Test scores are not irrelevant
dynomight.net
dynomight.net
I probably reviewed 20-30 applications a day. If high school transcripts were universally formatted, decisions could have been instantaneous but alas, we live in the real world and some human-in-the-loop normalizing had to be done over-and-over.
With all that reviewing, patterns emerged, namely that SAT and ACT scores strongly correlate to GPA. Now, I’m the kind of person that roots for the genius to overcome his grades and emerge a genius on the SAT/ACT. But in two years, it probably happened only twice. Before calculating a normalized GPA, I could look at the test scores and predict “admit” or “deny”.
While the author is correct to say “the irrelevance of test scores is greatly exaggerated”, in my experience, whether or not something is irrelevant has very little to do with what universities do.
I’d recommend only using test scores. Or, only go with GPAs. Only test scores is more efficient. Only GPAs looks better on press releases.
I see 31 and think, “admit”. I see 3.18, I think “probably admit”. I check your math scores (which is where a lot of people trip up), and see you got mostly Bs- heck, you’re on Hacker Mews, probably As, and I think, “admit”. Now I do the normalizing math and yeah, Admit. Congratulations!
I had a 30 on my ACT my sophomore year then dropped out of high school my junior year. I was getting F’s my junior year because I couldn’t stay awake and had maybe like a 2.3 GPA before that. Would have reduced drastically if I’d stayed in school.
It was only that high because some teachers were always super annoyed with me, and a lot of them would try to bend the system to give me a better grade but some just were like “homework is the grade sorry” even though I’d ace tests. Also my stepdad was doing meth so that caused issues.
So am I an actual rarity?
But it sounds like you did not graduate high school or apply to college. If that’s correct, I would not have the context to know since the baseline of inclusion into my experience is people who graduate high school in some form - GED included, AND who provide test scores.
I’m really sorry to hear about your stepdad, wincy. I hope things are ok for you now.
If I had seen your file, it would have been the talk of the day. "Can you believe this file!" I probably would have talked to the Dean, maybe called you and given you some advice. That advice would have been something like:
"Listen. Don't tell anyone I said this, but, this school is more expensive than it needs to be. Heck, who says you need college at all? But if you really want to go here, you've got two options. 1. See if you can get into the local community college for a semester or two and then transfer your credits - we won't care about your HS grades anymore. 2. AND REALLY DON'T TELL YOUR PARENTS/TEACHERS I SAID THIS You could, in theory... just get your GED. That's a loop hole around us caring about your GPA."
Main reason was that I just spent all my time pursuing ECs and didn't have enough time to spend on grades.
Think you'll lose a lot of smart kids who spend time on ECs that way.
They rightfully told me to go to community college instead, because my GPA was abysmal. I'd have failed right out of OSU. I went to that community college and failed right out of it ;-). Then I went in the USAF, and maybe a year into that experience something clicked and suddenly I felt like an adult. I felt like my priorities realigned and I knew what I wanted and how to get there, and I could stick with it.
So when I left the military, I went back to the community college, got perfect grades, convinced the admissions gal at OSU to ignore all the HS & college grades from a few years earlier, and let me in. Graduated with my bachelor's in CS with excellent grades. Ultimately went on to get my masters, though that was years later.
Anyway, all of that to say ... my SAT score would have said "admit him" but my GPA was a more accurate assessment of my grit. I think both scores are useful, but don't give up on GPA.
I personally prefer the GPA system as it measures your performance over your final 2 years of high school rather than having your future determined by one test.
In the US now we have federal school testing to try and normalize schools better. But before that many schools were graduate students that were illiterate (actually some still are, but I hope it's gotten better..). The US is 10x the population of Canada so image the difficulty for a liberal arts school in the northeast looking at a student from some rural 500-person school they've never heard of from the southwest.
Canada's population is smaller but we also have many obscure rural schools. Non-prestigious universities don't have much data but they also don't have much choice in top applicants so it doesn't really matter. Over time, they can build up decently accurate profiles of high schools for majority of applicants.
It also puts you at a disadvantage if you come from an immigrant area or poor area where your 90% will not count as highly as someone with 60% from the richest areas with a trackwork of success.
It really punishes anyone not rich and locks them out of elite universities and pushes most of the poor out of average universities.
A single test where everyone can study and pass seems more fair than basing it on things that can be impossible to change like where you grew up
Neither system is perfect but I think the purely SAT approach creates too much unnecessary stress for high school students when there are other proxies for determining future success.
Grades can be easily biased
There is nothing stopping you from taking the SATs multiple times. It's encouraged because you most likely will go up a few points the 2nd pass. I've taken it twice myself, 3 times if you include the PSAT. And I also took the ACT, only once.
GPAs you can only screw up once. If you fail even one class it's impossible to climb back to the top.
All three of these things are already happening.
For example, the Cal State University system has purely objective admissions for most campuses. That's good! But while they technically consider SAT scores, the last time I looked the difference in admissions points between a minimum SAT score and a maximum SAT score was roughly equal to the difference between a 2.0 GPA and a 3.0.
I think it is even worse -- the inflation is not universal. At Cornell (undergrad), most engineering classes set the mean to B- or C+. You had to go 1SD higher to get to A- and near 2SD to get A+. Imagine how shocked I was to hear my friends at Princeton had a mean set to A-. Consider the pressure this puts on some students and not others, esp when you're all applying to the same graduate programs. Is a Cornell B+ worth more than a Princeton A-? Statistically yes, but in reality no one is harmonizing the distributions.
There is also the issue of fancy private prep schools which have 10 or 15 "Valedictorians" which many of us public school students were shocked to learn when we arrived at college. You'd meet multiple people claiming to be valedictorian from the same school's graduating class until you learn that private prep schools stretch the meaning of valedictorian.
Some reason life lessons: pay enough and you get to bend the rules.
Some reason life lessons: more elite, less pressure.
I say that as a boy who was worse at classwork.
A pull-up competition is a perfectly valid test if the job/program requires exactly that kind of upper body strength.
(2) There is a serious representation problem in primary education, particularly elementary schools. Both boys and girls benefit from having male teachers, boys particularly, since as it is they get the unambiguous message that school is an institution by and for women, one in which they don't have a place. It's bad enough that it shouldn't be thought of "we need to hire more men as elementary school teachers" but "we need to stop hiring women as elementary school teachers".
Please define sexist/sexism. This use doesn't match with my definition.
The measure is an objective one, which is highly correlated to graduation rate and thus pertianate. It's not like this is used to discriminate.
Yes, you could have individual teachers showing bias, but it seems that the data in the article doesn't support this being impactful. I'm actually a little skeptical that bias is rampant given how overbearing many of the school policies have become and an inability to explain grading differences would be highly suspect. I'd expect people to get sued/fired left and right over this if it's truly widespread.
The attribute of being labeled male is not a protected class (maybe legally, definitely de facto) in the same way that of being labeled female is.
To your broader point, disparate outcomes is ipso facto evidence of sexism. At least, that's what our society has settled on for other excluded identities, so we should do the same for men.
"disparate outcomes is ipso facto evidence of sexism."
Lol, no. Again, please provide your definition of sexism, as this does not match the one in the dictionary.
There are plenty of things that are not sexist and have disparate outcomes.
https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents...
This has been well studied and is a pervasive, consistent result. However, we don't see the EEOC launching lawsuits against or even studies investigating bias against boys. Can we really say that being male is a protected class if no one bothers to protect it?
I'll look more into this to see if I can dig out an American specific study.
[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01425692.2022.2...
If we knew SATs are more predictive of college success for men than women, we'd even be able to simultaneously increase both representation of men in college and overall success rates. That's received a lot less study than other topics in vogue for educational researchers.
Colleges often re-weight both GPAs and test scores based on sex, race, socioeconomic background.
If we look at SAT discrepancies to identify groups harmed by structural issues in the test, we should also do the same with grades.
Anyways, I graduated from high school in 2006. At the same school now, there are apparently multiple/many teachers that are fully accepted by both the guys and girls as being sexist against boys. I doubt this trend is limited to my school and it's concerning as hell.
As far as college acceptance itself, the norm is for colleges to apply a lower admission standard for boys than they do for girls.
The structural issues are elsewhere, such as the emphasis on GPA and the related emphasis on grading for effort without caring whether the student knows the material.
Where are you getting this from? The data and all incentives going female>either>male would suggest otherwise, if it would suggest anything at all.
If you think the data suggest that colleges are overall giving admissions preferences to females in favor of males, you haven't looked at the data.
>girls don't want to attend all-girl schools, so you can get higher overall female admissions by admitting some unqualified boys
This implies either unqualified boys are better attractors, or there not being enough qualified boys. I doubt either of those being true given tournament selection being omnipresent.
>you haven't looked at the data
The data most available shows admission rates to be fairly equal, with far more scholarships for girls in areas they lack presence than the other way around. The data on standards is practically invisible, and I'd be very skeptical of colleges publically admitting to sexism in today's age, let alone sexism in favor of boys. Openly doing so and not trying to change this is asking for a massive boycott.
> The data most available shows admission rates to be fairly equal, with far more scholarships for girls in areas they lack presence than the other way around. The data on standards is practically invisible
So you're saying... you haven't looked at the data, and that's why you're comfortable interpreting what it says.
Solid intellectual effort there.
> If this is public, surely you have some actual sources to verify this?
Indeed! You can find them yourself too, just look for any coverage of the issue over the last 20 years. I can't be responsible for everyone who wants to contradict stuff that's been known for decades. Get your own house in order.
Highly selective colleges that strive for parity must accomplish that by rejecting a few girls who would have gotten in on merit alone, and admitting a few boys who should have been the first ones out.
What incentives are you thinking of? What's the source of your data?
I don't know how they do it legally, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Their researchers apply for grants. That is considered "funding". Enrolling students who have taken out student loans is also considered to be "goverment funding" for the school rather than the student.
Do you have a source for this?
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/20/1681
> in regard to admissions to educational institutions, this section shall apply only to institutions of vocational education, professional education, and graduate higher education, and to public institutions of undergraduate higher education
Bayesian analysis could then be applied to pull the signal out of the GPA data. GPAs can then be renormalized such that students are not incentivized to go to a HS that gives everyone As.
I think the correct thing is to require schools to publish their minimum and maximum grades, and then everyone can just scale that range as appropriate - because why should some kid going to Stanford get to report a 4.0 GPA when they’ve got low grades, but a kid at CSUEB has to report something lower because they’re a state school that can’t invent new grades?
From my personal experience, my GPA when I graduated was 8.7 or something, which at least makes it clear that I’m not on the same scale as you might normally think - whereas a 3.9 from Stanford might seem really good but is bolstered by courses with >4 scores. An extreme would be if you heard someone from my school talk about a 3.9GPA, which if IIRC would imply an average grade in the region of 60% (and yes you could in principle go negative, but that would get you on the “let’s talk about whether uni is right for you” list with the uni admin)
My university's GPA was (IIRC) -2..9 or something where 9=A+, 8=A, 7=A-, etc but that wasn't used in any externally facing mechanism, because a GPA as a single score is not useful outside of the school administration. Single average GPAs aren't remotely robust enough to warrant any kind of external value, and they actively discourage any course experimentation because if you are wanting to do anything GPA gated you cannot risk anything that you don't already know you'll get a high grade in.
Given you could get into uni on a high enough 6th form cert grade this is obviously absurd (I think that it was something like your total score for your best 4 subjects had to be less than 6, so you can see how one course consuming 3 points even if you were absolutely perfect screws that)
FYI, they rate according to the school's scale. This knowledge is shared.
You don't think they'd notice if every single candidate from specific schools never got higher than a 4.0? :)
The schools here certainly do get bonus money from the government for every person who graduates.
On the other hand, companies like to employ people no matter what their degree - if they passed courses and did projects and learned useful skills in some school, that's definitely great, but graduation by itself isn't such a big thing.
Then there's the whole other aspect of school, getting to know people, learning social skills, organizing events, even activism. Just as an example lot of politicians come from student politics background. If everybody just "minds their business" and "doesn't have an opinion about politics" then dictators can just seize power.
So why should school intake optimize for graduation? We could get people who are really good at barely passing a large amount of narrow topic exams over a few years with methods like cramming in their room the previous night, but really bad at their job or other aspects of life.
Including people's assumptions that seats in school should be prioritized for people already learned more than everyone else.
Do we care to measure grit? If someone can do the courses and pass the final exams, does it matter whether they did "sufficient grit" during the process?
In my opinion, it's better think of school grades as a measure of efficacy instead of intelligence. Given a fixed amount of time, how correctly could you perform the task? Discipline, or "grit" as it has been called earlier in the thread, refers to one's propensity to allocate larger portions of time towards accomplishing a single task, especially in the face of adversity.
Hopefully this perspective makes it more clear how "grit" is useful.
I got A in all of my stats exams despite not doing homework, I still got a B in the class because homework is part of the grade
But why should everyone be forced to do homework if some people don't need the extra time waste?
