Anybody cheering the exclusion of some test or other, because it was a pain to study for in high school, is simply not noticing the frog-boiling secondary effects going on. Every bit of emphasis taken out of objective results mean more advantage for smooth talking, photogenic, well-connected people.
Yes, some misguided parents waste thousands of dollars on SAT courses. But students can also prep using the $20 official book, which is what I did, and what I still regard as the best option. Even if money helps incrementally for tests, it helps for everything else even more. International volunteer work? An inspiring (i.e. college counselor approved) essay? Recommendation letters from authoritative people? Anything that requires equipment, like computer labs or robotics? It all costs money -- and in many cases literally measures nothing besides how much money you have.
But that's entirely the point. The people bitching about how the SAT isn't fair aren't smart poor people who are being beaten out by upper middle class losers, but rather upper middle class losers being beaten out by smart poor people. They tell themselves that the test isn't fair, but a part of them knows that they could never get into the 1500's even with all the prep in the world, so they try to get the admissions changed to a more bullshit-centric approach that they know favors them. And they say they are doing it to help the poor and disadvantaged to give themselves moral cover.
I think this is true about the SAT but the subject tests are kind of niche and I assume a lot of poor people actually don't know about them. If you're not in an environment where a lot of people are applying to top schools, it's unlikely to be something you are familiar with
Top schools are more than fairly niche, especialy at the very top of the very top like MIT, which is extremeley niche.
Source: I was a poor kid who got into UC Berkeley based largely on my SAT II scores.
Any poor kid seriously considering applying to MIT or Cal is high information enough to be aware SAT IIs exist.
Do ya'll understand how patronizing and insulting this bigotry of low expectations is to brilliant trailer park trash kids like 1990s me?
PS I'm rich and early retired now thanks to (Bitcoin and) setting/enforcing high standards for myself, not lowered expectations.
I didn't have $20 to spend on an SAT prep book, so I checked some out from the HS library. It wasn't hard, it simply took initiative.
SAT IIs let applicants pick an area in which they can shine above and beyond the genereic g-weighted diagnostic.
My gifts are largely verbal, so the Writing subject test was my once-in-a-lifetime to demonstrate objective superiority to my peer group, regardless of income and race.
My SAT IIs were obviously vital to the package presented to the admissions committee because I lacked two key things critical to UC's usual stringent paradigm. One, my GPA was below Cal's 4.0+ standards. Two, I didn't take a single AP test (Dad's attitute towards APs was the same as Driving School: "It was free when I was in HS so I'm not gonna pay for that").
I approached getting into Cal FROM OUT OF STATE like a hacker: telling the system what it wants/expects to hear. That entailed a deep dive on how admissions officers think and weigh applications. Every single trade-off I made in HS was in light of that strategy. Job or heavy extra-curriculars? I'll just be broke and stack trophies. AP Econ/English/Bio or Debate? I'll suffer in Honors/Regulars and stack moar trophies. Dating or academic decathalon? Same. Prom or debate tournament? Ditto.
From this point going forward it is no longer a usual extracurricular item. The school that they are applying to has specifically told all applicants that they don’t want to hear about their subject test score. It would be unusual to include it, not to mention blatantly violating application submission instructions, which applicants are expected to carefully follow.
In any case, his name is “cognitive elite.” If he is who he says he is, then he would have find other ways to prove his eliteness/worthiness if subject tests were not being considered for any applicant. He had the initiative to study for that test. If he knew that it would have been a waste of time to study for it, then maybe he would have taken that same time and initiative to do something else to make his application stand out.
>If he is who he says he is, then he would have find other ways to prove his eliteness/worthiness if subject tests were not being considered
No, that's completely wrong and totally incorrect!
The SAT II Writing subject test was the only way for me to make up for lack of AP English, which is basically a prerequisite for the school hosting the world's top English and Rhetoric departments.
>maybe he would have taken that same time and initiative to do something else to make his application stand out.
Nope, I would have simply crossed MIT off the very short list (Stanford, Cal, MIT) of extremely niche institutions fortunate enough to be considered within my purview for eventual attendence.
MIT's anti-meritocratic, clown-world decision to ignore SAT IIs makes me furious. To hell with MIT and their woke, filthy Epstein-tainted staff/faculty/endowment. They are pulling up the class-mobility ladder on kids like me while pretending it's for the sake of social justice.
It just seems to me that MIT has looked at their data and saw that subject test scores are not a key differentiator between students who do well at MIT and students who do not. You’ve already mentioned MIT is niche. Is your alma mater with the top English and Rhetoric departments dropping these tests, or is MIT doing so? If subject test scores are not a differentiator of success at MIT, why should MIT make students go through with them, especially if that time and effort can be put towards doing other things that actually are better indicators? Maybe programming projects, etc, or whatever their case may be. Call it woke but maybe their actual numbers support their decision?
>MIT has looked at their data and saw that subject test scores are not a key differentiator between students who do well at MIT and students who do not.
Objection. Assumes Facts Not In Evidence.
Following the OP link reveals no such analysis, only a statement SAT IIs are being suddenly being ignored because "We believe this decision will improve access for students applying to MIT." That's coded language, 100% typical for their woke, clown-world admissions functionaries.
>maybe their actual numbers support their decision?
Maybe we should be verifying the actual numbers instead of swallowing whatever just-so story MIT plops out to justify the woke thing they wanted to do anyway.
After reviewing other HN articles from MIT admissions, such as “Picture yourself as a stereotypical male” (which includes the blatantly racist gem "A Good Night’s Sleep, A Hearty Breakfast, and Being White"), along with "Black Lives Matter...until they don't", and the Epstein fiasco, it becomes very clear MIT doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Let’s go back to the point where he said poor kid. It’s really hard to get those opportunities. Many poor kids have to work through high school or provide unpaid child care for their family, many of those also have to deal with food and/or housing insecurity. It’s extremely difficult to not only have the connections to get in someplace for an internship or a volunteer experience for your scholastic resume but also to be able to get there or have the time outside of work/school/family to do it.
> PS I'm rich and early retired now thanks to (Bitcoin and) setting/enforcing high standards for myself, not lowered expectations.
Awesome!
> My gifts are largely verbal, so the Writing subject test was my once-in-a-lifetime to demonstrate objective superiority to my peer group, regardless of income and race.
Same, though I don't really consider skills like oratory to be a gift; rather I think it's something you simply refine with time and experience.
I was actually the first to score a perfect score (at the time) in my English Placement Exam at the University I ultimately started at, however, my writing legibility is admittedly horrendous and I was docked 2% after I was asked to read it aloud for the inconvenience of the reviewers: yielding a 98%. It was about the Tobacco Industry--I understood this topic well as my childhood best friend's Father was an Exec at Phillip Morris.
But, and I have to ask as I think this follows the Bitcoin meritocracy ethos: wouldn't you have preferred to have your admission be based on your ability to have positively contributed to your field of study rather than some arbitrary score on an exam which, if you were like me had to prep and take several times before you took it serious? And probably purposely forgot 85% of it as soon as you got up and walked out the door?
I mean isn't awesome to see a project where some of the most World renowned Academic Cryptographers (Adam Back) work alongside College dropouts (Peter Todd), and absolute nutters in the best way (Amir Takki) contribute to a project on equal terms and be judged by their skills rather than anything else? Especially when you see how vital its role can be in your financial well being?
That's what I always thought University was going to be, rather than the petty politicking non-sense I saw. Which is acutely seen when trying to get Peer Reviewed Journals to be even approved for review.
I personally have since shunned academia after my experience, I have a BS in Biology and that was enough BS for one life time; but a part of me wonders what I could contribute to my field now that I have experience in Agriculture, Culinary, and (very limited) Aerospace fields as well as a background in Automotive Industry and its Supply Chains.
Side note: I was that guy in class in University setting up study groups among my peers for notes, homework assignments, and lecture recordings because I had to work during school hours and I couldn't attend class nor afford the required texts; so I understand very well what having to over-perform despite not having the supposed 'bare essentials,' is like as my upper division years were during the financial crisis.
>wouldn't you have preferred to have your admission be based on your ability to have positively contributed to...
Uni-bound HS kids don't usually know which field(s) they will study, hence the S.A.T. is a Test for generic Scholastic Aptitude using general intelligence metrics (math+verbal) as a proxy. HS me intended to be a cyberlaw lawyer at Wilson Sonsini but wound up in cogsci, a field HS me wasn't even aware existed! There was NO WAY my admission could have been based on my eventual contributions to cogsci.
Academic achievement was my ticket out of the trailer park so I always took it seriously, starting in middle school when I devoured a book called 999 Words You Need To Know For The SAT. I didn't "purposely forget 85% of it" after the tests, I still know them all and never stopped building on that foundation, serving Master Satoshi well while fighting against the BCashers in the trenches of the Blockchain Wars.
Bitcoin's meritocracy is an extension of the hacker ethos (on the internet no one knows your a dog...etc) and yes, I love it. I idolize Back and adore trollish Todd, and while Amir's cringe black flag left-wing anarchism is tedious it's forgivable given the obvious sincerity.
If your Uni experience was "petty politicking non-sense" SFYL, but that's on you. Should have transferred and done STEM at a different/better institution.
I did 3 years then dropped out for financial reasons. The degree meant nothing to me; the Promethean knowledge base and powerful lifelong social network are what I wanted. But I'll always be an academic at heart.
On top of that exam dumps are much less efficient when it comes to SAT IIs, where questions are much more diverse an subject knowledge is essential. SAT I is the one that is easy to game.
Eh its all easily game-able. The SAT (and ACT) is a joke. So are the subject tests. The only subject test that wasn't laughable are the language ones (since you can't "intuit" spanish as easily as math or physics or chemistry). Its not bad if you are a good test taker (a dumb skill but a useful one) or wealthy. My friends were tutored idiots and did well (2200+ SAT, 700+ subject tests) and i was a good test taker (same scores). Its all garbage
The SATs have a top score, if it were easy to game you'd find many people would clump at the top. That would make it impossible to normalize that distribution into a bell-shape because they're all clustered into the same bucket with no way of spreading them.
OP's point was that the perfect scores remain consistently outside of people's grasp despite the variety of resources available to prep for the exam. I only once managed to hit perfect score and my other best scores were one or two questions off. I had been taking the test since I was 11 (for various extracurricular camps/activities) and prepped multiple times for them. The biggest scores jumps were more closely related with my age and academic achievements than anything else.
So the SATs are (almost certainly) 3-pl (actually 2) IRT models. Essentially, it's a multivariate generalised linear mixed model to estimate both question difficulty and participant ability.
Normally, they'll estimate the abilities on the logistic scale, and use the percentile to back transform to a standard normal.
Most people don't cluster at the top because they are a good proxy for g, which is an imaginary statistical construct that we use to explain differences in school outcomes.
So I had a long digression here about the usefulness of penalties for guessing, but it turns out the SATs don't do that anymore, so wth?
A lot of the reason the SATs are able to maintain a spread that lets them normalize the distribution is that they fill the tests with stupid tricks that fool people into wasting time. If you do a ton of prep then you learn to spot these tricks and then a lot of the questions become really easy and you can knock them off quickly.
A poor smart student may have mastery of the material but their score will suffer if they don't know the tricks.
No, but I think the point is a combination of Chesterton fence and Goodhart's law. The personal statments and the like, by becoming the primary targets, will cease to measure achivement, and instead measure wealth. So instead of changing without a plan, make a plan to replace SAT2 with something less subject to wealth
MIT is removing a test which rewards the wealthy and punishes the poor. That's good. But the other metrics that MIT currently use are more punishing to the poor, and more rewarding to the wealthy.
With the removal of this element, MIT is left relying on personal statements, recommendations, and the like. With those metrics as the targets, the kids of the wealthy will fund their child's various activities for the sake of giving them a better application.
I find this truly baffling. How can it be considered good use of time for someone to sink endless hours of time into learning the ins and outs of some stupid test that is not useful for anything? Just think about the man years of enthusiasm and creativity wasted on learning to score on a test, instead of something truly useful.
I understand why the students do it, I don't understand why anyone would consider it a good system.
There are plenty of kids in the US who can't afford to bring lunch to school, let alone pay $20 for a SAT prep book. Many of these kids don't have a computer or Internet access at home for that matter, so Khan Academy isn't much good to them either. When we talk about rich vs poor kids, there's a HUGE gap that many people don't realize.
Anecdote: When I was younger, I used to take a public bus to a local bookstore and work through the SAT practice books (on separate scrap paper of course).
It sounds like you didn't have to pick up younger siblings at school when you were younger. That's the reality for a lot of poor kids. Raised by a single parent, the older siblings are in charge of looking after the younger ones. The parent often does not get home from work until late (and may have multiple jobs).
I'm not saying the poor aren't disadvantaged. It's just that the disadvantages are more along the lines of attitudes towards education in the first place (along with everything else). There are also fewer people nearby that serve as an "example" on how to learn or get ahead.
I don’t think that gap is huge in terms of internet access - there’s certainly a gap but it’s mostly a function of parents limiting access in my experience.
84% of teens have smartphones in the US. A large percentage of that remaining 16% have access to internet at school, as 98% of schools have broadband internet.
> The SATs have a top score, if it were easy to game you'd find many people would clump at the top.
I understand and appreciate my school was statistically abnormal but that is exactly what happened. I graduated in a class 334 students and several achieved perfect scores. Perhaps more than a third of the students achieved greater than 1300 and greater than 20% achieved greater than 1400. This is when 1600 was the perfect score.
All these scores indicate is the degree of conditioning imposed upon a student. I know people want these tests to mean something more for personal reasons, but according to all available data this is biased wishful thinking. The research on standardized convergent testing indicates it is not a measure of academic success or potential, but rather an indicator/discriminator of class distinctions due to availability of preparation.
Because I did not come from well groomed pedigree, did not value the subculture of excess vanity, and came from a family that was lower positioned financially I deliberately inverted the goals for a personal social experiment. I wanted to see how close to the bottom I could get and still graduate on time. This was exciting because the risks were greater. If you fail to estimate the conditions correctly you don’t graduate whereas other people get a slightly lower test score or grade point average. Because the goals were different you had plan and weigh the conditions in unexpected ways. Even with all the effort I put in there were still 5 people who graduated with a lower class rank than me.
What impact did that have in later life? I did not get a free ride to an Ivy League school like many of my classmates, enter corporate management immediately out of college, or become a corporate executive within 10 years. I did enter and graduate college. I became a self taught software developer without much challenge and have found very low resistance attaining employment as a senior developer in my full time job. I also became a managing principal in my part time job without as much effort. The greatest tragedy in all this isn’t lost status or earning potential but how boring life has turned out.
If you had a multiple choice quiz with the actual questions hidden you would get a normal distribution in results. Anything where you sum lots of small random effects.
You're just bragging that you hit the ceiling on those tests.
That doesn't mean tests don't work; if you wanted to, you could have found much harder ones. (That's what I did, out of necessity. They wouldn't have given my app a second look if I hadn't.)
30 years ago, the ACT test changed enough that it was no longer a valid test to use as entry for Mensa. Prior to 1990, an ACT test could be used as evidence for Mensa admission.
So... the ACT wasn't always 'a joke', but doesn't have the same impact that it had decades ago.
That's irrelevant, what matters is that a high IQ society has a vested interest in measuring IQ as a proxy for general intelligence and standardized testing results should reliably correlate to IQ and general intelligence.
It's not impossible that these tests measure something other than general intelligence, that just happens to correlate with social outcomes (like historical, relative familial wealth).
IIRC general intelligence also doesn't simply measure speed of cognition, but also ability to choose what to focus on ("intuition"), which these tests do not measure.
Adoptees have IQs in line with their biological parents, not their adoptive ones. It’s heritable like every other psychological variable I’m aware of.
Speed of cognition is absolutely correlated with IQ but the difference in speed doesn’t cause the differences in results. Both are downstream of being more intelligent.
