[HN Gopher] Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?
___________________________________________________________________
Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?
Author : throwkeep
Score : 197 points
Date : 2021-07-23 15:31 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| Causality1 wrote:
| _Aligning enrollment with state demographics would require
| cutting the share of those students by almost two-thirds._
|
| My best friend growing up was Korean. I saw firsthand the amount
| of effort he put into his studies. Why should we allow any
| institution to invalidate his work because our culture produces
| lazier, dumber students? Why should we artificially prop up
| patterns of thought and behavior that have negative effects on
| the people subjected to it?
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| I worked really hard in high school and got basically nothing
| for it (went to an average college, and now have an average
| job). My message to your friend would be "tough".
| whoaisme wrote:
| Basic people like you shouldn't be giving messages. You
| failed so I guess that means you'd prefer if everyone else
| fails too. I don't know why you're so bitter about your
| average life because you seem average in general.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I can only wonder if in a few years some company will have an
| unspoken rule about scoring candidates, thanks to all the
| affirmative action and "holistic admissions". With these
| policies, an Asian male has to be extremely talented to land a
| spot at a good state school/ivy.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| I'm an extremely unimpressive Asian male and I got into my
| state's flagship, which is considered a public ivy according
| to the 1985 list [0]. If going to a state school is beneath
| these people (and therefore, even _associating with people
| like me is beneath them_ ) then perhaps I'm perfectly fine
| with them feeling a tiny bit of discomfort.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Ivy#Original_list_pu
| bli...
| golemiprague wrote:
| We already do those calculations in our heads. We know that
| many Asians got admitted because they worked very hard, not
| necessarily because they are very smart or because of good
| social intelligence. I am sure this affects the way they are
| perceived in the workforce, the same way people assume things
| about blacks or women. Usually those assumptions has some
| basis in reality and as much as you want you can't really
| control what people think deep down inside, even Stalin
| couldn't really change it and he used much stricter
| measurements.
| gedy wrote:
| From the article: "People in power today would much rather do
| something that seems to promote "equity" than make an evidence-
| based choice that could lead to accusations of racism. This is
| the kind of infuriating policy decision that looks like it is
| going to help poor, minority students but will actually harm
| them."
| visarga wrote:
| Removes the motive to excel for all groups of students, why
| strive when you get accepted by quota instead of test score?
|
| It's how communist countries allocate admissions and jobs,
| what mattered most was not merit, but collusion to the party.
| So there was no reason to try to be very good in any field.
| umvi wrote:
| > If we were to think about this assertion rationally instead of
| emotionally, we would have to face what California has done:
| consigned its most vulnerable students to some of the worst K-12
| schools in America
|
| ...assuming a given school is responsible for 100% of its
| students' SAT scores. In reality parents are responsible for _at
| least_ 50% of a kid 's performance in school and so even if you
| put low income students into gold-plated schools they would still
| underperform because they lack a strong family life outside of
| school (i.e. educated, non single, motivational parents) that
| would have prepared them.
|
| Take a truant kid from Baltimore and put them in the finest high
| school in America and they would still fail because the problem
| is the family life enabling truancy, not how much money the
| school has.
| contemporary343 wrote:
| We don't use the SAT in Canada. Instead it's course grades plus
| provincial final exams which are subject specific. Generally
| works pretty well..
| tonymet wrote:
| this is common with diversity efforts: over emphasis on
| admission. I feel this does students a disservice. I was one of
| these students.
|
| Focusing on admission rates sounds nice to a bureaucrat - but to
| the individual who will drop out, they will be taking the hit on
| their career and savings- they won't be getting hired, and they
| will have $100k in debt for nothing.
|
| Who would you hire? A graduate from CSUn or a dropout from UCLA?
|
| it's telling that people rarely talk about SAT correlation with
| university graduation rates. I'm guessing they are tightly
| correlated (which is why they've been used for 60 years).
| starchild_3001 wrote:
| Cancelling SAT (especially subject exams) is the stupidest
| decision I've seen anywhere. Make access more fair? Sure. Cancel
| it? Plain wrong!
|
| How do I know? I'm one of those students who didn't have stellar
| high school grades, but I excelled in subject exams --- those
| subjects were genuinely interesting to me (math, science). I
| didn't find the rest of high school interesting, and I wasn't a
| nerd nerd studying anything my parents told me to study. I turned
| out "ok" (graduated as the top my class in college, then had a
| successful career in top tech companies). Without that final exam
| that gave me the opportunity, I probably wouldn't be typing this
| message today.
|
| I'm not even counted as "diverse" (because I'm not black or
| hispanic) despite coming from a muslim family and middle eastern
| background. I can only select "white", though I'm not really
| white (european).
|
| Today's admission debates and anti-racist treatments are wrong at
| so many levels, I don't know where to start.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Cancelling SAT (especially subject exams) is the stupidest
| decision I've seen anywhere. Make access more fair? Sure.
| Cancel it? Plain wrong!
|
| UC doesn't control access to the SAT, it does control whether
| it uses the SAT. Not using it in its current form is the
| strongest influence it has to incentivize change.
| waterhouse wrote:
| So is your position that, while the SAT is still the best
| choice for admissions, UC should stop using it for some years
| in the hopes that this will motivate College Board to improve
| it more quickly, after which UC should resume using the SAT?
| That the impact (on future applicants and everyone else
| involved) of using a worse admissions process for some years
| is less than the bargaining-chip value?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > So is your position that [...] the SAT is [...] the best
| choice for admissions
|
| No
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I'm not even counted as "diverse" (because I'm not black or
| hispanic) despite coming from a muslim family and middle
| eastern background. I can only select "white", though I'm not
| white white.
|
| Should that even matter for admission purposes?
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This article is specifically about the UC system, which has
| been banned by Proposition 209 since 1996 from considering an
| applicant's race when making admissions decisions. It might
| matter at private schools or in other states, though.
|
| It might surprise people who only know California by
| reputation and assume it is completely full of raging
| lefties, but affirmative action measures have been pretty
| soundly rejected by voters many times in the past three
| decades and the state has not been allowed to implement any
| of them.
| dcow wrote:
| No it shouldn't, but as a society we seem to want it to so it
| does.
|
| Sowell has an interesting take on AA and believes it actually
| does more harm than good because it pits those subject to it
| against scenarios they have not been prepared to handle and
| thus in turn results in over-stress, higher rates of failure,
| and ultimately disillusionment.
| dcow wrote:
| The means at which we arrive upon AA is even suspect:
|
| A: We want equality, why are white people successful?
|
| B: Clearly because they went to a good college.
|
| C: Okay easy, let's put the underprivileged into good
| colleges, that should fix 'er right up.
|
| It doesn't seem like anybody is interested in solving the
| hard problem of why underprivileged communities aren't
| producing good high school graduates. Maybe it has
| something to do with, IDK, the fact that they're under
| served and underprivileged? Maybe primary education is a
| more important factor than the name at the top of your
| college transcript? Maybe good communities produce
| outstanding colleges and universities, not the other way
| around? Yet we can't seem to spend money on primary
| education or figure out how to help struggling communities.
| Why is that?
| gjhh244 wrote:
| Exactly. From an European perspective America's obsession
| with race seems absolutely idiotic. Progressive taxation
| and major help for poor communities and families
| regardless of skin colour is obviously the only sensible
| solution.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Racial groups are used as vote banks by the two major
| parties - that's all there is to it. It has nothing to
| with wanting to help the poor or improve social cohesion,
| rather the opposite. A divided society is great for the
| most incompetent politicians since it provides them an
| easy way to whip up their constituents against other
| groups and fish for more votes.
| madengr wrote:
| Why not just put down Black? If I can identify as an opposite
| sex, I can certainly identify as another race.
| xwdv wrote:
| Absolutely not. Any attributes like race and gender should
| play no consideration in a fair admissions process. It should
| not even be public information.
| tdhz77 wrote:
| The color blind thinking modal has a long history of
| helping the majority stay the majority. What you propose is
| to continuing allow the status quo, which has already by
| statistical aggregation of college entrance proved to allow
| under performing "whites" in. Have you not seen the news
| where Aunt Becky got her kid in? Without tough affirmative
| action rules, Aunt becky's kids get in and your kids don't.
|
| This thinking model is best to be dropped into the dustbins
| of history.
| rayiner wrote:
| Black, Latino, and Asian people all oppose racial
| preferences in admission:
| https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-
| americ.... For example Latinos say that race and
| ethnicity shouldn't be even a "minor factor" in college
| admissions by a margin of 2:1.
|
| Like many things, this is in large part about liberal
| white people wanting to engage in social engineering on
| behalf of minorities who mostly don't support their
| policy. Like "defund the police."
| tdhz77 wrote:
| 30 years of conservatives not understanding what
| affirmative action is really the reason for this. They
| often misquote 1970's affirmative action law which was
| thrown out by the liberal court. It's shocking how most
| people don't understand affirmative action and it's
| rationale. But, then again conservatives aren't thinking
| people.
| dolni wrote:
| > 30 years of conservatives not understanding what
| affirmative action is really the reason for this.
|
| And yet you haven't made any persuasive argument about
| what it "really" is or why it's good.
|
| > But, then again conservatives aren't thinking people.
|
| Imagine the hubris someone must possess to casually
| dismiss millions of other people as "not thinking".
|
| Have you looked in the mirror today?
| mbostleman wrote:
| So racism is fundamentally good and the tool to use, but
| it just needs to be carefully guarded to be safe - sort
| of like nuclear power?
| gjhh244 wrote:
| Members of certain minorities aren't underrepresented
| because of their skin colour, but because they are more
| likely to be poor and lack access to quality education at
| childhood and youth. Racial discrimination against whites
| and Asians in higher education is not the best way to fix
| any of this. Progressive taxation, better childhood/youth
| education for everyone on the other hand could make a big
| difference.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Have you not seen the news where Aunt Becky got her kid
| in? Without tough affirmative action rules, Aunt becky's
| kids get in and your kids don't.
|
| This whole controversy is about a handful of the most
| elite schools in the nation. I find it more than a bit
| silly tbh, since whatever admissions policy they choose
| it's not going to be even close to affecting "the
| majority" of prospective students. We should be working
| to expand access to education at _every_ level, not just
| focusing on such a tiny minority.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| My high-school's college admissions advisors told us, in no
| uncertain terms, if you are non-white or mixed race, make
| sure you declare that because it will help your chances.
| klipt wrote:
| Unless you're Asian, in which case declaring your race will
| lower your admission chances even relative to white people.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I recall hearing in casual conversation "ohh this guy is
| Asian and went to X so you know he's good". I was
| shocked.
|
| It must create a weird dynamic to have two identifiable
| groups where you know one got there on merit alone, while
| the other one maybe benefited from a quota.
| waterhouse wrote:
| Absolutely. This is one of the reasons affirmative action
| is poisonous--it creates rational reasons for
| discrimination. Which will, of course, be exaggerated by
| actual racists; but it's much harder to argue
| "Discriminating against group X is bad" when it's public
| knowledge that group X has passed a lower bar.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| We actually had a few Pacific Islanders express anxiety
| with selecting "Asian American/Pacific Islander" because
| they were worried that identifying as such would subject
| them to more competition. They were advised to do it
| anyways.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > I'm one of those students who didn't have stellar high school
| grades, but I excelled in subject exams
|
| I'm in the same boat. If it weren't for my SAT scores, most
| colleges wouldn't take me seriously.
| cmh89 wrote:
| Deciding whether or not the SAT is equitable, fair, or valuable
| shouldn't have any anecdotal component. For every one person
| with a story like yours, there is someone who had a bad
| experience with it for reasons outside of their control. I did
| exceptionally well in take home or book assignments because I
| understand the subject matter, but never was a good test taker.
| I took the ACT and did 'fine' but I could have done much better
| in an untimed, open book environment. What are we trying to
| measure with these tests? Your memory? Your ability to devote
| time to studying?
|
| At the end of the day, tests like the ACT/SAT will always
| privilege people who can afford to spend more time on it. Lots
| of kids do better because their parents spend thousands on
| tutoring. Other kids of the same skill level do worse because
| they work 25 hours a week to help their family make rent. No
| amount of change in 'access' can overcome that.
|
| Knowledge and skill is complicated and trying to boil it down
| to a timed test isn't a particularly useful measure.
| rayiner wrote:
| That kid working 25 hours a week to help their family make
| rent is going to have an easier time buckling down for one
| test than keeping up their GPA over four years. https://www.u
| satoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2021/03/23/sta...
| cmh89 wrote:
| I agree that there are issues with GPA too, but despite
| saying that it's easier to take one test than it is to
| maintain a high GPA throughout high school, that's opinion.
| Teachers can work with over extended students to help them
| while they are in school
|
| I can't really speak to your opinion piece because its
| behind a paywall
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| It's written by a contributer to the National Review, if
| that helps you decide whether you're missing out on
| anything important:
|
| https://theintercept.com/2020/07/05/national-review-
| william-...
| cmh89 wrote:
| Ah, so it's the digital equivalent of trying to read
| soiled toilet paper. Got it
| starchild_3001 wrote:
| Not sure what data you're talking about. What I've seen so
| far: SAT <-> Income are correlated => let's not rely on SAT?
| That's such a BS argument.
|
| Anything related to income will be (statistically speaking)
| associated with intelligence and other personal traits
| (perseverance etc). Any of this will be obviously correlated
| with your kid's SAT --- it's called genetics.
|
| Any other, more sensible data to look at?
| dsr_ wrote:
| It's never the kid's income, though. It's always the
| parents' income.
| JPKab wrote:
| The SAT is an extremely high predictor for IQ. It correlates
| incredibly well.
|
| I grew up in a trailer park, and didn't have access to the
| test prep industry, so I understand that wealthier kids had a
| big edge. That being said, nobody is talking about the SAT
| being biased against poor kids. They are pretending that it's
| purely a racist, culturally-biased test due to its outcome of
| having average scores that are hundreds of points lower for
| certain ethnic groups. And like all hamfisted efforts at
| "equity", it will benefit the most privileged members of the
| favored class at the expense of the least privileged members
| of the disfavored class.
|
| Rich Black kids will gain the most, and poor Asian and White
| kids will lose the most. Poor Asian kids are already getting
| screwed. My best friend is the child of dirt poor Cambodian
| refugees, but the college admissions people treated him as if
| he was the son of college educated Korean immigrants.
|
| Obama's daughters will never be held back in life, and this
| ideology makes no room for that fact, or the fact that a pale
| kid born to a single mom in a trailer park is, statistically,
| screwed.
| cmh89 wrote:
| Plenty of people recognize that the SAT is bias against
| poor kids
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/07/why-
| po...
|
| The reason that the racial component comes out is that
| Black children are over-represented in poor communities due
| to systemic racism
| paulpauper wrote:
| Agree. when we hear about 'promoting opportunity' , what they
| mean is is we need more of groups X and Y and less Z. Motte and
| bailey at its finest.
| Spivak wrote:
| Any change to the college admissions process will positively
| affect some groups and negatively affect others.
|
| There will always be some controversy over whether any change
| actually makes it fairer or whether the changes were made to
| achieve a specific outcome.
| rayiner wrote:
| > Any change to the college admissions process will
| positively affect some groups and negatively affect others.
|
| That embeds some really questionable assumptions about
| "some groups."
| the-smug-one wrote:
| In Sweden there is a university exam you can take which
| functions similarly. You get a curved score between 0.0 and 2.0
| with which you can apply to unis with. You can take it however
| many times you want at a cost of about 80 USD (I think).
| JPKab wrote:
| All of this revolves around a selective assumption that a
| disproportionate outcome (if the outcome isn't favorable to a
| group with a large activist base in US universities) is
| evidence of discrimination. Note that I say "selective".
|
| Males are disproportionately incarcerated and killed by police,
| but nobody is saying police are systemically bigoted towards
| males, because it's blatantly obvious that males
| disproportionately commit crimes vs. women. However, the same
| depth of thought is ignored the minute the discussion turns
| towards discrepancies where women/Black/etc are on the "losing"
| end.
|
| At the end of the day, the ideology is shallow, and equates to
| something very similar that emerged in the waning days of the
| Weimar Republic:
|
| Group X (German Jews) has more on average than Group Y (German
| Gentiles), and this must be because those with more are rigging
| the system and taking from Group Y. They ignored the cultural
| differences that make Ashkenazi Jews vastly more successful
| than other ethnic groups wherever they go, because that would
| have forced German gentiles to look inward, rather than
| externalizing blame.
|
| I grew up in a mostly Black county, and didn't sit in a
| classroom where I wasn't in the minority until I left to
| college. By all definitions, my mostly Black school was
| underfunded and fit the narrative of "systemic racism". But
| this ideology makes no allowances for the non-Black students
| who attended my school. Was I a victim of systemic racism
| because I attended the same schools? I lived in a trailer park,
| and my family's income put us squarely below the federal
| poverty line. But this ideology makes race the primary and
| essential reason for all things bad in the world, ignoring the
| complexity of life that emerges when viewing it at high
| resolution. Like all fundamentalist ideologues/religions, it
| constructs a low-resolution narrative, and places blame for all
| bad things in the world on a nebulous superstructure (Satan,
| White Supremacy). And predictably, it is filled with clerics
| who desperately try to blow up any incident into evidence that
| the nebulous superstructue "great evil" is far more prevalent
| than it really is. In the 80's it was devil worshippers, and
| today it's "White supremacists". The desperation is readily
| apparent in attempts to frame a wave of anti-Asian violence
| that was primarily perpetrated by young Black men into a
| narrative of newly ascendant White supremacy.
|
| The worst part of this ideology to me has been it's utterly US-
| centric focus, where things like objective testing, education,
| and work ethic have been labelled as "White", ignoring the
| numerous cultures throughout the world, such as your Middle
| Eastern ancestors or China, who were conducting Civil Service
| entrance exams while my ancestors in northern Europe were
| running around the woods with bows and arrows chopping each
| other's heads off.
|
| The biggest element of White privilege that I possess is not
| having a tiny group of useless, whiny, unelected activists get
| put on a pedestal by corporate media as personifying and
| representing my views on the world. Al Sharpton doesn't speak
| for Black Americans, and was never elected to do so. BLM
| doesn't speak for them either. They only claim to do so, and
| are convenient tools for White elites to shift the conversation
| from discussions on economic class to purely race. For an
| ideology based in Marxism, it's amazing how much it undermines
| the ability to organize unions. After all, Jeff Bezos just had
| to make s few donations here and there, put a few words on his
| website, and was let off scot free by the media for his awful
| treatment of workers and aggressive union busting.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| I took the SAT the first year they added the essay. It wasn't
| optional and they had no accommodations for people with
| disabilities. I would have much rather had a score of 1500/1600
| than the dumb 1700/2400 I got.
