Of course colleges do all these things already, but imagine how much easier it will be for them when they don't have these pesky test scores showing the students they want to admit aren't qualified.
That's an important thing to keep in mind. Particularly with the more elite schools, the goal isn't to educate as many people as possible, but to keep their inflated prestige through artificial scarcity. The Harvard Extension School is a great example of this - they have tens of thousands of students and advertise themselves as giving students a true Harvard education taught by Harvard educators, but the students aren't "official" Harvard graduates because the institution wants to keep that number artificially low and selective.
edX is another good example - sure, we'll give you the opportunity to learn these things, we'll even offer to assess you and give you a certificate, but we're not going to use technology to really open up the education system.
These institutions will pay lip service towards increasing underrepresented demographics (including racial and economic), but they're never going to embrace truly substantive solutions because they desperately want to keep the education credentials scarce.
Please provide examples because I am not aware of any.
In "other countries left" the left tag is defined by this topic (and this topic alone).
So, for someone not from america, your statement is a bit weird...
If the narrative was mostly about economic status, we would hear more about that and about universal programs. Rather than disparities and identity politics.
Like.... Universal healthcare? One of the most (perhaps THE most) discussed topics at democratic presidential debates?
Just because neither Bernie nor Elizabeth Warren didn't win the nomination doesn't mean that their ideas aren't part of the left.
—
Many poorer people already get Medicaid which is quite good. If that was expanded a bit more to slightly higher incomes and [conservatives] states couldn’t deny so many people who should get it. That would be many times cheaper than Medicare for all. It would help the most marginalized.
Millions of people on good Medicaid right now could actually see their health insurance worsen under some universal health measures.
Her exact proposal was to phase-in full universal by starting with a subsidized public option and then spending more time building out a full universal plan, i believe.
You can argue this is a cop-out but i'd say it's more of a technocratic play - offering full universal would be a massive undertaking and not something that can just pop up overnight, but offering a subsidized insurance plan in the existing system is comparatively easier and could be implemented easily in a president's first year in office (with a cooperative congress, anyways)
Regardless, that's all aside the point
Free college education will not help the marginalized anywhere close to as it will others.
We essentially don’t even have free high school. If a teen has work a full time job or more while attending high school to support their family. That’s awful. That should be tackled before something as status quo as free college.
If I'm a 21yo man in North Dakota working the oil fields to support my young family, how would you expect me to react to the idea of increasing my taxes so that white collar kids don't have to pay as much?
Tanstafl.
Frankly though- the American education problem is just people talking about the loss of manufacturing jobs at two degrees removed.
You're using education in an ambiguous way here. Either you're including vocational training, in which case the argument for universal college doesn't follow, or you only mean college, in which case the premise is false.
How well "Whites" as a group are doing says nothing about "poor whites" and how they're doing. It's a fallacy of division, and anyway you shouldn't pre-judge things about people based on race... it's literally racial prejudice.
How so? "Poor whites" are just a subset of "whites". The parent comment claimed that "poor whites" are worse off. This is making 2 claims: that they are worse off because they are poor, and that they are worse off because they are white. I'm not denying that they're worse off because they're poor, that should be fairly obvious to anyone that knows anything about the American university admissions system. But the parent added the extra claim about race, and I'm refuting that for being inaccurate.
> and anyway you shouldn't pre-judge things about people based on race... it's literally racial prejudice.
Where in my comment did I make any racially prejudiced or racially divisive statements? The parent comment was the one that decided to divide the group of poor further by race.
Anyway, it's Harvard (and the other Ivy Leagues) that are pre-judging people by race. Is me discussing that fact somehow also "prejudging by race" and "racial prejudice"? I don't follow what you're trying to imply.
Edit: Looks like I confused the parent comment with the grandparent comment. The parent comment was about the "left" not caring about poor white kids. I think most of what I'm saying still applies, just replace "worse off" with "not cared about by the left". Ie. The left doesn't care about the poor too much, but they're definitely neutral towards whites, if not biased in favour.
