Such a contrast to other systems where for example your HS grades will count 100% - and similar "ungameable" systems.
Elite-College Admissions Were Built to Protect Privilege
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...
The new holistic admissions policy worked as intended, successfully suppressing Jewish admissions.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...
The 'holistic' admissions lie - The Daily Californian
https://www.dailycal.org/2012/10/01/the-holistic-admissions-...
The False Promise of 'Holistic' College Admissions - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-fa...
Lifting the Veil on the Holistic Process at the University of California, Berkeley - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-...
My professor explained that academics alone is not enough for success in life. He explained that some of the smartest engineers report to average business majors in companies. And he explained that that I cannot get any scholarships with perfect GPA while my roommate, a B student, has scholarships because he plays basketball and will likely get in leadership role in early on. That is good for the university as their graduates are seen as more successful.
It was a hard thing to listen to but I accepted it. I wish he told me the truth though.
I heard the lack of balance in the Bay Area: "wierdos, tech bros, etc.". A geek can contribute either very positively or very negatively to society (ex: tech CEOs, unabomber, etc.),
Maybe too young to judge at university admissions, but still a reasonable proxy (another topic).
Had to listen to someone talking about "humping it across the line" this week.
Being smart is valuable, but it’s only one ingredient among many. You need to be able to communicate with others, take risks, work hard, have empathy, be a creative problem solver, etc
Being a brain with a body attached is not enough and that’s good
The entire premise was following 2 people, one guy barely graduated community college, the other was incredibly intelligent. Went to an elite university, got a masters really young, and I believe was a member of Mensa.
The difference was in other areas. The first guy had a lot of persistence and didn’t stop when things got hard. Ended up becoming a very successful person, married with kids, had their own business.
By contrast the other guy despite being legitimately one of the smartest people in the world, simply withered into obscurity, had trouble maintaining gainful employment, relationships etc. A very stark contrast to the first person.
I realize the point of a documentary is to highlight extremes but I think it does say something about the relative value of intelligence as it correlates to successful outcomes
But then that raises the question of why they want to go to an elite university. Well, obviously, because being able to pass as a good student does matter.
You see the same thing with asians today. The competitive-admissions high school I attended went from. 30% asian to almost 70% asian. There was a backlash, almost entirely from very liberal white people. I don’t think any of them disliked Asians per se. But they wanted to preserve a certain culture in the school and all the Asians led to a change in the culture.
Citation please.
Ok, screw that and screw the Ivy League and the WASPs with it.
I understand the sentiment and sometimes share it. But I’m also sad to recognize that while elite asians like me can excel within the systems created by WASPs, we probably wouldn’t have created such systems ourselves.
What other group in history has created a system so fair that they were replaced-without being conquered—within the very institutions they themselves created? My dad was born in a village in Bangladesh and my brother went to Yale and is an executive at J.P. Morgan (two of the WASP-iest institutions in America). WASPs are a minority in these institutions now. This sort of thing basically only happens in Anglo countries.
Good reading: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/opinion/george-bush-wasps...
I think that's really begging one of the important questions here. _Is_ the system fair now?
The system clearly wasn't originally fair (when elite schools excluded women, people of color, etc).
They became more open after decades of struggle driven in large part from the outside, and helped along by the GI bill, as well as a broader shift towards getting more public funds.
The demographics have changed, but to the degree that it's more fair, is that because WASPs created them that way, or because women and other racial groups changed society more broadly?
WASPs were unusual in creating systems that saw openness to outsiders as a virtue, and then actually giving up their own power to allow others into the institutions they built. The first black Harvard student was admitted in 1847. Two Japanese students got a degree from Harvard law school in 1874. But if you look at societies where African and Asian people have the power to exclude, those places aren’t very open to outsiders.
In your view, did that view of openness to outsiders as a virtue manifest in other ways? It's been a while since I had to study the period but the colonial northeast was perennially at war with the native population and French Canadian colonists. E.g. it seems Harvard was founded during the Pequot war. In that same year of 1636, Roger Williams set up Rhode Island because he had been banished from Massachusetts after being convicted of heresy. So in general, it seems like WASPs were founding schools in an environment where being native, French, or indeed the wrong kind of Anglo-Puritan was worth attacking. I'm not seeing the openness to outsiders.
> The first black Harvard student was admitted in 1847.
Harvard was founded in 1636, so it seems like they went a full two centuries with total segregation before it finally admitted _one guy_. Again, not so much a culturally inculcated openness to outsiders so much as a slightly imperfect execution of exclusion.
> But if you look at societies where African and Asian people have the power to exclude, those places aren’t very open to outsiders.
I'm trying to think of what a fair comparison would be. I do think there's a meaningful difference between a dominant/imperial power that (begrudgingly, slowly) allows room for its own citizens of diverse racial backgrounds, vs a previously colonized or dominated country making space for foreign powers.
