Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajwinn | Hacker News Reader

I worked in Admissions at a large state school from 2005-2007. Our method for determining admissibility reminded me of the heat map chart in this article - ie GPA on one axis, SAT/ACT score on the another axis, trace your finger along both paths to see if the applicant was in or out.

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.

View on HN

I can see the value of the GPA. When I was applying to Oregon State way back in the day (this would have been early 90s), my SAT score was really great. Probably top 10 in my school. My grades, on the other hand, were sub-2.00. I may have had a problem keeping myself interested in school. But I found tests extremely easy.

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.

GPA is problematic because not all high schools have access to the elite courses that push a GPA beyond 4.0 and many top schools look for an admission barrier around 4.5 (some with exceptions for valedictorians only).

This points to the real problem with GPA. The institution assigning GPAs to students have a strong incentive to inflate GPAs. If colleges only looked at GPAs, high schools would inevitably give in to the temptation to give away perfect scores like candy, and students from schools retaining some shred of dignity would suffer for it. Standardized exams, for all their faults, are standardized, and don't have this problem.

We don't have SAT in Canada and mostly rely on high school grades. Most universities/colleges adjust student GPAs on a per high school basis based on alumni performance in their first year courses.

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.

You can retake the test as many times as you want. Some schools average them, others will take the highest. The whole point of creating the test(s) in the first place were to deal with variability of GPA's between schools, so it's a bit useless to say "just adjust GPA's between schools instead".

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.

Adjusting GPA between schools is one approach to deal with grade inflation between schools. SAT is just another approach with its own tradeoffs. I've simply listed why I prefer the former over the latter approach.

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.

They do a regression that includes both GPA and SAT. That is mathematically an adjustment of grades, where the adjustment is the SAT term. Then, as articles such as this one show, this correction correlates well with success at the university. So ultimately it becomes the same correction you want.

It would be interesting to see a study that compares SAT scores vs alumni performance to see which one has a better correlation with success to use for said adjustment

It's been many decades since I took the SAT (3x, at ages 11, 12, and 16), but I seem to recall that I had a choice of which schools to share my SAT results with, such that a school that only ever saw my age 16 SAT test couldn't possibly average in the other two scores.

It creates bad outcomes where students retake classes in the summers as a profession and game the system.

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

Said test can also bias against the poor depending on how it's created. It can ask questions based on subtleties that only private schools/tutors have the time to cover or on life experiences that only upper middle class realistically have experienced.

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.

Tests are fair

Grades can be easily biased

> your future determined by one test.

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.

> If colleges only looked at GPAs, high schools would inevitably give in to the temptation to give away perfect scores like candy, and students from schools retaining some shred of dignity would suffer for it.

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.

> This points to the real problem with GPA. The institution assigning GPAs to students have a strong incentive to inflate GPAs.

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.

Another reason GPA is problematic: it's sexist. Male students face structural barriers when it comes to college acceptance, to the point where a woman is ~50% more likely to get a college admission. Male students tend to both score higher on average on the SATs and have a higher variance. Deemphasizing SATs in favor of GPA (which itself is a discriminatory measure-- teachers systemically show bias against boys when it comes to grades, particularly boys of color) is exacerbating the structural barriers boys face when it comes to attending university.

It might not be sexist; it might be that boys deserve lower GPAs because they tend to be worse at classwork.

I say that as a boy who was worse at classwork.

If it's as you say systemic that boys do worse at classwork, then continuing to use that (a la GPAs) as an admissions criteria _is_ sexist. It would be akin to having a pull-up competition determining admissions knowing full well boys perform better than girls.

But classwork is what you'll have to do in college anyway. It's not the admissions criteria that's the problem, it's the format of undergraduate higher education itself.

A pull-up competition is a perfectly valid test if the job/program requires exactly that kind of upper body strength.

The #1 difference between college and HS curriculum is that colleges have far far less classwork.

The opposite is true in my experience. I basically coasted through high school spending very little time on homework. I'd often spend hours, or even tens of hours, on single college assignments.

Far more courses in college rely on one or two exams over coursework. To be more precise, men tend to do better on tests of mastery of material over evidences of participation.

I view it similarly to military, or construction. It's not the biases' fault, as many as there are, that men are overrepresented in these domains. I'd urge to address systemic issues, but the profile of representation is not necessarily a symptom of such an issue.

(1) Many colleges are already practicing affirmative action for boys because many boys are not applying. Schools are glad to have girls but girls don't want to go to a school which is 70% girls so they try to admit more boys to make the social life more normal.

