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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

University objectives of making a diverse student body (an objective I basically agree with!) make this tricky and futzy (but not impossible IMO! You can always do something a bit hybrid), but I really feel like if some US university just decided to go to an entrance exam model they'd probably instantly have a cohort of students that would be _much_ easier to onboard into university materials.

Biggest problem is you'd need to make the entrance exams _actually tough_. Like "basically nobody who takes it gets an A". The objective is to rank students between each other, after all! It doesn't matter if the top scorer only has a 70% or something.

Every argument against standardized testing in this kind of thing seems to boil down to "test results are heavily correlated to socio-economic status". But... every other form of university entrance criteria process is even more correlated, right? All those extracurriculars aren't free after all.

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> Biggest problem is you'd need to make the entrance exams _actually tough_. Like "basically nobody who takes it gets an A". The objective is to rank students between each other, after all! It doesn't matter if the top scorer only has a 70% or something.

Plenty of other countries already do it this way

Yeah I did the French engineering school exams, I got a looooot of nasty grades in some of the test banks.

I was in the American school system up until HS and then moved to France. The _way_ stricter grading compared to what I had in the US was very hard to get used to.

One thing that I did witness while studying for the engineering school exams (which is a whole two year affair) was seeing a lot of people who were very used to being the top of their class and getting good grades flame out, because they had already been working super hard in high school to keep their grades up.

I think there's a good chunk of "straight A students" who might struggle with the hit to their ego in that environment. But it was helpful and humbling to me.

It also really opens your eyes to the reaches of what you learn can achieve when applied intelligently. My favorite class in university, by far, was an astronomy/astrophysics type class. I think I scored around a 60%, which ended up being a 4.0 for the class. It was just brutal, but seeing what was at least possible to achieve from what we were learning was also amazing.

Speaking as a teacher it's highly unfortunate that at most schools this doesn't really fly - even with curving, because parents and kids alike expect 100% for basic understanding and application. So it's the analog of understanding akin to an assembly line worker instead of an engineer. This is especially a shame in the era of LLMs when rote regurgitation is becoming increasingly irrelevant, and higher order 'understanding' is becoming much more relevant. Though obviously the rote work is necessary to achieve that deeper understanding, but not a path by itself.

I've always been much more an application than theory guy, but we all have to adapt to technology and this is where it's at now.

I've told myself if I ever become a teacher I'll do things like make tests out of 250 or something like that, and make sure enough points go around. Ultimately I wouldn't want to punish the students, but at least give them opportunities to get the points they need to get a good grade, and then have opportunities to push themselves for the rest of the material.

(on the entrance exams.... in some of the test banks they do something quite cruel where they determine that if roughly everyone gets some question right then they just award zero points for that specific answer....)

I would support this wholeheartedly. In fact, make the exams blind. No name or info on the exam. Completely fair and level ground for all!

This isn't normal?

Not in USA.

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