Harvard will require test scores for admission again
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One could argue that my lack of grades is a good reason for me to not get into a good school. But without the tests, I definitely wouldn't have. I shutter to think how my career/life would be different had I not gotten into a decent school.
So, at least for me, I have a real affection for these kinds of tests. And, as far as I know, I think the US is like the only place that doesn't use tests as the primary decider for higher education.
It seems like the move away from testing was "not based on science". Though it was sometimes couched that way. I'm glad to see sanity (and science) prevail. But it all seems very fragile to me right now.
Standardized tests are the most fair and simplest way to evaluate students. Plus gaming the test is what exactly? Hiring a tutor and spending hours studying, much of it alone? And it's not a shock that success on studying and doing well on exams correlates to college where you're evaluated on how well you study and do on exams
It reminds me of that Key and Peele sketch where they're planning a long con bank heist but by the end it's obvious they're just working a job and saving for retirement
Years ago, in a grad course of some sort, we looked at some papers of predicting performance in school. Basically, even at the grad level, GMATs were far and away the best predictor of academic performance, followed by undergrad grades. Things like letters of recommendation were pretty worthless.
That doesn't mean we should do away with test scores altogether, but we do need to realize the limitations. These scores come with error bars and uncertainty, and it matters how you use them. "Everyone with a score higher than the requirement ends up in a lottery" tends to be reasonably fair, but "we take the top-200 scores" tends to be biased to the well-off (sometimes very biased).
I agree that there is likely no difference in performance between a 1500 and 1600 SAT so a lottery is reasonable. Although I will say it's pretty strongly correlated even at the extremes. But why should a school solely focus on maximizing gpa? It should minimize failure but choosing between a student who will get a 3.5 or a 3.75 is pointless
Getting extra tutoring, focused on improving your test results, does not make you more prepared for college.
It's not like your analogy.
There is truth to the fact that some students have better access to study the test than others, but in my recollection, it really doesn't help those kids very much. I'm sorry I don't have any sources off hand, but I remember it being something like that all the extra prep will add maybe 10-30 points to the SAT.
To put another way: a dumb rich kid with private tutors will still score lower than a bright poor kid who takes the test with no prep.
I don't know if there's any good answer.
This depends on what kind of performance you're trying to measure. There will be some people who test very highly but are much less inclined to persevere and follow-through. Grades can be a better measure of this (though with rampant grade inflation, their utility is undercut).
Only if you aren't in Asia. Cram schools are a thing in India, China, Japan, Korea...
Of course, willingness and perseverance to go an extreme in work ethic has to be related indicator of future success. But that's your competition if you are just hiring a tutor and spending some hours studying alone.
I did as little work as possible in high school. I was depressed due to unknown reasons at the time, diet playing a large role in that - as well as being high functioning autistic, Asperger's, and so in classes I cared about then I was passionate in - getting the only or one of the only 101% in a computer class that that high school had given anyone due to my quickly doing my assignments and then helping anyone else who needed help.
The teachers who saw me excel in their classes fought at the end of high school, my final year, when deciding what final grades to give - pitted against the teachers who saw the absolute least motivated and incompetent versions of me; they settled on giving me 80% honours - which allowed me better placement at top tier universities, technically 2 points above where my grades would have averaged otherwise - but where they had discretion.
It's time the pendulum begins to swing the other way again - and then for proper education to begin so that it limits or prevents it from swinging again as far as it has recently.
Perhaps the greatest difficulty with this, for policy makers, is it's hard to quantify or account for externalized benefits. However the other end of the spectrum with the student loan scandal, giving loans to people for "education" that - has already occurred and so it's time to go back towards merit-based acceptance and distribution of resources - tied to an actual path with an ROI, and then where "liberal arts" can thrive once enough parents have enough to pay for their children to go into those programs - rather than society funding them, like we poorly-irrationally do in Canada.
