Harvard won’t require SAT or ACT through 2026 as test-optional push grows
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I’m guessing it also helps eliminate the “blue collar asian” applicants more easily. It removes one of their shining accomplishments.
From a 2018 article from politico:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/10/21/harvard-a...
“But the data collected by the Education Department contained some explosive information. It showed the athletes and so-called legacies who were actually accepted had lower SAT scores than the rest of the class and were also deemed less attractive candidates by the admissions officers conducting Harvard’s process.
Some of the comments those officers wrote on the application folders of admitted legacies strongly suggested something more than a tiebreaker was at work. “Lineage is main thing,” one reader wrote. “Double lineage, but lots of problems … no balance,” the notes on another successful application said. “Lots of lineage here … Hard to explain a NO,” yet another said. “Classical case that would be hard to explain to DAD.”
just the way they refer to it is disturbing, bad enough favoring legacies but "lineage" makes it sound like they really think these people are somehow superior based on their bloodline. The new nobility, how dare these serfs with good test scores defile our institutions!
Harvard has always been a social indicator that is also decent educationally in some areas (but not, AFAIK, superlative in any undergraduate field.)
It's worth noting that the term "meritocracy" was actually coined by somebody criticizing the serfs defiling sacred institutions.
In practice this doesn't happen - some children have massive advantages compared to others. To then take all of these children and one day try to use an objective measure to decide who gets access to yet more advantages is obviously going to massively favor the non-meritocratic-to-that-point advantaged children.
So yes, a true meritocracy may be completely fine, but in the real world "meritocracy" is. anything but.
Without a common language communication becomes impossible.
The normal definition of the word is that those who are best at a task should perform it. The most competent applicant should be hired for a job. If a billionaire's kid happen to be best, because of all the private tutoring they got, that's not really relevant for a meritocratic decision.
I mean, if some job requires being good at math, I agree math ability should be considered. It's just that I don't think it should be high status or prestigious.
Basically meritocracy can turn into classism, and due to accumulated advantage it can entrench. Everyone has a chance in theory, but in practice advantage compounds.
There's also the simple human welfare problem that vicious never-ending competition every minute of your life is exhausting & demoralizing.
It's possible that they will become less biased in their admissions, but it's also possible they'll become more biased.
The University of California has also announced that they won't be considering SAT/ACT scores for admission. California forbids affirmative action in their state schools and while the SAT/ACT aren't objective tests, people often treat them as such and it provides a number for people to compare (whereas you can't really compare "really good at guitar" with "volunteers planting trees"). It's led to Berkeley being 2% Black and UCLA being 3% Black while Stanford is 7% Black and USC is 5% Black. Also notable, Berkeley is 24% White and UCLA is 26% White while Stanford is 32% White and USC is 37% White; Berkeley/UCLA are 36%/28% Asian vs 23%/21% for Stanford/USC. The University of California system is certainly having its admissions decisions impacted by California laws against affirmative action in their public universities.
I don't expect Harvard's admissions makeup to change significantly. I just expect it to be harder for third-parties (who might want to sue) to compare data. If you're qualitatively comparing applications that take a lot of time to review, it makes a lawsuit very difficult. If you're able to compare a numeric score, it makes it less time-consuming (even if the numeric score is biased/inaccurate, people often treat it as unbiased/accurate). It's easier to argue qualitative differences in judgement too and means that you have to start challenging things individually rather than as a class (which basically makes it impossible).
With the University of California, it will be interesting to see if they start coming closer to peer institutions in their student body.
so imo getting rid of standardized tests does get rid of a subjective rating of an applicant which is good in theory, but when you leave in all of the other subjective ratings that are much more difficult for disadvantaged students to do well on it who is it actually benefiting?
That doesn’t make a timed foot race a subjective measure, IMO.
Pointing out shortcomings of standardized tests is one thing. Advocating for eliminating what seems to be our most equal/standardized/objective/whatever measurement without a replacement seems like a bad idea to me.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidie...
I mean, it's okay to use the best imperfect metric you have available; so acknowledging "the metric is not fully correlated and depends on other factors" does not mean anything, the only argument that has weight is "hey, this other metric has better correlation with The True Thing and less bias, use that instead"; if the remaining alternative metrics are even less objective and more biased than SAT/ACT tests (which IMHO is the case), then removing SAT tests won't and can't improve things, despite these tests being flawed.
to be clear, i still think the sat is better than everything else because preparation is much more legible and accessible compared to all of the other ways to stand out for college applications.
Which begs the question, who exactly do you admit to your school, and why?
In my not-so-humble opinion, however, the best way to prep for the verbal SAT is to read books. Novels are fine.
For the math, prep by taking all the math classes your school offers, and make an effort to learn all the material.
Do that, and you won't need prep classes, and you'll also be well prepared for college.
They can still take the test and get a high score.
> How are the SAT/ACT not objective tests? Are they not objective measures of how you perform on the SAT/ACT?
Most of the studies on this show that all of the cultural references in the reading passages and math word problems were things that wealthy people would have experienced in real life, but poor people would not, so it gave an advantage to wealthy kids. Also a lot of the vocab were words that wealthy kids had heard at home but not poor kids.
So while it was supposed to be a test of intelligence, it is really a test of how wealthy you were growing up.
Edit: Here is the main study from 2003 from Harvard: https://meridian.allenpress.com/her/article-abstract/73/1/1/...
Here is a writeup of someone who replicated it with more recent test scores: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/21/new-evidence-...
MENSA accepts it for admission to their high IQ club.
Depends on how much money is meaningful to you. Time has its own costs, especially since an older teenager can work as an alternative.
And that's just the reading comprehension. The idea that the math word problems involve cultural bias that would affect performance is utterly ridiculous. "Most studies"... there is no chance that any quality research has been done to support something so laughable.
I will look at any citations you may have, but I am 100% confident that you have been duped.
That 2003 study was done at Harvard.
Here is a writeup of someone who replicated it with more recent test scores: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/21/new-evidence-...
Well, I'll be damned. Huh.
> The 2003 study and this year's found no DIF issues in the mathematics section.
The earlier claim about math word problems being culturally biased seems unsupported by the citations.
But will the claim be withdrawn? Hmm, let's find out...
Runner is to Marathon as XXXXXXXX is to Regatta
If you grew up on the coast in a wealthy family, you have a much higher chance of knowing what a Regatta is and that it involves boat races.
It would be hard to deny that generally sailboat racing is done by wealthy people.
The yearly regatta has always been like the Olympics of Newfoundland
There are no questions like that any more. You really think the people designing the highest-profile standardized test in the country are oblivious to this kind of problem these days? There's a ton of cultural and racial bias screening and filtering that goes into producing these questions now, both manual and statistical. You can look at some sample questions yourself.
You can definitely cram for the grammar / math portions, but the reading comprehension sort of just requires a lot of reading experience. There isn't a rote set of things you can memorize to get a high score, which could arguably be seen as good or bad.
Maybe more practically, we should consider: Do lower income students read less on average? And if so, is the difference greater than their ability to gain access to tutoring services / prep books which can be used for the crammable portions of the exam?
Poverty makes things harder, no doubt. But American parenting is just bad and American students don't try very hard. My wife comes from a lower-income white family (multi-generational lack of economic mobility) and the lack of emphasis on eduction or discipline at home is glaring. Some people, like my wife, are just naturally very self-driven and make it out. But a lot of potential gets wasted because kids are allowed to just faff around instead of being rigidly guided by parents (or, as is more commonly the case, by the one parent).
