The Harvard undergraduate admissions lawsuit a year ago or two provides an example. Asian applicants were consistently ranked to have inferior personalities to white people, even with otherwise identical applications. There's no particular reason to think Asians are inferior to white people, and Harvard is really just promoting racist ideologies that say that Asians are mindless automatons who might be technically proficient but lack the creative, human impulses that would make them suitable for social roles higher than servitude.

I can understand that the motivation of such reform is to improve equity, as numerous studies have shown positive correlation between family income and testing scores. Therefore, lowering the difficulty of challenging courses and removing requirements of standard tests appear to be a natural choice towards better equity. Besides, many of us do not need advanced math or STEM in our profession anyway, why spend so much time on STEM, right?

That said, I don't see how such reform will lead to more equity. Studying and taking tests are probably the most inexpensive activities out there. All that a driven student needs to learn well is a library, a good teacher, and a few like-minded classmates. And tutoring school does not necessarily make a difference, either. But with all the reforms, what would happen? Here is what I can imagine:

  - Tutoring schools will make more difference. Family with means will send their kids to 
    tutoring schools so their kids can learn geometry or algebra in grade 5 and have all 
    the time to study AP courses in high school. Who suffers? Smart kids from poor families. 
    Same goes for history, writing, English, and etc. 


  - Money will matter more. Families with means will send their kids to robotics camps, 
    science research labs, coding schools, professional sports coaches, and etc. 
    You know, things that poor families have a hard time to afford. With non-differentiating
    test scores, guess what school admission officers will look at? 

And I'll be happy if someone could show me how wrong I am.

This is a heartbreaking example of how some people today take equality to mean taking everyone down rather than trying to bring everyone up. Or in other words, "they don't love the poor, they just hate the rich"

This part shocks me a little bit. All kids in Vietnam start geometry at grade 6. I have a hard time comprehend what is the difference that makes kids in a developing countries can learn things 3 years ahead of a developed countries.

Correlation != causation.

One of the best SAT prep available today is https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/sat and that is free for everyone.

Standardized tests are important, otherwise students are not evaluated using a uniform criteria. GPAs can be compared only within the same school district.

Even the curriculum is not standardized across states. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core_implementation_by_...

The hard part will be that the poorer folks won't have the same luxury of free time to study like this.

So in the end I'm not sure that we'll really escape from Matthew's Law ("the rich get richer and the poor get poorer").

That's when I took it as a youth and nobody in either of the school districts I went to around those years took it any earlier.

(For non-North Americans, 9th grade is 14-15yo).

(And did you mean 'board' instead of 'union'?)

EDIT: Some basic googling isn't coming up with anything about this, the closest I've found is SF high schools delaying algebra 1 until 9th grade, but with an option for kids to take both algebra 1 and geometry at the same time (or algebra 2 and geometry at the same time). Details at https://www.sfusdmath.org/high-school-pathways.html

> I'll simply send them to private schools, all kinds of camps, or tutoring schools. They will learn calculus in grade 7 or early if they are talented. They will have a bucket list of volunteering experience and so-called leadership proof in their resume. They will build their ML-powered robots or conduct their favorite chemistry/physics experiments in their private lab that I can help build, if they are interested. And in the worse case, my wife and I have no problem and plenty of time to home school my kids.

Sounds like a great way to give them one hell of a complex.

I've had co-workers who were parents of kids in the Princeton NJ school district (and adjacent districts) and from what they say it is an incredibly stressful and competitive experience. On the opposite coast, there's a reason kids in Palo Alto are killing themselves so much more than elsewhere.

The world is very quickly bifurcating into 1. a small professional elite and 2. poverty for the rest. The middle class is going away, and with it, jobs and dignity for B, C, and D students.

As a parent I feel if I don’t go into six figure debt paying for camps, tutors, sports, accelerated this, and advanced that, then there is some other parent doing this whose kid will take her spot on the train. Id be dooming her to a future of poverty.

College placement is a highly competitive, zero sum slugfest and for her sake I need to at least try.

In the usual secondary sequence, Geometry is between Algebra I and Algebra II; doing it in 9th grade, even with a full year precalc after Algebra II, gets you to Calculus I in 12th. with a combined Algebra II/Trig and no separate precalc, which has long been thr common accelerated course, it gets you to Calculus II.

