No, it was an intentional move to restrict the number of Asians admitted because despite their best efforts to hide it, prestigious universities' data showed systemic discrimination against Asians in the admissions process (see: SFFA vs Harvard). Removing the SAT removes some of the data that opponents can use to sue them. One of the reasons the UC removed the SAT was to "diversify" their admit pool because Asians disproportionately did really well on the SAT and they aren't allowed to discriminate based on race by state law.
My hope is that the Supreme Court, now that it's a 6/3 conservative majority, finally strikes down race based "affirmative action".
At the same time, I recognize that this is also some of the challenge that underrepresented minorities face in general in American society where there are others who have more closed doors than I (I went to a high school with over 70% minorities, mostly African-Americans + hispanics). I don't pretend to know what the solution to the problem is, but given that high prestige colleges have created a high risk high reward situation with how they handle admissions, I feel like a lot of the problem is how academia has created this artificial situation - maybe this is by design, I don't know, but if we truly value diversity & equity in higher educational opportunities, there needs to be a significant change.
This always seemed short-sighted to me. I think standardized tests provide one of the clearest opportunities for less advantaged students to make inroads. And while certain groups do better now, I don't think there is a better way than this clear metric for other groups to improve their standing.
Also, I think we simply overvalue going to Harvard. So instead you go to UVa or Puget Sound University. You "can" learn a great deal at these other places as well -- and maybe learn more given your existing level of achievement.
If we think long game on this, we will see that this is one of the best things to lift all boats.
Agreed, and also favouritism for "legacies", children of faculty and athletics (they can get in on their own merit if they have it). This is a rot that seems to be unique to the US. In the pretty much every other country there would be an outrage if someone got admitted because their parents donated a lot of money.
I don't know how to fix that fundamental aspect of reality, or indeed if it should be fixed. Any ideas?
Without these types of tests, you could end up being biased toward a measure of "how hard did the parents push."
1: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/calculus-is-the-pea....
So the SAT can easily give you 7 times as much info as the AP BC, and it's more about your aptitude than your achievement.
How many bits do you really need to know that you're a good candidate for continued education? Is being in the top 5% really not enough?
From the point of view of MIT, admitting you has a significant downside: they have to turn down someone else, someone who might have been able to do better research than you do and donate more as an alumnus. But from the point of view of an individual person, more education is always better, because your alternative to education is not admitting someone better; your alternative to education is ignorance.
(Schooling may not be the best way to get that education, however... far too many people opt for ignorance after their schooling.)
I didn't say the 5 gives you 4ish bits of information. I said it gives you 1.4 bits of information. That's only 35% of 4, not very 4ish at all. It's barely in the order of magnitude centered on 4 (1.26 to 12.6).
Which is obviously wrong. The self-selection does provide a lot of information. Students who believe themselves unlikely to score well are unlikely to take the test, which is why so many students get a 5.
Scoring 1600 intersection being valedictorian definitely does not give you 22 bits of information. Maybe 13.
Also being valedictorian gives you less information than 10 bits about your relative countrywide or worldwide standing.
I agree, but arguably the benefits of the SAT with regard to class mobility is less than it was when it was introduced.
The heritability of IQ, combined with assortative mating, means that increasingly class divides are forming around differences in IQ. I think many people are rightly concerned that this will eventually result in simply a different entrenched class hierarchy.
I still think MIT should use the SAT, but the problem of maintaining class mobility is one we should continue to assess.
For better or for worse, regression to the mean is a thing.
The introduction of free markets, and later IQ testing, disrupted a great deal of the entrenched social class structure within western societies and allowed many people of rather humble backgrounds to achieve great things.
The concern I express is about whether IQ testing will continue provide the same level of social mobility in the future.
Do you have a citation for this?
It’s inconvenient and correlates with SAT performance. Hence the big push to get rid of the SAT to try to hide the disparities in general cognition within groups and between groups.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial...