The findings are that much of the disparity between minorities and whites goes away for harder analogies that are more technical or scientific in nature, in fact contrary to what I expected, the recommendation of the study is to simply eliminate the bottom third of verbal questions (ranked by difficulty) involving analogies or sentence completion, as those are the questions that are most likely to involve cultural bias.
If my understanding is correct (and I'm sure I have some subtle details wrong), the idea is to let students take the SAT, then go over the verbal/analogy/sentence completion portion of the SAT and order each question by the proportion of white students who answered it correctly, and then eliminate the easiest of those questions from the final score. The most difficult questions are still part of the test, but apparently most of the cultural bias is among the easiest questions to answer that minorities get tripped up on.
If your hypothesis were true, that it's mostly a matter of bad parenting, it's kind of hard to see why bad parenting would make minorities struggle to answer the easiest questions for white people, but not also struggle to answer the hardest questions as well.
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/21/new-evidence-...
This is all you needed to say.
The problem is that the system is designed to identify the most effective parents, not the most talented children. If you look at college admission as a function of personal merit, then it's unfair to judge a child based on their parents' ability to raise them. If you look at it as a system to identify those who will benefit society most by being educated, then you're going to get a lot of false positives that have parents from higher socio-economic classes.
Providing a test that produces an empirical result is just making it very easy for parents to game the system. It's a single, stationary target that they can fire money at. If you take away the test you're still selecting for the best parenting (all of life is). But it lets universities put more emphasis on grades and personal stories, areas where students whose parents have never heard of the SAT can still excel.
If you can use money to game the test then it's culturally loaded toward people who have enough money to game the test. A broader admissions criteria doesn't have this specific flaw
And you’re missing the point re: income, which is that all poor kids aren’t similarly situated. Asian kids raised in the bottom 20% of the income scale have a 25% chance of ending up in the top 20% as adults. For white kids it’s only 11%. Socioeconomic status is a factor but it’s not dispositive or insurmountable.
As to grades—you think it’s easier for a bright but poor kid to do their homework in time for 12 years than to study for one test? As to “personal stories”—that’s just a vector for manipulation by the whites people who run the admissions system. It’s remarkable to me to read anecdotes from admissions counselors, who say stuff like that they are looking for weird and non-conforming kids: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/22/former-stanford-admissions-o.... Talk about cultural loading!
I never said that someone's income quantile was dispositive. If my parents never took the SAT and have no idea what it is, I'm at a huge disadvantage to do well on the test by any measure. Regardless of their income. Again, the SAT isn't testing for academic aptitude but for the cultural knowledge of parents and peers.
As a wealthy parent I know exactly how to throw money at prepping for one test: hire expensive tutors and purchase practice tests. Gaming years of GPA or coming up with a compelling story is more complicated and difficult to solve with the application of financial resources.
A system with vague and subjective criteria is subject to bias, for sure. They are also more difficult to manipulate directly with wealth (other than bribes). We have to decide what our priorities are there as a society.
Runner is to Marathon as XXXXXXXX is to Regatta
If you grew up on the coast in a wealthy family, you have a much higher chance of knowing what a Regatta is and that it involves boat races.
But if you read the papers cited in the GGGP comment, those hard problems aren't the problems that show the racial gap. The hardest problems show the least gap. Which doesn't fit the pat little sailboat jargon theory at all. However it does fit a common pattern, also seen in longevity statistics, where the most exceptional are more similar to one another than the average are.
Wait, can you elaborate?
As people get older, the mortality rate gaps between different groups get smaller on a relative basis. Like, the ratio between rich and poor 50 year olds' risk of death over the next year might be 3x or more, but as they age, they become more similar, and by 90 the ratio may be more like 1.3x, and after 100 it becomes indistinguishable from 1 (in part because of thin data).
The theory is that the genetics and environmental conditions needed to survive to an old age are fairly specific, so once you're down to those people, they have less variation from one another. The health risk factors that distinguish income and racial groups may mostly impact younger age mortality, and the people that get past those younger ages may have avoided or resisted those risk factors, regardless of race or income.
Similarly here, students who "survive" to do well on hard SAT questions may be fundamentally very similar to one another (sharing a high g-factor), and this may greatly reduce socioeconomic and racial gaps that are seen on the easier questions.
Does this mean the easier questions are biased? Not necessarily, I would argue. The concepts tested in the easy-medium questions are most likely to be intellectually foundational -- you are far, FAR more likely to get obscure rich people jargon in the hard questions than the easy-medium ones. We want people to have the basic intellectual exposure that enables them to do well on those easier questions, and we should reward it.
The problem is not the test, the problem is racially biased failure to educate in the lead-up to the test. This explains the pattern perfectly: the strongest students power through regardless of background, while the weaker are more sensitive to resources they were given. So you see the biggest gaps on easy-medium questions where basic educational background matters most to getting them right, rather than raw talent.
Have you explored broader implications of your idea? For example people who survived tribulations of a political career may end up close to each other despite their initial difference in political opinions, and maybe even across different countries. This doesn’t sound quite as convincing, but I’m kind of grasping in the dark trying to find some other examples.
I don't know of any examples outside of health but health is a big enough topic and closely related enough to education that I think it's likely to have some application.
Certain psychometric studies also support higher sensitivity to environment in the lower economic strata. Not exactly the same but you see the connection.
The studies cited by jedberg are very interesting, I just don't think they show what he thinks they do.
A better alternative to trashing the SAT is to provide an estimated adversity score, as ETS recently began to do, so schools have a sense of what a student may have had to overcome to reach their level of achievement.
Still there is something in the longevity example that’s evading the trivial explanation.
It's also a little unclear whether we should consider the % difference convergence remarkable, given that mortality at older ages is so much higher and the absolute difference may not show much convergence.
Incredible educational resources are available online for free and just a click away on that supercomputer in everyone's pocket.
There's no reason to be restricted to your parents' vocabulary.
Still, I'm a fan of standardized tests. If there's a problem, we should try to improve the tests rather than doing away with them.
Here's a comment from a different branch of this thread:
> The findings in general is that much of the disparity between minorities and whites goes away for harder analogies that are more technical or scientific in nature, in fact contrary to what I expected, the recommendation of the study is to simply eliminate the bottom third of verbal questions (ranked by difficulty) involving analogies or sentence completion, as those are the questions that are most likely to involve cultural bias.
Secondly, that doesn't address differential prediction abilities. It addresses a concerning aspect of the verbal test, but is somewhat irrelevant when your goal is to predict college success. I'm not aware of differences on that metric.
That's good to hear. It's hard to know what research is still fresh, unless one is employed to stay current in a field.
But I think the bigger danger is that after a while, practicing for standardized tests starts monopolizing the curriculum at secondary schools, and teachers start being evaluated by their students' test scores to the exclusion of all else. Even 20 years ago, I remember getting herded onto a bus to some community college to take an extra "practice state proficiency test" whose score didn't count for anything at all.
Even if universities have lousy motivations, de-emphasizing that kind of thing probably makes high-schoolers' lives a little better.
One could make a test called 'big brain test' and sell it to schools to say it measures big brains, and it might be only somewhat correlated but still get widespread adoption because it fulfills a need schools have to have some sort of quantitative sorting of students, but it still wouldn't necessarily be a measure of big brains. This is sort of what the history of the SAT is.
