It’s perhaps to address lower scores amongst legacy and athlete students who are accepted? It can’t be controversial if the comparison metric is removed.
I’m guessing it also helps eliminate the “blue collar asian” applicants more easily. It removes one of their shining accomplishments.
“But the data collected by the Education Department contained some explosive information. It showed the athletes and so-called legacies who were actually accepted had lower SAT scores than the rest of the class and were also deemed less attractive candidates by the admissions officers conducting Harvard’s process.
Some of the comments those officers wrote on the application folders of admitted legacies strongly suggested something more than a tiebreaker was at work. “Lineage is main thing,” one reader wrote. “Double lineage, but lots of problems … no balance,” the notes on another successful application said. “Lots of lineage here … Hard to explain a NO,” yet another said. “Classical case that would be hard to explain to DAD.”
I think it gives Harvard a lot of cover for their admissions decisions. As you noted, Harvard has come under fire for rejecting a lot of Asian American applicants while also coming under fire for letting in less-qualified legacy applicants. While standardized tests have biases that are problematic, this move allows them to be more or less biased as they choose.
It's possible that they will become less biased in their admissions, but it's also possible they'll become more biased.
The University of California has also announced that they won't be considering SAT/ACT scores for admission. California forbids affirmative action in their state schools and while the SAT/ACT aren't objective tests, people often treat them as such and it provides a number for people to compare (whereas you can't really compare "really good at guitar" with "volunteers planting trees"). It's led to Berkeley being 2% Black and UCLA being 3% Black while Stanford is 7% Black and USC is 5% Black. Also notable, Berkeley is 24% White and UCLA is 26% White while Stanford is 32% White and USC is 37% White; Berkeley/UCLA are 36%/28% Asian vs 23%/21% for Stanford/USC. The University of California system is certainly having its admissions decisions impacted by California laws against affirmative action in their public universities.
I don't expect Harvard's admissions makeup to change significantly. I just expect it to be harder for third-parties (who might want to sue) to compare data. If you're qualitatively comparing applications that take a lot of time to review, it makes a lawsuit very difficult. If you're able to compare a numeric score, it makes it less time-consuming (even if the numeric score is biased/inaccurate, people often treat it as unbiased/accurate). It's easier to argue qualitative differences in judgement too and means that you have to start challenging things individually rather than as a class (which basically makes it impossible).
With the University of California, it will be interesting to see if they start coming closer to peer institutions in their student body.
How are the SAT/ACT not objective tests? Are they not objective measures of how you perform on the SAT/ACT? There are abundant low cost practice guides and study materials. I came from a very poor family and with some practice at home scored very well on the SAT. It was one of the few tools I had to attract college admissions boards. I feel like taking that away will severely disadvantage poor kids who are otherwise bright with strong work ethics.
There is some truth to the argument that standardized tests are a flawed proxy for the combination of intelligence and motivation to learn that one wants in a student, and that the test may be biased towards some cultures that have a tradition of preparing their children for those standardized tests, whether directly or indirectly. Despite the relative low cost of practice, it is not free. Also, each attempt of the test has a cost.
Still, I'm a fan of standardized tests. If there's a problem, we should try to improve the tests rather than doing away with them.
I mean, the SAT has "aptitude test" in the name; the idea that you can practice it and do better each time is a bug and not a feature.
But I think the bigger danger is that after a while, practicing for standardized tests starts monopolizing the curriculum at secondary schools, and teachers start being evaluated by their students' test scores to the exclusion of all else. Even 20 years ago, I remember getting herded onto a bus to some community college to take an extra "practice state proficiency test" whose score didn't count for anything at all.
Even if universities have lousy motivations, de-emphasizing that kind of thing probably makes high-schoolers' lives a little better.
Since 1993 SAT no longer stands for 'scholastic aptitude test'. It had its roots as a sort of IQ proxy but that has fallen out of favor because it doesn't reflect the full purpose of schooling (e.g. advancement from given means, value-add of schooling for a given student) nor range of things that cause students to achieve (e.g. hard work, conscientiousness, etc).
One could make a test called 'big brain test' and sell it to schools to say it measures big brains, and it might be only somewhat correlated but still get widespread adoption because it fulfills a need schools have to have some sort of quantitative sorting of students, but it still wouldn't necessarily be a measure of big brains. This is sort of what the history of the SAT is.
I'm an immigrant and moved here when I was 9. My parents always spoke in a different language growing up. I personally had a hard time with certain vocabulary that I never picked up and that maybe I otherwise would have if I had native English-speaking parents. This definitely slows you down when reading problems as you're only gathering about 3/4 of the problem at times. This is probably an outlier, but just thought I'd share my point of view here.
Statistically significant, such that it created some academic literature and enough cover for Harvard to make this new policy. Practically significant, maybe not.
Here's a comment from a different branch of this thread:
> The findings in general is that much of the disparity between minorities and whites goes away for harder analogies that are more technical or scientific in nature, in fact contrary to what I expected, the recommendation of the study is to simply eliminate the bottom third of verbal questions (ranked by difficulty) involving analogies or sentence completion, as those are the questions that are most likely to involve cultural bias.
First off, the SAT has gone through many revisions in the last 20 years so it's unclear this still applies. The SAT doesn't even have analogies any more, perhaps as a result of this research.
Secondly, that doesn't address differential prediction abilities. It addresses a concerning aspect of the verbal test, but is somewhat irrelevant when your goal is to predict college success. I'm not aware of differences on that metric.
Biased in the sense that cultures that that rewarded diligence and intelligence are able to compete more effectively against cultures that don't and the wages of these accomplishments can be seen in their posterity?
put a big IMO/IMU around all of this, but the SAT/ACT isn't objective in the sense that studying for them is something you can do to improve your score and your prospects. However, it is also transparent in how you do that: you take a course, get study books, and/or take practice tests and there are programs out that have been trying to help disadvantaged students get access to these tools. its also much more cost effective compared to the other solutions like going to a private school (difficult, can be costly without aid) or getting into expensive niche sports.
so imo getting rid of standardized tests does get rid of a subjective rating of an applicant which is good in theory, but when you leave in all of the other subjective ratings that are much more difficult for disadvantaged students to do well on it who is it actually benefiting?
subjective/objective are probably not the right adjectives here, but to use your example I would say that a timed foot race is an objective measure of how well you do in timed foot races, but is not an objective measure of your innate athletic ability because of training/coaching and you have to factor those to attempt to back into physical ability. the same is true for the SAT, in that people treat it like an intelligence/general knowledge test when you have to factor in the specific training that person has had for the SAT itself.
A timed foot race is a quite reasonable measurement of athletic capability - like, it's not a perfect one and a more thorough and diverse evaluation would be better, but if you don't have a better evaluation option then it's obvious that it has some information; if you'd take a hundred random people and split them into two halves based on foot race times, then that would be a far better separation than one based on randomness or any factors that measure athleticness even less.
I mean, it's okay to use the best imperfect metric you have available; so acknowledging "the metric is not fully correlated and depends on other factors" does not mean anything, the only argument that has weight is "hey, this other metric has better correlation with The True Thing and less bias, use that instead"; if the remaining alternative metrics are even less objective and more biased than SAT/ACT tests (which IMHO is the case), then removing SAT tests won't and can't improve things, despite these tests being flawed.
that would work if you were talking about random people who were selected to do a surprise track race, but if the track race is known to be THE measure and that can be influenced by training then you’re going to see skew.
to be clear, i still think the sat is better than everything else because preparation is much more legible and accessible compared to all of the other ways to stand out for college applications.
So what do you propose is more objective (or whatever qualifier you prefer) than the SAT?
Pointing out shortcomings of standardized tests is one thing. Advocating for eliminating what seems to be our most equal/standardized/objective/whatever measurement without a replacement seems like a bad idea to me.
if you read my first comment i never argued for getting rid of the sat, though they should get rid of the usurious prices for tests and sending your scores out. in fact, i argued that of all the subjective tests the sat has the most legible and accessible path to maximizing your score compared to all the other subjective things colleges look at.
That's an interesting read, and I personally am a fan of Scott's somewhat radical views on college education in America, but surely you recognize that you are directly side-stepping the question? The problem at hand here is not about "how to decide who to get into undergrad", it's "how to decide who to train for the 'elite' jobs in society".
I haunt thrift stores, and almost always there are SAT/ACT prep books for sale for a couple dollars. You can probably get them for free from your local library.
In my not-so-humble opinion, however, the best way to prep for the verbal SAT is to read books. Novels are fine.
For the math, prep by taking all the math classes your school offers, and make an effort to learn all the material.
Do that, and you won't need prep classes, and you'll also be well prepared for college.
While it's true that one can improve their standardized test scores by studying or taking a course, and the ability to do those things is correlated to a student's socio-economic situation; if you label standardized tests as subjective, then for me it follows that there is no objective measure of a student period.
Which begs the question, who exactly do you admit to your school, and why?
> I feel like taking that away will severely disadvantage poor kids who are otherwise bright with strong work ethics.
They can still take the test and get a high score.
> How are the SAT/ACT not objective tests? Are they not objective measures of how you perform on the SAT/ACT?
Most of the studies on this show that all of the cultural references in the reading passages and math word problems were things that wealthy people would have experienced in real life, but poor people would not, so it gave an advantage to wealthy kids. Also a lot of the vocab were words that wealthy kids had heard at home but not poor kids.
So while it was supposed to be a test of intelligence, it is really a test of how wealthy you were growing up.
This is pissing on people's leg and telling them its raining. There's no "cultural loading" in the SATs. English is my second language and I didn't even know Chicago was a big city until my mid-20s, but reading a lot and practicing vocabulary words is easy and cheap. New York's Stuyvesant high school has an average SAT score of around 1500, and half of students are eligible for free/reduced price lunch: https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/stuyvesant-serves-needy-...
Poverty makes things harder, no doubt. But American parenting is just bad and American students don't try very hard. My wife comes from a lower-income white family (multi-generational lack of economic mobility) and the lack of emphasis on eduction or discipline at home is glaring. Some people, like my wife, are just naturally very self-driven and make it out. But a lot of potential gets wasted because kids are allowed to just faff around instead of being rigidly guided by parents (or, as is more commonly the case, by the one parent).
So then what do you make of the studies that show that SATs are culturally biased, like the one OP posted [1]. I decided to go ahead and buy it for the 10 bucks and review it. It's a surprisingly technical study that seems fairly robust and it has been replicated several times (original study in 2003 and replicated in 2010).
The findings are that much of the disparity between minorities and whites goes away for harder analogies that are more technical or scientific in nature, in fact contrary to what I expected, the recommendation of the study is to simply eliminate the bottom third of verbal questions (ranked by difficulty) involving analogies or sentence completion, as those are the questions that are most likely to involve cultural bias.
If my understanding is correct (and I'm sure I have some subtle details wrong), the idea is to let students take the SAT, then go over the verbal/analogy/sentence completion portion of the SAT and order each question by the proportion of white students who answered it correctly, and then eliminate the easiest of those questions from the final score. The most difficult questions are still part of the test, but apparently most of the cultural bias is among the easiest questions to answer that minorities get tripped up on.
If your hypothesis were true, that it's mostly a matter of bad parenting, it's kind of hard to see why bad parenting would make minorities struggle to answer the easiest questions for white people, but not also struggle to answer the hardest questions as well.
The racial gap is almost exactly as big on the SAT Math as it is on Verbal. Do you think SAT Math is also culturally biased? If so, do you think it is exactly as biased as Verbal? That is, why is the Math gap not, say, half the Verbal one, if the cause for disparities is cultural bias?
Why would there be a Black-white gap (two groups that come from the same American culture) but not an Asian-white gap (two groups that come from different cultures)?
Black and white families are not in fact part of the "same American culture". And, of course, it's not the case that Asians uniformly outperform white subjects on the SAT; "Asian" comprises many different cultures, and not all of them are empirically advantaged in America.
The problem is that the system is designed to identify the most effective parents, not the most talented children. If you look at college admission as a function of personal merit, then it's unfair to judge a child based on their parents' ability to raise them. If you look at it as a system to identify those who will benefit society most by being educated, then you're going to get a lot of false positives that have parents from higher socio-economic classes.
Providing a test that produces an empirical result is just making it very easy for parents to game the system. It's a single, stationary target that they can fire money at. If you take away the test you're still selecting for the best parenting (all of life is). But it lets universities put more emphasis on grades and personal stories, areas where students whose parents have never heard of the SAT can still excel.
If you can use money to game the test then it's culturally loaded toward people who have enough money to game the test. A broader admissions criteria doesn't have this specific flaw
There is no such thing as “personal merit” independent of parenting. Kids are a product of their genetics and upbringing.
And you’re missing the point re: income, which is that all poor kids aren’t similarly situated. Asian kids raised in the bottom 20% of the income scale have a 25% chance of ending up in the top 20% as adults. For white kids it’s only 11%. Socioeconomic status is a factor but it’s not dispositive or insurmountable.
As to grades—you think it’s easier for a bright but poor kid to do their homework in time for 12 years than to study for one test? As to “personal stories”—that’s just a vector for manipulation by the whites people who run the admissions system. It’s remarkable to me to read anecdotes from admissions counselors, who say stuff like that they are looking for weird and non-conforming kids: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/22/former-stanford-admissions-o.... Talk about cultural loading!
Even if you remove personal merit from the idea of college admissions, which most people do not, then you've still got a system that's selecting for the cultural knowledge and position of parents instead of the benefit received from educating a particular person. This seems to be working well enough so far, but it isn't optimal.
I never said that someone's income quantile was dispositive. If my parents never took the SAT and have no idea what it is, I'm at a huge disadvantage to do well on the test by any measure. Regardless of their income. Again, the SAT isn't testing for academic aptitude but for the cultural knowledge of parents and peers.
As a wealthy parent I know exactly how to throw money at prepping for one test: hire expensive tutors and purchase practice tests. Gaming years of GPA or coming up with a compelling story is more complicated and difficult to solve with the application of financial resources.
A system with vague and subjective criteria is subject to bias, for sure. They are also more difficult to manipulate directly with wealth (other than bribes). We have to decide what our priorities are there as a society.
With all due respect, the vast majority of us here took these tests. Do any of us remember them containing quizzes on obscure aspects of water polo and equestrianism and sailing jargon, or other things that only rich kids would know about? I remember them being fairly self-contained.
And that's just the reading comprehension. The idea that the math word problems involve cultural bias that would affect performance is utterly ridiculous. "Most studies"... there is no chance that any quality research has been done to support something so laughable.
I will look at any citations you may have, but I am 100% confident that you have been duped.
To be completely fair, I think at least some portions of the SAT are distinctly more difficult without a strong reading background.
