The whole "holistic review" crap should be banned. It was originally invented to reduce the number of Jewish people [1]. It is still being used for illegal or illicit discrimination of one kind or another.
This article [2] says "holistic review" is subterfuge... it is how colleges make admission decisions based on factors they would rather not talk about.
It's a hard problem and anyone who says it's easy (including "just look at SAT/GPA!!") shouldn't be taken seriously.
The problem with SAT, GPA is that once everyone knows what you're measuring, they optimize for that measure, and it loses its meaning.
Of ten kids with no particular extra tutoring over what they got in their average public school, SAT and GPA are going to tell you a lot about underlying aptitude.
Have one of those kid's parents send the kid to a bunch of extra tutoring, and it ruins the ability to do the comparison.
Have every kid get all that exact same level of tutoring and it's back to an even playing field, but you've managed to ruin everyone's childhood.
And you might've beaten a lot of creativity and other useful-for-real-life but less useful for mass-produced-college-education skills out of them.
Today we're somewhere in between - well-off kids often get the helicopter-parent-study-to-the-test short-term-maximization childhood; less well-off ones do not.
So you need a new metric, or some secret sauce, but the secret sauce is only useful if it's secret. And if it's secret, it's hard to tell if it's legitimately trying to value the right things...
If we were starting schools greenfield it might make sense to just let them all do whatever they want, and then see how their graduates do, but... we're saddled with a lot of legacy shit from existing wealth, past wrongs, etc, that make that real tough.
> well-off kids often get the helicopter-parent-study-to-the-test short-term-maximization childhood; less well-off ones do not.
This criticism of standardized tests is ubiquitous, but what never, ever seems to be discussed is whether holistic review of many facets actually improves this problem or simply entrenches the well-off further.
Say you're a poor, smart kid who works to support a dysfunctional family. You want to go to a life-changing school. Would you rather prove your potential by simply taking a test, perhaps along with a brief note about your disadvantaged background, or would you rather have to submit materials reflecting ten different dimensions of yourself, all of which the wealthy have hired armies of consultants to optimize for them, and networks of insiders to feed them knowledge of what the schools want to see?
We don't have to answer that because the schools have never asked. It was never their goal to get poor students in the first place, and income statistics of admits at Ivies show this clearly.
In practice the wealthy and connected are likely to be somewhat advantaged either way. Whatever system you set up is going to get gamed, whether that means having someone ghostwrite/coach their admissions essays, exaggerate their recommendation letters, prep them (or even help them cheat) on admissions tests, train them in exclusive sports, help them obtain experiences inaccessible to other students such as working in a research laboratory or visiting exotic places, or just directly bribe the school with cash. But IMO you still have to try to push back against those games.
The purely test-based system is absolutely ruinous for some kinds of ambitious parents’ children. Look at the childhoods of kids growing up in e.g. South Korea or some Chinese social classes. It’s nonstop test prep from morning to night starting from age 3 or 4 through the end of high school. Sure some of the kids who succeed in that system are “working hard for it”, but at what cost?
And while one particular extraordinary disadvantaged kid might succeed in that system, it’s not any kind of general recipe for social mobility or fixing large-scale social justice problems.
Best thing is probably something straightforward that can't be gamed like a difficult to game SAT. Instead we have a complicated set of criteria that can basically only be gamed by rich people. Worst case scenario if you are are poor and want to get into one of these colleges.
While I agree in principle, I don’t think this would easily work at super prestigious schools like Harvard, since there would be far too many applicants.
Harvard has about 1700 undergraduates per class (total undergraduate population ~7000), with an acceptance rate of 4%. That means they get around 40,000 applicants for each freshman class. Harvard’s matriculation rate is around 80%, so we can conservatively assume that somewhat less of those 40,000 applicants would enroll in your proposed trial period, say 50%.
Even if the weed-out period was just the first semester of freshman year, how would it handle an influx of 20,000 additional undergrads for that single semester? For reference, Harvard’s entire student body (including all graduate/professional degree students) is around 30,000.
> The purely test-based system is absolutely ruinous for some kinds of ambitious parents’ children. Look at the childhoods of kids growing up in e.g. South Korea or some Chinese social classes.
It's not the test doing that, it's the parents. If it weren't a test they'd target whatever else is being used as the evaluation metric.