| dragontamer wrote:
| You should have been like me and...
|
| 1. Take the test the year before they added the essay, so
| you'd have the "non-essay" exam grade recorded. Even if you
| were in 9th or 10th grade, that's still useful.
|
| 2. Take the test again with the essay. But when you do so,
| have AP classes worth of "knowing how to write against a
| graded rubric" experience so that you beat everyone else's
| writing score. (Thank you AP World History teacher that I've
| forgotten... I'm pretty sure she taught me how to beat an
| essay portion on any test)
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| I have illegible hand writing. I was able to type all other
| standard tests I had taken up to that point. How was I
| supposed to know that they changed the test? When I signed
| up there was no mention of the essay and a lot of kids were
| surprised by the essay at the time of the test. I'm sure I
| would have rocked the essay had I been able to type it. I
| planned to major in English because i enjoyed writing. I
| haven't written for fun since that test.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Its so weird to hear that.
|
| My entire college-bound peer group took the SAT twice,
| once without the essay and once with the essay. Literally
| all of us, every single friend/acquaintance in my year.
| Most of us took the PSAT (practice SAT) to get used to
| the "timing" of multiple choice. (When you're low on
| time, its time to start guessing and moving way quicker)
|
| The exceptions were the military dudes, who left for the
| Iraq / Afghanistan wars. So they had no need to take the
| SATs.
|
| We all were worried about how the essay would be graded,
| whether or not colleges would accept the essay score, or
| whatever. Some of us even took alternative tests (ACT) in
| addition to the SAT (I only took the SAT twice).
|
| For us, the essay thing was announced long-in-advance and
| we literally strategized our college acceptance plans
| around it. I don't know who figured out the essay
| announcement, but... it was very well known in my bubble.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Rich, privileged kids who can buy good extra-curricular
| "experiences" and bribe their way to better grades at private
| schools will be the big winners here.
| spamizbad wrote:
| Admissions are already way too complicated. Just have a GPA
| cutoff and randomly select people via a lottery.
| fleddr wrote:
| You don't change a test to serve the needs of student, you change
| students to serve the needs of the test.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| Good; the sooner we make university credentialing irrelevant the
| better.
| paxys wrote:
| In the very first line:
|
| > but out here in the crumbling state of California
|
| Yup, no need to read any more.
| warent wrote:
| California is crumbling, socially. Have you seen the
| homelessness epidemic from San Fransisco and everywhere south?
| I work in a lucrative upper engineering management role and
| still cannot afford to buy a house... That's not really an
| indicator of a healthy state.
| pie420 wrote:
| Then ask for a raise. Two people making $140k should easily
| be able to save up $400k in 5-8 years for a mortgage down
| payment. And single people don't need an entire house.
| [deleted]
| jessaustin wrote:
| With the $400k, they should forget the down-payment, move
| somewhere with reasonable real estate, and buy two houses
| outright.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Should just move to somewhere in Montana with fiber. Buy a
| house with a forest attached to it and only one person need
| to work making $100K to live the same life.
|
| The downside being lack of good sushi restaurants anywhere
| near, but ones got to make choices.
| b9a2cab5 wrote:
| Clearly you've never tried to purchase real estate in the
| Bay or done the math. $140k after taxes is more like 90k,
| and then rent eats up $25k of that alone. Subtract another
| $25k for living expenses (food, insurance, car, etc.) and
| you're left with 40k, which realistically you'd be dumping
| into a retirement fund. 2 bedroom house in a decent
| location with decent schools costs well over $1.5M, plus
| the insane property taxes due to Prop 13., and you need to
| pay cash or you won't win the bidding wars.
|
| In states with functioning real estate markets, a decent
| house in a decent location costs $700k tops and you don't
| pay $3-4k/mo in rent for a shitty, tiny apartment next to a
| homeless encampment. My friend rents a highrise penthouse
| in Chicago for the same price as a 1930s 3bd apartment in
| SF.
| _RPL5_ wrote:
| "functioning real estate markets"
|
| Is the housing market in the Bay area really uniquely
| dysfunctional? High property prices are a result of
| demand outstripping supply. It's what you get for
| concentrating the entire tech industry in one place.
| Similar to Manhattan and the financial industry.
|
| In that regard, the real estate market in the Bay area is
| basically working as intended. Or am I missing something?
| b9a2cab5 wrote:
| By functioning, I mean markets where the local property
| owners haven't colluded to restrict supply via bullshit
| environmental assays, zoning, etc. Or at least they
| haven't sufficiently colluded to the level of straight up
| preventing new housing from being built.
| toomim wrote:
| Are you dismissing this argument simply because it is negative
| towards california?
| pie420 wrote:
| Yep, recently moved to California from the Midwest and I am
| regretting not moving earlier. Its been 3 months but I am still
| blow. Away by how amazing everything. Sure, it's expensive, but
| you get what you pay for.
| Aperocky wrote:
| California is doing well on a lot of things but is it because
| of the state or despite of the state?
| jimbob45 wrote:
| There may be some political slant to this article but I found
| it genuinely interesting with some largely unknown facts.
| usaar333 wrote:
| This is not a particularly strong article. Here's a much more
| data-backed one arguing similar points (though still with some
| bias): https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-arent-actually-
| mad-...
|
| Issues with this particular article (addressed by above):
|
| * It's ignoring the racial gap in SAT scores (and other
| standardized tests) that exists even after controlling for family
| income. A large part of the political narrative here (including
| the university backing Prop 16 which would allow it to consider
| race) is coming from this fact, not just the income gap in itself
| (Note that I don't think the university ever took the position
| that the tests were per se discriminatory, which the author
| claims).
|
| * It's not really defining what "worst" school means; you need to
| be careful here as you might just be saying the tautological
| "students at schools with low-performing students on average on
| low performing". It's making the common claim these schools are
| underfunded, but on average, lower performing schools are
| receiving more money. (Example from LA -
| http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed04m.php -- LAUSD, which some
| of the lowest ranking schools, is well over average funding -
| areas with top schools - e.g. Arcadia - get the least). Perhaps
| the author means "underfunded schools relative to what I think
| they should get", but that's a different statement.
|
| * UC admission data for 2021 is out
| (https://ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-
| planning/co...), so it's possible to start objectively assessing
| the impact of the policy.
| b9a2cab5 wrote:
| The idea that the SAT is somehow racist is quite laughable. If
| you controlled for both family income and hours spent per day
| on academics you'd probably get an equal result. Culture
| differences mean that Asians are forced by their parents to
| study longer and harder. As people have pointed out in this
| thread, parental involvement is the biggest contributing factor
| to student success, even more than income and school funding.
| If white/black/whatever parents aren't getting as involved as
| Asian parents then obviously even if you control for income
| there will be disproportionate outcomes.
|
| I will ask you this: why do you think black people are
| overrepresented in the NBA relative to their share of the
| population? Could it be because black culture highly values
| sports and black kids tend to spend more time than the average
| kid playing sports due to parental or cultural influence? That
| same logic applies to Asians and education.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Where is your source that Asian people value education more
| than other racial groups? lmao
| iammisc wrote:
| > Could it be because black culture highly values sports and
| black kids tend to spend more time than the average kid
| playing sports due to parental or cultural influence?
|
| Americans love meritocracy and hard work when it comes to
| sports, and can't stand it when it comes to academics and the
| resulting income.
| throwaway284534 wrote:
| All this gnashing over test scores and booster programs is just
| showboating. If states really want to fix poor schools they
| should make school funding occur at the state level, rather than
| whichever random zip code you're born into.
|
| Seriously, you can't justify a wealthier neighborhood being
| entitled to better schools when they're public institutions
| receiving state and federal funds. Evening out this funding is
| the only real step to giving students a more equitable future,
| but nobody would dare try it and put their own school district's
| budget in jeopardy!
|
| They want to fix the problem? Create an executive order requiring
| that all public schools who receive federal funding must have a
| percentage of their local funds be distributed at a state level,
| inversely to the funds generated locally.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| That wont work. Increasing funding of a school does not improve
| quality. Allowing families to choose what school they go to,
| and as a result which school they fund, forces schools to
| compete on quality or go out of business. The only arguments I
| have heard against school choice are from teacher's unions that
| claim that nobody would go to their school if they had a
| choice. Good! That means you are failing at your job. You
| should go out of business.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| > Allowing families to choose what school they go to,
|
| This is a non-starter for any family that depends on public
| school buses to transport their kids to school. It might help
| to some extent in regions if schools are in close proximity
| but overall it just becomes "School choice for people with
| parents that can afford it".
|
| Plus I would be surprised if it there's a case the program
| led to a 'bad' school closing and a 'good' school opening on
| the same facility/location. What tends to happen (my state
| has this) is that rich/educated parents do everything they
| can to get their 3-5 year old into the best school and the
| poor/uneducated kids are still stuck at the 'bad' school. The
| 'good' school ends up with a large waitlist which wealthy
| parents work around by moving close enough (which costs more)
| such that the good school is the default school for them.
|
| The only equitable method would to make every school use a
| 100% raffle system but that's not logistically possible.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Schools are not static. Some will fail. New ones will pop
| up. If there is a group of people in an area that are not
| served then somebody can create a school to serve them.
| Make the only government run part of the school system the
| funding attached to a child.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| SFUSD's operating budget (excluding capital expenditure and
| maybe some other stuff) is $1.1bn. It normally serves 57k
| students. That's $17k per student per year.
|
| Funding is not the problem.
| zzt123 wrote:
| Possibly disagree. The cost of living index in San Francisco
| is somewhat above 250. Let's round down to 200, so 2x as
| expensive as the national average.
|
| That brings $17k down to $8.5k. The average spend per student
| in K-12 schools nationally is more than $12k.
|
| San Francisco may be significantly underfunded in a
| nontrivial number of its schools.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Schools' costs don't vary the way that individuals' costs
| do, so the COL index isn't a good measure.
|
| But, putting that aside, isn't ~$2k per class per day
| enough, even in San Francisco? If we were to increase
| funding for SFUSD, would outcomes improve?
|
| - [20 students/class] * [$17k/year/student] / [180
| days/year]
| srswtf123 wrote:
| This is the most important task required to fix education.
|
| Its so obvious and it's never on the table, which tells me
| everything I need to know about "reformers".
|
| Until this is done, most everything else it shuffling deck
| chairs.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| As noted in the sibling comment - this has already been
| implemented in Texas for almost 30 years now. While studying
| the outcomes and the way it was implemented is an exercise
| for the reader, it's hardly the silver bullet your comment
| makes it out to be.
| nishs wrote:
| I found this criticism of the Robin Hood plan:
| https://www.keranews.org/archive/2005-12-12/texas-schools-
| an....
|
| Let's examine the substance of the points the article
| makes.
|
| > Yet when the money is being transferred to other
| districts, it becomes a state issue and is therefore a
| state property tax, which is illegal in Texas.
|
| Ah, geez.
|
| > Furthermore, taking funds from one district to another
| makes accountability for funding convoluted [...] how will
| they ever know if their money is being used constructively?
|
| Sure, there's also no way to definitively say that the
| money is _not_ being used constructively.
|
| > The percentage of Texans graduating was stagnant from
| 1993 to 2003 - stuck at 77%. If the "Robin Hood" system is
| supposed to bring up the weaker districts (which tend to be
| the poorer ones), the statistics show no signs of
| improvement.
|
| The graduation rate isn't the sole metric that should be
| considered to make this argument. And even if it is
| considered, you'd only want to consider the graduate rate
| change across time in the weaker/poorer districts, not
| across the whole state.
|
| Is there an article with better criticism? The English
| Wikipedia entry doesn't really mention any, besides "oh no
| it's actually a state tax".
| nishs wrote:
| Found a better one with a decent (but tangential imo)
| criticism.
|
| https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2018/04/06/
| wil...
|
| > All those taxes aren't going to poorer districts; the
| money goes to the state, which also uses it to offset
| other parts of the budget. "Where did the state spend the
| 'savings?'" says a slide from Taxparency Texas. It lists
| $2.6 billion for cuts in the business franchise tax and
| $1.2 billion for increasing the homestead exemption.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| Agree that both the Wikipedia article I linked and the
| article you linked are not very good. FWIW, the state
| property tax illegality issue was somehow addressed
| shortly after the article you linked was written via some
| legislation that lowered the minimum obligation to the
| state and awarded local jurisdictions more leeway to levy
| their own taxes instead.
|
| Here is a more recent article with some numbers that I
| linked in a sibling comment that details how Texas has
| essentially painted itself into a corner with Robin Hood
| funding: https://www.texastribune.org/2019/01/31/texas-
| robin-hood-rec...
|
| Everyone seems to acknowledge that its current
| implementation is somewhat problematic but there really
| isn't a clear path forward for resolving the issues with
| the system that is tenable in the current Texas political
| and legal climate.
| usaar333 wrote:
| CA does equalize funding at the state level and has since the
| 1970s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serrano_v._Priest).
|
| There's only a small number of wealthy areas (1% of the
| population perhaps) that have excess funding. Generally, the
| funding policies ensure worst schools get more funding. Here's
| how LA County looks:
| http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed04m.php. -- poor
| performing LAUSD is easily in the top 10th percentile by
| funding, strong Arcadia and Pasadena are well below average.
| tyoma wrote:
| California already has state level funding of schools. Since
| 2013, the funding formula channels proportionally more money
| per student to districts with poor students and English
| learners.
|
| Moreover, some kind of equalization had existed since the 1980s
| as a consequence of both Prop 13 and Serrano vs. Priest.
|
| It hasn't fixed the problem.
| 323454 wrote:
| This already exists and it doesn't quite work. School funding
| and outcomes are less well correlated than you might expect.
| Some of the worst performing schools and districts are also the
| best funded. The top causal factor appears to be parental
| involvement: highly involved parents in even poorly funded
| schools is better than uninvolved parents in well funded
| schools.
| spicymaki wrote:
| That makes sense. Ultimately when you have distress at home
| caused by poverty, violence, neglect, etc. the student will
| be at a disadvantage no matter how good the school is.
| Distressed parents will lead to distressed children and then
| distressed schools which creates a cycle. This is ultimately
| a hard problem to solve because so many issues need to be
| fixed simultaneously. College is way too late to address
| this.
| settrans wrote:
| It exists in many, many states in some form or another: New
| Jersey (where every dollar collected from the progressive
| income tax is funneled redistributionarily to
| municipalities), Connecticut, and Vermont to name a couple.
|
| For one eye-popping counterexample to the notion that
| redistributionary school funding policies are effective, it
| might be worth understanding what happened in Newark[0],
| where 75% of the school is paid for the state already.
|
| [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/schooled
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Property taxes pay for local schools in NJ.
| vageli wrote:
| Yes for a portion of the school's funding. In NJ there
| also exist Abbott districts which receive additional
| funding from the state.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district
| ghaff wrote:
| It's very common for urban public schools in particular to
| have the highest or near-highest funding per student in a
| state and some of the lowest outcomes in terms of
| standardized testing and other quantifiable measurements.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| Texas actually has a system like this - it's called recapture -
| or more colloquially, the "Robin Hood law". You can read more
| here on how it has actually played out in its implementation:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_plan
| throwaway284534 wrote:
| That's a very interesting read, thank you.
|
| It's a shame that the law only applied in full effect for 10
| years. That's barely enough time to fix a generation of
| students.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| The Wikipedia article makes it sound like it was thrown
| out. That is very much not the case. It is still in effect
| today. What happened in 2005 was that local jurisdictions
| were given more leeway to set their tax rates in lieu of
| state minimum requirements. Local residents in richer
| districts got more power to decide whether they should be
| taxed more to give more funding to their own school. And in
| reality it works the same after 2005 as before.
|
| The spirit of the law remains in effect today. People like
| me who currently own a home in the Austin, TX area pay a
| lot of money via property taxes. School taxes very often
| make up over half of the property tax burden here, which is
| already quite high since there is no state income tax and
| the state has to make money somehow. Almost all of that
| money is effectively swept up and redistributed to the rest
| of the state due to the recapture laws.
|
| Here's an article that discusses its current impacts in
| more detail: https://www.texastribune.org/2019/01/31/texas-
| robin-hood-rec...
| curryst wrote:
| It's not solely isolated to funding. Baltimore is the 3rd
| highest per-student spender in the US, and has terrible
| outcomes.
|
| I don't doubt that funding is part of it, but there's
| definitely some more nuance to it.
| rhino369 wrote:
| While too little funding is an issue, once you hit a baseline
| the issue is no longer funding.
|
| The rich neighborhoods (and working class neighborhoods that
| value education) have better schools because their kids are on
| average better students. They make sure of it and set high
| expectations.
|
| Nobody believes that you if you just funded Northeastern
| Illinois State University the same as Northwestern that the
| student outcomes would be the same. Why do we think the same
| thing doesn't apply in elementary and high school.
|
| Want to fix the problem? School vouchers at the statewide
| level.
| dehrmann wrote:
| You also have to remember local tax contributions to schools is
| probably a good proxy for parental involvement.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > All this gnashing over test scores and booster programs is
| just showboating. If states really want to fix poor schools
| they should make school funding occur at the state level
|
| Does spending per pupil even correlates with outcomes?
|
| > rather than whichever random zip code you're born into.
|
| Is it random or the result of the parents hard work?
| throwaway284534 wrote:
| I think there's several issues going. The first is a lack of
| funding in poor schools. Less money, less resources. The
| second is that just having money doesn't necessarily mean
| it's going to be managed well by the administration. Maybe
| that too needs some amount of state oversight.
|
| Lastly, the phrase "parents' hard work" implies a lot about
| the core problem here. It's no secret that wealthy families
| have a multi-generational advantage on less fortunate ones.
| Immigrating to this country and working your entire life is
| hard, and you may still never break out of your socioeconomic
| class. Perhaps your children may go further, but that's
| significantly harder when their education is funded
| proportionally to your initial circumstances. Success isn't
| just hard work, it's the luck of your innate talents and
| abilities. It's also being born at the right time and place
| to make a better life for your kids.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > The first is a lack of funding in poor schools. Less
| money, less resources.
|
| Are they really less funded? Interestingly, poorer schools
| are often eligible for state and federal grants.
|
| > The second is that just having money doesn't necessarily
| mean it's going to be managed well by the administration.