Edit: but beyond that, IQ-based class divides seems like a rather logical consequence of the following:
1. The heritability of IQ
2. Assortative mating
3. IQ being a significant determining factor of success in a given society
There's a lot of people pedaling this kind of IQ stuff to justify blatant racism, so you'll forgive me for wanting to see the data and not just letting statements like that fly by unchallenged.
A fairly quick summary is available on the Wikipadia page for this book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Reception) where you can dive deeper by looking into the reference (I particularly recommend S.J. Gould which addresses scientific racism in length in the book Mismeasure of Man). There is also a long video essay by Shaun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo) —if you have 3 hours to spare—which does an excellent job of summarizing the bad science and political agenda of The Bell Curve.
And why bring up the alleged racism when we are talking about class? The Bell Curve barely mentions race, and I'm not sure if Coming Apart does at all.
I'll watch the video at some point as it actually reviews The Bell Curve but I urge readers to seek out what Murray has himself said (both in his books and in interviews). The smear of him as being a racist and political hack is quite without merit.
I admit this is far fetched and maybe unfair. However I’m hardly the only one to accuse this book of being racist. The Wikipedia page is full of accusations, ranging from the aforementioned data from racist studies used unapologetically, to its advocates receiving funding from organizations associated with white-supremacy.
EDIT: I also want to address why it is totally fair to advocate Mismeasure of Man as a counterargument to The Bell Curve. There is a level of scientific rigor which The Bell Curve fails and Mismeasure doesn’t. For example the studies used in The Bell Curve were—to put it bluntly—bad. The Bell Curve failed to go through peer-review, it misused concepts, relied on unbacked assumptions, reached a conclusion unrelated to the premise, etc. You might find that some of these criticism applies to Mismesure, but hardly all, and not nearly on the same level. As an objective—albeit arbitrary—measure, just look at the ratio of the Wikipedia articles for each book which is devoted to criticism and controversies. Almost the entire article about The Bell Curve goes into some controversies. If both books were criticized and surrounded in controversies, one was definitely worse then the other.
Here we are talking about class differences. That's the primary subject of The Bell Curve (indeed he only devotes a scant few pages to the subject of race) and the only thing relevant to this discussion. Even if he were racist, them implication that he would have nothing important to say on matters of class is absurd.
> just look at the ratio of the Wikipedia articles for each book which is devoted to criticism and controversies.
Wikipedia is a great source finding out that things exist and their connections to other things, but there is no reason to believe it is objective with regard to politically charged issues.
That is not to say that the criticisms are wholly without merit, but few are actually technical critiques of the data or analysis.
Which is actually kind of sad, because while the technical critiques may be good (I haven't the time yet to check) the non-technical critiques I've studied are pretty poor.
> If both books were criticized and surrounded in controversies, one was definitely worse then the other.
The counter argument to that is that going against the shibboleths of our modern era is going to get you more flak, regardless of whether you are right or not.
This does not mean that Murray is correct because he is going against the grain and gets a lot of negative attention. Simply that all of the negative attention tells you a lot less than you might otherwise hope.
The fact that it then goes on to advocate for conservative policies based on such a weak case is why people conclude it is simply a racist work masquerading as academic. In an alternative world where the premise wasn’t of such poor scientific quality and the findings were sound, I bet people would still criticize it, but the overall reaction would be different. We would be trying to find a way to accommodate groups of lower IQ. Social scientists would try to identify barriers and advocate for their removal etc.
However given this work’s poor scientific quality, the whole notion that this group different a) exists, b) is significant, c), is innate d) is immutable, and e) largely inherits, should simply be ignored as false. Our current scientific understanding does not allow us to conclude this, or at the very least. This book is wrong in reaching these conclusions.
The main reason Murray gets criticized is for his alleged racism and his politics. The attempts I've seen to discredit his actual arguments tend to be more self-righteous than serious.