Presumably they had a separate GPA, or at least term-specific GPAs, from their second round of community college.
But absent that conversation and direct evidence, GPA is a start. Assuming that the high school curriculum is at least passably similar to what they're going to expect from you in college (of course it isn't, exactly, college tends to be more heavily focused on tests than homework), a good GPA demonstrates that you will do the academic work required to succeed in class.
Got into state school in engineering, cruised through intro term, almost failed out second term when the weed-out started. Felt the same thing click into place over the summer: might as well try. No military experience required — 4.0 from then on.
I think the whole process is biased against male students because they mature later, and there is nothing difficult in high school and no real form of soft failure to wake you up.
We ought to make things harder, but support and include people when they fail the first time. We should normalize learning from failure.
So much of it is down to your family environment. My parents hardly existed as an environment.
The ACT score was in the 80s before some scoring model change. It's probably changed multiple times since then, but I'd learned there was a model change in 1990(?) which makes comparisons between them a bit less useful. My siblings had slightly lower scores years later, but because the model changed, there's not a lot of comparison we could make.
I took the ACT on a lark my sophomore year of high school. I scored a 29. I also attended one of the top high schools in the nation.
When I was registering for classes in college, my advisor kept trying to put me in Trigonometry or Pre-calculus (I can't remember). Because my ACT score in math said that's what I needed. I took the ACT while I was taking Geometry and Algebra II, so yeah, my math was probably weak. I tried explaining to them that my high school transcript shows I've taken up to Calculus. They wouldn't hear it. I refused to register for any sort of math below Calculus.
Eventually, they told me to go talk to the head of the math department. I told them fine. I went down there all prepared to make my case. As I started to make my case, he saw my transcript, said "Oh, <SCHOOL NAME REDACTED>. What class do you want to take?"
He didn't care about my transcript in the opposite way. I probably could have registered for 300 or 400 level math courses.
From a non-Admissions perspective, accounting for these non-empirical differences seems wise and fair. However, they introduce subjectivity into the equation, which increases the likelihood of a human decision maker being unfair.
So what normalization did we do? What would you do? Knowing that no equation is perfect, you must start with a goal and find the least-bad equation.
The goal: Only admit students with a high likelihood of not failing out.
Why: Failing out has consequences for most US students who take out large loans and must repay immediately if they fail out.
The realization: High schools already provide a proxy for degrees of past failure - letter grades.
Assumption: Assume that high schools use their letter grading system as a method of normalizing and displaying how hard their courses are. A B+ should represent a certain level of achievement regardless of school. The school has the autonomy to use any letter system they choose.
Solution: Assign a point system to letter grades and calculate an average. Use only classes correlated to success at your university. This is the normalized GPA.
Surprise #1 - If your high school thinks a tougher-than-average letter grading system (eg a 93% is a B+) somehow makes students more attractive to the majority of the 7000 US colleges, they are wrong. And probably causing students to lose out on scholarships.
Surprise #2 - If you believe this system is unfair, you can aim the blame at technology. Applications to most universities (until recently I’m told) increase every year as digital applications make it easy to apply to 10 schools instead of 3. To handle the increase, colleges can hire 3x more admissions people, or find ways to speed up the process.
Surprise #3 - Colleges always want more applications than ever before. By dropping SAT/ACT as criteria, it removes a point of friction in the customer experience, and removes a step in the calculation effort. (If they could drop GPA and keep SAT/ACT, this would the ideal situation from a metric and efficiency perspective, but Marketing and the public would throw a fit.)
There used to be a set percentage of spots for students in that situation, but the admissions people decided that “Standardized tests are racist!” is a good twitter sound byte and eliminated the spots.
Of course, their own reports said that the “bad GPA, high test score” cohort were mostly from underprivileged areas (and disproportionately black or hispanic). That nuance didn’t make the 140 character cutoff, so that group is officially abandoned by UC now.
In other news, they’re now promoting a big push to make the student body composition match the general population.
However, there is only one over-represented ethnic group in the UC system. Guess which one?
Hint 1: Whites are under-represented.
Hint 2: They swore they’d never bring back UC’s old “asian quota”.
I honestly think the people running this state’s school system are malicious racists. Their results speak for themselves: California schools are currently ranked 43rd in the nation. They used to be top ten.
Most of the decline is due to underfunding due to prop 13
This is a decades-old talking point that simply isn't true and hasn't been for years. Funding levels keep breaking records year after year.
"K-12 per-pupil funding [in 2022-23] totals $15,261 Proposition 98 General Fund—its highest level ever—and $20,855 per pupil when accounting for all funding sources." [0]
"Reflecting the changes to Proposition 98 funding levels noted above, total K-12 per-pupil expenditures from all sources are projected to be $18,837 in 2020-21 and $18,000 in 2021-22—the highest levels ever (K-12 Education Spending Per Pupil)." [1]
[0]: https://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2022-23/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Edu... (p. 3)
[1]: https://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2021-22/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Edu... (p. 4)
A) have received more money than ever before
B) not have enough money to function properly
You can see that in 2012-2013 there was a big jump in funding from 2011-2012, going from $47.3B to $58.1B. In 2022-23 we're at $102B.
We're at roughly double funding levels from a decade ago, and the schools still don't have enough money to function properly? If so, this is alarming, and signals something is deeply wrong. We should investigate what is wrong and fix it rather than throwing ever more money into the black hole and hoping that will improve outcomes, despite a decade of evidence to the contrary.
Hint: teacher salaries are a very tiny part of the expenses
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/they-spend-what-real-co...
This was me, fwiw. I’m so lucky that the engineering school I got into was enamored with my math score.
I'm plenty smart, I just needed an extra couple of years to mature before I was ready to take on the responsibility required for school, but by then my software career had already begun in earnest so I never returned.
The argument is a bit less stupid than that. IQ = racist because whites and Chinese have it while blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Mexican immigrants don't.
Is that reflected in different levels of group performance? Well, yes, but ignore that.
Let's give the assumption that certain racial/ethnic groups perform better on IQ tests as a whole than others.
If that were true, that would just be a fact. Yes. But why that is matters. And a lot of the why is just plain old racism. The groups who don't score well on IQ tests don't do so because they've been held back from all of the progress enjoyed by the rest of the world.
It's that progress that increases IQ scores. It's not that white people and Chinese people are smarter due to genetics or culture or whatever people use to spout. It's because they've been able to leverage the progress of the world to advance themselves. Black people, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans, especially immigrants have not been allowed the same access to leverage it. You give them the same resources, the same chances, and over time, you'll see the same increases.
In fact, you do. Because those groups constantly get progress's hand-me-downs. Last year's progress. So they lag behind.
Does the ethnic group that gets a quarter of Nobel prizes and was hated by Hitler not count or something?
Did I become smarter? - I sincerely doubt it.
Did I become less likely to fail out of college? …Seems unlikely, but I don’t know.
As an admissions rep, I understood that high scores, whether SAT or GPA, are certainly both proxies for a prediction: If I admit this student, are they going to fail out?
Unknown: It actually might be the case that students who get private tutoring are less likely to fail out because their parents can financially endure them struggling to repeat failed courses. I’d be interested to see a study on that.
By the time I started prepping , I had already accepted a scholarship for a local college with the plan on doing joint enrollment after 3 years.
I didn’t do that either. I was tired of college after three years and just graduated the next year and started working. I didn’t really care about GT.
[1]https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...
> That means they ought to be irrelevant to college admissions officers. Briggs found otherwise, however. Analyzing a 2008 survey conducted by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, he noted that one-third of respondents described a jump from 750 to 770 on the math portion of the SAT as having a significant effect on a student’s chances of admissions
But my question about final admit/deny stands. If you look at the racial distribution of the upper performers of any standardized exam (your “heatmap tracing”), it is unlikely to me that a college would be fine with that class composition. Either there must be a secondary layer where your admit/deny’s are adjusted or your acceptance rate must be very high.
My ACT was 34 and I can't recall my SAT score but it was also 99th percentile. My GPA on the other hand was abysmal. I can't recall, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was well below 2.5.
Once I actually made it to college I was a pretty good student, though. Graduated with honors in 3.5 years.
My school experience was that it's easy to cheat during the year and much harder to do so in exams, so often people with generally good grades would do at best average at the end.
I always had terrible grades(except for math), but they're not part of college admission scores in my country so I had no incentive to do anything about it.
The author identifies the steel man version early on: "standardized test scores are nearly useless (at least after you know GPAs)" but then mostly ignores that parenthetical. This part that addresses it seems deliberately obtuse:
> If you care about the difference in accuracy between GPA and ACT, then you should care even more about the difference between (GPA only) and (GPA plus ACT). It’s incoherent to simultaneously claim that the GPA is better than the ACT and also that the ACT doesn’t add value.
Again, the version of this that reasonable people argue isn't that the ACT doesn't add any kind of value, it's that the amount and kind of value it adds (incrementally more predictive accuracy) aren't worth the costs and biases are introduced. If you myopically value accuracy, it doesn't make folks who want to balance accuracy with other goals incoherent.
Two schools with two different grading tolerances can produce students with similar GPAs but different SAT/ACT scores. As the SAT/ACT is a national standard, not a regional one.
I remember many classes that were taught by two separate teachers: one teacher consistently gave students higher grades. The other teachers students consistently did better on the AP test - much more strict with homework and test scores, but it ended up positively impacting the students.
1. If we get rid of test scores, it would cause too much upward pressure on GPA which would make GPA less reliable. There are tens of thousands of high schools in the US. Even if the GPA distribution inside every high school is correct, how do you compare with GPAs from other high schools? And from experience I can predict that, once people realize that only the GPA is important, there will be outside influences (i.e. pay the teachers for good grades) that could cause even the distribution of GPA inside one school to not be correct.
2. If we get rid of GPA, students could just study for the test with obvious disastrous effects for their education.
We need both GPA and test scores to keep both of them in check.
Isn't it usually the opposite? Artificially high GPA from grade inflation and favoritism is "set straight" by a standardized test?
So, sometimes people are just bored. And there are a bunch of other factors here too - perhaps the biggest one being that "graduated within six years" is not a great indicator of success. Linus Torvalds did not graduate within six years but did build the first version of Linux at university.
GPA is a good indicator of how much work you're willing to put into what you're learning _now_, so it tracks well as a predictor of how much you care about GPA which is a pretty good predictor of whether you'll graduate in X years and probably not much else.
1.4 GPA.
I was eligible for the maximum academic grants for my state, just to be denied due to GPA because the string of high schools I went to were utter dystopian nightmares.
this tracks.
I understand some people "test poorly" but the truth is, if you actually know the material well, you'll test just fine in most cases. We can also coach students on how to approach testing. Other ideas are to break the test into various sessions with different admins to limit cheating potential and to take an average of the scores (or some other method) for each subject.
I guess my point is - make test results the metric to remove all bias. Change how we approach testing and preparation.
giving any credence to GPA is upholding this hellish set of norms.
K-12 should be K-9. High school is glorified babysitting, with bullying and drugs being the only escape, for both parents, teachers, and students.
So yeah, you weren't very good at the game. I wasn't either. Own that, and stop making excuses!
But for some reason, when I took my SATs, I found it to be fun. I got completely immersed for the period it took to take the test, and truly gave it all I had, with real focus. I got the best SAT scores in my school, which was shocking to some people.
And it turned out that that was far more predictive of my future, including my college GPA performance, than my high school grades were.
The problem with using just GPA is that GPA can easily be manipulated by school authorities who dislike you, test scores cannot.
In the end the scores were so accurate in predicting eventual success - a decade later, the folks who got 96% plus are all either professors or deliberately chose not to, while the rest just took industry jobs (and in my opinion because they realized that’s best for them).
Here’s the kicker - every institution explicitly said they will NOT consider these scores as part of admission process. None of the people who got in the top percentiles (4 I know) made it to a top 10 institution in the US, while a bunch of others did because they had paper authorship in their undergrad. But paper authorship in undergrad has NO correlation with your actual scientific skills! It just meant you were connected and or a hustler. It’s sad that such an awesome test is deliberately ignored by these institutions.
The irony was that these tests were also not elitist. All you needed to do was thoroughly read Lodish and Lehninger and you’re good. We did study in a semi-premium institution in India, but by no means were we privileged by any special facilities or help (at least in the context of this test). The only barrier might be the test fee itself if anything.
> All you needed to do was thoroughly read Lodish and Lehninger and you’re good.
How can these be true at the same time? If you can just read a book and get a good score, why don't everyone just get the good score?
I was lucky, I genuinely loved reading them. I think I went through them both once every time I had a bad breakup lol.
