I used to be against standardized tests, but I grew up as a low-income minority in a single-parent household and I ended up getting into good schools pretty much only due to my high test scores, which has been a life changer. Other than test scores, I couldn't afford to do any fancy extra-curriculars. It felt a lot more achievable to know I can change my life if I just focus and do well on a test than it would if I had to somehow do a bunch of random things to look competitive on paper.
100% agreed. I could also buy a test prep book on amazon plus get a few others from the school and public libraries for a grand total of $15 spent on test prep.
That's a lot cheaper than dedicating my working summer to smarmy volunteer/extra-curricular projects.
I went to high school in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and almost all of the top academic students in my class were first or second generation immigrants (mostly Indian) that had no interest in extra-curricular activities like sports, band, choir, or really anything.
It's important that people, especially immigrants, can get into these schools based solely on their test scores and not have to do any of the other trivial stuff that demonstrates that they can participate in the society in which they live.
The notion of a “well rounded student” who does music, art, and extra curricular activities, is a legacy of blue blood WASP culture.
That is not to say that I think only test scores should matter. But the kinds of extracurriculars colleges value—in particular that they don’t value having a job or working in the farm—smacks of old money ideals.
Valuing something like breadth of experience and being a well rounded person might be considered one of the things that makes a western style education as good as it is. Compared to other types of university systems, for example the one in India which is extremely concerned with test scores and performance metrics, many people would consider the western one to be better (including many people in India who try to come to the US for their education if they can). Not saying it's the only thing that makes western education good, but I think it definitely plays a role.
What's this Western education system of which you speak? Among Western nations the US is unique in how much emphasis it puts on extracurriculars and character. We know why that is too. The system arose as a smoke screen around Jewish quotas. The overwhelming majority of universities admit students on the basis of results of blind marked exams and nothing else. I'm by no means an expert but the usual examples given of exceptions, Oxford, Cambridge and ENA are looking for academic brilliance, not aristocratic polish ("well roundedness").
Western systems vary a lot in their degree of specialisation too. By 16, after the GCSEs the UK is done with being a generalist. Pick 3 or 4 A-Levels of your choice and if you feel like doing Math, Further Math and Physics or three sciences and Maths no one will stop you in the name of "well roundedness".
Many of the colleges people are actually attending in the U.S. are the same, and offer automatic admission if you hit some threshold of GPA, class rank or test scores. A couple examples:
These hand-wringing conversations about fair admissions mostly apply only to the elite top X schools. Those places receive tons of applications from academically top-tier students. The are looking for "something else" to make you stand out from the crowd.
Note the whole system would collapse if they only let in academically gifted people. Because only a small fraction of those gifted people would have the connections and wealth that is the core networking value these institutions provide.
Thats why simple systems like a lottery for everyone that's qualified aren't adopted. And the people trying to get in dont want them to be adopted, they dont want the system to be fair or socially useful, they want access for their kids to the exclusive club, with just enough window dressing to make it seem like something else.
Even if this cynical take is 100% true, so what? The ivies are private institutions, and have no obligation to admit people based on whatever criteria you, or I, or the general public consider fair.
Meanwhile, admission to an elite school is neither necessary nor sufficient to a happy, successful life. A couple of the best software engineers I've ever worked with - guys who got 3-4 promotions by age 30 - went to schools I'd never heard of until I met them.
This isn't really true. The ivies are bound by the rules that govern private institutions that receive federal funding. For example, they are not free to disregard Title 9 or Obama's "Dear Colleague" letter without jeopardizing their federal funding. Very recently a bill was introduced with pretty bipartisan support to require all universities that take federal funding to cease favoring legacy admissions. The federal gov't can't force these universities to do this, but they can withhold all federal funding, and that is a very powerful coercive mechanism.
I agree with you strongly that elite schools are not necessary in software engineering, but they make a huge difference in fields like Law.
Well, once you stop trying to get people into exclusive clubs, you start asking crazy questions like "why don't we just educate everybody to a high level rather than place arbitrary cutoffs based on century old social clubs to maintain an artificially restricted elite?"
> Well, once you stop trying to get people into exclusive clubs, you start asking crazy questions like "why don't we just educate everybody to a high level rather than place arbitrary cutoffs based on century old social clubs to maintain an artificially restricted elite?"
Pro tip... if you want to be educated well through instruction, don't go to an elite school. The instruction in most of the classes really sucks (with some notable exceptions that are often available for free or cheap online).
Small liberal arts schools tend to do a much better job of educating through instruction.
Because those institutions produce a disproportionate share of the most powerful people in US society, so the kinds of people they do or don't let in tend to have a strong effect on the kind of society we live in.
I support a lottery type system 100%, it would be a sane way to calm the current pressure. I don't think it would collapse the system at all. It would effectively create a pipeline of smart qualified kids into the existing networks of the schools. The lottery kids would be successful after college, and continue to reinforce the network. The only difference would be the network would look more Asian/Indian.
The Redditors on /r/cambridge routinely tell American applicants that the whole "extra-curriculars" thing is only relevant if whatever you did demonstrates enthusiasm for or ability in your subject, both of which you will need to survive. Ability for the obvious reason, enthusiasm because you will get the shock of it no longer being effortless and meeting peers who are better at it than you.
For me, the "HR interview" was "what would you say to convince me of your enthusiasm for physics?" (as in, I was explicitly asked that very question) not "tell me about how your adventures pogo-sticking up the Khyber on your gap yah made you a well-rounded person" (and the "technical interview" asked you do actually do some physics).
As someone who couldn't have afforded a gap yah and would probably have been too frail to go on one, I'm pretty happy about that.
The thing that I'm told they will do is look at your school and weight things like GCSE results and A level results accordingly (as in, if you are at a bad school, they'll make allowances for that). https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/jan/10/how-cambri... is interesting from that point of view.
> Valuing something like breadth of experience and being a well rounded person might be considered one of the things that makes a western style education as good as it is.
so imagine how good great test scores and being well rounded is!
> The notion of a “well rounded student” who does music, art, and extra curricular activities, is a legacy of blue blood WASP culture.
For what it's worth, several of my old college friends are heavily involved with extra-curricular programs at the middle school and high school level across a few different states.
From what I've observed, your generalization isn't true at all. The extra-curricular programs are actually heavily populated with students who have two parents working long hours who want something productive for their kids to do after school.
Harvard doesn’t care about the extra curricular activities offered in midwestern high schools—sports (unless good enough to be recruited), 4H, playing an instrument, etc.
That's not true. Harvard and similar colleges actively discriminate against 4-H participants, ROTC and similar red-state activities.
> But what Espenshade and Radford found in regard to what they call “career-oriented activities” was truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars. Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”
> That’s exactly what I said. My wife went to high school in Iowa and was involved in FFA.
If someone is involved in 4H or FFA in a way that would be compelling for an elite school like Harvard or Stanford, I wonder why they would want to go to that elite school.
To use a simple example in California (where I currently reside), highly competitive / leaders in 4H and FFA people would almost always be much better served going to UC Davis rather than Stanford or Berkeley.
If Stanford or Harvard would be a better fit, I think the onus would be on the applicant to explain why. This is very doable (e.g., a focus on agricultural macroeconomics or investing), but I’m not sure most teenagers who do not have connections to elite schools would naturally think to do that in their application and/or other supporting activities.
You're assuming that someone who grew up in a rural area is destined to be a farmer no matter what and just gave an example of the bias those kids face. The same logic would suggest that a kid who won a music competition in high school shouldn't apply to Berkeley because the other Berklee would be a better fit for them.
> You're assuming that someone who grew up in a rural area is destined to be a farmer no matter what
Not at all.
I live in an area where 4H is big. Many of those people go to Davis and seem to be very happy with their choice, and it seems to be a good fit. Some go to Stanford or Berkeley, and the differences in interests are pretty obvious, even though they are all 4H participants.
If someone is in a club called Future Farmers of America, and they are knocking it out of the ballpark in FFA, then I would expect that there is a high probability that they will have a lot of future prospects in ag. Harvard and Stanford are (usually) pretty bad fits if you want a career in ag, although I can imagine cases when they are actually a good fit. That said, I think the onus is on the applicant (any applicant actually) to show why they are a good fit.
> The same logic would suggest that a kid who won a music competition in high school shouldn't apply to Berkeley because the other Berklee would be a better fit for them
Similarly, if someone has a lot of music accolades but thinks that Berkeley or Stanford or Harvard is a better fit than Berklee, then I think that the onus is on the applicant to explain why. I am definitely not saying it’s impossible or even difficult, rather just that it needs to be done to show that the school is a good fit.
If you spend much time at these elite schools, you see a few people (more than I would prefer) who are completely fish out of water. They are miserable. Sometimes it is because they are not academically prepared (hard to believe, but true), sometimes they have culture shock due to being not from the NE corridor (for Ivies), sometimes they have geographic shock (winters can really suck if you are from SoCal or Hawaii), sometimes they don’t have many peers who share similar interests (e.g., hardcore FFA folks might fall into this category), etc. Many of these students transfer out or drop out. Those are basically failures in fit that admissions officers try to avoid while also maintaining a diverse class (“diverse” here including geographic and SES diversity).
Obviously, a student must sell themselves to the school, but the admissions department should not be assuming what an applicant wants to do beyond what they say in their application. Every college application I've seen has a question asking "Why us over other schools?" and that is the appropriate place to explain why the school would be a good fit. It is not okay to assume that because of someone's extracurricular activities or background that they are not a good fit for your school. It is unlikely that a musician or an athlete would be assumed not to be a good fit despite many of these schools having mediocre music departments and sports programs. The original article shared in this thread cited a study showing that membership in ROTC, 4H, or FFA was negatively correlated with admission. It could be that those types of students are just bad at marketing themselves, or it could be (more likely, in my opinion) that the admissions reviewers have a bias against those activities and the people they imagine do them.
> the admissions department should not be assuming what an applicant wants to do beyond what they say in their application
It almost seems like you may have created a straw man here.
1. I’m not an admissions officer.
2. Of course admissions officers look at what the applicant stated and don’t assume.
3. My question “why would a high performing 4h person want to go to an elite school” is a reasonable one. There are good answers to this question. Sometimes the answer is “I have perfect grades and a high sat score.” That’s not a good answer. As a simple example, I have a friend whose daughter has a lot of potential for an elite school, but she wants to be an animator. Her mom wanted her to apply to Harvard, but after they did some research, they realized that Harvard was not a good fit.
4. The issue with most “research” that claims bias in elite school admissions is that they normalize the data based on grades and scores. The scores and grades at elite schools are heavily condensed at the high end, so they aren’t really the main differentiators (unless you are a recruited athlete). The stuff that the researchers can’t easily quantify often swings the decision between reject and admit.
5. So many people seem to be convinced that elite school admissions officers are actively hostile towards highly qualified applicants. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The admissions decisions may look confusing when folks with similar grades and scores have different admissions results, but that’s probably because a key part of their application is unknown to most people, and/or they were marginal candidates and something seemingly small and not easily quantifiable swayed the decision.
6. The biggest source of discrimination I have seen in elite school admissions is at the local school level. Specifically, I have seen school counselors and some teachers subtly sabotage compelling applicants for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of the applicant (e.g., counselor preferred someone else, counselor/teacher didn’t like something about the student, etc.). But that’s unfortunately on the student to work around — that is out of the sphere if influence of elite school admissions offices (other than to note potential bias).
7. Lastly, I would love to see the data on the folks who were were active in ROTC, 4H, etc. being negatively correlated. There may be a correlation, but I doubt it’s the cause. I would guess that something that is not easily quantifiable is missing in the application. I will also add that some elite schools have ROTC, so that is especially surprising to me.
> 4. The issue with most “research” that claims bias in elite school admissions is that they normalize the data based on grades and scores. The scores and grades at elite schools are heavily condensed at the high end, so they aren’t really the main differentiators (unless you are a recruited athlete). The stuff that the researchers can’t easily quantify often swings the decision between reject and admit.
How do we square scores being heavily condensed at the high end with still seeing large between-group score differences? We'd expect, surely, to see smaller between-group score differences if one end is cut off.
This part of the thread is about alleged discrimination in elite school admissions against folks in 4H, FFA, and ROTC. These researchers say that they normalize for all other variables other than participation in these activities, and I suggest that their normalization methods are inadequate.
You are asking about a completely different issue.
That said, I think my last sentence still answers your question:
"The stuff that the researchers can’t easily quantify often swings the decision between reject and admit."
Just because you do something well and are outstanding in it doesn't mean it's what you want to do for a career. People fill time with all kinds of things or to pad out a resume. I've been really good at a lot of stuff. I had no intention of making a career out of any of it.
> Harvard doesn’t care about the extra curricular activities offered in midwestern high schools—sports (unless good enough to be recruited), 4H, playing an instrument, etc.
I beg to differ.
Anyone who does any of these things at a regional, national, or international level would probably be very strong candidates, assuming they have competitive grades and scores.
Regional isn't true. National depends on the sport and instrument. International they'd care about even as a bit if it's big enough to get covered in national newspapers. Harvard can afford to be extremely highly selective.
Actual examples I know of people who got into elite schools:
- First chair violin in city youth orchestra
- Winner of regional ice-skating competitions, but not nowhere near Olympic competition-level.
- Winner of regional judo tournaments, again not at Olympic competition-level.
- Winner of regional chess tournaments. Not a national champion. Can’t remember his rank, but he actually didn’t spend much time playing or studying chess as a teenager… he was just a crusher.
- Winner of school-based regional trivia tournaments. Attended nationals but never placed.
- Winner of regional solo sailing competitions. Note that free/cheap access to small racing sail boats was pretty easy in this person’s community.
- Soccer player selected to regional-based national team development squad. Note that, imho, this is not nearly as impressive as it sounds. He also played on a “travel team” (about half of whom also made the development squad) that won many regional tournaments, but never succeeded nationally.
- Many athletes who were not recruited (in that they did not get preferential admissions treatment… see “Academic Index” for more insight), but who were varsity athletes in high school and college in track and field, cross country running, rowing, gymnastics, golf, swimming, diving, etc.
> National depends on the sport and instrument.
Actual examples I know of people who got into elite schools:
- For instrument, see local orchestra above as being adequate.
- Took two years off after high school to tour and perform with a jazz band.
- Starter on nationally ranked football team who was definitely not recruited to any elite schools and had no intentions of playing collegiately.
- Player on nationally ranked ultimate (“frisbee football”) team.
- Several people who were nationally ranked in various niche sports like fencing, squash, etc., but were not Olympic-caliber.
> International they'd care about even as a bit if it's big enough to get covered in national newspapers
Actual examples I know of people who got into elite schools:
- Went to international science fair four years in a row. Got there’s by scoring well enough in locals, regionals, and nationals. Note that this is something that an elite school-bound 4Her could do if they tried.
- Co-authored science research that was published into an international journal.
All of these fall into the “sports, instruments, and 4h” that was originally mentioned. It could easily be expanded if community development examples were included.
Note that most of my examples were regional, so I humbly suggest your concept of what is needed for admission is way off base.
Also note that not all of these folks went to Harvard (not all applied to Harvard), but some did.
> Are these people who are living in the "midwest" like Chicago or midwest like some rural town of 10,000 people that is hours away from any major city?
Off the top of my head, with provincial city being something like Akron, OH and provincial town being something like Bangor, ME:
Provincial cities in DE, IL, MI, TX, MT, IN, FL, OK.
Provincial towns in GA (2... both near military bases), CA (2), TX, HI, WA, WI, PA.
The interesting thing is that being from a provincial area has a lot of merits (and some demerits).
MERITS
- There is often very little competition for slots (depends on state).
- It's relatively easy to have a very high class rank and to be the top 1% of students that a teacher has ever taught.
- It is relatively easy to find ways to stand out in community development, since there are not dozens or hundreds of local kids who are trying to do the same (some for resume padding, some because they are genuine leaders).
- It is relatively easy to get unique learning opportunities like Rotary scholarships to study abroad since most of the people around you lack interest and/or ability.
- It is relatively easy to latch on to some local research initiative because most people around you lack interest and/or ability.
- It can often be easy to be a varsity athlete in some sport just because you are willing to participate. This is true even if you are not particularly athletic, but you are willing to work at it. This may sound trivial and potentially distracting, but note that some elite schools (e.g., Harvard) specifically rate you on athletics.
DEMERITS
- Many/most teachers will not know how to write strong recommendations, even if that is what they want to convey. Short version... provide specific details/examples that describe someone who is actually amazing.
- One or more folks in the process may try to keep you down, especially if they don't like you -- think school counselor, a teacher, etc. It helps a lot to be liked, but a lot of smart kids realize that K-12 schooling (especially in provincial areas) is the farce that it is, so they are often cynical and antagonistic towards teachers and administrators.
- Since school is often very easy, it can be tough to motivate oneself to study tougher topics, many of which have to be studied at a different venue (e.g., junior college, summer studies, self-study, etc.). The smartest kid in school often chooses to coast rather than push themselves, since it is not clear how pushing themselves has the potential to benefit them.
- Unless they are in a good private school or learn from another source, some/many folks from provincial areas are underprepared for an elite education. They often don't have the same foundation of knowledge and study skills that folks who went to better schools have, often times because they rarely or never had to study. Catching up in foundational knowledge and study skills is not impossible to overcome, but it's definitely starting a square or two behind everyone else.
- You probably won't know anyone at your university going in, but some of your dorm mates (e.g., from Stuyvesant) will have quite a few peers with whom they attended high school.
I don’t know what point you’re trying to make, but a small midwestern town of 10k in the middle of nowhere doesn’t differ significantly from the “small towns” in my example. There is pretty much nothing in either place.
I’ve spent time in small towns like that (not in the Midwest), and I don’t recall anyone having any ambition to attend an elite academic school (but lots of interest in elite sports schools).
I still stand by my suggestion that someone from a small midwestern town of 10k in the middle of nowhere can get into elite schools. I think the information available in the internet makes this easier than ever before. That said, I wonder how many actually apply.
> You know a lot of people who went to elite schools!
That happens in certain circles.
I will add that the list above easily does not include the 10 most interesting people I know who got into elite schools.
The “dirty little secret” that helicopter parents don’t want to accept is that the vast majority of elite school students are just really damn interesting people (typically with great grades and scores). You can’t coach interesting, although you can cultivate it over time as a good parent.
> The notion of a “well rounded student” who does music, art, and extra curricular activities, is a legacy of blue blood WASP culture.
More precisely it was first invented by Yale to limit the number of Jewish students admitted, and was later repurposed to limit the number of Asian students admitted.
Exactly. If you’re really intellectually bright and committed, all those extracurricular activities, populated by average students, are a total waste of time. Regardless of anything they say, MIT and Cal Tech have prospered precisely by ignoring that crap, and giving preference to people who can do the work.
Extracurriculars like research, robotics competitions, math camp, etc. are absolutely considered heavily by MIT. SATs and grades are way too saturated at the top end of the curve to make reasonable admissions decisions, and performing highly at a particular extracurricular can be an important signal for future success in itself.
I get what you're saying though, being a typical jack of all trades high school overachiever isn't the best strategy for getting into MIT. I don't think that's because they don't consider personality though - heck one of the admissions short answers is "what do you do for fun?". I think it's actually because they are trying to avoid the type that does things just to get into college or just because it's the thing to do at their school. If you're an absolute prodigy then it probably doesn't matter either way, but if you're borderline MIT is definitely the top school that tries the hardest to take the kid that seems more genuinely passionate and not like a social climber.
MIT also does the best job of considering context of all the elite schools. If you went to a great private high school you better have taken full advantage of those opportunities, whereas most other elite schools will just see the better overall resume/prior education. This is pretty clearly reflected in the schools' respective demographics.
Aha! They have extracurricular activities for nerds now! I had forgotten! (I am such an alter cocker this was unknown, absolutely unknown, science fiction unknown, when I was young.)
At least back when I knew people in the admissions office, MIT definitely did not ignore that “crap” though I’d be willing to stipulate it may have weighted it less heavily than a school like Harvard.
Yes you knew what they told you. Yes they looked at for a minute. Yes, out of a class of 950, it made a difference for 20-30. But I bet, privately, they spat on it. They had plenty of experience with total nerds who founded industries or disciplines. Remember, physics, chemistry, EE, material science, that’s 40-50% of the class: physics up to quantum mechanics. Entire undergraduate body: special relativity with 4 weeks of problem sets, and derivation of the magnetic field from this. When you’re 18.
I think you underestimate the number of people that have a perfect gpa and a perfect score on the sat/act. Thousands of kids get a perfect score on the sat or act test every year. MIT is going to have to be looking at more than just that.
Most of the people I’ve known from MIT, and pretty much all of the interesting ones, are technically savvy but pretty much the opposite of total nerds.
Heh heh. Perfect example of why “extracurricular activities” are total bs.
Admissions people need to have intangibles. That way, they can do what they want, when they want to.
Exactly how did they prosper? Caltech seriously mishandled its endowment between 1999-2008 despite getting some of the largest individual donations in history.
First of all, I don't know what "blue blood WASP culture" is. Explain that please.
Second, there's nothing wrong with expecting students to participate in extra-curricular activities like music and art as a basis for admission. MIT is still going to evaluate those things.
Selecting for students whose parents can afford formal music, art and sport lessons is selecting for wealth. Having extra-curriculars you can document costs money and time.
Poor kids are getting 'well rounded' by spending summer break at work, saving enough money to survive the school year.
> Poor kids are getting 'well rounded' by spending summer break at work, saving enough money to survive the school year.
This is an interesting point: why shouldn't work count towards being well-rounded? If anything, work is much more grounded in reality, and a lot of kids who never had to work in high school and college would come off as out of touch (at least to me, as someone who did work thru high school and college). It would be nice if work experience (even if unrelated to a field) was valued as much as being part of a silly club.
It does. I've helped with college applications to Ivy League where the "volunteer opportunities" are "working summers for minimum wage, looking after my younger siblings and/or helping at the family convenience store".
Those kids got in.
I think the point is to show you offer something more than just being good at school. It doesn't have to be volunteer opportunities or something expensive.
Who says it isn't? Being in a silly club hasn't worked as well as people think it does for quite a while now. Admissions see tons of this bullshit and I bet their eyes glaze over.
I recently went through grad school applications and waded through dozens of sample essays and tips for writing a great “statement of purpose essay”.
Based on the admissions decisions the school made (as reported by Reddit) and the changes to content length made over the years, I suspect the school cares about precisely four things.
- Can your write a coherent essay?
- Can you clearly state what your qualifications to pursue the academic program are?
- Can you clearly articulate why you want to complete a 3 year program?
- If there is a problem in your background e.g. a low GPA, can you clearly state why you don’t think this will be a problem going forward?
Graduate admissions processes are very different from undergraduate admissions in exactly that way though. Undergraduate admissions are trying to select on a pretty wide definition of "successful", basically trying to find students likely to graduate then make the university look good. Graduate admissions care about one thing only: how good are you at generating published research in the department you're applying under. It's much more similar to a job application than an undergrad application.
If you get great test scores, and you go to a school that does not send many students to the ivy leagues et al, you will get noticed; this helps a lot of smart low SES urban or rural students gain entry.
> spending summer break at work, saving enough money
is going to count in your favor
if you go to a competitive high school that sends lots of kids to top universities, then you need to stack up your extra-curriculars to stand out wrt all the other kids in a similar position
In the U.S. public schools offer students all kinds of extracurricular activities that cost the families either very little or nothing at all. I attended a low- to middle-income public elementary and middle school where I was able to practice violin for several years, and it didn't cost my family anything.
One thing that might stand out is a complete lack of interest in doing anything besides studying. It seems like it may be a sign of low social intelligence
But elite schools select for (1) students who will enrich the experience for their classmates and (2) who are likely to have an outsized impact on the world as adults and bring prestige to the institution.
There are some people who are so quantitatively intelligent that a lack of social skills/intelligence doesn't matter (geniuses), but these people are so exceptional they can't be really measured by a test like the SAT. It's too easy to get a perfect score.
Instead they'll distinguish themselves by excelling at STEM competitions (eg. Math Olympiad, programming contests, the Putnam).
I’d also like to add an anecdote: while my family wasn’t necessarily poor, I pretty much spent all my extra-curricular time doing things like coding and design, and neither of them were really in a way that was documentable. There was no “coding” club or “graphic design” club and if there was something similar that popped up in high school the physical gathering nature of most clubs was odd when applied to things like internet coding. So the clubs tended to be a waste of time more than anything, and most students participated knowingly just to pad college applications.
WASP is White anglo saxon protosant and is to indicate that a "right" and "proper" person ought to know music and etc, but only in so much depth that it demonstrates there wealth. Which is how extra-curricular creep sometimes shows up when people apply to college and were President of X club and play Y sport, while not really having a deep interest in the activity. When you are treating an activity as a resume builder rather than an activity or experience to invest deeper in to me that shows a lack of intellectual curiousity (but does show a thought process of understanding procedualism and bureaucracy (not the students fault when its what the system values))
Usually if someone has an impressive extracurricular that is tough to document, one of their recommendations will mention it in a compelling way.
As a simple example, a relative of mine was a co-founder and editor of the school newspaper at his high school… and it got banned for uncovering shenanigans within the administration and board of education.
See also: https://www.hbo.com/the-gilded-age. These are the folks who founded Harvard, Yale, etc., and created the ethos of higher education that remains nearly universal in America today.
> Second, there's nothing wrong with expecting students to participate in extra-curricular activities like music and art as a basis for admission. MIT is still going to evaluate those things.
It's a complex issue. On one hand, what differentiates universities from trade schools is teaching students how to learn/do their own research vs. acquire specific skills/knowledge: demonstrating some kind of self-motivated achievement aside from strict academic requirements helps universities select students who are receptive to this. On the other hand, yes, it selects for more well-off students who have the free time, inclination, and means to pursue their interests.
Sorry, to clarify for people who haven’t watched the show. The show is about a Gilded Age new money family in New York City trying to break into the social scene composed of affluent families who traced their ancestry in America back to the 1600s. It’s these sorts of families (who were “old money” back in the Gilded Age) who were intimately involved with the inception of Harvard and Yale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elihu_Yale
So basically this is just a completely fictional account for entertainment with maybe some historical context thrown in for dramatic flavor? What is one supposed to take away from that?
The WASP elite are a completely historical group of people deeply involved with our Ivy League universities. The show is just a pop culture illustration of the point. (Though maybe not as popular as I thought.)
having a sun tan, was associated with field laborers, so rich people of the time did every thing they could to retain the whitest of skin to demonstrate their richness. When you have very pale skin the veins are more easily seen which carry un-oxygenated blood back to the heart, giving a blueish hue.
Of course, now the term blue blood, just means wealth that has established generational history.
Blue Blood and WASP generally refer to people who come from rich/prominent families. Whether it's fair or not, the stereotype is a polo playing, boat shoe wearing type who has a vacation house somewhere fancy and family connections into good jobs etc.
> notion of a “well rounded student” who does music, art, and extra curricular activities, is a legacy of blue blood WASP culture
This concept finds heritage in Greco-Roman tradition moreso than anything Anglo or Saxon. It's also not uncommon for non-European civilizations to have emphasized educating their elites in both aesthetic and practical matters. For good reason. If your job is to lead a civilization, people are your tool of trade.
The tradition in America has racist--specifically, anti-Semitic--roots. But that doesn't mean we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. If there's something sorely lacking in modern American culture, it's attention to matters in civic, philosophical and possibly even literary.
If these colleges don't value what you bring, why apply to those colleges? For many areas of study, we have amazing and relatively inexpensive access to instruction/training/knowledge - if that is one's goal. If ones goal is simply to get trained for a job/industry - then colleges are probably not a good fit either.
No exposure to other areas of interest, like art and music, indicates ability to work towards one goal for many years. This kind of persistence is a key to success in every discipline.
I'm trying to say that we all here are skillful in hollow rhetorics.
the things to which you allude are actually an imitation of WASP culture, WASPS dont strive by doing the things they do naturally. you study music/art because it helps you be a better person, not because it (these days) might help you get into a school you should be able to get into anyway. you do service work because you believe that it is important to give back.
using this things as credentials to gain entry into schools is a late development.
When they talk about well rounded students: They do value working on a farm. Or going to Guatemala and building wells for people. Or construction work building houses. It's definitely not just about doing ballet and fine arts.
I was the only kid in my class who didn't go to college, but I went to one of the top 3 prep schools in terms of Ivy League placement in the country, and the entire focus for extracurricular activities was doing volunteer work. Sports, music, fine art and theater were all there as a potential route, but the advisers pushed kids who wanted to do those things as a career away from leaning on them as a way to be "well-rounded" in the eyes of the college admission boards.
TL;DR In my experience, a kid who had no creative talent but took a summer to build houses in Ecuador was much more likely, in the 90s, to get into the Ivy League than one who played violin, or football.
> TL;DR In my experience, a kid who had no creative talent but took a summer to build houses in Ecuador was much more likely, in the 90s, to get into the Ivy League than one who played violin, or football.
And how is a lower middle class kid in the Midwest supposed to be able to swing a summer off to build houses in Ecuador?
Or, Kayak shows round trip flights this summer from Cincinnati to Ecuador for $500. So, Set up a table outside the local grocery store for a few weekends with pictures of starving Ecuadorans and beg. Or, gofundme.
I think the key is initiative, which is one of the main traits they’re looking for.
It's not. Being well rounded is the ideal of the nobility in practically every settled culture, ancient or modern. It's the definition of "cultured". Having said that, it is a class marker, so participants of the dominant culture have a leg up.
Your take is very strange, and does not correspond to the Indian immigrant experience from what I have seen. I spent 10 years in the US, and the really weird part is how stridently Indian parents would push their kids to train in Indian culture - particularly classical dance like Bharatanatyam and Carnatic classical. Of course, since Westerners have hardly even heard about these cultural forms, these do not even exist as "extra-curriculars" for standard university admission boards.
I found the emphasis on Indian cultural roots so disturbing that I had to weasel out of conversations by saying "I don't know anything about classical dance, I am mostly interested in science-fiction". It is easier to have your own way as an Indian middle-class student in India than as second generation Indians in the US.
It's because they don't want their children to lose their indian culture, despite raising them in a foreign country. When your in india, you don't have to worry about that.
That was probably accurate "back in the day". My wife owns/runs an after school learning center and I can say that 1st/2nd generation take extra-curricular activities very seriously. That is not to say academic is out the window, but academics is not the only interest.
As a matter of fact - I wrote a letter of recommendation for someone to volunteer at the library. Due to the competitive nature (I live in an area with lots of 1st/2nd generation, especially Indians)...she did not get a position. Imagine competing to work for free!
Cultures that value education also value unpaid internships. It's an excellent trade. Free education in exchange for free labor.
Yes, this has been extremely exploited in America, particularly in tech, where it has:
- Created a sense that some work should be "free", hiding the true cost of labor from employers
- Turned students into an endless pool to be exploited
- Undercut the wages of professionals
That being said, the answer is for the student interns to recognize when it's time for them to be paid and to demand it. A lot of Americans think interning is just about getting your "foot in the door" so you "know the right people" and get a leg up on a cushy job. That's simply not the way immigrant families think. There is a value proposition to interning for free when you're learning a trade. It's how I started. When I came to feel I was being exploited, I asked for money, and got it.
>> Preparing for internship culture
This quote itself implies that you're not willing to put in the effort other people are willing to put in. So now, as an employer, why would I hire someone who didn't feel like putting in the extra work for their resume? I suppose you're owed a job - but then, isn't everyone?
I think you are right. The correct comparison is internship vs. no opportunity at all, not internship vs. job. The actual number of real jobs is driven by revenue.
> It's important that people, especially immigrants, can get into these schools based solely on their test scores
This is very unlikely to happen for East Asians or Indians.
> and not have to do any of the other trivial stuff that demonstrates that they can participate in the society in which they live.
This “trivial” stuff is often not trivial when done well.
- Sports, especially varsity athletics and Olympic sports, has social currency in elite circles. Some folks may not like the fact that this is true, but it’s foolish to deny that it’s true. In some cases, participation in sports actually develops character leadership skills.
- The things some high school students are able to do as “volunteers” can blow your mind. The soft skills that these activities can develop carry over really well to the “real world”. Lots of extracurriculars are BS, but the folks who do the BS ones aren’t getting into elite schools based on those.
- If I understand what you are saying, suggesting that immigrants should not need to have the skills to participate in society is mind boggling to me. Elite schools aren’t just looking to churn out brainiacs (and the real brainiacs are getting in on more brainy stuff than high SAT scores and perfect grades). They are looking to churn out people who will impact society. Honestly, some sort of impressive community involvement in the Indian community (as an example) is something that would be a strong part of an elite school application.
>This “trivial” stuff is often not trivial when done well.
I loathe to say it but you've been got. Reread the OP in a sarcastic tone, you'll see what I mean.
I agree with what you're saying but in the spirit of disagreeing with OP, I would devilishly advocate:
When evaluating extracurriculars, there is a chance that the type of extracurricular may matter as much/more than the degree of participation, which can be problematic.
In theory, colleges are just a place where you go to learn. So it doesn't make much theoretical sense to me that an admissions officer would probably think different things when they hear "rugby captain and president of the debate club" as opposed to "full time brother and avid programmer." That's because traditionally, colleges are also where children of privilege learn what the status quo is and how to fit in with one another. Of course we have to measure something other than SAT scores (i.e. IQ), we have to measure how nice they are/capable of leading/willing to learn (i.e. how white they can act/how much their parents know about and push them towards traditional leadership positions/how much free time their family can afford). To some degree, it isn't in the interest of the college to admit someone who isn't also a cultural fit; but the more important culture is in your selection process, the more problematic that process is.
> and not have to do any of the other trivial stuff that demonstrates that they can participate in the society in which they live
How many DFW public schools have cricket or kabaddi teams? How many bands and choirs play primarily non-European music?
Are you sure that these students are one dimensional boring test-takers with absolutely no interest in being part of their community? Could it possibly be that many are very active members of a vibrant and deeply rooted immigrant community, but that this community involvement doesn't show up because they aren't either playing in a football game or putting on a half time show for a foot ball game?
(I'm also deeply skeptical that participating in band, choir, extra-curricular activities, or sports is actually indicative of much of anything in terms of community participation... playing unorganized pick-up games with friends feels much more participatory than leveraging the well-oiled pre-college apparatus of an upper middle class neighborhood to check the "scholar-athlete" box.)
Playing organized pickup, or participating/organizing activities for your immigrant community are the same as extra curricular activities. They do prove that a student is not just one dimensional test taker
So someone who plays drums in band or throws an egg shaped “ball” (or worse, hits themselves in the head like rams) is contributing to the society than someone who focuses on tests?
I’m not even on the side of the Asian families that force their children to study and study alone, but your comment seems to suggest that somehow they don’t have the right to (or are abusing a system). Sounds a bit prejudiced. In the end families which want their kids to “look successful” will make them do whatever is needed, and merely focusing on studies is just one flavor. Look at the Tiger mom bs about Carnegie Hall or Yale law. But at the least they are fully American in their right to do so, and I’d rather have more of them than broken families with kids not even being taken care of.
I think it was intended to be prejudiced - he was sarcastically saying that the parents don't care about integrating into the culture, they think they can attain success for their children with tests alone.
I'm a child of Jewish immigrants. I had NO planned school/extracurricular activities except for music. I had these requirements from elementary school through high school: (1) Never get less than a B+ on any test or any class, or you're grounded. (2) Read 50 pages of books my father would assign every night, some light fiction, some history, everything in between, and spend 15 minutes reporting what I read to him. (3) No television or video games. A computer was okay as long as I was using it to "work", which could mean writing my own video games. (4) Find a job the day you turn 15, and work every day. Any job you want. Ideally something that deals with the public, like selling shoes. (I went into advertising).
Now, some of my best friends in high school were Korean immigrants. They had a lot more fun than me, but they also studied a lot harder for tests. By no means would I ever think their parents were doing it wrong.
What this sarcastic poster means about the society you live in, is ultimately very shady. The society he lives in is lazy. It doesn't want to study or work. It cries foul when people ask for "welfare handouts", but meanwhile, he is asking for a welfare handout from us the people who work and study harder - by means of claiming it's his culture and we're just here doing all the math right while failing to integrate. That's just not true. It's sour grapes from someone who has been eclipsed in all areas of intellectual and artistic achievement, and is likely to soon be eclipsed in the realm of popular culture as well.
So anyway /rant over. I wouldn't take it too seriously. Just keep doing what you do well.
>What this sarcastic poster means about the society you live in, is ultimately very shady. The society he lives in is lazy. It doesn't want to study or work. It cries foul when people ask for "welfare handouts", but meanwhile, he is asking for a welfare handout from us the people who work and study harder - by means of claiming it's his culture and we're just here doing all the math right while failing to integrate. That's just not true.
Exactly this.
And you know what, maybe these immigrants that can't demonstrate their ability to play rugby have more important things to do, like actual work for some purpose other than virtue signaling or self care/healing from dealing with existential threats.
>It's important that people, especially immigrants, can get into these schools based solely on their test scores and not have to do any of the other trivial stuff that demonstrates that they can participate in the society in which they live.
So you're saying only studying and not doing anything else to eventually become a doctor that serves a community in Dallas doesn't demonstrate enough participation in society as much as being able to play a sport?
And don't get me wrong, extra curriculars are important, but the simplistic reduction of immigrants studying hard equates they don't participate in the society is a bit much.
> So you're saying only studying and not doing anything else to eventually become a doctor that serves a community in Dallas doesn't demonstrate enough participation in society as much as being able to play a sport?
To be fair, it is Texas. Plus, he also mentioned band. Someone needs to play in the halftime show, after all.
I'm a 5th-generation white American with no interest in sports, band, or choir... and many of my Indian and east Asian first-generation high-school friends and I participated in activities like math club, knowledge bowl, science olympiad, etc etc.
Just because they aren't participating in YOUR extra-curricular activities doesn't mean they aren't engaged.
>almost all of the top academic students in my class were first or second generation immigrants (mostly Indian) that had no interest in extra-curricular activities like sports, band, choir, or really anything.
I suspect it's more like their parents prohibit them from having any interest in these extra-curricular activities. Academics > *.
If you recast your civilization as simply the sum total of the economic activity generated by fungible worker-units, that's the sort of thing you get. A giant. somewhat dilapidated luxury shopping mall with a military attached.
There are a lot of negative things that one can imply about America, so I'm surprised that you reached for 'boring'. I don't even know what source to cite, but it seems self-evident that Americans care passionately about causes besides economic efficiency, for better or worse.
Trying to find some objective ground for discussion, I'll take the bait on your specific analogy: Americans are spending progressively less time in shopping malls[1] and the military[2].
>Americans are spending progressively less time in shopping malls[1] and the military[2].
[1] Are Amazon, ebay et al shopping malls?
Given healthcare and college tuition being paid by the state I think you might see [2] drop very, very fast and far. I've heard the argument made that this was why the establishment corrupt of Washington united so cohesively against Bernie.
Now don't smear, it's against house rules around here and @dang will get very cross.
I've heard the argument, I repeat it because I take it seriously and it seems plausible to me. I am not sufficiently expert to know with /certainty/ so I don't claim certainty because that would be silly. Moreover when you point out an argument that appears to have some merit but you have not yet made up your mind about, someone here frequently responds with a well-reasoned perspective that is different and based on evidence. Such things make conversation here worthwhile like this particular one basically isn't. Best.
"Weasel words from which my immediate instinct is to recoil."
Obviously is not engaging with an argument, idea or evidence and isn't much more than abuse. Also completely wrong in every way as I politely outlined.
"Weasel words" is a term and it's correctly used here. I don't understand how you think it's "completely wrong"; it's not. It's also not abuse at all to object like that.
And engaging with an argument requires understanding it, and their post is a pretty good way to get an understanding of your actual argument. Unless you mean they needed to engage with your quote independently of what your argument is, which I would disagree with.
weasel words
noun
words or statements that are intentionally ambiguous or misleading.
There is no engagement with the idea expressed at all. There is a statement that you must agree totally, disagree totally or shut up about an idea otherwise it's "weasel words" which is clearly and obviously to me utter nonsense. As I said. That kind of nonsense not encouraged around here because what happens next is flame-war, is my understanding. Is it also yours?
Much the same as if were to say, (which I am emphatically not) that you are just "piling-in" and are trying to distract from a point about possible contributors to Washington corruption and ensuring that anyone who even suggests such a thing about corruption is worth considering and exploring should be condemned as being weasel-like.
If I said that, which again I am not, that would be personal, not helpful, not engaging with an argument. So I am not saying that. I am now saying explicitly I have zero reason to believe that. I am giving you the benefit of of the belief that the argument is in good faith and engaging with it accordingly rather than casting aspersions about you.
We really do need to be able to discuss possibilities before having full, firm and unshakable views as to their unambiguous and evergreen truth. You're allowed to consider a plausible argument before having been awarded your PhD in it.
What do you think? Is it plausible that the corrupt in Washington united so cohesively against Bernie because with health care and tuition covered the numbers volunteering for the armed services would plummet? Do you think there was a different reason and that isn't significant? Or do you think the corrupt in Washington were not against Bernie? Or do you think there isn't meaningful influence of the corrupt in Washington? Or something else? Or do you not have the right to express any ideas about any of it because there must always be something you can't know about it. If you had thoughts and an argument from /evidence/ about it I'd likely update my views at least somewhat. Would I dismiss this idea? Would it become more plausible?
The argument, that I heard expressed, and lack information to fault (acknowledging that such information may exist),
is interesting to me and possibly others. Refraining from stating it as an incontrovertible fact is not at all weasel-like and doesn't seem to me that calling it so is likely to lead to productive discussions between people who are capable of updating their opinions on a topic.
> here is a statement that you must agree totally, disagree totally or shut up about an idea
> The argument, that I heard expressed, and lack information to fault (acknowledging that such information may exist), is interesting to me and possibly others. Refraining from stating it as an incontrovertible fact is not at all weasel-like and doesn't seem to me that calling it so is likely to lead to productive discussions between people who are capable of updating their opinions on a topic.