> Speed of information processing and general intelligence
> One hundred university students were given five tests of speed-of-processing, measuring their speed of encoding, short-term memory scanning, long-term memory retrieval, efficiency of short-term memory storage and processing, and simple and choice reaction time or decision-making speed. They were also given the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the Raven Advanced Progression Matrices. A number of multiple regression analyses show that the cognitive processing measures are significantly related to IQ scores. Other analyses indicate that this relationship cannot be attributed to the common content shared by the reaction time and the intelligence tests, nor to the fact that parts of the WAIS are timed. It is concluded that the reaction time tests measure basic cognitive operations which are involved in many forms of intellectual behavior, and that individual differences in intelligence can be attributed, to a moderate extent, to variance in the speed or efficiency with which individuals can execute these operations
There is no evidence connecting IQ to hereditary traits. This has been demonstrably proven false multiple times. What you are arguing is eugenics and that is patently false.
> Substantial genetic influence on cognitive abilities in twins 80 or more years old.
> General and specific cognitive abilities were studied in intact Swedish same-sex twin pairs 80 or more years old for whom neither twin had major cognitive, sensory, or motor impairment. Resemblance for 110 identical twin pairs significantly exceeded resemblance for 130 fraternal same-sex twin pairs for all abilities. Maximum-likelihood model-fitting estimates of heritability were 62 percent for general cognitive ability, 55 percent for verbal ability, 32 percent for spatial ability, 62 percent for speed of processing, and 52 percent for …
This is great for Swedish people. The problem is that humanity consists largely of not-Swedish people. Same for most studies of this kind, which are largely concerned with populations that are already genetically closely related; it stands to reason that the differences between people who are closely related will be more attributable to their inborn differences, than the differences between people who are not closely related. They haven't been able to do an interracial, intercultural comparison on this because socioeconomic circumstances are so substantially different between groups (and have been so since the rise of modern empirical research) that it's impossible to set up a decent comparative study.
So if intelligence is inherited, then children of geniuses should be uber-geniuses. And if intelligence is a desired trait, then people can breed for that. And that's eugenics, so I believe you're agreeing with me.
Or intelligence is correlated with familial wealth because it is hereditary and smarter people tend to end up in more complex cognitively demanding professions which tend to pay more.
Maybe? The confounding factors are many. How to account for war (which often accrues wealth to the most brutal among the reasonably intelligent), disease (where selection is based on behavior, e.g., adherence to cultural norms, not necessarily intelligence), disparities in wealth across geography and culture (relative shifts in the normal distribution of IQ across demographics are reflected exactly in measures of wealth)? Let alone that procreation necessarily requires the joining of individuals who might have disparities in wealth, or intelligence, or both.
I tend to err on the side of caution with this one.
This is more of a joke story, but a few years ago a friend of mine who is neither ambitious nor succesful surprisingly scored 165-170 on their test.
When they offered him a membership and told him the membership fee, his reaction was - Alright, but as I am in the top 5% of your members - should not you be paying me to hang out with you? :D :D :D
Well to be fair, those are the subset of high IQ people who have the time/desire to join a club about having a high IQ. Kind of an adverse selection bias
The overwhelming majority of the high IQ are not Mensa members. They are academics, doctors, lawyers, successful businesspeople, the kinds of people for whom it is more common in their friends group to have a Master’s degree than to be a high school dropout.
Those people are called academics. The kinds of Master’s degrees that are rent seeking credentialism, MBAs, MSWs, M.Ed.s are far more common than consolation prizes for those who didn’t get their Ph.D.
Alternatively it could be objection to numerous examples of somewhat arbitrary standardised testing which takes over student education to the exclusion of pretty much anything else, limiting a lot of the creativity and enjoyment students might otherwise take part it.
As someone who went to a boarding school on scholarhsip after moving from a bad public highschool and couldn't afford the $1600 SAT prep classes that preprogrammed in solvers in your calculator, I agree with you in general and deeply resonate with this argument.
However, my initial thought was that MIT maybe has so many perfect scores it's useful at this point and not really a differentiating factor.
For example they can afford to have a perfect 1:1 ratio of men to women for a tech school and I don't think they lower their standards for that.
On the contrary, I went to a highly ranked engineering school of the same limitations (limited other genres of degrees) and it was 30% females overall roughly, but actually in general it was more like 6%-8% females in the actual engineering degrees.
I worked in the admissions office one summer and was hard pressed to find a B on any Q4 report cards which was one of my summer tasks to ensure no early admission students entirely flunked out. I got to see other things like scores and in general I have to say even at a lesser well ranked school, and reading the averages of every incoming class, my notion is not that there is a difference between the scores of smart hard working lower middle class vs the upper rich as much as there is an over emphasis on the exam as a whole.
I agree objective results are very important, and I don't have an answer for a way to calibrate across schools. I think AP exam scores are better indicators but not all schools have AB or IB classes, etc.
It is really at the end of the day like most things about your commitment and ability to get something done regardless of how tangential you think it is to your core goals or study. In real life it is the same way there are lots of silly things people have to do all the time to get where they want to be and the weeding out is those who don't stop trying vs those who find a comfortable spot and stay there and blame everyone else for not having the right priorities.
Regardless, I still fill like even amongst high ranking SAT scorers, students are good at acing them now. My theory though I'm not confident is true is that studying for them has been systemized so much that it is actually difficult for MIT to tell above a certain threshold of score what the bell curve is.
This is all with the exception we need to realize that the SAT is not objective or perfect (the top comment this one is in response to) it was only less than five yrs ago they pulled sailing terminology from the reading and vocabulary portions after having to admit children growing up in the Bronx indeed might not have casually sailed not had sailing related literature in their curriculums, making this a bit unreasonable even for "guessing from context".
I've never been sailing but had no problem with the terminology because I read books. Books reflecting our civilization's Greco-Roman and Anglo-American historical ties to seafaring.
It's a form of cultural genocide to foment linguistic amnesia regarding the source domain for so many metaphors and narratives.
Nice use of "the Bronx" as a dog whistle for 'muh poor helpless minority yoof chilldrunz'. Guess what, smart kids of any color can read Treasure Island. Even in the Bronx, you can check out a copy of Moby Dick and 20000 Leagues Under the Sea. Even in landlocked Iowa, HS classes read Homer's Oddesy and Kon-Tiki.
Your unreasonable, emotional bleating about how we all need to lower our expectaions of non-sailing children is insulting to those of use who bothered to learn everything we could in spite of divorce, poverty, etc. and came out ahead.
Your unkind assumptions are full of holes and don't hold water; they are not seaworthy and should be scuttled forthwith.
The idea one can only learn about nautical terminology by literally being on the water is asinine and untrue. If you can't learn sailing terminology except by acutally sailing, you lack the capacity for abstract thought required for scholastic aptitude.
Removing sailing terminology is a way to subsidize illiteracy and pretend non-sailing kids are so stupid they need to be coddled with softened expectations.
That’s nuts, I got a 1590 on my second try with a calculator that turned out to be missing batteries, the day after going to a friends house and drinking with my only prep being reading a few paragraphs from some big book.
I had a lackluster performance on the new writing section the first time around or I wouldn’t have spent any time upping the original 1520 or whatever.
The point is to brag a little yes because I really never get to tell that story now that I’m 30.
The point is that rewarding me for skipping class to smoke weed with my friends because I aced some test turned out to produce a university student who spent a lot of time partying.
I’ve changed a lot since then, and I do also have the blessing of being a rather natural and amiable person to talk too, but there was a long time where by sheer luck I was getting glided along because I ace tests like those and AP tests, but it certainly not indicative of someone who was going to spend a lot of time producing some great research paper in college or anything.
So I always thought it was kind of bullshit and I nailed the shit out of that test.
Probably just an imperfect science all in all. Much like hiring tech workers.
I also had excellent SAT scores (I didn't bother to retake them, but perhaps I should've).
I also resonate with the idea that rewarding smart kids for being good at taking tests tends to undermine their work ethic and grit; when I finally got to math classes I couldn't just ace the test on, I had a very hard time; I truly didn't know how to buckle down, on my own, and do homework, because I'd never actually had to do that before.
On the other hand, when I'm hiring people, I've discovered I really do want to hire people who are able to ace simple math questions quickly. It's not sufficient, but it seems to be very correlated with being able to wrap your head around complicated code.
As I told a couple others, you just hit the ceiling.
That doesn't mean tests don't work; if you wanted to, you could have found much harder ones. (That's what I did, out of necessity. They wouldn't have given my app a second look if I hadn't.)
Those who fight for fair admissions on the basis of intellectual ability and academic potential should hold up the SAT and standardized testing as a cornerstone of the admissions process.
Standardized testing significantly levels the playing field for students across income brackets. Returns on study investment quickly diminish, and reaching a plateau on returns doesn't require much investment at all (internet connection and the purchase of a few large study manuals).
At my high school in sophomore year I remember speaking with a wealthy friend whose father had signed him up for flying lessons so he could "stand out in college admissions". There are many, many cases like this.
Admissions should disregard such superficial peacocking and focus on metrics like the SAT that disentangle intellectual and academic potential from wealth.
The premise of your answer is that MIT wants good "students" and "test takers". What if that's not what they want so much anymore? A test is supposed to be a metric, an indicator of something. But metrics tend to become target as soon as they're exposed. Maybe then they still remain an indicator of something, but not necessarily what they were originally intended to filter for.
I understand that it might feel like the goalposts are being moved for people who optimize to score high on such metrics, but such is the nature of this type of games. That's also why search engine companies have to keep refining their algorithms.
MIT has an obvious incentive to admit rich, well-connected people, and an obvious incentive to maintain a reputation for admitting the most intelligent on merit. We should be sceptical of any changes they make that purport to be about getting more meritorious students, especially if those changes result in the admission of more rich, well-connected people.
Good test takers are people who have learned things and know them well enough to pass a test on it. There are many kinds of test. The SAT is the kind designed by psychometricians, experts with Ph.D.s building on millions of man hours of research to make tests that are both valid and reliable, that predict success in college and are as close to ungameable as possible.
MIT could drop the real SAT tomorrow and still fill its freshman class with valedictorians who captained their high school sports team and have ten AP 5s. Schools with fewer applicants have the SAT.
>Good test takers are people who have learned things and know them well enough to pass a test on it.
Tell that to the massive test prep industry. Many many years ago I took a trial SAT and scored around 1000. Then I took a Kaplan SAT prep course, and lo and behold after learning all the tricks scored a 1300 on a test SAT. Back then the test prep course cost > $1000. I had a car in high school, so I could drive to the test prep school in the evenings.
Seems to me that people who prep for the tests (not necessarily learned things through high school) and are willing to spend time and money have a great margin of benefit.
It's the same thing for tech interview prep industry. The ones who prep well for the interview, do well in the interview.
> The SAT is the kind designed by psychometricians, experts with Ph.D.s building on millions of man hours of research to make tests that are both valid and reliable, that predict success in college and are as close to ungameable as possible.
This is what the CollegeBoard wants you think. You don’t have to be all that great to realize that the people writing the test are hardly better than you are at both the subject and writing test, and in many case significantly worse.
These are positions for which a Ph.D. is an absolute requirement. Compare Assistant or Associate Professor.
> About you
> Education/Experience:
> Doctorate in psychometrics, educational research, educational measurement or a related field is required. New PhD level applicants will be considered, as will applicants with additional experience. A minimum of 3 years relevant experience is required for the Associate level.
I suspect this is just getting rid of redundancy. Everyone taking the SAT subject tests is probably taking the equivalent Advanced Placement test anyhow.
However, the biggest problems with these tests (and the AP tests) is that they are expensive--they cost a non-trivial amount of money to sign up for and they cost a lot of time to prepare for if your school doesn't offer direct AP classes.
Also, I wouldn’t necessarily agree that AP exams are more difficult than the SAT subject tests. School curriculum is not uniform. In fact, in my high school the material for certain SAT subjects tests was _only_ taught in AP classes.
My school had a deal where when you signed up for an AP class you had to take the AP test. But if you pass the AP test (3 or higher) the school would reimburse you. I took 5 tests and never paid for one. Including the one where we didn't have a teacher for half a year (long story).
I think this is the fairest way to do it. If you got talent but no money, the opportunity is still there.
> My school had a deal where when you signed up for an AP class you had to take the AP test. But if you pass the AP test (3 or higher) the school would reimburse you.
This just drives home the unfairness though.
You had a school that was willing to pony up this money. That is not universally true.
While I agree, let's acknowledge the fair critique from the end that is not, "Keeping high-achieving Asian kids out": the part where the tests themselves cost money parents (and school systems) don't have; the part where the study guide in and of itself is not enough to prepare for these exams, leaving us the true, astronomical cost of preparation; the part where this is all begging the question of what admissions tests are for anyway (generally, the same things poll taxes and quizzes were for).
I agree that the answer is the base SAT, but with an addition of a lottery past a point threshold. Luck (of birth) got us into this mess, and luck could get us out.
> Luck (of birth) got us into this mess, and luck could get us out.
I'm all in favor of adding some kind of RNG to this process. The overpreparation of the wealthy in all kinds of aspects of admissions gives them a big advantage over those who don't. RNG evens it out.
I disagree. A raffle system, while inevitable in some cases (H-1B lottery comes to mind), is totally inappropriate when applied to a standardized test. Quite on the contrary, a standardized test aims to measure capability (however abstract it is), not luck.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to go with a lottery system after some point. Most people with a ACT over ~30 are going to be completely capable of performing the coursework for an undergraduate degree at MIT. And anyone with a perfect score is going to be fine anyway. There are plenty of world-class institutions in the USA that would be more than happy to accept these peopl.
>I think it's perfectly reasonable to go with a lottery system after some point.
Only the wealthy can afford to apply to every single "prestige" college and university available. A lottery where some people get twenty tickets and others get one or two seems just as silly.
This is not entirely true. SAT scores can be used as ways to admit more privileged students, as they tend to have access to more test prep along with privileges such as extra time:
> In 2010 three College Board researchers analyzed data from more than 150,000 students who took the SAT, and they found that the demographics of the two “discrepant” groups differed substantially. The students with the inflated SAT scores were more likely to be white or Asian than the students in the deflated-SAT group, and they were much more likely to be male. Their families were also much better off. Compared with the students with the deflated SAT scores, the inflated-SAT students were more than twice as likely to have parents who earned more than $100,000 a year and more than twice as likely to have parents with graduate degrees. These were the students — the only students — who were getting an advantage in admissions from the SAT. And they were exactly the kind of students that Trinity was admitting in such large numbers in the years before Pérez arrived.
> By contrast, according to the College Board’s demographic analysis, students in the deflated-SAT group, the ones whose SAT scores were significantly lower than their high school grades would have predicted, were twice as likely to be black as students in the inflated-SAT group, nearly twice as likely to be female and almost three times as likely to be Hispanic. They were three times as likely as students in the inflated-SAT group to have parents who earned less than $30,000 a year, and they were almost three times as likely to have parents who hadn’t attended college. They were the students — the only students — whose college chances suffered when admissions offices considered the SAT in addition to high school grades.
The article goes on to explain that while grade point average is relatively consistent across income level, SAT scores are skewed towards the rich. Schools have realized this, which is why many schools no longer require the SAT or ACT.
Does that study control for school quality? If grades are normalized for a local school population, then good grades at one school can be worse than mediocre grades at another school.
This was exactly the purpose for which tests like the SAT were created. If that factor wasn’t controlled for, then the quote above is misleading.
While I've heard that said, I've never seen proof that grades are inflated at poor schools. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't actually the opposite, as helicopter parents and their ambitious students are more able (more free time) to self-promote and argue their way into higher grades.
Grades are more inflated at rich school. The presure teachers are under is great. For private school, if parents can get better grades elsewhere they will move them.
The material may be easier in a poor school and an average student can seem amazing compared to a below average student.
The rich dumb, poor smart both come in from behind the eightball. Rich can buy there way out and poor can work there way in. If I'm mit I want rich smart.. seems less risky.
