> we do expect to return to requiring the SAT/ACT once it is possible for everyone to take them safely
Fine with this being temporary. Much less fine with the schools who have completely abandoned the SAT/ACT in the name of equality while still considering things like personal essays and extracurriculars, which are way more liable to be gamed by the wealthy than the SAT.
One of the more obnoxious things is how biases are buried into things like personal essays and extracurriculars. They're so subjective that it lets evaluators sneak bias into their decisions.
The Harvard undergraduate admissions lawsuit a year ago or two provides an example. Asian applicants were consistently ranked to have inferior personalities to white people, even with otherwise identical applications. There's no particular reason to think Asians are inferior to white people, and Harvard is really just promoting racist ideologies that say that Asians are mindless automatons who might be technically proficient but lack the creative, human impulses that would make them suitable for social roles higher than servitude.
It can be permanent. In addition to the effort of removing standard tests, education reforms are happening left and right. San Francisco school union recently decided to remove fast tracks. The union will also delay the teaching of geometry to grade 9, which IMHO will make teaching physics and algebra really hard.
I can understand that the motivation of such reform is to improve equity, as numerous studies have shown positive correlation between family income and testing scores. Therefore, lowering the difficulty of challenging courses and removing requirements of standard tests appear to be a natural choice towards better equity. Besides, many of us do not need advanced math or STEM in our profession anyway, why spend so much time on STEM, right?
That said, I don't see how such reform will lead to more equity. Studying and taking tests are probably the most inexpensive activities out there. All that a driven student needs to learn well is a library, a good teacher, and a few like-minded classmates. And tutoring school does not necessarily make a difference, either. But with all the reforms, what would happen? Here is what I can imagine:
- Tutoring schools will make more difference. Family with means will send their kids to
tutoring schools so their kids can learn geometry or algebra in grade 5 and have all
the time to study AP courses in high school. Who suffers? Smart kids from poor families.
Same goes for history, writing, English, and etc.
- Money will matter more. Families with means will send their kids to robotics camps,
science research labs, coding schools, professional sports coaches, and etc.
You know, things that poor families have a hard time to afford. With non-differentiating
test scores, guess what school admission officers will look at?
I really don't see how good intention in this case will help less privileged kids. Such reform is advantageous to my ids, as I'll simply send them to private schools, all kinds of camps, or tutoring schools. They will learn calculus in grade 7 or early if they are talented. They will have a bucket list of volunteering experience and so-called leadership proof in their resume. They will build their ML-powered robots or conduct their favorite chemistry/physics experiments in their private lab that I can help build, if they are interested. And in the worse case, my wife and I have no problem and plenty of time to home school my kids. Yet it still pains me to see potentially hundreds of thousands of kids who would get better chance but can't because of watered-down education.
And I'll be happy if someone could show me how wrong I am.
As someone who grow up with very few opportunities, accelerated programs and standardized tests were far and away the single biggest reason I was able to go from growing up poor and without any connections to a top 10 school and then a great career in software. In turn, that's allowed me to support my family in everything from mentoring to financial support.
This is a heartbreaking example of how some people today take equality to mean taking everyone down rather than trying to bring everyone up. Or in other words, "they don't love the poor, they just hate the rich"
This part shocks me a little bit. All kids in Vietnam start geometry at grade 6. I have a hard time comprehend what is the difference that makes kids in a developing countries can learn things 3 years ahead of a developed countries.
I agree. Compared to extracurriculars, SAT/ACT test prep is (was?) probably the most cost effective way of improving the chance of admissions for low-income students. It is possible to significantly improve the score simply by being familiar with the test format and a few test-taking strategies, and this is all doable even with just a SAT prep book and a timer.
Standardized tests are important, otherwise students are not evaluated using a uniform criteria. GPAs can be compared only within the same school district.
I think we'll actually see more of a divide as those who are motivated to study on their own go through online programs like OCW and use that knowledge to do impressive things in lieu of credentialing themselves (though they may also leverage the impressive things to get credentials).
The hard part will be that the poorer folks won't have the same luxury of free time to study like this.
So in the end I'm not sure that we'll really escape from Matthew's Law ("the rich get richer and the poor get poorer").
> The union will also delay the teaching of geometry to grade 9
That's when I took it as a youth and nobody in either of the school districts I went to around those years took it any earlier.
(For non-North Americans, 9th grade is 14-15yo).
(And did you mean 'board' instead of 'union'?)
EDIT: Some basic googling isn't coming up with anything about this, the closest I've found is SF high schools delaying algebra 1 until 9th grade, but with an option for kids to take both algebra 1 and geometry at the same time (or algebra 2 and geometry at the same time). Details at https://www.sfusdmath.org/high-school-pathways.html
> I'll simply send them to private schools, all kinds of camps, or tutoring schools. They will learn calculus in grade 7 or early if they are talented. They will have a bucket list of volunteering experience and so-called leadership proof in their resume. They will build their ML-powered robots or conduct their favorite chemistry/physics experiments in their private lab that I can help build, if they are interested. And in the worse case, my wife and I have no problem and plenty of time to home school my kids.
Sounds like a great way to give them one hell of a complex.