All you need to do to get 4.0 in Calculus 1, 2 and 3 and Real Analysis is work through Stewart, doing all the questions. Just because it’s simple to describe doesn’t mean it’s easy.
uh, the whole point of a phd is learning how to produce scientific knowledge usually in the form of a paper? I can't think of a better measure for that then if you have experience publishing papers because that means you've contributed to the production of some scientific knowledge? sure there's tons of variability there due to circumstance, but I think my point holds
and finding connections is bad? the scientific process is one of cooperation, teams building off the work of other teams. the lone polymath is a long dead myth.
and again, having hustle is bad? I think you'd want someone who can be self motivated enough to get involved with research going on at their university
It’s great experience but I am saying again that my personal experience suggests this to be a worse indicator of success than a good standardized test.
and what do you do in a research lab as an undergrad? you contribute to research of course. you plan, monitor, and execute experiments. you write up the results and their impacts, limitations, and related aventures for future work. you work with others in a research environment. you gather the nexessary background knowledge required to understand the field of research. in short, you do most every you would do in a PhD just with more guidance. you're not giving much reasoning beyond your "personal anecdote".
> Paper authorship had NO correlation with research success
I think paper authorship demonstrates that you're willing to put in a non-trivial amount of work to persue a problem. That seems to be atleast one attractive skill in a PhD, wouldn't you agree?
I've not been to any school in the US and I don't have a PhD, so all these acronyms like GPA only have a vague meaning to me. But as someone who kinda disliked school and didn't put much effort in it, I can see how school grades can be a bad proxy for university. I didn't even do that well in math in school, but I managed to go above and beyond with all my math classes for my CS degree. I'm not completely sure how the admission for PhDs work and if they look at your BSc/MSc tests... but again, I guess doing ANY work related to finishing a paper is probably closer to what you'll be doing later than e.g. your grades in database stuff when you'll be researching programming languages...
Paper authorship if the student is the first author shows grit and “gumption” I suppose? As if that’s what’s needed in academia at this moment (it’s important but not the main requirement). But almost no undergrad gets a first author paper. They get mentioned in the middle because they ran a bunch of sds gels. I wasn’t even interested in trying to become a professor and I got 10 papers before I finished my PhD, do you know how many I (or any of the folks I actually know who are now professors) had during our undergrad? Zero. And not for lack of trying. You know who actually got papers? The son of the department head.
> Almost no undergrad gets a first author paper
Maybe this is different in different fields but we have a lot of undergraduate first author papers in programming languages and machine learning. I mean -- through and through -- undergraduate students bringing up a topic, getting guidance from professors and senior PhD students, getting results by the end of the semester, and publishing results by next year. Even the people who end up "running the sds slides" either fall out by next year or end up working towards their own first author publications. I've always chalked this up to the experimental setup cost being very cheap in CS compared to in the "hard sciences" so most undergraduate students are already comfortable with all the tools they need to do research.
> I wasn't interested in trying to become a professor
I think this is precisely the variable that a standardized test cannot account for! I feel an "authentic" undergraduate research experience is successful if it helps students realize if research is right for them or not.
> ... papers ... the son of the department head...
I see where your frustration is stemming from. Sorry this was your first experience with undergraduate research.
Of course, but I'd bet the farm there's a very strong correlation!
Connections and hustle are very strong predictors of success.
Test scores do indicate ability, and ability is helpful but far from sufficient.
This seems like a bad take because the goal of PhDs in the US is to produce people who can publish a lot of papers, whether that's a good ideal or not. So having produced papers as an undergrad gives you a powerful signal that you are such a person.
>Here’s the kicker - every institution explicitly said they will NOT consider these scores as part of admission process.
I know in my field, Physics, the subject GRE was very important for admissions and outside of the recent changes due to Covid I believe every top program explicitly requires the Physics GRE for admissions and its not until you get to much lower ranked programs that it becomes optional or not used at all.
I personally struggled a lot in school due to health and other issues. I also hated doing homework which is BS work, and I always had high scores on my midterms and finals which I think matter way more.
Why does busywork play such a big role? It should be exempted. If I can get a 95+ on midterm and final I obviously understand the material. Why did I need to spend hours of my day doing BS exercises when I already understood the material? Nonsense.
So I get a B at best overall because I get a F on homework? What a joke. I really think school is a waste of time when it’s done that way. Learn stuff, move on. I wish that when I have kids I can afford to send them somewhere they can actually grow and thrive, not just sit down and do a bunch of homework problems.
(Just my $0.02)
Now I struggle immensely on going through the every day grind of adult life.
Perhaps you’d just be more numb.
I now run eng at a prop trading firm that you'll occasionally see in the FT.
So in my view, I read it as "Why should I have to do bs when I'm lucky and tend to do well on tests?"
In my cs classes, I did terribly on tests, and got 100% on all the work, so I failed. Why? Well I have chronic sleep issues and miserable short term memory that's gotten worse over time, and the mid-term was 40%. I also just don't really care about the outcome, because it doesn't represent my ability to do any of the tasks in the real world. Oh, I was too slow in writing out the exact java syntax for a generic implementation of a priority queue implemented with an array? Tests aren't inherently virtuous. You have to believe in them to do well, and you have to feel adrenaline in the process. Usually has nothing to do with incremental progress, measurable skill, or anything valuable really. I can now recall various key bits of key events from the Byzantine empire, but did I do well on the test? No, I was a bit tired that day.
Both should be balanced, and relevant. The tests and the homework should meaningfully test whether or not I can do what they intend to indicate. Not "He couldn't sit there for 3 straight hours from 6pm to 9pm on one night of the year writing out java in pencil in a dead silent room.
I would prefer having quizzes on each chapter as well, so every few weeks you review the material
That's assuming that these midterms/finals accurately and completely assess understanding of the material.
As a teacher, I need more assessment moments than one or two tests in a term to monitor, guide, and support students' learning processes, for all students in my class. This "busywork" gives me the extra input I need to adapt my teaching to my classes and students.
Of course, from my perspective, this isn't "busywork" because I try to create meaningful learning activities. However, from the perspective of some students, I can understand it feels like busywork. I try to differentiate, but that's not always possible, particularly if you're performing significantly above average.
The problem is that even if you are doing fine without the busywork, your classmates might not and need the training through busywork. Or they might need the structure and incentive to do something at all. Unfortunately, giving some students no work and other some work and other a lot of work will not go down well, particularly in larger heterogeneous groups. So we end up treating everyone the same, more or less. This can really suck for any student who's an outlier to the positive OR negative side.
Ideally, you'd get an education tailored to your needs, but in practice that's difficult to realize depending on where you live, your parents' background, etc. For example, if you're living in a smaller village with just a single high school, you don't have much choice. Similarly, if your parents don't understand what you need, they'll not go look for it. Or if your parents don't have the means to support your alternative schooling, bad luck. Etc.
Some students (particularly those who spent lots of time on the HW but didn't do well on the tests) found this unfair, but I think it teaches an important lesson: that you don't get credit for trying. Your performance actually matters.
There's issues with GPAs too, like lack of standardization, but they both have their issues with fairness.
Maybe that’s all true. But it’s quite a remarkable claim that would turn the world as we know it upside down.
If you structured society such that only the top 0.5% of households by income could send their kids to college, you'd find that a lot of your successful entrepreneurs, judges, scientists, etc. went to college and had a high income growing up.
But I don't know that proposing something else, like standardized testing, as an alternative to this would be quite a remarkable claim. You're just saying that the scoring function produces a lot of false negatives.
What I’m saying that the current scoring function appears to match up pretty well with our intuition about who is smart enough to work on Wall Street or at Facebook. At least, these profit-seeking institutions don’t seem to think it would be better for them to shift their hiring from Stanford to kids with 4.1s and lower SATs who went to UCSB instead.
Which would cause those institutions to move away from income as a means of deciding who gets in; much like in institutions now are moving away from standardized testing as a means of deciding who gets in.
> At least, these profit-seeking institutions don’t seem to think it would be better for them to shift their hiring from Stanford to kids with 4.1s and lower SATs who went to UCSB instead.
There's two assumptions here that you may want to reexamine:
1. Profit selling institutions are purely rational at hiring, and only hire based on merit. As in, if you're hired to work at a Wall Street firm, it's not because you went to Harvard; it's because you're smart. Which is very optimistic, to say the least.
2. That people are intrinsically smart or not, and the institution you go to doesn't change that. If test scores didn't correlate at all with merit, you'd still want to hire from Stanford over UCSB; not because the SAT scores are higher at Stanford but because Stanford is a better institution for educating people. So even if the people who go in are the same caliber, the people who come out are different.
To be clear, I'm not disagreeing that test scores can measure aptitude. I'm disagreeing with the line of reasoning where we have the following premises:
1. We live in a society where resources are allocated by performance in standardized testing.
2. Having more resources increases the likelihood you're successful.
3. People who are successful have high standardized test scores.
And conclude that standardized test scores are an accurate predictor of future success.
What people are getting up in arms about is the validity of testing as a whole regarding real life outcomes, and this is an effective argument as it is damn hard to grade people by any metric that doesn't get gamified to death and resulting in people wasting a ton of time on playing the game.
A student who fails a Calculus exam is nearly guaranteed to be poor at Calculus.
To say exams have no predictive power is to ignore the obvious.
Passing a Calculus test doesn't necessarily predict if the student can apply their knowledge to production to generate new ideas and widgets which make our lives better, it just predicts that Student A can follow rules and learn something _when required by an authority_.
I think this sentiment is similar to how people feel about Leet Code interview questions. So what if an engineer can invert a binary tree if they can't formulate new, useful ideas and convince others to work on them?
Perhaps student A is more likely be create new, better widgets than student B but I think academicia/LC cannot test this directly, which is what people are getting at when they criticize tests.
Some jobs require a creativity, a spark, a something that you can't test for. But they also require some solid skills, and those skills are testable.
I'm not so sure about this. What if student A was just better suited to learn Calculus when they were tested while student B bored by the class and teacher and stopped going/caring but, if given the chance to apply themselves in a non-academic setting working on real problems that affect people's lives, student B would learn Calculus twice as fast as student A and deliver a better widget in less time?
There are many more scenarios here that I could list but I think the primary point is that the context around the students, their lives, and the testing environment matters a lot and this is something that cannot easily be accounted for using numerical test scores
> But they also require some solid skills, and those skills are testable
Maybe badly. Leet Code is supposed to do this but is famously criticized. Probably better than nothing I suppose
Nobody says that tests are perfect
They are just the best thing we managed to find
Go ahead and design something as fair as tests that takes env/context as input too.
It actually does though, because if he fails, then you can be completely certain that he can't.
I feel like you're making my point here. I can speak french and be spoken to, order off a menu, etc. but I can't understand when two native speakers are conversing. Are you saying I don't understand french?
Everything is time constrained.
Yeah but not to the same degree or in the same way. Having to sit in a room with no sources for an hour and shit out some test answers is not really same as having weeks to apply yourself with access to appropriate resources, references, and guidance from more senior coworkers.
If you want to be creative the first step is to put the problem in your head so that you can actually ponder it. If you have to pour over references and look things up, then you're not in the game any more than you can play chess if you have to look up the rules as you play.
> If you want to be creative the first step is to put the problem in your head so that you can actually ponder it. If you have to pour over references and look things up, then you're not in the game any more than you can play chess if you have to look up the rules as you play.
It seems like you are confusing the problems with the solutions. If you can understand the problem well enough, the solution will become obvious, even if you never took the math class--at least that's how it works for me. I do best when I have an actual real-world problem to solve, not a conceptual one created by an instructor.
Everyone on my engineering course did this question, but my guess is zero of us could solve it right now from memory. A fair portion would be able to solve it with some references available.
But you're making the other guy's point for him here. It's a waste of your mind to have test-taking skills memorized.
What I mean is that if you know calculus you can do it fluently, like a language. You don't remember the solution, you calculate it, preferably in your head.
Edit: Though, back at my university tests took five hours, and I understand one or two hours is normal in America, and I could imagine that those shorter tests mean that there's more memorization and less sensible study.
The way I see it, you should have the machinery in your head, so that you can derive things if pressed, and you should have the ability to work largely in your head and actually ponder things, but you shouldn't necessarily memorize formulas.
For example, I haven't even memorized the formula for the quadratic equation, I just complete the square in my head every time.
I think it's important to end up knowing them and to end up being able to calculate with paper and pencil to some degree and because calculus is very basic it's something one should be able to do in that way.
You should be able to imagine a right angle triangle sitting on the hypotenuse of another right angled triangle and figure out the x and y coordinates of the corner and how to get the sum of angles formulas from that, or to in general imagine things from calculus, like how the product rule can move what what is differentiated from one function to another etcetera.
Most of the time it's better to do something the right way than to artificially hurry developers to hack something together that will bite you later in the form of bugs
I've always been bad at math, I failed precalculus multiple times in both highschool and college, I never got past my first year of calculus in college, I wasn't able to pass descrete maths, and I never took an algorithms class but, never the less, I am applying statistics to novel problems at my day job and people are lining up to work with me and my career growth is accelerating faster than those around me who certainly got better marks than I did.
How is this possible? I'm not entirely sure, however, it indicates that academic tests don't actually measure ones ability to apply themselves and their knowledge to real problems that people actually have outside of an academic setting (i.e the real world), which I believe is the primary point in the "anti-testing" narrative.