The policy politicians will push for will depend on if their goal is to maximize centralized control and dependance on government or not, where if more and more "students" require state-funds for "acceptable" state accreddited education - where they must comply and be "good citizens" and follow your orders, mandates, if they want to continue to be able to suck on the teet of the centralized state control - while that same state may be (and is what's happening in Canada) has policy in place to dramatically increase and continue to increase the cost of living, reducing the quality of life - so where more and more people are going to become forced to depend on the government aka a communist state; or if the state as part of their strategy is also to accept foreign students, flooding the institutions with foreign students for their revenues, also as a way to bring in revenues from external sources, for better or worse.
“Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world.” ― Vladimir Lenin
This is a very good point. Americans rarely realize that single points of capture are magnets for wannabe tyrants. If you can't be a full dictator of the entire country for life, you may settle for being a full dictator of some massive institution that meddles in everyone's life.
To be clear, I don't think that Americans are stupid for not realizing this. They just don't have enough experience with tyranny.
Some of the best programmers I've had the chance to work with had no degree, though I know that's an HR bar in itself to leap over.
That was rather a long time ago (like when HP existed), so I don't know what's happening now.
HS GPA factors into getting into college, and is irrelevant afterwards. College GPA factors into getting internships and the first job placement and is irrelevant afterwards. If an employer actually cared in any meaningful way about my uni or grades after 5 years of work experience, I would take it as a red flag during hiring.
IQ tests administered by psychologists admit that there is a cutoff beyond which they fail, and so presumably the same situation exists with standardized tests.
Great phrase that allows anyone to make any kind of shit up to evaluate someone.
> And, as far as I know, I think the US is like the only place that doesn't use tests as the primary decider for higher education.
Yeah, it baffles me too. It's also hard for someone outside of the US to understand how even raising such question will be political and worse, racial. For god's sake, we don't need national or even state exams. Universities can simply design their own tests. Britain does that. Japan does that. Germany does that. East European countries do that. India does that. China does that (in addition to their national entrance exams).
How is a simple measure so divisive in the US? Oh well, what is not divisive in the US?
Why?
As a counterexample, measuring a programmer's productivity by lines of code written is almost as simple as a rule possibly can be, and is extraordinarily easy to game.
You may not agree, but the system seems to work pretty well.
The fact that Waterloo maintains a monopoly on its internship/coop model blows my mind every year we do recruiting.
OTOH, after successfully recruiting from Waterloo for over a decade, my company's recruiters suddenly decided to stop because it was more work for them even though it has consistently given great results.
It's a decision we've been fighting but our recruiting org won't budge.
I found little practical difference in the top ten percent between an Ivy and a decent state school. In fact, once someone is in the top half, other factors such as organization, drive, and the ability to get along others will dominate. As such, I save money and no longer hire from Ivy’s.
When you're good, you're good.
There’s a reason legacy admissions need a thumb on the scale.
Also, state research universities didn't/don't have as much grade inflation because they're intent on "competing" in the ranks without having the legacy, endowment, or name branding that Ivy's and Pac-NN's, so typically all they have (outside of NCAA sports $$$). University academic department staff are worried about bolstering their public image and of winning the approval of accreditation organizations.
Frame of reference: Most all of my college-prep public high school friends went to Harvard, MIT, Stanford, or CalTech while fewer, like me, went to University of California universities (UCs) like Berkeley or UC{LA,SD,SB,D}. I'm only certain of a few certain universities of that era were more or less more rigorous by comparing notes on specific courses and how team participation was regulated fairly or not. In 2001, we had a intro networking course requiring creating a forked caching HTTP/0.9-1.0 network web proxy server as one project of many.
https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...
- If you don't hit some level of Math score, that's sort of a red flag that you'll struggle with at least calculus and physics right off the bat.
- If you have strong SATs, that's also a flag that you may be worth a deeper look even if you don't have other things on your resume that jump out, possibly for socioeconomic reasons.
I expect very few schools just mechanically admit based on SATs.