(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".

"then continuing to use that (a la GPAs) as an admissions criteria _is_ sexist."

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.

> 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.

Literally, legally, Title IX protects males as well as females. Any pattern of arbitrary grading against male students and not female students would provide a basis.

"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.

> Any pattern of arbitrary grading against male students and not female students would provide a basis.

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?

That study is from France and doesn't mention the pervasive nature (in fact it shows some areas/groups don't have problems). Do you have one from the US? I'm particularly interested in one that has data to back up your "pervasive" claim.

American educational researchers are surprisingly uninterested in this topic; I managed to find recent studies on it out of France, Italy (from last week!)[0], the UK, Sweden, Denmark, and the Czech Republic, but none out of the US. In fact, I found more material in the US about the gendered bias in grading by students of teachers than by teachers of students(!!!).

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...

They're trying to determine how well you will do in courses in college. Surely how well you did in courses in high school is relevant. It is not sexist just because some groups tend to do better than others at a certain point in time. Girls have increased their academic success because they've historically not been encouraged to do so, but in recent decades they have. Girls in high school today are like 2nd (or 3rd) generation of women in the US to have been actually broadly encouraged to do well in school and obtain professional careers. There is an issue with boys feeling hopeless about their futures, and maybe this is a factor in why they as an aggregate have done worse in school relative to girls in recent years, but the solution isn't to lower standards.

SATs are predictive of college completion rates. Deemphasizing them in favor of another predictive metric (that women tend to do better on) exacerbates the disparate graduation rates that are adversely affecting men.

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.

Is it then more or less sexist if colleges aim to balance gender ratios (as most do)?

Colleges often re-weight both GPAs and test scores based on sex, race, socioeconomic background.

Classwork isn't some static thing; historically, boys had higher GPAs than women, and I suspect you can find some subfields of study today where boys consistently outperform women as far GPA goes. The choice of what subject matter goes into the curriculum that a GPA represents and how's it's taught and evaluated is a political choice. You could very easily make GPA equitable by removing one class that girls over perform in and replacing it with a class that boys over perform in.

The truly awkward question is that GPA is important because colleges give grades too, but maybe the classwork grading and tests are bad and not conducive not education overall.

I'd be interested in seeing if there's a gender effect on how predictive SAT scores are on college completion rate. A quick survey indicates that this isn't an area education researchers have thought is a good use of their time.

It's also a maturity thing. Girls tend to be more mature than boys (emotionally and mentally) in their late teens, so their grades are a bit better. By the time everyone reaches their early 20's the differences have largely vanished.

We regularly use outcomes as evidence of discrimination, so I think it’s reasonable to strive to be consistent.

If we look at SAT discrepancies to identify groups harmed by structural issues in the test, we should also do the same with grades.

For what it's worth, I regularly interact with high school seniors and this topic has come up a few times. When I was in school, there was one teacher that was known to be sexist against boys. If you were regularly an A student, you'd be getting Cs. I was one of them. She taught English, which is probably the best subject to teach if you want to be subjective with your grades. Hell, there was another guy in class that kept getting the same percentage grade down to the second decimal point.

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.

And yet people wonder why the MRA and MGTOW movements are gaining ground...

> Male students face structural barriers when it comes to college acceptance, to the point where a woman is ~50% more likely to get a college admission.

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.

>the norm is for colleges to apply a lower admission standard for boys than they do for girls.

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.

It's well known. Colleges will admit to it in public, often saying things like "we need to have a lower standard for boys, or else no girls will want to attend our school". (The ideas being that (1) the goal of running a college is to admit more girls; and (2) girls don't want to attend all-girl schools, so you can get higher overall female admissions by admitting some unqualified boys.)

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.

If this is public, surely you have some actual sources to verify this?

>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.

>>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

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.

I'm not the person you are arguing with. I'm only dropping in to say it's extremely frustrating seeing you claim data this, data that, without ever providing that data. The crux of the issue you are debating is the data you claim to have. Please either provide it or stop going in circles.

I am yet to see a single university admit to biasing males in admission. Most of them admit to biasing by race, so it shouldn't be hard to find an example.

Schools that deliberately don't go out of their way to select for gender parity wind up with far more girls than boys. UNC Chapel Hill, for example, is 60% female. From what I understand, this does interesting things to their social dynamics.

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?

Please cite a source for gender discrimination in admissions. Seems like this would be a textbook Title IX violation.