Failing something multiple times in the past also doesn't mean that you don't know it now.
But that method will need to be able to predict future events that shape the person
Tests dont say that you cannot be successful, it just says how prepared you are, now.
I am trying to point out that the methods we use to "determine who is a genius and who is not" are deeply flawed and rudimentary, letting people fall through the cracks and preventing people with different learning styles for succeeding.
Like I said in another comment, I am terrible at testing and failed my way through school but I am still able to have a successful career as a software engineer applying maths to engineering problems that other people are excited about and want to work on. The reasons for this are complex because I am complex, like all people, but not like numerical test scores.
> But that method will need to be able to predict future events that shape the person
I think individuals are capable of qualitatively assessing a person's ability and trajectory given enough information, time, and context. Humans may come to the wrong conclusions a lot of the time but so do academic tests...
If you want the change, then propose an improvement.
________
>I think individuals are capable of qualitatively assessing a person's ability and trajectory given enough information, time, and context. Humans may come to the wrong conclusions a lot of the time but so do academic tests...
Ive heard countless stories like teacher telling student that he will be not even close to being successful due to not giving a damn about school and yet they manage to do fine
So no, i dont think people of school are capable of this at scale
You would need smart and open minded and up to date people to at least try to do that reasonably
I don't need to have a solution to have valid criticisms of an existing system. I am just sharing my experience with testing, how it has affected my life, and why it didn't work for me.
That said, I do think we can improve our ability to assess (not test) people by:
* Putting less emphasis/focus on tests and more focus on long form project work and interpersonal relationships with peers and instructors * provide more flexibility to students when testing them (like access to resources/notes, more time, allow them to ask questions etc).
> You would need smart and open minded and up to date people to at least try to do that reasonably
I would certainly hope that the people teaching the next generation were smart, open minded and up to date. Testing doesn't control this anyway, a bad teacher will be unfair and have bad curriculum regardless if they test their students formally or not.
I agree.
>I would certainly hope that the people teaching the next generation were smart, open minded and up to date. Testing doesn't control this anyway, a bad teacher will be unfair and have bad curriculum regardless if they test their students formally or not.
Hmm, I originally didnt think about those people as a teachers, but as if they were some kind of examiners.
But thats fine, they could be teachers too
Yet, I do believe that the bias would be too big :(
At every level of eduction except higher teachers were visibly biased towards students
Some benefited from it, some had harder time due to that.
I think I ended up with a D or worse on that one units test. My friend was like "oh bro you just add a pi to everything". This isn't thanksgiving and it's more complicated than that!
Very well put. The whole question of "do test scores predict college graduation" is easily conflated with "do test scores predict success/ability". In reality, college is a big set of tests. It would be interesting to compare with other metrics.
They're taught as "test techniques." And there's plenty of tutors who teach it.
Process of elimination, read the questions then passage, common question structure, are all examples.
These are "skills" but they don't really apply outside of testing.
Hell I went into standardized tests with common question solvers programmed in my calculator. If that's not gaming I don't know what is.
But there are limits to GPA gaming and references gaming too
I'm not trying to say tests are useless or anything, but they're definitely gameable.
Test-taking is a skill that many students learn that's not applicable outside of school really
There are also $30 books that teach it and youtube videos that give it away for free.
I don't think it makes tests useless -- almost everything is gameable.
But claiming that tests are ungamable objective measures of knowledge/ability is not true
But then again, we don't have any standardized tests here. Not for college admission, or afterwards. The grades you get, are what you have - and everything is judged by those grades.
Using the same methods to measure wildly diverse people is a tragedy that causes individuals who could otherwise contribute to society in very meaningful ways to have fewer doors open to them.
Of course, the far left will claim that "real world outcomes" are also systemically biased when they don't align with their priors.
I don't buy this. It's like saying someone has a remarkable physique or remarkable fitness only because they used PEDs when it actually requires a significant amount of effort and discipline regardless of what's in the gas.
Certainly targeted studying, tutoring, test accommodations, etc. can help. But the difference is at the margins.
Test prep helps the average person test at their level, but there are some people who can at best make excuses like "I must have skipped a line when I was filling out the form" and for those people the one thing that helps is hiring a ringer to take the test for them.
School on the other hand offers vastly greater options for people to turn financial and social capital into false achievements in terms of chiseling for grades, expensive sports and other activities, etc.
You still have to listen to and understand what the tutor says, though. And it's not as if the tutor is saying anything that's not published in books or on YouTube videos - the only real benefit a private tutor could even theoretically have is that he could potentially find a few different ways to explain a concept until the student understood it.
Yes that's one benefit. Also with the focus on one student the tutor can gear lessons to best suit their learning style and current knowledge.
Really anyone who can afford a tutor would benefit from one.
I view "test optional" as a signaling exercise. In brief, how closely can you read the instructions and infer what you are not being told? The key is "test optional". If you sit for the test, you get more than just admissions, as merit-based financial awards are unlocked. The University Admissions does not require a test, but many of the donor contracts that fund scholarships do require those tests.
Unless the issue is students just don't want to take the test to begin with.
Sorry, what does that mean - who is the "you" in that sentence, and what are they inferring?
It sounds like what you mean is that that your school went test optional (ostensibly to help level the playing field), but those who are lucky or privileged enough to have the secret decoder ring can decipher the instructions and find the key to optimizing their chances of admission. If so (as someone who grew up with immigrant parents who were educated but definitely would not have had the awareness to navigate this), that seems really fucked up...
If it doesn't change you chance of admission then what is the applicant supposed to be infering from your cryptic instructions?
It’s a difficult problem to solve, but it’s unfair if a student gets easily distracted or anxious when taking a test around others in a time constrained setting. Those types of external factors generally shouldn’t be represented in a student’s test results yet often are. If tests are to be a good indicator for all students, I think accommodations have a ways to go.
If tests are indeed a generally good indicator of a student’s success and are continued to be used in such a manner, I feel it’s important that the experience is fair for all types of test takers. Many US tests such as the CPA exam do a great job of handling accommodations. However, many others (like the PSAT) have a lot of room for improvement.
I have long wondered how these interact / can support people who are a couple of sigma out from what we have decided is the “norm”. I can see how additional test time can help someone with anxiety or distraction issues, which can help someone with other strengths shine.
But how can this work outside the academy? A trial lawyer has only so much time to work on the case before it goes to trial or before some response to a filing is required. An engineer building a rocket still has to get something designed before assembly. Arent such time accommodations are hard to implement in the “real world”?
There are nice counter examples to my question. For example dyslexic people struggle with all sorts of cases, yet technology can help many of them (e.g. new kinds of fonts), and not just current students but people already in the work force.
I can also see the school accommodation helping someone who is separately working on their anxiety issues — though mental health cost support is quite poor, at least in the US.
But at their root: do these accommodations help or do they provide an unrealistic hope to the student?
NB: I want everyone to have a fair shake, and am a fan of ADA accommodation and affirmative action and related diversity efforts. I ask this question within that context.
Those density gradient plots in the linked blog post are interesting and useful to think about, but they're kinda hiding the fact that the vast majority of the data going into them is based on test-takers with a certain standard background, characteristics, and so forth. That in turn shapes the contours of what is error in those plots and analyses. The problem isn't necessarily that the tests are useless per se, it's that it's hard to interpret them in a way that accommodates people in nonstandard situations, or even accommodates the idiosyncracies of differences between people in general, differences that wouldn't matter in the real world.
The errors of using ACT-only, GPA-only, and so forth in the post is pretty interesting, but the author is missing the fact that that table has never really been the point of contention. The point of contention is whether that table's patterns apply equally across divisions of gender, race, SES background, age, disability status, and so forth and so on. They raise the point that the improvement in error from switching from ACT to GPA is comparable to (or better than) adding ACT to GPA, but isn't the real question whether doing so increases certain types of "predictable error variance", in the sense that you could predict the residual from things like SES, race, and so forth and so on?
I think GPA is seen as more acceptable than ACT because it's exchangeable in an important sense with the criterion being predicted. That is, if you want to know college GPA, maybe secondary school GPA is a little flawed, but at least it's ostensibly similar in terms of what it actually is. I think people have a sense that, say, you aren't using standardized tests as the criterion for college graduation, so why use it for prediction? Why have college and college GPA at all? Why not just let people take standardized tests and skip the whole degree program thing? There's reasonable arguments for doing that, but also reasonable arguments for not doing it, and many of those are the same arguments for and against using the test for admissions.
On the other hand, on the GRE, the writing portion was last and I could not bring myself to care. I scored in the 50th percentile, which for someone who regularly scores in the 99th percentile on standardized tests (including ones with writing portions), is pretty bad.
Sounds a lot like the precogs in Philip K. Dick's Minority Report.
Several decades ago, I had a high-school History teacher. We had an elite private high-school in the same city as I lived (India has both private and public schools). They had an extremely rigorous selection process, including infamous interviews with parents for admission to kindergarten. Our history teacher once remarked, "They take horses and send them out as horses. We take horses, asses and everything else and send them out as horses".
The SAT/ACT/GPA filter seems to be focused on selecting horses and proudly declaring all horses graduated.
Correct. Although there are huge benefits of a gate-kept horse-only environment. Competing against each other, the horses become more excellent. This is why the parents are paying the big bucks and putting up with the process. It is about gaining access to a horse-only environment.
> We take horses, asses and everything else and send them out as horses.
This is just envy at the easier job of the private school teachers, not indicative of their actual transformational capabilities of the public school teacher. The best that these teachers can do (which is no small feat) is to manage the classroom such that the donkeys and the horses do not fight and the horses can stay motivated despite having fewer peers.
Ended up going to what I thought was my safety school and rejected/waitlisted at every reach school I applied to. I sometimes wish colleges mandated name/ethnicity-blind application reviews - not to sound ungrateful, but I’m still incredulous to this day that the best I could do was a public state school (still top 50 admittedly).
It ended up being a great experience in that it was a forcing function and made me realize most of these rules and expectations around admissions were meaningless. But I probably could have saved years in high school exploring things that mattered rather than optimizing for a college application process that didn’t ultimately end up feeling very fair.
This is the President of Stanford speaking out of both sides of his mouth:
2022-10-12: "Stanford apologizes for admissions limits on Jewish students in the 1950s and pledges action on steps to enhance Jewish life on campus". Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne apologized on behalf of the university and pledged action on recommendations in a task force report confirming Stanford limited the admission of Jewish students in the 1950s.
https://news.stanford.edu/report/2022/10/12/task-force-repor...
2022-08-02: Amicus brief filed in support of Harvard and University of North Carolina “A diverse student body enriches the academic experience for all Stanford students,” said Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne. “Considering race as one part of holistic review helps us foster a diverse campus community, one in which all students have the opportunity to learn from each other’s experiences and to think critically about their own views and preconceptions. It also means that Stanford graduates from all backgrounds can go on to bring their unique insights to leadership roles in the government, business, and nonprofit sectors.”
https://news.stanford.edu/report/2022/08/02/amicus-brief-fil...
Guess which race/ethnicity Stanford is limiting now?
It seems Jewish life is already thriving on campus - despite being just ~2% of US population, they are 7/11% of Stanford's undergraduate/graduate students [1]. To put that into perspective, and excluding from analysis the 10% international students, they are 3.9x over-represented among non-international undergraduates, relative to their US population.
In contrast, white (including Jewish) undergraduates are only 32.6% of undergraduates, but 57.8% of US population [3]. Meaning non-Jewish whites are 25.6% of undergraduates, making them 0.49x under-represented.
So despite a Jewish person having a 7.9x greater chance of getting into Stanford than a non-Jewish white, Stanford's president is apologizing that this disparity isn't even greater.
[1] https://www.hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/stanford-un...
[2] https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/stanford-university/...
Any time I see this come up it always feels like asian students are being used a cudgel in order increase admissions for white students.
You can disagree with it, as I do (where I don't expect every non-racial sub-population to show proportions of race corresponding to the total population) but how can you not comprehend what he's saying? Like, you don't understand it? Come on, postulate a few explanations in English for what it could possibly mean.
In fact, it's past the time time to address your question, and start using the term consistently. Stanford themselves boast how "underrepresented minorities" are the fastest growing group [1], without defining the term. Presumably they mean relative to population, but somehow they don't count whites among that group, despite them being, at Stanford, both under-represented and a minority.
We would all greatly benefit if, instead of being so coy, they would openly state: "Yes, there are fewer non-Jewish whites than what would be expected from population numbers, but that is because they're just not smart enough."
After all, how can the conversation advance, if the participants are dishonest, hiding or ignoring data as is convenient?
[1] https://news.stanford.edu/report/2021/12/08/underrepresented...
The implication may be clear to you and I, but the post I replied to was literally asking what over-represented means (what, not who). Presumably they would ask the same of that Stanford article.
Group A is 5% of the overall population, but 15% of the best admissions to a college, and the college ends up being 10% from group A.
Also - grouping all Asian groups is racist in itself. It's implying that Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Thai, Vietnamese are the same, which is patently false.