According to Washington Post and Slate, both being rather progressive, SAT prep might improve scores 10-20 points on average, with greater effect on the math section. There is a paper on the ACT website suggesting 30-60 points.
Downward adjustments for high performing demographics can be double that.
A cup of coffee would probably see similar or better improvements than test prep.
Khan Academy claims that doing their test prep is associated with a 115-point increase. Fortunately, their test prep is free, and is usable by anyone with access to a computer/phone/library.
I don't know about the SAT prep specifically, but much of their content is also downloadable for offline use, which is pretty cool.
Among admits, there are small differences in actual test scores especially among whites and Asians.[1] Also, there are racial gaps among actually using SAT prep.[2] Whites may actually be the least likely to use test prep courses depending on which source you look at.[3] I guess if you are applying to Harvard, test prep could actually be pretty significant.
When Harvard makes it decisions, test prep could actually be a major factor in admission there since scores are so close(assuming the numbers you gave). Especially since they try to reach out to people in different regions of the US.
The Slate article says the points effect is modest but also that a few points make a big difference to college admissions at the selective schools.
I also question how the controlling is done. The control group does better seemingly from doing the test more. You'd think that's one of the things that shouldn't be controlled for. After all isn't it part of test prep?
> Have every kid get all that exact same level of tutoring and it's back to an even playing field, but you've managed to ruin everyone's childhood
Spending a summer studying for the SAT is both more approachable and less disruptive to childhood than putting together a bunch of bullshit extracirrculars.
Spending a summer studying for the SAT is a 100% waste of time, with no redeeming value whatsoever beyond playing an admissions game. Every hour that students collectively spend on SAT prep is an hour thrown away, not spent on some activity with more social/personal value. People encouraging all students to spend hours on this are effectively advocating an extra uncompensated time tax on high school students. It’s grotesque, especially considering students are already forced to spend thousands of hours in school.
“Extracurricular” activities are only bullshit if you make them so. Otherwise, the whole point of “extracurricular” activity is that it is outside of the curriculum, based on students’ personal choices about how to spend their time. There are thousands of worthwhile ways to spend time outside of school, and no particular “bullshit” choice is forced on anyone. (Indeed, admissions officers are more interested in the students who find their own interesting things to do vs. do stuff they think is bullshit but are told to do by their parents or others.)
The equivalent of the kind of personally edifying extracurricular activity you’re talking about would be actually reading a lot and doing a lot of math, and then just doing well on the SAT using your actual knowledge. If you’re the kind of kid who would do that then great, just like if you’re the kind of kid who naturally becomes #1 at archery or something then great. Most kids are not like that, and it is assumed that whatever the criteria for admission is, most people will be gaming it. From that perspective, the extracurriculars game is way more time consuming, money consuming, and more bullshit.
> actually reading a lot and doing a lot of math, and then just doing well on the SAT using your actual knowledge
Yes, this is what we should encourage kids to do. It is both more interesting/meaningful and more effective than test prep per se, because it better accords with how human brains store and process information. The skills learned are also dramatically more transferrable to other tasks/activities, and much more valuable to society.
Test prep is a pathetic substitute for actually learning things.
It doesn’t take a special kind of person to learn and do things for their own sake. Every child naturally behaves this way. It just takes a society/culture that values humanity and learning not to smash those kids’ basic curiosity by the time they get to high school age.
That's fine, but we should compare apples with apples: actual-learning SAT prep with actual-learning extracurriculars, or cram-school SAT prep with cram-school extracurriculars.
I agree with you that this sort of mission of self-actualization for kids is a laudable goal. I personally hated school and spent 12-18 blowing off boring coursework to indulge my curiosity with computers. In that ideal world, I'd say it's a tossup between whether reading/math or exploratory hobbies are more important (probably depends on the person). But in the world we live in, where kids are burdened with the reality of practical concerns, especially the ones for whom college is supposed to be their ticket to social advancement — in other words, in the world where it's a given that kids are going to be doing meaningless hoop-jumping — the SAT tends to be, I think, a much more reasonable hoop to jump through than faking extracurriculars and "holistic" merit. Like 'rayiner says, a summer of studying, versus four years of starting fake clubs, doing various competitions, trips to third world countries, volunteer work, collecting awards across various hobbies, and whatever else is on the checklist now (these were the things in my day).