I haven't read all of The Bell Curve (though I have read the sections that deal with race) but I have read other works of his, as well as criticisms of those works, and to my layman's eyes I find little credit can be given to his critics. Indeed, Murray often goes to great lengths to highlight to what extent each of his claims can be supported by facts, and does a great deal to acknowledge where there is disagreement in the scientific literature. It may be that good critiques exist, but they are hard to find in the deluge of low quality hit-pieces.
> The fact that it then goes on to advocate for conservative policies based on such a weak case is why people conclude it is simply a racist work masquerading as academic
Frankly, this is why it's so hard to take his critics seriously. The only practical effect of the political Left's use of the label "racist" is to inhibit critical thought. We've spent much of this discussion talking about his alleged racism, when it still has nothing to do with the actual core thesis of The Bell Curve or my initial reasons for citing him.
> In an alternative world where the premise wasn’t of such poor scientific quality and the findings were sound, I bet people would still criticize it, but the overall reaction would be different. We would be trying to find a way to accommodate groups of lower IQ. Social scientists would try to identify barriers and advocate for their removal etc.
What do you think Murray's advocated policies entail?
Regardless, in a world in which people acknowledged group differences, there would still be genuine differences of opinion in how best to address those differences.
>However given this work’s poor scientific quality, the whole notion that this group different a) exists, b) is significant, c), is innate d) is immutable, and e) largely inherits, should simply be ignored as false. Our current scientific understanding does not allow us to conclude this, or at the very least. This book is wrong in reaching these conclusions.
That group differences exist is an incontrovertible fact. The extent to which those differences are driven by genetics is certainly up for debate, but Murray never claimed (and indeed, specifically argued against) that those differences were completely genetic.
The idea that genetics has no role to play in group differences is quite astounding, and attempts to defend that position tend to fall afoul of Lewontin's Fallacy[1].
He and Hernstein advocated for abandoning affirmative action, and divert funds away from supporting low IQ groups (e.g. welfare) into supporting high performance groups. This conclusion would always be debated among political lines as more left wing folks would argue against it in favor of accommodations, even in a world IQ was actual proven science.
> That group differences exist is an incontrovertible fact.
This is true, however the reason for this difference, and whether it is of societal significance, is up for debate.
I would argue that we should care more about SAT scores then IQ scores because SAT scores are actually used as an admission metric. These two correlate however I can just as well come up with a new metric which correlates with SAT and use that in my models in place of SAT, that doesn’t mean it is providing any additional info over SAT, nor that anyone should care about it.
[EDIT]
Or as M. C. Frey (2019) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/ puts it:
> Finally, when we understand that the SAT is a reasonable measure of intelligence, we can use SAT scores as a proxy measure for time-consuming and sometimes unavailable traditional intelligence assessments, as dozens of researchers have been doing since 2004.
Although, I should say that Frey misses an important alternative interpretation of her conclusion here, which is to ask: “Why care about IQ if we can use SAT to measure the same thing?”
[/EDIT]
We do care about the group difference present in SAT scores, and we do care that high/low SAT scores seem to follow generations. However we see that as something to rectify. Nutrition, childhood led exposure, high noise levels all contribute to lower SAT scores, so we try to eliminate those. We could do the same for IQ scores, but why would you? If we found out that 50% of the variance of SAT scores were explained by genetics, who cares? The effect size is still tiny compared to other reasons why people score low on these test. Lets fix those.
Lewontin's Fallacy is a silly path to go down. You can draw taxonomy lines wherever you want. If you base that on a silly metric you get a silly taxonomy. Junk-in Junk-out still applies even if you subscribe to Lewontin's Fallacy. This is especially true in the study of human behavior.
Humans are a remarkably homogeneous species, we share almost all the same genes. Our experience varies way more then our genes. And alas, that is how most people split us into behavioral groups, e.g. by education, by socio-economic class, by occupation, by geographic region, etc. Group difference down these groups is way more interesting study then down gene make-up. And alas, this is where you find most research which actually contributes to policy change and further our understanding of the human mind.