This sentence comes out as both racist and elitist at the same time.
Columbia? A public school in a state that mandates acceptance of Community College graduates with good enough grades?
Only got into flagship state schools that were well below my average SAT
The one thing I've learned from this (a valuable lesson): never, ever do the self identification. You'll always get fucked. Self identifying is always a mistake
It’s more of a sniff test that is only performed at elite schools or for privileged positions (affirmative action and/or scholarships).
I knew a woman who identified as black who was lily-white. It turns out her grandfather (in the south was black), and the locally scandalous out-of-wedlock interracial relationship that produced one of her parents was a big part of her identity and influenced what she studied. She ended up at an elite school.
On the other hand, if someone puts a race on the application that doesn’t really match how they look and doesn’t have much in the way of explanation in their application, then I think that interviewers at elite schools would (at a minimum) be curious. This is especially true if the race selected would likely get them some sort of preferred admissions status.
With regards to Asians in particular, many (most?) Asians can reasonably put down multi-racial since there has been much racial mixing within Asian over the past few millennia. Whether that jibes in a US elite college application is a different issue.
At most schools, unless race confers someone a special status like affirmative action or scholarship eligibility, then no one cares. If someone got in specifically due to an inaccurate claim, then they run the risk of being expelled or even having their degree revoked for unethical behavior.
I'm extremely pasty white, blond hair, blue eyes, Norwegian last name. But 23 and me said that I have 0.1% North African ancestry, or 1 ancestor from ~1600 AD..so African American it is!
Good question.
Just because they can doesn't mean they will.
As I said elsewhere, I think that the most likely filter for race bamboozlers is in the application process when the stated race and the combination of application, references, and alumni interview does not tell a coherent story.
Regarding Warren specifically, I will honestly say that I don't think race mattered very much for her. I know it's a meme in certain circles, but she applied in a very different era, one in which admissions standards were much lower. Being capable and ambitious was probably enough regardless of her race. I could be very wrong about her specific case, but I am certain that the Harvard and Penn of that era was nothing like the Harvard and Penn of today in terms of competitiveness of admissions.
Have either of these actually happened? Someone put an 'innacurate' representation of their 'race' down and that happened? I'm trying to imagine how you could prove it. For instance, some theories hold that humans emigrated from sub-saharan Africa and thus most/all (even Americans) would be technically 'African-American' by some definition of the word.
It's my understanding that these forms request your self identified race thus there would be no wrong answer, you merely need to self identify for the second it takes to check the box.
Yes, people have been expelled and had their degrees from elite schools revoked for unethical behavior (usually academic misconduct).
Has it happened for misrepresenting their race on their application? I have no idea, since I don't keep up with such things. I would imagine that this situation is handled much more subtly and much earlier in the process (e.g., by noting that race doesn't match appearance in the interview and/or content in application). Said another way, if someone is able to con their way into an elite school via lying about their race, my guess is that they dodged the most likely filter (the admissions process).
That said, there is a blurb in almost all applications that says that folks can have their admission rescinded etc etc if their application is not true to the best of their knowledge.
There is also a code of conduct that says something similar regarding ethical behavior.
I've seen some whacky stories about these clauses being invoked, so anything is possible. Need an example, do a search for "the water buffalo incident" that happened at one of these elite schools (ostensibly for racial harassment under the code of conduct).
By that exact same reasoning, couldn't literally anyone else do this? If we start blurring the definition, why does it conveniently stop there?
Sure.
I don't think anyone is getting dinged or getting special affirmative action consideration for listing themselves as unspecified multi-racial.
If someone checks a box that gets them special affirmative action consideration, and it makes up no part of their application, and it doesn't pass the sniff test at the alumni interview, then a note will probably be made that race, appearances, and application do not appear consistent, and they will proceed from there.
The admissions officers are looking for a compelling narrative to admit the applicant. It's up to the applicant to provide that compelling narrative.
If I were advising someone who is multi-racial with an affirmative action twist while not really looking the part, I would recommend that they make a note of it in their application. Note that being part Black while appearing very White usually has some impact on shaping the person's identity.
For reference, I knew one person at an elite school who would introduce herself in icebreakers as "My name is $NAME, and I am Black"... and her skin was extremely pale white. She had a Black grandfather who had a scandalous affair with a White woman (when and where that was not apparently acceptable) to produce one of her parents. She told us stories about how that impacted her identity. I imagine she may have written a little bit about it in her one or more of her admissions essays.
This is actually what I’m asking. How do they measure your race? If you make the claim someone is driving under the influence, you have a defined blood alcohol level threshold and a way to test that. How do they do the same for race?
Great question.
My guess is that they would only take action if you did something like brag on social media about hacking the admissions system by lying.
Stranger things have happened...
Still better than being binned as Asian
Prop 16 failed, but that won't stop them. Asians at Meta and Alphabet look to your left and look to your right. One of you will be gone when corporate American implements the same policies as Harvard (which cuts Asian numbers in half). And who is standing in the way of that future? Republican judges.
We're no where near such draconian decisions. But if we get there, the decisions will be based entirely on the financial contribution of an employee/team/project/department to the company's bottom line. I don't believe tribal/race/group affiliation will matter.
I love how the GPA requires a decimal place of precision, yet musical achievement requires nothing more than listing the plural of "instrument."
We all care about different things, I guess
My (Asian) kids are going to face the same challenges when they apply for college. When the time comes, I'm tempted to ease off the whole tiger parent thing, let them have a more well-rounded high school experience, and go to a public state school. It's what I did. Had to spend a few years clawing my way into a FAANG compared to graduates from fancier schools, but in the end it worked out.
The main thing I want for my kids (they're still young - 7 & under) is to find things they're passionate about - things that makes them want to work hard and overcome a challenge. That could be school, sports, music, games, or whatever.
Of course, I'm just a random internet stranger, why would anyone listen to me :)
The comments below on how to get into an elite university (like Harvard or Stanford) have a fairly high hit rate when all of the boxes are checked. This is a fairly detailed and actionable list, but I am sure I left some important parts out (esp. regarding edge cases and corner cases). Feel free to ask follow-up questions if you have any.
My comments/suggestions:
-Strong grades and strong test scores will get a student into most state schools. This is a very solid baseline goal, imho. These same grades and test scores will be table stakes at elite schools -- more will be required in order to be admitted.
- Make sure your kids are actually interested in going to an elite school and making the extra effort that entails. If they are not, then steer them towards state schools. The comments below assume that they want to go to an elite school and are willing to make the extra effort.
- Take a challenging curriculum and get As with maybe a B or two -- the goal is to be top 5% of the graduating class, ideally the top 1%. Note that Bs (more than two) can be overlooked very easily if the rest of the application is strong. Note that the grade criterion can absolutely suck if your kids go to a high school that thinks that AP/honors classes just means that the students should be assigned more busy work. The busy work will take time away for them to do something that is actually interesting (see below).
- Learn how to write well. This will serve the student well in the application, HS classes, college classes, and life in general. Note that students will probably be rated on their writing skills by their references, and they will need to rate extremely highly (e.g., top 1% ever for this teacher).
- Do solid on the SAT. Contrary to popular belief, you do not need a perfect score. That said, a strong score is table stakes. Specifics below.
- My main advice for folks is to prepare for the SAT, mainly by taking practice tests with recent old tests at the same time and a similar location that the student will be taking the real test. The SAT is a marathon, and most people perform below their potential due to fatigue. Getting used to the long slog and the pacing of taking the test helps most people a lot. They will also be able to find gaps in their test-taking skills, and these are usually fairly easy to address when not under time pressure to do so.
- Math -- I would definitely aim for a perfect score in the Math (since it is fairly basic), but a slightly less than perfect score in Math is fine. Engineering people and folks who apply to MIT tend to have perfect or one tick below perfect.
- Verbal -- Most people try to game this a month or two before the test. Big mistake. My suggestion is to read well-written newspapers like NYT, WaPo, and WSJ as well as "high brow" magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and/or National Review. They should make note of every word that they don't know, and they would do well to learn them. This is easy to do over three or four years and tougher to do over one or two months. Bonus points if you, as a parent, discusses these articles with them so that they are reading critically rather than just casually. The text structures are the same types of (edited and abbreviated) text structures that they will see on the SAT.
- More than grades and SAT scores, the student should be able to impress one or two teachers that they are in the top 1% of students that the teacher has ever seen. Why? This is a common question on the reference letter form. I strongly encourage the student to check out the reference letter forms early in their high school career to see the manner and extent to which they need to impress the people who write them references. The student can do this by showing interest in one or more areas and really going deep into the subject beyond what is in the high school material -- basically, have passion for the topic.
- Also note that there are schools and teachers who know understand how the admissions game is played. The two things that these folks do that help a lot are: 1) to round up their rating of the student (e.g., if top 1%, maybe rate them "best I've ever taught"), and 2) to give detailed examples of outstanding work the student has done. The recommendations give credence to whatever it is that the student writes in their application. Picking who writes recommendation letters is a very important decision that I think many applicants put very little thought into. Not only do these teachers/people need to know you well, but they need to be able to write a good recommendation letter as well (this is a rare talent, imho, unless you attend an elite university feeder school).
- Related to grades/subjects, I would personally encourage students who can do it to enroll in a joint hs/jc program. There will be much less busy work, and one or more of the professors will know how to write a good recommendation.
- Try to figure out one or more areas in which they can do something notable at a national or international level. There is a wide scope of what this can look like, but this is where most people have a substantial gap in their application. This area can be social/leadership (probably the "easiest"), sports, arts, or academics (probably the toughest). I buried this relatively deep in the list assuming most people won't read this far, but this is the one thing that really sets aside exceptional applicants from threshold applicants who have great grades and test scores.
- Examples of "notable" (social/leadership): Start a successful business (ideally in an interesting area), start a non-profit that does meaningful work, develop a community program that makes meaningful change (esp. in under-served communities), develop some ongoing development aid project abroad (often seen in church missions), amazing Eagle Scout service projects. Note that all of these are starting or leading a group to new levels of success. Just participating is not enough (anyone can do that).
- Examples of "notable" (athletics): Be a recruited athlete, be an athlete that is not recruited but would be competitive on the university varsity team and expresses an interest to play at the university, win a state championship, be chosen as "all state" in your state (preferably first team), be on an Olympic team or on the short list development squad, win a regional (or wider) event in an "Olympic sport" (e.g., figure skating, ice skating, diving, swimming, etc. that might not be covered in HS sports). On a personal level, I would probably encourage folks to look at less common sports that can be excelled in at a young age -- competitive shooting, obscure martial arts (Japanese sword drawing, anyone?), noodling, etc.
- Examples of "notable" (arts): Be a published author, have an exhibit in a gallery, win a national/international competition (this might be easier than it seems if you're clever), be a national/international touring artist. Note that this can be combined with social/leadership by doing something like creating a highly regarded arts competition, creating a successful touring music group, etc.
- Examples of "notable" (academics): high placement in a nationwide math contest, be selected for the international science fair (a series of competitions), win a Westinghouse competition, publish a research article (as primary or a significant contributor). Note that this is the toughest category to stand out in, imho. The people who apply to elite schools are absolutely crushing this category. "Placed 3rd in state with HS trivia team", while commendable, won't really look that impressive or unusual when compared to a Westinghouse winner.
- With regards to the "do something notable" point made above, this something should be referred to in one or more of the student's references, otherwise it looks like it is completely made up and will probably be discounted. Supporting documentation helps (e.g., awards, newspaper articles, published papers, etc.), and be sure to send in this documentation as "supporting materials". If your kid is doing something special, I hope that they reach out to the press to have their special thing covered -- local news outlets love stuff like this, and it looks great in an application.
- Note that there are weird edge cases in admissions. As an example, UPenn is a private school, but they have to accept a certain number of PA residents per year. While there are extremely strong students from PA at UPenn, there are also some students who are relatively weak (and it shows). Also at UPenn, each of the four schools has an independent applicant pool, so the Wharton pool (9% admission rate) is different than the Nursing pool (25% admission rate). Not to pick on UPenn, but I happen to know details about these two examples.
- When applying to a school, the applicant should have a good reason for going to that school. "Because it is #1" or whatever doesn't cut it. The access to resources at elite schools is amazing, and the applicant should show that they have at least considered how they might utilize some of those resources.
A few additional notes:
- Note that many people who attend elite schools almost stumble into checking off all of the boxes above without realizing it. It's amazing how some people just randomly do the right things that pave the path to admission into an elite school, while others who try so hard to get into an elite school either do the wrong things (like overly focus on grades and SATs because someone told them to) or have someone else in the process (e.g., a teacher or guidance counselor) fail them.
- Some people think that what happens at elite schools is what makes their graduates so successful. This is true at the margins. Specifically, the access to specific networks of people that control high value parts of the nation and economy is exceptional, and people who avail themselves of this feature of elite schools will see an outsized return on their attendance at an elite school (secret: many/most don't avail themselves). All that said, many of the people who have crazy success after attending an elite school would also have crazy success after attending any school because they and their families are very well connected. Note that state schools also have these sorts of networks, but they are typically limited to the state or regional area in terms of scope.