You don’t have to start fake clubs, take trips, volunteer, collect awards, or whatever else if you don’t want to though. Claims that some particular assortment of these is necessary an invention by parents/whoever who can’t conceive of time spent and choices made for reasons other than winning some game.
Activities like music/debate/programming/sport contests, tutoring younger kids, performing science experiments, hacking on computers, getting short stories published, working a part-time job, working for a political campaign, or whatever else have some intrinsic value/interest and are not just meaningless busywork for many (most?) of their participants.
In my experience the kids who pick one or two things they find personally interesting and pursue those out of real excitement end up significantly more successful in the admissions "game" than the kids who spend every waking moment trying to play it as a game per se. While also having a better time. And this is not because they are any inherently smarter or more motivated or whatever.
Rayiner almost always comes across to me as a cynic whose main goal is running up his family’s score in the money-earning game and who looks down on anyone with humanistic goals as merely an unsuccessful fellow cynic. Maybe that’s unfair, but that’s my persistent impression comment after comment, year after year. YMMV.
I don't get why people keep pretending like less well off children do not have access to this.
People like me growing up needed this as an avenue as this was often times one of the only avenues available to the less fortunate for standing out.
We don't have access to other privileged activities that holistic reviews love.
People that want to take this away from us are short sighted and demonstrative of how the privileged have no idea what the impact their policies have on the people they ostensibly want to help.
At the end of the day, yes there are a lot of rich kids who get helicopter parented and sent to ivy leagues and they perpetuate the system of benefitting the few who have the most resources in life. But quite a few kids who are less fortunate, perhaps a bad combination of less fortunate with terrible homelifes who have little chance to succeed in school, are able to move to fairly high quality state schools after doing a couple years at what are usually free, if not incredibly affordable community colleges.
The problem is with the existence of colleges like the Ivys, or MIT, or any other massive private research university. There is no sense in schools like this holding so much wealth with their disgustingly large endowments. Why can't these schools be broken up, or, better yet, nationalized (or turned into state schools)? The problem is not affirmative action or prep-school kids, but the very existence of these massive, corrupt institutions which function increasingly not so much as halls of education but hedge-funds for the ultra-wealthy.
Holistic review can still exist on the basis of impartial factors subject to quantitative analysis. The strength of the SFFA case is that there's no way the numbers the public or perhaps even the plaintiffs have privileged access to can avoid reasonable doubt that quotas exist in the current system. That's why many top colleges have recently announced they will stop requiring SAT scores, because the data on their racial breakdown can be easily obtained.
In theory, other measures of student achievement: grades, extracurricular activities, personal statements, letters of recommendation. GPA by itself isn't terrible for this, though pairing it with test scores is an improvement over both it by itself and test scores by themselves for prediction of academic success in college.
In practice: things that satisfy ideological goals and maximize fundraising outlook for the institution.
According to a professor I know, the average quality/preparedness of students has dropped with the removal of the SAT where he teaches. A high SAT score was never going to get you accepted to a good school, but a low SAT score used to get you rejected. Removing that filter makes room for less objective measures (I know the SAT isn't particularly objective either) to get more weight.
To be clear, I strongly oppose removal of SATs as a metric used to evaluate candidates.
That said, there's a confounder here: schools which remove SATs as an admissions metric are schools that are looking for different things than academic preparedness/quality. It's likely that they're using methods and rubrics to deemphasize the predictive quality of GPAs as well.
GPA is fairly objective (though less so than the SAT) and predictive (more so than the SAT) as a standard. Accounting for the courses taken and the high schools the courses are taught at, you could select a class purely based on grades that is highly qualified and prepared (and incidentally would also have high SAT scores; GPA and SAT are correlated). But a university removing the SAT from admissions is also likely to be trying deemphasize the component of GPA that's predictive of quality as well.
To add one thing here: the professor in question is at a school in the top 20 worldwide. Almost every applicant had a basically perfect GPA from high school, but some of them had SAT scores that were 70th percentile or below. The SAT seems to "scale up" to that market much better than GPA as a predictor.
Right; GPA is a coarse representation of performance on coursework. A 4.0 at Stuy with coursework on real analysis and organic chemistry means something very different than a 4.0 at a struggling inner city public school where the hardest math class is Algebra 2.
My point is more that universities can (and do!) create a different representation of coursework performance that accounts for rigor. But a university that eliminates the SAT is also likely intentionally making that representation less predictive of undergraduate performance to allow weighing of things more than preparedness/quality as indicated by grades.