No, but you have to state a stance at all.
If you don't state a stance at all then you're not engaging with the argument you've quoted!
People should engage with what you're arguing, but much less so something you just toss out as having heard. If you don't say what your opinion is, then don't complain that there isn't engagement.
> We really do need to be able to discuss possibilities before having full, firm and unshakable views as to their unambiguous and evergreen truth.
Okay. But say what your view is. It doesn't have to be firm and unshakable. Be clear about if you believe it and how strongly you believe it.
> otherwise it's "weasel words" which is clearly and obviously to me utter nonsense
The phrase "I've heard the argument made" is one of the clearer examples of weasel words I've seen. Your dictionary definition isn't perfect. From wikipedia: Examples include the phrases "some people say", "most people think", and "researchers believe."
> being weasel-like
It's a term, not calling you a weasel.
> What do you think? Is it plausible
I guess?? I'd need to see a lot more about priorities in washington before I can have more than a ghost of an opinion, personally. Without that I find it a little bit interesting.
> If you had thoughts and an argument from /evidence/ about it I'd likely update my views at least somewhat.
I'm not trying to change your opinion. I'm encouraging you to better express your opinion.
But if you only have a vague idea yourself, then you're not going to change mine either. If you were actively looking for evidence instead of just mentioning the idea I might be more interested? Whatever, I'm not here to post about that, I'm here to explain weasel words.
Please go have another look at the definition of "Weasel Words"
Intentionally ambiguous or misleading. Heavy emphasis on the intentionally misleading. When you accuse someone of using weasel words you are accusing them of intent to mislead. You aren't calling them a small furry mammal. You are calling them someone who is, in other words, basically telling lies. That is a smear every damn day of the week. "Weasel" being a word used to describe someone untrustworthy hence "Weasel words." Calling mere ambiguity "weasel words" is unambiguously incorrect usage of that term.
My comment was not intending to mislead. I don't believe it is in any way misleading. How you can think that I'm trying to mislead you is not obvious to me at all. This is not cross-examination under oath. This is not a politician's response as to whether their hand was in the till and the photograph of the nude holding the S&M gear was themselves and they were not in their place of worship at that time. I have stated my view. I have heard the argument. Implicitly by phrasing it like that I have not endorsed it but find it has some merit based on my limited knowledge about it. As I have now spelled out in full a few times.
If you think you or anybody has been misled here, I can't really help you, I did not do that nor did I contribute to it. If you think your post is totally unambiguous and are going to ignore the "intentionally misleading" aspect of "weasel words" I also can't help you.
Just don't deliberately smear people speaking to their intentions when you don't know what those intentions are and are totally, utterly and 100% wrong about them. Seems pretty unambiguous to me, I guess that's why its the rule around here. dang does get cross when you get personal. Like accusing people incorrectly of using weasel words, speaking to their intentions with zero evidence, and making them cross about it, just like I am.
It remains a smear and I continue to call it what it plainly is. Maybe they didn't mean it?
What you say above is ambiguous. Hence by your definition "Weasel words."
I say the pejorative is there in Weasel Words and so does the dictionary and indeed it must be there to describe something as weasel words or we end up with everything being weasel words. Hilariously the work of max plank is weasel words. He intentionally does not express an opinion on whether light is a wave or a particle.
My opinion on your good faith in that post above is now also unstated.
Some people say Jimi Hendrix is a wonderful guitarist and it's a shame he died so young. What weasel words. You should recoil. Some people say using words with their accepted meanings is essential to communication but James Joyce might disagree.
I intended nothing personal, and indeed my point was to elevate the level of discourse. I would call out 'ad hominem', 'no true Scotsman' or 'motte and bailey' as easily as I would 'weasel words'.
I assure you I too have been guilty in the past and I'm sure I will slip in the future.
> I would call out 'ad hominem', 'no true Scotsman' or 'motte and bailey' as easily as I would 'weasel words'.
You doubled down? With no explanation. No justification of claiming it to be weasel words? I guess you can't or chose not to defend your use for which I have called you out. Maybe, in your words guilty in the past, the future and also right here & now then. Consider it.
I've heard the argument made that Louis Armstrong was the most important and influential musician of the past 200 years and yeah whatever edifying conversation were possible it's now very, very dead.
> It's important that people, especially immigrants, can get into these schools based solely on their test scores and not have to do any of the other trivial stuff that demonstrates that they can participate in the society in which they live.
I genuinely thought your comment was serious before reading other comments and realizing you were being sarcastic.
It actually *is* important that these people can get into these schools. If they are studying and working diligently they will contribute to society.
If you need them practicing sports or singing in choir for you to understand that they can participate in society, then that is your failure on assessing students.
Which society? The one that has mass shootings on a regular basis but makes gun ownership a viable identity? Or the one praises love and peace while buying clothes made in sweatshops?
“…based solely on their test scores and not have to do any of the other trivial stuff that demonstrates that they can participate in the society in which they live.”
What is the point of these tests if people can just test prep their way through it? The result is not indicative of their true selves, it is simply yet another horrible facade.
This thread is filled with people arguing false dichotomies: "test scores" vs. "fancy extra-curriculars" or "rich experiences" vs. "working class experiences."
I recently saw one child into college, and have another on the way. I've spoken to many admissions officers, counselors, and similar folks making admissions choices for public and private universities.
To a one, they all claim to be looking for two things: (1) students who will succeed at their university, and (2) a diverse range of students to avoid a monoculture.
This means they try to look at the "whole student." For some students, that means academics and test scores to show academic prowess. For others, it's working summers to pay for their college to show it's a personally meaningful step for them. For others, it's being a primary caregiver to siblings or parents while still meeting college requirements to show grit and determination. For others, it's demonstrating consistent progress in pursuing a passion (e.g., volunteering or music or art) with a trajectory that continues through college.
Admission officers say they want a student body comprised of all of the above, and that's how they get the diverse range of students to create a dynamic learning environment.
Some of the least interesting students are "box checkers" who have a bunch of disconnected extra-curriculars that don't show passion, direction, or a proclivity towards success. If a student defines "success" as "getting into college," then what will they do once they get there? Probably flounder.
Test scores can be a useful data point towards determining collegiate success, but it certainly won't be the only one used. Nor will extra-curriculars or any other single factor.
The single biggest piece of advice for any applying student: create a narrative that shows how your activities (whatever they are) demonstrate why you will be a successful student that achieves your major-related goals. Your grades, scores, work life, home life, interests, and personal experiences should all be connected to show you are thoughtful, motivated, driven, and have your shit together. Do that, and you'll have the best chance of success at most admissions offices.
> Some of the least interesting students are "box checkers" who have a bunch of disconnected extra-curriculars that don't show passion, direction, or a proclivity towards success. If a student defines "success" as "getting into college," then what will they do once they get there? Probably flounder.
This comment really rubbed me the wrong way. Sorry these "box checkers" worked too hard to follow the rules of the game as described to them by their teachers? Your assertion that they "probably flounder" is completely devoid of any evidence, and just reflect your own idiotic biases. People who think like you were the ones giving Asian kids systematically lower "personality scores," dismissing them as "grinds" without a shred of evidence.
I'm simply unable to follow the flow of logic that gets you from my comment, which reflected the statement of an admissions officer, to your conclusion about how "people who think like me" would dismiss Asian kids.
The admission officer was describing someone who shows no passion towards anything, and only does it because they're supposed to - which often includes why they're applying to college, because they're supposed to. Is it an idiotic bias to think that someone without passion in a subject area will be less successful than someone with passion and direction?
In case you missed the earlier part of the comment, kids with high GPAs, test scores, etc. - the "grinder" you describe, regardless of race - fit into a different category of a likely successful student that they also look for. To elaborate though, there are lots of "grinders" and differentiation still matters. Are they grinding in math and CS, and also have a Github and contribute to OSS and are applying to the college of engineering? That's better than someone with super high scores but nothing else, because there are probably lots of other applicants with even higher scores. Competing on only one axis is hard.
Like it or not, in a limited resource like seats at a competitive school, admissions officers are looking for small signals. It may seem unfair, but it's what I was told.
And as for the evidence, I'm merely passing on the information I was told by the people making the decisions. They hold the evidence (if it's even an evidence-based decision) not me. Feel free to have your own discussions with them if you'd like, I've generally found admission officers to be extremely friendly and open about their criteria.
A room full of box checkers is also worse for education. I want to have classmates that are willing to question the teacher, classmates that will spend time thinking beyond a class instead of cramming every trivial detail for an A+, classmates that will choose their classes based on what sounds interesting to them and not only what would look best on their resume.
These schools don't systematically reject all box checkers, it's just that there are so damn many of them the admit rate is going to be very low for box checkers if you want a class with diverse perspectives.
I also don't think it's a binary property, and to some extent is a product of how one spins their application. This is definitely a downside of the current system. But there are fundamental, educational reasons to not want your entire class consisting of students that poured every waking hour of high school into gaming the college app.
When I think of box-checkers, I think of the kind of classmates I had who could memorize things far better (or just put in more hours studying) than I ever could but would fall apart the moment you asked them to do something outside the happy path.
They're saying the lines they're paid to say the same as an oil exec is paid for theirs. There is a significant amount of profit being made in higher education, yet look at your statements right there - they're looking for people whom are willing to slave themselves.
It's discriminatory and a massive waste of resources. We have to do away with these institutions to build something that actually meets the needs of today. But given government is involved i doubt it ever will.
A student who pays tuition for 4 or 5 years is more profitable than one who drops out (or transfers) after a year.
Their interests are (generally) aligned with their statements, in that they want to find people who will be a good fit for the school and want to stay there. That means academically and also culturally.
As an aside, my kid got into several schools and was rejected by several others. She chose a small private campus you've probably never heard of that was a perfect fit - and she has thrived like I can't believe. They also gave her a scholarship that made the cost lower than almost anywhere else, including public/state universities.
The real tragedy is people who only look at top 10 schools and feel they're a failure if they don't get in. There really is a school for everyone. And I'm not sure what "government" has to do with it, most universities are either private or run by independent boards of regents or trustees.
High level public institutions get tens of thousands of applicants. I can almost assure you that what you’re describing is a wonderland that doesn’t exist in all but the smallest schools that can take time to review applicants on the whole. Most schools can barely weed through the applicants based on standardized measures (GPA, SAT/ACT, coursework). The feel good stuff likely only shines in essays, but very little prestige is going to be given to someone that wrote about working a summer job to pay for school, even if that’s unfortunate for the student.
> I recently saw one child into college, and have another on the way. I've spoken to many admissions officers, counselors, and similar folks making admissions choices for public and private universities.
> To a one, they all claim to be looking for two things: (1) students who will succeed at their university, and (2) a diverse range of students to avoid a monoculture.
> This means they try to look at the "whole student."
In the 1920s, "look at the whole student" meant "exclude Jews". In fact, the whole modern "holistic" admissions process was brought into being to exclude Jews [1]. And the "holism" of the process was instrumental to creating the desired racial bias, as "holism" affords tremendous room for subtle biases to entrench themselves. This persists today in Harvard's "personal rating" bias against Asians, which launders anti-Asian bias out to the wider society that rates those students.
I do not think that admissions officers are hellbent on racial exclusion today, but I also do not think that admissions officers can be trusted to describe the full nature and biases of their processes.
> Some of the least interesting students are "box checkers" who have a bunch of disconnected extra-curriculars that don't show passion, direction, or a proclivity towards success. If a student defines "success" as "getting into college," then what will they do once they get there? Probably flounder.
Yet if a student defines "success" as "playing a musical instrument really well" you'll think that he is well-rounded and deserves to get admitted.
This was a pretty compelling argument to get rid of the current rigamarole of the college admissions process. Is the purpose to get an education or to audition for a reality show? Why are we making 17 year olds craft a narrative about their life and judging their worthiness based on that?
Bingo. I came from an economically challenged background with a very chaotic family life. Grades were impossible to keep up let alone extra curricular activities. Tests were how I was able to demonstrate my academic potential.
I gamed the SAT by "studying". It took an SAT book checked out from the library and a few hours of practice. The SAT is not particularly hard for a bright student of any background that puts some effort into it. And these days there are more free resources available than ever before.
I get the feeling policies to remove standardized tests are set by those who have no idea what real intelligence and achievement is.
Seriously, is there no talk about how unfair the notion of extra-curricular activities is in the US? It is one of these things that gave me a major culture shock moving into the US. Things like giving an advantage to people that have so many hours of volunteer work feels a really blatant way to give an unfair advantage to folks that are already way privileged and over represented.
>Yes! Having a job in high school can definitely look good on your college application. As long as it doesn't end up negatively impacting other key areas such as academic performance and extracurricular participation, working in high school is an excellent way to increase the strength of your application.
It does seem pretty screwed up. I don't see how working couldn't have a negative impact on time for extracurricular activities. Or say someone wasn't even officially a worker, like providing care for elderly relatives living at home.
it's very likely that i would have never gone to college had there not been an option to test-in. instead i got offers from several top tier institutions based on test scores, essays, work experience and the equivalent of a ged alone.
as such, i'm immensely thankful that the route exists and believe that it should continue to exist as part of a variety of routes for prospective students to demonstrate their aptitude, grit and readiness for higher education.
just as exams and associated scores should not discourage anyone from applying, neither should grade averages or k-12 school experiences. the application process should provide those with all manner of experiences and strengths to make cases that suit their situations best.
I'm not against standardized tests. What I am against is a test ran by a private company as a barrier of entry into a public institution. Private schools who want to require SAT/ACT, fine, they are private institutions, I see no issue them requiring a test administered by a private company. University of North Carolina, eh, can't we have a test ran by a public institution as a barrier of entry into a public institution?
I can see this argument. You’d also hope that graduation from one of our high schools and the motivation to apply was enough to demonstrate preparedness for college. While private run tests have their drawbacks, a publicly run exam has its own, and we have examples of that too. It isn’t easy to fix unfortunately.
There are intelligent people though that don't do well on standardized tests (or at least don't get top tier results). I agree that standardized testing is a good metric to get a general idea of aptitude, but I think it hugely fails in appreciating people who are able to solve 'non-standardized' problems. And those are actually the people who should be placed in top institutions
> And those are actually the people who should be placed in top institutions
Do you really think there's this untapped group of "non-standardized" thinkers out there who belong in the to institutions but for standardized tests?
This sounds a lot like something I'd tell myself when I was 16 instead of dealing with the reality that I was just a lazy, underachieving high school student and would have made a lazy, underachieving college student.
In reality, those unconventional thinkers you're talking about find a way to achieve anyway by unconventional means.
Reflecting back on my own attitude and performance in schools, I was just an underachiever who wanted more but refusing to put in the work. Now that I am an adult I can tell you what got me into this thinking and it was because of ego and unrealistic expectations that I built for myself based on what I was told.
"You have a high IQ, you are smart, you are intelligent, you don't study and you do well etc"
I let it get to my head and instead of growing, instead of recognizing what I didn't know, I focused on what I knew. Pride and ego. For a while it worked so I had no reason to doubt it. But when the sheer work load got to a point where effective time management, strong and consistent work ethic were required I couldn't pull it off.
its a downward spiral, you are not used to putting in effort and seeing good results. that is setting you up for failure.
now? people who do well on tests, who do well in school, are completely deserving because they put in the work and patience.
same with success, its not a matter of rolling dice but focus and it requires:
- knowing what i dont know
- effort & work
Yes there are really smart people out there who could really benefit from the above but many do not like to admit it. I do and now I take the time and effort to know what I don't know. This has nothing to do with race or equity but more to do with your attitude. Yes it can be influenced by our surroundings and events but everyday we get up and make the choice to believe or not believe what we don't know and know.
Having said that if you realize you are unconventional, realize why that is, because an unconventional path is riddled with false paths, pain and require faith. If you are conventional you need to rely less on faith and it is why many try to get others to follow it because it is less risky.
I know at least one of these people. When you give her an opportunity she hits the ball out of the park. Wherever you put her she quickly rises to the top, but she has been denied many opportunities because she doesn’t test well on standardized tests.
The SAT measures the two skills colleges care most about: reading and math.
Reading is the most important part. Your score on this section is determined by how much time you spend reading. A student who reads for an hour a day will get a top score, while a student who doesn't read at home will get a low score. Colleges require students to be capable of reading for long periods of time, and the SAT is a great way of filtering out people who are not active readers.
A student with a low reading score might be otherwise intelligent, but intelligence does not make a scholar. A college education involves consuming copious amounts of information; it is no place for someone who struggles with reading comprehension.
Is it the literal act of reading or being exposed to language?
What if kids watch shows on TV and it exposes them as much to stories, communications, language?
I used to work for a place that did the summer fancy extra-curriculars.
Basically, think a very very fun summer camp, BUT we would package in X service features, one per week. This was a win win. Parent's would pay because kid could put the stories of painting the walls in X town on the application, or cleaning up Y pollution on a beach. And the rest of the times the kids could have fun and learn cool stuff (I'm being vague because I liked the program even though you had to have good money to go).
Not OP but I am an abnormally good "tester." It was always easy for me to see what the questions were asking for and could make a go of anything multiple choice. I'm also good at writing essays. It does not make me smart, it makes my abilities especially suited to standardized tests.
If you cannot solve the same problems given an open ended question, is it real ability? There is definitely something there, but I’m not sure I could be proud of it.
In my case it means performing well under stress, having good time management, and skim reading quickly/effectively. All of these are real things that do matter, but they dramatically boost test scores.
These are skills I use every day as a surgeon. Also grew up extremely poor. Close to perfect SAT/ACT which led to a full ride to good private school. Math degree. NSF fellowship. And, so on..
Would not have happened without the SAT as I was working after school through middle and high school and had very limited 'extracurriculars'
Funny, I rely on those same skills in management all the time. So much so that I wish that the value of those skills, independent of educational subject matter, had been emphasized to me as a young person.
Maybe some impostor, but at the time, there was a penalty for guessing. Between my risk-taking personality and the sense that I wasn't going to get out of the minor leagues by watching pitches go by, I 'swung' at every question and apparently got a lot of questions right that I couldn't actually explain why the answer was correct.
Arguably, someone who knew more than I did but was too hesitant to go out on a limb about it should still have gotten a higher score if the test is designed to assess knowledge.
If I remember correctly, in that period it was still EV-positive to guess if you could eliminate at least one incorrect possibility. Not everybody knew this, though. Simply having someone tell you that (or having the patience to read and understand the scoring rules) is a significant advantage over folks who didn't know.
If your intuition allowed you to guess with a high enough success rate that it overcame the penalty then it is that intuition that gave you an advantage. You didn't just get lucky.
Being able to choose the correct answer in a test environment by process of elimination or similar methodology is a useful skill to have in some non-test circumstances, but it’s not a great test of domain knowledge.
Anecdote: I recently did some tests where I read a bunch of material before hand and used a combination of short term memory and multiple choice trickery to pass with flying colors, but I still don’t have any real knowledge of the subject area. I barely remember any of it, other than a few bits of jargon.
True, but I think the claim is also that said intiuition does not manifest in a general way when dealing with the subject matter; only on the tests. In which case it would not correlate to performance on real world outcomes.
Yes, even the most difficult standardized tests are full of artifacts just based on the fact that there is a correct answer and the test makers have a relatively narrow range of difficulty to work within. In the real world the majority of problems are either trivial or impossible and its not always obvious until you dig in which it is.
I will say I'm of decent peer-inteligence (and the test scores put me in the top 1% or higher) but that doesn't account for other aspects of "ability".
I feel my grades more accurately portrayed me as a whole but the test was accurate as to potential if that makes sense.
Standardized tests are extremely structured, and therefore easy to train for, so you can do well on such tests and yet lack other basic abilities which are important for less structured contexts.
Test taking is a skill, and some people are much better than others. Good test takers understand how test takers make questions, and can use context clues and things we know about how answers are worded to get a higher score than if we were just answering the questions based on how well we know the subject itself.
Has anyone ever said "tests fucked me over"? Yes, some people say that, but every time I meet one I see why they tested low. Being able to stay calm under pressure and complete a task on time, and preparing for that, are important life skills, on top of being technically capable.
Tests generate a lot of false positives, but they give false negatives less. If you fail you fail for a valid reason.
Many universities explicitly want policies of institutional, systemic racism.
Obviously many people who are in favor of this hateful divisive racism will try to gaslight you into believing it somehow isn't racism, or try to redefine the meaning of words such that they are innocent and you are guilty. But that doesn't change what it is.
So at the end of the day these institutions will bring in whatever policies they want, and they don't really give a crap about actual racism. All they care about is money, PR, etc.
When the effects of actively racist institutions and policies is not even a generation away. I Don't think leveling the field that should be level in the first place isn't racism. what is real racism to you honest question.
I can't really understand what you're saying there. There are actively racist institutions now, their systemic racism is affecting people today, and they are continually pushing for more racism. The racists are becoming more emboldened and blatant -- look at California prop 16, there was a push to explicitly repeal the constitutional prohibition against racial discrimination! And it was only narrowly defeated! Does that not ring any alarm bells with you?
I oppose all racism. "Oh but we can just be racist in this case because..." - nope. Doesn't cut it for me. Racism is non-negotiable. Racism can never be a tool for improving anything, because it hurts the individual in in unjust way, that's the problem with it. "It's fine Asians are privileged they can easily get into college" doesn't help the Asian kid from the poor family who came as a refugee, didn't speak English and was picked on at school for not fitting in.
I have no problem with institutions giving consideration to people who have experienced certain disadvantage. The income their parents made, for example. And if that consideration turns out to benefit some races more than others that's perfectly fine. "We have too many Asians at our college, increase the cutoff for them" is just disgusting vile discrimination though. I don't care what justifications I hear, what gaslighting, or how much people falsely accuse me of being the racist, I will never accept or agree with that.
I know some people think they can use racism "for good" as it were (isn't that always the story?). They need to own it though. Rather than accuse other people of being racist for opposing their racism, if they believe racism is the best tool for the job they should just be honest and admit it.
> I have no problem with institutions giving consideration to people who have experienced certain disadvantage. The income their parents made, for example
Just wanted to note that this is partly why the SAT was stopped from being used at MIT and other universities - because it tend to score lower for people who are considered to be under disadvantage. In other words, I'm not sure that this approach necessarily leads to a more positive outcome.
Edit: Looks like HN resolve this and it's ranked properly now (no offense meant to the OP).
Here's a hint. The real anti-racists are the people who are against actual racism. The people who are instituting racist policies and trying to repeal constitutional prohibitions against racism are not anti-racists. They're the opposite.
Hint, Thanks to Critical Race theory your children will learn to think about race in a way that has been accepted by academics for a long time and eventually we'll make a lot more progress since we won't waste time with parrots like you. Goodbye.
We've banned this account for egregiously breaking the site guidelines. You can't do that here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You also broke the site guidelines badly in this thread. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of how bad someone else's comments are or you feel they are. We had to warn you about this once already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29085513.
I'm not going to ban you right now because you've also posted good comments on unrelated things, but if this pattern continues, we're going to have to, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on.
I'm trying to understand how Scantron can be racist. It does not know the identity, race, demographic or the economic class of the test taker. It literally just scans the test takers responses and scores it based on a preset solution. You are not given extra time because of your demographic nor are certain demographics punished or given extra points, everybody has access to the same learning resources, and one can take mock exams in preparation based on previous Scantron exams. The test producers do not know the race, demographic of the test taker or think about race when creating exam questions. They write questions to filter out those who demonstrate the best aptitude. Do you feel that this is unfair? What alternative do you forsee that could measure the aptitude of the test takers? Is this attitude limited only to academia or does it apply to professional sports? Do you think knowledge of game theory and physics should be an important part of aptitude tests for atheletes? Should pianists be subject to athletic requirements to measure their aptitude to enter Carnegie Hall?
I've asked similar questions to people who hold this view of "standardized testing is racist". While I never got a direct answer, I could infer or "read between the lines" that they are not oblivious to the seemingly glaring contradiction to some of their solutions to racism, its just that when it comes to equality--the ends justify the means. Groups whom have previously enjoyed privilege with college admissions (whites and Asians) may endure some injustices and discrimination during this transition phase to equality. Other minorities dealt with this for so long, it's no big deal if some applicants with perfect SAT scores get cut because they are Asian.
> I've asked similar questions to people who hold this view of "standardized testing is racist"
The most defensible explanation that folks who claim standardized tests are racist is that the range of scores are not approximately equal across races. In theory, a “fair” non-racist test would have similar ranges of scores for all races.
There are a lot of assumptions baked into the argument, many with which I disagree, but it’s an interesting idea.
Much of the data supports the idea that most of the differences in test scores are due to socio-economic status. When SES is controlled for, everything else (like race) just has a minor impact on scores
Iirc, race is the largest contributor to variance when SES is controlled for, but folks within the same SES perform much more similarly than same race folks in different SESes.
> ...the range of scores are not approximately equal across races. In theory, a “fair” non-racist test would have similar ranges of scores for all races.
This is a good example of what I meant by "they are not oblivious to the seemingly glaring contradiction to some of their solutions to racism". If you follow that argument to its logical conclusion you have to explain why races don't have similar ranges while also accounting for the core belief that "we are all equal and race doesn't matter."
The "socio-economic factors" argument is easier to argue and also more widely accepted, yet this doesn't explain why these folks focus primarily on race.
> yet this doesn't explain why these folks focus primarily on race
In my experience:
- Race-based arguments seem to be easier for folks in general to understand than SES-based arguments. Race-based oppression is something that all Americans learn about in school, while SES-based oppression has been occurring non-stop since the start of the country, and it is not covered nearly as much in schools.
- It’s easier to get social support, political support, and/or funding for race-based projects, while SES projects are tougher.
- One possible reason the above two are true is that highlighting SES discrepancies reveals that the concept of American “equality”, even for the majority race, is a myth. This idea of Americans being equal and having equal access to institutions is, imho, an American value that many Americans hold dear and believe to be true, despite significant evidence to the contrary.
> When SES is controlled for, everything else (like race) just has a minor impact on scores
This is sadly not at all the case. See the below famous charts about SAT results split by race and SES (proxied by either parental income or parental education). The lowest SES segments of the white/Asian population score as well as the highest SES segments of the black population.
This then makes it obvious that colleges need to choose between either (a) equality of opportunity where SAT matter and that gets you more Asian kids and fewer black students or (b) equality of outcomes where extracurriculars and 'personality' matter and get rigged until racial balance is the same as in the general population, disregarding the maximisation of talent or ability.
That said, I think two charts that try to summarize the data should probably combine the two if they actually want to measure SES rather than just SS or ES.
Note that there definitely still is a statistically significant difference based on race, but I am fairly certain it’s not as large as the charts you linked to seem to suggest.
Specifically, I think it has to do with generational efficiencies in optimally using the opportunities that higher education presents.
Simple examples: knowing the hows and whys of relationship cultivation in college, knowing how to avoid or navigate potential educational pitfalls, knowing how to optimally use university resources, etc.
Choice quote which does a good job of summarizing what I have seen:
“In addition, the differential direct and indirect effects of income on high school achievement and, in turn, high school achieve-ment on SAT scores may also be explained in terms of residential racial and economic segregation which are, through property values and taxpolicies, related to the quality of schooling. Moreover, the poverty effects reported here suggest the lack of social and educational resources in the larger community that are needed to supplement and complement the learning taking place in schools.”
I don't think so ivy league discrimination of asian american applicants despite high standardized test scores is very much a published statistic one that is often met with emotional fervor by groups that seek to continue it.
Just my observation as an outsider looking into America. Often sensitive debates that don't follow a certain mainstream narrative are brushed off as strawman or whataboutism.
I'm just seeing this from an objective data driven view and puzzled why ppl would react so harshly.
People who claim “standardized test is systematic racism” are not necessarily the same people who think “asian americans being discriminated at ivy leagues even with good standardized test score is not seen as systematic racism.”
You are taking two different points of views which are made by two different groups, reducing their arguments down to practically nothing, and pretending they’re being made by the same group.
You are mutating the arguments and inventing a boogie man. Textbook straw man argument.
> Often sensitive debates that don't follow a certain mainstream narrative are brushed off as strawman
There’s a reason for that. It has nothing to do with following a mainstream narrative or not. It has to do with the false assumptions in the basis of your questions.
You are trying to argue that the people who claim standardized test is systematic racism is meritocracy and against affirmative action. Then following your logic, the people who aren't claiming standardized test is systematic racism is anti-meritocracy and pro affirmative action.
Yet the standard test does not differentiate the race of the test taker. If race was factored into the test scores somehow then what you are claiming makes sense, but the SAT/LSAT/MCAT/PCAT do not, cannot know the race or socioeconomic status of the test taker because as society we benefit from placing people of merit, who have the aptitude.
Are you comfortable with a lawyer/doctor who is responsible for you because they fit a certain affirmative action profile but scored low on their aptitude test and low gpa to meet a certain quota for that demographic group vs someone who were hired because of their high score on standardized aptitude test and consequently high gpa (that does not discriminate the test taker based on their race or socioeconomic class)?
Would you trust the latter or former if it meant your life/bank account depended on it and is it racism if you do not choose the former?
1. Your original asked what GP thinks of people that make the argument. Mine asks about the argument itself. It's subtle but important difference, and to have productive discussion about sensitive topics it's imperative to avoid any sort of personal attacks. Even if one's answer might be "those people are stupid" it doesn't help. By addressing the claim/substance rather than the person, it will likely be a more productive conversation.
2. By omitting your opinion portions, it keeps the conversation more focused. When you introduce "standardized test is the only way to measure somebody on their aptitude for doing well like the LSAT", you move the conversation away from systemic racism and toward a debate about whether there are any other ways to measure aptitude for doing well. These seem to me like completely separate topics/discussion.
Think you are being overly pedantic with syntaxes here to warp my intended context. I did not care about the people, if not clear from my previous comment, that it was intended to raise attention to the idea of standardized testing being perceived as systematic racism, one which is obviously held by some people. It's to be construed as part of everyday speech, not witchhunting on the character of people believing in the said idea that standardized test is systematic racism.
The examples I added of standardized aptitude test for law school entry and the very real biases against Asians in American institutions requiring standardized testing quod erat demonstrandum was designed to set the context in which you are to understand the implicit spirit of the question (not the people rather the focus on standardized test = systematic racism).
Anything else you derived ad litteram to accuse me of malo animo by "moving the conversation away from systemic racism toward a debate about whether there are any other ways to measure aptitude for doing well" is exactly what you are doing here.
However, I am curious to hear what other possible scalable medium you think exists for an institution to properly vet millions of applicants every year and evaluate one's aptitude for law school that does not involve unbiased standardized testing that measures ability to think logically and work under timed pressure? Do you mean to say then that physically active professional sports must properly test a candidates aptitude from their understanding of game theory and physics through a written examination or is that somehow exempt from alternative means to detect aptitude? Shall law schools instead pit candidates in a simulated combat environment like Navy Seal's hell week to test their mental grit? Where does this end?
How does this constitute as systematic racism in your view when the test taker's scantron is measured against a pre-configured solution? Does the scantron system take account the race, socioeconomic background of the exam taker to invalidate and validate their exam responses at the time of scanning? Are test takers given penalties or extra time based on their demographic?
Did you really accuse me of being overly pedantic and then you used the terms "ad litteram" and "malo animo" (lol)
If you want to have productive conversations, you really need to read and write more carefully. Please point out where I did any of these things you're accusing me of doing:
1. Warped your intended context by accusing or even suggesting that you actually only care about people. If I thought that was your intent, I wouldn't have offered you constructive feedback to help improve the conversation. You were getting downvoted, in my opinion unfairly, and I was trying to help you see some potential reasons why. You literally asked about what GP thinks of "the people" and if I thought that's what you actually meant, why would I have suggested that you change it to something else? I would have just downvoted you and moved on like most others did.
2. Suggested in any way that I think SATs are systemically racist
3. Suggested in any way that I have any of the answers to any of the questions here.
Since you seem to care what I think on the topic (even though I didn't offer any opinion on it), let me first disclaimer this by pointing out that if I were going to advocate for a position on this, as a responsible person I would want to do a lot more research because I always try to maintain a healthy volume of Socratic Ignorance, and I recognize that I know very little on this subject. But anyway, I am pro-standardized testing. I think there are real flaws to it that should be admitted, just as there are with any quantitative analysis of something as complex as "likely to succeed," but I think the pros of testing outweigh the cons. I think that standardized testing is one of the few things that give people with less than ideal home situations a chance at a good education and a pedigree (which undoubtedly helps set people up for success). I think the focus on race that discriminates against Asians absolutely is systemic racism. I think it fits the definition of systemic racism better than almost anything else I can think of.
I'm not trying to be a pedantic prick who corrects your grammar, as I said before, I was trying to improve the conversation by giving you a tip (something your downvoters did not do I might add). People on the internet (especially in written forums) are not mind readers. They're not going to magically know that you didn't mean what you literally said (asking about "people"). If you're lucky, they'll do exactly what I did: Give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the best possible interpretation of what you wrote, which is that you didn't mean it literally. As you yourself just illustrated wonderfully, there are serious limits to written communication and it behooves us all to remember that and give each other the benefit of the doubt. From the HN FAQ: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Now, please stop being so defensive, and please start reading more carefully, especially if you're going to get this offended and go off on the attack against people that care about you and are offering you kindness. I think if you re-read everything I said but this time do it with the idea that I'm a friend trying to offer you help to improve your writing and to get less downvotes, I think you'll come away with a much different impression.
Finally, welcome to Hacker News! This is a great community that I think you'll enjoy, but do please review the posting guidelines, especially the section "In Comments": https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Apparently you are not even remotely self-aware of your patronizing tone. I really don't know what you are trying to fish for here but I am well familiar with the HN rules, I just wish you took the time to read them ;)
> Apparently you are not even remotely self-aware of your patronizing tone.
Thank you that's helpful feedback! I certainly didn't intend to be patronizing.
It took a bit of restraint to look past what felt like a personal insult and extract the useful part of your comment though. In the future it would have been a lot better as just a simple informative statement that assumes good faith:
> Your tone comes off as patronizing.
Re:
> I just wish you took the time to read them
Which rules would you like me to read? Can you either provide more information, or give a link and section header so I can know what specifically you're referring to?
the inequalities could be caused by racial discrimination (bring born in a black household, you're more likely to have issues than a white household, statistically). Inequalities could also be caused by other factors, unrelated to racism.
The tests measure certain cognitive capabilities. Genes have an effect, nutrient intake has an effect, nurture has an effect. Trying to fix racism via test scores (or disregarding it) isn't going to help fix racism.
To be blunt. You can look at life expectancy for black and white americicans. Whites live longer. Measuring the difference is not systemic racism. We should not avoid measurements for this reasons.
Some minorities perform worse on SAT. This is a fact. SAT predicts performance in college, this is also a fact.
The question becomes, how do we select college students. Those most likely to succeed, or other values.
“In October 2019, Judge Allison D. Burroughs ruled that Harvard College's admissions policies do not unduly discriminate against Asian Americans.”
“In February 2020, SFFA filed an appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. The court heard oral arguments in mid-2020 and ultimately ruled in late 2020 in favor of Harvard, concluding that Judge Burroughs had not erred in her ruling and major factual findings.”
Elite admissions is more than great grades and great standardized test scores. Some folks may not like the fact that this is true, but that doesn’t make it less true, and it doesn’t (necessarily) make it racist.
Judge Burroughs was wrong. The Supreme Court will overturn, especially given the explicit promise by (likely to be confirmed) Justice Jackson to abstain.
As a general rule, I always look at more subjective measures like extra curriculars and “well-roundedness” with a huge amount of skepticism. Such subjective standards are phenomenal places to hide discrimination and favoratism.
I didn't see your point in the beginning, but as I read this thread I realized how much pressure we are putting on these kids. Even for kids whos parents can afford the extra curricular stuff, it just seems bonkers to me how much they have to do to "stand out". I don't know where I am going with this, but just wanted to say this is too much pressure.
I agree, and I think it's yet another symptom of the hypercapitalist society we live in.
Kids are bombarded with media telling them that success is when you get rich and famous, or when you reach the absolute top of your field. Then again, at school, we're drilled with the lies that college is required and that you need to be in x percentile to get into x school to get x job. Finally, once we get into the workforce, we all judge each other based on our initial salaries, positions, and career trajectories.
As long as there is unequal distribution of resources, anyone with an opportunity to further cement their family's socioeconomic status by taking advantage of the system will tend to do so. We need to be able to offer houses, leisure, and fulfillment to everyone from hyper-privileged techy college grads (like a lot of us) to housekeepers, bus drivers, social workers, teachers, etc.
I'm ashamed at how easy it is to do so little and 'win' in this system while so many others suffer. And there's nothing I can do with my smidge of resources to help more than a few people at a time which makes no meaningful trajectory change to the millions (billions?) that need help.
May I ask on what basis you were against them? Was it just ignorance of the facts (like the canard that they just measure wealth), or did you change your opinion of something subjective?
I imagine that test preparation is far more accessible when you have well funded schools and parents who can cover any additional tutoring/preparation. For me the game changer was community college, it gave me a second chance at a price I could afford and with a clean slate I earned a 3.9 GPA and got into a top 10 engineering program.
They literally wrote again, it's a multiple factor process. Why is there this concept "test vs no test"? No one expects meritless acceptance to anything.
Using that as a metric for society is exactly why we have out of control poverty, drug abuse, and homelessness.
If you were able to get good grades in school it wasn't because of your efforts, as a child and teen your brain is largely programmed by the community and environment you grow in. There are no gifted children, only those with educated parents that started early. This is becoming an ever more common theme, especially of kids with teachers for parents whom make too little yet know the systems enough to know exactly how to get their kid past the trite systems created for class warfare.
The solution is to defund universities and stop this elitist nonsense. Just like COVID has shown we don't need to show up to the office, we don't need universities either. We are a better society without their control and political agendas. There is little of value that isn't better done by a YouTube video today.
> The solution is to defund universities and stop this elitist nonsense. We are a better society without their control and political agendas.
As someone currently doing a PhD, I definitely agree that there is some elitism in academia, and that school administration usually sucks. However, I also love the work I do, which I couldn't really do anywhere else, and the community of students and faculty, which is pretty unique.
What makes you condemn the institution as a whole?
> There is little of value that isn't better done by a YouTube video today.
As someone who enjoyed the liberal arts education portion of their education, it seems like we don't have the same way of defining "value." Could you describe how you measure if something has value?
Definitely for the best. Standardized testing was pretty much the only reason I and many other working class folks I know could get into good schools -- I was never going to do a million side activities, and my summers were spent working, not building my academic resume.
Of course the real tragedy is that we fixate so much on college, even prestigious ones, at all given how unnecessary they are for making people into productive and happy human beings. This change is significant but affects less than one percent of the population each year..
>Of course the real tragedy is that we fixate so much on college, even prestigious ones, at all given how unnecessary they are for making people into productive and happy human beings. This change is significant but affects less than one percent of the population each year..
I'm ambivalent because I sympathize with both sides of the equation. One one hand, I have the hindsight now that I didn't at 18 to realize that the world didn't end because I couldn't get into Harvey Mudd. And in many ways it turned out 100x better; instead of staying in LA-ish areas, I explored a whole new area I never would have considered otherwise, still got a great education for a small fraction of what Mudd woulda cost me, and was exposed to a completely different flavor of computer science that helped me decide my career.
But on the other hand, college really does open a ton of doors that for many non-upper class people would never open otherwise. While I was still in tech and had many choices, I imagine people at MIT or Mudd would be fighting off recruitment at top companies with a stick, with many opportunities coming from certain companies who only recruit at such universities. It can accelerate your career on the order of 5-10 years if you stick it out. And you'd likely be unparalleled in resources and opportunities if your focus is on research. If your goal is as lofty as being the next household name or to pivot into creating your own business, there are oodles more oppurtunities there.
I wouldn't trade the education I got for an MIT one, but I can understand why 18YO me (and many others) do feel that way.
Yes, prestigious schools open a huge number of doors. But more importantly, they teach elite mannerisms, standards and beliefs, and prejudices. If you are not a true genius (true geniuses can always make their way, but they are rare, even at MIT et al), this knowledge is invaluable and irreplaceable.
I’ll give you an example from my own career. I went to MIT/Berkeley, SB/PhD. But I practically washed out of grad school, not due to lack of ability, but because I hated it. What I did like was making things and explaining things, and had a successful career in the more business aspects of science where successful scientists were the customers and decision makers. I understood, in a fundamental way, how these people thought and what they expected. This was invaluable, and was conveyed, in an irreplaceablely concentrated way, by my being a 30th percentile student in a 95th percentile university.
yes, true geniuses are a rare breed and a university gets more benefit from admitting a true genius than vice versa (Did harvard get more out of bill gates or bill gates out of harvard? I would argue Harvard got way more out of that exchange). But for the plethora of above average, hard workers going to a top school is still a pretty good deal.
1) Bachelor’s level by 15-16.
2) Doctorate or equivalent by 20-21.
3) Decent communication and social skills. This is a significant flameout point.
4) Creativity and absolute refusal to work on directed projects by others, except voluntarily for some higher good.
5) Tremendous persistence.
6) Cheerfulness, related to 3) above, increases the degree of genius-ness.
genius is not defined by accomplishments, believe it or not. geniuses may or may not achieve the things we hope or expect they will. genius is seeing reality, intuition, knowing things even though you maybe didn't even read the book. genius is generative, not always performative. it takes many forms.
Not to demand too much rigour for a casual discussion forum, but what you left out were the reasons to believe that was the list and not some other list of different things.
someone like Srinivasa Ramanujan. True genius needs to be found, identified and nurtured. If they are born in a poor household, there would not be as big an opportunity to identify them, and society would be poorer for it.
Therefore, society should look to try and identify them, and spend resources to get them to flourish.
I likewise had a similar experience on the other side of the Atlantic with British universities. The goal for top achievers was always Oxford, Cambridge, or Imperial. I ended up significantly under-achieving on the grades my mock exams and teachers predicted, and went to a less prestigious institution, which used to be a Polytechnic. However, this gave me such an appreciation for the North of England that I would have never experienced otherwise, and a group of friends a league different from the ones I grew up with in the South, that I wouldn't trade for the world. It probably worked out well too because I got a relatively pain-free 1st grade (4.0 GPA) when I know full well that with my ability and work ethic I would have got a low 2.1 or 2.2 at where I planned to go.