If a university's mission goes beyond just collecting already-top-performing students from the best (usually wealthiest) school districts, you can't just do a straight rank on a single signal. There's a lot of variance in educational opportunity across the US, ranging from highly selective specialty public high schools [1], to places where they can only afford 4 days of schooling a week [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_High_School_f...
[2] https://stateimpact.npr.org/oklahoma/2022/10/27/oklahoma-law...
Harvard probably wants a mix of people who have a history of going to Harvard, elites, with high performers and others. If it's only elites, then the academic quality goes down. Only best academic performers, elites will go to another school to call home, etc.
Harvard might not have this problem, but some, even some good, schools have to put some thought into if the student is actually going to accept the offer as well. Some states require a certain percent of students to be from the state in state funded schools.
I think most schools would claim it is that, they just reject that testing is the end all be all of who is the best. These schools are looking for the next generation of leaders, theres a lot that goes into being a leader that isnt counted on standardized tests. Standardized tests really just tell you who has the highest IQ. Useful, but it misses lots of other attributes.
If you have the resources to review applicants individually, sometimes there are people who clearly stand out for reasons unrelated to test scores. I expect that in most cases, if they've taken tests, they have good scores, and it can make sense to generally have a threshold, but if you simply rank by top scores they are likely not the absolute best, as they would have been spending more time and attention on things other than studying for them.
Simultaneously, I've also heard that it's easier to get your name on a paper as a high schooler than as an undergrad working in the same lab. Some of this is because professors are incentivized to put random high schoolers on their papers -- when applying for grants, they're often asked what K-12 outreach they've done (https://new.nsf.gov/funding/learn/broader-impacts). "Look at this paper where there's a random high schooler on it" checks the box if a bit inappropriately. Incentives at work!
But in my lab at least, we did have the odd high schooler/undergrad, whom I had a part in mentoring. For the high schoolers, my PI at least privately admitted it was because their parents had "means" and it was about at least the potential for grant money.
I was about to call them out on this, since most institutions were using loosely supported discrimination claims to justify eliminating test scores. But reading MIT's announcement at the time (https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-suspending-our-...), it really was explained solely in terms of COVID, and even at that time they reiterated that their own studies had shown how valuable test scores were. MIT switched back to using test scores just 2 years later.
On the other hand, Harvard announced up front that they'd stop using tests scores for 4 years, and included the standard baseless claims that it would aid diversity. Some at Harvard had been clamoring against test scores for many years, so COVID just offered the excuse they needed. I suppose it is to Harvard's credit that they at least saw how wrong they were after the fact. But it's a shame they had to hide behind chalking it up to "new research" when the data had been clear all along to those willing to address it honestly.
When I saw state and other universities move away from standardized tests as acceptance criteria during the COVID era my only thoughts were - my kid was will not be college age for years and years and this should be over by the time it may impact him.
As someone who immigrated to the US during at a high school age with a non-negligible language barrier and culture shock, getting excellent grades across all subjects in school was impossible, but excelling at written tests especially in Math is what got me into a great state school and opened many doors for me later on.
This chance was being taken away from the kids of 2020s. I’m glad this is over.
My next hope is that any identity-based acceptance criteria are deemed illegal and acceptance is blindly merit and experience based to give a chance for my kid who may not fall into any protected categories to get into any school that his merit allows
It doesn't seem like a bad experiment to have tried, but the results were negative and bad for the students, so time to back it out.
For instance we're instructed by admin to never encourage students to pursue mathematics. They "must" be funneled through an academic advisor, who can establish whether or not this is worth the financial risk of them potentially failing. This is regularly presented as "improving equity".
There are a number of incorrect assumptions hidden in this statement. Foremost is the idea that academic failure is always regular failure. I know people who started in math amd pivoted after they didn't think they could handle being full fledged mathematicians, but who benefitted from the math they did learn enough that it was worth it to them.
Secondly, you can't know in advance who is going to fail, and people are not obviously better served by a strategy that plays it safe.
Even many of those who were not clueless definitely leaned on those of us who had worked as engineers to take the lead on the math stuff in group projects.
