Weighted GPA * 1000 + SAT Score + SAT II English + SAT II Math + max(remaining SAT II scores)
They would then just keep admitting people until they hit 5000 offers.
Then they got accused of racism because that process ended up overweighting Whites and Asians compared to the applicant pool for all the top schools.
There is/was a lot of debate on why Whites and Asians did better, but when you dug in it turned out they tended to almost all be upper-middle class or wealthy. So basically it was wealth and systemic racism, masked by "standardized testing".
Also it should be noted that wealthy people had a better chance at a higher weighted GPA because their schools offered more AP courses.
Is admitting the most capable students unfair? It is inherently discriminatory based on their knowledge and ability, which seems is what people want, but it also means that having more resources to be better equipped aka better nurture, which tends to positively influence individual's prospects, is suddenly something many are not okay with?
Obviously, the SAT tests are flawed one way or another. But then again, they don't care for students' superficial characteristics.
If not that, then implied statement is very reminiscent to slogans used in USSR or during cultural revolution in China.
Are they actually the most capable students, or did they just have a better chance of getting higher scores on the arbitrary metrics chosen? And if so, why did they have a higher chance?
There is a difference between better nurture and lack of opportunity. It's true, we shouldn't be correcting for lack of opportunity at the college admissions level, we should be doing it at the elementary level and younger.
But it's a lot easier to correct it at the college admissions level, which is a good choke point in one's life path, so for now, that is where the focus is.
Further, why should colleges try to correct for lack of opportunity? Their job is to educate people, and not everyone is apt for higher education. Admitting a student with poor mathematical abilities into a rigorous engineering program is just setting that student up for failure, not recompensing him for opportunities lost or squandered earlier.
A student who goes to a poor school who offers zero AP classes will always achieve lower weighted GPAs than students who go to wealthy schools that offer many AP classes. No amount of individual achievement will overcome that mathematical disadvatnage.
Racism comes into when, because of racism, it just so happens that schools who are well funded and can give that advantage are overwhelmingly white, and schools who are are poorly funded and cannot give that advantage are overwhelmingly non-white.
Suggesting that a student who is "placed above his or her station" into an elite program is setup for failure is a favorite of a few SCOTUS Justices, but in fact is not supported by evidence. Graduation and other metrics of success are not strongly correlated to past attainment, primarily because most programs have already had to deal with achievement inequities, and the most successful programs already have mechanisms to even out unequal prior achievement. Virtually all programs that have elite programs already have a substantial apparatus dedicated to filling achievement gaps between incoming students.
The larger question of "what is the purpose of college" and "is it to educate people" is bigger than this thread, but shouldn't be overlooked. For schools that are publicly funded in whole or part, there should be a larger mission than sending young adults through an educational meat grinder. The public mission of public universities should absolutely have a social justice component.
There is absolutely no doubt that we could design an education system which, at an early age, divides and tracks students towards a successful and high level of attainment. By ruthlessly focusing resources on those children with the best chances of success, and minimizing resources expended on those with lower changes of success, the system could produce many multiples of positive outcomes than we do now, but at the cost of many more left with almost no attainment. Our present distribution of resources, in the US, is haphazardly assembled and produces a balance of outcomes, but is by no means optimized for any particular set of outcomes.
Public schools should do it because they are part of the education system that needs correction.
Private schools arguably are still part of the public education system since they all get Federal dollars, and thus the same argument applies.
If they're getting tax dollars, that makes them a public good, and therefore they should be doing things that help all people, not just some people.
However, the downside to "solving" this is significantly worse. By giving a headstart to students based on their superficial or socioeconomical characteristics creates perverse incentives in the system and disconnects it from a selection process.
Usually, countries that are not US solve this by providing free tutorships or lectures to aspiring students, scholarships and a fixed quota of free placements in the admission for top performing students (each country may have their own flavour of the policy, but the main thing they !fortunately! did not use to be based on race or gender).
It is usually much better, in my personal opinion, to provide the "help" to those who seek it rather than trying to equalize for outcome. Poor upbringing can and usually does damage and incapacitates individuals to an extent. But any movement among the lines of "not having issues or being better prepared means you have to do more work" explicitly discourages the optimal behaviour, incentivizing victim-hood and demoralizes individuals which did use the opportunities available to them or managed to create ones.
Again, and I cannot stress this enough, communism is bad.
> Again, and I cannot stress this enough, communism is bad.
Again I agree with you. But I'm not sure how that's relevant. Changing the way we do college admissions isn't communism.
In fact, admitting students purely based on test scores is something that happens in communist countries.
They are the most capable. You call them abitrary, without stating what makes them arbitrary. Until you prove they're arbitrary, your opinion isn't worth addressing.
Standardized testing isn’t perfectly meritocratic, but everything else is worse.
