Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students | Hacker News Reader

Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

hechingerreport.org

222 pointsgmays573 comments

The greatest source of admissions inequity is childhood socioeconomic status. Dropping the SAT is so obviously not a fix for that I question the competency of the administrators who thought doing so was a good idea.

The SAT is probably the most attainable piece of the application process for a poor kid to succeed at. You literally just need a guide book or two and enough time to study. One good smart friend helps if you're lucky enough to have one. Literally the lowest barrier to entry for a kid stuck in a shitty school with parents that aren't around and no money to your name. Is it still a hurdle for poor kids? Undoubtedly, but I can't think of anything that can show academic capacity that requires fewer resources.

> You literally just need a guide book or two and enough time to study.

I think it's important to realize just how extremely non-obvious this is, though, for many high school sophomores/juniors.

I went to a decent high school and was in honors classes, and even I would have had zero idea test prep was even a thing, if a single science teacher hadn't randomly mentioned it in class once. I went to the school library and found the "Princeton Review" and practice exams and everything. I absolutely credit it with raising my score by probably a couple hundred points.

But I never would have discovered it except for that single teacher's offhand comment. I just assumed it would be a test that was an accurate reflection of your knowledge/intelligence, so as long as you were going to school, you'd just take the test and get your grade. If someone had pressed me, I probably would have said that test prep would be something kids in rich schools wasted their money on that wouldn't make a difference anyways. I just had no idea.

Yes, I absolutely agree that the SAT is the most attainable way for a poor kid to succeed at. I personally don't support the movements to remove standardized testing, not at all. But I also want to highlight how there's still an utterly gigantic step needed to reliably educate kids both about the importance of the SAT and how to prepare for it.

Very often barriers aren't even primarily a question of money/time/effort -- they're simply a question of awareness that an option even exists or that it matters.

Especially because the entire purported schtick of the SAT is to measure aptitude (the "A" in the acronym). In principle, if the SAT is true to its name, getting a study book shouldn't help at all. But since study guides or repeated testing does improve the score, it can't be a true measurement of aptitude.

It changed its name from the Scholastic Aptitude Test in 1990. (Over time they’ve also eliminated some of the sections most correlated with IQ.)

There’s a good history of the SAT and where it succeeded and failed in its goal of making college admissions more fair, The Big Test by Nicholas Lehmann.

What were the sections removed that were more correlated with IQ?

I don't think they meant aptitude in the strictest sense. You ability to learn and apply ideas is an aptitude in and of itself. That is something studying is a part of demonstrating, and the the type of aptitude these tests, I believe, are intended to measure.

You know what's a good way to test for scholastic aptitude?

Try studying, and see if helps you learn. Studying to increase score on a test is scholastic aptitude.

If studying fails to raise your score, you lack scholastic aptitude.

I would think, personally, that if studying were an important part of scholarship, I said if it was, just hypothetically, then studying for the test of scholastic aptitude would itself demonstrate aptitude for scholarship.

SAT must agree, since they changed the test to be much more amenable to study. That must be the reason why right.

I don't know when all of this happened to you, but these days there's no excuse. I just googled for "how to increase my sat score" and the first result was this collegeboard.org page[1] called "How to Improve Your SAT Score." It referred me to the Khan Academy's free SAT practice course[2].

[1] https://blog.collegeboard.org/how-to-improve-your-sat-score [2] https://www.khanacademy.org/sat/confirmed

Let me reiterate: that requires for it occur to a student that you even can increase your SAT score.

That remains non-obvious. After all, IQ tests aren't supposed to be something you can prepare for. So why should the SAT be, if it's this kind of supposedly holistic aptitude test? Why isn't "school overall" all the possible preparation you could do?

Again, the difficulty isn't primarily in getting the extra resources. It's in even knowing that it's something extra resources would help with at all.

So the idea that there's "no exuse" is awfully judgmental. It's not just what kids don't know -- it's what they don't even know they don't know. You're not going to Google something if you'd never even suspect it existed, and you shouldn't be blamed for that.

That’s right. And guess who does know that SAT prep is a thing and takes full advantage of it? If you said “rich kids and their parents,” you win the prize.

Not just the rich. I was an immigrant kid, and knew plenty of other immigrant kids. None of our families had much money, but we all had a do-or-die attitude about education and the SAT. You can bet we all knew about prep options, scholarships, etc. and we milked every advantage for all it was worth.

In my public school, the SAT was never discussed during school. Not once, until the test was announced, the week before. No other information, besides “The SAT is next week”. This was after a long stretch of standardized testing that happens in CA schools. It’s definitely something you had to know/find out about, outside of everything. This was in a well off community in California, US.

I think immigrants as a group self-select for "determination to improve" to a certain extent, and probably teach that outlook to their children.

So what if they call themselves an aptitude test? Believing what it says on the label is naive. I prefer to think of it as Jordan Peterson would say: it's a dragon guarding the treasure you wish to obtain. Your goal is to find a way to slay it. Family money can help, but I can tell you from experience that it's not a requirement. Some kids fully devoted themselves to the slaying of this dragon; others had a more "whatever happens, happens" attitude.

And when schools bring you in to read this comment out to the entire school in the auditorium, perhaps then you may blame the "attitude" of the kids, instead of the (highly class-based) environment they were brought up in.

>Let me reiterate: that requires for it occur to a student that you even can increase your SAT score.

If you are a high school student and the possibility of increasing your score doesn't even occur to you, I would suggest that college isn't for you.

Would you study for an IQ test? Perhaps, but then is that fair? If you do, what is actually being measured? Certainly not IQ anymore.

Maybe it doesn't occur to students that they should attempt to increase their score because they have a certain innocent model of the world, perhaps one in which they put trust in educational institutions to (as they claim to do) tell them how they should best achieve personal success. If it were a valuable use of their time, surely someone would tell them?

Reminder: you are responding to a commenter who is telling you that an offhand comment literally changed their life.

If an IQ test were required for admission to university or anything else I wanted to do, you're damn right I would study. Why would I care if that is fair or if I corrupt the measurement by studying if increasing my score benefits me? The validity of the measurement is the school's problem, not mine.

It seems like you might have a history of applying adaptive behaviors, that is good.

How have you avoided maladaptive behaviors, perhaps such as procrastinating or distracting oneself with substance?

Do you believe that nature or nurture has played a larger role in your healthy response to environmental pressures?

>Would you study for an IQ test?

I'd study for any test that was consequential to my future.

>Maybe it doesn't occur to students that they should attempt to increase their score

In my opinion, if it doesn't occur to someone that they can better their score on any test by studying, then they aren't ready for college. Studying isn't some sort of arcane concept available only to the privileged few.

>Reminder: you are responding to a commenter who is telling you that an offhand comment literally changed their life.

This is Hacker News, not a struggle session. It isn't disrespectful to tell people they aren't equipped and/or ready for higher education. It is one thing to argue that some people don't have the resources to access study courses, materials or have the free time to do so (due to work requirements or living conditions), it is entirely another thing to suggest that it would never occur to a college candidate that studying for a test would improve their chances of doing well.

>because they have a certain innocent model of the world, perhaps one in which they put trust in educational institutions to (as they claim to do) tell them how they should best achieve personal success. If it were a valuable use of their time, surely someone would tell them?

Perhaps this comment will inform some potential college-bound student, who has otherwise had their life crippled by a childlike dependence on whatever information (or lack thereof) was spoon-fed to them by incompetent school authorities, that studying will help increase their test scores. That would be a win-win!

> I'd study for any test that was consequential to my future.

This makes the very large assumption that you’re aware the SAT has anything to do with your future, and that’s it’s not another one of the half dozen standardized tests that you take every year, neither of which was communicated in my public school. I’ve heard from many that my school was not unique.

I mean, in high school did it occur to you how to become a fighter pilot? College is about as far removed as flight school in some people’s lives.

> I'd study for any test that was consequential to my future.

When I was really little a teacher referred me for a Stanford-Binet test, which was administered one on one by a psychiatrist. I did not know at the time what this test was, what a psychiatrist was, or that it would be consequential to my future since I tested above the range of the test and was put into a gifted program and thus got to avoid classes with students screaming and throwing chairs.

How should I have studied for the Stanford-Binet and what would have happened to my score if I did? What resources or guides do you use when studying for an IQ test and which would you recommend as suitable for someone 5 years old?

The SAT stopped calling itself an Aptitude test 29 years ago.

If you go to school and you don't presume that your can improve your score on a test by studying, it seems unlikely that you would score high on the SAT anyways.

As a stubborn, idealistic teenager I refused to do any preparation for the SAT/ACT. I believed that I _should_ be an aptitude test so I treated it as one.

Would preparation have been helpful? Most likely. But I was happy with my >2000 score, and felt.lkke.i earned it more by not preparing.

You earned something more by not working for it? That’s a hot take

That's a snarky reading of my experience. As an aptitude test, my "working for it" was my seventeen years of learning and developing cognitive skills leading up to the test.

Can you, or anyone else, say you learned something beneficial by studying for a standardized test? Was there anything worthwhile about it sans the score?

Would that mean that pouring marketing dollars for test prep awareness to low income kids and parents could be an effective intervention?

> Let me reiterate: that requires for it occur to a student that you even can increase your SAT score.

Maybe, but this is so far from my experience, I'm having trouble accepting it.

There's an important test coming up. Surely the default, baseline assumption must be that you should prepare for it? How could anything else be true? Everyone knows getting some practice in makes you better at something, right?

I guess your answers to all of these questions are "no", and I accept that, I'm not arguing, but man, this is weird.

I guess there some things the school do (unarguably) need to tell kids: the SAT is coming up and it's important. My impression is that schools don't always do that.

I had a similar experience as OP. Maybe you can't imagine it because you went to a competitive high school where kids talked a lot about stuff like that?

I barely tried and was in the top 1% of my class yet I didn't prepare for the PSAT or SAT that I can recall. Maybe I did do a few practice SAT tests, but it definitely was preached that the SAT was an aptitude test so you couldn't study for it.

I ended up getting $60k in scholarships mostly from my PSAT results but at the time I took the test I had no idea what was riding on the results. I thought it was literally just "Practice" SAT.

> I had a similar experience as OP. Maybe you can't imagine it because you went to a competitive high school where kids talked a lot about stuff like that?

The reason I probably can't imagine this stuff is that I grew up in the UK, where exams are exams, and everyone knows you can study for them (even if they don't).

The idea of a set of exams being pitched as an aptitude test you can't study for (when in fact you definitely can study for aptitude tests) is weird.

I guess children in many public schools in America are being failed on such a basic level - not being told what the tests they're taking mean and whether you can study - that I had no idea.

> it definitely was preached that the SAT was an aptitude test so you couldn't study for it.

This seems like you were just straight up lied to, and is sad.

It seems like you maybe just don't know what the SAT is.

It's not an exam like any other high school exam, it's totally unique. It's not meant to be studied for -- it's meant to give a general overview of your total scholastic ability. (It's also not even run by the school system, it's a private company that you have to pay in order to take the test.)

But the reality is that you can "game" it by learning patterns in the types of questions they ask, and how to give the answer they're "looking for" on the verbal section, when the correct answer is often highly subjective for questions on analogies and reading comprehension. And you can also focus on a very narrow subset of words and math problems that tend to statistically recur. There's also literally strategy around when you should guess vs. when you should leave an answer blank, depending on your confidence. These are what test prep focuses on -- not on improving your general scholastic aptitude in any way.

So it's not studying for an exam in any normal sense. It's more like "gaming" it.

As for children being failed on such a basic level in many public schools in America -- on that, you couldn't be more correct, sadly.

> There's also literally strategy around when you should guess vs. when you should leave an answer blank, depending on your confidence.

This hasn't been true for almost a decade, and now you can guess on any question.

The tests are a lot different than school exams based on coursework that you study for. Those exams you are taught content and told what will be on the test and how to prepare. There may be weekly quizzes, a midterm, a final, essays, graded homework. You receive back graded each quiz and exam that has marked exactly what you got wrong so you can focus on areas you have problems with for the final.

With standardized state tests, IQ tests, SAT/ACT, you don't get any feed back. For standardized state test you spend a lot of time on the test and are never given any feedback at all. When I was in school I just stopped taking them. I would sit there and not fill in anything. Why should I? The SAT was more of the same. I would not receive any feedback about what I got wrong and I have no idea what the questions will be or what I will be tested on. A lot of students then say why bother and just sit and fill in all A bubbles or leave their sheets blank. There is no point in studying for such a test as you have no idea what will be on the test.

Now the ACT is better since they have a test question bank and if you take it enough times you'll see most of the math and grammar questions. But the reading stuff is all random and lots of the questions arbitrary with even the authors of the excerpts used saying they have no idea what the correct answer is supposed to be about "what was the author's intent". Still how many students know any of this? Most teachers don't, fewer students.

With "high stakes" state standardized exams so many schools in the US spend most time in class drilling and prepping for these that everyone loses interest. It is incredibly boring prepping for this stuff and they push test prep for over 10-13 years, badgering the students about how important it is for a test they will get no feedback from, and which is taking up the majority of time in over a decade of state education. Everyone sane checks out and gives up.

Cool so when exactly is a student supposed to spend this time to study?

I really think HN should stop for a moment and think about how insidious and pervasively poverty creeps into every aspect of a poor child’s life, because some of what’s being written here is embarrassingly naïve.

As someone who grew up super poor, time tends to be one of the only things poor kids have as much of as rich kids. Is that universal? Of course not, but name something better.

My man, if you were poor and had a lot of free time, someone in your life was being a great person to keep you from that effect of poverty.

Not all of us were so lucky.

Again, I'm not saying my experience is universal, just common among myself and my poor friends and cousins. Time seems to me to be the most equitably distributed resource, but I'd love a counter argument that was more than vague disagreement.

Only on the Internet would someone demand a “counterargument” to support the super basic statement “your life experience wasn’t universal amongst poor people”…

Fine [0][1][2][3]. Keep in mind this isn’t some “1+1=2” problem, and people have dedicated their lives to figuring this out, so if you’re looking for a “conclusion” then I don’t recommend human psychology.

Let me know if you have any questions, but honestly I’m wary of an attempted trolling on your part so please come honestly and with curiosity. Also this is not my area of expertise, and you’ll likely get a better understanding of this very complex issue if you look into this on your own. At best I can be (and frankly am only interested in being) a starting point.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/03/the-m...

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/20734446

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanshapiro/2014/10/24/3-ways...

[3] https://talkpoverty.org/2017/06/01/matters-poor-kids-dont-ti...

> Only on the Internet would someone demand a “counterargument” to support the super basic statement “your life experience wasn’t universal amongst poor people”…

My argument is not "Poor kids universally have time to do what they want." It's hard for me to believe you are having a good faith conversation, or even read my comments, if this is your opening line.

> Fine [0][1][2][3]. Keep in mind this isn’t some “1+1=2” problem, and people have dedicated their lives to figuring this out, so if you’re looking for a “conclusion” then I don’t recommend human psychology.

The fact that none of these represent a counter argument, and some actually support my premise, supports the above, you either haven't read my comments at all, or you flavored them in your own mind to such a degree that they no longer represent anything I actually said.

I'll restate my point a final time in hopes you'll actually address it: *time is the most equitably distributed resource amongst poor youth. Is it universally so? No. Is it perfectly so? No.* Two of your four links talk about the parents' time (either time with their children or otherwise) and the last two talk about time for recess. I fail to see how either of these represent less time for high school students, the kind who take the SAT, to study for the SAT.

Had you provided links that showed that kids in poverty have less time to study than their rich counterparts by some non-trivial margin, that'd be relevant, but all of your links just point out other places in poor kids lives that they are disadvantaged (less parental supervision, less childhood vocabulary, less childhood free social time, etc.), which are all definitely problems, but I fail to see where college administrators can use those to inform admissions in any meaningfully objective way.

> Had you provided links that showed that kids in poverty have less time to study than their rich counterparts by some non-trivial margin, that'd be relevant, but all of your links just point out other places in poor kids lives that they are disadvantaged (less parental supervision, less childhood vocabulary, less childhood free social time, etc.), which are all definitely problems, but I fail to see where college administrators can use those to inform admissions in any meaningfully objective way.

If you can’t see how a leads to b, there are no words I can write here to convince you of anything, about anything.

I can’t make connections for you, you need to figure this out for yourself, which is why I never expected you to do anything but stick to your “let’s have an Internet argument about an obvious fact” strategy.

What are A and B in this scenario? Schools not giving 4th graders recess means they don't have time to study in 10th grade? Parents not reading to their kids means those kids have less time for self directed study?

Again, vague disagreement isn't super helpful. I'd love to have my mind changed to match reality if I'm mistaken in some way.

Please say what you are trying to communicate. That poor kids are working full time jobs? That's not true.

I agree. Sure, holding a part time job in high school cut into study time, but a lot of that was balanced out by not being to afford a bunch of time consuming extracurricular activities.

> time tends to be one of the only things poor kids have as much of as rich kids

In a poor family, the kids are likely working a part-time job before going to school and then another part-time job (or two) after school. There's not much free time. They might also be the caretaker for younger siblings since their parents are also working three full time jobs so they never see them.

They'll certainly have more time to study than they will for extracurricular activities, social clubs, volunteering and all of the other "soft" ways kids pad out their college applications.

In terms of fairness across racial and economic strata, standardized tests like the ACT and SAT are the fairest ways to judge college applications.

ACT and SAT measure free time as much as they measure anything else, which overall is exceptionally little.

And I would very much love to live in a world where the sum total possible things a child has to worry about are extracurriculars or studying. Good lord what a better place we’d live in if that were true…

This seems contradictory given many of the "top" students who fill up the top universities frequently have both really good scores as well as incredible amounts of extracurriculars.

You'd expect there to be a tension if ACT/SAT scores measured free time.

Second this. I didn't have the money for required uniforms, and no health insurance, so sports/band/several other potential ways I could look good on a college app, were basically off the table for me.

Somehow poor immigrant kids in NYC find time to study.

The benefits of SAT test prep seem to be a lot smaller than most people think https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the.... And in studies that have shown a benefit, the control group also tends to improve - meaning that simply taking one practice test ahead of time might have nearly as much of an impact as doing hours of test prep classes.

Also, just curious, how long ago was this that you were preparing for the SAT? It might have been non-obvious to study for it then, but I can't imagine that any kid today who is driven enough to want to get into a good college wouldn't just google this and find a bunch of practice resources.

Way back in the day, my high school hosted a practice SAT session in the cafeteria some Saturday morning. Pair that with a free breakfast a little before the start, a 15 session on strategies (like watch the clock and guess if you’re not done with a minute or two left) and you could probably replicate most of the test prep gains in the low SES cohort.

Also if you think the chances of being told "here is a really well documented X step process you follow to crack this" is very hard to come across and/or needs Uber levels of serendipity (or just midly competent teachers) how is a completely subjective, random biased-person-in-the middle-with-random-criteria-for-different-people process supposed to be explained or discovered?

? Very often barriers aren't even primarily a question of money/time/effort -- they're simply a question of awareness that an option even exists or that it matters.

100% agree, and this was an experience I had as well coming from a single parent household with a high school dropout. I, thankfully, had a grandfather that had forgone college and regretted it. So, every chance he got, he reminded me to study, so my life wouldn't wind up as hard as his and my mother's. I wholeheartedly recognize that just knowing there was an attainable way out was a huge advantage over similarly poor kids. A lot of my friends and family pretty much self-selected themselves out before high school even began.

Part of the argument for dropping the SAT is that the SAT has been shown to be a proxy for family socio-economic status and is no better an indicator of success at college than GPA, honor/AP/IB course participation, and extracurriculars.

(I’m not making that argument myself, I haven’t seen numbers explained well enough to form a solid opinion)

Almost everything colleges use to admit students is a proxy for socioeconomic status. Some things, like extracurriculars, could be far more correlated to SES. The only exception would be when a student gets points for being from a race or neighborhood that tends to be less affluent.

Which raises the question: why single out the SAT?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

SAT is a rugged system that performs well while withstanding concerted efforts by hackers to undermine it. Replacing it with systems that perform no better (when not under anywhere near as much fire, and appearing to have no real security) is probably not going to work so well.

You can watch SAT prep videos and pirate prep books for free. GPA gets juiced all the time. Honor AP/IB had a solid premium. Very few extra curriculars that don't cost money / resources.

The handful of kids (including me) that didn't pay 5 digits for fancy SAT prep at my school poured over some study guides and watched pirated VCDs and ended up doing better than kids who half hearted their private prep.

You don't even need to do that. There are plenty of free, legally accessible resources to prepare for the test available now- much more so than when I took the tests back in my youth.

Yeah, this was 20+ years ago at international school where materials had to be imported. SAT prep has always been fairly easily accessibkem

There are a lot of issues with this argument which any administrator should immediately see the issue with.

GPA: Schools weigh GPA differently. One thing I saw was that some schools with honors / AP you can get above a 4.0 to the point of a 5/4. Also GPA can be messed up when someone has a bad home life, or works a job.

honors/ap/ib: These are often related to which school you go to. Poor schools have few to no AP classes available. My school had 2 AP courses available, 0 IB. I was shocked when I went to college and talked to people that had 10 or 20 AP classes. Sure anyone can just take the AP exam, but I didn't know that at the time.

Extracurriculars: Bad and poor schools have fewer extracurriculars.

When you compare good schools (which are in wealthier more exclusive neighborhoods) with bad schools, not even accounting for private schools, its absolutely astounding the differences.

College admissions teams don't accept the GPA from each school as-is. Instead, they look at the difficulty of each course, the school and their knowledge of the students from that school in past years. They actually use their own formulas and recalculate an internal GPA that is specific to that college admissions team. For example, they may only consider core classes and ignore electives. They may or may not count AP courses as part of their formula. In the end, each college makes their own rules about what criteria they will use to compare students.

Yes, but selective colleges have relatively little experience with each school's grading distributions and are not permitted to systematically share data with each other because of antitrust/collusion concerns.

It doesn't matter what the numbers show on that, because it's a strawman argument. Most people promoting the preservation of the SAT, (certainly the OP by implication of his comments) is that a high score on it is a sufficient metric for college aptitude, which has a low cost barrier of entry for the poor but intellectually gifted. The people who look to do away with it seem to wrongly assume that the former group are all saying a high score should be a necessary condition for a competitive applicant.

> SAT has been shown to be a proxy for family socio-economic status

The problem is that this argument is in isolation. If SAT is a proxy, how much better are the other activities as proxies? Who has the leisure to participate all those sports clubs, volunteer clubs, writing all kinds of fancy essays? While the poor kids struggle with jobs outside the school work to support the family and are perpetual tired? If u get rid of the SAT score, who are supporting these poor kids?

I don't believe the people who is making the argument didn't know this. I firmly believe that they are bad faithed and hope others can't see through the crack of the logic and eat it up. Who benefit from this kind of policy which favors the kids with 'life fulfilling' resumes? Plus AA, you know fully well who are benefiting (hint, not the poor kids).

We don't need numbers here, logic is fine.

If it were a proxy for socio-economic status, there would have to be some way for the score to adjust if the student's parents suddenly went broke.

Since there isn't it cannot be a proxy.

Perhaps you meant it correlates? So what? What if it correlates better with success in college than pure socioeconomic status, which I'm fairly sure it does?

Should we just use the less accurate one instead?

> no better an indicator of success at college than GPA, honor/AP/IB course participation, and extracurriculars

It's no better than each of these, but it improves the prediction when combined with them.

But worse, those other things: GPA, AP course participation, impressive extracurriculars--- are far more receptive to being "bought" than a good SAT score. Being on a travel sports team, or having leisure / advice to do "impressive" volunteering, or having systemic tutoring support... do much more to move these other metrics than you can move SAT with any amount of prep.

The problem of SAT is that it's too easy, or at least too easy to be gamed by tutoring. That is, family with means can really improve their kids' scores by throwing money. Make SAT as challenging as India's JEE or those national entrance exams in East Asian countries, and we will see that tutoring hardly will matter in large scale but teacher's quality will do.

Are you saying that students with money to spend on tutors don't do better at the JEE or Chinese entrance exams?

I don't know otherwise, but that seems unlikely to me, so I'm interested if you have any evidence that poor kids pass these exams at the same rate.

On an orthogonal note, harder tests are more sensitive. In a test as easy as the SAT you would expect most of the bright kids to have the same score regardless of whether they are top 10% or top 1%.

With a harder test like the JEE, we can separate these two outcomes

It's not that harder tests in general are more sensitive, it's just if your test score saturate at either endpoint, they are not sensitive at that endpoint

In india due to less resources for the poor compared to the rich, the government has 'reservations' for the economically weaker section, i.e. at least X percent of the students who will be given admission will be from economically weaker sections.

On the negative side, we also have reservations depending on your caste, so whether or not you get admission into a prestigious institute depends on your family history.

> Are you saying that students with money to spend on tutors don't do better at the JEE or Chinese entrance exams?

