UC slams the door on standardized admissions tests, nixing any SAT alternative
latimes.com
latimes.com
The whole anti-standard-testing movement is pushed by ideology leftists and corrupted bureaucrats, but the supposed experts just quietly watch the world burn. Lol.
Update: I found experts in the UCLA were tasked to make the suggestion. They suggested a new admission assessment. So the bureaucrats just totally disregarded their recommendation . See https://50.cresst.org/2020/05/20/cresst-recommendation-for-n...
Also quote: The Task Force in its review found—to some surprise—that tests such as the SAT provide a useful tool to support admissions leading to a more diverse pool of admitted students than UC otherwise would have had. The Task Force found that approximately 25% of low-income, first-generation, and underrepresented minor students earned their guaranteed admission into UC because of test scores. The Task Force’s report showed that test scores are better predictors of success for underrepresented minority students, first-generation students, and those whose families are low- income. Using recent UC-specific data, the Task Force found that test scores remain predictive of success even after student demographics are taken into account. That is especially true when compared to high school grades, whose predictive power has gone down due, in part, to grade inflation. These findings tell us that there is value in the evidence that educational assessments provide, but they can be improved—and so can the UC admissions process as a result. In a vote of confidence in its veracity, the Task Force report was unanimously endorsed by faculty members of the UC’s Academic Senate, 51–0.
The great irony being it's decisions like this that are undermining support for the University of California. We're not there yet. But a few more of these, and I could see an off-year proposition that dramatically cuts the UC budget.
Every parent is thinking about education. Kids and universities come up all the time. If it’s on the ballot, it will be scrutinized, regardless how it is going to slammed.
>The Smarter Balanced test only provided “modest incremental value” beyond high school grades in predicting a student’s first-year UC performance while “reflecting and reproducing inequality” in educational opportunities for underserved students, committee co-chair Mary Gauvain, a UC Riverside professor, told regents on Thursday. Using the state exam in admissions decisions could benefit some underrepresented students who test well but have lower grades, the committee report found, but would disproportionately favor Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and could reduce admission rates of Black, Latino and low-income applicants.
Every study I've ever seen has shown that high school grades by themselves are a good predictor of 1st year college success; high school grades + standardized test scores are an even better predictor. As noted, the use of standardized tests further benefits some underrepresented students who may have had challenges in high school. So what is the problem here? The only issue listed is that it might benefit Asian applicants more than Black and Latino applicants. Is this really where we are?
"Nearly half of American high school students – 47% in the class of 2016 – are graduating with grades ranging from A-plus to A-minus. According to the Department of Education, the average high school grade point average was 2.68 in 1990. By 2016, it had risen to 3.38, with the biggest inflation occurring in private independent schools."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2021/08/24/cla...
However, I find that I do not know how easy it is to game grades. Perhaps that is equally easy, or significantly easier. For example, can one "game" high school grades by moving to a different neighborhood with a "better" school?
Eventually they had to put a minimum because there was too much low score students draining the professors and tutors time both in and outside class.
When Computer Science became mainstream and synonymous with making lots of money then they began to limit places and the problematic students went away.
Picking any test, and curating for those willing to and capable of the work required to pass it, would create this result.
That’s the problem with this justification. It doesn’t have a functional limit.
“DIY University” covered the history of how this mechanic brought down the Ming dynasty in just a couple generations.
Tests can always be justified by non-causal correlation.
Assessments ARE the reason why validated methods of learning, like project based learning, are not widely adopted.
We have copious amounts of evidence now that teaching to the test is both psychologically harmful & reduces the ability to learn.
We will not change our education system until assessments are dethroned.
The movement to end assessment is our only hope as a society to stop teaching children based on archaic & wrong ideas about how we learn & develop work ethic. It is a significant factor in why a generation is experiencing alarmingly destructive levels of anxiety on a daily basis.
We all have a lot to gain by building education programs where students demonstrate what they learn.
Tests are the worst possible option.
Check out “Most Likely To Succeed” for powerful alternatives.
This seems very weasely worded to suggest that standardized testing benefits low income, first-generation and minority students, but since it doesn't actually say that in a straightforward way I'm left feeling that in reality it doesn't. Which would make sense, and is probably the main reason for this change.
Am I just being too suspicious?
One exam. One billion people. One standardized metric to determine who goes where.
There are flaws to this of course. The rich, with better access to tutoring and such, naturally have an advantage over the poor. But herein lies the benefit of such a system -- it is an explicit advantage. Everybody knows it. Everybody can see it. The path to obtain it is as clear as day -- "simply" have enough money. Similarly, the path to obtain success is clear -- succeed on the Gaokao (besides cheating, which is a whole other thing, and corruption, which is yet another thing).
People naturally stratify themselves in competition. When you eliminate standardized metrics to distinguish people, they will find other ways. Your friend has an internship opening that your kid can fill. Your boss lets your kid work under him. You know people who can help your kid get ahead. Meanwhile, the underprivileged are still pushed down, but in a much more subtle way. It is not scores that divides them and the privileged. It is connections -- and when you are a kid, these connections come from your family. And if you are poor, you do not have these connections. And unlike the singular exam, the path to obtaining these connections is not so clear.
Removing entry exam requirements does not help underprivileged students. It hurts them, but because it is a subtle hurt that ties to their family's place in society instead of a loud hurt like the cost of tutoring, people pretend it is somehow better. It is not. It is worse.