You can definitely cram for the grammar / math portions, but the reading comprehension sort of just requires a lot of reading experience. There isn't a rote set of things you can memorize to get a high score, which could arguably be seen as good or bad.
Maybe more practically, we should consider: Do lower income students read less on average? And if so, is the difference greater than their ability to gain access to tutoring services / prep books which can be used for the crammable portions of the exam?
Succeeding in college also requires a strong reading background. The point of the test is to predict college success, not "be fair" (an inherently subjective statement)
This theory would make sense if the hardest questions showed the most racial disparity, but it's actually the easiest questions that do, according to the papers cited by jedberg.
Come on, man. Your opinions about the SAT are based on a single infamous SAT question (of unknown provenance) from many decades ago?
There are no questions like that any more. You really think the people designing the highest-profile standardized test in the country are oblivious to this kind of problem these days? There's a ton of cultural and racial bias screening and filtering that goes into producing these questions now, both manual and statistical. You can look at some sample questions yourself.
Being from Cincinnati, I had to laugh at that particular example a little bit, because there's an annual charity "Rubber Duck Regatta" where you pay to sponsor a rubber duck and they dump them all in the river and give a prize to whoever has theirs finish first. When I was a kid, they ran TV ads for it blasting the name out loud about every six seconds, so most students who didn't know the word otherwise would have figured it out. I'm sure there would be statistical analysts looking at the scores for that question by region and scratching their heads.
It doesn't say only wealthy people will know what it is, it says they are much more likely to know what it is because they are much more likely to have experienced it first hand.
It would be hard to deny that generally sailboat racing is done by wealthy people.
That doesn’t follow. Poor people are aware of many things they don’t do. You’re wanting to lower standards to help people who don’t need that kind of help to expiate you own status guilt.
Poor people may also not have cars. Or have ever flown on a plane or owned an iPhone. But they aren’t necessarily stupid and will probably know what these things are and if they happen to be then they should go to elite colleges.
OTOH, You could be wealthy but from Montana. You probably have never witnessed a regatta in your life. You and your wealthy friends will probably be able to answer every question related to a ski holiday however.
That appears to be a purely statistical argument - some questions appear to be disproportionately hard/easy for certain racial groups. That has some value, but it would be nice to see some concrete example(s) of how this bias is expressed.
Definitely my most hated section. Full of rare, obscure, you-know-it-or-don't words for massive bookworms.
But if you read the papers cited in the GGGP comment, those hard problems aren't the problems that show the racial gap. The hardest problems show the least gap. Which doesn't fit the pat little sailboat jargon theory at all. However it does fit a common pattern, also seen in longevity statistics, where the most exceptional are more similar to one another than the average are.
Sure! This idea is interesting and may well be original:
As people get older, the mortality rate gaps between different groups get smaller on a relative basis. Like, the ratio between rich and poor 50 year olds' risk of death over the next year might be 3x or more, but as they age, they become more similar, and by 90 the ratio may be more like 1.3x, and after 100 it becomes indistinguishable from 1 (in part because of thin data).
The theory is that the genetics and environmental conditions needed to survive to an old age are fairly specific, so once you're down to those people, they have less variation from one another. The health risk factors that distinguish income and racial groups may mostly impact younger age mortality, and the people that get past those younger ages may have avoided or resisted those risk factors, regardless of race or income.
Similarly here, students who "survive" to do well on hard SAT questions may be fundamentally very similar to one another (sharing a high g-factor), and this may greatly reduce socioeconomic and racial gaps that are seen on the easier questions.
Does this mean the easier questions are biased? Not necessarily, I would argue. The concepts tested in the easy-medium questions are most likely to be intellectually foundational -- you are far, FAR more likely to get obscure rich people jargon in the hard questions than the easy-medium ones. We want people to have the basic intellectual exposure that enables them to do well on those easier questions, and we should reward it.
The problem is not the test, the problem is racially biased failure to educate in the lead-up to the test. This explains the pattern perfectly: the strongest students power through regardless of background, while the weaker are more sensitive to resources they were given. So you see the biggest gaps on easy-medium questions where basic educational background matters most to getting them right, rather than raw talent.
I see. Very curious. Shall we call it “adverse convergence” hypothesis?
Have you explored broader implications of your idea? For example people who survived tribulations of a political career may end up close to each other despite their initial difference in political opinions, and maybe even across different countries. This doesn’t sound quite as convincing, but I’m kind of grasping in the dark trying to find some other examples.
There's probably a name for it somewhere! I want to call it something like... convergence of survivors, broadly construed. (Achievers? Overcomers?)
I don't know of any examples outside of health but health is a big enough topic and closely related enough to education that I think it's likely to have some application.
Certain psychometric studies also support higher sensitivity to environment in the lower economic strata. Not exactly the same but you see the connection.
The studies cited by jedberg are very interesting, I just don't think they show what he thinks they do.
A better alternative to trashing the SAT is to provide an estimated adversity score, as ETS recently began to do, so schools have a sense of what a student may have had to overcome to reach their level of achievement.
Yes, it's not trivial because evolution stops caring about you after you reproduce.
It's also a little unclear whether we should consider the % difference convergence remarkable, given that mortality at older ages is so much higher and the absolute difference may not show much convergence.
Aside from the fact, repeatedly pointed out, that the analogy section has been kaput since 2005... this would be a hard question, the sort that shows the least racial and income gaps.
No, it's a measure of how well you perform on the subjects tested by the SAT. There are many things that correlate with high SAT scores (e.g., grades, being Asian?), but it is definitely true that you can prep for the SAT without any meaningful amount of money. I don't believe that anybody has ever alleged that SAT scores are a proxy for intelligence, though I suspect there is a decent correlation. In my mind it is a useful, objective, universal measure of how an individual student is able to prepare for and execute on a difficult task.
There seems to be a lot of bending over backwards here to say over and over again the SAT/ACT aren't objective. I'm not discounting the role socioeconomic status, parental influence, school district, family income etc. have on one's life, but at the end of the day if you get more questions right, you have a higher score. That's what objective means. We can talk about making the test more equitable, whether or not we should do that, and whether or not that's a good thing for college admissions specifically or education in general, but it doesn't change the fact that the tests are by definition objective measures of whether or not you know the things on the test at the time you take it.
You take the test twice, once with a blindfold on, and once without a blindfold. As an objective measure of your intelligence, I expect you to get the same results on both tests
You are considering whether it's objective only by that the reader at the end sees the final score, but there's many spots in between an empty sheet of paper and that score where somebody's subjective experience comes into play
That's like saying putting something on a scale isn't an objective measure of its weight because you can just take the batteries out of the scale. I'm considering it objective because the more correct answers you get, the higher your score.
We can argue about whether or not the stuff on the test is important. We can discuss the various environmental, cultural, and socioeconomic factors that go into the kids taking it and how that impacts scores statistically. We can even talk about the various medical and neurological factors that go into test taking generally and standardized test taking specifically that can affect some people more than others. I'll even concede that the SAT/ACT isn't a test of your intelligence so much as it is a test of how well you did on the SAT/ACT, just like putting things on a scale may at best be a measure of its weight relative to other things on that specific scale.
But at the end of the day, more right answers === a higher score, and I'm not sure how you get any more objective than that when it comes to something as fluid as academic ability.
Exactly right. I think the critique is that it serves little value in college admissions because aptitude at taking the test is not an indicator of anything else. But IMHO, defining a difficult task and judging people on their ability to prepare for and execute on that difficult task is a useful means of measuring whether that individual is capable of doing that very thing when facing other difficult tasks, as they certainly will at college and in life. That alone has value and relevance in college admissions.
Everything has bias and nobody can agree on what "student quality" means even on a single admissions panel at a single school. Isn't that the whole point of having a wide and varied application? One that has standardized testing, grades throughout school, life experience, extracurricular activities, volunteerism, and more?
Getting rid of one of these because it's easier if you have money (when all of these things are easier if you have money, because life is easier if you have money) is just setting the stage for more explicit bias.
Perhaps you misunderstood my comments as advocacy. I was not, and would advocate for keeping the standardized tests. I was answering someone else's questions about the choice.
> Berkeley/UCLA are 36%/28% Asian vs 23%/21% for Stanford/USC. The University of California system is certainly having its admissions decisions impacted by California laws against affirmative action
By comparison, Asian and Pacific Islander populations combined only make up 15% of the California population (1). I don't suppose the interaction of affirmative action policy and cultural differences might have inadvertently advantaged a couple of Asian subpopulations that are now pissed that the basis of their advantage is being taken away?
I didn’t go to Harvard, but I went to a decent university.
I was one of those students who got perfectly scores on all my tests but couldn’t possibly be bothered to do homework in high school, so my grades were less than perfect. If it weren’t for my high ACT score, I’m pretty confident I wouldn’t have been accepted into any university—especially as someone from a lower middle class family.
I’m not sure if eliminating standardized testing is a misguided effort to introduce fairness or a wisely guided effort to only let in the types they want through a more opaque process.
The dirty little secret is that most of the admissions hoops don’t really matter.
I was a mere peasant at a SUNY school, but I tutored kids in the EOP program. These kids were mostly from awful high schools and had aptitude, but lacked a lot of basic high school skills.
Just like my friends from “normal” educational backgrounds, the kids who worked did fine. Most were boxed out of engineering but I know of a few alumni who are attorneys or have other professional gigs.
>If you back basic high school skills then you're not only probably not suited to Engineering, you're also probably not going to cut it.
Quiet part aloud right here.
What you're saying is that if you haven't been raised in a certain way (in an environment that prioritizes formal schooling) then you're not fit to be a professional (engineer in this case) no matter how smart/talented. There's a word for this: classicism.
But I'll tell you something. As someone who grew up exactly like that but is now getting a PhD in CS at a top school and who has excelled in several FAANG internships: you can teach/learn high school skills. You can't teach/learn aptitude though.
So if you think it's some kind just/effective/correct that these kids are kept out (just because they don't have good essay writing skills or something) well I have to wonder if you're just someone trying to keep the labor pool small to inflate your own salary (or for other reasons...)
You can definitely teach 'conscientiousness' and the 'basic high school skills'.
You can't teach 'aptitude' but I think you can encourage those things i.e. reading, curiosity, exposure.
You're right though that rich kids probably have a huge advantage in prep for Eng in terms of the former, but whether or not you call it 'classist' is besides the point: teaching your kids to show up to class and pay attention, do homework etc. is not something that costs money (of course it can help).
"So if you think it's some kind just/effective/correct that these kids are kept out (just because they don't have good essay writing skills or something) well I have to wonder if you're just someone trying to keep the labor pool small to inflate your own salary (or for other reasons...)"
For a PhD you're having an odd bit difficulty with leaps of unsubstantiated assumptions, because there's definitely nothing in my statement that would remotely hint about 'What I'm trying to do' about anything. I mean seriously, "I'm trying to keep the labour pool small?" What?
>teaching your kids to show up to class and pay attention, do homework etc. is not something that costs money (of course it can help).
of course it does. it costs money in the form of time - you have to be not working at home to have the opportunity to teach these things. it costs money in the form of energy - if you've never argued with a young child about the relative merits of homework and television then you have no idea how much it costs.
>because there's definitely nothing in my statement that would remotely hint about 'What I'm trying to do' about anything. I mean seriously, "I'm trying to keep the labour pool small?" What?
really? then what is the purpose of this part of your response?
>then you're not only probably not suited to Engineering
If you 'don't have basic high school skills', you're 'not suited' to Engineering.
There is not much to interpret from that statement.
'Basic High School Skills' would be general subject matter competence, basic diligence and conscientiousness with respect to attendance, participation, learning, homework, socialization, organization.
Engineering is fairly advanced, it requires an even higher degree of general competence than most Uni subjects, and even those need a level of competency only found in the upper tranches (say top 1/3) of students in high school.
If you're not 'Generally Not Good At High School' then you are not going to make it through Engineering.
I don't think there's anything controversial here.
>If you 'don't have basic high school skills', you're 'not suited' to Engineering.
begs the question.
>and even those need a level of competency only found in the upper tranches (say top 1/3) of students in high school.
yet not a single one of these things has the slightest to do with technical aptitude
>'Basic High School Skills' would be general subject matter competence, basic diligence and conscientiousness with respect to attendance, participation, learning, homework, socialization, organization.
i'll repeat myself: you can teach each of these things to a kid that is good at math and physics but you cannot teach a kid that has perfect attendance, diligence, etc etc etc how to be good at math and physics.
>If you're not 'Generally Not Good At High School' then you are not going to make it through Engineering.
<shrug> i made it through a physics+math BS, and I'm well on my way to finishing the PhD (as in aced my classes and my quals) and i graduated high school with a 2.2GPA and 40 absences senior year. so not just bottom 2/3 but probably close to last. so along which axis do you think you're wrong? either a technical degree doesn't require the kind of "diligence" you think it does (i'd argue it does not) or that diligence can be learned fairly easily (i'd argue that too).
"competency only found in the upper tranches (say top 1/3) of students in high school.
yet not a single one of these things has the slightest to do with technical aptitude"
?? Aptitude is definitely correlated with academic performance. There is no debate there.
I'm sure on your journey you've taken enough stats to grasp that your personal anecdotal experience doesn't count for that much? I mean, being last place in school, absent all the time ... would it be reasonable for you, the Uni, or anyone to believe that you were 'well suited' to Engineering, or at least more suited than those with good grades, GPA yada yada? It's great you did well, but you must agree that wasn't likely.
In the aggregate, both GPA and SAT are highly correlated with Academic performance in University, so you're arguing against the wind here. [1]
(Do I really even need to provide a data point on this?)
And you must know that being 'Last Place' in High School would preclude most kids from even being accepted to Eng. programs, let alone Uni.
Students who do poorly in High School generally won't succeed in Eng. programs - let alone be accepted in the first place.
Everyone knows this, and it's why they use Grades and SAT as a primary means of admission.
And FYI raw aptitude can't be taught but all sorts of other things can i.e. having basic mathematical literacy and just 'keeping up' from grades 1-9, means that kids have the confidence and opportunity to participate in 'STEM' things which they would be blocked from doing otherwise. Peers, Mentors, points of Inspiration also give kids the extra energy and ethos to work through the issues they might not otherwise care about, in effect, there's a lot of 'passion' hidden inside 'aptitude'.
You're literally commenting on a thread about how the SAT is being removed from criteria and your whole point is that the intangibles (you used a bunch of ambiguous words like diligence and etc and I explicitly pointed that out).
So have you lost the thread of the conversation?
>Students who do poorly in High School generally won't succeed in Eng. programs - let alone be accepted in the first place.
You really need to look up and understand the begging the question fallacy that I alluded to
>And FYI raw aptitude can't be taught but all sorts of other things can i.e. having basic mathematical literacy and just 'keeping up' from grades 1-9, means that kids have the confidence and opportunity to participate in 'STEM' things which they would be blocked from doing otherwise.
