitted.
The problem they are trying to address is that true meritocracy only exists in a perfect system, that is to say that you can not fairly compare individuals across different environments. More concretely one of the problems it is trying to account for the situations where wealth or post code privilege gives students an advantage over other students.
There are often situations where students just performed better on a standardized test because they could afford a couch or had better teachers and not because they are “smarter” or more capable.
The solution is to make sure that students have good teachers and a couch (??) to become more capable, and not to waste limited elite teaching resource on less-capable students.
In order to make sure that students have good teachers, one challenge is making it possible for people from impoverished communities to be able to get high-quality schooling so that they can either become teachers or earn money that can go back into those communities.
If you could afford enough teachers, with good training, on a impoverished region tax base, it would be revolutionary.
All I can say is that's nuts. I got a perfect score on my ACT, and I know for a fact that I guessed on some questions. Am I really a stronger applicant than somebody else who made less-lucky guesses?
There's a garbage-in/garbage-out problem here where people who desperately want "meritocracy" are deluding themselves into believing they can accurately identify "merit" down to some extremely fine precision.
Well, what you seem to be saying is that the selection process is basically randomized among the top candidates already, per the linked article... so, no change needed?
You can see on the Asian curve for the SAT, that cohort saturates the high end. The SAT should be so difficult that no one gets a perfect score without being lucky.
And lucky guesses on an entrance exam is a better filter than a lottery, because it feels like merit. For an MIT degree to mean "I'm reasonably smart and very lucky" would be a disaster, for society and for MIT students both. The illusion of agency simply must be maintained.
Anyway the alternative proposed here is replacing lucky question guesses with luck via a lottery.
Yes, this proposal is more transparent and honest about the factor luck plays in the outcomes. It doesn't try to launder luck through some test numbers and essays to pretend it's purely meritocratic.
Definitely time to quit get back to work.
Even were the tests perfect, rich people and ones with additional free time can take more attempts with reduced cost to themselves and families.
Additionally, tests are extremely time boxed, while actual research work is much more lax. Tests also do not measure cooperation, a crucial thing in real life research and development. Speed is not necessarily quality, and we don't know how correlated it is.
Multiple attempts on tests don't help very much. We have 75 years of reliability research to show that. It's not single sample estimation. It's a couple hours to collect A LOT of samples.
Of course, money for tutoring, better schools, and highly-educated parents help with test outcomes and are a barrier to socioeconomic mobility. The basic problem is, random selection aside, no one has proposed a fairer system. Read Animal Farm at some point to see what happens when you have revolutions against an unfair system, without proposing something better to take its place..
But my basic point is you're confusing things YOU don't know with things WE don't know. We know a lot about tests, their upsides, their downsides, and alternatives. It's not like there aren't scientific conferences on this stuff.
Your numbers, 99.9997% to 99.9998%, roughly ask whether we can distinguish the second-best student in America from the fourth-best with an SAT.
I'm not quite sure anyone is either using the SAT for that, or claiming it's a helpful tool for that. Indeed, at that level, it's not even clear what ranking even means. If you believe people are using the SAT this way, please point me in their direction.
Again, inane comments aren't helpful for advancing the discussion. We have specific facts and numbers to work from. Trump popularized the art of making up facts on the fly, but it's not one I recommend adopting more broadly.
My assertion is that there's no way for them to accurately make distinctions that fine. Much more honest to set some bar of "you must be at least this proficient to perform academically at Yale" and then pull names out of a hat containing everyone who meets that standard.
As it stands, the current admissions regime looks designed to reify class privileges in America.
This is thread reads like a Donald Trump speech. AstralStorm claims science doesn't exist, when there are whole conferences. rhino369 fakes up some numbers. And now, you come in making fake claims about Harvard and Yale admissions.
I mean, yes, no one is arguing that the admissions regime isn't there to reify class privilege, but if you're going to try to fix the problem, you can't start with falsehoods, half-truths, or sloppy thinking.