Look at the incoming class numbers. Harvard/MIT/Princeton/Yale are all within 2% of 50/50.

I don't know how they do it legally, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ah, that makes sense. Since those are private schools they don't need to comply with Title IX.

Title IX applies to schools that accept federal funding such as Harvard, MIT etc. see for example https://studentlife.mit.edu/titleix

I wasn't aware they accepted funding. So it seems odd they are so evenly balanced.

Another possibility: men have higher variation in performance than women. Even if the male mean were lower, a greater standard deviation would swamp that effect at the high end.

> I wasn't aware they accepted funding.

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.

"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?

Title IX specifically does not apply to undergraduate admissions at private universities.

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

Ah, so even though the rest of title IX applies, admissions does not.

It's more nuanced than that. Engineering schools have mugh higher admission rates for women, sometimes over 2x, in the case of MIT: https://www.collegetransitions.com/blog/can-your-gender-give....

One solve for this is to require schools to anonymously publish their GPA percentiles along with some demographic info.

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.

Seriously, schools in Palo Alto or Stanford itself, producing GPA>4 only means that they’re cooking the numbers by giving some courses a greater than 4 average.

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)

Is that a typo or did you actually have an 8.7 gpa? I don’t understand how that’d be possible

Which is entirely the point I was making - having anything based on GPA requires that the GPA have an agreed range, and a bunch of private universities in the US have decided to give students >4.0 GPAs - now if you see someone with a "4.5 GPA" you immediately know they're cooking the books, but a person can also have a 3.9 GPA with a bunch of bad grades countered by a few >4 grades.

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.

For sure. But weird I didn't know of any universities/colleges that gave above a 4.0 for GPAs (in the US) - thought that was more of a high school thing relating to Honors/AP classes.

Stanford and Harvard at least do this.

Scaling the ranges doesn't fix things for the students. At my high school, some electives only awarded grades up to 4 and others were offered in flavors that went up to 5 or 5.5. Every foreign language actually spoken by modern humans had the first year offered with grades up to 4 only, so optimal play was to take Latin or take Spanish 1 in summer school since that counts for qualifying for Spanish 2 but does not contribute to your GPA. Most kids took Latin because they had lives.

If you want insane you should look at the old sixth form certificate system in NZ - each school is allocated a set of grades to assign to kids based on the grades the prior year got from school certificate. As in say your school got 5 As, 5 Bs, 5 Cs, etc in school certificate exams (the nationwide standard tests from when you are 15), then your school would get 5 1s, 5 2s, etc (1 being the best). Then the school gets to choose how those available grades are distributed - so say the 5 As came from math exams, the school could allocate all the 1s to the English department, so the best grade you could get in 6th form cert outside of the English department would be a 2. I had a friend who was a super talented musician, but his highest possible grade in 6th form music was a 3. Despite getting essentially As across the board in school cert music his best 6th form cert grade for music was notionally a C+/B- or some such.

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)

> GPA is problematic because not all high schools have access to the elite courses that push a GPA beyond 4.0 and many top schools look for an admission barrier around 4.5

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? :)

They also weight schools differently. Shitty high schools + good scores let you avoid all of those cello lessons.

There are thousands of high schools, and for each college, most applications come from a relatively small group (usually based on geography, while for elite schools, a set of top "feeders"). So to answer your question, no, most colleges are only familiar with the scale of a small percentage of schools.

I'd say the GPA is problematic because it's often a "weakest link" measure rather than focusing on strengths that a person can leverage for success. By that I mean, a GPA can easily be dragged down by a lack of interest in one or two mandatory subjects. A student can be a brilliant scientist who aces those classes but simply isn't very interested in world history or Catcher in the Rye or conjugating verbs in a foreign language. Or the opposite -- loves English and History and Arts but simply has no aptitude for geometry or physics. So these individuals graduate with 3.2 while others who are ok but not excellent at anything manage a 3.8.

Admissions departments re-norm GPAs and many of the best high schools do not engage in grade weighting.

Also, grade inflation is real and not uniformly distributed.

These days to avoid this problem most schools normalize GPA's before looking at them for admission.

TFA actually calls out that very high test score can be a a signal someone won't graduate.

But why take graduation as the target? Clearly it's not the school's mission in the world.

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.

When you start pulling that thread, the whole system of education metrics falls apart.

Including people's assumptions that seats in school should be prioritized for people already learned more than everyone else.

