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Comment by Pigalowda | Hacker News Reader

It’s perhaps to address lower scores amongst legacy and athlete students who are accepted? It can’t be controversial if the comparison metric is removed.

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.”

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I think it gives Harvard a lot of cover for their admissions decisions. As you noted, Harvard has come under fire for rejecting a lot of Asian American applicants while also coming under fire for letting in less-qualified legacy applicants. While standardized tests have biases that are problematic, this move allows them to be more or less biased as they choose.

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.

How are the SAT/ACT not objective tests? Are they not objective measures of how you perform on the SAT/ACT? There are abundant low cost practice guides and study materials. I came from a very poor family and with some practice at home scored very well on the SAT. It was one of the few tools I had to attract college admissions boards. I feel like taking that away will severely disadvantage poor kids who are otherwise bright with strong work ethics.

put a big IMO/IMU around all of this, but the SAT/ACT isn't objective in the sense that studying for them is something you can do to improve your score and your prospects. However, it is also transparent in how you do that: you take a course, get study books, and/or take practice tests and there are programs out that have been trying to help disadvantaged students get access to these tools. its also much more cost effective compared to the other solutions like going to a private school (difficult, can be costly without aid) or getting into expensive niche sports.

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?

It’s well-known how to train for foot races and that training will improve your natural/untrained performance.

That doesn’t make a timed foot race a subjective measure, IMO.

subjective/objective are probably not the right adjectives here, but to use your example I would say that a timed foot race is an objective measure of how well you do in timed foot races, but is not an objective measure of your innate athletic ability because of training/coaching and you have to factor those to attempt to back into physical ability. the same is true for the SAT, in that people treat it like an intelligence/general knowledge test when you have to factor in the specific training that person has had for the SAT itself.

So what do you propose is more objective (or whatever qualifier you prefer) than the SAT?

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.

Not really about SATs, but about a different direction to take the concept of college and higher education.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidie...

That's an interesting read, and I personally am a fan of Scott's somewhat radical views on college education in America, but surely you recognize that you are directly side-stepping the question? The problem at hand here is not about "how to decide who to get into undergrad", it's "how to decide who to train for the 'elite' jobs in society".

if you read my first comment i never argued for getting rid of the sat, though they should get rid of the usurious prices for tests and sending your scores out. in fact, i argued that of all the subjective tests the sat has the most legible and accessible path to maximizing your score compared to all the other subjective things colleges look at.

A timed foot race is a quite reasonable measurement of athletic capability - like, it's not a perfect one and a more thorough and diverse evaluation would be better, but if you don't have a better evaluation option then it's obvious that it has some information; if you'd take a hundred random people and split them into two halves based on foot race times, then that would be a far better separation than one based on randomness or any factors that measure athleticness even less.

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.

that would work if you were talking about random people who were selected to do a surprise track race, but if the track race is known to be THE measure and that can be influenced by training then you’re going to see skew.

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.

While it's true that one can improve their standardized test scores by studying or taking a course, and the ability to do those things is correlated to a student's socio-economic situation; if you label standardized tests as subjective, then for me it follows that there is no objective measure of a student period.

Which begs the question, who exactly do you admit to your school, and why?

I haunt thrift stores, and almost always there are SAT/ACT prep books for sale for a couple dollars. You can probably get them for free from your local library.

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.

> I feel like taking that away will severely disadvantage poor kids who are otherwise bright with strong work ethics.

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-...

No, it's a measure of how well you perform on the subjects tested by the SAT. There are many things that correlate with high SAT scores (e.g., grades, being Asian?), but it is definitely true that you can prep for the SAT without any meaningful amount of money. I don't believe that anybody has ever alleged that SAT scores are a proxy for intelligence, though I suspect there is a decent correlation. In my mind it is a useful, objective, universal measure of how an individual student is able to prepare for and execute on a difficult task.

SAT's are closely correlated with IQ tests: https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/what-do-sat-and-iq-test...

