[HN Gopher] Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admis...
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Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles
Author : razin
Score : 761 points
Date : 2022-03-28 16:35 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mitadmissions.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (mitadmissions.org)
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| rayiner wrote:
| I don't think people appreciate the radical nature of the attacks
| on standardized testing. Standardized tests have been critical to
| higher education and the professions for almost a century.
| Virtually everyone in an elite academic, government, scientific,
| legal, medical, or financial role attained that role based, in
| part, on the SAT and similar exams like the LSAT or MCAT. Not
| only them, but everyone who taught and mentored them, and
| everyone who taught and mentored those people. If the SAT is not
| predictive, as some claim, we've been selecting our elites and
| professionals the wrong way for three generations.
| kragen wrote:
| I would say standardized testing has been critical to higher
| education and the professions since it was established 1416
| years ago and is a major reason that China and Japan (which
| began standardized testing more recently, some 1100 years ago)
| never went through the catastrophic colonial subjugation that
| did so much damage to India and the Middle East and obliterated
| most of the cultural heritage of Africa and America.
|
| Moreover, the British adoption of the system some 200 years ago
| was crucial to their imperialist success, and Western academia
| began adopting it slightly earlier. Without this Sinicization
| of Europe the Enlightenment might have fizzled out; perhaps we
| would never have had an Industrial Revolution.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| > If the SAT is not predictive, as some claim, we've been
| selecting our elites and professionals the wrong way for three
| generations.
|
| Yes, and?
|
| The easiest way to understand the shortcomings of these tests
| (at least their older versions) is to realize that students who
| use paid SAT/ACT-prep materials and services get higher scores
| than students who don't. Yes, there are confounding factors,
| but this fact alone is fairly damning evidence that these tests
| can be "defeated" using techniques beyond simply learning the
| things taught in high school. A better-designed test would not
| yield higher scores to test-takers with more specific knowledge
| of how the test itself is constructed. (In software terms,
| think "property based testing" as opposed to "unit test cases
| written in a predictable manner", with the assumption that your
| implementation under test has adversarial motives to obtain
| passing builds.)
| xeromal wrote:
| What do you think is the better way to test students for a
| specific univeristy?
| jostmey wrote:
| All tests have flaws, but a flawed test is better than no
| test. Design a better test if you can! Any test can be
| "defeated" to some extent
| rory wrote:
| This complaint is addressed in footnote 10 of the article.
|
| It would be great to design a test that's less gameable than
| the current version, and we should certainly try to do that,
| but the current version is already less gameable than
| basically anything else colleges consider for admission.
| [deleted]
| SodiumMerchant0 wrote:
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious about the advantages of going to MIT or any
| other super competitive CS college for undergrad instead of say,
| UMass or another less-competitive CS university.
|
| From limited knowledge and experience at other colleges (all
| pretty well-ranked but not as well as MIT), it's the prestige and
| graduate research which makes colleges like MIT superior.
| Otherwise, for most undergrads it's like a typical college
| experience, but with harder courses and smarter peers, but even
| that is flexible (since they have access to graduate students and
| grad-level courses).
|
| It's particularly relevant today because apparently college
| admissions are really competitive. A lot of high schoolers are
| upset because they got rejected from everything but their
| safeties, except their safeties are like Georgia Tech, Rutgers or
| the UCs.
| fuzzyset wrote:
| Compare a list of companies that attend MIT's career fair vs
| those that attend UMass. There will be some overlap, and it's
| not a closed door if you don't go to MIT/Stanford/etc. But, if
| you want to land an internship at "the best" companies (which
| can often lead to jobs), being recruited at a college career
| fair is the best option.
| frankchn wrote:
| Speaking from personal experience, it does help in at least two
| ways:
|
| (1) Being surrounded by other hard-working students pushes you
| to do better and exposes you to more advanced classes and
| research early on (a majority of my friends in CS started
| taking graduate courses by their sophomore year and did
| undergraduate research at least for a summer in one of research
| labs on campus).
|
| (2) Recruiting/Ability to get interviews. It isn't a problem in
| getting interviews for software engineering internships/full-
| time positions if you have MIT, Stanford or Berkeley on your
| resume.
| notacoward wrote:
| This is just so beautifully written it brings a tear to my eye.
| It explains their rationale, points to evidence, acknowledges
| shortcomings or gaps in knowledge, and shows empathy for those
| affected. Worth reading just for its pedagogical value, plus it's
| on an important topic near and dear to many hearts.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Yeah, when you're doing something that is
| politically/ideologically unpopular or in the minority you tend
| to need to have bulletproof justification if you want to get
| away with it.
|
| Then again, with these sorts of things you can never be sure
| how much the tail wags the dog.
| 0des wrote:
| I think I get where you are going with this, can you expand a
| little bit on the wagging the dog part? I am not familiar
| with that term. I get what it means, having looked it up, but
| being new to the concept I want to make sure I understand the
| context of that segment of the comment correctly.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| The actions of big prestigious institutions like MIT have
| an effect on opinion. So if MIT starts doing something tons
| of people will just knee jerk take their side on whatever
| the thing is. So another few institutions might follow suit
| and it might snowball and standard testing could become
| back in fashion as fast as it went out of fashion.
