> The chattering class is using poor kids as pawns to eliminate standardized testing. Which helps their own kids. Rich kids who “don’t test well.” But they know how to strategically boost their GPAs, get recommendation letters from important people, stack their resumes with extracurriculars, and use the right slogans in their admissions essays. They have “polish.”
> Applicants from the most affluent families excel at these games. A study at Stanford found that family income is more highly correlated with admissions essay content than with SAT scores. Applicants from well-to-do backgrounds are especially adept at crafting their essays in ways that please admissions committees.
If equity is so important, why not grant preferential treatment to all children coming from families that aren't upper-middle-class? Or ban legacy preferences at the very least? This is a simple and effective way of achieving the goals they claim to be championing. The author hit the nail on the head. Every other metric used for admissions is far more easily gamed by rich families. Hence why they are being preserved. Standardized test scores are the hardest metric to game, and hence, are most under attack. All this talk about equity is the most convenient and cost-effective way to eliminate the one barrier that most vexes rich parents.
Now that I have kids at in private school, I have a totally different perception of the cultural capital these families have that we didn't. We have a second winter break for ski holiday. My daughter asked me why we don't ever go to Aspen. When we were kids, we didn't know anyone, we didn't know what to write in admissions essays. We had enough money to do test prep, but that's incredibly cheap in comparison. I'm not concerned about my kids if we move to a subjective admissions system. We'll send my daughter to Bangladesh to do some gold-star project and hire an admissions coach to wring my dad's story of growing up in a third world village for all its worth. But if I was a recent immigrant, or a lower middle class kid in Iowa, I'd be pretty outraged about this.
I wish the obsession with top-tier colleges would go away. It’s not hard to get into a public research university, where there always an opportunity to shine, even if the average student is, well, average.
The real tragedy here though is costs have gone up quite a bit for state educations and the true top-tier educations have so many scholarships available that an average education costs more than a premium one.
I went to a state school but have spent far more of my life working at and with people from Princeton, Caltech, Stanford, etc…
It may be worth mentioning that one of the, if not the, most powerful IP lawyers in the Bay Area is “only” a University of Iowa Law School grad.
https://www.quinnemanuel.com/attorneys/verhoeven-charles-k/#...
Of course, no one cares about these kids (least of all the elites and their cadre), and any outrage from lower middle class Iowans is already explained away as racism (never mind that Iowa, like much of the rest of middle America, went to Obama in 2008 and 2012).
We've got this at my kid's public school. Neighboring school districts don't, but they have two weeks for spring break (Easter) and we have only one. So that works out for me, although I don't much want to go on a vacation that needs two weeks when everyone else is on vacation; it's no fun to go to fun places that are overcrowded.
And what are the real goals of these institutions? The whole approach of having artificially limited education where people are sifted into higher and lower status classes based upon judgements made when they're teenagers is premised on elitism, not equity. That's the purpose of these institutions - not to education as many people as possible, but to restrict education to a privileged few in order to increase their own worth. Saying they're concerned about equity is like the casinos that put up signs saying they're concerned about gambling addiction.
There's a reason why Harvard is happy to take people's money and give them an education in the Harvard Extension School, but why they firmly tell those people they can't call themselves Harvard graduates. Contrast this with OMSCS, where they firmly say an in-person degree and an online degree will be the same thing.
Its kind of like when Nokia used to sell the mobile phones with gold plating and the only way to get one was via an invite from an influencer. Basically creating the perception of value via false scarcity.
The first elite university school system that can physically expand to multiple campuses to accommodate new in person students and provide them with the exact same quality education and opportunities to network with legacy students will become Apple of collegiate education.
IMHO, the UC school system gets probably closest to this ideal.
Just wanted to add since I've looked into Harvard Extension School (HES): a HES graduate from a degree program is enrolled in the Harvard Alumni Association and does get to refer to themselves as a "Harvard graduate".
The degree is from the HES with a degree in "Extension Studies", which is the big distinction versus "real" Harvard, but I also suspect that beyond you first or second job, that becomes about as meaningful as your GPA.
Also importantly, that difference has come up in the last few years, to the point where the Harvard College Undergraduate Council and the Harvard Graduate Council both voted last year in favour to remove that differentiation from HES degrees[1]. It is however, Harvard University that has to decide, although it's quite interesting that the students - who are generally considered to be the ones who make the biggest fuss about "real" Harvard - are the ones in support of the move.
It's also worth noting that the child of a HES graduate is still considered a legacy, so that benefit is also conferred on their family.
---
[1] https://blogs.harvard.edu/lamont/2022/03/28/harvard-college-...
My friend who's ultra rich was selected in EWS Quota. His father who runs his own company took Zero pay for the last two years so he qualified for the benefits. Meanwhile people who actually deserved this had to compete for the non reserved seats.
The point is you can't just give preference based on income as its incredibly easy to fudge.
Does India have something like SAT as well?
That's why you have to look at total wealth, not just income... though I'm sure the ultra wealthy will find some way to work around that as well.
Okay, well this is the US.
Your tax returns are a very good indication of how much money you make.
If you lie on your tax returns then you have much bigger issues than college admissions counselors.
At most US elite schools, less than 20 percent is for “non-reserved” seats. Elite schools reserve seats for sports teams (affirmative action for rich white elites with “sports” like fencing and rowing), legacies (affirmative action for rich white elites), related to professors and school administrators (affirmative action for rich white elites), those who write essays on poverty tourism and their work experience in the NGO/white savior/charity scams (rich white elites), and then regular affirmative action (capped at 20%].
So it is a brilliant way to use regular affirmative action for Blacks as a weapon to ensure that rich white elites always win and do not compete with the “deplorable” poorer whites, the Asians and immigrants.
If you're concerned about the wellbeing of black people, and you justify your concern with statistics pointing out that they're disproportionately poor, why not, instead of instituting preferential treatment for black people (which, btw, is racist), you support preferential treatment for poor people instead? That way, you are more efficient (e.g. your resources aren't wasted on Obama's daughters, who are certainly sufficiently privileged already), while also helping people who weren't captured by your superficial assessment ("black <==> poor").
1) Black people are not actually less “good at stuff”, we just have a habit of defining “stuff” in a way that excludes the things that black people are more likely to excel at.
And, 2) Where black people do statistically worse, it’s not due to any innate difference, it’s because socially accepted “normal” support systems are more useful for people with challenges more common in white populations than challenges common in black populations.
So the idea is, if you change the support systems and measures of success to be more universal, the differences will go away.
And then the metric for whether administrative bodies have succeeded in this is “equal outcomes”. What you call “racism”.
But the inferences on which this affirmative action position are based make rational sense. There’s no logical flaw. There’s no conclusive evidence for these hypothesis either, but they are logically plausible.
The opposite perspective is the same: rational, yet lacking any basis in evidence. That is the perspective that black people, through biology, socialization, and/or culture, are actually “worse at stuff”. And the support systems and performance metrics are fair.
There’s no way to prove something is “fair” or “not fair” in the face of “unequal outcomes”. It just comes down to what you want to believe. There’s no rational basis to come to one conclusion or the other.