|
| That's interesting.
| dahfizz wrote:
| > The first is a lack of funding in poor schools. Less
| money, less resources.
|
| Source? We spend more and more on education every year with
| nothing to show for it[1][2]. Throwing more money at
| students absolutely does not mean they will be more
| successful[3]. This is not a problem that can be solved
| with money.
|
| [1] https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edlite-
| chart....
|
| [2] https://reason.org/commentary/inflation-
| adjusted-k-12-educat...
|
| [3] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-
| baltimore/baltimore-ci...
| 41209 wrote:
| For one , you don't need to go straight to college , or attend
| college at all. Even before I got my BA I was making more than
| the Ivy League Alum in my family.
|
| That's the first myth.
|
| California has what's probably the best community college system
| in America. It was very easy for me, as a poor kid to meet ( and
| at times date) people from all over the world. Maybe you dropped
| out of high school due to just not liking it. You can still
| attend a community college, transfer to a UC and have a great
| career.
|
| I did very poorly in highschool since I was constantly ether
| getting kicked out or evicted. Still I had morons in my family
| pressuring me to shrug it off.
|
| If anything I'm angrier now than I was back then
|
| I was exceptionally lucky to be able to find an affordable place
| to live at 19. My family is pretty horrible, all I really needed
| was a stable place. But that's impossible now, the same apartment
| that used to be $600 is now $1,300 or 1400.
|
| For the record I've had several Asian friends who come from
| similar backgrounds, where there's extreme domestic violence at
| home and they just need a stable place to live. This is very much
| not a race issue, it's a 'people who don't have stable households
| aren't going to be able to get into top schools' issue.
|
| If you want to fix test scores or whatever, you need to look at
| actually fixing the economic situation many of these kids are in.
|
| Make it possible to afford your own place with a full time
| minimum wage job. At least then when a kid from a messed up
| family turns 18 they can move out.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Amen
| hindsightbias wrote:
| I would encourage any Californian who lives near a CC to
| consider taking in a younger relative and helping them get
| established. Even a year lets them find friends/jobs where 2 or
| 3 of them can get together and find a apt/house if they want or
| you can't support a 2 or 4 year program.
| jessaustin wrote:
| It's possible that dropping standardized tests will have the
| demographic effects that TFA fears, but it isn't certain.
| Standardized tests aren't the only reason that Asian-Americans
| are "over"-represented and other groups are "under"-represented.
| Another reason is that Asian-Americans are good students.
| Standardized test scores are not the only indicator of that.
|
| Of course, the people who have decided to drop these tests claim
| to want some sort of demographic change. As long as California
| public universities have a limited number of open seats, that
| will hurt some groups if it helps others. Personally I hope that
| this doesn't just turn into helping whites at the expense of
| Asians, but that isn't impossible.
| usaar333 wrote:
| We already know what happened as 2021 data is out:
|
| Applications: https://ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-
| planning/co...
|
| Admissions: https://ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-
| planning/co...
|
| System-wide, any demographic change looks insignificant. No
| change at Berkeley (which had already increased SES weighing in
| 2020). UCLA slightly boosted URG, but it looks like some of
| that might have been application demographic changes (which
| removing the SAT might have caused to some degree - a small
| number of students may be discouraged by it)
| kart23 wrote:
| The article makes no mention of the lawsuit that was brought
| against the UC system. They ended up settling, with the UC system
| agreeing to stop using the SAT for the next 5 years. I think the
| lawsuit had a lot more influence on the decision than most people
| think.
|
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/Judge-bars-Uni...
|
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/UC-settles-student...
| visarga wrote:
| If the test is unfair they should demand more support for
| preparation rather than removing the test.
| ejstronge wrote:
| > The article makes no mention of the lawsuit that was brought
| against the UC system.
|
| The article very clearly references the lawsuit: "Do the tests
| prevent low-income Black and Latino students from getting
| college degrees? This is the charge of a lawsuit filed in 2019
| and settled by the university in May"
| kart23 wrote:
| oops, good catch.
| crackercrews wrote:
| > There is only one group of students who are "overrepresented,"
| to use the chilling language of social engineering, at the
| university: Asian Americans.
|
| This is partly because of the yield rate of Asian students. This
| refers to the rate that admitted students choose to attend UC.
|
| White, Black, and Hispanic students all choose to attend UCs at
| less than 40%. The yield rate for Asian students is 48%.
|
| If Asians had the same yield rate as the other racial groups,
| their share of UC enrollment would drop from 37% to 31%. This is
| pretty close to their share of the UC applicant pool, 28%.
|
| This comes from the most recent data available, from 2020. [1]
|
| 1:
| https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions...
| panda88888 wrote:
| I personally feel that colleges are dropping the SAT and ACT
| because those scores show correlation between race and
| higher/lower admission criteria in the admitted student body. See
| the Harvard lawsuit. Without the scores it is easier for colleges
| to shape the incoming student population to better approximate
| the desired demographic distribution.
| tdhz77 wrote:
| I'm thankful for the diverse group of people that I studied with
| at the University of Missouri. Different backgrounds, point of
| views, and experiences added so much to the college experience.
| Diversity is such a great thing. We should do everything we can
| to promote it. My life is better, more enriched because of
| affirmative actions over the years.
| flowerlad wrote:
| Some parents move to areas with better schools in order to give
| their kids an advantage (such as Cupertino or Los Altos school
| districts if you are in silicon valley). This may seem like a
| sensible thing to do, but because of the weird admissions process
| in US colleges, this may actually work against the kid. It may
| make more sense to move to an area where the kid can stand out,
| where schools offer fewer AP courses, and where the same
| accomplishment is considered to be a bigger deal. See link below
| for details.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co...
|
| Excerpts:
|
| UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in
| the context of their own schools and communities to assess how
| much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available
| opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at
| her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at
| a school that offered twice as many.
|
| A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the
| top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower
| class rank at a more high-achieving school.
| hackitup7 wrote:
| School size is a related factor. For example, Harvard is not
| going accept 50 applicants from the same school, even if it's a
| relatively large and exceptionally competitive one like
| Stuyvesant in NY or Thomas Jefferson in DC. But Harvard _will_
| totally accept 8-10 applicants from a small exclusive private
| or parochial school. The ratio plays in favor of smaller high
| schools if (say) the population of students going to any one
| college is capped at 5% for a large school and 10% for a small
| one.
|
| This bears out in what I've observed (all anecdotes ofc). Many
| people who go from these sorts of large south bay high schools
| to top-5 UCs are head and shoulders smarter than the graduates
| of the small private school => Ivy League pathway, despite the
| Ivy schools ranking better.
|
| When you see it in action (brilliant kid who went to a large,
| highly competitive public high school who was rejected from
| every Ivy, and is way smarter than many students who went to
| the schools that rejected them), it feels rotten. Happily most
| of the folks I've met in this category have great careers but
| their confidence often takes a hit at the age of 17-18.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| There's a selection bias here; the parents willing to do that
| are those who care the most about education.
| rayiner wrote:
| What I find very odd about this is the assumption that kids in
| challenging circumstances would have more problem with test prep
| than with keeping up their GPA. Poor people can afford test prep.
| Stuyvesant, NYC's selective admission high school, has 50% of
| students living in poverty, and a 1300+ average SAT score. A
| couple of thousand dollars one time is something most Americans
| can scrape together.
|
| Gaming GPA is much easier for privileged kids. My wife and I
| carefully manage her younger step siblings' course schedules to
| maximize GPA. We schedule meetings with professors, counselors,
| schedule retakes and extra credit, etc. I can't imagine how it
| would be easier for a kid with an unstable home life, who is
| moving around, maybe has parents getting divorced, etc., to keep
| up their GPA over several years than to do well on one test.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Man up. Admit everyone who applies. Let the ones that can't meet
| the standard fail out and the ones that can stay. Everyone gets
| what they want.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| UCD 2009 CS&E alum.
|
| This is as dumb as when California threw away phonics or when it
| forced longer-distance busing of white and Asian kids to inner-
| city schools.
|
| I took the SAT-I (1600) without studying and got a 780 on the
| math section. How is math racist?
|
| If some schools suck, fix the schools.
|
| If some kids aren't getting enough to eat, feed them.
|
| If some kids aren't in an environment where they have everything
| they need, put them in quality foster care.
|
| It's not a feel-good, quick fix to lower the bar because it leads
| to a sense of entitlement, lower confidence, lower competence,
| and ruins an educational system that the world may decide its not
| worth sending their students to. If this is normalized, then
| academia becomes a center of victimhood codependency rather than
| a center of knowledge, accomplishment, and excellence.
| jlangemeier wrote:
| Higher Ed Number cruncher here (who also read the report, which
| apparently was a big deal to the author since they cited the page
| count - and many of their arguments hinge on you taking their
| word for it and not reading at least the exec summary yourself -
| which is only 8 pages):
|
| So, fun thing about the actual study that the author
| references... the committee actually __DIDN'T__ tell UC regents
| to not get rid of the test; they recommended against making it
| test optional due to variability in assessment requirements
| between institutions - and the exec summary doesn't include any
| recommendation for or against fully excising standardized testing
| from their eval process.
|
| Further, the committee found that while the tests over HSGPA
| (high test score, low GPA) weighting was used in a subset of
| cases it was more likely that a student was admitted with just
| the opposite (low test score, high GPA); and overall it looks
| like the strongest recommendation was to disincentivize the HSGPA
| due to it losing almost 25% predictive effectiveness over the
| tested time period.
|
| This article reads fine until it gets to the last couple of
| paragraphs, covering "affirmative action" and over-representation
| of AAPI students; and this is where a glaring issue comes through
| with their analysis. Like any higher ed institution there is a
| monetary incentive to get international students; as there isn't
| usually an out for lower tuition like WUE/WGE (which
| coincidentally the UC system no longer participates in),
| interstate compact agreements, and the like for tuition
| reduction; and the home country in many cases subsidizes the
| student so the higher ed institution gets full out-of-state
| tuition rates on a nearly guaranteed basis. So, by using AAPI
| students as a proxy argument for their weird screed at the end
| while leaving off factors like what percentage of that UG
| population is in-state v. out-of-state v. international does a
| disservice to that over/under-represented claim; while also
| leaving them off of the earlier analysis pieces moves the slant
| of the article in a weird way.
|
| For further reference; AAPI students are __NOT__ included in
| Underrepresented Minority (URM) calculations - even though in
| many cases a layperson __WOULD__ include them; so by not
| mentioning them until you reach the point you're calling out the
| discrepancy they end up begging the question around the "model
| minority" bs; when it really may be explained more concretely
| through international and out of state student draw.
| usaar333 wrote:
| > So, by using AAPI students as a proxy argument for their
| weird screed at the end while leaving off factors like what
| percentage of that UG population is in-state v. out-of-state v.
| international does a disservice to that over/under-represented
| claim; while also leaving them off of the earlier analysis
| pieces moves the slant of the article in a weird way.
|
| UC reports international students separately. They also have
| dedicated reports for CA. Here's the CA admissions data:
| https://ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/_f...
|
| > For further reference; AAPI students are __NOT__ included in
| Underrepresented Minority (URM) calculations - even though in
| many cases a layperson __WOULD__ include them;
|
| Not in higher ed.
| jlangemeier wrote:
| > UC reports international students separately. [sic]
|
| The report cited in the article isn't as clear on their
| distinction and in some cases the numbers indicate that the
| comparisons are among feeder, in-state high schools; and
| others are general enough that the lack of detail is
| concerning as the study leaves out the total population and
| only provides percentages.
|
| > Not in higher ed.
|
| While the common/colloquial understanding through recent
| years shows that Asian students are more represented in
| higher ed; the general notion of what URM is codified as in
| higher ed contexts is less known; and wasn't clearly defined
| in the article. And I initially spoke too broadly, as the PI
| (pacific islander) portion of AAPI is included in URM, the
| Asian portion is not; and the PI portion is not mention
| anywhere in the article; and with AAPI discrimination being
| in the current cultural Zeitgeist, if that distinction goes
| unmentioned it's a leading statement.
| nyc640 wrote:
| > The report cited in the article isn't as clear on their
| distinction and in some cases the numbers indicate that the
| comparisons are among feeder, in-state high schools; and
| others are general enough that the lack of detail is
| concerning as the study leaves out the total population and
| only provides percentages.
|
| You can look at the data[1] yourself. It's clear that of
| in-state students enrolling in UCs (not international),
| Asian Americans make up 36% of enrollees and white
| Americans make up 20% of enrollees (indeed
| "underrepresented"). It seems like you are leading on with
| your comments that it is maybe OK to cut down on Asian
| representation because most of those students are probably
| international anyway (which I also don't agree with), but
| the data clearly shows that such a cut to Asian
| representation would harm Asian Americans as well.
|
| [1] https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2021/
| chapt...
| jlangemeier wrote:
| You're literally __NOT__ citing the study used and
| provided to the regents and which forms the basis for the
| article.
|
| Again, as I noted to the GP, the study is not clear in
| all cases what n they are using when calculating their
| percentages, and the author of the article takes
| advantage of that.
|
| Further, you're reading a lot into my comments; I am
| neither advocating for or against changes to given
| policy, but that the study leaves inconsistencies that
| the author readily takes advantage of for their own
| agenda.
| zzt123 wrote:
| Ah. So when the article says that by percentage, white students
| are underrepresented, that's because the denominator for the
| student body population includes all students (thus also
| international and out of state students), rather than just in-
| state California students?
|
| Tricky article!
| jlangemeier wrote:
| There is a chance; but more than likely they're quietly
| mixing what they count in the denominator; especially since
| with the rest of the URM group and whites it seems they are
| very careful to call out that its comparisons between the
| high school pipeline and the in-state collegiate pipeline,
| but aren't as careful when discussing the AAPI pipeline.
|
| Also, it looks like the study is following federal guidelines
| (IPEDS/NCES) on student groups; so Asian in this context for
| international students includes everyone from Korea, China,
| and Japan, down to the Malaysian Peninsula, through India,
| all the way west to the Arabian Peninsula (you know, like
| about 50% of the world population, no biggie there); so there
| may be some weird mixing of what's included in the
| denominator for AAPI students.
| nyc640 wrote:
| This is not true, you can see the data[1] yourself for in-
| state students. It is true that of in-state students at UCs,
| white students are "underrepresented" compared to their share
| of the population, but their share of admissions is actually
| very close to their share of applications so there could be
| other reasons for this. For example, white students in CA
| _may_ be:
|
| * more likely to apply to private schools
|
| * more able to afford private schools
|
| * more likely to get accepted to private schools that don't
| have the same race-blind admissions restrictions that UCs do
|
| * more likely to go out-of-state for college
|
| [1] https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2021/ch
| apt...
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Yes, it would be better if a school system produced racially
| unbiased test results, rather than abandoning the racially biased
| tests.
|
| Unfortunately the former is vastly more difficult than the
| latter. So, while you wait for the school system to catch up, why
| not stop the system from inflicting some of its worst
| discriminative damage in the meantime?
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| IMO a solution the higher-education issue both in terms of cost &
| acceptance is to force any public or publicly funded school (i.e
| all of them just like Title IX did) to:
|
| 1. Offer all undergrad classes online, without capacity limits ,
| and at a lower price. [1] 2. Degrees are awarded on some tiered
| scale (instead of the college's name?). 3. All student outcomes
| are published including % that get a job within 6 months &
| average starting salary. 4. Most classes can be passed/skipped
| via an exam of some sort. 5. All amenity/building costs are
| optional or part of the in-person price.
|
| Certainly lots of students prefer or say they prefer small,
| physical classes but if the online cost is 1/10 of the physical
| price then you can prioritize which classes you prefer in person
| vs online.
|
| The cost breakdown would be like this:
|
| * ~$200 to take the class online or ~$2000 to take it in-person.
| * ~$50 to just take the exam.
|
| If you take 8/10 classes online and take 1/10 as an exam and 1/10
| in-person; then you save ~82% ($3,650 vs $20,000). This puts the
| cost easily within a summer job.
|
| The tiered scale would probably just be putting the GPA on the
| degree. (It will never happen but I think it would be good if the
| degree lacked the school's name and school's would not disclose
| if the student attend that specific school.)
|
| This would be a drastic change but the current system is
| extremely biased to the kind of student/person that schools like
| for their 'culture'. We essentially have an Instagram version of
| education that's pay-to-play and pay-to-win.
|
| The counter argument is always that college is about network
| effects that can only be accessed in person. I think this is
| absurd since a good portion of students don't have the
| luxury/desire to build those connections. In undergrad, I bet
| it's less than 5% that benefit (but those 5% benefit _a lot_ ).
| In any case, schools shouldn't be using admission requirements to
| boost their schools reputation. e.g taking Calc 1 at a Ivy school
| isn't very impressive besides the fact you are at an Ivy league
| school.
|
| There are certainly a lot of other issues to resolve. Schools
| would hate it because they couldn't be prestigious simply because
| they are very selective and wouldn't be able to spread costs
| around between colleges/classes. Professors would hate it because
| they would have to have an online class (which they seem to
| hate). Etc.
|
| [1] Obviously lab classes cannot be 100% online but in this the
| student should be mostly free to take the class at any physical
| school. A titration lab is still just a titration whether it is
| at MIT or the local community college. Even STEM programs are
| made up of mostly lecture classes. And obviously there is an
| upper limit per class/semester but it's probably like 10x the
| current class size.
| [deleted]
| mchusma wrote:
| The SAT is the single biggest determiner of intelligence I've
| come across (at least from people taking the test 10-20 years
| ago). It's the only number I've come across that people commonly
| have, and is ballpark correct. Throwing it away is insanity.
| lokar wrote:
| There is no real evidence for the idea that a difference in
| scores predicts a difference in performance, once you are above
| some threshold.
|
| They should keep the test, but use a threshold (per major and
| school) with a lottery for everyone above the threshold. And
| admit a small number below at random to keep evaluating what the
| threshold should be.
| djrogers wrote:
| > There is no real evidence for the idea that a difference in
| scores predicts a difference in performance,
|
| Except for the gigantic study commissioned by the UC system the
| article references?
|
| " Second, while high-school GPA has been found to be more
| predictive of success at college than standardized test scores
| at some schools, the exact opposite turns out to be true for
| students at UC schools. There, standardized test scores say
| more about which applicants are likely to earn a degree and to
| do it in less than eight years; they also correlate strongly
| with students' GPA at the university."
| lokar wrote:
| That is over a wide range. Someone who scores 15 points
| higher is no more likely to do well. It's not a good ranking
| function
| [deleted]
| Aperocky wrote:
| I don't understand why lottery are used so much in official
| context. Instead of the best, you select randomly and hoping
| RNGesus is on your side. I agree about the threshold, but how
| about using other criterias instead of RNG.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The idea of the randomness is to calibrate your criteria
| against general population. I wonder if it works.
| tornato7 wrote:
| You mean like, read the student's application and use
| critical thinking to evaluate whether they're a good fit for
| the school based on their essays and individual
| accomplishments? Say it ain't so!