| IncRnd wrote:
| That's a great point. However, you're using the idiom of
| the tail wagging the dog incorrectly. The tail wagging
| the dog usually means something important or influential
| being controlled by something less so. In other words,
| the tail would be wagging the dog if I wrote a blog post
| that made people change their opinions on the SAT.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| The movement to shit-can standardized tests was far
| bigger than MIT or any one institution and was part of a
| broader political trend whereby these sorts of
| institutions have been adopting particular positions.
| Hence MIT is the tail in this case.
| 0des wrote:
| Ah ok thank you for taking a moment to help me understand
| that. Having looked up the term and re-read the comment,
| I see what was meant.
| nemo44x wrote:
| > Yeah, when you're doing something that is
| politically/ideologically unpopular or in the minority
|
| I don't think they are though. I think there would be
| massively popular and wide support for this. You're seeing it
| in SF right now as the school board is being overthrown for
| trying to ruin the school system in the name of "equity" or
| some other garbage reason. The people finally found out and
| organized.
|
| All this woke stuff today is actually very unpopular and it's
| why you see Democrats trying to separate themselves from it
| and make progressives own it. It's even unpopular with the
| arbitrary groups it claims it helps.
|
| Most people want to be good people and treat others with
| respect and woke ideology sounds good on the surface ("anti-
| racist", sure sounds great!) until you get past the formal
| meaning and into the actual meaning. Sort of like how
| Democratic Republic of Korea sounds great until you actually
| read into it.
| [deleted]
| peteyreplies wrote:
| thanks!
| neovive wrote:
| 100%! As a parent of a child about to go through the college
| admissions process (with his heart set on MIT--of course), I
| want him to read this particularly for the later part of the
| article: "...you are also not your MIT application..." The
| acceptance rate is so low, that it should not be used as a
| measure of self-worth and accomplishment.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| As the parent of a student who was just rejected from MIT...
| I wonder if the reinstatement of the SAT requirement came too
| late. I'll never really know, but it is possible.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| If their score wasn't in the 99% percentile it probably
| wouldn't have made a substantial difference.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I'm a technologist who wanted to attend MIT but, for reasons
| that are beyond the scope of this thread, didn't make the
| cut. I've still had the opportunity to work for the US
| federal government, unicorn startups, and a detector team at
| the LHC. As you said, "The acceptance rate is so low, that it
| should not be used as a measure of self-worth and
| accomplishment.", and enjoyable, meaningful work can still be
| accomplished without the MIT experience (although if they get
| in, also good, I wish them well and hope they're accepted).
| xwdv wrote:
| Likewise I know people who went to MIT and are now working
| shitty low paying jobs in unrelated fields of study and
| generally have failed to get their life together in
| reasonable time.
| killerdhmo wrote:
| ... the natural extension of you are not your MIT
| admission, is that your MIT admission is not you. Do you
| know they don't have their life together? What if they
| wanted something different than you? The tone of this
| comment sucks.
| mikeryan wrote:
| It's also important to note that they try to make clear that
| they're describing their own situation and not providing a
| blanket statement.
| eruci wrote:
| Score back to 1 for merit based admissions, 0 for politics of the
| day.
| myle wrote:
| Just two hours ago, there was a very engaging talk from
| Daskalakis, a professor at CSAIL at MIT, that is very related to
| the topic:
|
| https://youtu.be/9sePKcQnrXE
|
| The research he talks about includes college admissions.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| Kudos. SAT Prep is freely available online at places like Khan
| Academy. Extracurriculars, not so much.
| lightup wrote:
| My son found out 2 days ago he didn't get accepted to his in-
| state land grant public university. The University of Minnesota.
| This was his fall back plan. Now he's screwed and may not be able
| to start college in fall.
|
| His sins: - a 35 ACT score (legit with no studying or ACT prep
| classes) - a 3.8 weighted GPA (because he took multiple AP
| classes and actually was in college for his junior and senior
| years through Minnesota's PSEO program) - leader on robotics team
| - lettered in 2 extra curriculars - etc etc
|
| Why? Because U of MN doesn't consider weighted grades nor do they
| accept test scores anymore. So why even try hard?
|
| The only upside is that we weren't stupid enough to put his
| college savings in a 529 tied to MN. We would be superscrewed if
| we'd done that.
|
| 35,000 applicants. 7,000 freshman admissions. My kid not even in
| top 1/5 of applicaents? Complete BS.
| ffggvv wrote:
| gourabmi wrote:
| I'm curious. How many universities did he apply to ? How many
| accepts/ rejects from that pool?
| lightup wrote:
| He applied to Iowa State, Rice, UNC, Duke, and U of MN - Twin
| Cities. Accepted at Iowa State (they have a formula for
| everyone). He also got their highest out of state
| "scholarship" - which is more like a break on out of state
| tuition - no reciprocity with MN. No word from Duke yet but
| that probably won't happen either.
|
| Complete disaster for his future and really a shot to his
| otherwise happy and optimistic life. He's really upset as are
| we all.