I choose to believe that all of the big categories of people are pretty similarly “good at things” but I can acknowledge that belief is a leap of faith. The truth is unknowable.
It's starting to get some traction with regulators as well: https://www.progresstogether.co.uk/
Basically whatever metric you choose will leave gaps. And if you try to universally implement a system you get other negative effects (from cost, to information overwhelm, to non-adaptability).
https://priceonomics.com/do-elite-colleges-discriminate-agai...
It’s happened in the past to Jewish people and it’s now happening with Asians. It’s routine to hear admissions officers say that Asians are boring.
If the end goal is to eliminate any sign of a meritocracy, they are well on their way to achieving it.
Or the universities could spend a bit less money. Most donations go to things that aren't exactly central to the supposed mission of a university, like football fields or $90 million dining halls [1]. The explosion of administrative staff over the last couple decades also doesn't help.
[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/blog/real-estate/2016/0...
Aren't costs going up for everyone else anyway? Hot take: instead of hoping that rich alumni would donate to universities, the nation could tax these folks properly instead, and use that money make public education free/cheap.
There are quite a few countries in the world doing this, not all of them rich.
Look at the worth of theirs endowment funds at the end of 2021 :
Harvard 53G$
Yale 42G$
Stanford 37.8G$
Princeton 37G$
MIT 27.4G$
Encouraging donation to top schools via legacy admission creates a perverse incentive to concentrate resources at a few top schools, creating the cycle of everyone fighting to get into them. Money and resources should be spread out.
I think that's a joke of an argument. The people whose kids would no longer get in would go somewhere and the distribution of their bribery would surely be more democratizing.
LOL they don't need any more donations.
Learning disabilities give unlimited time on the tests. That means you can slowly use brute force on the math section to check each alternative one by one instead of needing to be good at other techniques.
Harvard had something like 25% of admitted students do this. Does it sound plausible that 25% of Harvard students need unlimited time on the test due to a learning disability and that lower tier schools have lower rates of learning disabilities, or more plausible that Harvard students have more access to sympathic doctors (through family relations, upper/upper midle class organization connections) and savvy admissions advisers?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/colleges-bend-the-rules-for-mor...
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/h...
Why is somebody deemed somebody to have a weakness in learning in one particular area that makes them “learning disabled”? Why aren’t students who just aren’t as smart as other students considered “learning disabled” and given extra time on tests? But if you’re called dyslexic or dysgraphic or have dyscalculia you’re disabled and deserve not just accommodations (Which I wouldn’t be opposed to on balance) but extra time on every test even if on the whole you smoke the other students?
They are beyond questioning and any teacher who does is likely to have their heads chopped off for hating and not believing disabled people despite not being an expert in disability. Which pretends these accommodations were given out in the first place due to some rigorous criteria by experts in disability.
My kid recently went through another testing gauntlet, which is the 11+ test. For those who aren't in the Southeast corner of the UK, this is a multiple choice type test that looks a lot like an IQ test in some ways. It's a single sitting and determines whether you are allowed into something called a Grammar School, which is just a selective school, and the test is taken the year the kid turns 11.
So the thing about this test is that nobody will admit to it, but everyone in the middle class will hire tutors to help their kids pass the test. Furthermore, private primary schools will spend a lot of time prepping for this test in the two years before the kids take the test. Plenty of people do both: send their kids to a fee-paying primary school, and pay for tutors.
Guess what, the pass rate for fee-paying (aka independent) schools is way higher than for state schools. It's hard to break down which parents went for state + tutoring, but it's not exactly a stretch to suppose those kids did better than state school kids with no tutoring. Furthermore state schools that do well tend to be in certain wealthy areas.
If you have a look at one of these tests, it's pretty clear you benefit from practicing. Like just about any test, if you've done it before you are at an advantage, the more the better.
I don't see how this isn't gaming the test. The idea with a test is to uncover which kids will get the most out of the selective school, but how is that going to work when a select few are prepped for the test?
Now just for the record I did the SAT back when I was a kid. It's pretty much the same as the 11+, for a slightly older age group. Again, it doesn't make any sense to say it's hard to game. People are gaming it as we speak.
I think what might actually be hard to game is teacher recommendations. After all these people have been with the kid for a long time and know what they can do. They also tend to be distanced enough that they don't have to say good things about every kid.
When I was 11, I had a teacher lean over during class and tell me how much she didn't like me, that I was the laziest student she had ever had, and that she couldn't wait until the end of the year because she wouldn't have to see me any more. To be fair: I wasn't a horrible student, was usually quiet without many friends, and just wasn't at the point to handle 2-3 hours of homework, probably due to undiagnosed issues.
I learned that teachers don't always have your best interests at heart, and I couldn't trust any of them much. I couldn't imagine the stress of trying to impress teachers to the point of getting recommendations, and I can't imagine she'd have given me one and I probably would have been scared to ask the others after that. On the other hand, it also became quite clear that you could game the system a little if you got the teachers to like you.
Just because they don't have to say good things about every kid doesn't mean that all of them will say things that give a fair assessment, though a lot would try a little more than this woman did.
How can you compare recommendations from different teachers? The whole point of the SAT is that it is a single number: you can compare SAT results from different schools and see which children are better at taking the test.
> If you have a look at one of these tests, it's pretty clear you benefit from practicing. Like just about any test, if you've done it before you are at an advantage, the more the better.
Yes, but you can't get from 500 to 1500 by practicing. You can probably get from 1450 to 1500, but that's just a few practice sessions to learn what the questions look like, how to fill in the answer sheet, how to tackle the most common ones.
Teacher recommendations are incredibly easy to game. I asked my teachers for recommendations and, to help jog their memory and for their convenience, provided them a sample letter of recommendation that I wrote. They could sign and send that one, use the content as a reminder to write their own, or start from scratch.
I’m quite sure that money or services have changed hands for a recommendation in the past, probably more frequently than stand-ins have taken standardized tests.
At least with tests you could release previous tests and then possibly some groups could release free instructions on key points or tactics.
I don’t think teacher recommendations are great. Presumably parents who currently pay for test prep will instead throw money at getting good teacher recommendations through the right schools, teaching good manners, etc. If I look at my mother and her sister, one went to the grammar school and the other didn’t because they had gotten a new headmistress who didn’t really know the students. The grammar school stopped being selective after a few years anyway (did I mention that grammar schools have been a hot topic for a long time…) and I think the teachers struggled with the change. Perhaps another difference is that grammar schools are often single-sex which I think has a bunch of benefits and drawbacks.
Recommendation letters aren't worth a lot. Most kids who have a shot at getting into a top-ranked school surely have some teachers they got along with. But then there's the luck of the draw whether said teacher will also put in an effort beyond a pro-forma recommendation.
Private schools don't give as much 11+ help as you would think - if a child passes the 11+, the private lose all the potential senior school fees.
Tutoring for the exam definitely helps, but it's mostly exam technique and practise on those types of logical reasoning questions. They can't do the questions for you.
> Standardized test scores are the hardest metric to game, and hence, are most under attack. All this talk about equity is the most convenient and cost-effective way to eliminate the one barrier that most vexes rich parents.