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| In other words, use subjective criteria that allow them to
| slip discrimination in under the radar.
| corlinp wrote:
| When you admit as many students as a UC, you can easily
| run regressions to determine whether a particular
| admissions officer is being discriminatory. They should
| also be able to anonymize applicants pretty well.
| chriswarbo wrote:
| One advantage of lotteries is that they remove competition
| and 'arms races', since there's no way to affect the outcome
| (ideally; modulo hacking, etc.). Once you're over the
| threshold, you might as well focus your remaining time and
| effort on other things; rather than spending more money on
| 'interview technique coaching', or hiring more proof-readers,
| or rephrasing the same sentence over and over for months in
| an attempt to get it 'perfect'.
|
| Not only do lotteries mitigate Goodhart's Law (which rewards
| 'bad' candidates who _appear_ good, whilst punishing 'good'
| candidates who don't _appear_ that way); but even a perfect,
| un-gameable measure can waste resources chasing diminishing
| returns. Even something as trivial as spelling mistakes can
| be decisive; and whilst those judging might only care a
| _little_ about spelling, candidates care _a lot_ about
| winning, so it 's in their interest to obsess over even such
| minor things.
|
| This imposes a massive opportunity cost, whether it's
| spending whole childhoods in 'cram schools'; or university
| salaries going to 'grant proposal writing services' rather
| than educators and researchers; etc.
| MikeUt wrote:
| > Here are some more of the fiercely held arguments for dumping
| the tests: Test scores don't reflect the character-forging
| aspects of life as a poor teenager; the tests force students from
| underfunded schools to compete against "affluent whites" who can
| afford expensive test prep;
|
| While the article does offer some rebuttal to that claim, I'd
| like to give a stronger one*: California is 31% white, University
| of California students are 25% white - they are underrepresented.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California#Stude...
|
| *Edit: On second thought, grardb is correct: Comparing with K-12
| demographics, as the article does, is better.
| zumu wrote:
| Does anyone else think the % of the student body metric is
| misleading? Shouldn't it be a % relative to college age
| population?
| jessaustin wrote:
| Universities are, in general, not responsible for high-school
| dropouts.
| rscoots wrote:
| >Test scores don't reflect the character-forging aspects of
| life as a poor teenager;
|
| One of these two is a better metric for who will actually pass
| college courses though.
| namelessoracle wrote:
| Im kinda curious what exact "character-forging aspects of
| life as a poor teenager" lead to not just better school
| outcomes but better life outcomes in general?
|
| The only thing that comes to mind is possibly empathy towards
| the less fortunate, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to
| result in better life outcomes for a person in our modern
| society. But let me stress "possibly" because there seems to
| be plenty of examples of people who dont have any kind of
| empathy towards others who grew up as poor teenagers.
| vehemenz wrote:
| Considering that international students are overwhelmingly
| nonwhite, I don't think those numbers really hold up.
|
| https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/fall-enrol...
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I know many public universities court international students
| because they have to pay full price.
| recursive wrote:
| According to the article, university and K-12 students in CA
| are also overwhelmingly nonwhite. You'll need to be more
| specific.
| grardb wrote:
| I'm not following how that's a stronger rebuttal than the one
| in the article:
|
| > But white students are also underrepresented, if only ever so
| slightly, at the UC: They make up 21 percent of the
| undergraduate population and 22 percent of K-12 schoolchildren.
|
| If we're talking about college admissions, I think the
| percentage of white K-12 students is more important than the
| percentage of white people of any age. Obviously, some people
| start attending college later in life, but that number isn't
| high enough to make the demographics of the general population
| more important than the demographics of K-12 students.
| recursive wrote:
| The article also concludes that whites are underrepresented in
| UC, although they use even more relevant numbers.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I was born in yugoslavia (later slovenia), under the red star,
| communism, brotherhood, unity, equality, and all other communist
| bullshit back then.
|
| ...and even then we had standardized testing, and it worked.
|
| You went to elementary school, usually the closest to your house
| (from about 6/7yo to 14/15, =8 years), and at the end of that,
| you'd apply to a highschool of your choice (either general
| "gymnasium", or 3 or 4 year technical, trades, economic etc.
| school), and then you'd have standardized tests. Your grades in
| last three years and your test scores would be calculated into
| points (i think it was 120 points max), high schools would sort
| the applicants by points, and however many spots were available,
| that many top students would get accepted and a cuttoff point
| value was published (everybody above X points got accepted).
|
| In high school it was a bit more complicated, because
| standardized testing had three core subjects (slovene, math and
| usually english (1st foreign language)) plus two subjects chosen
| by the students. Colleges would post requirements in advance -
| most had just 40% grades, 60% standardized testing, some (i think
| medicine) required one of the two chosen subjects to be either
| biology or chemistry (and it was 20% that subject, 40% grades,
| 40% other subjects), and only a few (art, acting, music) had
| entrance exams. And the process was the same as before...
| everybody did the tests, results got calculated into points (i
| think 0-100), top X got accepted.
|
| The exams included knowledge from all the years of schooling, and
| tutors were a thing for "bad" students, who couldn't learn enough
| from the teacher (or didn't listen, did other stuff, failed, and
| had to get a higher grade, not to fail the whole year). With
| math, you had to know math... there was a lot of practice in
| school with every part of math, and tutoring was no better than
| just doing the work from regular workbooks. With history, well..
| you had to memorize a lot of stuff, but you knew that when you
| chose the subject. There was no way to game the system, because
| everybody did the same programme.
|
| I have no idea why only america has issues with standardized
| tests... IMHO, using grades is worse than testing, because an
| average students with shitty classmates will in general get
| better grades, than in a class with mostly "geniouses".
| ldiracdelta wrote:
| Some people in America don't like SAT's because of "disparate
| impact"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| But this is a thing that needs to be fixed in earlier
| education (basically the schooling/schools before college
| need to be fixed), and not later, where you basically accept
| an objectively worse applicant, because they happen to be
| some specific race.
| jacobolus wrote:
| > _IMHO, using grades is worse than testing_
|
| Empirically, grades are more predictive of college outcomes
| than test scores. Both are pretty artificial though, and cause
| various kinds of perverse incentives.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Grades are very subjective, especially with oral exams.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I have no idea why only america has issues with standardized
| tests...
|
| The United States has issues with standardized tests because
| (1) its black population performs very, very badly on them,
| while (2) official policy is that the black population should
| enjoy outcomes such as college admission or job offers that are
| in line with its share of the total population, not with
| performance against objective metrics.
|
| Note that communist societies had the analogous problem;
| whenever they implemented standardized testing, class enemies
| filled the ranks of top scorers.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Shouldn't this be fixed earlier, and not after they get the
| lower scores?
|
| Equal opportunity is ok, but equal outcome is really shitty
| for kids of other groups who work hard and lose their spots
| due to the color of their skin.
|
| > Note that communist societies had the analogous problem;
| whenever they implemented standardized testing, class enemies
| filled the ranks of top scorers.
|
| Meh, we were lucky, we were the "3rd world" (literal
| definition, before the current one), and our top students
| left the country and worked in other, western, capitalist
| countries (and sent money back to their families :)) I think
| for a huge range of years, our biggest export was the
| workforce :)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Shouldn't this be fixed earlier, and not after they get
| the lower scores?
|
| There is no point earlier than when they get the lower
| scores. The performance gap is apparent at all ages where
| performance can be measured at all.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| But why fix then? Will the performance gap vanish when
| they get accepted by an university (even if someone else
| from some other group, wouldn't get accepted with the
| same score)?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Will the performance gap vanish when they get accepted
| by an university
|
| No.
|
| > But why fix then?
|
| It's an ideological commitment, not a reasoned one.
| _RPL5_ wrote:
| Russians introduced standardized testing for college admissions
| in late 2000s. The stated goal was to curb regional variations
| in GPA (easier to get high GPA in a bad district), and to make
| it easier to apply to colleges outside of your immediate city
| [1].
|
| The kids & parents have generally gotten used to the testing,
| but the teachers & educators absolutely despise it. You
| regularly see diatribes on social media against it. The crux of
| their criticism is that standardized testing emphasizes very
| niche test-testing skills as opposed to a holistic education.
|
| But overall, I'd tend to agree - standardized tests are a good
| thing. They help streamline the admission process and make it
| less painful/variable, which is good thing for society as a
| whole.
|
| ----
|
| [1] Prior to standardized testing, each university in Russia
| held its own full-on series of admission exams that would take
| 1 to 2 weeks. Even if you were lucky and lived in a city with
| several universities, the logistics would limit you to 3 or 4
| college applications at most. The "SAT" alleviates this, as
| most universities now use it as the sole application metric. So
| you can apply to an unlimited number of schools.
|
| That being said, universities retained the capacity to do their
| own testing, for example for foreign students who didn't take
| the SATs. I think elite schools & programs (like a physics
| program at a top technical college in Moscow) may require
| additional testing. But overall, the admissions system they
| have in Russia now seems to closely approximate what you
| describe for Slovenia.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| There's a decent argument to be made that standardized tests
| distort the education system by making good test results the
| goal of teaching and attending class, rather than learning
| whatever the class is supposed to teach. To put it differently,
| it's not comparing students on the basis of tests that's the
| problem, it's what those tests cause the students and teachers
| to do in the year leading up to them.
|
| I used to be quite strongly anti-test because in my opinion,
| testing well is a skill like any other that can be learned
| largely independently of what the test is on, and it doesn't
| transfer outside of a school environment. I've softened that
| opinion a little because testing well seems to require
| performing abstract thought under stress, which is probably
| useful in more situations than I originally thought. Still,
| while it's useful for categorizing students, I still suspect it
| has a net negative effect on learning outcomes.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Can't the tests be made to reflect the whole subjects? For
| example have the math test cover everything that high school
| math programmes are supposed to teach, so there's no way to
| prepare for the test, except to actually teach the whole
| subject?
|
| For example, our general high schools ("gymnasiums") have
| predefined lists of topics, that sudents will learn there,
| and the standardized tests basically cover everything. How
| can you prep for eg. derivatives, except by actually learning
| and doing derivatives?
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| One needs to learn derivatives at least in the form they'll
| be on the test. A lot of high school teachers I had were
| familiar enough with sorts of questions on the standardized
| tests their classes would be taking that they taught these
| subjects with an artificially narrow focus, in order to
| boost our grades compared to other schools. Of course,
| teachers at those schools no doubt did the same. The result
| is that a lot of people who studied eg. derivatives would
| be much less able to apply that knowledge in any
| environment except the standardised test.
| walkedaway wrote:
| Thomas Sowell has broken this down very well over the last 50
| years.
|
| https://www.hoover.org/research/affirmative-action-around-wo...
|
| https://www.commentary.org/articles/thomas-sowell-2/affirmat...
|
| And of course the Bible on the subject:
| https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sow...
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" The Hoover Institution, officially the Hoover Institution on
| War, Revolution, and Peace, is a conservative American public
| policy institution and research institution that promotes
| personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited
| government."_
|
| Not surprisingly, Sowell's article is against affirmative
| action.
|
| While I was reading it, I was also looking out for anything
| that might distinguish Sowell as one of "the top 5
| intellectuals alive" and saw absolutely nothing. It just seemed
| like another random article with absolutely nothing special
| about it.
|
| If there is some evidence that he's so brilliant, it'd be great
| if someone could point it out.
| iammisc wrote:
| I suppose the fact that he's a Stanford professor (formerly
| Cornell), and has written a large number of popular books.
| seriousquestion wrote:
| Thomas Sowell is easily in the top 5 intellectuals alive, and
| yet most people are barely aware of him and his work. Why? I
| genuinely don't understand why he is so ignored.
| zzt123 wrote:
| Whether he is ignored or not depends on the thought circle of
| discourse and how that circle sets, or does not set,
| expectations based on skin color.
|
| He's ignored for the same reason Clarence Thomas is ignored -
| the juxtaposition between the color of his skin and his
| words.
| iammisc wrote:
| Thomas isn't just ignored, he is actively campaigned
| against (As a person, rather than his views) and
| 'unpersoned'. For example, there is a wonderful PBS
| documentary, Clarence Thomas in his own words, that was
| _removed_ from Amazon Prime TV during Black History month
| at a time the company chose to 'center' black voices.
|
| Apparently only black voices with the correct political
| leanings.
|
| Love him or hate him, I highly recommend the documentary.
| It's very humanizing.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Clarence Thomas' skin color is irrelevant. He believes the
| US should be a Gilead as much as the Taliban wants to turn
| Afghanistan into an Islamic nation: Christian state
| religion, no abortions, women and children as property,
| patriarchy, women at-home/barefoot/pregnant, no porn, no
| LGBT rights, no accommodations for disabilities, no
| dancing, no premarital sex, no divorces, criminalize
| adultery, decriminalize sexual harassment (irony!), no
| welfare except for the rich, no unions, and only teach
| abstinence and Creationism.
| settrans wrote:
| Would someone who is downvote-burying these comments care to
| explain their distaste? Irrespective of whether you agree
| with Sowell's viewpoints, they are articulate and seem
| germane to the conversation.
| iammisc wrote:
| The distaste is a black man who is a republican. That is
| all there is to it. Ask any non-white republican, and you
| will understand. The hate dished out towards us is on a
| level white republicans never see (not that they should...
| it's absolutely ridiculous). Accusations of 'Uncle Tom',
| 'race traitor', etc are common. When the various racial
| groups organize anywhere, and you volunteer your time with
| them, they silence you, get rid of you, and prevent you
| from speaking up elsewhere.
| justaman wrote:
| The left doesn't like a black man with right-wing ideas so he
| doesn't appear in mainstream avenues which are typically
| moderated by the left.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Sowell doesn't advocate for "right-wing" ideas. He's a
| moderate classical liberal, which is generally described as
| a centrist position.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > He's a moderate classical liberal, which is generally
| described as a centrist position.
|
| Organizations like the Hoover love to present this as
| such, but there is a reason why the departments just 100
| or so feet away don't interface with them - and it isn't
| because they are centrists.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| He's extreme far right wing, especially compared to other
| parties in the USA, which tend to be right wing and
| moderate-right compared to those in Europe, where the
| terms originated.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| At this point I'm really wondering what the ostensible purpose of
| Universities is, as opposed to their true purpose of wealth
| signaling.
|
| We live in an age where university level lectures and materials
| are available for free. Why are we paying a ton of money to
| obtain a limited slot that allows us to show up at a building for
| the same lectures and materials?
|
| Is it personal attention? Almost certainly not, but even if it
| was that can be had on the open market for far less cost.
|
| Access to specialized equipment? Well maybe, but surely there's a
| more efficient solution there.
|
| Is it certification? Because in my experience, as well as that of
| many others, the degrees don't say much of anything about
| competence so what good are they? Besides, it's again a really
| expensive way to certify people and surely there must be a better
| method.
| logicalmind wrote:
| In my opinion there are a few reasons to attend college:
|
| 1. You legitimately want to expand human knowledge beyond what
| exists. This should be the ultimate goal of a PHD. Whether or
| not this produces important output (in the capitalistic sense,
| aka is profitable) is secondary to attaining the new knowledge.
|
| 2. You want to attain high level knowledge of a subject AND the
| best way you learn is by having a strict course regiment with a
| decent teacher-to-student ratio.
|
| 3. You just want that check mark on your resume when you try to
| get a job.
|
| #1 isn't about getting a job. #2 and #3 have some overlap in
| that the ultimate goal of both tends to be securing a job. The
| difference between them is how an individual learns material.
| Some people can read a book, or view youtube lectures, then
| take some tests and learn sufficiently that way (#3). But some
| people require #2 style learning.
|
| But let's be honest, the vast majority of people attending
| college are for #2 or #3. Meaning, it is ultimately about
| getting a job. So as long as a job in a desired fields requires
| a degree, people will essentially be required to get them. The
| trend is recent years seems to be the dramatic split between #2
| and #3 style learning.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| One explanation I've heard is insurance - a degree is supposed
| to prevent someone from making mistakes so egregious that the
| person ends up in a life of poverty. As you pointed out,
| degrees are overwhelmingly received by people who already have
| some family wealth, so it's easy to sell university as the
| cause of those higher lifetime earnings.
| charlesju wrote:
| Isn't GPA even easier to game than SATs?
|
| -- Private schools can curve more leniently so its pay to play
|
| -- Rich schools tend to have more AP/Honor courses which inflate
| weighted GPAs
|
| I went to one of the best public schools in America and it was
| not uncommon for someone to take 100% AP/Honors and get a 4.5+
| GPA.
| dnautics wrote:
| in california the top X% of all public high schools are
| guaranteed a berth at SOME UC, so to some degree intra-school
| comparisons are less at issue. (parent article is about the UC
| system as a whole).
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Private schools could but in my experience as a private HS
| grad, they DO NOT. There are other factors that prevent that.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Some don't. Others definitely do.
| mattnewton wrote:
| This kind of drives home the bigger issue though, that grades
| between two schools look like comparable numbers but aren't.
| lozaning wrote:
| UC system, back when I applied only let you weight something
| like 8 classes, regardless of how many you'd taken.
| president wrote:
| Presumably, that could be solved by lowering the weight for GPA
| dahfizz wrote:
| I don't see how taking more advanced classes and scoring well
| is "gaming" your GPA. You are legitimately taking harder / more
| in depth classes and performing well. The fact that your GPA is
| higher as a result seems legitimate.
|
| You can argue about availability of AP classes / funding / etc,
| but that doesn't detract from the hard work of the AP students.
| Plenty of rich white kids take hard AP classes and get D's.
| charlesju wrote:
| Given 2 equally smart people. The one that has the
| opportunity to take more AP/Honors will have more opportunity
| to get a higher GPA.
| exolymph wrote:
| And that betrays the whole game, right? It's not about
| teaching knowledge. It's about filtering and sorting people
| into legible strata for employers.
|
| That and babysitting so parents can work without their kids
| setting the house on fire.
