They should increase difficulty until the number who can handle it matches the number they can admit.

Why? Because there's no signal other than standardized test scores? If you believe that then you probably should just admit the highest scores.

When I last looked at the research many years ago, other signals certainly tended to be noisier but there's no particular reason to think that admissions would be better if universities simply set a test floor then rolled a dice.

We can't really resolve this with the current data, because the current system encourages people to get as high a score as possible at the cost of maximum stress. How do we know whether changing the system would lead to a less stressed system where people just do enough to leap the bar, perhaps like the diving test?

The selection process has a cost. If it doesn't produce value it should be replaced with a lottery.

It's pretty clear however that the selection process at elite universities, however imperfect and to whatever degree it factors in things (like legacy admissions) that you may think shouldn't be factored in, still produces better results than just randomly admitting some percentage of whoever applies. (Especially if applicants knew it would be a completely random process.)

It's not clear that the existing selection processes at most universities actually adds value in proportion to its cost. What value, and to who? What are the shortcomings you think they're trying to fix?

Even if everyone agreed on a standard and its impact on admissions (+3 for participation in the Model UN, for example) it's not clear how we'd judge "better results" as we evaluate our admissions criteria. Are we optimizing for an even racial/religious mix of students? Higher output grades? Higher wages? More children raised successfully by the age of 40?

Then even with an agreed upon goal and some objective measures to used to approach it - is it worth doing? If we could get 1% better results by doubling the difficulty of the application process for the students then it probably wouldn't be worth doing it when the plan was considered holistically. What's an acceptable trade-off? What's the cost on transparency and perception of bias when we start considering subjective criteria?

What university has done this experiment?

For the SAT/ACT specifically, it's optional at a fair number of schools--elimination mostly started during COVID has been extended. (And not used at all at a few.) Of course, they still look at high school grades and class rank. I guess they'll have a better understanding in a few years how things turn out.

Of course, the process is still a far way from random.

A lot more people could handle it than are admitted because you can pick the classes you want to take.

If you are saying a lot more people could handle taking the top level classes than are admitted, I would also agree - but most of those people go to similarly elite unis.

I'm only looking at own experience, where you couldn't just choose whether classes you liked.

Right, but as one of those "anyone" who has been to an elite university, I'm giving my two cents.

I went to a selective uni where I thought basically half my year at high school would have been just fine there. The other half were not particularly interested in studying anything and would have screwed up at any university.

It's not like the laws of physics depend on what college teaches them, right? The content of just about any course is going to be more or less the same. A lot of the books were the same as well, comparing notes with friends who didn't get in.

> It's not like the laws of physics depend on what college teaches them, right? The content of just about any course is going to be more or less the same. A lot of the books were the same as well, comparing notes with friends who didn't get in.

To restate your claim (correct me if I'm wrong): Because the laws of physics are constant, there is only small limited possible variability in the difficulty, knowledge transferred, and comprehension needed to take a physics class between that at an elite university vs. any other university.

The facts: Only 19% of American highschoolers take calculus. This already precludes 80% of students from taking the standard physics classes at my university.

Advanced classical mech. classes for first-years can go much beyond that, delving into lagrangian and hamiltonian formulations, fictitious forces, difficulty relativity problems, etc.

If you are claiming half of your year at high school would have been fine taking a course like this, you went to a very unusual high school in my opinion.

Well the ones in the higher math classes would have been, but that's perhaps a small class size effect. I mean half of them did do either a math or engineering degree, one did a math PhD. I'm not too knowledgeable about the ones doing other subjects like history or art.

But yeah it would seem of the people who were on the path to apply to Oxford (or any other mathy course at a university) would have been fine if they had gotten in.

I'm extrapolating that the other kids in other subjects were just as qualified.

I mean of course I'm not saying people who hadn't done the prerequites would be fine, just the ones who did and didn't get in would be.

My US experience, which is probably pretty typical, is some choice of core courses, choice of major, with some required and some options within that major. Undergrad I'm pretty sure I could have made choices that would have made it pretty much impossible for me to graduate and I could have made choices which--while they certainly wouldn't have made my undergraduate education trivial--would have made things easier.

I'm saying for almost every major there is a very easy path.

But I absolutely disagree if they're saying that there are tons of people who could grok the advanced first-year physics classes like Physics 16 @ Harvard who are just being turned away and also not getting into other similarly good schools.