- IMHO, the at-school opportunities available to a great student at a big state school (something that I think is relatively easy to be) is probably comparable to the opportunities available to a slightly above average student at an elite school (harder to be due to the admission's barrier). The reason is that most state school students are not ambitious and overly curious and extremely talented, so the best students stand out to the professors at state schools while they are relatively common at elite schools. I think the only potential "loss" of going to a state school is if a student would be one of the best both at the state school as well as being the best at an elite school (this bar is almost unbelievably high).
- Most people think that there is discrimination against Asians because they know or have heard of some Asian who got a perfect or near perfect SAT score and a perfect GPA (i.e., the "standard strong" applicant that is a dime a dozen at elite schools) and did not get into Harvard or Stanford or wherever. As I hope the above post has shown, that result is not surprising if their grades and SAT scores are the most compelling part of their application. Harvard's entering class this year is ~25% Asian (most being Asian-American). The threshold Asian folks who didn't get in probably look a lot like the threshold White folks who didn't get in -- they were very solid but didn't stand out or had one or more red flags in their application. As such, the goal is to be a strong admit applicant rather than be a threshold applicant and hope for the best.
- All of the above seems like a lot of work, and I suppose it is. That said, I think that most of it is something that ambitious and motivated people will be doing anyway just because they want to, and the rest is just polishing the edges (e.g., making sure to get good references).
- Lastly, Cal Newport has written some amazing books about "being a superstar" and "standing out without burning out". I recommend giving his books a read.
I hope this helps.
Thanks for this comment. I think this is really important. I see so many families make huge sacrifices to try to get their kids into top colleges when they really dont seem like the type of kids to be elite class people. I grew up in a country where this didn't really exist so am a bit baffled by the whole game. I'm happy to take it easy and get a regular college, but worry my kids might miss out on some pot of gold.
The default assumption should be that if your kids enter an elite school as $SES kids, then they will leave the same (SES = socioeconomic status). So a middle class kid will likely leave Harvard still a middle class kid due to their connections, way of perceiving the world, way of interacting with the world, etc. There usually is no pot of gold.
The dream of social climbing is often more of a rug pull than many middle class people realize since it doesn’t just end with school. Some folks with classic hard-working working class or middle class values will go to an elite school, do well, and then get a top job in IB, consulting, law school/law firm, or whatever, and they think they have made it. But then their career path just flattens after a few years of very grindy work. If the social climber did not make a concerted effort to develop a network of higher class friends (which is not easy if you’re not already in it, imho), then partner or whatever becomes much tougher when job performance is basically based on if they can make it rain or not via their social networks.
There are exceptions, typically in academics, in specializing in a topic or group of people that are foreign to northeast corridor people (e.g., oil people in Texas or car people in Detroit), or in certain organizations (e.g., Goldman was/is known for facilitating social climbing).
An example of one guy I know who made a big jump in SES (sort of)…
He came from a family of educators in small town Michigan, but had a very working class mentality (pro-union, kids did manual labor, etc.). The guy was obsessive about being rich from a young age — the type of guy who actually wrote himself a check for one million dollars dated for his 30th birthday and was hell bent on cashing it.
Long story short, he managed to work his way into a PE firm as a partner in his mid 30s after a decade of decent-but-not-great pay grindy work. His speciality was suppliers to Detroit auto manufactures. Note that he knew nothing about cars and the auto industry at the start, but he knew how to talk to Detroit people without sounding like a NYC shyster.
Made a bunch of money (mid 8 figures), closed down the fund, and retired in his early 40s in the Hamptons.
Note the path though… super grindy, didn’t really make it early, relied on his prior SES, a lot of social climbing, and a bit of luck to set himself apart and make it “big”.
This is not a path I would recommend to my kids unless they are hellbent on taking it like the example above.
The experiences I see of those who tried to social climb is that a lot of them hit mid-life and wondered where their high-trajectory career went. That “high-trajectory” was a class-based illusion, imho, and they didn’t do what it would take to make that illusion become real.
Apologies if this sounds overly cynical, but I think it’s important to debunk some of the myths about what makes the elite schools seem so impressive.
To end on a more positive note, I will say that elite schools often help folks reach the top end of their SES range, especially for upper middle class folks. So kids who come from families with wealth in the 10m range might end up with wealth in the 50m range, with a few making a bigger jump to lower upper class. This may seem like a big jump, but it is not functionally since that level of extra money largely just buys QoL improvements rather than access life changing levers.
There was a guy on HN who wrote a really good social class guide and what affordances each class gave you. I will try to find it and link it here later.
Here is a link:
https://indiepf.com/michael-o-churchs-theory-of-3-class-ladd...
Michael O’Church had the original idea. I can’t quickly find a link to his original article in the internet archive (way back machine), but I think it’s still there.
Some things that may have gone wrong:
- Maybe your GPA was too low for your high school. If it put you outside of the top 10% or so of your class, then that hampers your chances substantially.
- Maybe your references did not know how to write good reference letters for elite schools. I think this limits a lot of people, since tepid reference letters from people who don’t know better can kill an application.
- Conversely, maybe you went to an elite university feeder high school. If so, maybe you didn’t compare well against other folks who did get into elite schools other than test scores.
- You applied based on academic prowess, and maybe your academic prowess was not enough for elite schools. Elite schools typically want national or international levels of success in something (especially academics, which is hyper-competitive), so maybe your state competition results combined with a relatively low GPA (for elite schools) didn’t really match up to the other 100-200 or so people at each school who got in on the back of academics.
- Maybe you didn’t have much/any significant community involvement and/or leadership experience. This may seem soft, but it makes applicants stand out, imho.
Fwiw, I don’t think your ethnicity played as much of a role as you think it did. Those killer test scores you have are basically table stakes at elite schools (i.e., you need a lot of something else to get in), but they are a meal ticket at large state schools. Many/most people think that test scores and above average grades alone should be enough for elite school admission, but this hasn’t been true for many, many decades.
For reference, “top 50 state school” is something like University of Georgia or Ohio State University, both the type of school that will not slow down someone who would have fit in at Harvard or Stanford, imho.
> But I probably could have saved years in high school exploring things that mattered rather than optimizing for a college application process that didn’t ultimately end up feeling very fair.
I guessing that you optimized incorrectly.
I’m curious about where you got your information on how to optimize for elite school admissions. Most people will say something like “have great test scores and great grades”, and they would be wrong for elite schools but very accurate for most state schools.
I don’t want to say that elite school admissions are perfect (or even good), but people who have never been able to see the processes from the inside (e.g., actual applicant pools) usually make very unreasonable criticisms of the processes.
Fwiw, every elite school tells applicants exactly what they want in their recruiting materials. It’s just that different people interpret those materials in different (usually inaccurate) ways.
All that said, I’m glad it worked out for you.
At the same time - if I'd gotten 300-400 points less on the SAT, I likely still would have ended up at the same school. So in that vein my gut says the test scores were close to irrelevant. Or maybe not, I guess I wouldn't know.
Separately I think it's valuable to evaluate this through another lens. It sounds like you have some experience with the admissions process, and something I've been curious about for the longest time is this: if I had been in a slightly different segment, e.g. first-generation immigrant of non-East-Asian ethnicity, how would that have affected my chances?
Is it that test scores mattered less for me in this particular case, or is it that there's generally a higher bar because of competition from peers with similar East Asian backgrounds? In both cases it feels like test scores matter less overall (even if paradoxically the bar is generally higher!).
---
> For reference, “top 50 state school” is something like University of Georgia or Ohio State University, both the type of school that will not slow down someone who would have fit in at Harvard or Stanford, imho.
This was the only piece I felt differently on. There's a significant advantage to attending a top school - the alumni network and a generally stronger and more well-connected student body for starters. Going to a state school didn't necessarily prevent me from finding success later in life, but I definitely took the long way around.
I do. Not as an admissions officer, but in a variety of advisory capacities to admissions offices over the decades.
> if I'd gotten 300-400 points less on the SAT, I likely still would have ended up at the same school
Maybe. It depends on the state school. I certainly hope that your scores and (maybe) grades got you access to some sort of honors or scholarship program that a significantly lower score would not have. If you were not in one of these types of programs, I am curious about why that is the case.
> if I had been in a slightly different segment, e.g. first-generation immigrant of non-East-Asian ethnicity, how would that have affected my chances?
My default answer is that it would not have affected your chances at all unless someone in your application process was racist. This would most likely have happened with someone who wrote a reference letter rather than someone affiliated with the universities.
The exception would be if your different ethnicity put you into an affirmative action category (specifically Black, Latine, or indigenous people). You might get in based purely on academics, but it seems like you would still be relatively average or weak in other areas. There would be a lot of other factors to consider (e.g., socioeconomic status, school/school district, geographic area, etc.).
While a few of the affirmative action admits are merely "standard strong" (i.e., not admit and not close because so many people are similarly strong while not standing out) who get in due to their race, many/most tend to be shine in other areas (esp. community leadership activities). Affirmative action basically gives some of these folks a slightly lower curve on academic rating, but their academics are (usually) good enough, and the other parts of their application made them shine. There is plenty to debate about whether that is a good policy or not, but I think that this is a reasonable policy if a specific kind of racial diversity is an institutional goal (as it seems to be). Almost all of the folks who get into elite schools are extremely impressive in some factor that the school values.
> Is it that test scores mattered less for me in this particular case, or is it that there's generally a higher bar because of competition from peers with similar East Asian backgrounds?
Without knowing more about your specific situation, my guess is that you focused on the wrong things -- specifically SAT scores over almost everything else.
As I have said elsewhere, no "strong admit" East Asian candidates are being denied admissions to elite schools because of a quota. Zero. None.
The folks who don't get admitted who feel jilted are typically "standard strong" (good grades, great SATs, nothing exceptional, will never get in) and the threshold applicants who just miss an offer because the whole package doesn't quite add up to enough (rare, but it happens). That said, lots of White people fall into these categories as well, so I don't think that it is specifically an East Asian phenomenon.
The issue of discrimination comes up because the average SAT scores of Asians is higher than that of other races. Some people think that is a sign of racial discrimination. This can be seen in articles that claim that Asian students need ### more SAT points to get into $ELITESCHOOL (prime example of misuse of statistics around the theme of correlation does not indicate causation). Personally, I think that this just points to a focus on test prep in the East Asian community that is consistently greater than other racial communities (by a lot).
> There's a significant advantage to attending a top school - the alumni network and a generally stronger and more well-connected student body
This is true... if the students avail themselves of this network. Most folks who are not already part of that network rarely do. I have found that there are relatively few people who effectively utilize this network during school or after school who would not have had similar access via another school and/or their already-existing family connections.
I call this the dirty little secret of the Ivies -- the Ivies largely don't make people successful, they just accept a large chunk of people who are already going to be successful and let them go to school there. There are a very small percentage of people of modest background who go to elite schools and then becoming someone exceptional via the school network, but that is extremely rare (for a number of interesting reasons, imho).
Note that state schools have similarly strong alumni networks, but the scope of these networks is usually state or regional rather than national or international.
The real exception in my eyes is if someone has relatively narrow ambitions to be an investment banker, a consultant, a supreme court justice, etc. (i.e., some line of work that almost exclusively consists of elite school grads). Yes, elite schools help with this tremendously. That said, I imagine that the elite folks in GA and OH society (which I listed as top 50 state school examples) are more likely than not graduates of UGA and OSU, and certain roles like state-level politicians, judges, business magnates, etc. are disproportionately from these schools.
Feel free to ask more questions. I feel like the misinformation on this topic is abundant, and I like to dispel as many of the myths as I can (at least based on my experiences).
I made very detailed reply to a concerned Asian parent who replied to you:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33341897
Please add to that line of the thread as well if you find it interesting.
Of course there was. An admissions officer saw it and they have to stop the school getting too Asian.
Where do you believe that this specific situation has actually happened this century?
I am fairly certain that this has not happened at any elite school in the recent past.
The worst actual evidence I’ve seen is of an admissions officer referring to a “standard strong” applicant as something slightly less flattering like “a familiar profile” Asian applicant.
Note that “standard strong” basically means great grades and scores and little else of significant note. This title defaults to non-admit.
Below is a link to a click-bait article that discusses the topic. Note how almost all of these “inappropriate” statements fall into the category of least charitable possible interpretations of the rater’s comments rather than the explicit malice that you seem to suggest is happening in admissions offices.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mollyhensleyclancy/asia...
The reason the holistic admissions system was made up was to avoid having too many Jews. Now it’s used to prevent too many Asians.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
Would you mind expounding on these interesting reasons? I've heard a theory that it's because the truly powerful networks are established at prep schools such as Andover and Exeter, so the vaunted power of the elite university network is really an extension of the prep school network.