| muh_gradle wrote:
| Your son and I had really similar stats in high school. I
| also didn't do well in college admissions, but that was
| mostly due to my poor strategic decisions and affirmative
| action (I'm Asian). I would really emphasize that transfers
| are 100% legitimate avenues for him to take. It just
| requires immediate planning and dedication now.
| cheeze wrote:
| > Complete disaster for his future and really a shot to his
| otherwise happy and optimistic life
|
| I'm sorry but this is a bit over dramatic, no?
|
| Your son still got into college. Just didn't get into the
| specific school he wanted.
|
| I didn't get into the college I wanted either. I'm doing
| just fine.
|
| Some of the best coworkers I've ever had went to a
| community college and transferred after a year or two.
|
| I get it, it's okay to be bummed. But you're acting like
| his life is already over. Set a good example and instill
| the value that you can overcome barriers and failures in
| life, it's going to be okay.
| js2 wrote:
| > If you're worried about having the account in one state and
| attending school in another, don't be. With most plans, your
| school choice is not affected by the state of your savings
| plan. You can be a resident of Minnesota and send your student
| to college in North Carolina.
|
| https://www.mnsaves.org/plan/details.shtml
|
| (This is generally the case for most 529 plans.)
| lightup wrote:
| Off topic. Doesn't apply.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Asian?
| lightup wrote:
| No, but I'm sure some of the kids on his math team will be in
| the same boat even through they're mainly South Asian and
| Chinese. Backlash against them too it seems.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Wait, your state 529 plans penalize you for applying the funds
| to out of state schools? That sounds like a highly unusual
| setup. Not all states do this.
| ausbah wrote:
| definitely not over. kicking ass in community college for a
| year or two and transferring to a much better school with
| scholarship is a great option for anyone
| lightup wrote:
| And young people on here imagine having 2 children 2 years
| apart. One of them doesn't get to go to college because of
| covid and the other doesn't get to go because ability didn't
| matter for a year.
|
| In MN we're kinda slow so maybe ability won't matter for 4 more
| years.
| rg111 wrote:
| > _as a result, not having SATs /ACT scores to consider tends to
| raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our
| education_
|
| It all come down to me to what this point touches.
|
| When you have a test, you have something definite to prepare for.
| Even if you do not have dedicated mentors or well-wishing, caring
| teachers, you simply _know_ there is a test that significantly
| improves your chances for MIT.
|
| When you don't have a test, you have to study all the year round,
| do all homeworks, be active members of math, chess, or debate
| club all the year round and win at least province-level
| competitions, play an instrument at the school band, be elected
| the class monitor, create social equity clubs, do social service
| and so on.
|
| Which path do you think will be easier for someone from an
| impoverished, troubled background?
|
| Is it easier to prepare for a test for three months or be a whole
| different person severely constrained by your background?
|
| Whom does no-test policies benefit? The rich White student living
| in a gated community, or a Black/Hispanic person living in slum-
| like condition?
|
| ____
|
| I have little first hand experience (was born in a middle-of-
| nowhere small town, but wasn't truly poor), and a lot of second-
| hand experience. I know a lot of friends, acquaintances who moved
| up the socio-economic ladder just because test-score based
| admission policies existed.
|
| The people who promote no-test policies are deluded ivory-tower
| dwellers detached from reality.
| spideymans wrote:
| > When you have a test, you have something definite to prepare
| for. Even if you do not have dedicated mentors or well-wishing,
| caring teachers, you simply know there is a test that
| significantly improves your chances for MIT.
|
| Totally tangential, but this is also why I've slowly come
| around to appreciating technical interviews. Yes, it's
| annoying, but it's also a pretty straightforward path to
| getting a $150k+/yr job.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I grew up not terribly well off and I knew somewhere in the
| back of my mind that college admission depended on
| extracurriculars and such - I never really thought much about
| that until I grew up, did relatively well for myself and had my
| own kids. Then I found out just how much these extracurriculars
| _cost_ and how much parental guidance is involved in sticking
| with them. My kids did sports in high school - but the busses
| don 't take kids to and from the school in the off-hours that
| sport practices take place, so I had to drive them in early and
| pick them up late. That was an option for me - it wouldn't have
| been for my dad. The only reason they made the teams in the
| first place, also, was because they had been doing rec league
| sports since they were little kids and were already competitive
| going into high school (we knew plenty of kids who tried out
| for the teams and didn't make it). We've sunk who knows how
| much money into private lessons/coaching/one-on-ones, etc. None
| of this would have been possible for my parents, even if we'd
| been the type of family that did that sort of thing.
| rg111 wrote:
| Yes, extra-curriculars are expensive, too.
|
| The ones that I did- needed spending of little to no money,
| but needed a lot of time. I could afford it.
|
| Someone I know, who is now a pharmacist at a big-pharma had
| to help his dad in his men's salloon after school. He has
| zero extracurriculars, but good scores, and he reached a
| reputed college with much of his fees paid for due to
| standardised test scores.
