My two cents are standardized tests greatly reduce the function of MS/HS education. They are tied to school funding, teacher effectiveness, local/regional reputation and create a trickle down effect from SAT/ACT > PSAT > state-level tests so that the worst-served students are practicing multiple choice and boilerplate prompts from February to May every year. And these students hardly even go to college if they graduate, so that's time that could have been spent exploring trades, developing life skills (civics, taxes), understanding how to cope with any learning differences, etc.
Then there's the fact that a student can be taught to bump their score past a nominal requirement, gain admission, take out loans and never graduate. Not necessarily the fault of the test but part of the overall complex.
Eh, depends on how your country's standardized tests are set up. You don't have to ask multiple-choice questions.
There's no reason you shouldn't use standardized tests in trade education - if you're teaching plumbing with copper pipe, have them solder some joints and quiz them about air locks and suchlike.
You can cover things that are truly impossible to examine by just requiring a certain number of hours. If you want people in the first year of high school to receive sex ed but don't want to do exams on it, you can just require that schools deliver a certain number of hours of it.
When I last looked at the research many years ago, other signals certainly tended to be noisier but there's no particular reason to think that admissions would be better if universities simply set a test floor then rolled a dice.
Even if everyone agreed on a standard and its impact on admissions (+3 for participation in the Model UN, for example) it's not clear how we'd judge "better results" as we evaluate our admissions criteria. Are we optimizing for an even racial/religious mix of students? Higher output grades? Higher wages? More children raised successfully by the age of 40?
Then even with an agreed upon goal and some objective measures to used to approach it - is it worth doing? If we could get 1% better results by doubling the difficulty of the application process for the students then it probably wouldn't be worth doing it when the plan was considered holistically. What's an acceptable trade-off? What's the cost on transparency and perception of bias when we start considering subjective criteria?
Of course, the process is still a far way from random.
If you are saying a lot more people could handle taking the top level classes than are admitted, I would also agree - but most of those people go to similarly elite unis.
It's not like the laws of physics depend on what college teaches them, right? The content of just about any course is going to be more or less the same. A lot of the books were the same as well, comparing notes with friends who didn't get in.
To restate your claim (correct me if I'm wrong): Because the laws of physics are constant, there is only small limited possible variability in the difficulty, knowledge transferred, and comprehension needed to take a physics class between that at an elite university vs. any other university.
The facts: Only 19% of American highschoolers take calculus. This already precludes 80% of students from taking the standard physics classes at my university.
Advanced classical mech. classes for first-years can go much beyond that, delving into lagrangian and hamiltonian formulations, fictitious forces, difficulty relativity problems, etc.
If you are claiming half of your year at high school would have been fine taking a course like this, you went to a very unusual high school in my opinion.
But yeah it would seem of the people who were on the path to apply to Oxford (or any other mathy course at a university) would have been fine if they had gotten in.
I'm extrapolating that the other kids in other subjects were just as qualified.
I mean of course I'm not saying people who hadn't done the prerequites would be fine, just the ones who did and didn't get in would be.
But I absolutely disagree if they're saying that there are tons of people who could grok the advanced first-year physics classes like Physics 16 @ Harvard who are just being turned away and also not getting into other similarly good schools.