Some schools continue the "social justice" movement further, ensuring that those you cited don't fail.
Tests measure only that you are good at answering tests under heavy stress and at cramming for them. The whole teaching/learning to test thing - you don't learn to be able to understand and practically use the knowledge but cram to pass the tests and will usually promptly forget most you have "learned" in this way after the tests are over.
Not really a lot more. There are plenty of very good students that are just terrible at tests - either because they don't cope well with time pressure or because they learn in a different way and standardized testing is unable to capture that because of its "least common denominator" focus.
And don't get me started on people with very common disabilities like dyslexia or dyscalculia - neither of which has anything to do with intellect and sufferers of either can be excellent students. However, they will fail horribly at any kind of standardized testing.
So it is only a cheap to administer and easy to evaluate (just count the points) proxy for actual performance and knowledge that are much harder to objectively assess. But a very poor one.
And then there are the various sports stipendia and legacy admissions and ... that basically bypass the entire process as long as you are either good at football/whatever or been born to a well to do alumni family.
Let's call tests what they are - a cheap and somewhat objective filter to fit the large amount of applicants to the much smaller amount of available places. And don't delude ourselves it has anything to do with quality.
(I am a former university teacher and have done a specialized course in university pedagogy, including assessment)
Sounds a lot like college, particularly for engineering degrees. Someone who does well on the math portion of the SAT likely has the baseline understanding of math to start on college math.
People with disabilities is a different conversation IMO, and should have some accommodation.
I have never imagined it to be actually a thing. Wild.
Ensure, no, of course not. But it's better than nothing.
>very common disabilities like dyslexia or dyscalculia
These are not "very common" by my defintion: 10% of population, of varying degrees.
>neither of which has anything to do with intellect and sufferers of either can be excellent students. However, they will fail horribly at any kind of standardized testing.
How do you know they'd be great students but fail at testing? How are you assessing it? Isn't this the answer to all these issues?
Still, I ended up getting a SWE job at Google in 2004 and working my way up to L8.
I think standardized tests are fundamentally bullish!t because they test more your ability to have time to prepare and study and think mechanically under artificial time constraints. None of which are associated with success in college. Some jobs, say a trauma surgeon, need to evaluate for the time constraint decision making, but a software engineer does not.
How much of college is associated with success at software development? Especially if you're essentially full-time employed in the industry (at an ISP) during high school?
I'd wager that when you were studying your ass off, you had books open and were hacking away trying stuff out, figuring what works and what doesn't, yeah?
You're the person I'd want to admit to university or hire for my work, and it has jack-all to do with your test-taking ability.
Was this research not available when the universities decided to make the tests optional in the first place? The listed benefits of standardized testing should have been well-known. There seems to be a lack of reflection here about just what went wrong in the decision-making process.
I was looking at applying to grad schools last year. I've been out of school for, uh, a bit, and my undergrad was neither stellar nor relevant. I do great on standardized tests but basically none of the programs I wanted to apply to even accepted them and there's not a lot of room to communicate non-academic learning, so I just didn't bother.
So, if any bias, they should admit with counter-to-general-society biases, since those who satisfy the biases of the general society don’t need preparation.
(Unless the goal is to just appear to be preparing people for success while doing nothing, in which case having biases aligned with those of the general society is the ideal strategy: pick the people that were going to succeed no matter what, and claim credit for preparing them.)
I do think this is what lots of schools do. I mean, "the best people available" will be roughly identical with "the pool of people that contains the highest fraction of those who would succeed no matter what". And if your alumni are successful, then you claim credit. Why not? (I've occasionally seen people attempt to calculate "value added", but completely accounting for selection effects is difficult.)
And, by the way, just because someone would have succeeded no matter what doesn't mean you can't increase their success. It's plausible that some highly-driven highly-competent genius would have ended up becoming a top engineer going to school X, but would have co-founded a billion-dollar company going to school Y, due to some combination of getting a somewhat better education and meeting the right people. So the value proposition may be real.