When I bring the point of the standard exam as a great equalizer they immediately laughed and told me that the US is a egalitarian paradise compared to what goes on there.
Everyone's results are posted publicly. The government works very hard to prevent cheating, or loss of trust in the exam or its results.
> One billion people
If you referring to people who take the exam, it's 10.78M [1].
> One standardized metric to determine who goes where.
This is just to determine the entrance to public university. Of course, the people who can afford alternative higher education is negligible compared to those taking gaokao.
But there are actually a lot of people who won't take gaokao, as they entered vocational school, in 2019 6M entered the so-called vocational high school.
> Removing entry exam requirements does not help underprivileged students.
You got it wrong.
It's not about privilege it's about the effectiveness and efficiency of the talent selection. Secondary is about giving education as a means of climbing social ladder.
[1] https://3g.163.com/dy/article/GBTPVA0U0517M6OP.html?spss=ada...
I've seen both sorts of problems.
When test scores are used well, they function the way that some people here see them. They provide another bit of evidence of potential, and can help to provide some signal as to what is going on with someone who might otherwise be underresourced, or facing sociopsychological challenges, or whatever. It's also much harder to score well on a test than to score poorly, so I think that asymmetry is helpful: a mindful admissions committee doesn't hold a less-than-stellar score against someone, but will give credit for an exceptionally high one.
At the same time, I've been in committees where controversies have erupted because of the stereotypical bias situation. There are minorities applying, they have tons of extra-score stuff to attest to their promise, they are coming from ridiculously challenged backgrounds, and they get a middling score, and someone on the committee is arguing that this single score, at a single point in time, should somehow override really high GPAs with challenging courses, volumes of very impressive letters, scores of accomplishments in research and the real world, etc. This is in the context of a program that has lots of experience with disadvantaged students, where you can see that they have this extra "learning the ropes" disadvantage but are equally smart, etc. This is also with committee members who, on paper, seem ultra-woke, but for some reason when it comes to stuff like this become really irrational and ultra-focused on test scores, and come across as highly bigoted.
Anyway, I feel a bit torn in all of this because I've seen both sides of the test score problem and think both sides are right. The problem is that the challenge is really trickier than "are test scores good or bad", the challenge is really about how people in power use them, and that's murkier, and more complex, and fraught with all sorts of obstacles.
The China example is a good one: why have any limits on how often you can take the test? What, really is the basis for that other than some kind of bigotry about human nature? Can people not change? Don't they have rough spots? We're just going to pretend that all those other sources of corruption don't play a role? That tests can't be gamed?
It's not really about the test per se.
All of these metrics seem MUCH more gameable than the SAT. Sure, buying an SAT practice test book might bump your score up by 20 points. But if you look at the rigor of courses available, that is going to vary DRASTICALLY from school to school. At least when I was in high school, poorer schools had a lot less to offer in terms of AP classes, and wealthy people have obvious advantages when it comes to extracurricular activities and some "special talents"
‘University of California Regents Chair John Perez said, "The failure of Proposition 16
[repealing that the government and public institutions cannot discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to persons on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, and public contracting.]
means barriers will remain in place to the detriment of many students, families and California at large. We will not accept inequality on our campuses and will continue addressing the inescapable effects of racial and gender inequity."’
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...
>record-breaking number of freshman applications for fall 2021 — more than 200,000
>evaluate the flood of applications without test scores, using 13 other factors
https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/fres...
>Factors we consider
>Identification by UC as being ranked in the top 9 percent of their high school class ("eligible in the local context," or ELC).
>Academic accomplishments in light of a student's life experiences and special circumstances.
>Location of a student's secondary school and residence.
i think the "semi-prestigious" refers to the fact that some bay area CCs are known as transfer feeders for Berkeley (which does not have TAG, so you have to be competitive among CC candidates).
https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/fres...
"Special talents, achievements and awards in a particular field, such as visual and performing arts, communication or athletic endeavors; special skills, such as demonstrated written and oral proficiency in other languages; special interests, such as intensive study and exploration of other cultures; experiences that demonstrate unusual promise for leadership, such as significant community service or significant participation in student government; or other significant experiences or achievements that demonstrate the student's promise for contributing to the intellectual vitality of a campus."
Notably absent is achievement in any STEM field.
It's covered by the first line of your quoted comment, right? "Special talents, achievements and awards in a particular field."
STEM is a field (although still broad) and they are looking for accomplishment in a field.
To keep this in perspective, kids haven’t even taken Science 101 at this point.
And the exceptional students who have won Olympiad golds or created open source software, etc, would more than be covered by the “special talents, achievements and awards in any field” section.
A student in my dorm had designed and built a computer using random TTL chips while in high school. Me, I'd torn a car completely to pieces, rebuilt the engine, and put it back together.
In physics 16 year olds have already been thought classical mechanics, optics and electro magnetism…
Defeats the whole meritocratic element tho, makes you think about the real reason behind this
So the price of this "equity" movement is going to be (and always was) mass de-industrialization and transforming the economy to third world status in which only immigrants educated in more sane institutions overseas drive all of the technological innovation.
I just don't see a how a nation can build state of the art planes, missiles, satellites, ships, and chips if its universities decide to eliminate objective measures of intelligence.
The future learning institutes will simply be places that administers tests and organize group projects at 1/10th the cost of current universities.
