Sufficiently prestigious schools are drowning in perfect applicants. You don’t even need to admit any rich slackers. Just let some of the qualified substitute money for luck.
This is by design. There exist tests that can distinguish between the merely very good and the outstanding. Elite US universities go out of their ways to not use them, precisely so they can admit the merely very good legacies.
Of course I can’t find a reference for that right now, but it certainly doesn’t predict college graduation rates best.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/prestoncooper2/2018/06/11/what-...
They aren't being used, so they aren't the existing standardized tests, which are being used.
But it's not that hard to simply extend the difficulty gradient higher. Stick some math olympiad-type problems on there, for instance.
I don't understand why that is some secretly accessible knowledge that is only available to some. FWIW, the ACT always seemed more game-y to me what with its hard time crunches and stuff.
I'm not sure why one would even think an academic test could determine success. One of the biggest lies many of us have been told is that if you're just smart enough you'll be successful. Sorry, but that's not how it works.
[0] https://edpolicyinca.org/publications/predicting-college-suc...
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-22/grades-v...
One very important piece of insight I gained throughout that time is that after you use some exam to get the top 25% (ish) percent of students, the exam performance really does not matter: it does not correlate with scientific output or originality of work. If anything, I had to unlearn some of the skills that made me good at olympiads because they were severely limiting my creativity. At an olympiad you know there is a solution, while true research problems might be unsolvable and need to be approached differently.
TL;DR: Exams (selective or not, hard or not) are great at giving you the top 20% of students, but they are inherently terrible at telling you who among the top 20% will be a productive scientist or engineer.
In particular the famous Benbow study [1] that established that even among the top percentile of the population there are massive differences: the top quarter percentile (99.75-99.99) was 2-3 times more likely to have authored academic research later in life, and about 1.5x more likely to have attended postgrad education, to have gone for a STEM degree, to have gone for a PhD than the bottom quarter of the top percent (99.00-99.24).
I am asking, because if I have to choose between my empirical observations (anecdotal as they are, given it is n=1 observers), and a single piece of research without followups, I do feel justified to stick to what I have seen myself. But I am open to be convinced otherwise.
To start testing the validity of the claims in this paper a study needs to be performed where the strength of effect has to be considered, when comparing a similar one-percenter group and a larger ten-percenter group. My prediction is that the strength of effect would show only negligible differences, confirming my hunch that the special treatment[1] is what created the new subdivision in this new group.
More reading material on this topic would certainly be interesting, if you have anything in mind.
[1]: The special treatment in this paper being telling a kid "you are only a 7th grader, but you are as smart as a high schooler".
That's in line with my experience, too. Selecting olympiads is a preference for highly competitive people. In math, at least, collaboration is much more important.
It's much simpler to have a candidate include notable achievements on their CV including competitions and after-school programs. However, even here you'll find factors that don't correlate to future performance e.g. those with the means and desire to min-max a CV for college admittance ( A very important life skill ) may not be the best leaders, academics, or students.
While both of the above skills will be correlated to future performance there are almost certainly diminishing returns from selecting the top .1% according to a single dimension.
Curiously the list of fields medalists does not appear to contain a mathlete at present. Providing at least one datapoint that performance in math competitions may not be correlated to future (Academic) mathematics achievement.
Similarly, an organization of students maximizing academic performance has a certain vibe that definitely doesn't feel "perfect". It doesn't even seem like that useful of a skill, but I'd have to know the purpose of a uni to comment further.
If I fail, that's easy. I lick my wounds and go home.
But if I pass? The shape of the distribution -- basically slicing off one end of a bell curve -- means that in all likelihood, I would be at the lower end of the IQ scale within the group, even if at the upper end within the overall population.
So I'd be taking a test and paying money for the privilege of being the dumbest person in the room. It hardly seemed attractive to me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School#Demogra...
The number of Black and Hispanic students at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science was an order of magnitude higher in the 1970s; the current demographics are a consequence of paid preparation being a reliable way to score highly on the SHSAT.
Nope. Just like money, there’s also an intellectual family bank that gets inherited. And it’s not genes, it’s access to knowledge which is purchased by capital.
Of course genes play a part, but eugenics is mostly economic and political discrimination, not objective assessment of absolute potential.
That doesn't follow at all. IQ is correlated with parental IQ, due to genetics. Equally plausible, if not more so, than "books cause high IQ" is "high IQ causes books". Smart people a) like to read, and b) have smart children. I don't think it's likely that kids are boosting their IQ scores by cracking open their parent's book collection.
The hypothesis "smart people are likely to buy more books, and smart people are likely to have smart children" sounds quite plausible to me. Does it seem implausible to you?
The best way to convince me that books directly increase IQ is to donate a ton of books to kids who need it, and measure the gains. (As a side effect, you would probably win a Nobel price if that worked.) My experience with charity says that actually many people are willing to donate books to charities; charities refuse them, because they already have enough books and the kids are not reading them anyway.
There are many ways how poverty can hurt intellectual development. This is not one of them.
There are many people who want to get rid of old books for kids, because the kids grew up and don't need them anymore; if you asked them to donate the books to you, you would be doing them a favor -- saving them from a dilemma between the bad feeling of throwing the book away, and the wasted space at home. If any NGO would bring a truck and say "please give us the books for kids you no longer need", the truck would be full in an afternoon. Then... according to your theory, the truck could go a few blocks further and turn hundred poor kids into Einsteins. I would be so happy if that worked! Unfortunately, it does not.
What tests are these?
The difference between kid who gets a 1550 and a 1600 on the SAT is so marginal that calling one "outstanding" and one "merely very good" is just silly.
Is that difference the extra $20,000 parents spent on tutoring? Or is that difference actually correlated with outcomes in and after college? Doubtful.
There are tens of thousands of adults all over the world who went to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford etc. that then went on to live completely mediocre middle class lives.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with that but my point is that how you do on a test at 16-17 years old does not make you a "genius", nor does scoring in the 99.999% ensure that a person will achieve academic or career outcomes superior than the person who scored 99.9%