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| If you have a weighted GPA...
|
| Also, GPA is not a great measure of student quality. IRT
| [1,2] is better.
|
| [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1434976 [2] https://digita
| lcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...
| Y_Y wrote:
| Is student quality a well-defined and measurable value?
| Is it a scalar?
| TchoBeer wrote:
| How well they do in college, I'd presume.
| dahfizz wrote:
| And as a result, the person who took more Honors classes
| will be "more educated" (assuming the Honors / AP classes
| succeed in their stated goal). Therefore, the student that
| took the Honors classes is more competitive.
|
| It comes back to the question of what universities should
| prioritize. Should they be optimizing for the fairest /
| most equal student body, or the most gifted / competitive
| student body?
| visarga wrote:
| Even when parents are paying for the lesson, it's still
| the student that has to do the hard work. But a student
| with less help deserves more merit for achieving the
| same.
| jfengel wrote:
| More educated and more competitive are not the same
| thing.
|
| What you want is the most talented, hardest working,
| brightest students. That's difficult to discern given the
| differences in the availability of opportunity. Scaling
| for availability is hard.
|
| But it is clear that just selecting for the students who
| succeeded in the best environment will leave you missing
| out on potential. And worse, that rapidly becomes self-
| reinforcing, since the next generation of students will
| be influenced by your choices on this one.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Gaming implies that your metrics are being ruined by moving
| towards an opposite effect, not that they fail to be
| perfect. Similarly, doing well in the IMO could be a
| predictor of wealth and circumstance, but it's also a
| signal for math talent.
|
| If we're saying that AP tests and classes are too easy,
| then of course people can have a discussion about
| increasing difficulty.
| charlesju wrote:
| All I know is there are trivial AP classes like AP
| Government, AP Econ, AP Art, AP Computer Science, etc. at
| my school. Almost everyone got an A and a 4 or 5 on the
| test.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| In 2021, Under 50% of students got a 4/5 on compsci, econ
| (both of them), gov, and Art. The only thing which can
| charitably be included is AP drawing, which about 52% got
| a 4 or above. The high scores in your classes have more
| to do with school quality than anything else.
|
| Stats from https://www.totalregistration.net/AP-Exam-
| Registration-Servi...
| danaris wrote:
| In some schools, so I understand, AP and Honors courses come
| with a "bonus" to GPA--so if you get 100% in the course, it
| may go down on your transcript as a 110%, that sort of thing.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| My school had a pretty good system, where AP grades got a
| boost proportional to how far from 100 they were, something
| like 40%, so if you got an 80 raw it would be boosted by
| 20x.4 = 8 to 88 final score. This effectively means that
| weaker students aren't penalized for chosing harder classes
| whilst very strong students don't get rediculously inflated
| grades.
| lostcolony wrote:
| It's not gaming, per se, but it definitely is a privilege
| based thing.
|
| Getting into an advanced class generally means you already
| know the material that would be in the normal class (taking
| trig the year everyone else is taking geometry, for
| instance). How did you get to where you already knew that
| material? Well, you were either in the advanced class the
| year before, or, you already learned the material outside of
| class. How did you already learn the material outside of
| class? Better education at home. Which is easy to do with a
| private tutor or stay at home parent; really hard to do with
| a single parent, or dual income that don't allow for much in
| education expenses.
|
| And because you are in an advanced class, you basically get a
| .5-1.0 bump to your GPA (so people are graduating with a 4.5
| GPA at some schools), all because you had the extra early
| resources; you can't compete with just what the school
| provides.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > . How did you already learn the material outside of
| class? Better education at home.
|
| You are basically saying if someone is more educated, that
| they will do better in education.
|
| Yes, that's the point. The more time and effort someone
| spends in their education, the better they will do in
| education.
| lostcolony wrote:
| No. I am explicitly pointing out that even if you learn
| everything taught in class 100%, and get perfect grades
| in it, you may not be eligible for some advanced classes.
| It requires outside investment. And then the advanced
| classes give you a leg up in terms of college admissions
| if GPA is a guaranteed entry point.
|
| That means the grade inflation of AP classes just serves
| as an indirect proxy for money, rather than a reasonable
| consideration for class performance, knowledge, aptitude,
| or any such thing.
| vt100 wrote:
| The "outside investment" is just time and effort. There
| is free access to information via public libraries, the
| internet, youtube, mathworld, etc.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Yeah, if kids all have equal time outside of school
| (because poor kids have the same workloads at home as
| rich kids), equal access to resources (because poor kids
| have equal access to computers and internet access as
| rich kids), and we're relying solely on the kids
| motivation (rather than parents who can supply time to
| engage with their kids education, unlike the kids whose
| parents are working multiple jobs just to make ends
| meet).
|
| If all that's true, then yeah, it's just the kids' choice
| of how they spend their time and effort, and NOT a proxy
| for wealth. But I don't think all of that is true.
| [deleted]
| stale2002 wrote:
| > It requires outside investment.
|
| So if you engage in more and better education, above and
| beyond the education that one is engaging in school, then
| that person will be better at education?
|
| Yes, of course.
|
| Just like if someone practices basketball, outside of
| their school team, and hires a basketball tutor, then
| they would become better at basketball.
|
| Obviously, if someone spends more of their own time on
| something, anything, whether it is education, or
| basketball, or whatever, then they would become better at
| that thing.
|
| The only question now, is why would that possibly
| surprise you, that people who go above and beyond
| whatever everyone else is doing, would become better than
| everyone else at that thing?
| karpierz wrote:
| The investment GP is talking about is money.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| Would the school you went to be TJHSST?
| raunak wrote:
| Well, I graduated from TJ this year (2021) and it wasn't very
| common for people to have a 4.5+. Yes, some, but not the
| average by any stretch - average was probably a 4.2, or a
| 4.3.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Grade inflation is already a serious problem. I can only see
| this making it even worse.
| black6 wrote:
| > People in power today would much rather do something that seems
| to promote "equity" than make an evidence-based choice that could
| lead to accusations of racism.
|
| "Wokeness" and CRT are steps back in logical and rational
| discussion. Sometimes the truth hurts, and instead of plugging
| our ears, shouting "LALALALALA", and denigrating the purveyors of
| said truth, we should accept the truth for what it is and look to
| the underlying causes.
|
| The modern western allopathic medicine treat-the-symptoms-with-
| drugs school of thought pervades more than just healthcare.
| honkycat wrote:
| I went to a RURAL school. My graduating class was 20 people. We
| didn't really do SAT prep, basically all time was eaten up
| triaging students who were struggling, and dealing with poorly
| behaved students. Or the teachers were sometimes completely lazy.
|
| I didn't even know AP classes EXISTED. I got to go home for a
| work study after my first class senior year because I had taken
| all of the classes available to me. A lot of my peers weren't so
| lucky and had to sit in study hall for the entire day. The school
| was gaming attendance because kids in seats means more money, and
| with how small the school was every student mattered.
|
| Either way: Not a great place to be as a reasonably intelligent
| young person with an aptitude for technology. I was so profoundly
| unprepared for college, I had to work twice as hard to do half
| the work as everyone else, but I managed to sneak by with never
| failing a class. ( OK, I failed one statistics class because I
| walked into the final without a calculator. )
|
| I had to work during the day to support myself and do night
| classes my Jr and Sr year of school. I have this memory of all of
| my classmates going to an "Of Montreal" concert, and I really
| wanted to go, but I didn't have the money to buy the ticket. Or
| the time, I never went out, I had to spend my free time on the
| weekends doing my homework.
|
| So yeah, this is a nice gesture. The SAT is easier to study for
| when you are a product of an achievement driven environment and
| have mentors to coach you through the process. College is more
| valuable when you actually have the time and capacity to take
| advantage of your education and it's opportunities. Same as
| everything else, there is a massive gulf of education and
| training between students of wealthy districts, and the rest of
| us. Personally, I think those of us from the sandlot deserve a
| swing as well.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| The SAT is one of the few ways that smart, poor kids have to
| move up in the world. It not very study-able. Removing the SAT
| is just going to take the one semi-objective measurement of
| ability that exists out of the application process. This is
| great for university officials because then they can make their
| student rainbow have all the desired hues but it sucks for kids
| with real potential.
|
| Not very study-able: https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-
| prep-courses-do-the...
| slownews45 wrote:
| It's funny because in California the SAT is one of the only
| ways you could basically test into the UC system even if your
| school didn't offer the required A-G courses.
|
| So you could go to a crappy school, but could show you had a
| reasonable chance to do well in college and test into the UC
| system from almost anywhere.
| flowerlad wrote:
| In most countries students apply to just 1 or 2 colleges. Because
| college admissions are predictable in other countries. In the US
| students apply to a dozen or more colleges, and each college
| requires custom essays. Then these applications go through
| "holistic reviews". In reality, because of the huge volume of
| applications, colleges spend 6 to 8 minutes reviewing each
| application, and the reviewer is often an inexperienced 22-year-
| old graduate student.
|
| The system of "holistic reviews" and unpredictability was
| introduced to control the number of Jewish people being admitted
| to top universities. More here:
| https://circles.page/5680a56b5c28af0998656e09/College-Admiss...
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| It's literally the same in America. What you're seeing is the
| "dream hoarder class" lashing out. These are elites that seem
| to have nothing but contempt for normal folks like me and I'm
| tired of it.
|
| At my high school most people didn't apply to more than 3
| schools (1 or 2 less selective state schools + 1 flagship). I
| only applied to 4 and only actually had a chance at the two I
| got into. The undergrad I graduated from didn't require an
| essay or anything, just SAT scores and GPA. Even my flagship
| university - a public Ivy - effectively just judges in-state
| applicants using a GPA/SAT grid system.
|
| I'm not alone in this, my university has about 40,000 students
| enrolled today.
| flowerlad wrote:
| So your college didn't require an essay. Is that the rule or
| the exception in the US? Nearly all colleges require essays.
| Your college may not have used "holistic reviews" but nearly
| all colleges in the US do.
| mbostleman wrote:
| My two cents. Be color blind for access to things like this.
| Then, when you see cultural groups that don't seem to getting
| through in the numbers you'd like, study the success factors from
| other groups and help promote those from the bottom up, within
| the culture. Sounds cliche, but it's better to build naturally
| occurring desirable attributes in communities than providing the
| benefits despite the absence of the attributes.
| pfisherman wrote:
| I think the University of Texas has one of simplest and most
| egalitarian admissions policies that I have seen. If you graduate
| in the top 10 percent of your class, then you are guaranteed
| admission to all state funded universities.
|
| As a Californian I find it quite ironic that many policies in
| "conservative" Texas (ex. university admissions, property tax,
| income tax) are more much more progressive than what we have in
| "liberal" California.
|
| If anybody from Texas has a different perspective on UT admission
| policy (I am sure it has its pathological edge cases) then I
| would be curious to hear.
| ryan93 wrote:
| Top 6% now FWIW
| briliantbrandon wrote:
| Yeah I wanted to point this out. In Texas it is the top 10%
| for every public university except the University of Texas at
| Austin which varies the percentage from year to year
| depending on the expected number of applicants. 6% is the
| lowest I have seen it. I believe it was 8% the year I was
| accepted.
| asimpletune wrote:
| I went to UT and having this program in was a great experience.
| It allowed for a lot of variety and kids from all sorts of
| backgrounds, but you still had crazy smart people. If you're
| from the city, the school's super hard to get into. I don't
| know about the more suburban or rural areas. That being said,
| my classmates were very diverse and it was a blast. CS
| education was phenomenal there and I still think their approach
| puts them in the best of the best globally. Everything else was
| really nice too, can't have asked for a better experience.
| Aperocky wrote:
| All system can be gamed. I guess UT isn't that prestigious to
| create strong enough incentives. Imagine if Harvard said you'd
| get admission if you're top 1% of the class. Imagine how many
| parent would just stick their kid into the worst school for 1-2
| years to get that.
|
| California just made it very hard to game.
| freeopinion wrote:
| Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth my U.S. state tried to
| stem the brain drain to out-of-state universities. They
| offered big money scholarships to anybody who graduated in
| their school's top ten. The higher the rank, the more money.
|
| This was pre-internet, but people still tracked rankings
| across the state. One kid would transfer schools to bump
| their rank two spots. That would cascade to a flurry of
| transfers. All the top students knew where their GPA would
| place them in every other high school in the state and
| everybody was watching for movement. Eventually, they capped
| the program to be based on your rank midway through senior
| year to prevent 100s of transfers in the last month of the
| school year before graduation. Which of course, just moved
| the activity to the last month in the semester before the
| last semester before graduation. But then you had to maintain
| your GPA in the new school for a whole semester, so it
| involved more risk.
|
| Now that I've told this whole story, let me say that none of
| it is true. Or, at least, I don't really know how much of it
| is true. I do know that it was the buzz among students when I
| was in school. I never entered that world very deeply. I'm
| pretty sure that it did happen a bit. Probably not as much as
| it was talked about.
| thebradbain wrote:
| UT Austin is one of the most prestigious public universities
| in the nation, the Texas equivalent to UC Berkeley. Texas
| just strictly limits how many from out of state can come
| (also, in state tuition is only $5000/semester, so it heavily
| incentives even the wealthy / those who can achieve a Harvard
| or, say, Pomona College admission to attend). Full
| disclosure: I did not attend UT Austin.
|
| Also. as someone who grew up in Texas and now lives in
| California, I can tell you the UT System has more than its
| fair share of gaming attempts -- as such, you're ineligible
| for the automatic-in based on rankings if you switch schools
| in the last 2 years (i.e. you need to get in holistically),
| and those who attend private high schools also need to get in
| holistically (because top private schools got caught saying
| more than 7% of their students were in the top 7% and have
| non-state-standardized ranking criteria). Granted, being
| automatically admitted to one of the UT schools via rankings
| often does _not_ mean admission to UT Austin, but rather a
| satellite campus.
|
| It's a decently progressive and fair system.
|
| https://news.utexas.edu/2020/06/18/new-ranking-puts-ut-
| austi...
| thebean11 wrote:
| > Imagine how many parent would just stick their kid into the
| worst school for 1-2 years to get that.
|
| Native Texan here, not the first time I've heard this
| strategy.
|
| For in state students, you really can't beat UT's cost to
| value ratio..people do try hard to get in.
| tannhauser23 wrote:
| What's wrong with that? That'll encourage education-focused
| parents to move to more diverse neighborhoods. Right now
| parents are trying to cram into the 3-4 best school districts
| in any given area.
| Causality1 wrote:
| That wouldn't be a good thing? Students are assigned to
| schools based on their address. To put their kid in a bad
| school would require moving into a bad neighborhood. That
| means the poor town gets more tax money, which all the
| students benefit from.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The overwhelming majority of towns do not impose an income
| tax and presumably the property tax would be the same
| regardless of whether a "typical" or "college admissions
| gaming" resident lived there. The only small difference in
| tax income to the town would be any minuscule difference in
| excise taxes on vehicles or local sales tax. Do you have a
| larger difference in tax income to the town in mind that
| I'm not seeing?
| mattmcknight wrote:
| Not to mention that you could just rent an apartment in
| that area to get an address and drive your kid to school.
| Businesshabit wrote:
| GOOD
| usaar333 wrote:
| Well, UC doesn't consider your skin color in said evaluation
| (the evaluation criteria is constructed in a weigh that does
| boost racial diversity, but that's different from considering
| at the individual criteria), and it has similar gaming
| dynamics.
|
| As the article notes, you absolutely can go to a weaker high
| school to boost your chance into a UC (parents can also try
| dropping their income lower to boost their kids as well).
| Though, neither might not be a good strategy for the long-run
| anyway.
| thomquaid wrote:
| Consider there is a major difference in purpose between a
| State and private educational institution. Prestige is hardly
| relevant in my view--the purpose is to efficiently allocate
| state taxpayer resources for the public good of state
| citizens at UT, as it should be for UC. Harvard and prestige
| are two tangential things.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| genedan wrote:
| > Imagine how many parent would just stick their kid into the
| worst school for 1-2 years to get that.
|
| This actually happened when UT started applying the rule.
| Parents moved their kids to less competitive schools.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > If you graduate in the top 10 percent of your class, then you
| are guaranteed admission to all state funded universities.
|
| Aren't most schools small enough that this incentivizes
| sabotaging classmates to boost your relative rank?
| mandelbrotwurst wrote:
| Yes, this is a side effect of stack ranking and it exists
| even when the class sizes are large.
|
| It also encourages zero-sum thinking generally.
| klyrs wrote:
| That would be a ton of work (liable to expose the plot)
| unless you're right at the threshold and you know who's
| immediately in front of you.
| sct202 wrote:
| I think it would incentivize making sure your lower ranked
| peers stay in school to pad out the ranking more than
| sabotage. IDK how you would even sabotage effectively, but I
| can think of a lot of ways to help your peers stay in school.
| mattpratt wrote:
| In my experience the more common narrative was gaming the
| system to keep your GPA high. AP/DC/Advanced classes are
| typically shifted a GPA point up.
|
| For example, you may not take an elective (Photography)
| because getting the top grade in the class would still drop
| your overall GPA. Despite Spanish being available in middle
| school, our valedictorian waited until high school because it
| would count a point higher -- by the time you realize how to
| play the game, it might be too late.
|
| The other example cited was kids attending a very competitive
| school up until their senior year and then moving to a less
| competitive school and graduating a higher rank.
| stanford_labrat wrote:
| My favorite example of this is a CISCO/networking class
| offered at my old high school.
|
| It counted as 2 classes when it came to calculating your
| GPA...and accordingly was supposed to take up 2 "slots" on
| your schedule. However it didn't and instead the 2nd slot
| was always after school, which nobody went to anyways. So
| it allowed you to fit N+1 AP classes into what would
| normally be a N class schedule and gave a major advantage
| when calculating class rank.
|
| As a result you got some very interesting people taking
| this class who you would never expect, simply to boost
| their class rank. It saddens me a little now to realize
| that these kids schedules were planned out from the
| beginning from fall freshman year to optimize their
| GPA...but I went to a very competitive school so in
| retrospect it makes sense.
|
| Bonus, to your point they offered ap options for most arts
| and electives! You could take AP photography or "honors"
| art/music which counted as an AP for weighted gpa
| calculations :P
| freeopinion wrote:
| In our school district they have multiple tiers: normal
| classes, honor classes, AP classes, college classes. It
| amuses me that AP classes are weighted higher than
| college classes. That is, it would just amuse me if it
| didn't affect my children.