You take the test twice, once with a blindfold on, and once without a blindfold. As an objective measure of your intelligence, I expect you to get the same results on both tests
You are considering whether it's objective only by that the reader at the end sees the final score, but there's many spots in between an empty sheet of paper and that score where somebody's subjective experience comes into play
We can argue about whether or not the stuff on the test is important. We can discuss the various environmental, cultural, and socioeconomic factors that go into the kids taking it and how that impacts scores statistically. We can even talk about the various medical and neurological factors that go into test taking generally and standardized test taking specifically that can affect some people more than others. I'll even concede that the SAT/ACT isn't a test of your intelligence so much as it is a test of how well you did on the SAT/ACT, just like putting things on a scale may at best be a measure of its weight relative to other things on that specific scale.
But at the end of the day, more right answers === a higher score, and I'm not sure how you get any more objective than that when it comes to something as fluid as academic ability.
Getting rid of one of these because it's easier if you have money (when all of these things are easier if you have money, because life is easier if you have money) is just setting the stage for more explicit bias.
By comparison, Asian and Pacific Islander populations combined only make up 15% of the California population (1). I don't suppose the interaction of affirmative action policy and cultural differences might have inadvertently advantaged a couple of Asian subpopulations that are now pissed that the basis of their advantage is being taken away?
(1) https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-population/
I agree with most of your comment, but I think you're using "harder" and "rarer" interchangeably here.
One would guess that receiving a scholarship for elite athleticism or superior intellect are both quite difficult, and I have zero basis of comparison for which one is harder. I would not assume that athletic scholarships being rarer reflects on their difficulty. Rather, it's most likely a reflection on what the main function of a university is, as a place of learning. They admit more students to study than to play sports.
The unfortunate thing may be that we've conflated college admissions with this notion of "merit", rather than what you can get out of college itself.
Of course, I'm sure the athletics department does apply other forms of pressure to various parts of Harvard, making it easier for athletes to get admitted and pass their classes etc. But any scholarships they award are (corruption aside) at least theoretically based around financial need.
(Since it's hard to tell in text: no I'm not being sarcastic.)
I was one of those students who got perfectly scores on all my tests but couldn’t possibly be bothered to do homework in high school, so my grades were less than perfect. If it weren’t for my high ACT score, I’m pretty confident I wouldn’t have been accepted into any university—especially as someone from a lower middle class family.
I’m not sure if eliminating standardized testing is a misguided effort to introduce fairness or a wisely guided effort to only let in the types they want through a more opaque process.
- applicant A: average grades, average SAT, no sports
- applicant B: great grades, no SAT, great sports
- applicant C: great grades, great SAT, great sports
then B wasn't even considered. Now, B will probably get in over A.
That's because the admissions process is not the line-by-line ranking exercise you're implying.
In some cases an SAT may help to complete the picture of an applicant. In other cases, other attribute permutations are enough. Maybe #1 was close and the SAT sealed it. But, it's not necessarily the case that applicant #2 was hurt by not submitting their SAT (or would have fared any better by submitting even a perfect SAT score).
I was a mere peasant at a SUNY school, but I tutored kids in the EOP program. These kids were mostly from awful high schools and had aptitude, but lacked a lot of basic high school skills.
Just like my friends from “normal” educational backgrounds, the kids who worked did fine. Most were boxed out of engineering but I know of a few alumni who are attorneys or have other professional gigs.
If you back basic high school skills then you're not only probably not suited to Engineering, you're also probably not going to cut it.
It takes 'Aptitude' plus at very least skills plus even more.
Quiet part aloud right here.
What you're saying is that if you haven't been raised in a certain way (in an environment that prioritizes formal schooling) then you're not fit to be a professional (engineer in this case) no matter how smart/talented. There's a word for this: classicism.
But I'll tell you something. As someone who grew up exactly like that but is now getting a PhD in CS at a top school and who has excelled in several FAANG internships: you can teach/learn high school skills. You can't teach/learn aptitude though. So if you think it's some kind just/effective/correct that these kids are kept out (just because they don't have good essay writing skills or something) well I have to wonder if you're just someone trying to keep the labor pool small to inflate your own salary (or for other reasons...)
You can't teach 'aptitude' but I think you can encourage those things i.e. reading, curiosity, exposure.
You're right though that rich kids probably have a huge advantage in prep for Eng in terms of the former, but whether or not you call it 'classist' is besides the point: teaching your kids to show up to class and pay attention, do homework etc. is not something that costs money (of course it can help).
"So if you think it's some kind just/effective/correct that these kids are kept out (just because they don't have good essay writing skills or something) well I have to wonder if you're just someone trying to keep the labor pool small to inflate your own salary (or for other reasons...)"
For a PhD you're having an odd bit difficulty with leaps of unsubstantiated assumptions, because there's definitely nothing in my statement that would remotely hint about 'What I'm trying to do' about anything. I mean seriously, "I'm trying to keep the labour pool small?" What?
of course it does. it costs money in the form of time - you have to be not working at home to have the opportunity to teach these things. it costs money in the form of energy - if you've never argued with a young child about the relative merits of homework and television then you have no idea how much it costs.
>because there's definitely nothing in my statement that would remotely hint about 'What I'm trying to do' about anything. I mean seriously, "I'm trying to keep the labour pool small?" What?
really? then what is the purpose of this part of your response?
>then you're not only probably not suited to Engineering
what do the words "not suited" mean to you?
There is not much to interpret from that statement.
'Basic High School Skills' would be general subject matter competence, basic diligence and conscientiousness with respect to attendance, participation, learning, homework, socialization, organization.
Engineering is fairly advanced, it requires an even higher degree of general competence than most Uni subjects, and even those need a level of competency only found in the upper tranches (say top 1/3) of students in high school.
If you're not 'Generally Not Good At High School' then you are not going to make it through Engineering.
I don't think there's anything controversial here.
begs the question.
>and even those need a level of competency only found in the upper tranches (say top 1/3) of students in high school.
yet not a single one of these things has the slightest to do with technical aptitude
>'Basic High School Skills' would be general subject matter competence, basic diligence and conscientiousness with respect to attendance, participation, learning, homework, socialization, organization.
i'll repeat myself: you can teach each of these things to a kid that is good at math and physics but you cannot teach a kid that has perfect attendance, diligence, etc etc etc how to be good at math and physics.
>If you're not 'Generally Not Good At High School' then you are not going to make it through Engineering.
<shrug> i made it through a physics+math BS, and I'm well on my way to finishing the PhD (as in aced my classes and my quals) and i graduated high school with a 2.2GPA and 40 absences senior year. so not just bottom 2/3 but probably close to last. so along which axis do you think you're wrong? either a technical degree doesn't require the kind of "diligence" you think it does (i'd argue it does not) or that diligence can be learned fairly easily (i'd argue that too).
yet not a single one of these things has the slightest to do with technical aptitude"
?? Aptitude is definitely correlated with academic performance. There is no debate there.
I'm sure on your journey you've taken enough stats to grasp that your personal anecdotal experience doesn't count for that much? I mean, being last place in school, absent all the time ... would it be reasonable for you, the Uni, or anyone to believe that you were 'well suited' to Engineering, or at least more suited than those with good grades, GPA yada yada? It's great you did well, but you must agree that wasn't likely.
In the aggregate, both GPA and SAT are highly correlated with Academic performance in University, so you're arguing against the wind here. [1]
(Do I really even need to provide a data point on this?)
And you must know that being 'Last Place' in High School would preclude most kids from even being accepted to Eng. programs, let alone Uni.
Students who do poorly in High School generally won't succeed in Eng. programs - let alone be accepted in the first place.
Everyone knows this, and it's why they use Grades and SAT as a primary means of admission.