All the same, finding a decent job after was a slog, and required me to go back to do a postgraduate degree at a Russel group (Ivy League equivalent) university to get a seat at the table with any major tech company. I'd like to earn more, but finance firms and most unicorn start-ups demand Oxbridge so I'll probably consider an MSc or MPhil at one of the two some time in the future, but that'll be 7 years of schooling for £80k, when I could have done it in 4 years for half that cost. All in all, it's what would have been a retirement at 40 to one at 50, which while not the end of the world is a little frustrating.
> Of course the real tragedy is that we fixate so much on college
This is what gets me. The whole concept of college, and especially selective, high profile colleges such as Harvard, MIT, etc., seems antiquated and almost entirely manufactured at this point. It's artificially crafted scarcity designed to create a market and brand. I feel the true, primary function of these institutions is to give the rich and powerful a means to identify each other and their respective pedigrees. Sure, they throw the unwashed a few bones and let them take home some degrees. But what do you actually get for your effort and money? I can't believe the competitiveness is justified by an actual difference in the quality of the experience or the person that results from it.
No no no. The thesis topics are in graduate schools are more cutting edge, and the opportunity to interact with real science as an undergraduate are invaluable. I would tend to agree that excelling at a second tier university with a comprehensive program is an acceptable start. It generally gets you to a higher level.
Competitiveness is about speed. Anyone can look something up. It’s about knowing things right off the bat, knowing what’s an unreasonable answer, estimating things, knowing what’s important. That takes years of education and practice.
In the US, we have probably had 750,000 excess deaths in the last two years because politicians do not have an intuition about probability and statistics. This was generally true in the West, but NOT in China and Asia in general, where the leaders were more numerate.
Wow, I didn't realize I was advocating for excess deaths. Thanks for clarifying that for the folks at home.
Maybe my point is more anecdotal than I realize. After all, I've never had a colleague from MIT who exhibiting any meaningful difference in characteristics that mattered. But at the same time, I resent being an unwitting participant in upholding MIT's legacy by being passed over for opportunities by people who are more credentialed and more well connected than me but otherwise the same in every way that counts. Maybe I belong on a different planet. I wonder sometimes. It seems my destiny has already been decided on this one.
It's a trade-off. I'd rather live in a democracy and take my chances with Covid-19 than live under an authoritarian regime. Even authoritarians are correct at least twice a day.
> live in a democracy and take my chances with Covid-19 than live under an authoritarian regime.
that's a straw man false dichotomy. It's not mutually exclusive. Just because trump and his administration handled it poorly, doesn't mean it can't be handled well under a democracy. Look at new zealand and australia - they handled it fairly well.
Both democracies and authoritarian regimes can be found among governments that have had laissez-faire policies and both can be found among those that have had strict lockdowns. You can probably find the world's full range of policy responses to COVID-19 within the United States.
Well, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc relaxed on the vaccination distribution and got hammered.
Also, authoritarians sometimes get the actions right even if they don't understand the science or the math.
And do you remember the great "fogging disinfectant trucks" in China. Completely ineffective show that may have fooled the masses but would have failed to destroy any viral agents.
We did lockdowns and mask mandates and rapidly created and distributed a vaccine. I don't think the US response was perfect, but I find it unlikely that politicians' numeracy would reduce the death toll by a further 80% when we've already picked the low-hanging fruit.
Are there specific shortcomings that you think would account for that gap?
Maybe it's just that my search skills are subpar, but I can't seem to find any relevant works on Google Scholar. Would you mind taking the time to share some of these sources?
Thanks for the link, I actually haven't seen that. Here's an interesting preprint tackling this issue as well: https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/rw4es
I'm also curious as to why you thought that this was "very well known," however. Could you elaborate on how you determine which set of facts can be selected to be well known, and which set cannot?
> I feel the true, primary function of these institutions is to give the rich and powerful a means to identify each other and their respective pedigrees.
That has been true for a long time. And before then, the primary function of those institutions was training ministers.
Joking aside, there's lots of evidence (assembled in a book like The Cult of Smart [1]) that the effects of education are saturated in developed countries. In other words, you won't get an appreciably better education at a prestigious school than you will at an unprestigious school. The biggest educational difference arises from the composition of the student body, not the actual instruction.
So many young people are working themselves raw in high school and college to be prestigious when it doesn't have much of an effect on outcomes. Couple that with an antiquated curriculum and the modern college experience is so much wheel spinning.
The VP of Global Operations where I work who has his undergrad in Mechanical Engineering from Harvard and MBA from Dartmouth will tell you, all those schools bought him over a public institutions was a network for after he graduated.
The scarcity isn't artificial, I don't think. There are limits on how many people a given faculty can teach, beyond which teaching becomes much less effective. People with reject letters are probably not significantly less deserving, but there's no fair non-competitive means to decide who gets a go, IMO. The competition could certainly be fairer, as with most things.
If your main point is that less prestigious schools can potentially deliver on education just as well, and the main difference becomes the marketability of the degree and superficial status, well... I agree.
Also foreigners—a lot of these side activities and volunteer opportunities depend on having social capital and connections.
Same thing with essays. I’ve observed that working class Americans are reticent to talk about diversity and adversity in the way college admissions officers expect, and recall having a similar experience. My wife’s parents grew up so poor in rural America that “store bought meat” was a phrase they used when she was growing up. Meanwhile, my family left Bangladesh when I was 5 under political circumstances where one day my mom’s brother (a military officer) showed up to our house in uniform and my dad thought that he was coming to detain us (it was a social call). But she would have been embarrassed to write about how her father grew up poor or that she faced any adversity, and I would have been embarrassed to write about how I was a foreigner instead of a middle class kid from Virginia.
Kind of the same. I was too poor to participate in extracurriculars. I was lucky to have clothes on my back and food on the table and electricity to do my homework and run my hacked together computer. I still graduated valedictorian. No sports, no music, nothing. I was on the chess team as a senior because we moved closer to the school, and I was able to walk to school in only 15 minutes which was huge for me. I was already a senior at that point, and it felt silly to start joining extracurriculars at that point. I had more time than some of the rich kids who were in everything in addition to keeping their grades top-notch. Between my great SAT scores and being valedictorian, I was able to go to great university that I might not have been able to attend otherwise.
I live in slovenia, and the system is pretty much unchanged from the socialist times.... standardized testing + grades are used to get entry into colleges (and previously high schools). No resumes, no diversity/affirmative actions, clubs, volounteering etc... just grades+results.
Those other things are great, but have little value in terms of academic success. I think that for people who do poorly in academics but well in those other areas should have other avenues of advancing themselves rather than being forced through the college funnel.
It could be nice if access to education is equitable.
In chile we also have grades + standardized test + ranking (your position versus your cohort). But the top universities are filled with the top alumni from expensive private schools because they are usually 1. given inflated grades 2. trained to perform well on standardized tests (in their own schools, theyre rich so they can afford this).
If you look at OECD statistics with regards to quality of education you will see that not everyone in the USA really gets a good primary (and secondary) education and there are gaps. This tends to not be the case in most of Europe... So are standardized exams good for admissions in the USA? Not sure. But obviously replacing it with curriculum might even be worse. So what's really the answer?
At least here in the US, test prep isn't actually effective at increasing test scores. The SATs were introduced in order to allow kids of lesser economic backgrounds to get access to prestigious colleges without having to go to expensive preparatory schools. And they have been largely successful in that regard.
The problem in the US is that, for political reasons, colleges have been trying to get away from standardized tests.
The lower performing areas in the US tend to have one of two problems:
1) Very high percentage of immigrants and / or English as a second language learners. These students have multiple disadvantages.
2) A local culture that dismisses education. Two personal anecdotes: One poor rural white 6 year old boy swore at and otherwise rejected his teachers authority. She was a friend of mine and mentioned many kids are like that there because the parents are passing on their own behaviors. Other anecdote, a black friend who grew up in an dense inner city said he was locked at school by his peers for "acting white" when he tried to get decent grades.
Number 2 is obviously more prevalent, likely due to most jobs not actually needing a college diploma and not caring about your grades in some areas, and the persistent crime culture in others (gangs in the cities, meth in the country).
Well yeah, but you still want the best performers in college (and later too), and things like these should be solved "back then" (eg. extra language classes... fixing culture is hard, but again, if your peers make you a worse student, you're still a worse student, even though you blame your peers).
Giving some groups a push, especially on racial grounds (where you group together bill gates' kids with bobby from a trailer park in bumfuck alabama on one side, and Will smiths kids vs some random kid from philadelphia fighting on a basketball court) is really bad... both for people who should be accepted on merit, but don't, because they're in the wrong group, and also for their later careers (do you really want a doctor, who only got accepted to college because of affirmative action?). Government paying for books for the poor, programmes for gifted students, actually "leaving bad students behind" (and having special schools for them, like we had), etc. would help more.
Same here in Bulgaria. The only extracurriculars that influence university admissions are subject olympiads. Students who reach the national finals are exempted from the corresponding tests (max grade assumed).
I hated taking the SAT/ACT, but holy cow are we in the US in a better situation than Chinese students dealing with the Gaokao. A Chinese pen-pal once showed me some calculus problems from the Gaokao and the example I saw (a bunch of integrals) looked like a math test a sadist would create: long, complicated expressions just for the sake of complexity, "ugly" numbers that turned into messy fractions you have to carry around. I (a graduate engineering student at the time) couldn't identify any trick or educational point to the complexity, only the malice of the people giving the test.
I am not sure how it compares but India suffers through the same problem. It is essentially a rat race. A lot of those problems could be trick questions, but to be able to identify it, especially on a regular basis takes longer(when the question has less than a minute dedicated to it).
Yes exactly, I remember our Physics teacher in 11-12th grade used to just solve trick questions and asked us to remember shortcuts and rote memorise formulae. I completely fucked up the physics portion of entrance exam and got a mere 7 out of 120 on a national test. I fucking hate physics now.
The Indian education system doesn't care about learning at all. It's all about scoring good grades and getting a job at the end. It's quite important as every individual needs to be able support themselves. However, it's really bad for learning. I'm a product of that. I've been struggling a lot with an online course from MIT but at least I'm enjoying learning a lot of stuff as I'm employed now. Physics and Mathematics are the most beautiful things if done right and not under stress. Good luck, man!
>The Indian education system doesn't care about learning at all.
Honestly, I think people from other countries get that impression about you guys too. I've been a part of multiple (honestly, quite racist) conversations where we just WTF over the fact that these guys have masters degrees but can't solve the most basic problem assigned to them.
I understand that your perspective is colored by your immediate colleagues who might not have the bandwidth or horsepower to solve simple problems, but please note that Indians are a large diaspora globally. If your Indian peers cannot solve the most basic problem, how did they make it through the same interview process that you did? It’s sad to read such commentary on HN, a bastion of inclusive commentary. This is like me saying that Aussies are lazy and just want to party, based on my anecdotal experience with Aussies who are all about barbies and beer.
I agree with you on generalising based on what immediate colleagues are capable of or not. Indians in general have done quite well on the world stage. To answer your question from an Australian perspective, the interview processes here generally don't include many technical questions. Don't get me wrong. Some companies are almost like American companies and ask the candidates to even take home some tasks and come back with a solution.
But other enterprise companies generally have a look at the candidate's resume and hire them based on how they are able to answer questions related to their resume. It's sad to see such statements and also sad to see some incompetent people holding high position in many organisations. But it's not particular to Indians. I've come across such people from almost every background. I'm not very knowledgeable either. But I'm able to do my job well. :)
Edit: Having been living in Australia since several years now, I can understand AussieWog93's comment. I've also lived in India to know that such conversations are quite common in India too. It's just that Australians are willing to share it without hesitation. haha.. Don't be offended.
I’m not offended. Not one bit. My response is based on something more fundamental that the person missed: the Indian system enables kids to get jobs. At that, the Indian system is amazing. Period.
Hypothetically, if the Aussie system were better, Indians from the Indian system would never jobs in Australia that satisfied the employment criteria established by Australian firms. It would all be Australians. The truth is far from that statement.
I’ll end with this observation from 24-years in the industry. I’ve worked with many incompetent people. They come from all backgrounds. Incompetence has nothing to do with education. If your education system is without sin, i.e. doesn’t produce incompetent people, go ahead and throw the first stone.
It sounds like an honest conversation. I agree with you on the first point. The Indian education system is quite good to enable kids to focus on getting a job. It's a bit too focussed on how to get good grades, which ultimately results in a rat race. Not saying that competition is bad but I never enjoyed or actually learned anything even after completing 16 years of education there include a bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering.
I haven't studied anything in Australian unis yet. I might do that in future. But I've seen some of my friend's kids studying in public schools here and am envious. I wish my school days were like that. Schools here are not focussed on exams at all, rather they encourage students to explain things that they're learning to other students. They've presentations on the concepts they learn, do practical tasks, do a variety of creative crafts and last but not the least encouraged to do sports and music as well. Now, can I blame my country of birth India for it? Of course not. India was quite poor economically and my schools barely had doors and windows, let alone desks. BWT, this was back in 1999. Teachers barely cared and most of them were abusive and beat the shit out of us. I can only wish that I had better opportunities but I can't go back in time. My MIT programme is quite hard as the home work assignments force me to think. They're never tediously long to work out. Based on the feedback I've gotten from my colleagues, Australian unis are a mixed bag. It all depends on the programme you choose. Some unis have very good engineering programmes, whereas some are more research focussed. But most of them have very good infrastructure.
Lastly, I agree with on the last point. I've been in the industry since 16 years and have met my fair share of incompetent people. To be honest I've been incompetent at some skills at every job I've worked at.
But when I talked about those incompetent people, I was talking about people who weren't even willing to learn and sometimes even pulled rank to threaten their subordinates into making poor decisions. Nobody here claimed that the Australian system or any other system for that matter is without sin! Every system has flaws and as long as we're willing to accept that, there is still scope for improvement.
Good observation. People are selling adhoc explanations: that Indian education system is the cause of the incompetence of colleagues. No one denies incompetence, but the explanation is adhoc. Even a product of a bad education system can learn later and shine.
So what the Indian education system lacks is making students learn how to approach a novel problem or subject on their own. From an early age it's all about getttthe right answer through the prescribed route. There is very little room given for exploration. For example in my 10th grade I was instructed to only solve a math problem in one way since another cause if I tried deriving my own method the person correcting it wouldn't understand and I would be penalized for it. This just disincentives students to only learn a bunch of tricks. In the end thinking from first principles is something they don't learn. Of course it can be corrected later but it's usually only when they are in college. Of course I'm speaking from my own experience and things have generally improved now
Anyway, my original point (which I didn't actually get to) was that SAT/ACT scores are quite important as they kind of give the person an idea whether they'll be able to handle the homework and academic rigour at an institution like MIT. But as the original blog posts says, it's not the end of the world if someone can't crack it. At that age I don't think anyone is mature enough to even understand the meaning or depth of scientific knowledge they'd receive at MIT. So one can always pursue it later with the prevalence of online education these days, if one were so inclined. :)
Barring the racist part, I can imagine some of the situations that might have led to such conversations. My wife was working for the Covid vaccine deployment programme for one of the Australian states as a consultant from a respected company. The two guys employed by the state's government dept were utter clueless about almost everything. One was in charge of project management and the other was an architect. The architect didn't even know how to use a filter on an Excel spreadsheet! The level of incompetence was just unfathomable. Don't want to name the state as it might might lead to the two individuals!
But at the same time my wife and her team mates (A diverse team consisting of Caucasians, Indians and Filipinos (all Australians)) did deliver the project and helped the government at every step. So, I would argue that there are a lot of intelligent people that came out of the Indian education system, but the education system itself did fuck all for their success in life. There are also a lot of people with degrees, boasting very high GPAs, but with no analytical skills whatsoever! It's not only limited to Indian people in general. But the education system is indeed quite bad.
Absolutely. They were the pioneers in open sourcing so much knowledge. I'm doing a course on EDX from MIT and there are deadlines for homework assignments. It's quite hard. But one can learn the concepts from the OCW course if they're not interested in a certificate.
I did great in Physics because I was a year ahead in math and had already taken Pre-Cal (Trigonometry). I thought it was incredibly dumb they were asking kids to calculate velocity and acceleration before they knew what an integral or differential equation is.
I have a hard time seeing US standardized testing as "better." All of my Korean peers who have studied for the CSAT or Suneung laugh at how easy the SAT/ACT math section is in comparison. K-12 education in the US is years behind at this point from many Asian countries. The fact that we are debating whether standardized testing for colleges and prestigious high schools (Lowell in SF, Stuyvesant in NYC, etc) should be banned is just laughable and only sets us further back.
For one, they don't all have 11 aircraft carriers and 62 destroyers backing their money as the reserve currency in the world. For another, China certainly is.
Probably because high levels of math skill don’t translate to economic success. Analytical thinking is a good skill that math can teach you, but there is more than one path to that. In the context of a college education the ability to write clearly and persuasively is far more an important skill to learn.
As someone with a degree in math, I’ve always found the monomaniacal focus on how America is “behind” on math education quite baffling. Do people really thinking calculus skill is necessary to succeed?
It's not just math education. It's science as well. I'm bewildered that this is even something that people are even contesting what I wrote in 2022 on Hacker News of all places. The majority of PhDs in the STEMs are done by international students and have been for many years now. It's well known that American K-12 is woefully insufficient. But sure, I guess a-ok. But carry on with the straw man.
A possible explanation that the US is still somehow leading despite the drop in proficiency in education (if that is indeed actually true), is that the high level of tech and investment done in the 70's and 80's are still playing out (and returning dividends). It might take one or two generations to pass before the cracks show up as real problems - like a demographic transition, you cannot patch it after the problem is discovered, but must anticipate and pre-empt the problem.
If the education in the US is in decline, then the next 2-3 decades will show a decline in innovation and tech improvements coming out of the US.
The USA is unique because we accept the best and the brightest from everywhere, but East Asian countries are doing laps around other “western” countries.
As someone who uses to be very good at this kind of "math" in high school...it's not even real math. It's a bunch of teenagers being tested on how good they are at being poor man's computers. And I don't just mean standardized tests - almost the entirety of the high school math "education" is sad.
I don't think the math part of the Gaokao tests memorization.
Looking at a sample paper (https://medium.com/@yujia_jo/2016-jiangsu-gaokao-national-hi...), it seems like the examination really tests for the ability to do math and problem solve under fairly heavy time pressure (150 minutes total for all questions if you are in the science stream).
This honestly looks perfectly reasonable to me. It's obviously far harder than the SAT math section (which isn't saying much since SAT math is a bit of a joke), but the questions look completely fair and not at all like they're trying to trick or screw the student.
Makes the comment upthread that started this come across as just more racist prejudices about China, unless the commenter has something to back up their claim.
Yeah the SAT and the GRE suffer from the same problem - they’re meant to be taken by everyone, so the math is made basic and the non-STEM folks aren’t penalized when looking at total score.
Completely agree regarding the Gaokao sample. This all looks like it should be well within the means of a high school senior.
Looking at the first 10 problems, the only thing that really required memorization for me was trying to remember how to define the foci of a hyperbola and ellipse (questions 3 and 10), which I've long forgotten since high school. Everything else was pretty simple.
I would say the questions by themselves don't test memorization but all the circumstances around the test push it towards memorization.
Given decent fundamentals you can solve all these problems from first principles but you would take way too much time (unless you are a genius, of course). To solve these problems within the allotted time would require grinding a ton of problems so you can get familiar with a part of or the full question beforehand. Don't get me wrong, practicing problems is a good way to study math and I don't have any issue with this in a vacuum.
However, this is before bringing other people into the equation. The floor is raised every year and the competition is intense. You also need to study for other subjects, not just math. All in all, "memorization" became the only strategy. It's fair to debate whether it's "rote memorization" or actually "learning the material" but with how much the students study the line between the two blurs. It feels too "overfitting" if I would borrow a statistics word.
i mean... integrals are weird. there's a whole slew of ways of doing them and usually there's a handful of techniques that are taught for a handful of integrals of specific forms and then those show up on tests with the forms sometimes slightly hidden.
how do you know it wasn't just forms and techniques you were unfamiliar with? any math you're unfamiliar with can appear as complexity for the sake of complexity.
but if we're getting at the point... like the real point..
everything knowledge comes in trees. skills, abilities, talents are all the product of tradeoffs between time and choices of focus. the lazy approach is to attempt to linearize these trees when evaluating people, institutions, programs and the rest. it's this laziness, this linearization, this attempt to construct a global ordered set, that causes all the problems.
I really don't understand how many tests still allow trick questions like that when we have so much data that indicates that it's an awful metric. To me it indicates incompetence of the test creators.
sounds painful, the only thing I could think of would be to test the precision of transcribing step by step. Sounds like the surface area for loss of precision is wider when you just add the noise of messy figures into a problem. A clever student could just replace the messy figures with constant variables that are shorter to write of course and at the very end substitute everything back to evaluate what comes out in the end.
This is just so beautifully written it brings a tear to my eye. It explains their rationale, points to evidence, acknowledges shortcomings or gaps in knowledge, and shows empathy for those affected. Worth reading just for its pedagogical value, plus it's on an important topic near and dear to many hearts.
100%! As a parent of a child about to go through the college admissions process (with his heart set on MIT--of course), I want him to read this particularly for the later part of the article: "...you are also not your MIT application..." The acceptance rate is so low, that it should not be used as a measure of self-worth and accomplishment.
I'm a technologist who wanted to attend MIT but, for reasons that are beyond the scope of this thread, didn't make the cut. I've still had the opportunity to work for the US federal government, unicorn startups, and a detector team at the LHC. As you said, "The acceptance rate is so low, that it should not be used as a measure of self-worth and accomplishment.", and enjoyable, meaningful work can still be accomplished without the MIT experience (although if they get in, also good, I wish them well and hope they're accepted).
Likewise I know people who went to MIT and are now working shitty low paying jobs in unrelated fields of study and generally have failed to get their life together in reasonable time.
... the natural extension of you are not your MIT admission, is that your MIT admission is not you. Do you know they don't have their life together? What if they wanted something different than you? The tone of this comment sucks.
My read is that you can usually get here if you just fight long enough, lol. I didn't get in for undergrad or grad school, but am here doing a postdoc. My advisor here was also rejected for grad school and undergrad. In the end it's really, really important to remember it's just a school. It's a really good school with a good engineering/science culture, and I'm enjoying my time here a lot, but people make it out to be much more than it is. I think I did -- not that I'm disappointed.
As the parent of a student who was just rejected from MIT... I wonder if the reinstatement of the SAT requirement came too late. I'll never really know, but it is possible.
The most successful people I know as a class are the ones who turned down Harvard or MIT and went to a state school or somewhere private with incentives instead.
Granted, nobody does this anymore because credentialism is now an uncontrollable monster.
Yeah, when you're doing something that is politically/ideologically unpopular or in the minority you tend to need to have bulletproof justification if you want to get away with it.
Then again, with these sorts of things you can never be sure how much the tail wags the dog.
> Yeah, when you're doing something that is politically/ideologically unpopular or in the minority
I don't think they are though. I think there would be massively popular and wide support for this. You're seeing it in SF right now as the school board is being overthrown for trying to ruin the school system in the name of "equity" or some other garbage reason. The people finally found out and organized.
All this woke stuff today is actually very unpopular and it's why you see Democrats trying to separate themselves from it and make progressives own it. It's even unpopular with the arbitrary groups it claims it helps.
Most people want to be good people and treat others with respect and woke ideology sounds good on the surface ("anti-racist", sure sounds great!) until you get past the formal meaning and into the actual meaning. Sort of like how Democratic Republic of Korea sounds great until you actually read into it.
The problem is that the wokes tend to be loud. A small, vocal group can really ruin your day on Twitter (unavoidable for a leader these days). The only ones willing to speak against them are the hard-right Fox-News Q-anon types. The folks who may be against them but are otherwise reasonable tend to stay quiet until they reach the anonymous safety of the voting booth lest they be similarly targeted.
Then again the MIT Dean of Admissions hasn't been cancelled yet so maybe we're strawmanning.
It's not so much that they are loud but that they are well organized. A small but well organized group will always have an outsized voice compared to the unorganized majority. It's why there's always a minority of elites in just about every type of social situation from a classroom to a country.
Of course, the Woke's aren't just a subculture but embedded deep into our elite universities and prestigious media organizations. But even there, they are a small but well organized group that can be rooted out and disposed of. It just takes organization and a bit of bravery and soon the masses will outwardly support the reaction to Wokeness.
I think I get where you are going with this, can you expand a little bit on the wagging the dog part? I am not familiar with that term. I get what it means, having looked it up, but being new to the concept I want to make sure I understand the context of that segment of the comment correctly.
The actions of big prestigious institutions like MIT have an effect on opinion. So if MIT starts doing something tons of people will just knee jerk take their side on whatever the thing is. So another few institutions might follow suit and it might snowball and standard testing could become back in fashion as fast as it went out of fashion.
That's a great point. However, you're using the idiom of the tail wagging the dog incorrectly. The tail wagging the dog usually means something important or influential being controlled by something less so. In other words, the tail would be wagging the dog if I wrote a blog post that made people change their opinions on the SAT.
The movement to shit-can standardized tests was far bigger than MIT or any one institution and was part of a broader political trend whereby these sorts of institutions have been adopting particular positions. Hence MIT is the tail in this case.
I went to high school in a bit of a backwater in the US. People don’t really go to selective colleges or care much about applying. It was only doing very well on standardized tests and spending time on the internet looking for info about colleges that led me to believe I could go to one of these places. I got into several and attended one, and I believe it greatly positively changed my life. (For the record, I had more going for me than just tests, but having a more objective way to compare myself to people across the country was very helpful, since I could easily attribute things to my area being backwards).
Removing admission tests was a huge slap in the face to social mobility out of the middle class. To reiterate other commenters, admission tests are the hardest part of the process to game and the least biased towards things like having a tiger parent, while being the most predictive indicator of success in college. Wealthy and well connected people can easily game extracurriculars and essays, and HS grades are vastly inflated at this point across the country. That pretty much only leaves standardized tests for your average kid who isn’t being deliberately primed by their environment to stand out for selective college admissions.
I hope more colleges are brave enough to reinstitute standardized test requirements. I know they want to do “class building” by hitting minimum representations across many groups (including legacy, but I don’t think that’s as big at MIT), and not requiring test scores makes it easier, but for institutions to keep up high standards and continue to give opportunities to kids, I really think it’s most beneficial to require scores.
> huge slap in the face to social mobility out of the middle class
No, it was an intentional move to restrict the number of Asians admitted because despite their best efforts to hide it, prestigious universities' data showed systemic discrimination against Asians in the admissions process (see: SFFA vs Harvard). Removing the SAT removes some of the data that opponents can use to sue them. One of the reasons the UC removed the SAT was to "diversify" their admit pool because Asians disproportionately did really well on the SAT and they aren't allowed to discriminate based on race by state law.
My hope is that the Supreme Court, now that it's a 6/3 conservative majority, finally strikes down race based "affirmative action".
As an American born Asian myself, the "unofficial" quota system process colleges use is painful to me - I was an extremely academic high performing student before college, netting national level recognition in some areas with a lot of extracurriculars & came from a very poor background, yet my ethnicity worked against me.
At the same time, I recognize that this is also some of the challenge that underrepresented minorities face in general in American society where there are others who have more closed doors than I (I went to a high school with over 70% minorities, mostly African-Americans + hispanics). I don't pretend to know what the solution to the problem is, but given that high prestige colleges have created a high risk high reward situation with how they handle admissions, I feel like a lot of the problem is how academia has created this artificial situation - maybe this is by design, I don't know, but if we truly value diversity & equity in higher educational opportunities, there needs to be a significant change.
> No, it was an intentional move to restrict the number of Asians admitted
This always seemed short-sighted to me. I think standardized tests provide one of the clearest opportunities for less advantaged students to make inroads. And while certain groups do better now, I don't think there is a better way than this clear metric for other groups to improve their standing.
Also, I think we simply overvalue going to Harvard. So instead you go to UVa or Puget Sound University. You "can" learn a great deal at these other places as well -- and maybe learn more given your existing level of achievement.
If we think long game on this, we will see that this is one of the best things to lift all boats.
> My hope is that the Supreme Court, now that it's a 6/3 conservative majority, finally strikes down race based "affirmative action".
Agreed, and also favouritism for "legacies", children of faculty and athletics (they can get in on their own merit if they have it). This is a rot that seems to be unique to the US. In the pretty much every other country there would be an outrage if someone got admitted because their parents donated a lot of money.
There are plenty of institutions where "someone got admitted because their parents donated a lot of money" is a fact of life, as natural as rivers flowing south or getting sick from standing in the cold. It's not something you normally brag about in/to the West, and certainly it's very reasonable to object to the practice, but it's not remotely unique to the US. If anything, it's telling that this version is presented disguised, even if it's a well-known disguise at this point.
Sure, I think that’s in many ways covered by what I mean about middle class mobility. Given that Asians are less likely to be legacies and dont benefit from Affirmative Action, pretty much all their “slots” come out of the high-achieving-middle-class bucket
Different kinds of advantage. Yes wealth can bring you all sorts of luxury. But it is a bad idea to close the doors to the poor, especially essentials like education.
Similar opinion and story. We live in Boise, Idaho and my daughter does a hybrid model of home school and high school. She knew she got top grades and 5's on all her APs but it didn't give her any idea of where she sat, nationally. She was planning on going to art school until a year ago, when she sat for her first standardized test, the PSAT. She saw the score, which was national merit range and realized that she should have higher ambitions. She took the SAT last October (she's a Junior) and got a great score. So now she's considering top schools. She wasn't before.
Without these types of tests, you could end up being biased toward a measure of "how hard did the parents push."
Arguably 5s on her APs tells her where she sat nationally, I was under the impression that AP tests were the same across the board, while they don’t rank you against other students the test is made to be just as difficult for the top elite college prep private school students as it is for the inner city public school students. The assumption being the AP class material is the same.
Yeah, there's some truth to that because she applied to Oxford earlier this year, before she got the SAT results and she got to the interview having passed the academic requirements with mainly the five APs of 5. Still, I think the SAT results proved it to her in a way that wasn't ambiguous.
Taking the Calculus BC test already puts you in the upper echelon of high school math students though. According to a quick google only 15% of high schoolers will take the BC exam, so getting a 5 is something only 5% of students achieve.
That's the student providing 2.7 bits of information ("I want to take this exam") and getting an additional 1.4 bits from the result. By contrast, being valedictorian is about 10 bits of information, and being in the 99th percentile on a test (1510+ on the SAT) is 6.6 bits. Scoring 1600 on the SAT is 12 bits.
So the SAT can easily give you 7 times as much info as the AP BC, and it's more about your aptitude than your achievement.
You don't need information theory to tell me that 1% is less than 5%. Obviously scoring in the top 1% of a test everyone takes provides more information than getting a 5 on an AP test. But that 5 still provides, as you put it, 4ish bits of information, which is a lot more than the 0 you have without it or other standardized tests.
How many bits do you really need to know that you're a good candidate for continued education? Is being in the top 5% really not enough?
Zero bits, because everyone is a good candidate for continued education.
From the point of view of MIT, admitting you has a significant downside: they have to turn down someone else, someone who might have been able to do better research than you do and donate more as an alumnus. But from the point of view of an individual person, more education is always better, because your alternative to education is not admitting someone better; your alternative to education is ignorance.
(Schooling may not be the best way to get that education, however... far too many people opt for ignorance after their schooling.)
I didn't say the 5 gives you 4ish bits of information. I said it gives you 1.4 bits of information. That's only 35% of 4, not very 4ish at all. It's barely in the order of magnitude centered on 4 (1.26 to 12.6).
> I didn't say the 5 gives you 4ish bits of information. I said it gives you 1.4 bits of information.
Which is obviously wrong. The self-selection does provide a lot of information. Students who believe themselves unlikely to score well are unlikely to take the test, which is why so many students get a 5.
No, I was considering them as happening to potentially different people at potentially different times. It's definitely true that if you somehow know you have scored 1510+ then finding out that you scored 1600 only gives you an extra 5.6 bits of information, and if you know that you scored 1600 then the fact that you scored 1510+ gives you 0 additional bits of information. And the correlation with being valedictorian is also pretty strong.
Scoring 1600 intersection being valedictorian definitely does not give you 22 bits of information. Maybe 13.
Also being valedictorian gives you less information than 10 bits about your relative countrywide or worldwide standing.
This wasn’t my path, but many of my peers where I went to college had a similar type of story. They came from very poor areas like rural Texas or rural Georgia, and they got into engineering after getting into things like Lego sets and video games. They got great at math because it intrigued them even in their subpar schools. Aced the math SAT and then doors opened for them. I’d hate to see that door close.
I grew up in a very rural, working class community. There was a mill in town, and a factory two towns over, and all the kids in my high school were pretty much expected to either work for those two businesses or go into the military after school. That's what probably 80 out of the 100 kids in my graduating class did. We didn't have AP classes and Rowing Club and Mock United Nations and all that upper-middle-class qualitative stuff people jam into their college admissions. But we did have access to the SAT and I crammed for it and knocked it out of the park. If it wasn't for the SAT I probably would still be slummin it in that same town (minus the mill and factory which have long since closed) and would not be here on the west coast working in tech.
To be fair I think the whole Model UN, volunteer kind of thing is a way for mediocre students without athletic skills to juice their resumes. If you’ve got good SATs you’ll go to a good college. If you’re an athlete that opens tons of doors too.
> Removing admission tests was a huge slap in the face to social mobility out of the middle class.
I agree, but arguably the benefits of the SAT with regard to class mobility is less than it was when it was introduced.
The heritability of IQ, combined with assortative mating, means that increasingly class divides are forming around differences in IQ. I think many people are rightly concerned that this will eventually result in simply a different entrenched class hierarchy.
I still think MIT should use the SAT, but the problem of maintaining class mobility is one we should continue to assess.
The heritability of wealth, combined with assortative mating, means that increasingly class divides are forming around differences in wealth. I think many people are rightly concerned that this will eventually result in simply a different entrenched class hierarchy.
That's how class divides have historically worked, yes. Previously those differences were also enforced through explicit class-based laws (the actually meaning of privilege).
The introduction of free markets, and later IQ testing, disrupted a great deal of the entrenched social class structure within western societies and allowed many people of rather humble backgrounds to achieve great things.
The concern I express is about whether IQ testing will continue provide the same level of social mobility in the future.
The research on IQ heritability is abundant. You’ll get death threats if you point out the research though.
It’s inconvenient and correlates with SAT performance. Hence the big push to get rid of the SAT to try to hide the disparities in general cognition within groups and between groups.
Maybe. I'm just more than a little skeptical given that GP has a scant post history, and spends his other posts railing on about CRT being marxism.
There's a lot of people pedaling this kind of IQ stuff to justify blatant racism, so you'll forgive me for wanting to see the data and not just letting statements like that fly by unchallenged.
You are right to be skeptical. Charles Murray is not the most reputable of scientists, and his book The Bell Curve is full of bad science to say the least, used to advocate for conservative (if not racist) policies.
A fairly quick summary is available on the Wikipadia page for this book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Reception) where you can dive deeper by looking into the reference (I particularly recommend S.J. Gould which addresses scientific racism in length in the book Mismeasure of Man). There is also a long video essay by Shaun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo) —if you have 3 hours to spare—which does an excellent job of summarizing the bad science and political agenda of The Bell Curve.
Making a big deal of the controversy around The Bell Curve and then going on to recommend The Mismeasure of Man is deeply ironic.
And why bring up the alleged racism when we are talking about class? The Bell Curve barely mentions race, and I'm not sure if Coming Apart does at all.
I'll watch the video at some point as it actually reviews The Bell Curve but I urge readers to seek out what Murray has himself said (both in his books and in interviews). The smear of him as being a racist and political hack is quite without merit.
It is true it is a bit unfair to claim that the policies Murray were racist without providing context. Some of the research he used to back up his case definitely were but the policies he advocated for were for sure conservative but only racist by association (which is why I put it in parenthesis). Conservative values in the 1990s America were really really connected to race. The whole debate about “inner city crime” and the notion of the “welfare queen” were largely a dog whistle. And conservative policies which advocated for “tough on crime” and welfare elimination were most often doing so against a largely racialized group.
I admit this is far fetched and maybe unfair. However I’m hardly the only one to accuse this book of being racist. The Wikipedia page is full of accusations, ranging from the aforementioned data from racist studies used unapologetically, to its advocates receiving funding from organizations associated with white-supremacy.
EDIT: I also want to address why it is totally fair to advocate Mismeasure of Man as a counterargument to The Bell Curve. There is a level of scientific rigor which The Bell Curve fails and Mismeasure doesn’t. For example the studies used in The Bell Curve were—to put it bluntly—bad. The Bell Curve failed to go through peer-review, it misused concepts, relied on unbacked assumptions, reached a conclusion unrelated to the premise, etc. You might find that some of these criticism applies to Mismesure, but hardly all, and not nearly on the same level. As an objective—albeit arbitrary—measure, just look at the ratio of the Wikipedia articles for each book which is devoted to criticism and controversies. Almost the entire article about The Bell Curve goes into some controversies. If both books were criticized and surrounded in controversies, one was definitely worse then the other.
Normally I'm glad to have a good debate about whether Charles Murray is racist, but the point I'm trying to make here is that whether he is or not is irrelevant.
Here we are talking about class differences. That's the primary subject of The Bell Curve (indeed he only devotes a scant few pages to the subject of race) and the only thing relevant to this discussion. Even if he were racist, them implication that he would have nothing important to say on matters of class is absurd.
> just look at the ratio of the Wikipedia articles for each book which is devoted to criticism and controversies.
Wikipedia is a great source finding out that things exist and their connections to other things, but there is no reason to believe it is objective with regard to politically charged issues.
That is not to say that the criticisms are wholly without merit, but few are actually technical critiques of the data or analysis.
Which is actually kind of sad, because while the technical critiques may be good (I haven't the time yet to check) the non-technical critiques I've studied are pretty poor.
> If both books were criticized and surrounded in controversies, one was definitely worse then the other.
The counter argument to that is that going against the shibboleths of our modern era is going to get you more flak, regardless of whether you are right or not.
This does not mean that Murray is correct because he is going against the grain and gets a lot of negative attention. Simply that all of the negative attention tells you a lot less than you might otherwise hope.
Regarding The Bell Curve, it being a poor academic work (i.e. technical critiques) is probably the main reason it is so heavily criticized. It used deeply flawed studies to back up its case, the conclusions did not logically follow the premise, it relied on dubious assumption with weak justifications, etc.
The fact that it then goes on to advocate for conservative policies based on such a weak case is why people conclude it is simply a racist work masquerading as academic. In an alternative world where the premise wasn’t of such poor scientific quality and the findings were sound, I bet people would still criticize it, but the overall reaction would be different. We would be trying to find a way to accommodate groups of lower IQ. Social scientists would try to identify barriers and advocate for their removal etc.
However given this work’s poor scientific quality, the whole notion that this group different a) exists, b) is significant, c), is innate d) is immutable, and e) largely inherits, should simply be ignored as false. Our current scientific understanding does not allow us to conclude this, or at the very least. This book is wrong in reaching these conclusions.
I appreciate the civil perspectives of you both, and would be interested in seeing you two discuss this in written format. I'd admit to having a relatively poor view of Gould, but this is not an impression formed from particularly close reading.
> Regarding The Bell Curve, it being a poor academic work (i.e. technical critiques) is probably the main reason it is so heavily criticized. It used deeply flawed studies to back up its case, the conclusions did not logically follow the premise, it relied on dubious assumption with weak justifications, etc.
The main reason Murray gets criticized is for his alleged racism and his politics. The attempts I've seen to discredit his actual arguments tend to be more self-righteous than serious.
I haven't read all of The Bell Curve (though I have read the sections that deal with race) but I have read other works of his, as well as criticisms of those works, and to my layman's eyes I find little credit can be given to his critics. Indeed, Murray often goes to great lengths to highlight to what extent each of his claims can be supported by facts, and does a great deal to acknowledge where there is disagreement in the scientific literature.
It may be that good critiques exist, but they are hard to find in the deluge of low quality hit-pieces.
> The fact that it then goes on to advocate for conservative policies based on such a weak case is why people conclude it is simply a racist work masquerading as academic
Frankly, this is why it's so hard to take his critics seriously. The only practical effect of the political Left's use of the label "racist" is to inhibit critical thought. We've spent much of this discussion talking about his alleged racism, when it still has nothing to do with the actual core thesis of The Bell Curve or my initial reasons for citing him.
> In an alternative world where the premise wasn’t of such poor scientific quality and the findings were sound, I bet people would still criticize it, but the overall reaction would be different. We would be trying to find a way to accommodate groups of lower IQ. Social scientists would try to identify barriers and advocate for their removal etc.
What do you think Murray's advocated policies entail?
Regardless, in a world in which people acknowledged group differences, there would still be genuine differences of opinion in how best to address those differences.
>However given this work’s poor scientific quality, the whole notion that this group different a) exists, b) is significant, c), is innate d) is immutable, and e) largely inherits, should simply be ignored as false. Our current scientific understanding does not allow us to conclude this, or at the very least. This book is wrong in reaching these conclusions.
That group differences exist is an incontrovertible fact. The extent to which those differences are driven by genetics is certainly up for debate, but Murray never claimed (and indeed, specifically argued against) that those differences were completely genetic.
The idea that genetics has no role to play in group differences is quite astounding, and attempts to defend that position tend to fall afoul of Lewontin's Fallacy[1].
> What do you think Murray's advocated policies entail?
He and Hernstein advocated for abandoning affirmative action, and divert funds away from supporting low IQ groups (e.g. welfare) into supporting high performance groups. This conclusion would always be debated among political lines as more left wing folks would argue against it in favor of accommodations, even in a world IQ was actual proven science.