> I don't believe that anybody has ever alleged that SAT scores are a proxy for intelligence

MENSA accepts it for admission to their high IQ club.

> meaningful amount of money

Depends on how much money is meaningful to you. Time has its own costs, especially since an older teenager can work as an alternative.

With all due respect, the vast majority of us here took these tests. Do any of us remember them containing quizzes on obscure aspects of water polo and equestrianism and sailing jargon, or other things that only rich kids would know about? I remember them being fairly self-contained.

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.

Here is the main study from 2003: https://meridian.allenpress.com/her/article-abstract/73/1/1/...

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-...

"The SAT has been shown to be both culturally and statistically biased against . . . Asian Americans."

Well, I'll be damned. Huh.

From the second article:

> 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...

Here is a simple example from an old SAT (1970s):

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.

Is there a more up-to-date example? The SAT hasn't even had an analogy section at all since 2005.

Yes, only wealthy people know what a sailboat is and have a large vocabulary.

It doesn't say only wealthy people will know what it is, it says they are much more likely to know what it is because they are much more likely to have experienced it first hand.

It would be hard to deny that generally sailboat racing is done by wealthy people.

That doesn’t follow. Poor people are aware of many things they don’t do. You’re wanting to lower standards to help people who don’t need that kind of help to expiate you own status guilt. Poor people may also not have cars. Or have ever flown on a plane or owned an iPhone. But they aren’t necessarily stupid and will probably know what these things are and if they happen to be then they should go to elite colleges.

That is dependent on where you're from, you could be from a poor family and know exactly what a regatta is.

The yearly regatta has always been like the Olympics of Newfoundland

OTOH, You could be wealthy but from Montana. You probably have never witnessed a regatta in your life. You and your wealthy friends will probably be able to answer every question related to a ski holiday however.

Being from Cincinnati, I had to laugh at that particular example a little bit, because there's an annual charity "Rubber Duck Regatta" where you pay to sponsor a rubber duck and they dump them all in the river and give a prize to whoever has theirs finish first. When I was a kid, they ran TV ads for it blasting the name out loud about every six seconds, so most students who didn't know the word otherwise would have figured it out. I'm sure there would be statistical analysts looking at the scores for that question by region and scratching their heads.

Come on, man. Your opinions about the SAT are based on a single infamous SAT question (of unknown provenance) from many decades ago?

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.

To be completely fair, I think at least some portions of the SAT are distinctly more difficult without a strong reading background.

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?

Succeeding in college also requires a strong reading background. The point of the test is to predict college success, not "be fair" (an inherently subjective statement)

This theory would make sense if the hardest questions showed the most racial disparity, but it's actually the easiest questions that do, according to the papers cited by jedberg.

Biased against cultures that don't value competence / excellence in mathematics.

This is pissing on people's leg and telling them its raining. There's no "cultural loading" in the SATs. English is my second language and I didn't even know Chicago was a big city until my mid-20s, but reading a lot and practicing vocabulary words is easy and cheap. New York's Stuyvesant high school has an average SAT score of around 1500, and half of students are eligible for free/reduced price lunch: https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/stuyvesant-serves-needy-...

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).

So then what do you make of the studies that show that SATs are culturally biased, like the one OP posted [1]. I decided to go ahead and buy it for the 10 bucks and review it. It's a surprisingly technical study that seems fairly robust and it has been replicated several times (original study in 2003 and replicated in 2010).

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-...

Why would there be a Black-white gap (two groups that come from the same American culture) but not an Asian-white gap (two groups that come from different cultures)?

Black and white families are not in fact part of the "same American culture". And, of course, it's not the case that Asians uniformly outperform white subjects on the SAT; "Asian" comprises many different cultures, and not all of them are empirically advantaged in America.

The racial gap is almost exactly as big on the SAT Math as it is on Verbal. Do you think SAT Math is also culturally biased? If so, do you think it is exactly as biased as Verbal? That is, why is the Math gap not, say, half the Verbal one, if the cause for disparities is cultural bias?