|
| I see myself as a well-rounded person. But if I were in his
| shoes, I wouldn't be where I am today as a person; I would be
| much less. (You can see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30821265)
|
| I am not saying I would have been the same as him. Because I
| have seen people grow up as comfortable as, or in much better
| situations than me, yet achieving much lower than me.
|
| Equal opportunity does not ensure equal outcome.
| caffeine wrote:
| The no-test policy is espoused by two groups who find
| themselves to be unlikely allies: naive progressives and actual
| racists.
|
| The naive progressives think what you'd expect: "Minorities and
| poor people can't possibly be expected to do well on anything
| objective, so it's unfair to test them". It _is_ bigotry, but
| at least it's well-meaning.
|
| The actual racists are more cynical: "I don't want Yale to be
| 67% Asian." Obviously, this is even worse.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| I think we can disagree with a policy without saying, "The
| people who agree with this policy are racist.". I mean
| weren't the elimination of standardized tests also justified
| on them supposedly being racist? At this point I couldn't
| care less what people assume the motivations of their
| opponents are.
| caffeine wrote:
| That's why I made the comment.
|
| One group wants to delete the tests because they think the
| test is racist.
|
| The other group wants to delete it because they are
| actually racist.
|
| I found the irony of it amusing.
| paxys wrote:
| The far right and far left share a surprising amount of
| common ground in their beliefs. Vaccines are bad. Science is
| a conspiracy. Big tech must be strictly controlled by
| government. Speech must be tightly controlled. Individual
| rights are less important compared to overall societal
| benefit. We must not be race-blind but rather use race as a
| critical factor in deciding outcomes.
| caffeine wrote:
| > The far right and far left
|
| I wish we could just call them all "far" people and ignore
| the side.
|
| It would help those of us who are not "far" recognise that
| we have more common values with each other than with the
| "far" regardless of side.
| rg111 wrote:
| They just want to see some races and ethnicities more at
| colleges.
|
| This is a sad case of Goodheart's Law [0] in action.
|
| Some people have chosen one metric as a measure of progress
| of historically oppressed races- enrolment in college
| degrees.
|
| And this serves no one.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17320640
| tombert wrote:
| I mean, I'm definitely a naive progressive (and probably hold
| some internalized bigotry that I'm unaware of), but I was
| against the SAT/ACT requirements sort of for the opposite
| reason than what you described.
|
| I half-assed my entire way through high school, but studied
| for about a month for the ACT and did extremely well (perfect
| in all categories except Math, which I got a 32 in). I didn't
| get into MIT (I never applied) but I did get into a few other
| relatively well-regarded universities (Auburn, NYU) despite
| my awful grades, almost exclusively riding off the strength
| of my ACT scores, and ended up going to Florida State (since
| it was cheaper than the other two I listed). I dropped out
| after 2 years (nearly flunking out due to low grades).
|
| To me, this showed that the tests are not an accurate
| measurement of how successful someone will be at college, but
| instead just how well someone can prepare for a specific
| test. If that's the case, why add the extra cost, both time
| and money-wise? If a mediocre student can just cram for a few
| weeks and do well on the test, then it seems to me that it's
| not a great test.
|
| I acknowledge that this is pure anecdata, but that was my
| perspective, not "minorities can't be expected to do well on
| anything objective" and not "I don't want Yale to be 2/3
| asian."
| caffeine wrote:
| Edit: I should add, thanks for pointing out a third group -
| people who think the tests don't work!
|
| > To me, this showed that the tests are not an accurate
| measurement of how successful someone will be at college
|
| The test proves you are smart enough.
|
| Like, do you believe you were not intellectually capable of
| getting through college? That you flunked out for a pure
| lack of IQ and no other factors? From the writing in your
| comment alone I find that hard to believe.
|
| There are some other factors you need to be successful in
| college, like interest, motivation, work ethic. Also luck -
| avoiding illness for example.
|
| And I don't think anybody is suggesting colleges should
| ONLY use standardised IQ tests for admittance, they should
| try to select for those other things too if they can do so
| fairly and accurately.
|
| I can't pretend to know you enough to know why you dropped
| out. But if I had to bet it wasn't raw IQ.
| tombert wrote:
| > I can't pretend to know you enough to know why you
| dropped out. But if I had to bet it wasn't raw IQ.
|
| No it almost certainly wasn't raw IQ (not that I take a
| lot of stock in IQ in itself anyway), it was a
| combination of depression and attention issues.
|
| > The test proves you are smart enough.
|
| I wouldn't exactly call the ACT (I never took the SAT so
| I cannot speak to it) an objective measure of
| intelligence. It's _extremely_ formulaic, and you can get
| "good" at taking it just by doing a boatload of practice
| tests, which is what I did. If the Kaplan practice tests
| are anything to go on, I would have gotten about 21 (not
| a great score) the first time taking the test had I not
| studied for it. I doubt I got considerably "smarter" in a
| month, I think I just got better at taking ACT tests.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| What happened at FSU? It is enough of a good deal that I
| might send my kids there one day.