The tests don't not work (I believe that within the middle of bell-curve they accomplish their goal well), but at the extremes they are prone to gamification, especially to those in the know. For example, the pre-2017 SAT had some well known (and some lesser known) tricks that you would only know by studying the test, rather than the material:
- ALL sections (and sub-sections) have questions that strictly increase in difficulty / projected "miss-rate" as time goes on. This is to keep test takers from coming back to answers they're unsure about but may themselves know how to solve -- so if you find yourself struggling with questions in a row, it's better to stop and go back rather than miss out on what you may already know trying to solve questions that you don't. For the reading section, the scale is scoped to each passage. For the vocab section, where there are 3 sections (vocab, grammar, and multiple-choice fill in the blank), the scale is scoped to each subsection. For the math section, it is scoped to the whole thing.
- The "Free Section" (e.g. the one that doesn't count toward your score, which instructors tell you before you start that section, so you can use it as a break if you wish) is usually section 4 or 5 of the test, to help plan your breaks. Some students, not previously-knowing or confused that the "free section" is ungraded, still take it thinking there must be a penalty of some sort.
- The word "equivocal" is tested within the SAT Vocab in around 60% of tests. Unequivocally, these questions have some of the highest wrong-rates of any question on the test.
- Within the grammar questions, Choice (e) "None of the above" is 99% of the time NEVER the answer. This is one of the most certain things on the test.
- The math questions will usually have (1) answer that is an outlier. 95% of the time, this is not the correct answer; (2) will be similar to the correct answer in different ways; and (1) will be the correct answer (e.g., say you're supposed to subtract "x" by 5 to get to the real answer. The obviously fake one might be multiplied by 5. One of the slightly-wrong answers might have 5 added rather than subtracted, another might just be off by 1). If you're ever in doubt, you can drastically increase your chances at guessing on a question by picking the question "most similar" to all of the others -- something like 65% chance, rather than 25% in the naive case.
- Again for math questions -- particularly the "word riddle" type ones -- the SAT will generally purposely pick questions that could have multiple seemingly-correct questions if you plug in 1, 2, 5, or 10 for the variables. 3 is almost always a safe bet, though I particularly liked to choose 7, because who thinks you'd ever choose to plug in 7.
- The essay is funny. Per the SAT's own published rules, they are not graded on fact at all; purely rhetoric, vocabulary choice, and clarity. All of the prompts also usually include a historical figure or event of some sort -- you don't need to know anything about them other than what the prompt tells you, but a well-known and easy way to win points with the graders is to make up a fake quote from someone adjacent to the event / historical figure as a hook: e.g. "Disconsolate upon hearing the tragedy of [EVENT X], [FIGURE Y]'s au pair journaled 'His life was short, but his memory will last forever'. Previously unknown to historians until then, Y's au pair embodied Y's belief that [SOMETHING FROM THE PROMPT]. [then THESIS STATEMENT on 3rd or 4th sentence, always]." (this is an objectively wrong and terrible sentence that I would hate to read in any other context. This is, however, similar to the SAT's example of a top-tier intro).
This is just the tip of the iceberg, too. It's a very predictable format and pattern (it has to be, as it's given multiple times during the same academic year; tests must be similar, lest one session of test takers do statistically significantly better than an equally-talented group which takes the test a month later)
So yes, while I believe the SAT does attempt to test for knowledge, it's that same pursuit of a bell curve that makes it easily gamifiable for those who know the test and not the material -- who are, once again, usually already the wealthy and connected.
Wow, this is a remarkable level of gaming that I never was aware of!
> - Within the grammar questions, Choice (e) "None of the above" is 99% of the time NEVER the answer.
> - The math questions will usually have (1) answer that is an outlier. 95% of the time, this is not the correct answer; (2) will be similar to the correct answer in different ways; and (1) will be the correct answer
This is exactly the reason that, when I design tests, I strive to make "none of the above" or the outlier answer the correct one about 20% of the time. I really hope the SAT writers are doing that now.
> ALL sections (and sub-sections) have questions that strictly increase in difficulty / projected "miss-rate" as time goes on.
The computerized GRE goes even further... it's like a videogame, it feeds you harder questions the better you do, then reverts to easier ones when you mess up.
> The computerized GRE goes even further... it's like a videogame, it feeds you harder questions the better you do, then reverts to easier ones when you mess up.
Isn't that one of the better ways to finely calibrate a score? Rough approximation of heapsort?
It does feel a little crazy, though, when suddenly all the vocab words are like, "tergiversate" and "pulchritudinous". And then when you get them all wrong it's back to "the cat sat on the mat". :P
I completely agree, and as much as I hate CollegeBoard hope they've done more to reinvent their tests, as I do think objective measurement of some kind does have a place in admissions, even though perhaps as not the end-all-be-all it used to be.
I used to be semi-adjacent to that sphere, but I do not know anything about the current format of the tests other than what is published.
> The essay is funny. Per the SAT's own published rules, they are not graded on fact at all; purely rhetoric, vocabulary choice, and clarity. All of the prompts also usually include a historical figure or event of some sort -- you don't need to know anything about them other than what the prompt tells you
When I realized this applied to a lot of required essays -- ie, they can be fiction or satire -- I had a lot more fun writing papers. I wouldn't exactly recommend it but can confirm it doesn't completely tank your GPA.
This reminds me of a Physics GRE I took. I studied all the tests and remember very clearly the test saying to only calculate to two decimal places to save time. There was a relativity question that had 3 answers that just varied on how many decimal places you carried through your calculations. That question had the answer if you kept 2. But it also had the answers for more. I'm not sure questions like this actually show that you know the material, considering to get 3 of the 5 answers you have to do the actual calculations.
What I learned about studying for tests like these was that you were studying for the test, not the material. This felt extremely different than studying for... say... an actual physics test.
I wish more people who fall into the kneejerk "we must emphasize only objective testing" group were aware of things like these. Standardized tests are incredibly game-able, particularly at the upper tail of the distribution. Because of the nature of that distribution, that means that if you selected students only by "objective" measures like standardized test scores, you will be disproportionately selecting for students who are experts at test-taking, not experts at being good students.
The more we can reduce the overdependence on standardized tests, the better we can be at selecting for well-rounded students and not just test-gamers.
Indeed, much better to select for the kinds of people whose parents know how these things work and can ensure their child has the right letters of recommendation, internships and extracurricular activities. And don’t be terribly specific about what exactly it v is you want; that way you can change it from year to year to ensure the right kind of people get in. Wouldn’t want Harvard to look like Cal Tech or Berkekk OK way would we? That’s what happens when you have a public, objective test instead of being able to select some smart and some connected.
Maybe this is will be seen as radical but I think the best way to end all this gaming is for collegeboard to not release their previous tests to the public. There simply shouldn't be enough data out there to study the test rather than the material. All that should be known in advance is the topics, format (multi choice v. Open ended) and point system. I'm sure the cottage industry of test prep companies would hate it, as would those that prefer studying the test to having merits, but those groups can pound sand.
You don’t need examples of previous tests to prepare. Even if there was perfect enforcement of no recording devices, no corruption, no breaking in and stealing test papers people would talk about what the test was like, sitting to sitting. Some people retake the test multiple times. This would probably become normative in this case because the practice effect on IQ tests like the SAT is small but real. If people were really motivated you can just pay 100 people to do the test and get them to memorize parts of it, then stitch the parts together afterwards.
> Standardized testing significantly levels the playing field for students across income brackets.
There's a correlation between parental income and SAT scores.
“[S]tudents from families earning more than $200,000 a year average a combined score of 1,714, while students from families earning under $20,000 a year average a combined score of 1,326.”
There's a correlation between parental income and IQ scores too. There's also a correlation between parental income and GPA. It's just a correlation, though, and it does not follow that a good standardized test would result in the average score would match across different parental income groups.
Just because a test is standardized doesn't mean it completely eliminates all confounding factors outside of the test, but it does mitigate some of them. Equality and equity aren't the same thing.
Certainly, without reliance on standardized testing I'm somehow certain that Braden who got a helicopter pilot's license at 16 so he could fly the family helo from Manhattan to Westchester is going to do better in admissions than Tyrone who excelled in academics and was lucky enough to attend a technology magnet school, but grew up in the projects and had no access to anything outside of what school and the library provided. With SAT tests included, the fact Braden made a 1530 and Tyrone made a 1970 plays a factor.
But there’s a much greater correlation between parental income and other measures you could use to evaluate applicants. Even height has parental income correlation, you can‘t eliminate it completely.
How is this comment upvoted? MIT has not removed the requirement to take SAT tests.
> We will continue to require the SAT or the ACT, because our research has shown these tests, in combination with a student’s high school grades and coursework, are predictive of success in our challenging curriculum.
This is typical of a knee-jerk reaction without even understanding their policy. Let alone reading the actual post. It's the answer to the very first question at the top of the post. I thought HN would do better than this.
Probably because many (most?) people don't take or know about the subject tests.
I thought I had never heard of them, but after looking at wikipedia, it looks like they were called the SAT II when I was in high school. I remember that existing, but never knew why you would take them and never knew anybody that did.
It's not a stretch to imagine people being confused.
SAT IIs are pretty obscure, and I don't think there's any benefit to taking them over AP tests, since APs can sometimes be translated into college credits and have much more support in public schools.
One of the points of metrics is to reduce the relevance of how savvy your parents are. But you have to have pretty savvy parents to take the SAT IIs.
Metrics get a lot of heat from people who don't realize what the alternative is, but I know a guy who got into Harvard because his grandparents go to the same synagogue as some admissions people and called in a favor. _That's_ the alternative to metrics.
It's been a few years since I applied to college, but subject tests were nice because they showed a baseline for certain subjects that didn't really have AP exams (e.g. Math II is everything through pre-calculus). You can also take them more than once, unlike AP exams. Also, you don't send "official" AP scores to college admissions; you only do that once you're admitted, since they actually go to the registrar, not admissions. You simply self-report AP scores otherwise.
I feel like there are other benefits that I'm forgetting, but those come to mind immediately.
It's explicitly explained in the very short article. Yet somehow people lacking basic reading comprehension are en masse bemoaning the dumbing down of kids these days.
And way back, they were apparently called the Achievement Tests. I vaguely remember taking a few but don't otherwise remember much about them or what the requirements were.
GP comment seems completely relevant to SAT subject tests to me. The point is that removing a test from consideration, even if it's not the only test considered, makes it easier for rich people to game the application process.
No. The point about replacing a test with more subjective criteria is completely invalidated when, instead, multiple tests are replaced with a single test.
EDIT: Instead of completely invalidated, I should say irrelevant to MIT's change. In another context it could be an important point.
I think the top level comment is based on the assumption that a greater quantity of objective data will lead to a greater weighting of objective data, and a lower quantity will lead to a lower weighting, leading to a greater weighting of subjective measures.
Likewise, there are many skills you can't demonstrate on the SAT such as Spanish language proficiency. For whatever reason I took the French subject test but no AP test, perhaps there are other schools that do this.
The math score might say a little about the other sciences, but the blmultilingual students are going to be disadvantaged by this it seems to me.
This is completely incorrect. The SAT is not changing to incorporate the skills that would have previously measured by the subject test. As a result we are simply going to have fewer objective metrics.
Exactly. If you look at the comments on the linked article, or the ones that were on top here when I wrote mine, people are making comments that aren't specific to the SAT subject test at all -- "this is great, because I bombed that test", "this lowers stress", "that test was too easy anyway".
If the subject test was a thing that everyone was informed about, did not cost extra, and was readily available, if not required alongside standard SAT administration, then I would be more inclined to agree. But here knowing that they even exist is half the battle.
What you call a "smooth-talker" is what someone else would call an articulate, socially well-adjusted person who can communicate their values and opinions in an intelligent way and who is comfortable making connections with others. Perhaps if this was the standard college admissions used, public schools would have more incentive to educate students as functional humans rather than test-taking drones.
The problem is that "articulate, socially well-adjusted person who can communicate their values and opinions in an intelligent way and who is comfortable making connections with others" is (a) highly subjective, and (b) only a means to an end. The end is to have a productive civil society where people do not prey on other people. Unfortunately, all these highly subjective characteristics are used by people to prey on other people instead of to help with having a productive, civil society. So by themselves they can't be used as a standard. There has to be some objective criterion to distinguish people who can actually contribute to a productive civil society from people who prey on other people.
If a university's objective is to select the applicants most likely to reflect prestige and wealth back onto it, the university is best served by picking those who can most effectively cause themselves to be selected (rather than the most academically gifted students).
Admissions essentially boils down to "impress me." (Not saying that's good for society, but it's good for the university.)
It's one of the exceptional cases where Goodhart's Law—"a targeted metric is no longer good"—doesn't hold.
Distrusting social skills, linguistic ability, and emotional intelligence doesn't sound like a recipe for success.
It's not like there aren't plenty of engineers, scientists, math folks, i.e. those "honest", quantitative folks, who aren't also crappy or deceptive people.
> Distrusting social skills, linguistic ability, and emotional intelligence doesn't sound like a recipe for success.
It's not a matter of "trusting" vs. "distrusting" them. It's a matter of what universities (and other exclusive institutions, for that matter) select for. If you select for "social skills, linguistic ability, and emotional intelligence" without also having any objective way of measuring actual productive potential, not to mention evaluating a person's actual willingness to use their talents in support of a cooperative civil society, you're going to get a lot of people who will be very good at preying on others and using the system they are gaining entrance to as a tool to that end.
> It's not like there aren't plenty of engineers, scientists, math folks, i.e. those "honest", quantitative folks, who aren't also crappy or deceptive people
Yes, that's true, but without those social skills they do a lot less damage, because they can't get very many people to interact with them.
They don't identify that directly. But they do identify the potential to do something productive. Obviously that can't be the only thing being used to judge people; but some objective standard like that has to be part of what is being used.
Also, regardless of what standardized tests do or don't do, judging based on "articulate, socially well-adjusted person who can communicate their values and opinions in an intelligent way and who is comfortable making connections with others" is, IMO, a very poor way of filtering out people who will prey on other people, since anyone who preys on other people has to have those skills (or at any rate be able to fake them well enough to pass a test for them) to be successful at it.
"They don't identify that directly. But they do identify the potential to do something productive." It think your definition of what is productive might be very different than mine.
"since anyone who preys on other people has to have those skills" If you look at history you will find many without those skills that preyed on others.
> an articulate, socially well-adjusted person who can communicate their values and opinions in an intelligent way
Yes, that's me.
> and who is comfortable making connections with others
And that will never be me.
Leadership is inherently nepotistic. You simply aren't permitted to lead if you have the wrong class background or the wrong ethnicity. (There's a reason all Senators look exactly the same.) You're literally just advocating for an old boys' club, and if that's what you want, you might as well be explicit about it.
> You simply aren't permitted to lead if you have the wrong class background or the wrong ethnicity. (There's a reason all Senators look exactly the same.)
In what sense did, I dunno, Obama and McConnell look exactly the same?
Language is a social creature, you can't have language without society and social interactions, if you're not able to communicate with spoken word you simply can't work as effectively with others. Especially if you can't make connections with others.
In fact, most of history the etymology of words wasn't a huge topic because everyone would pronounce the words in their language similarly and thus language wouldn't evolve nearly as rapidly--the phoneme is as important as the lexeme when it comes to language.
The insert bridge here wasn't built in a day, with one person.
> In fact, most of history the etymology of words wasn't a huge topic because everyone would pronounce the words in their language similarly and thus language wouldn't evolve nearly as rapidly--the phoneme is as important as the lexeme when it comes to language.
Uh, what? How do you think we got more than one language in the first place? How do you think we have entire language families with mutually-unintelligable members? Or what about dialectal continuums? If anything, I would posit that we are closer to your statement now than at any other time, because the printing press calcified spelling -- which could vary quite a bit in the time of scribes. And radio and TV and the Internet have started spreading linguistic innovation faster.
This is straight from Saussure, and then Chomsky. You can read his first course in linguistics [1].
It was highly disputed in the 1800s.
I'm not an expert, but:
> Uh, what? How do you think we got more than one language in the first place?
We would compete for resources, new languages would be created rapidly from old languages instead of the gradual change we're seeing in the last 4000 years.
> How do you think we have entire language families with mutually-unintelligable members?
All language, like I said, is composed of many -emes. Chomsky's big discovery was that you can't seaparate syntax and semantics when it comes to any language.