There are plenty of extremely intelligent people who for various reasons accomplish nothing and plenty of dropouts bringing enormous value to the world.
Unfortunately that's not true. And we have a lot of data that this isn't true.
I recommend reading "The Ape That Understood the Universe" for an overview https://www.amazon.com/Ape-that-Understood-Universe-Culture/...
Part of the problem here is that people feel qualified to weigh in with their feelings of how they want the world to be, completely ignoring all the evidence and data. It's that type of confident denial of reality that is at the heart of this UC decision
"Well, my uncle Jim is really smart and he was always bad at tests!"
That's basically the level of discourse happening here when making public policy, and it's shameful.
Idk, I can imagine a class of "dropout" who would find that very appealing.
And I've worked with devs who used Lambda or other bootcamps to transition from another technical/professional career into software, so it's not a completely useless model.
I also disagree with these sort of decisions but this seems a bit hyperbolic. Certain institutions will probably admit fewer students who are able to excel in those fields, and if the change is large enough it will affect the quality of those degree programs (although in probably any admissions process talented students will be better able to game it).
But the likely eventual outcome to that seems like it would be other institutions attracting the most talented students and professors. It's hard for me to imagine every single university getting on board with this, although I could imagine STEM being increasingly concentrated at universities with that focus like Caltech instead of general liberal-arts schools.
It also might be kind of interesting if the brightest students tried to excel more in things that aren't directly competitive (kind of like Thiel fellows), although I don't think that's the purpose behind these sorts of changes.
Think for a bit how many things that were hard to imagine 10 years ago are now common place in the corporate world. Social conformity pressure is a real b*tch. The best we can hope is that the occasional larger-than-life professor will be left alone to teach his craft the way he sees fit. Pray that your kids have a chance to meet one of them and the wisdom to subject themselves to the gauntlet.
If social trends seriously impaired companies' competitiveness I might expect to see the companies that are more on board underperform. But when I think of recent corporate failures (maybe Google failing to compete with FB on chat / VR / Google plus etc), garden variety mismanagement still seems like it has more impact.
So I also disagree with the policy, but worrying about "transforming the economy to third world status" like the OP seems like it is going overboard. If suboptimal policy choices or social trends destroyed society it would have been destroyed a long time ago many times over (and San Francisco wouldn't be a startup hub).
Re "mass de-industrialization", there is a historical reference, specifically the complete bankruptcy of ex Soviet block industry in the '90s, being sold for pennies to Western investors to bulldoze it and build something else in its place. I don't have a crystal ball, but I do wonder how US/China rivalry will play out in the 2040s and beyond.
Before the baby boomers we had global war, before that the great depression and growing literal communism, before that prohibition and the mob. And of course prohibition was prompted by social problems around alcohol.
So I don't think "problems compound" is always true. For a long time, teen pregnancy and alcohol use were on the rise, but that trend didn't continue indefinitely, and both have relatively recently had dramatic declines.
If you look closely enough at any time period there are often multiple serious political, economic, and/or social problems, so much so that it seems to be the norm rather than the exception.
> Post-stalinist Soviet Union, while not manically murderous, eventually imploded under the weight of a myriad suboptimal policy choices
Even this I'm not so sure. Here is a graph of their GDP [1]. My understanding is it was a political collapse first (a failed coup), and the economic collapse followed. An example that I've read China has been very mindful of (apparently Xi talks about Russia much more in his books than he does the US).
> I do wonder how US/China rivalry will play out in the 2040s and beyond.
Me too, at that point they'll probably be a much larger economy than the US. Will that have a destabilizing effect (especially with a potential military conflict over Taiwan)? Or will (the US) having a shared rival be somewhat unifying? The UK did OK despite declining in (relative) importance, but I could imagine the US struggling with its domestic problems even without any great power rivalry...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet_Union_GDP_per_capi...
In 1989 Boris Yeltsin visited Texan grocery store and was positively shocked by the choice and availability. https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...
This is the very tangible result of suboptimal choices.
But I agree, life in the '90s, post collapse, was even worse. I read it as a warning that embarking on a suboptimal choice course may be hard to steer back until reality forces a very harsh collapse.
I agree - I've always liked that story about the grocery store.
I don't think bad policies are something that can be straightforwardly extrapolated into a course to the Soviet Union though. The US has had price controls in the past but backed off. Even large welfare states like Sweden eventually hit a point where they stopped or turned back the expansion of the public sector (reducing marginal rates, eliminating wealth taxes, spending as % of GDP leveling off, etc).
The Soviet Union even collapsed while it was heading in a more positive direction from where they were at (reducing state political and economic control).
So there doesn't seem to me to be a straightforward connection between incremental policy changes and collapse.
I don't see a clear connection between collapse and subsequent "steering back" either. Support for the market economy and multiparty democracy in Russia are both at record lows [1]. Venezuela has undergone an economic collapse but is still very dysfunctional. Neither seems on track to catch up with western countries any time soon.
It's interesting to contrast this with China, which had similar issues to the Soviet Union (of having an inefficient state-run economy) and had heavy debate about how to go about reforming it [2]. At least for their economic prospects the incremental path they chose seems to be working out better.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Escaped-Therapy-Routledge-Studies-Chi...
