Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles

So you're saying only studying and not doing anything else to eventually become a doctor that serves a community in Dallas doesn't demonstrate enough participation in society as much as being able to play a sport?

And don't get me wrong, extra curriculars are important, but the simplistic reduction of immigrants studying hard equates they don't participate in the society is a bit much.

I’m not even on the side of the Asian families that force their children to study and study alone, but your comment seems to suggest that somehow they don’t have the right to (or are abusing a system). Sounds a bit prejudiced. In the end families which want their kids to “look successful” will make them do whatever is needed, and merely focusing on studies is just one flavor. Look at the Tiger mom bs about Carnegie Hall or Yale law. But at the least they are fully American in their right to do so, and I’d rather have more of them than broken families with kids not even being taken care of.

That is not to say that I think only test scores should matter. But the kinds of extracurriculars colleges value—in particular that they don’t value having a job or working in the farm—smacks of old money ideals.

As a matter of fact - I wrote a letter of recommendation for someone to volunteer at the library. Due to the competitive nature (I live in an area with lots of 1st/2nd generation, especially Indians)...she did not get a position. Imagine competing to work for free!

How many DFW public schools have cricket or kabaddi teams? How many bands and choirs play primarily non-European music?

Are you sure that these students are one dimensional boring test-takers with absolutely no interest in being part of their community? Could it possibly be that many are very active members of a vibrant and deeply rooted immigrant community, but that this community involvement doesn't show up because they aren't either playing in a football game or putting on a half time show for a foot ball game?

(I'm also deeply skeptical that participating in band, choir, extra-curricular activities, or sports is actually indicative of much of anything in terms of community participation... playing unorganized pick-up games with friends feels much more participatory than leveraging the well-oiled pre-college apparatus of an upper middle class neighborhood to check the "scholar-athlete" box.)

I suspect it's more like their parents prohibit them from having any interest in these extra-curricular activities. Academics > *.

I found the emphasis on Indian cultural roots so disturbing that I had to weasel out of conversations by saying "I don't know anything about classical dance, I am mostly interested in science-fiction". It is easier to have your own way as an Indian middle-class student in India than as second generation Indians in the US.

Just because they aren't participating in YOUR extra-curricular activities doesn't mean they aren't engaged.

“…based solely on their test scores and not have to do any of the other trivial stuff that demonstrates that they can participate in the society in which they live.”

This is very unlikely to happen for East Asians or Indians.

> and not have to do any of the other trivial stuff that demonstrates that they can participate in the society in which they live.

This “trivial” stuff is often not trivial when done well.

- Sports, especially varsity athletics and Olympic sports, has social currency in elite circles. Some folks may not like the fact that this is true, but it’s foolish to deny that it’s true. In some cases, participation in sports actually develops character leadership skills.

- The things some high school students are able to do as “volunteers” can blow your mind. The soft skills that these activities can develop carry over really well to the “real world”. Lots of extracurriculars are BS, but the folks who do the BS ones aren’t getting into elite schools based on those.

- If I understand what you are saying, suggesting that immigrants should not need to have the skills to participate in society is mind boggling to me. Elite schools aren’t just looking to churn out brainiacs (and the real brainiacs are getting in on more brainy stuff than high SAT scores and perfect grades). They are looking to churn out people who will impact society. Honestly, some sort of impressive community involvement in the Indian community (as an example) is something that would be a strong part of an elite school application.

That's a nasty bit of what I assume to be sarcasm

I genuinely thought your comment was serious before reading other comments and realizing you were being sarcastic.

It actually *is* important that these people can get into these schools. If they are studying and working diligently they will contribute to society.

If you need them practicing sports or singing in choir for you to understand that they can participate in society, then that is your failure on assessing students.

Which society? The one that has mass shootings on a regular basis but makes gun ownership a viable identity? Or the one praises love and peace while buying clothes made in sweatshops?

>especially immigrants

not their fault Rutesh has maidens and you don't

I feel my grades more accurately portrayed me as a whole but the test was accurate as to potential if that makes sense.

Arguably, someone who knew more than I did but was too hesitant to go out on a limb about it should still have gotten a higher score if the test is designed to assess knowledge.