"A fallacy of division is the error in logic that occurs when one reasons that something that is true for a whole must also be true of all or some of its parts."
Anyone poor won’t have the means to play the subjective system, and any left/liberal admin officer/provost in the Ivy’s knows that.
Champagne corks are flying tonight.
Rich whites were less threatened when they could game the system, but once Asian Americans began to become overly represented per capita academically and Affirmative Action lawsuits on descrimination against Asians began working up the courts... problem solved now.
There’s no outright conspiracy, these people know their position and what’s best for them. They’re probably not bad people but they’re not going to give away what they’ve got.
How would you change the incentives to make what you described less viable?
It’s too many trying to get into too few colleges. We need more, smaller universities. Federal funds/grants should be reoriented away from the Ivies. Zero Federal funds for schools that don’t have lower than 30:1 class sizes. That would stop admin bloat overnight.
The Musks, Gates and Bezos’ of the world should be building new colleges, not dumping more into the olds.
Ivies don’t need fed funds - they play a different game since the underlying markets tend to be asymptotic - the upper end of students, the upper end of professors, the upper end of athletes, the upper end of wealthy legacies.
Fund those with few resources or create new ones away from the Ivies. You can’t democratize the Ivies but you can give a lot more people a better education. The status quo is that the Ivies have their cake and eat it too.
> full $41.59 billion of the Ivy League’s money could be traced back to taxpayer-funded payments and benefits.
Traces back.
So part of it is tax breaks to educational institutions- which is natural, they have the biggest endowments combined so the tax benefits will be massive.
They point out that major research happens at these institutions so they have more money from that as well.
This meshes less with the “have their cake and eat it too” line of thinking and more a result of the distortions from reputation and network effects.
Liberals making conservatives personas non-grata means they have half as many people to compete with for a coveted spot at the top of the pyramid of power.
That's why there's so much talk of "disparity" or "inequality" vs. actual improvements to standards of living and quality of life. Almost all economic growth creates inequality for the simple reason that the more wealth there is, the more potential you have for skew.
In China, for instance, there was much less income inequality back in the 60's but I don't think too many folks want to go back to those days.
Similarly, I don't really care how much a CEO makes, I care about my own quality of life. To hear the new American left tell it though, we'd be better off all being equally poor instead of generally wealthier with a big differences between individual incomes.
Your quality of life depends very much on how much other people make. It's all relative. If the average income in an area goes up by 50% but your own income only goes up 5%, then you are worse off than you started, because prices for everything will rise with the market. If you don't believe me, look at Bay Area housing. Inject a couple thousand new millionaires into an area and tell me things don't become worse for the existing modest-income people.
On a percentage basis, the world is zero sum. If someone else captures (or creates) an additional 1% of something, that comes at the expense of 1% collectively from everyone else.
This is circular statement. Percentage is defined as a fraction of a some specified thing, so of course it's fixed. Ten percent of something is ten percent no matter how big or small that thing gets...
Anyway, I'm still not following your reasoning here. If you cut everyone's salaries where I work by 50% and only cut mine by 20%, that's still a bad day for me, even though I'm getting a bigger share of the total compensation paid out. People can argue about whether or not, or to what extent, wealth should be redistributed, but zero sum thinking is a bad path to go down and completely ignores humanity's ability to better its lot through innovation, trade, etc. It's a depressingly pessimistic worldview that prioritizes taking from others instead of creating things that others find valuable. At it's core it's a selfish ethos.
Today, if you look at the preceding 40 years of economic growth in the US, the reality is "rich get richer, poor get poorer."
Clearly, magic capitalism beans aren't the only ingredient in an economy that improves everyone's lot. My theory is that the other key ingredient is growth. Growth is chaotic and stirs money around, it's one of the precious few strong market forces that pushes towards equality rather than winner-take-all, even though it does so purely on entropic grounds and isn't strong enough to actually arrive anywhere near the maximum-entropy state.
Of course, once the growth stops, the market settles out again, and the real question is how to deal with that. "Try to stimulate growth at all costs" just creates bubbles. It's a tough question, but whatever the answer is, I'm pretty sure it involves stirring money around, and I'm pretty sure big monied interests are going to fight it tooth and nail out of self-interest.