Some will do, for sure. However, when tests are challenging enough, teachers and talent become dominating factors. Good teachers make sure that students work hard and have access to illuminating exercises to realize their full potential, and students with insufficient talent will not excel in those tests no matter how much tutoring they have. After all, tutoring is not education. Of course, I may have been biased per my own observation: the distribution of student performance in my schools hardly changed due to tutoring because my teachers simply gave challenging enough homework and exams, which did a good enough job to remove the advantages of tutoring, if there's any. Using an extreme example: yes you can find the best coach for you to prepare Math Olympiad, but you'd be able to cross a threshold first before you can even understand what the coach talks about. Similarly on the level of JEE or national entrance exams, I may spend 10 times as much time memorizing some patterns while my classmates whoop my ass by simply attending classes -- this is also why I think the progressives are doing a deservice to poor kids or minority groups. They could've raise standards and build better public schools to help the talented stand out, yet they choose to lower standards and really damage the perception on the otherwise truly talented group.

GPA is utter horse hockey, at least in the high schools I grew up around. Grade inflation is so rampant in some schools that 80+% of students have an A or better average. Our valedictorian took classes like "Honors Ag[riculture]" that were trivial, but were graded on a 110 point scale. She also cried to the teacher in front of the class after every single assignment she made less than an A+ on and sent her mom in to cry if that didn't work. IMO GPA is one of the most hackable metrics and should play absolutely no part in college admissions.

This rings true for myself and a couple of my friends who grew up relatively poor in a wealthy area - our test scores on the SAT and relevant subject tests boosted us into private schools that we would not have gone to otherwise, which then led us to well-paying jobs right out of college. Last I checked, my high school implemented affordable/free SAT tutoring for all students and I hope to see more of it nationwide as I believe it helps immensely in socioeconomic mobility.

> The greatest source of admissions inequity is childhood socioeconomic status

If we are talking about the US, no, I disagree.

The greatest source of admissions inequity are shit K-12 education.

I'll give you a direct example from when my kids were at the local middle school. Their science teacher --a Chiropractor-turned-teacher-- was, well, there's no other way to put it, a moron. The guy actually taught the kids that the moon does not spin...at all. They, quite literally, had to answer the question that way on a test in order to get the points. I can't even remember the number of horrifically wrong things this guy was teaching his students. By the time my kids got to his class he had been there for about twenty years.

It didn't end there. This guy was a bad teacher. He was angry, had self-confidence problems, would yell and scream at the kids, etc. If a kid had a question he would sometimes tell them "That's stupid question" in front of the entire class. Just horrible.

I lost count of how many times I met with the school principal and vice principal to file complaints. I had many (friendly) conversations with him. He was clearly intimidated by someone who's daily life was about science and engineering. I offered to come in once a week to help out and bring stuff with me to inspire the kids (robots, space-related stuff I was working on, etc.). Heck, I offered to arrange for the kids to take a tour of a rocket-making factory. He never took me up on the offer.

My kids, to this day, tell me their science education happened at home because that guy was a clown and other teachers were ineffective. There was no way to get this guy fired. He did not belong in a school, at all. He is still there. That school might get a better science teacher once he retires...with full benefits for life.

I have other examples of truly bad teachers doing the kids a horrible disservice. Unions protect them. You can't get rid of them. We somehow accept this and it permeates the land.

The bottom line is that we, the inhabitants of this land, pay taxes and fund schools that are going a horrible job of educating our children. The school is where we can clearly make an effort to provide kids from all walks of life with better outcomes, regardless of socioeconomic status. They can be learning calculus and science even if their parents didn't finish high school and are not in a position to help or advise them. They can be using computers even if they can't afford them at home. They can take inspiring field trips to the most amazing universities, museums and companies even if they don't have the means to do that outside of school.

And yet, we don't do that. We don't have a unified nation-wide standard of excellence based on an absolute dedication to giving kids the best opportunities to learn, regardless of socioeconomics. Instead we hire people like the moron from my story, who, for thirty years, will not only teach nonsense to class-after-class, he also manages to destroy any potential opportunity for kids to get excited about learning science by being an absolute asshole.

Put a different way: If we had really good K-12 schools and results, university admissions would not be a problem for anyone at all and success rates would be amazing.

> > The greatest source of admissions inequity is childhood socioeconomic status

> If we are talking about the US, no, I disagree.

> The greatest source of admissions inequity are shit K-12 education.

You've missed the step where the higher socioeconomic classes opt-out of the shit K-12 education by moving to better school districts, sending their kids to private schools, or homeschooling them.

That's why so many parents advocate for vouchers and school choice. Kids shouldn't be locked into shit schools just because their parents can't afford to move.

Kids would instead be locked into shit schools because their parents aren't there, don't care, or simply don't have the time to research alternate schools, but (yay!) private and charter schools get to siphon off money from the public school system.

My anecdotal experience is that none of the ~10 or so pro-Charter School people I know are in the bottom 30% of incomes (even talking about bottom 30% of my network). Most of them reference the curriculum and their objections, whether from religious beliefs, pseudoscience, or similar. Others planned to send their kids to private school anyways and want to save money.

Vouchers that immediately squander the social mobility provided by public schools by placing them in an opportunity to go into a financial death spiral the moment those who can afford to leave and take the tax money with them while those who don't have the opportunity jump ship to a public school are left high and dry in a local education system bleeding viability. Public schools exist as an egalitarian institution, why deliberately fracture them into pieces for any reason other than to kill the whole idea off? Tangentally the idea is often pushed underhandedly by some evangelical types to shovel taxpayer money into religious schools in a way that isn't currently legal to do outright, but that's a problem adjacent to the idea rather than the main problem with it.

Well that's cause his _actual_ point is that they shouldn't have to, and that public schools should be run differently so as to eliminate the advantage of rich people just circumventing them, ya dig?

> Well that's cause his _actual_ point is that they shouldn't have to, and that public schools should be run differently so as to eliminate the advantage of rich people just circumventing them, ya dig?

I'm all for that point, I grew up in Switzerland which on the whole exemplifies that attitude (make sure the schools are good). But "we should fix the schools" is not a counter-argument to the fact that current admission inequity is primarily driven by socio-economic status.

> current admission inequity is primarily driven by socio-economic status

Maybe I didn't make my point clearly enough?

If admission is based on testing and our schools are top-of-the-line, kids would not any problem at all passing the test.

We need better education before university. Make that happen and admission isn't an issue.

Beyond that, the world is wide open now. There are tons of universities anyone can attend remotely and get a degree. Some have very permissive admission policies.

> Well that's cause his _actual_ point is that they shouldn't have to

Precisely correct. Our public schools should be the example the entire world tries to emulate rather than the substandard mess they use as something to avoid.

As a kid I had the experience of attending school in other countries due to my parents moving around for work. The best example I have of just how bad things are in K-12 education in the US is that coming back to US schools felt like a vacation, a joke. My level of preparation when compared to US students of the same age almost didn't compare. I could read, write and do math better than anyone in my class. And that's after attending school at a third world country. That says a lot.

> You've missed the step where the higher socioeconomic classes opt-out of the shit K-12 education by moving to better school districts, sending their kids to private schools, or homeschooling them.

No, I did not.

I stated that our schools are garbage.

If we fixed that, it really won't matter what anyone else does with their kids, public schools would be great.

Put a different way: There is no justification whatsoever for our public schools should be crap. The only reason this happens is because we do not exercise the kind of control and set the kinds of standards needed to provide every child in the country with the education they deserve. Teaching should be a profession where the standards and performance we demand from teachers are of the highest levels. That implies (and requires) that bad teachers are expunged from the system like a bad infection. Curriculum and teaching standards have to be optimized for top-of-the-world results.

This, BTW, also has to include kids who, for whatever reason, are not college-bound. Not everyone needs to or has to go to university. The problem is our schools are so bad that the average high school graduate is good for nothing other than maybe, again, maybe, going to college. The average high school graduate in the US is good for stacking boxes and, with training, making coffee. That is a tragedy and a massive failure of the system.

What people with money would not matter at all of our public schools were driven by a merit, performance and results-based system that floated the best teachers, teaching methods, technology and curriculum to the top.

This would require up-ending our entire system of education. Which means it is likely just-about impossible.

> That implies (and requires) that bad teachers are expunged from the system like a bad infection.

Good luck with this, when the working conditions and compensation are such that staffing education at all is a massive struggle, let alone being selective.

(I do think that quality of teachers is sometimes an issue, but I think there are larger systemic issues impeding education than the quality of workers on the front line.)

> teaching methods, technology and curriculum

Teaching methods and curriculum are important. And educational research is mostly crap: well controlled studies basically don't exist.

EdTech, etc, is part of the problem. Occasionally technology is a great support to teaching, but I'm a STEM teacher who teaches the "T" without much technology at all: certainly much less than is trendy in core classrooms (like, no joke, having middle school students write out machine language programs on paper). Edtech is expensive and very often unproven snake oil that allows distractions into your classroom, but it's something administrators love to point to to show they're doing something.

> when the working conditions and compensation are such that staffing education at all is a massive struggle, let alone being selective

Of course. And that needs to change. Right?

However, this should not be a freebie. Pay more? Absolutely. And, with that, comes a require for excellence and performance that should be no different from any job where, if you don't perform, you are out looking for work elsewhere.

> I'm a STEM teacher who teaches the "T" without much technology at all

This is crazy. I am not sure how to put it other than, with the money we spend our public schools should be so good that private schools --not just in the US, world-wide-- should use them as a tough-to-follow metric.

I have tried very hard in our own school district to help up the level of STEM education in a range of ways.

My first attempt was with one of the local elementary schools. I offered to fully fund and conduct a model airplane STEM program for up to 100 students (about three classrooms). I would provide airplane kits to build and, for the more advanced class, also the radio control equipment. I met with the Principal to discuss. A couple of meetings later the county and school district got involved. The only way I can described what happened is "dystopian". Rather than jump on the opportunity to provide our kids with something like this, the reaction and interaction was in a range between being ghosted and feeling like I was the enemy at the gates. Truly incomprehensible.

My next attempt, years later, was to introduce a robotics class as at four local schools (two elementary, one middle and one high school). I scheduled and met with all four Principals from these schools. I brought with me a short presentation as well as a small inexpensive robot made from 3D printed parts and RC servos with an Arduino for control.

Once again, I volunteered to fund the entire thing at all four schools. Well received. Good conversation. One of the Principals took lead and proposed to organize a meeting with the science and math teachers from all four schools. This felt like progress.

What happened next?

I was ghosted. Seriously. And my kids attended two of these schools at that time.

The meeting never happened. Emails and calls were never returned. Nothing. Once again, I eventually dropped the matter.

Fast forward to just about a month ago. I offered the local high school's Physics teacher to come in every so often to help with anything she needed. I could bring interesting STEM show-and-tell items from my work in aerospace, robotics and more. She was kind enough to thank me for the offer. Since then, silence. I asked one more time. Nothing. One of my kids is in her class. I spend more time teaching my kid the Physics she is not teaching than she probably does actually teaching the kids in class. It's crazy.

We have a bad teacher problem. We have a bad schools problem. Until the system is morphed into one where excellent teachers and excellent schools survive and bad ones do not, we are not going to improve outcomes. And, yes, of course, this affects lower socioeconomic sectors far more than others.

The odd thing is that we already spend more per student than most nations of the world. Our return on that investment are high school graduates who are only good for stacking boxes in a warehouse and barely good to work at the local coffee shop. Being that about 60% of kids go from high school to college, that means 40% of adults leaving high school have no marketable skills whatsoever.

From there you have to look at what portion of that 60% actually finish college with what I will call a useful degree and how many drop out. A useful degree adds enough value to have better than minimum wage employment. There are lots of degree programs out there that are a straight path to minimum wage + no real marketable skills + lifetime college debt. Those who drop out are back to having no marketable skills due to the failure of our K-12 education.

The data [0] (interesting site) seems to show that only about 30% of the 60% who go to college actually graduate. Once again, that is terrible. No useful skills from high school and the vast majority of our college-bound students don't or can't graduate.

This is not an example of a school system designed to lift people out of their station in life. Quite to the contrary. It is an expensive mess with bad outcomes everywhere.

I could go on. STEM education is a topic I am obviously passionate about. I can't say I have not tried to make things better. I can only hit my head against a brick wall for so long. At some point all I could do is revert inward to devote my time, attention and resources to my own kids. They are doing great. They are far more advanced in STEM than any of their peers. I was willing to devote a nontrivial amount of time to help hundreds of kids in this region. The system expelled me, rather than those who are likely actively causing damage to our kids. That's sad.

[0] http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/index.php?submeasure=24...

> This is crazy.

I teach in a private school and the school resources my programs well, and I'm willing to kick in whatever else is needed. I chose the "crazy" because it's a better way.

https://github.com/mlyle/armtrainer

Most of the course was pencil-and-paper and the special computers come out at the end. If you choose to let the students get their 1 to 1 laptops out, there's a million additional distractions you have to deal with.

For the most part you don't need a lot of "stuff". And the stuff you have, it's better to get out sparingly so it's exciting and use of it is focused.

(I do coach 2 FTC teams and 1 FLL team; sure, computers are out more in those rooms, and there's capital costs to coaching a robotics team...)

> We have a bad teacher problem.

Don't mistake not being welcomed with open arms for the teacher being "bad". In many public schools, there's a whole lot of heavy management on hitting specific test goals and curriculum items. Your offer would likely not help the teacher in this task.

My closest experience with this is that I teach AP Microeconomics. In most classes, I have a lot of discretion on curriculum, etc. But this is an AP course, and the College Board stuffed the course 110% full of stuff I need to cover and my performance is measured by students' performance on the end-of-year exam.

If a Nobel Laureate wanted to come do a fun activity or give a talk in my econ classroom, I'd say no. I don't have the class time.

It's terrible: I have a few students that are independently game theory nerds. I have half a class period to talk about game theory in the context of oligopolies. If it were up to me, I'd gladly shear off some content to talk more/play with a subject that my students are passionate about...

I also have only 2-3 simulations/activities in the semester; with just a little bit less material I could have a lot less direct instruction and present the material in a way that is much more likely to be retained in the long run.

> Don't mistake not being welcomed with open arms for the teacher being "bad". In many public schools, there's a whole lot of heavy management on hitting specific test goals and curriculum items. Your offer would likely not help the teacher in this task.

Understood. I do know teachers who are, objectively speaking, just terrible. Like the teacher who, years ago, was "teaching" a Lego robotics class. My kid told me she would come into the room, take out her magazines and tell the kids to do whatever they wanted. My kid ended up teaching the others, she did nothing all year.

When I characterize things as "bad" I am thinking about what I will call the system rather than, for the most part, individuals. Few people are motivated --in any profession-- to push hard and excel without a process, structure and stimulus that drives them there. The colloquial term is "self starters". Most are not self-starters, that's just normal and independent of profession. Add a unionized system within which a genuinely bad teacher can "hide" and be protected for decades and you have the makings of bad educational outcomes.

You seem to be the kind of teacher we should strive to have at every school. Your students are lucky to have you. As a kid I attended both private and public schools (about the same number of years each) and I know the difference. My argument is our public schools should be far better than they are and, perhaps, even better than anything private schools could deliver. For one thing, they have the financial backing of an entire nation. The only reason they are not is that our policies and focus are wrong.

I come down hard on unions, not out of spite or ideology but rather out of experience. I was a member of a union for about ten years when I was in my 20's. I saw the sausage being made. Unions had every reason to exist back in the day. It is my opinion that, in a wide range of industries (maybe not all) unions are horrible beasts that exist for the benefit of the wrong people. This is to say, their management. Union members are not the problem. They are average folk who just want a good life and everything anyone else would want. Unions, however, are driven into creating the problems they do because their mission isn't aligned with the outcomes of what it is they affect; in this case, educational outcomes.

Getting off that subject, I was a mentor for our local FRC team for many years. We got to Nationals a couple of times.

While not a teacher, I am pretty good at teaching complex subjects in ways that make them accessible. Well, at least that's the feedback from my own kids and FRC team members. I very much understand you don't need a lot of stuff to teach. It can get in the way.

I absolutely love working with kids. I would hate to be under the thumb of a system that did not allow me to help them excel (in real terms, not just pass tests).

Regarding your microprocessor trainer. You'll appreciate this. I own a couple of these:

https://i.imgur.com/ZsIJj1p.png

I am of the 8080, 6502, MC6800 era. I actually owned an IMSAI and such things as a real DEC VT100 terminal.

I used the 8085 trainer to teach my kids assembler and show them how things work at the base level. They had a lot of fun with it.

I've been thinking of doing a series on YouTube that goes from basic gates and logic through actually building a small microprocessor and defining your own assembler instructions. From there I would implement Forth, move on to programming block-based storage, write a text/code editor and then implement a few interesting higher-level projects. I know this would be a lot of fun to do (at least for me). It's a question of time. I might be able to jump on this in a few months. It's one of those things that's been in the back of my mind for, quite literally, years.

> The only reason they are not is that our policies and focus are wrong.

The real dirty secret is that schooling is an adverse selection problem. Private schools usually spend far less per student, but can be selective behaviorally and in learning capability. Further, parents who are willing to spend for "better" education are a far different cohort than those who are not.

I'm able to teach undergrad material to MS students, because they come in primed to learn, without many substantial behavioral problems. All of the resources can go to top-end programs, because there's no need to provide services to students with learning disabilities 1:1. Etc.

Even with more resources, as long as we're going to insist on mainstreaming students with behavioral problems or who just don't care about the educational process, outcomes for the other students in the rooms are going to be affected. Indeed, the direction of policy change is to make many of these things worse, with increased mainstreaming and reduction of tracking for equity reasons.

> I come down hard on unions

IMO, unions are part of the problem, but really mostly a symptom of it. We have terrible administrative systems, terrible societal expectations for teachers, and unions are seen as a necessary response to make the job halfway survivable (but end up perpetuating the worst parts of the system in the process).

I think we need to accept:

- Education will take more resources than are currently given.

- Education can not fix equity issues: lack of parental support is a powerful disadvantage that we cannot expect a classroom teacher to overcome.

- Differentiated experiences, magnet schools, tracking, behavioral selectivity for classroom environments, etc, are necessary to get the best outcomes for top students and acceptable outcomes for students with problems.

> I used the 8085 trainer to teach my kids assembler and show them how things work at the base level.

Computers are more accessible now. But the terrible thing is there's not a really good onramp to figuring out how things work anymore. I try and get students to tinker, and they're not really used to it in the way 70s and 80s kids were.

> I've been thinking of doing a series on YouTube that goes from basic gates and logic through actually building a small microprocessor

This was basically what we did in my Comp Org & Design class, though after we got the "gist" of our own processor with registers, an ALU, flags, and a skeleton of control logic we pretty much hand-waved it and pivoted to ARM THUMB. We didn't do any of the higher level stuff. We didn't get to any higher level stuff (didn't even really reach procedure calls for most students-- lots of spaghetti code of branches everywhere).

I've been thinking about teaching a Verilog + microprocessor design class in our high school. It's a challenge, though, because our high school is relatively small. I also seem to have a bit less success getting HS students to really stretch in the way middle school students do in my classroom-- in part because there's so much other academic weight for high school students to carry.

(Unfortunately, parents want this academic pressure and "rigor" even though it is often counterproductive to the best learning).

Lots of interesting elements in your comment.

> Even with more resources, as long as we're going to insist on mainstreaming students with behavioral problems or who just don't care about the educational process, outcomes for the other students in the rooms are going to be affected.

The insistence on equality at all levels and all things is a problem. I know there are people reading this comment thinking "this guy is a bigot". If you are that person, please stop, calm down and think.

Everyone understands that there are people who will never been competitive swimmers, basketball players or good dancers. While I am not terrible at sports, I could not become one of those three, no matter what I do. One of my kids will never be an artists. Just not interested, at all. Another cannot think about anything else. Why is it that we want to shove everyone into the same mold when it comes to intellectual capacity, IQ, etc.? Should I force one of my kids into art class and the other into engineering? No. That would be insane.

We don't all have to be engineers. It would be a really sad planet if that were the case. It is not bigoted to suggest we need to allow kids to excel at what really drives them. Expose them to a range of topics, of course. Don't torture them by forcing them into a mold. Should a kid who is an artist not graduate high school if they don't pass algebra, physics and calculus? Why?

I love this Ted talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

The whole thing is interesting, however the story that starts about 15 minutes in speaks loudly to this matter of treating all kids as if they were clones of some made-up model of humanity. I won't spoil it for those who might not have seen it. Watch this and think about what we are doing to our kids in school.

> who just don't care about the educational process

I don't know enough about this. I wish I understood it better. My uninformed thinking is that we damage both groups of kids by forcing them together. One of my kids had to ask to be moved to a desk at the front of the class because the kids in the back were not interested in the class at all and made it impossible to pay attention and learn. The uninterested group should not be discarded. They need a different focus and help. If their families can't support them, perhaps better programs can. I revert back to this idea that not everyone in K-12 is, or should be, college-bound. That's an unnecessary model that might just be causing more damage than good.

Of course, this has policy implications that transcend schools. There has to be opportunity outside of college-centric careers for that large percentage of non-college-bound students to be able to access middle-class living. This perspective, if accurate, results in many tentacles affecting wider policy and politics. In other words, it isn't just about schools and the policies that control them.

> Education can not fix equity issues: lack of parental support is a powerful disadvantage that we cannot expect a classroom teacher to overcome

Maybe I am being naïve. My thinking is, if, a big "if", we could "fix" --whatever that might mean-- the system for one generation, maybe two, the parental problem might self-regulate over time. Sadly, there are kids who are in a really bad environment. Can we address that as a society? Equal outcomes are a fantasy. That does not mean we don't try. I would gladly devote half or more of our war-machine budget towards a better educational system and better outcomes. For that to happen humanity needs to change. None of these things are simple. Easy to throw around grandiose ideas. Hard to make them happen. Also, very easy to throw your hands up and give up when nobody seems to care (as I have done locally).

> I've been thinking about teaching a Verilog + microprocessor design class in our high school.

I've done tons of work with FPGA's. They are great. My fear, when it comes with using them as a teaching tool at that level, is that the student could suffer from exactly the same problem they have when they learn Python as their first language: Everything is magic. I could be wrong. Perhaps it is because of the fact that I came up wiring raw gates together on breadboards that I feel getting down to that baseline has greater value than instantiating an entire circuit with half a dozen lines of code.

Here's a thought I had for yet another attempt to help our local schools with STEM. There are so many well executed resources out there that one could create a hybrid program based on using them under supervision.

My example of this is having my own kids take the MITx 6.00.1 and 6.00.2 courses on edX under my guidance and supervision. This was a lot of work, yet, a lot easier than coming-up with a full curriculum and coursework from scratch. I could see taking this kind of an approach with HS kids to teach a CS class or two. They would get to boast about earning CS certificates from MIT, which I would hope would me motivating enough.

> Should a kid who is an artist not graduate high school if they don't pass algebra, physics and calculus?

No US school system requires proficiency in Calc to graduate. Here in California, graduation requirements are 3 years of math. The low track in public schools around me is "Integrated Math I" to "Integrated Math III" which perhaps slightly goes beyond Geometry-- a pretty decent path for votech (building some intuition for triangles and solving equations is going to serve you well in a whole lot of trades). If you can't cut it in integrated math, you can graduate taking the "Math Skills" class which is even more practical/vocational-oriented.

Similarly, Physics CP (tracked beneath Physics 1 or Physics 2) is not very rigorous. Indeed, the top class my local public high schools offer is AP Physics 2, which doesn't even require any calculus and is all Algebra-based.

I don't think the graduation requirements are too high, in general. And I think there's a decent votech path available through many high schools interwoven with the supports community colleges provide. The problem is it's stigmatized and everyone expects to go to college.

(And, honestly, US comparative advantage is predicated upon sending a whole lot of kids to college... though we need to do better at getting people into practical majors and control college costs).

My local public high schools do offer "CTE" tracks in food/hospitality, agricultural business, basic IT, vet tech, multimedia production, woodworking, and construction. Before there was automotive and trades, but that's now been centralized to the adult school and the community colleges (a bit of a heavy lift for high schools to do well).

> The uninterested group should not be discarded. They need a different focus and help.

They need smaller ratios and easier, more engaging material.

I can handle 24 students and present very high level material. Because I have a student population that is very much "easy mode". I can even be excessively hands off at times like your kids' robotics teacher-- sit back and see what the room does (after establishing a bit of culture and common goals in the room in prior classes).

In other contexts, I've worked with 6-7 students who were not invested or interested. It is really hard to build that investment if it isn't there.

> My thinking is, if, a big "if", we could "fix" --whatever that might mean-- the system for one generation, maybe two, the parental problem might self-regulate over time. Sadly, there are kids who are in a really bad environment. Can we address that as a society?