It's also a good way to sneak in affirmative action (racial discrimination really) in places where voters and taxpayers repeatedly said no, like in the UC system, since it removes an objective measure and leaves more "holistic" criterions an admission committee can use to accept or deny (without giving out any explanation) a candidate. [0]
[0] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-harberson-asian-...
It amazes me how corrupt higher education is now. It is AMAZINGLY corrupt.
There is this thing with getting old (I'm in late 40s now) where you think the world is going to hell, but really what is happening is that you are figuring out EXACTLY how fucked up everything is.
However, sometimes things really are going to hell (increasing rich/poor divide, environment/global warming, vast increase in higher ed/healthcare/housing relative to inflation).
Anyway, in this case, I still am trying to gauge if my fondness for the general institution of higher education circa late 1990s was actually still somewhat deserved at the time and it has _truly_ fallen apart in the next 25-30 years, or if it was this bad for the last 40-50 (I can argue there's a good chance it was a great institution in the 1960s fresh after post-WWII investment in higher ed by the gubberment).
Anyone have thoughts? I personally think it is ACTUALLY worse, that the rise of the huge administrator/MBAs in higher ed has led to do-anything-for-a-buck, and it REALLY is this bad.
Signs that it actually is bad:
- the stupendous rise in cost / that little student loan crisis we have
- the stupendous rise in Div I coaching salaries and facilities
- the amount of frivolous facilities built
- the rise of the minimum wage adjunct professor
- the decline of import of tenure (revenue/publishing/research is now everything)
- the decline of humanities. I still as a science guy look down at them, but they are historically important (as in over 1000s of years) to educational institutions.
- grade inflation, it is pay for degree even in some Ivies it appears now
This is so true. When I was younger I thought "oh what a cynical thought, I should cheer up and be less gloomy". Now I realize I was right. The sheer amount of waste arising from badly managed orgs with wrong incentives is just enormous. This is why we don't have flying cars and teleporters.
If you consider that universities these days let in a lot more people, it's inevitable that the academic level is lower. Back in the day someone doing a phd had a reasonable chance of becoming a professor. Now there's so many people the university is not really for producing knowledge, that's just a side business to giving a stamp of approval to your average middle class kid who is not gonna be doing research.
Asians mostly come from poor families compared to west. Here is distribution of test scores and Asians have top scores.
https://twitter.com/monitoringbias/status/163214392094241587...
College education has always been sold as a way to keep your children elite, and to the less well-to-do, as a golden ticket to being elite. The issue with education is that it has been marketed as the ultimate wealth signal: "My daughter is attending ______." (too bad for your daughter who is at ______ State)
> Standardized test scores are the hardest metric to game, and hence, are most under attack.
While this is true, standardized tests tend to favor children from more stable family situations and higher levels of wealth. The attack on the SAT is usually from the side favoring evening the odds for less financially advantaged groups.
It's difficult.
https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-why-elite-colleges-...
"To find out why elite colleges love legacies, two business school professors were granted access to 16 years of admissions data at one elite Northeastern college. The upshot: it’s in this school’s clear self-interest to take them. Alumni children who received offers matriculated at much higher rates, giving the school more certainty in their future enrollment numbers. And these loyal families with multi-generational ties to the college were far more likely to donate funds, money that the school needs, in part, to offer scholarships to others."
Colleges want to look good... but no chance in hell they'll give up consistent students of families who donate.
Cost effective? not when it'll cost them millions or billions in kick backs.
Semi-related anecdote: my alma mater got huge pushback from donors when it tried to eliminate its football team [0], which was legendarily bad and a recruiting nightmare to boot (apparently football rosters can be 100+, though Swarthmore’s was ~53). So there was about as clear a case for elimination as you could hope for, and still it was a big controversy that impacted the school where administrators tend to notice — its endowment.
So when we talk about eliminating legacy admissions, I picture that, but just a thousand times worse.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/05/sports/football-no-more-f...
It's much easier to believe that this is being driven by college administrators who know that the way to advance their careers in the current climate is by passing radical social justice changes, and this particular idea is simply an organically popular fad among social justice influencers so it's the one they've latched onto.
> Elite colleges are eliminating standardized tests before they eliminate legacy admissions. Tells you all you need to know.
The only way to game that metric would be for the wealthy to send their kids to schools that perform worse, which would wind up driving more resources to those schools.
Because equity is about keeping people down, not lifting people up.
The kids with sufficiently "decent" parents get handled with kid gloves and rule adherence, everyone else gets punched down with half-assery even when if they're experiencing injustice and unfairness.
Have known so many bright kids who get nowhere because of schools.
Very rough example but the idea is this. Philosophically/ethically, it seems better. But practically as well: you want to admit the students most likely to excel if given the high quality resources at your university. Among a kid with all the comforts and private tutoring and all that, and a kid who rose way above his shitty lot in life, wouldn't the latter fit that description better?
It should satisfy people who want elite universities to be places to rub shoulders with other elites. My hope is that such a policy would reduce the incentive to game the ordinary system by throwing money at it.
But I guess the whole thing feels terribly unegalitarian and so couldn’t happen.
Perhaps an easier improvement would be if enrolment could be massively (say >2x) increased at elite schools.
Or they just completely fake it, like a few cases that were discovered a few years ago. [1]
Let's be honest though. Those with less "polish" that would be admitted on purely objective/anonymous merit might even excel academically at the university, but they would be excluded by the very same social games being played here.
Sometimes they might even be told that explicitly but usually an excuse will be concocted.
The real question should be:
> What is more cruel, excluding them early on or allowing them to "win" but then ignore them completely when the benefits of that are to be distributed?
Because the equity that the school cares about above all else is its endowment, and rich family legacies give more than anyone else by far.
The SAT has flaws, like AIs trained on criminal records has flaws.
Getting rid of a flawed test won't suddenly make rich privilege suddenly increase
Zoe Bee did a good video on grades... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe-SZ_FPZew
It would be interesting if there was a rule that forbid you from attending the same school as your parents.
So, a lot of restrictions and quotas were added to get these working-class children into universities. A couple of years after the first batch graduated the program was rolled back. Soviet scientists started to complain, because diversity and equity be damned, the quality of the graduates cratered. If you want to be able to rain nuclear fire on the USA, you need the best and the brightest working in your research institutes.
My next statement will be controversial, and is largely anecdotal, but there is very little to no research that contradicts my opinion, so I'm going to say it anyway. Smart, capable people who simply "don't test well" are almost non-existent. Even if they did, you can't accurately identify who doesn't test well except by giving them a job and letting them prove they were capable when they aren't under testing pressure. I have met hundreds of people who claimed they simply didn't test well, and only one of them later proved it by being genuinely capable and competent.
The thing that pisses me off the most about this whole debate, is that it only really matters if you think it matters whether you went to one of the top 10 universities available to you. Frankly, most employers will throw out your application if it says Harvard School of Business. The number of management jobs that want Harvard graduates is less than half the graduating class, and Business majors have it easier than most of the engineering degrees in that respect. If you're an electrical engineer, there are fewer than 100 jobs Nation wide, and they are already occupied. If you want to be a civil engineer, straight up forget about it. The medical and legal schools are the only exception, and those are graduate schools only.