A very weak signal, about as strong as whether the person is male or female. And it's outliers in both directions that create this effect, not just high scores. This probably just indicates that the student was not a great match for the school and is likely to lose motivation before making it to graduation.

> 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.

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?

I think if you take "grit" to mean "discipline", it goes a long way.

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.

Grit is exactly what's needed to pass college courses and final exams. It's also one of the most important skills in the real world. It's easy to have a stroke of luck or be a genius for a day on a single exam. It's much harder to persevere and learn unfamiliar material that you don't want to do for many months, culminating in a final exam.

Finals exams were pretty easy, you don't need grit to just show understanding of material, you just need to show up to lecture, listen, participate in class

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?

Because a job requires doing repetive work you already understand, so you shoul learn to do that. And because practice builds long term memory.

Refusing to do assigned tasks despite knowing it will be a factor in your final assessment score is probably something valuable to measure as a factor in predicting your future success at tasks. I had some college courses where the homework was optional, but this is not that, this is courses where the homework is required, but not completed.

I prefer to replace "grit" with "programs on my calculator". Turns out the calculator is still better at stoichiometry than the chemistry student with a lot of grit.

But in that case did the chemistry student actually learn the chemistry, or just learned the tool? What's the goal for taking that class?

His anecdote clearly says that his low GPA correlated to his inability to finish the degree (by doing the courses and passing the final exams), which is a real criterion to consider by admissions, and that relates to grit.

But how should they measure "I matured and now I have grit"?

> I went back to the community college, got perfect grades

Presumably they had a separate GPA, or at least term-specific GPAs, from their second round of community college.

Good question. In my case, I talked to the person in admissions who was making the decision and explained the situation and why I thought they should disregard the earlier grades.

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.

Basically the story of my teens and early 20s except that my grades were good enough to get into CS at UIUC... where I promptly drank/smoked my way into an academic suspension. Switched to an easier school and easier major and failed out again which prompted me to enlist in the Navy. Graduated with highest honors from my boot camp class--it's fucking amazing what a little structure can do for people who need it. 16 years later I have a BS in economics, MBA, MSCS, and now trying to beat the final boss and get a PhD before I turn 40.

I was the same. Top fraction of a percent on SATs without studying but never turned in homework. Got Cs.

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.

According to the University of California’s own internal study, there is a small group of students with terrible GPAs and good test scores. They tend to do well in college.

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.

You jump from the UC to primary/secondary schools. They are not run by the same people.

Most of the decline is due to underfunding due to prop 13

California spends about twice as much per student today (inflation adjusted) as it did before Prop 13 passed, so it doesn't track that Prop 13, or underfunding, is the cause of the poor performance.

All the 200+ student classes would certainly hurt them a lot though since that's a big chunk of some rankings.

I meant that primary/secondary funding per student had doubled. The UC and CSU systems have gotten less money from the state, but not because of Prop 13 which limited property tax rates. UC/CSU weren't and aren't receiving property tax revenue.

Prop 13 made it harder to raise all tax rates

That does not include capital expenditures

> underfunding

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)

I don't know the specifics here, but it seems possible for something to both:

A) have received more money than ever before

B) not have enough money to function properly

OK, please see the chart at the top of page 5 of the 2021-22 budget PDF: https://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2021-22/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Edu... .

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.

How come everywhere else they get LESS money and have BETTER outcomes?

Hint: teacher salaries are a very tiny part of the expenses

NAEP scores have been pretty much flat since the 1970s while inflation adjusted spending per student tripled.

https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/they-spend-what-real-co...

> According to the University of California’s own internal study, there is a small group of students with terrible GPAs and good test scores. They tend to do well in college.

This was me, fwiw. I’m so lucky that the engineering school I got into was enamored with my math score.

This was me as well; I should not have been allowed in, I took someone else's spot and I forever feel a tiny bit bad about that. I was not ready for college, and ultimately never graduated.

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 arguments against tests, from SAT to civil service exams is that effective tests correlate to IQ. IQ=racist, because we say so, so tests=bad.

> IQ=racist, because we say so

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.

Obviously we currently don't ignore it while not studying it in details either, so we've come up with IQ=racist and stopped there.

I think you're closer to something than the other poster.

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.

Actually California's state school system at the UC level is 1st in the country. And 1st in the world.

> However, there is only one over-represented ethnic group in the UC system. Guess which one?

Does the ethnic group that gets a quarter of Nobel prizes and was hated by Hitler not count or something?

