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Comment by Kwpolska | Hacker News Reader

You know what’s an even better policy? Making standardised tests the sole admission criterion. No high school grades (which are often inflated, unless your teachers hate you), no extracurricular activities, no essays. Just one set of objective numbers from the national maturity exam; which tests and with what weights depending on the field of study. This is what universities do in Poland (for most fields of study; some might have extra tests to write), and it’s great at letting people from different backgrounds into universities while filtering out people highly unlikely to succeed.

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What a silly idea. Universities are not just in charge with academic education but rather with the formation of a person’s character. To succeed with the latter, academic capability must be held alongside the estimation of one’s character, for it is not only about one’s intellectual capacity but rather how one uses it.

If schools started estimating the merit of one's character they'd have to probably throw out half of their own faculty and cut off ties with many of their donors.

If academic education is not their top priority, it would be beneficial to separate research facilities from universities and let universities be glorified fraternities. It's a waste to spend resources of top professors on "formation of a person's character" when they can help build the next generation of elite scientists and engineers.

Should scientists and engineers not have good character?

I don’t think it’s a job of academia to instil “good character” into students. It reminds of scientific textbooks in the USSR that had to mention Lenin in their preface and the mandatory subject that taught the history of the Communist Party.

Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.

No, it doesn't. We already have K-12 for that and rightfully so. Academia is supposed to be a place for complete adults to be able to optionally invest to specialize. At this rate we have to admit that 12 years of general education isn't enough to build characters so we have to make K-16, which is certainly an option with its own concerns.

Anyone who has met a group of college freshmen could probably tell you they aren't exactly complete adults.

In theory this is what the diploma or GED is already for. These are all certified by the state to show you've completed a certain amount of education to a certain level of quality. What is an SAT or ACT supposed to be on top of all that honestly? Really its tackling a symptom of colleges for whatever reason no longer trusting the states own education departments' diploma or GED. Which is damning considering these schools point to these same states accreditation as a quality measure for their own programs, forgetting that if the diploma is untrustworthy then so are these state accreditation...

Where do the grades on a US high school diploma come from? They are arbitrarily assigned by teachers from the student’s high school, right? One teacher might give everyone good grades, while another will be more strict, and yet another may give good grades to their favourite students only. Grades of two students from the same class are often not comparable, let alone grades of two students from different states.

The SAT and the ACT are standardized tests, meaning that everyone in the country writes the same test on the same day, and the tests are designed to make the test results comparable between different sessions.

There are sometimes state ran standardized tests done to prevent this very issue of certain schools having uneven standards. And both SAT and ACT tests are conducted multiple times a year with completely unequal testing center conditions if you are into considering anything that might introduce a confounding factor (e.g. some schools they have hundreds of kids sit in a gym like what you'd see out of national exams in Korea, other kids might take it in seclusion at a private testing center). Then there is this idea of the extra tutoring people are paying for outside of the school curriculum basically amounting to something akin to paying for the right to use steroids in sports.

There is no way for all 3.7 million high school graduates in the US to write a test in the same conditions. But the SAT and ACT are much better w/r/t similar conditions than grades.

> state ran standardized tests

The US is the land of capitalism, so it delegates standardised testing to private for-profit corporations. Many European countries have a nation-wide or state-wide standardised testing system.

> Then there is this idea of the extra tutoring people are paying for outside of the school curriculum basically amounting to something akin to paying for the right to use steroids in sports.

I wouldn’t compare tutoring to steroids. In sports, some athletes can afford to spend more time in the gym and to get a better coach, while some can’t, and that might affect their test results.

You want academic prep to drive consumption in multiple sectors silly /s.

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