There is far too much focus on whether the top 10 university admissions are fair and equitable, and far too little focus on whether we have affordable universities that meet decent educational standards for everyone who could reasonably earn a useful degree.
We definitely shouldn't be trying to get rid of standardized tests. There are arguments that can be made about their content, especially historically, but they have merit in showing whether a student is ready for certain classes. At a normal university, they use SAT and ACT scores to decide if you can skip algebra and go straight to calculus, or if you need to take even more basic classes before algebra, and they do this for science and English courses as well. Having such a laser focus on how the top 10 or top 50 schools that actually turn away applicants because they're at capacity is a massive failure to see the actual big picture when it comes to education.
Why does this even exist?
It's the same stupidity that leads well-thinking liberals to bring their kids to drag strip shows because in their little mind "trans = gogo dancers in gay clubs".
And that makes them perfect for poor kids who don't have much time or money, they can easily get similar levels of test prep as rich kid with little effort. GPA or extracurriculars however, no chance, those are much more dependent on home environment and wealth.
All the data shows the exact opposite. Also, it's pretty obvious this is false if you spend 10 seconds thinking about it.
You're forced to give the test yourself. Whereas you can easily hire a tutor to read over and "check" (i.e. rewrite) your school essays/homework.
Rich kids can also easily get internships/research experience while in HS due to family connections.
When I read what you said and thought the same thing. I then looked up what the author wrote:
Rich kids who “don’t test well.”
He's just saying if you have a kid that doesn't test well (I am one of those) and happen to be wealthy, the rich have options that poor kids don't. He isn't saying rich kids don't tend to test well.
I'm not sure that premise is 100% accurate either. My parents were teachers and we didn't have extravagant lives, but my parents knew the value of an education and forced me to do test prep 6 days a week the summer after my Junior year. I ended up improving my scores and getting into a good state university and subsequently have a good career 25+ years and still going strong.
I think edge case success (students that don't test well) boils down more to parents giving a shit than anything else. It's not easy, that's for sure, even if you are moderately wealthy.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
The SAT is an IQ test.
Based on comments so far, I'm curious what you mean by this. My own take is that you are correct because standardized tests are 'easier to prep for' because, in many ways, they are IQ tests that you can't prep for, or rather that Bang for the Buck of prepping is low. So, poor, smart kids with no prep can take the test hung over and do well, as the author says. Rich folks can get tutors to spend tens or hundreds of hours prepping, and have only a modest impact on their score.
Meanwhile, GPA and extracurriculars are significantly reflections of socialization and parents rather than anyone's inherent or learned abilities.
Want to be a lawyer but are not sure about law school and do ot know any lawyers? Look to the LSAT. Do well and where you went to university/highschool doesnt matter. Do really well and scholarships will appear. That is the freedom of good standardized testing.
It helps to have some familiarity with the test, so test prep has some value, but some rich kids can’t test their way out of a paper bag. The one thing they could do is hire a ringer to take the test for them, otherwise it is a valuable form of downward mobility which presents a “barrier” to them hoarding opportunity from someone more able.
The claim is that they are trying to give the kid from East New York a shot but the reality is that this is all about the Dalton parents not wanting their little precious to have to go head to head on a fair playing field against a Stuyvesant kid.
Their goal is to make all desirable institutions look like Dalton—-very wealthy students with an appropriate sprinkling of diversity make everyone feel great about how open minded and progressive they are.
The majority of rich kids, whose parents are serious about college, are tracked through prep schools beginning with kindergarten.
Its more rare than not that such a kid underperforms enough to be excluded from elite University admission. Especially once one includes the many elite liberal arts colleges that are generally off of the radar of poors.
I do agree about the value of standardized testing, but for the reason that it enables positive filtering of underprivileged kids who otherwise wouldn't be looked at. I don't believe that a downward pull on rich kids is all that significant. To politely disagree with the reasoning of an otherwise well intentioned post.
I attended prep school as a poor. One of the most egregious things that I've ever witnessed, in terms of admissions, is a truly stupid poor being admitted to an Ivy because his Father networked enough as the a prep school's soccer coach (soccer being why his son was at the prep school, but not why he was admitted to the Ivy). I knew this kid from when we attended Catholic school together before the prep school.
Thankfully they also have standardized test scores, which both have a much more transparent scoring method and seem a much better match for the children's competency. It's not that standardized tests are perfect, but removing them makes things extremely capricious, and often very unfair.
Grading in certain subjects is just laughable. Can you objectively evaluate English essays so that 97/100 is "better" than 96/100? Why not add more significant digits: 96983/100000!
The thing is, attempts to measure the effect of test prep show they have little effect. According to these studies, SAT test prep courses might add ~30 points to your score: https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...
Total education and intelligence are largely what determines one's score. Beyond basic studying that literally everyone can and should do, no one is going to cram-course their way to a 250 point difference. Which when I took the test, was often the difference between say a successful Ivy applicant and a successful Duke applicant. Lesser private and public school applicants dropping from there.
quoting the penultimate paragraph (why are the relevant bits always buried?)
> Analyzing a 2008 survey conducted by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, he noted that one-third of respondents described a jump from 750 to 770 on the math portion of the SAT as having a significant effect on a student’s chances of admissions, and this was true among counselors at more and less selective schools alike. Even a minor score improvement for a high-achieving student, then—and one that falls within the standard measurement error for the test—can make a real difference.
Your link literally says: - test prep improves scores - most conservative possible study suggests ~25 point bump in score - college admission stats show this matters for many applicants
???
the fact that the piece ALSO says, later on:
> students who have a mean score on the math portion of the SAT around 450. According to the same admissions counselor survey, a 20-point improvement to a score in this range would have no practical meaning for students who are trying to get into more selective schools
and no kidding. 450 on either section is clearly not suitable for a college experience at a "selective school." You're expected to do multivariable calc during MIT's freshman year, regardless of major. 450 on math SAT means you can't do algebra.
The only K-12 school in which my children have been enrolled that has never reported standardized test scores to student's parents also happened to be a private school. I suspect the school's motive is a combination of not wanting to give leverage to parents whose children do well, and not wanting to piss off the wealthy parents. We are in the first group and thankfully my children weren't at that school for very long due to COVID lockdowns.
(Don't get a JD unless set on a particular practice because the field is overflowing. Consider MD or DDS first.)
I’m S Asian, scored 99th percentile 17x, but my GPA was around 3.3 because I think college is a joke when it involves homework. I had never gotten less than a A on midterms and finals, but what I’m trying to say is that GPA and race matters much more.
There was a law school acceptance calculator. With my scores and my Asian background, the T14 were either out of reach or I had somewhat of a chance at a lower rank of those schools.
Law school is probably the most atrocious when it comes to race based acceptance. Changed my race on the calculator and my chances became green across the board basically.
Being Asian is hard enough. We have to succeed because our parents and in some cases like me know what life is like without running water or electricity, genocide every few years, etc.
It sucks that no school ever looks at that. I grew up without running water nor a toilet, and multiple people living in a home that was barely 400sq ft. Yet nobody cares about that because I’m Asian, the wrong minority.