Yes, vast majority did not have to work while going to HS (which is possibly why some angles toward free HS should be focused on. Not free college). But they also weren’t freely going to Haiti.
What's the logic here? I'll admit I'm not a big fan of college sports myself, but who assesses the credibility of a college by their athletics program?
At Harvard specifically, beating Yale in football is a big deal within the community.
At large state schools, sports can function as an incredible arm of marketing. In addition to benefits for the alumni community and donations, it also can impact recruiting to undergraduate and graduate programs. Case in point, check out the change in the quality of the student body at the University of Alabama since Saban has been coaching the football team. It has improved not just the profile of the undergrad student body, but also the profile of the law school student body (among other grad schools, I’ve been told).
I will also add that being a varsity athlete puts the student in a totally-not-a-club club that makes a difference in certain social circles (especially in the northeast corridor).
One factor that comes to mind is location- Notre Dame is in the middle of damn nowhere, if they did not have the appeal of the football team I think they would have a harder time attracting students to actually go there (regardless of name recognition).
It also will probably depend on how much the rich alums care about sports, so again for a school like Notre Dame that has always been big on sports and is also very big on legacies and promoting alum community and what not, it makes sense.
To be honest I don't see why it matters much for today's Harvard though, at least none of the benefits I can think of really line up. Plus Harvard can never attract the truly best athletes because no Ivy scholarships/the generally lower level of Ivy competition in most sports. Maybe they just care about being better than Yale.
I think more generally it adds to the general culture of the school - people will pick up on the fact that some athlete they know went there and think that's cool, even if it doesnt impact their academics at all.
More cynically, lots of students love to associate their school's legacy with their own ego
They also bring back older graduates for a piece of nostalgia and bit of donation.
Test scores don’t prove much except who had the resources, time, and motivation to study the most. You could replace the SAT and ACT with obscure movie trivia and you’d see roughly the same distribution of scores and it would have the same predictive power. The people who signal that they’re willing to put it a lot of time, money, and effort into their education do well… surprised pikachu.
There’s no such thing as qualified for college outside of a genuine desire and motivation to do it.
So I don’t see any sort of contradiction in colleges admitting people based on novelty, coolness, and straight-up effort.
Aren't colleges looking for people who will study the most? Who have the motivation and the ability for the motivation to translate into results?
Dunno about you, but even if this is true, something that shows you were highly motivated and took time to do something seems very valuable if your goal is to produce people what produce.
In most areas of study, being motivated and investing time are key contributors to success. They aren't the only one. Intelligence, diversity of thought and resources matter too, but they certainly aren't negligible or dismissible.
I was under the impression that SAT prep doesn't move the needle much. Am I mistaken?
I have seen scores improve 100-200 points per skill on average for middle range scores, and 50-100 points per skill for higher range scores with quality preparation.
Reasons:
- familiarity with test format
- improved test taking strategies
- familiarity with test content
- developing the mental stamina to perform at a high level throughout the relatively long test
- lowered anxiety and (often) increased confidence
The college board says that an SAT is better predictor of success in college than GPA, which based on my experience of American high schools makes sense. I get that wealth probably has a positive correlation to both. But it seems that should matter a little.
Is this data or anecdata? You be the judge. He finds it easy to bank on professionally.
I encourage you to talk to someone who has worked at a high-end SAT training program (not Kaplan or that type). They can tell you the real deal, both successes and failures. Don’t rely on talking to the businesses themselves, because they will be selling their services rather than telling the complete truth (unless you know them personally).
Fwiw, failures are usually due to one of a few factors:
1. anxiety
2. learning blocks
3. physical issues (e.g., lack of sleep, sick, etc.).
But if you get put in the “honors” track of a lot of high schools where the name of the game is to teach material informed by the SAT, ACT, AP, and IB teats then you almost can’t help but do well since you’ve been cramming for 4 years.
That's not called cramming. It's called "learning". It means the test is working as intended.
