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Comment by thesausageking | Hacker News Reader

It would be a lot worse. Harvard could fill its classes 4x over with students with perfect SATs and GPAs. They would miss out on the ones who published ground breaking biology papers, wrote code for important open source projects, etc.

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.

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This suggests to me that the SAT isn’t hard enough then. That many students should not be able to get perfect scores.

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.

> This suggests to me that the SAT isn’t hard enough then

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?

Then you have tiered exams. e.g. if you score >1500 on the SAT, you can take the harder SAT-2 which would be used for admissions to top schools.

Diminishing returns, really. As you continually test the margins will get smaller and smaller and the outcomes won't change much. Someone scoring >1500 on the SAT will likely just as well graduate from ivy league as someone who scored 1550.

Someone with a 1300 would do fine. But only because thy aren't as difficult as top schools should be because, as we see from their admissions policies, they are status and credentialing gatekeepers to elite status, not really top educational institutions.

Right - so does it really matter?

If wealth is the ultimate playground for everything (capitalism?), then obviously the elite institutions are playing the right game.

Yes it is small, but you want to incentivize that, because someone smart enough will make it happen. Or you can be smart enough to do both.

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