I do not understand what you're saying. On the one hand not being diligent and having good attendance should preclude students but lack of "confidence" shouldn't?
I'm picking on you specifically because a lot of people are making this mistake. "Not requiring" is not the same as "eliminating". Not submitting scores will no longer be a reason someone is rejected. Someone who did well on them can still submit them and it will help their application.
I don't see how this can work in practice. At some point, you'll have an application with an SAT go up against an application without one for the same seat. Either a really good SAT score will push that one up (meaning not submitting an SAT score hurts application #2) or the score is ignored, meaning it doesn't actually help to include it.
That's because the admissions process is not the line-by-line ranking exercise you're implying.
In some cases an SAT may help to complete the picture of an applicant. In other cases, other attribute permutations are enough. Maybe #1 was close and the SAT sealed it. But, it's not necessarily the case that applicant #2 was hurt by not submitting their SAT (or would have fared any better by submitting even a perfect SAT score).
I haven't followed this closely, but have seen a few headlines and tweets in passing. This is the first I've heard that people can optionally add test scores to help them stand out. Thanks for highlighting this.
Same. I had a troubled childhood and many D's in high school. If it wasn't for me studying really hard and getting a 2320 on the SAT, I wouldn't have gotten into any school, but that was enough for UCLA to take a chance on me.
Homework was several hours per night of busy work. I learned nothing from it. I spent that time teaching myself programming and things that were actually useful.
For tests, simply paying attention and listening to what the teacher said was enough to do well.
For many people, homework is completely useless and many US schools absolutely love overwhelming students with it. There are also kids who need to work jobs after work to support their family--busy work assignments are just punishment for them, and countless people I know suffered because of that. The ACT/SAT was a way for them to elevate themselves.
The only thing I learned from the Aeneid diorama in my “Honors” English class in 9th grade was that a teacher could mark down a cave for not being colorful enough.
just the way they refer to it is disturbing, bad enough favoring legacies but "lineage" makes it sound like they really think these people are somehow superior based on their bloodline. The new nobility, how dare these serfs with good test scores defile our institutions!
It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others. - the man who coined the term.
Basically meritocracy can turn into classism, and due to accumulated advantage it can entrench. Everyone has a chance in theory, but in practice advantage compounds.
There's also the simple human welfare problem that vicious never-ending competition every minute of your life is exhausting & demoralizing.
Basically the average person hears it and thinks "smartest/best for the job objectively" which sounds fine, but in practice is often shorthand for "prestigious is better" aristocracy. One of those things where there are multiple levels of interpretation talking past each other.
In a truly genuine meritocracy, everyone would have the same opportunities in terms of upbringing, schooling, college etc. If resources were scare (such as an elite private school for kindergartners) then the most talented children would go there, not those whose parents had lots of money.
In practice this doesn't happen - some children have massive advantages compared to others. To then take all of these children and one day try to use an objective measure to decide who gets access to yet more advantages is obviously going to massively favor the non-meritocratic-to-that-point advantaged children.
So yes, a true meritocracy may be completely fine, but in the real world "meritocracy" is. anything but.
What you're describing is an equal opportunity society. That's a worthy goal, but trying to redefine "meritocracy" to also mean that results in confusion at best.
Without a common language communication becomes impossible.
The normal definition of the word is that those who are best at a task should perform it. The most competent applicant should be hired for a job. If a billionaire's kid happen to be best, because of all the private tutoring they got, that's not really relevant for a meritocratic decision.
Meritocracy is unfair because most merit is unearned. For example, I am very smart, I won national math olympiads, but I didn't spend much effort to be good at math. Showering me with advantages feels deeply unfair.
I mean, if some job requires being good at math, I agree math ability should be considered. It's just that I don't think it should be high status or prestigious.
Meritocracy requires established experts to select candidates based on merit, which is quite different from the masses selecting candidates based on popularity (democracy).
I disagree with the experts part, after all under meritocracy Einstein is the greatest scientific mind of the 20th century however he wasn't even able to get a job in academia until after he produced ground breaking results.
I think that was the implication -- that experts are often wrong. One could go the No True Scotsman route and say that a true expert would occasionally select randomly following a Bayesian Bandit approach for optimal decision-making.
Is a Harvard education really that spectacular anymore or is it more a social indicator? Feels like it’s prominence has wained over the past couple decades.
Not entirely. If the selection process ensures that the brightest (and luckiest) minds are all together, they will still be able to benefit one another over time, even if they didn't gain access to capital or connections beyond their cohort.
They probably believe that their target market (i.e. donors) would consider it an advantage if their offspring would study together with people with "good lineage" (e.g. children of foreign leaders) - and I don't think that they're mistaken, I think that they likely know their market characteristics better than me or you.
You guessed it, poor whites and asians. The kids who couldn't afford extra curricular but who did great on the tests. Who is it going to help the most? Children of wealthy East-African and Caribbean immigrants.
This focus on extra-curricular also makes it really easy to sneak-in affirmative action (despite voters and the general public repeatedly saying no). Because, let's be honest, you can't objectively compare these things to one another.
> lower scores amongst legacy and athlete students
I'll give a pass to athletes.
It's no small feat to get an athletic scholarship, and for many sports there's absolutely no future beyond college (no pro league or circuit like football or tennis).
Everyone seems to waaaaaay underestimate how hard it is to get an elite athletic scholarship or overestimate how common they are. They are uncommon and you have not only have to be good academically but outstanding athletically. it is harder than getting in with an athletic scholarship than without one.
I tend to agree. Athletics, while not academics, is as valid a reason as chess or acting for acceptance into a school. And top D1 athletes in the top tier sports are generally exceptional at what they do.
The unfortunate thing may be that we've conflated college admissions with this notion of "merit", rather than what you can get out of college itself.
It's especially hard to get athletic scholarships at Harvard, because as with all Ivy League universities they don't award them.
Of course, I'm sure the athletics department does apply other forms of pressure to various parts of Harvard, making it easier for athletes to get admitted and pass their classes etc. But any scholarships they award are (corruption aside) at least theoretically based around financial need.
> it is harder than getting in with an athletic scholarship than without one.
I agree with most of your comment, but I think you're using "harder" and "rarer" interchangeably here.
One would guess that receiving a scholarship for elite athleticism or superior intellect are both quite difficult, and I have zero basis of comparison for which one is harder. I would not assume that athletic scholarships being rarer reflects on their difficulty. Rather, it's most likely a reflection on what the main function of a university is, as a place of learning. They admit more students to study than to play sports.
It's so funny how the class of people who most criticize "entitlements" (read: social services paid for by taxes) are the same class of people who are most "entitled" (to admittance in (so-called) elite institutions).
Umm I think you'll find the criticism of both things comes primarily from the right. To be clear, this push to remove standards is coming from the left (in the guise of racial justice blah blah blah) but the beneficiaries will primarily be the untalented children of the gentry class (the Lori Laughlin's of the world).
I get the racial justice angle. I just have a bad feeling that in the long run this sort of thing will end up hurting racial justice more than helping.
I see this as another way to pull the ladder to success away from talented poor kids under the guise of somehow being more fair. This really only benefits rich kids who can pad their applications in other ways and makes admissions standards even more opaque.
Any kid can get a used copy of an SAT prep book for cheap and get similar results to a rich kid getting private test tutoring.
Let’s say there’s two high schools, one is the ritzy private school (Eagleton Academy) and the public school that has a lot of poorer students (Pawnee High). Harvard needs a way to distinguish between students across schools. An A at Academy, after all, might be harder to achieve than an A at High, after all, Academy is a world-class institution. So, Harvard needs to tune its algorithm to factor that in.
So, the A+ prodigy at High might not stand out against a sea of B+ students at Academy, after all, Academy is much more rigorous.
Enter standardized testing: the prodigy gets a 2400 and the B+ students at High get ~2000s. Suddenly the prodigy can actually catch the attention of the Harvard admissions.
Yes, but the prodigy at Pawnee High happens to be Asian and we're full up on them so we take the B+ students at Academy whose parents went to Harvard.
Sorry, we've been advised by legal to say that we're not really "full up" because that would imply we have quotas and also that we only consider race peripherally and only ever as a plus factor. It just so happens to not be a plus factor here, while it's a default plus factor for some other candidates.
I'm glad I live in a country where only grades and standardized tests are taken in account, and colleges don't even know the race or background of anyone.
If it was literally just grades & test scores it would be easy, but once you include personal essays & extracurriculars, inevitably inferences can be made about the applicant.
Slovenia. But the system is pretty much the same in other former socialist countries (atleast the end results... some colleges have specialised entry exams in some countries or even a combination of both, but in the end, the students are sorted by whatever score they get (based on grades and exam scores, not race or whatever), top X get acceppted, and only the cutoff score is published - everyone with that score or more is accepted, everyone below is not).
This may be a leftover of socialism though, because in yugoslavia everyone was considered equal to everyone else.
The prodigy at High will come across as a prodigy: not only will they have the better GPA, they're also more likely to have the nice "extra factors" that play well in admissions--class valedictorian, leadership in student council or maybe other clubs, etc. By contrast, the mediocrity at Academy has a worse GPA, and is unlikely to get nice statuses in those other extracurricular activities (who will be snatched up by the prodigies at Academy). So for the mediocrity at Academy to be marked as better, the admissions officer has to know of Academy and its reputation... and that's less common than you might think, even for the most-highly-ranked exemplars of Academy.
The other factor to bring up is that mediocrities at Academy are often competing against the prodigies at Academy; many schools don't want to admit too many people from Academy and will have a cap on the number of admissions.
[Yes, I did go to such an Academy, so I have some personal experience on the matter.]
The prodigy might be valedictorian, but might not. Maybe this student is gifted at math and gets all perfect math SAT scores and subject tests and mails in the rest of their classes for easy A’s.
Same story here. I graduated with my GPA in the bottom 10th percentile of my class. My SAT scores were in the top 95th percentile across the nation though. Seeing this change just makes me reflect on how much it will harm the disadvantaged kids, while giving a free pass to the people who learned how to Google the answers to their homework.
It's been said many times, many ways, but the education system is totally broken.
Nothing in this change says that a kid like you wouldn't be able to get into Harvard under new policy. They won't REQUIRE SAT scores, they aren't saying they won't use them if you submit them.
right, harvard reserves the right to admit someone who may potentially have really bad SAT scores. But that's fine, if admission officers see that person as Harvard material, why shouldn't they? Most candidates will still submit ACT/SAT scores, and average ACT/SAT score of the incoming class will likely still be high.
Look at what happened in San Francisco when they dumbed down the math for these same reasons. The rich kids just supplemented it with private tutoring. Which is what they will always do and you aren't ever going to be able to stop people with money from spending it on their children, at least not in a semi-free society.
I was poor growing up and got into Pomona College because of my test scores.
If the rich kids are also getting SAT prep books AND tutoring on top, and everyone gets maxed out scores, seems like it's a waste of everyones's time and we're better off just skipping it.
I don’t think you should be downvoted for asking an honest question. As someone who tutored in SAT test prep a couple decades ago, I’m aware of the issues with standardized testing. However, the solution you propose is not so simple. The parent had a good point: high test scores may have given many students a boost in the eyes of admissions teams, especially if they did not attend a high school that is notable in the eyes of those admissions teams. They may not see top grades as equitable to those from a top prep school if they don’t know much about the school and don’t have high test scores to confirm their view of the student. Again, it’s not fair, but for these students, it’s a way to stand apart. If you take that away, it could be harder for them to be noticed until we have something else that’s sufficient.
Ah yes the. We are going to modify your score based on the color of your skin. I think that is a good way of doing it. I am sure no one would lie about that just to get a few extra points on the SAT, besides treating people different based on their race is totally a good idea an never results in unintended consequences. I like the idea basically we are making sure each side is equal but slightly separate from each other.
here are the criteria they used in the adversity score:
Crime rate, Poverty rate, Housing values, Vacancy rate, Family environment, Median income, Single parent, Adversity score, Education level, ESL, High school environment, Undermatching, Curricular rigor, Free lunch rate, AP opportunity
Oxford does something a bit like this, but AFAICT only for getting interviewed; you still have to get the same exam results as anyone else, and you aren't given any advantage in the interviews:
The former head of Green Templeton College, Oxford, did an analysis of the final results achieved by people from different backgrounds who had got into Oxford, and the conclusion was that those who came from fancier backgrounds did less well in their degrees than their poorer colleagues with similar entry scores. The hypothesis was that the private schools were very good at hothousing borderline students, but that this obviously stopped happening once they were admitted and got the same environment as everyone else.
This is one of the reasons that Oxford is beginning to seriously concern itself with background - it turns out that if you're already expecting top entry grades it's a good way of getting better students.
That, and its long-standing gross overrepresentation of children from posh schools is getting embarrassing.
Looks like I am too late to edit my comment but I will acknowledge I was wrong about that those indicators seem to be reasonable and I could see myself possibly being in support of something like that not in the SAT itself but as a factor in admissions.
The real question is: how much does tutoring really helps as compared to simply prepping with free ressources?
Is it 5%? Does that mean you can't tie-break between two scores within 5% of one another? That's called a measurement error. No, this steel beam isn't 8 feet up to the micron.
I strongly suspect there are diminishing returns. You get the biggest benefit from knowing the material from school. After that, familiarity with the test (practice tests every weekend for a few months) will help the most (and tutoring is no substitute for actually practice the test). After that, yes, tutoring will help some, but again, diminishing returns.
The alternative is to make it completely subjective and based on the whims of the committee. I can't see that going wrong at all, like because there are no committee members who might be racist or sexist or have a bias against religious people or anything like that. No the college acceptance committee stands as paragons of virtues moral giants in this land of ethical pygmys they alone are incorruptible unswayable and perfectly and completely fair in all things.
So standardized merit based metrics serve only as a barrier to their ineffable judgement and pure deductions let it be them alone and their powerful "algorithm" that is too pure and holy for mortal eyes to sully with their gaze be the new standard by which we determine if a student can go to Harvard, for clearly this is the one true way forward and will never be manipulated by self serving or short sighted beauracrats to manipulate and politic in.
It certainly targets "asians" students who are deemed too successful at school, despite their diverse economic background, as they are already discriminated against in Ivy league colleges right now. It's just obfuscate discrimination. Yes, when you are told "you're too successful as a community" to get in, it's not only discrimination, it's straight out racism.
It will change absolutely nothing for actual rich kids, no matter their race, who can buy in admission through donations, unlike what some people are claiming here. For these kids, SAT scores already don't matter.
if you have a shitty class rank and you submit a stellar ACT score, it will still count in your favor, that has not changed. They just don't require you to submit it.