Just my observation as an outsider looking into America. Often sensitive debates that don't follow a certain mainstream narrative are brushed off as strawman or whataboutism.

I'm just seeing this from an objective data driven view and puzzled why ppl would react so harshly.

The tests measure certain cognitive capabilities. Genes have an effect, nutrient intake has an effect, nurture has an effect. Trying to fix racism via test scores (or disregarding it) isn't going to help fix racism.

The most defensible explanation that folks who claim standardized tests are racist is that the range of scores are not approximately equal across races. In theory, a “fair” non-racist test would have similar ranges of scores for all races.

There are a lot of assumptions baked into the argument, many with which I disagree, but it’s an interesting idea.

Much of the data supports the idea that most of the differences in test scores are due to socio-economic status. When SES is controlled for, everything else (like race) just has a minor impact on scores

Iirc, race is the largest contributor to variance when SES is controlled for, but folks within the same SES perform much more similarly than same race folks in different SESes.

lol

East Asian female at my high school.

- 1st chair violin in the city youth orchestra

- perfect grades

- very high SAT scores

- no sports

- took or tested out of all of the classes in our high school except advanced and AP German… in three years

- admitted into MIT after her junior year

- IIRC, she had some volunteer activities in a science research lab, but nothing significant like being an author on a research paper.

She seemed to be well-rounded enough.

Their interests are (generally) aligned with their statements, in that they want to find people who will be a good fit for the school and want to stay there. That means academically and also culturally.

As an aside, my kid got into several schools and was rejected by several others. She chose a small private campus you've probably never heard of that was a perfect fit - and she has thrived like I can't believe. They also gave her a scholarship that made the cost lower than almost anywhere else, including public/state universities.

The real tragedy is people who only look at top 10 schools and feel they're a failure if they don't get in. There really is a school for everyone. And I'm not sure what "government" has to do with it, most universities are either private or run by independent boards of regents or trustees.

The admission officer was describing someone who shows no passion towards anything, and only does it because they're supposed to - which often includes why they're applying to college, because they're supposed to. Is it an idiotic bias to think that someone without passion in a subject area will be less successful than someone with passion and direction?

In case you missed the earlier part of the comment, kids with high GPAs, test scores, etc. - the "grinder" you describe, regardless of race - fit into a different category of a likely successful student that they also look for. To elaborate though, there are lots of "grinders" and differentiation still matters. Are they grinding in math and CS, and also have a Github and contribute to OSS and are applying to the college of engineering? That's better than someone with super high scores but nothing else, because there are probably lots of other applicants with even higher scores. Competing on only one axis is hard.

Like it or not, in a limited resource like seats at a competitive school, admissions officers are looking for small signals. It may seem unfair, but it's what I was told.

And as for the evidence, I'm merely passing on the information I was told by the people making the decisions. They hold the evidence (if it's even an evidence-based decision) not me. Feel free to have your own discussions with them if you'd like, I've generally found admission officers to be extremely friendly and open about their criteria.

we don't talk like that here.

"You have a high IQ, you are smart, you are intelligent, you don't study and you do well etc"

I let it get to my head and instead of growing, instead of recognizing what I didn't know, I focused on what I knew. Pride and ego. For a while it worked so I had no reason to doubt it. But when the sheer work load got to a point where effective time management, strong and consistent work ethic were required I couldn't pull it off.

its a downward spiral, you are not used to putting in effort and seeing good results. that is setting you up for failure.

now? people who do well on tests, who do well in school, are completely deserving because they put in the work and patience.

same with success, its not a matter of rolling dice but focus and it requires:

- knowing what i dont know

- effort & work

Yes there are really smart people out there who could really benefit from the above but many do not like to admit it. I do and now I take the time and effort to know what I don't know. This has nothing to do with race or equity but more to do with your attitude. Yes it can be influenced by our surroundings and events but everyday we get up and make the choice to believe or not believe what we don't know and know.

Having said that if you realize you are unconventional, realize why that is, because an unconventional path is riddled with false paths, pain and require faith. If you are conventional you need to rely less on faith and it is why many try to get others to follow it because it is less risky.

In chile we also have grades + standardized test + ranking (your position versus your cohort). But the top universities are filled with the top alumni from expensive private schools because they are usually 1. given inflated grades 2. trained to perform well on standardized tests (in their own schools, theyre rich so they can afford this).