> That group differences exist is an incontrovertible fact.
This is true, however the reason for this difference, and whether it is of societal significance, is up for debate.
I would argue that we should care more about SAT scores then IQ scores because SAT scores are actually used as an admission metric. These two correlate however I can just as well come up with a new metric which correlates with SAT and use that in my models in place of SAT, that doesn’t mean it is providing any additional info over SAT, nor that anyone should care about it.
> Finally, when we understand that the SAT is a reasonable measure of intelligence, we can use SAT scores as a proxy measure for time-consuming and sometimes unavailable traditional intelligence assessments, as dozens of researchers have been doing since 2004.
Although, I should say that Frey misses an important alternative interpretation of her conclusion here, which is to ask: “Why care about IQ if we can use SAT to measure the same thing?”
[/EDIT]
We do care about the group difference present in SAT scores, and we do care that high/low SAT scores seem to follow generations. However we see that as something to rectify. Nutrition, childhood led exposure, high noise levels all contribute to lower SAT scores, so we try to eliminate those. We could do the same for IQ scores, but why would you? If we found out that 50% of the variance of SAT scores were explained by genetics, who cares? The effect size is still tiny compared to other reasons why people score low on these test. Lets fix those.
Lewontin's Fallacy is a silly path to go down. You can draw taxonomy lines wherever you want. If you base that on a silly metric you get a silly taxonomy. Junk-in Junk-out still applies even if you subscribe to Lewontin's Fallacy. This is especially true in the study of human behavior.
Humans are a remarkably homogeneous species, we share almost all the same genes. Our experience varies way more then our genes. And alas, that is how most people split us into behavioral groups, e.g. by education, by socio-economic class, by occupation, by geographic region, etc. Group difference down these groups is way more interesting study then down gene make-up. And alas, this is where you find most research which actually contributes to policy change and further our understanding of the human mind.
EDIT 2: If you want to see for your self how poor the scientific quality of The Bell Curve is, I recommend you read the sources it cites. Of particular interests is the meta-alalyses by R. Lynn (1991) [Here is a summary https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo?t=4256].
> He and Hernstein advocated for abandoning affirmative action, and divert funds away from supporting low IQ groups (e.g. welfare) into supporting high performance groups.
There are perfectly good reasons to support these policies that have nothing to do with being racist.
> This is true, however the reason for this difference, and whether it is of societal significance, is up for debate.
Agreed! But calling people with different conclusions on that question 'racist' is not debating. It is giving yourself an excuse not to have the debate, while doing nothing to convince the other side.
And Murray does not have a strong opinion about how much of group differences are attributable to genes. He only argues that they very likely play a role.
> I would argue that we should care more about SAT scores then IQ scores because SAT scores are actually used as an admission metric
Why do you think those are two separate things? There is not one single IQ test. Any test that is g-loaded is an IQ test. IQ is simply a way of representing a score on any test that measures intelligence. The SAT is an intelligence test, and you can represent scores on that test as a quotient.
> Lewontin's Fallacy is a silly path to go down.
It's a perfectly reasonable path considering you commit the same fallacy.
> Group difference down these groups is way more interesting study then down gene make-up.
There's no reason we can't study all of these things, including genetic differences in population.
> If you want to see for your self how poor the scientific quality of The Bell Curve is, I recommend you read the sources it cites. Of particular interests is the meta-alalyses by R. Lynn (1991) [Here is a summary...
I'll check out the video at some point, but it is very long so I'll have to find the time. A substantive critique would be appreciated.
Murray's most recent work on human diversity, Human Diversity, is also very much worth checking out, as it does far more to address issues, like race, that people seem to be so upset about.
If you want to hear from the perspective of someone who actual works in population genetics, you should checkout what Razib Khan has had to say on Murray's work.
The fact that genetic differences exist has nothing to say whether they matter. You can study those genetic differences all you want (like Razib Khan does[1]) but if you can’t show that these differences manifest in different behavior (which Murray tries to and has so far been unconvincing) then those differences don’t matter in the context of psychology. You can study it anyway, but you might just be looking for something akin to Russell’s Teapot[2]. While we don’t have conclusive evidence that genetics contribute a significant proportion of our behavior, then there is no reason to speculate around it as if it is a fact.
Now lets talk about Lewontin's Fallacy. First I’d like to note that Lewontin's Fallacy is not a logical fallacy. It is even debated whether we should call it a “fallacy” at all[3], especially when the metrics we use to group by are suspected to be biased. IQ is by no means a clean metric and we will never completely clear it of bias (even in a world were g was a proven fact, which it isn’t by a long shot). So if your metrics are biased and you measure a small group difference where inner-group difference is much larger then the inter-group difference, and the science is not conclusive in how exactly how this difference materialized in difference in behavior. Then applying Lewontin's Fallacy is silly at best (but much more likely it is disingenuous). If you insist that we should make a taxonomical distinction on such blurry lines your are just making an arbitrary choice. There are millions of equally blurry metrics which you could draw a million different lines. Why do you insist on IQ?
Finally lets talk about the difference between IQ and SAT. First of all Frey’s assertions that they are the same thing is actually a rather fringe on in the scientific community. They don’t correlate perfectly, they don’t even share a distribution, and they are designed to measure a different thing. The SAT authors repeatedly reject this:
> name change was meant "to correct the impression among some people that the SAT measures something that is innate and impervious to change regardless of effort or instruction.
1: Although from Razib Khan’s published works it looks like he is more interested in pumping the hype for consumer genomics and the exploring the cat genome then exploring human behavior through genetics, so he should not be taken as an authority—nor even an expert—in the intersection of genetics and psychology. I’m not aware of much research in this intersection, but if you want the intersection of biology and psychology, then the field of neuroscience has plenty. When I was studying the field over 10 years ago V. S. Ramachandran and Patricia Churchland were the big shots. Though this is largely off topic.
3: Although I’d like to say that a group difference with small effect size is probably still worth studying in the field of medicine. Especially in subfields where most of our studies are conducted on a single demographic of white abled bodied men.
I realized that I’ve shifted the goal post quite a bit here. From “The policies advocated by Hernstein and Murray can be considered racist” to “IQ is a scientifically uninteresting construct”. Or as you say—quite truthfully to be honest:
> But calling people with different conclusions on that question 'racist' is not debating. It is giving yourself an excuse not to have the debate, while doing nothing to convince the other side.
I did this a little on purpose (as you have noticed) because frankly the latter is a much more interesting debate (which I merge from a nibling thread I started where I made this claim).
So to address your concerns that I claim Hernstein and Murray are racist in their book The Bell Curve. First, I never called them racists directly. I claimed that their policies can be considered racist in the cultural context of 1990s american politics. I also claim that they blatantly and unapologetically use racist studies to back up their claims. So they are racists by association, and their work is racist as a result.
If they had made a convincing argument about the heritability of IQ and it’s importance in explaining behavior, and omitted citing blatant works of scientific racism to back up their case, I would be more hesitant in calling this work racist. I would just say that their conclusion is wrong. That we would need to make accommodations for people with lower IQ. We should keep affirmative action despite it being counter-productive simply because it is the right thing to do, etc.
However they did make a very unconvincing case that this g-factor explains the group difference in intelligence between groups. And they did cite racist studies to back up their case. And on top of that they used rhetoric to advocate for conservative policies which falls in line with what racists used at the time.
So to summarize my views on this less interesting debate. I consider Hernstein and Murray’s policy proposals in The Bell Curve to be racist because a) they use an unconvincing argument based on racist studies to advocate for set of policies, which b) were widely shared by other people at the time which were doing so because of their own racist beliefs. However you are of course free to disagree with my conclusion, although I hope you can see that these two premises for that conclusion have some reason.
> Maybe. I'm just more than a little skeptical given that GP has a scant post history, and spends his other posts railing on about CRT being marxism.
I do think the comments about CRT were a bit off-topic from this discussion.
However, I do agree that CRT is Marxist and I doubt the original formulators of CRT would object to that characterization. The people I've seen most vigorously object to that characterization have been classic Marxists who object that CRT rejects the materialism of Marxism. From just about every other perspective, there is a great deal of overlap.
> There's a lot of people pedaling this kind of IQ stuff to justify blatant racism, so you'll forgive me for wanting to see the data and not just letting statements like that fly by unchallenged.
Fair enough. However, most of the misinformation about IQ is coming from the skeptics of IQ[1].
I'm aware that IQ research is sometimes used by racists, but that's only possible because certain political interests have done their level best to make IQ as radioactive as possible. It makes it hard for anyone not already on the fringes of society to engage in the research.
To be frank IQ research is getting less and less relevant, and I suspect it has less to do with politics, and more to do with the fact that it has failed to further our understanding of human behavior and the human mind for the past 80 years.
Much more interesting research has come from other fields of psychology, including (in order of peak popularity) behaviorism, cognitive psychology, social psychology, neuro-psychology. Unlike IQ works from these fields have made predictions in unrelated fields and inspired lasting paradigm shifts inside psychology. For example social psychology has provided very useful constructs used in economy, behaviorism in criminology, neuro-psychology in medicine, cognitive psychology in computer science etc.
Scientifically IQ is a dead end. It only makes predictions inside the field of psychometrics, it correlates only with related constructs, the only place where it is used in an unrelated field is when racists are trying to excuse ludicrous statements.
Note: This is not entirely true. IQ was (is?) used to assess cognitive disability in individuals, but today we have a lot better tools for that (thanks to cognitive and neuro-psychology), so it’s usefulness has been surpassed by other fields.
> To be frank IQ research is getting less and less relevant, and I suspect it has less to do with politics, and more to do with the fact that it has failed to further our understanding of human behavior and the human mind for the past 80 years.
That's a fairly bold claim. Honest question: how did you come to that conclusion.
> Scientifically IQ is a dead end. It only makes predictions inside the field of psychometrics, it correlates only with related constructs, the only place where it is used in an unrelated field is when racists are trying to excuse ludicrous statements.
That's patently false. We already know it predicts academic ability (which is why MIT is reinstating the SAT requirement. It's an IQ test). And we also know it to be one of the best available[1] predictors of performance in cognitively complex work - like programming (Google's HR has publicly discussed this in the past).
[1]"best available" here doesn't necessarily mean great, just better than the competition. In domains like psychology that have a high degree of causal complexity, you rarely have any single factor that explains more than 50% of the variance in some subject - heck even 10% is pretty good.
> That's a fairly bold claim. Honest question: how did you come to that conclusion.
I didn’t conclude anything. This is merely a suspicion, I explained my reasoning below.
SAT being an IQ is a stretch. SAT is a scholastic amplitude, a far more narrowly defined construct. In fact IQ (according to psychometricion) should be immutable and somewhat inheritable, while SATs should reflect the work you put in during your school career and should be fair across demographics. IQ is also normally distributed while SAT has a negative skew (raw mean around 1050 with arithmetic mean of 1000).
You might have meant to say that SAT is correlated with IQ. While true, that is by design and is scientifically uninteresting on its own. SATs are far simpler and cheaper to administer. We have way more SAT data on the general population then IQ data. If your model includes scholastic amplitude but you measure it in IQ, you will not only have a less accurate model, but you will also make gathering data way more expensive and difficult.
> SAT being an IQ is a stretch. SAT is a scholastic amplitude, a far more narrowly defined construct.
SAT is an IQ test[1]. It was always an IQ test. There might be better (i.e. more g-loaded) tests out there, but the SAT still definitely works.
> You might have meant to say that SAT is correlated with IQ. While true, that is by design and is scientifically uninteresting on its own.
The SAT is correlated with g, which makes it an IQ test. You claimed that IQ doesn't correlate with anything other than performance on IQ tests. That is clearly incorrect with regard to academic performance. That you find this correlation 'uninteresting'is frankly beside the point.
> If your model includes scholastic amplitude but you measure it in IQ, you will not only have a less accurate model, but you will also make gathering data way more expensive and difficult.
There's not one 'IQ' test. Anything that correlates strongly with g is an IQ test. Yes, it also tests knowledge, but the ability to learn and recall facts is a heavily g-loaded activity.
Class divides have always been around IQ in every society.
Which is why CRT being pushed on children is so sick. They’re literally teaching children race Marxism. They’ve replaced the idea of class with race and now demand equity not between classes, but between races.
> Class divides have always been around IQ in every society.
Given by the positive effects of SAT testing on social mobility in the mid 20th century, I rather doubt that.
And to be honest, if we are going to have a class system one way or the other, IQ might be the better approach. But IQ is not wisdom, and I worry that the elites of such a society would be disposed to unprecedented levels of ego and hubris.
CRT is an outgrowth of critical _legal_ theory, which upon examination of the career of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Bean has ample justification for existing.
I think he's saying that the whole society would be slaves. While I did not live under communism, I personally know some people who did and I think they would characterize that existence as a form of slavery.
>Removing admission tests was a huge slap in the face to social mobility out of the middle class. To reiterate other commenters, admission tests are the hardest part of the process to game and the least biased towards things like having a tiger parent, while being the most predictive indicator of success in college. Wealthy and well connected people can easily game extracurriculars and essays, and HS grades are vastly inflated at this point across the country. That pretty much only leaves standardized tests for your average kid who isn’t being deliberately primed by their environment to stand out for selective college admissions.
I agree with most of this but Exams are absolutely gameable. There's a reason there is a multibillion dollar industry focused on them. There's a reason why Cram School exists across Asia and there's a reason why parents will pay thousands for ACT/SAT tutoring. Because it flat out works. You can increase your scores substantially by paying for these services. All else being equal I would expect that between 2 students with identical aptitudes where one has paid thousands of dollars for tutoring that the student with tutoring will score higher than the other. This can't be ignored. Can you mitigate this with self motivated preparation? Sure. But again, all else being equal and between 2 equally talented and motivated testers the one whose parents paid for a tutor that achieved a perfect score is almost always going to score higher.
IMO there is a difference between gaming a test and just getting better at what a test means to cover. For example, programs like Kumon allow students to learn math more rigorously/at a higher level than what they may get exposed to in a classroom. That doesn’t mean they’re gaming the test, they’re just getting a better education. While it’s perhaps unfair that some students don’t get this opportunity, I don’t think giving children legitimately better educations is something to discourage.
There was another near-top comment when I posted that pointed out that test prep classes only conferred a 30 point benefit. Likely because it’s just familiarizing students with the test and covering basic testing strategies (like skipping a hard section and coming back to it last). I agree the benefit should ideally be 0 but 30/2400 is not much. That’s what I meant in my post.
Also, I’ve heard that in the past the SAT in particular was much more gameable due to the vocabulary/analogy sections, which incentivized students to study specific known topics or cram vocab terms. I’m not sure if they added it back but they’d been removed by the time I took the exam.
That would be 30 per category, so 60 points. Which can definitely be the difference between a top university considerign an applicant or throwing the app away.
Back in my day when SAT's were 2400, I heard the swing being a difference of 100 points. Since reverting back to 1600 a 60 point swings sounds proportionately similar to 13 years ago.
Anyways, I think when people mean "gaming the system", they mean test prep classes literally geared towards the SAT and little else. Not practicing calculus to overprepare for the SAT math portion (maybe even using it to validate answers on a lower level), but being told that X is on the test and using older copies of the SAT to practive with. That does start to feel a bit game-y in my eyes. You're not better understanding combinatorial or algebra, you're understanding the pattern that a test has and playing based on that knowledge.
Right. Growing up in Melbourne (Australia) there was a marked difference in the performance of state school and private school students at university. Theory (don't know about studies) was that the private schools were selective about their students, but also held a lot of their reputation (and their ability to justify tuition) on TER (Tertiary Entrance Ranking) scores, and as such, taught their students extremely well "how to get a very high TER", but not necessarily how to be an independent learner - information spoon-fed in classes as such meant that assignment and essay scores were quite a bit higher than those in state schools, where there wasn't the individual and personalized attention available.
Once those students got to university, while the state school students were used to conducting independent research, having no-one who particularly cared or was going to crack the whip on assignment turn-in ("You're adults - turn your work in or don't. Not my problem."), and such thrived, while many private students found themselves at a loss. I remember many questions about elementary "Well, how would I go about researching that/studying this/doing that" in my first year of university that were along the lines of this theory.
Don't you get the majority of the benefit of specific test prep by running through a couple of sample tests from a guidebook, which you can get from a public library? (I'd say most of the benefit, in my case, but probably shouldn't generalize that far.)
I can imagine a longer test prep class that was really more like general math tutoring could make a bigger difference, a la Bloom's 2-sigma problem.
you're refuting a strawman. The claim wasn't that tests are impossible to game, only that they're harder to game than the other components used in the admissions process
I am also happy to see this, but requiring test scores and class building are not mutually exclusive. Test scores are a useful input to good class building. How else are you going to choose which student from a backwater school to put in the class if these students don't have access to the advanced classwork and research support that the rest of the class had?
They might be the least gameable, but this is kind of a “bare minimum” for diversity/equity practices. It is the cheapest way to get little bit of reliable signal.
Because let's be clear about the standardized test situation. Test takers had time to take the test, they weren't doing work on the side for their parents instead to make ends meet. They had transportation to the test location, they were able to pay the fees, and they were not being discouraged from college as “we can never afford that, I’m sorry.”
Standardized tests themselves have mostly tested not IQ or domain knowledge, but how anxious you are taking tests. This does predict later academic performance, sure, but to say that this anxiety is disconnected from demographics sounds like a rather strong claim. Instead you have that it is more disconnected than GPA and essays and extracurriculars which is not saying much.
If you want to be serious about diversity and equity, you invest some actual cash into it... The easiest way is talent scouting, you send people (trained, you can reduce bias) to underrepresented communities and allow folks there to interview with them. My wife worked at place that did this, it sounds financially intractable at first but it scales to whatever budget you want to put into it... Her place would send folks out to like Singapore as well as to inner city schools. But the point is that you have to leave the door open to the people who can come to you, but you also go to the people who cannot.
(This is also a startup idea... The reason the schools don't send out their best is that there are too many colleges, the reason the colleges don't canvas the schools that there are too many schools, these are obviously inverse problems that could cancel each other out in the appropriate sort of network, the recruiters just need to be common to both. The problem is getting people to pay for it—the schools who you want most are precisely the underfunded ones that cannot pay you, the colleges meanwhile are less willing to go in on these sorts of weird experiments, they, they have an admissions department already. So the idea has a dangerous scope creep where you want to also start a college so that you can dogfood... Not a degree-granting educational institution in itself, maybe, but just a “first year at college” school which sells its students to other top colleges. Obviously that's a much riskier investment for VCs.)
> Because let's be clear about the standardized test situation. Test takers had time to take the test, they weren't doing work on the side for their parents instead to make ends meet. They had transportation to the test location, they were able to pay the fees, and they were not being discouraged from college as “we can never afford that, I’m sorry.”
How big a proportion of the population is this that we throw out our most objective standard? Kids that don’t have time to take a test? I would wager the vast majority of kids have time for an exam.
Seems like we figure out how to get kids to the bus stop before we just decide that objective measurement is irresponsible as long as there’s a kid who doesn’t have the time for it.
Just to build on this even further, a kid who doesn’t have time for an exam also probably hasn’t had the time to build the educational foundation necessary to succeed at a university.
I can’t imagine some kid who didn’t have time for high school math succeeding in my engineering program, for instance. It might seem charitable to throw out the SAT and admit that kid, but you’d just be setting them up for failure.
What you’re describing is a different problem that needs to be solved. Throwing out the SAT does not solve it.
> Test takers had time to take the test, they weren't doing work on the side for their parents instead to make ends meet. They had transportation to the test location, they were able to pay the fees, and they were not being discouraged from college as “we can never afford that, I’m sorry.”
In Chicago, the taking the SAT is required to graduate from high school. The school district pays for it. It is taken at school, during the school day.
Some of these barriers are not the same as they used to be.
> Standardized tests themselves have mostly tested not IQ or domain knowledge, but how anxious you are taking tests.
So you really think a completely unstudied person off the street with a sedative would get a better score than someone who does KhanAcademy in their free time?
> Because let's be clear about the standardized test situation. Test takers had time to take the test, they weren't doing work on the side for their parents instead to make ends meet. They had transportation to the test location, they were able to pay the fees, and they were not being discouraged from college as “we can never afford that, I’m sorry.”
This argument can be used to argue against public school, against any sort of consequences for anti-social behavior, etc. it’s a bad argument. Instead find ways to get the kids to the test instead of arguing against the test in general.
>Standardized tests themselves have mostly tested not IQ or domain knowledge, but how anxious you are taking tests. This does predict later academic performance, sure, but to say that this anxiety is disconnected from demographics sounds like a rather strong claim. Instead you have that it is more disconnected than GPA and essays and extracurriculars which is not saying much.
saying 'tests are better than the other primary indicators we use to admit students to colleges' isn't saying much? this is nonsense
My son found out 2 days ago he didn't get accepted to his in-state land grant public university. The University of Minnesota. This was his fall back plan. Now he's screwed and may not be able to start college in fall.
His sins:
- a 35 ACT score (legit with no studying or ACT prep classes)
- a 3.8 weighted GPA (because he took multiple AP classes and actually was in college for his junior and senior years through Minnesota's PSEO program)
- leader on robotics team
- lettered in 2 extra curriculars
- etc etc
Why? Because U of MN doesn't consider weighted grades nor do they accept test scores anymore. So why even try hard?
The only upside is that we weren't stupid enough to put his college savings in a 529 tied to MN. We would be superscrewed if we'd done that.
35,000 applicants. 7,000 freshman admissions. My kid not even in top 1/5 of applicaents? Complete BS.
MN 529 plan 20 years ago was MN-only from what I remember. Honestly don't care.
[redacted] is "okay" school for CSci. However they have a 120MM budget and are facing 15MM shortfall for the college that hosts it. Out of state tuition for this school is 20k per year with max scholarships.
And young people on here imagine having 2 children 2 years apart. One of them doesn't get to go to college because of covid and the other doesn't get to go because ability didn't matter for a year.
EDIT:
I hope this never happens to your kids. Beware of being penalized for trying. Is that a lesson you will teach your kids?
I'm not "bummed". Read my post with anger.
U of MN was not his first choice. It was _fallback_.
Try on some shoes.... Imagine putting 30 years of high taxes into a state as a high earner and business owner (that's me). Then imagine that your almamater doesn't accept your kid when your kid is, in fact, a lot smarter than you and has accomplished a lot more than you did by his age.
Then imagine being that kid and being taught by the State that, while you are in the top 95th (99th) percentile nationally on test scores there's just something not right about you. Is it your GPA? It can't be. You're on the A honor roll every time.
In the end you'll never know and that is fine because the school you might have attended has changed into something it was never intended to be.
Land grant university or something else? The Great Emancipator rolls in his grave.
On the plus side the U of MN gets billions of dollars in state funding and keeps the washout money too. Win-win.
>Beware of being penalized for trying. Is that a lesson you will teach your kids?
Life is going to teach it one way or another, and Picard's words stand even more true as I enter my 30's as they were back when I was an angsty 14YO just trying to stay with my friends before Mom's job forces her out of state... again. Took me a while to realize I wasn't being punished for not studying enough and that this was simply a factor of life I had no control over.
>Try on some shoes.... Imagine putting 30 years of high taxes into a state as a high earner and business owner (that's me). Then imagine that your almamater doesn't accept your kid when your kid is, in fact, a lot smarter than you and has accomplished a lot more than you did by his age.
Well, that's the whole point. The establishment doesn't want smart kids that will challenge their kids who got their papers and position through connections. They want someone who will be happy being rank-and-file for their entire life. Ideally, with no ambition to have a family and raise kids, so they can work for peanuts as well. This is frightening, but it seems to be the way America is headed.
That said, there are states that value small business owners more, and have policies aligning better with them. As the saying goes, you need to vote with your feet.
It's important in relating these horror stories to include whether or not he was applying to Computer Science and/or Engineering. The growth in demand for CS has outpaced any schools ability to handle the students. My daughter's college counselor had different sets of target schools depending on the major (in her case she was thinking about biomedical engineering, one of the most sought after).
> If you’re worried about having the account in one state and attending school in another, don’t be. With most plans, your school choice is not affected by the state of your savings plan. You can be a resident of Minnesota and send your student to college in North Carolina.
Off topic. Doesn't apply. However, yes, when we started saving it was MN schools only. I don't know what the rules are now. Remember, we're talking about something from 20 years ago.
I’m not too familiar with UMN admissions stats are, but a 3.8 weighted GPA might have hurt your son considering a lot of people applying for computer science will have an unweighted GPA that is around that or higher. You haven’t shared the unweighted GPA here but if it’s substantially lower colleges will not like that, especially state ones, since they think it shows you just take classes beyond your level.
definitely not over. kicking ass in community college for a year or two and transferring to a much better school with scholarship is a great option for anyone
Wait, your state 529 plans penalize you for applying the funds to out of state schools? That sounds like a highly unusual setup. Not all states do this.
35 ACT and he was rejected to University of Minnesota? Tell your kid that he’s perfectly fine and that their admissions are FUBAR.
Try UIUC (my alma). Though I was in-state. It’s gotten more selective but a top one for CS. They admitted me into CE but it was easy to transfer after doing well in my first few CS classes.
He applied to [redacted] State, Rice, UNC, Duke, and U of MN - Twin Cities. Accepted at [redacted] State (they have a formula for everyone). He also got their highest out of state "scholarship" - which is more like a break on out of state tuition - no reciprocity with MN. No word from Duke yet but that probably won't happen either.
Complete disaster for his future and really a shot to his otherwise happy and optimistic life. He's really upset as are we all.
Complete disaster for his future? I don't think so, just a slight delay. I've had many setbacks in my life, i've known people in Asia who majorly messed up an exam they'd been preparing their entire life for, they just attempted it next year, and they did fine. If you have the brains to score a 35 on the ACT with no prep, then you really shouldn't have much problems in life if you put effort and deal with setbacks.
THanks, he reminded me tonight that he scored 35 _twice_. LOL. I kinda suggested to him he try for perfect like his best buddy. Best buddy is accepted at Ivy school (but probably will not go due to cost from what he said).
> Best buddy is accepted at Ivy school (but probably will not go due to cost from what he said).
All Ivy League schools are need blind; Most are free for those with family incomes <$100k. And my experience is that it really does open a lot of doors and make your life a little easier. I'm not saying you can't get a great education somewhere else; I'm saying money shouldn't be the main reason to not go for most people. The best buddy should at least ask for more aid due to need if they haven't already.
I replied to your other post but I’d also like to say: there is too much of a focus IMO on getting in to the “good” schools right out of HS. I remember a genius physics grad TA I had who went from community college to the UIUC graduate physics program. Undergrad education is pretty similar across the board; after all, the infamous US news rankings refer to the graduate programs (which can have ramifications for the quality of undergrad of course).
Anyways my point is that I think smart and capable people with hard work and persistence can end up at similar places when all is said and done even if they don’t start out at a “top” program.
Have you thought about MN State Mankato? They have a good math department and he can transfer elsewhere with good rec letters from there if he doesn't like it.
Thanks, yes, I talked with their new director about a month ago about hiring some of their people. Lin I believe. If you're Lin you might know who I am. Small newish program (~30 admissions per year) with TC presence but turning out people with actual skills.
Put yourself in my shoes. It's great that my kid got some college credit in high school but MN is not a great place to raise a family anymore nor is it safe or .... "Quality of life" isn't really a thing like it was.
And you see this from all sort of people here. Lots of people who grew up here are sick of it and want to leave or are in process of leaving.
> Complete disaster for his future and really a shot to his otherwise happy and optimistic life
I'm sorry but this is a bit over dramatic, no?
Your son still got into college. Just didn't get into the specific school he wanted.
I didn't get into the college I wanted either. I'm doing just fine.
Some of the best coworkers I've ever had went to a community college and transferred after a year or two.
I get it, it's okay to be bummed. But you're acting like his life is already over. Set a good example and instill the value that you can overcome barriers and failures in life, it's going to be okay.
U MN has acceptance rate of 70%. Your son is probably more brilliant than most people who go to U MN. The hell with them and their shitty admission process. They don't deserve him.
Like others have said, he should re-apply / transfer. I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but this might actually be blessing in disguise because many kids don't get to experience setback in life until too late.
Yet, this one is something he can easily overcome because he's brilliant and has supportive family. He just got super unlucky. Just need to play the game one more time to win.
This admission statement is wrong. See source in original comment. U of MN TC accepted 20% last year and 20% this year. Kinda nuts. It's possible that the 70% number you cite is for MN State system which is like a parallel CC and university system. They are good too though.
THanks for your other comments though. Appreciated.
I can only imagine how upsetting this must be for you and your family. I just hope that after you’ve had some time to process, that your son finds a way forward that brings him closer to the future he wants for himself. Just a bit of unsolicited advice from an internet stranger, but describing the situation as a “complete disaster for his future”, even if not expressed directly to your son, runs the risk of becoming a self fulfilling prophecy. Transfers, grad school, good job placements/pivots, a gap year, are all options.
Thanks for the thoughtful suggestions. We're mainly pissed and disgusted. Appreciate your comment though. He's an optimistic person by nature so he's already moved on.
Your son and I had really similar stats in high school. I also didn't do well in college admissions, but that was mostly due to my poor strategic decisions and affirmative action (I'm Asian). I would really emphasize that transfers are 100% legitimate avenues for him to take. It just requires immediate planning and dedication now.
> Complete disaster for his future and really a shot to his otherwise happy and optimistic life. He's really upset as are we all.
nah. if he really wants to challenge himself, he can probably get research experience pretty easily (much easier than a fancier institution) which then would set him up for a top-tier grad school or a great spot in industry. law and medicine really care about fancy brand names, but technology really only cares about accomplishment, skills, aptitude and attitude.
in my experience, most graduate TAs in STEM at fancy schools were previously superstars at state schools that didn't have crazy brand recognition.
for example: andrew grove went to the city college of new york in the 1960s, and then did a phd at uc berkeley. after that he worked in industry for a bit and then started a little company called intel.
He could consider a year of community college and reapply? I went straight from community college to a top 10 public university and it was the best decision I ever made. Some might even have guaranteed admission? Good way to save money too.
Iowa State is a good school, I went there and ended up at Amazon and then Microsoft. The engineering programs are pretty decent and have good student outcomes, I don’t see how going to Iowa State would be disastrous for your son’s future.
It's a good school but hard to stomach outstate tuition value prop. The "disaster" is having all your choices arbitrarily removed in spite of everything you did to succeed. Let's agree that's some BS.
>Complete disaster for his future and really a shot to his otherwise happy and optimistic life.
It depends. Imagine what if he got accepted only to be taught that his caring father (and the sole fact of having a father) is a "privilege" he should be ashamed of. And that his way of life should be culling his ambition and letting other less fortunate ones take his place.
All of this is a part of a bigger problem (switch from results to feelings and identities), and you cannot fix the symptoms without addressing the underlying cause.
Teach your son some business skills, maybe let him work for you for a while. He can then apply again next year being a bit more cynical about optimizing the KPIs.
Your son quite frankly should have expected this. I'm always wary of parents sharing "horror" stories of college application for multiple reasons. #1 Admissions are a crap shoot and you can't just apply to very selective schools and expect to walk maybe one of those schools is safety rest are reaches for any student in the country, his acceptances are most likely par for his skill level, Congrats on the test scores but north of almost 50000 students achieve scores in that range yearly. The quality of his admissions essay's are no doubt a factor. #2 if you're son is truly that talented and didn't get accepted to his dream schools than there must be some other red flags or issues you are not mentioning.
I have no idea. And the weird thing in MN is that a lot of kids go to U of MN. There are probably 5 topish districts in Twin Cities. The one my son is in sends dozens of kids to U of MN. His high school pushes AP, IB, and another special program aimed at business education. They also don't frown on PSEO (FT college while in high school). That's like 4 programs you take to get ahead on college credits. They're all weighted and all aimed at kids wanting to go to college. Lots of districts do this and weight the grades to make it fair for the kids trying the hard stuff. The "poorer" district I grew up in even has IB and they weighted grades 35 years ago. Very common here.
How many kids are getting a 4.0 GPA? Lots. How many valedictorians are there in a class? 1 or 50? I think 50. Maybe it's grade inflation.
So maybe if you are in a good school with lots of programs make sure you just phone it in for 4 years if you want to make sure you get in.
No, but I'm sure some of the kids on his math team will be in the same boat even through they're mainly South Asian and Chinese. Backlash against them too it seems.
You are claiming that the University of Minnesota is systemically discriminating against South Asian and Chinese students? Can you back this claim up in any way?
I have no idea why you're replying this with a question like this. You should read the MIT blog at the top of this forum and then return without the trolling.
If you're saying I should prove that my son is on a math team and has asian friends who are going to the University of Minnesota with similar test scores and GPA? Yeah, I'll get right on that.
Every university that is admitting for “diversity” is systematically discriminating against Asian students. This is not even an open secret, it’s just stated policy.
Major factor reduced to a bullet point: they acknowledge the existence of other testing and evaluation frameworks, but that those are even worse distributed in socioeconomic access than the SAT
Thats pragmatic, and sobering, since people hoping for more diverse representation in admissions are faulting the SAT pipeline itself (access to study prep, study materials, wording of questions in the test) but the known alternatives are more niche exacerbating the outcome
I don't think people appreciate the radical nature of the attacks on standardized testing. Standardized tests have been critical to higher education and the professions for almost a century. Virtually everyone in an elite academic, government, scientific, legal, medical, or financial role attained that role based, in part, on the SAT and similar exams like the LSAT or MCAT. Not only them, but everyone who taught and mentored them, and everyone who taught and mentored those people. If the SAT is not predictive, as some claim, we've been selecting our elites and professionals the wrong way for three generations.
> If the SAT is not predictive, as some claim, we've been selecting our elites and professionals the wrong way for three generations.
Yes, and?
The easiest way to understand the shortcomings of these tests (at least their older versions) is to realize that students who use paid SAT/ACT-prep materials and services get higher scores than students who don't. Yes, there are confounding factors, but this fact alone is fairly damning evidence that these tests can be "defeated" using techniques beyond simply learning the things taught in high school. A better-designed test would not yield higher scores to test-takers with more specific knowledge of how the test itself is constructed. (In software terms, think "property based testing" as opposed to "unit test cases written in a predictable manner", with the assumption that your implementation under test has adversarial motives to obtain passing builds.)
This complaint is addressed in footnote 10 of the article.
It would be great to design a test that's less gameable than the current version, and we should certainly try to do that, but the current version is already less gameable than basically anything else colleges consider for admission.
Whereas "holistic" admissions processes are probably the _most_ gameable option out there. If you were designing a process specifically to be able to game it (for example to keep out the Jews) then turning down the transparency would be the way to go.
> The easiest way to understand the shortcomings of these tests (at least their older versions) is to realize that students who use paid SAT/ACT-prep materials and services get higher scores than students who don't.
Admission criteria do not exist in a vacuum. Since throwing up our hands and saying "we're just not going to admit anyone since this is an imperfect criteria" is obviously not the answer, It only makes sense to compare to the alternatives. I can't think of a cheaper (and more accessible) measuring method than standardized tests. Compared to the cost of participating in leadership roles, sports, learning an instrument, etc, a $20 SAT prep book is an incredibly accessible option.
Or put another way, out of all admission criteria, is standardized testing really the least useful / fair? If not, why should it get cut first?
> The easiest way to understand the shortcomings of these tests (at least their older versions) is to realize that students who use paid SAT/ACT-prep materials and services get higher scores than students who don't.
Yes, and affluent people with family friends on the boards of non-profits can show volunteer work that’s way more interesting in an application than being actively involved in your church or mosque. Rich people can hire essay consultants to understand what the (mostly white American) admissions officers are looking for: https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/essay-content-strongly-rel...
Of all these measures, the SATs show the smallest benefits from paying to prep.
The issue with this comment and opponents of standardized testing more generally is that they compare standardized tests against some purely theoretical ideal metric that perfectly captures "merit," however it's defined.
The reality is that standardized testing doesn't need to be absolutely perfectly fair to be something worth keeping; it just needs to be fairer than selecting students who had the opportunity to be captain of the lacrosse team. That is a far lower bar that it easily exceeds.
This is the point where standardized testing opponents will typically rhetorically concede that they also are opposed to that unfairness, but they never manage to get particularly incensed about athletic or legacy admissions.
I'm not opposed to standardized testing nor am I among those saying to just eliminate the test; I'm just defending opinions critical of these tests from knee-jerk responses that I think are overly protective of them.
I would say standardized testing has been critical to higher education and the professions since it was established 1416 years ago and is a major reason that China and Japan (which began standardized testing more recently, some 1100 years ago) never went through the catastrophic colonial subjugation that did so much damage to India and the Middle East and obliterated most of the cultural heritage of Africa and America.
Moreover, the British adoption of the system some 200 years ago was crucial to their imperialist success, and Western academia began adopting it slightly earlier. Without this Sinicization of Europe the Enlightenment might have fizzled out; perhaps we would never have had an Industrial Revolution.
College Admissions in the US is broken. This is a great move at restoring normalcy though. The SAT or ACT are the best thing for leveling the playing field between the rich and the poor. If anything I would like to see more reliance on this.
If I had my way the US would model the college admissions process on the Chinese Gao Kao. Have everyone take the the exam, have students list their preference for university, then sort from top ranked to the bottom ranked filling open positions at universities. This is fair, the only bias is ability, and it removes all legacy, wealth and athletics factors.
This is kinda how medical residency is filled in the US, med students rank their top
choices, residency programs rank their’s. It’s called The Match, and generally results in a very fair equitable outcome.
While the match isn’t completely terrible, it still has some pretty bad qualities. The most notable one is the “pay for applications” issue. The odds of getting into your top picks is constantly declining, and so the dominant strategy is to apply to many residencies to maximize your chance of a successful match - the number of picks the average applicant submits has doubled in the past 15 years. But applying to more programs can cost thousands of dollars, for no apparent reason other than the enrichment of ERAS to the tune of about $100 million per year. This obviously creates a system where people with more money to burn can artificial create better results for themselves.
The simple answer here is to give each applicant a finite number of picks regardless of means, but the ERAS admin has no interest in this for obvious reasons.
The other thing this pick arms race has done is produced far more applicants for positions than makes any sense (the average Otho placement gets 150 applicants). Not only does this irritate program directors, this has also led to an increase in automated filtering, and therefore an increase in attempts to game automated filtering though things like bogus publications (see: things like the stupid medbikini publication which seemed like a poor attempt to add another pub to somebody’s resume).
Your suggestions are terrific and I’m sure there are others that are great too. Every system that involves humans will be game-able in some way, that’s simply life. That The Match is a much better system than college placement is undeniable and refusing to implement it because it’s not perfect is foolish.
Sort of, but if you were charged money per application (so that it was more accessible to the wealthy). The pick was supposed to avoid this sort of pointless mass application and allow students to focus on the residencies that they really wanted and were competitive for, but with higher education becoming so expensive and so competitive, shovelling money at applications has increasingly become the student strategy.
This is more discriminatory though. How can a poor kid express their "passion" to University admissions offices? SATs are the best leveller we have not to mention their strong correlation with actual outcomes.
Also, passion can be developed later, you can't expect 16 year olds to know what they want to do. Recruit for high competence.
Most people aren't passionate about math wholesale. They are passionate for activities that require a strong fundamental in math. That's always been my core reservation with how we currently deem students worthy of learning and applying skills into a career. SAT's feel like the high school equivalent of what the tech industry will joke about as "well you lead a team into launching a multimillion dollar product, but you can't reverse a binary tree on the spot, so...".
But if they have data that shows that it works out for them, I don't have any capacity to argue with the results.
Agree that math on its own isn’t the truly compelling thing for everyone.
I do believe that, since it fundamentally links and describes all sorts of observable phenomena, math is a gateway to a general understanding of the universe. And so might lead someone to their true passion.
I also hear you on the “binary tree” front - focusing exclusively on particular algorithms like that is a hiring antipattern, imo. Where I differ is that I treat math as one level lower and more fundamental - the ability to understand why the algorithm works at all and to prove it to yourself if you wanted to. And correspondingly the toolset to construct algorithms of your own.
I don’t think people need to readily recall partial differential equations on a daily basis, or be able to spot recall how to factor a complex polynomial.
I do think taking practice at those things builds mental strength that is useful for detecting patterns, chasing theories, describing and testing facts, and solving puzzles, and that that’s the true value of math education.
All MIT students, regardless of intended major, must pass two semesters of calculus, plus two semesters of calculus-based physics, as part of our General Institute Requirements. ... There is no path through MIT that does not rest on a rigorous foundation in mathematics, and we need to be sure our students are ready for that as soon as they arrive.
For a period in the 1980s-1990s, you could argue that calculus was not essential in computer science. It was all discrete math for a while. But then came machine learning, and it's all about hill climbing and gradients now.
I would argue exactly otherwise... with the advent of the web platform and frameworks like .net, the vast majority (and I mean like 95%) of developers will never touch anything ML related in their careers. I mean, I get that this is MIT and many of their students will end up working with ML, but applying that globally to CS is nonsense. Back when I was studying CS (cze) more than a decade ago, we had to pass linear algebra, graph theory and calculus, but honestly, that was like in the first year and a half and then it completely tapered off (later years were all about projects, algorithmization, i.e. "doing the work" and very little about hardcore theory) and guess what, I never needed it again. A bit of statistics and some graph theory here and there, but that's about it.
Contrary to popular belief, there are NOT that many ML jobs out there and the ones that are there are more about data science and messing with model zoo type of shit than actually coding useful programs. Most programmers will be lucky if they get to integrate inference of a prepared model into the apps they work on.
This is exactly why so many people (myself included) advocate for a pure "software engineering" degree at more universities. Let people who are interested study graph theory, combinatorics, linear algebra, advanced probability and statistics and whatever else. For the rest, provide a path to be ready for an industry job building websites and applications, which is what 90% of graduates will end up doing.
Every other discipline out there has a clear separation of pure from applied science. Why can't we do the same for software? What we end up with is borderline fraudulent coding bootcamps to fill in the gap.