Interesting. I see it as another way to pull another ladder up so that the kid who didn't get to go to the private prep school to train to take a test isn't being discriminated against for his parents' financial position. There are literally entire private schools where I grew up whose average student performs better than the best public school student.
The SAT is actually pretty tough test to game. Anxiety drives parents to pay a lot for test prep, but there isn't much indication that it actually improves scores.
clearly parent commenter was hoping no one would actually read the "handful of sources" with the "verified information" that the scores are improved. you literally could improve your score more by getting a good night's sleep. i really cannot empathize with the level of self-delusion necessary to be that intentionally misleading.
Your third source summarizes the common knowledge that has already been stated here: anyone can practice on their own with cheap or free materials to achieve the same benefit of those expensive classes.
"Anyone can practice" is pretty meaningless. The largest component of benefit of expensive classes is how they motivate students. Motivating students (unless they are already self-motivated) is very difficult and skill and resource intensive, that's why the service is expensive.
In a class what is it that finally motivates the unmotivated? Fear of failing the exam. You already got this scary motivator with standardized testing. If you're talking about self-study versus a taking a college class to learn something, then I'd agree with you. Also of course, preparing for a general test is easy review material you don't need a skilled teacher to coach you through.
I used to teach a free SAT prep for underprivileged high schools in Southern Cali. I found it amazing how much I could improve scores of kids who were engaged. Unfortunately, only about a third of the kids were really engaged. But going from 800 to 1100 I felt like I could do for almost any engaged student. And 1200 to 1400 was harder, but I think if you give me a year -- I could do that for a lot of students too.
If you're at 1550 I probably can't help you -- at least if you're like me -- you sometimes just read a question wrong.
I don't know about your SATs, but here in Eastern EU I've been taking advanced math as school leaving exam and I had some money that allowed me to visit tutor like thrice.
I had problems with geometry and decided to get some help with one of its branches. Tutor explained me stuff, gave exercises that I did and so on.
At the real exam there was one task from this geometry branch and I managed to do it. I don't know whether I'd be able to do it without going to those lessons, hard to say.
But at the end of the day it gave me 5 of 50 points at this exam, so I basically in very simplified version I received 10% on hard exam for less than 10% of minimal wage.
Of course it'd be naive to think that it scales like that, but you get the point.
Add me to the list of counterexamples to your claim. While my family was more lower-middle-class than poor, I was (evidently, according to the financial aid office) the poorest person in my graduating class. And my SAT score was likely the reason for that. (I increased my score by 200 points to a perfect score using practice books.) I was also admitted to Harvard but didn’t attend because of the insufficient (at the time) financial aid that was offered.
What motive would you need beside "a higher score gets me into better schools"? Surely someone smart enough to get a perfect SAT score can figure that out pretty easily.
Late replying, but I readily admit that supportive parents and a school subculture that valued academics were both factors. I didn’t mean to suggest that I single-handedly pulled myself up by my bootstraps. But the SAT was the main path I had to stand out in applications as a public-school-educated person from a rural place you’ve never heard of.
Yeah, no. I took the SAT back in the day and scored horribly. Bought a SAT prep book, worked through it during lunch and brought my score up 300 points in 6 months.
There are many such examples in the real world. That's not stuff from the movies. I don't think these things get reported in US but in India we see this in the news all the time. You can make a generic google search[1] and find tons of such people.
This doesn't counter my point through. From the first link[1]
> "I could not study because of financial problems, so I thought I must send my children to school and wipe out the darkness from their lives,"
> "I got tremendous support from my school teachers," he said.
This is exactly what i said. Environment of achievement is more important. "poor" doesn't mean just lack of financial resources. you cannot simply overcome lack of parental and social investment and care by reading a SAT book.
> I would say the environment, social expectations, exemplars within family/friends, peers ect matter more than a book.
I think every school, has its "smart kids" who define their identities by their academic achievement, and who seek to ace every test. It's their way of standing out and being special so they try extra hard to keep it that way.
Unfortunately they often tend to be introverts which colleges want less than overachievers in other areas. Except for the science/technology departments, who were probably overruled by other departments if decisions like abandoning test scores are made.
If it's being reported in international media I would guess it's still newsworthy enough to not be a regular occurrence. Like India is huge so you'll find a steady stream of events that are common enough to be frequent in absolute terms, but still unusual in proportional terms.
only way to effectively end that would be to have government seize all children upon birth so every child has an identical environment growing up.
The fact is a standardized test is far less biased than the metrics they will use to replace them. That's the reason they were created in the first place
As a black person, standardized tests saved me from racism/prejudice.
At my blue blood private school, I had a math teacher who explicitly told my dad that he gave me a bad letter of rec on an MIT summer camp application, because as a black person affirmative action would make life too easy for me.
I'm happy it was only a summer camp and not my real college admissions the following year.
Even though I was a top five math student in my class across the entire private school, he and the dean of the math department gave me lower grades for the same work. They also didn't let me test out of classes (wouldn't show me test results), etc.
Thank God for SAT II's and AP exams.
I destroyed those tests. 5's and 790's.
Highest marks in the class for Math SAT II's.
But it didn't help my GPA from those biased teachers.
I did get into MIT for real the next year.
Standardized tests helped protect me from teacher bias.
Ultimately, the world is just a mess.
Now, I just focus on teaching people that the only fix for our problems will not come from mankind (to see what I'm talking about, take a look at: https://jw.org).
Not sure what I should take away from "taking a look" at your link.
Do you mean "look at what comes from mankind ; we can't expect anything good from it when results like these are some of its outputs"?
I'd hope that's what you intended but I fear that it's not.
I personally do hope for either AGI or a 3rd type encounter to expend Humanity's philosophy.
I used to work with a black lady at the water treatment plant for my town in high school. The JW's disfellowshipped her for the crime of having opinions and divorcing her husband. Maybe you need to take a close look at your proposed solution with 144000 slots on the lifeboat.
> At my blue blood private school, I had a math teacher who explicitly told my dad that he gave me a bad letter of rec on an MIT summer camp application, because as a black person affirmative action would make life too easy for me.
How horrible. The only lesson of value is, "this specific teacher cannot be trusted." To deny a student an opportunity to learn to teach some bizarre life lesson is completely misguided. Sorry you had to experience it.
> Standardized tests helped protect me from teacher bias.
Me too. I got terrible grades because I was busy trying to be a rebel in high school. Many of my teachers thought it more important to teach "life lessons" instead of their subject. I did very well on the ACT and SAT and got into college despite lackluster grades.
I agree that humans are a mess. Well done on making it to MIT, it is not the first time I read or hear an experience like yours. Still, some kids are not privileged enough to get good math education but they might be late bloomers. I've met a genius with horrible SAT scores, a late bloomer, self-taught who now publishes in renowned math journals
And all that blue blood private schooling, mathematical prowess and MIT education has led you to conclude that the solution to all of humanity’s problems, checks link, is the Bible.
Please don't take HN threads further into religious flamewar and certainly please don't cross into personal attack, which your comment arguably did.
No doubt the link was a provocation but the whole idea here is to resist shallow provocations and focus on the interesting substance of a post, or an article, or a phenomenon.
This is the logical conclusion of our contemporary understanding of privilege. Anything a person does (or does not) accomplish can be directly attributed to the privilege he or she had (or lacked). High SAT scores means the person was privileged enough to afford tutoring, or privileged enough to live in a two-parent household, or privileged enough to be born without any major disability, etc.
Once you accept that as your worldview you accept merit is meaningless. What separates Ramanujan and Newton from the average college dropout are extraneous factors. Any difference in outcomes is societal and environmental, and must be corrected.
Merit is meaningful, but people confuse meritocracy with a just and equitable society.
If you are committed to selecting for the best, then you must select for individuals that are aided by factors outside their 'control', whether that's luck, environment, people, or genes. It does not matter how arbitrary or unfair these factors are, only that they help select the best men and women for a given job or career.
People also confuse a just society with an equal society.
There is no particular reason to want everyone to be equal, and there are plenty of reasons you do not want this -- when everyone is equal, people are constantly fighting for who is best because if anyone just slightly increases their wealth/power, they will be the highest of all. People are fundamentally competitive, competing over social prestige, mates, etc. So creating a situation in which anyone can be king is a recipe for constant war. Thus the equal society is the most unjust society, because it is the society in which violence and conflict are maximized.
Moreover, it's better to maximize well-being rather than worrying about whether you think it is "fair" that talent is not distributed equally. What you can do is tax those who earn more and use that to provide social benefits to others. That is, set up a society in which everyone benefits from the outperformance of the elite, rather than trying to pretend that everyone can be elite, or that there is no elite at all.
I'm not sure how much overlap ther is between the people who want meritocracy and the people who agree with your definition of a just and equitable society.
Luck and genes are generally considered fair arbiters in a sense, at least when they are the source of one's merit. No one complains the chess champion only won because she was fortunate to be given a chess board at an earlier age than the competition or something.
I agree that someone from a bad background will have to work a lot harder than someone from a good one, but in the end, it's the results that matter.
Just to give a stupid example, when you call a painter to paint your house, you don't really care that the painter is in a wheelchair and cannot reach the ceilings, or if the painter is blind and cannot see the walls... you want a good result, ie. a nicely painted house.
Same with colleges... (usually, atleast in "the rest of the world") they want the best students available to enroll. In my country, a formula taking grades and standardized tests results is used, students are sorted by their score, and if there are 60 spots and 100 aplicants, top 60 by score are accepted. The colleges don't know anything about the students except the scores, and the only valid measure is the score. (...there are some exceptions, eg. acting/art schools, with entrance exams)
yeah but statistically if you have lower sat score than 1450 (i found this number) you will have problems to perform and risk to lose years or drop out, but i believe a school could have a ethinc and net worth quotas relative to the country they operate. And go meritocratic (by scores) if they cant fill quotas
Malcolm Gladwell has a great series of podcasts in Revisionist History on elite colleges and admissions that made a lot of this stuff click. Elite colleges want to be a desired place for the high class to attend.
As a result of this, they have to keep a consistent ratio of high class students (with some baseline/distribution of ability) to talented students to miscellaneous students. Too many high class students, and they lose their academic prestige only to be an expensive private school. Too many talented students, then very few high class students can attend and the higher class will focus on other schools. If it's mainly other students, then it won't be a notable school.
Viewing elite college admissions from this level makes a lot of their actions more sensible. People are now able to game their old system so they have to adjust things to keep the ratio intact. I imagine at the graduate level, things are lot more performance/talent based and less political (excluding maybe MBAs or Law School).
I'm getting old, but at least 15 years ago, law school admission was almost purely LSAT score + College GPA (weighted by perceived difficulty/prestige of College).
Anecdotally, I've found that more prestigious professional schools -- law, medicine -- weight standardized testing higher. The less prestigious, more regionally focused ones, care more about GPA. This is different from undergraduate schools. I've met several people who applied to a large number of professional schools and were only admitted to the top tier. It could be due to the randomness of admissions, but the sample is large enough to convince me.
Exactly. Elite colleges are an intelligence laundering operation. Start with average students from wealthy families. Add in just enough talented students. And out of it they both come out with a status indicator indicating they're "very intelligent", much more intelligent than the legacy students, but less so than if all the talented students defected into their own school.
Yea remember Michelle Obama. I heard it from Peter Thiel when he said something like this: "Michele Obama said all colleges are good for children not only elite one. The next thing you hear her children are going to Harvard."
This is a weird comment in my opinion. MO says regular colleges are good too. She doesn't say "just as good". Of course going to Harvard can (not necessarily does) provide certain advantages. She didn't deny that.
She said: "The one thing I've been telling my daughters is that I don't want them to choose a name university. There are thousands of amazing universities."
Yeah, she may not have wanted them to choose a big name university, and yet they did. I don't see any hypocrisy here- her daughters have their own choice (If I were her daughters, you better bet I'd choose whatever lets me leverage my parents' connections). My parents didn't want me to apply to Texas A&M, and yet I did anyway, and got accepted (didn't go because of lack of financial aid). That wouldn't have made my parents into hypocrites if I did go, however.
I guess Stanford is not an elite university then either. If he went to state or community college i might care more but his argument is not in good faith anyway.
As a Canadian who never grew up with standardized testing, and also graduating with an IB cohort (from a public school) whom none of them actually went to the US (just took their boosted canadian grade equivalents or went somewheres in europe), I really fail to see how this could be that bad of a thing. The first year, or semester even is a great filter that cuts a significant amount of folks where school isn't for them.
I can also see this as a move like china did to kill tutorial services to give kids back their teen years. In a land where school is so expensive I think its worth it to spend summers working a job (and all the merits that come with that) to better prep for possibly the biggest financial decision ever for a still developing brain.
It's one of the worst aspects of some (not all) Canadian universities that they use the first or second year as a way to filter students out and the impact it has on students is rather devastating in terms of lost opportunity.
Almost 20 years ago I went to the University of Toronto's computer science program which is notorious for this practice and can see first hand the effect that this practice has on friends of mine even decades later. It's not just a matter of filtering students out, the issue is that there is a strict cut-off point that is unknown to people in advance, so you have students investing one to two years pursuing a program and then having those years go to waste because they're below the cut-off. It's basically a system that traps students with aspirations of going into one program and then when most of them fail due to uncertain admissions guidelines, those students end up with a great deal of pressure to continue studying at the university but under a less prestigious or financially sound program.
The result of this system speaks for itself, with the building used by the computer science department being the site of 3-4 suicides per year (which I am admittedly speculating is due to people not hitting the admissions cut-off).
Whatever one's opinion of standardized testing may be, the Canadian model of accepting as many students as possible into a program and then kicking them out or shoving them into a different program on the basis of rather volatile and uncertain criteria is not the one to go by.
I believe this is a more of a UofT practice rather than a general Canadian practice? As a Waterloo grad CS grad once you were in the program, you were in. I I agree it's really cruel to students to have this kind of 1st/2nd year cut off system though.
In the US private universities do not use the first 1-2 years as filters deliberately. It’s common to see 4 year graduation rates above 90% especially for schools like Harvard
I am also Canadian. Was not a fan of the lack of standardized testing because I was very aware that many schools (and not mine) was in the practice of inflating grades to help their students’ acceptance and scholarship applications.
This is one problem that standardized testing aims to solve — how does a university compare a student with 95% avg from one school and 85% from another?
Your point about schools filtering students who are not able to cut it is moot. Do you think standards won't (or haven't already) change to keep as many students as possible? Universities want money, the more students the better. The idea that this change happens in isolation shows a lack of systemic thinking.
My initial thought was we could just have a floor. We don't need to ensure a perfect score amongst the pool that gets randomly selected, so if there there is minimum that is still "high," and that isn't biased toward outliers from any race, then it would work.