| thedougd wrote:
| The 'truer' measure of your aptitude was likely your
| highest score. They allow multiple takes of the test
| because they understand that testing has errors from
| jitters, misunderstanding the wording, time management, a
| bad night of sleep, etc. Even within the bounds of a
| single class, we often get better at taking tests in a
| class once we understand the instructor's style.
|
| Ultimately, the score of everyone who takes the test
| fairly is capped by their aptitude. If we want to even
| the playing field, we should find a way to allow
| disadvantaged kids to have multiple tries at the test
| with some preparation. They may already have it.
| jxramos wrote:
| right, I think that type of bigotry is commonly identified
| with the phrase _the soft bigotry of low expectations_. Never
| knew the origins of that phrase until today. Interesting to
| see the word implicit show up in the definition, sounds about
| right. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/soft_bigotry_of_low_exp
| ectati...
| opportune wrote:
| There are other groups too. Like Big Rich Daddy who wants his
| kid to go to Yale as a legacy but he only has a 26 ACT and
| has only donated like $1m. When test scores are required, top
| schools basically have a "budget" of 25% of their student
| body they can admit with any score without it adversely
| affecting college rankings. Making tests optional makes it
| easier to admit more students that don't "meet the bar"
| otherwise, since they don't count against the 25% quota.
| caffeine wrote:
| When I went to $(fancy school not quite Yale but like
| Yale), they were even more blatant - the admissions people
| just flat out stated they have a quota for legacies and
| they have different standards.
| nullc wrote:
| You sound like they should be ashamed of it? I'd rather
| go to a school where the under-performing students at
| least had well connected and wealthy families: much of
| the point of these institutions are _networking_ -- if
| you just want to learn there are many other alternatives.
| thehappypm wrote:
| I'm interested to see what happens if schools become truly
| race blind. I've heard that top schools may be >50% Asian.
| What would that mean for these schools? Would being
| predominantly Asian mean Harvard isn't Harvard anymore? Would
| lopsided racial makeup make these schools less pretigious?
| Would they produce even more value with the top minds and
| nothing else?
| kuang_eleven wrote:
| Practically, the University of California system is as
| close as you will get to that, as they are bound by law to
| not use affirmative action. Looking through the
| statistics[1], you definitely _do_ see strong ethnic trends
| in admissions, especially for the top tier schools of
| Berkeley and UCLA, even when looking only at domestic
| applications.
|
| That being said, the UC system maintains a prestigious
| reputation.
|
| 1. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-
| us/information-...
| tzs wrote:
| Caltech is probably the closest to race blind in the US.
| Their current undergraduate enrollment is 44% Asian
| American [1].
|
| [1] https://registrar.caltech.edu/records/enrollment-
| statistics
| sam-2727 wrote:
| You will likely not have to wait long to see, given that
| the supreme court is most likely going to strike down
| affirmative action next year
| javajosh wrote:
| One would hope that if admittence into these schools is
| truly based on merit, then they'd pick the best regardless.
| I mean, what if Inuits turned out to be the most gifted
| genotype of humans WRT intelligence. Would it be wrong if
| Harvard became 80% Inuit? Presumably the student body would
| be smart enough to retain the culture that works and dump
| the stuff that doesn't, at a relatively conservative rate.
| (Personally I think elitism itself is what these
| institutions are defining/producing/protecting, and math
| ability is (relatively) easy to measure. I personally would
| love it if MIT started feeding us Presidents and Senators
| instead of Harvard -- or maybe better, if Harvard really
| kicked people out for failing to learn calc by second
| year.)
| blululu wrote:
| Not quite the same as an Ivy, but UC Berkeley (top public
| university) is doing just fine with disproportionate
| representation of East Asian Students. Still prestigious,
| still a great school, and still stocked with hippie coops
| if that's your idea of the school's culture.
|
| Ivy League schools are a bit different. Part of the value
| is access to capital, which means maintaining a wealthy
| community of alumni. The legacy admissions are grotesquely
| unfair but they do happen for a reason.
| [deleted]
| jvanderbot wrote:
| You don't put out fires by disabling smoke alarms. And you
| don't solve socioeconomic / class-related barriers by disabling
| their indicators.
| [deleted]
| jordanpg wrote:
| Part of the problem I see with standardized testing is that the
| stakes are so high. Some fraction of the people out there just
| get nervous or have a bad day. Nothing about these high pressure
| situations really reflects anything important in the real world.
|
| I'm a law student now. In law school, your entire grade usually
| comes from one 3-4 hour essay exam. Much depends on luck, how
| well you slept the night before, and how frantically you can
| type. It's absurd. It's been that way for some 100 years.
|
| I've always been able to play ball with standardized, timed
| exams, but I have had enough exposure to neuro-diversity that I
| can empathize with many. I just wish there was a way to de-stress
| these kinds of exams somehow. I don't know the solution, but I
| think it would answer of a lot of objections to them.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Still standardized tests are the most fair and least gameable
| way for admissions. Just because there is some issues, doesn't
| mean everything else isn't infinitely worse.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I can't comment on law, but back when I took the SAT and ACT
| (granted, it was a previous millenium) you could retake the
| test. The issue was, unless you were sick or otherwise in an
| abnormal state, you would usually get a pretty similar score
| the second time. They provide a few examples of old tests, so
| you know going in what your score is likely to be, thus you
| will know if it is likely to improve much if you take it again.