I've had co-workers who were parents of kids in the Princeton NJ school district (and adjacent districts) and from what they say it is an incredibly stressful and competitive experience. On the opposite coast, there's a reason kids in Palo Alto are killing themselves so much more than elsewhere.
> The union will also delay the teaching of geometry to grade 9, which IMHO will make teaching physics and algebra really hard.
In the usual secondary sequence, Geometry is between Algebra I and Algebra II; doing it in 9th grade, even with a full year precalc after Algebra II, gets you to Calculus I in 12th. with a combined Algebra II/Trig and no separate precalc, which has long been thr common accelerated course, it gets you to Calculus II.
Physics in high school is typically non-calculus based and works well alongside precalc or calc I or even Algebra II; there’s no difficulty having it in 11th/12th with geometry in 9th.
It may create problems keeping mathematically advanced students engaged, it doesn’t create problems teaching algebra or physics.
This was years ago but there's no particular reason I'd expect things to have changed. But basically if you looked at outcomes--I think this included post-uni outcomes like salary--the quantitative measures like SAT score had a lot more predictive value than interview/letters of recommendation/essays/etc.
(The way the one school I'm familiar with used to do things was that basically everyone went on an X-Y graph with X being a normalized quant score and the Y being a normalized everything else score. Everyone up and to the right. No one down and to the left did. Those in the middle band were looked at a bit more carefully.
I don't get why students need to be apply to be accepted. Why can't everyone go to MIT? Is there a scarcity on chalk boards, shitty chairs and cinder blocks?
Because you want to have a minimum level of ability so that you can maintain a certain pace of instruction. If you have students of various levels of ability and you teach high tier material, most of those kids will fail and drop out. Why set them up for failure?
The admissions criteria is probably most of the value of MIT. If you have a degree from MIT you're probably smart, and we know that because you were able to get in to MIT (and graduate).
If we could find proper way to do testing and administer unlimited class sizes, one option could be just allow everyone in first year remote with some lower tuition rate. And then just drop all of the students who do not do good enough to get inside quota of spots for further years.
Lab based courses are crucial to the natural sciences. Even an institution as well off as MIT can't afford to buy enough NMR spectrometers for everyone to take their chemistry classes. Simulations and videos are not adequate substitutes for real lab work.
With online schooling this is true now more than ever. Why _cant_ i just follow along online, have a bot grade the assignments, and get a degree? Makes you start to question what going to prestigious schools is really about.
How about kids test in? They can take classes online, if they perform well enough, they get to attend in person, everyone else can bang on the gates via a MOOC.
Why not take 1 or 2 university classes your junior and senior year of HS?
You know test prep courses are a thing, and that the wealthy are the primary consumers of them, right? Pretty much everything in the USA is pay to win.
You're being downvoted, but I think this sentiment is right and if you take it seriously, it's an argument for the SAT. Pretty much _everything_ in the USA is pay to win, not just the SAT, and the more subjective factors like essays, extracurriculars, and even grades, are more biased.
Test prep companies have an incentive to overhype their services but research suggests the improvement isn't that much.
Test prep has a more or less negligible effect size. Extra curriculars and paying someone to write your essay for you on the other hand are all about privilege.
Spending 10k on a prep class isn't going to cause your dimwitted child to outperform a bright kid from a disadvantaged background, but it can probably buy a better essay
At least in the past, Harvard had a far higher rate of students with learning disabilities than lower tier schools, because having one meant you could get unlimited time on the SAT (giving the time to, on the math part, test every multiple choice solution manually rather than solve once and choose or use other higher level strategies).
Richer families were more likely to have connections with a doctor to give the diagnosis, afford the insurance deductible, or even be in the right circles or to know through word of mouth or paid admissions advisers that it was a thing to try and acquire for the kid.
This is an oft-repeated meme, but I don't think it holds much water - the main value of SAT test prep is in taking a few practice tests, which you can do by yourself with a $20 book. You can't buy your way to a 2400, it takes being able to actually solve the problems. Otherwise, you'd see a lot more of them.
Yes, everything. But testing is the least gameable (assuming you can prevent actual cheating). So getting rid of it makes admission more gameable overall.
At least the wealthy still have to take the test. With essays, there is no guarantee that the person wrote it. There are numerous websites for purchasing essays
you know they also pay people to write their essays or give them tutoring to get a high GPA right? And that GPA's are inflated at private schools?
The SAT is the one mechanism that poor asian and jewish and nigerian kids could prepare for and do well on. But obviously the objective is to get rid of them as "theres too many"
Its also the only measure thats the same for everyone. There also isnt any indication that as a whole the test prep classes actually "work" to a serious degree. Maybe theyll take your score up 20 points but wont raise it 300.
I'd like to point out that there's an egalitarian approach to college admissions that I found interesting. Every single time I've brought it up with people, no matter their politics, they got angry about it, but I think it would be interesting to see it implemented and then compare the outcomes.
I've heard of similar proposals for funding grants; have a first pass to make sure the grant proposals aren't total BS, then lottery among those that pass.
That assumes that the primary purpose of higher education is education, instead of maintaining social stratification under the auspices of meritocracy.