While I spend 99% of my time doing pure "software engineering", I'm pretty grateful to have the advanced probability / graph theory / combinatorics etc. background because it helps me envision possibilities I wouldn't otherwise be able to.
That being said, there are probably lighter ways of teaching that instinct than full-depth classes. I try to listen to podcasts these days as a way of expanding my horizons.
I have been saying for years that we need to treat software developers like jedi when it comes to training.
Practical, industry expert-led coursework has been by far the most outstanding education I have ever received. My DSP professor was (is still) an adjunct to the university I attended and works a normal job 9-5 during the day at some engineering firm. He was easily the best educator I have ever experienced because he brought reality into the classroom every day. I still vividly recall the 20–30-minute lecture/rant about making power point presentations that don't suck.
It's all the little things for me... The nuanced details like "why are you holding it that way?" are impossible to discover until you have a customer complaining at you for a while or have someone who experienced it themselves giving you a heads-up.
For me, the future of practical software engineering education looks a lot more like a machine shop than it does a university campus.
I think this line of thinking fails to recognize what a general math background does for your critical thinking skills.
I'm sure you and I both took plenty of math classes, and therefore we won't ever really know what our computer science skills would be like without a rigorous math background. Even if I never touch anything more complex than algebra II again, taking ~30 credits of applied math allows me to think in a way that I wouldn't otherwise without that background.
Software engineering is based on applied mathematics too. You'll need at least some basic calculus to make sense of O(n) analysis, and Calc II as a prereq for probability. Then add plenty of logic, discrete mathematics (needed for algorithms and data structures), models of computation and concurrency, category theory (which is becoming a shared language of everything "compositional"), topology etc. etc.
If you really want a "math free" intro to tech, look into Business Information Systems. That tends to be more ad hoc, at least for now. At some point, people will start to care about software assurance even in that context, and the standards will rise accordingly.
You don't really need to know calculus (derivatives and such) but it's true that big O notation requires some sort of "asymptotic thinking" which is probably only explicitly taught in a calculus course.
The thing is people with a maths heavy background tend to think you need a much deeper understanding of math for this than you actually do.
You need very little beyond high school level math for most CS. Some areas, sure.
I've done things in my career that touches on a lot of different areas of math. But the number of times I've regretted not having taken more math have been pretty much non-existent. I wish I remembered a bit more of my trig, mostly.
Most software engineers come into contact with far less CS subjects where math matters than I do.
I don't have an issue with a place like MIT insisting on lots of math, but this notion that you need to understand so much math for software engineering is deeply flawed - you don't need much even for a lot of theoretical computer science.
The point is that even a "shallow" understanding of math is much deeper already than many, perhaps most realize. Many high-schools don't seriously try to teach math at all - there's no such thing as "high school math" in this day and age. You need college to even have a chance of being exposed to it properly.
(Then there's the whole "learning to code" part, of course. This is actually where middle and high school math provides useful application domains for learning to code, and people have tried to teach coding in schools since the 1980s.)
I don't really think you need much math to learn to code at all. Again, some forms of code is helped by math, but I've also seen beginners struggle to reconcile differences between whatever programming language they were introduced to an mathematical notations. There's no doubt there are close relationships between math and CS, but you can a lot of CS just fine without ever being aware of those relationships.
I opted out of pretty much all the math I could at university, and at mine you could opt out of almost all of it (I had to take one introductory course which mostly served to bring those who hadn't taken much in high school up to scratch, and one introductory stats course).
Many of my other courses touches on subjects where a mathematician probably would say "but that's math". E.g. my compiler courses of course touched on a lot on parsers and grammars that are effectively just math restated. But those restatements matter. Maybe if more math was taught in ways that downplayed the dense notations more people would actually stick with it.
Code is pretty much defined by having "dense notation". Learning to code involves plenty of familiarity with formal, logical reasoning; simple math helps provide a convenient domain for applying logical reasoning to meaningful problems.
Code is nowhere near as dense as it can be in most languages - we make considerations for human readers by making languages verbose on purpose to a much greater extent than most math (of course there are exceptions like e.g. J and K and similar languages). Most math violates the intent of pretty much every coding standard there is in focusing overly on density over readability to someone not intimately familiar. On top of that, math very often omit a lot of detail in a way code can't, that requires a lot more effort from the reader. I get that it's intentional - the focus is on expressing what is different in terms of a shared context people familiar with the math already has, while in code only a few fringe languages tends to take this approach over favouring readability.
And yes, we need familiarity with formal, logical reasoning, but the primitives you need to be able to understand coding are really basic, and often easiest introduced by showing people code rather than giving it the mathematical treatment.
It's not necessarily math itself that is the issue, but mathematical notation and the way we teach it - there's a very stark divide, I've observed, between those who prefer those really terse notations that you must take time to decipher, and those who want notations that can be read like prose. For my part I'm firmly in the latter camp.
> but the primitives you need to be able to understand coding are really basic, and often easiest introduced by showing people code rather than giving it the mathematical treatment.
The primitives are hopefully simple, but the logical implications are not. That's why it makes sense to have both.
For a subset of CS that most developers will never need, sure. Nobody is arguing math is never needed for CS, but most developers, and indeed a whole lot of CS researchers will never need much of it.
Discrete probability is probably adequate for most software engineering. Almost everything we encounter in our jobs is discrete. One thing I do think we need more of is linear algebra.
If all you're interested in is getting a good job, you don't need a degree at all. The information is available for free in a variety of presentations and formats. The source code to just about all the software you'll use is available for free as are all the tools. You don't even need a bootcamp, just time and energy.
You may not need a degree to learn the material, but as someone new to the field, there are plenty of jobs that list a 2 year or 4 year degree as a requirement. Having that degree will open more doors than just learning on your own simply because that’s what they’re looking for.
Sure, but in the same vein everything you will ever learn at MIT can be found for free online as well. Ultimately a 4-year degree does have value, whether just for the brand, or as a forcing function to learn, or the constant help from teachers and peers or whatever else.
I don't think a "pure" software engineering degree really needs to be four years.
What you're talking about sounds an awful lot like the program I went into initially at a community college. They taught you some coding in a few popular languages, some database concepts and sent you on your way. I dropped out after a year and found a job.
I ended up going to a four year program after a while. Turns out, a lot of the good jobs in software engineering require understanding those peaky abstract fundamentals.
If you just want to be a great web developer, MIT may not be the best place for you.
MIT best prepares people for those less well defined roles, such as designing the next era of web browsers. For that, you can never know exactly which skills will be needed, so it's probably best to have as many neighbouring skills as possible so you don't hit problems you can't solve merely because the knowledge required to see the best solution was in that topic your course didn't cover.
Who knows, maybe the next era of web browsers will browse the web for you, and then condense everything they learned from thousands of resources into a single paragraph for the user to see. And for that, they might need ML.
Of course if I browse linkedin MIT EECS grads, most are probably just doing bug fixing at FAANG or the latest unicorn and some small fraction are doing anything revolutionary. It's also likely that they would have done so without an MIT education. See e.g the Collison brothers.
Learning about those things aren't necessary for those jobs but they prove that you're capable of learning something, and as such is a part of the FAANG acceptance process.
Hmm I’m not sure I really agree with this. Does MIT (or any university) teach the creativity needed to envision the kind of thing you’re talking about? Or like most universities, is it just teaching some foundational skills coupled with whatever has condensed into “required reading” from industry over the last couple decades? Just with a higher pedigree and ostensibly better prepared student body.
Alright. You seem to feel pretty confident about this.
Having worked with quite a few MIT grads over the years, at least in my anecdotal experience, they were smart people who were no more or less likely than any of the other smart people working around them to stumble upon the next evolution of the web browser.
I remember finding myself in 3rd year Calculus in a Computer Science degree, and realizing: I don't have to be here! (only two years were mandatory)
I've always enjoyed math and kept enrolling into it out of habit, until it became so esoteric, and my actual interests more solid and practical.
I find a lot of my university career was fascinating and... useless. Not just from "I will never use this directly perspective", but also largely from "this will give me broader understanding and framework and enable me to learn faster" perspective. We can have wonderful philosophical discussion on what University should be for - job prep or educational enhancement for the sake of it - but truth of the matter was that I envied those in Engineering fields who had fun AND learned AND were doing practical things AND were going to apply some of it. Whereas my 3rd and 4th year maths were just maths for the sake of maths.
I may be hanging out with uninteresting crowds, but same experience is broadly true for my friends and co-workers - Java developer, VMWare architect, Database Administrator, ERP developer, etc. We all value education and love learning and will go on our vacation with couple of technical books - but university Computer Science degree seems very mistailored, or at least, sold wrong.
> I find a lot of my university career was fascinating and... useless.
I was in college long ago and for my CS undergrad and masters took the usual CS and math courses. When I needed electives though I took courses like economics, finance and accounting. Many years later, those electives ended up being the most useful.
The CS and math courses I wouldn't consider useless though. I'm sure I lean on theory I learned without realizing. But, at the time I couldn't have predicted working in small companies or startups and how important basic finance and accounting would end up.
interesting, I think almost the complete opposite. I am happy where I'm at, but I most certainly would have preferred doing a math/cs double major rather than all the BS busy work of an engineering degree I went through. I wouldn't call 60 hours a week of symbol manipulation practical...
If your goal is to be a code monkey writing database-backed web applications, MIT is probably a very expensive way to get there.
The goal of the degree is to prepare people for data analysis, machine vision, 3d graphics, ML, signal processing, and similar. If you're not into that, going to MIT is wasteful for everyone involved.
That's not elitism talking; that's just the nature of MIT. Other schools aren't like that. For example, if you want to do a startup around a database-backed web application, Stanford is a fine choice. I'm not arguing Stanford is either better or worse; it's just a little bit less academic and little bit more entrepreneurial. There are other schools which emphasize other things. Harvard or Yale will move you more into the class of powerful people. Etc.
Calculus was the first time in mathematics education where I actually had to understand systems and how to derive results from first principles. Prior to that everything was just memorizing: "this is what logarithm is", "socatoah", multiplication tables, etc etc. I straight up hated math until calculus (now I have a math PhD).
I'm sure the same could be accomplished with other fields of math but I don't feel it's necessary to switch. Would be extremely hard to find good teachers and course materials for combinatorics or graph theory to.
Calculus is not just about gradients. Fundamentally, calculus is about calculation and symbolic logic, a much older concept that predates its usage in gradient-based machine learning. In this sense, calculus holds deep connections to logical reasoning, proof theory and the foundations of computer science. [1]
This. The importance of learning calculus and model building (physics) is all about learning to reason, making predictions and quantify domain validity. It's not about calculating derivatives or proving continuity. I think people take these requirements too literally.
True, but the usefulness of calculus to a working developer in ML is pretty marginal. The difference between different ML algorithms for hill climbing or gradients, is orders of magnitude less than the effect of having the right training data, formatted the right way. Statistics or data science is far more applicable to nearly any field on real-world programming.
But, you know, like Latin in the 19th century was always still useful to one's education, calculus is still useful. It is also something a lot more people know how to teach, than know how to teach statistics (or other more useful topics). I think the latter is the primary reason it remains central to most engineering programs.
Agree. Statistics > calculus for the software engineers. Statistics > calculus for most people doing research as their papers would need to interpret t-scores, z-scores, confidence intervals etc. I don't understand this fetish about calculus.
Teaching only statistics and no calculus is how you end up with people such as Tai reinventing high-school calculus and attempting to use statistical methods to validate their “method”.
Well, you need at least some understanding of calculus to meaningfully understand statistics, don't you? A basic ability to intuit about integrals and derivatives seems like table stakes.
I disagree with this. Being able to read and understand the math in the paper of the algorithm you are implementing is useful, and calculus is common in ML papers.
You may have some short term success without understanding the algorithms at all, but as the field changes and you are no longer in school, being able to keep up at least somewhat with papers is very useful.
I agree that the day to day is mostly about formatting data though!
Well I took calculus, and I did a Master's thesis (much smaller than Ph.D., obviously) on neural networks, and I didn't find much application. Plus, the vast majority of work on ML is not going to be taking an ML paper and implementing it in code. It's going to be transforming this raw data into a format that the existing ML library can accept as input, selecting which cases are useful for training (e.g. making sure each important sub-case is adequately represented), and other things surrounding the data and how it is fed into the (already existing) ML library. Perhaps also playing with the options of the ML library, as to what kind of model you build.
But 99% of the alterations you can make to an ML library, will not make nearly as much difference as what data you feed into it and how. If it's the right data, many ML models will work, and if it's not the right data, none of them will. But regardless, none of this requires, or even really benefits from, calculus.
I agree with all of this, but ML will evolve a lot over the next 30 years of your career. Being able to read the papers as the field evolves is useful, and many of the papers (especially the ones that shift the field) will assume knowledge of calculus.
Latin is what almost the entire Western academic literature prior to the 19th century was written in. You may or may not know this, but Google Translate didn't exist. So, it was essential to anyone undertaking academic studies at the time (in the West) to read Latin, though not to write it. Nowadays English holds that position, despite Google Translate.
Yes, because learning Latin - as a written language - will put your vocabulary far ahead of those who don't. My high school had a general elective focused just on learning to use Greek and Latin to enhance your vocabulary, it was essentially a free SAT prep course for the language section.
So many terms can be quickly understood if you understand Latin prefixes and suffixes, and the better you understand Latin the better you'll understand its use in any of the modern Western languages.
and this is why trade schools like coding bootcamps are relevant at all
people aren't going to school to learn computer science, they are going to school to get a job and be effective in that field, but the universities shouldn't feel obligated to adjust to that since they've been for the privileged folks who are actually there to pursue education for the sake of higher learning for nearly 200 years (or much longer). it is mere coincidence that they have to put up with a few decades of people needing the school for subsequent employment and the school will exist after this phase as well
so with that observation it really is useful to push for trade schools again, for the people that actually need it
for the people that are really going for that upper echelon of access to other privileged people whether they get a wage-slave job or not, yeah they should slog through MIT, but everyone else should consider other things that more closely match the lane they were born into
Community colleges should have electives and tracks that are similar to trade schools: getting you up to speed on whats relevant right now
But as long as they are pushing towards associates degrees and transferable credits to universities I think the utility is less optimal for people looking to be efficient at a job
(Also employers should be training people for what they actually need too, sparing us all from imagining that the Computer Science major is necessary to synthesize better outcomes in unknown situations)
Honestly every educated adult should understand calculus, and certainly anyone with a technical degree should. Sure many people will be unlikely to need to do the raw computation of calculating derivatives and integrals (even people doing machine learning are typically letting computers do that work), but to understand the way these two concepts work together and describe the world is really essential to understanding so many problems.
This is hubris. I can think of many adults that know nothing of Calc and do very in life and work. Knowing basic accounting, being able to fix things around the house, being pleasant to work with, etc are far more important.
> Knowing basic accounting, being able to fix things around the house, being pleasant to work with, etc are far more important.
Those are totally useless skills. If you live in America and your only contribution to society is being pleasant, knowing how to fix things around the house, and basic accounting, then expect your livelihood to be replaced by someone willing to do your unskilled work overseas for a fraction of the cost in the very near future. Not to be harsh, but that's the reality.
Seems like that trend will result in wages between "America" (I guess you mean the US and don't know Bolivia is in America) equalizing with the rest of the world.
Also, fixing things is highly skilled work and very hard to offshore.
That's the one. Although Gran Bolivia is also in America, parts of it have fairly high wages, and it hasn't been the common meaning of the name "Bolivia" for 200 years.
It maybe "idealistic" but I would hardly call it "hubris".
My undergrad was in a non-technical area and so I never had to take calc in undergrad. Having later learned it to solve problems, it has become clear to me that it would be preferable if everyone with a college degree knew calc. I was, in retrospect, wrong to have tried to avoid it.
I'm well aware we don't live in that world, unfortunately many people with a college degree also don't know write effectively, or perform critical analysis on texts, things I also thing should be part of being college educated.
> Knowing basic accounting, being able to fix things around the house, being pleasant to work with, etc are far more important.
I'm not sure how knowing calculus reduces these things.
Calculus changed the way I look at the world. I suck at math and had to repeat calc ii, but holy hell am I thankful it was a core requirement at my school. I wish more liberal arts kids could have the same opportunity.
If we need calculus for CS, I wish we'd teach it under the CS heading so that exposure to math didn't have to be so biased towards real analysis. Students spend years achieving this arbitrary (unless you're going to be an engineer) goal and end up with the erroneous (and often harmful) intuition that all spaces are continuous metric spaces.
I don't get this take at all--learn both real analysis and discrete math. At MIT especially. Knowing calculus (the precursor to RA) is essential for quantitatively understanding the world in which we live, including the 99.9% of it that is not computer science.
I think we're in a circle: I'm objecting that we teach people to map everything onto the real line and you're saying that it's essential to quantitatively understanding the world. But isn't that what "quantitatively" means?
My point is that in the zoo of mathematics, the reals are just one exhibit. Equally valid is to map phenomena onto topological spaces, inner product spaces, sets, groups, rings, fields, lattices, topoi, etc... People have been standing on Newton's shoulders for so long that all they can see from there is ground well worn by their colleagues who stood on the same shoulders.
I think we'd be much better off if you had to specialize in some part of math, but that different people specialized in different parts of it without necessarily taking a major in it. This would maximize the sort of happy accidents that lead to discovery because for any given phenomena you now have a wider variety of perspectives on it, rather than just a classroom full of analysts.
I'm against the reals in particular because I think they're especially suited to zero sum games, and I wish we played fewer of those.
I could agree with this. The one regret I had was burning through all my math classes within my first two years while my early CS classes barely seemed to use Algebra to begin with.
Then lo and behold, turns out I like computer graphics a few years later, and all that linear algebra and multivariable calculus I skimmed through slams me back in the face as I find out that GPUS chew through such math for breakfast. I could never find the application of such math to my career track until long after I took those classes.
90% of software engineers don't do algorithms, even in ML -- nor are they capable of, besides rote memorization of interview algorithms. Software engineering these days is mostly a job of complexity management and automation, requiring little math and more secretarial skills. That's just the ugly truth that nobody wants to hear.
To be a developer you don't even need to go to university. I know a lot of valid developers with a technical high school diploma, and I see that most of the time are better than a lot of people with a degree (or even a master degree).
To this days to be a developer university must be seen just as something extra that you do if you want to occupy positions that goes beyond being a simple programmer.
I’m not sure that elementary calculus is particularly related to machine learning (I have a similar opinion of linear algebra which is fundamentally geometric in a way that machine learning isn’t). That doesn’t mean that you don’t need to know anything about calculus or matrix multiplication to understand machine learning but knowing eg Green’s theorem won’t help and neither will understanding a tensor as a multi linear map or in the way a general relativity physicist might.
I also don’t particularly know what goes into calculus (in the U.K. we studied something called ‘calculus’ in high school which included integrating/differentiating polynomials, some trig functions, easy integration by parts and, in the ‘further maths’ course, some second order linear ODEs with forcing, first order ODEs via integrating factors, first order linear systems of ODEs via the eigenvectors method, and I think some integration by parts based recurrence relations. At university things were divided into ‘calculus’, which contained practical tools for applied maths like Green’s theorem or partial derivatives or contour integration or Sturm–Liouville theory, and ‘analysis’ which had foundational things like epsilon–delta stuff or Dedekind cuts or the definition of a limit or Riemann integration or the conformal mapping theorem and so on.
I think a first course in the thing I called analysis above is very useful for building mathematical maturity (ie the ability to not deduce false things but also playing with definitions and thinking about counter-examples) but the calculus knowledge can be useful for understanding the physical world. But I don’t know if that understanding should be required for e.g. computer scientists.
A few calculus examples I can think of in computer science:
- Some famous story of Feynman ‘interning’ at Thinking Machines and solving some capacity management problem using bizarre differential equations with terms representing e.g. ‘bits per second’. No sufficiently good solutions had been found using discrete methods.
- I was once asked an interview question which I suggested solving with differential equations but I was quickly directed towards not doing that.
- Honestly I can’t think of many more but maybe this is a lack of imagination. I think there are a few things that are really probability theory that you need some understanding of calculus for, e.g. emergent behaviour of distributed systems, reasons to prefer random cache eviction, some intuition to answer a question like ‘if the time X takes has some distribution, but sometimes we have a gc pause for y milliseconds, how would that affect the distribution?
It's "fundamentally geometric" to understand that the Fourier transform diagonalizes a circulant matrix so you can estimate the clock skew between two radios?
I think you get into calculus very quickly once you start dealing with uncertainty. A bit is 0 or 1, a discrete value. A random or unknown bit has some probability of being 1, a continuous value. A process that produces a random bit does too. An unknown such process has a distribution over such probabilities. Things like that are fundamental for things like communication or image classification.
Also, though, a major application of computers is modeling and controlling the calculus-based physical world, just because they are so good at number crunching. Particularly popular examples are ray tracing, music synthesis, and motor control.
Calculus underpins almost every scientific advancement since its discovery. To exclude it from the curriculum at a school focused on technology would be insane.
There are discrete forms of “gradients” which generalize classical CS concepts. Submodular optimization, for example, covers many algorithms that search for optimal configurations of discrete sets, and it does so by arguments that are analogous to convex optimization.
The greedy approach has an 1-1/e type of approximatation. You basically prove that the problem is in the class and then solve it greedily. It’s not much different than proving the problem is convex and then using gradient descent.
There isn’t much theory on why it works in the nonconvex case. You can similarly make discrete heuristic algorithms for sorting, etc. with no guarantees.
Anyway, as nonconvex models are usually stacked convex models, you can find works that incorporate these submodular functions as neural network layers.
Curiously, MIT does not have an university-wide computer requirement, though some departments do. They have been debating this requirement for decades.
Footnote 21 (containing "the most important components to demonstrate academic readiness in the absence of SAT/ACT scores would be other standardized exams") is quite telling.
I think that is the implied meaning of "quite telling". Many institutions hastily removed SAT scores due to social pressure that standardized tests weren't effective or equitable, while the data shows the opposite
> due to social pressure that standardized tests weren't effective or equitable
Effectiveness and equity shouldn't be confused.
The tests are effective for assessing academic preparedness.
However, there is a strong argument that they aren't equitable.
MIT isn't claiming here that SAT/ACT are equitable. They are just claiming that they are a valuable data point in addition to other factors that they consider to deal with equity.
I was a crappy student in HS and the only good thing about me was my SAT scores. They got me into a good school. I ended up as a highly ranked engineer at Microsoft. My heart sank when people started not using the SAT. I hope this becomes a trend.
I have also read that it is really really hard to show that tutoring pays off for the SAT. I think the SAT is the fairest part of the admissions package.
My problem with SAT/ACT actually has nothing to do with the test itself. I grew up very poor in suburban middle of nowhere and even with a waiver for the fee, I had no way of actually getting to a testing center. Parents worked 24/7 to make ends meet, no real public transport and this was before Uber and Lyft. The real culprit here is the lack of public infrastructure.
this is a perfect example of why governmental services are so important - even if they are often run poorly. Without them, dis-equities inherently perpetuate due to external incentives.
The SAT is treated as a standardized test but it, as you note, is inaccessible to many. It is not government run or organized. I've found, from teaching undergraduates, that most of the students who go to college presume that everyone takes the SATs, that it is government administered, and that it is free.
compare this to the, still far from perfect and problematic in other ways, centralized university admissions testing system in many other countries.
Wow. As someone that isn't in the US, but grew up watching a lot of US TV, I had this same assumption. How the fuck is the primary method of judging student admission to University not a government run service? Wow.
As you say, contrast that to my experience where everyone took University Entrance exams in their final year of school. Score over X and you have the right to go to a university. Don't score high enough? The university can still choose to admit you at their discretion.
> How the fuck is the primary method of judging student admission to University not a government run service?
Because it's only de facto the primary method, as evidenced by MIT dropping it for a while there. They didn't need government permission to do that. Even public universities here generally have a high degree of autonomy regarding such things.
College Board is a nonprofit organization[0] and thus is partially funded by the government to say nothing of any other grants they may have received. ACT Inc is the same way.
Instead of funding The One True Test, the US government partially funds every test competing to be the best college placement test.
Uk qualification exams (GCSE and ALevels) are run by private boards. (Cambridge and Edexcel are the two big ones). These are effectively entrance exams, in that university offers are strongly dependent on them.
> How the fuck is the primary method of judging student admission to University not a government run service?
Well, I mean.. America is experimental capitalism. Why run anything government when it can be for profit and 'the market' will solve any and all issues with it?
It turns out 'the market' will skew in favor of making a small amount of people rich over actually improving the lives of anyone, but hey, that's freedom baby!
They're really precious about it though, so don't criticise this system out loud.
many schools are not public as with the SAT which is also "not-for-profit"
I wonder how one could codify a regulation for schools requiring entrance test to provide "reasonable" accommodations for prospective students to take it; like some parent comments mentioned not everyone can feasibly get to a testing center
> How the fuck is the primary method of judging student admission to University not a government run service? Wow.
Probably the same reason that the Federal Reserve Bank is not a government entity (they only have a meaningless government "oversight board") even though it loans all money to the US Government with interest and has never been audited.
I really hate this meme. The federal reserve is very much under the purview of the legislature. If the legislature isn't choosing to act in the way you would like, well, then that's a completely separate complaint. Implying that the federal reserve is somehow independent from the government is dishonest.
You think the Board of Governors is meaningless? Do you realize the Fed turns over interest it earns to the US Treasury? What an odd thing to bring up in this context.
Now that we know that you have a dislike of the Federal Reserve system, you didn't actually answer the question by stating a reason. What would "the same reason" be?
How can you seriously believe the Fed isn't a government entity? I'm legitimately struggling to understand how you came to such a misguided conclusion.
The ownership structure of the Federal Reserve's 12 constituent reserve banks makes the Fed a mix of private and public banking. Commercial banks hold shares in each of the reserve banks. As shareholders, they elect 6 of the 9 regional directors. So while it's largely a governmental organization, ownership and influence from private banking is certainly present.
Is there evidence physical access to the test center still a problem today (small or large)?
Is SAT worse than other criteria (such as extra-curriculum achievements) when looking at those poor suburbun middle of nowhere students? i.e. even in this example, did SAT actually made thing worse for those people when comparing against the alternative.
Sorry buddy, I can't give you anything other than my anecdata. No knowledge on whether anyone has done any studies on this specifically but lack of public infrastructure contributing to the income disparity has been widely studied.
It was hard enough for me to take the GRE when I went to a uni of 50,000 in a city of around 1 million. The testing center on campus naturally was booked out long in advance. Nearest center was 35 mins away in the outerbelt suburbs in another county at that point I believe, in some huge office park on a stroad without sidewalks nowhere near any bus lines. If I didn't have a car to borrow, there would have been zero way for me as a college student to get to this student testing center short of reserving three hours per leg to bike on de facto highways, which is baffling, but that was the reality.
Is there evidence that physical access has improved? The idea that you’re espousing, that things must have gotten better, is a belief that needs to be backed up.
It’s not just the getting to a testing center, it’s awareness (and cost) of the process.
Was a long time ago now, but parents weren’t really worried about or involved in my college prep process, so I had to figure it out for myself.
It wasn’t until later I realized it would have been better to start taking the test way before graduation. To say nothing of the benefits of test prep..
That was my situation, also. It sucked because in general, all the other kids in school who were academically gifted were from well-to-do families, and I think I was the only one taking AP calc or physics whose family couldn't afford the test.
I imagine through either scholarships or taking on bunches of debt. I was nowhere near as aggressive as some other classmates, but I managed to grab ~20k of total scholarships that helped me out immensely for college. Still a small chunk of what was needed for college, but it was an option I had compared to high school just making me eat the admissions and AP test costs wholesale.
Fortunately my parent did cover these costs, but I know others weren't so fortunate.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like you assuming they took the class for credit at university. Community college is also a possibility where it would be cheaper or around the same price. That also comes with the benefit of financial aid.
Community college is cheap, but isn't $65 for four credits cheap. Most financial aid I've seen has been in the form of loans, which also won't be as cheap as getting credit for those classes from testing out.
> The real culprit here is the lack of public infrastructure.
What was your area like? I grew up similarly poor but in a wealthy area and would walk several miles to a public library for early computer access, biked to school, etc.
My SAT's weren't on campus. It was on some other campus I never heard of on the other side of town. I biked the school but without a parent would have needed to trek across town on a saturday morning (easily 20+ miles, in the mid 00's right before smartphones would just provide a GPS, so I'd be juggling printed MapQuest directions on a bike) to get there. I'd be cutting it if I took a bus since they ran hourly and I believe the weekend buses started at 8Am for a 9AM test time.
Also note that I could drive by this time but we only had one car between my mother and I.
Not sure I would call the area I lived in wealthy. Probably middle-class suburban area. My high school at the time did not offer SAT/ACT testing on campus. If I recall correctly, and it's been a while so I might be misremembering, the closest SAT/ACT testing location was at the community college in the next city over.
Have you ever been to the rural US? Things are very far apart (often 10s of miles) and riding a bike may not be practical for things in the same way as in an urban or suburban area.
Yep - this. I wasn't even in /that/ rural of an area, but I was still ~20 miles (32 Kilometers) away from the nearest testing center. No vehicle to take myself.
My brother-in-law was ill-prepared for technical coursework because he had no choice but to attend a shitty (undemanding, backwoods, rubber-stamp) high school in Minnesota. He got talked into vo-tech training for transmission repair.
Years later, his weaknesses were evaluated at a Community College. He went to work on a one-year remedial skills plan. Then he was admitted to a state University. Four years later got a chemistry degree with honors. IMO it's likely he'd have succeeded at MIT as well. The man was a born techie.
Moral: shitty schools are everybody's loss. And we've continued to lose a lot because some of them are designed that way. Slyly, deliberately, officially sanctioned sly.
I would like to know how much of an “improvement” in outcomes these tests bring.
From another article linked in the one from this discussion:
“In short: Our research has shown that, in most cases, we cannot reliably predict students will do well at MIT unless we consider standardized test results alongside grades, coursework, and other factors. These findings are statistically robust and stable over time, and hold when you control for socioeconomic factors and look across demographic groups. And the math component of the testing turns out to be most important.”
There seems to be a lot of hand-waving in that quote.
If the improvement is only marginal, we really need to ask, as a society, if the improvement is worth all the money, potential for cheating, angst, and outright conflict that come with maintaining these tests.
If we want better talent, we can invest more money and energy into building better schools and paying better salaries to teachers. If we want more diversity, we can target vulnerable communities specifically.
The test prep industry is milking families that care about (and might even be obsessed with) education. It encourages folks to think of the whole system as a rat race, and leads to selfishness and hoarding of knowledge.
If we did away with standardized testing and spent more money on schools and teachers, we could cultivate a perception of education as a public good. It would be less about who has more resources and more about raising the tide and giving more people a fair shot.
This is the best outcome but then you don't get "prestigious" schools of the elite. I went to a public university and I'm much better off for it than my MIT peers.
I think the bigger question is whether we should have exclusive schools like MIT.
Screening for college admissions made sense a century ago, when 5% of people went to college. Today, not so much. From an undergrad class perspective, the difference between MIT and a better state school is mostly the brand stamp and the admissions department.
Why do we want to stamp people with a stamp like "MIT"?
If you want to be brutally honest, because other people in industry have the stamp of "MIT". There will just be natural bias when hearing that a prospective candidate attended your alma mata where you know (in your own personal experience) that the school runs you through the ringer. Nothing more relatable than saying "Hey is Professor Bob still teaching Astro 401? his tests were brutal" and instantly understanding how "this person survived that, he can survive JobCo".
If nothing else, the branding is reflective of how the world at large works, I guess.
Even more brutal honesty: MIT has core requirements that are about the toughest in the nation except for CalTech's. One term of calculus beyond the AP BC sequence, calculus based classical mechanics and E&M, one term each of chemistry and biology. No matter what degree you get, you have to get at least C grades based on mastery, not a curve.
And reading between the lines, it sounds like MIT has another "lost class" or two. A few years after I was admitted to MIT, the Director of Admissions retired and was replaced by a professional in the field. And being a professional he followed the faculty's official findings on how to select applicants and all of a sudden MIT was getting calls from schools asking why their best students were no longer getting accepted while the next tier suddenly were. And rather quickly the physics faculty led a revolt because way too many of their students were having too much difficulty with the above above minimum core requirements.
I got to casually know one of these students, she was very nice and of course smart, but boy did she struggle with the required math based core curricula of her major unlike her female peers from my years and thereabouts.
My question was a little bit deeper. I understand why we have elite schools.
Harvard's an easy one. Rich and powerful people look smart by association with smart people. Smart people gain access to powerful social networks.
My question was why this was a good idea for society. MIT was funded through federal grants, financial aid, and philanthropic donations. It's a 501(c)3. If it's bad for the world, we ought to have some mechanism to fix it.
We don't, and that's a deeper discussion about how we want to organize society. We ought to. In the limit case of a self-perpetuating endowment harming the world, there ought to be some way for that to be repurposed to help the world.
I mean, all education does (and should) make use of state and federal funding to provide an education, arguably they don't give enough for quality education in grade school.
And I don't think there's much of a solution to the conundrum of "rich people donate to the rich places and attract more rich people". In all the various other ways billionaires avoid taxes and donate to shady organizations/"charities", it's hard to really knock on them giving money to a place where (in SOME capacity) individuals past their immediate community benefit. It can certainly be better utilized, but I don't have a big fuss with it in the grand scheme of things.
Financial aid is certainly a bubble soon to burst, but that's an issue that expands nationwide, not just in the elite schools.
A lot of folks focus on act/sat scores when talking about diversity when really these ivy league schools shouldn't have an express lane for legacy entrants. If you are trying to be different than how it was previously, how can you expect that to happen when you give preference to folks that benefited previously?
Without legacy and the prestige and the entire shebang of old English style college, the Ivy Leagues aren't the Ivy League.
I agree with you that eliminating legacy would solve the issue of making the school different - it's never gonna happen though, so there's no point in talking about it honestly.
> shebang of old English style college, the Ivy Leagues aren't the Ivy League
I'm not quite sure what this legacy thing is, but I don't think English universities do it. It sounds corrupt to me, and I think it would be a national scandal.
Here's how "former MIT admissions director" McGreggor Crowley justified providing preferences to children of alumni and wealthy donors:
"What about university donors, though? Don’t they have an unfair advantage in this process? In truth, for every office of admissions there is a development office that builds a university’s endowment through donations from alumni and wealthy individuals. And every year, regardless of what a college or university says publicly, a number of children of wealthy donors and alumni get a nod in their direction while other applicants are rejected.
The reality is, the money generated by admitting wealthy students often serves to subsidize the financial aid of those less fortunate. If one squints, one might see here a karmic balance enabling many students to attend a college they otherwise could never afford."
Note he said "every office of admissions" and "regardless of what a college or university says publicly." If MIT were an exception, presumably he would have mentioned it. The "regardless of what a college or university says publicly" implies that MIT may be not stating the entire truth when they claim "we don't do legacy"[2] or that MIT's internal behavior may have changed since Crowley worked there. I'm not sure what MIT has to say about providing admissions preferences to children of wealthy donors the way many (most?)[3] universities including Stanford[4] do.
This stuff allows for way too many back doors and intentionally makes the process more opaque. If they were honest they would just name an amount that guarantees admission so rich guys could buy their way into the school instead of hiding behind “charity”.
I don't know that all stressors are alike. I don't feel stress in exam situations, most of the stress I feel at work is around social stressors. I don't think a university education should be easy persay, but I do think that the stressors of education should not be unique in the world. If success in the face of stresses of examination in school don't predict success in the face of stressors you face elsewhere in life, then maybe they should be re-evaluated.
MIT grad here. The achievement tests are more of a counter-indicator If you score under 700 on either test, you probably cant handle the coursework. The tests only test a 10th grade level.
I likely would not get into MIT this decade this decade with my test score 1480.
Number of stupid mistakes on a test is not indicative of success at MIT. I was lucky in that I test well from having competed in different math contests, but I don't confuse that with being better. If I didn't compete in those, I would have been no less qualified.
The article is spot-on. MIT ignores test scores above some threshold. That's a reasonable way to go.
While acceptance rates have gotten lower, some of it is due to more people applying.
Average scores are higher because more people are studying for exams than 20 years ago.
But I don't think the course work has necessarily gotten any more difficult.
So while it's true that 1480 wouldn't get you in MIT these days, if the same exact "You" were born amongst the kids applying to college these days, your score would likely be higher.
I was kind of hoping that the inline citations would lead to how they reached their conclusions. But it's just more "our research shows" conclusions without the meat underneath. Do they publish their methodology anywhere?
(It's pretty funny that the first red highlight hover is explaining that you can hover over red highlights to see more information. The only people reading it are the ones who no longer need to be told.)
I had the same observation. There is no data. It's nonsensical if you think about it: MIT stops using SAT/ACT in 2020 and now in March 2022 they have "robust" data that those students don't perform as well academically.
They’ve had a year with the students they admitted with no SAT. So they have one year of instructor experience with students selected without benefit of SATs. 700 or so students, two semesters of examinations. That’s plenty of data to see a dramatic fall in student preparedness.
It's most certainly not enough data. There is no way that academic OUTCOMES of a 4-year degree program can be measured by a couple exams from introductory courses during a time when classes were moved to being online.
Even if this "robust" data indeed showed that academic outcomes were worse over the course of one year, how can that possibly be attributed to not viewing students' SAT scores instead of, say, the entire classroom experience being upended and moved online?
One way that rich parents can game SAT/ACT is through aggressive seeking of test accommodations for disabilities. There was common knowledge of up to 50% of test takers having extended time in some affluent private schools in the SF Bay Area prior to the Covid pause.
In the case of students trying to get into MIT I wonder if there is actually much point in gaming the test?
The article says they are using the tests as a threshold. It sounds like they don't care by how much you pass the threshold, just that you have passed it.
I'd expect that most students who will be able to survive at MIT can make the SAT threshold with no gaming of the test and no test prep other than maybe doing one or two free sample tests.
Someone who could not easily make the threshold on their own who games their way in is just going to find that the coursework crushes them. All that gaming their way in gains them is the ability to in a year or two add "flunked out of MIT" to their bio.
Roughly nobody at MIT brags about SAT scores (at least when I was there 20 years ago). Any test is most sensitive around a given range. I think most MIT students are performing well enough in math that most of their mistakes in the SAT I and SAT II math subject tests are roughly statistical noise. I happened to get 800 on the math sections of both the SAT I and SAT II, and I got the impression most of the other students at MIT did similarly. I'm sure there are plenty of people with better mathematical ability than me who got 760s because of a loud neighbor or a bad breakfast burrito.
> I'd expect that most students who will be able to survive at MIT can make the SAT threshold with no gaming of the test and no test prep other than maybe doing one or two free sample tests.
Eh, not so sure. The "threshold", if we really trust that they do threshold and don't consider overperformance beyond that threshold (something I am skeptical of), is likely quite high.
The MIT threshold is 800 minus noise. So MIT can't consider overperformance on the SAT (math section) because the test is designed to make students indistinguishable at the top. All it does is help them weed out the chaff who won't be able to handle the mandatory math and physics classes that all students have to pass.
Very good point, and explains exactly why there should be no extra time on these tests. Give everyone the same time, same test, see how they do on the curve, and then you can make accommodations for disabilities ie 'how do you do among students with your disability or disabilities.
isn't that already the case for all grades? and all extracurriculars? (i.e., picking teams that allow anyone to join, or giving students who couldn't make the cut a pity position on a team such as `team manager` so they can add it to their college application?)
The implementation of footnotes on the right side of the screen is really cool, and not something I've seen before. Such a cool idea. I think it would be interesting for news publications to try that out in articles as well. It could allow for brevity in the main article text, but still allow those who want to know the source of a statement/fact or more detail the option to obtain it.
Buried in the details it says that MIT will be accepting anyone over a (presumably secret) threshold, not using it as a ranking tool as some people might indicate.
> MIT will be accepting anyone over a (presumably secret) threshold
I don’t think it’s a hard threshold. Some people are bad standardised test takers. If the rest of their application shows they won’t flunk their math tests, a lower score could be fine. If, on the other hand, it looks like a pattern, a marginal score could be seen to not make the cut.
I think the parent means "a score above a threshold gets the rest of your application read."
Certainly the article would not support reading "accepting" as "admitting".
"We do not prefer people with perfect scores"
"our research shows students also need [...] the resilience to rebound from its challenges, and the initiative to make use of its resources. That’s why we don’t select students solely on how well they score on the tests, but only consider scores to the extent they help us feel more confident about an applicant’s preparedness ..."
I read this as saying two extremely important traits are:
This seems a bit ridiculous. One would assume they could fill their entire class with 1600 SAT scorers but they don't and I think it's well known that isn't even sufficient.
To deal with socioeconomic issues in STEM, start early; very early like K-12.
In a vague fantasy world in the USA, I would reduce the Department of Education to a fraction, shift education to the States, take the best parts of the winning systems fom all States, and make Federal recommendations accordingly. Rinse, repeat.
I am saddened that most of the children I come across in first-world nations, lack the ability to rationally think through a real-world problem.
It seems like a good approach but the funding of things like special needs education (FAPE) is federal in nature; cutting those would likely nuke special needs programs nationwide.
You would need to start with your 2nd or 3rd "approximation" of your iterative approach (ie, pre-calc which programs are already popular/effective and keep those) unless your goal is to cause maximum disruption and possibly jeopardize your ability to do the "make Federal recommendations" effectively.
I'm always mildly assumed that Switzerland has 26 widely-different (far more variety than found in the US) school systems with only ~8 million people. And a high-school degree that guarantees entrance into any university in any subject.
Their are federal standards for said high-school degree (also for earlier education stages). And it's a relatively hard degree to get (22% of students get it).
Quite surprising that they went back on their policy, but it's a welcome change. Removing standardized tests and replacing them with more subjective methods necessarily reduces outcomes surrounding academic excellence, and almost always exacerbates socioeconomic/racial inequity (with a strong anti-Asian bias, as shown in almost all studies when test scores are blinded/dropped).