EDIT 2: If you want to see for your self how poor the scientific quality of The Bell Curve is, I recommend you read the sources it cites. Of particular interests is the meta-alalyses by R. Lynn (1991) [Here is a summary https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo?t=4256].
There are perfectly good reasons to support these policies that have nothing to do with being racist.
> This is true, however the reason for this difference, and whether it is of societal significance, is up for debate.
Agreed! But calling people with different conclusions on that question 'racist' is not debating. It is giving yourself an excuse not to have the debate, while doing nothing to convince the other side.
And Murray does not have a strong opinion about how much of group differences are attributable to genes. He only argues that they very likely play a role.
> I would argue that we should care more about SAT scores then IQ scores because SAT scores are actually used as an admission metric
Why do you think those are two separate things? There is not one single IQ test. Any test that is g-loaded is an IQ test. IQ is simply a way of representing a score on any test that measures intelligence. The SAT is an intelligence test, and you can represent scores on that test as a quotient.
> Lewontin's Fallacy is a silly path to go down.
It's a perfectly reasonable path considering you commit the same fallacy.
> Group difference down these groups is way more interesting study then down gene make-up.
There's no reason we can't study all of these things, including genetic differences in population.
> If you want to see for your self how poor the scientific quality of The Bell Curve is, I recommend you read the sources it cites. Of particular interests is the meta-alalyses by R. Lynn (1991) [Here is a summary...
I'll check out the video at some point, but it is very long so I'll have to find the time. A substantive critique would be appreciated.
Murray's most recent work on human diversity, Human Diversity, is also very much worth checking out, as it does far more to address issues, like race, that people seem to be so upset about.
If you want to hear from the perspective of someone who actual works in population genetics, you should checkout what Razib Khan has had to say on Murray's work.
Now lets talk about Lewontin's Fallacy. First I’d like to note that Lewontin's Fallacy is not a logical fallacy. It is even debated whether we should call it a “fallacy” at all[3], especially when the metrics we use to group by are suspected to be biased. IQ is by no means a clean metric and we will never completely clear it of bias (even in a world were g was a proven fact, which it isn’t by a long shot). So if your metrics are biased and you measure a small group difference where inner-group difference is much larger then the inter-group difference, and the science is not conclusive in how exactly how this difference materialized in difference in behavior. Then applying Lewontin's Fallacy is silly at best (but much more likely it is disingenuous). If you insist that we should make a taxonomical distinction on such blurry lines your are just making an arbitrary choice. There are millions of equally blurry metrics which you could draw a million different lines. Why do you insist on IQ?
Finally lets talk about the difference between IQ and SAT. First of all Frey’s assertions that they are the same thing is actually a rather fringe on in the scientific community. They don’t correlate perfectly, they don’t even share a distribution, and they are designed to measure a different thing. The SAT authors repeatedly reject this:
> name change was meant "to correct the impression among some people that the SAT measures something that is innate and impervious to change regardless of effort or instruction.
—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#Name_changes
1: Although from Razib Khan’s published works it looks like he is more interested in pumping the hype for consumer genomics and the exploring the cat genome then exploring human behavior through genetics, so he should not be taken as an authority—nor even an expert—in the intersection of genetics and psychology. I’m not aware of much research in this intersection, but if you want the intersection of biology and psychology, then the field of neuroscience has plenty. When I was studying the field over 10 years ago V. S. Ramachandran and Patricia Churchland were the big shots. Though this is largely off topic.
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
3: Although I’d like to say that a group difference with small effect size is probably still worth studying in the field of medicine. Especially in subfields where most of our studies are conducted on a single demographic of white abled bodied men.
> But calling people with different conclusions on that question 'racist' is not debating. It is giving yourself an excuse not to have the debate, while doing nothing to convince the other side.
I did this a little on purpose (as you have noticed) because frankly the latter is a much more interesting debate (which I merge from a nibling thread I started where I made this claim).