But it looks like the floor we'd need to have a reasonable representation would be something like a 500/800 math score. That is much too low, at least for elite schools. Choosing something like a 700 cut-off ends up being very racially selective.
I think you misunderstood. A Random acceptance above an achievable standard (e.g average marks of 80%) would reduce racial disparities. It doesn't matter what races are the top performers, it just matters how many people can achieve the base standard.
The entire basis of elite status comes from the notion that not just anyone can attend.
Your proposal effectively removes college as a signal of elite status, and thus people will organically invent new symbols that most will lack and we will be back to where we started very quickly.
Harvard’s primary admission criteria is “will this person write us giant checks in 20 years?” It’s a solid business model that’s worked for longer than the USA has existed. Legacies and athletes are the most reliable donors which is why they get an admission preference. Dispensing with testing makes it much easier to grow the endowment. Being able to justify it with the diversity fad is, frankly, smart. And if there’s one thing Harvard is, it’s smart.
I'd think for Harvard of all schools SAT probably doesn't matter much today. Their range is 1460-1580 with a mean of 1520. Broadly speaking, the test is too "easy" (especially for the class Harvard admits) - over 25% of enrolled students are pulling an 800 on math. And needless to say, Harvard will reject plenty of students getting perfect scores.
I imagine SAT provides little signal at Harvard conditioned on GPA, APs, and other extracurricular demonstrations of academic merit.
I wonder what this will do to the mean once it becomes optional. It seems mostly people with very high scores would be the ones to bother submitting them because otherwise it could hurt the applicant.
Harvard can do this because they're rich and they're Harvard. The SAT and ACT simply don't work well to predict good students. Harvard is going to run applicants through an insane gauntlet anyway, and they trust their admissions personnel to perform as well without the tests as with. In their case, the tests probably add more noise than signal, especially with applicant self-selection.
Other, worse universities, are not going to have the resources to significantly evaluate applicants at all, and still need those tests just to insure that students have minimal math and language skills.
Lots of lesser schools are trialing test optional and sometimes the stronger "test blind" right now, for a variety of reasons including covid and competition from their peers. Off the top of my head, the University of Oregon, the University of Utah. All UC and California State schools are test blind right now.
Universities devote a tremendous amount of resources to the admissions process because it is, of course, extremely important to their business that they get the right number of enrollments from the right kinds of students.
"Retest effects in cognitive ability tests" by Scharfen & friends is a good overview that mentions other studies that go into more detail and tweak different parameters (e.g. time between tests, tests that are more repetitive than others, etc). The meta-analysis found that retaking a test can add a couple points each time. So taking an IQ test 4 times on average yields an 8 point increase, almost an entire standard deviation.
Thanks, this actually matches my initial intuition about the matter. It's been awhile since I've looked up info in this area, partly due to the fact that a lot of IQ test proponents I spoke to seemed to have a great deal of personal identity staked in its significance.
Because the en vogue thought among "elites" at Harvard (and elsewhere) is that there are no smart individuals. Everything is simply a function of opportunity and privilege. Its the same sort of thinking that is behind removing gifted and talented programs and higher level math courses from schools. By that "logic" any sort of standardized test or objective standard that show differences in intelligence or learning are simply measures of privilege. Objective metrics are also the only concrete way to debunk these absurd, anti-science assertions about intelligence and learning, which makes them even more of an anathema.
Who needs meritocracy, hard work and hours dedicated to studying when you can just hop on one of the personal identity trains and build your brand around that instead?
China tried the US elite college admission approach by alllowing top universities to accept a small number of students before Gaokao as pilots. And corruption ensured. Lots of complaints from the public. It was reverted back to purely based on Gaikao scores. Not ideal but it is the closest to fair admission it can get in China.
It seems like society is hard-wired to create an aristocracy, one way or another. We tried using merit instead of nepotism for a while but I guess the pressure from "elite" parents with idiot children was too great.
Human society, at least in the west, is reverting back to the old ways of doing things.
Plato's Republic still relevant 2,400 years later:
"...the earth, as being their mother, delivered them, and now, as if their land were their mother and their nurse, they ought to take thought for her and defend her against any attack and regard the other citizens as their brothers and children of the self-same earth...While all of you, in the city, are brothers, we will say in our tale, yet god, in fashioning those of you who are fitted to hold rule, mingled gold in their generation, for which reason they are the most precious—but in the helpers, silver, and iron and brass in the farmers and other craftsmen. And, as you are all akin, though, for the most part, you will breed after your kinds, it may sometimes happen that a golden father would beget a silver son, and that a golden offspring would come from a silver sire, and that the rest would, in like manner, be born of one another.
So that the first and chief injunction that the god lays upon the rulers is that of nothing else are they to be such careful guardians, and so intently observant as of the intermixture of these metals in the souls of their offspring, and if sons are born to them with an infusion of brass or iron they shall by no means give way to pity in their treatment of them, but shall assign to each the status due to his nature and thrust them out among the artisans or the farmers. And again, if from these there is born a son with unexpected gold or silver in his composition they shall honor such and bid them go up higher, some to the office of guardian, some to the assistanceship, alleging that there is an oracle that the city shall then be overthrown when the man of iron or brass is its guardian."
Socrates proposes and claims that if the people believed "this myth...[it] would have a good effect, making them more inclined to care for the state and one another." This is his noble lie: "a contrivance for one of those falsehoods that come into being in case of need, of which we were just now talking, some noble one..."
This was pretty interesting, although I am having a hard time understanding some of that english.
Are there any interesting works of Plato-Socrates that a philosophy newcomer can understand? (Especially something translated to modern English, or with a modern English explanation.)
Essentially Plato is saying there is a concept of a "Noble Lie" that while untrue, could be told to society that results in a net improvement. His example is telling society that each person is imbued with the talent of Gold, Silver, and Bronze. The lie is that if people don't have the proper talent (soul) in each position, then their society will be overthrown. (eventually true but not as direct as told) So Silver people will be ensured their Gold children will do important Gold positions, and Gold people will be ensured their Bronze children will need to do manual labor, etc.
Yes there are, usually in the shorter plays. The Republic is famously dense and takes effort to read.
Everyone always thought that being smart was the only way into Harvard, but it’s not true. This change will make that obvious. Hopefully, the smartest people will no longer try to go to Harvard and it will just turn into an old crusty university. The idea that Harvard even produced intelligence needs to be questioned but it hasn’t been. The truth is - if you take the smartest high school students you’ll end up with the smartest college graduates. The quality of the Harvard education really isn’t what separates people.
Interesting points I’ve read recently in this area:
A national test creates cohesion in a society in that it defines what knowledge is valued and aligns people around it. Will we lose this benefit if the test is dropped?
The tests and other admission criteria are heuristics for talent, motivation, etc. those motivated to gain prestige in this way will attempt to max these out. But might we not encourage a better use of this energy than the maxing out of simple skills(eg error free, quick arithmetic vs going forward to study number theory)?
The problem is the reality that outcomes on standardized tests show very different distributions for different racial categories [1]. If you focus on the tests, you will get strongly undesired outcomes. So the admission process needs to find other methods to identify candidates that are both academically likely to succeed and roughly match the racial distributions of entire population. On a societal level, in my opinion, the right thing to do would be to address the causes of why certain groups have very low scores, ideally in a non-racial way, such a universal pre-K or more funding for math education and lower-performing schools or whatever. But universities have decided that more subjective evaluations are the way forward for their short term needs.
I agree, the argument always seem to be some kind of inductive reasoning stemming from the presumption that unequal representation is not only a bad thing, but causally due to either past or present racist actions.
This seems very facile to me, even though there undoubtedly is overlap with the truth.
But as to my own view, I remain a meritocrat, despite the the tide that seems to turning against such thinking.
As an American - it is an interesting question. I'm no history buff by any means....but one of the strengths of the United States is that the federal government is supposed to have limited powers. It's also a weakness (IMHO) and being able to 'universally qualify' students is one of them. Education standards & curriculum is controlled at the state. How can you compare two students between 2 different states, when even the GPA levels can be different despite have the same grades?
I have family in China...and in China there are national tests to be able to compare students.
If we start doing a national tests you'll have people start yelling "States rights!". We can't even have states accept free money to give their people insurance. I don't think all states would accept a national test.
As a European, you need to know that US universities ask you to state your "race" on the application form.
In most Europe of course, it would be straight out illegal as to my knowledge no country in the EU can legally do racial discrimination.
There is no such thing as "positive racial discrimination", it's racist no matter what the intent is.
Basically in USA "people of color" is a euphemism for "poor people", but acknowledging the existence of an economic underclass doesn't jive well in an ultra capitalistic society.
So identity politics and race dynamics serve as a cover for all that. People pushing all that madness aren't trying to change the system, but sustain it.
My daughter is currently applying for collage. Harvard is on the list. Her GPA is a 3.9 (unweighted) with a ton of additional plus items (3 languages, 2 varsity sports, leadership roles, 12 years as a Girl Scout, etc.) She struggles with testing like the SAT scoring only 1350 (I scored higher back in the day, but we had a very different educational upbringing - mine was regimented, where I made a different choice in her upbringing with a focus on allowing her to explore). She is scary smart (not just a proud father talking, she really very impressive in how she thinks) and driven like I never was. She decided to not submit the SAT scores as all she sees is the numbers. I have done a bit of research on the admission at Harvard and it is clear that the interviews play a huge part. The interviewers look at are they a leader, can they add something to Harvard, and they even consider if they will make a good dorm roommate.
The internet hurts kids today as they can see the scores and the data without understanding it as they are still kids. It is discouraging as the raw data without digging does not show them that there are people with scores above the line that do not get admitted and those below the line that do. It is the whole package that really counts, and test scores are not a true measure.
If students can still submit AP test scores as part of their application, then I don't have a problem with them eliminating the SAT. AP tests are much harder than the SAT, and more representative of college material anyway. Studying for the SATs was a giant waste of time, while I actually learned a lot studying for AP tests.
Not all highschools have AP classes, so AP tests should not be required to apply, obviously. AP tests provide an objective metric to compare students who go to high schools with AP courses. For students who don't have AP courses, I think using grades is reasonable. All students can still submit additional non-required test scores and other supporting material for their application. At least now we are not wasting students time with this SAT bullshit.
I think the SATs are like Leetcode but even less useful. Obviously Leetcode is some indication that someone can program, but we're all aware that Leetcode is nothing like actual programming in a job. Similarly, the SAT is some indication that someone can do college, but nothing like actual college. I just think the cost of wasting millions of kids' hours studying for the SAT is a tragic waste of time, when they can be studying for their classes or more rigorous tests that test actual subject material like AP tests.
I do see your point about test prep taking over the entire curriculum. And I can agree that's an issue as well. I guess I just find a test in an actual subject to be less BS than a general "aptitude" test, whatever that means.
With AP tests, I can say "I tried learning chemistry, so I studied chemistry, and took this standardized test, and here is my chemistry score." With SATs I'm studying random "aptitude" stuff and I'm not even sure what I'm really demonstrating or what is really being measured.
Senior year AP scores aren't available for seniors until way after the application process. I think I ended up having 7/11 of my tests during senior year.
Imo the main advantage APs brings is GPA weighting/more impressive looking transcripts.
I think scores often aren't even considered by admissions -- purely used for college credit.
4 standardized test scores before your senior year seems like plenty of information for a college to evaluate a student on. I don't think a college should need 11 standardized scores to conclude that you can probably do college level work.
Coming from a private school where many of my friends went to Ivy Leagues, a lot of them took SAT Prep, which honestly does not teach much except for how to practice for SAT so that you get a high score, also its a bit of an unfair advantage as you're basically paying for classes while others don't have the same opportunities or time.
1. Test optional - Students can still submit SAT and ACT scores. So if you get a perfect score you can, and probably should, submit your test score and it will look good and the admission committee will weigh that.
2. The issue with standardized tests is not if the SAT or ACT is objective or not. The issue is what those tests objectively measure. Ends up mostly family income and, well, ones ability to take standardized tests. It is like the 40 yard dash in football. Everyone obsesses about it as an objective measure, but it doesn’t really mean too much one way or another as it pertains to football.
As an aside, has anyone gone back and tried taking a sample SAT test? If you have not exposed yourself to the unique framing of standardized test questions in awhile it is quite jarring if you are not used to it.
I feel like the pandemic has to be tied to this somehow or else they would be test-optional indefinitely. There's some people who probably cannot take an SAT/ACT in the online format, or the conditions of the online format are too poor for it to be a valid assessment.
Also, people in this thread are confusing testing optionality with testing not considered. The smart low-income kid that kicks ass on the SAT/ACT can still submit their score.
I'm also interested in how this might affect recent immigrant applicants, actually (strong on quantitative aspects with strong narrative writing for essays, but weak in timed verbal/English exams due to comprehension).
College is a poorer education than high school 100 years ago. Reading levels of today's senior level high school students are actually 6th grade levels 100 years ago. It is easy to prove. Just look at what reading assignments are given today compared to yesteryear and calculate the flesch kincaid scores on it.
Interesting that many comments against this blatant racism are dead and remain dead, while blatantly racist nonsense claiming asians should be limited to their population proportion is still alive. How does it feel to support a community of racists, dang?
I find it interesting that the general sentiment here is to disagree with this change, but HN folks also generally seem opposed to whiteboard interviews. That seems contradictory. What's the difference? Or is it just a different group of people responding here?
How many students who refuse to report SAT/ACT scores will actually be admitted? In practice I suspect it's effectively required for those who want a serious chance at admissions, unless the applicant is a legacy or otherwise notable.
I have my guesses, but I'm very curious what the outcome of this ends up being. Sadly, a lot of these experiments will be polluted by the pandemic, so meaningful comparisons will be hard.
lots of people on this thread are confusing "Won't use ACT scores" with "Don't require ACT scores". If someone is super accomplished in other things, Harvard lets them appply even if their ACT score is bad. But that doesn't mean that, all things being equal, a high ACT score won't help an applicant.
On a slightly tangent, going forward universities will be less and less relevant compared to past. Except few areas where you cant learn things online (e.g medical), universities will be competing with online courses. If university help to get real jobs by innovating itself, it will stay relevant otherwise it will perish. The trend is clear.
Harvard has never been a meritocracy and never will be. It is an elite establishment and will protect the elites of the world and offer them safe harbor for 4 years. It is good of them that they removed the facade of requiring exams at all since they can now be open about choosing the future elites from the children of the current elites.
The diversity trope is just pure performative art to justify more rich elite whites. They do this discrimination while having a massive endowment and still receiving huge taxpayer handouts.
I should have posted this earlier, but it's probably still worth saying: this comment broke the site guidelines egregiously, and you started a wretched flamewar with it. That's seriously not ok.