I have to say that my American friends have a much higher confidence in the pendulum theory. Coming of age near the end of a 40 (70?) year historical tailspin, I have a somewhat less optimistic view.
But the political coalitions here (and even the economics) are somewhat complicated. For example, California recently passed several bills to de-regulate housing, which were initiatives of (a sub-faction of) the left-leaning party that controls the state. And the right-leaning party is not a technocratic one like Singapore - an important sub-faction of the right-leaning party goes against advice by economists themselves, on macro issues and increasingly on trade also.
The non-economic factions are more poised to benefit from dysfunction, and in my view, also more likely to cause dysfunction, and so enable each other. So my view is also more similar to a tailspin than a pendulum. Just that it is not as simple as trying as hard as possible to displace the establishment, because the people best positioned to replace them are often worse.
There is another, darker, argument, which I've seen presented by some fairly well-informed people. It goes something like this: the industrial revolution, with its huge inequality, financial crash, and the eventual fall to authoritarianism around the world, is, in fact, the natural order of things. And this has been papered over by massive economic distortions by governments starting with WWII, along with perpetually increasing debt levels as interest rates decline (which since debt and savings are two sides of the same coin, allows overall savings to increase and makes things less zero-sum).
With this premise, there is no natural politically-stable state to return to, and the path for managing outcomes that maintain public support for capitalism becomes even more narrow. I'm still thinking about it, but (unfortunately) I've found the arguments pretty compelling (from billionaire capitalist Ray Dalio [1], among others).
To refocus on the UC situation, and at the risk of putting words in your mouth, the general idea is that UC is exploring a set of policies, which may or maynot work for them, worst case they fail and some of the other XXX universities in this country will raise to the occasion and take their place. What's the big deal?
The SU slow moving disaster is relevant insomuch there are moral systems out there that have a mind of their own and are impervious to feedback, if not downright feeding on failure. They are so self evidently righteous that no cost is too high and no institution can afford to not implement them. With no control group left to highlight failures and moderate excesses, the whole society tailspins and the only hope becomes, tragically, total collapse.
The extent to which SU story is relevant to current UC / US situation, anybody's guess. My only job here is to be a witness for past errors.
On an absolute basis maybe, but on a relative basis I'd say they've been very effective. But as you said that's a different conversation (which if you want to have off HN, my email is in my profile!).
> worst case they fail and some of the other XXX universities in this country will raise to the occasion and take their place. What's the big deal?
> They are so self evidently righteous that no cost is too high
> the only hope becomes, tragically, total collapse.
Well, I didn't mean to minimize it exactly, just that mass de-industrialization and 3rd world status is probably going too far.
One of the hallmarks of extremism is the view you refer to that "no cost is too high". Sometimes this is about boosting the general welfare, but more often it is about a (perceived or real) threat. If every win by the right is a slippery slope to fascism, deplatforming becomes easily justified. And if every win by the left is a slippery slope to communism, it becomes easier to tolerate public undermining of the traditional checks on power, that depend on public support to be effective, like elections / the courts / legislature / (even the same side) media, etc.
The problem is as extremism increases, the threat to the other party becomes, increasingly, real. And the case for further authoritarian measures or undermining the existing system becomes more logical.
I have two issues with this accelerationist scenario. One is that the escalation is inevitably bi-directional in the end, and it is difficult to predict which faction (if any) will win, only that they are more likely to be authoritarian.
The second is that I don't see crisis as something that necessarily leads eventually to positive reforms. I think it is fully possible to have a crisis, then have things be poorly functioning for quite some time. Crisis aided the Soviet Union's fall but it also aided its rise.
In the US, the process of escalation seems to be well on its way, and to me seems more likely to lead to crisis in the medium term than incremental reforms (in any direction).
But I did extremely well on the SAT, and PSAT, which got me several scholarships and college admission.
Without the SAT to accurately gauge my potential, I wouldn't have succeeded.
This is a disgusting new policy, and will harm people.
They are too weak to say "SAT hasn't produced the results we wanted, so we're going to..."
"seek more equitable ways to assess a student"
They're again, too weak to say "from now on, admissions will be based on color".
"the state exam ... would disproportionately favor Asian Americans"
Oh, the horror, tests show that Asians are smart. Can't let that happen.
If a square peg doesn't fit a round hole, we just need to use a bigger hammer.
Vision one is that college is an elite institution meant to bring together smart, rich, and connected people in a learning and growth environment. This is sort of a perti-dish of success. In this vision, standardized tests bring in the smart people to compliment the rich and connected.
Vision two is that college is an institution for everyone to have a chance to get ahead. It's a natural extension of high school as we move into a period where we depend on knowledge workers. In this vision, standardized tests exclude people from opportunities.
Clearly the UC is adopting vision two. Whether the tests are racist or not is a distraction.
The problem with vision one is basic fairness, especially when public money is involved.
The problem with vision two is that, if we want real success, we do need elite institutions to concentrate a mix of people likely to produce amazing things. And also, I predict that the noble shine of college as a gateway to opportunity will wear off pretty quickly once they cease being elite institutions, and succumb to bureaucratic stupidity and financial recklessness.
There are a few problems with this hope, though. First, what about research? Second, government can protect universities, regardless of their quality, by requiring a university diploma if you want to work for any public institution.
> Vision two is that college is an institution for everyone to have a chance to get ahead.