So to address your concerns that I claim Hernstein and Murray are racist in their book The Bell Curve. First, I never called them racists directly. I claimed that their policies can be considered racist in the cultural context of 1990s american politics. I also claim that they blatantly and unapologetically use racist studies to back up their claims. So they are racists by association, and their work is racist as a result.
If they had made a convincing argument about the heritability of IQ and it’s importance in explaining behavior, and omitted citing blatant works of scientific racism to back up their case, I would be more hesitant in calling this work racist. I would just say that their conclusion is wrong. That we would need to make accommodations for people with lower IQ. We should keep affirmative action despite it being counter-productive simply because it is the right thing to do, etc.
However they did make a very unconvincing case that this g-factor explains the group difference in intelligence between groups. And they did cite racist studies to back up their case. And on top of that they used rhetoric to advocate for conservative policies which falls in line with what racists used at the time.
So to summarize my views on this less interesting debate. I consider Hernstein and Murray’s policy proposals in The Bell Curve to be racist because a) they use an unconvincing argument based on racist studies to advocate for set of policies, which b) were widely shared by other people at the time which were doing so because of their own racist beliefs. However you are of course free to disagree with my conclusion, although I hope you can see that these two premises for that conclusion have some reason.
I do think the comments about CRT were a bit off-topic from this discussion.
However, I do agree that CRT is Marxist and I doubt the original formulators of CRT would object to that characterization. The people I've seen most vigorously object to that characterization have been classic Marxists who object that CRT rejects the materialism of Marxism. From just about every other perspective, there is a great deal of overlap.
> There's a lot of people pedaling this kind of IQ stuff to justify blatant racism, so you'll forgive me for wanting to see the data and not just letting statements like that fly by unchallenged.
Fair enough. However, most of the misinformation about IQ is coming from the skeptics of IQ[1].
I'm aware that IQ research is sometimes used by racists, but that's only possible because certain political interests have done their level best to make IQ as radioactive as possible. It makes it hard for anyone not already on the fringes of society to engage in the research.
Much more interesting research has come from other fields of psychology, including (in order of peak popularity) behaviorism, cognitive psychology, social psychology, neuro-psychology. Unlike IQ works from these fields have made predictions in unrelated fields and inspired lasting paradigm shifts inside psychology. For example social psychology has provided very useful constructs used in economy, behaviorism in criminology, neuro-psychology in medicine, cognitive psychology in computer science etc.
Scientifically IQ is a dead end. It only makes predictions inside the field of psychometrics, it correlates only with related constructs, the only place where it is used in an unrelated field is when racists are trying to excuse ludicrous statements.
Note: This is not entirely true. IQ was (is?) used to assess cognitive disability in individuals, but today we have a lot better tools for that (thanks to cognitive and neuro-psychology), so it’s usefulness has been surpassed by other fields.
That's a fairly bold claim. Honest question: how did you come to that conclusion.
> Scientifically IQ is a dead end. It only makes predictions inside the field of psychometrics, it correlates only with related constructs, the only place where it is used in an unrelated field is when racists are trying to excuse ludicrous statements.
That's patently false. We already know it predicts academic ability (which is why MIT is reinstating the SAT requirement. It's an IQ test). And we also know it to be one of the best available[1] predictors of performance in cognitively complex work - like programming (Google's HR has publicly discussed this in the past).
[1]"best available" here doesn't necessarily mean great, just better than the competition. In domains like psychology that have a high degree of causal complexity, you rarely have any single factor that explains more than 50% of the variance in some subject - heck even 10% is pretty good.
I didn’t conclude anything. This is merely a suspicion, I explained my reasoning below.
SAT being an IQ is a stretch. SAT is a scholastic amplitude, a far more narrowly defined construct. In fact IQ (according to psychometricion) should be immutable and somewhat inheritable, while SATs should reflect the work you put in during your school career and should be fair across demographics. IQ is also normally distributed while SAT has a negative skew (raw mean around 1050 with arithmetic mean of 1000).