> Or what about dialectal continuums? If anything, I would posit that we are closer to your statement now than at any other time, because the printing press calcified spelling -- which could vary quite a bit in the time of scribes. And radio and TV and the Internet have started spreading linguistic innovation faster.
This is the standard intuitive view with when one has no evidence. There is strong evidence to suggest that it is the individuals who mispronounce written words who cause this rapid change in language--they are mispronounced and then subsequently miswritten, and then their semantics are subsequently misinterpreted, so their syntax and semantics slowly change in this fashion.
Saussure, the founder of the modern linguistic tradition, has this all outlined in his book [1]. He outlines your view, and then shows you that it is in fact not true.
Exactly. People don't talk about class enough in this topic. The kind of people that college interviewers appreciate (in terms of behavior) will almost always be upper middle class people and those who know enough to behave like upper middle class people.
It's hard to create an accountable system to identify "smooth-talkers". We already know that perceived charisma is highly dependent on attractiveness, ethnicity, and other innate factors.
What we could do is gauge students' communication ability in a way that is less subject to these factors. Which we already do, by examining students' writing.
I think that "smooth-talker" is typically not sonmeone who is articulate and socially well-adjusted who communicate their values and opinions in an intelligent way.
The typical use of the word refers to manipulative people who will smoothly pretend values and opinions they don't have in order to mislead people and take advantage of them. Alternatively it is people who talk about things they know nothing about convincingly enough for those who also know nothing about the topic.
The two are much different things. People who communicate their values and opinions have massive comparative disadvantage against them.
> people who talk about things they know nothing about convincingly enough for those who also know nothing about the topic.
Exactly. This is what a room full of smooth talkers looks like: two top journalists agreeing on national TV that 500 million divided by 327 million is greater than 1 million.
You’re judging people by some stupid mistake that could have any of a million reasons. Maybe their monitors are small and they couldn’t read it, or they were thinking about whatever was coming up.
Your criticism seems motivated by some prior grudges against these people. For leadership Postillions, I’d prefer someone bad at math over anyone this petty.
> an articulate, socially well-adjusted person who can communicate their values and opinions in an intelligent way and who is comfortable making connections with others
If there's any correlation with this and academic success, it's not necessarily a positive one. There's a grain of truth to the stereotype of "nerds" not having great people skills.
Problem is, hard science has been known to be difficult to articulate, and a successful researcher may lose their characteristic as being socially well-adjusted (to the point of being burnt at stake).
OP’s “smooth talker” is a pedigreed bullshitter with a millionaire dad, big fake smile, and popped collar, who combines just enough sound bite knowledge with fancy-sounding words, signaling to similar ivy leaguers that he’s “one of them.” Pretty much the opposite of someone you’d select on academic merit alone.
functional humans ==> parasites who steal the economic output of non-smooth talkers.
The whole world is a gigantic Animal Farm, also in the West.
The apparatchiks have different functions and names, but the principle is the same. The system works better though.
All this would do is benefit the already-privileged and create affinity bias. Basically just affirmative action for white people from middle class and above homes.
Well, I am white and think that there is a difference in the way people socialize depending on their socioeconomic status, the area they grew up in, and the culture/language they are exposed to at home. And in the US it’s basically all white people who are most advantaged in these aspects. It will likely change over time as more Hispanic/Asian people become second+ generation immigrants rather than first, though
I remember going to college not so long ago and meeting kids who had grown up in the US who still had an accent/manner of speaking that they got from their parents (like a Chinese or Spanish accent). And of course there are very smart kids who grow up with AAVE or strong regional accents, some of whom are probably white but who probably aren’t from a good socioeconomic class.
Because the Senate is over 90% white, and most of the rest are at least half-white.
To people in this country, that's what leadership looks like, so if you grade based on leadership, that's what you're going to get. Not playing identity politics here, just stating a fact.
maybe for low-level engineering drones who don't have any say in what gets built, which is typical for the first few years of an engineer's career. But senior engineers, and especially engineering management need to have good communications skills to work cross-functionally.
Surely MIT would rather graduate future engineering leaders and technical founders and not just engineers.
Agree completely. SAT isn't perfect or perfectly objective. No test is. As long as a test controls admission to a highly desirable school, there will be exorbitantly expensive courses for it.
However, it is a far more objective test than the rest of the admission packet, and it's being dropped with no alternative.
This will make admissions less fair, precisely because SAT is still a test that you can ace with discipline and hard work without much monetary investment, and it will be replaced by other criteria that actually requires more capital.
Didn’t mean that comment to be about MIT (who may not do legacy preference and certainly isnt lowering academic standards to win ncaa championships). But those are both factors at other top schools including the Ivies and Stanford
I applied to 10 ivy league universities, and was accepted by 3. It's reasonable to suppose that if MIT gave a +1 for legacy admits, I would have gotten the nod.
that is not a reasonable assumption at all - it's a dice roll regardless. admission at one good school doesn't guarantee admission at another, even if you have legacy.
(and is also highly dependent on which Ivies we're talking about - not all Ivies are HYP, which are more on par with MIT)
> that is not a reasonable assumption at all - it's a dice roll regardless. admission at one good school doesn't guarantee admission at another
Saying "reasonable assumption" is not at all saying "guaranteed". Please stick to discussing ideas and not deliberately misinterpreting plain language.
> Anybody cheering the exclusion of some test or other, because it was a pain to study for in high school, is simply not noticing the frog-boiling secondary effects going on. Every bit of emphasis taken out of objective results mean more advantage for smooth talking, photogenic, well-connected people.
Absolutely right. Standardized testing become popular in the first place as an egalitarian measure, a way to combat inherited wealth and privilege. But wealth and privilege always want to propagate themselves to the next generation. Nowadays, we see rich parents paying crazy amounts of money to get their mediocre children into high-end schools, sometimes to the point of straight-up bribery [1]. They bribe crooked doctors into lying about their kids needing extra time on exams. After they get their mediocre kids into "top" schools, parents demand grade inflation. Once the kids graduate, they spend years supported by their parents in unpaid internships smarming their way into positions of power and influence unavailable to anyone who has to get paid to live. We have a thoroughly corrupt system that promotes stagnation, corruption, and incompetence.
Standardized testing is extremely inconvenient for the kind of person who uses these dirty tricks. It's hard to buy a university enough libraries to cover up your kid's 1100 on the SAT. This whole push to deprecate standardized testing is just corruption justified with twisty self-serving rhetoric about fake justice.
Only standardized testing should count toward university admission, because the only thing that matters is the competence of the next generation of decision-makers. We can only have a functioning society because good decisions get made, and status corruption damages society's ability to make good decisions.
The bribery scandal especially depresses me, because a lot of the colleges impacted had official bribery systems in place -- you're supposed to donate to the "Development Office" to get on the "Dean's List", or some other set of euphemisms. What the colleges were actually outraged about is that these middling-rich people tried to cheap out by paying a smaller bribe to some other office.
If someone donates enough money for a lab or an entire building or something that can be used by students for decades as a means to get their underperforming kid in, yeah, that's technically a bribe but I'm kind of okay with that because the good so vastly outweighs the bad.
How many labs can an Uni build to accept all the silverspoons? A lot of money end up not in the common pool of resources but are pocketed in different ways by the staff and board. This myth is becoming trite already. The rich pay their way in and not necessarily for the education but for the credentials.
There's something that doesn't quite make sense to me about this worry of wealthy people passing on their privileges to their children. Their children are different individuals who were effectively randomly chosen to be born into that situation. Why should it be some other child who was randomly chosen some other way instead? No matter who gets into Harvard, it's still the same number of people who somehow ended up with that privilege.
Is it simple jealousy of rich people? Or is it a worry that their kids aren't really the most capable so society won't function so well when they're eventually in charge? I'd say their kids probably are the most capable because elite universities get their funding and fame from successful graduates so they're incentivized to choose the people with greatest chance of success. Of a well-connected rich kid and a poorly-connected poor kid with the same SAT scores, the rich kid has better chance of future career success.
I think it's important to clarify that that SAT is not the same as the SAT Subject Tests. The latter are being excluded, but not the former. One could reasonably argue at this point that the Subject Tests are simply redundant with AP tests.
>mean more advantage for smooth talking, photogenic, well-connected people.
The whole point of the American University is to produce these kind of people so that shouldn’t be surprising. Otherwise you could earn a degree via self study proctored exams. Lack of objectivity during the application is a symptom not a cause.
I'd like to see more people being able to take self-study proctored exams, for those fields that can do it. There's a lot to be said for what is essentially a vo-tech education. It's purely objective and very useful.
That would leave a lot more space open in schools for creative work. That includes both academic research and the humanities, which are less objective but nonetheless valuable. As has been pointed out before, during the current health crisis, people turn to the arts: TV, books, podcasts, video games, etc. These are things that are hard to learn with self-study and impossible to test for -- except for the test of whether people will want to consume them.
Even programmers eventually need at least some of this. A development team requires a lot of people trained at a purely vo-tech, objective level to be experts in the various technologies. But for a product to be successful, it also requires people who know what its users want, which is much harder to judge objectively, and harder to learn from a book.
I believe too many programmers go to university to learn what they could learn on their own, or at a much less expensive school that doesn't try give a broad education. We need a lot of those, and employers make a mistake in rejecting people who don't have that university degree. Worse, even among those with that university degree, they test them purely on their objective skills, and then later complain that they produce ugly interfaces and write terribly.
Colleges have lost their monopoly on education but still hold the monopoly on accreditation. If we can figure out how to reduce that latter monopoly colleges will lose a lot of their power
College Prep is a giant business that needs to be dismantled. They have a monopoly in this area.
IMO each college should be doing their own objective test. Definitely agree about subjective tests - smooth talkers will get ahead. But that's already the case in getting a job after they graduate - interviewing process is already broken.
Standardized testing is a natural monopoly -- if you have every college making their own, it's a crazy duplication of work, will produce a lot of substandard tests, and will put tons of strain on the students. Might as well ask everybody to lay their own fiber.
ETS isn't perfect (I think the amount they charge for GRE-related stuff is sickening) but it at least does a good job of making sure the best prep resources possible are cheap or free.
Aside from the fact that this is all off-topic since MIT's announcement is about the SAT subject tests, not the SAT itself, it is not a true monopoly anyway.
MIT's web site says they accept either the SAT or the ACT. ("We require the SAT or the ACT.") The SAT is from College Board, and the ACT is from ACT, Inc., which are two different organizations. Both tests are in wide use, so if anything it is a duopoly.
Won't each college having to have their own test lead to many/most colleges, especially smaller ones, finding it easier or more cost effective to purchase their test from a central source, leading to some large College Board-like company making exams and a prep industry for that standard exam?
I think it’s pretty insane that a single company is a gatekeeper to elite institutions.
I’m honestly not sure of the solution, but the problem is pretty evident. College Prep could raise exam fees by 200% tomorrow and you have no law, no oversight from the government or anything preventing them from doing so. Absolute monopoly.
They’re no different than professors in bed with book publishers, mandating a particular book for the course. Students need to spend $350 on a textbook is insanity.
>I think it’s pretty insane that a single company is a gatekeeper to elite institutions.
Not just elite institutions, I would say 99% of accredited institutions in the US. You would be hard pressed to find an accredited college program in the US that doesn't require either SAT or ACT (talking about the general test, not the subject ones).
P.S. That 99% estimation is obviously made up, but I am yet to find a college that doesn't require an ACT or SAT score, and I applied to many different kinds of colleges in early 2010s (out of state, in-state, public, private, etc.), with almost none of them being MIT-tier elite.
People want to pay thousands of dollars to try to gain access to elite institutions. No matter what test you'll come up with, someone will offer an expensive prep course for it, because they will have willing customers.
Mandate that colleges accept scores from at least 3 different standardized tests, administered by different companies, and that the scores must be easily comparable. That may help break ETS's stranglehold over the market and test fees or test prep material might become reasonable.
the SAT test fee is about $65 and there's tons of free prep material (including direct from college board). what would you consider a reasonable price?
Hard to say if that's actually reasonable, given there's exactly 1 (maybe 2, if you count the ACT) test providers. Not really a competitive market.
For a multiple-choice exam, administered electronically to dozens of test-takers supervised by one proctor...is that actually reasonable? Plus they charge you $15 extra if you want more than 4 scores. Most students apply to more than 4 colleges. Are they physically mailing scores to these institutions?
For a mostly-electronic process (other than the essay grading) $65 sounds like a lot. $40 for the non-essay option sounds even more crazy.
I don't mean reasonable in a market equilibrium sense, more of a "hey, that price seems about right" sense.
I'm sure it's not trivial to make multiple versions of the same test every year where the scores are all comparable with each other. then you have to distribute the materials while minimizing the chance that they leak and people come in with the answers memorized.
the college board itself makes about 15% profit each year. definitely a lot better than some market segments, but hardly exorbitant. I guess they might find some ways of trimming the fat if they had more competition, but who knows. more competitors means fewer test-takers to amortize the test design costs over.
What you’re getting at is the government creates these types of monopolies due to massive regulations and licensing.
The issue is not with the college prep companies. It’s with government getting involved in education, making it way more expensive than it should be. The free market will drive prices down, especially in the education market.
What does the government getting involved in education have anything to do with the monopoly power of ETS? MIT is private, ETS's owner is a company. The problem is that MIT accepts only SAT scores - they should be forced to accept other standardized test scores too. That would create an actual market for standardized testing, along with competition and lower prices.
According to the original article, MIT accepts SAT or ACT. I have no idea if SAT is preferred though. It was certainly the default way back when when I was applying to schools.
Is the evidence really that suggestive that college prep makes such a huge difference? I am skeptical, it seemed pretty easy to just study from the blue book.
Probably the biggest way to stop the affluent from taking advantage of the system would be to eliminate school choice.
Bingo. The less objective their evaluations are, the easier it will be to hide the cronyism, bribery, and racial bias. Going to be a lot easier to discriminate against Asian kids when you don’t have to notice their test scores are better than the kids you admitted.
MIT isn't eliminating the SAT. They're not considering SAT subject tests, which are analogous to AP tests (which latter MIT will continue to consider).
Poor people can’t afford that $20 prep book, and they can’t afford the subject tests either.
I worked in high school but that money went to my family to help pay for food/rent. Thankfully I had an amazing high school teacher who was willing to pay for the remainder on my AP tests (the company who administers the test has a reduced fee option). My SAT test was free though, never got to take a practice test or even knew that there was a practice test —- that’s the joy of being a first generation college graduate, I suppose.
I agree about extra curricular activities. That just signals to colleges that your family is wealthy enough that you can afford to participate in terms of both time and money.
What’s the point in taking SAT Math 2, SAT Chem, and SAT Physics if you’re already sending scores for AP Calc/Stats/Comp Sci, AP Chem, and 3 different AP Physics lmao?
SAT scores is heavily correlated with income level (the data I have is for the standard tests, not the subject ones, but I would guess they follow a similar pattern).
Is it? I've heard about the movement to make the SAT optional for years. The argument was that grades correlate with success much more than SAT scores. That SAT scores were how privileged were "gaming the system" because they could afford tutors, can take it multiple times, and appeal for phony disability claims allowing extra test taking time.
I'm all for objective tests, but a single test mostly shows subject knowledge, not necessarily success. When I studied and took them, I always felt like it mostly evaluated standardized test-taking skills (which is a trained skill I feel many smart and successful people lack). It doesn't show anything if people cheat or if the process is gamed.
I don't really have a strong opinion either way--this is just what I've gleaned from following the news over the past few years. Here's an article I found that mirrors what I've heard:
Personally I feel most standardized tests, including the SAT can be gamed. If you have the right teacher or book or w/e you should be able to learn how to get a certain score. Granted a lot of people simply don't because they never learn the techniques properly.
They should still take it into consideration, but more of as a baseline aptitude level, smart enough to actually get past a certain score, but it shouldn't be a ranking system based on performance on the test. More to weed anyone out who are so incompetent they can't figure out the basics. Like everyone above 75% mark should be considered equally, but people beyond that point aren't ranked based on their test scores. As in, if someone scores a perfect score but the only thing they've done is get good grades and get good test scores and someone else scores at the 75% mark but started a small business, or did something remarkable to help with a disaster, then the latter should take precedence in my book.