OK, I concede that the comment might have not been particularly articulate or thoughtful, and I will refrain from similar snark in the future. I do not however think it resulted in a wretched flamewar as the replies were, for the most part, respectful, substantiative and not particularly acrimonious. The one-sideness of the upvotes indicates what I posted was not particularly controversial as well.
I wish I could laugh at this, but watching institutional racism come roaring back to life over the last decade has been extremely depressing. Is there any doubt that the goal of this change is to make it easier for them to reject Asian students?
The Ivy League schools haven't exactly been discreet about their desire to admit fewer Asians.
Agreed, equally as much “safe spaces” are “separate but equal” race based segregation.
If some people base their opinions this way for validation: I’m a minority.
Nip it in the bud, take it to court, call it out for what it is. Race based discrimination has no place in this society, find another way, especially for any institution that takes any state or federal funding, you can totalllly curb stomp that approach.
Existing civil rights laws are the ones that will force integration. I think you’re conflating a conservative newscycle view of what happens in some universities with the supporting legality. That article doesn’t address safe spaces, it touches on a notion of privileging speech of a victim class at the expense of a different class and says thats rooted in the civil rights act. It says everything you want to be afraid of but I think its operating in a very distorted realm and should also hire its own lawyers and see what view federal court actually hold.
The evidence the essay provides is compelling to me. This follow up article provides yet more evidence, including a recent $100 million + judgement against Tesla under Civil Rights Law:
The explanation provided by the essays is coherent and resonates with I have seen.
The Civil Rights Act made it illegal to use IQ tests to hire applicants. It is totalitarian in nature and needs to be scaled back to enable a free society where a sanctimonious elite is not using the force of the state to reshape private citizens.
Unappealed lawsuits and enforcement actions by employees and government agencies does not say thats the law.
Take it to federal court, then take it to federal appeals court. If the 9th circuit doesn’t match conservative land, do the same in another circuit.
You’re playing the helpless victim while having way more resources than the “protected classes” that you feel are oppressing your way of life, all because you (and the organizations that didnt appeal) are afraid of the PR. The protected classes dealt with way more than “potentially bad PR” to create this reality so just take the L and get the courts to correct it.
It's not the rich corporations vs the "protected classes". It's the rich corporations vs the civil rights institutions, which includes much of the legal profession, deep-pocketed and well-connected law firms and powerful government agencies, with indefinite taxpayer support to fund their activity.
The wokification of US law was established by the Civil Rights Act. As far back as the 1970s, the Supreme Court ruled that using IQ tests to vet job applicants is a form of prohibited discrimination under the CRA.
> The Ivy League schools haven't exactly been discreet about their desire to admit fewer Asians.
Just the Ivies? UW is explicit: they want racial "equity". Meaning they won't admit more Asians, as a percentage, than the population they are picking candidates from. And they promote it as a good thing:
https://www.washington.edu/raceequity/diversity-and-equity-f...
The page you linked to didn’t say they “wouldn’t be admitting more Asians than the population they are picking candidates from” nor did it even remotely imply that.
The easiest way to get into UW is to be (graduate high school) from eastern Washington, they actually have a state mandated quota for that.
If they have that aspiration they have tools to implement it. The tool is called "holistic review", which opaquifies the admissions process.
People who read college applications are "guided" by Universities using a system of feedback so they can get whatever outcome they want. Read more about that here:
UW is still a state school controller indirectly and sometimes directly by the state government. The reason the Easter WA quota exists is a because of its charter. The administrators at UW can express whatever opinion they want but don’t rule by fiat, it would take probably a state legislative vote to implement the quota you imagine exists.
College admission officers don’t get access to race and such when reviewing applications. Yes, they can add points to it, but that happens after the rest of the application is reviewed, and can’t be done without explicitly saying they are doing it.
Because of "holistic review", admissions are subjective, which means admission officers can do whatever they want. Admission officers do have access to race, why else is it on applications?
Read the NYT story I linked to, to understand how application readers are gently guided to consider race, without explicitly being told to do so.
Excerpt from the story:
"I received an e-mail from the assistant director suggesting I was not with the program: “You’ve got 15 outlier, which is quite a lot."
"What proportion (of x ethnic group) would you like?" is a question that greatly devalues the contributions of the individual student. Would you say, "You're a great interview candidate, but we already have a tall guy,"?
Discrimination happens when you treat equals as unequal, or unequals as equal. There is a world of difference between "we already have enough asian compsci majors", and "we already have enough compsci majors, but there is room for a sociologist".
Surely you're aware that this literally and explicitly happens in the context of college admissions. "We already have a couple tuba players, try Yale."
Sorry, but I don’t think your idea of meritocracy is very much in line with what most Universities are looking for.
That’s why they have things like essays and consider extracurricular activities. Most of the selective Universities specifically exclude people with high grades and very little else that they were involved in.
Moreover, I recall reading at some point that at least some of the Ivy’s, during at least the first half of the 20th century, specifically avoided students with the highest grades in favor of those who were more like a B+ average and were more social, which they determined through the very subjective means of interviewing students on campus. (I’m old enough that I recall some of my friends visiting Universities for such meetings, but I have no idea if they still meet prospective students like this).
Sorry I cannot tell what “this” is since that article neither mentions downplaying grades or interviewing students.
I believe the specific things I am talking about were discussed in relation to introversion and The Ivy’s specifically wanting to lean toward extroverts who were well-rounded and had good social skills.
Meritocracy might be great for the high achievers, but it's bad for multicultural societies where some cultures are significantly more conscientious and dutiful than others, or simply have different values.
It inevitably leads to the one or two cultures dominating positions of leadership in government, commerce, etc, inevitably breeding resentment and racism.
If you want a healthy society, you need to set aside the individual in order to create balance across the society. That might mean some high achievers losing out on their first choice college, it might mean affirmative action, etc.
Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness.
it's bad for multicultural societies where some cultures are significantly more conscientious and dutiful than others, or simply have different values
Sure, go ahead and see what happens when you disconnect negative behavior from negative outcomes. I'm sure that has no long-term consequences for your civilization.
That's a straw man you've constructed. I've never said that negative behaviour is going to be rewarded.
Getting back to Harvard, everyone who goes there will be extremely competent. You seem to be suggesting that they'll be accepting slackers and truants.
> Getting back to Harvard, everyone who goes there will be extremely competent
Now. Once they start admitting students absent an IQ test, don't be surprised when it's prestige and the assumed quality of it's graduates is diminished.
>Meritocracy might be great for the high achievers, but it's bad for multicultural societies where some cultures are significantly more conscientious and dutiful than others, or simply have different values.
>It inevitably leads to the one or two cultures dominating positions of leadership in government, commerce, etc, inevitably breeding resentment and racism.
By that logic, the alternative is you get more people in government, commerce etc. who are significantly less conscientious and dutiful? That doesn't exactly sound like a great thing for society.
"greater equality" is tautological when you have instituted equality of outcome, but does it produce greater happiness? I don't believe it to do so. It reduced overall outcome - as those who are forced down will not produce as much as they could've.
>But everyone notices when every aspect of their society is led by people of one race.
I didn't go to China and become resentful when I noticed their leadership was Chinese. But I did immigrate to America, then eventually become resentful when I noticed white people & asians were discriminated against out of some twisted sense of fairness.
> I didn't go to China and become resentful when I noticed their leadership was Chinese.
Of course not. You're a visitor.
> then eventually become resentful when I noticed white people & asians were discriminated against out of some twisted sense of fairness.
You probably need your eyes checked. White people run the United States, and Asians make up an outsized proportion of US college admissions.
> out of some twisted sense of fairness.
You haven't been reading my comments. I already addressed this. It's not supposed to be fair at the level of the individual. You need fair representation of a broad cross-section of the populace in order to achieve optimum happiness across the population.
Meritocracy is a fine ideal, but in practice is based on selection algorithms, and like any algorithm it can be and is used to launder whatever biases you like. Who decided what was meritorious? who wrote the tests?
Given what you're replying to, it sounds like you're suggesting that Asian Americans dominate power in this country, which I must be misinterpreting because that's ridiculous. I do agree with the general sentiment that what high achievers deserve is not necessarily what's good for society, but I'd say we should strive for equal opportunities, not equal outcomes.
Something I never see people talk about is the difference between:
(1) each job being filled by the person who's better suited for it than any other person
*versus*
(2) each job being filled by a person who's better suited for it than for any other job
I think this is where narratives and assumptions about "meritocracy" and free markets fall down.
You can't have both of the situations above hold. They are in conflict. And it's hard to be honest from the point of view of hiring people, that (1) is basically not a realistic option. Everybody says their goal is to hire the best person for a job without acknowledging that the best person is not, and should not, be available.
Is (2) optimal for society? I'm not sure, but I think society is closer to that than (1). But "meritocracy" sounds more like (1) to me.
> You can't have both of the situations above hold. They are in conflict.?
They are not in conflict at all, this is what the basic welfare theorems of economics say.
It's just that #2 and #1 are impossible to achieve because it requires perfect information about each person and each job, and a unified labor market, which just isn't realistic, as information has a cost and labor markets are fragmented.
In the real world, we are lucky to get some aspects of both #1 and #2, in the sense that people do search for jobs best suited for them, but imperfectly, and employers do search for workers best suited for each job, but imperfectly, and you kinda meet in the middle. If you want, you can call "meritocracy" the freedom of the employer to hire the best worker available, but I'm not sure of a snappy phrase to describe the freedom of the worker to search for the best job available. Maybe someone came up with a label for that. But really they are flipsides of a process that leads to an optimum, they are not two opposing forces where one makes the other impossible. It is like buying and selling, the supply curve does not make the demand curve impossible; both curves meet at an optimum price which is where supply and demand meet. If you mess with either the demand curve or the supply curve, you do not end up at the optimum price, you end up losing welfare somehow.
Obviously anything that can reduce frictions helps you get closer to the meeting of 1 and 2. For example, greater availability of job boards and pay transparency, working condition transparency to get information about available jobs to workers, or things like more accurate information about worker skills and talents to employers (e.g. meaningfulness of degrees play a role here as do rigorous interviews). Really both worker and employer are facing a murky question trying to figure out "how good is the other side here?". Both need as much information as possible.
It is the costliness of information that keeps us away from 1 and 2 simultaneously.
Yes they are. Imagine World War II. The best person to dig a particular ditch might be Alan Turing. But that's completely different from the best job for Alan Turing being digging that ditch.
>both curves meet at an optimum price which is where supply and demand meet
I think that optimum and equilibrium are different things and a single price cannot be optimum even if it is the equilibrium.
> Yes they are. Imagine World War II. The best person to dig a particular ditch might be Alan Turing. But that's completely different from the best job for Alan Turing being digging that ditch.
No, Alan Turing would be pretty bad at digging ditches, and there would be many people who could do the job just as well or not better than he.
So in that environment, the code breaker team needs someone, and the ditch digging team needs someone, and if it turns out that Alan is in the ditch and Joe doing an awful job breaking codes, then the code breaking team will try to fire Joe and hire Alan, and the ditch digging team wont mind switching Joe for Alan. Thus this swap is a pareto improving trade, and there are no pareto improving trades in equilibrium, therefore no equilibrium process would settle on Alan in the ditch and Joe breaking codes.
So look, this is an actual body of science and math that you can't just dismiss without understanding and thinking about. There are legitimate criticisms of welfare theorems -- the ones I outlined, namely around lack of perfect information -- does the code breaking team know how good Alan is at breaking codes? Does Alan know there is a job opening other than ditch digging? Etc. It is all about information, but to just pretend that the welfare theorems don't exist because you haven't thought of them or they don't seem intuitively "true" to you is neither a good avenue of exploration nor of debate. These are, after all, theorems. You attack theorems by attacking their hypotheses, not by "disagreeing" with them or just asserting that they are false.
> I think that optimum and equilibrium are different things and a single price cannot be optimum even if it is the equilibrium.
This is, mathematically, false. But it's also irrelevant because there is not one price, there is a single price vector. Alan and Joe don't earn the same wage. The budget of the ditch project and code breaking project are also not the same.
>No, Alan Turing would be pretty bad at digging ditches
It's a contrived example that illustrates something general. It could still be true - maybe Turing would have some insight that let him do half as much labor. But whether it's actually true for him is irrelevant.
Let's say the manager of a McDonald's started out making hamburgers and does it better than any of the other employees, but doesn't normally do it any more, unless there's a crisis and they have to fill in when nobody else is available. Or some software engineer at Google would be better at processing data for litigation purposes than anyone in that industry, yet they outsource the work.
And plus these 300 year old Ivy League universities existed before the educated workforce … existed ... and will to continue survive long after the workforce thinks Ivy League has anything to do with on the job performance.
It is purely happenstance that these institutions have even had to consider caring about how they gatekeep genpop’s upwards mobility for the last half a century.
They literally have no reason to care. They believe attendees want higher education for the pursuit of academic knowledge and are so disconnected from the desperate reality. And they’re right, they can weather this fad.
The ombudsman closes the thick book in the monestary, blows dust off the back, walks outside and says “there are third generation people with Asian heritage in this country? huh, how about that.” Goes back into their monk quarters after replacing the wax, lights another candle and goes back into the books. This is how these institutions function. They don’t know anything about how passionate, desperate or how much energy has been put into simply getting in, they don’t know why its important to people except for them loving the attention and pride and money.
I would like to see some evidence that this is how you create a “healthy” society. Excluding high achievers on the basis of factors beyond their control is how wars are started.
> If you want a healthy society, you need to set aside the individual in order to create balance across the society.
That's fine, but the question is, who gets to decide? Individuals.
> Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness.
Receiving unearned money doesn't lead to happiness due to lack of fulfillment. Having earned money taken away doesn't lead to happiness due to a lack of reward. Equality of outcome always ends up killing the initiative and freedoms needed for prosperity to support such a society to begin with.
> Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness.
"Equality of outcome" == "greater equality"... Well yea, assuming outcome is definable and changing those outcomes to be "equal" is possible, by definition, things would be more "equitable" by that same definition.
"Greater happiness" - I assume you mean greater overall societal happiness. That's quite a subjective claim. I'm not sure that's even a measurable thing, but do you have any evidence of this?
I think this is a bad way to choose who gets to be a doctor, because if it is common knowledge then some demographic classes of doctors will be viewed as sub-par, regardless of individual merit.
Ironically, I think they can't. Their brand depends on public perception of their admissions process, and careful curation of their student body. The point of an "elite" college is that everything about it is on display. The value offered to each student depends in part on expectations about the characteristics of the student body.
It's like a human menagerie. Imagine choosing the animals for a zoo. Even if it were agreed which kind of animal was best (I like zebras), a zoo full of nothing but zebras would lose the interest and support of the public. Therefore, some "lesser" animals must be included, to provide the variety that makes it a zoo.