And FYI raw aptitude can't be taught but all sorts of other things can i.e. having basic mathematical literacy and just 'keeping up' from grades 1-9, means that kids have the confidence and opportunity to participate in 'STEM' things which they would be blocked from doing otherwise. Peers, Mentors, points of Inspiration also give kids the extra energy and ethos to work through the issues they might not otherwise care about, in effect, there's a lot of 'passion' hidden inside 'aptitude'.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/prestoncooper2/2018/06/11/what-...
You're literally commenting on a thread about how the SAT is being removed from criteria and your whole point is that the intangibles (you used a bunch of ambiguous words like diligence and etc and I explicitly pointed that out). So have you lost the thread of the conversation?
>Students who do poorly in High School generally won't succeed in Eng. programs - let alone be accepted in the first place.
You really need to look up and understand the begging the question fallacy that I alluded to
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
>And FYI raw aptitude can't be taught but all sorts of other things can i.e. having basic mathematical literacy and just 'keeping up' from grades 1-9, means that kids have the confidence and opportunity to participate in 'STEM' things which they would be blocked from doing otherwise.
I do not understand what you're saying. On the one hand not being diligent and having good attendance should preclude students but lack of "confidence" shouldn't?
The successful students were taking and succeeding at Calc 1 in their second year.
For tests, simply paying attention and listening to what the teacher said was enough to do well.
For many people, homework is completely useless and many US schools absolutely love overwhelming students with it. There are also kids who need to work jobs after work to support their family--busy work assignments are just punishment for them, and countless people I know suffered because of that. The ACT/SAT was a way for them to elevate themselves.
You guessed it, poor whites and asians. The kids who couldn't afford extra curricular but who did great on the tests. Who is it going to help the most? Children of wealthy East-African and Caribbean immigrants.
This focus on extra-curricular also makes it really easy to sneak-in affirmative action (despite voters and the general public repeatedly saying no). Because, let's be honest, you can't objectively compare these things to one another.
> lower scores amongst legacy and athlete students
I'll give a pass to athletes.
It's no small feat to get an athletic scholarship, and for many sports there's absolutely no future beyond college (no pro league or circuit like football or tennis).
Any kid can get a used copy of an SAT prep book for cheap and get similar results to a rich kid getting private test tutoring.
I would say the environment, social/parental expectations, exemplars within family/friends, peers ect matter more than a book.
Talented poor kids acing SAT by reading a cheap book is stuff from the movies.
The fact is a standardized test is far less biased than the metrics they will use to replace them. That's the reason they were created in the first place
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=poor+family+child+tops+exam+...
> "I could not study because of financial problems, so I thought I must send my children to school and wipe out the darkness from their lives,"
> "I got tremendous support from my school teachers," he said.
This is exactly what i said. Environment of achievement is more important. "poor" doesn't mean just lack of financial resources. you cannot simply overcome lack of parental and social investment and care by reading a SAT book.
> I would say the environment, social expectations, exemplars within family/friends, peers ect matter more than a book.
Unfortunately they often tend to be introverts which colleges want less than overachievers in other areas. Except for the science/technology departments, who were probably overruled by other departments if decisions like abandoning test scores are made.
what motivated you to do this at the time ?
Also, I never said its not possible to do it with practice books.
> I would say the environment, social/parental expectations, exemplars within family/friends, peers ect matter more than a book.
my point was the word "more" in that sentence.
The SAT is actually pretty tough test to game. Anxiety drives parents to pay a lot for test prep, but there isn't much indication that it actually improves scores.
I have a handful of sources that disagree.
https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/R171...
https://collegefinance.com/college-admissions/does-sat-prep-...
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/04/why-should-...
"Powers and Rock concluded that the combined effect of coaching on the SAT I is between 21 and 34 points."
If you're at 1550 I probably can't help you -- at least if you're like me -- you sometimes just read a question wrong.
I had problems with geometry and decided to get some help with one of its branches. Tutor explained me stuff, gave exercises that I did and so on.
At the real exam there was one task from this geometry branch and I managed to do it. I don't know whether I'd be able to do it without going to those lessons, hard to say.
But at the end of the day it gave me 5 of 50 points at this exam, so I basically in very simplified version I received 10% on hard exam for less than 10% of minimal wage.
Of course it'd be naive to think that it scales like that, but you get the point.
Crime rate, Poverty rate, Housing values, Vacancy rate, Family environment, Median income, Single parent, Adversity score, Education level, ESL, High school environment, Undermatching, Curricular rigor, Free lunch rate, AP opportunity
Each school got a score.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/sat-to-give-students-adversity-...
https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/applying-to-ox...
This is one of the reasons that Oxford is beginning to seriously concern itself with background - it turns out that if you're already expecting top entry grades it's a good way of getting better students.
That, and its long-standing gross overrepresentation of children from posh schools is getting embarrassing.
So standardized merit based metrics serve only as a barrier to their ineffable judgement and pure deductions let it be them alone and their powerful "algorithm" that is too pure and holy for mortal eyes to sully with their gaze be the new standard by which we determine if a student can go to Harvard, for clearly this is the one true way forward and will never be manipulated by self serving or short sighted beauracrats to manipulate and politic in.
It's happens. I think I'm pretty smart but obviously very privileged.
Agree, but what are we replacing it with if we're "just skipping it"? Extracurriculars? Are those also not "waste of everyone's time"?
Is it 5%? Does that mean you can't tie-break between two scores within 5% of one another? That's called a measurement error. No, this steel beam isn't 8 feet up to the micron.
So, the A+ prodigy at High might not stand out against a sea of B+ students at Academy, after all, Academy is much more rigorous.
Enter standardized testing: the prodigy gets a 2400 and the B+ students at High get ~2000s. Suddenly the prodigy can actually catch the attention of the Harvard admissions.
Sorry, we've been advised by legal to say that we're not really "full up" because that would imply we have quotas and also that we only consider race peripherally and only ever as a plus factor. It just so happens to not be a plus factor here, while it's a default plus factor for some other candidates.
This may be a leftover of socialism though, because in yugoslavia everyone was considered equal to everyone else.
The prodigy at High will come across as a prodigy: not only will they have the better GPA, they're also more likely to have the nice "extra factors" that play well in admissions--class valedictorian, leadership in student council or maybe other clubs, etc. By contrast, the mediocrity at Academy has a worse GPA, and is unlikely to get nice statuses in those other extracurricular activities (who will be snatched up by the prodigies at Academy). So for the mediocrity at Academy to be marked as better, the admissions officer has to know of Academy and its reputation... and that's less common than you might think, even for the most-highly-ranked exemplars of Academy.
The other factor to bring up is that mediocrities at Academy are often competing against the prodigies at Academy; many schools don't want to admit too many people from Academy and will have a cap on the number of admissions.
[Yes, I did go to such an Academy, so I have some personal experience on the matter.]
It's been said many times, many ways, but the education system is totally broken.
gp is wants others won't be rejected because of low sat scores
It will change absolutely nothing for actual rich kids, no matter their race, who can buy in admission through donations, unlike what some people are claiming here. For these kids, SAT scores already don't matter.
At my blue blood private school, I had a math teacher who explicitly told my dad that he gave me a bad letter of rec on an MIT summer camp application, because as a black person affirmative action would make life too easy for me.
I'm happy it was only a summer camp and not my real college admissions the following year.
Even though I was a top five math student in my class across the entire private school, he and the dean of the math department gave me lower grades for the same work. They also didn't let me test out of classes (wouldn't show me test results), etc.
Thank God for SAT II's and AP exams.
I destroyed those tests. 5's and 790's.
Highest marks in the class for Math SAT II's.
But it didn't help my GPA from those biased teachers.
I did get into MIT for real the next year.
Standardized tests helped protect me from teacher bias.
Ultimately, the world is just a mess.