Yes I don’t give a shit about homework, I understand the material which is why I’m slaying each test. I hated that about college. We are adults. I’m paying to get an education, why the fuck is homework 20% of the grade? It’s practice, for people who don’t get the material.
Education is a joke. when I see a fellow asian person from a top uni I know they had to be actually extraordinary to get in and come out.
So what you're admitting is that you are willing to not to do required parts of your job because you don't feel they're important. If you go out into the workforce and become a lawyer, what parts of your job are equally willing to blow off because you don't like them? Billing clients properly? Procedural stuff like filing answers properly?
You're basically arguing that your unwillingness to do the assigned tasks not be held against you.
What discipline did you study in undergrad?
In many majors - or even just in well-taught classes - work outside of lecture or recitation is designed to complement what you are learning. It _is_ the education you're paying for. It isn't high school where it's a bunch of repetition of the same concept (although I'd vigorously defend that, too) intended as practice. Problem sets ought to be the application of the material you're introduced to in lecture, done so in a way that forces you to grapple with and connect core concepts to other material in your major.
For example, in grad school I TA'ed an upper-level undergraduate course that would typically have 15-20 students. The problem sets I created with the professor I worked for had problems split across two themes. The first was discover; we'd take something that seemed ho-hum or rote from class, and apply it to an oddball setting which yielded surprising results. Sure, that straightforward equation works - but why does it go so weird in this curated example we're providing? There's extraordinary opportunity for learning there.
The second theme was connection across disciplines. Introduce a mathematics, computer science, or other concept and use it to extend something from lecture in an interesting way. These problems were intended t be challenging. We referred students to other textbooks and invited them to work together or come to office hours to fill in gaps in their background, because (a) this is a _vital_ skill to learn, and (b) it led to really cool and interesting problems and solutions.
There simply is not time in lecture or recitation to cover the stuff we introduced in these homework assignments. That's why the course credit hours tallied up to 3x the amount of time spent in lecture. I'll also note that while challenging, we did not allow poor marks on or incomplete problem sets derail a student's grade. If in lecture/recitation participation and on exams they clearly knew the core content, we'd work with the students to ensure they got a high grade. But if someone shirked off the homework entirely but aced the exams? Well, the exams aren't testing everything we're teaching you in this course, so you better believe they'd get poor grades at the end of the term.
So your perspective seems warped. If you weren't doing the homework, then you didn't get the education you paid for, and that's on you - not the university.
Universities in the UK use A-level results (which are mostly based on standardised tests), but will sometimes compensate (lower) the required grade based on a students school and background. Which IMO works out fairer in practice.
This doesn't somewhat improve college performance. It creates a markedly different brain and habits. An effect that declines as entrance into such a school system becomes later. Middle school being exceptionally late. High school being so late so as to have a marginal effect if any. Kindergarten being optimal.
Prep schools, generally speaking, only give basic test instruction for college entrance exams. Other standardized testing is the same or even less than normal schools. Cram-course style instruction is generally private and paid for privately by any given family. In my experience, the vast majority of prep school students don't seek it. This is in the United States.
Not if they go to a school that doesn't have the prerequisites for college/university. Not if the school is so poorly-resourced that they don't have access to the study material, or even access to take the standardized tests they need. Not if the teachers are jerks. Go luck getting into a university science program if your highschool didn't teach science.
(Yes, that is a thing even in the US. Many religious schools do not teach what we who read HN would call "science", which makes university applications tricky.)
Neither SAT nor ACT are measured in "grades", so it's not clear what you mean to say here.
This view ironically makes schools and education irrelevant. Why even send students to school, if test scores are "totally" in the control of the student?
For those pursuing expertise though, schools can provide a lot of value through offering access to others with talent and to some degree infrastructure.
That these schools serve both sets of demand is a problem: Sure hand out the elite status tokens to favored groups, they dont matter much anyways. But if society actually believes that there are pressing problems that need to be solved (global warming perhaps etc) training resources should be aimed at those who can best go on to make use of them.
Because the tests measure knowledge, and schools are intended to impart knowledge.
As an analogy, my physical fitness is totally in my control: if I work out more, I'll build more muscle. But you'd never say "Why are you even going to the gym if your fitness is within your control?" If my local gym is really trash or I can't afford one, I can still do pushups on my own or go for runs, but nobody would argue based on that that gyms are worthless.
Likewise, schools are (or should be) built for students to learn. Students can learn in other ways, too, and any kind of learning will be measured on these tests.
The fact that other means of learning exists, though, doesn't mean that schools aren't important or useful.
That hardly makes the school “irrelevant”.
I love it that you make your candidates go through binary trees questions on a whiteboard AND are totally dismissive of it at the same time. That's totally not a waste of everyone's time.
Why were teachers biased against you?
In 1996, California repealed affirmative action via Prop 209. At the UC Berkeley and UCLA, considered the 'best' of the UC system, Asians represented 25-30% of the student base. Studies and fear-mongering at the time showed that a repeal of affirmative action would imply that Asians would become 90% of the enrollment based on the admissions factors used.
The UC system dismantled its admissions framework, and yet despite moving to a 'softer' framework, Asian enrollment at UC Berkeley rose to 65-70%, which is the case today.
Now the ithe same thing happening, but on a national scale, 27 years later. It's about time! The reality is on any quantifiable, OBJECTIVE framework, Asians and to a lesser extent, whites, have been shown to be discriminated against. The only way to sustain this, especially in light of the pending ruling from SCOTUS likely banning affirmative action policies at Harvard et al... is to dismantle any external, objective framework for measuring applicants.
Chief Justice Roberts said it plainly: "the only way to end discrimination is to end discrimination."
My question is, if you eliminated race - 'banned the box' on applications, what would the outcomes be? Answer is self-evident and that's the true reason the SAT and test scores in general are going away. "a rose by any other name".
They say that they don't discriminate, but it's an absolute lie.
The whole contention is that these measures are not objective, and that they're biased in favor of certain groups.
You can't just base the core of your argument on the assumption of objectivity when that objectivity itself is what is in question.
Back to the email, it showed before and after charts. Asian percentage dropped sharply, and all other percentages rose.
It’s only discriminatory against Asian AMERICANS.
Legacies and big donors are much more likely to not be Asian. The other well-off white upper class is getting admitted based off all the holistic extracurricular/volunteering/etc bullshit. And there are secret quota systems for other minority (not all racial) groups. Then there are athletes, needing representation across academic disciplines to match teaching capacity, etc.
Basically, I think middle class Asians and white people who fit the “high scores, want to study stem” paradigm are just figuring over a very small pie when it comes to selective university admissions. Within this group Asians dominate (because demographically they make up a large portion of high scorers) but outside of it they are not as likely to fit into any of the other admissions buckets.
If admissions were based purely on test scores and academic achievement, yes there would be more Asians and less underrepresented groups, but most importantly it would completely shake up which white people get admitted, which is what the admissions system cares most about.
Based on this Whites are the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action (by numbers), even if blacks are by ratio. There just aren’t enough blacks at these schools to make that much of a difference of scale.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/pennsylvania-governor-r...
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/25/companies-eliminate-college-...