If you look at OECD statistics with regards to quality of education you will see that not everyone in the USA really gets a good primary (and secondary) education and there are gaps. This tends to not be the case in most of Europe... So are standardized exams good for admissions in the USA? Not sure. But obviously replacing it with curriculum might even be worse. So what's really the answer?

Also, authoritarians sometimes get the actions right even if they don't understand the science or the math.

And do you remember the great "fogging disinfectant trucks" in China. Completely ineffective show that may have fooled the masses but would have failed to destroy any viral agents.

Maybe my point is more anecdotal than I realize. After all, I've never had a colleague from MIT who exhibiting any meaningful difference in characteristics that mattered. But at the same time, I resent being an unwitting participant in upholding MIT's legacy by being passed over for opportunities by people who are more credentialed and more well connected than me but otherwise the same in every way that counts. Maybe I belong on a different planet. I wonder sometimes. It seems my destiny has already been decided on this one.

Are there specific shortcomings that you think would account for that gap?

Given decent fundamentals you can solve all these problems from first principles but you would take way too much time (unless you are a genius, of course). To solve these problems within the allotted time would require grinding a ton of problems so you can get familiar with a part of or the full question beforehand. Don't get me wrong, practicing problems is a good way to study math and I don't have any issue with this in a vacuum.

However, this is before bringing other people into the equation. The floor is raised every year and the competition is intense. You also need to study for other subjects, not just math. All in all, "memorization" became the only strategy. It's fair to debate whether it's "rote memorization" or actually "learning the material" but with how much the students study the line between the two blurs. It feels too "overfitting" if I would borrow a statistics word.

Makes the comment upthread that started this come across as just more racist prejudices about China, unless the commenter has something to back up their claim.

As someone with a degree in math, I’ve always found the monomaniacal focus on how America is “behind” on math education quite baffling. Do people really thinking calculus skill is necessary to succeed?

similar to the mythology of the "10xer". is it brilliance, or is it having prior exposure to the right things?

Then again the MIT Dean of Admissions hasn't been cancelled yet so maybe we're strawmanning.

Back in my day when SAT's were 2400, I heard the swing being a difference of 100 points. Since reverting back to 1600 a 60 point swings sounds proportionately similar to 13 years ago.

Anyways, I think when people mean "gaming the system", they mean test prep classes literally geared towards the SAT and little else. Not practicing calculus to overprepare for the SAT math portion (maybe even using it to validate answers on a lower level), but being told that X is on the test and using older copies of the SAT to practive with. That does start to feel a bit game-y in my eyes. You're not better understanding combinatorial or algebra, you're understanding the pattern that a test has and playing based on that knowledge.

I don't know how to fix that fundamental aspect of reality, or indeed if it should be fixed. Any ideas?

It’s inconvenient and correlates with SAT performance. Hence the big push to get rid of the SAT to try to hide the disparities in general cognition within groups and between groups.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial...

Given by the positive effects of SAT testing on social mobility in the mid 20th century, I rather doubt that.

And to be honest, if we are going to have a class system one way or the other, IQ might be the better approach. But IQ is not wisdom, and I worry that the elites of such a society would be disposed to unprecedented levels of ego and hubris.

The introduction of free markets, and later IQ testing, disrupted a great deal of the entrenched social class structure within western societies and allowed many people of rather humble backgrounds to achieve great things.

The concern I express is about whether IQ testing will continue provide the same level of social mobility in the future.

I'm sorry but this is a bit over dramatic, no?

Your son still got into college. Just didn't get into the specific school he wanted.

I didn't get into the college I wanted either. I'm doing just fine.

Some of the best coworkers I've ever had went to a community college and transferred after a year or two.

I get it, it's okay to be bummed. But you're acting like his life is already over. Set a good example and instill the value that you can overcome barriers and failures in life, it's going to be okay.

Iowa State is quite a good school. BTW, it's the home of one of the first computers in history, the ABC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atanasoff%E2%80%93Berry_comput...) Surely he'll do well there.

Like others have said, he should re-apply / transfer. I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but this might actually be blessing in disguise because many kids don't get to experience setback in life until too late.