Now, I just focus on teaching people that the only fix for our problems will not come from mankind (to see what I'm talking about, take a look at: https://jw.org).
Humans are a mess.
I personally do hope for either AGI or a 3rd type encounter to expend Humanity's philosophy.
Despite all of our wonderful technological and scientific advances, our basic problems still involve moral division and disagreement.
This is in harmony with what the Bible predicted.
Commenting on our intellectual capacity: "there is nothing that they may have in mind to do that will be impossible for them"
Commenting on our moral situation: "men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money...not open to any agreement"
So, the Bible's thesis seems very accurate to me.
We have unlimited scientific and engineering ability.
But very limited ability to create harmony.
That's why prejudice, jingoism, injustice, racism, and numerous other issues are stubbornly difficult to get rid of.
But since the Bible's thesis is correct, I believe its proposed solution is likely correct as well.
But that's a topic for another day. :)
No doubt the link was a provocation but the whole idea here is to resist shallow provocations and focus on the interesting substance of a post, or an article, or a phenomenon.
My message is mostly that standardized tests can help minorities.
Typically, the assumption is that they hurt minorities.
But, if you're a high performer that is graded unfairly, standardized tests can help reveal the truth.
How horrible. The only lesson of value is, "this specific teacher cannot be trusted." To deny a student an opportunity to learn to teach some bizarre life lesson is completely misguided. Sorry you had to experience it.
> Standardized tests helped protect me from teacher bias.
Me too. I got terrible grades because I was busy trying to be a rebel in high school. Many of my teachers thought it more important to teach "life lessons" instead of their subject. I did very well on the ACT and SAT and got into college despite lackluster grades.
Once you accept that as your worldview you accept merit is meaningless. What separates Ramanujan and Newton from the average college dropout are extraneous factors. Any difference in outcomes is societal and environmental, and must be corrected.
If you are committed to selecting for the best, then you must select for individuals that are aided by factors outside their 'control', whether that's luck, environment, people, or genes. It does not matter how arbitrary or unfair these factors are, only that they help select the best men and women for a given job or career.
There is no particular reason to want everyone to be equal, and there are plenty of reasons you do not want this -- when everyone is equal, people are constantly fighting for who is best because if anyone just slightly increases their wealth/power, they will be the highest of all. People are fundamentally competitive, competing over social prestige, mates, etc. So creating a situation in which anyone can be king is a recipe for constant war. Thus the equal society is the most unjust society, because it is the society in which violence and conflict are maximized.
Moreover, it's better to maximize well-being rather than worrying about whether you think it is "fair" that talent is not distributed equally. What you can do is tax those who earn more and use that to provide social benefits to others. That is, set up a society in which everyone benefits from the outperformance of the elite, rather than trying to pretend that everyone can be elite, or that there is no elite at all.
Luck and genes are generally considered fair arbiters in a sense, at least when they are the source of one's merit. No one complains the chess champion only won because she was fortunate to be given a chess board at an earlier age than the competition or something.
Just to give a stupid example, when you call a painter to paint your house, you don't really care that the painter is in a wheelchair and cannot reach the ceilings, or if the painter is blind and cannot see the walls... you want a good result, ie. a nicely painted house.
Same with colleges... (usually, atleast in "the rest of the world") they want the best students available to enroll. In my country, a formula taking grades and standardized tests results is used, students are sorted by their score, and if there are 60 spots and 100 aplicants, top 60 by score are accepted. The colleges don't know anything about the students except the scores, and the only valid measure is the score. (...there are some exceptions, eg. acting/art schools, with entrance exams)
As a result of this, they have to keep a consistent ratio of high class students (with some baseline/distribution of ability) to talented students to miscellaneous students. Too many high class students, and they lose their academic prestige only to be an expensive private school. Too many talented students, then very few high class students can attend and the higher class will focus on other schools. If it's mainly other students, then it won't be a notable school.
Viewing elite college admissions from this level makes a lot of their actions more sensible. People are now able to game their old system so they have to adjust things to keep the ratio intact. I imagine at the graduate level, things are lot more performance/talent based and less political (excluding maybe MBAs or Law School).
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4CM4Q8lOoGrEOSnXmqp1D1?si=6...
Edit: here is the Peter Thiel reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz4VYFAQGaA
FTFY
I can also see this as a move like china did to kill tutorial services to give kids back their teen years. In a land where school is so expensive I think its worth it to spend summers working a job (and all the merits that come with that) to better prep for possibly the biggest financial decision ever for a still developing brain.
Of course, it is a public university, so money is a bit different.
Almost 20 years ago I went to the University of Toronto's computer science program which is notorious for this practice and can see first hand the effect that this practice has on friends of mine even decades later. It's not just a matter of filtering students out, the issue is that there is a strict cut-off point that is unknown to people in advance, so you have students investing one to two years pursuing a program and then having those years go to waste because they're below the cut-off. It's basically a system that traps students with aspirations of going into one program and then when most of them fail due to uncertain admissions guidelines, those students end up with a great deal of pressure to continue studying at the university but under a less prestigious or financially sound program.
The result of this system speaks for itself, with the building used by the computer science department being the site of 3-4 suicides per year (which I am admittedly speculating is due to people not hitting the admissions cut-off).
Whatever one's opinion of standardized testing may be, the Canadian model of accepting as many students as possible into a program and then kicking them out or shoving them into a different program on the basis of rather volatile and uncertain criteria is not the one to go by.
This is one problem that standardized testing aims to solve — how does a university compare a student with 95% avg from one school and 85% from another?
- Small percentage (10-20%) based purely on performance (either academic or athletic)
- All other admitted applications drawn randomly from a pool who achieve a base score on SAT's.
With the following benefits:
- Student population reflective of national demographics due to random sampling.
- Elimination of bias and discrimination endemic to these institutions history
- Could even mark our 5% for "legacy" status students to keep the elite donors happy.
- Motivation for students: anyone who can achieve a baseline has a real chance of attending an elite university
Your proposal effectively removes college as a signal of elite status, and thus people will organically invent new symbols that most will lack and we will be back to where we started very quickly.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-h...
My initial thought was we could just have a floor. We don't need to ensure a perfect score amongst the pool that gets randomly selected, so if there there is minimum that is still "high," and that isn't biased toward outliers from any race, then it would work.
But it looks like the floor we'd need to have a reasonable representation would be something like a 500/800 math score. That is much too low, at least for elite schools. Choosing something like a 700 cut-off ends up being very racially selective.
I imagine SAT provides little signal at Harvard conditioned on GPA, APs, and other extracurricular demonstrations of academic merit.
I wonder what this will do to the mean once it becomes optional. It seems mostly people with very high scores would be the ones to bother submitting them because otherwise it could hurt the applicant.
Harvard devaluing their diploma is good because smart people will get off the credential treadmill and do something productive instead.
Other, worse universities, are not going to have the resources to significantly evaluate applicants at all, and still need those tests just to insure that students have minimal math and language skills.
Universities devote a tremendous amount of resources to the admissions process because it is, of course, extremely important to their business that they get the right number of enrollments from the right kinds of students.
Human society, at least in the west, is reverting back to the old ways of doing things.
"...the earth, as being their mother, delivered them, and now, as if their land were their mother and their nurse, they ought to take thought for her and defend her against any attack and regard the other citizens as their brothers and children of the self-same earth...While all of you, in the city, are brothers, we will say in our tale, yet god, in fashioning those of you who are fitted to hold rule, mingled gold in their generation, for which reason they are the most precious—but in the helpers, silver, and iron and brass in the farmers and other craftsmen. And, as you are all akin, though, for the most part, you will breed after your kinds, it may sometimes happen that a golden father would beget a silver son, and that a golden offspring would come from a silver sire, and that the rest would, in like manner, be born of one another.