Entrance exams are a common option in other countries, and they are a good way for students who are late bloomers to get into top schools.

I'm your outlier!

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.

The edge cases are more common at elite institutions, which are the typical admissions mania targets. At the top ~10 university I attended, there were plenty of people (myself included) falling in the poor HS GPA bucket (mostly due to extracurriculars) with perfect or near perfect ACT/SAT scores, among other outliers.

Short term one get can rid of test scores or GPA since they indeed seem to be correlated. But long term:

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.

28 on the ACT, no studying.

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.

Another problem with relying on GPA is it is easily gamed. Parents and students can pressure teachers and administrations since so much is reliant on it. And a 4.0 at one school may not be the same at another school.

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.

It doesn't remove all bias. It does remove a lot of bias and concentrates the remaining bias in a particular dimension, which probably does substantially improve the fairness of the system, but we need to be clear-eyed that it's not eradicating bias.

Your refusal to take responsibility for your part in that 1.4 GPA also tracks, heh...

of course, but that just illustrates that GPA is less about actual academic achievement, and more about playing a revolving game of teacher's pet at best, and at worst, being another tortured cog in a horrible system of petty social games called "high school"

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.

Academic achievement is entirely a measure of how well you're able to play the game, and has little to do with intellect until you reach the highest levels, and even then you can be a little less intelligent if you are very very good at the game (whereas you cannot be very intelligent and bad at the game).

So yeah, you weren't very good at the game. I wasn't either. Own that, and stop making excuses!

I think my HS GPA was... 2.9 or perhaps 3 (out of 4), yet I had a 29 on the ACT.

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.

Yes, nobody is dropping test scores because they are irrelevant -- although that overreach does exist in the press. They are dropping them because they add little after GPA is considered and may introduce costs, barriers and biases.

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.

What do you think about GPAs being non-standard? Test scores calibrate between schools - GPAs only kind of do.

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.

Why did't the other teachers correct their grades at the end of the term?

My GPA was bottom 10ish at my high school. I graduated high school essentially because I already had most of the credits I needed to graduate from middle school. I got into college based on test scores alone (and I was surprised that this was possible). My GPA improved a bit early on in college and then improved much more around junior year once I started getting into harder classes. I ended up graduating with a math + CS double major in 4.5 years.

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.

My high-school GPA was mediocre because I simply was unable to pay attention in class, or to study at home, or to turn in homework that wasn't dinged over and over for "careless errors". I was born in 1956. Given today's knowledge of things like ADHD-Inattentive, I'm pretty confident that I would have been diagnosed. Some drug would probably have been prescribed, and it probably would have helped my grades (although I'm not convinced it wouldn't have hurt me in other ways).

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.

Interestingly, I was one of those "geniuses" that had a perfect ACT score but a horrible GPA (long story). I got rejected by every college I applied to except for the local state school, so that's where I ended up going. In the end I dropped out in my final semester and just went to work, but that's besides the point. I was more than qualified to academically excel at any university I wanted to attend, and I maintained a 3.9 GPA in college up until I dropped out.

The problem with using just GPA is that GPA can easily be manipulated by school authorities who dislike you, test scores cannot.

Grades and gpas are based on tests too, but on crappy tests without any psychometric validity, often correlated with race and broken in a bunch of ways which standardized tests are not. How many high school math teachers run irt or dif analysis on their tests? Meanwhile, standardized testing companies spend a lot of money and energy trying to remove race from their tests. It is as though smart people have been working really hard on this problem for many decades and found an optimal solution. The solution is standardized tests.

Sure, we can use only GPAs as long as all the applicants are graded on the same common platform. But today the GPA from one college is not exactly equivalent to the GPA from another one. The grading system as I heard is also not standard across US (leave alone international) with some instructors using absolute while others relative grading. So an A student from college X is not necessarily as good as a B student from college Y.

> With all that reviewing, patterns emerged, namely that SAT and ACT scores strongly correlate to GPA.

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.

I guess test scores are more efficient because GPAs are somewhat subjective and can be gamed to a degree. By both the school and the student.

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.

Out of curiosity how did you normalize for say 3.0 GPA at a competitive admissions magnet school, and a 3.0 GPA at an underperforming high school? Did you correlate pervious students from that high school and their high school gpa and their graduating gpa?

I have long wondered about this. Note that you also need to be able to normalize grades across students who went to the same school but had different teachers. I suspect the answer is that both normalizations are hard so admissions people don't bother.