Biasing the tests for "better student" sounds obvious, but it's still a bias to be to clear.
Instead we should leave criteria merit based and invest in social programs that give the high school student in question ability to be a student instead of a parent and caregiver
Yes, I guess we should completely reinvent American society to make it better, but in the meanwhile, tweaking college admissions standards seems like an okay stop gap measure. We should also work to systemically eliminate homelessness and hunger, but that doesn't mean we should be shutting down shelters and soup kitchens in the meanwhile.
[0] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/19/study-finds-e...
The circumstances of this imaginary person would prevent that from succeeding in college if they are accepted and we should be able to attack the circumstances that prevent highschool students from being the best student they can with social programs, instead of moving away from merit-based college acceptance criteria.
Their circumstances are not conducive to any kind of learning whether before or during college and should be addressed instead of getting rid of merit-based college admissions
"Further, the data suggested unintended adverse outcomes of test-optional policies in the admissions process itself, potentially undermining the goal of increasing access. The committee was concerned that some students from less-advantaged backgrounds were choosing not to submit scores under the test-optional policy, when doing so could actually increase their chances of being admitted."
If you believe that, I have a bridge you might want to buy...
No, this was dictated by exigencies of the COVID pandemic.
Critical race theory doesn’t dictate any policies.
> Academia and its policies should be driven by science and not feelings.
All policies are driven by feelings; science can tell you what is, and how to achieve a given goal, but it takes values/preferences – which, ultimately, are feelings – to have goals in the first place.
Let's consider the times when these institutions have had meritocratic admissions. What exactly have the meritorious students from these institutions contributed to society? The primary accomplishment is that they've engineered a corporate take over of society. The 2008 financial crisis, the tech driven surveillance society, all came from the talented minds of the merited elite.
So it is any surprise that there is support for the idea that merit is a meaningless idea? The gifted class hasn't made life any better for the rest of the society.
One way to address some of this is to properly fund all public schools so academic success isn't largely a tossup of where one's parents could afford to live. Trying to correct for this at the admissions level is a divisive and bandaid solution.
Perhaps the better way to think of wealth is as a proxy for intelligent, conscientious parents who care about educating their children. That is, the same qualities that make someone more likely to become wealthy are also qualities that promote academic success, not that wealth causes academic success.
> properly fund all public schools
Some of the worst-performing public schools in the nation are funded quite well, and the US nears the top per-student spending around the world[0], well above the OECD average. There is no amount of funding that can supplant parents who value education and a culture that values education.
[0]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
That just doesn't line up with reality. In the U.S. the vast majority of wealth accumulation is in the form of homeownership [1] — Which has a stark and undeniable racial divide of which we're still seeing consequences today. Specifically racist zoning laws and redlining by banks that refused to give loans to PoC.
A lot of these laws are still being enforced today (i.e. 5,000sqft minimum lot sizes and huge setbacks requiring the purchase of lots of unproductive land that less wealthy people can afford).
Now, during the course of these discussions someone usually brings up a 'model minority' that's succeeding academically, and I'll agree that there's a cultural aspect to this as well. However, if they also own their homes disproportionately to other minorities, they're benefiting from an inequitable system that's still in place.
I'm not trying to reduce anyone's academic success and hard work down to a matter of money, there are lots of successful people despite their obstacles. But we can't pretend the system is setup to reward everyone solely on merit.
[1] https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/racial-diffe...
Yet these schools exist in one of the freest societies that ever existed, with untold riches in terms of health care, prosperity, and quality of life.
Ask someone from 1800AD about antibiotics, vaccines , cars, computers, electronics and electricity. The advantages of a modern state are astonishing, and all come at the feet of modern universities.
Heck, metoo, the woke movement none of that could have ever existed without decades of courts ruling on the rights of the individual. Quite literally the woke movement's mocked boomer narrative was astonishing, as the woke movement would have never been given room to breath in 1930.
Boomers enabled the woke movement.