>This was the only piece I felt differently on. There's a significant advantage to attending a top school - the alumni network and a generally stronger and more well-connected student body for starters. Going to a state school didn't necessarily prevent me from finding success later in life, but I definitely took the long way around.
People have studied this and found that students that were accepted into elite colleges but ended up going to lower ranked schools had equivalent levels of achievement after graduation. So it turns out graduating from Harvard isn't as important as you think. Unless you want to go into IB or Big4 Consulting.
Getting into a top 5 school would have definitely been a surprise, but I also doubt the top 20 or even top 50 schools have equal levels of talent.
> People have studied this and found that students that were accepted into elite colleges but ended up going to lower ranked schools had equivalent levels of achievement after graduation. So it turns out graduating from Harvard isn't as important as you think. Unless you want to go into IB or Big4 Consulting.
This tracks but as mentioned elsewhere it's probably a longer journey all around. There very much is an in-crowd of connection pooling when you're an alumni of an elite school, from my experience of going to some meetups with heavy membership from them.
I tend to think that that outside of like the top tiers of Harvard, Yale, Princeton and MIT/Caltech that the top 20 have student bodies that are basically interchangeable and it's a coin flip whether someone gets into UPenn but not Columbia or UChicago but not Vanderbilt.
>This tracks but as mentioned elsewhere it's probably a longer journey all around. There very much is an in-crowd of connection pooling when you're an alumni of an elite school, from my experience of going to some meetups with heavy membership from them.
You can short circuit this by doing a graduate degree. MBA from HBS is at least as good if not better than an AB from the College. But like I said outside of a few industries those connections aren't as valuable as you may think. Is getting a job in a VC firm easier as a Harvard/Stanford Alum? Sure, but least in theory though getting startup funding from a VC as a Harvard vs Michigan alum should be roughly equivalent in difficulty(lest we break the illusion of meritocracy in the tech world).
The "why this college" essay can trivially be addressed by looking through the university website.
Most applicants don't even do this.
A simple formula for this essay is:
- $APPLICANT has a demonstrated interest in $TOPIC(S).
- $ELITESCHOOL has $RESOURCES about $TOPIC(S) that $APPLICANT would like to explore.
This can obviously be iterated, expanded, and refined, but that's the basic formula for knocking it out of the park on that sort of essay.
Touring colleges has little to no impact on this essay.
Ghost-written essays also come across as shallow unless the parents also pay off teachers to write recommendation letters that corroborate the BS. It happens, but it's not common.
> A simple formula for this essay is:
Sounds like a perfect job for a talented ghost writer. The problem with college websites is that only maybe 5% of is actually useful for essay writing. The rest is meaningless generic fluff. College tours allow you to experience some quirks of the school that you can sprinkle in to make your essay more interesting.
>Ghost-written essays also come across as shallow unless the parents also pay off teachers to write recommendation letters that corroborate the BS
You're comparing strong student with a modest background to a weak student from a privledged background. For students of equal ability, privledged ones have much better access to resources for writing a good essay. As far a recommendations go, that's also highly biased towards elite private schools. They have much smaller class sizes, so students are able to form much closer relationships with their teachers and teachers can write more personalized rec letters.
I suspect that you're greatly overestimating your BS-detecting abilities, which makes sense because you'd otherwise be hopelessly paranoid and cynical. My wife used to work part-time editing essays at a large college-consulting service, and it definitely helps. For example, simply by writing a lot of essays, you gain an intuition about how much you're able to BS without sounding fake. On their own, students are much more likely to overshoot or undershoot.
As far as my personal experience goes, my approach towards college essays was to write raw, avant-garde essays that obviously signal my personality. My writing skills weren't strong enough to make this work, but I could rely on the adults around me, a few of whom were alum at prestigious universities to refine the drafts into something that was actually coherent. I definitely couldn't have done this if I were from a poorer background.
I graduated with the highest SAT scores in my school and the second highest in my city back in the early 90s. I’m not bragging, it was a relatively small town in the south with not great school systems and a total graduating class of 1500 across all of the schools.
What are the chances that happen because I was so smart or because I had a mother who was not only a high school math teacher but also spent years volunteering to teach SAT prep classes?
Second story: my step son didn’t have the ACT scores to get into the college he wanted to go to. Four months later and with the help of a private tutor who was a teacher (not in his school) that we paid $100/hour for 12 hours, he suddenly raised his scores more than enough. Did he gain aptitude in 12 weeks or did he learn test taking techniques?
And nobody is denying that test scores can be raised. That’s likely a fixed amount so just amounts to constant noise. I think you’re as likely to find a way to consistently raise a 600 SAT to 1600 as you are trying to train any couch potato into an Olympic sprinter.
What are the chances that I would have chosen to be software developer coming from that same small town if my parents hadn’t bought me a fully tricked out Apple //e in 1986?
Even when I was in college in 1992, most of the CS students didn’t have a computer home. By then I had a $4000 LCII set up with a $1000 laser printer and a $300 SoftPC application to run x86 compilers. My parents weren’t “rich”. My mom was a teacher and my dad was a factory worker.
It sounds like you are saying that good parenting shouldn't have any effect of kids success in life.
Look, we know that poor parenting results in kids with poor outlooks, but penalising good parenting by taking away the effect of good parenting is probably not a good way to go about helping those kids with poor parenting.
Maybe it isn't, maybe you're correct, but the practical effect of ignoring tests is to penalise good parenting, instead of helping those kids with aptitude but no opportunity.
We need a really good reason for why kids that worked hard at the tests and demonstrated that they were willing to study (whether payed for and/or pushed for it by the parents) should be rejected in favour of those who never demonstrated this.
“Good parenting” == “being able to pay for private tutors for little Timmy”?
Just like a “good software engineer” == “someone willing to ‘grind LeetCode’ for six months?
(And just in case someone replies that I’m just upset because I couldn’t “get into a FAANG”, yes I work for one now. No I didn’t do the LeetCode grind or the DS&A interview. Yes, I’m in an IDE coding most days doing the same type of work I’ve been doing for almost three decades)
Are you saying that ignoring tests won't have any effect on the majority of good performers who got that way because of parental attention and involvement?
Ignoring the tests just teaches those kids who worked hard that they shouldn't have.
The message it sends to all kids is terrible: don't bother with learning because you'll be chosen, or not, based on your demographic.
Just like there is a big difference between “being a good software engineer” and “practicing reversing a binary tree on the whiteboard while juggling bowling balls while riding a unicycle on a tightrope”
Yes, but the PRACTICAL EFFECT of doing away with tests would be to disadvantage the hard workers.
It's true that people who are otherwise well off are more likely to have test prep, and those people's test scores are often several standard deviations higher than low-income students from bad schools without test prep. But the counterfactual of (same person) +/- test prep = about 40 SAT points.
"2. It might be that test scores don’t predict college graduation rates[...] is provably false."
You're technically right with "Admission test measure how well you can prepare for admission tests, nothing more.".
It's definitely not a silver bullet and doesn't assure success after admission. nonetheless, the ability to prepare for these tests is strongly correlated with success along this path.
If they can't be arsed to prepare for them they're unlikely to bother with studying either, making their admissions pointless too.
And if they attempted to prepare for the test but still failed... Then they're unlikely to be able to learn in the University setting either and should follow up on other avenues.
Big oof. This is an example of terminal data science poisoning. The data in the paper already proved the point of the article! Using it to create some chart gore where you reproduce the same plot in uncanny valley levels of resolution doesn't add to the argument. This is using very sophisticated techniques to achieve what you could by simply blurring an image of the first chart.
My older brother switched from a B student in a private high school to the public high school and slept his ways to A's
Roth, P. L., BeVier, C. A., Switzer, F. S. III, & Schippmann, J. S. (1996). Meta-analyzing the relationship between grades and job performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 81(5), 548–556. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.81.5.548 Employers and academics have differing views on the value of grades for predicting job performance. Employers often believe grades are useful predictors, and they make hiring decisions that are based on them. Many academics believe that grades have little predictive validity. Past meta-analyses of the grades–performance relationship have suffered either from small sample sizes or the inability to correct observed correlations for research artifacts. This study demonstrated the observed correlation between grades and job performance was .16. Correction for research artifacts increased the correlation to the .30s. Several factors were found to moderate the relationship. The most powerful factors were the year of research publication and the time between graduation and performance measurement.
I went to a top university in my country after transferring in after not getting in from highschool. Turns out myself and many others would have got a lot of value from going to a less prestigious university. Ultimately most of us end up working at the same select companies. But idk I am from Canada so maybe the intensity of selection is not the same.
We put far too much value in prediction of success and not enough value in actual success. Seems like the academic version of keeping up with the Jones's
As to explain the confusion in the models, well when you have confounding variables like this it is easy to reduce one variable's weight nearly to zero and place the rest in the other variable. So if I'm right (might not be) I think you could also show that the inverse is true, that grades aren't a good predictor and test scores are. The breakdown suggests that this is true too tbh.
But I also disagree with some of the analysis and techniques here. It's not always easy to use models that have continuous(ish) variables (GPA/ACT/income) and discrete ones (race/gender). I bring this up because there's some hints that they aren't a stats expert. For example there's the line
> The “likely-to-graduate” score becomes a probability after a sigmoid transformation.
Which just isn't true. A Softmax function[1] creates a probability distribution but a Sigmoid[2] doesn't. A Sigmoid bounds the output to [0, 1] (or [-1,1]) but being bound on that range isn't the only requirement to a probability distribution. A sigmoid does not guarantee that the sum of the elements is 1 (cumulative density), but a softmax does. In fact, it almost never will. (I mention this in my ML class a lot so make sure you all don't make this mistake too! I'll be really annoying if you do)
There's some more errors and novice approaches here and so I just want to note this because we shouldn't just take the results and conclusions as is when the modeling is bad. But I still think he makes some good (and bad) points and those are definitely up for discussion.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33338809
Tests are just leetcode for students, after all.
https://meet.nyu.edu/uncategorized/test-optional-at-nyu-what...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-23/csu-drop...
https://wtop.com/maryland/2022/06/maryland-university-system...
I don't know how this works in practice tbh. But it is curious.
Factors for college rankings often include acceptance rate (lower is better), and average SAT/ACT scores. By not requiring SAT/ACT scores, you do two things at once:
1. you allow more people to apply, especially those who did not take the test or received a poor score, who you can simply reject to bring down your acceptance rate
2. by making it optional, only the applicants who think their score would be an advantage (i.e. those with high scores) would send them, which brings up your "average test scores".
We have some evidence from MIT that it is a bad idea to drop testing.
https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...
Some researchers collected data before, during, and after this time, and followed-up on the physicians later.
My fuzzy memory (which might be incorrect) is that MCATs were predictive of GPA in the first two years of medical school like 0.20 on a Pearson correlation metric, and it dropped from there as you went out increasingly further in time and included things like ratings on clinical rotations. So it was predictive, but fairly weakly so and seemed less predictive as time went forward.
There is a huge amount of data backing up the claim that the school attended influences the SAT, etc.
There is a huge amount of evidence backing up the claim that SAT/ACT aren’t 100% predictive of later academic success.
But “not being 100% predictive” does not mean “is not predictive”.
The core problem the removal of SAT, etc is attempting (imo hamfistedly) to mitigate is the following chain:
(1) Student A comes from affluent family, in an affluent region.
(2) Student A goes to a private school with better teachers, etc, or because it’s an affluent region the public schools have better teachers, etc
(3) Student A’s family can afford additional SAT, etc tutors
Now imagine a somehow identical Student B, but from a poor family in a poor region. Before any other factors become involved, they don’t get the benefits of 2 or 3.
We would expect that on average 2&3 result in higher scores, and so a higher acceptance rate, and a higher rate of scholarships for Student A vs Student B. Again this is on average.
The TLDR is given two kids who have identical mental ability, the one from the richer family will, on average, have better scores. So schools say let’s drop the scores entirely, but that is also clearly nonsense: Even in this exact scenario Student A will do better in uni or what have you, because part of why they got a better score is that they have been taught and learned more - IE they absolutely do know more and are more academically proficient than Student B by this point. Moreover we know (because of yet more studies), Student A will tend to continue to do better than Student B once they’re at school, even once B “catches up”, because we know that people with fewer external stressors perform better at everything.
So even if we discard the score based entry to unis, we’ll see a strong correlation between original score and subsequent academic success.
So while I understand the desire to remove the “accident of birth” factor that benefits the lucky and penalizes the unlucky, simply removing the test requirements is fairly questionable as an approach.
This is also before asking about Students C and D who are the peers of students A and B - surely the better scoring of A and C (or B and D) is who you should prefer, but now you’re discarding theoretically ideal and unbiased data in favour of…?
I think both are important to being successful. Ignoring one for the other is probably bad. That said I prefer IQ over grades.
Grades have a disadvantage of A's being way too common, though - no resolution at the top of the scale.
I don't have any good ideas to get away from that.
It's possible our declining academic performance is simply another artifact of rising inequality.
Or what matters most - who is willing to put in the effort.