Maybe as a society, but probably not in mainline education.

You want things like Big Brothers Big Sisters (which has the highest quality of research in support of their program that I've seen from any nonprofit, based on a study controlled between students-on-the-waitlist and students-allowed-to-skip-the-waitlist). You want social work. You want coaching. Teachers can be subsidiary members of such a team: another set of eyes and hands supporting whatever the big plan is.

BBBS is able to make a radical difference in the likelihood of students attending class, avoiding violence, avoiding drugs, etc, in just several months.

> I've done tons of work with FPGA's. They are great. My fear, when it comes with using them as a teaching tool at that level, is that the student could suffer from exactly the same problem they have when they learn Python as their first language: Everything is magic.

There's always magic. There's a lot of circular dependencies in knowledge and you need to spiral.

When I started with gates, there was "well, wait, what are transistors?" When I started with transistors, there was "how does anyone build something useful from this and how do they work?" I haven't tried starting from semiconductor physics, but I don't picture it going perfectly, either ;).

Few students in middle/high school are going to be able to grasp (and it's arguably not a great use of their time to force them to specialize enough to do so) the whole relations between semiconductors, circuit analysis, gates, combinatorial logic, boolean algebra/synthesis, sequential logic, the software/hardware interface, compilers, etc. The normal approach is to try and handwave through all of it. I teach classes where I give a really deep window into one part of it and handwave around other parts (and maybe if they take another of my classes they get a really deep window into another part and slightly different handwavy explanations of the other parts).

> My example of this is having my own kids take the MITx 6.00.1 and 6.00.2 courses on edX under my guidance and supervision.

This works well with a few highly driven kids, but mostly hasn't been successful for me. Even in my academic environment, flipping with lessons from OCW, etc, gets pretty low engagement. Having a passionate, motivated presenter in the room with a social connection seems to be essential.

(Also, as much as I hated groupwork as a kid... think-pair-share and groupwork is a superpower for retention and overall class esprit de corps. Many kids hate explaining stuff to fellow students, but it makes everyone so much better. Few of these outside resources are set up to really allow you to do that well).

The best thing I've been able to do with outside presenters / material is to use them in a "adversarial" mode in the classroom. Superstar presenters like Jacob Clifford, Richard Rusczyk, or Walter Lewin are great, but students are inclined to tune out from multimedia... OTOH, if everyone is sitting on the edge of their seat trying to figure out if Mr. Lyle is going to go on a rant about what "Mr. Richard" is saying this time, then they pay attention. ;)

This is really interesting insight. Thank you. I am particularly interested in what you said about BBBS. I just added them on my list of entities to donate to every year.

I'll repeat, I wish more teachers were like you. It really sounds like the kids in your classes get access to really cool and valuable material and thinking they are unlikely to see with other teachers.

Thank you for the discussion.

> I am particularly interested in what you said about BBBS

I, too, give to BBBS. Money definitely helps (but it's not super clear how to e.g. make it 2x bigger). It's my sense that many Boys and Girls Clubs are also good in the same way, but less supported by research.

> I'll repeat, I wish more teachers were like you.

I do my best. I'm not a career teacher but it's my second (third? fourth?) career after retiring from tech. (I hear rockstar teachers through my walls, and I'm able to do well in part because I can just piggy back on a lot of their efforts).

> It really sounds like the kids in your classes get access to really cool and valuable material and thinking they are unlikely to see with other teachers.

Last thought: IMO it doesn't matter too much what you teach, as long as the teacher thinks it is cool and it builds a tolerance for taking on difficult work in the students. Most of my students will never use the stuff I'm ostensibly teaching them, but that's OK.

University administrators are incompetent by default.

Perhaps a more important factor is that university administrators are being constantly bombarded with various demands, requests, accusations, and threats regarding diversity issues. By students, pundits, even accrediting organizations.

A law school dean once told to me that for years the ABA was constantly demanding, privately, that they increase the number of black students. The problem (as I saw it, we didn't discuss it much) is that this university had a reputation for being libertarian, which in the broader political climate translated (especially back then) as conservative, which translated as potentially hostile to black students. There were black students, but they deliberately chose the school for its somewhat unique curriculum which in many respects absolutely did lean libertarian. Most black students, like most students generally, wouldn't have strong enough preferences to override such a negative impression.

The woke crowd is far more vocal and fervent, and they're that way because they know that, at least in the short-term, being forceful can be effective, at least superficially. People with more reasonable sentiments and preferences, OTOH, aren't eager to put themselves in harm's way to defend those who are being targeted.

For all I know, the ABA was applying pressure because the ABA was being pressured by some other interest groups. And perhaps the ABA pulled their punches, keeping everything on the down-low, precisely because they believed the demands were less than reasonable. As the saying goes, "shit rolls down hill."

> The greatest source of admissions inequity is childhood socioeconomic status

Agreed, and good public schools can be of great help. Only when public schools fail do tutoring and socioeconomic status matter. No, I'm not talking about frills like one ipad per kid or low kid-to-teacher ratio or amazing extra-curriculums. I'm talking about teachers who can really explain concepts and deliver inspiring homework. I'm talking about an incentive system that students are motivated to learn instead of mocking those who try as "teacher's pets". I'm talking about an incentive system that ordinary students like me are pushed to achieve excellence even when they do not feel like studying. Really, it really does not require much to learn high school curriculum. It just requires a lot of dedication from teachers and students. Take a look at Asian countries. The have millions of students who went through daily hardship, yet they had a national system that drives students and teachers to focus on learning what matters, even though they can't necessarily afford what kids in the US can enjoy.

I grew up pretty poor, and through a longer story than I want to type here and a confluence of negative voices mostly from my school, was dissuaded from taking the SATs and even considering college.

Years after high school I eventually found my way to community college, then to a 4-year, a grad program and so on. It worked out to be a blessing as I graduated without debt from a major university and entered into a realm of well paying jobs that have put me firmly into a life the rest of my family can barely even comprehend.

To me the proof I should continue to a 4-year degree was doing well in my community college courses. I am fortunate to have been given the gift of automatic entry by policy makers who decided long ago that if you graduate from a Community College you can go to a State School no questions asked...and you can go to a Community College by basically walking off the street no questions asked.

I graduated my undergrad with a 4.0 and my grad with a 4.0, but to be honest I don't think my SATs would have been worth entry into any college and my high school GPA was around a 2.5.

My point is, there are other ways of assessing a child's entire future for entry than a single test, and many alternate paths to attainment. But we act as if there is only one kind of path and one kind of package, a 1600 SAT score, lots of extracurriculars, "differentiator" activities, and an original heart strings pulling letter.

Top schools need to get smarter, more creative, and maybe take a page from those "lesser" schools they turn their noses up at.

Doing well in college is a great measure of how well you'll do in college, and subsequently, many good schools will accept mid degree transfers of undergraduate students who might not have done well in high school. I don't think it's viable to use that to replace the SAT and other current evaluation metrics, however.

I guess my point is, why not just shove all the students into a Community College a-like for the beginning of their undergrad? With the following features:

- Open enrollment - Cheap - Can drop out and retry later without any penalty - Entry into the final two years is granted based on first two year performance, state schools are guaranteed entry, and privates get to be selective based on major(s), student performance awards, and GPAs. - CC Associates degrees can be earned in periods much longer than 2 years. Allowing students to work, or retake remedial subjects, or try out multiple majors, without it being a huge deal.

The first two years of most undergraduate degrees are fairly similar. IIR there's been studies that show that students who arrive at the universities from CCs do as well as or better than their traditional peers. It helps with student cost and loan problems. Graduates who don't go on to their final 2 or have no plans to can simply treat the CC as a trade education. And many students who do flunk out of school due to partying, immaturity, etc. can simply come and try again when they are ready. Students actually get an education rather than studying for a mostly useless test.

Basically the CCs are a softer entry into higher education, and can be the test for performance in a way that actually is meaningful. Since student have to pay to be there, it's not just the same thing as high-school, and CC schedules are usually so flexible students can even enter the workforce while going to CC, or take more time to "figure out" what they want to really major in without it costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Also, as I've gotten older, and realized that tests like the SAT are just a product offered by a company, and not some Federal standard, I've started to view those kinds of tests as more of a racket than a real filter. People I know in higher education think the test is basically worthless, but also acknowledge that students have basically learned nothing over the pandemic, leaving them with very little to be selective for entry with.

I mean, if the route makes sense for you, it's there right now, and if you want to and are able to get into a bigger school without that, why not do that instead? Is there a benefit from forcing all students to funnel through a CC?

It seems to me everything you want kids to do they can do today, they just aren't forced to do it. I got a scholarship for a state U, so it was actually just as cheap for me to do that as opposed to a CC (maybe cheaper since I had dorms available to me at the state school).

> Students actually get an education rather than studying for a mostly useless test.

I don't think the test is useless. A lot of the things you do on the SAT you have to do in those Gen. Ed. classes, so it seems to me it overlaps considerably with the classes you are proposing they take at a CC. That being said, it's hard for me to imagine the Gen. Ed. classes at a CC aren't as useless as anything else considering my experience with that at the U. I went to.

> or take more time to "figure out" what they want to really major in without it costing hundreds of thousands of dollars

Plenty of schools are significantly cheaper than that. The university I went to was about the same cost as a CC as my brother went to (granted he went to a CC in California and I went to a U. in Florida). That said, I do think students that are in the boat of wanting to go to a super expensive school, that they'll need loans to attend, should definitely get their Gen. Ed. credits from a cheaper school if possible. It's a waste of money to pay private school prices for "Algebra 1" or "Art History 1".

> Also, as I've gotten older, and realized that tests like the SAT are just a product offered by a company, and not some Federal standard, I've started to view those kinds of tests as more of a racket than a real filter.

Being offered by a private company doesn't make it a racket. Schools are free to consider it in their admissions process or not since it's private, but most choose to because it's useful in the selection process (as evidenced by this story).

> Undoubtedly, but I can't think of anything that can show academic capacity that requires fewer resources.

I'm less inclined than normal to challenge your view because I know how much of an anomaly I am: I was headhunted in HS by several UCs (that I didn't apply to as I focused on CSU because of the costs) despite having pissed off my HS administration who tried to impede my graduation despite holding a 3.2-3.5 GPA but only attending for the exam days. The irony being I'd later go on to get honors and letters of recommendation despite detesting and being a vocal critic of this system during my time in University. And after graduating in 2009 I barely made into my field, health sciences, and because of my strength in physics I was encouraged by my advisors several times to take the MCAT despite having absolutely no interest in medicine.

But, the SAT system is ONLY the best option if only we accept we rely on a model that only have bad options. The amount sheer amount of rote learning needed plus defaulting to deciphering cryptic deductive reasoning with misleading questions as a way to show 'academic capacity' underscores why plagiarism, fraud and just outright mediocrity plagues academia. I wonder if having more written or presentation based examinations, like they do in Cambrdige and Oxford in the UK, would be best. The issue is that it doesn't scale at all and thus cannot be so heavily monetized as it is at present.

As a person with a BSc and going for my 2nd in AI and ML I think the notion of university being used as a gate-keeping mechanism for mos roles needs to be re-evaluated: the Germanic model has proven that engineering doesn't suffer because you don't follow the 'straddle your undergrads with immense amounts of debt in a cram model from 8th grade onward' which ultimately often fails to deliver for many since the economic down-turns puts so many either of their fields entirely or dropping out for all but a select few who get cherry picked as the norm.

In short, the apprentice model works best of all as it gives talented students to shine better than anything else, but because of the current status quo and Paper signalling that University degrees have become (not to mention the admission corruption scandals) this doesn't mean much for the majority of said 'talented' individuals.

However, there may be legitimate concerns about a Scholastic "Aptitude" Test where you can increase your score by simply cramming with a guide book. Of course, since that is how most (?) college students operate anyway, maybe it is appropriate after all.

1) The SAT is obviously a superior and more objective indicator of "will do well on schoolwork" than the other components of college applications. Essays on political topics, biggest weaknesses, and a time you had to overcome a challenge are obviously less standardized, more subject to whims of reviewer, and this is why they are being promoted. The idea that there are kids with terrible scores but great portfolios of work worthy of admission seems wrong to me. The people with portfolios of work were likely already getting in.

2) "If you can study for the SAT that defeats the point" is wrong. Nassim Taleb made a point of demonstrating that these tests are study-able. The idea that you can't really study for the SAT is loserthink promoted by the SAT. Nearly everyone I know who wanted to succeed in school studied multiple times, took the test multiple times, and greatly improved their scores. It might still be unfair insofar as the better-prepared<->better-supplied kids get a head start but if you grind out a 1600 from a bad school that is still impressive and demonstrates hard work.

3) The solution to inequities in SAT/admissions is to devalue education via school, a la Caplan/ScottAlexander.

Grades you got on actual schoolwork are a much more obvious predictor.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-22/grades-v...

Grades from different schools are not equivalent.

It's extremely difficult to compare grades from hundreds or thousands of different schools. You have to really know how rigorous each individual school's grade scale is.

Grades from different schools are not remotely equivalent in representing material learned.

However, they are comparable with respect to the hoop-jumping conscientiousness of the students involved, and there's a decent argument that it's the latter is what matters for successful completion of college.

Conscientiousness is not all that matters. Schools can vary widely in their level of academic difficulty.

Top students who come from one school (to take one extreme example, Stuyvesant high school in New York, which has produced four Nobel Prize winners) may be on a completely different academic level than top students from the average school.

Following the la times article’s link to its primary source, it also says:

High school GPA as a predictor of college success results in a much higher representation of low income and underrepresented minority students in the top of the UC applicant pool, than do SAT scores.

“The SAT score does not reflect your future possible success in college,” she said. “If you want it, you can do it.”

Amen. I loosely put GPA in my "portfolio/body of work" mentally.

> The idea that you can't really study for the SAT is loserthink promoted by the SAT.

Nope. SAT offers an official curriculum via Khan Academy.

https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/scores/what-to-do-with...

Glad to see this. I highly recommend manuals of problems too.

What surprises me is how many Asians support these measures. Make no mistake: our ability to progress as we have in America has depended on the fact that objective metrics cannot easily be gamed. The cost of test prep is a minor barrier to entry compared to the cultural knowledge required to write an essay that moves a WASP admissions officer, or the social capital and connections required to get involved in charitable or social activities that stand out in an application.

I'm not sure where you're getting this impression, just read the Wikipedia page for SFFA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions

Asians are a pretty big and diverse group but I would say there's pretty strong support the lawsuits that will soon dismantle affirmative action.

Realistically everything you listed here all requires you to come from at least an upper middle class family to attempt. My family couldn't even afford for me to join a club in high school. There is in reality no real fair way of selecting candidates without knowing more personal information such as their families tax history, income level, demographics, citizenship, etc.

I'm not aware of any clubs in my high school that charged its members. Not even the Boy Scouts.

None of the colleges I applied to asked for my family's tax history or income level, except for on the separate financial aid application.

I can answer this because I was in this position. Parents couldnt afford the gas. They worked long hours to make ends meet and couldn’t take time to drive me to this stuff even if they had the gas money. Finally, there’s just not a lot of ECs available in a lot of poor areas , like the one I came from. I filled that space in the app talking about my hobbies instead because there was no money. Yeah.

The school clubs met after school, one was there anyway. The Boy Scouts also met within walking distance. The Scouts used to meet at public schools, but the people who hate the Scouts got them kicked out because they had a religious requirement for one of the ranks.

Can you please explain how the child would get home from the after school activity, if it existed?

I’m being clear when I am saying there really aren’t any EC options . In poor areas , there’s no money because school funding comes from property tax . Where I went, the funding was so tight they had to fire the foreign language , art teachers and music teachers . If they can’t afford regular instructors , where is the money coming from for the ECs?

I walked home from school. I can't recall my parents ever picking me up.

The Boy Scouts didn't run on money. A chess club, book club, drama club, dance club, photography club, math club, etc., don't require money.

Besides, creating something from nothing is going to look a lot better on an application than following a course that is laid out by instructors and papered with cash.

Yup same here. Public school was walking distance (20 min walk but not a big deal) so I didn’t rely on my parents. We also had a public metrobus route with discounted fare.

> I walked home from school. I can't recall my parents ever picking me up.

In the United States in the 2020s being able to walk yourself to and from school without A) having your life in grave danger from motor vehicle traffic and B) having someone call CPS or the police on your parents is an incredible luxury.

The neighborhood where I grew up was built in the early 90s and its elementary school and middle school are on the opposite side of an eight lane highway that has no crosswalks or sidewalks (on the school side) for at least a quarter mile. The town believes so strongly that no one should walk or bike to school that they zoned the school and built out the roads such that attempting to do so would sooner or later result in certain death.

Yeah this was the issue. It’s probably a common one in rural areas like the one I am from. These areas also tend to lack public transit.

/r/fuckcars moment, but yes you're absolutely right. Transportation in the US seems to be getting worse as time passes, it's actually incredible.

Yes, absolutely an /r/fuckcars moment, growing up in suburbia with no survivable means of transportation besides the car made me extremely receptive to the thesis of that subreddit.

We're talking high school, not elementary school. College admissions don't look at elementary school activities.

High schoolers can walk around unattended. Even a quarter mile, both ways. It's not a big deal. In the summer I often try to get in 5 miles a day of running/walking.

> incredible luxury

Don't overstate your case.

The irony in this thread is all the complaining about "can't do things that will look good on a college application" just means that another student who does find a way around obstacles is going to be the one admitted. Surmounting obstacles makes one a standout candidate.

> High schoolers can walk around unattended. Even a quarter mile, both ways. It's not a big deal. In the summer I often try to get in 5 miles a day of running/walking.

Extremely location dependent. Where I live today, in Virginia very close to DC, I commute by bike and do lots of biking/walking for fun and to run errands. What you are saying about walking around as a means of getting from place to place is just completely untrue in many parts of the United States.

I made a specific point about my ES/MS because of how egregious it was to have them at a half mile's walk away but with unacceptably dangerous terrain, in the very place I grew up. My HS was a couple miles away and, until ~2010 when they built a protected ~800ft long MUP, would have required walking/riding on the highway to reach without a car as well.

The point of that is that if you live in an area like this and your parents work, you are extremely handicapped in what you can do by yourself. You would need a third car to get yourself around and if you cannot manage that then you are completely subservient to your parents' availability and your local school bus schedules for all of your transportation needs. Which has repercussions on clubs, extracurriculars, your social life, really the full range of experiences you can have growing up.

When I was in K-12 my life consisted mainly of school, sleep, and playing video games in the basement. Now that I am in a city and can go wherever I want whenever I want I find I am extremely active and social and have many different hobbies.

I'm sure there are places where it is difficult to walk anywhere. Those are not the norm, however. I don't recall any places like that in Seattle.

Most parents with kids try to pick places to live that are reasonably kid friendly. Real estate people know that, and advertisements emphasize things like walkability and distance to schools.

This is just not a take that squares with how it is to live anywhere in America outside of the denser urban cores and some shallow radius of the suburbs around them. Perhaps it was correct at some time in the past before the suburban expansion of the post-WWII era. Perhaps Seattle is different from the overwhelming majority of the United States and is uniquely walkable or upzoned. I would not know since I have not been there before.

In the United States today it is the norm for middle and upper middle class parents to raise their children in car-dependent suburbia. Particularly in the last half century, most new residential developments have been exactly this. The defining features of these places are sprawling circuitous developments of detached single-family homes, massive parking lots, impassable highways, and strip malls.

If you'd like an example, please come visit Loudoun and Fairfax counties. I grew up in that area. They are some of the wealthiest counties in the country, a common destination for families in the DMV, and you will see how much walkability and proximity to schools that money has bought them.

Seattle is definitely out of the norm. Even Northgate, which doesn't have sidewalks in places, has roundabouts on the collectors to discourage speeding. I grew up in a poverty-level suburb and you were walking miles away on cramped sidewalks even to get to a grocery store. When I grew up cars couldn't accelerate that quickly so it wasn't that scary, but these days cars can travel at > 60 mph on collector roads between lights.

You seem to have had a pretty privileged upbringing. I did too. School bus was always available during normal hours, and my mom was a stay-at-home mom, and was (nearly) always available to drive my sister and me places.

My schools were never within walking distance, and my parents wouldn't have been comfortable with the type of roads I'd have to traverse even if they were, even when I was in high school.

Your assumption that everyone -- or even most kids -- have a situation like you had is just flat-out wrong.

> Surmounting obstacles makes one a standout candidate.

This is just hogwash; being in a position to surmount obstacles is privilege too. And you seem to be ignoring the fact that some kids didn't have obstacles, and so it was easier for them to participate in all these other activities: they started out with a built-in advantage. Even if you do have obstacles, and are able to overcome them, you're still going to have a harder time than the kids without the obstacles. And not in ways that are obvious to admissions departments such that your experience would give you a leg up.

> privileged

Lower middle class. Pretty ordinary.

> in a position to surmount obstacles is privilege

I presume you live in America. That makes you just as privileged. Consider all the millions with nothing that are desperate to get into America. They see something you're missing?

> you're still going to have a harder time than the kids without the obstacles

Well, yes. Overcoming obstacles makes for a more compelling candidate.

> And not in ways that are obvious to admissions departments such that your experience would give you a leg up.

The opportunity to bring how you surmounted obstacles to the attention of the admissions people is through your application.

Our school was in a better neighborhood but still a part of the historically pretty dysfunctional DC Public Schools system.

Not sure how much was teachers volunteering, but we did have old instruments, old computers, etc.

Poor or rural. One of my school systems had less than 100 kids in the middle school over an area of several square miles. There just wasn't the population density for many/any non-sport ECs (and even those were difficult).

Then create your own extracurricular activity. There aren't any rules about it. It just has to be something that shows initiative, drive, and ability to accomplish something significant. I did things like build a gokart out of scrap (had a lot of fun with that, too!). No adults were involved in any way.

Next you're going to tell this group to lift themselves up by their bootstraps....

Overcoming obstacles makes one an attractive candidate for admission.

> but the people who hate the Scouts got them kicked out because they had a religious requirement for one of the ranks.

Actually people who love our Constitution got them kicked out.

In my career in the Scouts, there was not one religious thing done in any of it. There was "trustworthy loyal helpful ... brave clean reverent", and AFAIK the reverent was only a word, with even less meaning than "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance at school, or "in God we trust" on the currency.

There was no religious requirement for being a Boy Scout, there were never any religious ceremonies at meetings, religion was never even mentioned in any of the activities or meetings.

The only thing was one requirement for the Eagle Scout.

The religious thing was just a convenient excuse for the people who hated the Scouts.

> The school clubs met after school, one was there anyway.

And how did students get home after the club meetings were over, since the school buses weren't running anymore?

> The Boy Scouts also met within walking distance.

Is it really that hard to understand that many people don't live within walking distance of their school, or of where clubs might meet?

Or at least safe walking distance; the last house I lived in before college was certainly within walking distance of quite a few things, but that would require walking along sidewalk-less, shoulder-less, limited-visibility, twisty roads with cars zipping around corners at 45mph. Even if my parents would have allowed me to walk along those roads (they wouldn't), I don't think even my "invincible" teenage self would have felt comfortable with that.

I was lucky that my mom was available to drive me to and from places after school, and on days when she wasn't, I could sometimes find a neighbor, or a schoolmate's parents to help. But many kids just don't have that option. More kids than it seems you realize.

> many people don't live within walking distance

True. You can say anything at all about people, and there will be many exceptions.

Parents with kids tend to make an effort to be within range of the local school.

> More kids than it seems you realize.

I'm aware I have a different perception of walking distance that is quite a bit further than most parents, based on how far from the local schools I see kids walking to/from. It peters out to about 0 at the half mile mark.

Not sure where you went to school but I went to a public school in DC.

Both my immigrant parents worked crazy hours so I spent my evenings playing with friends and in various clubs.

Computer Club, Orchestra (early morning practice), various sports like tennis and soccer.

None of it cost my parents a penny, it was all free. Even school uniforms were free. I know generally in public schools, things are almost always free. If they aren’t, there are pathways to pay for it.

No, not remotely. Your experience is hilariously atypical of public school experiences.

Same here. You were expected to find your own way home afterwards since the buses were long gone (parents drive you, upperclassmen gives you a ride, bike, walk, etc, so I guess cost of gas could factor in here), but in general none of the clubs cost anything to join.

> None of the colleges I applied to asked for my family's tax history or income level, except for on the separate financial aid application.

Obviously that's not the point, as I'm sure you understand. It's that children lower-income families tend to have a harder time succeeding in school or participating in extracurriculars (maybe they don't have transportation, maybe they need to help with chores and cooking because parents work two jobs, maybe they don't have educated parents with free time to help with homework, etc etc etc), while higher-income families can afford all the help. Note that of course the same problem applies in myriad other situations: children in unstable households, with parents victim of domestic violence, with parents with mental health or drug addiction issues, etc.