You might have meant to say that SAT is correlated with IQ. While true, that is by design and is scientifically uninteresting on its own. SATs are far simpler and cheaper to administer. We have way more SAT data on the general population then IQ data. If your model includes scholastic amplitude but you measure it in IQ, you will not only have a less accurate model, but you will also make gathering data way more expensive and difficult.
SAT is an IQ test[1]. It was always an IQ test. There might be better (i.e. more g-loaded) tests out there, but the SAT still definitely works.
> You might have meant to say that SAT is correlated with IQ. While true, that is by design and is scientifically uninteresting on its own.
The SAT is correlated with g, which makes it an IQ test. You claimed that IQ doesn't correlate with anything other than performance on IQ tests. That is clearly incorrect with regard to academic performance. That you find this correlation 'uninteresting'is frankly beside the point.
> If your model includes scholastic amplitude but you measure it in IQ, you will not only have a less accurate model, but you will also make gathering data way more expensive and difficult.
There's not one 'IQ' test. Anything that correlates strongly with g is an IQ test. Yes, it also tests knowledge, but the ability to learn and recall facts is a heavily g-loaded activity.
Which is why CRT being pushed on children is so sick. They’re literally teaching children race Marxism. They’ve replaced the idea of class with race and now demand equity not between classes, but between races.
Given by the positive effects of SAT testing on social mobility in the mid 20th century, I rather doubt that.
And to be honest, if we are going to have a class system one way or the other, IQ might be the better approach. But IQ is not wisdom, and I worry that the elites of such a society would be disposed to unprecedented levels of ego and hubris.
And I’ll take a stand with other Americans to make sure our children don’t die slaves in America when the time comes.
I agree with most of this but Exams are absolutely gameable. There's a reason there is a multibillion dollar industry focused on them. There's a reason why Cram School exists across Asia and there's a reason why parents will pay thousands for ACT/SAT tutoring. Because it flat out works. You can increase your scores substantially by paying for these services. All else being equal I would expect that between 2 students with identical aptitudes where one has paid thousands of dollars for tutoring that the student with tutoring will score higher than the other. This can't be ignored. Can you mitigate this with self motivated preparation? Sure. But again, all else being equal and between 2 equally talented and motivated testers the one whose parents paid for a tutor that achieved a perfect score is almost always going to score higher.
There was another near-top comment when I posted that pointed out that test prep classes only conferred a 30 point benefit. Likely because it’s just familiarizing students with the test and covering basic testing strategies (like skipping a hard section and coming back to it last). I agree the benefit should ideally be 0 but 30/2400 is not much. That’s what I meant in my post.
Also, I’ve heard that in the past the SAT in particular was much more gameable due to the vocabulary/analogy sections, which incentivized students to study specific known topics or cram vocab terms. I’m not sure if they added it back but they’d been removed by the time I took the exam.
Back in my day when SAT's were 2400, I heard the swing being a difference of 100 points. Since reverting back to 1600 a 60 point swings sounds proportionately similar to 13 years ago.
Anyways, I think when people mean "gaming the system", they mean test prep classes literally geared towards the SAT and little else. Not practicing calculus to overprepare for the SAT math portion (maybe even using it to validate answers on a lower level), but being told that X is on the test and using older copies of the SAT to practive with. That does start to feel a bit game-y in my eyes. You're not better understanding combinatorial or algebra, you're understanding the pattern that a test has and playing based on that knowledge.
Once those students got to university, while the state school students were used to conducting independent research, having no-one who particularly cared or was going to crack the whip on assignment turn-in ("You're adults - turn your work in or don't. Not my problem."), and such thrived, while many private students found themselves at a loss. I remember many questions about elementary "Well, how would I go about researching that/studying this/doing that" in my first year of university that were along the lines of this theory.
I can imagine a longer test prep class that was really more like general math tutoring could make a bigger difference, a la Bloom's 2-sigma problem.