So e.g. the oldest university in Asia is University of Santo Tomas, which was founded by the Spanish colonizers and is a Catholic university, and I think was under Spanish governance until the Philippine Revolution. Should the new fledgling country have made sure that it saved space for white students? I'm not sure whether they actually did, but I think that's a very different ethical question than, "should Harvard/Yale/Brown in New England built on native land with wealth substantially built off the triangle trade, admit BIPOC students?". The oldest "university" in the modern sense in China is Tainjin University, founded in 1895; i.e. they didn't have a university until a couple generations after the 2nd opium war. Should it have saved space for foreign students? The first "universities" in India were founded during British rule. Etc etc.
But where there _isn't_ a strong power imbalance, I would be curious to see historical examples of any group having an especially better or worse record on inclusion.
You should be able to think of a dozen examples off the top of your head. Virtually every society has minorities and immigrant groups (which have nothing to do with colonial history).
> I do think there's a meaningful difference between a dominant/imperial power that (begrudgingly, slowly) allows room for its own citizens of diverse racial backgrounds
Why would a dominant power ever make room for people outside their in-group? Where does that notion even come from? That's not how most societies work. Some multi-ethnic empires in history showed various degrees of tolerance for outgroups (e.g. Muslims that ruled over the Indian subcontinent imposed jizya on non-Muslims only some of the time). But you have to go back to the Romans to find a major power that allowed outside ethnicities to rise to the uppermost reaches of society (without being conquered by outside groups).
You can't explain the unusual inclusiveness of American society by pointing to anything minorities did. Minorities always advocate in their own interest--that's commonplace, but almost never works. The Uyghurs can tell the Chinese "we don't want to be oppressed" all they want, but that's not persuasive to the Chinese because that's just an expression of self-interest. It's not contrary to the self interest of the Chinese for the Uyghurs to be oppressed.
The unusual thing is the dominant group actually giving up power voluntarily. For that to happen, there must be something in the dominant culture to which minorities can appeal, something that can be used to persuade the dominant group to give up its own self interest.
Define "fair" for a system designed not only to filter an elite out of the rest of society, but in fact to have that elite's size remain detached from larger demographic trends. Is it fair for Zoomers to have an easier time in college admissions than Millennials, while being subject to what are supposedly stronger DEI measures?
What, in fact, do we think this system ought to be aiming for, and how is that fair?
For the moment it seems to me that the system is arbitrary and we're being fooled, in a way, into imposing conceptions of fairness and/or merit onto it that it really aimed at and which always served more as happy-face masks for the arbitrary organizational shoggoth underneath.
I knew the director of admissions somewhat at an elite school and he said that they basically put a couple of quantitative metrics (like SAT) on one axis and read essays and considered other metrics like interviews on the other axis for diversity before that term became popular.
The upper right more or less got in, the lower left didn't, and then they debated the middle ground.
The problem finding a hard enough test with as little human intervention for assessments. Because human intervention brings with it subjectivity. This subjectivity was manageable when there weren't so many people applying for top schools (e.g. in the early 1900's). But right now its not.
SAT/ACT/GRE are no indicator of success. What this "study" is merely proving is that schools may have regressed in their rigor for grading hard courses.
My guess is because it was focused on those attending elite institutions:
"In their paper on admissions to highly selective colleges... students at each of the schools in this analysis... Students opting to not submit an SAT/ACT score achieve relatively lower college GPAs when they attend an Ivy-Plus college..."
My guess is the meaning of a high or low GPA versus standardized test changes quite a bit when you have groups very highly selected based on a wealth of other information.
The Dartmouth report has always frustrated because they, along with that other paper, selectively present conditional means rather than scatterplots, hiding the variability around points to make things look more predictive than they are. Means by predictor level are almost useless without knowing the conditional variance for each predictor level. They're basically deliberately pretending that there is no error variance in the prediction equation.
Meta-analyses suggest that both standardized test performance and GPA predict later performance. For example:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10627197.2015.99...
In some literature, GPA is superior, and others, testing.
There are other studies from decades ago showing that when standardized tests are temporarily removed from admissions (e.g., due to a court ruling), it has almost no influence on outcomes of admitted students later, suggesting admissions committees are able to select comparable students without tests.
I'm not saying tests are horrible and should be omitted, I just think people really overstate their predictive utility and it causes a ton of problems down the road.
I don't know how it is in Ontario now, but when I went through HS there university admissions were your top-K grades for the last couple of years and they didn't factor in which school you attended. There were no shortage of private/alternative high schools in Toronto that catered gaming that system with lax workloads and inflated grades.
Over the past 7 years other schools have done so as well. Waterloo's adjustment factor list got FOI'd and made public if you want to find yours.
After seeing the list I'm kind of sad, I had the choice between two schools at 10 and 13, and chose the one with 13. A 3% difference can make or break an application in any competitive program... Well, at least it wasn't one of those schools with 20 point factor, wow.
Which is basically what the SATs are:
Admissions required a triad - top grades, top test scores, and something significant in extra-curricular activities. And finally, an interview. Bomb any of those, and you're out. I was rejected by MIT because of the interview.