| [deleted]
| criddell wrote:
| I think I'd have less of a problem with the tests if the time
| limit was removed and you could bring reference materials with
| you.
| tzs wrote:
| > I'm a law student now. In law school, your entire grade
| usually comes from one 3-4 hour essay exam. Much depends on
| luck, how well you slept the night before, and how frantically
| you can type. It's absurd. It's been that way for some 100
| years.
|
| Well, not quite that way for 100 years. When I was in law
| school 30 years ago (University of Washington) it would for
| most people be "how frantically you can handwrite" rather than
| "how frantically you can type".
|
| There was a room set aside for people who wanted to bring and
| use typewriters but it was fairly hard to actually find a
| typewriter that they would allow. By the early '90s even low
| end typewriters often had several lines of buffer memory and an
| LCD display so that you could store and edit text before
| printing it, and higher end models were essentially specialized
| laptops that only ran a word processor and a printer driver. At
| my school if it had two or more lines of text storage it was
| considered to be a word processor or computer and not allowed.
|
| I had to drive all over Seattle before finding a place that
| still sold typewriters plain enough to be allowed.
| jordanpg wrote:
| Law schools put so much energy into these exam procedures!
| And all under the banner of preventing cheating and producing
| a nice curve.
|
| Now the technological arms race faced by law schools is how
| to get students to read anything in a world where case
| summaries (eg. Quimbee) and _all_ hornbooks are freely,
| trivially available.
|
| I suspect the schools will continue defend the case method
| for a long time to come, even as the vast majority of
| students don't read cases any more and even practitioners
| rely heavily on headnotes and other electronic research
| tools.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > Nothing about these high pressure situations really reflects
| anything important in the real world.
|
| Then why do the rest scores correlate better with college
| performance than other factors?
|
| If SAT scores also correlate well with, say, income, would you
| then accept that they actually reflect something important in
| the real world?
| jordanpg wrote:
| I'm not saying that these tests are not effective predictors
| of something. In fact, I'm sure they are.
|
| I'm saying that it's certain that they way they are
| administered leave a lot of people behind, and I don't think
| it has to be that way. There are many objections to these
| kinds of metrics, often involving disabilities or
| socioeconomic issues. I guess I'm just wondering out loud how
| much of that has to do with the physical way in which the
| tests are administered.
|
| As to reflecting the real world, all I can do is point to my
| own experiences: military, academic, legal, and corporate,
| and say being good at high stakes, infrequent, timed,
| standardized tests is not very important in those contexts.
|
| Here are 2 Malcolm Gladwell podcasts on the startling
| disconnect between the skills required to succeed on the LSAT
| and the skills required to succeed as a high-prestige lawyer:
|
| https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/puzzle-rush/
|
| https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/the-tortoise-and-the-hare/
|
| While the LSAT does predict success in those jobs, the skills
| needed to succeed on the LSAT have nothing to do with being a
| good Supreme Court clerk -- _especially_ the going super fast
| part.
| paulpauper wrote:
| _our ability to accurately predict student academic success at
| MIT 02 Our research shows this predictive validity holds even
| when you control for socioeconomic factors that correlate with
| testing. It also shows that good grades in high school do not
| themselves necessarily translate to academic success at MIT if
| you cannot account for testing. Of course, we can never be fully
| certain how any given applicant will do: we 're predicting the
| development of people, not the movement of planets, and people
| always surprise you. However, our research does help us establish
| bands of confidence that hold true in the aggregate, while
| allowing us, as admissions officers, to exercise individual
| contextual discretion in each case. The word 'significantly' in
| this bullet point is accurate both statistically and
| idiomatically.is significantly improved by considering
| standardized testing -- especially in mathematics -- alongside
| other factors_
|
| So much for that common, popular notion that standardized tests
| do not predict anything of value.
| globuous wrote:
| What's surprising though, is that APs and similar exams are not
| enough. In the UK, I though they essentially looked at A Level
| results, which are much more representative of what you'll
| actually study at uni. But I guess both SAT/ACTs & APs must be
| a better measure that just APs. I just remember fucking hating
| studying for the SATs though. So boring. SAT IIs were somewhat
| fun to study for though. In France for instance, they mostly
| just look at the baccalaureat to get into prep schools / first
| year at uni. Then exams to get into engr/business/vet schools
| are actually very interesting topics and very close to what
| you'll actually study. Same with exams at the end of the first
| year of med school (which you get into right after 12th grade,
| unlike in the US where it's after your bachelors).
|
| That being said, they seem to have backed up their numbers, and
| MIT knows how to count, so they must be right! I just always
| hoped SAT/ACTs weren't that conclusive so that we didn't have
| to go through them anymore and could focus on the funner AP/A
| Level stuff :)
| JustLurking2022 wrote:
| AP scores and SAT II's are highly subject to the quality of
| instruction. I had several teachers who treated it as a more
| advanced class than honors, but felt no need to teach to the
| rubric for the test specifically.