You could say the same for pretty much every educated person who has done an undergraduate or postgraduate degree. Seems like a lot of human progress has been made as the result of people that have been "cramming for 4 years"
The system ticked most boxes: poor students had a lot more resources to study and pass the exams, and the evaluation was very correlated to how well you would do in the University compared to doing than a single exam. It also served as a nice introduction of how to properly navigate a University environment.
When I did this course I wasn't happy in spending an extra year studying before starting university, but in retrospect this is a better system than anything else I've seen. Additionally, almost failing one of the maths courses was a wake-up call that made me realise that I couldn't just wing exams like I did during High School
I do not agree with all of these opinions, I am just telling you how this community, which is mostly still poor and not "model minority", views a lot of what is coming out of elite institutions in the name of progress and equality.
John McWhorter made a comment in a Reason interview that affirmative action really should be about socioeconomic status and not race. Back in the day race would have been a highly correlative proxy for income and wealth, but that it is becoming increasingly less predictive and advantaging middle and upper class minorities when today they almost no meaningful disadvantages relative to their white and asian peers of the same socioeconomic class.
They see Communism rising in America and support Trump.
Hell, if they were well off in South Vietnam before the communists came, it just goes to show that if your family had the mental foundations necessary for success, even if you hit rock bottom you still have the attitude to climb back up.
> Certain private universities, most notably Harvard, introduced policies which effectively placed a quota on the number of Jews admitted to the university. According to historian David Oshinsky, on writing about Jonas Salk, "Most of the surrounding medical schools (Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Yale) had rigid quotas in place. In 1935 Yale accepted 76 applicants from a pool of 501. About 200 of those applicants were Jewish and only five got in." He notes that Dean Milton Winternitz's instructions were remarkably precise: "Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all."[16] As a result, Oshinsky added, "Jonas Salk and hundreds like him" enrolled in New York University instead.[17] Physicist and Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman was turned away from Columbia College in the 1930s and went to MIT instead. See also Numerus clausus in the United States.
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota )
Today it's "too many asians"
There is clearly an anti-white, anti-asian agenda at these top schools now.
I'm for fair admissions and I'd hope race would not be a factor in admissions - only personal experiences/circumstance. Something that would level the floor a bit more to allow for people of less privileged backgrounds to shine and allow for real diversity of thought into the university environment. That said, it won't likely ever happen. My experience of a school with a 30% Asian student body was not great for many reasons but one reason was how hard it was to make friends. I did not make almost any Asian friends because most of the Asian student body was a very insular group of people. I spoke about this with Asian coworkers/peers who outwardly acknowledged it at the university. Now, I work with Asian coworkers who openly express their interest in being with Asians more than other races. I don't know if that same mentality is as abundant across other groups but imagine going to a school where 30% of the class refuses to interact with you. It does not make for a great student body.
It's worth noting and emulating. Punishing success is the path to mediocrity. Instead other groups should take note and ask themselves "what should our community be doing so that we can also emulate the success that that group has had?"
Any solution that doesn't involve trying to trying to get every group to emulate the success of the groups doing it right will eventually lower standards.
There is a soft bigotry in low expectations.
https://1776unites.com/featured-essays/the-1619-project-perp...
I'm not Jewish, but I have nothing but profound respect for that community because they have such great values that they are consistently crushing it and helping one another succeed. Just take the absolute atrocity many of them suffered in WWII and yet 75 years later, many of those that had everything stripped from them have succeeded better than probably any other community would have given the same adversity.
You're ignoring how problematic that culture is. It isn't a culture that can be emulated across the board because it's inherently exclusionary. It's not that these groups of people who have risen to the top are helping everyone - they're only helping their own. How should that be a desirable thing unless you're also selfish and discriminatory?
If anyone is only helping those of their own race rather than helping anyone - it's a problematic culture. (And - inherently - racist)
College is a zero-sum game. You either get in or you don't, and there is a limited amount of space. It would be nice if everyone treated each other as a cohesive whole rather than splitting up in groups as you've labeled and desire people to do. That attitude is what creates more divisiveness and tribalism.