Yet, this one is something he can easily overcome because he's brilliant and has supportive family. He just got super unlucky. Just need to play the game one more time to win.

Best of luck.

nah. if he really wants to challenge himself, he can probably get research experience pretty easily (much easier than a fancier institution) which then would set him up for a top-tier grad school or a great spot in industry. law and medicine really care about fancy brand names, but technology really only cares about accomplishment, skills, aptitude and attitude.

in my experience, most graduate TAs in STEM at fancy schools were previously superstars at state schools that didn't have crazy brand recognition.

for example: andrew grove went to the city college of new york in the 1960s, and then did a phd at uc berkeley. after that he worked in industry for a bit and then started a little company called intel.

It depends. Imagine what if he got accepted only to be taught that his caring father (and the sole fact of having a father) is a "privilege" he should be ashamed of. And that his way of life should be culling his ambition and letting other less fortunate ones take his place.

All of this is a part of a bigger problem (switch from results to feelings and identities), and you cannot fix the symptoms without addressing the underlying cause.

Teach your son some business skills, maybe let him work for you for a while. He can then apply again next year being a bit more cynical about optimizing the KPIs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_old_man_lost_his_horse#Tra...

But if they have data that shows that it works out for them, I don't have any capacity to argue with the results.

But 99% of the alterations you can make to an ML library, will not make nearly as much difference as what data you feed into it and how. If it's the right data, many ML models will work, and if it's not the right data, none of them will. But regardless, none of this requires, or even really benefits from, calculus.

So many terms can be quickly understood if you understand Latin prefixes and suffixes, and the better you understand Latin the better you'll understand its use in any of the modern Western languages.

https://math.berkeley.edu/~ehallman/math1B/TaisMethod.pdf

Those are totally useless skills. If you live in America and your only contribution to society is being pleasant, knowing how to fix things around the house, and basic accounting, then expect your livelihood to be replaced by someone willing to do your unskilled work overseas for a fraction of the cost in the very near future. Not to be harsh, but that's the reality.

My undergrad was in a non-technical area and so I never had to take calc in undergrad. Having later learned it to solve problems, it has become clear to me that it would be preferable if everyone with a college degree knew calc. I was, in retrospect, wrong to have tried to avoid it.

I'm well aware we don't live in that world, unfortunately many people with a college degree also don't know write effectively, or perform critical analysis on texts, things I also thing should be part of being college educated.

> Knowing basic accounting, being able to fix things around the house, being pleasant to work with, etc are far more important.

I'm not sure how knowing calculus reduces these things.

Everyone needs to learn calculus because it opens up a gate into a form of beauty that no amount of work can ever satisfy.

The idea that people only need to learn what they need to live their external lives, those of work and interpersonal relations, is just wrong.

You need to learn calculus as part of your own internal life.

To this days to be a developer university must be seen just as something extra that you do if you want to occupy positions that goes beyond being a simple programmer.

If you really want a "math free" intro to tech, look into Business Information Systems. That tends to be more ad hoc, at least for now. At some point, people will start to care about software assurance even in that context, and the standards will rise accordingly.

That being said, there are probably lighter ways of teaching that instinct than full-depth classes. I try to listen to podcasts these days as a way of expanding my horizons.

I'm sure you and I both took plenty of math classes, and therefore we won't ever really know what our computer science skills would be like without a rigorous math background. Even if I never touch anything more complex than algebra II again, taking ~30 credits of applied math allows me to think in a way that I wouldn't otherwise without that background.

Practical, industry expert-led coursework has been by far the most outstanding education I have ever received. My DSP professor was (is still) an adjunct to the university I attended and works a normal job 9-5 during the day at some engineering firm. He was easily the best educator I have ever experienced because he brought reality into the classroom every day. I still vividly recall the 20–30-minute lecture/rant about making power point presentations that don't suck.

It's all the little things for me... The nuanced details like "why are you holding it that way?" are impossible to discover until you have a customer complaining at you for a while or have someone who experienced it themselves giving you a heads-up.

For me, the future of practical software engineering education looks a lot more like a machine shop than it does a university campus.

