The kids of the upper class and the rich will always have an upper hand compared to the poor. However, standardized tests limit how wide the upper hand is. An upper class kid still has to study and pass the test, and the poor kid can also do that.

If admissions become “holistic”, poor kids would have little chances. Good luck to that poor kid competing subjectively with kids whose parents send them on impressive charity trips and get them unpaid internships at the most prestigious companies.

https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/racis...

>Asian Americans, which is always conveniently omitted from these racist narratives.

Ironically, so is the diversity of the Asian American community.

What would you use in its place? You think grades don't have bias?

Oh wait! That exists — it’s called the Common App, and it’s what most private colleges today use, from the Ivies to elite tiny liberal arts colleges with the largest share of students from the 0.1% that you’ve never heard of, like Pomona College.

I think the only good one out of those is the interview.

Question. Which tells you more about a student:

1. An essay that was probably written by chatGPT then edited by the students parents

2. A test taken in a supervised, controlled, timed environment

2. Would absolutely not either

I believe the whole concept of “meritocracy” for purpose of admissions is a lie— choosing the criteria to measure against is itself a subjective act.

Let me ask you. Do you also believe that requiring a display of proficiency in mathematics to get into the best schools is inherently discriminatory? What about requiring a demonstration of the capability to understand and complete basic subject matter material in the fields or reading, writing, or scientific literacy?

The whole point of a selective college is they have to select from a pool of already qualified applicants. There is no objective measure to measure against when you’re splitting hairs. Even were you to limit it to “objective” requirements like test score and GPA, how do you decide between two students for one spot when both have the exact same scores?

There is no shortage of perfect scores applying to Harvard. And yet a majority, or even a plurality, of any given class of admits didn’t have perfect scores.

1,000 people typically receive a perfect SAT score yearly.

We've gone full circle.

The Common App is great, but it's not magically less open to bias than standardized test scores.

Many schools, selective or not, actually do this whole process — multiple times, with each admissions agent doing a separate order of criteria, to ensure everyone’s application gets read at least twice. The idea being that those with the most “let’s give them another look” across the board are the most notable. Then from that shortlist the debates comparing each applicant, usually sorted by geographic proximity to each other, begin (at Harvard, if you’re from Texas you’re not really competing against New Yorkers for a spot, you’re competing against other Texans for the XX number of Texan spots they usually admit a year).

I did a short stint as a student worker in the admissions office of a very selective college in California (<5% admission rate, but not one many could name off the top of their head), and this is more or less how it worked

LOL. My understanding is the really good prep school college counsellors golf with one or more high-up folks in elite university admissions offices, and get the inside scoop on exactly what they and their peers in other universities are looking for in any given year, such that they can even tune an essay or letter of reference for a given school based on that non-public information and advise students which schools to focus their application efforts on, based on their background & activities.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/03/rich-students-get-better-sat...

For some reason a large part of our society doesn’t want to acknowledge that genetics (highly) influence intelligence.

There are entire countries trapped in poverty. China was desperately poor until just a generation ago. Did Chinese people suddenly become smart for some reason? Which is the next country that will magically go from being filled with dumb people to being filled with smart people?

As I said, just a bit of experience with the real world and critical thought will show that your explanation is nonsense.

Yes, they stopped following strict communism. They pivoted to authoritarian capitalism and got wealthier.

(Basically) no intelligent teenager in America is held down by poverty. My parents were relatively poor, didn't go to college, worked long hours, and I went to a public school and certainly didn't have any tutoring and didn't receive much help with homework.

I did well enough on my ACT to go to a private college for pretty close to free. Even if that doesn't happen you can go to a state school that doesn't need great grades, take out loans for the entire amount, get a degree for a good paying job, and suddenly you're out of poverty.

I would think there would be a lot of demand for an unbiased standardized test. All I saw for suggestions was to use GPA instead, which clearly has a lot of bias potential... is there a recommended replacement for the SAT/ACT?

"Students of Color" receive scores in the same distribution as white/asian/hispanic students (same fraction of 1s, 2s ... 35s, 36s on the ACTs for example)

AND

Top scores are meaningfully distinct from the population average? (because the first condition can be trivially fulfilled by having everyone score the same)

Standardized tests were invented in Sui dynasty China, in the early 600s AD, as a way of selecting officials for the imperial bureaucracy. They were invented precisely because they were more objective than the prevailing method of selecting officials - recommendations from the aristocracy.