> "Poverty makes things harder, no doubt."

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

There is no such thing as “personal merit” independent of parenting. Kids are a product of their genetics and upbringing.

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!

Even if you remove personal merit from the idea of college admissions, which most people do not, then you've still got a system that's selecting for the cultural knowledge and position of parents instead of the benefit received from educating a particular person. This seems to be working well enough so far, but it isn't optimal.

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.

That appears to be a purely statistical argument - some questions appear to be disproportionately hard/easy for certain racial groups. That has some value, but it would be nice to see some concrete example(s) of how this bias is expressed.

I posted an example in a sibling comment:

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.

As I replied there, this example is very old. There hasn't even been an analogy section since 2005.

Definitely my most hated section. Full of rare, obscure, you-know-it-or-don't words for massive bookworms.

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.

> the most exceptional are more similar to one another than the average are

Wait, can you elaborate?

Sure! This idea is interesting and may well be original:

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.

I see. Very curious. Shall we call it “adverse convergence” hypothesis?

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.

There's probably a name for it somewhere! I want to call it something like... convergence of survivors, broadly construed. (Achievers? Overcomers?)

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.

Now that I think of it convergence on a trait crucial to survival is a trivial result, though it’s often non-trivial to spot.

Still there is something in the longevity example that’s evading the trivial explanation.

Yes, it's not trivial because evolution stops caring about you after you reproduce.

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.

Aside from the fact, repeatedly pointed out, that the analogy section has been kaput since 2005... this would be a hard question, the sort that shows the least racial and income gaps.

> it is really a test of how wealthy you were growing up

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.

There is some truth to the argument that standardized tests are a flawed proxy for the combination of intelligence and motivation to learn that one wants in a student, and that the test may be biased towards some cultures that have a tradition of preparing their children for those standardized tests, whether directly or indirectly. Despite the relative low cost of practice, it is not free. Also, each attempt of the test has a cost.

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.

I'm not aware of any significant cultural test bias (which I'll define as differential prediction).

Statistically significant, such that it created some academic literature and enough cover for Harvard to make this new policy. Practically significant, maybe not.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29599455#29600100

First off, the SAT has gone through many revisions in the last 20 years so it's unclear this still applies. The SAT doesn't even have analogies any more, perhaps as a result of this research.

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.

> The SAT doesn't even have analogies any more, perhaps as a result of this research.

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.

What’s wrong with analogies?

Many analogy questions suffered from requiring cultural context, and it's hard for a question-writer to know which ones.

I'm an immigrant and moved here when I was 9. My parents always spoke in a different language growing up. I personally had a hard time with certain vocabulary that I never picked up and that maybe I otherwise would have if I had native English-speaking parents. This definitely slows you down when reading problems as you're only gathering about 3/4 of the problem at times. This is probably an outlier, but just thought I'd share my point of view here.

I mean, the SAT has "aptitude test" in the name; the idea that you can practice it and do better each time is a bug and not a feature.

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.

Since 1993 SAT no longer stands for 'scholastic aptitude test'. It had its roots as a sort of IQ proxy but that has fallen out of favor because it doesn't reflect the full purpose of schooling (e.g. advancement from given means, value-add of schooling for a given student) nor range of things that cause students to achieve (e.g. hard work, conscientiousness, etc).

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.

Biased in the sense that cultures that that rewarded diligence and intelligence are able to compete more effectively against cultures that don't and the wages of these accomplishments can be seen in their posterity?

There seems to be a lot of bending over backwards here to say over and over again the SAT/ACT aren't objective. I'm not discounting the role socioeconomic status, parental influence, school district, family income etc. have on one's life, but at the end of the day if you get more questions right, you have a higher score. That's what objective means. We can talk about making the test more equitable, whether or not we should do that, and whether or not that's a good thing for college admissions specifically or education in general, but it doesn't change the fact that the tests are by definition objective measures of whether or not you know the things on the test at the time you take it.