From a business perspective it must be more lucrative to select candidates by their cultural projection and the money connections than on the basis of academic potential.
I suppose that is true for MIT, for mainstream media, and for US corporations.
We can compare the audience of an flamewar post about racism in US, vs the readership of a paper on fixed point theorems, and it makes sense that organizations that don't care about science like US universities choose to favor the former.
Anecdotal evidence, but I did well on the SAT and spent very little money. I bought a few books, but easily could have pirated them online (like I did for all of my AP tests previously).
I think the SAT is likely more egalitarian than extracurriculars, although I cannot comment on its effectiveness as an indicator for college performance.
Someone who has to work after high school to support their family would not have the time or energy to play sports, do choir, run clubs, etc. But they could go to the library, pirate some books, print out the pages and practice 20 minutes a day starting 10-12 months ahead of time. It would be more difficult, of course, but I still think studying for a test is easier and cheaper than having extensive extracurriculars.
Anecdotally, I've also always heard SAT test prep is a waste of money.
Did SAT/ACT scores ever make a difference in applications here? I know they probably cut off around 1300-1400 (as do plenty of schools), but my understanding was that MIT wanted you to be doing tons of extracurriculars and other stuff that wasn't represented by standardized tests anyway.
The system when I was familiar with it basically used SAT/GPA as one axis and other stuff on another axis. So you needed to hit some cutoff but if all you had was a perfect SAT, that wasn't enough.
Like a lot of things, the pandemic will be used as cover to stop (or change) stuff everyone hates, but otherwise don't have the courage to discontinue otherwise.
--
Is anyone using lotteries as part of admissions?
My interest in lotteries comes thru 1) warming up to the notion of sortition, 2) tired of the food fight over affirmative action, and 3) rejection of ever increasing bureaucracy and credentialing.
As a mental model, I'm starting to think of lotteries as an optimization technique.
--
I briefly worked on some student facing stuff in higher ed. The course registration stuff is insane. There's got to be more fair, easier to administrate systems. Something like an auction. Release some fraction of courses every time interval. Figure out some rational way to prioritize bids. Like add weight for seniority, students in program, declared major. Or whatever. Then administrators can add or remove courses, sections, labs, whatever as needed.
--
Now that our university monopolies have been privatized, why hasn't Freedom Markets™ logic prevailed? Raise supply to meet demand.
Higher ed loves government pork. But are completely unaccountable.
If we are states are no longer willing to adjudicate bottom up, they must now impose some kind of top down pressure.
The most simple idea I can think of is raid (radical cashectomies) the endowments. Use it or lose. Compel places like MIT and Harvard to spend down their hoard. Increase slots. Add campuses. Adopt other universities and invest in them, like scholastic version of sport farm teams.
One question on my mind (as someone who has a master's degree and engineering degree and has never taken the ACT/SAT) is how kids will go about showing pure intellectual merit?
Like let's say you grow up ok but you can't really afford to join the ski club or for a tutor and maybe you work in the evenings but you crush the SAT/ACT because you're incredibly intelligent. How will universities like MIT take that into account? If we're talking about merit - boy that sure speaks of merit to me compared to a laundry list of clubs, activities, and organizations that the kids with hyper-dedicated parents or lots of money have on their applications.
I'll also say, I didn't take either of these tests and came from a family where to this day I'm still the only one to attend college, but if I had taken the SAT or ACT and scored remarkably well - I think that would have opened doors I didn't even know exist. High school counselor ideally would have noticed a high score and helped with applications.
I don't like these tests but I have to imagine a subset of the population uses them to great effect. Like many things, it seems, I bet that removal of these tests will result in bifurcation in the education system, or will wind up hurting poorer students (while making the middle extremely competitive).
Anyway. There are so many problems with the university system, starting with using universities to train workers, that it's difficult to feel emotion anymore around the issue because it's so overwhelming.
-edit-
For what it's worth I don't know if the SAT/ACT are a good show of intellect. And these tests can be effectively gamed - not just illegally as we saw with the recent scandal but with tutors and test prep.
-edit 2-
Many students who are intelligent but grow up poor have a difficult time in universities, especially when they don't get to take the same classes as their peers did in high school. I know I'm probably an average student, but when I went to my calculus classes after being out of high school for around 5 years I could grasp how to do derivatives and their meaning, but couldn't understand the log functions or trigonometry. So I'd do most of the homework and take the quizzes, then bomb the exams when these concepts came into play. I felt miserable and I didn't know how to study or how to even really get help - I didn't even have a concept of what I didn't know. I just thought I was dumb. It took 3 tries but I eventually got enough help and practice (thanks Khan Academy and others) to make it through, graduate, and go on to do other things.
Fortunately I had training in resilience from the military. What about that kid who grows up crushes a standardized test and fails a class and then thinks that they're stupid and they don't know how to ask for help or can't afford tutoring? Those kids maybe they fail out, or maybe they have mediocre grades so when they go to try and get a job they're competing against 3.8s with tons of on-campus activities. Yet again perpetuating the cycle of getting dumped on. Needs lots of luck or persistence to break the cycle.