So that the first and chief injunction that the god lays upon the rulers is that of nothing else are they to be such careful guardians, and so intently observant as of the intermixture of these metals in the souls of their offspring, and if sons are born to them with an infusion of brass or iron they shall by no means give way to pity in their treatment of them, but shall assign to each the status due to his nature and thrust them out among the artisans or the farmers. And again, if from these there is born a son with unexpected gold or silver in his composition they shall honor such and bid them go up higher, some to the office of guardian, some to the assistanceship, alleging that there is an oracle that the city shall then be overthrown when the man of iron or brass is its guardian."
Socrates proposes and claims that if the people believed "this myth...[it] would have a good effect, making them more inclined to care for the state and one another." This is his noble lie: "a contrivance for one of those falsehoods that come into being in case of need, of which we were just now talking, some noble one..."
Are there any interesting works of Plato-Socrates that a philosophy newcomer can understand? (Especially something translated to modern English, or with a modern English explanation.)
Yes there are, usually in the shorter plays. The Republic is famously dense and takes effort to read.
Here is a good overview of Plato's writings and which are recommended: https://phuulishfellow.wordpress.com/2019/08/18/a-platonic-r...
Also if it's highly rated on Goodreads, it probably has popular appeal translating to ease of reading: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/879.Plato
Stanford's philosophy library will help with explanations: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics-shorter/#11
TL;DR:
Apology
Symposium
Phaedo
A national test creates cohesion in a society in that it defines what knowledge is valued and aligns people around it. Will we lose this benefit if the test is dropped?
The tests and other admission criteria are heuristics for talent, motivation, etc. those motivated to gain prestige in this way will attempt to max these out. But might we not encourage a better use of this energy than the maxing out of simple skills(eg error free, quick arithmetic vs going forward to study number theory)?
As a European, I have to ask, how can a university qualify the students without having any standardised test?
At every level of my education I had country-level-standardised test. It was always the most important factor in getting in.
It also had an effect of allowing students from very remote, small towns to study in the capital, because of their top scores.
I have family in China...and in China there are national tests to be able to compare students.
If we start doing a national tests you'll have people start yelling "States rights!". We can't even have states accept free money to give their people insurance. I don't think all states would accept a national test.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-h...
To me it’s a little presumptuous that there’s an equal demand across racial categories.
I’m not saying there shouldn’t be but acting as if that’s the case won’t have achieve the results you want.
This seems very facile to me, even though there undoubtedly is overlap with the truth.
But as to my own view, I remain a meritocrat, despite the the tide that seems to turning against such thinking.
In most Europe of course, it would be straight out illegal as to my knowledge no country in the EU can legally do racial discrimination.
There is no such thing as "positive racial discrimination", it's racist no matter what the intent is.
Basically in USA "people of color" is a euphemism for "poor people", but acknowledging the existence of an economic underclass doesn't jive well in an ultra capitalistic society.
So identity politics and race dynamics serve as a cover for all that. People pushing all that madness aren't trying to change the system, but sustain it.
The internet hurts kids today as they can see the scores and the data without understanding it as they are still kids. It is discouraging as the raw data without digging does not show them that there are people with scores above the line that do not get admitted and those below the line that do. It is the whole package that really counts, and test scores are not a true measure.
Let see how this plays out.
Not all highschools have AP classes, so AP tests should not be required to apply, obviously. AP tests provide an objective metric to compare students who go to high schools with AP courses. For students who don't have AP courses, I think using grades is reasonable. All students can still submit additional non-required test scores and other supporting material for their application. At least now we are not wasting students time with this SAT bullshit.
I think the SATs are like Leetcode but even less useful. Obviously Leetcode is some indication that someone can program, but we're all aware that Leetcode is nothing like actual programming in a job. Similarly, the SAT is some indication that someone can do college, but nothing like actual college. I just think the cost of wasting millions of kids' hours studying for the SAT is a tragic waste of time, when they can be studying for their classes or more rigorous tests that test actual subject material like AP tests.
Well, I guess that's where we'll agree to disagree, because I didn't.
As I see it, AP courses are test prep taking over the entirety of the curriculum. That's way worse.
With AP tests, I can say "I tried learning chemistry, so I studied chemistry, and took this standardized test, and here is my chemistry score." With SATs I'm studying random "aptitude" stuff and I'm not even sure what I'm really demonstrating or what is really being measured.
Imo the main advantage APs brings is GPA weighting/more impressive looking transcripts.
I think scores often aren't even considered by admissions -- purely used for college credit.
1. Test optional - Students can still submit SAT and ACT scores. So if you get a perfect score you can, and probably should, submit your test score and it will look good and the admission committee will weigh that.
2. The issue with standardized tests is not if the SAT or ACT is objective or not. The issue is what those tests objectively measure. Ends up mostly family income and, well, ones ability to take standardized tests. It is like the 40 yard dash in football. Everyone obsesses about it as an objective measure, but it doesn’t really mean too much one way or another as it pertains to football.
As an aside, has anyone gone back and tried taking a sample SAT test? If you have not exposed yourself to the unique framing of standardized test questions in awhile it is quite jarring if you are not used to it.
Also, people in this thread are confusing testing optionality with testing not considered. The smart low-income kid that kicks ass on the SAT/ACT can still submit their score.
I'm also interested in how this might affect recent immigrant applicants, actually (strong on quantitative aspects with strong narrative writing for essays, but weak in timed verbal/English exams due to comprehension).
Just a couple thoughts.
The diversity trope is just pure performative art to justify more rich elite whites. They do this discrimination while having a massive endowment and still receiving huge taxpayer handouts.
* Take about 2/5 of students from the elites
* Take about 3/5 of students who are brilliant
Students of the elites look smart by association. Students who are brilliant are brought into powerful, moneyed social networks. It works well for everyone involved.
The focus on alumni donations is a little bit overblown. Harvard has way more money than it needs. What Harvard looks for is a lot richer than that. The alumni base is part of the national -- and increasingly international -- power structure. A president of some country, a high court justice, or similar sorts of power positions can be at least as important as a billionaire. Likewise, branding is important. The current push on DEI is to make sure that (1) the brand doesn't suffer (2) DEI-focused positions are filled by elite school alumni, and not focused on actual change to power structures.
(Though obviously not in this case because you correctly called it out)
Ivy League this year will have material overrepresentation of Latino and Black kids, substantial overrepresentation of Asian and Jewish kids, and up to 10% 'Children of Alumni', another overrepresentation.
Which leaves those not in those groups out in the lurch.
And one’s ability to pass the SAT proves only that one can pass the SAT. It just proves they were privileged enough to have some one teach them “the tricks and tactics to pass the test” - not understanding, not potential, and not intelligence.
Standardized test scores do very little to predict college success when controlling for other variables. And they're trivial to game.
They're a relic of back when people believed in IQ tests were useful selection criteria. Maybe there will be standardized tests in the future that are more useful, but we don't have those yet.
You make a distinction without a difference in this case, and what other variables are you controlling for? Class rank? That can't be gamed, you think? Rich people will always game the system, whatever it is. In many cases, the alternatives are AP exams, which aren't even available in all schools.
What criterion would you suggest? A lottery?
IQ tests are a very reliable proxy for academic performance potential. Is this even in dispute?
IQ tests are maybe ok at doing population-level correlations, but not at predicting the success of any given individual. Tons of things are correlated with intelligence, and IQ has the virtue that it's easy to measure. So it has uses for things like research studies.