There is not a shortage of textbooks or qualified teachers who could explain calculus or history or economics. As a society, the could easily produce far more educated people (and for a lower cost), but that is not the goal of a degree. The diploma -- especially from an elite school like Columbia -- first and foremost is a signifier that you deserve entrance into an upper middle managerial class. Unless the goals of higher education are teaching (or god forbid actual job training), the entrance requirements will always be arbitrary enough that class lines can be sufficiently preserved.
But that would never happen. The whole point of ivy league is that they are exclusive. Companies get to feel special when they hire an ivy league grad so they can feel special for having one of the special chosen ones. If everyone gets to have an ivy league degree, then the ivy league degree becomes worthless.
There is shortage of skilled teachers, especially in CS.
People go to the industry cuz pay sucks.
Anyone can pick up a math book and start teaching themselves, there's no doubt about it - but any form of third-party verification of this is very high effort on a case-by-case basis.
I think that while this take is largely accurate, it's incomplete. Substitute "upper middle managerial class" with "enlarged access to professional employment" -- not a huge leap -- and you can see societal benefit for aggressively modulating the gatekeeping for inclusivity's sake.
Otherwise it's just the usual cynicism which is always effective for maintaining the status quo.
> At the same time, standardized tests also help us identify academically prepared, socioeconomically disadvantaged students who could not otherwise demonstrate readiness . This may seem like a counterintuitive claim to some, given the widespread understanding that performance on the SAT/ACT is correlated with socioeconomic status. Research indeed shows some correlation, but unfortunately, research also shows correlations hold for just about every other factor admissions officers can consider, including essays, grades, access to advanced coursework (as well as opportunities to actually take notionally available coursework), and letters of recommendations, among others. Meanwhile, research has shown widespread testing can identify subaltern students who would be missed by these other measures.
[1]: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...
When I tested 99.9 percentile in Verbal and 97 percentile in Math my father's only comment was, "Who ever thought you could test like that?" Snicker, snicker.
I'm disgusted by this decision. You HAVE to let kids have a way of knowing they have capabilities when for some reason the environment blocks that.
I have 2 anecdotes of high school students who earned near perfect SAT scores, were terrible students in high school, barely passed their undergraduate courses and are struggling to maintain careers in tech.
My point is that standardized testing is a measure of potential. But a college must gamble on a bad-grades, high-scores student. The payoff for a college might be better if they target higher grades with slightly lower scores. Not every student lives up to their capacity and the transition away from home to college isn’t an easy one.
My preference is to build more colleges and let them choose their own entrance criteria. Also, adults should do far more to help high school students understand how much social status, marketing, and press relations do to make some colleges appear far more prestigious than they are.
There is this old joke about how even if you are a one-in-a-million person, there are still 8000 of "you"s to choose from; how does one chose who to pick, if there aren't positions for all of them?
So how do you make it "fair"? Since of the number of seats are limited, so imagine if the cut-off for the last seat is for someone who is in the 90.3765335th percentile, look at how many significant digits that is! (Yes, that's how specific it can get, when population sizes grow large enough.)
Yes, you can argue about having a "bad day", but there are thousands of other people ALSO in the same percentile as you, and you all didn't have a "bad day", at some point it's about resource limitation.
There are two and a half billion Asians of different varieties, that means MILLIONS of people at each economic/social strata. You simply CAN'T provide the same resource to all of them, some of them will have to vie for a lower-ranked resource.
If there are limited number of seats, and your economy cannot afford to fund more seats, then a standardized test is the only fair way, at least it allows you to have SOME sort of control at your luck.
----
That same thinking applies to Asians who move to the US. It's patently unfair, from their PoV, to give weightage to things they CAN'T control for (race/wealth etc.) and not give weightage to a thing they CAN control for; a standardized test.
Its proven pretty true so far.
It depends what the "resource" is. If it's the mix of prestige and the individualized attention of highly impressive scholars that you get at elite colleges, then of course not. If it's simply high-quality educational content plus some average-quality tutoring, that's a scalable resource that could be provided to many more people at very low cost.
So many examples of casually thrown around of borderline racist-ish terminology/dog whistles..."tiger parents", "hard working"...all the "model minority" stuff.
It really is a population density issue...which leads to resource scarcity...as a westerner all you have to do is interact personally with someone from India or China where you have millions of people competing for a seat at a university and it becomes pretty clear how you get the "Asian work ethic".
For the other 990 spots, you make a minimum bar of achievement (lots of As, high score, whatever) and put everyone who meets it in a lottery.
It depends on who writes the tests and who the tests are written for.
There's a long and shameful history of standardized tests being written to benefit certain groups over others, or to stigmatize certain groups.
Just because a test is standardized doesn't make it fair.
Why not just distribute those resources via lottery? Why not actually just split resources evenly across the population? There are good practical reasons not to do this, but they are, fundamentally, ideological (eg, we might feel it is inefficient to spend resources on someone which may not provide as much productivity as someone else). It serves nothing to pretend these things are inevitable.
If you said any other career except programming I'd agree with this, but programming is literally the least gate-kept of the high-paying careers. Anyone can break into programming, all you need is the internet, interest and aptitude to understand code.
Of course not all schools are ending testing, MIT for example:
"We are reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles" https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...
In MIT's case it probably is especially important to assess certain types of skills, because someone who doesn't have a reasonable math background for example is going to have a bad time. (Though problems doing math is a surprisingly common theme in higher ed including at the grad level--even with programs you wouldn't think were especially quantitative.)
However, certain groups sued saying that "equality of outcome" is more important than "equality of opportunity". They argued that if the outcome of a test showed intersectional differences, then the test must be biased. They succeeded in pressuring the various trade groups and industries to get rid of the tests or be sued into oblivion.
The trade groups that offered these tests realized it was just easier to require college degrees as a proxy instead of having their own specific tests and having to deal with these pressure groups. This is why many occupations these days require a degree when it seems like that should be unnecessary.
This slammed the door to upward mobility for many that the pressure groups were claiming to try to help.
It was similar when I applied to grad school (this was engineering). They told us pretty unequivocally that getting a perfect GRE math score was pretty much required, but that the verbal went right in the bin, so don't worry about it.
It makes sense for engineering focused schools or those applying to engineering schools. I'm still less convinced places like Harvard where a good chunk of the students won't take a ultra-difficult math class during their time there has much use in the SATs. At least in the "I got a 1580 on my SATs but someone with a 1570 got in over me, how is that fair?" Kind of way.
The question is not “does the SAT provide some globally useful measure of college performance,“ to which the answer is “very probably yes”; instead, Columbia is asking “does requiring it help them identify top tier talent from underrepresented backgrounds rather than filter out top talent from those backgrounds”, to which the answer is “quite possibly not”. They aren’t banning it as a factor, they are just permitting those with a low score to omit it.
And lest I sound like I’m cheerleading elite universities here, I suspect there are enough people with >1500 SATs and family incomes <$50k that you could fill 2 whole Columbias. They’re obviously going to keep admitting legacies and other high donor value applicants because they’re mostly trying to maximize return on investment.
This is the best we can hope for: a transparent system, with clearly defined multiple pathways, and a limited number of completely free seats at the education table.
