America has long had most of the best universities in the world. Getting rid of all standardized tests and instead relying on (heavily inflated, or not) grades, combined with bullshit essays, is going to significantly undermine that.

>America has long had most of the best universities in the world.

That's a very questionable claim.

Care to elaborate? I know I'd been making the same assumption about American universities - Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, and Stanford do seem to represent a good share of the world's best universities.

In terms of reputation, name recognition, notable people who come out of them, publishers of leading research, and advancers of technology? If you looked at a list of the top 20 I would bet more than half are in the US.

Many of those people are imported from foreign universities. If the claim had been "American universities are better able to drain talent and fund research", I'd agree. In terms of educational quality, it's questionable.

The ability to fund research and attract the best researchers (not necessarily educators) is useful at education's high-end, which is why many come to the USA in the first place. It isn't so great for standard or remedial education, however.

What do you know? You’re claiming something else but framing it as fact. You don’t know anything!

> If the claim had been "American universities are better able to drain talent and fund research", I'd agree. In terms of educational quality, it's questionable

Education quality at most top universities is middling, they’re designed for smart people who will reach for knowledge. Being around the best people drained from around the world provides fertile ground for that.

Yes but there's two parts to this: the teachers and the students. The student body in top American universities (especially undergrad) wouldn't even make the wait-list in a fair number of European schools.

> educational quality, it's questionable.

Virtually anyone at a top tier university would be 100% capable of learning their material and making good grades on it with the textbook alone. Combined with online resources, even easier. The quality of instruction isn't all that important for these schools, it's the decisions around which material to present and how to present it, which they can do because they attract the best talent.

In terms of research, it's been roughly true since WWII. Persecution by the Nazis and the war drove the cream of the European scientific establishment to the US, and the US poured a large amount of government funding into science funding after the war. Things are changing, first because the European scientific community has recovered and also because scientific research has been taking off in Asia.

Standardized tests have been known for years as an very unfair way of judging students. People with resources to prepare and study for those tests often end up with inflated scores than for people who don't have the resource to prepare for them. High school grades have been consistently found the be #1 leading indicator of how well a student is going to do in college.

So you're saying the SAT gives a bigger advantage to people with resources to prepare, compared to a GPA which is the result of many assignments and tests across four years? That does not sound remotely plausible to me.

SAT + grades is a stronger predictor of college performance than grades alone. AFAIK this is a pretty uncontroversial finding. For a review article, see Frey (2019), "What We Know, Are Still Getting Wrong, and Have Yet to Learn about the Relationships among the SAT, Intelligence and Achievement."

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/

Are you discounting that the factors that go I to the GPA are wildly different between schools?

I think the guy that got a 2.9 in a school that was seriously focused on education is going to be better prepared for the 4.1 from a peace and love participation trophy school.

Are you missing “standardized” portion?

So untrue. The best resource for preparing for standardized tests is Khan Academy. It is free.

High school grades on the other hand are getting inflated now, because of parental pressure, now that colleges are abandoning standardized tests, and relying more on GPAs. High schools don’t even have a standardized curriculum. Comparing GPAs across high schools make no sense. Within the same school it may make sense though.

I don't know about that. I had two one-hour tutoring sessions that helped me immensely. Going through all of Khan Academy might have helped just as much, but would have taken much, much longer.

And the alternative is letting rich parents hire agencies who will prepare their kids with a perfect portfolio of extracurricular activities starting year 10 that poor kids have no chance to match.

At least poor people have a chance when it comes to standardised testing.

The question is not "Does being rich help you with the SAT?" The question is "Does being rich help you more on the SATs the other possible criteria?" Because being rich and having resources helps with everything.

And being rich benefits GPA, extracurriculars, and college essays far more than it helps SATs where prep costs a couple hundred dollars and a month of weekends.

SAT prep being affordable only for rich is such a silly meme.

SAT prep materials are FREE at your local library (or high school library), anyone who is smart and has willingness to study - can study and nail this exam.

and SAT is very very easy exam nowadays, nothing compared to Indian/Chinese/Singapore exams

This was actually the very first statistics project I ever did. We had the basic high school level "Probability and Statistics class". We learned some simple combinatorics, some formulas for the normal distribution and the basics of hypothesis testing. The we were told to do some project (it was junior or senior year so they gave use fairly wide latitude).

I wrote up a survey of people and distributed to classmates who had either taken the SAT more than once or had taken the PSAT and then the SAT. I asked them if they took a prep class and what kind.

The results strongly supported the meme.

There was a big gap between people who did and did not take prep classes. There was a small but statistically significant difference between the Princeton Review and Stanley Kaplan (I don't remember which one won) and there was a large gap between people who took group classes and those who had private tutors.

I didn't collect any demographic information but it was at a fairly expensive private school in Manhattan. Mostly white kids. The minority kids were mostly from prep-for-prep.

They have been claimed for years; what is known is that they beat the hell out of every other way of judging students, especially subjective ones. When standardized testing was adopted in the first place it was rightly heralded as a tremendous win for diversity.

Could you name a metric where rich people get less of a boost due to their wealth and status than standardized tests?

To properly compare standardized tests vs. an alternative you need the other half of the comparison.

This ends up moving the burden onto individuals.

If you have an Asian Medical Doctor, they are AAA. If you have a multiple minority Medical Doctor, they are not necessarily AAA, they could be As.

Which one do you want to do brain surgery on you?