Although I like the sentiment, the only way to actually achieve it would be to make the college free and with no admission tests (that is, there is literally a place for everyone, including insane or retarded people). Otherwise, there will still exist criteria that separate the "diploma haves" from the "diploma have nots", only those criteria will be less transparent than now.
If the goal is to accept more students on merit, this is a big failure in my opinion: rich kids can just game the “holistic” admissions with opportunities not available to middle/lower class students (“volunteer” trips, extracurriculars, etc.).
And more do Native American. That's an easier one to check on the checkboxes for whites. That's why there has been an exponential increase of the self-identified "Native American" population since the 1960s. Elizabeth Warren is one of the more famous self-identified Native Americans (her siblings never knew they were).
In the last census their increase has been the most in the richest counties in the US with the most number of applications to elite colleges.
My state gave out grants to small businesses during the pandemic and directly said on the application that preference would be given to minorities. I didn't check both white and native only because a local organization would be dispersing the funds and I live in a rural area.
Quite frankly, I'm sick of "reverse" racism. That was my state government all but telling me that my small business didn't deserve funds because I'm (mostly) white.
I'm not going to comment on reverse racism, but if a position or grant was set aside for a Native American then claiming heritage one does not have is bs.
However, my great grandpa didn’t inherit the farm he was supposed to because he married the “wrong” woman. That combined with how they look gave a hypothesis and DNA testing on me proved it.
So there’s no real documentation, and I don’t know for sure what tribe I descended from.
The point wasn’t that there was money set aside for Native Americans, but that it was set aside for anyone other than white people. That’s straight up wrong, and if black person could have checked a “white” checkbox to circumvent discrimination in the 50s I would have been all for it too.
We live in a country that has special programs for certain races. If those programs continue to exist, then the money / opportunity set aside for Native Americans should actually be used by people provably Native Americans.
Yes, and those programs are immoral if they give a boost to the child of a Nigerian immigrant cardiothoracic surgeon for reasons ostensibly rooted in the oppression of American slavery.
I don’t see the logic. Are you saying that you’d become persona non grata in a small community for claiming these funds?
My father (an engineering manager) always said: "If you want GOOD employees, you never want to hire from UCB, Stanford, Cal Tech, etc. The best engineers in California come from Cal Poly SLO and Cal Poly Pomona. They are actually trained as engineers".
This is only proving that a college degree is not enough to qualify most graduates for any job. Better to hire from 2nd tier schools instead and even to consider HS grads on some cases. If they are more trainable than your typical entitled university degree holder, they are a better ROI, hands-down.
Caltech's engineering program doesn't actually train you to design machines, or how to operate a milling machine, or how to assemble an internal combustion engine. You can certainly get an engineering degree without ever getting grease under your fingernails. What it does do is teach you math. Every class is a math class. Statics, dynamics, newtonian mechanics, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, electromagnetics are all math, math, math, math, math.
What you wind up with is not being afraid of math, and you've got some very powerful tools. Grease under your fingernails is learned on the job. But almost nobody ever learns math on the job.
I've known many engineers who were competent mechanics, but were terrified of math. They'll always be second tier engineers.
1. "math vs no-math". All engineers learn math. Some are afraid of it. At elite unis, it's fair to say those afraid are weeded out. That does not mean that most who attend mid-tier schools are afraid of math, or don't know math -- that's wildly false.
2. "engineering versus operating". Elite unis prepare you better to go into research, which is not engineering. Yet you are pretending that research is engineering and that what other schools do is teach you how to "operate a milling machine", which is again wildly inaccurate and condescending. Other schools teach you to build stuff and have less emphasis on theory. At elite unis there is more emphasis on theory and less on building stuff.
3. "I've known many engineers who were competent mechanics, but were terrified of math" Yes, as a mathematician I know a lot of engineers who think they know math because they like to throw around words like SDEs, or think they are math heroes for studying a bit of functional analysis or linear programming. But their knowledge is pretty shallow, which is fine. What's not fine is it often comes at the expense of knowing how to build or design things well. That is a real risk with the more theoretically educated engineer, just as not knowing theory well is a real risk for the more practically educated engineer. Also a lot of theoretically trained engineers tend to be quite condescending and arrogant, not realizing how poor their math knowledge actually is.
Fortunately elite and regular engineering schools today do produce good students. The main advantage of the elite school is sorting - smarter students attend these schools, which means on average they are better at their area of study. Caltech is notable for resisting the "equity" tide and still requiring standardized scores, so I'd hire from them if I needed someone to assist in more theoretical areas, or someone looking for a career change into a more practical area. I would be much more circumspect when it comes to UC schools. I would also hire from lower-tiered schools but would require more screening.
That logically does not follow from my statements. Mathematically, (A implies B) does not imply (not A implies not B).
> Yet you are pretending that research is engineering
Nope, that does not follow, either. Theory != research.
> Other schools teach you to build stuff and have less emphasis on theory
Operating a milling machine is an accurate summation for "building stuff". If you want to build stuff as an ME, you're going to have to learn how to use the machine tools.
> What's not fine is it often comes at the expense of knowing how to build or design things well.
Again, I specifically said Caltech didn't teach how to build or design. I also said that that part can be learned on the job, but that learning math on the job is something for unicorns.
> theoretically trained engineers tend to be quite condescending and arrogant, not realizing how poor their math knowledge actually is.