Let's propose an experiment then.

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

That's like saying putting something on a scale isn't an objective measure of its weight because you can just take the batteries out of the scale. I'm considering it objective because the more correct answers you get, the higher your score.

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.

Exactly right. I think the critique is that it serves little value in college admissions because aptitude at taking the test is not an indicator of anything else. But IMHO, defining a difficult task and judging people on their ability to prepare for and execute on that difficult task is a useful means of measuring whether that individual is capable of doing that very thing when facing other difficult tasks, as they certainly will at college and in life. That alone has value and relevance in college admissions.

It's not a question of whether the score is objective, but whether the score is an unbiased estimator of student quality, whatever that means.

Everything has bias and nobody can agree on what "student quality" means even on a single admissions panel at a single school. Isn't that the whole point of having a wide and varied application? One that has standardized testing, grades throughout school, life experience, extracurricular activities, volunteerism, and more?

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.

Perhaps you misunderstood my comments as advocacy. I was not, and would advocate for keeping the standardized tests. I was answering someone else's questions about the choice.

> 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

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 didn’t go to Harvard, but I went to a decent university.

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.

I'm picking on you specifically because a lot of people are making this mistake. "Not requiring" is not the same as "eliminating". Not submitting scores will no longer be a reason someone is rejected. Someone who did well on them can still submit them and it will help their application.

I haven't followed this closely, but have seen a few headlines and tweets in passing. This is the first I've heard that people can optionally add test scores to help them stand out. Thanks for highlighting this.

I don't see how this can work in practice. At some point, you'll have an application with an SAT go up against an application without one for the same seat. Either a really good SAT score will push that one up (meaning not submitting an SAT score hurts application #2) or the score is ignored, meaning it doesn't actually help to include it.

Exaggerating here for ease of description: it used to be that if you had 2 spots and these 3 applicants

- 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.

>I don't see how this can work in practice.

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).

Same. I had a troubled childhood and many D's in high school. If it wasn't for me studying really hard and getting a 2320 on the SAT, I wouldn't have gotten into any school, but that was enough for UCLA to take a chance on me.

The dirty little secret is that most of the admissions hoops don’t really matter.

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.

"but lacked a lot of basic high school skills."

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.

>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.

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 definitely teach 'conscientiousness' and the 'basic high school skills'.

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?

>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).

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?

If you 'don't have basic high school skills', you're 'not suited' to Engineering.

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.

>If you 'don't have basic high school skills', you're 'not suited' to Engineering.

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).

"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"

?? 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-...

>In the aggregate, both GPA and SAT

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?

Classicism != classism.

Damn that's what I get for commenting late at night

The kids I worked with had 7th-9th grade math skills but a good home support system so they had good reading skills and work ethic.

The successful students were taking and succeeding at Calc 1 in their second year.

Why could you be bothered to work hard on your tests but not your homework? I don't get the difference?

Homework was several hours per night of busy work. I learned nothing from it. I spent that time teaching myself programming and things that were actually useful.

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.

Weighing in to say; same exact experience here.

The only thing I learned from the Aeneid diorama in my “Honors” English class in 9th grade was that a teacher could mark down a cave for not being colorful enough.

>lineage

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!

Is a Harvard education really that spectacular anymore or is it more a social indicator? Feels like it’s prominence has wained over the past couple decades.

The education is probably nothing special but it's more about the social network.

If you cut down on legacies then you lose the advantage of the social network. Kind of a catch-22.

Not entirely. If the selection process ensures that the brightest (and luckiest) minds are all together, they will still be able to benefit one another over time, even if they didn't gain access to capital or connections beyond their cohort.

Amazing to think that one movie could change a college's appearance so profoundly!

What movie?

if Harvard is not spectacular then what is? I mean what is replacing it’s role?

MIT

Princeton

IIT

When IIT research is knocking people's socks off, let me know.