Also: one thing which other systems miss is different maturity. If someone is bright but at 15 does not see the point of studying and prefers to smoke with the stoners, fine. At 18, get a job in retail, and perhaps at 20 the light will go on and they will realize that there's a way put of retail hell and they are smart enough to test into university with night prep classes.
Largely free (taxpayer-funded) at all levels but if you want to go into the best schools you better bring in your A-game because entrance requirements it to sit series of 4 hour long tests graded anonymously. You don't have to pretend to be a native American competitive rower who plays the trombone, but you need to know how to calculate Fourier series by hand.
Citizens are sometimes dissatisfied with individual outcomes, but there is no groundswell of resistance to it because people generally believe the system (both the educational system, but also the entire economic system) is fair.
I feel like instead of dropping the test they could provide free resources to students to prepare for it. At least get them familiar with the structure of the test and encourage them to do the best they can. A lot of kids like those in the article would stand to benefit.
The only winner from getting rid of the test is rich, stupid kids that don't do well regardless of how much prep they get. They then go on to cheat and BS their way through college and use their network to land jobs. Poor and disenfranchised students will continue to be marginalized.
If you're not self-disciplined, then college can be even worse than high school, because you have more personal freedom in college. For example, if you skip classes in high school, you're in big trouble, but if you skip classes in college, they just shrug, cash your tuition check, and give you an F. In college, the adult supervision is largely absent. You're expected to be an adult and supervise yourself.
The military accepts smart underachievers because the military is going to force you to work whether you like it or not.
I didn't join the military myself, but it took me until age 24 to become self-disciplined. Although I was smart enough to get into college, I wasn't psychologically ready for it at 18, and I dropped out at age 20. I had a great time partying for the first 2 years though. ;-)
Depends on the college. A friend of mine who went to an “elite institution“ struggled to supervise themselves and got set up with a counselor to keep them on track. I’m not certain this was actually in their best interests, since they’ve spent most of their late 20s and early 30s struggling to apply to med school but missing deadlines.
And the author also tries to correlate SATs with the Armed Forces aptitude tests, the latter which weeds out those at the far bottom end of aptitude versus making hitting a high bar a requirement for entry. Once in, recruits are judged by other means. And while what he says is true about how poorly those low scoring recruits faired, a big reason they died at a higher rate was that they were assigned to infantry at a higher rate, so were more often put in harms way.
Finally, why do we assume the SATs are fair? I was fairly good at the SATs, but would have been awful if they had required spelling, grammar or were fill in the blank versus multiple choice. Should I have a leg up over everyone because I am good at what it tested? I chose not to submit SAT 2’s for writing for that reason (timed essay writing for an hour in pen was a truly awful experience).
Yes, that’s a feature not a bug. The SAT doesn’t test randomly. It is designed to test for specific subjects and knowledge in those subjects.
I’ve SAT is not fun but I think it’s purpose is to fairly test all takers and rank them to assist with allocating educational resources.
It’s such an odd question to ask “should I get a leg up because I got an A in chemistry and someone else got a C?” There are many reasons that make trades hard to get. But the idea is to compensate for them as best as possible and not dwell on the fact that any merit system will not be completely fair.
Doing well on these tests is absolutely as important as all of the other ways that these candidates are amazing.
It is as irrational to highlight amazing performance in other areas while discounting sub-par performance in standardized testing. Just as much as it would be the inverse.
These tests lend insight into, and serve to balance, the "amazing" or "underperforming" metrics in these other areas that may be in fact be more a measure of the relative quality or relative competition within these other areas.
In my opinion, the only two factors that are likely to truly affect test scores beyond innate / developed talent are: time management and the timeline of natural cognitive development.
If time management is an issue, then it will be an issue in college as well. If it is an issue because of uncontrollable factors, then the student should seek help to have other arrangements made that will enable them to eventually do well on the test.
Some people truly don't cognitively bloom until their early to mid twenties. One indication of this might be signs of talent with underperforming grades. Other strategies are more appropriate than having them flounder at an elite University at eighteen years old.
The "club", which includes the assurance of giving legacies a hard look, is largely why these Universities are desirable for non-legacy candidates.
In general, but also University depending, the education itself is nothing that can't be attained at many liberal arts colleges.
Extracurriculars can make a very mediocre student look amazing, and if you pour enough money into sports, student organizations, community organizing, arts, etc, eventually one of them might pan out as sounding impressive. Middle class and poor kids won't have opportunities like that, while rich people can keep spending until their child seems unique and interesting.
Which is fine.
What _is_ narrow sighted is extending that to "Everyone will benefit from the SAT" and "the system must remain the same because it worked for me".
This article unfortunately drops into the latter category.
Standardized tests equalize things. It's everything else that should be banned, because all of those steaks get manipulated.
Lot of great stuff in there, but here's one quote:
> Richer students don’t just get better SAT scores. They also tend to outperform on everything else that an admissions committee would use to select students. Personal essays? Their style and content are more strongly correlated with family income than SAT scores are. Recommendation letters? They are subject to teachers’ classist and racist biases, and even knowing how to request the letters requires significant social capital.
The degree of randomness could depend on the school. For instance, community colleges accept virtually 100% of applicants anyway, and a random factor would not change anything.
Ah, well, case closed! Saved me from reading the entire article :)
Fundamentally, the question is whether the SAT does what ETS wants you to believe it does, that it provides an objective assessment of a high schooler for college admissions. The claim is a correlation to the first year grades. Beyond that, it's mainly correlated to IQ and social class (professional class scores best IIRC).
Contrast this with the situation in other countries that rely heavily on testing, such as Ireland. As I understand it, the subjects are tested and the test grade is used instead of subjective markers of academic performance. Students are allowed to choose their university course based on priority derived from these test scores. This seems like a much more likely way for a poor Irish kid to arrive at Trinity college than for Harvard to notice and pluck out a poor American kid, if they even bothered applying.
In fact, test prep works well enough to enable a shockingly high percentage of legacies and donor brats in elite schools.
Ending SAT use in admissions might enable a more balanced approach to admissions, but it does not broaden access to elite schools. They could increase class sizes, or they could get rid of legacies and donor admissions.
Having an essay essentially written for you by an expensive consultant with contacts in admissions departments is undetectable and widely practiced. But when it comes to standardized tests, many wealthy families get so desperate for good scores for their kids that they engage in criminal conspiracy (recall the Varsity Blues scandal in 2019).
It's extremely hard for me to see how, when you remove the least gameable aspect of admissions, that it gives the rich less of an advantage. I'm almost certain it gives them more of an advantage instead.
There are going to be special cases and examples of unfairness in any system, and so you can find cases where a standardized test resulted in an unfairness, but the alternative is only 100x worse.
The alternative is not "Without the burden of these inflexible uncaring mechanistic tests we can serve each precious flower better and leave no one out."
That is only the sales pitch.
The alternative is actually nothing but "Now we can discriminate."
Yeonmi Park's "While Time Remains" has a biting critique of Columbia University's "wokeness".[1] Park escaped from North Korea to China as a child. In China, she was an illegal alien, and if caught would be deported back to North Korea and executed, so she and her mother were kept as slaves. She managed to escape China and get to the US. So she knows about oppression.