Yeah, well, I can vouch for the math skills of a BSME from Caltech are better than that of Masters degrees from other unis. Good enough to ace the math part of the GREs. PhD level is way beyond me, I topped out at variational calculus. I don't pretend to be a math major, that's also way beyond me. I didn't take any "math" classes beyond the required ones. I am certainly not a math whiz. I just had it beat into me in every class.
If that’s true for EE, I’m okay with no grease but you better have soldered something (the EE equivalent of a lathe).
If you get a degree in mechanical engineering without ever operating a milling machine and a lathe, I think you should get at least a partial refund.
HAhahahahahaaaa (Caltech grad here. BTW, anyone who spells it Cal Tech knows next to nothing about Caltech.)
I don't think you're doing a good job of defending your alma mater, here. You may want to reconsider your comment, if that's your intent.
OTOH if you are being sarcastic and trying to insult CalTech, then by all means... Mission accomplished.
Caltech doesn't need defending. I'm just amused at xyzzy21's comment.
In my opinion, the biggest upside of CSU's is that they provide a vastly more diverse student body. There's a greater range of financial situations, age groups, and ethnicities. I feel this experience working with folks from a variety of backgrounds is an essential part of a strong candidate.
I'm personally not really on one side or another. "Alternative" paths (e.g. CSU's, community college, no school) seem to create candidates that have had a diverse life experience. Top UC's/private schools create candidates that are regarded as more academic.
That's just my take on it, and I feel that people being on one side or the other is mostly due to which of these stereotypes that person prefers.
How many students from Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley founded their own companies? How many from cal poly?
Why the massive difference?
I'd love to have a standard test for software engineering jobs that was accepted in the place of building yet another 8-hour sample React app.
It starts to sound pretty enticing. Essentially a certification that at least one time you performed at certain level. Ofc, verification is bit more complicated, but not impossible anymore.
Of course, there's no way to determine if they were thorough or not.
Want to let in 1/9th via pure random lottery? Have at it!
Want to let in 1/9th via racial or socioeconomic profiling? Have at it!
Then look at successful completion rates of year 1, degree by year 4, degree by year 5, and position (as self-reported) 10 years after admission for each group.
Either we’ll discover that there’s a better way to do admissions or we’ll discover that the current way is close to optimal.
If we want to be serious about equity and equal opportunity, we should focus on eliminating legacy.
Eg, quoting https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0013189X2090211...
> Yet, the emphasis on test scores over grades in policy and practice recommendations stands in contrast to research showing high school grade point averages (HSGPAs) are stronger predictors than test scores of college outcomes (Bowen et al., 2009; Geiser & Santelices, 2007; Hiss & Franks, 2014; Kobrin et al., 2008).
As has been in use at UC and just about everywhere else, up until now.
In math terms: just because predicts(A) > predicts(B), it does not follow that predicts(A) > predicts(A ∪ B).
Before making my earlier comment, I read the start of the the Hiss and Franks paper is at https://web.archive.org/web/20140310113612/http://www.nacacn... to make sure the citation I gave wasn't misrepresenting the topic (it wasn't). Here's text from the abstract:
It "examines the outcomes of optional standardized testing policies in the Admissions offices at 33 public and private colleges and universities, based on cumulative GPA and graduation rates."
That is, UC isn't the first to do this, and we can look at real-world evidence from previous universities where test scores were optional, to gauge how useful test scores are and what effect they have.
It found: "Few significant differences between submitters and non-submitters of testing were observed in Cumulative GPAs and graduation rates, despite significant differences in SAT/ACT scores."
That is, SAT/ACT scores don't seem to affect metrics like Cumulative GPAs and graduation rates. (As I recall from elsewhere, they do correlate with first year grades, but that's a different and less important metric.)
Further: "Optional testing policies also help build broader access to higher education: non-submitters are more likely to be first-generation-to‐college students, minorities, Pell Grant recipients, women and students with Learning Differences."
That is, using SAT/ACT scores in the selection process appears to have measurable effect on the student population; reducing what is sometimes referred to as "diversity."
As to your correct observation, "it does not follow that predicts(A) > predicts(A ∪ B)", one of the issues is that college success is also correlated with other factors, including parental wealth. And success on the SAT/ACT is also correlated with parental wealth, who can afford special training on how to pass those tests.
We know this by looking at the early history of college boards, which emphasized the topics taught at prep schools (like Latin grammar) than public school, because college admissions preferred rich white male Protestants, who were likely to go to prep school.
To be clear, the SAT has done a lot of work to de-bias their tests, and I don't know enough about to topic to say anything what factors are actually involved.
But I don't need to, since the tests don't seem to be that effective in predicting college success.
Which, if I can attempt to boil it down to one sentence, would seem to be: "Tests don't seem to be a good predictor of college success, even when taking GPA into account. But they do seem to promote diversity."
And to which I would like to add, solely from anecdotal observation[1]:
"They also provide a second chance for a significant number of people. Even with a bad year, or even two, in high school -- this doesn't necessarily mean you are doomed to a lifetime of minimum wage servitude. If you have the intrinsic cognitive skills, you can easily do moderately well on the SAT, even without prepping."
I would like to consider diversity and the possibility of a second chance to be not merely incidental, but essential benefits to be striven for in the admissions process. Instead of simply stack-ranking based on the most easily demonstrable predictors of success.
