GPA is not a useful measurement across schools in the US, because the scope of difficulty and curriculum varies widely between states and municipalities. It's also easy to game in schools that offer advanced courses- just don't take them. At my school, the people who had the highest GPA did so by avoiding classes like AP calculus BC.
Any one of these measurements in a vaccum is going to have problems. The GPA without the school and curriculum is like knowing that something is 25% off without knowing the original price.
That being said, the lottery is probably a better method than people give it credit for. It's guaranteed to have the fair distribution over time people want if the lottery is administered fairly.
Didn't Google do some hiring study and find that grades didn't matter as long as they were above a 3.0 or something? I know there is a lot of noise in grades, but there's probably some threshold.
Here's some source https://web.archive.org/web/20210610101258/http://qz.com/
If someone doesn't get how to do the work, but does care, that's probably a medical defect. Hopefully we can treat that someday, if not today. Getting lead out of the pipes and similar efforts would sure help.
If someone doesn't care, that's entirely another matter and we should be more introspective as a society about how to fix it. That's more a political problem than a science problem.
It came out in the court case that the real reasoning was to discriminate on the basis of race without saying they were discriminating on the basis of race, and they weren’t very careful about hiding the fact that the changes were racially motivated in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. Here’s the opinion: https://pacificlegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Coalitio...
The whole opinion is worth reading, but the meat starts from the middle of page 5 onward. Their explicit goal was to change the racial makeup of the school for political purposes, and so the case hinges less upon the changes themselves than the racially motivated reasoning behind them.
If you are interested and would like a far better explanation than I can provide that goes into the opinion, the context around the case and alternatives, consider the latest episode of the Advisory Opinions podcast released on February 28th, 2022[1].
[1]: Link to the episode page here but you are better served searching it in a podcast app like Overcast. https://advisoryopinions.thedispatch.com/p/judge-strikes-dow...
They should clearly eliminate the test fees and make free prep material available for those who can't afford them. Conduct free preparation classes for anyone to attend etc. A lot can be done to make standardised tests more accessible. That would serve a greater purpose.
Ironically, they used to have a set number of seats for people that had bad grades and aced the standardized tests. Blacks, Hispanics and other economically disadvantaged groups were over represented in that admissions pool. (So eliminating the tests will reduce the number of minority kids. According to the WSJ, they did this in Virginia in an attempt to boost enrollment in those groups. UC claimed that was their goal, but the study that they commissioned specifically to evaluate the policy change said it would reduce minority admissions.)
Doubly-ironically, a while back, California colleges had explicit quotas for Asian kids to keep them from "taking over". They eliminated the quotas and promised to never do it again.
They're still making a big stink about how the student body isn't representative enough. Guess which group is the only overrepresented one in California. (Hint: It's not the Caucasians.)
The structural racism in this state continues to amaze me.
When everyone is a valedictorian, nobody is.
What? The definition of a valedictorian is literally "the student (singular) with the highest academic standing in the graduating class" just as the salutatorian is defined as the student (again, singular) with the second highest standing.
Some schools literally don’t give less than a B anymore, and that some would make anyone with an ‘A’ valedictorian is a real thing. According to this [https://www.campusexplorer.com/student-resources/what-is-a-v...] article I ran across, Stratford High School near Houston gave 30 students valedictorian in 2010, and I doubt that has gotten much better.
Think of it as ‘scam innovation’ - the first ones to do it get major rewards (for schools it would be acceptance at better institutions for their students), then it spreads as more people figure it out, it hurts the legit folks, then folks start adjusting for it to try to tamp down the scamming.
The problem with the TJ case was that the administrators changed the admission criteria with the express purpose of racial rebalancing...and there are e-mails..
Could it also be that they want the better education? The names on the buildings aren't the only differences.
The problem is that demand is way too high for magnet / college prep type education. The solution is to designate more schools as such but as with anything the devil is in the details.
Concisely said. Blinding applicants' high schools would reveal the inequality in treatment latent in our educational system.
Which way?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
(Not saying this study is necessarily predictive of "inequality in schools", just that we shouldn't expect it to be a sure thing like you suggest)
re: TJH admissions:
> In 2020, during the summer after George Floyd’s death, the Virginia state government announced that it would be requiring schools to step up their efforts in diversity. Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Brabrand’s response was fairly simple. To create a new, broader admissions pool, he proposed eliminating the $100 application fee, the standardized test, and teacher recommendations in favor of a “merit lottery.” The district would be carved into regions, and each region would be given 70 seats in the incoming TJ class. As long as you applied and had the minimum required GPA of 3.5, you would have as good a chance at getting in as any other student from your group.
What exactly is the problem with this?