There's a lot of luck of the draw when you're applying to schools with a pretty low admittance rate.
I joke with someone I know pretty well in my alma mater's alumni office that I'd probably never get in today and they smile and follow it up with an "oh well, you're fine." :-) And they're not unhappy that I'm an alumnus. 3 people from my school's 59 person graduation class got in; certainly would never happen now.
I knew nothing about Caltech, and by amazing luck it was perfectly suited to what I wanted and my personality.
For a while now, I've been running the D Coffee Haus monthly meetings, where myself and fellow nerds meet and talk about nerdly stuff. It's as much fun as the same thing at Caltech.
The ratione behind this was "ending the school to prison pipeline." They saw the correlation between drop out rates and incarceration and thought they could reduce the latter by gaming the former.
This is why you see a lot of college dropouts from that corpus because they can't make it. They were lied to.
The optimal strategy would be to take the easiest classes required to graduate, since there's no national authority to normalize grades across classes.
This, of course, leads to yet more grade inflation. Hard to compete with a >4.0 student when your school doesn't even offer advanced courses!
Legacy admissions are part of the hereditary class system. The reason people go to elite schools isn’t just to receive an education, it’s also a status symbol and networking opportunity. If you do manage to get accepted by an elite school purely on merit, that’s not just an opportunity for you personally, it’s a chance to pass that status down to your children.
But yeah the rest of it is bullshit (and often a fig leaf for discrimination).
Of course the top tier students were likely to achieve an A regardless, so the more challenging courses would look better. For me though it probably would've been optimal to choose easier classes; admissions might not even be aware that a more difficult option was offered.
* If I recall correctly though, colleges were usually interested primarily in the unweighted GPA.
The SAT and GRE aren't perfect, but they're a massive help to students who would otherwise be outside the normal path. Get a high score on the SAT, and nobody cares whether you went through traditional K-12.
This is understatement, GRE being required for STEM postgraduate studies was always university requirement for all not something the STEM department would want.
One can argue that the quantitative part have a point but for the language part, you must be kidding me. Unless you are going to English literature it is just plain stupid (maybe even if you study literature).
For non-native speakers, it's just a test of how well they learned English, and nobody in admissions expects them to score as well as native speakers.
Beyond this, there are subject-specific GREs. They're far from perfect, but they're more uniformly comparable across all candidates than grades are.
There is no intelligence in most parts, it is just you memorizing a lot of words that you will never hear or use. Maybe you are confusing different parts of the exam.
> For non-native speakers, it's just a test of how well they learned English, and nobody in admissions expects them to score as well as native speakers.
That's different test/s. Programs will require TOEFL/IELTS for that purpose.
The vocabulary is not that difficult. If you regularly read literature as a child and adolescent, you will know most of the vocab in the test. Most people consider reading and having a decent vocabulary as signs of education and intelligence.
Beyond that, the verbal GRE is mostly about making connections between different words and concepts - just a test of reasoning ability.
TOEFL/IELTS are for a completely different purpose. That's why I said that the verbal GRE is only really meaningful for native speakers. You wouldn't expect someone who learned English as a second language to have the same command over the language as a native speaker. That doesn't mean that they're not smart.
The real downside is that school is insanely competitive, students study incredibly long hours, and they feel intense pressure to perform well on their exams.
The upside is that the students are much more serious about their studies than in the US, in general.
And when it comes to the levers of power, connections are still what defines future leaders in Asia, not grades. This entire idea of "serious students" are ultimately just a bone to throw to the masses.
This is an unrelated point, is your contention that the US is better off with unserious students? Social mobility / wealth accumulation for the masses does suck in other countries but it's great that people are still seriously motivated by schools. It's a big reason those students immigrant to the US and companies here hire those people in masses.
It's that America has the capacity to fully absorb it's talent so it's not a problem. The reason why other countries have more is because they don't have the capacity to absorb them due to less opportunities so the competition is higher. Many of those "serious" students in China or India will still end working in factory jobs and delivery drivers because they weren't good enough.
>It's a big reason those students immigrant to the US and companies here hire those people in masses
Eh, if they were hiring domestic students I wouldn't say there would be much of difference. Unless if you are running a startup, most of these "serious" students will be just writing basic CRUD apps. Value comes from experience here, not talent. Well, if I was American though, I wouldn't bother competing againt millions of desperate Chinese or Indians for opportunity cost anyways, I'd be going more into law or finance. And those fields are less diverse.
If you do academics only, there's also the phenomenon where getting into the right Kindergarten-level school determines your entire school career. In many countries, your current school is a significant factor of your next school.
Imagine not getting into the right Kindergarten having life-long consequences.
My wife is Asian (born there) and when I told her and her family this they were literally speechless.
This is not a hypothetical btw, this really happens.
All the rest, there are very lenient high school diploma requirememts, and no crazy costs like the US. All that want can basically attend, until they fail to pass a few times.