As a side note, I haven’t found any more detailed breakdown of the personality scoring results. Asia is a very diverse place and Asian ethnic groups in the US range from the very richest to some of the poorest.
For example, Harvard could simply auction off their seats. That’s transparent at least, if not exactly fair.
Or maybe alternative is truly random or negative wealth scoring. That is only the poorest students get entry and everyone else will have to figure out something else.
Grades and standardized test scores might be one of the least interesting and almost definitely one of the less effective ways to classify the “most capable” students.
If I’m optimizing for students who do cool stuff, force marching them into relatively banal optimization tasks is counterproductive.
With that said, I think modern education system can no longer scale and has outlived its usefulness. The future is with LLM-driven tutors which can somewhat alleviate the scaling issues inherent to "apprenticeship". Personally, as an ADHD individual it was always drastically easier to study under a person who gives you dedicated attention that for any of my peers. By a wide margin. And yet, studying for local SAT equivalent was an insurmountable task involving acquiring a lot of knowledge and skills that were useless outside of passing the test.
It would be more constructive to improve teacher education, wages, and standards to create a more productive and better resourced education system.
You could look to countries such as Finland et al for a model rather than drawing upon satirical dystopian ankle deep in thought Harrison Bergeron scenarios.
My understanding is that Brown basically does that. This would sort of back that up:
It would also put a ton of pressure on high school students to get perfect scores, creating a ton more stress than they already have. And at the expense of much more valuable things they could be doing with their time.
The current system has issues, but there are worse ways to do things.
The number of high school or undergrads who wrote groundbreaking biology papers is vanishingly small, but you do raise a good point. There’s a chicken and egg problem. Because schools aren’t just weighting test scores (because the score is flawed) there is incentive to work on other, more subjective things.
That’s tricky. In a massive country with many incredible students, it seems to me that it’s going to be possible for the top .1% of students to do as well as is possible on any reasonable exam.
Do you disagree?
If wealth is the ultimate playground for everything (capitalism?), then obviously the elite institutions are playing the right game.
There might be natural reasons for that but there were also clearly some perverse effects: because those exams became effectively competitive exams (fixed number of seats available), they require intense preparation in preparatory schools which became the educational equivalent of a 2-3y navy seal bootcamp (it's not enough to have good grades, you need the best grades). Teachers in poor area high schools were often unfamiliar and intimidated by this system (they didn't go through it themselves), and were actively discouraging good students from taking that path. Students not having educated parents who knew the system were not pushed to work really hard to get into, and survive that system either. And you ended up with 80%-90% of the kids in those colleges coming from families from similar colleges. Money wouldn't be a major factor, the top colleges and preparatory schools are free.
Now the natural ratio shouldn't be 3-5% (elite college educated parent as % of general population), probably around 50-60%, certainly not 80-90%.
For the past 15y, France has opted to break the thermometer instead, ie to bypass those exams for the majority of the recruitment, and to select students on file which grants them full latitude for subjectivity. I suspect they also nationalised the selection process of those preparatory schools (not super familiar with the latest developments). I think the main consequence is that those elite colleges will quickly lose their prestige, and it might actually be the unstated intention, i.e. converge to a german like education system where the name and prestige of the university matters little vs the profile of the student.
It might be a good thing or perhaps it will just ruin the french educational system, it's hard to tell.
And for anyone who thinks it's unfair: not anymore so than the parent lottery. And I think institutional acknowledgment of the role pure dumb luck plays in our lives would go a long way towards dispelling our inclination to actively punish people for acts of the cosmos and/or dysfunctional policy.
(As an aside: as an advisor of PhD students in computer science, I sometimes have to train students out of these habits. Research doesn’t happen if you’re used to getting the shallow answer more quickly, or if you’re afraid to be wrong.)
You seem to be coming from the perspective that testing must be the best metric, and then trying to develop a methodology based on that assumption. Purely as a thought exercise: it might be helpful to start from the assumption that testing isn’t an option, and think about what you might do instead.
At that time, the SAT was good at predicting the likely performance of a prospective college student … for one term. That’s it. I got an excellent score on my SAT (not a perfect score, but I thought that it was a bullshit measure — which, like all standardized testing, it is — so I didn’t care). I did well in my first term, and then not so well after that (I ended up doing fine in the end, but it took longer to get through a degree program because I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up; I think that Americans, by and large, put too much focus on going to university too early and we would be better served by an extra year of high school and/or a gap year).
One other thing I remember from that time period is that a better predictor of overall success in school was NOBITH, the Number Of Bathrooms In The House. That is, socioeconomic indicators were a better predictor than anything else, including nonsense standardized tests like the SAT. And given that socioeconomic indicators are a better indicator, that is a strong indication that there’s seriously wasted potential at all levels of eduction because we mistakenly equate family socioeconomics with success in general.