The "elite" college needs a curation process, and it has to be opaque, or it will be easily gamed, and the student body will turn into a freak show, spoiling its brand. There is enough demand, and little enough true variety among high school students, that a straight numerical admissions threshold will produce a class of effectively identical students.
I agree with this. The biggest issue I see is not that the Harvard admissions process is arbitrary and perhaps biased.
No, the biggest issue is the size of the student bodyis kept stagnantly small to maintain exclusivity. Perhaps this made sense in an analog age but at some point in the digital world of plenty this will get/needs to be disrupted.
The game changer will be when some University figures out how to become the Apple of higher education. Previously high end phones achieved prestige by adding diamonds, gold plating, a high price tag and only a select few stores that people in the know could find (i.e. the Nokia Vertu).
Somehow Apple figured out how to maintain prestige/exclusivity while essentially servicing the entire market.
It will be a breakthrough for humanity when a University figures out how to replicate this combo of prestige and quality at scale for higher education.
> The game changer will be when some University figures out how to become the Apple of higher education.
You think it hasn't been tried?
First, there's a chicken-or-egg problem. By virtue of being one of the oldest universities in America, Harvard was originally an elite institution that was powered by the tuition paid for by the children of elite parents. To start a new "Harvard-but-bigger", you need to figure out where the "elite" part comes from. In the absence of a pre-existing elite alumni body, you need to enforce rigorous academic standards on your early graduating classes and let your reputation grow from there. But, you also need to deliver the rigorous academic standards at scale.
MOOCs were one attempt, but it's impossible to defend against cheating online. It's hard enough to stop cheating in real-world exam rooms, letting people go through examinations at home makes it impossible.
If you require people to show up in-person, then you reach physical limits to scale very quickly. Even if you try to combine MOOC-style lectures with building out a network of controlled examination centers in the real world, the attempts to expand American standardized testing abroad show that you begin to run into problems of corrupt test center administrators. It's like the fast food franchise model, where the restaurant corporate headquarters finds it increasingly difficult to maintain the same standards across all of their franchised locations, except that with examinations, your day-to-day users want your standards to be compromised.
The state university systems are already doing this quite well. In my state, there's one "flagship" university, that also has the football and basketball teams. And a number of regional universities, commuter campuses, trade schools, and so forth. The regional universities have the same admission standards as the main campus, but fewer graduate and professional programs etc. Some of them specialize, e.g., one campus has the big nursing school. Sure, there is more prestige at the big campus, and students try to get in there if they can, but it's a well kept secret that the regional colleges are just as good for basic undergraduate education. And cheaper.
The community colleges in my state are so great. They do such a huge service, and they do it economically. You can get a 4 year degree by spending 2 years at a community college and the other 2 at a state university. That's like the bargain of the century. The CoCo's keep an eye on the curriculum at the big schools, so the students are prepared, and there's no hassle with transferring credits. And their focus is on teaching.
Disclosure: One of my kids attends the big school, the other is at one of the regional schools, both are in good situations.
I think that the "elite" schools can be left to their own devices, on their own funding, and turn themselves into a freak show if they want. Public attention should turn towards supporting and developing better access to education for the rest of us, starting with the community college system.
In a few decades, I hope we will look back on privatized higher education, the way we look on privatized health care today.
It turns out you can achieve both social justice and a powerful alumni donation base -- er, competent educated elite -- simply by admitting the top 1% of each race by income. Who knew? If you're Harvard, you can do good AND do well!
That's not really the Harvard way. The Harvard way is:
* Take about 2/5 of students from the elites
* Take about 3/5 of students who are brilliant
Students of the elites look smart by association. Students who are brilliant are brought into powerful, moneyed social networks. It works well for everyone involved.
The focus on alumni donations is a little bit overblown. Harvard has way more money than it needs. What Harvard looks for is a lot richer than that. The alumni base is part of the national -- and increasingly international -- power structure. A president of some country, a high court justice, or similar sorts of power positions can be at least as important as a billionaire. Likewise, branding is important. The current push on DEI is to make sure that (1) the brand doesn't suffer (2) DEI-focused positions are filled by elite school alumni, and not focused on actual change to power structures.
Not necessarily, some of the 0.1% may have poor opinion of the other, may have specific expectations about the environment for their offspring and not every group is equally influential. For example, since we're talking about Harvard - it definitely wasn't purely about money when in 1920s Harvard implemented Lowell's quota to reduce the number of Jewish students.
Everyone want to go after the exceedingly small percentage of black and Latino students that get boosted into the Ivy League and somehow in these discussions legacies always seem to get a pass.
(Though obviously not in this case because you correctly called it out)
Ivy League this year will have material overrepresentation of Latino and Black kids, substantial overrepresentation of Asian and Jewish kids, and up to 10% 'Children of Alumni', another overrepresentation.
Which leaves those not in those groups out in the lurch.
You're thinking the 0.01%. The 0.1% got busted trying to pass off their kids as athletes. The 1% can afford good school districts, extra curriculars, and test prep.
And one’s ability to pass the SAT proves only that one can pass the SAT. It just proves they were privileged enough to have some one teach them “the tricks and tactics to pass the test” - not understanding, not potential, and not intelligence.
Couldn’t one also say that getting into Harvard just proves they were privileged enough to jump the criteria for selection? Eg parents sent them to volunteer abroad and varsity crew? How can any admissions criteria not get gamed over time?
I never thought the tests were "objective." Anyone can practice and improve their score. They're biased towards students whos parents or school pushes them to practice.
In the late 1990s I practiced and bumped my score up about 100 points. Do I think it made a difference to the college I went to? Doubtful.
I think the better question is: Do the tests accurately predict if a student will do well in college? That's their point, and if schools have better ways to predict if an applicant will succeed, there's no point in using the test.
Critiques of the bias of testing need to come with a defense of what replaces them. Can extra curriculars be gamed? Of course. What makes a good essay? That would depend on the eye of the evaluator.
The dismay here is not due to a believe that testing correctly plucks the best minuscule number of deserving applicants that get in. It’s that everything else that is used is worse.
Unless the complaints result in the elimination of the SAT without a good replacement. Which is exactly what is happening.
I find it to be extremely destructive to spend all your time complaining about problems, and none finding solutions. That’s more or less what Maxism is: a long list of faults with capitalism and a half-baked untested idea of what could maybe be a solution. And we’ve seen the damage that ideology has done.
Grades are also biased towards kids whose parents and schools push them to practice. Being good at your job is biased towards being pushed to practice. Achieving the things you want in life is biased towards being pushed to practice.
Maybe instead of lowering standards, we should push kids to practice.
> Anyone can practice and improve their score. They're biased towards students whos parents or school pushes them to practice.
You just stated a very objective and valuable thing: they benefit people who practice. And it turns out that the will to practice doing things you don't know how to do is the most important skill you can have in life.
Sure, as long as they have the free time to devote to that (which they may not, if they have to work through high school). Alternatively, they can hire an (expensive) tutor, which can help.
If scores are an important factor for admission, then that selects for people who:
* are good at standardized testing
* or, have the extra time and/or money to improve their score
The latter has strong correlation with socioeconomic status (and by extension, race). If their goal is to broaden the range of students attending, then eliminating the test as a factor helps.
There are, of course, many other things at play here; but it's a start!
For our Uni, it's about getting more numbers because they're scared of numbers falling due to massive tuition increases and the decrease in perception of the necessity of a college education. Source: work at a Uni.
That makes the assumption that tests reflective of preparation are an objective criteria of academic performance. I would argue that such tests are only reflective of preparation.
During college tours at Harvard in 2007 I had an informational interview with an admissions Dean, and when he learned my SAT was 2110 he asked if I was planning to retake and cut the interview short.
"Why not just not aspire to attend"
If the schools remove academic testing credentials OP loses the ability to use test scores as a means of entry, which would have potentially levelled the playing field. Additionally if the schools elect to admit students based on racial / gender criteria and OP is a white heterosexual male, then OP cannot compete on a level playing field at all and his accomplishments are meaningless. You tell OP to aspire to attend but these changes would mean his odds are drastically reduced through no fault of his own except he was not born to the 1% and his skin and gender are wrong. Admitting people based on racial criteria is racist no matter the intention and hurts people that have likely done everything right to attend their school of choice.
> If the schools remove academic testing credentials OP loses the ability to use test scores as a means of entry, which would have potentially levelled the playing field.
This doesn't track. College admissions tests are a huge area of concern when it comes to institutionalized racism (due to the racial wealth gap). They don't test anything other than an applicant's ability to do well on the test, and that is primarily determined by (a) the applicant's to spend time studying for the test and (b) the applicant's ability to utilize resources to study for the test.
(a) tips testing in favor of the wealthy because poor people cannot afford to spend time studying, and (b) tips testing in favor of the wealthy because poor people cannot afford to spend money on test prep materials.
Compound this with the fact that the tests are fairly expensive themselves, so even retaking the test is often out of the question for people with few means, compared to wealthy students who can retake the test as many times as they like.
The idea that entrance exams balanced things in favor of people from lower socioeconomic classes is, and always has been, a bunch of malarkey.
> The idea that entrance exams balanced things in favor of people from lower socioeconomic classes is, and always has been, a bunch of malarkey.
You are looking at this absolutely, not relatively. The rest of the admissions criteria have similar issues you raise, if not worse. (Essays and interviews especially risk class bias)
> They don't test anything other than an applicant's ability to do well on the test, and that is primarily determined by (a) the applicant's to spend time studying for the test and (b) the applicant's ability to utilize resources to study for the test.
Citation needed here. They are quite predictive of college success (GPA) which is why they are used.
> You are looking at this absolutely, not relatively.
I do appreciate this point, but I still don't think it's enough to warrant keeping exams in-place. I think we should remove them while also striving to improve the rest of the college admissions process. Having a metric that claims to level the playing field but actually does not is, in my opinion, more harmful than other metrics that are less straightforward. It gives false hope and also allows for a more dastardly scheme of classism, since it is centralized instead of managed separately by each university.
> They are quite predictive of college success (GPA) which is why they are used.
I think they are indicative of socioeconomic standing, which in turn is predictive of GPA. Students who can afford tutoring, or who have parents who have free time to help while growing up, or who do not need to take on extra jobs, or who don't generally worry about other such stressors that are typically due to low socioeconomic status are consistently shown to achieve greater academic success at all grades, even as early as first grade. Socioeconomic status is the #1 predictor of academic success, and this is reflected by college entrance exams.
Keep in mind that it is in the best interests of these organizations to intentionally avoid addressing this point. Also, it's worth remembering that college entrance exams trace their origins back to purported tests of general intelligence that were in fact designed with intentional cultural bias to prevent non-white students from finding admission at universities. (This was later addressed and somewhat rectified, in some ways, but my points is that the organizations responsible have a history of not really caring about crafting a test in the best interests of the student.)
No. It's the opposite. I asked OP why he wouldn't simply NOT aspire to attend if he found the school's "social justice ideals" so disagreeable.
>OP cannot compete on a level playing field
What is a "level playing field"? That statement begs the question that you or OP can and should be defining Harvard's admission criteria in the first place. That's what you're missing. It's their prerogative to set the playing field. Your preferred criteria are irrelevant. And, the kicker is, it's a pretty good bet they know better.
>at all and his accomplishments are meaningless
That's hyperbolic to say the least. I'm sure they're meaningful to Harvard and elsewhere. Likewise, the experiences and capabilities of some whose talents may be reflected outside of a standardized test are meaningful.
>Admitting people based on racial criteria is racist
That's an unserious, facile argument that ignores 400+ years of history that continues to this day. It's been estimated that racism, starting with slavery, has cost Black Americans over $70 trillion. There's a legacy attached to that which clearly disadvantages black people. Further, redlining, unequal pay, etc. continue. If it's racist to acknowledge these facts, then it is also racist not to.
Elite college entrance is a lifelong shortcut in the distribution system of money and power that the rest of us do not get to opt out of.
The things you say about racial injustice are true, however if correcting this were truly the goal Harvard and the other ivies would remove legacy admission preference. They won’t because their core mission is to provide a route for the wealthy and powerful to pass down social status to their heirs.
The function of anyone else there is to obscure this core mission.
>That's an unserious, facile argument that ignores 400+ years of history that continues to this day. It's been estimated that racism, starting with slavery, has cost Black Americans over $70 trillion. There's a legacy attached to that which clearly disadvantages black people. Further, redlining, unequal pay, etc. continue. If it's racist to acknowledge these facts, then it is also racist not to.
Is that something current people who had no choice in what happened deserve to be punished for? and yes, I recognize this applies both ways, but every time this topic comes up it seems like we forget that no college applicant had much of a choice regarding the circumstances that led to the admissions criteria being the way they are, so the claim that one needs to be biased for/against a group because of historical issues isn't entirely morally sound. In the end you are still punishing some group of innocents.
Personally I think that instead the focus should be on trying to balance the field at the high school level. If everyone is brought up to a similar level of education by the end of high school, there is no need to bias admissions themselves, instead the university can just offer financial aid to poorer students. Alternatively things change so that the university one goes to doesn't really matter for future career prospects. In my opinion the former is easier to achieve.
Yes, it does work both ways but, while you acknowledge that, it's kind of like you want to read past that part quickly.
Because, what you're essentially saying is, "yes, this one group had a 400-year head start at the expense of that other group. But, why punish them for that?"
This line of discussion, BTW, overlooks a few other oft-overlooked points:
1. There is real value to having a student body that reflects the broader population--good for the school, the students, and the broader society
2. All of these students are of top quality. They're not eschewing a bunch of Einsteins to admit a bunch of dullards.
3. Harvard has an abysmal 4.6% acceptance rate. The overwhelming majority of applicants are being rejected for all kinds of reasons. The idea that qualified people are losing their seats en masse due to racial preferences is wildly inaccurate.
4. There's never been an objective, quantitative admissions process in any case. It's kind of funny that people are so focused on the SAT score, as if that was part of some numeric point-scoring system.
I'm not really trying to 'read past that part quickly'. I don't really have a personal 'horse' in this as I'm neither black nor white. I'm not even suggesting that they're rejecting capable people for 'dullards'. I've seen that argument used often so I can understand why you'd think I'm saying that, but I'm aware that usually it's more like choosing between two equally qualified candidates.
I just don't really see how that changes the fact that it's unfair to the person rejected because of an immutable characteristic. Your argument about having a student body that reflects the broader population has that same 'disconnect' to me, is it fair for an equally qualified candidate to be rejected just because they don't fit a statistic that they're powerless to influence?
That same point is also exactly why I think the focus should be on bringing everyone to a similar level in high school, so given equalizers for class differences like sufficient scholarships specifically targeted at poorer families (and similarly preventing the rich from paying their way in), every group has an equal chance of admission, which, along with a purely merit based admission criteria should naturally result in a student body representative of the population.