The dichotomy isn't between helping people outside your community or within your community.
That dichotomy I'm highlighting is between having a culture of helping one another or not having that culture.
The communities that aren't helping those within their community, typically aren't helping people outside their community either. There are plenty of cities and neighborhoods in this country where there isn't much community service, participation in the community and taking pride in helping your community succeed relative to other communities out there. I grew up in a predominantly Jewish town as a kid. The level of involvement from the parents in the school system was off the charts. Since moving away from that community, I've never once seen anyplace else that came even close to that level of civic involvement.
It doesn't even have to be community based on race. It can be as simple as volunteering in your neighborhood or city.
Communities that grow rich have a culture of service to one another whether that community is delineated along racial or geographical lines or if that community is global. The size of the group or whether there is exclusion or not is orthogonal to my point. This culture change is easiest to begin at home and within your community.
One of the big differences I've noticed between liberals and conservatives is that with liberals, community starts with the world, then moves to the country, then the state, then the county, then the city/town, then the neighborhood, then the family. With conservatives it's the opposite. Community and obligation to one another begins with the family and moves to the neighborhood, then the city/town, then county, then state, then country and then world.
Although, I agree. I just want all cultures to thrive. However, Whites doing this would be called out for nepotism and labeled supremacists in their own countries. You don’t see this reaction in Japan, Israel, Mexico, etc.
I'm not a conservative, but I agree with this piece by the American Conservative: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of...
Notice how Jewish admissions tanked after the college found a socially acceptable anti-semitic policy.
If you want to get into Harvard, I recommend striving to demonstrate greater fealty to the hardest of hard left-wing ideals than your fellow applicants, as that will become the real criterion for admission as fast as they feel like they can make it.
Anecdotally, I went to a technical school but some of my biggest shifts in perspective came from interacting with liberal arts and minority students.
I think race will replace the tests.
I don't know why everyone else seems to be talking long term reasons, but both options seem pretty bad.
The SAT actually seems easier to keep somewhat level during this time to me, as long as admissions counselors have some recognition of the drawbacks.
I also wonder about the distinction between "not required" versus "not considered". It becomes a weird mental game if submission is still considered just not required.
What difficulty is there? As they've announced it's removed due to events this year, I honestly can't guess.
On B, I said it skews more towards the rich this year. Most years everyone at least has their school day.
If it is not required, it just becomes extracurricular. If it's not considered it's useless.
Something that is not required but still considered is beyond the curriculum, or extracurricular. Many colleges have allowed you to submit both the SAT and ACT, admissions uses all the data available and the student should present themselves as best they truthfully can.
I grew up on welfare until middle school years, made straight A's in a poorly ranked public school applied to every boarding school on the east coast because where I come from those schools are legitmately better (unlike in the northeast where many public schools are legit and fostered by small towns full of rich white people who drive to Manhattan for work everyday) and while I appreciate the people who paid for me to go to boarding school, I still got rejected from a Stanford summer school robotics program despite being qualified because I couldn't pay $10k in cash for it while a peer of mine driving a Porsche to school complained his parents were forcing him to go.
I still couldn't afford the SAT classes many of my peers took after school on campus so while yes my life is measurably better and you are correct money helps pad resumes outside of GPA, you are also incorrect it doesn't also help pad SAT scores.
This has been proven time and time again like a few years ago when sailing terminology was removed from reading comprehension because it was supposed to be derived from the context. Most kids who grew up in the Bronx don't have context for sailing terminology regardless of how well read they might be. This is just one example of money aside, how it is false to believe the tests are any less biased inducing than anything else that might go into a students application.
This would be obvious to you if you've ever taken the SATs.
What point are you trying to make? You should make it. Right now you are knitpicking. Even if you are right only it was that one instance it sets precedent for economic power structures graduating students inherit in the workforce for years to come.
I just don't understand your prioritization of feedback which seems to be entirely focused on distracting from the comment.