This (correlation between parent's income and educational success) is both intuitively clear and also amply documented.

The value of test prep is way, way overblown.

Besides, the idea that you have to be wealthy to avail yourself of test prep is absurd. I buy books at the thrift store all the time, and there are always test prep books there for a couple dollars. The local public library has them for free. yootoob is loaded with test prep videos. There are no excuses.

If you want to prep for the test,

1. read lots of books meant for adults

2. pay attention in math class

Test prep is not overblown. Prior to test-prep I got a 630 on my math section. Post test prep I got an 800.

Why? Prior to test prep I was solving the problems as I was taught in calculus. Deriving equations. The test prep re-inforced memorizing key formulas and how to think not about solving the problem but eliminating options and determining when it's faster to validate if a given answer is correct.

SAT test prep does work. Similar to how FANG interview prep also works.

You'll wind up just knowing the formulas from paying attention in math class, and especially from doing all the homework problems and taking all the math classes your high school offers. To be sure, maybe your high school is deficient in teaching math (mine was). For test prep, then you need some extra math instruction, not test prep.

> not about solving the problem but eliminating options and determining when it's faster to validate if a given answer is correct

Those skills are not specific to test taking, they are general problem solving skills. You'll use them all the time in industry.

BTW, I picked up an SAT vocabulary prep book to see what was in it. I knew nearly all the words. That's simply from reading a lot. I kinda doubt that memorizing words from a vocabulary book is going to help. The SAT prep book had "hundreds" of words in it. The typical high school graduate has a vocabulary of 10,000 words, for college graduates it's 30,000 words. Hundreds of words isn't going to make much difference. Besides, memorizing words is not the same as organically learning them from routinely encountering them.

The TV vocabulary is 3,000 words if I recall correctly. That's right, TV is dumbed down. (On the other hand, that means one can learn a foreign language by only learning 3,000 words!)

>You'll wind up just knowing the formulas from paying attention in math class, and especially from doing all the homework problems and taking all the math classes your high school offers. To be sure, maybe your high school is deficient in teaching math (mine was). For test prep, then you need some extra math instruction, not test prep.

I don't agree that math classes are enough because teachers do vary, some sucks, some are great, but also at the end of the day they have to teach whole class, not just you, meanwhile maths on youtube runs at your pace

> For test prep, then you need some extra math instruction, not test prep.

This is a worthless distinction, that is correct only on an irrelevant technically.

The point being, that when people prepare for the test, they get better scores.

Yes, there are multiple ways to prepare for a test. But preparing is a good thing, regardless of what you call it, or if you are saying that regular math class also covers it.

What I mean by "test prep" is learning how to game the test, not actually learning the material the test covers.

> What I mean by "test prep" is learning how to game the test

You'd also be wrong here. Let me give you a simple example, that might not be immediately apparent to someone who doesn't know the rules of these tests.

At one point in time, on some tests, there was a "guessing penalty" for getting a wrong answer.

Having a basic understanding of how that works, and different guessing strategies, can increase your score.

EX: questions like should you guess? Should you rule out answers, and guess on the remaining?

There are even other things to think about, such as one's strategy for how long to spend on a question, and if/when you should give up on that one.

A person not experienced in test taking, might make a mistake of spending too much time on one single question, for example, when instead it could make more sense to skim the test first, for easy questions, and answer those first, so you don't run out of time and miss easy points.

Just learning the material doesn't automatically prevent you from making this mistake.

That's the only thing I remember from the test-prep book I bought: a brief paragraph about the "guessing penalty."

As the book said, it wasn't a guessing penalty, it was a guessing-wrong penalty. They told you it was a guessing penalty to scare you into not guessing.

The penalty was a quarter point. Most questions had four options. So it was already an expected zero points on average, not a penalty, and if you could eliminate a single answer it was a net positive to guess.

> that might not be immediately apparent to someone who doesn't know the rules of these tests.

1. Read the rules of the tests. Come on! Does one really need handholding with this?

2. Understanding the probability of success at guessing based on how many of the answers you can eliminate is trivial probability, which goes back to my advice to pay attention in math class.

3. "how long to spend on a question" I'm laughing/crying now. It's third grade arithmetic to figure out the time per question. You know, number of minutes for the test divided by the number of questions. Of course skim the test picking off the easy ones then the medium ones and save the hard ones for last. This is just common sense.

If this is what test prep is, things are much worse than I thought. Who needs to be told that reading the instructions is a strategy for doing well on the test? My gawd.

A lot of people naturally approach tests by trying to solve the problems in order.

For some tests, that's not the right approach. Going in order may be a bad idea. Actually trying to immediately solve the problems may be a bad idea. For example, it may be more efficient to check the units of all the multiple-choice answers first, to see if there's only one that's possibly correct.

You could try to figure out the best strategy during the test, but it's far more effective to learn these things before the test.

If you've already done a dozen practice tests, you'll know what kinds of methods there are to quickly eliminate incorrect multiple-choice answers. You'll know, say, that there are fundamentally 8 types of problems, and you'll be able to skim the test and immediately recognize which problems call into which categories.

This is why people who do test prep get higher scores.

That doesn't mean that we should throw out standardized tests, but it is silly to deny that test prep helps (a lot).

> Who needs to be told

And yet despite your incredulous, fake outrage, the stats simply show that test prep helps people significantly.

If you really want more reasons, read the other response that DiogenesKynikos gave to you in the post.

My problem is with you make false statements here. Be as mad as you want about the fake that test prep helps a lot of people, significantly, but do not make false claims, and ignore the fact that the stats show that it works.

Why does it seem so odd to you that learning how the test works, and learning about strategies that work for the specific test, can increase your score? It seems obvious that this would be the case, and it's pretty clear that this actually has helped many people (myself included) get a better score on subsequent attempts.

Why not just learn the material instead? It's a much more useful skill. And you can be proud that you did it without gaming the test.

> Why not just learn the material instead? It's a much more useful skill. And you can be proud that you did it without gaming the test

Because gaming the test works, as the stats prove. And these tests are very important for college admissions.

There is no reason to handicap one's self, just because someone from the peanut gallery is yelling in incredulous outrage.

I think your metric of a deficient high school is clearly lacking. My high school math class was taught by an actual mathematician with over a decade of research experience and it was highly skewed towards understanding and derivation instead of memorization. This was highly successful in making for better math students and the class was a statistical anomaly in performance - and since everything shown was proven in class, it was not necessary to memorize anything. Homework was really only to improve mechanical abilities.

I don't see how spending more time on memorizing formulas instead of actually understanding formulas, deriving them, and going above and beyond the high school curriculum would be a deficiency, and you would definitely be penalised in the SAT with such an approach over an objectively worse education where students are exposed to less math and more memorization. There is objectively no value to memorizing what amounts to trivia that you will then immediately forget.

That is to say, I strongly disagree that SAT prep is actually going to be just making you a better student, and we seem to both agree that it is strongly correlated to SAT score, while using such prep is correlated to SES.

It's a little weird that you're trying to tell someone that SAT test prep doesn't work, when test prep absolutely did work for them.

It worked for me, too, though I already had a high score, and wanted to see if I could get it even higher. (It worked; I did.)

That's great that you managed to develop SAT-ready vocabulary and math techniques on your own before taking the test. Many, many people don't, and test prep can help fill that gap, not only in their knowledge, but in strategies that work well for the test itself. And that last bit was probably what helped most for me: I, too, had a solid vocabulary (I read a lot growing up), and I never had trouble acing my math classes. But understanding how the test itself worked was helpful too, and netted me a nearly-perfect score.

It's pretty irrefutable that this can work; not sure why this is the hill you've decided to die on.

I've never taken the SAT, but I did take the GMAT. IIRC I used books by Kaplan and The Princeton Review.

Preparation absolutely did help. I didn't develop any new generally-applicable skills, but I did:

1. Practice the style of essays these tests require.

2. Improve my speed at spotting specific types of incorrect answers.

3. Learn a few grammatical rules that were different from the way I learned English growing up. (It was a long time ago, and sadly I don't remember the specifics.)

> Besides, the idea that you have to be wealthy to avail yourself of test prep is absurd. I buy books at the thrift store all the time, and there are always test prep books there for a couple dollars [...] There are no excuses.

Not quite. You have assumed that money is the only barrier, but that is not the case.

Arguing that "test prep is free - or nearly free - so anyone must be able to prep", doesn't account for the fact that both money and time are barriers to test prep.

What if you have no time prep because you must support your family through work? You have no free time to prep - or do any extracurricular - because you have a job. This is not uncommon! Or you have a parent or guardian who is incapacitated in some way and you must act as their care-giver? Again, not uncommon.

> Or you have a parent or guardian who is incapacitated in some way and you must act as their care-giver? Again, not uncommon.

It's very uncommon for minor children to have to act as caregivers for their parents.

If you have a job, that will look good on an admission form. I certainly listed my job on mine.

With all due respect, college admissions have drastically changed over the past forty to fifty years!

How? And why wouldn't a job look good? A job shows a person is capable of being responsible, independent, and deferred gratification.

A job might look good, but not good enough to offset poor test results or grades due to hours spent working instead of prepping and studying.

Nothing's perfect. But a job will look good.

BTW, admissions officers do look for diamond-in-the-rough applicants. Those whose test scores are lower, but have a solid reason for why. An example could be a significant accomplishment at their job.

I don't think WASPs are given an edge here. I feel like it is actually racist to make this assumption also. White people as a broad category are the only racial group that is underrepresented relative to their population percentage in Ivy League schools. Maybe you could make the argument that WASPs are a subset of white people who are overrepresented specifically because of that faculty benefit for admissions but then I am not sure why, for example, you couldn't make that claim about other groups who are overrepresented in the faculty and student body. There are other groups who fit that critique but the people who argue Ivy League admissions are unfair seem to make a scapegoat out of WASPs exclusively.

I think the person you’re replying to is referring to the current(?) standardized testing regime that heavily rewards test prep above all else.

There’s a very obvious correlation between the SATs de-emphasizing essays (~2000-2005ish) and Asians absolutely blasting past Whites in terms of average SAT score.

I didn’t say WASPs are given an edge. But the institutions are controlled by them. And minorities must appeal to their fancy to get in.

> institutions are controlled by them Citation very much needed. Have you actually looked at who occupies the high level executive positions at Ivy league tier universities? It's not predominantly WASPs.

I didn't say WASPs are given an edge

You are making a nuanced argument for sure then. But the Students for Fair Admissions have explicitly made the case that whites are given an advantage that takes Asian seats at Harvard via the children of faculty admissions, donations, essays, athletics, etc. But this discounts donations from certain foreign governments and I think it creates a misconception about the average white student there and pressures Harvard to specifically accept fewer whites (WASPs in particular imo) because that is the only socially acceptable result of their lawsuits despite whites being underrepresented there anyway. No one questions whether any other group has a backdoor admissions advantage though.

But the institutions are controlled by them. And minorities must appeal to their fancy to get in.

If you had said this about any other group it would not be socially acceptable even though a case could plausibly be made that Harvard is not run by the stereotypical blazer and khaki wearing WASPs. That's really what I am trying to point out is how strange it is that only WASPs can ever be criticized. I am not even trying to play a race card and I am strongly in favor of free speech. I am just trying to point out that in my opinion there is misdirection going on and that WASPs are probably being scapegoated in the fight over Harvard. Especially since anti-WASPishness has been the esprit de corps in academia for some time, I doubt they have any real control there. See other commenter's posts for example.

edit: this is a deep topic for sure and touches on a lot of American history. Given that every US president until Kennedy was a WASP, and that Harvard was started by WASPs for WASPs, Harvard's student body was undoubtedly slanted towards WASPs. But I personally doubt this has been true for at least a decade now but probably longer.

> You are making a nuanced argument for sure then.

It’s not a nuanced argument at all. Harvard and similar universities are WASP institutions run by WASPs. When you have non-objective admissions standards, you have to appeal to their WASP sensibilities to get admitted. That doesn’t necessarily mean they prefer other WASPs. They also like minorities that affirm their worldview (but not so much minorities that don’t affirm their worldview).

The root of your confusion seems to be thinking that I’m using “WASP” to mean “white people” generically. White people aren’t a monolith. Harvard WASPs have nothing to do with folks in Appalachia (who may literally be white and Protestant).

Northern White Anglo-Saxon Protestants like David Evans, who spent 50 years in Harvard Admissions, and was born in Arkansas to the grandhild of Agrican-American slaves?

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/09/jhj-changemaker-in-a...

Harvard and similar universities are WASP institutions run by WASPs

you would have to convince me of this. It was previously a WASP institution but I don't think it is anymore or has been for some time. There are still fencing teams and professors in tweeds but that doesn't make it a WASP institution, maybe one that borrowed WASP culture. The ethnicity of the current president and provost and past few say otherwise. I think WASPs have been defeated in the court of public opinion and Harvard is no exception in fact more sensitive to public opinion because of its global significance.

The root of your confusion seems to be thinking that I’m using “WASP” to mean “white people” generically.

I am not sure it really matters to admissions but I know what the difference is. No one will argue there should be fewer Hispanic or Black students. It will never happen, it is socially unacceptable. There is a lot of momentum to accept more Asians and Harvard can't possibly accept being called racist. The end result will be whites of all groups will be accepted less as the future goes forward in order to appease all the other groups. This is in spite of the fact that whites appear to be within a general SD of Asian test scores[1]. Of course it seems unlikely that the school would deliberately accept fewer Jews because that also seems like a socially unacceptable result given that there was previously a Jewish quota. That could never happen again.

But I think the stereotype of modern WASP as a lazy, corrupt, and dumb legacy admit is nefarious because no one really knows what a WASP is, it's not obvious, so any white student there could fit this. Also WASPs themselves are not necessarily this stereotype. Couldn't they be as hardworking and studious as any other group?

edit: my point here is that Harvard admissions policies and lawsuits just seem like blatant evidence of ethnic conflict in the US and WASPs are a scapegoat who I don't think even have a say in the policies. Also here is the current fencing team[2]. Doesn't look WASPy.

[1]: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/22/asian-american...

[2]: https://gocrimson.com/sports/mens-fencing/roster

Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all have Jewish presidents

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Bacow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Salovey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_L._Eisgruber

That doesn't full show the degree to which those institutions reflect the Jewish view of the world, but it gives one an idea.

In a sense all of the above were indeed WASP institutions: Those evil, evil WASPs created them, funded them, and built them into fine schools. But that part of their history is over and now they are controlled by a different group with a different purpose.

Why don’t you actually look up the religion and ethnicity of those people instead of blindly asserting that they are Protestants and Anglo-Saxons? You haven’t cited a single source showing that the leadership of the Ivy League are WASPs, but you’re claiming that all over this thread. If you’re going to make the bold assertion that the leaderships of those schools prefer applicants of their own ethnicity and religion, you better back it up with evidence, or else you just look like a bigoted racist.

"White people as a broad category are the only racial group that is underrepresented relative to their population percentage in Ivy League schools."

A better measure to consider: 4-year completion rates.

At elite universities, Asians tend to have the highest completion rates (even higher than whites) suggesting that you could improve completion rates by admitting a few more Asians, and fewer from other groups (including whites).

On this measure, Asians are the most 'underrepresented' group.

There is no such thing as “white people.” WASPs are a distinct tribe and feel zero affinity to white ethnics, Appalachians, etc.

Isn't that a bit like saying that there is no such thing as Asians? Both are still used for admissions it seems.

I don't think WASPs have any influence on the admissions policy at Harvard and I have seen no evidence that they are over-represented there. Others have pointed out who are. I could go on about US history, immigration, and WASPs but its better to be brief. I think they lost their power. That better fits the data than the theory that WASPs control Harvard and despite being racist and anti-semitic seem to prefer every racial group but their own. It's really just a racist trope at this point that untalented, privileged, and elitist WASPs are the villain.

Who said WASPs are racist? As a group, they’re probably the least racist people on the planet. Their conflict with Asians and Jews isn’t about race, but culture and worldview.

But the president and provost are Jewish as have been several past ones. We're essentially arguing about which tiny elite has more power and influence, a corollary to being a Harvard alumnus. As others have pointed out, by parity it seems there would be more Jews than actual WASPs there in the student body presently. Over half of the whites may be Jewish and it's unlikely the rest are exclusively WASPs but we don't have exact granularity on this.

I think the WASPs fell from power decades ago. It's almost inexcusable that they could have any power in a hyper race conscious society. I think they are kind of viewed as an archvillain in this country in some sense. As a result, I don't think the WASPs are still in control there. I think the sensibilities you mentioned to get in are not WASPy, but reflect the new elite.

FWIW I don't think that Harvard is explicitly discriminating against Asians in order to preserve WASPishness as alleged.

It's likely that if explicit racial discrimination is taking place, it's more for pragmatism. The Black and Hispanic student body % shall not be reduced. The country is still ~60% white but the white student body % has been reduced dramatically over the last decade. That trend will continue but it's not pragmatic to do it all at once. Nothing like the scale of immigration in the US has happened ever in history. The top 0.01% of populations > 1B in Asia can move to the US and within one generation achieve elite status and that's still more than enough to fill every spot at Harvard.

Meanwhile, Harvard remains a seat of major power in places like DC and corporations and law schools and science. There are far more elites on the planet than there are seats at Harvard so it's likely to cause major tension in the future and my best guess is Harvard is being pragmatic and slowly reducing the white population as it increases the Asian %. Who knows what the Jews do? Maybe claim victim status and get a guaranteed seat. Since Harvard is a gateway to power, it's likely this is going to be a source of major tension in the future.

zero affinity to white ethnics

a lot like another distinct tribe

Do you have a citation that demonstrates the effectiveness of test prep?

> Make no mistake: our ability to progress as we have in America has depended on the fact that objective metrics cannot easily be gamed.

Objective metrics can easily be gamed, and usually are, at the moment they are chosen. Metrics are almost always imperfect proxies, and the choice of metric is almost always driven by chosing the one that produces the most desirable results to the decision maker that can be sold given the notional purpose.

>” compared to the cultural knowledge required to write an essay that moves a WASP admissions officer, or the social capital and connections required to get involved in charitable or social activities that stand out in an application.”

When I was in high school we were advised, in no uncertain terms, that the mixed race students should not hesitate to identify with their Non-White ancestry on their application and that doing so gives them an advantage.

Universities and Colleges are all about diversity and I can’t imagine the admissions department being an exception to this. Diversity scores also factor into university rankings and I can’t imagine there are many schools that are actively trying to be less diverse in their admissions process.

I don’t follow the logic of needing social capital in order to get involved in charitable or social activities. I can’t really think of a local charity that would turn down volunteers because they aren’t WASP-y enough.

> When I was in high school we were advised, in no uncertain terms, that the mixed race students should not hesitate to identify with their non-white ancestry on their application and that doing so gives them an advantage.

One important caveat to this - I am not quite sure this would accomplish the desired effect if the other parent of such a kid was asian. Listing themselves as an asian instead of white for pretty much all top schools would almost definitely decrease their chances.

That was actually a big concern. Especially for the Pacific Islander students who were worried about being lumped in with Asians. Nevertheless, they were still advised to identify as Asian/Pacific Islander rather than White.

If culturally-discriminating WASP admissions officers were the main barrier, one would not expect non-Jewish whites to be the most underrepresented group in the Ivy League. Circa 2019, looking at non-international students only:

                          Ivy League   US      Ratio  Mean SAT score [1]
  Jewish                  17.2%         2.4%    7.16  n/a
  Asian                   19.6%         5.3%    3.71  1216
  White (incl. Jewish)    50.3%        61.5%    0.82  1148
  Hispanic                11.4%        17.6%    0.65  1043
  Black                    7.8%        12.7%    0.61   966
  White (non-Jewish)      33.1%        59.1%    0.56 ~1141 (lower estimate)

Percentages don't sum to 100 because multi-ethnic students, a few minor ethnicities (American-Indian, Pacific Islander..), and students categorized as "unknown"/"other" by the universities were excluded. Data on university undergraduate demographics was taken from the universities own diversity reports. Jewish representation was gathered from http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/, https://forward.com/jewish-college-guide/, and https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat..., taking the lowest estimate when sources conflicted. ejewishphilanthropy.com (eJP) points out flaws in Hillel's data gathering (e.g. showing Harvard as 30% Jewish, when eJP found it only 16%) Hillel seems to have since fixed these flaws, as the estimates they now give are in-line with those of eJP.

[1] https://www.ednc.org/eraceing-inequities-the-influence-of-ra...

Sure you would. WASPs don’t like Jews and never have. Only the justifications have changed.

It's the opposite. In a poll, WASPs gave Jews the 2nd highest rating (69, higher than Catholics, rating only themselves higher at 82), while Jews rated themselves at 89, and gave Evangelical Christians the lowest rating, 34.

In other words, WASPs have a positive view of Jews, while Jews have a very negative view of WASPs.

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2014/07/16/how-american... 2nd table

In fact, no country has a more positive view of Jews than the US (at least among those polled by Pew research): https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2008/09/17/chapter-1-view... - 2nd graph

But this sampled all US residents, not just WASPs.

That’s counting evangelical Protestants, which aren’t “WASPs” in the context of elite northeast educational institutions.

Random Americans feelings of "warmness" isn't the same as admissions officers decisions.

There's no evidence of anti-Jewish bias in Ivy League admissions (the opposite, in fact), and polls also show friendly attitudes towards Jews among the general population, so I don't know what it would take to convince you.

On the other hand, Ivy League students are only 33% non-Jewish white, and 4-5 of the 8 presidents are Jewish, per their wikipedia pages (Martha Pollack is listed as Jewish, but the citations in support of that claim are ambiguous, hence the uncertainty), so what makes you think that admissions are the exception where WASPs reign?

I wonder if the college administrators who enforced quotas on Jewish students would answer similarly (not being sarcastic, I generally wouldn't be surprised if they said in a survey that they had warm feelings towards the Jews)

Well, and there's the rub, right?

Jews and Asians are overrepresented because they give the hard signal. Some absurd double-digit number of Asian students at Harvard have a perfect SAT score.

What's taking assessment tests out of that picture likely to do to the percentage?

It's not more WASPs, there are exactly twenty of those matriculating per year and they all drink blood out of a skull†. It's less Asians and more, heartfelt college essays about: you can fill that in, I'm sure.

†I'm not actually blood-libeling WASPs, something about how conversations have gone here recently compels me to point this out. Remember the 2004 election? Me neither.

> Jews and Asians are overrepresented because they give the hard signal. Some absurd double-digit number of Asian students at Harvard have a perfect SAT score.

That is why I included the SAT score in the table. Non-Jewish whites don't benefit from a higher score - they get admitted at approximately the same rates as Hispanic and Black students, despite 100-180 points higher mean SAT scores.

On the other hand, the smaller, 70 point lead of Asians gives a 6.6x higher admission rate, and the unknown lead of Jewish students a 12.8x higher admission rate. Strange, isn't it?

If you don't know how linear changes in a score map to rarity of that score, then yeah, that's strange.

If you do, you probably did ok on the SAT.

Why don't you teach me? How are SAT scores distributed, that raising the mean by 175, from 966 to 1141, does not change the area above the Ivy League admission cutoff, but raising it by another 75 points to 1216, increases that area by a factor of 6.6x?

Certainly not by the normal normal distribution - unless there were truly dramatic differences in the standard deviation. Do you have any evidence that there are, and are in the correct direction for your argument?

Or you could look at e.g. Harvard's own documents and see that they required higher SAT scores for whites, and highest for Asians [1]. Of course they do not count Jews separately in those figures.

[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/widget/2018/10/21/sat-by-race-gra...

The fact that you haven't mentioned standard deviation shows that you don't know how a normal distribution works.

Moreover, you are talking about "admission rate" which you haven't clearly defined.

Also, the normal distribution is a law of averages - that does not apply here. You have to use the actual distribution of data, not the normal distribution of averages.

If you want to make a proper statistical argument you must have the acceptance ratio at a given college for every race for a particular SAT score (say a SAT score of 1250) Any other data is just muddling signal with noise.

In fact, the paper that you linked does just that

https://www.ednc.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Screenshot-2...

The darker bar graph us what needs to be used.

Asians most discriminated. Whites and Pacific islanders a distant second. Hispanics and multiracial follow closely at 3rd position. Blacks benefit the most, but given that the number of students in each ethnicity is not specified then the discrimination level is unclear.

If there are very few Asian students and plenty of black students, whites can be experiencing discrimination. However, if there are lots of Asians and very few black students, then whites are beneficiaries!

They could have used the average as a zero control, but they used whites, which means that definitive statements can only be made about black and Asian students!

Why would you take U.S. population rather than world population?

This is a very good point. In particular, it completely throws out the "overrepresentation" ratio for Asian students. What's the actual ratio by number of applications?

A very good point! We can also ask why whites are underrepresented at Addis Ababa University, and why there are so few Latinos attending Osaka University.

Because each university belongs to the whole world, and none were founded to serve their country.