Because let's be clear about the standardized test situation. Test takers had time to take the test, they weren't doing work on the side for their parents instead to make ends meet. They had transportation to the test location, they were able to pay the fees, and they were not being discouraged from college as “we can never afford that, I’m sorry.”
Standardized tests themselves have mostly tested not IQ or domain knowledge, but how anxious you are taking tests. This does predict later academic performance, sure, but to say that this anxiety is disconnected from demographics sounds like a rather strong claim. Instead you have that it is more disconnected than GPA and essays and extracurriculars which is not saying much.
If you want to be serious about diversity and equity, you invest some actual cash into it... The easiest way is talent scouting, you send people (trained, you can reduce bias) to underrepresented communities and allow folks there to interview with them. My wife worked at place that did this, it sounds financially intractable at first but it scales to whatever budget you want to put into it... Her place would send folks out to like Singapore as well as to inner city schools. But the point is that you have to leave the door open to the people who can come to you, but you also go to the people who cannot.
(This is also a startup idea... The reason the schools don't send out their best is that there are too many colleges, the reason the colleges don't canvas the schools that there are too many schools, these are obviously inverse problems that could cancel each other out in the appropriate sort of network, the recruiters just need to be common to both. The problem is getting people to pay for it—the schools who you want most are precisely the underfunded ones that cannot pay you, the colleges meanwhile are less willing to go in on these sorts of weird experiments, they, they have an admissions department already. So the idea has a dangerous scope creep where you want to also start a college so that you can dogfood... Not a degree-granting educational institution in itself, maybe, but just a “first year at college” school which sells its students to other top colleges. Obviously that's a much riskier investment for VCs.)
How big a proportion of the population is this that we throw out our most objective standard? Kids that don’t have time to take a test? I would wager the vast majority of kids have time for an exam.
Seems like we figure out how to get kids to the bus stop before we just decide that objective measurement is irresponsible as long as there’s a kid who doesn’t have the time for it.
Just to build on this even further, a kid who doesn’t have time for an exam also probably hasn’t had the time to build the educational foundation necessary to succeed at a university.
I can’t imagine some kid who didn’t have time for high school math succeeding in my engineering program, for instance. It might seem charitable to throw out the SAT and admit that kid, but you’d just be setting them up for failure.
What you’re describing is a different problem that needs to be solved. Throwing out the SAT does not solve it.
In Chicago, the taking the SAT is required to graduate from high school. The school district pays for it. It is taken at school, during the school day.
Some of these barriers are not the same as they used to be.
So you really think a completely unstudied person off the street with a sedative would get a better score than someone who does KhanAcademy in their free time?
This argument can be used to argue against public school, against any sort of consequences for anti-social behavior, etc. it’s a bad argument. Instead find ways to get the kids to the test instead of arguing against the test in general.
saying 'tests are better than the other primary indicators we use to admit students to colleges' isn't saying much? this is nonsense
I went to high school in a bit of a backwater in the US. People don’t really go to selective colleges or care much about applying. It was only doing very well on standardized tests and spending time on the internet looking for info about colleges that led me to believe I could go to one of these places. I got into several and attended one, and I believe it greatly positively changed my life. (For the record, I had more going for me than just tests, but having a more objective way to compare myself to people across the country was very helpful, since I could easily attribute things to my area being backwards).
Removing admission tests was a huge slap in the face to social mobility out of the middle class. To reiterate other commenters, admission tests are the hardest part of the process to game and the least biased towards things like having a tiger parent, while being the most predictive indicator of success in college. Wealthy and well connected people can easily game extracurriculars and essays, and HS grades are vastly inflated at this point across the country. That pretty much only leaves standardized tests for your average kid who isn’t being deliberately primed by their environment to stand out for selective college admissions.
I hope more colleges are brave enough to reinstitute standardized test requirements. I know they want to do “class building” by hitting minimum representations across many groups (including legacy, but I don’t think that’s as big at MIT), and not requiring test scores makes it easier, but for institutions to keep up high standards and continue to give opportunities to kids, I really think it’s most beneficial to require scores.