|
| So students can take a college class, get an A, and
| receive college credit. Or they can take an AP class, get
| an A, then take an exam that might determine whether they
| get college credit. Why take an AP English class when you
| could just take College Freshman English? Because the AP
| class will be better for your GPA.
|
| I get to see first hand when advisers are sticking a kid
| in an AP Government class that is completely pointless
| instead of the Honors Biology class for GPA reasons.
| Never mind that the kid wants to be a botonist or marine
| biologist or anesthesiologist. We don't have room for
| that. We have to maximize their GPA. Stick them in AP
| English instead of normal Stats even if they could be in
| Stats and normal English and are more interested in
| Stats.
|
| If your kid didn't take the Honors Ag class as a
| freshman, they're already mathematically eliminated. They
| will never recover the additional 0.025 point GPA
| advantage. There are only 64 academic slots available in
| a four year schedule. There are are 32 highest weighted
| classes, 16 mid-weights, and 24 low-weights. Only four of
| those can be taken as a freshman. If you miss just one
| opportunity, you're out.
|
| So you have a 4.0/4.0 GPA, 4.625/4.75 weighted GPA, and a
| class ranking of 53.
|
| And hopefully a support group that helped you understand
| and choose what is most important in life.
| stanford_labrat wrote:
| Sounds like my school district. Freshman were technically
| banned from taking AP classes (but of course, some
| parents spoke to the school and thus they were allowed
| in). And naturally the valedictorian 3 years later was
| one of the 4 that was able to get into an AP class
| freshman year.
|
| I always felt quite vindicated when I got my class rank
| (8/432) even though I had a "normal" schedule. 0, 3, 6, 7
| APs. I even took a free period and only had 6 classes
| junior year as opposed to the normal 7!
| rodonn wrote:
| I had a similar situation at my school where I was
| valedictorian because there are 2 Latin language APs vs.
| only 1 for most of the other foreign languages.
| duxup wrote:
| I think a lot of the meme form of 'conservative' and 'liberal'
| concepts OFTEN don't fit if you define it by politics or a
| state policy... especially any policy as time goes on.
|
| A state government might have a very liberal or conservative
| party in power ... and a given policy might be considered the
| opposite, but they're not going to revisit it all the time.
|
| The reasons for the policy too might have nothing to do with
| 'conservative' and 'liberal'.
|
| Personally, I'm not really sure I buy into the idea that any
| given University has to have a given admissions policy and be
| 'liberal' or 'conservative'. There's room for a mix of policies
| across universities IMO / should be a mix.
|
| Fankly I think you could tell most people any random policy is
| 'conservative' or 'liberal' and they'd just support or oppose
| it based on that label.
|
| Definitions are all dorked up... and 'conservative' and
| 'liberal' is too weird and narrow a lens to view everything
| through.
|
| Just as an example George W. Bush ran a campaign that very
| vocally opposed "nation building", it was thought to be a very
| important conservative value. George W. Bush then started the
| largest / longest nation building projects in Iraq and
| Afghanistan in decades ...
|
| These terms often don't make any sense when applied.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| TBF, I think when OP was talking about "conservative" vs
| "liberal" s/he was more less talking about progressive vs
| regressive systems.
|
| A regressive system takes away from those that don't have
| much to give to people that already have a lot.
|
| In this way - a blanket statement of guaranteeing the top x%
| of students admission into state schools is - I would argue
| fair and reasonable - but I would also argue is regressive.
|
| This is assuming the top x% of students come from wealthier &
| more educated families. It's possible this assumption isn't
| true.
|
| I think progressive policies would be like those that make it
| easier for certain groups to get admitted (i.e. harder for
| other groups). This seems unfair, but if you want change, I
| don't see how you do it fairly.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Affirmative action is a shortcut, but sometimes the
| shortcut is the only way to make any progress.
|
| There may be a few very large issues, but also a gazillion
| small factors that make up systemic discrimination, both
| racially and against women. It is impossible for minorities
| to fight those individually, especially not from a position
| of weakness. It is more effective to counter at least a
| small part of the net discriminative effect by relatively
| simple quotas.
|
| And usually those policies don't make up the balance
| anyway.
| mchristen wrote:
| The downside of that system is that the 10% at one school is
| definitely not equivalent to the top 10% in another school.
| When you compare rural school districts to the suburbs of the
| major cities a kid in the top 10 people at one school might not
| even rank in the top quarter at another school.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| But that's an upside if you're looking to be equitable.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Not necessarily. Wealthier parents are more mobile, and can
| move residences such that their children are in the top
| 10%.
| PEJOE wrote:
| You're losing the forest for the trees. Wealthier parents
| most often send their children to good private schools,
| and their children have lots of options for college if
| they are talented and hard working.
| analog31 wrote:
| Where I lived in Texas, no middle class family sent their
| kids to public schools.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| That's a hell of an indictment of the local schools.
| Where I live (Portland, Oregon suburbs) most middle/upper
| middle class families send their kids to public school.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Idk Seattle for example is liberal as hell but 25% go to
| private schools. Likely because equity goals are not good
| for non target groups
| endisneigh wrote:
| Where was this? I highly doubt this is true.
| snakeboy wrote:
| The equilibrium state in this scenario would be all
| public schools approaching equivalence, which would be a
| positive outcome.
| zepto wrote:
| It seems like you are arguing that wealthy parents move
| to places with _worse schools_ to make it easier for
| their kids to be in the top 10%.
| MathYouF wrote:
| This is in fact exactly what happens in Texas. I've met
| many people who attended UT whose parents or friend's
| parents did exactly that for the explicit purpose of
| increasing their chances of their child being in the top
| 7% of their graduating class so that they could get
| automatic admission to UT Austin, a very good school to
| attend compared to the usual options for someone
| graduaitng #35 in a class of 500 from a public high
| school with low educational achievement rankings.
|
| They'll often go straight for petroleum engineering if
| their career path is as calculated during college as it
| was in high school, and end up with a six figure salaxy
| at age 22 (not sure this still works as of 2020 given the
| problems with Houston's gas sector).
|
| For some parents, making sure their child has a sure fire
| path to the middle class is what they consider their main
| responsibility, and will do things as crazy as move to a
| worse school district just to get them on the above
| track.
|
| If you're as cynical about the value of education (to
| provide a "job") as the people described, you'll
| absolutely sacrifice the quality of your kids education
| (moving to a school with ostensibly less talented or
| credentialed teachers and possibly less academically
| gifted peers to learn from and larger class sizes) in
| order to game the system.
| svachalek wrote:
| Well, assuming this also moves funding this may actually
| do wonders for balancing out the system. And there may be
| some benefits to all the students, in seeing how the
| other half lives, making more advanced classes available
| in poorer neighborhoods, etc.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Yeah I agree this improves diversity and combats school
| district segregation. I think this is exactly the intent
| and works as it should.
| mcguire wrote:
| If you ever find a case of a wealthy family moving to a
| rural area to improve their children's chances of getting
| into a state school, please let us know.
| lightcatcher wrote:
| I went to high school in a science magnet program in
| Texas. Students from 3 high schools were eligible for the
| magnet program, and the magnet program was housed in one
| of the 3 high schools. Our math+science classes were in
| the magnet program, but our English/history/PE/art/all
| other classes were in the host school. The program made
| up about 10% of the host high scool, and students in the
| program were counted as part of the host school for
| purposes of university admission.
|
| This understandably made people unhappy at the host
| school - ~7% of the class is academic high achievers from
| out of the school zone who take most of the admission
| spots reserved for the top N%.
|
| I don't know of any cases of parents moving to avoid the
| extra competition, but I probably wouldn't have heard of
| that if it happened. I do know of some people set on
| going to UT who did not apply to the magnet program so
| they could have less competition.
|
| The point here is you don't need to move to a rural area
| to decrease school competition. There are plenty of cases
| where you can move a mile to get into the zone of a less
| competitive school.
| vkou wrote:
| They can, but they don't, just like how Jeff Bezos _can_
| choose to live under a bridge, but doesn 't.
|
| Nobody with money goes out of their way to send their
| children to a school in a 'common' part of town, because
| they don't want their children to mix up with 'the wrong
| kind' of people.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| In practice they want nothing to do with the poors so
| they cluster into "good" school districts.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Yeah I mean you always want the best for your own kid
| that's normal
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| You are making an implicit assumption that groups should be
| treated equitably. Some of us disagree with that--we feel
| *individuals* should be treated equitably and see these
| attempts to treat groups equitably as treating individuals
| *inequitably*.
|
| Why should my chance of getting into college be hampered by
| where my parents live or what color skin they gave me??
|
| Aiding one person is inherently discriminating against
| another.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| It's all a hack job to try and work around the fact that
| we haven't yet figured out a good objective measurement.
| Things like SAT do the same in reverse, aid the wealthy
| students at the expense of the poor ones. It's not an
| easy problem.
| sjs382 wrote:
| > Why should my chance of getting into college be
| hampered by where my parents live or what color skin they
| gave me?
|
| Why should theirs be hampered by the same?
| [deleted]
| david38 wrote:
| This is a terrible policy. Anyone who has kids in high school
| and sees the lengths people go to game their grades will tell
| you this.
| fortran77 wrote:
| California has an even better program. If you go to a
| California community college and have a 2.7 GPA you are
| guaranteed admission to a CA State University.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If you graduate in the top 10 percent of your class, then you
| are guaranteed admission to all state funded universities.
|
| UC is the more elite of two separate state funded university
| systems in CA, but it has a similar guarantee (but not campus-
| of-choice), that evaluates earlier (counts only 10th and 11th
| grade) and has a 9% cutoff for the "in your class" guarantee,
| which is called "Eligibility in Local Context".
|
| https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
|
| They also guarantee admission to the top 9% statewide, even if
| they aren't top 9% of class.
|
| https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
|
| California State University, the larger state-funded system,
| has a process called "redirection" which functions as a kind of
| admission guarantee for qualified California residents who are
| applying as first-time freshman or certain transfer statuses,
| but I can't easily find clear documentation of the cutoff
| (which may just be the minimum CSU eligibility cutoffs), but in
| any case is broader than UCs.
|
| I'm not convinced that Texas is more progressive here. (Even
| before considering the sibling comments that indicate that the
| actual current guarantee is less than the top 10%.)
| matthewowen wrote:
| Right, but the campus of choice difference is huge!
|
| The UC system includes schools like UC Merced which just
| aren't that competitive or prestigious to begin with, just as
| the UT system includes schools that are much less
| competitive/prestigious than UT Austin.
| namdnay wrote:
| So basically stack ranking?
| truffdog wrote:
| Doesn't the UC have the same policy? It is the top 9%, but
| still- https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-
| requi...
| akomtu wrote:
| The top 10 percent policy is a merit based system and the most
| recent flavor of "progressivism" says that merit based systems
| are racist and should be abolished. Lottery and quota based
| admissions is what considered progressive today.
| wavefunction wrote:
| This reads like a straw man argument.
| wyldfire wrote:
| I've heard of some families gaming this system by having their
| students attend less competitive high schools in order to
| improve their rank.
| mcguire wrote:
| The problem I see with that is that, if you are rich enough
| to game the system that way, you are probably rich enough to
| be gaming the system in order to get your kids into something
| other than a state school.
|
| Unless we involve football, for example. Sports break the
| model.
| usaar333 wrote:
| It's top 7% now and it has a holistic system to handle students
| outside that cohort.
|
| The reason this exists is that it's effectively an affirmative
| action program for both urban segregated schools and rural
| schools, which combined have enough political power to pull
| this off. I believe political dynamics in CA wouldn't allow for
| this to be constructed - note that suburbs in general fight
| against such policies.
|
| UT itself generally doesn't like the state mandated policy
| because it results in a less academically strong cohort than
| other flagship universities, reducing its rank.
|
| Whether one school's admission program is "better" or not
| depends on what you view as the purpose of universities
| (something often lost in these conversations). Are you weighing
| more academically similar cohort (in which case purely
| predictive measures of performance are most appropriate) or
| some sort of equity metric where putting students from less
| socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds with stronger ones can
| result in higher upward mobility? One can certainly make the
| case that the Texan system could be failing on both accounts
| compared to say UCs, but you'd need to try to build a causal
| model to understand which school is producing better results
| for students that arrive.
| dnautics wrote:
| > I believe political dynamics in CA wouldn't allow for this
| to be constructed
|
| I believe california has a similar program (or did at some
| time since Bakke), specifically for UC (the "higher tier"
| university system, versus cal state system)
| usaar333 wrote:
| ELC (https://www.ucop.edu/enrollment-services/programs-and-
| initia...).
|
| It doesn't get you into the top UC though (which Texas'
| program does), just any. There is wide variance in UC
| schools.
| [deleted]
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _reducing its rank_
|
| Do universities exist for students? Or do students exist for
| universities?
|
| I'm sure university administration believe the latter, but
| given that they're supported by the state (in UT's case, ~25%
| of their budget?) there's a pretty strong argument that they
| _owe_ the people of the state education.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| now you are starting to ask extremely uncomfortable
| questions for the higher education cabal.
|
| Unfortunately, what I suspect is going on with all this
| high minded "get rid of the SATs" is really going to at
| least help the universities combat what was an increasing
| pressure to do pre and post testing to validate or
| establish the value of a university's program. You cannot
| as easily gain useful information if you have no pre-test.
|
| The very irony of this is of course that it is a kind of
| deliberate and manipulative breaking of the scientific
| process by universities who will simply claim even more
| profusely that their graduates improve over 4 years of
| study, without any control of variables.
|
| The only possibility I see to circumvent what may be a
| devious scheme is for citizens to press state Legislatures
| to require a pre-test on entry and a post-test on
| graduation. Expect extreme pushback though because the data
| that is available strongly indicates that universities are
| largely not actually conferring the value one may expect.
| In other words, the quality of the students on entry is the
| primary determination of the quality of the student on
| graduation, which seems to hold across the board.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| University Presidents and Trustees have this bizarre
| fixation on rankings. I have no clue why, especially
| considering the fact that that composition of the top 100
| is fairly stable. Rarely does a university experience a big
| swing, up or down. Most universities are never going to
| dethrone the top 20, no matter how hard they try. And it's
| not like they are in desperate need for enrollment either.
| dataflow wrote:
| When people hear about a university they don't know
| about, they often get their initial impressions from the
| rankings. I imagine universities that fail that test can
| end up being filtered out very early on in the process.
| For some people anything top 20 is great, but I think
| even the top universities don't want to be written off by
| the best candidates because they were #11 instead of #10.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Because we put MBA's in leadership positions of
| universities so they do what they've been trained to do -
| run a business. And part of that is finding metrics to
| measure their success by.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Someone should give those guys an old-school CRPG to
| provide an outlet for this make-the-number-go-up
| fixation.
|
| The metric that can be measured is not the eternal
| metric. The result that can be result-driven is not the
| eternal result.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| What do you think fantasy football is?
| [deleted]
| ypzhang2 wrote:
| It's not really bizarre at all. Parents and therefore
| students care about rankings, and it directly leads to
| enrollment, donations, and talent attraction. There might
| not be changes in overall rankings but individual college
| or program rankings do change substantially.
|
| The administration will all profess a desire not to be so
| beholden but it's part of the game so to speak, you have
| to play.
|
| Source: current board member of a public university
| college
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"individual college or program rankings do change
| substantially."
|
| I hadn't considered that. Good insight.
| cafard wrote:
| There was a stretch in my life where I knew a lot of
| people who knew where George Washington University ranked
| versus Carleton College versus who knows what. The upper
| middle classes take this stuff seriously.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I expect it's a case of metrics-measured, metrics-
| optimized-for.
|
| Rankings are an easy "objective" measurement
| administrators can take to financial supporters (either
| government or private) and say "Here's what we're
| spending your dollars on." Consequently, rankings become
| very important to administrators.
| usaar333 wrote:
| Agreed, but that argument is more relevant to argue along
| the lines of how many in-state vs. out-of-
| state/international students you can educate. (Even then
| it's murky -- I can argue the international students both
| bring additional funding and add diversity which improves
| the learning experiences of in-state students).
|
| Regardless, the argument here is simply which people they
| select. Assuming they hold 90% of spots for Texans
| (required by law), it's just a question of how they select
| people. The university wants to select the strongest
| students holistically (which some additional
| diversification criteria) - the state wants it to select
| the top 7% of students from every high school. Even if you
| argue the people are owed a state education, either
| criterion is a valid way to select the students that
| attend.
| austincheney wrote:
| If you consume media or follow university rankings they
| exist only for _prestige_ , whatever that is.
| Aunche wrote:
| High calibre students not only help the university's
| rankings, but also other students. A few of my courses had
| absolutely terrible lecturers, but we managed to more or
| less learn the material from each other.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I had a girlfriend at U C Davis, and I found the
| opposite.
|
| The best students were called 4clickers. They sat in the
| front row, with four color pens in hand. They never
| helped, and one on occasion turned her in for cheating.
| She used to talk about how competitive thstudrnts were.
| They all wanted a spot in a graduate program. It was the
| most depressing school I ever visited. Couldn't wait to
| leave on Sunday. (I was suprised she cheated, but it
| taught me something about "the high caliber" student.)
| scottLobster wrote:
| Yeah it really depends on the students'
| objectives/options. For Electrical/Computer Engineering
| majors at my University we all knew we were all going to
| at least get decent jobs at graduation, those going to
| Grad school were the minority. So it was a very collegial
| atmosphere for the most part.
|
| But if you're in one of those programs where the
| Undergrad is fairly worthless by itself and are competing
| for a limited number of slots at a prestigious grad
| program, that's when then cutthroats start to emerge.
| [deleted]
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| I am a Texas resident (born here and also graduated from high
| school in Texas) and would like to point out that it's not just
| UT, every state school (the other big ones with a decent amount
| of competition are Texas Tech and Texas A&M) follows this
| policy. In actuality, it appears that because the demand is so
| high for UT they have had to lower the number to 6%:
| https://news.utexas.edu/key-issues/top-10-percent-law/
|
| The primary flip side to the top 10% law is that urban centers
| have much higher levels of competition than rural ones. If you
| happen to go to high school in Nowhere, Texas, it's quite easy
| to go to UT since achieving that top 6% is a somewhat trivial
| endeavor. Whereas if you go to an urban high school in a
| population center such as Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio, you
| have to really apply yourself.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Aside from quantization errors for high school classes with
| fewer than 16 students, why would it be easier to get the top
| 6% in a rural school?
| jacobolus wrote:
| Because on average the children of urban/suburban
| professionals have more academic support, higher
| expectations placed on them, and more competition, and as a
| result end up with more academic practice/preparation,
| compared to rural or working-class children.