But as an actual filter when you care about performance it's not great. Things like high school GPA are easier to measure and more predictive of college success.
needs sources, and unbiased ones.
The burden of proof lies with the person making a claim.
"Objective" entry is never coming back to college admissions.
Broaden your definition of admissions.
The Ivy League schools haven't exactly been discreet about their desire to admit fewer Asians.
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/caltech-college-admissions-...
It inevitably leads to the one or two cultures dominating positions of leadership in government, commerce, etc, inevitably breeding resentment and racism.
If you want a healthy society, you need to set aside the individual in order to create balance across the society. That might mean some high achievers losing out on their first choice college, it might mean affirmative action, etc.
Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness.
Given what you're replying to, it sounds like you're suggesting that Asian Americans dominate power in this country, which I must be misinterpreting because that's ridiculous. I do agree with the general sentiment that what high achievers deserve is not necessarily what's good for society, but I'd say we should strive for equal opportunities, not equal outcomes.
(1) each job being filled by the person who's better suited for it than any other person
*versus*
(2) each job being filled by a person who's better suited for it than for any other job
You can't have both of the situations above hold. They are in conflict. And it's hard to be honest from the point of view of hiring people, that (1) is basically not a realistic option. Everybody says their goal is to hire the best person for a job without acknowledging that the best person is not, and should not, be available.
Is (2) optimal for society? I'm not sure, but I think society is closer to that than (1). But "meritocracy" sounds more like (1) to me.
They are not in conflict at all, this is what the basic welfare theorems of economics say.
It's just that #2 and #1 are impossible to achieve because it requires perfect information about each person and each job, and a unified labor market, which just isn't realistic, as information has a cost and labor markets are fragmented.
In the real world, we are lucky to get some aspects of both #1 and #2, in the sense that people do search for jobs best suited for them, but imperfectly, and employers do search for workers best suited for each job, but imperfectly, and you kinda meet in the middle. If you want, you can call "meritocracy" the freedom of the employer to hire the best worker available, but I'm not sure of a snappy phrase to describe the freedom of the worker to search for the best job available. Maybe someone came up with a label for that. But really they are flipsides of a process that leads to an optimum, they are not two opposing forces where one makes the other impossible. It is like buying and selling, the supply curve does not make the demand curve impossible; both curves meet at an optimum price which is where supply and demand meet. If you mess with either the demand curve or the supply curve, you do not end up at the optimum price, you end up losing welfare somehow.
Obviously anything that can reduce frictions helps you get closer to the meeting of 1 and 2. For example, greater availability of job boards and pay transparency, working condition transparency to get information about available jobs to workers, or things like more accurate information about worker skills and talents to employers (e.g. meaningfulness of degrees play a role here as do rigorous interviews). Really both worker and employer are facing a murky question trying to figure out "how good is the other side here?". Both need as much information as possible.
It is the costliness of information that keeps us away from 1 and 2 simultaneously.
Yes they are. Imagine World War II. The best person to dig a particular ditch might be Alan Turing. But that's completely different from the best job for Alan Turing being digging that ditch.
>both curves meet at an optimum price which is where supply and demand meet
I think that optimum and equilibrium are different things and a single price cannot be optimum even if it is the equilibrium.
Is this stuff at all familiar?
No, Alan Turing would be pretty bad at digging ditches, and there would be many people who could do the job just as well or not better than he.
So in that environment, the code breaker team needs someone, and the ditch digging team needs someone, and if it turns out that Alan is in the ditch and Joe doing an awful job breaking codes, then the code breaking team will try to fire Joe and hire Alan, and the ditch digging team wont mind switching Joe for Alan. Thus this swap is a pareto improving trade, and there are no pareto improving trades in equilibrium, therefore no equilibrium process would settle on Alan in the ditch and Joe breaking codes.
So look, this is an actual body of science and math that you can't just dismiss without understanding and thinking about. There are legitimate criticisms of welfare theorems -- the ones I outlined, namely around lack of perfect information -- does the code breaking team know how good Alan is at breaking codes? Does Alan know there is a job opening other than ditch digging? Etc. It is all about information, but to just pretend that the welfare theorems don't exist because you haven't thought of them or they don't seem intuitively "true" to you is neither a good avenue of exploration nor of debate. These are, after all, theorems. You attack theorems by attacking their hypotheses, not by "disagreeing" with them or just asserting that they are false.
> I think that optimum and equilibrium are different things and a single price cannot be optimum even if it is the equilibrium.
This is, mathematically, false. But it's also irrelevant because there is not one price, there is a single price vector. Alan and Joe don't earn the same wage. The budget of the ditch project and code breaking project are also not the same.
It's a contrived example that illustrates something general. It could still be true - maybe Turing would have some insight that let him do half as much labor. But whether it's actually true for him is irrelevant.
Let's say the manager of a McDonald's started out making hamburgers and does it better than any of the other employees, but doesn't normally do it any more, unless there's a crisis and they have to fill in when nobody else is available. Or some software engineer at Google would be better at processing data for litigation purposes than anyone in that industry, yet they outsource the work.
"greater equality" is tautological when you have instituted equality of outcome, but does it produce greater happiness? I don't believe it to do so. It reduced overall outcome - as those who are forced down will not produce as much as they could've.
"Equality of outcome" == "greater equality"... Well yea, assuming outcome is definable and changing those outcomes to be "equal" is possible, by definition, things would be more "equitable" by that same definition.
"Greater happiness" - I assume you mean greater overall societal happiness. That's quite a subjective claim. I'm not sure that's even a measurable thing, but do you have any evidence of this?
Sure, go ahead and see what happens when you disconnect negative behavior from negative outcomes. I'm sure that has no long-term consequences for your civilization.
Getting back to Harvard, everyone who goes there will be extremely competent. You seem to be suggesting that they'll be accepting slackers and truants.
Now. Once they start admitting students absent an IQ test, don't be surprised when it's prestige and the assumed quality of it's graduates is diminished.
It is purely happenstance that these institutions have even had to consider caring about how they gatekeep genpop’s upwards mobility for the last half a century.
They literally have no reason to care. They believe attendees want higher education for the pursuit of academic knowledge and are so disconnected from the desperate reality. And they’re right, they can weather this fad.
The ombudsman closes the thick book in the monestary, blows dust off the back, walks outside and says “there are third generation people with Asian heritage in this country? huh, how about that.” Goes back into their monk quarters after replacing the wax, lights another candle and goes back into the books. This is how these institutions function. They don’t know anything about how passionate, desperate or how much energy has been put into simply getting in, they don’t know why its important to people except for them loving the attention and pride and money.
The ideology of Equality of Outcome has literally lead to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people worldwide(Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot).
That's fine, but the question is, who gets to decide? Individuals.
> Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness.
Receiving unearned money doesn't lead to happiness due to lack of fulfillment. Having earned money taken away doesn't lead to happiness due to a lack of reward. Equality of outcome always ends up killing the initiative and freedoms needed for prosperity to support such a society to begin with.
>It inevitably leads to the one or two cultures dominating positions of leadership in government, commerce, etc, inevitably breeding resentment and racism.
By that logic, the alternative is you get more people in government, commerce etc. who are significantly less conscientious and dutiful? That doesn't exactly sound like a great thing for society.
Not significantly so, no. These are still cream of the crop within their group.
> That doesn't exactly sound like a great thing for society.
It's not ideal, but far better than the alternative.
That's what votes are for on this site.
That’s why they have things like essays and consider extracurricular activities. Most of the selective Universities specifically exclude people with high grades and very little else that they were involved in.