It's my mistake for not clarifying that I'm not saying that the SAT is somehow important in this. I'm solely talking about this idea of intentionally applying racial bias to the system. Personally I'm quite happy that these standardized tests are going away for the same reason that they aren't particularly objective and success in them depends on the guides and coaching you can get access to, and how many times you can afford to try.
>I don't really have a personal 'horse' in this as I'm neither black nor white
I think we all do, to be honest. But, I shouldn't have phrased my response in a way that suggested you were being disingenuous. Sorry if it came across that way.
What I was trying to say is that was the really important bit and deserves more focus IMO.
>I just don't really see how that changes the fact that it's unfair to the person rejected because of an immutable characteristic
Well, the short answer is, that there may be some who are so rejected, but there are also real individuals on the other side.
And, this brings up a really important point, that I think presents the challenge when discussing these things. That is, we kind of oscillate between the macro and micro levels without announcing it.
So, we're talking about these ongoing and historical effects that really are generational and persistent, so bear down on Black people in ways that disadvantage them today. And, generally, you have many White people who benefitted from that equation and passed those advantages down to individuals. Not all, but certainly many, and even neutrality is better than disadvantage.
Now, we'll acknowledge that it's not fair to the Black individual. However, when any talk of remedy is had, there's an intense focus on whether an individual White person might be perceived to be negatively impacted. And, the conclusion generally runs along the lines of "well, you can't fight racism with more racism".
But, then, what about the individual Black person, who continues to be disadvantaged? He/she just becomes an externality; the by-product of a history and system that are really hard to address.
So, this treats the Black person at the macro level
("we must fix the system!") and the White person at the micro level ("we must now apply treatment evenly to every individual!").
However, if we do attempt to address the issue, then we charge the individual Black person with receiving any perceived benefits, and we forget about the system that operates at the macro level. So he is treated in the micro at the least advantageous time for him.
But, going the other way, we tend not to attribute generational/systemic advantages to White people at the micro level. So, individually, they are seen only as victims of efforts to remediate, and we push those advantages up to the system at the macro level. So she is treated in the micro at the most advantageous times.
The other part is that we tend to talk about this as if it's only the legacy of our history that we're remedying, when there are very real, persistent systemic issues from redlining to mortgage rates to unequal pay and more. So, these are ongoing advantages and disadvantages being mitigated. It's not as simplistic as a head-to-head match up wherein a Black person benefits from a diversity policy that directly disadvantages a White person.
Those two individuals are part of a larger system that doles out advantages and disadvantages in various ways and at various times.
"There is real value to having a student body that reflects the broader population--good for the school, the students, and the broader society"
Harvard is currently 39% white, 8% black, and 20% Asian.
This seems to indicate that Harvard should focus on bringing up the number of white students admitted and reducing the number of asian students. Whites are underrepresented by half.
> Because, what you're essentially saying is, "yes, this one group had a 400-year head start at the expense of that other group. But, why punish them for that?"
I feel like you said this as an example of an obviously disagreeable point, but I unironically hold this view.
Expanding opportunity for a group is always good; I'm all in favor of funding high-quality schools in historically underfunded districts, or providing free after-school programs to help kids whose parents are working, or to expand tutoring. These are all things that will disproportionately help those groups who have been marginalized throughout history.
I am absolutely against, however, grading an individual differently due to their historic group membership. If an Asian student is applying to college, there is nothing that student could have done differently to avoid the opportunities they were born with, so it seems eminently unfair to punish that specific individual for something they have no control in and had no say in. Charge the student more if they're rich, sure, but don't discount the merit of a student solely because of their group membership.
tl;dr: I'm all for investing in marginalized groups to level the playing field, but scoring individuals differently for things they have no control over feels flat-out wrong.
>I'm all in favor of...These are all things that will disproportionately help those groups who have been marginalized throughout history.
>I'm all for investing in marginalized groups to level the playing field, but scoring individuals differently for things they have no control over feels flat-out wrong.
I hear you, but what you're kind of doing there is drawing the lines around what you'd feel comfortable with, not what might actually be most effective. And, your comfort is generally tied to addressing things at the macro level. When we talk of groups, people tend to find it more acceptable than when they consider individuals being affected. But, of course, policies, including harmful ones, have historically been aimed at groups and groups are comprised of individuals.
>seems eminently unfair to punish that specific individual
Likewise with this sentiment. But, if we look at it as "punishing" individual people on one hand, then we're discounting the negative effects (i.e. punishment) experienced by individuals in the original group from previous and ongoing policies. That is, we're kind of unevenly oscillating between the macro and micro views, wherein the previous individual's "punishment" is lost in the group, but the current individual's is clear, present and personalized.
The other thing is that those individuals in advantaged groups are frequently also the direct benefeciaries of favorable policies that they didn't earn. Where do we sort that?
Because, in that context, even "merit" takes on a different meaning, relatively speaking.
It's all suboptimal, but we got to this place by embarking on a massive, multi-century campaign of codified disenfranchisement of some groups in favor of others, to include violence, murder and redistribution of trillions of dollars in wealth. Millions of individuals were harmed as a result. I wish this entire discussion was unnecessary, but if earnestly attempting to address this means that a relative few individuals, say, go to Duke instead of Harvard, then it's unfortunate, but these things don't reasonably show up on the same chart.
Yup, you're right I misread. With that said, a degree from Harvard is a golden ticket to success, anyone would be torn about giving that up. The issue is not that the ideals are disagreeable its that they have very real consequences in making it harder for certain demographics to have an equal shot at that ticket.
"That statement begs the question that you or OP can and should be defining Harvard's admission criteria in the first place"
This argument can then be applied to any school or workplace. Upset that google has started prioritizing White candidates, refer to your argument, who are you to question it? Upset that Princeton suddenly said they had too many minority students, who are you to question it? It doesn't work that way, anyone is free to question anything and blindly accepting things because someone says that these people know better is not a good thing in a free society.
"If it's racist to acknowledge these facts, then it is also racist not to" No one is ignoring racism and its history but rather I am arguing that college admissions is not the place to address them. College should provide an equal arena for everyone to compete for admissions based on academic and extra-curricular achievements. Intervention to bring minority applicants up to a competitive level should be done in early childhood up through highschool. The SAT is simply a series of questions that test academic achievement, getting rid of a test because a group does not do well on it is a race to the bottom in much the same way as removing advanced math from a highschool curriculum is.
The problem should be fixed at the source, if Harvard wants to make an impact, take a few billion of their endowment and donate it to local school districts that are struggling to provide for their children.
"That's an unserious, facile argument that ignores 400+ years of history"
I'm going to ignore the insults. Coming to a resolution that helps the affected minority should not be based on punishing one group to raise up another. It should be focused on raising all groups up to an equal stage, that can only happen if work starts with the young.
You're right, its Harvard's call to do what ever they want and to spend their endowment however they want but everyone is entitled to an opinion and to proffer a proposal on a message board. Discrimination based on race is the definition of racism, that's not an opinion, its simply the factual definition of the word.
From the oxford dictionary, racism is defined as "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized." Note: typical means usually, not always.
I appreciate your view point; as a father of young white kids, I disagree with it but I understand how you are likely approaching this from an equal but opposite position.
It's just sad that a historically prestigious institution is essentially committing suicide by no longer even pretending to uphold the ideal of meritocracy. It served as a shining beacon to millions of immigrants who came to this country in hopes of sending their kids to a top university. They came to a country where your name or rank in life matters a whole lot less than most other places. They told their children to study hard, and score well on this one test and they'll have a future for themselves their parents could never imagine.
I still believe western democracy, as embodied by America is a positive force on the world. At least when you compare it to the alternatives: China, Russia and the Middle Eastern countries. Our institutions of higher education are the envy of the world and we'll lose that as we abandon our ideals of objectivity, meritocracy and actual fairness. Other countries will fill the power vacuum and exert influence on world affairs in a negative way.
>It's just sad that a historically prestigious institution is essentially committing suicide by no longer even pretending to uphold the ideal of meritocracy.
That's pretty melodramatic.
But, maybe don't assume that, because they expand or modify their admission criteria or attempt to achieve some balance that is reflective of broader society, they're letting in waves of completely unworthy people. I mean, that's a pretty absurd notion, right?
Their admission rate is a lowly 4.6%. They're getting the cream of the crop. Admission to top schools (or any schools) has never been the imaginary 100% objective panacea that you're swooning over, wherein someone edges out the next candidate by a point on their SAT score. And, I would argue that we wouldn't want such a system that so overlooks the near limitless variables embodied by humans. Neither does Harvard.
>I still believe western democracy, as embodied by America is a positive force on the world...we'll lose that as we abandon our ideals of objectivity, meritocracy and actual fairness...
More melodrama. But, these "loftier" concerns are convoluted and contradictory. That is, if you really believe in western democracy and are concerned about it continuing to be a "positive force in the world", then you shouldn't want a monolithic group of people shaping that world. You should see the value of democratic participation by all groups.
>Admission to top schools (or any schools) has never been the imaginary 100% objective panacea that you're swooning over, wherein someone edges out the next candidate by a point on their SAT score.
Sorry, your belief is that some easily gameable standardized test correlates well with merit, particularly at the higher percentiles of the distribution?
I mean, if it's "easily gameable", why doesn't everybody just game it? There exist real score differences in practice.
You can say that it's "gameable" in response to time and resources spent studying, but that's actual learning, so of course that would result in higher scores.
It's one thing to say "Some people don't have enough time/resources", but it's another to pretend that these tests carry no signal.
Studying for how to game the SATs is not actual learning, in the sense of being generalizable knowledge or skills. It is learning how to game the exam.
It is also incredibly time and resource dependent, as you have surmised. Guess which strata of society tends to come out on top in that environment?
Yet the word was coined. It didn’t exist before. Then it was coined. Sure the made up BS that is meritocracy existed before. Which is the main point. It’s a BS status quo term for something that does not exist.
Is it BS if everyone with skill and imagination aspires to reach the highest level in a given field and is rewarded for their effort?
Would you rather have such a doctor treat you if you were to say, go to a hospital, or would you rather put your life in the hands of someone who is there to fill some coined up quota?
I disagree with the current top-voted comment, so I wanted to add a defense that doesn't care about disadvantaged white people:
Harvard is one of the core institutions for inducting new members of the US elite, aka the people who will be placed into positions of power over the next 10-20 years.
Deciding who gets in primarily on racial and gendered grounds without even a fig leaf requirement of intelligence or academic competence is going to deeply wound US culture. This is supposed to be an ideology abandoned in the 60s. Abandoned for good reasons, I might add. The universities are publicly and purposefully screwing up decades of social progress and the shockwaves could be broad because racial ideologies do tend to get out of control.
> without even a fig leaf requirement of intelligence or academic competence
College entrance exams do not test for intelligence or academic competence. They test for ability to do well on the exam, which is governed primarily by a student's socioeconomic status.
> College entrance exams do not test for intelligence or academic competence. They test for ability to do well on the exam, which is governed primarily by a student's socioeconomic status.
What is the signal Harvard uses to test for intelligence or academic competence? So far I only have learned that SAT and ACT are not it. Whaat is?
I wrote a bit more in [0], but in short my point is that they don't "test for intelligence or academic competence". The idea that standardized college entrance exams like the ACT and SAT are useful predictors of these things is a lie sold to you by their manufacturers, made believable only because they obfuscate the truth: that these tests are predominantly indicators of economic means and stability.
There does not exist a meaningful test of general intelligence that outputs a number that is equally meaningful to people from all socioeconomic (or even cultural) backgrounds. Similarly, there does not exist a meaningful test of academic potential (aside from a student's existing academic record).
College entrance exams are a scam meant to make money for the people who manufacture them. I say this as someone who did pretty well on every standardized exam I took, and felt guilty because I knew students who performed worse and had fewer college prospects than I did because of it, even though I knew they were better students who would easily out-perform me at the more prestigious institutions to which I was admitted in most meaningful metrics.
If they were really objectively driven I'm pretty sure Harvard etc would accept the graduating class of the same handful of high schools every single year.
"Objective" entry is never coming back to college admissions.
It's not sufficient that a metric be objective. The student's astrological sign is objective. But it's not a useful measure of college readiness.
Standardized test scores do very little to predict college success when controlling for other variables. And they're trivial to game.
They're a relic of back when people believed in IQ tests were useful selection criteria. Maybe there will be standardized tests in the future that are more useful, but we don't have those yet.
Yes of course it's in dispute. It's so dominant a dispute in intelligence research that it's hard to imagine anyone being familiar with research on IQ and not knowing that it's in dispute.
IQ tests are maybe ok at doing population-level correlations, but not at predicting the success of any given individual. Tons of things are correlated with intelligence, and IQ has the virtue that it's easy to measure. So it has uses for things like research studies.
But as an actual filter when you care about performance it's not great. Things like high school GPA are easier to measure and more predictive of college success.
standardized test scores, that is to say IQ test scores, are by far the strongest predictors of success available in any domain of the social sciences; nothing comes close, not even wealth. obviously high scores are no guarantee of anything, but there is nothing else that compares. to disregard them is to abandon the pretense of objectivity for nepotism.
>OP's point was "This sucks, they're doing away with objective criteria."
Actually, standardized testing does not represent objective criteria for a number of reasons, so that's an incorrect assumption.
But, my point was why do we also just assume that it "sucks" to do away with it? Where's the evidence that they are effective criteria?
If we're demanding proof that they are not effective, then it's fair to question how we established they are effective in the first place. Else, it's really just a default assumption that represents a positive assertion (i.e. an unsubstantiated claim).
I've been on HN for several years. The quality was once much higher than it is now, but HNers have always been willing to call out posturing and logical holes.
>You have absolutely nothing to contribute but useless rhetoric. I asked for sources to whomever I responded to,..
Right. And if you already agreed with SquishyPanda's statement, you would not have requested a source. So, I just asked you to source why you believe what you believe. Why is that any different? In fact, that answer would add more to the thread.
I mean, if you believe standardized tests are valid for the stated purposes, then that's the positive assertion. Have you questioned it?
If not, then why not? If so, then what did you conclude and on what evidence? Please share.
>Just don't waste my time with these pointless comments of yours.
To be fair, I asked you for a source, just as you did of someone else. You wasted your own time with your unsolicited rant.
This is so dangerously drunk on Kool Aid, I can barely manage to reply. The SAT was begun in the first place to even out the different schools people came from so that elite schools couldn't just slide people in, or due to grade inflation, or whatever (and race!)
You make a distinction without a difference in this case, and what other variables are you controlling for? Class rank? That can't be gamed, you think? Rich people will always game the system, whatever it is. In many cases, the alternatives are AP exams, which aren't even available in all schools.