The advantage of GPA is it's an average over a long time period, unlike a test, which is a slice at a very brief moment. The disadvantage of GPA is variability in course difficulty and grading standards.
What's interesting to think about is how variable grades and courses really are across institutions. For example, colleges do try to coordinate content a bit because of transfer issues etc.
But in the context of this finding, the returns to grade inflation are limited by the fact that, when you report your GPA, you also report a standardized test score. This theoretically nullifies any potential benefit to grade inflation. (In practice, there's still a benefit.)
When there is no outside check on the reliability of GPAs, might they adjust by inflating a lot more than they already have?
I do think along with the application the school is supposed to submit a profile of the classes they offer and the average grades at the school and whatnot, but I do wonder how much admissions committees actually look closely at this. It's also hard to penalize a student for having all As, because maybe they did deserve them!
I think we are going to end up having even more emphasis on legit extracurriculars, at least for the average middle class student.
What happens in other countries, where they only use grades/GPA, is that you start using more decimals - but then again, that's only useful when the size/population of "perfect" scores is low enough.
If you have 10000 students with a perfect 4.0, and 2000 spots, then it's obviously impossible to just use grades - so it kinda loses its function for selection.
This is why MIT got rid of considering Subject II tests because even on top of already relatively wealthy select schools that offer AP classes only a select few of those offer classes that prep you for subject II test.
It's essentially exponentiating the amount of opportunities rich kids have to slice themselves within percents different from other rich kids at their school but overall entirely leaves behind students who weren't lucky enough to born in a neighborhood with a tax bracket that determines the schools funding.
Again, when you have so and so many perfect students, you need to use other features - otherwise you might as well draw random names out of a hat.
These schools (Ivy Leagues, Stanford, etc.) first and foremost want the students that are most likely to succeed at their schools. They know fully well that there are far more good students (on paper) than spots, but they also know that two 4.0 students are not alike. Some will fail, no mater how good they are in HS.
The secret of being an honors kid isn’t aptitude but being told that you’re smart and your parents/peers expecting it of you.
How much teaching experience do you have? I'm including any time you tried to convey a skill to any other person.
Some of the main problems:
* A lot more people than you would expect have attention issues and just needed someone to give them one-on-one attention. They would get distracted in class for a minute and then be lost for the rest of the lecture. I got permission from our teacher to record the lectures and then had people work through them with the advantage of a pause and rewind button.
* Some people were really independent and our textbooks were utter trash. I brought them “more advanced” books like Spivak ayyy that didn’t treat the reader as an idiot too stupid for a rigorous explanation. Having someone not “teach down” to them opened up so much. Easiest tutoring sessions ever when they just needed some quiet space to read. It’s amazing how much lack of understanding comes from years of teachers treating them as stupid and trying to have them memorize shortcuts that convey no understanding and don’t generalize.
* A few people were very tactile and so I brought in my laptop with Mathematica and had a bunch of examples coded up and let them play with the sliders. So many people groked limits and integrals with this.
* Some people needed more or less abstraction. Symbol overload is real. I loved saying something like “and this is true for any 17.” Connecting problems to “real life” wasn’t as effective as I had hoped but putting numbers in or having a variable cheat sheet they could quickly reference the meaning / value worked great!
* Some people learn by machine learning. They need a bunch of problems to work algorithmicly to feel the pattens. I called them numeric tactile. Once they’ve done it 50 times or so they’re ready to hear the abstract explanation because they’ve oriented themselves.
* A lot of people struggled because HS has so little focus on rote memorization. People didn’t have the toolbox of identities and little tricks at the forefront of their minds but some flashcards and cheat sheets fixed that right quick. I had like 5 people suddenly get trig identities once I made them memorize a few of the core ones. Constantly asking them to repeat something back to me whenever it came up was way more effective than I thought.
As you can clearly see I didn’t have much of a social life in HS.
I'm not quite sure what the connection is, but the combination of
> Easiest tutoring sessions ever when they just needed some quiet space to read.
> A lot of people struggled because HS has so little focus on rote memorization.
brought it back.