Moreover, I recall reading at some point that at least some of the Ivy’s, during at least the first half of the 20th century, specifically avoided students with the highest grades in favor of those who were more like a B+ average and were more social, which they determined through the very subjective means of interviewing students on campus. (I’m old enough that I recall some of my friends visiting Universities for such meetings, but I have no idea if they still meet prospective students like this).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/09/14...
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...
I believe the specific things I am talking about were discussed in relation to introversion and The Ivy’s specifically wanting to lean toward extroverts who were well-rounded and had good social skills.
She had a sterling high school record, but they wrote a rejection letter explaining that they already had a woman attending the institution.
The punch line, as it were, as I recall it, was that "a woman" did not mean one undergraduate woman, but just one, period.
So, she went to a much less prestigious and well-known school, majored in math, and ended up being a programmer instead of an engineer.
I am not sure if she was bitter about it.
And really we do it for college too. Except it is “we already have enough comp science majors”.
Just the Ivies? UW is explicit: they want racial "equity". Meaning they won't admit more Asians, as a percentage, than the population they are picking candidates from. And they promote it as a good thing: https://www.washington.edu/raceequity/diversity-and-equity-f...
The easiest way to get into UW is to be (graduate high school) from eastern Washington, they actually have a state mandated quota for that.
People who read college applications are "guided" by Universities using a system of feedback so they can get whatever outcome they want. Read more about that here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-...
College admission officers don’t get access to race and such when reviewing applications. Yes, they can add points to it, but that happens after the rest of the application is reviewed, and can’t be done without explicitly saying they are doing it.
Read the NYT story I linked to, to understand how application readers are gently guided to consider race, without explicitly being told to do so.
Excerpt from the story:
"I received an e-mail from the assistant director suggesting I was not with the program: “You’ve got 15 outlier, which is quite a lot."
If some people base their opinions this way for validation: I’m a minority.
Nip it in the bud, take it to court, call it out for what it is. Race based discrimination has no place in this society, find another way, especially for any institution that takes any state or federal funding, you can totalllly curb stomp that approach.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-j...
There's a reason why lawyers are the second biggest financial contributors to the Democrats among professions:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FBwtxXnUUAIAm8W?format=jpg&name=...
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-sta...
Anti-discrimination lawyers are licking their lips at the prospect of sueing SpaceX next, this time for sexual harassment:
https://www.space.com/spacex-sexual-harassment-allegations-l...
The explanation provided by the essays is coherent and resonates with I have seen.
The Civil Rights Act made it illegal to use IQ tests to hire applicants. It is totalitarian in nature and needs to be scaled back to enable a free society where a sanctimonious elite is not using the force of the state to reshape private citizens.
Take it to federal court, then take it to federal appeals court. If the 9th circuit doesn’t match conservative land, do the same in another circuit.
You’re playing the helpless victim while having way more resources than the “protected classes” that you feel are oppressing your way of life, all because you (and the organizations that didnt appeal) are afraid of the PR. The protected classes dealt with way more than “potentially bad PR” to create this reality so just take the L and get the courts to correct it.
The wokification of US law was established by the Civil Rights Act. As far back as the 1970s, the Supreme Court ruled that using IQ tests to vet job applicants is a form of prohibited discrimination under the CRA.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-...
BTW Canada didn't have SAT requirement for college application I think they are doing OK. They do look at GPA during high school though.
It doesn't make too much sense to over indexing on this when it is already discounted in a significant way.
It's like a human menagerie. Imagine choosing the animals for a zoo. Even if it were agreed which kind of animal was best (I like zebras), a zoo full of nothing but zebras would lose the interest and support of the public. Therefore, some "lesser" animals must be included, to provide the variety that makes it a zoo.
The "elite" college needs a curation process, and it has to be opaque, or it will be easily gamed, and the student body will turn into a freak show, spoiling its brand. There is enough demand, and little enough true variety among high school students, that a straight numerical admissions threshold will produce a class of effectively identical students.
No, the biggest issue is the size of the student bodyis kept stagnantly small to maintain exclusivity. Perhaps this made sense in an analog age but at some point in the digital world of plenty this will get/needs to be disrupted.
The game changer will be when some University figures out how to become the Apple of higher education. Previously high end phones achieved prestige by adding diamonds, gold plating, a high price tag and only a select few stores that people in the know could find (i.e. the Nokia Vertu).
Somehow Apple figured out how to maintain prestige/exclusivity while essentially servicing the entire market.
It will be a breakthrough for humanity when a University figures out how to replicate this combo of prestige and quality at scale for higher education.
You think it hasn't been tried?
First, there's a chicken-or-egg problem. By virtue of being one of the oldest universities in America, Harvard was originally an elite institution that was powered by the tuition paid for by the children of elite parents. To start a new "Harvard-but-bigger", you need to figure out where the "elite" part comes from. In the absence of a pre-existing elite alumni body, you need to enforce rigorous academic standards on your early graduating classes and let your reputation grow from there. But, you also need to deliver the rigorous academic standards at scale.
MOOCs were one attempt, but it's impossible to defend against cheating online. It's hard enough to stop cheating in real-world exam rooms, letting people go through examinations at home makes it impossible.
If you require people to show up in-person, then you reach physical limits to scale very quickly. Even if you try to combine MOOC-style lectures with building out a network of controlled examination centers in the real world, the attempts to expand American standardized testing abroad show that you begin to run into problems of corrupt test center administrators. It's like the fast food franchise model, where the restaurant corporate headquarters finds it increasingly difficult to maintain the same standards across all of their franchised locations, except that with examinations, your day-to-day users want your standards to be compromised.
The community colleges in my state are so great. They do such a huge service, and they do it economically. You can get a 4 year degree by spending 2 years at a community college and the other 2 at a state university. That's like the bargain of the century. The CoCo's keep an eye on the curriculum at the big schools, so the students are prepared, and there's no hassle with transferring credits. And their focus is on teaching.
Disclosure: One of my kids attends the big school, the other is at one of the regional schools, both are in good situations.
I think that the "elite" schools can be left to their own devices, on their own funding, and turn themselves into a freak show if they want. Public attention should turn towards supporting and developing better access to education for the rest of us, starting with the community college system.
In a few decades, I hope we will look back on privatized higher education, the way we look on privatized health care today.
In the late 1990s I practiced and bumped my score up about 100 points. Do I think it made a difference to the college I went to? Doubtful.
I think the better question is: Do the tests accurately predict if a student will do well in college? That's their point, and if schools have better ways to predict if an applicant will succeed, there's no point in using the test.
Maybe instead of lowering standards, we should push kids to practice.
The dismay here is not due to a believe that testing correctly plucks the best minuscule number of deserving applicants that get in. It’s that everything else that is used is worse.
I find it to be extremely destructive to spend all your time complaining about problems, and none finding solutions. That’s more or less what Maxism is: a long list of faults with capitalism and a half-baked untested idea of what could maybe be a solution. And we’ve seen the damage that ideology has done.
Sure, as long as they have the free time to devote to that (which they may not, if they have to work through high school). Alternatively, they can hire an (expensive) tutor, which can help.
If scores are an important factor for admission, then that selects for people who:
* are good at standardized testing
* or, have the extra time and/or money to improve their score
There are, of course, many other things at play here; but it's a start!
You can say that about GPA too.
You just stated a very objective and valuable thing: they benefit people who practice. And it turns out that the will to practice doing things you don't know how to do is the most important skill you can have in life.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note these ones—you broke all of them here:
"Don't be snarky."
"Eschew flamebait."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."