| jeffbee wrote:
| You're saying it would be easier if you imported the
| support and expectations with you? Otherwise I still
| don't get it. If rural school students as a class are
| poorly supported and have low expectations, and you are a
| member of that class, I don't see where your advantage
| arises.
| jacobolus wrote:
| The same amount of effort spent on academic pursuits (or
| the same amount of external support) will get you further
| on a local-relative scale in a less competitive
| environment. Even the 75th %ile students at many schools
| filled with children of upper-middle-class professionals
| work insanely hard. But sure, being one of the few
| academic strivers in a less competitive school has its
| own challenges.
|
| I think making the system more equitable by supporting
| kids from all backgrounds is socially beneficial, even if
| it sometimes makes suburbanites complain.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| I think he's saying if you're in a bad urban school, it's
| hard to see how you're any less likely to be in the top
| 6% than if you're in a bad rural school given the same
| academic abilities. (Academic abilities which don't
| always need to be very highly developed.)
| madengr wrote:
| That must be why many of the rural, flyover states have
| higher standardized test scores than the urban ones.
|
| https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/sat-
| scores-...
| dietdrb wrote:
| football
| mcguire wrote:
| A typical rural school attracts students based on proximity
| ---if you're living in that district, you go to that
| school, no matter how much your parents make or whether
| they're lawyers or a convenience store clerk.
| (Additionally, the residents of the area are typically less
| interested in education, rather than getting a job or
| playing sports.)
|
| In an urban area, residential areas are typically
| segregated by wealth, and wealthier parents want their kids
| to go to good schools. Further, they are capable of moving
| within the area so that their children go to good schools.
| As a result, the competition among students for the top N%
| more fierce due to the pre-selection of students.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| I take it you never visited Yates High?
|
| I think you mean if you go to a good school you need to apply
| yourself. If you live in a rough neighborhood and go to a bad
| school, it's not really all that difficult. Of course, you
| have to get through high school, which is not so easy in the
| rough neighborhoods. But you get the idea.
| hoten wrote:
| > If anybody from Texas has a different perspective on UT
| admission policy (I am sure it has its pathological edge cases)
| then I would be curious to hear.
|
| Texan here. I'll share my story, at risk of coming across as
| big headed: I feel the 7% percent policy unfairly shut me out
| of a "better" school. I can't tell if it negatively or
| positively impacted my career. It either allowed me to focus
| more on becoming a better programmer (going to an easier
| school); or it made me lag in my career 1-2 years (not being
| able to go from a top school directly into FAANG/a SV startup).
|
| For my first 1-2 years of HS, I had a somewhat challenging
| personal life and didn't take any advanced courses. It wasn't
| until the 3rd year I stepped up in every way possible, taking
| all AP courses, and getting 4-5s in 8 AP tests by graduation. I
| don't recall what my GPA was, but thanks to my false start it
| didn't meet the threshold, and I attribute being not accepted
| to UT to the fewer spots available due to the 7% rule.
|
| ( an aside, I'm still baffled at how this happened. By all
| accounts I was overqualified: won a regional UIL CS
| championship, had multiple gaming projects, knew multiple
| programming languages. There's a larger critique here about how
| the hell colleges determine admissions )
|
| GPA is something you can game, and people in my school did. For
| example, the two highest level math courses you can take in HS
| is Calculus AB and Calculus BC-the former covers half a year of
| college-level math, and the latter covers a full year, both
| over the course of senior year. I chose BC due to an interest
| in math. Many others chose AB simply because they would both be
| weighted the same in GPA calculations, and clearly AB would be
| easier. The result is that the BC class had a dozen students
| and AB had 30. By informal surveying, the highest ranking
| students in the graduating class took AB, not BC. This is just
| one example: there are other ways a students can reduce how
| much they learn in favor of a higher GPA. I absolutely do not
| regret taking BC, it was the best part of my HS education. It's
| a shame it possibly harmed my college admissions.
|
| In the end, I was rejected from my first choice (UT Austin),
| was accepted to University of Houston on a half-free ride, but
| was very disillusioned with the quality of their CS program
| during my entire tenure. I landed in a subpar job right out of
| college, and after a year or two at a software consulting firm
| for the oil industry I managed to get myself to Silicon Valley
| (after throwing a hail mary and moving to Seattle without a
| job), where my career really started. In hindsight it was just
| a year or two, and perhaps this is just wishful thinking, but I
| think the admissions process at UT really failed to identify me
| as a worthy entrant, and I think the 7% rule exacerbated this.
| I used to be salty about this (in college / in my subpar job),
| but now I don't give it any thought.
|
| I count myself lucky because, like many in this field, I was
| motivated to develop my programming skills outside school.
| Perhaps going to a weaker CS college allowed me to focus even
| more on skills more relevant to software engineering (I even
| had time to consult in college).
|
| ________
|
| btw, UT Austin has a unique provision in the Texas law that
| reduces the 10% requirement to slightly less, hence my usage of
| 7%. See https://news.utexas.edu/key-issues/top-10-percent-law/
| wavefunction wrote:
| The problem arises when most of them want to attend UT-Austin
| rather than UT-El Paso or UT-Permian Basin or UT-Rio Grande.
| And as noted by others the threshold had to be revised
| downwards from 10%. I personally believe you can receive an
| excellent education from most institutions but there's prestige
| associated with UT-Austin that isn't with the satellite
| campuses.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > many policies in "conservative" Texas
|
| Just want to point out that the policy you're referring to was
| put in place while Democrats ran Texas. Historically Texas was
| a Democratic state, with only eight years of Republican
| governors from 1874-1995.
|
| > more progressive than what we have in "liberal" California
|
| And also that California was historically a Republican state.
| For most of the years from 1943-1999, they had a Republican
| governor.
| KerrickStaley wrote:
| Note that until recently, there was little correlation
| between the progressive/conservative axis and the
| Democratic/Republican axis. The passage of the Civil Rights
| Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 led to the
| downfall of the Dixiecrat faction of the Democratic party and
| the current ideological sort. Ezra Klein's book "Why We're
| Polarized" has a lot of good background on this.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Well, there are problems with that right out of the gate.
|
| * Consider a family where the highschool student has to work to
| help out with rent and food bills, so they miss school or don't
| have time to work on assignments. Compare this to a wealthier
| family where the student has all the free time in the world.
|
| * Or consider a district that skews wealthier and tutors push
| the haves up into the 10%, and push the have nots below. Plenty
| of the have nots would have hit the 10% threshold if only they
| had money.
|
| * Or consider being a minority in a very white district that
| isn't fond of minorities.
|
| These are just a few I've read about off the top of my head.
| The idea of standardized testing is fair, but only if it is
| aware of inequities in the system. This has been a debate since
| the 70's. In fact, the popular TV show "Diff'rent Strokes" did
| an episode about systemic racism in standardized testing the
| early 1980's.
|
| I'm not arguing if Cali has it right or wrong, but there are
| problems with using just testing.
| [deleted]
| drdec wrote:
| IMHO you are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good by
| pointing out situations the 10% (now 6% apparently) rule
| doesn't cover.
|
| Second, you are not offering an alternative solution that
| would be preferable.
|
| Also, you are not recognizing that fixing in the top 6% is
| not a requirement for admission so it is possible for the
| situations you list to be addressed.
|
| Finally you end with an argument against standardized testing
| which has nothing to do with the comment you are replying to.
| In fact the 6% policy allows a student to get into the
| university without ever taking a standardized test.
| jhgb wrote:
| You're describing certain individuals who might suffer from
| such an arrangement, but what's the opportunity cost here? If
| you will make a different arrangement, different people will
| suffer from it. I'm not convinced that there's a scenario
| where nobody at all gets hurt so I don't believe that listing
| a few examples of some people getting the short end of the
| stick in itself warrants outright rejecting this approach.
|
| > Or consider being a minority in a very white district that
| isn't fond of minorities
|
| For example these people by your own definition will be rare.
| They might also be disadvantaged in other ways should they
| live elsewhere, which means that that the same person in two
| different places would simply face a different set of
| disadvantages which might even themselves out. Likewise "a
| district that skews wealthier" should naturally have fewer
| "have-nots" than other districts so "have-nots" themselves
| would not be disadvantaged on average.
| zdragnar wrote:
| What your scenarios describe are students who are not ready /
| prepared to do as well as their peers in college.
|
| You cannot resolve prior inequities by forcing students into
| college- they drop out at higher rates, with higher
| (unforgivable!) debts, and word of mouth of their experiences
| will continue to deter others from trying.
|
| I personally witnessed this happen to friends I had made my
| freshman year at school.
|
| The ACT in particular has a really low bar for anyone who
| does reasonably well in school- most state schools around
| here had a minimum score that certainly required no
| preparation to achieve.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Yep. Packing unprepared students in based on non-merit
| items (including legacy) and disadvantaging prepared
| students is absolutely ridiculous. It's bad enough that the
| standards are low for student athletes because it's all
| about talent-recruitment business and NCAA $$$, where
| educational attainment is tertiary.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Some schools are actually quite good at ensuring student
| athletes need to actually be students in addition to
| athletes. The necessary discipline to simultaneously
| train in rigorous athletics and scholarship can make for
| a compelling case.
|
| Alas, my alma mater did not, and it was pretty obvious to
| everyone that they were athletes first, and kept up
| appearances about schooling. I am reasonably confident
| that several degree programs that the school offered
| would not have existed if the football and basketball
| programs didn't exist.
|
| Would they have been able to let in more students who
| would have bean more focused on schooling? Honestly, I
| don't know, but I strongly suspect there are lower
| hanging fruit to pick first.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| If the goal is to somehow boost black or hispanic admissions,
| it won't work at many schools due to other groups dominating
| the top 10%.
| mattpratt wrote:
| I'd point out that this only guarantees you admission into the
| general studies / undeclared school. It can still be difficult
| and competitive to get into the engineering or business school
| for example.
|
| A law was passed in 2009 for the University of Texas
| specifically, that stated "the university must automatically
| admit enough students to fill 75 percent of available Texas
| resident spaces" [1]. That 10% number has dwindled down to the
| top 6%.
|
| As a past automatic admission, I'm horrified hearing stories
| from coworkers. The process was never stressful for me -- I
| sent in one application, heard back before the holidays and was
| done.
|
| [1] https://admissions.utexas.edu/apply/decisions#fndtn-
| freshman...
| mcguire wrote:
| At the time I entered UT Austin, in 1986, they had that 10%
| policy---it's how I got in. Some programs (nursing and
| business are the two I remember) had competitive admissions,
| though, but that was for sophomores or juniors.
|
| The University had 50,000 students at that time. During my
| time there, they were constantly trying to find a way to
| reduce that number and succeeded at some point, so the 2009
| law may have been a result.
| kristjansson wrote:
| California does that too:
|
| https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
| mochomocha wrote:
| Yep. And the data that shows it at play is here: https://www.
| universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions...
| sam-2727 wrote:
| I'm skeptical of how egalitarian the top 6% (for UT Austin)
| policy actually is. All this does is guarantee you admission to
| the university, not a specific major. So, while you can gain
| admission easily to a liberal arts major, you aren't guaranteed
| admission to a STEM major and will still have to be a
| competitive applicant to gain admission into a STEM major.
| genedan wrote:
| I'm from Texas, went to UT when it had the 10% rule. It was a
| problem for kids who went to competitive/affluent schools that
| were so competitive that one or two Bs would put you out of the
| running. So you would get some lopsided scenarios where some
| kids would get into MIT but also be rejected from Texas because
| the standards were that high. Meanwhile the valedictorian of a
| bad school with a 900 SAT score would get in. Some kids would
| move to less competitive high schools to have a chance at going
| to UT.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Disclaimer: I'm in ATX around UT.
|
| The high school I went to was public but it had 15 perfect
| SAT scores in my grade, numerous full rides to Harvard, and
| such. Good luck with getting into the top 10% of that.
|
| A fairer way would be to rank the top 10% of students
| statewide by SAT/ACT and GPA.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >> As a Californian I find it quite ironic that many policies
| in "conservative" Texas (ex. university admissions, property
| tax, income tax) are more much more progressive than what we
| have in "liberal" California.
|
| There isn't much that is progressive about property taxes. They
| affect the middle class much more than the poor (who often
| aren't homeowners) and the rich (who can afford high tax
| rates).
|
| Texas specifically has some of the highest property taxes in
| the nation, and that's in part because we have no income tax.
| Income taxes, though, are actually progressive.
|
| Note that Texas's high property tax rates is one of the
| significant contributors to gentrification.
| jmclnx wrote:
| > Income taxes, though, are actually progressive.
|
| For some states it is a flat rate, I know of one.
|
| But to me is the largest issue is funding for public schools
| and quality. At one time you would leave high-school with an
| education that was similar to what you get now in a 4 year
| college.
|
| These days all we are doing is running a kind-of day care
| until the public school student leaves to work at McDonalds
| in the afternoon once the School Day ends.
|
| I also remember some Profs saying in many cases, the first
| year of collage is a re-education of what the student should
| already know.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > They affect the middle class much more than the poor (who
| often aren't homeowners) and the rich (who can afford high
| tax rates)
|
| Absolutely not. The burden of property taxes falls largely on
| the _capitalized_ asset-value of real estate, so a typical
| middle-class household can offset much of that burden by
| paying for a smaller mortgage in the first place. And poor
| renters largely benefit by not having to pay local income or
| sales taxes, since the burden of the tax will fall on their
| landlords. Property taxes are in fact quite progressive.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Property taxes are fundamentally regressive because if two
| individuals in the same tax jurisdiction live in properties
| with the same values, they pay the same amount of property
| tax, regardless of their incomes. That's the literal
| distinction between progressive and regressive taxation.
| The fact that the middle class household can offset the
| burden by getting a smaller place is quite irrelevant.
|
| In addition, it's erroneous to think that property taxes
| are shouldered by landlords. They are, in fact, passed on
| to renters.
| [deleted]
| weeblewobble wrote:
| Irony is when the nuances of reality conflict with facile
| binary stereotypes
| mochomocha wrote:
| As mentioned below, this is also how the UCs are doing
| admissions. You can look at the data for yourself here:
| https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions...
| You'll find out that there's a ~5-10% acceptance rate per high
| school.
| ecf wrote:
| Well to be fair University of California has a policy that is
| more or less the same.
|
| https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
| mcguire wrote:
| " _As a Californian I find it quite ironic that many policies
| in "conservative" Texas (ex. university admissions, property
| tax, income tax) are more much more progressive than what we
| have in "liberal" California._ "
|
| While I (as a graduate of UT Austin) agree with most of your
| comment, I would like to know why you believe Texas' tax
| policies are progressive?
|
| (Texas does not have an income tax, but does have (very high)
| property taxes. A resident of Texas with a large income but a
| small real-estate footprint pays relatively few taxes (which is
| why many wealthy individuals choose Texas as their state of
| residence) while an average homeowner, whose house is the
| largest asset, pays a greater relative tax rate.)
| mountainb wrote:
| The reason being that US conservatism is often a more
| egalitarian branch of liberalism. In states like California and
| New York, they're animated by a more hierarchical and
| traditional type of (small-r) republican politics in which they
| cultivate client groups which they support through direct cash
| payments and favored policies.
|
| In California the worthies are untitled hereditary aristocrats
| who secure political power by accumulating and supporting vast
| client populations. These clients vote for the aristocratic
| party and provide it with a patina of moral justification. It
| is an intensely traditional political form that can be found in
| other societies going back thousands of years. These
| aristocrats in turn ensure that big corporate interests get
| favored tax treatment (often effectively zero tax) while
| preventing small business competition through hyper regulation.
| BigCo gets subsidized and pays zero tax, LilCo gets hit with
| endless demands for paperwork and fines. You can find similar
| social forms in many societies throughout history: it's not
| special or unique.
| duped wrote:
| I wonder what the second order effects of this change will have
| on the curriculum and scheduling in K-12 schools in CA.
| honiti wrote:
| Any objective measure like the SAT is bad because it is dominated
| by Asians who the State has deemed undesirable and unworthy of
| this dominance. They tried changing the objective measures but it
| didn't work, they could do Harvard admissions by 100 meter sprint
| times and Asians would still find a way to dominate. So they need
| to remove objective criteria as they are roadblocks to ethnically
| cleaning their universities of Asians.
| xbar wrote:
| "People in power today would much rather do something that seems
| to promote "equity" than make an evidence-based choice that could
| lead to accusations of racism."
|
| My experience was that the system worked just fine for all kinds
| of people that got to the point that they wanted to go to a UC.
|
| Among my siblings and our offspring family of 12, we put 6 of
| family members through the UC system (Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD). 3
| went through the community college system with no reliance on
| standardized test scores. 2 took SATs and GPAs. 1 got in this
| fall on GPA alone.
| criddell wrote:
| The author doesn't spend much time arguing why the tests should
| be kept. This is one defense and it feels pretty weak to me:
|
| > standardized test scores say more about which applicants are
| likely to earn a degree and to do it in less than eight years;
| they also correlate strongly with students' GPA at the university
| namelessoracle wrote:
| "this metric shows better than the one they want to go with who
| will actually succeed" is a weak defense? What would a strong
| one look like?
| criddell wrote:
| The metric is basically just confirming that people who are
| good at writing tests in high school continue to be good at
| tests in college.
|
| If a college thinks an SAT is not a good way to judge
| candidates, maybe tests in general aren't a good way to
| evaluate their own students.
| ryan93 wrote:
| Maybe the dumbest comment in HN history.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Given that one go to the university to earn a degree (for the
| most part), I think this defense is pretty on point.
| enaaem wrote:
| Im from the Netherlands and US education seems to be worst of
| both socialism and capitalism: lack of choice and sky high
| prices.
|
| In the Netherlands we have:
|
| Free choice of high school. I grew up in the poorest
| neighbourhood of the city and I still went to a very decent high
| school with classmates from all backgrounds.
|
| More and smaller high schools. More choice and competition
| between schools. Schools are subsidised based on the amount of
| students they attract.
|
| High school programs have different difficulty levels. Everyone
| follows a program that matches their academic ability. If you
| finish the highest level (VWO) you are generally granted access
| to all universities. American university application feels like a
| job interview. You have one chance to impress. Dutch (European)
| university application is like a 6 year internship where you can
| proof yourself.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Note that because of diversity issues the US is moving away
| from any form of levels (called tracking). The problem they had
| was that the advanced / AP / pre-med / doctor levels etc had
| over-reps in white / asian. The push in the US is for more
| group work, less tracking so that all students including
| various racial groups that have historically not done as well
| can move together through system.