Standardized testing is widely vilified, but it's probably been the greatest single force for meritocracy in American history. Prior to widespread adoption, elite universities awarded slots on a "holistic" basis. Which mostly meant the well-connected scions of high society families.
When the SAT went mainstream in the 1960s it opened up a world of opportunity to the previously overlooked gifted kids from middle-class families and excluded ethnic groups. It was now possible for a bright kid whose parents were garment workers in the Lower East Side to objectively compete with the Kennedys or the Astors in Exeter or Dalton. And the raw numbers meant that college admissions officers could no longer pretend this wasn't true.
It's almost certain that the 21st century's version of "holistic admissions" winds up operating much the same way as the early 20th century. There will certainly be more diversity window dressing. But at the end of the day it will still primarily benefit the powerful, rich, and well-connected. They'll be a few less Rockefellers and Bushes and a few more descendants of Eric Holder and Carlos Slim. But at the end of the day, the result will be the same. Keeping out kids from the wrong side of town.
I did well on the SAT and ACT, but one problem is that it's just not enough. Parents who shove their kids into piano and tennis lessons since age 4, push them to run for student government and take petitions to the city council, whatever, those parents are also going to make their kids spend every evening studying for the SAT. They've also had tutors when they need it. How does Harvard tell the difference between "this kid did well because she's brilliant" vs "this kid got $10k worth of SAT prep classes"?
One interesting idea: the College Board could add in a class of problems requiring a particular novel, non-obvious approach that are effectively poison pills. Students who take the SAT prep courses are drilled on how to answer them, while students who take the test naively are bound to answer them incorrectly. It doesn't affect the actual score reported to the student. But when the score is reported to universities, a shadow score that represents likelihood that the student received extensive prep is also reported, which gives that kind of context.
Unfortunately it's not really possible to measure intellectual merit in a standardized way without inadvertently also selecting for children of wealthier backgrounds. Standardized testing ultimately needs to be formulaic in nature in order to produce comparable scores. As long as the test is formulaic, it will be possible to purchase test preparation services that essentially teach you the formula. Test preparation services are purchased by people of means; their children confound the test score's signal of intellectual merit with a signal of test preparatory ability. The more elite the institution, the narrower the range of acceptable test scores, the more that the score signals test preparation rather than intellectual merit.
For any sufficiently in-demand institution, a healthier approach would be to define a minimum bar ahead of time, accept applications only from students who meet the bar, then select applicants by lottery from the pool according to available openings. Ultimately, selecting for perfect and near-perfect scores is actually counterproductive - Goodhart's Law is as applicable as ever.
> ike let's say you grow up ok but you can't really afford to join the ski club or for a tutor and maybe you work in the evenings but you crush the SAT/ACT because you're incredibly intelligent. How will universities like MIT take that into account?
If the kid's that smart then presumably they'll have a top GPA as well. Absolute GPA of course is gameable, but class ranking really isn't. Texas at least has a "top 10%" law (https://news.utexas.edu/key-issues/top-10-percent-law/) which would get them in to a state school, and if that kid was really hankering for MIT then maybe they can transfer.
If they're lucky enough not to be in Texas, well, there's nothing wrong with state schools in any of the other several states, and furthermore there's no shame in going to a community college first if you have to.
> If the kid's that smart then presumably they'll have a top GPA as well.
I definitely wouldn’t make that assumption.
> If they're lucky enough not to be in Texas, well, there's nothing wrong with state schools in any of the other several states, and furthermore there's no shame in going to a community college first if you have to.
Oh no doubt. I went to two public state universities and I believe my education was just as good as I’d find anywhere. Though there are differences (opportunities), the education is pretty good overall. But! That doesn’t tell the whole story. Many of the kids I went to school with in undergrad had taken classes like AP Physics, or AP Chemistry, or math beyond geometry. I didn’t. So I had to work much harder in some classes. I failed Calculus I twice before getting an A (maybe a B+? Don’t remember) and moving on with my life. For other students this could send them out of engineering, or maybe out of school altogether, and I’d argue it’s not really an intellect thing more so than it is not being on a level playing field to start with. This is an issue even at state schools. Maybe more so if they lack enough resources to cover tuition and room and board. People growing up in poverty (not that I did myself but much of my family did) think debt == bad or maybe they’re afraid to ask for help.
I guess that’s to say, I think it’s a problem in the entire system, all the way down to elementary school (Lebron James Family Foundation is doing a good job in my view of trying to address this).
My main issue with Ivy League schools is the perception and recruiting exclusivity. Wanna work at Goldman? Yale. Google? Harvard. Netflix? CMU. Etc.
Not a whole lot of tech recruiting going on at, say, Ohio University where I did my undergrad. Fuck those kids. Not in our recruiting footprint. Not one of our “target schools”. As if you need to go recruit at Duke to hire a BA?
In my personal life I do a lot of work to try and get more employers and recruiters down there and find ways to help. It’s tough sledding. Sometimes I wonder why I bother when it seems like so few others care.
I fantasize like damn if I had a ton of money or a huge grant there are so many things I’d love to try and do. It’s just too hard to quit my full time work. I’ll have to wait until I’m older and financially secure.