|
| I aced the SAT and ACT but had a decent number of mediocre AP
| scores because I was seeing the material for the first time
| when I opened the test. Got to college and after a single 45
| minute lecture covering the gap material, I'm pretty sure I
| could have scored a 5. Ended up making for several easy A's
| freshman year.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| There are a lot of highschools where AP classes aren't really
| available, or are taught with varying degrees of rigor.
| amalcon wrote:
| The boringness could actually be a big part of the
| effectiveness. Efficient study habits and ability to work
| through boredom certainly help with some undergrad classes.
| The test would have some predictive power even if it's just
| measuring those.
| baja_blast wrote:
| Also it's hard to standardize something that is not boring.
| paulmd wrote:
| tbh I thought APs were generally more difficult than actual
| classes at a high-level university (USAFA). And my high
| school's regular courses (granted a fantastic high school)
| were actually much more difficult than a state school's
| courses.
|
| That said, outside of admissions, I don't think I got
| academic value out of them. They were hard for the sake of
| being hard. I'd rather have taken the SAT or ACT any day.
|
| (also apropos of nothing but I don't think much of the
| writing section on the SAT either, which was a hot topic 15
| or so years ago... a huge amount is dependent on the graders,
| and it's fundamentally a "blackboard programming" type
| scenario where the student is separated from basic resources
| like word processing and graded on the resulting product...
| that's not how you would actually work in an academic
| setting.)
| brimble wrote:
| > And my high school's regular courses (granted a fantastic
| high school) were actually much more difficult than a state
| school's courses.
|
| I went to a barely-known state university and was very
| surprised when some of my intro-level gen ed requirement
| classes mostly covered material I'd already seen in, and
| with a similar level of rigor to, _junior high school_. And
| my junior high and high schools were nothing special at all
| --at the higher end of performance in the state (so far as
| those measures are helpful, anyway) but just regular public
| schools in a state with overall mediocre-bordering-on-poor
| schools.
|
| If I'd known that the first couple years of college weren't
| going to be harder than high school, and would have a
| _lower_ total time commitment, hell, I 'd have probably
| tried to go the drop out -> GED -> start college at 16 or
| 17 route. I wasn't gonna get into top-tier universities,
| anyway.
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| >What's surprising though, is that APs and similar exams are
| not enough.
|
| That isn't what they said. They said that access to those
| tests is not universal. Students from high schools that don't
| offer AP classes would have a hard time taking AP exams. This
| would exclude people from rural or impoverished areas.
|
| This is why the SAT and ACT are useful: they are meant to be
| _aptitude_ tests. They are IQ tests in disguise. If properly
| designed, they will measure intelligence with minimal
| influence from education or cultural background.
| Theoretically something like these tests could be
| administered to elementary school students and still be
| useful for predicting success in college a decade later.
| kragen wrote:
| I passed the AP calc exam without a class. But that had a
| lot more to do with motivation and interest and a sense of
| entitlement than with aptitude. I wish everyone had my
| sense of entitlement, but they don't, and classes do seem
| to make a passable substitute.
| floren wrote:
| > They said that access to those tests is not universal.
| Students from high schools that don't offer AP classes
| would have a hard time taking AP exams.
|
| Yeah, I wish they'd just flat out told me "we expect AP
| courses" _before_ I applied for MIT back in the day. Would
| have saved me a lot of hassle that just resulted in
| "sorry, we wanted AP credits" in the end.
| paulpauper wrote:
| I practiced the math part several time to make sure I had it
| down pat, never the writing part though. Reading those long
| essays is a chore. I think the reading/verbal part is less
| coachable than the math part.
| [deleted]
| LewisVerstappen wrote:
| It's _far_ easier for rich students to game GPA, college essays
| and extracurriculars than it is for them to game the SAT.
|
| For GPA, they can hire a private tutor in the subject they're
| struggling with. There are services out there that will
| basically write your english essay for you / do your
| math/science homework.
|
| For college essays, they can hire college counselors to help
| them draft a compelling essay.
|
| For extra curriculars, they can hire a private coach, etc.
|
| However, there is very limited evidence that SAT coaching
| actually increases your SAT score. The NACAC did a study on
| this and they found that average gains of test-prep students is
| ~30 points (this was when the SAT was 2400 points).
|
| A 30 point increase out of 2400 points is not material to
| college admissions.
|
| Out of the college essay, gpa, extracurriculars, etc. the SAT
| is the _least_ influenced by your socioeconomic status. There
| obviously is an influence, but removing the SAT means more
| reliance on even more skewed factors.
|
| Here's the study ->
| https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED505529.pdf
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Kids who aren't coached on the test strategy do worse. My
| high school did no SAT prep, and my parents weren't really
| aware of it. I was lucky in that I had an AP History teacher
| whose goal was for every kid to get a "5", that meant
| incorporating test strategy into the flow.
|
| You needed to know stuff as the ante, but knowing the magic
| bullshit that would give you a good essay score was the key
| to get the top score. I increased my score ~120 points from
| taking the PSAT blind in 10th grade to the SAT because I
| understood at that point that strategy was key and found out
| about it.