>many Asians support these measures

(East) Asians that support these measures get the media platform. In East Asian dominant neighbourhoods I've been in, opposing these measures are one of the few things that has politically activated the community in decades.

Asians are the only ethnicity that encounters true system racism in the education system, and no one seems to care.

MIT admissions concluded that SAT scores were the least inequitable method for selecting students that would be successful at MIT.

Citation needed. MIT Dean of Admissions said the opposite:

"He says the standardized exams are most helpful for assisting the admissions office in identifying socioeconomically disadvantaged students who are well-prepared for MIT’s challenging education, but who don’t have the opportunity to take advanced coursework, participate in expensive enrichment programs, or otherwise enhance their college applications."

https://news.mit.edu/2022/stuart-schmill-sat-act-requirement...

What you quoted above actually kind of reinforces GP's point. And if you read the article you cited it agrees with GP.

> [W]hat I think many people outside our profession don’t understand is how unfortunately unequal all aspects of secondary education are in this country. And unlike some other inequalities — like access to fancy internships or expensive extracurriculars — our empirical research shows the SAT/ACT actually do help us figure out if someone will do well at MIT.

> It turns out the shortest path for many students to demonstrate sufficient preparation — particularly for students with less access to educational capital — is through the SAT/ACT, because most students can study for these exams using free tools at Khan Academy, but they (usually) can’t force their high school to offer advanced calculus courses, for example. So, the SAT/ACT can actually open the door to MIT for these students, too.

Most helpful for socially disadvantaged students vs least inequitable don't seem contradictory to me

Why even pretend that admission is in some sense "fair"?

I don't mean this as a "anti-woke" or "pro-woke" harangue, or as a middle school cynical pose.

Admission in the USA is a manual and largely arbitrary process. Just like judges' rulings, it's influenced by which person happened to read the application, what they had for breakfast and what time of day it is. Plus random factors like the orchestra's french horn player having just graduated.

We recognize this for hiring, why not school applications? Acknowledging it will reduce a lot of heartache.

(Another heartache reducer would be the elimination of the "common application")

Why would removing the “common application” remove heartache? I’m not familiar with that idea.

The common application encourages people to apply for schools they aren't qualified for ("what the hell it's only another $30"), a phenomenon which has been exacerbated by the schools themselves. The USNWR ranking includes acceptance rate ("more selective" means a higher proportion of rejections), so schools send letters to kids who can't get in, encouraging them to apply. I saw these letters last year.

In addition, the common app really restricts what you can say. For example two kids might have earned an Eagle Scout rank: one just did the minimum to get a check box; the other might have really used it to learn and develop. In the common app there isn't really room to differentiate unless you devote your essay to it.

Back when each school had a unique application, the burden of applying makes you more judicious in your choices. However it also allowed you to adapt your application to what you wanted to emphasize to each school.

For a quantifiable difference: back when I was applying to universities in the 1980s, MIT had quite a high acceptance rate compared to its peers, ~18% IIRC. Why? Turns out few people applied because they (probably correctly) assumed they wouldn't get in anyway.

Just forget about trying to be fair: use some kind of test and pick out by lottery from the n best results.

This is what SAT provides:

A way to find highly capable students based on a very low bar (relative to college education), with a low ceiling, avoiding peacocking.

>You care about fairness and justice? Well why don't you simply... not? Then your problem is gone.

Well that's hardly an interesting solution is it? x) Yes things are not good, and they might never be perfect. But that can be better.

A point is reached in that any improvement in fairness to one group will decrease fairness to another.

For example, I'm bald. That's unfair. At some point, one has to just accept it and move on.

I fail to see how the educational system has reached the end of any possible or conceivable improvement. I find it very very unlikely that 2022 USA is the end of history (but Mr Fukuyama might like a word with you :p)

Also, as a fellow man afflicted with male-pattern baldness, I wouldn't dream of comparing that with the injustices discussed in this thread.

> I fail to see how the educational system has reached the end of any possible or conceivable improvement

At least the public school has not made any objective improvement since around 1970 or so. That's pretty good evidence that that system cannot get any better.

Come on Walter, you're a very smart guy, you cannot possibly believe the nonsense you are saying x) In fact the very existence of several developed countries with much better educational systems (by almost any metric) than the US should clue you in on that.

So what then about the American system resists improvement? Why is it that, despite reform after reform after reform, the needle doesn't move?

An implicit point in my comment, which replies suggested wasn't clear, is that it's completely unclear what "fair" would even mean.

Is it fair that my parents went on an extended walkabout and so I happened to be in the US during high school and had the chance to go to amazing universities?

Is it fair that some kid with a 160 IQ grew up on a reservation with parents who desperately wanted to help the kid succeed but had no idea how, while the kid had to go to crappy schools, learn only the basics, and worry about their next meal? They would be waay smarter than I, but I would be far better prepared and would get more out of an MIT education.

Trying to diversify the student population sounds like a good thing for schools to be doing, something that in the medium term will hopefully ablate some of the second case. And if that excludes someone with high test scores, which is "fair"? Hell, if it excludes someone who diligently labored to worked the system, well, the there's a reasonable case to be made that such a person will do OK regardless while the student with less opportunity might end up with a greater benefit for society.

And, as far as "fair" goes: private universities, at least, are going to accept a certain number whom they believe will provide future donations, helping the institution survive and grow, even if they are otherwise unqualified. Is that fair?

> One college purchased a data service that ranked high schools and factored those high school rankings into each application. Students from underserved high schools received a lower ranking, an admissions officer explained. It wasn’t a fair process.

This is the crux of the affirmative action fascists. They picked what they thought was a “fair” set of criteria and it didn’t produce the outcome they wanted. They concluded it wasn’t “fair” because it didn’t produce they wanted. That’s garbage.

Backing into an outcome simply based on skin color that they want is racist and truly unfair.

If you want certain communities to do better in education, you don’t manipulate the outcome by changing the selection criteria, you produce better candidates. Invest in education and safety in lower income areas. No one does this. South side Chicago and St. Louis Missouri and Baltimore aren’t filled with stupid people. They are filled with people who have suffered generational poverty, living in some of the most violent areas of the world. If you dump money into schools, jobs, and police in those areas, you will produce a thriving middle class in a single generation and from there you can create hundreds of thousands and millions of educated “underrepresented” people that are COMPETITIVE.

> They picked what they thought was a “fair” set of criteria and it didn’t produce the outcome they wanted. They concluded it wasn’t “fair” because it didn’t produce they wanted. That’s garbage.

No, that's science. If your goal is "more racially- and background-diverse admissions", and you set up a process to achieve that, and then find that your new process didn't work, then the process was wrong. So you come up with a new process.

> If you want certain communities to do better in education, you don’t manipulate the outcome by changing the selection criteria, you produce better candidates. Invest in education and safety in lower income areas.

The problem is that universities don't really have the ability to invest in education and safety in lower income areas. As rich as many top-tier private universities are, they don't have the resources to make a dent in this problem. So you have a chicken-and-egg problem: you can't fix the inequity that causes some kids to get a worse primary education, but you can't give them a better secondary education and allow that to flow back into their communities.

You have to break the cycle somewhere, and it seems pretty obvious that US federal and local governments have been failing miserably at improving education and safety in underserved communities. So you decide that you're going to find kids that your regular admissions practices would have rejected out of hand, but have the potential to learn and be successful at your school, even if there are gaps in their education. No, it's not a perfect plan, but what had been going on before wasn't working either. And maybe this won't work. But I think it's a worth trying.

No it is not science. If the objective is to be “fair” then they don’t like the outcome then that’s not science.

If the objective is to increase the amount of certain skin colors, then fine. But call it that. Don’t be racist and then wrap it up in a lie saying that it’s to be “fair”. “Fair” in the way it’s used in the article is entirely subjective, which is not scientific.

When the system is as obviously corrupt as it is now, people lose faith in the system entirely and that’s what’s happened.

> The problem is that universities don't really have the ability to invest in education and safety in lower income areas.

I wasn’t talking about the universities, I was talking about the government. If the government is willing to dump hundreds of billions into Ukraine, I’d rather see that money going into creating businesses, schools and safety in the most egregious areas of our own country and build them up. Create competitive applicants by destroying generational poverty.

Not by bending admission standards and lying to everyone’s face as if we are racist for pointing out their racism. I would much rather see my tax dollars funding this rebuilding of the worst parts of the country than war. And if it produces hundreds of thousands of competitive students one generation from now, we all benefit because they won’t be as underrepresented and we can get rid of these racist policies by radical left fascists that believe that more racism is the answer for racism.

It reminds me of European universities switching from selecting on humanities to selecting on maths a century ago.

The idea was to remove the social upbringing's impact on test scores, as candidates from higher socioeconomic status are heavily advantaged from using a larger vocabulary from birth.

A PhD friend who studied this told me it had no measurable impact. Put aside raising math tutors salaries of course.

I'm from a former socialist european country, and we use grades + standardized tests results to get into most colleges (art, music and acting colleges are an exception, due to obvious reasons). Everybody has to pass a standardized test at the end of highschool, 5 subjects, for most, the first three are slovene (our native language), english (second language) and math + two subjects chosen by the student (eg. physics and sociology, or chemisty and informatics, or whatever).

The colleges just give out rules how to calculate "points" (usually 40% are the grades, 60% is the test score, but some (eg medicine back in my time) require you to choose chemistry or biology as one of your subjects and that is worth 20%, next to 40% for the other ones and 40% for the grades).

Students know those rules, apply for a college they want, finish the year, do the standardized tests, get the results, colleges calculate them into points, and if there are 60 spots for that study course, top 60 students are accepted... you don't even have to wait to get your letter, colleges publish that the cuttoff was 82 points to get accepted, and if you're above that, you're in, if not, you compete in other colleges/programmes that still have open spots left over.

No races, no letters, no subjective stuff, no problems with -isms.

40% are grades?!

taking grades into account seems weird as hell

Grades for each subject are calculated into end-of-year grades (for that subject), and a final "total" grade is calculated (some special formula, not a pure average). A mix of those is then calculated into those 40%... I can look up the formula, but yeah, the grades are used too.

> “I think the students that do have the strong test scores still do have that advantage, especially when you have a student that has strong test scores versus a student who doesn’t have test scores and everything else on the academics is more or less the same,” an admissions officer

Why would we expect this to not be the case? It’s literally additional evidence of scholastic aptitude and, if you want it to not have any effect on admissions, you have to prevent its inclusion* rather than making it optional, as optional means “those with strong scores submit those scores.”

* Or, accept them in the application but prevent their inclusion in the admissions process and use them only for research/analytics and only after the fall semester starts.

Maybe the "minorities" are actually smarter than you think, do they actually want to study there? What were rejection rates for minorities?

In many cases college is a scam, investment is simply not worth the money (future earnings). Diversity studies referenced in article were mostly performed on "liberal arts colleges". Maybe this type of study is good hobby for rich white kids. But most normal people will not throw away their future on such schools!

colleges are worth it if you get into the top 10 ones. Also, if you get scholarship.

Was this not obvious from the outset? Do these people not consider the consequences of their actions beforehand?

They're not reversing the decision, are they?

Going test-optional was a capitulation to social pressure, not a deliberate decision made for its benefits.

But...that was exactly the purpose? To be able to more freely select amongst racial and gender lines as desired

I think it’s more complicated than that because the students expect to get jobs after completing the degree, if they even can complete the degree.

For example, Im not great at art and don’t really have a passion for it. Should an art school accept me even though I’ll never have a career as an artist? Keep in mind I’d be taking a spot from someone who could. I have no doubt they’ll be able to improve my abilities but that’s not why many students apply.

I wonder what percentage of people work in the field their degree is in. I suspect it’s very high for some (law, pilot, doctor) and very low for others (history).

I was trained in mechanical engineering, but write software. I still find my college education to be of great help.

I came from poverty and was able to go to a top CS school because of standardized testing . I didn’t score as well as my peers , but the admissions committee looked at district and county percentiles . I checked test prep books out of the library . I took the SAT test with low income fee waivers. I was saddened at the news regarding removing testing because my parents couldn’t afford extra curriculars and the tests were the only way I was able to level the playing field.

The "avalanche" of applications isn't just from the lack of standardized test scores, but the rise of the Common application platform.

It's incredibly easy to fill it out once and then fire off a dozen applications in an afternoon.

common app is over 20 years old.

This is why, in the UK system, you're only allowed to apply to five or fewer universities in the same academic cycle. (It's possible to enforce this because all applications go through the same centralised system.)

You're also not allowed to apply to both Oxford and Cambridge in the same year - otherwise both universities would get twice as many applicants.

Honestly it wouldn't be as big of a deal if colleges accepted more applicants than they have seats for. The UofMN does just that and has a 70% acceptance rate and is a top public school. They have yet to run into any problems by doing so. While this might not work for colleges in say California or Ivy Leagues, for competitive and selective schools it's definitely an option almost none of them do.

Colleges do overadmit, including elite colleges, because a predictable percentage decline the admission.

The term for the percentage of accepted students who enroll is “yield”.

Every college predicts its yield and admits enough extra to get a full class. It’s basic college admissions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_(college_admissions) https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-yield-788445

It's suboptimal. It involves a lot of guessing on the applicant's part as to which university is suitable for them. There is a huge possibility for mismatch

USA is rich in universities. I wish people would focus less on the rankings and looking good credential aspect of college, and more on using it as an opportunity to learn / actually getting good at something. If we did the latter, we’d realize that people could go to pretty much any university (or coursera!) and get a high quality education here.

You are absolutely missing one of the primary points of US universities, which is to maintain a social hierarchy.

I mean, if you just want to learn stuff and get a good education, there are loads of resources where you can do that, often for free or near free. College is about much more than just learning new things, and if that's the only framework through which you value a college education, you'll be doomed to misunderstand the institution.

Yeah you’re right, that is the aspect of uni that this article is about. Who gets to get the premo credential.

Nonsense. Education is not about taking a course or reading bunch of books. The big part of education is being able to directly ask a knowledgeable person once you're stuck. You can ask the community of course but the quality of community answers is more than often just trash.

I think you’ve defined a tutor. Tutors cost less than college tuition. And top professors answer emails from non-students, sometimes they teach for free on MOOCs. Perhaps you’re on a very narrow field where knowledge is extremely scarce, but that’s atypical.

For the cost of a college education at some places you could likely hire a knowledgeable professor of the skill set you’re interested in to live with you for four years.

Nobody will loan you money to do that, howvevr.

People would probably loan you money for that if you have the income or collateral to support a loan.

> The big part of education is being able to directly ask a knowledgeable person once you're stuck.

Stuck on what? For an undergrad, those problems can easily be solved by going online or to a tutor for a fraction of the cost. And that's for STEM based problems, humanities is all about flattering whatever opinions the professor personally holds.

The best piece of advice I got was from one of my english highschool teachers who told me a story about how when he was in university he was getting graded really poorly on essays until he basically regurgitated what he thought the the professor wanted to hear.

It's been a while since I've been to university, but I think it probably still holds.

Now you know why businesses love university graduates! Being told what you want is a prime mover in business.

Now back to my TPS reports.

Another unique bonus of university education: in my undergrad one of the professors noticed that I cared about the subject material more than my classmates.

Due to this he gave me opportunities to perform research in areas that I didn't even know existed.

Had I not gone to a university I never would have been exposed to these areas of technology.

"humanities is all about flattering whatever opinions the professor personally holds" - maybe at some universities, but not at a good liberal arts school.

Good liberal arts schools don't really exist in the US anymore, unless we're talking about something like St. John's College or maybe some Catholic universities. I believe the capture of university humanities departments by critical theory is pretty complete at this point, and the sciences are rapidly being colonized.

It seems possible to me that people of a less analytic personality type can improve learning using the cue, "imagine you wanted to socially impress a particular person, an academic". The same way a weightlifter who doesn't study the anatomy of external hip rotation can get good results with "screw your feet into the floor", or GPT-3 from "Let's think step by step". It leverages instinct to do what isn't understood consciously. I agree you're going to need originality to really excel.

You get 1000 resumes for a job. How do you drop 95% of the applicants. One easy way is to look at the University and GPA as a quick snuff test. After running that cheap low-pass filter you now only have 50 Resumes. You now spend ~3mins on each of those resumes to determine the 10 people you plan to interview.

That's why university matters, it helps you get past the first level of screening. It's also fair of employers to assume that the average Top 25 university graduate is better than the AVERAGE bottom 50% university graduate.

There are far more effective ways to stand out as an applicant than your GPA and university — in particular, by actually contributing notable work to the field, but also by making social connections and leveraging those into a job.

I didn’t even graduate from high school, but I’ve never struggled to find employment with the companies I wanted to work for.

The idea of a degree as a first-pass filter is oversold at best.

The highest quality education I received was at a community college. The undergraduate education I got after transferring to a well-regarded research shool was lower quality, with larger classes and professors who weren't incentivized to put effort into teaching.

Malcolm Gladwell explains why it's statistically FAR better to be among the smartest kids at a 2nd or 3rd tier school than struggling to get into some elite institution where you will be below average among your peers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UEwbRWFZVc&t=220s

If you're borrowing money to pay for a degree, going to a school where you are not at the very top of the class is really taking a big risk.

Thank you for posting Gladwell's talk, which should be required viewing for any young, bright and hopeful high-school graduate. I wish all my nephews and nieces had watched it.

I thoroughly enjoyed being around students a lot smarter than me in college. I also enjoy working with people smarter and better educated than me.

It's just more fun, and it also puts me on my best game.

that's such a loser mindset, you should want to be challenged and pushed by peers stronger than you

edit: I agree that the first part of this comment is too harsh, see child thread

What! A 2nd tier school still has strong peers which you can surround yourself in. If you're at the top of a 2nd tier school you can push yourself to be near the PHD researchers and graduate students giving you similar academic peer rigor.

I agree with you from an academic standpoint! Maybe my comment was too harsh, I think surrounding yourself with PHD researchers and graduate students counts as challenging and pushing yourself.

But it's more fun when the people pushing you are your friends and peers. In contrast, how many PHD researchers with a spouse and kids want to study and get coffee with a 19 year old undergrad?

Given all the trash Gladwell has spouted as truth over the years, it's hard to take him seriously. Even if sometimes what he says has merit, it's hard to know when to believe him and when not to.

I especially cringe at the idea that Gladwell is saying it's statistically better to do something, when he has a known history of deliberately misinterpreting data and massaging numbers to get the result he wants.

While I think people should be much more accepting of 2nd- and 3rd-tier schools as options than they often are, kids should absolutely push themselves for the best-ranked school they can get into (assuming they also have a solid program for whatever field/major they're interested in). Not only is it beneficial to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are, there are also second-order effects to attending an elite university, like making connections that can help you along with your career later. Not to mention that if a recruiter sees two recent-grad resumes that are identical except for the name of the school, they're going to pick the candidate that went to the "better" school.

Certainly you don't want to set yourself up for failure; if that elite school is going to be such a struggle that you're eventually going to be washed out, that's probably not a good outcome, and a lower-tier school would have been a better choice. But, absent that, I think it's good advice to attend the best school you can get into.

Everything you said is valid assuming the student GRADUATES which is precisely the point Gladwell is trying to make.

another point is if you are the big fish in a small pond you’ll get more attention from the teachers and gain confidence. Both can be valuable.

I think with the rise of online communities, it's not as applicable anymore.

Gladwell says you're only comparing against yourself against your peers at your school, and not the world, but for me, I've absolutely compared myself from people from other universities (and for that matter, other countries).

For example, there are people 2-3 years younger than me who have a public output of projects/writing that is 100 times more than mine. I'm probably somewhat high up among in my own university in project output, but I still made this comparison, partially because online communities allow me to hear about these people.

Well duh. SATs maybe useless and completely unrepresentative of real world application. But they are just that - standardized. You know 10 years in advance what you are prepping for as opposed to "oh well I am this background so doing this set of activities optimizes my college application because the application reviewer is so totally allowed to bring in their own biases".

No one would dare complain if the incoming student body went from 80% white/asian to 80% black/hispanic.

People like you would

No? Nothing close to that has happened and many people are already complaining.

What if they eliminated racial consideration and it went to 0% black/hispanic? I wonder if anyone would celebrate?

Right now, you are complaining about how nobody would complain.

> No one would dare complain

It hasn't even happened and you're complaining about it!

Even very high scorers sometimes find it impossible to get into top schools. Part of the problem is supply of slots has not kept up with population growth. It's not like Harvard's enrollment has kept up with population growth. Another problem is that the ceiling of standardized tests has been lowered, so top scores more more common.

Universities like to limit themselves somewhat because they don’t want to endanger the brand, but it takes an insane amount of money and effort to get a new college or university off the ground.

The state schools may be able to sidestep this a bit.

Not just an insane amount of money and effort, but likely decades to develop a reputation that could rival that of a Harvard or MIT. When you're starting from zero, you're not going to be able to attract top-notch faculty.

I know a guy who got a perfect on his SAT at my lower middle class suburban high school back in 2004 or so. He got rejected from Harvard. Even the most prestigious school around the Kansas City Metropolitan area only gets 1 or 2 people going to Ivy League schools every year out of maybe 200. Which I think is funny because they definitely bill themselves as an “Ivy League Prep” type of school.

You mean Pembroke? Probably more like 5-10 kids a year. Even my public suburban kc high school had 7ish kids going to ivies my year.

> Admissions officers at selective colleges were also “overwhelmed” by the volume of applicants that test-optional policies had unleashed.

Given that acceptance rates are used as a ranking metric, and given what we have learnt about the lengths that even elite colleges like Columbia will go to to game those rankings, how sure can we be that the increased volume of applications wasn't the actual reason why they adopted test-optional policies (plus the nice side effect of likely raising the average scores of those admitted students that did submit scores, another common ranking metric)?

They are very upfront in terms of rhetoric about wanting more black and Hispanic students, but their policies are a lot of shuck-n-jive, trying to get that result while pretending to be fair. Nothing has worked so far. The pretending-to-be-fair sure hasn't either.

So, one thing that will work and keep it all simple: Just establish quotas. "We will admit the highest scoring black students until we hit x%." But I suppose that would make legal challenges easier.

A better alternative is to fix the problem upstream. Push much more test taking prep for poor students. And reevaluate the SAT. It’s well known the stories of the SAT not including questions blacks score higher on and using questions that whites score higher on. Try to remove the bias from the test even if that gives surprising results.

I’m not a fan of quotas, but I do think taking race into account up until a point is reasonable. It’s just a really tricky line.

Cite?

Cite what?

I assume the stories of black questions being dropped.

Ahh. See:

https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

There are some good snippets, but I’m on my phone. The whole thing is worth a read though.

Discrimination is an interesting thing, look hard enough and you'll find it whether or not it exists.

An alternate explanation for what they are finding in that paper: The creators of the test favor questions whose response correlates well with how the person scores overall. A question that low-scoring people are more likely to get right is a bad question.

What the researchers should have done is looked at racial differences in answering questions given the same overall score. Of course, that won't find discrimination so they're not going to publish it.

Your explanation could also be true and at the same time feeding into the same problem if the people that have done well historically have done so because of test bias.

Your proposed experiment doesn’t test what you think it does. Since we are trying to determine if the test is biased you can’t control using the score on the test that might be biased.

Hard quotas were already tried, litigated, and declared illegal by the Supreme Court - in the very same decision that allowed affirmative action in general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_C...

I thought that was the actual point of ditching admission testing. They wanted to return to the pre-SAT days when they could just admit any legacy, no matter how unacademically suited an alumn(us|a)'s progeny was.

Matt Parlmer on Twitter recently stated it this way:

> The university is primarily for theological indoctrination and secondarily for rich kids to get the same credentials as smart kids so they can maintain their status

> This has not changed one iota since Oxford was chartered, it's what the system is for, take the Caplanpill

I’m looking at this and thinking: Did the colleges have no forsight, at all? Why did they think admission tests existed? Did they honestly think, “wow, the tests are flawed, so get rid of them, problem solved?”

No it made it easier to discriminate and make more money money. Simple as.

Because people like taking down fences without knowing why they are there, because they are of course smarter than everyone who came before them.

I find it hard to believe there's a shortage of people capable of teaching 1st year students, so this seems like a problem of artificial scarcity.

It's all about margins. They want to squeeze teachers and get minimum-wage adjuncts to teach 1st years. At the same time, they want future rich people to be students, so they will donate back.

Harvard, MIT, and Oxford have no problem finding future rich people. Random schools can't compete for smart people, so it makes sense for them to try to find prospects based on alternative criteria.

far from a shortage, there’s a surplus of phds in almost every discipline. despite charging the highest tuition ever and sitting on massive endowments, the mbas in university administration don’t want to have to pay for them

Why would they even need phds at all. Teaching first year student should be more of a side job thing.