After a certain point, IQ doesn't correlate with success either. Too much focus is placed on objective intelligence, when part of the objectivity is how well someone gamed it.
The problem of SAT is not that it can be prep'd, but it is too easy to be differentiating, and too simple so people can game it.
By the way, isn't depending on SAT for years and everyone bitching about SAT is a gross failure of our education system? Take any serious test, be it STEM competitions, JEE, or NCEE, multiple-choice questions are the easiest part. The differentiating questions are all kinds of word problems. Yet the US can't afford such test, but countries like India and China can.
And why do people in the US, the most developed and the richest country in the world, complain that people can prep the SAT. It's truly a shame. In countries like China, it is public schools that produce the best students. It is the public schools that set high standards for the country. It is the public schools that come up with amazing text books and problem sets. Tutoring in China is joke. Classes offered by public schools are legendary. Something is wrong in the US.
> By the way, isn't depending on SAT for years and everyone bitching about SAT is a gross failure of our education system? Take any serious test, be it STEM competitions, JEE, or NCEE, multiple-choice questions are the easiest part. The differentiating questions are all kinds of word problems. Yet the US can't afford such test, but countries like India and China can.
We do have this kind of system in place, I'm closely involved in it. The Olympiads in the US basically fill the vacuum of objective assessment at a high level. The entry round for each Olympiad is pretty similar in level to, e.g. what you would get in JEE-Advanced. But they're also far less popular...
Yeah, the Olympiad in the US is well organized. Probably the best in the world. I'm more concerned with the middle tier, to which the majority of the students belong. The best students in the US have access to vast resources, the academically challenged students do not feel the same harsh pressure as kids in other countries do. It is the middle majority that suffer from insufficient training.
It's hard enough such that schools have to lower their SAT standards to accept underrepresented minorities.
Otherwise, for non-URMs, the top schools do agree with you. SAT (and school GPA) are usually used in threshold-y way with other factors mattering more.
IMHO the SAT is no more objective than an essay, grades in school, or any of the other things you listed.
What is the SAT objectively measuring? Not math. Not logic. Not writing ability. It's objectively measuring the ability to succeed at a timed test which involves some math, some logic, some verbal ability, and knowing how to "test well".
I taught GRE test prep classes for Kaplan for a year or two. What I observed was:
- To do well even the bright folks had to block out time and apply study skills, be organized, and "learn the test."
- This means having the time to do those things.
- Time allocated for test prep and study was a better predictor of success than almost anything else.
- Yes, some people who were naturally better at certain things had it easier, but that did not obviate the above.
My conclusion for the GRE at least was that it primarily measured the time available to prepare, the study skills of the student, and the test prep resources the student had access to.
What's "objective" about the SAT is that, at the very least, different people are being made to take the same test. Contrast that with the essay: it looks like the same task (everybody gets 500 words), but for poor kids this task looks like writing an essay, while for rich kids it looks like shopping for the best college counselor to write the essay.
At the very least, given an SAT score, I can know that somebody worked alone for 4 hours with a No. 2 pencil to get it... that's more than any other indicator can guarantee.
I agree with this comment. I grew up in a rural area of the midwest. There were no AP courses, let alone robotics or opportunities for international volunteer work. I worked through high school to help keep the pantry stocked above levels that required some figurin'. I didn't apply for scholarships, didn't think about where I was going or what I was going to do, I was worried about other things. My high standardized test scores got me noticed by schools and names that meant something to me. I might not have ended up at MIT, but standardized tests gave me perspective that it wasn't just that I was "good at school" compared to my rural peers, but that truly I did have a shot at these places.
Because decades of education needed to be at a level for even considering an SAT is a poor mans normal.
SATs are one of the original “My parents bought me a better education.” filters our culture came up with.
You’re just defending what’s normal to you but the same concern has been raised over SATs.
Let’s not pretend you’ve stumbled upon a lynchpin we’d all overlooked.
People bending over to work for money not their own interests has enabled the overall problem you’re highlighting. Yep now there’s a lot of money out there to be used to by our way into shit!
Don’t be naive. You don’t want filters like this you need to rethink your life and who you’re giving your agency to.
I did well on the SATs because there is a method to taking the tests that is agnostic of the underlying knowledge. I was only able to learn that because I could afford the classes. The SAT is a silly game.
In the press release MIT says they are still looking at SAT scores. What they say they stopped looking at is the "SAT subject tests." That's something like the old Achievement Tests.
While I agree on the money aspect, other achievements provide more points of differentiation for top candidates. MIT likely is deciding amongst students with about perfect scores anyway.
I had a bout of diarrhea during my SAT 2 Math (the harder one, whatever it's called) and still scored 780/800. I was a bit annoyed that one question put me down huge percentiles though, because you could miss like 10 questions and still get 800.
So, over time, MIT researchers decrease in quality, and it loses prestige to other institutions, perhaps overseas, perhaps China.
Instead, I think they will continue to try to evaluate genuine merit. SAT can be and is routinely gamed, through prep. You have to be truly outstanding to manage it alone.
Maybe if money weren't an obstacle for getting a good education, then we could actually have the best and brightest going to schools like these instead of just the most well-prepared because of family money and the advantage that wealth brings.
The SAT is a useful bullshit filter. I graded a physics class in college and the number of students wanting 50%+ credit for a wrong answer "because they tried" was high.
You mean average white middle class kids who have "smooth talking, photogenic, well-connected parents" who can pay for the tutoring?
This is like the old Uk secondary Modern vs Grammar schools - but with the total destruction of the skilled vocational path.
It interesting that if I had staying Birmingham (UK) my mum was keen to use family connections to get me into King Edwards :-)
For those not familiar with the UK education hierarchy its always in the top 3 in the entire UK and was Tolkien's old school - Rich Thickos go to Eaton
IMO, the subject tests are kind of a niche environment. You can't prep for them with the $20 official book and there are like 20 of them. (Also Amazon lists it for 30 but we get the point). You basically need to go to a school where they offer AP coursework, and pay something close to $100 bucks to the College Board to take subject tests.
When I was doing college search, the only college I recall that requested these subject tests was MIT.
note that the SAT subject tests are actually different from AP tests. when I was applying to college, a smart kid from the regular section of <subject> could expect to do fairly well on the SAT subject test for that topic. the AP tests ask questions on material that isn't typically covered in the regular classes, so it's hard to do well on them if you haven't taken the AP course or done a lot of extracurricular study.
The problem with tests like the SAT is that on one hand they produce quantifiable results and the comparison of one student's score to another student's score is indeed objective, but that does not mean the test itself is an objective measure of performance.
The primary fault is that the SAT is essentially a form of convergent IQ test. A convergent test is a test of questions with the accepted answered defined before the test attempt and comparing the test takers answers to the defined answers. This is convergent, or coming together, in that performance is measured against subjective, subject based (inferred acceptance), criteria. I understand the SAT is intended to be used as a measure of general scholarly assessment, but its primarily used as a discriminatory filter to limit access to a preferential segment. As such it is essentially an arbitrary IQ test in practice regardless of its intentions.
In contrast IQ tests more generally preferred by the psychiatric community tend, almost exclusively, are divergent tests. A divergent test has questions without any prior identified answer and so there is not a simple right/wrong conclusion. Instead the tests generally seek out things like abstract reasoning, creativity, reasoning, answer diversity, and other aptitude performance criteria.
In the few psychiatric administered aptitude tests I have taken I generally test a bit below the genius level. If on a numeric IQ scale genius is 150 or 155 I would be below that at 140 to 150 depending on the test and test criteria. The SAT, on the other hand, rated me as outstanding a math and reasoning but otherwise barely literate. Those SAT scores are clearly at odds with my real world performance and other test results.
Confusing the potential for objectivity, such as comparing score results, to actual objectivity, such as whether the scores are a valid measure in the first place is a common error. The most common IQ test is the Stanford-Binet Test formed by Dr. Lewis Terman who made the same error:
I'm sure the writers of the SAT are well aware of this, but full IQ tests just don't scale. How are you going to provide the same test ten million times a year, when the test has to be administered one-on-one by a trained professional over the course of hours? You're going to have to hire tens of thousands of administrators, so how are you going to keep bias from creeping in? How are you going to prevent the questions from leaking, or keep people from rehearsing scripts on the subjective parts? IQ tests have never dealt with these problems only because they haven't had to scale, not because they're immune to them.
> I'm sure the writers of the SAT are well aware of this, but full IQ tests just don't scale.
First of all its generally faulty to presume what others are thinking.
Secondly, standardized admissions testing in its current form should be eliminated and there is a fair amount of data to support this[1][2]. If schools really want to discriminate on performance they should test for originality, composition, and decision capacity all of which can be done objectively with automated administration.
Sorry, but I write tests and I have absolutely no idea how you propose to measure these things objectively and automatically, without producing exactly the kind of "convergent" test you said you didn't like. For example, take "decision capacity". I don't even know what you mean by that, and I don't know how this will be assessed automatically without fixing a pre-designed correct answer.
Incidentally, the GRE has a system for grading essay composition automatically. It also absolutely sucks. It has no idea what your arguments are actually saying, so points are allocated based on irrelevant features like average sentence length or the total number of paragraphs. Researchers have succeeded in getting perfect scores by just copy-pasting the same sentence 25 times. In my book, this is worse than multiple choice.
For that, there's an "inbox test", a set of incoming messages to be dealt with in order. Such tests are widely used to screen candidates for manager jobs.
Wow, I just learned something new. These look legit and well-matched to the actual work. It does seem hard to make a "standard" decision test though, it seems each would have to be tuned to the job it was made for.
There is a lot of evidence that this is absolutely not the case. On of my links in a prior comment indicated there are now many universities that are standard test optional and keep stats comparing the performance between standard test students versus other students to find no difference in performance.
Consider your example. You are a famous developer well known for a performance oriented programming language. Of the many computer science students that graduated from MIT I cannot name any who are as well known for such. It is impossible to say that if your SAT scores were closer to perfect you might have gained admission. Regardless you have clearly excelled where others have not regardless of institution or institutional entry. At the least this suggests the incorrect combination of parameters were assessed given real world performance.
I don't entirely understand your objection. the "meat-and-potatoes" skills tested by the SAT seem to be english vocab and algebra. there's certainly some gray area in the meanings of english words, but the examples on the SAT tend to be pretty cut and dry. as for the basic algebra questions, I don't really see how it could make sense for the answer not to be determined beforehand. 5 will always be the x value that make 5x = 25 true.
seems like as good a way as any to predict whether you'll be able to handle the rigor of 100-level courses in your freshman year. basically answers the question: "can you read and understand what we plan to assign?"
edit: out of curiosity I perused some of your other posts. it seems like you have a pretty good grasp of english vocab and sentence construction. I'm not really sure how you could have bombed the critical reading and writing sections.
A process that lacks objectivity will enlarge inequality gap instead of reducing it. And in general, the more complex a process is, the less transparent it becomes, and the harder it is to be fair to everyone.
I used to think the SATs were fair. Until I found out how much money was being spent on SAT prep. And those expensive prep courses had the potential to increase scores over 100 points.
I took the recommended SAT prep course through my high school. It was 2 weekends of going over material that might be on the exam and a workbook recommended by The College Board. Imagine my surprise going to university and meeting students much richer than I who had multi year SAT prep courses with actual exam questions!
The SAT is not fair. By taking an expensive prep course, you can potentially increase your SAT score by 100 (although that's quite extreme, the average improvement attributed to SAT prep is closer to 20 points). That's a significant, but not earth-shattering improvement: it moves you from the 75th percentile to the 84th, or from the 97th percentile to the 99th.
Now let's compare that to other criteria used in the college admissions process.
It's way easier to have impressive and relevant extracurricular activities if you're rich and go to a good school. And unlike SAT prep, acquiring good extracurriculars will definitely take years of your time and money.
Well-written admissions essay? MIT requires one. But you do it at home, instead of a tightly controlled testing center. So if you're rich enough, you can have ghost-written admissions essays. Needless to say, this process can turn even a completely worthless essay into an impressive one.
Creative portfolio? Unless you're in the 99th percentile of musical talent, the difference between "I write songs that I play on an old guitar" and "an orchestra performed my composition" is money. The former is probably not even 75th percentile; the latter, probably 95+.
Alumni parents who would be likely to donate big bucks? You don't need an expensive prep course to get that, yet it can provide your application with a much bigger boost than 100 SAT points. And unlike the SAT, if you don't have alumni parents to begin with, then you'll never get this boost, no matter how much extra work you put in.
The SAT is not fair. But it's the fairest admissions criterion used by U.S. universities today.
(note: MIT still relies on the SAT; today's announcement concerns the SAT Subject Tests)
You don't need to use the SAT or ACT as a criterion. The problem if you don't is probably two-fold.
1.) You're throwing out a signal that has proven to be pretty reliable in at least establishing a floor as what students have a good chance of succeeding and
2.) As a related matter, it's a very simple, quantitative, standardized metric (with decent predictive power) that lets you bucket applicants pretty easily.
Do you maybe throw out some applicants who are really bad at standardized tests, but would otherwise thrive in an undergraduate academic setting? Probably. But the data suggests that standardized testing is a pretty good predictor of success in school (which, of course, is not necessarily the same as success in life).
Potential directions of thought: Offer a series low cost test pilot class which allows potential students to take a single test course at MIT. The professors double as recruiters, they get to see them thinking.
Truth be told: the culture of those institutions is based on extremely synthetic virtue-signalling and superficial values and is very far from being meritocratic or open to social mobility.
This might be great for rich kids, though in case you are ambitious, clever, gritty but come from not-so-privileged background (not necessarily low-class or third world - just temporary economic turmoil is enough) - you are going to hate every single second you spend there with all your heart.
So maybe this way it is a win-win in the end. The aristocracy get their titles and the plebs their opportunities for self-realisation. No harm done.
Is that 20 point bump a comparison taking an expensive prep class to zero preparation? Or is it a comparison taking an expensive prep class to doing self-directed preparation with a $5 prep book? My guess is the former, when the latter is what's relevant for arguments about the advantages obtained through wealth.
I took tests in the 1600 era. I came from one of the best public high schools in California. I would say 80%+ of the high school had SAT prep, every single one of the people I talked to at school had SAT prep.
If you're not including self study, then maybe? But with prep and self study, everyone I knew was able to get at least a 100 point increase, I think I got a 300 point increase. Basically aced the math section through practice and study (missed 1 question).
I'm an underrepresented minority and I increased my SAT score by 200-300 from the PSAT to SAT, depending on how you want to measure the change. This was just by doing self-study with off the shelf test prep material. The classes aren't what increases your score, its the consistent structured study and ones innate potential. For some people, no amount of study is going to get them into the 90+th percentile. While others who have the capacity to do well but haven't had the best instruction over the years can cover a lot of ground with the right prep. But this is exactly what SAT is intended to measure, scholastic potential. That some people can increase scores dramatically through preparation does not indicate a failure of the test, but rather its success.
This. I’m a college freshman and took the SAT and PSAT when in high school. I’m also not a minority. While I and my parents could have afforded the expensive prep courses the students around me were taking , I decided to skip these and focus purely on solo prep. Across the PSAT and SAT, I spent a total of $50 for my prep–a $35 dollar, thick book of SAT problems, and a $15 PSAT prep book. Technically, you don’t even need to buy these books—many libraries offer the books to borrow for free.
Just going through those books and drilling incessantly on weekends and in my free time was enough to get me a 1520 on the PSAT (the max score, which helped in gaining merit scholarships, which is the reason I go to school for free right now), and a 1540 on the SAT (99th percentile). I also used Khan Academy extensively, which provides free prep sponsored by Collegeboard.
In my opinion, prep courses are just a means for unmotivated students to put in the same amount of work as a highly diligent, self-studying student. There’s plenty of free and relatively inexpensive resort resources out there nowadays, it just requires time and attention (which sadly a lot of my generation doesn’t have).
No one even told us at my school that the PSAT would count for national merit scholarships, which ended up saving me $20,000 on university tuition over four years.