I would challenge if ACT/SAT is much about pure intellectual merit, considering how much one can boost their score with dedicated tutors and so on, but I digress. How to show intellectual merit other than standardized tests without relying on rich parents:
(a) Straight As
(b) (if applicable) Take all AP courses available at your high school
(c) (if applicable) Take additional college courses through community college dual enrollment or online school
(d) (if applicable) Join the math club, honors society, run for some kind of student council position, or other academics-oriented or leadership-oriented club role that doesn't require a hefty buy-in
b-d may or may not apply, depending on your school, school district, and state.
> I would challenge if ACT/SAT is much about pure intellectual merit, considering how much one can boost their score with dedicated tutors and so on, but I digress. How to show intellectual merit other than standardized tests without relying on rich parents:
I don't think the difference between dedicated tutors and individual studying with Khan Academy is a large difference. The majority of low scorers score low because they're either lower on the intelligence scale or didn't spend time individually studying.
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
If your suggested measures were considered, they would quickly become targets & add to the already insane workload that high school students must put up with in order to be considered competitive applicants. It's unfortunately not a scenario where you can say 'Pick one of (a) through (d)', because it will quickly become all of (a) through (d).
it's hard to show intellectual merit using the SAT, because the test isn't hard enough so people just max out the score. the 25th percentile student at MIT got 790/800 for the math section.
it definitely does make a difference for bright students who do unexpectedly well -- but it gets them into "merely" good schools not ultra-selective institutions like MIT.
Preface: I scored extremely well on the SAT/ACT so I would have every incentive to keep the status quo. I think these tests should stick around as an option for students to prove their aptitude but that the requirement for them should be dropped.
Being smart does help you on these tests but not as much as you would hope. The things that meaningfully affect your score are studying for them and learning the specific material on the test. So there are two ways to do well: you study your ass off with test-prep materials or you go to one of the "good" high schools that tailor their entire curriculum to the ACT/SAT, AP and IB tests.
tl;dr these exasm only test how good you are at school and leave very little room to prove your aptitude in areas that aren't the primary subjects in school. CS being one area that until very recently was completely absent from all but the very best schools.
> I scored extremely well on the SAT/ACT so I would have every incentive to keep the status quo.
I did too (well, the SAT; given that and that evrywhere I wanted to apply took the SAT, the ACT would have been superfluous), but...
> Being smart does help you on these tests but not as much as you would hope.
Its pretty much all being smart. Focussed study has some effect (and because small score differences at the high end make big competitive differences, can be worthwhile), bit don’t really do much.
Scores are quite tightly correlatee with IQ, which is why, e.g., MENSA accepts them in place of IQ tests.
> The things that meaningfully affect your score are studying for them and learning the specific material on the test.
Sure, those are the things in your control near the time of taking the test that affect your score, aside from “not getting wasted the morning of the test”. There’s not much you (or anyone else) can do after early childhood to significantly improve your probable IQ at the time you take the test, but that’s still the main outcome driver.
Well, I scored 760 on the verbal because I read constantly and voraciously. I didn't "study" for it except in the sense that I'd spent the last decade with my face in a book on the bus, during lunch, as I walked from class to class, after I finished work in class, and so on.
Of course my aptitude at picking out synonyms didn't really indicate a damn thing about how well I could write an exam essay about the Reconstruction Era, so the fact that I got a good score without studying doesn't say that much for the test.
The fundamental issue is that crushing the SAT/ACT is more of a reflection of “mom and dad got me good tutoring or prep” than it is intellectual merit.
I “weaseled” my way into CMU via athletic admissions (I was an actual athlete, not a Lori Laughlin style one), but did very well at CMU once I got there. People who aced the SATs did not do as well. Fwiw I still did okay, 32 ACT score, but there were 35/36’s around.
IOW, prediction of academic success is hard; career success harder. These standardized tests don’t add much.
A 32 is still 96th percentile, or a little better than "okay" for most Americans. In the future if you want to argue that ACT doesn't predict academic success it might be more effective to leave your own score and academic success out of it.
Readit News
Fine with this being temporary. Much less fine with the schools who have completely abandoned the SAT/ACT in the name of equality while still considering things like personal essays and extracurriculars, which are way more liable to be gamed by the wealthy than the SAT.
The Harvard undergraduate admissions lawsuit a year ago or two provides an example. Asian applicants were consistently ranked to have inferior personalities to white people, even with otherwise identical applications. There's no particular reason to think Asians are inferior to white people, and Harvard is really just promoting racist ideologies that say that Asians are mindless automatons who might be technically proficient but lack the creative, human impulses that would make them suitable for social roles higher than servitude.
I can understand that the motivation of such reform is to improve equity, as numerous studies have shown positive correlation between family income and testing scores. Therefore, lowering the difficulty of challenging courses and removing requirements of standard tests appear to be a natural choice towards better equity. Besides, many of us do not need advanced math or STEM in our profession anyway, why spend so much time on STEM, right?