Of course it's not representative but I find it hard to believe that some no name school happened to be where the math nerds all hung out.
This condescension isn't even based on fact. I was in some honors classes but not in others and for the classes I was in an honors class, I had more aptitude than my peers. For those in the classes I was not in, those peers had more aptitude than me (probably more motivation too since it was for subjects I didn't care for like English Literature)
The “low performers” during HS, now that they’re unburdened by a stifling institution, are showing that they’re just as smart and talented but in areas that school didn’t bring out. One is a pastry chef, quite a few are artists and graphic designers, one is a copyrighter, one does industrial design, two are in theater now.
They could have done just fine in maths and physics but they, rightfully, didn’t really care.
You'd have to be very careful in how to measure both the inputs and the outputs.
First, "weighting" makes high school GPAs pretty difficult to interpret without a lot of context. This is compounded by the fact that "weighting" is a bad solution to the underlying problem of trying to compare fundamentally incomparable coursework. There's really no numerical way to compare a grade in a remedial Biology course to a grade in an AP Biology course.
Second, grading varies wildly from school to school and teacher to teacher, and what an "A" means will also vary wildly. Some teachers emphasize understanding, some emphasize busy work, and some hand of "A"s like candy. To give one example that might be useful to the HN audience: I've volunteered in several AP CS courses:
- In one course, getting an "A" required writing thousands upon thousands of lines of if-else conditions following inane string formatting guidelines. Barely any looping. AFAICT the teacher was the least competent math teacher that was removed from teaching any math courses that were tested for in state standardized tests (never taught algebra or geometry -- just all the random remedial courses and electives).
- In another course, getting an "A" required writing real programs, using some data structures appropriately, knowing the difference between constant/linear/"not linear" algorithm, etc. Students even wrote some simple proofs. Teacher was a CS major.
- In a third course, basically everyone got in "A". Teacher was, I shit you not, a gym teacher. Literally a warm body. Course was basically self-study on days I wasn't there.
So, even in relatively "standardized" AP courses, there's often not a nice bell curve, teachers aren't using the same rubrics or even assignments, and you really have no clue whether that grading reflects ability to put up with bullshit busywork or actual understanding.
Third, you also have to be careful about how you're measuring the results. College GPA and graduation rates are not field-agnostic. A 4.0 in CS or Physics or Math is not easily comparable to a 4.0 in Communications. Also, universities aren't comparable. A degree/GPA at Small Noncompetitive Liberal Arts College is simply not comparable to a degree/GPA at MIT or Stanford.
Also, dropping your lucrative major for a useless major can have an even bigger impact on your life than dropping out. The number of people who start in STEM and end up with a Communications or Business degree is just as relevant, or arguably even more relevant, than the number of Communications or Business majors who end up without a degree.
You mentioned the question of what the A means. I wonder if just the act of working to get the A tells us something and that something may be more predictive of college success than the SAT/ACT.
Or, another thing to imagine looking at would be say AP exam scores. I am biased, but I would imagine these would be more predictive than SAT/ACT and probably more informative than GPA.
The question of change in major is interesting--but I think even the coarse question of say graduates/doesn't graduate would be interesting to see how it correlates with high school GPA (as compared to SAT/ACT) before delving into the more difficult cases that you rase.
Any kid with an excellent (but not necessarily perfect) SAT score will likely be able to complete the coursework and graduate. After that point, why not judge on other aspects of the students lives? Test taking is a skill and outside of academia, not terribly useful.
But wouldn’t that cease being the case once scores are not taken into account? Presumably (retroactively speaking) I could have applied or my friends could have applied... now if they do a random selection they could get one of us...
This would actually be a reasonable way to go. Set a cut off ACT/SAT/GPA and just do a lottery for kids that are above it. Actual fairness. Of course thats not what HPY + Stanford etc. are interested in. They are still just finishing schools for the elite. If you want actual meritocracy go to MIT or Caltech
The argument is that the SAT/ACT is uniquely broken this year; including in the ability of applicants to take the test. Even among the people who did take the test; circumstances are so weird this year that it would be difficult to interpret the results based on historic data; and the results would be relatively meaningless for future data.