Physics in high school is typically non-calculus based and works well alongside precalc or calc I or even Algebra II; there’s no difficulty having it in 11th/12th with geometry in 9th.

It may create problems keeping mathematically advanced students engaged, it doesn’t create problems teaching algebra or physics.

Some other points:

1) SFUSD actually delayed Algebra 1 until 9th grade, not just Geometry.

2) This choice was a bit silly, but beginning algebra concepts are still being taught in middle school. The title of the course is less relevant than the actual content, and this was less of a radical change than the course title makes it sound.

3) The actual issue is that SFUSD eliminated algebra tracking, and for ideological reasons thinks that students who are ready to study calculus in 8th grade must be put into the same classes as students who are struggling with basic arithmetic. Every student has special needs, and it's a disservice to all of them to pretend that a single unified curriculum and classroom is equally suitable to all students.

Calculus based: AP Physics C Mechanics, AP Physics C E&M

No calculus: AP Physics 1, AP Physics 2

Of course you would need the one with calculus to get credit that works for any STEM major. Without calculus, you aren't likely to get more than a generic science credit.

This was years ago but there's no particular reason I'd expect things to have changed. But basically if you looked at outcomes--I think this included post-uni outcomes like salary--the quantitative measures like SAT score had a lot more predictive value than interview/letters of recommendation/essays/etc.

(The way the one school I'm familiar with used to do things was that basically everyone went on an X-Y graph with X being a normalized quant score and the Y being a normalized everything else score. Everyone up and to the right. No one down and to the left did. Those in the middle band were looked at a bit more carefully.

I've also read SAT scores are highly correlated to family income. Family income probably has a huge impact on post university outcomes.

Any time someone proposes to get rid of this or that requirement for being correlated to wealth, I'd like to see what the alternative is and see if it's any better.

We want something somewhat meritocratic, where we can tell the difference between natural capability and hard work on the one hand and simply being lucky to be born into wealth on the other... but it's not clear to me that objective measures like the SAT are going to be worse than interviews/letters-of-rec/essays in discerning that.

Everyone can, online. All of MIT's course content is available for free online:

https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

While this is a common belief (and many people, before I went to MIT, were very effusive in telling me how much it would benefit me), my experience is that it is a myth (or at least it was at MIT when I was there). Of course there were high achieving people at MIT when I was there, but there were also plenty who were not; overall I don't think the distribution of motivation was much different from high school. (Motivation is not the same thing as grades: most of my fellow students at MIT got straight A's in high school for the same reason I did, that for us, high school was simply not that challenging academically, so we could be lazy and still make the grades.) As for what I learned from my fellow students, I can't say I learned nothing (since, for example, learning what pot smells like counts as learning something), but I don't think I learned anything significant academically that I wouldn't have learned from my peers at a less selective school.

There are plenty of top quality professors at such schools.

Not every professor can make things work for their family at Stanford or MIT. Maybe their partner has a modest income so to afford a house so they go work at Penn State or whatever.

We are...

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-100b-analysis-i-f...

Yes, fair point.

> suggesting it can substitute actually studying at MIT is a bit too... optimistic

My personal experience at MIT was that I didn't learn much from lectures; too long, too boring, and too much tailored to the professor's style instead of the student's. In this respect lectures at other schools where teaching is valued more relative to research might actually be better. (One of the professors I had at MIT who was the exception--an excellent lecturer, who actually responded usefully to questions from students in a freshman-level class of 200 or more--was criticized by the MIT administration for not publishing enough research papers.)

Or if you mean there's more to the experience of going to college than just the coursework, of course that's true as well. But if everyone went to MIT (or any other selective school), that experience would change too; all those people would not be getting the same experience that people going to MIT now are getting.

In short, it is not really possible for everyone to "go to MIT" (or any other selective school) in either of the above senses. So I was focusing on what is possible, namely, for everyone to have access to the same actual learning materials that MIT students have access to.

There is one other thing you could be referring to that the online materials can't give you, namely in person instruction and feedback. Personally, if I think back to the classes I took at MIT, I didn't learn anything significant in those ways; everything significant I learned, as far as the actual academic material was concerned, I learned from reading the course notes and textbooks and working the problem sets and taking the exams (and seeing what I got right and what I got wrong). And all those things are available to anyone who goes to the OCW site. I can't say for sure what other people's experiences are, but I think this quote from Gibbon is relevant:

"The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous."