[1] Including observations of some of the smartest and most creative and inspiring people I have ever met -- but again, that's anecdotal.
(You wrote "promote" instead of "reduce".)
What is the origin of your quoted paragraph ending 'If you have the intrinsic cognitive skills, you can easily do moderately well on the SAT, even without prepping.'?
I don't know how the source quantifies "a significant number of people" or "intrinsic cognitive skills". If "intrinsic cognitive skills" means "does well on the SAT or other forms of standardized testing" then of course there's no need for prepping.
And the problem is the other way around. Given the emphasis on the SAT, a single bad day (or if you have the money to re-test, a couple of bad days) - if on the day of the test! - can "doom" you.
I'm also curious about the quote because a lot of people have a good life without going to college and without "minimum wage servitude". Median pay for plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters is $27.08 per hour (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers...), done by apprenticeship and/or vocational-technical training.
And don't tell me that plumbers (or Automotive Service Technicians and Mechanics, or Welders, Cutters, Solderers, and Brazers, or other careers which don't require a college degree) don't require 'intrinsic cognitive skills'.
> consider diversity
As a reminder, I used the term "diversity" in quotes, because I don't like the vagueness of the term. The specific sub-populations in the paper I linked to were "first-generation-to‐college students, minorities, Pell Grant recipients, women and students with Learning Differences".
> Instead of simply stack-ranking based on the most easily demonstrable predictors of success.
I don't know what you mean. The linked-to document about UC says:
] Training admissions office staff on the “comprehensive review” process that looks at grades, extra-curriculars, the socio-economic factors in which students grow up and other non-test criteria becomes even more important, Estolano said.
That sure does not look like simple stack-ranking to me.
> the most easily demonstrable predictors of success
FWIW, two easily demonstrable predictors of success are: 1) applicants from a rich family, and 2) applicants with at least one parent who has been to college.
I think you can see that using these predictors - and if you believe college is an important influence on life-time earnings - means the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor.
The mean score for people attending UC Berkeley is 1415 out of 1600.
If the UC admissions office were to use a threshold, it would have to be low enough that they don't get more Asians than they want. That threshold might end up being as low as 1010.
What I was saying:
GP suggested having a threshold used for qualification, and then selecting from qualified candidates using other criteria.
If you support this proposal, there's an upper limit to the threshold you choose. If you choose too high a threshold, then the % of students who are Asian will exceed the % of Asians in the applicant pool (or general population, whatever) and you will be accused of having a racist admissions policy.
So you must choose a threshold which is low enough that you have lots of freedom to pick on opaque/subjective criteria. Then you can achieve any demographic mix you want.
But if you choose a threshold as low as 1010, then it's probably not going to be any different from UC's current system, which ignores SAT altogether.
If determined immigrants start getting in more than your local populace, how do you make sure that admissions are balanced. That is the problem.
But yeah some "administrator" evaluating subjective criteria like courses taken, rigor etc is also not good and a pure objective test is also not good. I feel a balance needs to be struck, it is a hard problem
- I am an immigrant, ethnically Asian (Indian), and moved to the US from Asia (China)
- The 'Asians are overrepresented' meme isn't targeted at _immigrants_, but at Asians, regardless of birthplace. When I meet Asians who went to UC, they were usually born in California.
- When people decide to implement racial quotas (or policies that allow them to effect racial quotas without calling them racial quotas), they necessarily decide not to treat each person as an individual. Each person becomes just a 'representative' of some racial group.
I have never understood why the admission should be balanced? In my mind it should be absolute pure meritocracy. If you don't score high enough, try again until you do or accept institution with lower requirements. Meritocracy is the fairest system overall.
If not, the reason must (by definition) be systemic racism, which is unfair.
Of course, this argument is not entirely without merit.
Ideally, I think everyone should be allowed into the university.
I have several friends who did poorly in high school. Back then they wanted to have fun, party, and were not interested in academic achievement.
Once they got older, they decided to go back to school. They had to study hard and retake a lot of high school exams to get to the university.
One woman is a somewhat famous and well respected lawyer. One is an electrical engineer with a great job. One architect, and the last one a psychologist.
They all had the "intelligence" / endurance to do well academically they just did not follow the same schedules.
People who did not do so well in high school but have passing grades can really perk up at the university.
Of course, if you lot everyone in, most will fail. The distribution of who fails and who does not might surprise people.
However, we do not have limitless resources to allow everyone who wants to a shot in whatever field they feel like. There is not enough physical space, there are not enough professors and teachers, nor labs etc
Basing entry on standardized merit is in my opinion, the best we have so far.
I wonder if a future were Batchlor degrees are possible to take online if the system could scale to allow everyone a shot.
What things are scarce? Human resources to teach, capital to start businesses, bandwidth, computing power, physical security and time are some things I can think of that are scarce to varying degrees.
I don't mind if I got shut out of the ivy league Lottery at 18 ad long as I can get what I need to succeed at 36 when I finally get my act together.
At 36 as a male I might still have 40 or 50 years ahead of me to work on one or more career projects.
To some extent we need to stop worrying so much about who gets the spoils of any given lottery and just try to make it possible for people to get more bites at the apple.
The biggest problem isn't weeding out false positives and keep them from sullying Caltech or Stripe. Within reason this is a non problem.
The real problem are the people with aptitude who never get educated and don't get time and physical security in enough amounts to train themselves up to be good candidates to win capital to start ventures that will help advance society.