What you're talking about sounds an awful lot like the program I went into initially at a community college. They taught you some coding in a few popular languages, some database concepts and sent you on your way. I dropped out after a year and found a job.

I ended up going to a four year program after a while. Turns out, a lot of the good jobs in software engineering require understanding those peaky abstract fundamentals.

I was in college long ago and for my CS undergrad and masters took the usual CS and math courses. When I needed electives though I took courses like economics, finance and accounting. Many years later, those electives ended up being the most useful.

The CS and math courses I wouldn't consider useless though. I'm sure I lean on theory I learned without realizing. But, at the time I couldn't have predicted working in small companies or startups and how important basic finance and accounting would end up.

My point is that in the zoo of mathematics, the reals are just one exhibit. Equally valid is to map phenomena onto topological spaces, inner product spaces, sets, groups, rings, fields, lattices, topoi, etc... People have been standing on Newton's shoulders for so long that all they can see from there is ground well worn by their colleagues who stood on the same shoulders.

I think we'd be much better off if you had to specialize in some part of math, but that different people specialized in different parts of it without necessarily taking a major in it. This would maximize the sort of happy accidents that lead to discovery because for any given phenomena you now have a wider variety of perspectives on it, rather than just a classroom full of analysts.

I'm against the reals in particular because I think they're especially suited to zero sum games, and I wish we played fewer of those.

But don't have to

Community colleges should have electives and tracks that are similar to trade schools: getting you up to speed on whats relevant right now

But as long as they are pushing towards associates degrees and transferable credits to universities I think the utility is less optimal for people looking to be efficient at a job

(Also employers should be training people for what they actually need too, sparing us all from imagining that the Computer Science major is necessary to synthesize better outcomes in unknown situations)

Effectiveness and equity shouldn't be confused.

The tests are effective for assessing academic preparedness.

However, there is a strong argument that they aren't equitable.

MIT isn't claiming here that SAT/ACT are equitable. They are just claiming that they are a valuable data point in addition to other factors that they consider to deal with equity.

Probably the same reason that the Federal Reserve Bank is not a government entity (they only have a meaningless government "oversight board") even though it loans all money to the US Government with interest and has never been audited.

Because it's only de facto the primary method, as evidenced by MIT dropping it for a while there. They didn't need government permission to do that. Even public universities here generally have a high degree of autonomy regarding such things.

Well, I mean.. America is experimental capitalism. Why run anything government when it can be for profit and 'the market' will solve any and all issues with it?

It turns out 'the market' will skew in favor of making a small amount of people rich over actually improving the lives of anyone, but hey, that's freedom baby!

They're really precious about it though, so don't criticise this system out loud.

Instead of funding The One True Test, the US government partially funds every test competing to be the best college placement test.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Board

I wonder how one could codify a regulation for schools requiring entrance test to provide "reasonable" accommodations for prospective students to take it; like some parent comments mentioned not everyone can feasibly get to a testing center

Fortunately my parent did cover these costs, but I know others weren't so fortunate.

Harvard's an easy one. Rich and powerful people look smart by association with smart people. Smart people gain access to powerful social networks.

My question was why this was a good idea for society. MIT was funded through federal grants, financial aid, and philanthropic donations. It's a 501(c)3. If it's bad for the world, we ought to have some mechanism to fix it.

We don't, and that's a deeper discussion about how we want to organize society. We ought to. In the limit case of a self-perpetuating endowment harming the world, there ought to be some way for that to be repurposed to help the world.

And reading between the lines, it sounds like MIT has another "lost class" or two. A few years after I was admitted to MIT, the Director of Admissions retired and was replaced by a professional in the field. And being a professional he followed the faculty's official findings on how to select applicants and all of a sudden MIT was getting calls from schools asking why their best students were no longer getting accepted while the next tier suddenly were. And rather quickly the physics faculty led a revolt because way too many of their students were having too much difficulty with the above above minimum core requirements.

I got to casually know one of these students, she was very nice and of course smart, but boy did she struggle with the required math based core curricula of her major unlike her female peers from my years and thereabouts.

Even if this "robust" data indeed showed that academic outcomes were worse over the course of one year, how can that possibly be attributed to not viewing students' SAT scores instead of, say, the entire classroom experience being upended and moved online?