I was thinking more about power shifts, not inequitable comparisons :D

It is not clear that formal education in general is a causal factor for lifetime income, or merely a symptom of the same underlying cause(s).

> Is a Harvard education really that spectacular anymore or is it more a social indicator?

Harvard has always been a social indicator that is also decent educationally in some areas (but not, AFAIK, superlative in any undergraduate field.)

> how dare these serfs with good test scores defile our institutions

It's worth noting that the term "meritocracy" was actually coined by somebody criticizing the serfs defiling sacred institutions.

I still haven't figured out why meritocracy is supposed to be a bad thing or exactly what is going on with it.

Meritocracy requires established experts to select candidates based on merit, which is quite different from the masses selecting candidates based on popularity (democracy).

I disagree with the experts part, after all under meritocracy Einstein is the greatest scientific mind of the 20th century however he wasn't even able to get a job in academia until after he produced ground breaking results.

I think that was the implication -- that experts are often wrong. One could go the No True Scotsman route and say that a true expert would occasionally select randomly following a Bayesian Bandit approach for optimal decision-making.

Basically the average person hears it and thinks "smartest/best for the job objectively" which sounds fine, but in practice is often shorthand for "prestigious is better" aristocracy. One of those things where there are multiple levels of interpretation talking past each other.

Except that it’s a replacement for literal aristocracy.

Meritocracy makes it harder to select to meet political/social justice goals.

In a truly genuine meritocracy, everyone would have the same opportunities in terms of upbringing, schooling, college etc. If resources were scare (such as an elite private school for kindergartners) then the most talented children would go there, not those whose parents had lots of money.

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.

What you're describing is an equal opportunity society. That's a worthy goal, but trying to redefine "meritocracy" to also mean that results in confusion at best.

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.

Meritocracy is unfair because most merit is unearned. For example, I am very smart, I won national math olympiads, but I didn't spend much effort to be good at math. Showering me with advantages feels deeply unfair.

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.

There are a lot of tasks where quality and correctness is more important than fairness. If we could even agree what fair actually is.

It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others. - the man who coined the term.

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 has more to do with the donations to the university that came from their bloodline predecessors.

They probably believe that their target market (i.e. donors) would consider it an advantage if their offspring would study together with people with "good lineage" (e.g. children of foreign leaders) - and I don't think that they're mistaken, I think that they likely know their market characteristics better than me or you.

Who is this going to hurt the most?

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).

Everyone seems to waaaaaay underestimate how hard it is to get an elite athletic scholarship or overestimate how common they are. They are uncommon and you have not only have to be good academically but outstanding athletically. it is harder than getting in with an athletic scholarship than without one.

or the school just needs an excuse to admit legacy candidates

> it is harder than getting in with an athletic scholarship than without one.

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.

I tend to agree. Athletics, while not academics, is as valid a reason as chess or acting for acceptance into a school. And top D1 athletes in the top tier sports are generally exceptional at what they do.

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.

It's especially hard to get athletic scholarships at Harvard, because as with all Ivy League universities they don't award them.

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.

They don't have scholarships but there are dedicated athletic admissions slots.

Yes, and I think you will find that those slots cover most of the rich white male population present at Harvard...

Oh plenty of them are non-athletic legacies too I expect.

I'd easily believe that, yeah.

(Since it's hard to tell in text: no I'm not being sarcastic.)

Revitalizing an old Harvard tradition, I see. Of course, back then it was Jews they excluded...

It's so funny how the class of people who most criticize "entitlements" (read: social services paid for by taxes) are the same class of people who are most "entitled" (to admittance in (so-called) elite institutions).

Umm I think you'll find the criticism of both things comes primarily from the right. To be clear, this push to remove standards is coming from the left (in the guise of racial justice blah blah blah) but the beneficiaries will primarily be the untalented children of the gentry class (the Lori Laughlin's of the world).

I get the racial justice angle. I just have a bad feeling that in the long run this sort of thing will end up hurting racial justice more than helping.

Those are the same groups?

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