Caltech restores standardized test requirement for undergraduate admission | Hacker News Reader

Caltech restores standardized test requirement for undergraduate admission

caltech.edu

45 pointsmsravi20 comments

Related ongoing thread:

Harvard will require test scores for admission again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40003251 - April 2024 (110 comments)

Also related. Others?

Socioeconomic status and the relationship between the SAT and GPA (2009) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39694012 - March 2024 (70 comments)

UT Austin Reinstates Standardized Test Scores in Admissions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39677364 - March 2024 (3 comments)

Yale will again require standardized test scores for admission - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39467434 - Feb 2024 (233 comments)

Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39263106 - Feb 2024 (416 comments)

The misguided war on the SAT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38901976 - Jan 2024 (21 comments)

Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35028562 - March 2023 (652 comments)

Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33298336 - Oct 2022 (573 comments)

Harvard won’t require SAT or ACT through 2026 as test-optional push grows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592885 - Dec 2021 (485 comments)

UC slams the door on standardized admissions tests, nixing any SAT alternative - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29282174 - Nov 2021 (215 comments)

University of California Will Stop Using SAT, ACT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23266209 - May 2020 (367 comments)

MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22638764 - March 2020 (453 comments)

Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21297868 - Oct 2019 (153 comments)

Is it possible the entire country is slowly coming out of a strange psychological haze that has plagued the country for the last few years? This period I think will forever be studied and recognized as a moment in time where the country just lost all rational thought and devolved into a strange collective brain fog.

"strange psychological haze" and "strange collective brain fog" are "nice"--and wrong--ways of describing what was (and is) largely extreme hostility engaged systematically against groups of fellow US citizens, under false pretense.

Is Caltech the only school that went from refusing to consider SATs to requiring them? My sense is that lots of schools went test-optional during the pandemic, and now some are going back to test-required. But I can't think of another school that went all the way to test-refused and is now returning to test-required.

Either people are stupid to know or too evil to pretend not to know that the more complex a rule is, the easier it is to game it. So it is much easier for the wealthy to game the essay writing or whatever that "holistic admission".

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.

I wonder how much this has to do with LLMs making the essay portion of college applications (and even high school grades) somewhat useless at distinguishing among students.

Having a tightly controlled exam without the possibility of AI assistance seems to be the best option left for determining scholastic aptitude.

Standardized tests are interesting in that they measure both raw aptitude and socioeconomic resources. Either measurement is good from the perspective of long-term positive outcomes for matriculated college students but only the former is politically palatable these days

The conflation of the two measurements is a feature, not a bug. After all, the SAT is not an isolated FAFSA and it's not an isolated IQ test. It'd be easier for the SAT company to be just one of those but they choose not to be.

I recently learned just how much raw aptitude matters because my family began hosting a wickedly bright war refugee this past year. She flubbed the SATs on her first attempt, relative to her raw intelligence and her English competence, because she had received no ancestral wisdom about how to approach the SAT itself.

So it goes.

Really interested to see GPA data before and after this change, from Caltech and other universities.

GPAs have been inflating pretty steadily for decades.

They went test optional and then back in a mere four year period. I believe that should produce some fairly strong resolving power for any consequences of that decision.

It's the right direction of course but the concurrent release with Harvard sort of opens them up to antitrust probe tbh. Clearly the admission offices are all synchronizing policy in backchannels (or frontchannels).

What's the antitrust angle? SAT and ACT are administered by different companies, right? Do Caltech or Harvard have some sort of stake in either of them?

Top schools compete with each for students. Collaborating to keep prices high or keep admissions criteria consistent in a way that reduces competition between the schools would open them up to anti-trust complaints.

But that would be hard to prove. If two gas stations collude to set prices, that violates anti-trust law. But if they just follow suit as they see the other raise or lower prices, that's generally legal, as long as there isn't a secret or understood agreement. I expect the latter is more what's going on here.

But for there to be an antitrust case, consumers or suppliers must have been harmed in some manner to the benefit of the trust. Standardized testing costs are pretty low (especially compared to tuition), and they don't reach the colleges/unis.

It is just those are objective measures and lead to minority groups being discriminated against (notably Asians) having data to prove it.

SCOTUS ruled that universities can't use race as a factor for admission. Like, at all. Asian demographics are usually scoring higher on these tests.

None of this has anything to do with antitrust.

Colleges still use race in admissions. They just obfuscate it slightly. For example, they preferentially admit people by zipcode, i.e. by the degree to which the neighborhood is non-white, non-Jewish, and non-Asian. They encourage applicants to write about their experiences with discrimination in their applicant letters. They also accept people scoring in the top percentage of grades at a school (which preferentially admits students from worse schools with lower standards i.e. students from black and Hispanic schools). I assume they use a variety of other techniques as well.

None of this has anything to do with antitrust

Your post contained a possible misconception, that being legally barred from using race at all means they functionally don't use race at all.

Can someone earnestly state that this would make a difference? I keep hearing about those poor immigrant Chinese folks from NYC that get into Yale with just their 1600's and a dream but that straight up does not happen if you don't have the rest of the qualifiers. Nobody is getting into these top schools with just good SAT scores, the "high-agency" signaling on their application carries far more weight.

I'd even wager that the people that didn't include their SAT/ACT scores in the past few years and got in likely would have gotten in even if they had submitted them. The only impact this has is on reducing the cost of reading applications and decreasing the applicant pool (which is fine, but it's not some kind of win for meritocracy).

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