What makes SATs so important is that you get a very limited preparedness signal from kids with 4.0 at the crappy school; combining test scores with GPA allows for a selective school to get a much more meaningful signal for quality/preparedness.
My motivation here is to push back against the scores alone are enough idea, though it's an understandable reaction to the people who by all appearances think quality/academic preparedness should be a secondary concern in admissions.
According to the recent "Task Force on Standardized Testing" from the UCs (https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/committees/... page 23) SATs are better predictors than GPAs for most demographics, although both together is unsurprisingly better than either alone.
This seems natural to me, as GPA seems inherently less objective (different schools, different teachers).
I think it's fairly strange that universities are getting rid of using them. One explanation is that it helps protect them from lawsuits like those against Harvard, as there is less incriminating evidence. I fail to see how it actually helps students.
You don't need to speak Spanish to be Hispanic! [0] [1]
There are many White and Asian people who tick the Hispanic box, thanks to Hispanic-sounding names... Often at the suggestion of their high school counselor.
This is kind of a nitpick but the SFFA case doesn't try to argue that there are racial quotas, instead, they argue that whites, specifically, are admitted where Asians should be. This, despite whites being the only race that is accepted disproportionately less relative to their general population percentage.
SFFA doesn't attempt to say anything about other racial categories but that Harvard has designed backdoors to admit whites at the expense of Asians. The case may not have any impact on racial quotas or affirmative action if it wins. If it wins, there will just be fewer white people admitted I assume.
I agree that much of their use of "holistic" factors is simple discrimination and should be illegal, but considering other non-academic factors (arguably including character) seems reasonable, if not necessary, given the intent of these schools to build future leaders in various fields.
Quantitative measures can only give you so much information about a student. GPA is questionably useful past a point, where it starts to have more to do with grade inflation and gaming the system than differences in hard work or ability.
That leaves the SAT, which is far more of a level playing field than things like extracurriculars or "personal statements" that also end up reflecting your social class and ability to play the admissions game more than ability. Yet admitting students based solely on a single standardized test seems to disincentivize working hard at other pursuits that may actually bring more to the classroom than slightly higher test scores.
If there is a magical way to gauge character in a short amount of time then sure, however I doubt most people will do any better than a coin flip when asked to predict the "character" of someone without having known the person deeply.
> If there is a magical way to gauge character in a short amount of time then sure
This is key. Many universities that claim to do "holistic reviews" don't have the time or resources to actually do holistic reviews. University of Washington is an example. UW gives application reviewers 8 minutes per application. And who are these reviewers? Do they have the knowledge and experience to do a "holistic review" in 8 minutes, including reading essays and personal statements and so on? Nope! They hire grad students, retirees etc. to act as application reviewers [1].
The thing is, getting into a top level school requires maximizing all of GPA, SATs, and what might be called "extracurricular appeal"; this crowds out a bunch of different pursuits, more so than grinding test-taking ability (which has rapidly decreasing marginal returns) alone would. You might hope that those different pursuits being crowded out would instead feed into increased extracurricular appeal, but in practice there's a very particular subset of things that universities care about when it comes to extracurriculars. Indeed, some of them (like leadership activities in 4H, ROTC, or Future Farmers of America) actually hurt your chances of admission, which seems insane if you're looking for a variety of impressive individuals who can bring diverse perspectives.
If I were dictator of college admissions across the US, I'd use tests and GPA to coarsely bucket individuals (into basically capable of doing the work or not at each institution), and use a lottery to distribute spots where demand outstrips supply.
> The whole "holistic review" crap should be banned.
I'd very strongly disagree with this. If you just use grades then you are benefiting the rich to a very high degree. As the rich can pay any amount for tutors and the kids don't need to work, hence being able to use a far higher amount of their waking time for studying than someone who needs to work can.
Other factors should be factored into admissions. But the moment you agree that grades alone should be the only determination of who you allow in then you are by definition back to holistic admittance requirements.
How would you balance who to let in between a kid who has tutors and no job who gets higher marks than a kid who has to work to feed their family and has lower marks if you don't have a holistic review process?
Grades alone just doesn't seem fair and would only make wealth inequality worse as the rich get richer and the poor would fall further behind.