>But this is exactly what SAT is intended to measure, scholastic potential.
But if you define the variable like this, you end up opening a can of worms.
Do rich kids have more scholastic potential because they have better access to resources? Or should scholastic potential be the measurement of how a child performs assuming they had the same access to resources? Should children who belong to a racial/ethnic group that have social stereotypes of having more scholastic potential be defined as having more scholastic potential because of the effect of stereotypes and labels, or should the measure of scholastic potential be of the underlying potential if the effects of stereotypes and labels were equal?
Normally measurements of potential aim to be to measure the factors least impacted by other factors, because if we account for those factors we are measuring actual instead of potential.
> Do rich kids have more scholastic potential because they have better access to resources?
Yes. They do. It's maybe not the answer you were looking for, but if you are better prepared, you'll do better at the task at hand. Seems fairly straightforward.
The next question would be how easy are those resources to access (in the case of the SAT)? And the answer is you can do pretty well with a $20 test prep book that you can order from Amazon. The rest is time, effort, awareness etc.
Then we start getting into factors that are much harder to control or evaluate - parental involvement, guidance, nutrition, emotional support, etc.
>Yes. They do. It's maybe not the answer you were looking for, but if you are better prepared, you'll do better at the task at hand. Seems fairly straightforward.
I think you missed the point of the two questions, which is a question of what scholastic potential issue. What you are measuring is something that I might call scholastic actuality. It is how good they are with the tools they have. Potential is how good they are if we normalize the tools.
Granted, we don't have to go with that definition. If you want to call what I'm calling actuality potential, then that is fine. Just redefining a variable. But then we need a name for what I'm calling potential. Potential potential sounds a bit weird, but naming variables is hard so I'll use it as a placeholder for now.
So now that we have academic potential and academic potential potential, which should a person be ranked based off of when going to college? Given that academic potential is more dependent upon environmental factors that will change and be normalized between all freshmen (to some degree, there is still some differences), then should academic potential potential be a better predictor for success at college?
That isn't the complete answer, and real life is much more complicated than these simple equations. Just like emotional support can lead to a more mature individual that even once the emotional support is gone they have a life long benefit from.
But every metric used by colleges is to measure what you termed "scholastic actuality":
- School grades: if you didn't get the GPA you're already out of the running in many colleges
- Extracurricular Activities: if you didn't actually participate, then no one is going to look at how you might have done if you had participated
- College Essay: if you can't write you're not going to get any points here, no matter the potential you might have to eventually write something amazing
I don't see why the SAT should focus on some ethereal "potential" when everything else is centered on the current reality and not potential. Colleges aren't looking for the completely unrefined ore, they're looking for a diamond in the rough that needs to be cut and polished if you will. Not a bucket of rocks that are very likely to contain a diamond.
This is basically what I was trying to get at with my original comment - I think you did a better job of expressing it.
At some level you have to have to have something to show for your potential - otherwise there's no way to choose between candidates. Every single metric will advantage those who had the time, money, and resources to invest in developing academic aptitude. There are a small group of people who get by on developing musical or athletic aptitude but even those require time, money, energy, resources.
> Do rich kids have more scholastic potential because they have better access to resources?
Do kids with involved parents have access to more scholastic potential because their parents cared? Almost certainly, and that's a good thing and we should harvest it, not attempt to force something that is not going to work.
Once they are in college, the impact of parents is quite minified. So if you have a stupid whose default academic potential is 10 but has a parental multiplier of 2 for having involved parents and another kid whose default academic potential is 15 but has a parental multiplier of 1 for parents who don't care, once they get into college and the parental multiplier goes away the one who has a 15 should do better than the one who has a 10.
Now, numbers aren't that easily available. And maybe parents caring has a permanent effect that lasts even once they are gone. Real life is far more complicated than my example. But it shows a very simple possibility of why measuring potential while ignoring environmental failures can lead to a sub-optimal ranking.
Apologies. I meant the ongoing direct impacts like forcing you to get up in time for class, enforcing a curfew, consistently encouraging time to be spent studying. The impacts on the changes to a child, are another impact, and one that is even harder to account for.
Take a simple example of waking up in time for class. You can have a college freshman who was taught by their parents to be up on time. You can also have a college freshman who always depended upon their parents to wake them up and is thus oversleeping.
The former seems more in line with the true potential, while the latter is a temporary benefit from parents. A kid who taught themselves how to wake barely on time will do worse than a kid whose parents makes sure they wake up with time to spare when parents are present, but if the parents don't instill the values of waking up on time to the latter child, then in college the former one will do better.
Perhaps, but it doesn't necessarily translate so directly.
When a kid's academic achievement is significantly caused by their parents constantly putting daily active pressure on them, the removal of that pressure can cause them to completely fall apart.
SAT prep courses advertise that they can increase scores by 100 points but generally they're lying in order to sell more test courses. But the real number is closer to "11 to 15 points on the math section and 6 to 9 points on the verbal."[1]
As a former SAT tutor (and a guy who gamed the hell out of the SAT) I have trouble believing that. There are only a few classes of questions they ask on the test, and if you master them the whole test is a walk in the park.
Maybe the problem is most students just don't give a damn about the classes their parents make them take? Can someone explain the findings in this paper?
My impression as a former SAT instructor is a lot of students don’t spend that much time prepping. And if they have no good reading/math background it can take some effort to master things.
That said, typically saw increases well above that in my classes. Even with zero instruction I’d expect a self studying student to improve more than that from familiarization.
The SAT is designed to be an intelligence test, not a course final, and it's possible that the large team of education and psychometrics people who've been working on it for decades know what they're doing.
Armchair speculation: there are probably some really bright kids out there with poor test-taking skills, and prep likely has a dramatic effect on scores for them, but most students are not that.
Did you actually sit an SAT before you started gaming? What was your improvement?
Not GP, but also a test prep teacher in a previous life. I always scored well on the SAT and test well in general, so I can't speak to personal improvement there, but a few points:
First, the test prep companies heavily encourage (and may even require?) students to take the test multiple times. That change alone will boost most people's top score by a solid margin, because it's a noisy test. The first response they always gave to people complaining about lack of improvement was "take the test again, and if you still haven't improved, take the course again for free, and then take the test again".
Second, psychometric expertise is great, but the goal of the SAT is not to be impossible to train for except as a secondary thing. It's really hard to do, especially when you are such a high value optimization target and have to build a test that doesn't rely on much specific knowledge and can be quickly scored. A lot of what the SAT courses do is just teach students to make slightly more accurate guesses on multiple-choice questions where someone unfamiliar with test strategy would leave things blank. That alone tends to boost scores, and some of the other strategies are fairly clever to help avoid common mistakes.
Last, though I didn't have room to improve on the SAT, I also taught GRE classes and can speak to my improvement there. The math section is trivial to get an 800 on (it's easier than the SAT math, or at least it was when I taught 15+ years ago), but the verbal section is quite tough if you haven't studied, and in a lot of ways is a glorified vocabulary test, and the reading comprehension sections can be pretty tough as well. Before I trained to teach the courses, my verbal score was a 490 (on the real test, not practice), so I was considering not even trying to teach (there's some threshold you have to hit, maybe 700 at the time?), but the trainer encouraged all of us to try anyways because he said the content made such a difference. After just two weekends of intensive teacher training, I tested again and ended up with a 740. After teaching the course around a dozen times, I'm pretty confident I could have hit 800 without any difficulty, you basically just have to get used to the types of questions that they ask and get in the headspace of the question authors. Just one data point, but I definitely believe that this stuff is effective.
But for someone who did well on the SAT, you would be expected to do well on the GRE too. That you were able to prep your way into a good score doesn't indicate the GRE is measuring the wrong thing. You already previously showed a strong aptitude for g-loaded tests. What you needed was familiarity with the content and the kinds of questions asked. But that doesn't invalidate the test.
Students naturally do better without test prep, too. They get older, their brains grow more, and they’re more intelligent. Much of the score increase people see is attributable to that. And most kids bright enough to exercise good test taking skills will have them without special training, I guess? 11 years of school will do that.
Not only that, but these prep courses tend to assign practice SATs that are harder in the beginning and easier at the end, to give the impression of rapid progress.
Those estimates are generally in line with what other independent investigators find, maybe a bit smaller.
The elephant in the room in these kinds of discussions is the validity of the tests to begin with. MIT makes a statement that the general tests are predictive in combination with other criteria, but how predictive?
Generally studies of these sorts of things find that they're moderately predictive of first-year GPA (like .4 correlation), and then trail off to zero as the interval between testing and outcomes increases. The effects are even smaller in studies in relatively unselected samples (due to court orders or legal decisions, for example).
So one argument always goes that you should use whatever empirically-supported stuff you can to make fair decisions, but we treat them as if they're more than they are. Sure, you could have a lot of things that are significantly predictive but with small effect size, or where there's lots of noise, but why as a society to we pretend these are huge effects?
The other thing about that paper is the hint that the practice effects are larger in higher-performing examinees, which also makes sense and is consistent with other studies. Why is this a problem? Because those are exactly the types of students for whom these issues are more applicable. A 12 point average gain with practice doesn't matter if you're including people who never had a chance at MIT anyway, but a 20 point gain might in a highly competitive group where small differences are being magnified tenfold.
The issue in all of this isn't the people in the 99th percentile versus the 50th percentile, which is the bulk of what's going into these predictive models and effect sizes, it's the 99th versus the 95th. There's a ton of real-world noise, but society acts as if the noise is nonexistent. It's like we're idolizing the outcome of some kind of survivorship bias process.
>Students were able to indicate if they had prepared through the use of school courses, commercial courses, tutoring, or a variety of preparatory materials. In what follows, a coached student is defined as one that reported participating in a commercial preparatory course.
Is there any indication that they actually broke down any further, or is this just limited to the impact of average coaching and thus not a good representation of those who receive the top tier coaching?
The real scandal that I can't believe hasn't gotten more attention is that wealthy families are hiring psychologists to claim their child has a learning disability. They can then get more time to take the test and due to a policy change a few years ago, this information is hidden from the schools when students report their scores.
Look, faking a disability is deplorable but this stance is bonkers. I wish my parents had the money when I was growing up to get me checked and diagnose my ADHD.
And of course you wouldn't want to report to the college if a person has a disability, are you trying to scarlet letter everyone who needs a little more time to read from dyslexia?
It's always great when people compare learning disabilities to being dumb.
> performance enhancing drugs
I realize that it's easy to look at how stimulants affect people without ADHD and conclude that they're getting the same advantage but this really isn't true. A non-ADHD med example is caffeine. Most people who down a few coffees or energy drinks will be wide awake and jittery. But for me I'll be hyper and bouncing off the walls and spacing out until I have an energy drink which lets me focus a little bit and makes me sleepy.
As someone who has used similar accommodations (though not specifically on the SAT), yes. Dyslexia will hold you back in college. SAT is intended to measure odds of success in college.
You're not wrong but I think that's due to how much of university is based around timed tests. The artificial difficulty is maddening. I was fortunate that my school's disability office had fangs and that the maths program wasn't super competitive and wanted students to learn more than get marks.
My favorite professor was teaching number theory and always scheduled his classes for the end day and gave unlimited time for exams. Every time I would sit there for at least 5 hours (which wasn't super uncommon) and it was the nicest thing to not be freaking out and trying to force myself to focus.
I disagree that it's artificial. There's only so much time in a day. A programmer who can do a task in one hour will in the long run outsprint one who needs two.
Yes, you can (like many, many others) spend an extra couple hours at work every day, but it'll all come back to center eventually. Sometimes, or even much of the time, you won't even have that option. These are times when people seriously depend on you to perform.
It's not personal. I get that it can be stressful and I've been there but I don't kid myself that I'm as good as the people who can work quickly and under pressure.
Admissions committees at top universities are some of the most bleeding heart do-Goode types on the planet. There is no way disclosing a learning disability would get you Scarlett lettered. If anything, it would probably help your application.
Anyone can study the SAT prep books for free at a bookstore a few hours at a time daily.
If your offended by that, what about professors or HS teachers who teach certain sections of the textbook because it's going to be on the exam.
One can self-study the SAT prep book or self-study their biology book and in both cases can potentially be more knowledgeable than those who attended a formal university class or prep workshop. Most students aren't driven to do that though.
This goes to the fundamental problem, that our university system at present is really just a credentialing and signaling system.
> If your offended by that, what about professors or HS teachers who teach certain sections of the textbook because it's going to be on the exam.
Yes, this another big problem caused by (too much emphasis on) standardised testing. I learnt the most in classes that didn't do this. But people do better on tests when they do do this. Standardised tests are destroying our education system.
Teaching to an aptitude test is clearly counterproductive (and ditto tricks for hacking the test--like just testing each multiple choice answer instead of solving an equation).
On the other hand. the AP classes I took in high school (admittedly, a long time ago) seemed pretty reasonable. Perhaps you could quibble with how the syllabus weighted various subjects, or the (mercifully few) classes on how structure exam answers. Overall though, I felt like I got a decent education in Spanish/History/Physics/etc from those courses.
I think it's the testing that's the problem, more so than the standardization (although standardization can definitely be taken too far to the point that it's unhelpful). You can of course have a standardized curriculum without any testing at all. Countries like Finland put far less emphasis on test results, and a lot more emphasis on teacher's assessment of their pupils. It seems like a much healthier system to me.
Diversity in knowledge across the working population would seem preferable to homogeneity to me.
Sure you want some core things, like all engineers being able to solve 2nd order DEs, but outside that you want diversity if you're looking for innovation and application to diverse fields.
In general, sure, but how much diversity you can reasonably expect for say, high school calculus? It’s not as though schools abandoned their infinitesimal-based curricula to match the AP syllabus better.
The AP US History curriculum also kind of anticipates your critique:
“As has been the case for all prior versions of the AP U.S. History course, this AP U.S. History course framework includes a minimal number of individual names: the founders, several presidents and party leaders, and other individuals who are almost universally taught in college-level U.S. history courses. As history teachers know well, the material in this framework cannot be taught without careful attention to the individuals, events, and documents of American history; however, to ensure teachers have flexibility to teach specific content that is valued locally and individually, the course avoids prescribing details that would require all teachers to teach the same historical examples. Each teacher is responsible for selecting specific individuals, events, and documents for student investigation of the material in the course framework.”
The question shouldn't be is the SAT unfairly biased towards families with money, since of course it is, but is the SAT less biased towards families with money then other criteria. Having parents with money and connections lets you get tutoring to increase your GPA, tutoring to write essays, connections to get internships, the free time to do clubs, training to excel in sports, and so many other things.
Right! I don't understand why people in this thread are apparently mad rich families for this? Like a family with means is doing all the things to raise a socialized, well rounded, experienced, well-read and tutored, worldly person. Like god damn I can't think of a better use for the money as a parent.
I get that college admissions is a contest and performative but hot damn this thread is full of people mad at other people's happiness.
People are mad, because that happiness comes at their expense. Not because rich people prep their kids per se, but because society is a zero-sum game in many ways, and the end result is a de facto caste system. People are often willing to endure unfair hardships, if their children get a better chance. But if they know that not even their great-grandchildren are likely to be significantly better off, the focus shifts back to here and now.
The question isn't "can the SATs be gamed?", though. The question is "can the SATs be gamed more than whatever other criteria you use?". Simply analyzing one half of the equation won't produce a correct answer.
Rich people can game standardized tests. They can also game grades. They can game admission essays. They can game interviews. If colleges admitted students based on brain fMRI data, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that rich people managed to exploit that, too.
Are the SATs unfair? Absolutely. Are they more unfair than the alternative? I'm not convinced. I usually prefer the devil I know.
100 points isn't that much. The average score is 1000-1100. The elite universities expect 1500. Tutoring, even if it gave you 100 points, isn't going to cross that gap.
I'd say it's still relatively fair. Fairer than essentially any other admissions criterion: grades aren't comparable across schools, extra-curriculars are much more about money spent, etc.
I've worked as an SAT prep tutor and I've worked in the oil industry.