There is a long history of standardized testing being a means for rewarding merit, instead of more easily corruptible methods of selecting officials/students/etc., such as recommendations. Just to illustrate my point: Do you know why Harvard abandoned standardized testing in 1926 as the sole means of determining admissions? Because "too many" Jews were passing the admissions test. Harvard's "holistic" admissions policy was invented for the sole purpose of restricting Jewish admissions.

To the extent that society is meritocratic at all and intelligence is heritable (and it is), we should expect test scores to correlate with all manner of measures of success, including property values. Articles like this don't even take that question seriously. They just ignore it. It's proof by repeated assertion. It may be fashionable to insist that this is prima facie evidence of bias, but that is a question of logic and not a difficult one, whatever exceedingly average minds like Ibram X. Kendi's think of it.

[0] As a legal concept "disparate impact" is what it is. The law means whatever its authors intend it to mean. But as a matter of logic, it's embarrassing, and beneath this forum.

Now, too many Asians are being admitted based on test scores. Oh no! To fix this problem, Harvard consulted their history department and included a “personality traits” section. Is it any wonder that Asian students scored low on this?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...

We should be constantly improving our ways of measuring merit, not throwing up our hands and pretending it's meaningless to try.

Affirmative action was misguided because it assumed that because one student was Korean and the other Mexican, the Mexican kid must be disadvantaged. Besides the fact that there's an inherently racist worldview baked into that, Newsflash! There are tons of poor Korean kids and rich Mexicans!

It's because these people only see the world through the one-dimensional lens of skin color.

Further, it's an attractive way to view the world when you're a complete idiot with nothing of substance to offer society. It leads these people to infecting society with parasitic and fallacious ideas that you see manifested in the extremes of both political parties.

There should be some SAT score floor. But beyond that other factors should take over. If the floor is at n and two applicants appear - one with a score of 1.1n and the other 1.2n, I don’t think that’s enough information to decide who should get the spot.

Name a better way.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/4/19/23689402/colleg...

It's a good way of figuring out who is intellectually capable. SAT scores have a very good prediction rate of success in college.

I’m not saying SAT scores are useless, just that they should only be used as a filter and not for ranking.

Why not both? I think a lot of the debate over college admissions misses the fact that so much of this is artificial scarcity. Some of the big schools like Harvard/Yale/Princeton etc. could easily increase the size of their incoming classes many times, and still have them only be filled with highly qualified candidates.

Top schools exist not just to educate, but to ensure that the social hierarchy is maintained. If it were purely to educate or to ensure diverse learning environments, the top Ivies could solve this easily by quadrupling the size of their classes, but then this would of course dilute the exclusivity that is the primary reason for these institutions in the first place.

On Student 2 who build something in Sudan from stick and rocks. Unless he is from elite family he most likely did not get proper school education and won't be able to keep up with rigors of studying in top university even if he is very smart. Harvard is not really in a business of providing remedial education. With that if he is really smart and resourceful, he had a very good chance of doing very well for himself in Sudan (becoming entrepreneour, building soemthing local, become warlord, etc) and then his kids will be fully equipped to go to top university.

Case in point, we had a very wealthy black student in my college. This woman was not disadvantaged in any way, yet she played the race card all the time in order to claim a disadvantaged background. I'm talking about a family that would take their kids to France and England to summer. That level of wealth, yet framing all her accomplishments as if she came from the inner city. That's disingenuous, yet the (now-gone) affirmative action camp would have gladly taken her checking the 'African-American/Black' checkbox as a sign that all her accomplishments should be judged on a poor disadvantaged upbringing. How is that not racist?

S1 definitely.

If need-aware, does the admitting class have enough full pay to cover the costs of those needing scholarships (wouldn't want to actually tap into that tax-free endowment)? If they need more full pay, then S1, if there are already enough full pay, then S2.

Or are your applicants just completely overflowing with kids that have chip manufacturing lines in their basement? I am skeptical this is the case. That they give seats away to legacy and [favored race] in such quantities in the first place tells us something about how often students like your example come about.