They don't not bother. They just do it by gut feel without writing anything down about how they're doing it. Admissions counselors at elite high schools "network" with admissions offices at universities to benefit their students in this process. This is common knowledge in the industry to the point that foreign elite high schools, which have a harder time getting name-recognition, spend a pretty sum of money periodically sending their representatives on month-long US trips to go around, say, the top 30 US universities to market their brand.

This is true.

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.

Great question - the short answer is that our Admissions office did not attempt to normalize non-mathematical factors. At first, this surprised me. How often do we as students somehow get the impression that extracurriculars, magnet, Montessori, AP, IB, student council, <more trophies/achievements of your choice/> are somehow positively associated with college admissions?

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.)

To be fair, some state schools do operate on just GPA. I recall my HS had that GPA/SAT scatterplot available for past applicants: UVA had a flat cutoff at ~4.1 weighted GPA, and the SAT literally didn't matter at all.

Well, I had pretty good SAT scores (2350+) and a very poor GPA (3.0/4.0).

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.

That was probably more or less my college story for grad school. Very good GREs but lousy GPA in college. (And only somewhat less my story in grad school before going to the next grad school :-))

I just posted a comment about my step son who had stellar test scores after we spent $1200+ on a private tutor. Did he get more qualified for college than the kids who had parents who couldn’t afford private tutors?

Yes he is more ready to be a clog in the machine. He passed the first test. He studied enough leetcode and it doesn't matter how he got there. Will the tutor be there in college and will he be able to absorb all the information college gives are bigger questions.

Doesn’t that argue that neither college test or the standard tech interviews are effective.

Excellent question. I’m of two minds here. As a high school student, I too struggled to get great test scores. I took the SAT four times, which finally resulted in a score that could get me scholarships.

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.

Did your final score more accurately reflect your abilities? Probably. Can everyone increase their score by hundreds of points by repeated testing? Probably not.

Who knows? My first score in 10th grade without any specific SAT prep made me eligible for the only well known school I applied for my senior year - Georgia Tech. By the time I was doing specific prep for the SAT in 12th grade, that was only to get the award for the highest SAT score.

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.

The underlying assumption in these anecdotes is that if everyone had equal access to test prep resources they would show an equal increase in performance. But the studies[1] don't bear this out. If someone is an outlier in terms of coachability, that probably means there were gaps in knowledge that could be filled quickly to have an outsized effect on score. But this seems relevant to suitability for college admission.

[1]https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...

The same article states that even the minor change in scores:

> 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

> to overcome his grades and emerge a genius on the SAT/ACT

Isn't it usually the opposite? Artificially high GPA from grade inflation and favoritism is "set straight" by a standardized test?

SAT scores seem quite unfair as a single indicator of performance. GPA at least provides a view of a much wider range over which performance may naturally fluctuate.

I had a 3.18 GPA and a 31 ACT, is that outlying enough?

From a state school’s Admissions perspective, where the unit test resolves to admit/deny, there is nothing particularly outlying about your scores from what I recall.

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!

Ooh okay okay try me.

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?

You might be an outlier!

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.

Things are great for me now. Thanks! I’ve got a wife and two kids and just got promoted to a SWE team lead. Mostly self taught. College just wasn’t for me.

I replied to you in another subthread, but I'm curious how you would have judged me (I'm assuming "deny"), I had a 36 on the ACT (a perfect score) and a 1.97 GPA.

I like to think I wasn't "judging" anyone, but I know what you mean. Because we used both GPA and test scores, yes, you almost certainly would have been a "deny" with a 36 ACT and a 1.97 GPA.

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."

I pretty much did option 1. I attended a community college and then transferred to the state school that was in my home town. A lot of folks did this anyway because it was much cheaper, you could do all your general ed at community college first and get an AA and then move to another school for your major studies.

Was there a secondary adjustment step to finalize admit/deny? Your heatmap-based method would almost certainly result in an unacceptable racial composition of the class.

I worked in the underrepresented student office, so I was keenly aware/curious about that possibility when I began. However, after reviewing thousands of applications, my experience, to my surprise, was that GPA to SAT/ACT scores remained highly correlated regardless of race. If memory serves (and it’s been awhile) the outliers who were more likely to have higher SAT/ACT than their GPA normally suggested, tended to come from predominantly non-white schools. I’ve seen so many reports to the contrary that this surprised me to no end, but that’s what I observed.

I see your point on the GPA/test correlation and that is good in that it reflects that grade inflation wasn’t a major problem while you worked there.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com