That said, I don't see how such reform will lead to more equity. Studying and taking tests are probably the most inexpensive activities out there. All that a driven student needs to learn well is a library, a good teacher, and a few like-minded classmates. And tutoring school does not necessarily make a difference, either. But with all the reforms, what would happen? Here is what I can imagine:
I really don't see how good intention in this case will help less privileged kids. Such reform is advantageous to my ids, as I'll simply send them to private schools, all kinds of camps, or tutoring schools. They will learn calculus in grade 7 or early if they are talented. They will have a bucket list of volunteering experience and so-called leadership proof in their resume. They will build their ML-powered robots or conduct their favorite chemistry/physics experiments in their private lab that I can help build, if they are interested. And in the worse case, my wife and I have no problem and plenty of time to home school my kids. Yet it still pains me to see potentially hundreds of thousands of kids who would get better chance but can't because of watered-down education.And I'll be happy if someone could show me how wrong I am.
This is a heartbreaking example of how some people today take equality to mean taking everyone down rather than trying to bring everyone up. Or in other words, "they don't love the poor, they just hate the rich"
This part shocks me a little bit. All kids in Vietnam start geometry at grade 6. I have a hard time comprehend what is the difference that makes kids in a developing countries can learn things 3 years ahead of a developed countries.
Correlation != causation.
One of the best SAT prep available today is https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/sat and that is free for everyone.
Standardized tests are important, otherwise students are not evaluated using a uniform criteria. GPAs can be compared only within the same school district.
Even the curriculum is not standardized across states. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core_implementation_by_...
The hard part will be that the poorer folks won't have the same luxury of free time to study like this.
So in the end I'm not sure that we'll really escape from Matthew's Law ("the rich get richer and the poor get poorer").
That's when I took it as a youth and nobody in either of the school districts I went to around those years took it any earlier.
(For non-North Americans, 9th grade is 14-15yo).
(And did you mean 'board' instead of 'union'?)
EDIT: Some basic googling isn't coming up with anything about this, the closest I've found is SF high schools delaying algebra 1 until 9th grade, but with an option for kids to take both algebra 1 and geometry at the same time (or algebra 2 and geometry at the same time). Details at https://www.sfusdmath.org/high-school-pathways.html
> I'll simply send them to private schools, all kinds of camps, or tutoring schools. They will learn calculus in grade 7 or early if they are talented. They will have a bucket list of volunteering experience and so-called leadership proof in their resume. They will build their ML-powered robots or conduct their favorite chemistry/physics experiments in their private lab that I can help build, if they are interested. And in the worse case, my wife and I have no problem and plenty of time to home school my kids.
Sounds like a great way to give them one hell of a complex.
I've had co-workers who were parents of kids in the Princeton NJ school district (and adjacent districts) and from what they say it is an incredibly stressful and competitive experience. On the opposite coast, there's a reason kids in Palo Alto are killing themselves so much more than elsewhere.
In the usual secondary sequence, Geometry is between Algebra I and Algebra II; doing it in 9th grade, even with a full year precalc after Algebra II, gets you to Calculus I in 12th. with a combined Algebra II/Trig and no separate precalc, which has long been thr common accelerated course, it gets you to Calculus II.
Physics in high school is typically non-calculus based and works well alongside precalc or calc I or even Algebra II; there’s no difficulty having it in 11th/12th with geometry in 9th.
It may create problems keeping mathematically advanced students engaged, it doesn’t create problems teaching algebra or physics.
This was years ago but there's no particular reason I'd expect things to have changed. But basically if you looked at outcomes--I think this included post-uni outcomes like salary--the quantitative measures like SAT score had a lot more predictive value than interview/letters of recommendation/essays/etc.
(The way the one school I'm familiar with used to do things was that basically everyone went on an X-Y graph with X being a normalized quant score and the Y being a normalized everything else score. Everyone up and to the right. No one down and to the left did. Those in the middle band were looked at a bit more carefully.
I've also read SAT scores are highly correlated to family income. Family income probably has a huge impact on post university outcomes.
Everyone can, online. All of MIT's course content is available for free online:
https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
Why not take 1 or 2 university classes your junior and senior year of HS?
Test prep companies have an incentive to overhype their services but research suggests the improvement isn't that much.
There's a Jacobin article making the case for the SAT that people following this debate might enjoy reading: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/03/sat-class-race-inequality...
Spending 10k on a prep class isn't going to cause your dimwitted child to outperform a bright kid from a disadvantaged background, but it can probably buy a better essay
Richer families were more likely to have connections with a doctor to give the diagnosis, afford the insurance deductible, or even be in the right circles or to know through word of mouth or paid admissions advisers that it was a thing to try and acquire for the kid.
The SAT is the one mechanism that poor asian and jewish and nigerian kids could prepare for and do well on. But obviously the objective is to get rid of them as "theres too many"
Its also the only measure thats the same for everyone. There also isnt any indication that as a whole the test prep classes actually "work" to a serious degree. Maybe theyll take your score up 20 points but wont raise it 300.
A lottery system of admissions, with a guarantee of admission to at least some universities. It's described here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/admit-everybody/
I suppose that is true for MIT, for mainstream media, and for US corporations.
60% of 750 - 800 math SAT scorers are Asian
https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
I looked through the list of USAMO finalists in recent years and > 80% have Asian surnames.