She ended up as a student at Columbia University. "What a load of crap" she writes. "The difference between a passing grade and a failing one lay in a refusal to criticize the usual targets (capitalism, Western civilization, white supremacy, systemic racism, oppression of minorities, colonialism, etc.) Worse than a bad grade was to be labelled by one's classmates as a 'SIX HIRB', a sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamaphobic, racist bigot."
[1] https://www.amazon.com/While-Time-Remains-Defectors-Freedom/...
On one hand I'm fan of standardized exams because they feel very very fair, are transparent and allow you to bootstrap yourself.
On the other hand I see the pros of taking people's traits into consideration because you know, it's not always that the top scorers are actually top people.
Unfortunately how to decide which traits are desirable? who decides that? etc etc.
And just because of that I'd default to first option - pure exams, because they're fair and transparent, rules are clear - just be the best.
But I do agree that in some cases there may be better ways to pick top people - just like during job interview.
Within the first semester everyone was weeded out who wouldn’t make it to the degree with theoretical physics and math courses.
It was pretty fair in retrospect. Everyone had their chance and a bad grade in English didn’t prevent anyone from pursuing physics. Since there was only an administrative fee of ~500€ for the semester it also didn’t ruin people’s finances
Not saying this is that, but just a thought and I’d be curious to see if this is a trend that continues.
"Education doesn't create wealth. Wealth creates education."
Wouldn't you know it, graduating more students with terrible grades didn't magically lead to more capable working or studying adults.
It almost like pushing people through who are struggling to cope doesn't help them...
In college I went to school at night and worked during the day.
I basically didn't get an education but paid for two pieces of paper that for me a great career... Not as good as a CMU grad, but pretty good.
The person OP is describing is me.
I don't think standardized testing is the answer. Nothing good happens by accident and using the SAT to fight a proxy war for accessibility of high quality higher education is not a good strategy.
I don't even know why people bother posting this stuff anymore.
We are living with mass encampments of the unhoused in our major cities full of the mentally handicap and physically addicted and our government and private sector has decided to let them rot.
45% of bankruptcies are caused by medical debt.
The rich have consolidated their power. The purse strings are closed. Nobody who matters gives a shit about the poor.
To quote George Carlin:
"But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, EVER be fixed.
It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got.
Because the owners, the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want:
They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking..."
SATs don't measure much, they mostly measure how familiar you are with the structure of the test.
And why would they want that? Author doesn't provide any reasoning about it.
That being said, I support whatever helps empower the diminished classes and helps quash the undeserved power of those born into money. …And in that case, the SAT might make a lot of sense now that I think of it.
Even if your teenage years were a quagmire and you have no grades to show for it, a single test can still open you up to academic opportunities.
HN gets bizarrely left-wing when wokeness comes up.
Ruling classes keeping the poor down? You simply don't see that kind of talk here unless affirmative action or similar is discussed.
It'll be a double win if these attempts to undermine wokeness lead to a society that truly provides equality of opportunity for all.
From all I've read in the past, though, standardized test outcomes are very strongly correlated with family wealth. The kids who have great SAT vocabularies are overwhelmingly the kids who grew up with parents with plenty of free time to read to them every day. High scoring kids are overwhelmingly the ones whose families could provide lots of educational support (either through direct help from available parents or through private tutoring). They're so very often the ones who spent weeks of their lives getting dedicated training in the otherwise-useless skill of "how to take a standardized test". And the correlation between SAT score and college success (by whatever metric) is IIRC quite low once you control for family background. So by and large, the faculty members that I know have come to see standardized testing as precisely a tool to give preference to kids from wealthy, privileged backgrounds.
Obviously the author of this article had a very different experience! And clearly there are kids out there who can use standardized tests to demonstrate amazing competence beyond what their grades show. (That's why we went "test optional" rather than "no tests allowed", for what it's worth.) And I'm not at all surprised that admissions essays correlate even more strongly with wealth than do SAT scores. (We don't rely entirely on essays, either.) Maybe we really did get it wrong, and the research we considered really was misleading, and universal testing would raise up more underprivileged students than it threw down. But I promise you, I absolutely 100% promise you, that no person in that room where we made the test-optional decision believed that the outcome of our decision would be fewer students with challenging backgrounds being admitted.
So is the claim here that the college decision makers adopting these policies are also dupes of "the chattering class"? (Aren't we supposedly a part of that class?) Or maybe it's just that I, personally, was the dupe of my faculty colleagues, who were conniving behind my back to get less competent students in their classes? I don't get it.
The only conclusion I can draw, in general, is that it is really hard to disentangle an individual student's intrinsic potential and preparedness from the influence of family wealth and resources. I agree with this author that there really are enormous systemic biases that encourage class segregation, and those biases are viciously wide-ranging and flexible and are embedded across all axes of achievement and opportunity. So I'm not particularly happy about the way that this essay very explicitly assumes bad faith on the part of those of us struggling to find a way to make things better.
[I'm posting this late enough that it'll probably never be seen, but given my connection to the subject I still feel compelled to chime in.]
In the USA, public education funds are directly derived from the local tax base as a percentage of that revenue. If you live in a rich area, it means your family is also rich. The tax base, although it may be the rough same percentage, is much higher actual dollars than a small non-rich community.
I even see that locally in my nearby college town. There's definitely a "rich district". Homes go from $750k up to $5m. Their elementary has teachers and aides to cover students at 7:1, and flush with a wealthy technology budget. The other schools, or in particular, the "subsidized housing and trailer parks area's schools" have student coverage around 25:1, no teacher aides, and very limited tech budget.
This should be of little surprise given how our education system by default teaches the wealthy to be wealthy. And that starts as early as preschool and easily onwards through public school. And naturally, I didn't even touch upon private schools. And in my state, vouchers can be used from public schools on private and even religious schools. That too is an even higher rung on elitism.
Unless you're a genius from a poor family, you're likely going to stay in the "dumb and low paying" jobs for most of your lives.
Poor kids can technically access the same private test prep as rich kids, and whether they actually can or not, financially speaking, has nothing to do with the tax base and the school itself.
That being said, better schools do provide for better child development.
This can be compensated for, to a degree, by enhanced parental interaction with the child from an early age.
But he's just another guy that has to turn tricks with some new variant of "durr hurr liberal plan for X is elitist and a luxury belief."
It's a little personal with him, because right before the 2020 election he posted something pretentious like "In 2016 I bet and won a lot of money on the outcome of the election, and I bet even more this time" (Implying his non-elitist background gave him the clairvoyance that Trump would win. I asked him who he bet on this time. Then the results came in and Trump was clearly losing in 2020, and then he blocked me.
In the end, even if we agree with him, he's just another culture warrior that whose livelihood depends on feeding the angry masses outrage at whatever Team Blue/Team Red is doing.
Indeed, and this seems like a prime example.
I'm a fan of a level playing-field, and measuring, rather than judging, ability.
But lets face it the putative victim described by the author is actually up against the kids of quite privileged, or dedicated families, who will be hiring private tutors, sending their kids to evening cram schools, or doing the 'tiger-mom' thing.
Some flexibility might give a leg-up to talented kids who haven't had one before (although there is that danger that it could go woke).