Without Affirmative action, you'd trust a multiple minority doctor equally to an Asian doctor.

I wonder what the cost is on the healthcare system/US citizens when we have worse performers in critical positions.

The one who is the best surgeon which could be any of them judging from my experience from other jobs. All the best programmers I know did well in school and on tests, but beyond a certain point test scores mean very little and other factors not measured by tests matter more.

I would not want a doctor who did poorly on tests, but a doctor who is great at tests vs one who is top in the country probably does not matter.

Do people who do better on standardized tests make better doctors? I take the null hypothesis. One's grades and test scores in high school are poor predictors of one's professional efficacy after a certain point.

I say, eliminate obvious cases of students who aren't trying, take the handful of obviously excellent students, and for every applicant in between, have a lottery.

> If you have an Asian Medical Doctor, they are AAA. If you have a multiple minority Medical Doctor, they are not necessarily AAA, they could be As.

> Which one do you want to do brain surgery on you?

I have no strong opinion on affirmative action but this is a dishonest way to frame this topic.

Affirmative action doesn't mean an institution can produce unqualified doctors. Both doctors should've gone through same examinations at medical schools, studied same textbooks and have similar training.

Taking the same texts and having the same books mean nothing since the point of tests is the grades so what matters is if they had the same grades or not

Look at grade averages for med schools over time.

Also if the school is willing to bend their standards on admissions, who’s to say they won’t bend their standards on grading? It’s also almost impossible to get fired from a residency program once you get in, graduation rates are near 95%…

I already don’t trust MD’s compared to DO’s because MD schools nearly all got rid of grading and all classes are pass/fail which encourages doing just well enough to pass. DO schools meanwhile continue to grade students which encourages excellence.

> who’s to say they won’t bend their standards on grading?

Schools that do this will lose their accreditation.

Schools that _don't_ do this will lose accreditation soon.

Wishful thinking. The Physician club is one of back scratching, not critical evaluation.

The Physician->AMA->ACGME->Physician pipe benefits everyone involved.

What's the worst thing that could happen? Malpractice lawsuits have doctors win 50% of the time when there is strong evidence, and 90% of the time when there is weak evidence.

The rich created a cartel and the feedback loop is already here.

IIRC some med schools are getting rid of grades in favor of pass/fail. This makes it hard to tell which students are great and which ones barely passed.

I just saw the stats from a medical school— I believe it was UCSF but correct me if I’m wrong— where the average Asian reject had higher scores than the average Black/Hispanic accepted applicant

> I just saw the stats from a medical school— I believe it was UCSF but correct me if I’m wrong—

Given that affirmative action was banned at UC schools in 1996, I suspect that you're mistaken about at least the school in question.

Which, it should be noted, means that we've accrued ~25 years of data about the results of such a ban. And the answer is that it's bad: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-31/californ...

Affirmative action was banned across California and the article you cited itself says that the problem is only with UCs and not CSUs. The reasons proposed (distance, costs, number of UCs vs CSUs) intuitively ring true to me. Today's decision is obviously correct from a legal standpoint (equal protection clause bans all race-based discrimination) but the difference between CSUs and UCs actually suggests a positive path forward for helping boost Black and Latino enrollment in UCs- step one might be building a lot more and making them cheaper.

An asian applicant scoring 25 on the MCAT has a 6% acceptance rate.

A black applicant scoring 25 on the MCAT has a 56% acceptance rate.

As a medical school dropout, scoring 33S... I had a hard time accepting this.

It's important to remember that if the average Asian score is higher than the average Hispanic score, then the average Asian accepted will statistically have a higher score than the average Hispanic accepted, even without discrimination.

UPenn Med School lets in minorities through a side door, no MCAT required. [1]

This will increase discrimination against minority doctors. It most hurts the ones who could have gotten in through the front door but will be assumed not to have.

1: https://dailycaller.com/2022/08/26/some-underrepresented-stu...

> White students over Jewish ones

Isn't Judaism a religion? Most Jews I know are very white.

Good question. There is no consensus on who is considered white. Nazis considered Jews to be a separate and inferior race. At one point in the US, Italians were not considered white. Irish, Greeks and Poles were not considered white at some point, and were discriminated against in the US. “No Irish need apply” (NINA) signs were common at one point in history.

It's not they were considered "not white", that's marxist like thinking dividing amongst visual attributes instead of class.

They were discriminated against because they were considered lesser genetically/socially/etc...

The skin color has little to do with it other than being a phenotype visualizing the genetics that a group hates.

As you pointed out there are plenty of groups (Irish, Italian, etc.) where that phenotype (high melanin) doesn't exist, but the hate and judgement still does...

Ashkenazi Jews are an ethnic group originating in the Near East, but with some admixture from Europeans. At least the plurality if not majority of American Jews are nonreligious, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews#Religious_belief...

Originating in Israel/Judea with some admixture from eastern Europe.

Actually thinking about it, probably 'the middle east' since the Jews moved into Israel/Judea from elsewhere at some point.

Definitely considered an Ethnicity.

I think Wikipedia does a decent job of breaking it down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews

There's several Jewish ethnicities. The largest are Ashkenazi (Euro; 90% of American Jewry) and Mizrahi (MENA; majority of Israeli Jewry). Judaism is a religion, so people who aren't ethnically Jewish can convert, but it's also an ethnic identity, so Jews who drop Judaism or convert to another religion (like nearly all famous 19th century Ashkenazim) are still Jewish.