We have our society, those that came before us to thank, not belittle. And yes, we have our own things to fix.
It won't and that's the point. We should stop wasting our childhoods chasing meaningless standardized tests because the rationale for the tests is built on a lie. You can randomly pick people to run corporations and we won't be any worse off.
There's little difference in looking at test results and actual work which it is meant to proxy. At least in principle.
Your point is unclear.
Besides, SAT is a filter. SAT is objectively easy compared to the college entrance exams in other countries. Those who do well in SAT may not do well in school, but those who do badly in SAT or CAT are certainly academically inept, at least probabilistically. Of course, there are some corner cases, such as for the unfortunately students in those miserable Baltimore schools, where the median GPA is 0.5 (or 1.5?).
It's so sad that the US got into this Animal Farm shit, and far too many people cheered for it.
ish... TBF, now you have to do an additional secret indirection dance to get around the Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action.
Plenty of high school graduates have the 4.5 GPA and a snazzy personal statement and all the right "add-ons", but aren't actually equipped to succeed at Harvard. The SAT is plenty useful to evaluate that.
That's a feature, not a bug. If everyone has a Harvard degree, nobody has a Harvard degree. A lot of the worth of one derives from its exclusivity, and the cream of the crop you meet there because of that exclusivity. I'd posit that the difference in the quality of the education itself received between Harvard and a good state school isn't worth talking about.
Harvard freshman class size is 1700, but there are also a number of other schools at the same tier of Harvard (off the top of my head, Princeton, MIT, U Penn, Stanford, Yale)
As Harvard said in the article: yes, the tests may have some bias, but every other measure suggested so far to replace them --- especially "personal statements" --- has an even higher bias.
Using the SAT as the sole or primary factor for selection means that we are going to end up widening the wealth gap over the long run.
That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be used, but that if we want to converge towards a more egalitarian society, then these institutions also need to properly weigh other factors when selecting candidates and also provide more support to students from less advantageous backgrounds and with less resources.
The problem is that most of the alternative measures, which not using test scores make more prominent, also do this, some much more than test scores. Personal statements were particularly mentioned upthread, but looking at grades does this, too (and doing it in combination with looking at what classes were taken does so even more), looking at extracurriculars favors resources probably more than any other factor typically examined in admissions (though personal statements are in the running here, too.) Standardized test scores may be the least problematic factor commonly used in admissions.
If your goal is egalitarianism, however, the best response would be to abolish Harvard, not have them implement the Progressive Stack.
The thing is, Harvard education is not measurably higher quality than other schools. You can get a very similar quality of education elsewhere. The real reason why you go to Harvard is specifically for access to the social structures of America's rich and powerful. Every rich family is sending their kids to Harvard specifically because every other rich family does the same, creating a nexus of social capital[0].
Now, if you're a poor or middle class kid that manages to get into Harvard, that's great, you have the ear of a bunch of rich kids all at once. The SATs were the vehicle by which that happened. Intelligence does not accumulate like social capital does, so even an imperfect measure of intelligence makes the pool of accepted applicants more egalitarian. If you want to replace the SATs, you need a selective measure that rich people can't readily optimize for, and by Goodhart's law, such measures are extremely hard to find.
So what would "abolishing" Harvard mean, exactly? I don't mean literally winding down the school's business entities or nationalizing it (mostly), but breaking the social norms that make rich people all cluster in one educational gated community away from everyone else. Harvard won't break them themselves, because it brings in tons of money from rich donors who want to don't-call-it-a-bribe the admissions department. But what if we forced Harvard - and every other university - to share one giant pool of applicants? You'd have a unified admissions system that took every applicant and randomly assigned them to 3 to 5 different schools' applicant pools. Students could then pick from the acceptances they got or try again if they didn't get any. This incredibly invasive change to how university admissions exist would have to be done for the sole purpose of keeping all the rich kids from just picking Harvard.
[0] In general, social capital precedes all other forms of control, including capitalism and politics. See also: The Tyranny of Structurelessness.