I had a high school teacher that liked to say the following:
You can be smart and lazy and do fine. You can be dim and hard-working and do fine. But smart and hard-working will always beat them both.
I was pretty clearly in the smart and lazy camp, and was OK with that lot. And, as he said, I've done fine.
EDIT: I should add, though, that I'm very happy the SAT did not have the writing section when I took it. I severely doubt it would have improved my relative score.
~.2 isn't really "huge".. Your source shows that the SAT is much more strongly correlated with other measures of aptitude.
The SAT does indeed correlate slightly more strongly with income than the AFQT does, which could show the "gaming" of the test. Only a ~.03 stronger correlation though. Not particularly dramatic.
Yes, but is that correlation after controlling for IQ and work ethic? Because family income correlates with IQ and work ethic...
As far as I can tell, the thing the SAT really correlates with most is the thing it's actually designed to predict: ability to succeed in college, as measured by college GPA. (In particular, the correlation between college GPA and SAT score is higher than between college GPA and high school GPA.)
Having a high IQ means you can probably retain information better with less effort but for the vast majority of students, its a question of consistent work ethic.
Important to differentiate places like South Korea has a massive privatized cram schools where it does a fantastic job of creating high scorers but because it is scaled, it means if you are not paying extra and spending ridiculous time in privatized cram schools, you are almost certainly going to fail unless you can rely on some innate genius. Here in this case, it is truly discriminating students based on the economic capacity of their parents and it has the highest houshold debt not only from real estate but from debt to finance the young into educational hell.
Another unpopular opinion: Unhappiness correlates with high IQ if a proper outlet is not met due to a variety of factors.
This would have been good news for me were I planning to apply today. I got very poor grades in high school and if they had ranked the students or calculated a gpa I doubt anyone would have looked at my application at all.
I’m really glad to see this part; I hope it’s true:
> At the same time, standardized tests also help us identify academically prepared, socioeconomically disadvantaged students who could not otherwise demonstrate readiness
When I was at MIT I felt that the institute was working hard on this area and took it seriously (for undergrads at least), though how well I could not tell — I was most definitely not of any cohort that deserved any special treatment.
My dyslexia is so bad that these types of tests were/are a total barrier to entry for me and folks like myself.
Fortunately, tech is one high-paying industry where an IT degree from a great university and certifications are not required to get a job making good money. I was able to learn system administration - network engineering at the community college and use online resources.
If there is one positive is that MIT has a very small undergraduate class so the impact will be minimal across the global cohorts of future college students. Perhaps perspective students will stop applying to that school and focus their application strategy on schools that do not have this requirement.
This explanation could have benefited from histograms showing the distribution of grades pre-and-post making the test optional, and then showing statistical tests that the null-hypothesis, that the grades are the same, could be rejected.
The SAT being a help to low-income students shows how messed up the US high school system is. Normally standardized tests hurt low-income students because they require extra-curricular resources to do well on. In the US they hurt poor students less because the GPA system is so badly broken. AP courses are not offered in the poorest schools but offer such large bonuses to GPA that a 4.0 GPA is considered very poor for applying to university. A student can literally have a perfect GPA in the best courses offered by their school and be considered a very poor applicant academically.
It’s literally two straightforward google searches. Search “university entrance GPA admissions USA” has a top result that shows that Ivy League admissions have weighted GPAs above 4.0. Searching “course offerings poor us high schools” shows some high schools only offer courses where 4.0 is the top GPA.
It's clear the SAT/ACT has predictive power for highly-selective colleges, such as MIT. And therefore, they are valuable for these colleges – especially for the Math scores as MIT suggests. The value of SAT/ACT scores decreases as selectivity decreases or as math abilities matter less for admission (e.g., liberal arts programs).
Here are some related points:
- Harvard considers roughly 4 in 5 applicants to be academically capable of doing the work at Harvard (about 50,000 applicants of which Harvard only accepts 2,000). This data is pulled from their court documents, and my team wrote about it here: https://writingcenter.prompt.com/posts/strong-essays-increas....
- This means that most applicants at highly-selective colleges are very similar academically. Colleges are mostly just using grades, academic rigor, and test scores to determine whether the student will be able to succeed doing the work in college. Absent other information on academic preparation (e.g., not having access to AP/IB classes), the SAT/ACT score can be a critical signal of whether the student can do the work. Students with well-above-the-bar academics are admitted at a 3x clip to those just above the academic bar. But other parts of the application (e.g., essays, athletics) can have a much stronger effect on admissions chances (e.g., a strong personal score, much of which is essay-related, can have a 10x increase on admissions chances).
- Math SAT really is highly predictive of math abilities. When I was with McKinsey, we asked for applicants' SAT scores because it was highly predictive of people succeeding at McKinsey. People hired with scores below 700 struggled to succeed analytically. So, McKinsey used 700 as a bar. MIT is roughly doing the same thing here. Other colleges do this as well.
- Outside of highly-selective institutions, the SAT/ACT can have less predictive power in student success in college than other factors (e.g., GPA). There are a bunch of great analyses at fairtest.org that looks at these exams - e.g., breaking scores down by race.
So overall, we tend to give weight to what we know and what data we're looking at. Most of the SAT/ACT analyses out there are looking across all students. Here, MIT is looking at just their proportion of students. So, both things can be true – the SAT/ACT may not be a useful predictor for the vast majority of students. But scores can (and do) matter for the highest performers, the approximately 1% of high school graduates attending the most selective colleges.
And as MIT states, a perfect SAT/ACT score doesn't matter all that much. All they're using the scores for is to provide an indication of whether the student is above their bar for being able to do the work (e.g., not failing multivariable calculus).
Note: I did go to MIT – some of you may think this is relevant. I also run the largest college essay coaching company globally, Prompt.com. So I've spent a lot of time understanding college admissions.
> Harvard considers roughly 4 in 5 applicants to be academically capable of doing the work at Harvard
I have no doubt that this is true of Harvard. I mean, after all, you can pick your own classes! That said, I think there is a difference between admitting just those capable of doing the work vs. a set of some of the best of the best, in that that second group will be the one filling the advanced physics classes for first years or whatever.
Best of the best is very subjective. Once you're over the academic bar of being able to do the work, other factors are far more important for success in college and life.
Essentially, there's a bar for intellectual horsepower – which 4 in 5 Harvard applicants are above. And this is the same for all highly-selective institutions.
Then, other factors become far more important. Specifically, colleges look for people who are unusual even in a pool of extremely higher-performers (essentially the top 1% of all high school graduates). Students who are unusually driven, unusually intellectually curious, unusual contributors, unusual experiences, unusual at taking the initiative.
These personality traits are very similar to what YC looks for in founders. Raw intellectual horsepower is important – but only to a point. Given the choice between a student far above the academic bar without any other distinguishing features and a student just above the academic bar but is unusually driven – we'd pick the unusually driven person pretty much every time.
You want to do a calc test instead? I wouldn't even complain. If the average leetcode is hard for someone they're probably going to suck at even just integration e^z over the unit circle showing your work.
We could even tell them it demonstrates “problem solving” and “critical thinking” skills when they ask how leetcode is relevant on day to day university life.
The 1k+ comment count speaks for itself, but it's hard to overstate the importance of this decision. Maybe the wind has changed on some very lofty peaks.
My opinion has always been that the SAT/ACT is the best method we currently have to achieve any reasonable goals that you might have for an admissions process, with one possible exception. In fact the SAT/ACT looks to me like a better method to achieve the aims that the anti-SAT faction claims they're fighting for, than any other method on the table, again with one exception. As such I'm delighted with this decision.
(Sure, you could spend a lot of time and money designing a test that's even better calibrated than the SAT/ACT, and then switch to that. Until you've done that, I'm in favour of sticking with the SAT/ACT.)
The one exception is if you want a quota-based affirmative action program (or, to be more precise, a back door to get around the legal ban on an openly quota-based admissions system in the US). It is possible for two people to disagree on whether this is a good thing while both of them remain decent human beings, as far as I'm concerned.
Well, in Canada we don’t have standardized exam like ACT and SAT but we do have provincial exams that account for 20% of your grade in major courses from Gr 10 to 12.
I didn’t do fancy extra curriculars. I merely joined student council to organize events, started an announcement club (just me reading a school events over the PA), and didn’t do any sports (but did music and band). None of these are costly.
I think the truth is you need to look at a diverse rage of factors. If someone is not into sports, let’s look at what else they did. If grades are high, why do they need to engage in other extracurricular?
Obviously, the motive is different. Students want education to find what they want to do or gain skills, reps and network to find a job that pays descent.
Universities however look at other criteria - % alumni finding a job, average alumni pay, etc.
What we do should ultimately help the students achieve what they want while balancing the motives for universities.
The question is, should a university
a. maximize for absolute value of success of its alums (for some definition of "success"), or
b. maximize for the value it adds to the student (and hence the society) by considering the difference in the said measure as a result of the student joining the univ.
(a) is easier to measure and optimize for. But it will select for students who will do well in later life - irrespective of what the univ has to offer. The univ's entrance criteria will exhibit this bias. Of course, some biases can be explicitly countered - by having a quota system for those with less privilege. But in each of those subsets, the univ still tries to maximize for absolute success of the individual.
(b) is harder to measure - as it seeks to quantify the portion of individual's success that can be attributed to the univ specifically.
as somebody who came from an underprivileged background, showed talent in standardized testing and had an outstanding career as a military officer, author and politician.
Part of the problem I see with standardized testing is that the stakes are so high. Some fraction of the people out there just get nervous or have a bad day. Nothing about these high pressure situations really reflects anything important in the real world.
I'm a law student now. In law school, your entire grade usually comes from one 3-4 hour essay exam. Much depends on luck, how well you slept the night before, and how frantically you can type. It's absurd. It's been that way for some 100 years.
I've always been able to play ball with standardized, timed exams, but I have had enough exposure to neuro-diversity that I can empathize with many. I just wish there was a way to de-stress these kinds of exams somehow. I don't know the solution, but I think it would answer of a lot of objections to them.
I can't comment on law, but back when I took the SAT and ACT (granted, it was a previous millenium) you could retake the test. The issue was, unless you were sick or otherwise in an abnormal state, you would usually get a pretty similar score the second time. They provide a few examples of old tests, so you know going in what your score is likely to be, thus you will know if it is likely to improve much if you take it again.
I'm not saying that these tests are not effective predictors of something. In fact, I'm sure they are.
I'm saying that it's certain that they way they are administered leave a lot of people behind, and I don't think it has to be that way. There are many objections to these kinds of metrics, often involving disabilities or socioeconomic issues. I guess I'm just wondering out loud how much of that has to do with the physical way in which the tests are administered.
As to reflecting the real world, all I can do is point to my own experiences: military, academic, legal, and corporate, and say being good at high stakes, infrequent, timed, standardized tests is not very important in those contexts.
Here are 2 Malcolm Gladwell podcasts on the startling disconnect between the skills required to succeed on the LSAT and the skills required to succeed as a high-prestige lawyer:
While the LSAT does predict success in those jobs, the skills needed to succeed on the LSAT have nothing to do with being a good Supreme Court clerk -- especially the going super fast part.
> I'm a law student now. In law school, your entire grade usually comes from one 3-4 hour essay exam. Much depends on luck, how well you slept the night before, and how frantically you can type. It's absurd. It's been that way for some 100 years.
Well, not quite that way for 100 years. When I was in law school 30 years ago (University of Washington) it would for most people be "how frantically you can handwrite" rather than "how frantically you can type".
There was a room set aside for people who wanted to bring and use typewriters but it was fairly hard to actually find a typewriter that they would allow. By the early '90s even low end typewriters often had several lines of buffer memory and an LCD display so that you could store and edit text before printing it, and higher end models were essentially specialized laptops that only ran a word processor and a printer driver. At my school if it had two or more lines of text storage it was considered to be a word processor or computer and not allowed.
I had to drive all over Seattle before finding a place that still sold typewriters plain enough to be allowed.
Law schools put so much energy into these exam procedures! And all under the banner of preventing cheating and producing a nice curve.
Now the technological arms race faced by law schools is how to get students to read anything in a world where case summaries (eg. Quimbee) and all hornbooks are freely, trivially available.
I suspect the schools will continue defend the case method for a long time to come, even as the vast majority of students don't read cases any more and even practitioners rely heavily on headnotes and other electronic research tools.
Still standardized tests are the most fair and least gameable way for admissions. Just because there is some issues, doesn't mean everything else isn't infinitely worse.
Many Americans in the comments here acknowledge that the admissions system in the United States is broken and prejudiced, and then continue on to celebrate what is otherwise a band-aid for a systemic disorder.
To me, standardized tests like the SAT scream "our education is so inconsistent across our country that instead of attempting to improve it we simply ignore it and focus on an entirely different artifact."
Standardized tests are good for one thing: measuring how good examinees are at taking standardized tests.
Shouldn't a dataset collected over four years be more thorough and representative of a prospective student's capability of successfully navigating what is usually a four year undergraduate program?
After all, the purpose of a system is what it does.
A long time ago, there used to be standardized tests for all sorts of things. These allowed people of all backgrounds to pursue career paths in many industries, without requiring the time and money involved in getting a college degree.
They were sued into oblivion because of what we now call equity. The pernicious idea that if equality of outcome is not observed, then it must be due to racism.
The industries that used these ended up de-risking by just requiring college degrees.
One of the things the SAT appears to actually measure is income. More specifically it measures access to expensive preparatory courses, which is a good proxy for income.
The "expensive preparatory courses" offer something like a 10-30 point benefit over checking out an SAT prep book from the library, if you control for the time spent on preparation, last I checked.
What the courses do offer, of course, is the structure to force indifferent students to sit through the preparation.
There's a lot of bad statistics, whether by accident or with an agenda, being done around the SAT....
But more important than all that, as the MIT post says, pretty much all the other measures elite colleges use for admitting students correlate even _more_ with income than the SAT does.
I understand the audience here, but we don't need more emphasis on iq. We need more emphasis on ethics. We already have the power to destroy ourselves many times over, and within a century, will likely be seeing AI that can best a human in any intellectual endeavor, by an order of magnitude. Ethics first, with some baseline level of intellect, will be the only way out of this impending disaster.
As someone from the UK I am confused by this. What were they using to decide who to admit without SAT/ACT tests?
In the UK all students pick at least 3 A levels at the end of their high school. Each degree and university then has different requirements like 3 As in Math, Physics, IT (with some alternative subjects) for Computer Science. So my understanding of SAT/ACT testing is limited.
because certain demographics performed poorly at it, that was grounds to label it systematic racism and justifying affirmative action vs. meritocracy by discriminating other demographics in favor of ones that were perceived to be victims of systematic racism
if you are confused so am I. I still don't understand how they can discriminate against americans of asian descent who do well on standardized tests but not call it for what it is.
I'm grateful for the SAT/ACT being present when I was in high school(HS). Without it I might not have a decent education, mostly b/c I was drifting along and paying little attention to life.
Junior year I had high PSAT scores and received letters from various universities expressing interest. Yet I hadn't even considered what I would do after HS. I was amazed to see anyone expressing interest, decided it was a fluke and dropped it all in the trash.
Next year I scored high on the SAT and unexpectedly received multiple offers for full scholarships, room and board et al from universities. I asked around and realized my peers had been applying to colleges for months while I, the quintessential apostle of Lao Tzu (OK, I'm lazy!), had done absolutely nothing.
I hesitated to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when there were several. I picked one and was off to college. My Dad was pleased to get off the hook for college costs, Mom was proud, but I mostly felt sorry for friends who had to work hard to get into university.
tl;dr: PSAT and SAT made getting into college easy for me and I am thankful.
The purpose of college admission should make sure that students sitting in the same room should have similar learning ability. Denying the existence of uneven learning ability in students only makes things worse.
IQ means Intelligence Quotient, which is simply a way of representing a score on an intelligence test by dividing the individual's score by the population mean (and then doing transformation to make the numbers look nice).
An IQ test is simply short-hand for a test of general intelligence.
As a minority, i think those pushing for removing the SAT/ACT are racist in that they think certain minorities cannot perform as well as others. The whole point is that the SAT is the only objective piece of an application that can be easily compared between applicants. They want to reduce to only subjective qualifications which they can easily manipulate to benefit groups they deem under-represented. Its the bigotry of low expectations.
Their problem isnt that the SAT can be gamed, its that it has an objective score which cant be manipulated to benefit who they deem worthy.
> Standardized testing is a joke. There are other, better forms of tests. See: Europe
Europe isn't a country.
France has BAC and BEPC and plenty of other forms of standardized tests at every step of its education system, as a requirement to integrate highschool or college. Same in Spain or Germany. If anything most countries in Europe have a more conservative approach when it comes to candidate selection: strict standardized tests.
All Nordic countries have (Standardized) national level testing and also have tests that have to do with the local school. All of them are top performers when it comes to education.
> as a result, not having SATs/ACT scores to consider tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education
It all come down to me to what this point touches.
When you have a test, you have something definite to prepare for. Even if you do not have dedicated mentors or well-wishing, caring teachers, you simply know there is a test that significantly improves your chances for MIT.
When you don't have a test, you have to study all the year round, do all homeworks, be active members of math, chess, or debate club all the year round and win at least province-level competitions, play an instrument at the school band, be elected the class monitor, create social equity clubs, do social service and so on.
Which path do you think will be easier for someone from an impoverished, troubled background?
Is it easier to prepare for a test for three months or be a whole different person severely constrained by your background?
Whom does no-test policies benefit? The rich White student living in a gated community, or a Black/Hispanic person living in slum-like condition?
____
I have little first hand experience (was born in a middle-of-nowhere small town, but wasn’t truly poor), and a lot of second-hand experience. I know a lot of friends, acquaintances who moved up the socio-economic ladder just because test-score based admission policies existed.
The people who promote no-test policies are deluded ivory-tower dwellers detached from reality.
The no-test policy is espoused by two groups who find themselves to be unlikely allies: naive progressives and actual racists.
The naive progressives think what you’d expect: “Minorities and poor people can’t possibly be expected to do well on anything objective, so it’s unfair to test them”. It is bigotry, but at least it’s well-meaning.
The actual racists are more cynical: “I don’t want Yale to be 67% Asian.” Obviously, this is even worse.
There are other groups too. Like Big Rich Daddy who wants his kid to go to Yale as a legacy but he only has a 26 ACT and has only donated like $1m. When test scores are required, top schools basically have a “budget” of 25% of their student body they can admit with any score without it adversely affecting college rankings. Making tests optional makes it easier to admit more students that don’t “meet the bar” otherwise, since they don’t count against the 25% quota.
When I went to $(fancy school not quite Yale but like Yale), they were even more blatant - the admissions people just flat out stated they have a quota for legacies and they have different standards.
You sound like they should be ashamed of it? I'd rather go to a school where the under-performing students at least had well connected and wealthy families: much of the point of these institutions are networking-- if you just want to learn there are many other alternatives.
I mean, I'm definitely a naive progressive (and probably hold some internalized bigotry that I'm unaware of), but I was against the SAT/ACT requirements sort of for the opposite reason than what you described.
I half-assed my entire way through high school, but studied for about a month for the ACT and did extremely well (perfect in all categories except Math, which I got a 32 in). I didn't get into MIT (I never applied) but I did get into a few other relatively well-regarded universities (Auburn, NYU) despite my awful grades, almost exclusively riding off the strength of my ACT scores, and ended up going to Florida State (since it was cheaper than the other two I listed). I dropped out after 2 years (nearly flunking out due to low grades).
To me, this showed that the tests are not an accurate measurement of how successful someone will be at college, but instead just how well someone can prepare for a specific test. If that's the case, why add the extra cost, both time and money-wise? If a mediocre student can just cram for a few weeks and do well on the test, then it seems to me that it's not a great test.
I acknowledge that this is pure anecdata, but that was my perspective, not "minorities can't be expected to do well on anything objective" and not "I don't want Yale to be 2/3 asian."
Edit: I should add, thanks for pointing out a third group - people who think the tests don’t work!
> To me, this showed that the tests are not an accurate measurement of how successful someone will be at college
The test proves you are smart enough.
Like, do you believe you were not intellectually capable of getting through college? That you flunked out for a pure lack of IQ and no other factors? From the writing in your comment alone I find that hard to believe.
There are some other factors you need to be successful in college, like interest, motivation, work ethic. Also luck - avoiding illness for example.
And I don’t think anybody is suggesting colleges should ONLY use standardised IQ tests for admittance, they should try to select for those other things too if they can do so fairly and accurately.
I can’t pretend to know you enough to know why you dropped out. But if I had to bet it wasn’t raw IQ.
> I can’t pretend to know you enough to know why you dropped out. But if I had to bet it wasn’t raw IQ.
No it almost certainly wasn't raw IQ (not that I take a lot of stock in IQ in itself anyway), it was a combination of depression and attention issues.
> The test proves you are smart enough.
I wouldn't exactly call the ACT (I never took the SAT so I cannot speak to it) an objective measure of intelligence. It's extremely formulaic, and you can get "good" at taking it just by doing a boatload of practice tests, which is what I did. If the Kaplan practice tests are anything to go on, I would have gotten about 21 (not a great score) the first time taking the test had I not studied for it. I doubt I got considerably "smarter" in a month, I think I just got better at taking ACT tests.
The 'truer' measure of your aptitude was likely your highest score. They allow multiple takes of the test because they understand that testing has errors from jitters, misunderstanding the wording, time management, a bad night of sleep, etc.
Even within the bounds of a single class, we often get better at taking tests in a class once we understand the instructor's style.
Ultimately, the score of everyone who takes the test fairly is capped by their aptitude. If we want to even the playing field, we should find a way to allow disadvantaged kids to have multiple tries at the test with some preparation. They may already have it.
I’m interested to see what happens if schools become truly race blind. I’ve heard that top schools may be >50% Asian. What would that mean for these schools? Would being predominantly Asian mean Harvard isn’t Harvard anymore? Would lopsided racial makeup make these schools less pretigious? Would they produce even more value with the top minds and nothing else?
Not quite the same as an Ivy, but UC Berkeley (top public university) is doing just fine with disproportionate representation of East Asian Students. Still prestigious, still a great school, and still stocked with hippie coops if that’s your idea of the school’s culture.
Ivy League schools are a bit different. Part of the value is access to capital, which means maintaining a wealthy community of alumni. The legacy admissions are grotesquely unfair but they do happen for a reason.
One would hope that if admittence into these schools is truly based on merit, then they'd pick the best regardless. I mean, what if Inuits turned out to be the most gifted genotype of humans WRT intelligence. Would it be wrong if Harvard became 80% Inuit? Presumably the student body would be smart enough to retain the culture that works and dump the stuff that doesn't, at a relatively conservative rate. (Personally I think elitism itself is what these institutions are defining/producing/protecting, and math ability is (relatively) easy to measure. I personally would love it if MIT started feeding us Presidents and Senators instead of Harvard -- or maybe better, if Harvard really kicked people out for failing to learn calc by second year.)
Practically, the University of California system is as close as you will get to that, as they are bound by law to not use affirmative action. Looking through the statistics[1], you definitely do see strong ethnic trends in admissions, especially for the top tier schools of Berkeley and UCLA, even when looking only at domestic applications.
That being said, the UC system maintains a prestigious reputation.
I think we can disagree with a policy without saying, "The people who agree with this policy are racist.". I mean weren't the elimination of standardized tests also justified on them supposedly being racist? At this point I couldn't care less what people assume the motivations of their opponents are.
right, I think that type of bigotry is commonly identified with the phrase the soft bigotry of low expectations. Never knew the origins of that phrase until today. Interesting to see the word implicit show up in the definition, sounds about right.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/soft_bigotry_of_low_expectati...
The far right and far left share a surprising amount of common ground in their beliefs. Vaccines are bad. Science is a conspiracy. Big tech must be strictly controlled by government. Speech must be tightly controlled. Individual rights are less important compared to overall societal benefit. We must not be race-blind but rather use race as a critical factor in deciding outcomes.
I grew up not terribly well off and I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that college admission depended on extracurriculars and such - I never really thought much about that until I grew up, did relatively well for myself and had my own kids. Then I found out just how much these extracurriculars cost and how much parental guidance is involved in sticking with them. My kids did sports in high school - but the busses don't take kids to and from the school in the off-hours that sport practices take place, so I had to drive them in early and pick them up late. That was an option for me - it wouldn't have been for my dad. The only reason they made the teams in the first place, also, was because they had been doing rec league sports since they were little kids and were already competitive going into high school (we knew plenty of kids who tried out for the teams and didn't make it). We've sunk who knows how much money into private lessons/coaching/one-on-ones, etc. None of this would have been possible for my parents, even if we'd been the type of family that did that sort of thing.
The ones that I did- needed spending of little to no money, but needed a lot of time. I could afford it.
Someone I know, who is now a pharmacist at a big-pharma had to help his dad in his men's salloon after school. He has zero extracurriculars, but good scores, and he reached a reputed college with much of his fees paid for due to standardised test scores.
I see myself as a well-rounded person. But if I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t be where I am today as a person; I would be much less. (You can see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30821265)
I am not saying I would have been the same as him. Because I have seen people grow up as comfortable as, or in much better situations than me, yet achieving much lower than me.
> When you have a test, you have something definite to prepare for. Even if you do not have dedicated mentors or well-wishing, caring teachers, you simply know there is a test that significantly improves your chances for MIT.
Totally tangential, but this is also why I’ve slowly come around to appreciating technical interviews. Yes, it’s annoying, but it’s also a pretty straightforward path to getting a $150k+/yr job.
our ability to accurately predict student academic success at MIT 02 Our research shows this predictive validity holds even when you control for socioeconomic factors that correlate with testing. It also shows that good grades in high school do not themselves necessarily translate to academic success at MIT if you cannot account for testing. Of course, we can never be fully certain how any given applicant will do: we're predicting the development of people, not the movement of planets, and people always surprise you. However, our research does help us establish bands of confidence that hold true in the aggregate, while allowing us, as admissions officers, to exercise individual contextual discretion in each case. The word 'significantly' in this bullet point is accurate both statistically and idiomatically.is significantly improved by considering standardized testing — especially in mathematics — alongside other factors
So much for that common, popular notion that standardized tests do not predict anything of value.
It's far easier for rich students to game GPA, college essays and extracurriculars than it is for them to game the SAT.
For GPA, they can hire a private tutor in the subject they're struggling with. There are services out there that will basically write your english essay for you / do your math/science homework.
For college essays, they can hire college counselors to help them draft a compelling essay.
For extra curriculars, they can hire a private coach, etc.
However, there is very limited evidence that SAT coaching actually increases your SAT score. The NACAC did a study on this and they found that average gains of test-prep students is ~30 points (this was when the SAT was 2400 points).
A 30 point increase out of 2400 points is not material to college admissions.
Out of the college essay, gpa, extracurriculars, etc. the SAT is the least influenced by your socioeconomic status. There obviously is an influence, but removing the SAT means more reliance on even more skewed factors.
The rich kids in my (public) school were the ones afforded not only tutors, but also just the insight into extra-curriculars. They were the ones who had parents who knew to sign them up for college courses at ~15-16 years old to ensure they could maximize their GPA (5.0 scale, so getting a 5.0 was literally impossible unless you did this). This created a competitive disadvantage for kids who just really didn't realize these resources existed (plus, having parents that would support it + take you to the local college to take additional courses).
Not to mention that, but there were sports our school didn't participate in, but the richer kids had levels of access to that looked great on college applications - rowing and lacrosse specifically come to mind.
So, essentially - rich kids have many easier ways to pad their college applications. It's not that they aren't working hard(er) - they are. But they have easily acccessible opportunities that middle-to-lower-class students (like myself) did not have access to.
--
Coming to the SAT, I'm not surprised by that study. I wasn't afforded the same opportunities as these richer kids, but my SAT score was highly competitive with them. I was ranked 50th in my class with a 4.55 GPA (my 4.0s were gym each year, and I think one or two electives that weren't AP), but my SAT score was a 2300, which was relatively similar to most of the hyper-performant, wealthier kids.
--
This is all super anecdotal. I was definitely upset by all of this at the time - but it didn't affect my life very negatively. I still was able to get into a great school, and have a great career now. But these disadvantages certainly persist against others, and re-adding standardized tests likely will help level the playing field in my mind.
> Not to mention that, but there were sports our school didn't participate in, but the richer kids had levels of access to that looked great on college applications - rowing and lacrosse specifically come to mind.
Exactly. I went to smallish rural school. We had soccer, basketball, baseball. Youth soccer in my area was a rigged game where only people who were enrolled in the coaches summer camp would make the varsity team. Basketball had 75 kids try out for 12 spots. Baseball is ruthlessly competitive, and while I was a really good little league player, I had no chance against kids who were in multiple travel leagues, etc. I probably played 50 baseball games from age 9-12. The best players played at least 500.
My cousins went to a fancy private school. Everyone played on a varsity team; it was how they did gym. My older cousin did fencing, the middle one did basketball, the younger twins played squash. The squash guys sold themselves as a package and ended up getting a couple of ivy league places fighting for them.
I think we have a similar outlook on this. For me, getting good SAT/ACT scores let me "punch higher", and got me into some really good schools that I would not have be admitted to. Ultimately, I went to a state school, but was able to parlay the competitive nature of things to get a better grant package.
> Baseball is ruthlessly competitive, and while I was a really good little league player, I had no chance against kids who were in multiple travel leagues, etc. I probably played 50 baseball games from age 9-12. The best players played at least 500.
Same thing drove me out of baseball after age 12 or so. I had more than a little natural talent and put in some time drilling with my parents, so I could keep up with the kids doing the traveling leagues and such until (a little before) then. After that it became clear that my parents and I were gonna have to devote hundreds more hours per year (plus not a small amount of money), realistically, for me to keep playing. The gap was just growing way too fast, otherwise. What was left were bad teams/leagues where few players were really trying, so that's no fun, and ones for which I couldn't make the cut. Someone who liked it but just wanted to put in a high-side-of-normal amount of time and effort for a youth sport, had no place.
As far as extra-curricular activities go, like sports, etc., those aren't really the point. The point is for the candidate to demonstrate that they can accomplish significant things other than academics.
This can be anything. For me, I didn't do sports, or any school extracurriculars. What I did do was run a small business (paper route), used the money to fund my hotrodding efforts, was an Eagle scout (back in the days when that was something), etc.
Basically, you just gotta find something non-trivial to do that demonstrates motivation.
I went to MIT 20 years ago. Plenty of people smarter than me failed out. MIT seems to do a pretty good job of screening out people who won't pick up the material fast enough. In my experience, the ones who failed out were the ones who were plenty smart but didn't adjust fast enough to having to work hard for the first time in their lives. If you get into MIT, you've probably gotten special treatment from teachers your whole life, and not really had to work hard before.
My high school had just shy of 4,000 students in 4 grades. My senior year, I took slightly over a "full course load" at the local state university, plus went to high school 1/4 time. Technically, that wasn't supposed to happen, but administrators look the other way for smart kids. I wasn't really competing against others in my grade. People asked if I was smarter than the girl a year ahead of me who went to Harvard. She was my competition. I'm sure something similar happened with a kid a year behind me.
I knew that at MIT, I'd probably just be an average student. However, I really underestimated how hard it is to learn to work hard when you've been able to coast through your first 18 years, despite taking honors courses at the nearby state university, etc. I think the SATs are probably generally pretty good at measuring how quickly students learn, but there's a certain grit it takes to succeed at MIT that the SATs don't cover at all.
Edit: I'm also an Eagle Scout, but I came through after it became significantly easier. It seemed to me that probably at least 10% of the men at MIT were Eagle Scouts. If nothing else, it shows an ability to stick with something for at least a few years, despite it being uncool for most of your peer group.
I, too, had a disastrous freshman year due to my attempts to laze through it like I had all through public school. Fortunately, I was able to change before I was forced out.
I also got my comeuppance about being "smart".
At the time, being an Eagle wasn't cool anymore, either, and I never talked about it. I was reluctant to even mention it here. Also, these days, it seems that being an Eagle is a project for dad, while the kid is along for the ride. My parents had zero involvement with scouting.
MIT has a ~95% graduation rate, so most students really do graduate. And for the 5% that don't it's unclear how many dropped out due to the workload vs dropped out to found a company, etc. MIT has tons of internal resources to help you if you're struggling.
The shock for entering freshman is very real. I really like the practice of making your first semester Pass/No Record so that there's less pressure to try and get an A, and if you do fail it won't even be on your transcript. Second semester still treats F as No Record as well.
There's a certain subtle ego disorder that creeps up on you slowly when you're used to regularly being introduced as the smartest person someone has met, and you let that slowly become part of your identity. The people I knew who failed out had too big of an ego to seek help, and even were afraid to work too hard, because that made them feel less smart. They didn't outright brag, but were used to others doing their bragging for them, and had a kind of false modesty about them.
> What I did do was run a small business (paper route), used the money to fund my hotrodding efforts, was an Eagle scout (back in the days when that was something), etc.
If I were a college admissions officer strapped for time, I'd let the app through on proof of "Eagle Scout" and ignore the other two.
The only easier bet would be seeing the words "I'm Hungarian" on an app for a secret world-saving advanced math project.
Intention is irrelevant, the outcome is the same. A parent driving a kid to lacrosse practice every Wednesdays and Fridays shows as much potential to accomplishments as a parent asking their kid to help them with their under the table car mechanic job every weekend. Yet I bet only the former is evaluated as significant. I wonder why that is.
And was your extra-curricular activity both broadly available to lower class students (in time, cost, culturally, etc.) and a significant contributor to your acceptance?
There was no cost to joining the Boy Scouts. All you had to do was show up. About half of the troop was poverty kids. You didn't have to buy the uniform, most of the scouts never bothered acquiring one.
Your bet is based on anything? The second story is a potential sob story that plays better, barring subjective classist biases counteracting. That only points to objective test scores being a better measure.
Nope, just a feeling which is further reinforced by other posts on this thread (i.e. confirmation bias) such as:
> Standardized testing was pretty much the only reason I and many other working class folks I know could get into good schools -- I was never going to do a million side activities, and my summers were spent working, not building my academic resume.
> I grew up as a low-income minority in a single-parent household and I ended up getting into good schools pretty much only due to my high test scores, which has been a life changer. Other than test scores, I couldn't afford to do any fancy extra-curriculars.
Of course this is (somewhat) testable. I could ask different collage admission boards to summarize anonymized admission records of students where extra-curricular actives was weighted favorably for admission. And then group these activities based on how accessible they are to various wealth classes before counting them up. I don’t know if that has been done, and I’m not in a position to do it my self... so the best I can do is make a bet.
If I was in the admissions dept, I'd look favorably on an applicant who worked at a job.
I had a paper route, which was run as an independent business. I had a territory, I signed up people in it to subscribe, I delivered the papers, I collected the money, I paid for the newspapers the newspaper company dropped off. How much money I made was entirely up to how I operated. If I was sick or out of town, I had to find someone to cover for me.
There's also a lot of room to disagree as to whether playing sports counts as a meaningful accomplishment. Professional sports are pure entertainment, and succeeding even at that is extremely rare. The best argument for caring about it is that it's better than nothing, and it's something that ensures more average people have a chance to get to MIT too, even if they aren't all that intellectually minded.
I disagree completely. You could literally give zero effort, focused or not, and sit on the bench of a winning team. On top of that, your parents could have 100% made you do those things.
You could. You can just phone it in at work too, but most people don't. Sports are a place where kids figure out who they are. Not the only place, but an important one to many.
My son is 11 and loves baseball, I've coached a few times as well and it's been a great shared experience. There are definitely kids in Little League / Cal Ripkin who are there because mom & dad said so. But... I've gotten to see my son and a few of his teammates build friendships and mentor relationships with the kids ahead of and behind him that are difficult to do in a school setting.
It's a big deal. When a ten year old stops and is there to help teach an eight year old how to do something, etc those are valuable skills/processes/habits to build. They learn to lose and how to practice.
Part of the "package" a student brings to an application is how they apply those experiences. You can send a laundry list of things, or use your essay/interview to tie it together.
I don't really have evidence for this, but it's always felt like SAT/ACT coaching doesn't improve scores so much as get rid of some of the "dumb mistakes" that cost you score.
It's gonna help you when the test writer was playing some gotcha tricks with phrasing or whatever, but if you don't understand the material, even narrowing it down to a 50/50 isn't going to get you a good score, and if you truly don't understand the material you probably won't be able to eliminate half the answers anyway. And they are absolutely aware of the "answer b/c if you don't know" nugget, that's nothing special either.
Also "adaptive difficulty" systems where the system throws harder questions at you after successfully answering the easier ones are basically the "elo rating" of academics. Everyone hates elo but... it slots you into a very statistically accurate ranking. If you score highly on Level 600 questions but you are failing on the Level 700 questions, odds are good you are somewhere between 600 and 700. My understanding is that's what SAT/ACT were moving towards about 10 years ago, that it would be computerized and "everyone's test is personalized" by the elo system probing your exact knowledge level from a bank of questions with difficulty scores dynamically based on how "similar ranked" students performed on that question.
>> I don't really have evidence for this, but it's always felt like SAT/ACT coaching doesn't improve scores so much as get rid of some of the "dumb mistakes" that cost you score.
As i learned in college, the real "coaching" was rich parents getting rich kids more time on the SAT by getting psychiatric diagnostic classifications that give you more time.
Time has been the real challenge on SATs for most people beyond a certain score threshold, and money can buy time.
I finished the SAT early, and used the extra time to go back to the beginning and verify each answer. More time wouldn't have done much. If you can answer the questions, there's enough time to complete the test.
I understand your perspective-- my test memories were all breezing through tests with copious extra time... But as an educator I've noticed that there is a wide variation in the amount of time needed for a test between students. For some tasks it is nearly an order of magnitude.
The students who are quick and on the competitive math team finish something in 6-7 minutes and some other students are doing correct work but not quite done in 45 minutes. More practice doesn't seem to make them much quicker, either.
And this is in students without a formal diagnosis that allows them to spend extra time.
[There was one time I crashed and burned on a test and ran out of time... where I didn't memorize enough of a big table of identities for a trig test and ended up having to derive everything from scratch]
I hypothesize that the student who took 8 times longer isn't going to do so well at MIT.
A typical exam at Caltech would be 4 problems and 2 hours.
I never memorized the trig identities. I simply knew them from using them a lot. And having worked enough algebra/trig problems, you can just see the answer in your head as you read the problem. (This turns out to be a big timesaver at Caltech, where every course was a math course. When you're dealing with calculus, you really need to have moved past struggling with trig.)
At some point in the last 40 years, however, they've slipped my mind.
> I hypothesize that the student who took 8 times longer isn't going to do so well at MIT.
Sure. But the grandparent's point was: if you're the student taking 3x longer, your parents can buy you a disability diagnosis that gets you extra time.
> I never memorized the trig identities. I simply knew them from using them a lot.
Yah, a reasonable course would make this possible. My analytical trig class was pretty heavy on obscure identities, and the first exams I was like-- no big deal, I know how these are derived, I can figure these out as I need them... For the purpose of that class, nope.
Are you suggesting that wealthy people can bribe the profs to bestow better grades on their students?
Or the grad students who do the test grading?
BTW, Caltech's testing was done on the honor system. That meant no proctoring, and it was entirely up to the student to adhere to the time limits, and any other instructions on the test.
You didn't need wealth to cheat. Any student could, and with half a brain not get caught.
I recall one physics midterm which 2/3 of the sophomore class failed, including me. I suppose that precludes there being large scale cheating going on.
>> Are you suggesting that wealthy people can bribe the profs to bestow better grades on their students?
>> Or the grad students who do the test grading?
Not bribe. Hire as tutors with $. This happened pretty regularly at my college (Cornell) where ex-grad TAs were hired as tutors. You could focus on just what you needed to study if you could afford to hire them.
Here in the US we just went thru four years with President Trump (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump) who could not even communicate with clarity and rattled barely coherent ideas. He graduated from Wharton, the most prestigious finance program in the US. He is just one case I thought of. Does everyone really think he was the most qualified candidate to be in the very small inbound class at Wharton? Does everyone thing he was actually qualified to graduate based on merit?
For students in the category of "exam easy. finished the exam w/o any time issues", the whole sub-thread is irrelevant. You're going to ace the exam rich, or poor.
The sub-thread and discussion is about wealth bias for exam scores.
Coaching and studying improves SAT scores. People learn the type of questions they do poorly on and can study to improve. The SAT is a test you can study for.
The SAT is a test of your academic preparation, not Raven's progressive matrices. That you can study for it is not inherently a bad thing. Portions that are highly susceptible to coaching are bad, and that's why there aren't analogies any more.
If students learn the vocabulary and practice the math to do better on the test, at some point it just becomes the Key and Peele Heist sketch: "That's called a job!"
Agreed. I spent a bunch of time a few years ago doing home-coaching for our two teenagers as they rolled into SAT time. The way you get better at the math section is to genuinely fix whatever gaps might exist in your knowledge of algebra and geometry. As OP says, that "is not an inherently bad thing."
There's probably another 20 points that can be picked up by learning to read the questions very carefully -- so that you don't race to show how quickly you can spin-up an off-task answer that precisely matches the wrong question. Getting that right also "is not an inherently bad thing."
The verbal section is a bit more of a swamp, and there might be a larger element of gamesmanship there. But for schools like MIT, where math aptitude is the main event, I think keeping a math-focused role for the SAT can help a lot.
It identifies not just the elite-school wizards with lots of AP and math SAT 800s -- but also the teens from humbler public schools that didn't have an AP track, but whose 790s on the (pre-calc focused) math SATs speak to their ability to play at a higher level.
Apropos of analogies, I think the test-takers got rid of those because they can be ridiculously skewed to particular (affluent) cultures. For some people, it's obvious if yacht-to-dingy is akin to symphony-to-quartet. For people who grew up with less money, it is a total WTF moment.
I remember an analogy question that required knowledge of alcoholic drink formulations. I was way under drinking age, and had no idea what went into a martini.