With GPA, you can still see the pre-crisis grades of the students; as well as the historic performance of the school that provided those grades. These are signals that can be calibrated against historic data; and which admissions likely already uses.
Hard not be cynical and hate the institutions when witness stuff like this.
This will presumably be a lot easier to do without having to maintain a false sense of propriety in admissions.
The thing about this, loosely speaking, is that there's bias and variance. The issue with tests is that there's huge variance in them. Out of your life, how much time is spent actually taking it? With the GRE or SAT you're talking a few hours at most; the same thing could be said of most standardized tests.
The problem with this is that now you don't just have bias, you have this huge error/noise/variance associated with the test score. Maybe you don't take tests as well as the person sitting next to you. Maybe there was something weird the day and time you took the test, but it wasn't enough to declare the test invalid because of financial incentives. Maybe it makes assumptions, like that everyone taking the test comes from a common educational background, that are irrelevant to the actual thing the test is measuring. Etc etc. So yes, it predicts things, but if you look at studies, it does so relatively weakly in the grand scheme of things, and even more weakly with reference to even longer-term variables past first-year GPA.
The issue is that yes, the SAT, GRE etc is providing some information. I agree that ideally it shouldn't be thrown away. But today you have this opposite extreme in many cases where it's taken very much at face value, as an error-free quantity, or only minimally so. It's difficult to do anything with. Let's say you have someone apply. They're Asian, or white, or black, or whatever. Their test score is relatively low, but they have incredible background, GPA, etc. How do you interpret that individual test score in that context? The appropriate thing to do is to treat it as one bit of information, so that if everything were uncompetitive, it would support that, and if everything were competitive, it would support that, but in the scenario described it's kind of off. If you ignore it though, do you really need the test? If you blindly let the test overrule other things, is that appropriate?
Tests I think have become a kind of liability, in that they are useful, but their use is superceded by their misuse. There's always this one person or group who argues that the test score should supercede other bits of information because it's "more objective" ignoring all of its noise. It's almost like information that becomes dangerous because how it's leveraged by admissions committees, politicians, etc. in a way that far exceeds its validity. It's like having a tool that people can't use correctly on average -- if some product were on the market that led to lots of problems because people were misusing it, you might say the tool isn't the problem, people are, but if people were misusing it that much, you might still take it off the market because that's still critical.
I feel like there's a lot of this -- it's not just tests -- where a lot about a person gets reduced to a single number, or a couple of numbers, that are treated as fixed properties of that person, which is not true. A number may be more objective, but if its meaning is hazy enough, the objectivity doesn't matter.
This all may be moot, because I suspect a lot of this is just due to coronavirus-specific issues and tests will get readopted later. But I could be wrong.
My theory is that those kids don't do better than other kids.
A holistic process mitigates that disparity.
I highly doubt the intent of this change is to "favor rich kids" or any of the things in the other comments in this thread, which strike me as exceptionally mean-spirited.
Outside of cheating, there's truly a limit as to how much gaming can go into standardized testing.
I don't think the user was making the point that it was an intentional decision, but rather an unintentional consequence.
Most asian immigrants came here with nothing and much less resources than the caucasians who've already been here for years. They worked hard and performed well on the SATs and got into great schools and as a result are now generating a higher than average income than caucasians.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_Uni...
Not trying to brag about asians here. It's really just part of the culture and it can get really extreme. It stems mostly from parenting... the memes below are really illustrative:
https://www.pinterest.com/lindaschloss/asian-father-memes/
I think one time when I was a kid I mentioned to my dad I was interested in becoming an artist. My dad beat the shit out of me. Now I'm on hacker news and I'm definitely not an artist.
I would argue that what is causing the income disparity is the ability to work hard and study. This ability leads to higher test scores and higher income.
The only time I have seen some one who was just not suited to development was case of this.
If there is a systemic bias in test scores, it is still better to have the test score there so you can quantify it, and adjust your admissions policy to account for it. By throwing out the test entirely you are flying blind.