|
| Europe had tracks for things like trade schools / skill based
| schools and other programs - US is very focused on academics /
| college / university etc.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| >"Free choice of high school"
|
| How does this work when 25% of the students want to go to the
| "best" one? Is it really not free choice, but free choice of
| schools for which your exam scores qualify you?
| nr2x wrote:
| Having spent a lot of time doing MS admissions at a top-tier CS
| program, I never really cared that much about specific scores
| unless they were absolutely terrible. Tests don't tell you much
| about an applicant, essays are more helpful to know if somebody
| can be successful. We did away with tests and I didn't miss them.
| vharish wrote:
| Can't essays be gamed? And if one is better at writing essays,
| it doesn't necessarily mean he is better at other stuff. MS
| admissions in particular have people applying from different
| countries, countries where English is not the primary language.
| panda88888 wrote:
| IMO essay is easier games than the SAT. There is no guarantee
| on how much essay is actually written by the student compared
| to SAT, where it actually checks the ID. If anything, if I
| have the means I would have consultants work with my kid on
| choosing a topic, then heavily edited for impact while
| retaining the student's writing style.
| nyc640 wrote:
| I can see how essays for graduate admissions can be more useful
| since you have to make a personal statement about your
| academic/research interests, how the program would help you
| accomplish your goals, etc. But for undergraduate admissions,
| the essays are the easiest part of your application to game
| since they ask about very generic life experiences (e.g. tell
| us about a hardship you overcame) that are unverifiable.
|
| This is especially true for people with money: either through
| major editing from professionals ($$$), or just outright paying
| someone to write them for you ($$$). As someone who went to a
| rich high school in a large city (as a diversity student), I
| can tell you the number of students I knew who paid to have
| their essays written or heavily edited outnumbered those who
| didn't.
| fridif wrote:
| Don't understand the hate for the SAT. Where I went to school,
| students would just beg their teachers for better grades and it
| literally worked.
|
| I did average on my SAT compared to my ex-gf in college (top 30
| US school) but I ran a 3.8 in college compared to her being a C
| student.
|
| Doesn't matter anyway because none of the stuff I learned in
| college is used in my daily job as a java developer.
| shawndrost wrote:
| I can't point to something better than the SAT, but I can tell
| you what people don't like about it. SATs correlate with
| demographics in ways that conflict with the concept that merit
| is evenly distributed among student demographics.
| narrator wrote:
| One approach to prevent people from drawing racist inferences
| from standardized test scores or other statistics is to adopt
| the French policy of not collecting or keeping any race
| statistics. That would allow us to preserve meritocracy
| without promoting racism or depriving highly qualified
| applicants of the limited educational opportunities that will
| help them contribute the most to society.
| fridif wrote:
| But like, I'm not a good soccer player at all and I don't
| harbor a belief that I should be placed on a soccer team to
| the exclusion of others who are _much_ better (as opposed to
| just marginally better).
| zeteo wrote:
| The fact is that requiring the SAT leads to worse educational
| outcomes for Black and Latinx students. You can close your eyes
| to it all you want and say "but I don't see how that happens,
| they don't ask you skin color on the test!". That doesn't
| change the reality on the ground. We need a better system than
| the SAT as the gatekeeper to higher education. And yes, maybe
| UC doesn't have the perfect replacement. But at least they're
| trying.
| sjg007 wrote:
| The SAT is basically institutionalized racism. I think this has
| been well studied, from its origins until today. If you have
| the means and money you can get tutored test prep and do
| significantly better than you would otherwise.
|
| Next on this list will be scholarships and admissions for elite
| sports. Rowing and gymnastics all favor the wealthy.
|
| https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/views/2020/08/17/h...
|
| Maybe we need randomized admissions when kids qualify above a
| threshold...
| fortran77 wrote:
| The linked article may give you another point of view.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| It didn't. The author seems to have a gut-felt conviction
| that there is no bias or damage in standardized testing or
| its subsequent use for university admissions.
| dnautics wrote:
| what? did you RTFA? The author gives an argument based on
| concrete evidence that the SAT helps underrepresented
| minorities, and states there ALREADY is a pathway (that
| also lots of underrepresented minorities use) that avoids
| the SAT, the biggest problem being that statewide
| guidance counselors are not instructed on the existence
| of that pathway.
| andreilys wrote:
| The problem is that every approach to university
| admissions will be flawed.
|
| Personally I think there should be a lottery system after
| a certain grade/extracurricular cut-off. The difference
| at a certain point between students is negligible and a
| lottery system would help alleviate some bias. Of course
| there's plenty of things wrong with this approach as
| well, you're never going to find something that pleases
| everyone.
| dlp211 wrote:
| I'm not sure of any state universities using a lottery,
| but some do automatically admit the top N% of students
| from every high school. For example, U of Texas admits
| the top top 6% or every high school.
| thereare5lights wrote:
| Did you even read the article?
|
| > How do I know all of this? Because unlike the regents,
| who enthusiastically voted to eliminate the tests for the
| first time in 2020, I did not ignore the findings of a
| 225-page report that was prepared for them at the request
| of the UC's then-president, Janet Napolitano. This
| report[1], by the Academic Council's Standardized Testing
| Task Force, was based on years of UC admissions data and
| was the product of a tremendous amount of work by a
| formidable team of experts in statistics, medicine, law,
| philosophy, neuroscience, education, anthropology, and
| admissions.
|
| > The scholars determined that the obvious challenges
| faced by low-income Black and Latino students were
| poverty and poor K-12 education. And they found that the
| UC's use of standardized tests did not amplify racial
| disparities. They agreed that the university should
| continue using test scores in admissions, but recommended
| that the UC begin developing its own test, which would be
| designed to meet the needs of both students and the
| institution.
|
| [1] https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/comm
| ittees/...
| Aunche wrote:
| You can also just hire tutors to help you with coursework.
| How is the SAT different in that aspect?
| ikiris wrote:
| Yes yes, have them do it at your lake house during the
| derby my good sport. You can even take more time if you
| have your chef prepare you meals so you can study through!
| filoleg wrote:
| What? You are missing the point completely.
|
| The parent comment is saying that with the SAT removal,
| the only hard number the admissions officers have left to
| use is GPA. And GPA is just as gameable, if not even
| moreso than SAT scores, for kids with wealthy parents.
| hotcold wrote:
| Hey man, totally agree. Instead let's just give IQ tests,
| because test prep doesn't help. Uhuh, whoops, those are
| racist too.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| gotoeleven wrote:
| This is a bizarre canard that people keep running with. You
| can prep for the SAT but it adds 20-30 points at most. So
| mostly you can't prep for it. You certainly can't buy a high
| score.
|
| College sports is a racket though for sure.
| honkycat wrote:
| So personalized tutoring does nothing to improve your
| score? What an absurd suggestion.
|
| That USED to be line line but it has since changed:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-
| sheet/wp/2017/05/...
| sjg007 wrote:
| Interesting I was 150 points of Stanford.. should've
| prepped.
| panda88888 wrote:
| Coaching and tutoring has diminishing returns. Simply
| having done the practice test before the actual one would
| both significantly boost the score while reducing the
| anxiety. The tricks are not hard to learn, and practice
| tests are cheap to buy (or borrow from library). SAT is
| (was) probably the cheapest way to boost admission chance
| for a poor student compared to extracurricular,
| competitions, volunteering, etc. Those with money always
| have an advantage, but standardized test like SAT is
| probably the most egalitarian, as everyone has to take
| the tests by themselves in a controlled environment.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| I didn't know Khan Academy was elitist, expensive or
| personalized.
|
| No amount of expensive tutors is going to help a rich kid
| on the SAT unless they really do all the work.
| [deleted]
| endisneigh wrote:
| I don't understand this comment lol.
|
| You say you don't understand the hate for SAT, but then proceed
| with an example of how you did better than your ex-gf in
| college despite doing presumably worse on the SAT then her?
| iammisc wrote:
| No. He's saying that the GPA in college doesn't matter,
| because he just asked his teacher to raise his grades, and
| that worked. Whereas his girlfriend was more intelligent by
| the SAT, but didn't realize this one simple trick.
| endisneigh wrote:
| what? I don't think that's what he's saying lol
| fridif wrote:
| My high school GPA was very bad, my SAT was "good enough to
| get in", and my university GPA was excellent, showing that I
| was now an adult and taking things seriously.
|
| No SAT, no admission, I think would have been the case for
| me.
| austincheney wrote:
| SAT is a standardized test of academic performance, where in
| there is an affirmed bias in what criteria you qualify as
| education worth testing. That bias is substantially amplified
| by dedicated preparation, which requires assets that are
| egalitarian.
|
| This means wealthy families are substantially advantaged in SAT
| test performance. As a measure of preparation more than
| potential it may well serve as strong indicator future academic
| participation, but for all the wrong reasons. As such it can be
| used as a tool for exclusivity as a measure of anything.
|
| To adequately test for performance biases aside divergent tests
| are better than conforming tests. The difference is the former
| tests for answer distribution, quantity, and validity where the
| later asserts correctness by asserting one answer against a
| single approved answer.
| Spivak wrote:
| I don't know why you were immediately downvoted. This is
| precisely why places are doing the whole holistic thing which
| isn't some mysterious quota thing but giving applicants the
| ability to show off their talents in whatever their strengths
| are however they manifest. If you're bad a standardized
| testing your app won't immediately hit the trash. But if you
| are then by all means put your scores on your application.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Replacing the SAT by a "Holistic" process is a convenient way
| to impose a quota on some groups judged problematic. To
| directly quote the article:
|
| "There is only one group of students who are "overrepresented,"
| to use the chilling language of social engineering, at the
| university: Asian Americans. Twelve percent of K-12 students
| are Asian or Pacific Islander, compared with 34 percent of UC
| undergraduates. Aligning enrollment with state demographics
| would require cutting the share of those students by almost
| two-thirds. It would mean getting right with contemporary
| concepts of anti-racism by reviving one of California's most
| shameful traditions: clearing Asians out of desirable spaces.
|
| [...]
|
| The UC has an established history in this dirty art. In the
| 1960s, Asian enrollment at UC Berkeley was strong, and it
| soared through the '70s. But in the '80s, it plummeted
| mysteriously. Berkeley was investigated by the Department of
| Education, and in 1989, the chancellor apologized and pledged
| that this would never happen again."
| an_opabinia wrote:
| No one ethnic group owns the schools.
| visarga wrote:
| Each individual is a minority of one. Forced equality is
| oppressive at individual level.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Framing the issue as one "foreign" group "taking over" the
| school is interesting.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_foreigner
| thereare5lights wrote:
| Red herring or strawman.
|
| No one asserted that
|
| In fact, the person you responded was asserting that this
| course of action is meant to deny access to members of
| certain groups because of their membership in a group, not
| that they are entitled to access because of their
| membership in a group.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| The stuff the person is talking about is a bad faith
| argument.
| briefcomment wrote:
| All the best colleagues I've worked with aced the SAT and/or
| other standardized tests. I would hate to not be able to
| refer to them while interviewing job candidates.
|
| Honestly, standardized test scores and some case study type
| questions would be sufficient to make a decision (along with
| 1 on 1 convos). I hope a decision like this opens a channel
| for smart people to get to employment without having to go to
| school or spend as much time in it.
|
| Edit:
|
| Some people are commenting that relying on scores from years
| ago can unfairly disadvantage people who have improved since
| then, and can generally be misleading. I agree with that.
|
| There should be a robust ecosystem of aptitude tests that are
| generally accepted, are as unbiased (culturally) as possible,
| and that can be retaken at any time.
|
| I think it's developing, as I've seen some examples of this
| in the hiring process.
| kcatskcolbdi wrote:
| You......ask what people got on the SATs in your job
| interview?
| mcguire wrote:
| Well, it is basically an IQ test.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| In other words, an SAT score is most meaningful at the
| low end of the range?
| iammisc wrote:
| For my first jobs out of college, I listed my SAT scores.
|
| EDIT: Don't understand the downvotes. I went to a top
| liberal arts college and they told us to, if it was over
| a certain number. It worked broadly speaking.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I did too. It specifically came up in interviews as a
| reason they brought me in.
| sokoloff wrote:
| One place I worked at did, by policy (D. E. Shaw & Co.).
|
| It was also the place with the densest collection of
| high-achieving, highly intelligent colleagues that I've
| ever experienced.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| DE Shaw rejected me after I submitted my SATs (not once,
| but twice).
|
| What even is the point of living if society deems people
| like me to be inherently inferior _for life_?
| sokoloff wrote:
| Almost no place has this (fairly pointless IMO) policy in
| place. How predictive is the SAT test I took when I was
| 16 to my performance on the job a decade later?
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| You went to MIT so fairly predictive I think, as you just
| said it was the densest region of talent you've ever
| seen.
|
| If you saw my resume you'd understand how hopeless it is
| for people like me. It's depressing.
| netr0ute wrote:
| You can actually take the SAT at any age, so I'd say
| there's no reason to not try and get a high score.
| briefcomment wrote:
| +1
| munchbunny wrote:
| Google used to ask college candidates (I was asked). I
| don't know if they still do.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| > All the best colleagues I've worked with aced the SAT
| and/or other standardized tests
|
| I did not do well on my SATs (1500/1600) - do you think
| there's any way to make up for this? Or am I supposed to be
| as unimpressive as I was at 17 forever?
| harmegido wrote:
| I believe 1500/1600 is top 2%, so it's weird you'd
| consider that not "well" to me.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| It's not good enough to get into any top school, and top
| 2% is simply not good enough when it's effectively the
| same as the top 20%.
| netr0ute wrote:
| It's enough to get into any state school, and many people
| in places like MIT/Harvard/other-here have scores around
| yours.
| briefcomment wrote:
| It's definitely in range [1]. You could also consider
| retaking it, or taking the GMAT, LSAT, or GRE.
|
| [1]https://www.thoughtco.com/sat-scores-for-ivy-league-
| admissio...
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| That range includes triple legacies, Jared Kushner types
| and recruited athletes. I doubt it's applicable to people
| like me.
| FinalBriefing wrote:
| What world do you living where people share or remember
| their high school test scores?
|
| I've almost never heard of anyone caring about their SAT
| scores since freshman/sophomore year of college. The only
| people who still talk about them are the people who did
| really well on them complaining that they didn't help get
| them jobs once they graduated.
| axaxs wrote:
| I think it's an important point.
|
| To kinda bounce of your comment and replies, no, I don't think
| the SAT is racist in any way.
|
| However, I don't think it's a particular useful metric by
| itself.
|
| I had a near perfect SAT score (sans all this private tutoring
| people are talking about), but was an absolutely terrible
| college student. Just wasn't for me, and despite trying twice,
| I never really got anywhere. I wish I hadn't spent the money.
| And I hope I didn't prevent someone who was truly more
| motivated an opportunity in doing so.
| shawndrost wrote:
| In this article about the impacts of dropping the SAT, I would
| hope to find a coherent analysis of the impacts of that policy
| vs. the status quo. Unfortunately, that analysis seems internally
| inconsistent:
|
| "In short, this decision will probably hurt thousands of Asian
| American teenagers, backfire for Black, Latino, and low-income
| students, and make little difference for affluent whites."
|
| Wait a second. If this policy is going to reduce enrollment of
| non-white and low-income students, and make little difference for
| affluent whites, then which demographics will see increased
| enrollment?
| aynyc wrote:
| Middle class blacks and Latinos, as well as women.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Because students at underfunded schools have such limited
| access to college counseling, they often assume that if they want
| to go to the UC, they should keep an eagle eye on their GPA. What
| many don't know is that, to be eligible, they must complete a
| series of 15 college prep classes called the A-G requirements.
| Good grades in other classes don't count. (And--shockingly--some
| high schools don't even offer all the A-G requirements.)
|
| > There was a loophole these students could use, and it involved
| test scores: The course-load requirement could be waived for
| those who did well enough on the SAT or the ACT. This was a Hail
| Mary pass for many smart kids who, for whatever reason, didn't do
| well in high school or did well but not in the A-G classes. In
| 2018, about 22,000 students "tested in" to the UC. Almost half of
| those students were low-income, and more than a quarter were
| Black, Latino, or Native American. The UC has now taken this
| lifeline away.
|
| Wow.
| whoaisme wrote:
| When are we going to start talking about black privilege?
| option wrote:
| I will ask uncomfortable questions here. How will this change
| affect UC's competitiveness (as measured by alumni quality)
| against Tshinghua University (China), or IIT (India), or MSU
| (Russia). Or we don't care about that any more?
| spoonjim wrote:
| The top students will remain the top students. The Asian kid
| who would have gone to UC but now goes to Cal Poly will
| graduate and completely kick the ass of the UC kid who got in
| through "holistic" means.
| France_is_bacon wrote:
| Statistics:
|
| The UC system has decreased the white student admissions down to
| 20%. It varies by school. Asian Americans make up 34% and Latinos
| are 37% of the UC campuses. It does change by campus, for
| example, white students are 15% at UC Irvine, and 11% at UC
| Merced.
|
| Additionally, admittance ratio of universities across the nation
| is 60% women and 40% men, so that means of that 20% of white
| students admitted to the UC program, only 8% are white males.
|
| Drop the SATs in order to concentrate on "lived experience", and
| then squeeze out the remaining white males? Or get it down to 1
| or 2%?
|
| A friend of mine, took the most difficult advanced courses at the
| most challenging high school in all of California, did all kinds
| of extracurriculars, sports, music, volunteering and never got
| less than an A in a single class. The very hardest classes.
| Fluent in several languages. Could not get into a single UC
| school. Would he have been admitted if he was a POC? I don't
| know, you tell me.
| ZanyProgrammer wrote:
| Longform journalism can be reduced to the simple formula of
| ostensibly liberal journalists writing pieces that appeal to
| conservatives.
| throwawaysha wrote:
| And we've gone full circle: objective analysis, facts, longform
| journalism, etc. are now what "appeals to conservatives".
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I think you have it backwards. Standardized testing was a
| liberal policy to promote egalitarianism and civil rights, and
| it was historically opposed by conservatives. Liberals
| _persuaded_ conservatives that standardized testing was a Good
| Thing, but as with segregation, opposition to mixed-race
| relationships, and general race essentialism, leftists are
| copying right-most folks in opposing standardized testing. It
| 's not "liberals appealing to conservatives".
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