You might be under drinking age, but you should have years of practice making mummy and daddy martinis at the end of their work days if you want any chance of succeeding at $PRESTIGIOUS_OLD_INSTITUTION
The top link is a study that shows that the improvement is pretty marginal in practice.
It does miss something: in specific ethnic enclaves SAT coaching is much more effective, perhaps because of a culture of out-of-school schoolwork and teaching beyond SAT prep. Those enclaves aren't particularly wealthy either (if I recall correctly it was a Korean enclave). Even then we're talking 70 points -- not nothing, but also not a radical transformation.
I wouldn't be surprised if those improvements were mostly moving below-average scores toward the average, by giving deprived students basic skills that their "education" didn't.
And there are books available to help with a lot of that. (And I actually agree with the point that doing some amount of test prep/sample tests is helpful. But it doesn't need to be super-expensive/time-consuming. I do understand that the playing field has probably upleveled over the decades but it's still probably as democratized as any such thing is.
My own anecdotal experience confirms that sat and act tests are very studiable. Honestly even more than average tests just because there is so much material available to study with.
Yeah, I have found that it improves 3 things. (this is for GRE, which is similar)
1. Basics: If you don't know standard permutations and combinations then knowing those formulae off the top of your head is nice to have. The language portions in particular, take a lot of preparation for non-native speakers.
2. Speed: Giving a decent number of sample tests helps put you in game mode for the real thing. It also acquaints you to the manner in which questions are phrased and their intended meanings. (big deal for non-native speakers) Lastly, it helps ease anxiety.
3. Gotcha-proofing: Every examination has some familiar gotcha patterns. Some training helps in looking out for them helps.
I'd say one of the valuable things an SAT tutor could teach is an attitude: to take initiative, and reject resignment to failure.
The biggest difference I noticed in how I would take a test versus other people I tried to coach is that I viewed the test as a fun game like a challenging video game level. And those who struggled on the test viewed it as dreadful judgement being rendered on them.
It's like when you can tell someone is extremely self-conscious while dancing: Beyond teaching them any actual dance moves, you have to turn off the part of their brain which is blocking their natural mental resources for problem solving, and that's often the fear they are inadequate to the task, will disappoint their supporters, and that it will hurt their future prospects.
> My understanding is that's what SAT/ACT were moving towards about 10 years ago, that it would be computerized and "everyone's test is personalized" by the elo system probing your exact knowledge level from a bank of questions with difficulty scores dynamically based on how "similar ranked" students performed on that question.
That is indeed where they're moving. They've recently announced that the SAT will be transitioning to a digital, adaptive test in the next 1-2 years. [1]
Notably, the upcoming iteration of the test will only be semi-adaptive, adjusting the version of the second half of the test based on your performance on the first half, rather than adapting to your performance on a question-by-question basis.
I suspect overall this will be an improvement in the accuracy of the results. As it stands, for students with a strong math background, a majority of the math questions on the current test are far too easy and cloud their results on the rest. With the recent removal of the CollegeBoard's math subject tests, high-level math students have very few opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge using a standardized metric.
I think that is great. Once you get past a certain threshold, the test loses prediction value. Giving the kids in the top 5% a way to differentiate is great.
My kid didn't get to take an SAT/ACT due to Covid. They did end up with a substantially lower PSAT score due to one of those dumb mistakes. They missed one "easy" question on the math portion while nailing almost everything else. The difference between National Merit Scholar Finalist and a "really good score".
They're doing great at a top 50 university now but it probably was the difference between waitlist and admit at two top 15 schools.
> SAT/ACT coaching doesn't improve scores so much as get rid of some of the "dumb mistakes"
If so, that still doesn't imply that rich kids with access to private tutors will necessarily do better on these tests than poor kids - just that anybody with the motivation to read a test-prep book will.
I live in a very rich town, like super rich. I work in tech so am rich by the standards of general population, but by the standards of Silicon Valley.
My child did very well on the ACT. All she did was buy a $35 practice book, which almost anyone can do. Literally this was it. Furthermore, she doesn’t know of a single friend or acquaintance that hired a private tutor.
All the nay-sayers belly-ache about this but for most children, even the “rich” ones, this simply isn’t true. It’s most definitely not necessary.
Considering the weight of the SATs/ACTs you would figure a student would at least buy a cheap book and put in two hours per week for a few weeks in practice. In practice, the vast majority of students who do this do quite well. The improvement is dramatic.
Everyone wants to always blame “the system” which yes, has an influence, but nobody wants to put ANY responsibility on the student themselves.
As one of those private tutors that the ultra-rich hire, I can definitely support most of what you've said here.
The greatest service that private tutoring provides is structure, accountability, and guidance. A dedicated student working independently through quality practice materials (many of which are cheap or free) can absolutely attain most if not all of the beneficial outcomes of preparing with a tutor/service.
I think when people look at inequity in college admissions, standardized testing ends up being an easy, tangible target, but not a particularly important one. If you want to look at how wealth impacts standardized test scores, focusing on paid preparation programs is missing the larger picture.
Wealthy students have had literate parents who can afford books and have the time to read to them when they're toddlers. They've gone to safe schools where the teachers can focus on teaching rather than making sure the students are well fed. They are surrounded by adults who have gone to college and can serve as role models for positive academic behavior. They have friends who are all taking the same tests and applying to the same schools to provide emotional and thoughtful support.
The collegeboard markets the SAT as measuring preparedness for secondary education. These students have been preparing for college their entire lives; is it any wonder that they score higher?
Thank you. You absolutely validate my own observations.
I went to college. My parents did, as did my extended family on one side. I saw both sides and chose this one.
I picked a town where my children would be surrounded by an environment where cool was defined as “good at school”. I didn’t want external influences contradicting my influence.
My child is dedicated, but I taught that dedication.
A parent doesn’t have to be rich to understand the importance of a good education. My mother came from a dirt poor background.
People never say it’s an advantage to have parents that care about education. They always put the blame somewhere else. The parents worked too hard, whatever. For different traits, some parents are just better than others. Academics is just one trait. Is the most important? No, but it’s one that’s easy to measure.
I agree. I spent some time as a Kaplan tutor. The students in my experience fell into a few buckets:
1. They already know the material/are serious and would do fine without tutoring (maybe some small help here and there)
2. They kind of care, but need structure to study. They probably wouldn't study or study effectively without being in a class or having someone for accountability.
3. They don't care and their parents are paying for someone to babysit them to study
IQ is quite heritible. This is especially so when upbringing is not neglectful. People who land very high paying tech roles are probably average higher in IQ than the general population.
Your daughter likely has the benefit of strong academic genetics. A child like that who puts in effort (i.e. works through a book) is going to do amazingly well. I'd also argue that families who value academics are also more likely to buy the books to do a couple hours per week in.
The $250k to put a totally unqualified student through school would pay for a lot of test prep hours at some impoverished schools.
It would likely take about 10 contact hours (1h/week, 10 weeks), basically enough coaching so that the result is not artificially low through under-preparation.
Let’s say it costs $100/hr all-in to coach 10 kids. So for $1k you can get 10 applications from motivated, underprivileged kids whose SATs are representative of their ability.
For one $50k annual ride you could run this in 50 low income schools and get 500 underprivileged applicants and then actually admit some of them who might benefit.
Rather than refusing to test, and wasting those resources supporting some kid who obviously won’t hack it.
Do you honestly believe that if you were from a very poor town, poor by the standards of african american neighborhoods in Detroit, that giving your child a $35 practice book would have a similar outcome?
My mother was an orphan at 15 in Honduras. When she had me, she shared a 400 square foot house with six of her sisters.
Look up the crime stats for Honduras and try again.
Also, looking at the very worst situations is not a valid argument. By that rational, what about the poor girl who is kept a sex slave in her basement by her father for twenty years?
Do you think sending your African American example to SAT prep will make a difference? Coming from the poorest and sketchiest towns in America? Such a child would likely be better served by starting at a community college. After that, SATs are not accepted.
My experience with "10 Sample SATs" which was my only prep was about 500 points of improvement. IIRC I was about a 1050-1100 on my first, and my best V/M combo was 1450 (back in early 90s, so pre-recentering). I actually did about 1380, I had a so-so actual one.
It probably is the best bang for the buck, if you're already 1-2 standard deviations on general intelligence. Because the test is a game like admissions is a game, so if you're smart enough to see the game, it's easier and most effective to practice with that.
For the "normals", I have no idea if it will work. But we're specifically discussing MIT, who do NOT want normals, I'm not good enough. They want 2-3 standard deviations people.
MIT should be able to weight for socioeconomic and location/environment given the amount of information required for financial aid and "the internet".
If this becomes ubiquitous, I can see suburbanites getting ghetto apartments for the address to game the weights :-)
Those places are sadly lacking even in the most basic standards of education, so their potential ACT scores are frankly irrelevant as is admission to MIT. You gotta learn to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run.
Not only is this analogy wrong (there are plenty of animals that run the moment they are born) but it is also deeply insensitive.
The reason people do worse from underprivileged is not only the lack of quality education, but a fundamental difference in the quality of life. Everything from the diet, to available time, and noise pollution, all makes a difference on education level. Our education system relies heavily on outside help, and poorer neighborhoods often don’t have the time and energy to give their kids even the most basic help with their homework.
> Everything from the diet, to available time, and noise pollution, all makes a difference on education level. Our education system relies heavily on outside help, and poorer neighborhoods often don’t have the time and energy to give their kids even the most basic help with their homework.
The analogy is correct because we’re talking about people.
Parents are the primary educators. When they aren’t educating, or need to educate on too many other things, academics suffer. This is news to nobody. It would be highly suspicious if environment had no influence on educational outcomes.
As a middle class going poorer higschool student (dad lost his desk job, mom had to start working again to keep the house, tried moving to cheaper city and it didn't work out, had to apply for scholarships for stuff, never had money to go out weekends, etc, etc) I think the thing resourceful people overlook that "rich" kids have in higschool and "poor" kids don't, is a space to study. Just a personal quiet space where you can deploy your book or laptop and write some stuff maybe with headphones maybe not but definitely without your parents screaming or the TV blasting stuff about social protests or whatever.
In college most of my other "poor" friends that made it either also had a space like that or were taught by their parents to study in public libraries or other spaces designed for concentration.
You aren't rich if you have to work and you're relying on what a high school student tells you who doesn't know all the details of the lives of other students, just what they tell her. In my experience as a student, other students will keep their tutoring and hand-ups under wraps.
>It's far easier for rich students to game GPA, college essays and extracurriculars than it is for them to game the SAT.
Disagree. I worked for the Princeton Review while in college back in the day. We would outright guarantee 99th percentile for one on one tutoring. If you didn't get 99th percentile the course was refunded or you could take it again. For classroom tutoring we would guarantee some improvement of I believe 200 (out of 1600) with the same refund or take it again option. Candidly, no one would pay for a prep course for a 30 point gain. These course are expensive. Some of them hundreds of dollars per hour.
The cited research is pretty fundamentally flawed.
"Although extensive, the academic research base does have limitations. Most notably, few published studies have been conducted on students taking admission tests since 2000. Only two studies have been published on the effects for ACT scores, and no studies have been published since the 2005 change to the SAT, which added the Writ- ing section among other changes."
This position also doesn't pass the sniff test. GPA is accumulated over four years of study. SAT/ACT is a single test. You can't retroactively improve your GPA by doing better in the past. But you can dramatically improve your SAT/ACT results.
> If you didn't get 99th percentile the course was refunded or you could take it again
Plenty of other domains have study programs with similar guarantees where the program has little to no effect-- it's a simple economic calculation: Set your rates so you make a good profit even if the program has no effect (even if you allow retaking the course, students won't be willing to waste their time and yours forever).
It would be more informative if you knew the actual before/after performance for the program. Elsewhere this has been studied (see links in the thread) and the improvement wasn't that substantial.
> You can't retroactively improve your GPA by doing better in the past.
Indeed, which means that people who's families have been carefully shepherding their education since they were much younger have an _insurmountable_ advantage in the GPA game. For people people who don't come from highly educated families, they only learn about the GPA boosting games as they start thinking about college years to late to take full advantage of them.
>Plenty of other domains have study programs with similar guarantees where the program has little to no effect-- it's a simple economic calculation: Set your rates so you make a good profit even if the program has no effect (even if you allow retaking the course, students won't be willing to waste their time and yours forever).
They offer a refund or to retake the course. It is indeed a simple economic calculation. The company would quickly go bankrupt if a sizable percentage of students were refunding. The company itself, and the location I worked, had excellent reviews. Even today it has a 4.9 star rating on Google Maps. Quite a high rating for a service that people in this comment section proclaim has no impact.
Intuitively, how could it be correct that people pay thousands of dollars on these courses and receive zero or near to zero benefit from them? If this were true no one would take the courses, the courses would be rated poorly, and the underlying business would fail.
>Indeed, which means that people who's families have been carefully shepherding their education since they were much younger have an _insurmountable_ advantage in the GPA game.
Sure, but the context is "which is easier to game." To game the GPA takes four years of study and prep and you must start doing it at the beginning of grade 9. Tens of thousands of dollars and preparation+work over multiple years. To game the SAT or ACT you must spend a few thousand dollars during grade 11 or grade 12.
> To game the SAT or ACT you must spend a few thousand dollars during grade 11 or grade 12.
"Or check out a SAT book or two for free from the library.", says my partner from an extremely poor family who got into college on the basis of her perfect SAT score and whom never would have qualified to a prestigious school on a GPA basis. (And whom was also admitted to law school on the basis of a nearly perfect LSAT, which she studied for only with free and extremely low cost used materials)
> Intuitively, how could it be correct that people pay thousands of dollars on these courses
People, particularly those to whom a thousand dollars isn't a big deal, spend all kinds of money on speculative and outright ineffective treatments. Including mystical mumbojumbo, quack medical treatments, and products and services which accomplish nothing except contributing to the 'identity' they present to themselves and others. ("I am a parent who cares, look I spent $zillions getting Jr the best opportunities!").
> To game the GPA takes four years of study and prep and you must start doing it at the beginning of grade 9. Tens of thousands of dollars and preparation+work over multiple years. To game the SAT or ACT you must spend a few thousand dollars during grade 11 or grade 12.
I think on this point we're agreeing to a great extent but we're drawing opposite conclusions. I agree SAT improves with focused study, though I believe that improvement is available for free (other than time and knowing you should do it).
You seem to agree with me that it is very expensive to hyper-optimize GPAs, requiring costs and actions extremely early and on a sustained basis.
My conclusion from this is GPA optimization relatively more available to students with more affluent families, because it takes more time, more money, and requires it earlier and more speculatively. -- we don't have an option where you can't improve your performance with the input of time,money, care but we can choose metrics where the available improvement is available to more people.
> Intuitively, how could it be correct that people pay thousands of dollars on these courses and receive zero or near to zero benefit from them?
Because the people paying have a sample size of n=1?
Look, any test will be subject to random measurement noise. If you got a bad night's sleep, got lost on the way to the test, had an argument with your parents or broke up with your boy/girlfriend, you're probably going to do worse. Conversely, if you had a nutritious breakfast or take a version of the test with lots of questions similar to the ones you practiced on you'll do better. Some people get "lucky" (for lack of a better word), while some get "unlucky".
The thing is, unlucky people are far more likely to retake the test and pay for test prep. So people enrolled in you test prep class are NOT a random sample of high school students. The sample is biased to include more unlucky people and fewer lucky people.
People paying for your service don't know whether their child was unlucky or not.
I used the work "lucky" for a reason. It is less likely that those negative factors would affect the student both times they take the test than just one time. So someone who encountered a confluence of unlucky factor for the first test might score higher on the second test simply by having fewer unlucky factors--or even just being more familiar with the test, having taking it previously.
> If this were true no one would take the courses, the courses would be rated poorly, and the underlying business would fail.
Your course doesn't need to actually help anyone. Your customers just need to believe it helped them. How do they know whether you actually helped, or whether the improved test scores are down to luck?
Does your average customer have 20 grandchildren who they can randomly split into test and control groups? Or do they have an imperfect understanding of statistics?
Glad you mentioned this. I went to a strong wealthy public high school with a high asian population (~50%?). When I was there, a lot of my friends were 2nd generation immigrants and their parents still spoke their native language at home. Their kids (my friends) were perfectly fluent/native in English but didn't do as well in the "edge vocabulary" parts of the SAT and I always figured that was why (in comparison to me and my english-at-home parents).
> Candidly, no one would pay for a prep course for a 30 point gain.
My understanding of the research in this area is that the 30 point gain is if you compare people who take a prep course to people who put in an equivalent amount of time preparing on their own with the widely available (e.g. can check them out of the local public library in many cases) preparation materials.
The 200 point gain is if you compare people who did the prep to people who have not done any prep.
The set of people who can't make themselves put in the time without the structure of a course would benefit by a lot more than 30 points from the course, and would pay for it. And do.
I vaguely recall a question on the Duke University application about what assistance you received with your college application efforts. (I can’t remember if test prep was included specifically.) I’m sure that some people lie by omission, but maybe asking this question is better than not asking it.
This times 10. GPAs have been rendered close to useless, especially at identifying above average ability, due to grade inflation, and also extreme variability between schools. Same for valedictorian and other appellations.
yeah this is a really hard problem and I don't see a fix outside of standardized testing. Every school is individually incentivized to use every trick - grading out of 5.0, grading loosely, giving a bonus score for AP/IB courses "because of difficulty", etc and teachers are obviously very sympathetic to the future of their students and the impact that being a Grading Nazi could have. And parents are obviously incentivized to find the school that's going to make Little Billy look best (best educated is great but not sufficient, that's why we're discussing testing).
You need a uniform grading system, which means a uniform material and a uniform grading process, which is... standardized testing, or at least AP/IB courses.
i came from a rural high school that didn't have any ap/ib courses. i wonder how much that affected my college applications.
i still got to go to the college of my choice (fire up chips!) but i have to wonder -- if i was able to boost my gpa using ap/ib courses, would i have received more scholarship opportunities/better offers from other schools?
That assumes the AP classes would have boosted your GPA. If the harder class knocked you from an A to a B then it would have been a net negative, at least at my high school (AP counted as a 1.2 weighting, so an A in a regular class is 4.0 and a B in an AP class is 3.0 * 1.2 = 3.6).
Admissions officers will tell you they are aware of what programs schools have, and take that into account. If your school has no AP with GPA inflation your 3.x is the same as a 4.x at some bigger high school. How true that is idk.
that may be true for colleges looking at local feeder schools ("northwestern knows that my high school doesn't have grade inflation"), but I don't know how that idea scales nationwide or internationally. To steal an example, how does a college in Seattle know that a high school in Illinois has grade inflation or not? is that tracked anywhere centralized?
you could certainly look at past performance of students from that school but that turns into a "legacy system with more steps"...
Anecdotal, but it seems universities have solved this by figuring out which schools have grade inflation. I went to a gifted school in Chicago that was quite competitive and did not have grade inflation. 20% of the school went to Northwestern every year because they'd accept every B student.
For one thing, if a school has grade inflation so bad that even an A+ from that school isn't enough to get into Yale - is that a problem?
For another example, if adjustment for grade inflation means Yale will ask for an A+ from Martin Luther King High, Detroit while they'll accept a B from Phillips Academy, Andover - is that a problem?
Well the thing is I went to an inner city public high school. It was much closer to "Martin Luther King High, Detroit" than it was to a prep school. Majority of students were below the poverty line, yet almost half were accepted to Northwestern every year, many with full rides.
I've met people from elite private day schools. Their education in a different world than 99.99% of public high schools, except maybe a few like Stuyvesant in NYC and Lowell in SF, or the fortunate few where 3/4 of the kids have parents who are doctors or college professors (why not both?).
Exactly. What teacher is going to fight for the B when the parents are complaining to the administration she’s keeping their precious angel from Harvard?
The SAT, ACT, and even IQ tests, were originally created in part to help identity promising students who weren't from upscale backgrounds.
I'm not 100% sure that the tests can't be coached, but certainly not like the "leadership", etc.
And even if they can't be raised by coaching, the scores can certainly be lowered by poor education and a chaotic living situation.
EDIT: Most people who can pay for coaching are already sending their kids to the kind of high schools that serve to get them ready, so they are close to their peak already.
Even things like summer public service, there are consultants who can tell you, based on your target school, the best one for that school, like is it better to work on a clinic project in Honduras, or teach basic literacy in Burkina Faso.
Never mind that the plane fare to get your youth group to Burkina Faso would pay the school fees for an entire village, with enough left over to pay 1/2 the teacher's salary for a year.
Being a poor student myself, the EC is way more expensive and challenging for poor families(can not afford those at all), comparatively, SAT/ACT is actually much easier, a few books and keep bugging teachers can carry a long way at extremely low-cost. Comparing to EC's cost(and time), SAT/ACT mentor(online or offline) is still fairly affordable.
Living in internet era, I am jealous that nowadays 'poor' students can find so much resources online, most for free, even MIT courses! All you need is an ordinary computer and maybe internet access, which are quite affordable for nearly all families in US.
I will vote up for SAT/ACT and vote down on those EC from a socioeconomic perspective if I have to pick one.
I took one of those expensive SAT prep courses and yes, I agree that those don't increase scores very much, the program I took was awful.
However, I totally disagree that rich people can't game the SAT. I used to be a moderator at /r/SAT and /r/ACT on reddit. All of the questions and answers for all of the exams, including subject tests are known and published online. Both SAT and ACT routinely reuse exams from prior years, and anyone who puts in enough time to study the old exams can do well on the exams. And rich people have the luxury of more time to study, because they don't have to work second jobs or cook for their families or clean the house after school and have more services that can save them time.
> And rich people have the luxury of more time to study, because they don't have to work second jobs or cook for their families or clean the house after school and have more services that can save them time.
Unlike tricks for getting into university like studying after school for classes, hiring private tutors, or taking extracurriculars like lacrosse or rowing, which are great levelers equally accessible to the rich and the poor.
> And rich people have the luxury of more time to study
Those rich students, they cheat by studying harder!
Btw, I don't actually think being rich correlates with better academic achievements. It's better to be in the middle, not rich, not poor. To keep motivated.
Did you bother to read the letter? This is directly addressed:
"This may seem like a counterintuitive claim to some, given the widespread understanding that performance on the SAT/ACT is correlated with socioeconomic status. Research indeed shows some correlation, but unfortunately, research also shows correlations hold for just about every other factor admissions officers can consider, including essays, grades, access to advanced coursework (as well as opportunities to actually take notionally available coursework), and letters of recommendations, among others. Meanwhile, research has shown widespread testing can identify subaltern students who would be missed by these other measures."
Why do you say rich kids have more time? I grew up in an underprivileged area and I very much disagree that poorer kids are getting their free time hammered.
Thanks for the interesting link. However, based on the paper, it seems like a "30 point increase out of 2400 points" could be significant. The study says:
"A survey of NACAC-member colleges unexpectedly revealed that in a substantial minority of cases, colleges report either that they use a cut-off test score in the admission process or that a small increase in test score could have a significant impact on an applicant’s chances of being admitted." (p. 2)
The paper later notes:
"These results indicate that in some cases more than one third of postsecondary institutions agreed that a score increase on the SAT-M of 20 points, or a score increase on the SAT-CR of 10 points, would 'significantly improve student’s likelihood of admission.' This proportion tends to rise as the base level of the SAT score before the 20 or 10 point score improvement rises. This is especially true for the more selective institutions. At lower scores on the SAT scale, a small score increase does the most to improve a student’s chances of admission at less selective institutions; at higher scores, the same increase appears to have an equally large or even larger impact at more selective institutions." (p. 19)
The graphs on pages 18 and 19 give more detail.
The paper also notes that "The College Board gives a specific example of a use that should be avoided: 'Making decisions about otherwise qualified students based only on small differences in test scores'." So it appears that up to a third of the institutions surveyed are not following this guideline. It would be interesting to know who they are.
I agree with your comment about rich kids gaming GPA, essays, and extracurriculars. Daniel Markovits addresses many of these points in "The Meritocracy Trap". Since I don't see how you can prevent gaming GPA, essays, or extracurriculars, given the alternatives, you're probably right that the tests may be better in this respect.
I used to take the ACT for people, they'd pay me in beer (which I wasn't old enough to buy for myself). You'd get ID'd at the entrance, but nobody kept track of whether the name on your test was the name on your ID, so you'd just take each other's tests.
This was in 2004. I was 17, they were in their mid 20's.
I know that one was training to be a dental hygienist, or at least wanted to be training for that. The other few didn't share as much, but they all knew each other so maybe it was the same thing?
I highly doubt I've harmed anyone by enabling their hygienist to get where she was without knowing the formula for the volume of a cone. As far as I'm concerned the gumption necessary to hack your way in is worth just as much as the gumption needed to pass authentically.
And 18 year olds aren't taking the ACT. Or if they are, there are other reasons why they aren't getting into certain schools and they aren't as concerned with getting good ACT scores.
Not to mention, the drinking age being 18 was for a window of about 14 years in the 70s and 80s. (Unless he's from Louisiana)
No this was my older co-workers. My academics were fresh because I was still in high school, theirs was rusty because they had graduated several years prior without bothering to take the ACT.
Kids who aren't coached on the test strategy do worse. My high school did no SAT prep, and my parents weren't really aware of it. I was lucky in that I had an AP History teacher whose goal was for every kid to get a "5", that meant incorporating test strategy into the flow.
You needed to know stuff as the ante, but knowing the magic bullshit that would give you a good essay score was the key to get the top score. I increased my score ~120 points from taking the PSAT blind in 10th grade to the SAT because I understood at that point that strategy was key and found out about it.
All of this stuff is a red herring though. The nut of the controversy is that standardized tests correlate to IQ. IQ, rightly or wrongly, is perceived to be culturally biased.
Anecdotally I think it raised my scores by maybe 100 points. Not coaching so much as just doing practice tests to learn that, especially for the reading, the questions were actually pretty dumb. Lots of them are asking for the most basic insights. This is surprisingly non obvious or at least was not to me at the time. Many questions were filled with "traps" of answers that felt more insightful and more broadly relevant; but less relevant to the specific passages being questioned on.
I'm not so sure about that. About 20 years ago, counselors advised taking the SAT/ACT only once, since your score wouldn't really change.
I took the SAT several times. Each time my score went up significantly. My high school ended up creating a new award category for "greatest score increase", or something to that effect. I believe it was ~200 points.
I'd taken a prep course being offered by a local instructor. However, the biggest benefit was from dedicated self-study (Kaplan books, as I recall).
> A 30 point increase out of 2400 points is not material to college admissions.
Not so sure about that. Beyond the fact that that number is an average, the question is from where to where. So many kids get perfect 2400 scores that going from 2370 to 2400 might be the difference of getting eliminated from competitive admission pools altogether. Whereas nobody will care about you going from 1850 to 1880.
P.s. I am dating myself a bit with the 2400 range, which seems to have changed at some point. Transform accordingly :-)
Are there really that many kids getting perfect scores?
I got a pretty low/average score, but took the test early in junior year so I hadn't taken some of the more advanced math courses yet. I never took it again since I got into everywhere I applied to (didn't apply to ivy league, obviously). Seemed like most other kids I knew did similarly with the smartest kids maybe 150 points higher (2400 time-frame). Nobody I know got a perfect score, or even close to it.
Edit: man, after talking about this I want to see what my score was exactly. No way am I paying $30 for an archived score though. I want to say it was only 1200/1600 (the schools only wanted 2 of the sections). But I'm not sure I trust my memory for something so inconsequential from that long ago.
Extra edit: found my old score report. It's worse than I thought. The writing was 570 (74th percentile) and math was 510 (47th percentile). I'm a lot dumber than I remember.
Looks like it's 1% between 1550-1600. I couldn't find stats for an actual perfect score. Saying it's crowded I guess is ok, but is a matter of perspective. Like the top 1% of income earners saying their yacht club is crowded. Maybe true, but only for a very small number of people who could choose to go somewhere else if they actually wanted to.
Yeah no the study was definitely not about test prep getting people from 2370 to 2400 lmao. There is no test prep service in the world that will claim they can get you from a 2370 - 2400.
The mean SAT score is ~1600, so it's a 30 point increase for students scoring in that range.
If you're already capable of getting a 2350+, that means you know everything and it's just down to variance and not making a silly mistake.
A perfect 2400 score is actually really rare. From a stat in 2009, the collegeboard reported that 1 student out of every 5,000 taking the SAT gets a 2400.
I took it back when it was out of 1600 and missed a perfect by one question; however I don't think I was exceptionally brilliant or anything.
The SAT does not operate in the way the LSAT or some other computerized tests work where it keeps giving you harder and harder questions until you start getting them wrong.
I suspect more people could get a 2400 if those who get really close bother retaking it.
But test prep is marketed to people who are average or below average. Saying you can gain hundreds of points is clearly misleading/deceptive advertising.
I have a family friend who does consulting for rich kids w/ college admissions.
You basically have someone who's on the board of an elite university coaching kids on their essay, clueing them into extra-curriculars, etc. They get paid pretty well.
I also had a dinner conversation from a lady with two children in Ivy league universities who said she emphasized with the parents who went to jail for bribing schools to get their childrens admitted and would do it herself if her children couldn't get in the school. She also personally knows one of the people doing jail time for bribery.
I had basically no adult academic/university guidance growing up. I just liked reading books in the library and studying things I liked. I was able to receive a scholarship to my university through my SAT scores. I'm not sure how I would square up in the current academic environment when I see the sheer amount of parent involvement in the application process. I also went to a smaller university where the level of tactics and skullduggery is limited.
> The NACAC did a study on this and they found that average gains of test-prep students is ~30 points (this was when the SAT was 2400 points).
> A 30 point increase out of 2400 points is not material to college admissions.
There must be some subset of students who gain much more from "test prep" than others? Even if its benefits for the average student are marginal, maybe there is a certain type of student for whom it is much more beneficial?
Not American so never did the SAT, but I honestly think I would have done much better in high school if I had one-on-one private tutoring. I struggled with focus and one-on-one attention helps keep me focused. Our son is similar – he's gifted and demonstrates his giftedness when the teacher focuses on him one-on-one, but then the teacher has to go spend time on the rest of the class, and as soon as that happens he stops doing any work.
>However, there is very limited evidence that SAT coaching actually increases your SAT score. The NACAC did a study on this and they found that average gains of test-prep students is ~30 points (this was when the SAT was 2400 points).
IIRC SAT's equivalent of Matura in Poland, so I'll be talking about my case
I've been taking advanced math exam and I had some time + some money (like 10% of minimal wage) during winter break and I decided to buy 3 lessons on analytical geometry cuz I've been terrible at geometry, but since that was analytical, then I've seen a chance to get into that
I've attended those 3 lessons, did some exercises and guess what
on official exam there actually was a task from analytical geometry and I managed to do it and receive full points, which basically increased my score by 10 percentage points (that's a lot, I'd say)
Saying that 10% of minimal wage spent was equal to 10 perc. points is naive, but you get the point
What if I were attending those for whole year? 2? 3? hard to say.
>Rich students don't need to game anything. They simply get admitted because their family name is on a building.
The mean parental income for Ivy League students is 170k, which is above middle class, but not Bezos-level rich.
What is considered to be rich is a huge spectrum. The difference between 7 figure rich vs. 9 figure rich..is up to a factor of 1000. Those whose parents can donate enough to be commemorated on a building, is an outlier even for the rich. Unless your parents are dynastically rich, being rich is not that much of an advantage for admissions.
> instead to guarantee a standard distribution of scores
Which is precisely what you want in an assessment test. Any assessment test.
You only want a normal distribution if the quality under assessment is normally distributed, but you do want a test where the worst candidate does better than chance, and exactly one candidate gets a perfect score. That's an ideal which is only approximated, but it is the ideal.
For context I graduated high school in the late nighties (I took the paper/scantron test).
At the time, the SAT was purported to provide a score that predict ability to perform academically at higher learning institutions.
Along with other factors such as GPA, and participation in extra curricular activities, a school could reasonably determine how well a student would do.
In practice, the normal distribution for scores correlated with the distribution of college performance. It was a reasonable predictor of success, but it did penalize students from certain backgrounds.
Because the test was devised by psychologists and statisticians, uncovering the pattern to the types of questions and the expected answered allowed test prep people to devise tricks to improve scores beyond the expected deviation.
Your first post claims it isn't a test of scholastic aptitude, and then this one says that it does predict scholastic success, and what could reliably predict scholastic success other than a test of scholastic aptitude?
Sure, a big donation by the student's dad, but that's a known quantity. I took the same SAT you did if it matters.
Which certain backgrounds are you referring to? I'd ask you for the references to show the supposed boost that test prep gives to SAT scores, but then I'd have to find the papers that fail to reproduce it...
I wonder how much taking the SAT multiple times plays a role. Personally I took it at least three times, and my score improved each time (don't remember by how much).
Which is also tied to socioeconomic status. If you can pay, your score will go up the more you take it, according to my experience, and the college board.
If you can't pay, you take it the one time it's offered for free if your school offers that. Then you get what you get.
I think we should learn from the gaokao and only test once a year. The fact that you can pay for more tests (and pay more for "score choice") is the most unjust part of the whole thing.
Counterpoint, you don’t want being sick or having a bad day to ruin your chances at what you’ve been working for for years. Also, being under pressure is generally not good for people’s ability to reason calmly - another reason not to make it so high stakes. So I really hope what you’re suggesting doesn’t come to pass.
We should probably make the SAT nearly free, though, if that price actually keeps people who’d otherwise go to college from taking it more than once.
A: Should your entire future job prospects be dictated by something that an abstract employer in the future might want? Or should the test we use try to get at what is really important; actual knowledge and skill?
It's been decades, but back when I was in high school rich kids paid people to fake their identity to take the tests (with fake IDs). I heard rumors that it was a dozen kids in my graduating class, and witnessed 2 myself. 1 was caught.
Does anyone know if they have better checks for this now?
I am all for reinstating the SATs, but it’s a stretch to say that it’s not impacted by socioeconomics. While test prep may have limited value, a lifetime of wealth provides more educational opportunities.
As a counterargument, a fake ID is all that a rich person needs to put a smart kid in their place at the testing center. Those places are usually huge, nobody knows anyone, and if you flash a legit looking ID, you will have no trouble sitting the test. GPA and such require effort over years to game (and maybe the kid actually learns something from all that tutoring, who knows).
Do you speak from experience? I attended it for grad school and not undergrad, but there was the expectation that you stand on your own. I was in one of the rare programs that was a terminal masters and you had to reapply for the PhD, and only 50% were accepted to the PhD.
I think there probably aren't too many failing out of undergrad simply because they do a great job of filtering in the first place. But I know people who attended that certainly struggled... one who came a C student and still want on to a great medical school and a successful career. There isn't grade inflation.
That depends on your definition of grade inflation. I think most of my undergrad classes at MIT had a median grade somewhere in the B range, maybe B-. Edit: I know some people consider a non-inflated grade curve to be C-centered.
I came to MIT with more than a year's worth of credits from the U of MN, including 6 trimesters of honors level math[0] (multivariable calc, linear algebra, diff. eq.). I had all As, except a B in my Intro to World Politics class. My senior year of HS, I was actually taking a bit over a "full course load" at the U of MN, plus 1/4 time at my HS.
I could sleepwalk through nearly straight A's at a pretty well regarded school's honors program. I was a B/C student at MIT. I like to think that a lot of it was that some "wise" uperclassmen had sat me down my freshman year and explained that once you had a degree from MIT, nobody would ask for your GPA. (The were wrong, BTW. Work for those grades.) I taught myself most of a CS degree while earning a degree in Mechanical Engineering. However, I was also too slow to put my ego in check and admit to myself that I really needed to work hard.
Sounds like you’re effectively saying there wasn’t grade inflation. You were an A student elsewhere and then become a B/C student at MIT despite working hard. That’s my point — now imagine you were only an A student because you were rich and somehow swindled those good grades in high school. Imagine what would happen at MIT.
Note that Harvard undergrad has something like an A- average. That’s grade inflation.
I certainly agree with your broader point: nobody is handed a degree from MIT. If they have a degree, they've put in the work and have a good grasp of the subject matter. (Also, MIT doesn't give out honorary degrees.)
I also attended it for grad school only. Nobody was even close to failing out. I don't think MIT did a lot of grade inflation and generally regard it as a very strong academic institution.
That's not incompatible with weaker students being able to pass by with lower grades. Getting bare minimum grades just isn't that difficult.
edit: teammwork also seemed to be strongly encouraged. It wasn't a place that wanted you to fail. It wanted to help you succeed, which is by all means a good thing.
Well, Trump did it, that's one data point. Also, he did fine at U Penn, an Ivy, so why should we assume MIT is so awesome that another rich kid couldn't cheat his way through there?
I'm just saying that U Penn, being an Ivy, has as much "reputation" as MIT, CalTech, etc. Until someone pipes up with some sort of proof that it is actually better (which I doubt it is), then why should U Penn's reputation allow a Trump to go through, but at MIT such a thing could never occur? I'm not seeing it frankly.
MIT is absolutely harder and more rigorous than UPenn (and, for that matter, HYP). If you compare the GPAs of people from those schools and e.g. MCAT scores, MIT students exhibit a much stronger positive correlation.
This is pretty common knowledge, in the same way people know that Berkeley and CalTech have tougher classes than Stanford.
As an MIT grad with many friends at other Ivies, I can tell you that it is more rigorous than pretty much all of them. Princeton is probably the closest.
1) The solution to that is to improve security measures. Not to remove the SAT entirely.
2) It is significantly harder to find someone who can score well on the SAT and is willing to take the test for you compared to gaming GPA, extra curriculars, etc.
I've heard of tons of instances of people hiring homework-help services, their dad paying $5k to get their extra-curricular club going, private tennis lessons, etc.
But I've never personally heard of someone paying someone else to take the SAT for them.
I'm sure it occasionally happens, but it's a lot harder to pull off compared to manipulating GPA, extracurriculars, college essay.
> It is significantly harder to find someone who can score well on the SAT and is willing to take the test for you compared to gaming GPA, extra curriculars, etc.
Idk about that. I found people to pay me for taking the ACT for them through my alma mater's subreddit. Top schools are full of people who got 35/36, I'm sure there are plenty of other people who scored there and would be willing to take the standardized test for 10k too. In fact, in some ways it's easier to find someone to take the test for you than it is to find someone to boost your extracurriculars because you can structure the payout around the score obtained. I got 10k for a 36, 7k for a 35... no guarantees with tutors and coaches.
If the parents/students are willing to cheat on the SAT, they're probably going to have no issue manufacturing extracurriculars. The schools for the most part aren't auditing run of the mill activities (student org leadership, fundraisers, mission trips, local awards), and a lot of local newspapers basically let you write your own articles for them so cheaters can build up documentation if they're really motivated.
Some years ago in high school others offered me significant amounts of money to take the SAT for them. I didn't do it, but based on the security arrangements at the time I'm pretty sure I could have done it without getting caught. So I have to assume there has been some of that cheating going on.
> So much for that common, popular notion that standardized tests do not predict anything of value.
To be fair, I don't think the debate was ever about the quality or predictive value of the tests. There is a small, but well-organized and vocal subset of the population that hates the idea of excellence and differentiation. They want, and have been quite successful in, the replacement of standards of excellence with vaguely defined (defined by them, of course) buzzwords like "equity" and "diversity".
I've pushed back against standardized testing at certain points of my life, and I don't think this comment even remotely summarizes my views.
If anything, I would say that my views are the opposite -- homogenization creates a lack of differentiation around skill and aptitude based on questionable science (and sometimes outright pseudoscience) and often leads to an oversimplification of human intelligence in general. It always feels very strange to me that people trying to compress aptitude into a single number say that they're defending differentiation or diversity of talent.
MIT's findings here don't really change my view of the value of SATs, although the findings are interesting and I think they're worth looking into further. I'm not sure "they're more predictive than GPAs" is the glowing recommendation that SAT proponents think it is. You can agree or disagree with me on that point, I'm not here to debate the entire idea of testing or IQ or whatever -- I just want to point out the above comment is a pretty big oversimplification and (in my mind) a borderline complete misrepresentation (I assume unintentionally) of what people like me believe. I can only speak for myself though, maybe there are people out there who do hate the idea of excellence.
Well, what you have written just feels like a more favorable to your side explanation of the same thing.
Colleges are not trying to compress aptitude into a single number. It’s even worse. They are trying to compress aptitude into a single Boolean variable, you are either admitted or not. That’s it. And it seems that subject tests and general aptitude tests are very good indicators of college fit. I don’t know what system you envision, but alternatives I have seen always seem far worse.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. GP writes:
> There is a small, but well-organized and vocal subset of the population that hates the idea of excellence and differentiation.
I don't see how that applies to my comment above, and I don't see how saying:
> They are trying to compress aptitude into a single Boolean variable, you are either admitted or not. That’s it.
is doing anything other than backing up what I said. At the point where you are dividing a subset of the population into binary "in or out" groups, you are in fact advocating for homogenization, for less differentiation between students, and for fewer levels/categories of excellence or exceptionalism.
I'm not here to tell you that's wrong, you do whatever you want. MIT is trying to decide who gets into their specific college, fine. But if you're arguing that the point of SATs is to make a binary determination about students, then it's just strictly inaccurate to say that it's the SAT critics who are all trying to cut down tall poppies.
You conflate vertical differentiation with horizontal differentiation. Horizontal differentiation is what is usually understood as “diversity” and considered good among certain groups of people. Vertical differentiation is what is usually understood as “hierarchy” and considered bad among those groups of people.
MIT like many American universities does only general admission and that’s indeed would be considered weird in other countries, but it seems like a whole nother issue.
> You conflate vertical differentiation with horizontal differentiation.
A binary admissions model reduces both. That's not to say a binary admissions model is wrong, but it does reduce vertical differentiation. Of course compressing an integer value into a binary result reduces differentiation, a boolean represents fewer states than a number.