Actually, I felt way more guilt about my SAT tutoring work than the oil industry. The world runs on oil, but no one needs expensive SAT tutoring to give rich kids an edge over the poor ones.
This seems like such a weird stance since pretty much all formal education isn't free. Even without SAT prep rich families can still afford better schools, private tutors, set up apprenticeships.
It's a weird world where people are mad that those with means are using them to educate themselves and their children.
As an adult I choose to pay for lots of different forms of education that gives me "advantage" -- bleh -- over my friends, peers, coworkers, etc.. Why should I feel guilty that I have the means to buy culinary textbooks so I can bake better?
I'm not angry at the people who want to help their kids, but at the system that we're making. Our "meritocracy" has become a caste system in which a small group of people are doing very well and everyone else is scrambling to make it. It's a big social problem. Look at how suicide rates in middle America has skyrocketed, look at how much more divisive our politics have become.
I have no idea what the solution is, and can't say for sure where we should place the blame, but I have an innate distaste for the passing along of inherited advantages.
I think you're reading the position a little wrongly.
People are upset when being rich means you can be prepared for a test and so get a higher score than someone who is equally able.
Supposedly, in a properly operating university, once at the uni the background of the students shouldn't matter [as much], those who came from schools where they couldn't afford equipment should now have equal access as those who could buy anything they needed and more. Simply having access to facilities makes a massive difference to what can be achieved and that feeds in to intellect growth.
I think the difference is that, better schools and private tutors, are at least in theory, teaching useful skills and ultimately creating a better person at the end. Being good at the SATs doesn't have the same excuse, so its much more obvious when you're basically just paying to get a better score.
Look, I don't disagree with you -- other than the score SAT prep is fantastically bad education investment. But I think this is a problem with the testing more than some larger class issue. We've rewarded learning a bunch of useless facts and test taking strategies. You could probably switch out the SAT for an entire test of movie trivia and you'd probably get the same distribution of performance since ACT/SAT just reward the people who study for it the most. You can't accidentally prepare for these tests by other schooling that's not geared for it.
While it's true that prep courses can help dramatically, the SAT subject tests are also not really that hard. I don't consider myself terribly smart (certainly not MIT level) and I managed to get an 800 on the Math II and 800 on Chemistry with a minimum of studying using pretty inexpensive books. This applied to many of my friends as well.
This is one of the reasons the subject tests are not especially useful. And since they test knowledge rather than aptitude, making them more difficult doesn't actually find smarter people but instead people who had access to more rigorous high school coursework.
At the GRE level this is even more extreme. For competitive programs a perfect score doesn't distinguish you so taking the test can only harm you. When applying to grad school I was explicitly advised not to take the GRE subject tests.
The subject tests, IMO, are terrible. I took the Chemistry one right after taking AP (college level) Chemistry, and while I got a full score on that, I got absolutely destroyed on the subject test. They asked trivia-like questions and barely tested for actual chemistry knowledge.
Interestingly, I had the opposite experience, finding the AP Chemistry exam more difficult than the subject exam. I think part of it is that I have no love for chemistry, so I just memorized the things I needed for the subject test.
I was a child of the 80s, and while I agree the Math "Level 2" was a cakewalk,
getting an 800 on Chem was definitely something to write home about. I get
that scaling may have changed in the past thirty years, but still!
I was shamed by some older fellow alums when I told people that my parents had hired someone to go over my application and essays. Their stance was that my parents gave me an unfair advantage (note, both of my parents are immigrants who did not even finish high school). My retort to them was point out that most of them didn't exactly grow up in the crime ridden rural parts of the world (quite the opposite in fact). Their parents paid a higher tax rate to support the world class public education they got, which they just assumed is the norm. That shut them up rather quickly.
SAT prep classes or not, coming from a more advantageous social-economic background grants you so many benefits in many ways. My parents wouldn't have to hire someone to review my applications if my school had a good college counselor (50% of my classmates do not go on to college).
>coming from a more advantageous social-economic background grants you so many benefits in many ways //
It's not all benefit: you can be taught to be lazy, not to be self-reliant, you can lack tenacity and resilience, you can have perverse expectations and a sheltered view of the World. Such things can turn out to be a hindrance to self-fulfillment.
Yeah that's a fair point for sure and I've seen examples of those too. However, even then some well resourced parents will still clear a path for these children to get into selective schools as the recent college admissions scandals revealed.
The main thing that frustrated me about the SAT, at least when I took it, was that it essentially boiled down to an IQ test, not a true "scholastic aptitude" test. I did barely any prep (aside from, I think, a flip calendar with questions), but I scored 1510 out of 1600 at the time which qualified me for a prestigious program in my university.
Then I narrowly avoided flunking out because I'd never actually learned to study or manage my time properly in high school because I'd never needed to until college. Study skills and time management seem like pretty important factors in a true measure of scholastic aptitude.
That's a fair criticism of the general SAT - I used to teach those classes, and the test is very gameable in the sense that there really are "A FEW SIMPLE TRICKS!" to learn that have nothing to do with actually knowing the material in a useful way.
But at least some of the subject SATs are not like that at all, specifically the math/science ones. There really aren't many tricks or traps, they really are like normal school tests (if multiple choice) where doing well on them requires you to know the material they cover. Nobody who is "good at tests" is going to 800 the physics one without knowing physics well enough that they'd do well in a freshman mechanics course, and someone who gets a 400 either slept through class or is going to struggle at college level.
Coming from someone who took said expensive prep courses, I can tell you that just taking practice exam after practice exam is easily 90% of the benefit. The test taking strategy they teach is something anyone with serious prospects of getting into MIT would have learned years ago.
What really increases your score is having a good night's sleep and a healthy breakfast before school every day of your life prior to taking the test. The test doesn't really measure aptitude because it can't control for those inputs.
I work for a company that collects aggregated SAT data. I was pretty upset when I discovered there is a very strong, direct correlation between family income and SAT score, with a credible spread of several hundred points between the average scores of the highest and lowest income groups. I knew that there would be a correlation, but seeing how strong it was was pretty depressing.
I think the courses mostly help with discipline in studying for the test. There’s nothing magical about them. I’ve taken many standardized exams with and without prep courses and it’s quite possible to do very well with inexpensive self study material if you’re incredibly disciplined about studying.
That's true, but at the same time it's a standardized test so anyone can replicate those prep courses. There's tons of prep books with practice questions, tips, etc.
It's a matter of awareness and taking it seriously (obviously a simplification, but hope you get my point).
I mean, it's not really true. People spend a lot of money on test prep, but this isn't even a case where the evidence hasn't come in yet. We know perfectly well that test prep has negligible influence on SAT scores.
Those studies were mostly funded and influenced by the college board, and they needed that to be true, so that’s what they found. But there is prep and there is prep!, they are different with different influences. Studying the former (say a few weekend long prep course) to make conclusions about the latter (intensive cram school for a couple of years) is criminal.
I’ve seen an SAT cram school in China, and yes...it will influence your scores significantly because they pull out all of the stops.
> Those studies were mostly funded and influenced by the college board, and they needed that to be true, so that’s what they found.
The SAT draws a huge amount of overtly hostile attention. So does SAT prep. But these highly motivated SAT-hostile researchers haven't been able to produce the results they need.
Yes, no one disputes that memorizing an answer key can give you a higher score. But by the same token, no one believes that the influence of cheating is of interest when studying potential gains from "test prep".
That isn’t just it though: they have access to old tests, they have access to test takers who memorize questions, given the importance and popularity of any test, these options will arise and people with means will have access to them.
You can make a case for a much weaker form of Goodhart's Law, that with the SAT as a well-known target, SAT scores are less informative than they would be otherwise.
But "there is no avoiding Goodhart’s law" is obviously wrong if you interpret Goodhart's Law as it's actually phrased; the SAT is doing a fine job of avoiding it today. The SAT hasn't ceased to be a good measure. It's still very informative.
I realized how much of a scam standardized testing was when I used to do the PSATs and increased my score mostly by using a different strategy rather than getting smarter or anything. The SAT prep class my high school offered for like $40 was a complete joke because they were designed for public school students where you get around 1250 and it's pretty good for state school admissions. Until I learned to treat the test as a game and understand its scoring I went from 1330 to 1520 simply by _not_ answering anything I wasn't fully confident with my answer - this is literally the opposite strategy I was instructed to do where they encouraged people to guess. To get to the higher end, you are best off never getting even a partial deduction for getting something wrong. When I got my best score, I only got 3 questions wrong but far more unanswered.
This is indeed a strange decision for MIT. The conventional wisdom has long been that the SAT subject tests are MORE predictive of future success at MIT, because the influence of test prep, cramming, test coaches, etc. is minimal for the subject tests. While there are reports of people raising their scores artificially on the non-subject tests by hundreds of points through these short-term methods, the subjects tests have long had a reputation as being more representative of what you really know.
> The conventional wisdom has long been that the SAT subject tests are MORE predictive of future success at MIT, because the influence of test prep, cramming, test coaches, etc. is minimal for the subject tests.
Who cares what the conventional wisdom says? The psychometric results are that SAT I scores and SAT II scores predict performance about equally well in isolation and don't have more predictive value in combination than they do in isolation. In other words, they measure exactly the same thing.
(Contrast the other major predictor, high school GPA, where the predictive value of considering GPA + SAT in combination somewhat exceeds the predictive value of either metric individually.)
There is another implication as a consequence of the statement "the influence of test prep, cramming, test coaches, etc. is minimal for the subject tests." That is, I first read thag the students don't suffer under these conditions. It is a valuable trait no doubt, to be able to cram swaths of loosely associated facts. I'd argue that it's a vital trade for study, but perhaps it is less severe than only twenty years ago, because very powerful memory aids have become ubiquitious.
> predict performance about equally well
having no tires or no engine predicts performance of a car--or rather the lack thereof--equally well. Yet grip and horsepower are independent variables. I think that means SAT scores don't predict success too well at all beyond a certain threshold.
Having the right motivation (haha, a pun) for a certain disciplin might make a huge difference. So you can test e.g. vocabulary learning in general, or top9cal knowledge, which requires precise choices of vocabulary nonetheless, but one not found in a general dictionary. It's more like knowing which dictionaries exist, and what texts are referenced therein.
> There is another implication as a consequence of the statement "the influence of test prep, cramming, test coaches, etc. is minimal for the subject tests." That is, I first read tha[t] the students don't suffer under these conditions.
This is not a valid inference to draw; the influence of test prep, cramming, coaches, etc. is also minimal for the main SAT, but students suffer through them anyway.
> Who cares what the conventional wisdom says? The psychometric results are that SAT I scores and SAT II scores predict performance about equally well in isolation and don't have more predictive value in combination than they do in isolation. In other words, they measure exactly the same thing.
This is point where you take a step back and conclude that if this is your measured result, you may have been measuring nothing at all.
>The conventional wisdom has long been that the SAT subject tests are MORE predictive of future success at MIT, because the influence of test prep, cramming, test coaches, etc. is minimal for the subject tests.
Citation needed? The admissions office has much better data on this stuff, but in my experience, MIT students who performed well on these tests did so because their schools offered AP exams that were relevant. For students like me, we were S.O.L. and had to teach ourselves a year's worth of test material entirely by self-study while still maintaining top grades in school, doing research, and studying for the SAT.
To clarify: not disputing that there's less cramming, just that it's a better predictor.
I'm assuming most everyone taking the SAT subject test is also taking AP tests. AP tests were significantly more rigorous than SAT subject tests and would have provided more useful information to admissions. It took more prep to get a 5 on an AP Chemistry test vs a top score on the SAT subject test.
Some rich trustee's dumb kid probably got "screwed over" by a poor kid who put in insane hours. I dont see how this leads to egalitarian access to education given that on every other metric spoilt idiots carrying rich parents DNA will have an advantage.
If the reason is benign, I'm guessing it's just because AP tests have gotten so watered down that they're just a stand-in for the SAT subject tests at this point.
A number of comments here seem to be confusing SAT subject tests, which are domain-specific tests about subjects like biology, with the "standard" SAT. It's only the former that MIT is dropping from consideration in admissions:
> We will continue to require the SAT or the ACT, because our research has shown these tests, in combination with a student’s high school grades and coursework, are predictive of success in our challenging curriculum.
Note to those who haven't been in high school for some time: these aren't the main test. The main test still gets considered (in addition to your parents' money)
"As for the children of prominent campus donors, [former MIT director of undergraduate admissions] Crowley said a college's development office might reach out to the dean of admissions to say, "Hey, just so you know, Lisa's dad has been very generous to us in the past, or something."
Since one isn't provided this is the top google result containing the quote [1].
The context of the linked article is that Crowley now works for an admission prep company IvyWise and this quote may not directly reference MIT but his broader experience in this more recent role.
I'm sure that I will get in trouble for this but...
The SAT/ACT system is corrupt. It's plain an simple. Follow the money. It's as simple as that. The root of most issues involve simple economics. (Maybe a little broad of a statement, so take it with a grain of salt, but certainly applies in this case.)
The tests are built on revenue from the taking the tests and industry selling you prep material. I don't have time to find the article but the SAT organization got busted a while back for charging different prices for different zip codes.
Although I can't prove it, but I'm sure there were kickback for universities that used the tests. It's a little unsubstantiated claim but we already know you can bribe your way into to school. (The Rick Singer debacle) Why wouldn't these "Testing" companies be doing the same.
Memorizing a method/strategy to take test is a waste of time and national resources.
Slightly unrelated but could be useful to any HS seniors here: My n=1 study method got me a 1520. I would study for the SAT in a dark room, with horror movie music or war sound effects playing in earbuds, while planking. For every incorrect answer, I'd do 10 pushups or 3 pull-ups (can adapt to your own level). Rationale was that if I could do well in the worst conditions possible, then I'd do better sitting in a quiet room.
I'm a pretty bad student also, I had like a 3 GPA.
"And last, but certainly not least: I know we are making this announcement during the COVID-19 pandemic. We had already been planning to make this change, and decided to announce as soon as possible in part because we wanted to make sure no one was spending more time or energy studying for tests they wouldn’t have to take for us, especially during a public health emergency. "
Riiiiiiiight. 'Cuz nobody that applies to MIT ever applies to a back-up school. You know, just in case they don't get accepted. I've heard that can happen.
SAT Subject Tests are either optional or not considered at most schools. I personally took a few SAT Subject Tests that were only required for a single school I was applying to.
The SAT subject tests just felt like a joke to me anyways. My high school was a public high school in Singapore, a country generally considered to have great education. With a generally good mastery of the normal high school curriculum, these tests were considered very easy. Pretty much all my friends and I got 800 out of 800 for all the subject tests. And these perfect scores ended up not mattering that much in college admissions anyways.
The normal SAT I tests, on the other hand, seemed to require more critical thinking, higher reading comprehension and reasoning skills, skills that are sorely needed in an age of blatant misinformation. These are much harder to score well, which is why so many people spend a lot studying for them. Not so much for the SAT subject tests.
It depends heavily on the SAT subject test. Math II, for instance, is heavily curved and anyone with a solid understanding of high school math and their calculator should have no problem getting an 800. But I'm not sure if the same is true for all of the tests in the humanities and social sciences.
In my home country Iran we had the equivalent of SAT general and subject tests. I did pretty poorly in general tests, but the subject tests saved me (near perfect scores in physics and math) and opened the door for me to go to a good university in my country. Just to get a clear understanding of my financials, I was living off 1$ per month at that time which was just enough to buy heavily subsidized food stamps in college. I ended up graduating with a PhD degree and worked at several top companies in the US later. This seems to me like a case of a cure that is worse than the disease.
To be fair, the SAT is pretty useless when you have enough applicants with 99 percentile scores that you can fill your class multiple times over. It was never a differentiator.
If they ever extend this to the SAT / ACT itself (and not just the subject tests) I will have lost a lot of respect for MIT.
A goal of higher education is to give the opportunity to people who will likely make the best use of the education, and have the greatest chance of succeeding given their preparation. Spots at top colleges are a limited resource. There has to be a selection function, and an unbiased test that asks questions about math, reading comprehension, etc. is as close as you're going to get.