I think you're misunderstanding the challenge. Teaching first year students doesn't require Ph.D.-level knowledge, but it requires more teaching experience and skills than teaching later levels: The classes are larger; the students are less experienced at learning on their own; the students are new to the environment and less familiar with how to navigate it.

Large classes of novices are particularly sensitive to logistical and teaching errors. You make a question on a homework or exam a bit confusing, you have 400 students utterly perplexed who may not have the domain expertise to know it's the question that's broken.

At Carnegie Mellon, our teaching-track faculty generally own the large intro classes for this reason. They're the best we have at the process of teaching & education. It's the exact opposite of a side job. You want people who are deeply expert and passionate about teaching so that you don't completely botch the job, because the opportunities to botch it are huge.

It also takes a lot of expertise to understand why certain subjects are introduced in intro courses, and to frame those ideas in a way that will help those students learn more advanced topics.

It doesn't require Ph.D. level knowledge, but it helps a lot, especially when you're talking to one of those few students with more and deeper questions about the subject.

If you’re representing the college, how do you know the individual you’re about to hire has sufficient knowledge to both teach the material and cover any questions on the material students may raise.

Just like any other skilled job, there is an interview process.

The local community college will have openings for adjuncts. You go first and teach a semester, then you'll have a better understanding of the problem field.

> I find it hard to believe there's a shortage of people capable of teaching 1st year students, so this seems like a problem of artificial scarcity. reply

The supply is short because at least in the US, entry pay is low in higher ed.

- $25/hour w/ benefits for semi-skilled labor

- $42k/year no benefits for adjunct

Sounds more like the supply is overflowing that they can charge factory rated for it. Same reason flight instructors are so cheap.

Nope. They are having problems filling positions because the market has given people a better, higher paying option.

I hate that these article from obviously biased random websites are submitted to HackerNews just to be a lightning-rod submission for people to air their already inbuilt frustrations in the comments.

The site's subtitle is "Covering Innovation & Inequality in Education" for god sakes. Look at all the articles and there is nothing positive.

There is space to analyze affirmative action, or schooling in general, but this is literally just educational propaganda.

It should be easy to make the student body reflect the diversity of applicants: select them at random.

I actually think this would be a good way to run admissions at ultra-selective elite universities - places like Harvard or Oxford where getting in or not can make a huge impact on the entire rest of your life. Everyone knows the evaluation process is bullshit and highly dependent on luck, so why pretend otherwise? Just discard those applicants who don't meet some minimum objective standard (SAT scores or whatever) then pick the remaining names out of a hat.

It's never going to happen, but still. If people don't like it then maybe the solution is to improve the quality of other universities so that getting rejected from Harvard isn't such a big blow in the first place.

It’s often not the quality as it is the network. It’s well known that many state schools have excellent business programs (think MBA) but that you should only ever go to your local one, because the network you get will be limited to that locality.

Whereas NYU Stern or whatever is a world-wide network.

> places like Harvard or Oxford where getting in or not can make a huge impact on the entire rest of your life.

What part don't you understand?

I disagree that getting into those two schools makes such a huge impact.

I said that it can make a huge impact. I'm sure it doesn't always.

Thomas suggested this as an alternative to using race as a plus factor in Grutter v. Bollinger. He claimed the existence of this alternative meant that the schools use of race was not narrowly tailored even if one conceded the compelling government interest in diversity.

I'd have them selected randomly from those that clear the standardized testing bar. Otherwise, without selecting for academic performance, universities become a continuation of highschool where high achievers are surrounded by riffraff who don't really want to learn but rather spend a few years partying with student loans before hitting the workforce.

The solution is to make high school more selective - which is done in some countries. Around 12 it is determined if you’re on the college path or the tradeschool path and you go from there

Then suddenly you have the ability to boot non-performers on the college path into something else.

You really think we can accurately determine people's paths by age 12?? It's more likely the determination ends up as a proxy for whose parents were rich enough to [stay at home to / pay for someone to] train their kids to get onto the college track.

continuation of highschool where high achievers are surrounded by riffraff

One of the best things about adulthood is no longer spending every day with what one teacher called "the peanut gallery" hooting and squawking from the back of the room.

1. Spend more money to give kids all the extra assistance they need 2. Remove/Reduce the testing criteria and lower standards

Schools and colleges are overwhelmingly choosing option 2...to the detriment of ALL students.

This is not saying the SAT is good. It is saying they don't have something better.

A lot of people are misinterpreting this.

The zeal of reaction to the problems with the framework left everyone without any framework. A very common failure mode that exacerbate the division in "culture wars".

In time, maybe universities will collapse under the weight of their own idiocy. I went back to school to finish my degree for fun at 25 t a top school. To my dismay, many online courses were better taught.

In retrospect, the only courses in I enjoyed were small seminar passion projects.

Removing SAT harms lower class people and benefits upper class people, so of course that removed it.

The theory was that standardized tests harm lower class people and help upper class people. That is why they removed it [1].

This article demonstrates that the theory was wrong, but the intention was opposite of what you describe.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-us-colleges-are-...

Admissions tests are the best tool to fight racism, specifically institutionalized racism, that we have in our tool kit. When racism increases in the future the tests will be ushered back in with great urgency, but because institutionalized racism takes decades to slowly grind away at, I think we’ll be doomed to such cycles. On some level it’s hard not to see that process play out, notice that it benefits the elites by acting as a sort of moat around their comfy middle class lifestyle while hurting racially marginalized groups, and also hurting groups which are rapidly closing the gap like Asians, and not see it as at least potentially misguided.

Just take a look at kids of all Harvard faculty, top administrators. These kids get admitted to Harvard. I know of some MIT faculty, who jumped to Harvard, only to have his kids get admitted there.

Sure, any testing, any measurement would have problems. Replace that with a better one. Instead, these people hide behind "well-rounded" admit pool. Since SCOTUS is going to put an end to affirmative action, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, etc will get rid of SAT/ACT requirement. Also admission committees will implement a secret system for admissions, where all comments about applicants are recorded and then get deleted after three months.

I've heard that lots of professor kids get into the colleges where their parents teach. But is that surprising? They would presumably be much more well-qualified than the average applicant, based on both nature and nurture.

Most administrators are not professors, but are former professors. The same rationale would apply to their kids.

University staffs' (that are reasonably high up) kids are always given priority. That's just how it works. The reason is that you don't want the parent to leave or complain.

What's your source for this? What makes you think this is the reason, as opposed to the nature and nurture rationales?

Just ask anyone in academia? It barely counts as an open secret. Most admission forms (for the Cali and other state schools/private schools) would ask you explicitly if you have any relatives working for the school and their specific title and role.

Definitely not true for UC. Had a friend whose mom is a professor there. There wasn't anywhere to indicate this.

Privates ask about alumni connection, and possibly about teaching connection. But not the public schools.

Regardless what you've mentioned isn't proof that this is why so many get in. The fact is that kids of PhDs are likely to have genetic and educational advantages. That is likely much of the reason that they get in at a higher rate.

Check Stanford and USC. It is a well known (though unofficial) policy.

It is rampant in private schools. UC is a public school.

I mentioned UC because GP claimed public schools in CA do this. They don't.

I checked Stanford's admission forms [1] and there is nowhere to even report this. They link to the Common App and don't have forms that ask about where your parents work.

1: https://admission.stanford.edu/apply/first-year/index.html

Yes, that was the intention - to admit more "diverse" students without embarrassment, at the expense of kneecapping themselves with crappier heuristics for the general admissions pool.

A selection process based on academic achievement alone yields a graduate more highly valued by corporate America [1].

Private universities should be able to use whatever criteria they want (as long as there is no illegal discrimination) including "building communities" and "shaping the student body". (It's a free country after all!) But public universities must use objective criteria. Students need to be able to control their own destiny through hard work. That's a basic principle of fairness that should apply in this land of opportunity. No "shaping" of the student body by universities that receive funding from taxpayers, because that is unfair to students. Imagine being denied admission by the only good public university in your state, not because your grades or test scores are not good enough, but because you didn't fit in whatever "shape" the university decided is appropriate for that year! For more on this see [2].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-selection-method-can-bo...

[2] https://circles.page/5680a56b5c28af0998656e09/College-Admiss...

I very much agree on the shaping your own destiny part. How can anyone subject themselves to a committee of random bureaucrats deciding their future? Even if they were 100% fair and impartial, does it not take away your agency in choosing your own fate?

And let's not pretend that they are 100% fair and impartial. We know for a fact that they are racially biased against different races depending on the time period. And maybe the one who rejected you didn't like how you name sounded. It's not as though the process is transparent, and they're only making it a 100 times more opaque as people catch on to them.

This Holistic Admissions nonsense has always been a scam just like Holistic Medicine

One of the most bone-headed directives I've ever seen. I truly believe the progressive goals are true and noble, but they have the aim of a blind man.

I think it's not about doing away with all tests, but providing various kinds of tests / process to get in, so various types of students can get in.

For instance, like some here, I never knew about SAT prep, etc., but I did run a business in high school and did a ton of hardware/science projects, which both in retrospect made me far better prepared for startup life than anything school taught me.

However, this more makes me think we need a better way of matching students with schools, training, and other programs that fit their style. People think the "Learning Styles" approach has been discredited, with in specific they're right, but that doesn't mean that the current style of school is good for everyone either.

I went to school in rural Western Pennsylvania with parents who went to community college, and I definitely didn't have anyone helping me think through any of this stuff. Big shame, because plenty of people have everything but the right environment / people around them to help them succeed. I was lucky to go to Pittsburgh and found the startup scene basically by random.

> I think it's not about doing away with all tests, but providing various kinds of tests / process to get in, so various types of students can get in.

This. Same goes for hiring. You don't want to eliminate a successful pool of candidates but rather unlock more pools and places to recruit from.

Although I don't think education should be limited the way hiring is. There may only be 1 position that can be filled at a company but there are so many ways IMO we could expand class sizes at exclusive universities and/or improve online college options.

It's the illusion of control. It may be possible to select the obviously great candidates, but its foolish to think that this can be carried out for all of them.

Set aside 15% of the slots for the highest ranked candidates.

Set another threshold for "nope".

Then all the candidates that do not get into the 15% but are better than nope go into a lottery.

For everyone who finds the removal of admission tests ridiculous, how do y'all feel about leetcode?

From what I’ve seen interviewees hate it (this is dumb busy work) but interviewers love it because of the absolute deluge of incredibly inappropriate candidates they receive.

I spend my time working on open source or other products instead of leetcode prep. This means I don't apply to FAANG roles.

Leetcode easies are fine, and that's all most companies outside of FANG ask in my experience. I've done interviews myself, and atleast 30% of candidates fail a problem that simply required a for loop to solve (no trees, no algorithms, just simple loop through list and do x).

And if companies dropped the degree requirement and only asked leetcode mediums, I'd consider that fine honestly. Most of what I learned through college was useless to my career, 6 years out of college and I think I'd struggle to name even 25% of the classes I took.

I don't expect my employees to solve problems on the spot, why would I expect it of interviewees? I give them a short take-home challenge, and it has worked well so far - I have a great team.

Kind of a big assumption that admission was fair before.

Having test scores to fall back on is more useful as a CYA exercise than anything meaningful. "Nobody ever got fired for hiring McKinsey” indeed.

Nobody thinks admission was completely fair before, but it was without a doubt more fair with objective test scores than without.

The headline says it was easier to fairly choose students with the exams, and I'm calling bullshit on that assumption. It implicitly assumes that selecting for standardized test scores is more fair.

College admission has been unfair for generations. TBH I'm not sure "fairness" is even a good metric. Is it fair that I didn't have to work after school to support my family? No. Is it fair that my parents have advanced degrees and read to me as a young child? No. Is it fair that I got to take the SAT twice, because I wanted a higher math score? No. None of that is fair, and all of it helped me get into highly selective colleges.

It is honestly fascinating to look at the US (and many other countries) college system as a Belgian. Except in few cases (becoming a medical doctor is the only one I can think of but there might be others) you can just study what you want, where you want.

Obviously the US can not do that as some colleges would be overrun by students but it is so foreign to me.

I'd encourage everyone to read Emily Shaw's research on this topic: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED563202.pdf

"Validity of the SAT for Predicting First-Year College Grade Point Average"

TL;DR: High School GPA + SAT score produce correlation coefficient values between 0.44 and 0.62, depending on the population. How strong are those values?

> A general rule of thumb for interpreting correlation coefficients is offered by Cohen (1988): a small correlation has an absolute value of approximately 0.1; a medium correlation has an absolute value of approximately 0.3; and a large correlation has an absolute value of approximately 0.5 or higher.

From Dr. Shaw's paper on page 7, linked above.

In other words it's very strong, the strongest correlation coefficient that has been found for any signal associated with first year GPA at college.

This has been well understood in the academic community for decades, it's only outside of professional education circles that the validity of the SAT and ACT (when combined with high school GPA) as a predictor of future performance at college is even questioned.

The idea of "fairly" choosing students is insane on the face of it.

We want the best and brightest to succeed. They should be showered in whatever is necessary in order for us to advance the state of the art.

Colleges should admit everyone then let those who pass pass and those who fail drop out. That is the fair way to run your admissions policy. Everything else is BS.

Harvard admits 4% of it's applicants. How is it going to allow 25X as many students?

More accommodation. Most of them will fail first year. Or if they don't, Harvard needs to up it's internal standards.

Alternate headline:

  "Colleges that ditched admissions tests have to actually holistically evaluate applicants rather than reduce them to two numbers"

No doubt that it's more subjective and more difficult; human beings are complex, multi-dimensional entities and I find it sad that in many of these selection processes, they are reduced to a few numbers for the sake of low effort filtering.

There is plenty of evidence to doubt the whole "holistic evaluation" line of thought, which is often a tool for subtle discrimination. And pretty much all of these schools already did "holistically evaluate" students; test scores were just one part of that evaluation.

Besides, at the end of the day everything boils down to a single number - applicants are ranked and those that make the cutoff get in, those that are below the cutoff don't.

Holistic evaluation in practice really means “present your best self in your application whatever that might be.” It allows for a range of impressive feats outside “was good at the arbitrary selection of school subjects and extracurriculars.”

In practice it also often means, "This Asian isn't 'well rounded' enough and they're only into math and chess club."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...

I don’t really know what you do to combat this kind of thing because what would you do as an admissions officer trying to create a student body with a wide range of skills and experiences but you have thousands of applicants who are “focused on having perfect grades to the detriment of everything else and participated in the ‘look how smart I am clubs’.”

And I say this with full self-awareness that this was me. It’s probably the thing I regret most about my high school experience because of how unnecessary it was and how much it set me back on all the things that mattered.

I consider myself extremely lucky that any university took a chance on me because my application was 100% “I have no real interests except playing the game of school and winning by min-maxing the point system” which looking back is so obviously the worst applicant. I for sure lost out on my dream school because of it.

Easy:

1. Have some minimum objective criteria (test scores, grades, class rank, etc.)

2. Accept students who meet that minimum with a lottery.

Of course, that would never happen at highly selective colleges, because it would shatter the notion that "only the best and brightest" got in and would ruin colleges' role as a maintainer of social hierarchy in the US.

I say this as a person who went to one of the most selective colleges in the world: the idea that colleges set up their application systems to build a "diverse" student body is complete and total bullshit. The reason being that some of the most important diversity comes from interacting with people of widely varying economic levels and intelligence levels. The idea that you can have a socially diverse student body, but only made up of people who got 4.0 GPAs and above, is bullshit on its face.

> Besides, at the end of the day everything boils down to a single number

This is about as silly as dating app profiles that cut off at 6'.

>This is about as silly as dating app profiles that cut off at 6'.

But it's reality. Women extremely rarely think of men under 6' as ideal mates.

Exactly. Of course having numerical values you can directly compare is going to be the easiest way to select students, but it's only "fair" to the degree those numbers accurately reflect the relative academic performance and potential of the students.

I think the reason people so vigorously defend the use of standardized test scores in admissions is that we all have a built in bias towards viewing quantifiable comparisons as inherently more objective because it's easy to justify how you arrived at a decision. After all, who can argue with a decision based on one number being larger than the other?

The problem though is that this approach doesn't really remove the subjective, complex elements at all, it just moves them from the decision step to the measurement step. Sure, an SAT score is just a simple number. But how the test is constructed to arrive at that number is much more complicated. And the value of a simple score comparison is only as good as the process of constructing the test, leaving you with the illusion of having made the decision simpler and more objective when you really just move the complexity behind a curtain.

In tech terms, I think the analogy is project managers trying endless different ways to measure software development performance. Number of tickets closed, "velocity", commits, releases, etc, (lines of code if you're very unlucky), all give you nice simple numbers to look at. And while they're not entirely useless, it's easy to become overly reliant on them and assume they are more objective measures than they actually are.

> But how the test is constructed to arrive at that number is much more complicated.

Is that done per student behind closed doors though, with the people calculating the score knowing who the student is and the ability to alter the scoring based on that knowledge?

Standardized tests are bad, but they're a giant step up from the corruption that is other forms of selection.

On the contrary, test scoring is the most objective thing we had to evaluate students based on the diligent work of a company whose entire business is maintaining that perception of objectivity. Sure, it's "the perception of", but if you think there aren't smart people analyzing college board exam scores across the country for signs of skewed testing so they can write an expose on it, you're far from reality.

In fact - the line that you're walking is the reason there was briefly a suggestion of an "adversity score": https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/college...

Which is the first time that's been considered, because in the current climate - working extremely diligently to try to ensure that no particular student or group of students has an advantage, some students do have an advantage. They are smarter, or have better parenting, or better education, or their parents simply have more money to throw at tutoring

You can say "that's unfair! This is about selecting the best students and locks smart people from worse off backgrounds out of university!"

It does the second thing, sometimes, as a side effect - but it is also true that those students are still better students, regardless the path dependence.

Meanwhile, universities are enacting racial and gender preference schemes, Cites: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

Additionally, the primary winner of the policies this line of argument promotes are white women - with the primary loser being Asian men. Asian students in particular are bringing the suit against Harvard for these practices.

So while your epistemic humility ("is this REALLY objective? How do we measure that?") is well intentioned, it's the exact sort of reasoning used to cover up a strict ideology of "more black good, more women good, less white good, less men good" in universities, and the actual behavior of universities shoe that.

You’re glossing over the core issue which is that universities (and employers when hiring juniors for that matter) need to measure potential and many of the objective measures do correlate but do so weakly. It’s why we don’t hire based on Leetcode, whiteboard algorithms problems or GPA. Doing better on those is a positive sign but I can get a much much stronger signal through a conversation, probing to find out their strengths and passions and then setting them up to show off.

And look, race and gender ends up being a component but not in the way you’re describing. I’m not being like “woman good” it’s that a woman sitting across the table describing her technical achievements is made more impressive because I know first hand what women have to go in CS programs — you don’t put up with all the bullshit unless you’re really passionate. An example based on real life, a woman leading her capstone project group is unfathomably impressive because of how decisively strong her technical and communication skills have to be to earn the respect of the men in her class.

Who is we?

Literally every major tech company hires on effectively leetcode alone.

https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma...

Men perform (slightly) etter on technical interviews when modulated as women, and women perform the same.

The idea that women are "putting up with so much more bullshit" when we have every major university and large tech employer bending over backwards to find more women who are interested, sky high salaries, and that we can show notable although weak bias in favor of women in settings where gender is obscured is out of date at a minimum.

> when we have every major university and large tech employer bending over backwards to find more women who are interested

I swear this is always at the core of it. Trust me it’s not as glamorous as you make it out to be. Yes tech companies are bending over backwards to find and hire competent women because we’re rare (and why!) but that statement is not at all the same as women have lower standards. You have to understand that literally no team ever is going to burn their hire on a perceived less qualified woman because she’s a woman. The desire to have the best person because the team is lazy and wants someone who will make their lives easier always wins. And not to put too fine a point on it but your average team of tech folks is pretty anti-woke liberal-tarian meritocracy so you’re not getting a whole lot social justice bias there. I guess this could happen if you have HR hiring in a vacuum but I’ve never seen a place where the team doesn’t have the final say.

> putting up with so much more bullshit

The bullshit is the culture. Look I wish this wasn’t true but it’s the unfortunate reality of being a woman in a CS major. Your male classmates do not see you as an equal. there is an in-built presumption that you don’t know what you’re doing; any normal mistake you make that guys make too just cements it. When you’re doing group work nobody listens to you and you get the “fun” experience of waiting for them to catch up and then having no recognition at all that you had already told them. Getting study groups together is awful one because guys will not let you join because they think you’ll be a drain, or they will let you join and then hit on you. Do you know how many fucking times I got told to go make me a sandwich? In more than one class I just asked the professor to do group projects alone. And that’s before dealing with how isolating it is to be the only girl in class and having the shock and head turns the first time you speak.

It’s not perfect by any stretch of imagination but I would have been driven out of tech had I not by chance landed at a few companies with older teams and realized that maturity makes a huge difference.

> and that we can show notable although weak bias in favor of women

Well yeah, of course you expect that. I just talked about a situation where a woman saying something is more impressive than a man saying the same thing. Context matters.

Removing SAT scores doesn't remove the subjective and complex elements, but it does give a measure that took more than 8 minutes to arrive at.

As a previous commenter mentioned, UW spends about 8 minutes looking at applications at first. This isn't nearly enough time to make a "holistic" decision, especially when the application is largely subjective.

SAT scores, on the other hand, take longer than 8 minutes to arrive at. The subjective evaluations that go into designing the test can be determined over the course of months, leading to a measure that is imperfect but likely better than 8 minutes of a grad student's time.

The larger point is that in order for "holistic" admissions to work, you need to design an admissions process that actually evaluates candidates holistically. Removing SAT scores doesn't automatically fix those issues, it just removes one more piece of data to aid the process.

> Sure, an SAT score is just a simple number. But how the test is constructed to arrive at that number is much more complicated.

But you’re ignoring the other side of that number. That test score provides a hell of a lot of information about the individual beyond just doing well on a single test.

With the 10s of thousands of applications top universities get, there isn't enough time to evaluate the "complex, multi-dimensional entities" behind each application.

At University of Washington, applications are not reviewed by "admissions people". They hire temporary workers (grad students, retirees etc.) to review applications, and give them 8 minutes per application [1]. And this is typical of most universities.

[1] https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/a-look-inside-admis...

But at highly competitive schools you still have several times more students with 1500 SATs than you have available spots. So you eventually need to use holistic judgement anyways.

They could just admit at random from among that group. What would be the downside?

So no cutoff, just an SAT score? And then a cutoff based on that? What about GPA? Weighted GPA? AP tests matter? Creating a cure for COVID matter?

I think for the very top schools they care about the intangibles. For mid-tier schools the SAT cutoff lottery is fine. But the cut off is probably like 1150, and these arguments aren’t about those schools.

Just an SAT cutoff. Maybe cure Covid kid ends up at Vassar instead of Princeton. So what? Will his life be over? Will the US decline into irrelevance?

That’s an interesting race to the bottom for those schools. They’d end up with kids who basically ditched studying advanced math, physics, research, etc and just a lot of kids who prepped for the SAT for four years.

The “advanced math, physics, research, etc” in high school is all just college admissions prep too. When you major in math you have to take an analysis sequence starting at the beginning because AP calculus isn’t actually math. It’s just memorizing and learning to execute some math related algorithms.

It’s all just signaling. Let’s be open about that instead of hiding the ball.

Again there’s levels to this. Harvard Math 55 is filled with exceptionally strong math students. I’m a 1500 SAT student, but not a Math 55 student. Them not being able to differentiate these classes of students seems problematic.

Problematic is such a vague word. Connect the dots for me.

The top N schools in the nation, collectively representing enough seats to account for 5% of SAT takers, all change their admissions policies to select randomly among applicants in the top 5% of SAT scorers.

After ten years of these policies being in place we will likely see the following negative effects:

Here are some of the connection. The SAT is a basic test where strategy can come into great affect. And honestly, it's surprising how little some of the strategy is talked about -- but I suspect amongst the wealthy it's well known.

But back to the topic. A 1550 on the SAT says very little about your mathematical ability. The test just doesn't measure your ability to do more than basic algebra and has no real measure of writing ability. And honestly probably has a somewhat inverse relationship on your ability to read nuance into text (which is one of the first strategies I teach -- this isn't English class -- there's no nuance in anything you read on the SAT).

On advanced college math -- kids who are actually good at math likely have a high math SAT score, but their verbal score can vary a fair bit. I regularly see kids with 1400-1450 SATs, with perfect math scores who are Math Olympiad stars.

The likely end game of this though is that schools REALLY start teaching to the test. Why even offer AP tests if they don't help admission? Why even teach biology or physics at all? Simply teach SAT math, reading comprehension (which is comprehension of the worst kind) and what the SAT calls writing. So no more calculus or statistics. Even most of what is taught in algebra II is thrown out the window.

Today the 95%ile of SATs is around 1440. It would probably move up to around 1550, once schools teach to that test year around for four years. And any actually advanced undergrad courses are tossed because they can't get enough students to fill them.