I think the SAT is likely more egalitarian than extracurriculars, although I cannot comment on its effectiveness as an indicator for college performance.
Someone who has to work after high school to support their family would not have the time or energy to play sports, do choir, run clubs, etc. But they could go to the library, pirate some books, print out the pages and practice 20 minutes a day starting 10-12 months ahead of time. It would be more difficult, of course, but I still think studying for a test is easier and cheaper than having extensive extracurriculars.
Anecdotally, I've also always heard SAT test prep is a waste of money.
--
Is anyone using lotteries as part of admissions?
My interest in lotteries comes thru 1) warming up to the notion of sortition, 2) tired of the food fight over affirmative action, and 3) rejection of ever increasing bureaucracy and credentialing.
As a mental model, I'm starting to think of lotteries as an optimization technique.
--
I briefly worked on some student facing stuff in higher ed. The course registration stuff is insane. There's got to be more fair, easier to administrate systems. Something like an auction. Release some fraction of courses every time interval. Figure out some rational way to prioritize bids. Like add weight for seniority, students in program, declared major. Or whatever. Then administrators can add or remove courses, sections, labs, whatever as needed.
--
Now that our university monopolies have been privatized, why hasn't Freedom Markets™ logic prevailed? Raise supply to meet demand.
Higher ed loves government pork. But are completely unaccountable.
If we are states are no longer willing to adjudicate bottom up, they must now impose some kind of top down pressure.
The most simple idea I can think of is raid (radical cashectomies) the endowments. Use it or lose. Compel places like MIT and Harvard to spend down their hoard. Increase slots. Add campuses. Adopt other universities and invest in them, like scholastic version of sport farm teams.
Let Freedom Markets™ sing!
Like let's say you grow up ok but you can't really afford to join the ski club or for a tutor and maybe you work in the evenings but you crush the SAT/ACT because you're incredibly intelligent. How will universities like MIT take that into account? If we're talking about merit - boy that sure speaks of merit to me compared to a laundry list of clubs, activities, and organizations that the kids with hyper-dedicated parents or lots of money have on their applications.
I'll also say, I didn't take either of these tests and came from a family where to this day I'm still the only one to attend college, but if I had taken the SAT or ACT and scored remarkably well - I think that would have opened doors I didn't even know exist. High school counselor ideally would have noticed a high score and helped with applications.
I don't like these tests but I have to imagine a subset of the population uses them to great effect. Like many things, it seems, I bet that removal of these tests will result in bifurcation in the education system, or will wind up hurting poorer students (while making the middle extremely competitive).
Anyway. There are so many problems with the university system, starting with using universities to train workers, that it's difficult to feel emotion anymore around the issue because it's so overwhelming.
-edit-
For what it's worth I don't know if the SAT/ACT are a good show of intellect. And these tests can be effectively gamed - not just illegally as we saw with the recent scandal but with tutors and test prep.
-edit 2-
Many students who are intelligent but grow up poor have a difficult time in universities, especially when they don't get to take the same classes as their peers did in high school. I know I'm probably an average student, but when I went to my calculus classes after being out of high school for around 5 years I could grasp how to do derivatives and their meaning, but couldn't understand the log functions or trigonometry. So I'd do most of the homework and take the quizzes, then bomb the exams when these concepts came into play. I felt miserable and I didn't know how to study or how to even really get help - I didn't even have a concept of what I didn't know. I just thought I was dumb. It took 3 tries but I eventually got enough help and practice (thanks Khan Academy and others) to make it through, graduate, and go on to do other things.
Fortunately I had training in resilience from the military. What about that kid who grows up crushes a standardized test and fails a class and then thinks that they're stupid and they don't know how to ask for help or can't afford tutoring? Those kids maybe they fail out, or maybe they have mediocre grades so when they go to try and get a job they're competing against 3.8s with tons of on-campus activities. Yet again perpetuating the cycle of getting dumped on. Needs lots of luck or persistence to break the cycle.
When the SAT went mainstream in the 1960s it opened up a world of opportunity to the previously overlooked gifted kids from middle-class families and excluded ethnic groups. It was now possible for a bright kid whose parents were garment workers in the Lower East Side to objectively compete with the Kennedys or the Astors in Exeter or Dalton. And the raw numbers meant that college admissions officers could no longer pretend this wasn't true.
It's almost certain that the 21st century's version of "holistic admissions" winds up operating much the same way as the early 20th century. There will certainly be more diversity window dressing. But at the end of the day it will still primarily benefit the powerful, rich, and well-connected. They'll be a few less Rockefellers and Bushes and a few more descendants of Eric Holder and Carlos Slim. But at the end of the day, the result will be the same. Keeping out kids from the wrong side of town.
> But at the end of the day the result will be the same. Keeping out kids from the wrong side of town.
For any sufficiently in-demand institution, a healthier approach would be to define a minimum bar ahead of time, accept applications only from students who meet the bar, then select applicants by lottery from the pool according to available openings. Ultimately, selecting for perfect and near-perfect scores is actually counterproductive - Goodhart's Law is as applicable as ever.