The SAT, regardless of your opinion of whether it exacerbates or merely reflects inequities in the system, is a very strong indicator of whether a person has the preparation to succeed at university. You cannot get around that fact.
Whether high-priced prep courses or studying out of a book from the library help you pass the test, the person doing either of those things has gotten education and skills along the way. God forbid you consider the idea that someone actually learned something even though the test was standardized. And the fact that even poor families will pay to put their kids through test prep courses suggests they see value in it. It's not like they're paying to be given instructions on how to cheat the system.
People who want to water down the admissions criteria to be a social equalizer ought not mask their motives by saying that the test is flawed. The test is perfectly fine, and it reflects people's preparation and abilities to succeed at university. If you want to change the outcome, change the inputs -- and work on getting more people qualified to pass that test.
Most of this is to obscure their admission criteria. Harvard has come under fire for actively discriminating against Asian applicants. By removing a standard test, these colleges can actively discriminate whilst making it more difficult to prove admissions bias from a numerical and arguably more objective standard.
They are removing the extra optional tests, not the main SAT test. Sounds great to me, as these extra tests just show you have the money to take them. Your comment is an unfounded opinion, please do not present it with the certainty of a fact.
The SAT IIs are not extra/optional if you're applying to most selective colleges/universities. They aren't the main SAT, but they are far from optional for students who would be considering MIT.
There's been a similar debate over subject GREs in my field. The argument has been made that subject GREs are racist/sexist, because of the differing distributions of test scores in different demographic groups. There is a strong social pressure to accept this argument, despite its obvious absurdity, leading most people in the field to do so (and if they disagreed, they probably wouldn't tell you).
The problem is that graduate school admissions committees are left with very few quantitative measures. Undergrad grades are difficult to compare, because every university grades differently, and applicants come from different countries with completely different grading scales. So many people score perfectly on the quantitative GRE that it's nearly useless. The verbal GRE seems irrelevant to a scientific field, and it seems pointless to rule out international applicants because they don't know the meaning of the word "garrulous." In short, the subject GRE was one of the only uniform quantitative measures available to admissions committees, and now it's considered "racist."
There upshot, ironically, is that the elimination of quantitative measures makes discrimination easier to hide. This discrimination is meant to be positive, helping increase representation of underrepresented groups. The applicants who suffer most from this policy are those who are just on the line between admission and rejection, and who don't come from the "correct" demographic. The people pushing these policies think they're changing the world for the better, but it sure looks unfair to the individuals they're denying entry to. Applicants are being treated as representatives of their race or gender, rather than as individuals who should be considered individually.
MIT's grad schools jettisoned GRE consideration a while ago. As you say, the
GRE quant is trivial by MIT's standards, and the GRE verbal largely
irrelevant.
It's fairly easy to spot the "heavy-hitters" just from recommendations,
undergraduate publication record, thesis, and GPA. In short, MIT and its elite
cohort (CMU, Caltech, etc.) only accept undergrads who found their way into
their professor's research groups -- this feat in and of itself is a superior indicator.
GPA is difficult, because there's no uniform standard. A 3.9 GPA from Caltech is much more impressive than a 3.9 GPA from Harvard (where there's serious grade inflation), but then again, you have to look carefully at which specific courses went into that GPA. But how do you compare those numbers to a grade of 15/20 from a French university, or a 1.1 from a German university, or some other country whose system you don't know?
Undergrad research (including a published first-author paper) is almost a requirement now for entry into many top programs. But you have to know the research group the student worked with, and you get applications from all over the world.
The subject GRE is a uniform quantitative baseline. It isn't everything (or even most of everything), but it is a somewhat objective standard that can at least flag applicants who might have real difficulty in a top program.
The thing is, I've heard "equity" arguments for disregarding not only the subject GRE, but also published research ("Not everyone has the opportunity to do research as an undergrad") and letters of reference ("Letter writers suffer from implicit bias"). The "equity" advocates seem to want to throw out every piece of relevant information. Of course, that makes it easier to hit whatever targets "equity" requires.
> A 3.9 GPA from Caltech is much more impressive than a 3.9 GPA from Harvard
Having been an undergrad at one of the above, I can assure you both are super
impressive (in either STEM or humanities), and should garner special attention
from graduate programs.
> The subject GRE is a uniform quantitative baseline.
It seems we've moved off the topic of undergraduate acceptances to elite
graduate admissions. The dearth of slots at these rarefied levels relative to
the global supply of smart people is such that results from an arbitrary
exam coming out of New Jersey would only get a second look in the narrowest of
"splitting hairs" cases.
Absolutely! I have a lot more faith in grad admissions than undergrad, because there's so much more good signal. Unfortunately nothing like this is available when people are in high school.
It makes intuitive sense to me that MIT wouldn't find these useful. They test subjects that students study in school. They're tests of knowledge, and have multiple choice questions like "One purpose of the Marshall Plan of 1948 was to..."
As far as I know, everyone's score on these tests correlated extremely well with 1) their school grade in the relevant course 2) the relevant Advanced Placement test.
Honestly welcome change. The SAT Subject tests (at least for people around me in HS) were always considered as a much easier test you'd take after the AP for that very same subject. I just equated it to another way for collegeboard to get money especially since the questions were way more straightforward than AP. I am slightly concerned about what this means for schools where AP classes are not offered (I imagine SAT Subject tests presented the most accessible opportunity for these students to demonstrate their aptitude in a subject).
EDIT: changed wording in response to child comment.
Yep! But there are a few more barriers in the way if your school does not offer AP courses (you'd need to find neighboring schools that do allow it and talk to the AP coordinator at that school).
For subject tests, there are pretty minimal barriers associated with signing up. You just register as you normally would for an SAT exam IIRC.
These were called "Achievement Tests" in the early 90s, and man, they were
much harder than the SAT. If the current "Subject Tests" approximate their
level of difficulty, then it's a clear mistake for MIT to disregard these
datapoints. When I was applying to college, yes, people paid for SAT prep but
very few paid for Achievement Test prep, and so Achievement Tests were a superior
indicator.
> These were called "Achievement Tests" in the early 90s, and man, they were much harder than the SAT. If the current "Subject Tests" approximate their level of difficulty, then it's a clear mistake for MIT to disregard these datapoints
Difficulty as perceived by test takers is irrelevant. What MIT cares about is how well test performance predicts undergrad performance. As TFA notes, MIT is retaining the standard SAT because their data indicates that performance on that test is predictive.
Back when I applied to MIT (early 80s) our entire SAT prep was "fill in the circles completely, bring only #2 pencils to the test and if you can't eliminate even one possible answer skip the question." Back then I never heard of anyone using any more advice than just that.
A few years ago I bought some SAT prep books for my kid and he never cracked them.
Makes sense; doesn't everybody pretty much get perfect scores on these? (at least everyone who is a serious applicant to an institution like MIT) If everyone gets the same (perfect) score then the test doesn't really help the admissions committee select for the best applicants. Tests like AMC 12 may be more useful for this type of purpose.
Oxford also tried something similar by implementing their own entrance tests for engineering and physics (and other subjects). The idea was to stop private school kids with straight A GCSEs and A-levels from dominating. The entrance tests are supposed to be harder to prepare for, and therefore fairer - all that did was force the rich kids to get tutors and the situation remains largely the same.
One of the main reasons I didn't apply to the US for grad school is having to sit through the GRE (which I had no time to prepare for during my final year) and then to redo all my Masters courses because the US doesn't recognise foreign qualifications. Virtually anywhere else in the world you can convert your grades to local standard, and a masters is a masters. At grad level an interview is much more useful to gauge ability, as grades are a poor predictor of research output.
To clarify, SAT subject tests are the ones like physics, chemistry, Spanish, etc. Not the main verbal and math portion. For students smart enough to get into MIT, the subject tests are way too easy. Most students applying to MIT probably have near perfect score already, so for MIT it's probably not a useful indicator.
When I was at university, the head of admissions position at the school of physics was forced on someone who didn't want it. So he used it as an opportunity for an experiment.
He offered a place to everyone who applied. People with low grades, people without the maths prerequisite, anyone really.
Our intake swelled from about 60 students to almost 100. The ones without maths really struggled. Many dropped out.
But to him that was the whole point: if you're smart/hungry/hardworking enough to pass you'd pass. If you weren't, you'd drop out or fail. Either way, why should he try to "pick winners"? This way winners without math prereq (or whatever) still hey a chance.
That changed the way I thought about admissions as 2 of the extra 30 got a degree they never gave had a chance at otherwise.
A comment section of people who didn't read the article lol. They explicitly said they consider SAT to be a predictive metric of success at MIT. This is not critical of SAT, only SAT subject tests.
While they weren't explicit about why SAT subject tests won't be accepted, this may be a clue:
> No: in fairness to all applicants, we won’t consider them for anyone. We think it would be unfair to consider scores only from those who have scored well and therefore choose to send them to us.
Seems reasonable to expect tests which are optional to suffer from heavy selection bias as they described. I'd expect optional tests to also skew towards the rich because there is a cost to each test.
Cost for tests can be waived using exam vouchers, even for the subject tests. I think the actual factor would be preparation time/cost of other resources, which can be either really small or thousands of dollars for a test prep course.
Oh... this actually makes sense. MIT is still accepting the main SAT test and AP tests.
SAT subject tests were always a weird thing in the middle. AP tests cover the same goal, but with more rigor and differentiation. (I remember taking the SAT subject tests just to "cover my bases", because they were there, not because there seemed to be any real reason.)
Also -- remember, even if your high school doesn't offer AP courses, you can still study for and take the AP tests on your own.
It was over 35 years ago, so it has absolutely no influence on me anymore, but I achieved a perfect 800 on the SAT math achievement test, along with a 5 on the Calculus BC.
But on the regular SAT, I only achieved around 1300 total, and the math part was somewhere between 780-800 (did I have a bad day?).
I never completed college, but I have been successful nonetheless.
I think that there is more to one's ability than simply achievement test scores, grade point averages, or college degrees.
Is there some other standardised exam (AP? IB?) that they will be considering instead? I went through a very non-traditional route to university, and standardised exams were an important part of me being able to demonstrate preparedness for university. I hesitate to just go on what grades someone gets at school, as it simply puts them at the mercy of their teachers and administrators, and some people like me didn’t really go to school...
It isn't exactly a surprise. Back then, in school, we toured the national synchrotron facility, and the same question came up: if didn't have much physics at school can you still study physics? The answer was: if you study physics they'll teach you physics just fine, where you'll run into trouble is the adjacent subjects, chemistry, biology, computing. You'll need to take care of that yourself.
>For all applicants:
We require the SAT or the ACT. We do not require the ACT writing section or the SAT optional essay.
> we still require the score because it is predictive in conjunction with other acedemic factors
So.....basically nothing has changed and the headline is extremely misleading.
Edit: so apparently this applies to the "subject" tests. I never took those and didn't know they were a thing, now I do.
> "... for non-native English speakers, we strongly recommend taking the TOEFL if you have been using English for less than 5 years or do not speak English at home or in school..."
I hope that TOEFL is offered on a pass/fail criteria. For. e.g. if you score (say) 85% or more, it shouldn't matter if you score 100% for purposes or communication or comprehension.
The only criteria for English should be abilities at least as good as the worst teaching assistant in the undergraduate college. This is the lowest possible standard of English language proficiency.
"""
WHEN Mark W. Eichin showed up for his course in differential equations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this year, he found that his instructor was a Hindustani whose spoken English was ''almost incomprehensible.'' Along with most of his classmates, the freshman stopped attending lectures. ''People just got their assignments and left,'' he recalled.
"""
Wouldn't demanding English language abilities help to reduce instances of this in the future? Like if they're letting students graduate with language deficits then the chance of tutors/teachers/professors having less language ability than desirable would seem to go up?
The University of Illinois requires TOEFL and in person English language interviews before a TA or professor from a foreign country is allowed to teach any section. Students still face similar issues, due to accents and the fact that fluency in a language guarantees that you can convey an idea, not that you can engage listeners and use idioms which translate well.
I'm sure this is for the sake of "diversity" yet this only harms those kids who can't do any extracurricular activities or similar and had to rely on standardized tests to have a chance. I should know, I was one of them.
So this can only backfire (if the goal really is to get more people from different backgrounds in), as these initiatives always do.
I am a class of 2020 MIT student. Taking these tests was sort of awkward in my case. My high school allowed me to take the ACT once for free. I did not have to take SAT Subject Tests for any of my other college applications. I am happy with Stu's decision here. I can speak more on my experience if people would like me to do so.
Nearly none of the comments are really about what they're eliminating: SAT subject tests (NOT the SAT!)
The main SAT is basically a basic skills and IQ test while the SUBJECT tests are almost entirely about preparation, making them much easier to game/prepare for.
I did poorly for SAT general ability test. But was at the top most percentile (I can't remember the exact number here, long time back) in the subject tests (I think I took Math and Physics). I wonder how that happened if both tests predict performance equally well.
What about the College boards initiative to consider adversity? Has that initiative gone anywhere or is it dead? I would rather consider adversity of a child's upbringing in context of standardized test results then any immutable traits.
Title nitpick, "SAT Subject Tests" is in a specific case in the original title, and the lack of title-case on "Subject Tests" is making it hard to understand the true announcement.
Yes, they are accepted on the application. Many of the undergrads at MIT qualified for the AIME. A substantial number qualified for the USAMO or IMO as well - just look at the Putnam results every year.
Frankly, in order to stand out among MIT applicants by demonstrating some sort of mathematical ability on these exams, the minimum is probably USAMO qualification (top 270 of ~200k AMC takers). Otherwise it's a nice thing to have but not particularly unique. Even then I know a reasonable number of USAMO qualifiers who have been rejected.
I am always wary of universities removing testing requirements as they are usually motivated by activist pressure (vilifying meritocracy and pushing for equity, AKA equality of outcomes) rather than evaluating for the best talent more precisely. Anyone know more about what the story is behind this one?
Everyone here claiming that SATs aren't fair don't seem to realize that SATs are the most fair and most objective criteria in college admissions. It's not perfect but it's the best and only objective measure we have.
GPA is far worse than SATs because not only are each high schools grading standards different, each teacher's grading policy is different. There are plenty of dumb 4.0s out there but there aren't that many dumb 1600s.
Extra-curricular is more unfair than SATs because you generally need time and money and parental involvement for rowing classes.
Interviews are worse because it's a lot more about how the interviewer likes and relates to you.
Of course the most unfair part is legacy admissions which nobody wants to get rid of.
Sure, SATs aren't perfect, but it is the best and most objective measure we have. It's actually the only tool we have to objectively measure and expose racial discrimination in admissions policy. Now, people are fighting against SATs. The only reason I can come up with is that these universities want to participate in racial discrimination.
SATs, GPAs, Extra-curriculur, interview, etc should all be part of a student's portfolio for admissions. That universities want to remove the ONLY, though not perfect, objective measure is worrisome.
I'm glad I didn't study at all or have any coaching for the 1600 pt SAT I in the mid 90's because it would've been entirely unnecessary. I missed one question on the math section and it was a dumb mistake on my part. Our school's graduating class alone had over a dozen perfect SATs, multiple full rides to Harvard/MIT/Stanford and around 70 over 1500. ~97% had test prep.
Now go to India, take the JEE and find out how fun testing can be because the SAT is not much harder than a driving test. :) (Emphasis on the JEE being a much better measure because it's more difficult and more voluminous so that it would make Einstein feel insecure and inadequate.)
So they will consider what ? Recommendation letters ? Maybe they dont realise that people from disadvantaged groups dont really have the luxury to volunteer at one of those fancy NGOs. Standardized tests are actually except for the super expensive textbooks in the US. If these books for basic education could somehow be made free but oh wait - socialism.
Yes, some misguided parents waste thousands of dollars on SAT courses. But students can also prep using the $20 official book, which is what I did, and what I still regard as the best option. Even if money helps incrementally for tests, it helps for everything else even more. International volunteer work? An inspiring (i.e. college counselor approved) essay? Recommendation letters from authoritative people? Anything that requires equipment, like computer labs or robotics? It all costs money -- and in many cases literally measures nothing besides how much money you have.