The idea that "holistic" admissions is used to benefit teens working to support their family is not realistic. An Asian-American kid who spends most of his waking hours doing deliveries to help keep his parents' struggling Chinese restaurant afloat is absolutely not getting admitted to Harvard, even if he is a valedictorian with a perfect SAT score. In practice, holistic admissions means admitting students who wouldn't otherwise be admitted in order to satisfy admissions officers' ideological or financial goals.
Unfortunately, the law currently treats “white” people as a single group, ignoring the cultural and indeed ethnic differences within the group. Harvard is racist against German-descended midwesterners just as it’s racist against Asians, and for many of the same reasons.
ANY statistic other than race can be gamed by rich families. It seems like it would at least be harder for a rich teenager to game a standardized test, as no matter what study is required.
Compare this to political activism, prestigious internships, club membership, and other “holistic” application line items. Poor teenagers have no realistic way to build up these items for their application, especially if they’re working at Burger King after school.
The suspicious part of me feels that dropping standardized testing from applications is just a way to get MORE rich, advantaged legacy kids in the door.
> If you just use grades then you are benefiting the rich to a very high degree. As the rich can pay any amount for tutors and the kids don't need to work, hence being able to use a far higher amount of their waking time for studying than someone who needs to work can.
So what? Even if it's unfair that some group of people were able to study more and have better teachers, the fact is they are better educated people--fair or not.
What about taking someone who is significantly less educated/prepared due to unfortunate circumstances in their first 18 years of life is made right by thrusting them into an environment where they're unprepared to compete for 4 years?
I say this as one of these people. I should not have been admitted to the school I went to. I got a terrible GPA my first year that progressively improved over the course of the years, but even after catching up to the Exeter students by my senior year, my GPA was shit from being averaged out with the first couple years. There are plenty more people in my same position who decided to just bow out of the competition, and studied subjects where they weren't forced to compete with the well-educated magnet/prep schoolers.
> As the rich can pay any amount for tutors and the kids don't need to work
The rich can pay any amount for a professional to write their entire college essay, milking every diversity advantage they’ve got, send their kids to collect awards in every extracurricular activity under the sun, and take annual summer trips to third world countries to collect subject matter to write about.
Every concern that you have is literally way worse when you change the metric from grades to some other more nebulous metric. At least a poor kid with a 140 IQ can get good grades and a 1570 on the SAT. He can’t take summer trips to Africa so he can write about the orphanage he helped start or something.
> How would you balance who to let in between a kid who has tutors and no job who gets higher marks than a kid who has to work to feed their family and has lower marks if you don't have a holistic review process?
Give a bonus to kids with low parental income/assets.
You need to separate the types of rich. Yes, if your family is rich enough to name a Harvard building, you'll be in the legacy admissions pipeline, but for those who are merely upper middle class, they have a much higher chance of getting in via only test scores than those who don't have the means to hire outside tutors for their children.
I'd recommend reading those that disagree with race-based admission (Jason Riley for example) as to why it tends to be a bad idea.
My take on the argument against what you are saying is that it is effectively lowering the standards for certain groups of people to get in. This can 1 of 2 effects:
(1) those that are admitted to a college where the standards expected of their students are higher will mean that these lower-performing people will fail out.
(2) the university either lowers the standards for all, or creates specific majors that are "easier" for people to attempt to be able to graduate.
Neither of these are good options.
Guess what? Life isn't fair. Kids that grew up in a family that promotes education and learning will perform better in these high-tier colleges (on average). The reason is that the kids were able to (or forced to) perform to certain standards much earlier on in life (see Tiger Moms). Kids with parents that don't have the time (or care) to focus on a child's education will obvious not have the same skills/training at 18 compared to some others. Does this make them less smart? Nope! These kids can still be served very well by lower-tier colleges where they can still learn a lot and develop their skills. They just aren't as prepped for certain universities.
If we want our society to continue to be a meritocracy, holistic review needs to DIAF.
I think I agree with most of what you wrote, especially race based administration.
But I have a hard time thinking that grades alone is the best determinant of who should get into university, but the moment you use anything other than straight up grades, you are back to a holistic process, which the OP claims is worse.
What makes KA the best for SAT prep? It is free for everyone, assuming you have a phone/computer (which most kids do, either personally or through school)
This article [2] says "holistic review" is subterfuge... it is how colleges make admission decisions based on factors they would rather not talk about.
[1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-fa...