To go a step further, even if that wasn't the case, vertical and horizontal differentiation still can't ever be completely decoupled from each other. Horizontal differentiation allows for greater vertical differentiation by allowing people to vertically differentiate based on their strengths rather than on a questionably representative average of all of their qualities. And I don't think that's a solely Progressive or Left-wing idea, it's a big part of the reasoning behind why economic specialization leads to more advanced societies.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30834517, but I'm here clarifying what my criticisms of the SAT are and what I think its weaknesses are -- and pointing out that my criticism of the SAT is the exact opposite of what tharne says it is. I'm not here to rework the entire admissions process.
I don't have a single-comment answer to replacing the entire SAT and reworking the entire college admissions process, and it's feasible that the SAT might still be preferable to pure GPAs in the meantime. But I don't think saying that requires us to pretend that compressing skillsets into an objectively less granular/descriptive metric is a good thing or that it's somehow increasing our understanding of student skillsets. Saying that MIT might be right to accept SAT scores doesn't mean we need to pretend that the SAT doesn't have very serious flaws. Certainly it doesn't require me to pretend that every argument against SATs are arguments against meritocracy, I think that's just objectively wrong.
Ideally we would have standardized metrics that were more granular, and ideally we would at least have an SAT that was administered differently and more regularly so that they were optimized less for formal test taking skills. But there are a lot of barriers in front of that.
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I also don't have a single-comment answer for what to replace Github repos with during hiring interviews, or how to make whiteboard coding tests more accurate, and I have criticisms about them too. The answer might be that there isn't an easy single number that represents meritocracy, and we might be fooling ourselves pretending that there is, and it might just be wishful thinking in the first place to pretend that there is a version of admissions processes for colleges that isn't fiendishly difficult and complicated and multifaceted.
When people criticize whiteboard interviews on here, it's reasonable to ask if there's a better system, but I rarely see people saying, "you're only criticizing whiteboard interviews because you hate meritocratic job placements." No, I have criticisms of these systems because they're not good representations of talent.
> If anything, I would say that my views are the opposite -- homogenization creates a lack of differentiation around skill and aptitude based on questionable science
If that were true, you'd expect countries like South Korea, Japan, and German to perform poorly in science and engineering, among other things.
Diversity may be a worthy goal for societal reasons, but it certainly is not a perquisite for excellence, seeing as there are many highly successful countries that are very homogeneous.
> If that were true, you'd expect countries like South Korea, Japan, and German to perform poorly in science and engineering, among other things.
It's wild to me that someone can have the view that the existence of other countries settles the debate over whether or not our school systems encourage well-rounded/successful students given that comparisons to more homogenized schooling environments like China is still one of the more contentious high-level debates about educational quality we have today. Again, I'm not here to convince you one way or another, but that is not a debate that I think most of society considers settled.
> Diversity may be a worthy goal for societal reasons, but it certainly is not a perquisite for excellence
If that's the argument you want to make, then fine, go for it. But then don't say that you're opposing a group that "hates the idea of excellence and differentiation." You are arguing for removing differentiation between different kinds of intelligence and skillsets and compressing that spectrum into an objectively less descriptive metric.
Make up your mind whether I'm arguing for more diversity and more differentiation between people or for less of it.
I'm not completely sure. I think MIT's conclusions might be correct, they might be preferable to GPAs. I also think there might be other alternatives that aren't easy to implement, that require either a restructuring of how we do school or a better distribution of resources than we currently have.
One conclusion that MIT hints at (although it doesn't say it outright) is that SATs might be a better indicator of success across economic levels in part because it's harder to buy a better SAT score with money. Looking at things like extracurricular activity runs into many of the same problems as looking at Github repos during hiring processes -- a lot of people don't have time to do a bunch of extracurricular activities, and access to those extracurricular activities is likely highly correlated with socioeconomic status. It might be difficult to move in that direction when access to school resources varies so much between areas.
I do think the SAT could be improved -- I think one really easy way would be to change how it's administered so that it optimizes less for formal test-taking skill. The really good thing about the SAT is that it's a less school-specific measure than GPA. So a better alternative might be a version of the SAT that kept a standardized metric but that either widened its scope significantly or was administered differently.
I also want to put forward the idea that admissions might just be really hard, period, and there might not be an easy way to assess potential, and trying to figure out the easiest way to do it might be like asking, "what's the best way to teach a child to play an instrument in a single day?"
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One really important point that I want to get across: there is a difference between a measure being good and a measure being "the least terrible option we have at the moment" -- and confusing the two can cause real harm.
At the top of this thread I see the quote, "so much for that common, popular notion that standardized tests do not predict anything of value." And if that's somebody's attitude, then they're never going to find a better option because the whole thing is being approached through the lens of "see, we were right, this is a good metric."
I think a lot of criticism of standardized testing, IQ, coding tests for hiring, etc... is not necessarily trying to destroy everything, it's just trying to point out that many of these measures are really bad and they shouldn't be treated with the respect they're often given. I think that someone can very easily both have the position, "yeah, MIT probably should use SAT scores alongside GPAs" and the position, "people place way too much confidence in these things as an indicator of success."
I'm definitely not the person you describe, but the idea of standardised testing being equivalent across all factors just strikes me as being fundamentally untrue.
Personally I am very lucky to test well; and I definitely buy the notion that people who test well in SATs may go on to do better in University, but the reasons are probably the same: freedom from worry about financial circumstances will affect grades. 10 times in every 10.
I grew up poor and I achieved some of the highest scores state wide in my country's standardised tests as a child (we get tested at ~8,10,12,14). A lot of my peers at my school were from social housing. My assessment is that their biggest issue wasn't money but their homelife. Parents who didn't value education, or even a basic respect for rules/authority. The kids were wild because their parents were kind of wild themselves. Money wouldn't fix scores for these kids.
If you wish to make a political correct stance, I wouldn't go the money route. I'd say that these kids are victims of intergenerational poverty cycles.
Same. My family was below the US poverty line, but my parents were college educated and most of the extended family placed tremendous emphasis on education, academic performance, and college prep. I always get very annoyed with modern discourse that reduces all successes, even staying out of prison, to family income and nothing else. Most of the people I went to school with were from poor or working class families, and I guess a “normal” proportion went to college, and a “normal” proportion were “smart kids.” Based on my observations, a large factor that I never see discussed is religion. Although I’m an atheist, I think the religiosity of the communities I grew up in was a highly effective mitigator of common social ills.
I think the benefit of religion is that a religious mother/father is less likely to be off on 3-day meth binge compared to a non-religious one. There's a social network to help support people. The social network also encourages a reduction/removal of typical vices that are going to affect a families children (alcohol, drugs, etc).
>but the idea of standardised testing being equivalent across all factors just strikes me as being fundamentally untrue.
What's your take on MIT's stance?
our ability to accurately predict student academic success at MIT 02 Our research shows this predictive validity holds even when you control for socioeconomic factors that correlate with testing.
Not GP, but you should approach this using Bayes' Theorem just like anything else. If one study from MIT causes you to completely flip on any of your beliefs, you need to rethink how you form these kinds of opinions.
MIT's conclusions should cause you to adjust your priors by a certain amount, but they should not cause you to completely flip by themselves -- particularly if you're not in the camp that thinks literally every decision MIT makes is correct by virtue of it being MIT.
If you wouldn't have looked at MIT's original plan of abandoning SAT scores as proof that they didn't matter, you probably also shouldn't look at them picking up SAT scores again as proof that they do matter. MIT's conclusions should lead you to update your priors by some amount dependent on how much you trust you currently have in the accuracy of college admissions processes when they assess student qualifications and outcomes.
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My personal take on this is that I do absolutely buy that SAT scores could be a leveling factor between kids from different socioeconomic backgrounds and that they could be a better metric than GPA for determining admission. But of course, that's a pretty low barrier of entry to clear, GPA scores are probably close to meaningless when compared across schools. It seems to me that there's a lot of room here for SAT scores to be simultaneously mostly meaningless and at the same time also a reliably better predictor of school success than GPAs.
It's also important to ask what exactly MIT is measuring -- what does it mean by academic success and how much does that definition overlap with "fits in when placed in an environment optimized for people who are good at standardized testing?" And again, even if they are kind of circular or if they're measuring the wrong things, it's still plausible that they're more reliable than GPAs; it's a low bar to clear.
The same factors that lead to success for SATs can lead to further academic success.
I believe that MIT is probably right, in fact, I'm quite certain of it. Many people will drop out of university or perform poorly than their peers for socio-economic reasons, the person working while studying will probably do worse than the person who just studies.
MIT wants the most graduates and especially the most successful graduates, so the institution is right to do this, but I do still think it's more inhumane than I'm personally comfortable with -- but this is part of why I live in Europe where university students in general are seen as an investment by the state and not so much a business to be optimised.
> this is part of why I live in Europe where university students in general are seen as an investment by the state and not so much a business to be optimised
In this specific case, though, I don't think these two things are in conflict at all. By selecting the best candidates on the basis of merit, MIT is doing what's best for both MIT as well as the broader society.
We all benefit from living in a country that produces top-tier scientists and engineers, and MIT benefits from being a place that is known for producing top-tier scientists and engineers.
Funny that you bring up Europe. As far as I know European countries don’t rely on extracurriculars and other nebulous measures as much as US colleges do.
Doesn't most of Europe also rely on standardized testing for university admissions? My country definitely does so, and has for decades, both ore and post communist times. I also know France has the famous Bacalaureat at the end of high school.
> Doesn't most of Europe also rely on standardized testing for university admissions?
They sure do. So does India. In fact, a lot of other countries rely on testing a whole lot more than the U.S. which has interviews, essays, sports, teacher recommendations, etc.
We have to read the sentence very carefully. It's saying that regardless of socioeconomic factors, the number correlates with graduate success rate. This seems like a very easy "duh". The way I read that is "if a student gets in the 99th percentile regardless of whether they grow up rich or poor, they are likely to do well at MIT". This doesn't talk about acceptance rates based on socioeconomic factors.
The point in question is whether the students in a lower socioeconomic situation even has a chance to get into MIT.
It's not saying regardless, it's says controlled for. A subtle distinction, but the former is a raw comparator and latter is an adjustment, which implies even with a bias that still doesn't account for substantive change.
I was hoping someone had more insight into process or metrics on it.
Your own post has an implicit accusation that lower socioeconomic situations preclude high testing, which has all kinds of implications about the quality of education and living standards as a prior for acumen. I suppose my own bias shows in drawing that conclusion though. As Henry said though,
"If I had seven peasants, I could make seven lords. But if I had seven lords, I could not make ONE Holbein."
>To be fair, I don't think the debate was ever about the quality or predictive value of the tests.
It is. The common argument is that GPAs are as predictive as SATs. MIT says it is not. I think the problem is you only need average ability to a good GPA, but a top 1-5% SAT score confers a higher ceiling of ability. MIT wants to admit exceptional students, not just average or above average ones.
The debate is about the quality and predictive value of the tests. Opponents claimed that the tests had a cultural bias so students from some backgrounds would do better than others, that students who had a good education before university would be better prepared, and that studying for tests or taking tests repeatedly has been shown to improve scores but is only accessible to people who can afford it. These are all claims that the tests are not good at predicting aptitude.
The arguments against these tests are, of course, awful. Objective tests are the best way we know of to remove human bias. Aptitude tests (basically IQ tests) are the best way we know of to measure someone's natural ability (determined in early childhood) with little influence from their experience. Since their arguments make so little sense, it is reasonable to wonder about the psychology of opponents of standardized testing. But their arguments are, at least on the surface, about predictive value.
> it is reasonable to wonder about the psychology of opponents of standardized testing
It is, at its core, a fear that testing largely reproduces the status quo. If one accepts the idea that there is an intellectual elite who constitute the highest strata of society, and that their gifts are innate and heritable rather than trained, it follows that social mobility is pretty much dead. It is a bleak vision.
Personally I think there are different problems that are much bigger and woollier which keep people from non-elite backgrounds down, regardless of test outcomes. The structure of the education sector and employment more widely. Expectations about life and the distribution of rewards etc. We rarely have good quality, nonpartisan discussions about these things which I think pushes people to take views which are instrumental rather than informed.
>it follows that social mobility is pretty much dead. It is a bleak vision.
I have always found the idea of social mobility depressing. It assumes that we will always have a hierarchy, with some people who are powerful and prestigious and others who are poor and always feel inadequate. It assumes that we will always have an underclass but at least people can leave it.
The kind of social mobility that SAT has some influence on is not really about "power and prestige", which I also think of as generally pathological dynamics. It's literally about how competent and professional you want to be, and how well you can perform your work duties. It's social mobility within the 'working' class, not really away from it.
Yes. The old saying among Labour party socialists in the UK was "rise with your class, not above it". They were in favour of a high floor on living standards and a low ceiling on wealth. It isn't a stretch to think that a more even playing field would be a better substitute for mobility.
It is actually possible that some people go to MIT because it has more diversity [1] than its very close competitor, Caltech. [2] But it's true that the first filter for these students is undoubtedly world-leading-technical-program.
We're talking about the school's goals in forming a class, not the applicants' goals. Most schools that are among the "best in the world" find they can weigh multiple factors to decide who to admit, and there's no single magic number that does that job for them.
It very much depends on the style of coding test - personally, I'm more than happy to do take-home style tests where I prepare something in a matter of a few hours, but I can't stand "leetcode" interviews or anything where I'm pressured to produce in 30 minutes or less; perhaps that's because that's typically not how I work in the real world and in my experience, they do a really poor job of demonstrating my skill set and experience.
I have terminated interviews before they even got started because of poor interview loop design from employers.
I recently failed a CS coding test. I was asked to solve a problem in 10m. I solved it in 20m and was rejected. I came up with a solution and communicate it right from the start. My solution was totally clear and readable. I just needed time to warm up and attentive to my code. I love CS. I love solving problems and reading books about Algorithm and Data Structure. I implemented them from scratch as a hobby. But the interviewer guy is not caring about that and said process is process. I felt disappointed at first but felt lucky after that since I wouldn't want to work with those people in the future.
10 mins per problem sounds extreme except for something that can be answered in no more than 5 lines of python (no code golf of course). Even then its signal-to-noise ratio (from an interviewer's perspective) can't possibly be too high. Most places would ask you to solve a moderately nontrivial problem in 30-50 minutes
From the other part of the table - we'd lose more candidates if we did take-homes. People in general prefer to study once and use that knowledge for multiple companies at once, you can't optimize take-homes like that.
Sure, but all in all, you just need 100 frequent HN users hating on these interviews to fill all related threads with such complaints, and there are dozens of millions of SWE worldwide. Big tech companies still hire mostly based on this type of interviews and they've been growing a lot lately, meaning that enough people apply to them. Leetcode and the likes have also democratized the process for many candidates.
If anything, I'd say that the proportion of the workforce willing to submit themselves to these tests is increasing, but that's just a guess.
I refuse now and didn't two years ago. Anecdotal, I realise. But I think lots of people have decided that the message heavily test oriented recruitment processes send out indicates a bad work culture and sense of entitlement from employers. I subscribe to this view and vote with my feet.
The SAT has been demonstrated to be effective at predicting success in university. We have almost no evidence about the computer industry's hiring practices. It is completely unscientific. Interviews operate on folklore, not statistics.
This is something your HR department should be very concerned about. If the questions you ask during your interview are not useful in finding a good candidate why are you asking. This isn't just about time either, interviews have some strong laws around them so asking the wrong question could get you in court.
I know when we wanted to do a coding test they told use we need to spend 6 months of giving everyone a coding test, have it independently graded by someone not involved in the hiring process. Then after people have worked here for 6 months we examine our actual results from those we hired and see if the tests at all predicted something useful. (or something like that - there is room in the scientific process for some variation)
The bar below which HR has to be worried is not "we've scientifically determined that our interview questions lead to good on-the-job performance". There has to be some reasonable sense in which you could argue the interview filters for good candidates, but no one is requiring you run studies.
Google once did a retrospective study and found that interview scores for people we ended up hiring were not correlated at all with people's on-the-job performance. I'm pretty sure nothing really changed as a result of this. I think it's a combination of the industry, especially FAANG, being kind of "stuck" on these kinds of interviews, and a lack of clearly better alternatives (I think there are better alternatives but it's not like I can point to studies backing me up).
> I know when we wanted to do a coding test they told use we need to spend 6 months of giving everyone a coding test, have it independently graded by someone not involved in the hiring process. Then after people have worked here for 6 months we examine our actual results from those we hired and see if the tests at all predicted something useful.
This is interesting but also way heavier weight than anything I've ever heard of. OOC where do you work? (Like vague description of kind of company, if you're not comfortable sharing the specific name).
> Google once did a retrospective study and found that interview scores for people we ended up hiring were not correlated at all with people's on-the-job performance.
This sounds like an unsound result. If you select based on a criteria the correlation with the criteria is usually diminished and sometimes even reversed in the selected sub-population.
Like if you select only very strong people to move furniture then measure their performance. Because they're all strong, you won't observe that weak people are bad at it-- plus you'll still have some people who were otherwise inferior candidates who were only selected because they were very strong, resulting in a reverse result. But if you dropped the strength test you'd get many unsuitable hires (and suddenly find strength was strongly correlated to performance in the people you hired).
This is actually confirmed with real world data on this for professional football with player weight and professional basketball with player height.
For Offensive Linemen in the NFL, there is no correlation between weight (which range from 300-360 pounds) and overall performance. A "heavy" 350 pound player is not more likely to do better than a "light" 310 player. But nobody who weighs a mere 250 pounds could realistically make the cut or perform well at the highest level.
For basketball players there is no correlation between height and performance, and there are several standouts examples of players below six feet so there's no cutoff. But if you compare the distribution of the subpopulation versus the general population, you'll see an extremely strong height bias.
> This sounds like an unsound result. If you select based on a criteria the correlation with the criteria is usually diminished and sometimes even reversed in the selected sub-population.
Yeah that's very true and I think was part of why they maybe didn't react to it too much. What you really want is to find the people you rejected and see how well they're doing, but we don't have that data.
Still though, naively I think I would have thought that someone who gets great marks across the board should be able to be more successful at Google than someone who barely squeezes by, and I do think it's kinda telling that that's not the case. But I'm maybe just injecting my own biases around the interview process.
edit: This reminds me a lot of this informal study that found that verbal and math scores on SATs were inversely correlated, which seemed surprising, until people realized they were only ever looking at samples all from a single school. Since people at any given school generally probably had ~similar SAT scores (if they were lower they wouldn't have gotten in, if they were higher they would have gone to a more selective school), the variation you see within a given school will be inverse (the higher you do on math, the lower you must have had to do on verbal to have gotten the "target" score for that school).
At google's scale, if they had an alternative basis for hiring people they could judge candidates by both and hire randomly use one method or the other method to make some of their hires, then compare their performance over time and at least say if there is a significant difference or not.
But as you note, the lack of obvious good alternatives is an issue... and we can't pretend that there isn't an enormous difference among candidates. If we though that unfiltered candidates were broadly similar then "hire at random, dismiss after N months based on performance" would be a great criteria, but I don't think anyone who has done much interviewing thinks that would be remotely viable.
(Though perhaps the differences between candidates are less than we might assume based on interviewing since interviewees should be worse than employment pool in general, since bad candidates interview more due to leaving jobs more often and taking longer to get hired)
>If we though that unfiltered candidates were broadly similar then "hire at random, dismiss after N months based on performance" would be a great criteria, but I don't think anyone who has done much interviewing thinks that would be remotely viable.
I know a fair number of companies that do essentially that. They hire contractors for 6 months, at the end of 6 months the good ones are offered a full time position. The contractor company probably does some form of interview, but they are more interested in their 6 months of overhead from the contractor than quality candidates.
> since bad candidates interview more due to leaving jobs more often and taking longer to get hired
But there are also great people who interview badly.
It's similar but it also brings in a challenging problem: coding tests costs candidates far more than it costs employers in terms of time. I am currently interviewing and two of the companies I am otherwise excited for sent take-home tests that just exhaust me, especially after a long day of otherwise productive work. I've got 12 years of experience under my belt but somehow great references and a killer resume aren't enough to convince them I can find a security vulnerability.
I do coding tests for the first interview. Nothing hard, just enough to do basic data modeling and writing a unit test. I also time cap to under an hour, and the internet is available as a resource.
It's more about labor market dynamics and supply versus demand. If there are plenty of developers available to hire then employers will insert extra hurdles in the process to filter out weak candidates (with the understanding that there will be some "false negatives"). But when the labor market is tight then employers will take a chance on any candidate who seems minimally competent because they need to fill the req.
I think that is more about the disconnect between coding tests and the actual day to day work and skills required to do the job. Example: I could have a high level of competency in software engineering and also not care how a mouse gets out of a bucket.
Those "mouse getting out of a blender" brain-teasers or whatever are pretty unheard of at this point I think. Most people complain about coding questions, generally leetcode-style questions I think.
> So much for that common, popular notion that standardized tests do not predict anything of value.
To people with a particular agenda -- that society will be improved if equal outcomes are mandated -- I suppose standardized tests aren't "valuable" to them.
I am very grateful for the SAT. I wasn't a good student. I was unable to do any work outside of school because of a bad home (my brother did hours long "hand-clapping/stimming" and chanting rituals, my mother drank, and my father was violent). But I did well on the SAT -- enough to get a national merit scholarship and a scholarship from Hofstra University where I got my BA in Math in the early 80s.
If it wasn't for the SAT I don't know what I would have done. Standardized tests are the only answer, and I was very upset when I read of schools getting rid of using them for admission.
SATs are also a great predictor of a person's ability to complete college. That was one of their original uses. So without SATs, you'll get more people doing poorly, and more people with no degrees and a lot of debt. And if these people are members of what's considered an "under-represented minority" then there will be even more remedial action required elsewhere to fix the problem of the high failure rate (like giving them degrees anyway, etc).
I guess the issue in their analysis is that they are trying to predict MIT grade success, which is possibly another flawed metric. If say exams at MIT resembled SAT, it seems more logical that you'd find a correlation between SAT success and MIT academic success.
What would be a more interesting measure of real value is to study for academic innovation and invention (valuable to society), as well as future success on the job market or at new business ventures (valuable to the student and economy).
I'm making the assumption here that since we have limited educational resources, we'd want to provide the best education to those most likely to advance an academic field through new discovery or insight or invention, as well as those who'd best innovate or provide for existing business and services to society.
And I'm curious if we've ever had any study looking into that? Or if this one did?
Just an interesting anecdote on the predictive power of standardized tests:
When I took the ACT in 2006, I scored around a 24 or 26 for composite score. Not very good. I didn't prep nor study for it because I was pretty apathetic about school and did my best to coast on whatever natural talent I could muster. Since my score wasn't very good, I retook it several weeks later. About halfway through I realized I was given the exact same question set as the first time I took it. I had of course not studied nor prepped for the second time, being the apathetic teenager I was. However this time I score around 32 or 34 or so. I don't remember exactly.
What was different? Why did my score go up about 8 points? Better mood that day? Which score was the "real" one that best represented my abilities?
Did I eat a better breakfast beforehand? I recognized some of the questions but of course I never expected to see the same questions a second time so I didn't prep for that. I didn't prep for anything about it.
I wonder how many kid's college admissions results are ultimately because of one bad or good day? I suppose the other lesson is if you get a bad score, try again. You only need one good score.
MIT and Caltech have always held a 'number-oriented universities' perception in my mind. This is in contrast to a 'prestige-oriented or identity-oriented' perception that I hold for Ivies.
What's surprising though, is that APs and similar exams are not enough. In the UK, I though they essentially looked at A Level results, which are much more representative of what you'll actually study at uni. But I guess both SAT/ACTs & APs must be a better measure that just APs. I just remember fucking hating studying for the SATs though. So boring. SAT IIs were somewhat fun to study for though. In France for instance, they mostly just look at the baccalaureat to get into prep schools / first year at uni. Then exams to get into engr/business/vet schools are actually very interesting topics and very close to what you'll actually study. Same with exams at the end of the first year of med school (which you get into right after 12th grade, unlike in the US where it's after your bachelors).
That being said, they seem to have backed up their numbers, and MIT knows how to count, so they must be right! I just always hoped SAT/ACTs weren't that conclusive so that we didn't have to go through them anymore and could focus on the funner AP/A Level stuff :)
tbh I thought APs were generally more difficult than actual classes at a high-level university (USAFA). And my high school's regular courses (granted a fantastic high school) were actually much more difficult than a state school's courses.
That said, outside of admissions, I don't think I got academic value out of them. They were hard for the sake of being hard. I'd rather have taken the SAT or ACT any day.
(also apropos of nothing but I don't think much of the writing section on the SAT either, which was a hot topic 15 or so years ago... a huge amount is dependent on the graders, and it's fundamentally a "blackboard programming" type scenario where the student is separated from basic resources like word processing and graded on the resulting product... that's not how you would actually work in an academic setting.)
> And my high school's regular courses (granted a fantastic high school) were actually much more difficult than a state school's courses.
I went to a barely-known state university and was very surprised when some of my intro-level gen ed requirement classes mostly covered material I'd already seen in, and with a similar level of rigor to, junior high school. And my junior high and high schools were nothing special at all—at the higher end of performance in the state (so far as those measures are helpful, anyway) but just regular public schools in a state with overall mediocre-bordering-on-poor schools.
If I'd known that the first couple years of college weren't going to be harder than high school, and would have a lower total time commitment, hell, I'd have probably tried to go the drop out -> GED -> start college at 16 or 17 route. I wasn't gonna get into top-tier universities, anyway.
The boringness could actually be a big part of the effectiveness. Efficient study habits and ability to work through boredom certainly help with some undergrad classes. The test would have some predictive power even if it's just measuring those.
AP scores and SAT II's are highly subject to the quality of instruction. I had several teachers who treated it as a more advanced class than honors, but felt no need to teach to the rubric for the test specifically.
I aced the SAT and ACT but had a decent number of mediocre AP scores because I was seeing the material for the first time when I opened the test. Got to college and after a single 45 minute lecture covering the gap material, I'm pretty sure I could have scored a 5. Ended up making for several easy A's freshman year.
I practiced the math part several time to make sure I had it down pat, never the writing part though. Reading those long essays is a chore. I think the reading/verbal part is less coachable than the math part.
>What's surprising though, is that APs and similar exams are not enough.
That isn't what they said. They said that access to those tests is not universal. Students from high schools that don't offer AP classes would have a hard time taking AP exams. This would exclude people from rural or impoverished areas.
This is why the SAT and ACT are useful: they are meant to be aptitude tests. They are IQ tests in disguise. If properly designed, they will measure intelligence with minimal influence from education or cultural background. Theoretically something like these tests could be administered to elementary school students and still be useful for predicting success in college a decade later.
> They said that access to those tests is not universal. Students from high schools that don't offer AP classes would have a hard time taking AP exams.
Yeah, I wish they'd just flat out told me "we expect AP courses" before I applied for MIT back in the day. Would have saved me a lot of hassle that just resulted in "sorry, we wanted AP credits" in the end.
I passed the AP calc exam without a class. But that had a lot more to do with motivation and interest and a sense of entitlement than with aptitude. I wish everyone had my sense of entitlement, but they don't, and classes do seem to make a passable substitute.
It's important to keep in mind that the context here is the SAT/ACT versus the currently available alternatives. They're not saying that the SAT/ACT is good, but simply that it's better than other options. Some of those options, like alternative standard tests, may be significantly better, but in the world as it is today, it doesn't matter if they are, because lower-income candidates don't have access to them.
The current discussion I thought focuses around the idea that higher scores should just about guarantee acceptance due some fantasy notion of objective merit, and here they pretty much say that's not the case here:
> To be clear, performance on standardized tests is not the central focus of our holistic admissions process. We do not prefer people with perfect scores; indeed, despite what some people infer from our statistics, we do not consider an applicant’s scores at all beyond the point where preparedness has been established as part of a multifactor analysis
Seems like semantics - maybe they don't explicitly prefer perfect scores but it sounds like they're filtering out using a minimum bar, and I'd bet it isn't too far off perfect.
The University of California commissioned a study to determine the predictive value of SATs for college success. A strong positive correlation was found. The test requirement was dropped anyway.
The problem with testing isn't that it's inaccurate, but that it's a poor tool for the problem that it's being used to solve. You can't express "likelihood of success in college" in one number. Looking back on my time in college, the idea that my success could be predicted by my knowledge of geometry and vocabulary words is laughable.
If there was a test that could accurately predict someone's chances of "success", be it SAT or IQ test, it would be used by everyone for everything. Billion dollar companies would be giving CEOs a version of that test before hiring them. A near perfect SAT score is noteworthy personal trivia, but other than that it loses all meaning as soon as someone steps on campus.
Schools with strong brands use tests because they have way more applicants than they can properly review. Standardized testing is made necessary by scale, not predictive accuracy. I'm sure that anyone who has worked in college admissions for years has a very clear picture of what a successful student looks like. But there doesn't seem to be a way to quantify and codify that knowledge. And there likely wouldn't be time to apply it to tens of thousands of people in a few months anyway. So, standardized testing is what we have until someone comes up with something better.
> the idea that my success could be predicted by my knowledge of geometry and vocabulary words is laughable.
You really should look into the g-factor research. This isn't about knowledge, but rather performance. It turns out that your performance on geometry and vocabulary tests is highly correlated with your performance on tests in such disparate fields as Classics and Music:
The crazy result in general intelligence is that your performance in all these areas is highly correlated, and incredibly correlated with career success:
> "Research indicates that tests of g are the best single predictors of job performance, with an average validity coefficient of .55 across several meta-analyses of studies based on supervisor ratings and job samples."
Many years ago--business grad school--one of the professors (forecasting?) had done research into GMATs and various post-school success metrics. Like it or not, the standardized test scores were a better predictor (by far) than anything else.
In terms of gaming scores on standardized tests generally, yes people with more money can take prep classes and the like, but there are also test prep books available--presumably even from the library--that probably get you a lot of the way there.
I don't doubt that MIT's study showed otherwise for their needs. But UChicago is also a top-tier school and is not requiring standardized tests, for educational not political reasons.
Don't underestimate the value of the kind of conscientiousness it takes to do well on these tests! I found grit much more useful than cleverness when I was an academic researcher.
I wonder why we can't hire more teachers to grade word problems in tests like SAT, like Asian countries do. Those problems are much harder to game or cram.
as an MIT alum, a wealthy one who thought he would leave his fortune to MIT, I applaud this move, but it doesn't get me back to giving.
MIT shouldn't have stopped requiring the tests in the first place, shouldn't have participated in that anti-intellectual "shut down tech" day or whatever that was, and shouldn't have done a dozen other things like cancel speakers to bow to a woke mob.
and MIT needs to stop writing stuff like this (from TFA):
Our research can’t explain why these tests are so predictive of academic preparedness for MIT, but we believe it is likely related to the centrality of mathematics — and mathematics examinations — in our education.
IQ science is well established, and it is well known that the SAT is an IQ test, plain and simple. To pretend otherwise is to dissemble, to be anti-science. Hopefully, MIT will save itself, but I'm sadly not expecting miracles.
> IQ science is well established, and it is well known that the SAT is an IQ test, plain and simple. To pretend otherwise is to dissemble, to be anti-science. Hopefully, MIT will save itself, but I'm sadly not expecting miracles.
The "woke mob" you called is also well established, and people in academia have been fired before for recognizing aspects of IQ tests (e.g. Ronald Sullivan, a dean at Harvard). I agree with your sentiment, but also want to recognize that it takes time for the policy makers at MIT to fight against this trend.
Using IQ as the sole metric for intelligence is bogus though, in my opinion. Hard working "low IQ" slow learners beat mentally fragile or lazy "high IQ" quick learners 9 times out of 10 in my book. Low(er) IQ people can still master advanced sciences, it just takes them longer to do so. Standardized tests filter for the quickest learners who can think the fastest but they don't do as well filtering for mental fortitude or work ethic. Completely anecdotal, but it seems like a lot of the smartest people I've ever known ("high IQ") turned out to be mentally fragile (paralyzed with nihilism, depression, purposelessness). But most of the hardest workers I know who required a few extra years of work to master their fields ("low IQ") are extremely dependable and have high mental resilience by contrast. Of course, you can't beat hard working, high IQ people, but they are very rare in my experience, at least in the fields I've worked in.
I didn't base what I wrote on my opinion or my personal experience, it's published peer reviewed science. The notion that many psychologists over many decades who have devoted their careers attempting together to understand/explain/theorize about the cleverness that sets us apart from the other apes would have somehow failed to stumble upon your insights seems fanciful.
I always take social science studies with a huge grain of salt because they are highly susceptible to emotional and political bias, even with safeguards such as peer reviews. It sounds like you are upset that MIT doesn't do enough IQ-based gatekeeping, which is fine. I'm just saying IQ alone doesn't measure a person's work ethic, mental resilience, or even ability to master a topic, and that in my experience, I've noticed my Mensa obsessed friends have other shortcomings that are worth factoring into their profile - shortcomings that friends with lower IQs (but still smart) tend not to have.
I read that sentence as they think SAT scores are correlated with but not causal for MIT student success. You would need to do a randomised controlled trial or a mendelian randomisation analysis (requires a lot of genotyping of students) to establish any kind of causality. Those experiments have not been done, so the relationship is correlated.
there are other factors that are correlated with success beyond IQ, but IQ is also very highly correlated with success, that's part of what's been established by IQ science.
Yes, regression models do shows that IQ correlates with socioeconomic status. But remember that our statistical techniques often tell us about what factors matter on average. In something as messy as human IQ there are going to be people with low status and high SATs. MIT can find those people by filtering for high SAT and low socioeconomic status, however MIT measures it.
I would consider the problem of socioeconomic status correlating with IQ to be a different problem. Maybe a bit more equality in society would help.
for privacy reasons I remain non-specific and/or obfuscated about true facts of my life. However, after MIT and some entrepreneurship I did also study finance and that--along with lucky timing and my attraction to my own outside the box radical ideas and/or perhaps more luck--grew a modest nest egg into a large number of eggs in one basket.
This is the best technical university in the world offering the best technical education in history. It's where the smartest minds learn foundational knowledge that will enable them to make amazing technological contributions to mankind.
Not everything needs to be a battleground for the boring diversity of skin color. It's actually important that we get the most qualified people in these seats.
No, not here. 100% of MIT admissions should go to pupils who are the most capable of succeeding and who are already the best prepared to succeed before they arrive. Utopia aside, as a society we require elite science and engineering ability. If we don't have it we lose out to another society that doesn't do this incessant navel gazing, simple as that. To whatever extent "starting point" is a problem it should be remediated entirely upstream from admission into the world's most prestigious technical university.
If someone has "elite science and engineering" ability and came from a background where they were raised by a family with a household wealth of $5, and someone has a slightly more "elite science and engineering" ability and was raised by a family with a household wealth of $1,000,000, I am not confident that long term the second person will be the greater innovator.
I agree with you completely, and a lot of talent surely goes to waste. I'm not sure what difference you think that makes. If the kid from the poor family isn't well prepared by the time he gets to MIT on day one, all of the natural talent in the world isn't going to change that.
One of two things will happen: He'll fail out; this is common for diversity admits. Or, he may require a remedial curriculum to develop these natural talents he is believed to have, but may not, nobody's really sure yet because he can't demonstrate them as well as the other students from richer households. Either way, a prestigious university is not the proper forum for that.
I've never seen somebody who opposes meritocracy actual suggest taking starting points into consideration - instead, they demand that easily observable, intrinsic physical characteristics be used as a proxy for "starting point".
But there are a number of studies demonstrating how race & class impact things (when controlled for other factors) like teacher perception, grading, letters of recommendation, not to mention just the fact that if you are growing up in a black (or white) household that has $5 in wealth, you'll have less access to educational opportunity than the white (or black, albeit far more rarely) household with $200,000 in wealth.
No. That only tells you to fix those factors but the outcome is what they are. By the time of the ACT/SAT test it's too late to fix those things. Fix those upstream.
Based on this MIT press release stating that controlling for socio-economic factors test score was still significant in predicting outcome in college. You want to challenge that you need to come up with data.
18 years of growth differences cannot be made up by "exposure to things" from age 18-22. It helps, but it does not resolve it. If someone is truly smart they will score well on the not-very-difficult ACT/SAT without any test prep in the first place. These are stupidly easy tests by international standards. Just suck it up and recognize that at the high level that these schools operate at, if you are below a certain score range, you are not ready, regardless of how many "opportunities" you are given.
That's not to say that some people aren't capable in other ways and will do just fine in life, but these schools are not for them.
What do you mean by "whites". American "whites"? The last IQ report has many Asian countries at the top followed by "white" European countries. Whites and blacks are such generic terms. There are many different types of white, black, asian, etc peoples that have different cultures and phenotypes based on the region.
That site is a mess. Shows a chart where the average IQ is 82, links to a page saying the average IQ is 100 (which is the original design). Also cites a eugenicist and thinks that worthy of a passing footnote. Frankly, I wouldn't trust anything I read there.
You can look for "intelligence" on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT. From memory, Human Intelligence by Earl Hunt has plenty of references as well if you're into this topic.
The page states pretty much the opposite. If you read the link, they state how, amongst other things:
Good SAT scores can help find students from poorer high schools who didn't have the opportunity to take as many advanced classes in high school.
Also, to quote the paper "College admission protocols should attend to how social class is...encoded in non-numerical components of applications"
Like admissions essays touched up by educational counsellors, who can also get children of rich parents into "volunteering programs" that touch up experience, while poorer kids have to work after school.
I’m genuinely curious about the advantages of going to MIT or any other super competitive CS college for undergrad instead of say, UMass or another less-competitive CS university.
From limited knowledge and experience at other colleges (all pretty well-ranked but not as well as MIT), it’s the prestige and graduate research which makes colleges like MIT superior. Otherwise, for most undergrads it’s like a typical college experience, but with harder courses and smarter peers, but even that is flexible (since they have access to graduate students and grad-level courses).
It’s particularly relevant today because apparently college admissions are really competitive. A lot of high schoolers are upset because they got rejected from everything but their safeties, except their safeties are like Georgia Tech, Rutgers or the UCs.
Speaking from personal experience, it does help in at least two ways:
(1) Being surrounded by other hard-working students pushes you to do better and exposes you to more advanced classes and research early on (a majority of my friends in CS started taking graduate courses by their sophomore year and did undergraduate research at least for a summer in one of research labs on campus).
(2) Recruiting/Ability to get interviews. It isn't a problem in getting interviews for software engineering internships/full-time positions if you have MIT, Stanford or Berkeley on your resume.
Compare a list of companies that attend MIT's career fair vs those that attend UMass. There will be some overlap, and it's not a closed door if you don't go to MIT/Stanford/etc. But, if you want to land an internship at "the best" companies (which can often lead to jobs), being recruited at a college career fair is the best option.
I grew up poor, and from my anecdotal experience people do better on the SAT if they "are rich". You can also pay people to take the test for you.
Maybe it's because they don't have to spend their days worry about getting shot, stabbed or beaten to the ground by gangs. Maybe it's because they get to eat every day. I guess, perhaps, they get more quality study time. Or, heck maybe you're all right, random questions - your ability to regurgitate the points on the unit circle at will - indicates the level of education you are qualified to attempt. Thank goodness these tests will let you know what you are capable of.
To be fair, I tried to get into several universities (over the pandemic) to round out my self taught education, but I was rejected everywhere I applied. So, I guess for some people - tests or no tests - it doesn't really matter. Apparently, I am too stupid to get an education. Good to know.
For anyone who is salty about this (I used to be quite angry about this and the "Google style" hiring process (which is essentially the same thing)), this realization helped me get over this:
_These tests are designed to filter out people like you. You have a qualities they do not want. That's why they are used. The tests are working from their point of view. They wont stop using them. Your life will be much easier if you just accept it, let it go, and go do something else._
I think you’re focusing your anger on the wrong target. Is it Google’s fault for performing blind objective skill tests? Or is it your society’s fault for not giving you the chance to grow up fed and safe enough to study?
Absolutely not! Sorry if you thought I was angry. I sometimes have a funny way of expressing myself, but there is no anger here at all. Just acceptance of the way the world works - kind of my point actually :)
If I were you I wouldn't apply right away to a 4 year college. Do community college in your chosen field and then transfer.
In California if can do 2 years in a community college you are guaranteed a spot in a school in the UC system. Not UC Berkeley, but still some place great. I think to qualify for this transfer you need to have a 'C' or 'B' average.
If you stay on the pity pot you won't get anywhere.
Also, in California, community college is very cheap.
I grew up poor enough that I got a full need-based ride to a state school. The SAT helped me differentiate myself from all the kids with expensive summer camps, tutoring for competitions, and expensive sports lessons that didn't actually do that well in school.
> Google style hiring process
A couple leetcode questions is hardly a difficult task compared to getting matched for residency as a doctor or accruing enough volunteering experience as a poor college kid for law school. Don't even get me started on investment banking.
Sorry that reality has hit you I guess? My perspective has always been that if you fail you should get up, evaluate what went wrong, and try again.
> but I was rejected everywhere I applied
Did you try going to community college and transferring?
Don't want to go too much into this, but thanks for the thoughtful response.
> A couple leetcode questions is hardly a difficult task
I don't have a problem with data structures and the like. I've been building software for >20 years. I can do pretty much anything I want with a computer. However, and I can't articulate this well, but where I come from "high pressure" things mean people are getting killed - it's not fun. I don't do hackathons either for the same reason. The whole argumentative style of communication doesn't work so I just stop answering. Like I said, they are filtering out people like me on purpose, and it's fine.
> Did you try going to community college and transferring?
That is not something I could do at this stage. I tried to get into a few online degrees which have a more flexible schedule.
Several years ago, I did try to go to a community college, but none of my current bachelors credits would transfer (they are from an online school which no institution apparently counts as valid). So I'd have to start over from scratch.
This is turning into a life story here. I have indeed tried - for a very, very long time. I've given up on the idea of going to school or working at some hip company now, and I've made peace with it.
I do think the standard leetcode style interviews are often administered poorly.
But I also think that if you create a fairly complex mousetrap, the profile of the average person who gets to the other side will be decent enough.
So likely many false negatives, but works at scale.
I'd do it very differently for my own company. But I think some of the bigger cos have actually gotten better, e.g. not asking certain types of questions too far removed from 99% of programming work.