And other countries will realize that the US left a huge gap -- the ability get students who strong in like areas and train them. They'll target the best math students, the best programmers, the best artists, etc...

Interestingly, the best meritocracy we have in society is sports. And in sports they recruit holistically -- that is they don't exclusively use HS stats (these are generally worthless) or combine numbers (these have some value, but limited). They use scouting services. And the very best athletes tend to congregate in programs that will develop them the best. Many hold up sports as a great example of meritocracy, yet it actually doesn't rely solely on measurables (in fact they are moving further and further from it).

What sports has though is a good objective function. What is the objective function of school? Answering that question will greatly help determine what the best path forward is.

So basically the SATs are too easy. They could put more advanced math on the test.

This is genius and would probably accurately capture the overall demographic makeup of that group of 1500 SAT applicants.

That's my suggestion - who wants a school full of unlucky kids?

Okay, great Ringworld reference.

I'm not sure if you mean the book or the game (I've only read the book) but I think it might go back further than that. But maybe I got it from there.

It's not that it's not possible but rather we've simply been so lazy that we don't have the right heuristics.

No; I don't have the answer. I'm not an economist nor an admissions expert. But I've qualified and hired software engineers over the years and my process never focuses on a score or outcome of an assessment.

"holistically evaluate applicants"

How likely is it that this holistic evaluation will end up preferring individuals conforming to the current Zeitgeist (e.g. using all the momentarily popular buzzwords in their applications) rather than truly talented candidates? Thus contributing to further ossification of current elites?

An academic institution shouldn't only be about picking truly talented candidates; that's the exact opposite of holistic.

My take is that part of the function of an academic institution is to help individuals discover and develop talents.

A good teacher isn't one that helps A students get A's but one that can develop any student into an A student.

To merely select and propel those who already have the talent rather than select for the capacity to grow and develop talent is precisely why score based systems are biased in the first place.

Unfortunately, in practice they now rely on one number: GPA, quietly weighted based on the high school's reputation.

Well you have to reduce them to a single bit eventually: either they get admitted or not.

Yeah, I almost felt like flagging this submission. It's taking something that on its own could be interpreted in many ways and giving it a strong political spin.

For the sake of argument, let's imagine a college doing the opposite: admitting students solely on the basis of a standardized test score. You submit your SAT score, and everyone above a certain percentile is admitted. People below the threshold are not. Many of the comments here seem to think this is optimal.

In that scenario, there wouldn't be any complaints from admissions committees at all about them having to put effort into the situation, because they wouldn't be involved at all. So is it being difficult a sign that reality is more complex than suggested by a test score, or that they've lost an objective indicator?

Most of the statistics thrown around in the article could also be turned on their head. For instance, just hypothetically, if getting rid of the test isn't changing the student body, what's the point of the test?

Having an objective number is useless on its own. Even if it's roughly correlated with the outcomes you desire, if it's that roughly correlated with outcomes, and subject to biases, there's no point in having it.

I feel like these tests are kind of like buying a house based on nominal square footage alone. Sure, it's probably correlated with satisfaction and resell value, it's an objective indicator that involves some measurement, and so forth, but no one would buy a house that way. It's subject to all sorts of manipulation and fuzziness, and doesn't tell you anything about the architecture, lot, or anything else. And yet that's kind of how standardized tests are used.

I'm fine with using standardized tests in theory, but they're far too abused and misused. It's not so much the tests I have problems with, as it is how it seems once you introduce them, it seems they can't be interpreted rationally in making any sorts of decisions about human beings. It's like people take something that has a sliver of information value with all sorts of limitations, and then treat it like an infallible signal just because it's easy to use.

Its ease of use could be seen as a problem, not something desirable.

> I feel like these tests are kind of like buying a house based on nominal square footage alone

Great analogy.

Buying a house is about far, far more than just the square footage. How are the neighbors? How's the walkability? Noise levels? Schools? Access to transport routes? Access to jobs? Property taxes? HOA fees? Access to activities of interest?

There are so many factors to buying a house that it would be ridiculous to look at any single dimension alone and make a determinate based on that one dimension.

> There are so many factors to buying a house that it would be ridiculous to look at any single dimension alone and make a determinate based on that one dimension.

But that's not what they've been doing. Standardized tests played a role, but were not the only factor.

To continue the house analogy: look at everything _but_ square footage before you make an offer.

Who could have seen that coming? The whole point of ditching quantitative tests is to empower the bureaucrats who want to make qualitative judgements based on their personal whims and biases. "Holistic" my ass.

Absolutely agree. In the US, "holistic" admissions were introduced to deny admission to students suspected of being Jewish [1].

[1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...

Shaping the ethnic demographic of the school is a big component of the modern intent as well. Particularly, these "holistic" admission standards are designed to facilitate discrimination against Asian Americans. This is justified with transparently racist bullshit claims about Asian American students being too focused on academic performance, not "well rounded" whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. They reduce Asian American students to the stereotype of dull people with no personality because they spent too much time doing homework and learning piano, and use this stereotype to justify discriminating against them. Flagrantly racist.

A more charitable interpretation is that a student body made up of too much of any one thing is not good. Part of the value proposition for going away to university for four years is to spend that time surrounded by diverse and interesting people.

That doesn't excuse the actual racism that we've seen in admissions, of course.

In that case, maybe some universities could specialize on having racially diverse student bodies, and others on other attributes (say, political diversity, or something completely different). This way, everyone could choose their preferred institution according to their wishes and values.

> A more charitable interpretation is that a student body made up of too much of any one thing is not good.

So what would you say is “not good” about a “student body made up of too [many]” Indians? Or Jews? Or Chinese people?

Are schools in India or China or Israel inherently worse than those in America because those schools have “too much” of a single race?

> Are schools in India or China or Israel inherently worse than those in America because those schools have “too much” of a single race?

Both China and India are countries with a number of different races, some/most of which are represented at the top schools (I imagine all of the large racial groups). I’m not sure about Israel, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were true there as well.

That said, the prestigious schools in these countries (not sure about Israel) heavily use tests as an admission standard to the best schools. I think that this is part of what makes them less prestigious than their American counterparts.

Elite American universities use social capital as part the admissions criteria, with a reasonably broad definition of social capital. I think that this social capital along with intellectual capital (not always in the same student) is part of what makes the magic work at these schools.

Notes:

- In China (and probably other places), historically the admissions exam was a proxy for social capital, since families with high social capital could prepare their kids better via tutors. This is still somewhat true today, but it’s not as powerful as it was in the distant past.

- State schools in the US, which seem to be the focus of this article since they don’t have a history of holistic admissions, should probably stick with a grades-test score combo for most admissions, and maybe add some “social capital” admits (similar to athletes, who also fall into the social capital category, with the extent of exceptionalism required being equivalent).

- Schools that admit based on tests alone without having some sort of built-in social capital component will end up defaulting towards the creation of a lot of middle management drones rather than future leaders of the country. Many people seem to wish that social capital is not the primary driver of success, but results (historical and anecdotal) seem to suggest otherwise.

There’s infinite ways you can define diversity. Choosing to define it in the way you’re referring to (skin color, sex, sexual orientation) is just discrimination.

Colleges should be about furthering academic knowledge and preparing our best and brightest to make the world a better place. Diversity for diversities sake harms that.

Believe parent's point was that "spend[ing] that time surrounded by diverse and interesting people" is an effective way of "preparing our best and brightest to make the world a better place".

But since when is superficial appearance the primary measure of "diversity"?

"Skin color, sex, sexual orientation" all drastically impact an individual's experience in our world. Therefore, having interactions with someone with different varieties thereof increases the diversity of ones experience.

More so than economic, cultural, geographic or domestic factors? Do you have a citation?

Sure, if you can give me ones supporting your preferred measures.

It sounds simple, but it's difficult to do

Who are the best and brightest? How do you determine that?

Do the best&brightest from one community or circumstance always have the same traits as the best&brightest from another community or circumstance?

My understanding is diversity initiatives attempt to address the latter part (effective or not).

> Do the best&brightest from one community or circumstance always have the same traits as the best&brightest from another community or circumstance?

Can the answer to this question be "yes"? In the same way that the best NBA players share traits, I don't see any reason why the best physicians, engineers, etc. also wouldn't share traits across cultures/backgrounds.

Going further, can't we measure these traits with outcomes of standardized testing? Given you agree these traits exist, can you propose an better alternative?

By that logic if it’s okay for 60% of the student body to be white because 60% of the United States is white then you are explicitly saying it’s okay for the university to be 60% of the same race which means it should be equally acceptable for the university to be 60% Asian regardless of them being x% of the United States and merit based admittance should be acceptable.

The only logical reason for discriminating against so many Asians in our current setup needs to be attempting to mirror the population statistics of the United States. I don’t approve of that logic to be clear and think the universities will be issuing apologies to the Asian American community in X years similar to the ones they just made to the Jewish American community recently.

In that case shouldn't they also diversify the administration, and say that the university president should be Asian (or Black or Hispanic) x% of the time?

I don’t know, universities in Israel seem to keep magically pumping out geniuses that invent all sorts of incredible technologies despite not being particularly diverse.

Israel does not exactly set the PISA on fire, what they do do is delay college until after military service

At UW they call it "race equity" [1]. Meaning that you can't have more than x% of Asian Americans in the UW if the percentage of Asian Americans in the community is x%. The Supreme Court will soon decide if this practice is legal [2], and it is going to be interesting either way!

[1] https://www.washington.edu/raceequity/

[2] https://edsource.org/2022/as-supreme-court-considers-affirma...

And yet somehow they never decry the race inequity of lucrative ventures like the NBA player pool.

Arguably there you have an exterior reliable measurement of ability (and if there was inappropriate discrimination against Asian basketball players, you should expect a team to realize it and get a winning team for cheaper).

But somehow we can't have an exterior reliable measurement of intellectual ability? And have no controversy testing for it across ethnic groups? Oh wait..

Of course there is objective measures, that’s the point. And it’s why no sane person thinks the race inequity within the NBA player pool is a problem. The problem lies in the hypocrisy of crying about systemic racism or sexism as the reason for inequity when talking about college admissions or C level jobs but never talking about the same inequities in nursing or iron workers or NBA players.

Here's a question to those in control of these so-called "equity" rules at UW: do these also go for e.g. sex? In other words, if the percentage of women in the population is 49% there can not be more than 49% female students? If not, why not? The answer is already clear of course given the data but it would be interesting to hear their defence of their untenable position.

I think that's why the idea of a protected class has typically been central to US legal definitions of equality: application to every individual characteristic is untenable, but blindness to all impinges on justice too.

Or in essence, how to address the historical inequities of racism and sexism, without also ushering in something ridiculous like "mentalism" that attempts to help people who are "bad at tests and grades."

If that is not racism, and illegal according to the myriad anti discrimination laws the US must have, I do not know what could be.

The idea of a “well rounded student” reflects the WASP roots of these elite institutions. The ideal “Harvard man” was a well bred WASP who didn’t appear to try too hard (which would be unseemly) and balanced academic pursuits with sports and social activities accessible to people who had connections and didn’t work for a living. That’s who you wanted running your Wall Street banks, corporations, etc. Holistic admissions is just the modern incarnation of that.

In slight defense, if you must hand the keys to the kingdom (or a substantial amount of power) to one person, you can do worse than putting them through a battery of enculturation that reduces their inclination to abuse it.

And an effective part of that litmus test could be 'already has substantial power, but is able to self-restrain their abuse of it.'

Caligula vs the recent British monarchy, etc.

Is there any evidence that Harvard educated politicians or business leaders behave more ethically than their peers from less prestigious schools?

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C10&q=%22...

It’s really disappointing that many recent attempts of progressivism have just turned into new sexism and racism but defended as “the correct” versions of those. It erodes the intellectual validity of these institutions.

Fortunately I feel convinced that it's a passing fad. I just hope that the pendulum does not swing too far the other way.

Maybe I'm in a bubble, but every anecdote I read online in the past year or two is someone royally fed up with liberal politics. On Twitter, Reddit, and real life, the majority of people keep complaining about crime, drugs, homelessness.

Sounds like a perfect environment for a generation of conservatives to get elected. Hopefully they stay close to the center for a long time.

> Sounds like a perfect environment for a generation of conservatives to get elected. Hopefully they stay close to the center for a long time.

The conservative groundswell is because generations of conservatives have already been getting elected, especially in less flashy positions that wield influence. Conservatives have really played the long game, at least since the New Deal.

I think people’s need to frame seemingly every issue and even their entire worldview as liberal vs conservative is the biggest problem in politics.

I think many things can be framed as "change things" or "leave them".

"change things" vs "change things but ostensibly back to the way they were before".

For instance, ruling against Roe v. Wade. Regardless of what you think of that, it, such a ruling was a deviation from the status quo. It was "changing things" as surely as the original ruling changed things.

Sure, or "we made a mistake changing things, let's put them back". It just depends on the timescales you consider when determining the status quo.

Putting things back where they were depends on our recollection of the past, which is imperfect and subject to various biases and confusion with myth. But even ignoring that, the circumstances of the present are different than the circumstances of the past so past laws won't work the same in the present as they did in the past. Even if you could perfectly replicate past laws in the present, you couldn't get the same effect out of those laws because the inputs (the state of society) have changed.

Nobody can roll back the clock. What conservatives actually do in fact is propose ways to change things going into the future.

> depends on our recollection of the past, which is imperfect

We do have pretty good records to help us sort it out, especially for recent history.

> the circumstances of the present are different than the circumstances of the past

Surely some circumstances, such as human nature and social biology, have not changed. I'm not sure that "the state of society" is the primary differentiating factor in the effectiveness of laws, particularly laws relating to fundamental human behaviours like violence or reproduction.

> I'm not sure that "the state of society" is the primary differentiating factor in the effectiveness of laws, particularly laws relating to fundamental human behaviours like violence or reproduction.

I think it is, since there is great cultural variation in the ways humans think about violence and sex. Monogamy or harems; human sacrifice or the abolition of the death penalty. Any combination of these can be "normal" to people raised in that context, there is little which is fundamental about the way human societies are structured with respect to these subjects.

And yet, some things are near universally constant amongst large scale agrarian civilizations. For instance the confinement of violent criminals or the institution of marriage.

You're right in that there is some variation, but there do actually seem to be some choices in this regard that are more conducive to a stable, prosperous, society. Just like there are many ways to run a company, but only some of them lead to success. Point being that if you live in such a society, "changing things" may lead you off the golden path that brought you where you are. It's true that some change is inevitable, but any operator of any system that prioritizes stability above all is always wary of any unnecessary change.

> And yet, some things are near universally constant amongst large scale agrarian civilizations. For instance the confinement of violent criminals

Certainly not. Imprisonment for violent crimes is far from being a universal constant of human culture. There have been and are cultures in which violent criminals are only detained so they can be executed. Or beaten and then released. Or simply fined. Or not charged at all. What even counts as violent crime varies considerably even in developed countries today. Legal self-defense in one country may be murder in another.

Similarly, marriage is only culturally universal in a very abstract sense. Who are you allowed to marry? How many consecutive marriages are you allowed to have? Under what conditions can a marriage be broken? Can you be sold for marriage against your will?

> You're right in that there is some variation, but there do actually seem to be some choices in this regard that are more conducive to a stable, prosperous, society. Just like there are many ways to run a company, but only some of them lead to success. Point being that if you live in such a society, "changing things" may lead you off the golden path that brought you where you are. It's true that some change is inevitable, but any operator of any system that prioritizes stability above all is always wary of any unnecessary change.

I agree. My point is that liberals, progressives, conservatives.. pretty much everybody except the most apathetic, seek to make a change to society to turn society in a direction they think will be for the better. Each have different value systems and experiences, and accordingly have different opinions about what's wrong in society and what would constitute society being better. Conservatives frame themselves as apart from this by saying they don't want change, but "not change" is itself a change they want to impose on society to bring society back into line with their values.

> We do have pretty good records to help us sort it out, especially for recent history.

But why does it even matter, other than setting things up as “us” vs. “them”?

I think that is mostly imagined. Lots of “conservative” positions involve deep societal change and lots of “liberal” policies maintain the status quo. The reverse is true as well.

I think you're conflating (US) "Republican" and "Democrat" with "liberal" and "conservative". Most dictionaries define "conservative" in contradiction to your comment.

I agree, I think it blinds people to the sort of problem that user macrolocal mentions in a nearby comment, rising illiberalism among both 'liberals' (more accurately called progressives, but this terminology is all twisted in America..) and conservatives. I'm concerned that both use the other to justify or rationalize their own declining liberalism.

> I think people’s need to frame seemingly every issue and even their entire worldview as liberal vs conservative is the biggest problem in politics.

I don't know if that was addressed to me for speaking of conservative political movements or to the conservatives, but it is not a label that I pin on an unwilling recipient; I am referring to a self-described conservative movement.

You know what trick I love?

When someone points out something Democrats did and they say "that's why I'm conservative" then when you point out something Republicans did they say "We need more than two parties"

Yes, I agree. It's like sports teams now, where people cheer on whoever has the correct letter next to their name rather than bases on their actual personal policies or beliefs.

It's also resulted in an effect I've noticed in most debates now where people just shout the advantages of their position and the disadvantages of their opponents position at each other without any attempt at addressing what their opponent is counter-arguing, if that makes sense.

Maybe those with countervailing opinions are too busy working for a living instead of commenting on the internet.

> On Twitter, Reddit, and real life, the majority of people keep complaining about crime, drugs, homelessness.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding your comment but in the US, these issues are the result of conservative politics.

Which is why there’s so much violent crime in conservative bastions like Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and Baltimore.

Think of it like climate change. The weather today is the result of poor decision making 30, 40, 50+ years ago.

Additionally, politics and policies exist at the national level as well and can influence what happens in even liberal cities.

I'm not sure that's true at all. There have been many demonstrably effective short-term crime reduction strategies. Broken window theory being the most famous example. Shockingly, arresting and confining violent antisocial people reduces violence in society.

Well as long as you’re not sure that’s good enough for me. I retract what I said.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/22/nypd-fewer-a...

The ‘clearances paradox’: could less policing actually reduce gun violence in New York?

Your over simplifying the complex reasons behind crime.

I think you're oversimplifying the complex nature of policing. If we want peaceful, stable, societies we should model our policing systems on the places that most effectively deliver peace and stability. Two notable examples being Israel and Japan. Both places give police wide latitude to accomplish their goals and punish criminals harshly. Is Israeli policing discriminatory against Arabs? Yes. Is it effective? Also yes. Is Japanese prison inhumane by US standards? Yes. Is it effective in preventing the establishment of a criminal culture? Also yes.

Violent antisocial behaviour presents itself in a small percentage of young (mostly) males. It can be predicted as early as age 4 and effective intervention is very difficult. Most people who present with it tend to age out of the behaviour by around 30. Therefore the only effective strategy to protect the rest of us from this tiny fraction of people is to confine them until they age out. This is basically what our criminal justice system does, however imperfectly.

If we were to design a system eyes-open, knowing these constraints, with the goal of minimizing violent crime, we'd:

1. Enact age-based confinement - teenagers who present with violent antisocialism are very likely to reoffend in their 20s. Violent teenagers and young adults should be confined until they've aged out.

2. Structure prison culture - prison should not be crime university. Criminals should not be permitted to form a culture. Violent antisocialism should not be tolerated in prison. Instead they should be given the tools to find a legitimate place in society upon their eventual release. Japan does this quite well.

3. Seal records after release - criminal records relating to youth-associated violent antisocialism should be sealed. People we release should have a clear path to reintegration without discrimination.

What if we model it after nordic countries which seems to be the complete opposite

I actually think nordic countries do 2. and 3. quite well, and their crime rate has risen significantly due to the large number of migrants. The baseline number of violent antisocial people in a society also does vary - but avoiding the creation of these people is different that dealing with the ones who already exist.

Because the Nordic countries 1) are not at all diverse 2) are rapidly becoming conservative as they do get more diverse.

This is a tired trope.

Or maybe we try to actually fix the problems that cause people to turn to violence and crime. "It's the economy, stupid!" and all that. People who feel financially secure and can pay for more than just life's basics have less reason to commit crime. People who have mental health issues are less likely to engage in criminal activity if they have those issues treated.

That won't fix everything, of course. People will get involved in crime for other reasons. Obviously there are rich people who are criminals; financial security doesn't remove every temptation to do crime. But I think a lot of the people you label "antisocial" these days are people who have been left behind by society, people who have gotten crushed by wages that haven't kept up with inflation (even before the current inflation issues), by companies who raise CEO pay and send dividends to investors, while ignoring the wages of their employees. Why would anyone bother to be "social" if doing so doesn't solve their economic insecurity?

And sure, there are some people who just don't give a shit about living in polite society, who don't think twice about violating norms and taking what they want. I have no problem locking those people up. But I think those people are a much smaller percentage of people who commit crimes than you think.

I don't know much about policing in Israel, but as I understand Japan, there's rampant corruption and a lot of innocent people behind bars. A near-100% conviction rate is just too good to be true. If you get charged with a crime in Japan, you are screwed, even if you didn't do anything wrong. The only alternative explanation is that Japanese police are so afraid of losing a case that they only charge the near-certain slam dunks. But if that were the case, I think we'd see a lot more crime in Japan than we do. So the only realistic explanation is that a lot of innocent people get steamrolled.

I do absolutely agree with your points 2 and 3. Time spent in prison should not make convicts into better criminals! Hell, even sitting in pre-trial detention for a few months can harden minor offenders. And after a prisoner has served their time, they shouldn't have that history dragged into employment, housing, credit, etc. decisions. If we still feel like they can't be trusted in jobs without their employers knowing about their conviction history, then they probably aren't fit to be released from prison in the first place.

> actually fix the problems that cause people to turn to violence and crime

These are not mutually exclusive propositions. As I mentioned in my comment, there are two concerns here:

1. Reducing the number of violent antisocial people by reducing the number of people who are exposed to childhood circumstances that tend to produce them. This is complicated and entails dictating to parents how they raise their children to a much higher degree than most people are comfortable, and than our society's values permit.

2. Dealing with the ones who already exist. This is policing and justice.

> the people you label "antisocial" these days are people who have been left behind by society

> It's the economy, stupid

If only it were this simple. I'm referring to people who haven't been correctly socialized in their early childhood. Toddlers are all violent, self centered, assholes by adult standards. They learn not to be through appropriate socialization with their peers, through play. Children who are not given this developmental opportunity past a particular age tend to exhibit traits that strongly correlate with violence in early adulthood. This is exacerbated by numerous domestic factors, most importantly the absence of two parents in the household and the presence of violent antisocial adults in the household (not household income).

We can observe these same traits and behaviours develop in our ape relatives for the same reasons. We're not that different.

> I think those people are a much smaller percentage of people who commit crimes than you think

This just isn't true - this small percentage of people are the serial criminals responsible for most of the real danger in our society - shootings, armed home invasions, armed robberies, etc. These sorts of crimes are largely not committed by people who are "down and out", but by people who are in many ways fundamentally different from the average person. I'm not talking about petty theft here.

This can be most clearly illustrated by the phenomenon of college campus rape. The rapes themselves are committed by a tiny fraction of repeat offenders. "Teach men not to rape" doesn't work on them. They're just not like most people, mostly as a result of some combination of tragic childhood circumstances and poor socialization (again, not household wealth). The best solution is to identify these people and imprison them as efficiently as possible. To enact this solution effectively, the people we entrust with it need power.

This doesn't include the last two years, which I'm sure have gone up, but the crime rate for most types of crimes in NYC has gone down significantly for the last 50 years.

https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm

And why rural Appalachia and small, highly religious towns across America are absolutely ravaged by meth and fentanyl and the crime around it, which you really should not ignore.

You’ll find a lot of “lock em up and throw away the key! … But not my son. Or my daughter. Or my nephew and his children and my former coworker. Or my pastor’s children. But everyone else, yeah”

Overly-liberal cities (SF, Vancouver, LA, etc) are killing far more of their citizens with failed drug policies than COVID, and with circumstance they've engineered such as giving extra "safe" fentanyl to people, telling dealers they won't be arrested, and never institutionalizing against their wishes.

The difference between approaches isn't "lock them up / don't" or "my kids / their kids". It's not a left/right or conservative/liberal divide, it's on another axis - more about the philosophical difference of personal vs group responsibility and meaning vs nihilism.

We need to look at the path these front running cities are taking, and where everyone else will be dragged, to see the difference. The same cities which refuse to lock up a violent junkie will lock up a parent who complains too loudly to the school board. It's not that they aren't authoritarian, often more than conservatives. It's that they don't feel there's any degradation of the individual which is ultimately wrong. Like, an individual can "choose" to be a street whore and die painfully from heroin. That's valid. This is how all junkies eventually live and die, and without a strong moral consensus that this is all bad - for the junkie and society and that we must stop it, you can't make progress on the base issues.