Tldr False negatives worse than false positives to all you evil gatekeepers
I’m just wondering because why not just admit as many people as you could for various price tiers of: in-person, hybrid, and online education. So in that sense, as long as money wants to come in, why reject anyone other than to fake exclusivity?
Today, alongside Jewish people, US universities want to discriminate against Asian-Americans, who have the same high test scores, high academic achievements including grades, and stereotypes of working too hard; often they carry out this discrimination by requiring higher test scores from Asian-Americans than from white people https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/08/07..., but this practice is illegal in California and under attack elsewhere. Consequently Asian-Americans constituted 40% of in-state UC freshmen in 02019, double their share of the population https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-11-01/affirmat... and this explains why UC wants to drop objective admission requirements like SAT scores in order to admit a more balanced (read "white") student body, provoking strong opposition from Asian-American groups: https://asianamericanforeducation.org/en/pr_20200519/
Unsurprisingly standardized testing increases representation of low-income students https://50.cresst.org/2020/05/20/cresst-recommendation-for-n... because, within a context of inequality, the only alternative to meritocracy is inherited privilege.
This is closely related to why US tech companies, who hire you based on whether you can program in an interview, are dramatically more diverse than, for example, US tech journalism companies, who apparently hire you based on whether you're white: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29277661
We know you can take "underachieving" students and put them in high achieving programs (such as law school) and that the students will rise to the occasion and do well.
Who cares what happens before you hire someone. The only thing that matters is the results and that you can quickly fire and replace someone that doesn't fit without you or them suffering.
Motivated people will rise to their abilities either way.
What usally happens now is that developers leave if there are no customers, but yes, if we ever reach that state where even the companies with the worst products can hire the best developers, then wages will have fallen quite a bit.
No. But if your vocabulary is limited, you'll do poorly on the verbals.
I never did any prep for the SATs, and nobody I knew did. Of course, this was back in the 70s.
From the article:
UC admissions officers have said they were able to thoroughly evaluate the flood of applications without test scores, using 13 other factors in the system’s review process, such as a student’s high school grade-point average, the rigor of courses taken, special talents, essays and extracurricular activities.
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Special talents and extracurricular activities are great filters for the privileged. Nothing like the academic promise of fencing and rowing. The Winkelvoss twins from Greenwich Connecticut attended Harvard through the white elite loophole of rowing.
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This is why there is an allergy to making it based on class and being poor. I doubt any poor blacks or Hispanics will benefit from this.
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Interesting book on this matter:
Reflections Of An Affirmative Action Baby Paperback – August 24, 1992
https://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Affirmative-Action-Stephe...
It's possible that standardized tests are biased. Then fix them!
I didn't have rich parents. So I had never gone abroad.
A rich parent can send their kids on "charity missions" to poor countries to rack up those "extra curricular points".
Indian here. I have rich relatives who send their kids on very very expensive "charity missions" to Africa (Where the kids work temporarily in some school or such. Something to add to their CV.). These people are not white, and they're not trying to be saviors. They're trying to get their kids into the Ivy League. Their friends-group literally has parties where they share all the ways they can add extra-curriculars and such to their kids admissions applications.
> It's possible that standardized tests are biased. Then fix them!
We know they are biased but everytime the solution it's brought the solution is to replace them with another biased test.
[0] https://www.teenvogue.com/story/the-history-of-the-sat-is-mi...
Math tests are universally acknowledged to be neutral, even if hard. Most countries have standardized tests that have a spectrum of subjects covered. If you apply to say engineering only your Math and Science scores matter. If you apply to Literature only your language scores matter.
Maybe a good idea is to unbundle the English from the Math in the SAT and have two separate tests.
Language is definitely "subjective" and open to interpretation compared to Math. Maybe the bias you are referring to is in the English part.
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I know people who still contribute to Planned Parenthood even though they know it's founder Margaret Singer was a racist and eugenist.
Literally the genetic fallacy.
I had many black friends in high school and none when I went to Berkeley in 2005-2010. I can say the SAT, ACT, etc. are biased against anyone who doesn't have the money to get the prep for them.
I genuinely don’t understand when people say the SAT is so biased, because it seemed quite fair to me compared to alternative metrics. Unless asking someone to spend a lot of time studying is too much to ask.
If you admit the kids you're talking about under affirmative action they'd just be weeded out in intro courses and get relegated to some social sciences degree with negative return on tuition. That is objectively worse than rejecting them.
Most of the PMs I know have either business or STEM degrees.
What about the humanities majors that went straight into the workplace?
Kids with stable families have money. Take away the money, and the thing that gave them the advantage goes away. For the poor kids, the money is no longer a blocker.
but that's not even the point... the post was about how students who don't care about school will somehow be better served by getting into a good school anyway. sure, some people will have an "oh shit i cant screw this up" moment, but... many will just fail. right? and in the meantime, the student who didn't get the chance to pursue their dreams... does what? it is unfortunately a pretty zero sum game. i wish it weren't. i think it'd be great for universities to figure out how to scale up much bigger than they are currently for exactly this reason.
That was 2019-20, after colleges had starting going whatever you want to call not requiring standardized tests.
https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2021/09/13...
i have a hard time understanding how affirmative action + SAT scores is somehow worse than affirmative action w/o SAT scores. the former seems like a clear win?