It's the labs and the projects. Especially for engineering degrees, a good part of learning comes from shipping projects. I think it's where "everyone doing MOOC" falls short.

True, this is one thing that online course materials can't give you. But I also don't think a school like MIT has any real advantage in this respect over other schools. At least, not if the labs I had there are any indication; the materials we were given to work with were just as half-baked as anywhere else.

I think these things can be found at any decent school. Or, for that matter, in many kinds of activities outside of any school.

At the senior level, folks have typically carved a path out for themselves. College is typically the oldest thing on their resume anyways.

I think a lot of people here assume a fairly linear SWE progression beginning with a CS degree but that's not the norm for a lot of people who work in the computer industry in various roles even that didn't involve wholesale career shifts.

citations needed

Parents should teach their kids about the importance of networking and signaling while growing up. Obviously, it's secondary to actually being proficient and productive, but still just as necessary.

Why not take 1 or 2 university classes your junior and senior year of HS?

Wasn't this the point of AP classes?

I think there are some Community Colleges/Universities that will allow it, or used to.

It would result in massive inefficiencies and major risks.

With few exception (medical school, some very specialized research), you do not go to MIT if what you genuinely and strictly want is a good education. There is nothing that an undergrad is going to learn at MIT that can't be learned online. There's nothing secretive that MIT teaches that only MIT grads could possibly know about. There is no proprietary research or knowledge that MIT teaches to its students that isn't well established and that other colleges don't have access to. And finally, MIT and most other Ivy league schools and schools in general don't have any kind of specialty when it comes to lecturing or any kind of area of expertise on delivering educational material in any kind of special way; on the contrary most professors are pretty bad at teaching and teaching is not their area of expertise. The textbooks, the lectures, heck even the tests and assignments, are all available for anyone to learn from if they so choose.

You go to MIT because it puts you ahead of well over 95% of the population in virtually every future aspect of your career.

Test prep companies have an incentive to overhype their services but research suggests the improvement isn't that much.

There's a Jacobin article making the case for the SAT that people following this debate might enjoy reading: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/03/sat-class-race-inequality...

Spending 10k on a prep class isn't going to cause your dimwitted child to outperform a bright kid from a disadvantaged background, but it can probably buy a better essay

Richer families were more likely to have connections with a doctor to give the diagnosis, afford the insurance deductible, or even be in the right circles or to know through word of mouth or paid admissions advisers that it was a thing to try and acquire for the kid.

Again, you should expect every metric to be thoroughly gamed.

Well, no, since that would be 150% of the maximum score.

You can buy your way to the maximum score, and people have been doing it, but test prep won't get you there. (As you note, prep is worth nearly nothing in terms of score gains.) You need advance access to the answers, or a substitute to take the test for you, or something along those lines.

Sure, yes, maybe bribery or fraud could get you there. Have there been reported cases?

Yes, there have been various reported cases of fraud on the SAT. The most prominent two that come to mind are the recent college admissions scandal, in which strategies included both (1) having a substitute take the SAT in place of the student and (2) bribing the test proctor, and the year in which every test result from South Korea was canceled due to widespread cheating.

https://world.time.com/2013/05/10/for-the-first-time-sat-tes...

Even so:

> In any case, even small effects can be unfair. Let’s assume the effects of short-term coaching are really just a 20- or 30-point jump in students’ scores. That means they ought to be irrelevant to college admissions officers. Briggs found otherwise, however. 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.

https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...

Test prep, even if it's as rudimentary as taking the test multiple times (thus, being able to afford to take the test multiple times), is an advantage that matters.

In extremely competitive situations, the slightest edge matter. Arguably test prep is less of an edge than spending a summer on some community project would be but even a relatively small point jump is an edge for someone on the bubble. And, of course, elite schools have become hyper-competitive. I have very few illusions that I would have the school choice I had when I went to college--especially given that that about an eighth of my class went to the school in question.

The SAT is the one mechanism that poor asian and jewish and nigerian kids could prepare for and do well on. But obviously the objective is to get rid of them as "theres too many"

Its also the only measure thats the same for everyone. There also isnt any indication that as a whole the test prep classes actually "work" to a serious degree. Maybe theyll take your score up 20 points but wont raise it 300.