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Comment by TchoBeer | Hacker News Reader

So what do they stand to gain by eliminating standardized testing, if they also don't benefit from legacy advantage?

If you can't compete in intelligence, you want to compete in bullshit (essays / "activities") because you have a much better chance of winning that than someone who can't afford it.

Is the SAT or ACT a particularly good test of intelligence? Smarts, maybe, but I've met a lot of extremely intelligent, talented people who are not particularly "smart" by these measures.

You can practice and take classes that teach you how to do well on the SAT/ACT. No guarantee that you'll ace it but you'll do much better if you know the strategy behind a perfect score.

This is one of the reasons people with more resources do much better on these tests - getting test-specific tutoring, taking prep classes, etc. will significantly raise most people's scores. The tests are much closer to measuring "How good are you at taking the SAT/ACT?" than some kind of unbiased "How brilliant are you?" measurement.

As opposed to all those other academic tests where resources and preparation make no difference?

Once you are in school, perhaps with a scholarship, you have many more resources and time to prepare, to compete with classmates. That's the point - just getting into the school is filtering out students, even those that demonstrate achievement and commitment in other ways (i.e. grades).

I don't understand what that has to do with intelligence? Rote learning doesn't make you intelligent. Again, OP specifically said "if you can't complete on intelligence" and then went on to draw a link to "activities" being bullshit, and therefore a not a measure of intelligence. That makes no sense at all.

Well, then they're judged on their extra-curricular, volunteering and community activities, rather than their SATs.

I'm willing to bet poorer people don't do so well on those.

I'm willing to bet poorer people don't do as well on the SATs either.

Try participating in extra-curricular, volunteering and community activities while working a minimum wage job 20+ hours a week and going to school. Have you worked in a restaurant? It is fu##ing exhausting. At least testing tries to achieve standardized results. It is not perfect but it is better than the current alternative

But the question is , is it better ? From my experience the test all come down to if a student is lucky enough to have caring parents and test prep. Wouldn’t a better metric be to have that minimum wage job count as a extra curricular activity?

Why are you trying to improve the world rather than choose between two bad choices? /s

Applying data from other complex systems besides our own might not be easy, but surely other countries have some studies we could compare with our own. I'm going to go look. Hope you're having a nice day.

My wife is from a fairly poor background and had few advantages growing up, but her country rigourously uses standardised testing for university admissions. She didn't have any extra curriculars or after school activities to brag about in her personal essay, but she aced the standardised test and got into the best university in her country and now she has a successful career and lives a lifestyle far more affluent than anything her parents could have dreamed of. Without standardised testing she wouldn't have had a chance.

The drive to eliminate standardised testing is insane, and it can only hurt minorities and the already-disadvantaged, to the benefit of the elite. But then that's the whole point.

Without SATs, upper income parents can put their kids in private schools with inflated grades and pay top dollar for high-end extracurriculars, sports and music coaches, etc.

While I won't get into whether the SATs also "discriminate" in some way against students who are disadvantaged by poverty, etc., eliminating the SAT won't solve the problem. It will just make things worse! They are, for all their problems, a great equalizer.

It's my understanding that, at least for elite private college admissions, the extremely high quality of college admissions counsellors at decent-or-better prep high schools is a major advantage. They know admissions officers by name at several schools, they know which rules are firm and must be followed and which can be bent or ignored to the applicant's advantage, they write excellent recommendation letters, they give highly tailored and accurate advice on getting into specific schools, the do a good job of focusing their and the students' efforts on schools they actually do have a good chance of getting in to (and also not aiming too low) and ruling out long-shots early to improve chances (because more, better-focused effort) at the remaining options, that kind of thing.

Probably less of a factor at (most) state schools, though.

It's much worse than that - there is whole industry around college admissions consulting. Why depend on your high-school counselor when you can hire an expert? In the worst cases the expert even helps students effectively pre-plan their whole high school experience to increase students' chances of getting in to elite schools.

In my country, universities don't compare school grades apples-to-apples. Usually if a school gives out inflated grades, that is taken into consideration.

Entrance by subjective determination. Might as well make it a lottery. Apply, get ticket, random number generator makes selection.

If this were clearly a bad thing, wouldn't the schools that don't do this produce much higher quality graduates?

Honestly, I have no idea. I think everyone is seeking signal when a lot of life is luck. Smart people will overcome except when they can’t (smart people fail despite their best efforts all the time) and those who might be unable to achieve (whether because of lack of intelligence or because of life circumstances) might still stumble into success. It’s a crapshoot, but pulling levers makes everyone look like they’re trying to fix whatever they want to fix.

We’re optimizing for the wrong problems (selective admissions for limited slots), versus working towards universal access to high quality instruction regardless of location.

You make it sound like it's not something that should be fixed. Any alternative ways of enabling lower-middle class kids with fewer resources to achieve opportunities at success?

Universal access (free) to community colleges, remote learning MOOCs from those top in their fields. Commodify higher education and distribute widely, don’t reward artificial scarcity.

Existing colleges do not have incentives to do this. They are incentivized to protect the value of their brand and their institution, and to preserve scarcity and gated access to credentials.

Except Colorado just banned legacy admissions and dropped their SAT/ACT requirement.

Someone will be making a subjective determination for each student based on something that isn’t a test score or legacy attribute (“feels”, their “story”, whatever you want to call it). Not exactly universal access imho (although I agree legacy should’ve never been a deciding factor).

are there schools that do random admission to compare to?

The argument is that dropping SAT/ACT requirements is bad for the school. So if that were actually true, then there should be data showing schools that dropped the requirement being worse off than schools that didn't.

What does 'bad for the school' mean? As long as they continue to rake in the cash from tuition/sports/grants and can keep funding their ever-growing bureaucracies, will they care if educational standards have cratered? The evidence suggests that they don't.

If it were purely about money, they would not be axing legacy admissions.

The legacy kids will all still be admitted. The more vague and subjective the admissions criteria, the easier it is to shoo-in the rich kids and pretend it's about anything other than money. No wonder they're getting rid of the SAT.

> Might as well make it a lottery. Apply, get ticket, random number generator makes selection.

Why not? A lottery could still have the most basic requirements for entry but beyond that what makes you think anyone's qualification system would beat random chance?

It makes it really easy to accidentally favor someone because you happen to know their pop.

Extracurriculars and essays.

I suppose poor people can't write essays? And if the argument is "wealthier students can afford help for writing essays" then the same could be said of the SATs too.

Essays for admission are never (at least when I went through the system) done under observation - they're take home assignments which makes them really easy to game.

Interviews by alumni honestly seems like a pretty good evaluation metric - it is quite susceptible to legacy favorship though.

Think the problem is more with extracurricular activities. If you are well off, it easier to let your kid go to piano lessons, do some volunteer work, join a social mission to Africa during summers, etc.

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