Vancouver will leave a junkie in their own vomit, to continue hitting the drugs that almost killed them, because "nobody should be committed against their will" but it will fine or confine an otherwise fit college student who drinks in public, or who commits any of the other offenses the junkie is committing (littering, starting fires on the sidewalk, having a violent dog, openly carrying a weapon, and so forth). The junkie has somehow "chosen" his or her role and now it's a beautiful thing, like a butterfly, that should be left to unfold, unmolested, in the parks.

Portugal, often held out as a utopia for drug users, has a "not even once in public" policy where they will jail you and assign you to a multi-year rehab program. They know nobody wants to die in their own vomit, in the street.

We need to regain the compassion we've thrown away in the "everything is okay!" anti-conservative backlash such that we can help people in obvious distress. Once we all look at things that way we can see that our policies won't actually be too different, or rather, it doesn't matter if they are and we can work in a spirit of cooperation from different angles rather than fighting about the issue itself.

Ultimately, Portugal is a more liberal society (for drug users) than Vancouver.

"and with circumstance they've engineered such as giving extra "safe" fentanyl to people"

Fentanyl is cut with other drugs and there's no fentanyl distribution that I can see. Care to provide a source? The drug is extremely potent to be consumed alone.

----------------------------------------

Here's a DEA warning about mass overdose events from Fentanyl "Fentanyl-related mass-overdose events, characterized as three or more overdoses occurring close in time and at the same location, have happened in at least seven American cities in recent months, resulting in 58 overdoses and 29 deaths. Cities impacted include Wilton Manors, Florida; Austin, Texas; Cortez, Colorado; Commerce City, Colorado; Omaha, Nebraska; St. Louis, Missouri; and Washington, D.C."

I don't' see SF or LA mentioned here. I'm sure some of these are Democrat controlled but You are claiming that liberal policies cause an increase in overdoses. Do you have a source for your death rates?

https://www.dea.gov/press-releases/2022/04/06/dea-warns-incr...

------------------------------

Top 10 states by drug overdose in 2020 (latest year for this source)

West Virginia 81.4 1,330 Kentucky 49.2 2,083 Delaware 47.3 444 Ohio 47.2 5,204 Tennessee 45.6 3,034 Maryland 44.6 2,771 Louisiana 42.7 1,896 Pennsylvania 42.4 5,168 Maine 39.7 496 Connecticut 39.1 v1,371

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor...

-------------------------------------

"We need to regain the compassion we've thrown away in the "everything is okay!" anti-conservative backlash such that we can help people in obvious distress."

Ant-conservative backlash? Republicans, as in elected officials, are calling their political opponents pedophiles and communists. They claim guns are going to be taken away for the last 40 years guess what actually gets banned? Abortion. Multiple Republicans are still lying about election fraud and you wonder why there's a backlash?

> Multiple Republicans ... and you wonder why there's a backlash

I'm generally not in the USA so I'm trying to speak of things more internationally, and broader than just the divisive Dem/Rep mob.

And no, the backlash I'm talking about is the last eighty or more years. The hippies are boomers, after all.

> Top 10 states by drug overdose ...

I'm not talking about deaths but deaths that society encourages. What would happen in that area if you tried to shoot up in front of a cop?

> there's no fentanyl distribution that I can see. Care to provide a source?

The programs aren't very well documented because they're "just" a doctor treating their patients, many of whom they never meet. The newspaper articles aren't great. Here's a transcript of the Alberta government examining Vancouver's drug situation for the purposes of setting their own policies. There are also other days of testimony and citizen input if you look around. https://docs.assembly.ab.ca/LADDAR_files/docs/committees/ess...

> The drug is extremely potent to be consumed alone.

Yeah. The dealers intentionally kill a few every now and then as an ad for their product and they manipulate the potency in competition with other dealers. The police warn non drug users that a cheap street dose is many times more likely to kill an inexperienced user than a similar dose from a decade ago.

You provided a link to a Canadian program. If you don't have other sources then why do you think it happens in the us

"The police warn non drug users that a cheap street dose is many times more likely to kill an inexperienced user than a similar dose from a decade ago."

This is a conspiracy theory. Evidence?

And about your first comment, I'm showing numbers of deaths, you're claiming that some part of that is encouraged and that percentage is higher for liberal cities. But the death rate doesn't correlate either way. So it doesn't make sense, even if it was encouraged apparently it's not making things worse

Most of what you said is speculation and you haven't provided meaningful evidence besides linking to a paper in another country.

> You provided a link to a Canadian program. If you don't have other sources then why do you think it happens in the us

Because the cities literally follow the same public policy. Don't arrest for "simple usage", camping on the streets is allowed, etc. They're getting advice from the same people. But yes, the USA does not that I know, have vending machines for drugs yet, that's still afaik a Canadian thing. In the USA you have to go to a "clinic" and ask a worker for your dose by hand and generally they want you to consume the drug there.

> [Street doses growing in strength] is a conspiracy theory.

Not even a little. I'm not talking about the why or the who. When tested the bags sold contain more active drug and many first-time users are reported dying when generally opioids (read erowid, etc) don't do that.

> Evidence?

Your googling fingers are busted but the ones you use to complain are working?

> Most of what you said is speculation and you haven't provided meaningful evidence besides linking to a paper

No, I've provided enough evidence to show that things are run by people who don't know what they're doing and are misrepresenting the studies to the city. If you can't find the public documents talking about your own cities you aren't trying hard enough.

> in another country.

Lol, so sorry the world doesn't end at your borders.

"Your googling fingers are busted but the ones you use to complain are working?"

It's not my job in a debate to provide evidence for your arguments

"Lol, so sorry the world doesn't end at your borders."

We are discussing American politics

> We are discussing American politics

We're also discussing drugs and the lib/con divide which aren't in the article either. I didn't respond to you originally, you responded to me which means you adopt the discussion at that point - or did you intend to reply elsewhere?

Also, this is how you stay uninformed. Refusing to look to countries who are a few years ahead of you on a policy cycle. Drugs are drugs no matter the country.

> [not my job] to provide evidence for your arguments

You don't have to. I fully supported my argument, it's not my fault you can't read Canadian.

It's as valid for me to quote Vancouver as a model for SF and LA as it was for Vancouver to reference Amsterdam twenty years ago.

Maybe you should check the crime rate in other cities. Also consider Covid and the economy as a more probable factor in an increase in crime.

Here's just one set of statistics-Most Murders 2022

St. Louis, MO (69.4)

Baltimore, MD (51.1)

New Orleans, LA (40.6)

Detroit, MI (39.7)

Cleveland, OH (33.7)

Las Vegas, NV (31.4)

Kansas City, MO (31.2)

Memphis, TN (27.1)

https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/cities-wi...

What solutions are the conservatives offering to crime, drugs, and homelessness?

The usual ones: effective policing and punitive justice. It works pretty well actually if your goal is to keep law-abiding citizens safe without much regard for the fates of criminals.

Policing is the responsibility of the state. Are you saying Republican led states have less crime?

Policing and crime are fundamentally local concerns. The main predictor of exposure to crime or likelyhood of police encounter is zip code. Some (local) policies are more effective at crime reduction than others. Among the most famously effective is the broken windows theory of policing. The basic principle being that arresting and confining antisocial people is an effective method of maintaining social order and stability. I'm not saying these ideas are "Republican", only that they are "conservative" in the sense that we've been practicing them for milenia.

The concept of broken windows started in the 1980s and according to a recent paper it's not effective.

https://news.northeastern.edu/2019/05/15/northeastern-univer...

Here's an npr article showing that the effects in nyc were overstated

https://www.npr.org/2016/11/01/500104506/broken-windows-poli...

As a representative example, maybe arrest somebody when they assault a woman and kill her dog (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/nyregion/dog-attack-park-...).

Who is responsible for arresting people?

Promoting strong family structures and communities. Supporting social norms that dissuade destructive behavior.

I wonder - which Conservative would you look to as a good example to model such behavior and lead the nation?

Really? promote or force?

Can you name any policies or bills that Republicans have to make this happen? Can you prove that social norms have an effect on crime or homelessness? Are you claiming gay people are more likely to be criminals because they don't?

Homeless: "Research shows that, compared to homeless families, homeless single adults have higher rates of serious mental illness, addiction disorders, and other severe health problems." How would social norms fix that? If an adult has a mental illness and can't afford care are you willing to have universal health care? You don't think if they had family that could take them in and they were willing they would do that?

https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/basic-facts-about-ho...

------------------------------------------------------

Here's some GOP news about social norms

1.https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/29/cawthorn-orgies-fre... 00021548

2.https://people.com/politics/madison-cawthorn-wife-cristina-d...

3.https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/09/29/marj...

4.https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/07/jd-vance-violent-mar...

"GOP SENATE CANDIDATE J.D. VANCE: IF PEOPLE LOVE THEIR KIDS, THEY’LL STAY IN VIOLENT MARRIAGES"

5.https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/23/matt-gaetz-sex-trafficking-p...

and you damn well I know go on

"Promoting strong family structures and communities"

What does this actually mean in practice? This vague comment could mean anything from running for office, passing no laws and shouting "Hey don't get divorced" to passing laws making it illegal for anybody to get divorced.

"Supporting social norms that dissuade destructive behavior"

Nobody is for "destructive behavior". What is "destructive behavior" and what changes does this vague comment mean in practice? It could mean anything from passing no laws and shouting "don't do drugs" to dissuading homeliness by throwing all homeless people in jail.

> Promoting strong family structures and communities.

That's not actionable. What does that even mean? What law or laws would you want proposed and passed that would accomplish that? Are there any political candidates that have a list of these laws, justifications -- with hard data -- why these sorts of laws will fix the stated problems, and a plan to get them put into place?

> Hopefully they stay close to the center for a long time.

I feel like the "the left" is undergoing a purity spiral whereas other parties are scooping up everyone pushed out.

Thats not exactly how pendulums swing.

Think about how far we have swung in one direction. Its going the same distance in the other. May god help us.

I'm angry about the loss of abortion rights federally, the rise of Christian nationalism, politicians lying about election fraud, people calling their enemies pedophiles and communists, politicans not knowing what those words mean, and facism

What is this center you think we are going back to because all I see are far right politicans and the end of American democracy

> the end of American democracy

Granting all the problems you've cited, things have still been much worse in the past than they are today. Maybe not in the recent past, the 90s and 00s look quite rosy today in some (not all) respects, but think a bit further back. America has gone through civil war, anti-communist witch trials, frequent politically motivated bombings and assassinations, etc. Throughout all of that, people have remained hopeful that things could get better.

The greatest threat facing America today is demoralization. The belief that demise is inevitable and cannot be prevented could do America more permanent harm than anything else.

So people don't trust the government and the election system. Could that is why they think demise will occur? That's the doing of the republican party.

Trump is constantly saying America is a failed state. A democracy fails because people don't believe it works. All of this is republican

It's weird how the "Christian nationalism" meme has been pushed by the usual suspects when US church attendance is at an all-time low, and religious influence on politics is a shadow of its former self. My guess is it's a mixture of obsession with The Handmaid's Tale, and the need for an alternative pejorative term that can be applied to black and Hispanic conservatives.

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/14/1073215412/christian-national...

Evangelicals are key backers of the republican party.

Evangelicalism is now a meaningless term with the nyt even claiming it’s largely an identity that does not practice in any form. It’s just a default conservative term for whose who can’t admit they are atheists.

No,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism

The problem is that US political parties don't actually express the will of the majority of their constituents.

These "Christian nationalists" are not a majority in any shape or form, but the GOP as a party bends over backwards for them.

By the way, I don't know where you're from, but I bet it isn't currently fascist. In the same vein, most leftists shouldn't be called communists. Examples of fascism are the Nazis, Mussolini, that Spanish chap, and apartheid. The only modern incarnation that springs to my mind is the Phillipines.

I'm not saying I like the American right with their religion and their fixation on abortion (I do agree with them on some other things). I'm saying maybe there's a growing trend to the right, globally, and if there is, I hope it stops in the center and stays there for a long time, because I am a centrist.

Who is more of a centrist right now, the republican party or the democrats?

That's... actually a really good question. I expect you are perhaps trying to push the idea that Republicans are more centrist than Democrats, but I don't think I'd agree with that.

If you were to suggest that your average Republican US citizen is more centrist than your average Democrat US citizen, I would probably agree. But when it comes to the politicians and the people running the parties, I think the GOP is much farther right than the Democrats are far left.

> Sounds like a perfect environment for a generation of conservatives to get elected. Hopefully they stay close to the center for a long time.

The problem is that conservatives (at least in the US, though this is happening in Europe too) have been swinging even farther to the right than most liberals have been swinging left.

I think we're in for some bad times if the leftists don't stop stepping all over their own feet, causing a backlash (that we're already seeing to some degree) that puts the autocrats in power irrevocably.

I worry about illiberalism becoming more prominent on the left and right.

Liberal has been somewhat taken over by a cross of libertine and anarchist, who say basically that liberalism is liberal it can't be exclusionary and therefore they're as valid a liberal as Locke. They've then used "liberal" as a rallying cry and a shield while they push a lot of illiberal policies.

Actual liberals need to field a bit of a defense against this encroachment, and in language the public can understand. "No, XYZ is not [a liberal action] because ..."

I fear this more than a backlash because it speaks in our name. Our usual political opponents reacting to us at least openly enact their own policies and messages and leave our voices and our message unmolested.

I'd guess people are rejecting neoliberalism more than Locke.

But if so, it's curious that the vocal left had shifted their attention from the disparity between people living in huts and palaces, to making sure that the people living in palaces are appropriately representative. That's a surprisingly conservative project (for better or worse).

I'm not sure that wasn't the original intention for many if not most of the people advocating those positions.

Less-powerful people tend to appeal to principles more, because principles tend to align with their benefit. You don't know whether the principles really exist until you see currently-powerful people hold themselves to the principles.

I suspect nearly all people would fail this test, execpt those who've been on both sides (at least in small ways) enough times.

Very insightful. This gets to the root of power and how different moral truths are advocated by different positions with both saying how they are universal. I wish we could admit that as progressives and have a better conversation around the motivations of certain policies.

It is not just neo-racism and neo-sexism.

It is also a weird kind of neo-feudalism, excluding outsiders that cannot or won't fit the expected mold. In the court of Versailles, you had to behave according to a certain stiff etiquette. If the same is required in institutions of higher learning, how many really creative people will be willing to put up with it?

They won't. Can't wait for all the great music in the next few decades.

Fair point. The 60s wouldn't have happened without the 50s. The 90s without the 80s.

Artistic creativity brews strongest when there's an omnipresent dogma to reject, and the current pastiche of thoughtlessly-implemented progressivism is fertile ground.

It's been bubbling up in standup comedy for a while, but that tends to be the quickest turnaround on cultural commentary.

No nuanced good idea ever survives contact with a brainless bureaucracy.

> If the same is required in institutions of higher learning

Can you give an example? At my colleges there were no rules about "stiff etiquette"

Tech companies have crazy stiff etiquette and at its worse point hr people were butting into meetings on demand and correcting behavior in real time. It was … creepy.

As a society we got ourselves into a situation where ignoring race now I promotes inequality as it helps those that have benefited from racism in the past. And doing ANYTHING proactive now is racism not.

The question is just — what type of injustice do you prefer?

> ignoring race now I promotes inequality as it helps those that have benefited from racism in the past

Does it?

I think the argument goes something like: if racial groups and socioeconomic outcomes are correlated due to previous inequalities, and social mobility is limited, then doing nothing further entrenches the inequalities.

Then discriminate on the socioeconomic inequalities. A poor white person and a poor black person should get aid. Obama’s daughter (black, but rich and powerful) doesn’t need any aid or discrimination in her favor.

Discriminating on the basis of race for these programs is so stupid. Ask why and people say “because socioeconomic status”, but then why don’t you discriminate on that? I think people know this but it’s a political move (black people vote for democrats for the vast majority, so making it means tested instead wouldn’t be popular with them).

Sure, just do _anything_ that's a directional improvement.

I think a lot of bad faith prevarication prevents any improvement (such as the question I was replying to).

You are accusing me of a bad faith question?

Elaborate, and make it good.

This is a much longer discussion and one that tends to devolve. And there is a camp that believes that black peoples have it better than whites people today. I find it hard to believe, but they exist.

You made a statement that clearly begged the question, and now I see that you’ve made this comment twice to try and stop further discussion and examination of your claims, and yet I see a perfectly fine and interesting discussion has continued below and hasn’t devolved at all.

Might be time to check more than one of your assumptions, but more importantly, stop trying to police what I and others here say. I’m an adult, if you don’t wish to engage further that’s up to you but I and the others on these boards can make our own decisions, and there are moderators for when things get out of hand. Thanks.

I never said not to have the discussion. I said it would devolve, and look at what we’re already discussing.

I pointed out that it hasn't devolved. If you think people calmly and rationally discussing and disagreeing with your assumptions and claims is devolution then you have a further claim to back up.

Go read what you wrote about policing and other stuff. It was demeaning and clearly not my intent. Apparently you’re an adult, so yes, have whatever discussion you like. I’m just saying I won’t be apart of it, unless you plan to force me.

No one is demeaning you by pointing out that you are the one trying to shut down discussion, you are demeaning yourself by partaking in that.

“unless you plan to force me.” Jesus wept.

The answer is really simple: discrimination not on race, but on inequalities. Don’t discriminate because someone is black or white, but give due consideration to factors like family situation/income/legacy/etc

This seems like the most reasonable solution. If you believe that systemic racism exists in the background, then this corrects for its real effects. If you don’t, I’m sure you at least accept that all else equal, a smart poor person will have accomplished less than a smart rich person due to lack of resources, so if you can correct for that in admissions you better identify smart people.

Need-oriented discrimination, with no accounting for race, is the answer

You should apply some second order thinking on this argument.

In the welfare days, those that were in more need were women with children where the man ditched the family. So more effort and money was applied there which seems totally reasonable.

But it also incentivized men to leave their families to qualify, and they did in high numbers.

These type of things made to correct something in the past also have a tendency to incentivize something bad in the future.

This is part of why these things are so difficult in practice.

Or we could acknowledge that society functions best when the most qualified people are chosen and decide to only discriminate on merit.

These selection criteria are meant to match students with schools filled with students of the same ability level. Of course there will always be factors in life that make it harder or easier for people to succeed.

Having had exceptionally difficult life circumstances doesn't somehow change the fact that you need to have already mastered Algebra to succeed at MIT for example.

We should focus more on mitigating the extent that difficult circumstances hinders learning not just manipulating selection criteria after it already has.

> We should focus more on mitigating the extent that difficult circumstances hinders learning not just manipulating selection criteria after it already has.

This is harder, but I agree the right place to focus our energies. The problem is that the people that want to solve the problem are those in higher education. The people at the root of the problem are probably the same ones that don't want to solve it. A bit of a catch-22.

To be clear, this is about university admissions where their goal is to identify the most capable people for the school, and a smart but poor person might very well be the most capable (even if it’s not clear on paper given their previous lack of resources). This IS merit-based, but it’s an attempt to find the diamonds in the rough.

Someone with an IQ of 140 but poor might not have accomplished as much as a rich person with an IQ of 100, so on paper the rich person looks better, but correcting for circumstances the poor (smart) person is wayyy better. This is meritocratic.

And I’m certainly not suggesting you take the objectively worst person, especially in a job market. Universities are given public money to provide societal benefits. If they aren’t properly able to give people opportunities, they don’t deserve my tax dollars.

> Or we could acknowledge that society functions best when the most qualified people are chosen and decide to only discriminate on merit.

The problem is that we have never actually done that. "Legacy admissions" is a fine example of that failure. Large donations influence admissions decisions. Biases (unconscious or conscious) can take two people of equal merit and cause an admissions officer to prefer one over the other.

There have already been studies showing that simply changing a person's name (either to present a different gender or race/national origin) on a resume can result in a different hiring decision.

A purpose of all of these equity initiatives is to compensate for the reasons why we already suck at giving people opportunities based on merit. Some of them are ill-advised and end up not working, but that doesn't mean we should just throw our hands up and accept the status quo.

And I certainly don't expect us to wave a magic wand and turn ourselves into perfectly rational, unbiased robots who actually do select purely on merit. Which wouldn't even fix the problem, anyway. But I feel like people like you who tout this "merit" thing are also pushing something impossible to accomplish.

Affirmative action is racist. It must stop, along with hiring biases.

The problem with "quantitative" tests is that they are not without their own bias - they select for students that had the luck (or the right parentage) to go to either a private school or to a public school in a well-funded school district. The result is that the student base will be overwhelmingly white rich kids, which is pretty problematic (see e.g. [1], fresh out of the press).

Additionally, at least when one goes by the original purpose of academia - that is, to provide education and research opportunities to the actually gifted instead of yet another way for employers to bypass ADA and other anti discrimination regulations - it should be the way that qualitative judgements by humans prefer the academically gifted and interested!

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03251-0

> they select for students that had the luck (or the right parentage) to go to either a private school or to a public school in a well-funded school district

You're not wrong, but I interpret this as evidence that the problem is earlier in the pipeline and trying to fix it here is a hack.

Families with more resources are going to be able to use those resources to game anything. The question is then, which metrics have the most resistance to gaming? Testing would seem more resistant to gaming than extracurricular activities or how well "you" write essays.

Or, to crib the aphorism, 'Standardized testing is the worst method of ranking students... except for all the other ones.'

> they select for students that had the luck (or the right parentage) to go to either a private school or to a public school in a well-funded school district.

They select for math ability, it just so happens that students with access to great resources get better at math than those without them.

> The result is that the student base will be overwhelmingly white rich kids, which is pretty problematic Pretty clearly not true. It is overwhelmingly asian kids and while wealth plays a factor, poor asians still do exceptionally well (IIRC poor asians do better than rich whites). This can never be acknowledged because it makes people less sympathetic to your point.

> purpose of academia - that is, to provide education and research opportunities to the actually gifted instead

A students innate ability is irrelevant for college admissions. What matters is what are your actual capabilities. Are you capable doing mathematics at the highest level or are you not? An innately talented student who is bad at math due to life circumstances out of their control is still bad at math.

> They select for math ability, it just so happens that students with access to great resources get better at math than those without them.

So we just throw our hands up and lament that those without preexisting opportunities stay down?

I completely disagree. Colleges should be looking for high ceiling students who have the potential to do great things if the college throws their resources at the kid for four years.

> A students innate ability is irrelevant for college admissions. What matters is what are your actual capabilities. Are you capable doing mathematics at the highest level or are you not?

Last time I checked, the whole point of college is to develop these skills!

Should every single person who didn't get to take advanced math in high school be immediately disqualified from studying high level math, even if they have the potential to do incredibly well given the tools? This isn't to say that students who have the foundation should be kept down, more that those without it shouldn't be excluded if they have the potential to succeed.

> The whole point of ditching quantitative tests is to empower the bureaucrats who want to make qualitative judgements based on their personal whims and biases.

I can completely believe that this is the result, but I find it very hard to believe that it is (at least in all cases) the point. At my university, the decision to stop considering some standardized tests came from the department and college level, where we don't even make the decisions, not from the admissions department. While it is easy for me to believe that there were unintended consequences, I can say for sure that what you describe was not our goal.

>We used racism, to fight racism. Only fascists subscribe to meritocracy.

-years later-

OH no, we're taking the pr hits for our disgustingly discriminative and biggoted admissions processes.

It seems like modern wokeism was designed to make it easier for rich elites to exploit their privilege. Stuff like this makes it easier for lazy kids with rich and connected parents to get into best colleges/universities. All the talk about race and gender also conveniently turns attention away form real solutions that could help the underprivileged, like progressive taxation, which the rich elites oppose.

At least Marx was smart enough to understand that ultimately who has the money/assets is the key, unlike modern progressives and their obsession with other less relevant qualities. We should tax the rich and fund the poor regardless of their ethnicity or identity.

I think this implies a personal philosophy along the lines of negative utilitarianism. I'm not sure everyone shares that.

Oh, you mean the correct one?

Well, we need to make them understand that some ethical systems are better than others. Negative util is truthtil.

It wasn't designed for this, but you're correct in that, so long as existing structures of economic power remain as they are, the rest is mostly just virtue theater.

Seems like the fairest option. GPA, essays, and extracurriculars are BS and even worse.

Sat should be pass or fail. It's not precise enough to rank students

Water is wet.

This is not surprising, because the whole point of ditching the admissions test was to make the process less fair, and more biased.

As Nelson in The Simpsons would say: "Ha ha!"

In other words, this was a foreseeable consequence.

> Without SAT and ACT scores, he explained, the job of admitting students had become more subjective and more time-consuming.

It's amazing we are doing a nationwide experiment to find this out.

I am confused as to why this wasn't expected. "We removed our objective measures, but then the process became more subjective." Riiiiiiight.

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