You already have 6 hours a day in high school. Don't need more time than that. As for money, that's not needed either. Your high school math books will do. There's also the public library, the Kahn Academy, youtube, etc.
Now, if you basically don't know or have trouble understanding the material? I wonder to what degree some tutoring and even a fair bit of time are going to make up for years of poor school outcomes (for whatever reason). Some specific strategies are 1.) pretty straightforward--if you can quickly narrow options down, maybe guess and move on--and 2.) won't move the needle a lot.
In my opinion and experience of the results my peers got, these kinds of standardized tests were really pretty good. The tests and studying methods themselves didn't necessarily mimic what you would do in a real job or even a university degree and sure seemed stupid and annoying at the time when you had to do the damned things... But stepping back and thinking about it, for the most part the people who were intelligent and capable of a motivated and disciplined approach to academics and fields that typically require degrees did actually tend to score better than people who were lacking in those things.
Yes there was the occasional very intelligent person who wasn't disciplined or motivated for whatever reason who did poorly. They weren't or wouldn't have been happy or done well in college either though, for the most part. And there were a few uninspiring intellects who got extremely high marks withe the sheer grind, although I think that's an impressive attribute itself and probably very useful for a lot of fields. There certainly were not hordes of Einsteins and Newtons just slipping through the cracks because they didn't test well.
So I don't know. There is this "common wisdom" that tests are terrible, which is an attractive idea. I just don't know if that's really true. Maybe they're actually pretty good for a large proportion of people.
Want to do well on the SATs?
1. take all the math classes your high school offers
2. pay attention in those classes
3. read a lot of adult-level books (I read tons of scifi)
and you'll do fine without needing any gamesmanship.
Me, I struggled and came pretty close to flunking out.
Obviously you can try to create a real simulation but it's probably not the same thing.
Extremely valuable skills for white collar drones.
Completely meaningless as a measure of actual intelligence though.
We could get the same results by forcing people to complete white noise patterns and seeing how long it takes them to quit.
The intent is to gauge general mental ability, not rule following.
Take spatial in tests [0]. They aren’t about rule following so much as problem solving and lateral thinking.
Also iq tests are standardized and normalized. They have flaws, certainly, and are no way meaningless. It’s the best that we have until we get something better and there’s lots of correlations between iq and positive life outcomes. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_intelligence_(psycholo... [1] “ IQ correlates positively with family income, socioeconomic status, school and occupational performance, military training assignments, law-abidingness, healthful habits, illness, and morality. In contrast, IQ is negatively correlated with welfare, psychopathology, crime, inattentiveness, boredom, delinquency, and poverty.” https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/iq-and-...
General mental ability as defined by sitting down and doing an arbitrary boring task, viz. following a rule that you don't see much point in but someone important told you to do.
The ability to do well on those tasks correlates much more strongly with:
>family income, socioeconomic status, school and occupational performance, military training assignments, law-abidingness, healthful habits, illness, and morality. In contrast, IQ is negatively correlated with welfare, psychopathology, crime, inattentiveness, boredom, delinquency, and poverty
than whatever intelligence is.
In short: IQ is a great tool to measure your ability to be a white collar drone.
The test is not designed to be confusing or hard to understand.
I expect IQ is also correlated with being a white collar drone (pretty awesome) but it’s also correlated with whatever intelligence is, as imperfectly as we’ve defined it.
E.g. you're given a finite set of pictures and expected to guess what the next picture is from a few possibilities. The answer is that it's all of them since any finite sequence has an infinite number of generating functions. The only way to get it right is to try and read the mind of whoever wrote the test and guess what they meant. An invaluable skill to have in the white collar workforce when guessing what your boss actually wants from you. But white collar empathy is not intelligence.
From the IQ test listed here: https://www.mensa.org/public/mensa-iq-challenge literally all of them are reducible to questions about integer sequences.
But why so snarky?
I don’t think we’ll have closure.
What grades show is how well the student presented what the teacher wanted returned. Generally, but not always, students that are more intelligent than their teachers and may even have a better grasp of the subject don't receive the highest grades. Grades are about obedience, not learning. The "best" students are children of teachers.
Why would any rational individual take an IQ test? IQ cannot be changed and whatever outcome doesn't change your course of action, being the fact that you have to work hard.
Low IQ: Gotta work hard
High IQ: Gotta work hard
It certainly felt like the kind of test that could be improved with practice. Not as easily as the SAT, sure, but certain patterns seemed to appear, in a way I bet I could prep for.
I haven't tested that hypothesis, but if anyone wants to fund me to take a bunch over the next year... let me know ;)
(Why did I take it in the first place? Curiosity. Maybe also a bit of vanity. "Rationality" seems like a false idol to focus purely on in general, for decisions.)
Regardless of the test, the percentile numbers didn't change.
I've read people claim on and off for years that you can "study" for them and "improve" your scores, but that's not been my experience. Any variations you get might be slight, but you're extremely unlikely to get any statistical difference... unless....
I had a test at age 9 for a specific 'gifted' program starting in our school district. 2 months later, we moved districts, and I was given the exact same test again. I aced it, because I'd asked my parents some of the questions I didn't understand the first time. I 'confessed'(?) to the test giver in the second district that I'd already had these exact same questions 3 months earlier, which they noted. I'd already 'qualified' after the first test, so again, I don't think there was any significantly different outcome (I 'qualified' after the second test in the new district as well).
you cannot pre-emptly put yourself in your place, that’s the best route for depression and depression sucks whether you have a high, normal or low IQ
From what I can tell, most professions have a rough IQ floor. If you're above the floor, more IQ can always help, but other traits like conscientiousness and agreeableness tend to matter more. But if you're substantially below the floor, there's almost no chance that hard work will help you bridge the gap.
If you're doing research, you have the other side of the spectrum, IQ beats everything, and hard work can actually prevent you from finding solutions.
There aren’t many Archimedes out there and most research is the result of lots of labor.
It’s some level but not genius.
Also at some level "I'd rather have" becomes pointless. Choices are usually 1 individual, or waiting 6 months to a year. I don't know if we're in a bubble but I've seen the same in biochemistry research and computer research: academics take everyone they possibly can, because master or above and they will get an unbeatable offer from a huge company very soon.
Ideally, you would want an IQ test and the 'Big Five' personality traits. The latter though can be annoying to get.
I have seen some firms get very good results by basically using a disguised IQ test, there are some firms that basically compose the tests, give them to 1000s of people and perform the factor analysis to extract IQ from the test, then contract the the test out for hiring departments. Some of those tests are pretty creative in that most people wouldn't know they were taking an IQ test.
> Scholastic assessment or g? The relationship between the scholastic assessment test and general cognitive ability
> There is little evidence showing the relationship between the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) and g (general intelligence). This research established the relationship between SAT and g, as well as the appropriateness of the SAT as a measure of g, and examined the SAT as a premorbid measure of intelligence. In Study 1, we used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Measures of g were extracted from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery and correlated with SAT scores of 917 participants. The resulting correlation was .82 (.86 corrected for nonlinearity). Study 2 investigated the correlation between revised and recentered SAT scores and scores on the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices among 104 undergraduates. The resulting correlation was .483 (.72 corrected for restricted range). These studies indicate that the SAT is mainly a test of g. We provide equations for converting SAT scores to estimated IQs; such conversion could be useful for estimating premorbid IQ or conducting individual difference research with college students.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0956-7976.200...
If you're 10 years old and have a below average IQ, don't bother aiming for a PHD at MIT in atrophysics.
Any study in this area that doesn't control for socio-economic factors is near useless, because it mainly predicts that children of successful (ie rich) people will likely grow up to be successful (ie rich). This is almost tautological.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761243873...
> Scores on the SAT (a test widely used in the admissions process in the United States), secondary school grades, college grades, and SES measures from 143,606 students at 110 colleges and universities were examined, and results of these analyses were compared with results obtained using a 41-school data set including scores from the prior version of the SAT and using University of California data from prior research on the role of SES. In all the data sets, the SAT showed incremental validity over secondary school grades in predicting subsequent academic performance, and this incremental relationship was not substantially affected by controlling for SES.
Or this
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED562860
> (a) SES is related to SAT scores (r = 0.42 among the population of SAT takers), (b) SAT scores are predictive of freshman grades (r = 0.47 corrected for school-specific range restriction), and (c) statistically controlling for SES reduces the estimated SAT-grade correlation from r = 0.47 to r = 0.44.
There are more studies on this, with rather consistent results. In short, poor students do about as well as rich students when matched on SAT score.
a) influence grades in primary and secondary school
b) influence standardized test scores
but not also do:
c) influence college performance (esp. freshman year when you're least removed from those same effects in HS)?
This doesn't mean that SAT scores can't still be similarly predictive across socioeconomic gradients. Both of these things can be true without any inherent conflict.
Questions that are much more interesting to me are:
* should any level of the education system attempt to correct for underlying socioeconomic factors?
* if so, how? (I would love more discussion about this because it both seems like an extremely difficult problem and because otherwise we waste all our time and energy on non-effective things like removing standardized tests from admissions requirements.)
In the software engineering interview world, for instance, a whole lot of active discussion is spent around interviewing methods. Let's make that bigger! Let's figure out how to get the people who never even make it to the interview stage today a better opportunity.
Otherwise it's like taking two plants, reducing the amount of sunlight one gets to 50% of what the other one gets for several years, then moving them both to a new environment, waiting four more years, and saying "huh, the one that was taller before we moved them 4 years ago is still taller, guess that's a good measurement to use to pick plants, since even controlling for that, the taller ones from the light-limited cohort are also ended up taller than their cohort-mates after the last 4 years!"
Sure, but it's still worthwhile to point out factually inaccurate articles and deceptive papers. If they want to argue for how the education system should correct socioeconomic factors, they should do so honestly, not by lying to us that tests are useless.
The test scores are useful. That's the point. There's nothing to debate.
This means that admission officers who want to learn about SES of candidates in addition to learning their test scores usually either are looking for something else the student’s aptitude for learning and ability to succeed, or are completely unfamiliar with state of the research (this is sadly quite common, and this is often willful ignorance too).
>You seem to be completely unfamiliar with the research in the field.
I didn't mean to imply that the SAT or grades are not predictive of future performance, only that lower socio-economic statuses will correlate to lower SAT grades in the first place, ie your (a) proposal in the second source.
From this same source:
> The SAT-grade relationship is not an artifact of common influences of SES on both test scores and grades
To substantiate my initial comment, test scores are highly predictive yes, but as you just linked, SES is highly predictive of test scores (and this is only for people who get to the damn test). This is the tautological part. High incomes make people test well which lead to jobs with high incomes. But since this correlation is not 100% but merely very high, we can pat ourselves on the back and say hey it's accurate!
Articles that defend the accuracy of the system tend to implicitly defend its legitimacy, which I think is a much more important question than "is SAT indicative of future performance" when considering whether the SAT is useful.
Why then talk about “controlling for SES”? The correlation SES/educational ability very much exists, but why would one want control for SES? The goal is, allegedly, to test scholastic aptitude, so that we can identify students that are likely to succeed at school. If SES correlates with this ability, by controlling for this, all you’ll do is control out the effect.
> High incomes make people test well which lead to jobs with high incomes.
No, there is little evidence that high incomes makes people test well. Here, and in the entire thread, you are committing what is called a “sociologist’s fallacy”. This is from Meehl, P. E. “Nuisance variables and the ex post facto design.”:
> While every sophomore learns that a statistical correlation does not inform us as to the nature of the causality at work (although, except for sampling errors, it does presumably show some kind of causal relation latent to the covariation observed), there has arisen a widespread misconception that we can somehow, in advance, sort nuisance-variables into a class which occurs only at the input side. This is, of course, almost never the case. The usual tendency, found widely among sociologists and quite frequently among psychologists (particularly among those of strong environmentalist persuasion) is to assume sub silentio that there is a set of demographic-type variables, such as social class, domicile, education, and the like, that always operate as nuisance variables to obscure true relationships, and that function primarily as exclusively on the input side from the standpoint of causal analysis. This automatic assumption is often quite unjustified. Example: We study the relationship between some biological or social input variable, such as ethnic or religious background, upon a psychological output variable, such as IQ or achievement. We find that Protestants differ from Catholics or that Whites differ from Blacks. But we find further that the ethnic or religious groups differ in socio-economic class. We conclude, as an immediate inference and almost as a matter of course, that we have to ‘control’ for the socio-economic class variable, in order to find out what is the ‘true’ relationship between the ethnic or religious variable and the psychological output variable. But of course no such immediate inference is defensible, since on certain alternative hypotheses, such as a heavily genetic view of the determiners of social class, the result of such a ‘control’ is to bring about a spurious reduction of unknown magnitude in what is actually a valid difference
This was published over 50 years ago, but nevertheless, this mistake is done over and over in sociological research and discussions.
> Articles that defend the accuracy of the system tend to implicitly defend its legitimacy, which I think is a much more important question (…)
I actually have no idea what you mean by “legitimacy” here.