If the kid's that smart then presumably they'll have a top GPA as well. Absolute GPA of course is gameable, but class ranking really isn't. Texas at least has a "top 10%" law (https://news.utexas.edu/key-issues/top-10-percent-law/) which would get them in to a state school, and if that kid was really hankering for MIT then maybe they can transfer.
If they're lucky enough not to be in Texas, well, there's nothing wrong with state schools in any of the other several states, and furthermore there's no shame in going to a community college first if you have to.
I definitely wouldn’t make that assumption.
> If they're lucky enough not to be in Texas, well, there's nothing wrong with state schools in any of the other several states, and furthermore there's no shame in going to a community college first if you have to.
Oh no doubt. I went to two public state universities and I believe my education was just as good as I’d find anywhere. Though there are differences (opportunities), the education is pretty good overall. But! That doesn’t tell the whole story. Many of the kids I went to school with in undergrad had taken classes like AP Physics, or AP Chemistry, or math beyond geometry. I didn’t. So I had to work much harder in some classes. I failed Calculus I twice before getting an A (maybe a B+? Don’t remember) and moving on with my life. For other students this could send them out of engineering, or maybe out of school altogether, and I’d argue it’s not really an intellect thing more so than it is not being on a level playing field to start with. This is an issue even at state schools. Maybe more so if they lack enough resources to cover tuition and room and board. People growing up in poverty (not that I did myself but much of my family did) think debt == bad or maybe they’re afraid to ask for help.
I guess that’s to say, I think it’s a problem in the entire system, all the way down to elementary school (Lebron James Family Foundation is doing a good job in my view of trying to address this).
My main issue with Ivy League schools is the perception and recruiting exclusivity. Wanna work at Goldman? Yale. Google? Harvard. Netflix? CMU. Etc.
Not a whole lot of tech recruiting going on at, say, Ohio University where I did my undergrad. Fuck those kids. Not in our recruiting footprint. Not one of our “target schools”. As if you need to go recruit at Duke to hire a BA?
In my personal life I do a lot of work to try and get more employers and recruiters down there and find ways to help. It’s tough sledding. Sometimes I wonder why I bother when it seems like so few others care.
I fantasize like damn if I had a ton of money or a huge grant there are so many things I’d love to try and do. It’s just too hard to quit my full time work. I’ll have to wait until I’m older and financially secure.
(a) Straight As
(b) (if applicable) Take all AP courses available at your high school
(c) (if applicable) Take additional college courses through community college dual enrollment or online school
(d) (if applicable) Join the math club, honors society, run for some kind of student council position, or other academics-oriented or leadership-oriented club role that doesn't require a hefty buy-in
b-d may or may not apply, depending on your school, school district, and state.
I don't think the difference between dedicated tutors and individual studying with Khan Academy is a large difference. The majority of low scorers score low because they're either lower on the intelligence scale or didn't spend time individually studying.
If your suggested measures were considered, they would quickly become targets & add to the already insane workload that high school students must put up with in order to be considered competitive applicants. It's unfortunately not a scenario where you can say 'Pick one of (a) through (d)', because it will quickly become all of (a) through (d).
And by the time there are actually viable free options the kids are already far behind.
Preparing for tests are much cheaper than joining good clubs and/or preparing to write a food essays
ACT/SAT scores are more representative of your socioeconomic level rather than just straight up smarts.
it definitely does make a difference for bright students who do unexpectedly well -- but it gets them into "merely" good schools not ultra-selective institutions like MIT.
Being smart does help you on these tests but not as much as you would hope. The things that meaningfully affect your score are studying for them and learning the specific material on the test. So there are two ways to do well: you study your ass off with test-prep materials or you go to one of the "good" high schools that tailor their entire curriculum to the ACT/SAT, AP and IB tests.
tl;dr these exasm only test how good you are at school and leave very little room to prove your aptitude in areas that aren't the primary subjects in school. CS being one area that until very recently was completely absent from all but the very best schools.
I did too (well, the SAT; given that and that evrywhere I wanted to apply took the SAT, the ACT would have been superfluous), but...
> Being smart does help you on these tests but not as much as you would hope.
Its pretty much all being smart. Focussed study has some effect (and because small score differences at the high end make big competitive differences, can be worthwhile), bit don’t really do much.
Scores are quite tightly correlatee with IQ, which is why, e.g., MENSA accepts them in place of IQ tests.
> The things that meaningfully affect your score are studying for them and learning the specific material on the test.
Sure, those are the things in your control near the time of taking the test that affect your score, aside from “not getting wasted the morning of the test”. There’s not much you (or anyone else) can do after early childhood to significantly improve your probable IQ at the time you take the test, but that’s still the main outcome driver.
Of course my aptitude at picking out synonyms didn't really indicate a damn thing about how well I could write an exam essay about the Reconstruction Era, so the fact that I got a good score without studying doesn't say that much for the test.
I “weaseled” my way into CMU via athletic admissions (I was an actual athlete, not a Lori Laughlin style one), but did very well at CMU once I got there. People who aced the SATs did not do as well. Fwiw I still did okay, 32 ACT score, but there were 35/36’s around.
IOW, prediction of academic success is hard; career success harder. These standardized tests don’t add much.
Deleted Comment