|
| All of this stuff is a red herring though. The nut of the
| controversy is that standardized tests correlate to IQ. IQ,
| rightly or wrongly, is perceived to be culturally biased.
| synergy20 wrote:
| Being a poor student myself, the EC is way more expensive and
| challenging for poor families(can not afford those at all),
| comparatively, SAT/ACT is actually much easier, a few books
| and keep bugging teachers can carry a long way at extremely
| low-cost. Comparing to EC's cost(and time), SAT/ACT
| mentor(online or offline) is still fairly affordable.
|
| Living in internet era, I am jealous that nowadays 'poor'
| students can find so much resources online, most for free,
| even MIT courses! All you need is an ordinary computer and
| maybe internet access, which are quite affordable for nearly
| all families in US.
|
| I will vote up for SAT/ACT and vote down on those EC from a
| socioeconomic perspective if I have to pick one.
| mathattack wrote:
| I am all for reinstating the SATs, but it's a stretch to say
| that it's not impacted by socioeconomics. While test prep may
| have limited value, a lifetime of wealth provides more
| educational opportunities.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I used to take the ACT for people, they'd pay me in beer
| (which I wasn't old enough to buy for myself). You'd get ID'd
| at the entrance, but nobody kept track of whether the name on
| your test was the name on your ID, so you'd just take each
| other's tests.
|
| It might be harder now, I don't know.
| bena wrote:
| But they also wouldn't be old enough to buy you beer.
|
| Unless you are suggesting adults would buy you beer for you
| to take the ACT on behalf of a minor they knew. Which seems
| odd.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| No this was my older co-workers. My academics were fresh
| because I was still in high school, theirs was rusty
| because they had graduated several years prior without
| bothering to take the ACT.
| 8note wrote:
| Non-adults are capable of getting alcohol, without buying
| directly from a store.
|
| Typically they know somebody who knows an adult that will
| to the transaction with the store and provide the id.
|
| Otherwise, some stores accept good fake ids, or squint to
| believe that the person buying actually matches the
| picture on the card
| bena wrote:
| In which case, he would be able to get beer in the same
| manner.
|
| The issue is that the people he claims are getting him
| alcohol would be in the same situation as him.
| tiahura wrote:
| He's old. You used to be able to buy beer at 18.
|
| This country used to be a lot less uptight.
| bena wrote:
| And 18 year olds aren't taking the ACT. Or if they are,
| there are other reasons why they aren't getting into
| certain schools and they aren't as concerned with getting
| good ACT scores.
|
| Not to mention, the drinking age being 18 was for a
| window of about 14 years in the 70s and 80s. (Unless he's
| from Louisiana)
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| This was in 2004. I was 17, they were in their mid 20's.
|
| I know that one was training to be a dental hygienist, or
| at least wanted to be training for that. The other few
| didn't share as much, but they all knew each other so
| maybe it was the same thing?
|
| I highly doubt I've harmed anyone by enabling their
| hygienist to get where she was without knowing the
| formula for the volume of a cone. As far as I'm concerned
| the gumption necessary to hack your way in is worth just
| as much as the gumption needed to pass authentically.
| rsync wrote:
| My instant moral judgement on your having taken tests for
| others dissipated fully upon learning that they paid you in
| beer.
|
| I will smile all day thinking about this.
| skissane wrote:
| > The NACAC did a study on this and they found that average
| gains of test-prep students is ~30 points (this was when the
| SAT was 2400 points).
|
| > A 30 point increase out of 2400 points is not material to
| college admissions.
|
| There must be some subset of students who gain much more from
| "test prep" than others? Even if its benefits for the average
| student are marginal, maybe there is a certain type of
| student for whom it is much more beneficial?
|
| Not American so never did the SAT, but I honestly think I
| would have done much better in high school if I had one-on-
| one private tutoring. I struggled with focus and one-on-one
| attention helps keep me focused. Our son is similar - he's
| gifted and demonstrates his giftedness when the teacher
| focuses on him one-on-one, but then the teacher has to go
| spend time on the rest of the class, and as soon as that
| happens he stops doing any work.
| tester756 wrote:
| >However, there is very limited evidence that SAT coaching
| actually increases your SAT score. The NACAC did a study on
| this and they found that average gains of test-prep students
| is ~30 points (this was when the SAT was 2400 points).
|
| IIRC SAT's equivalent of Matura in Poland, so I'll be talking
| about my case
|
| I've been taking advanced math exam and I had some time +
| some money (like 10% of minimal wage) during winter break and
| I decided to buy 3 lessons on analytical geometry cuz I've
| been terrible at geometry, but since that was analytical,
| then I've seen a chance to get into that
|
| I've attended those 3 lessons, did some exercises and guess
| what
|
| on official exam there actually was a task from analytical
| geometry and I managed to do it and receive full points,
| which basically increased my score by 10 percentage points
| (that's a lot, I'd say)
|
| Saying that 10% of minimal wage spent was equal to 10 perc.
| points is naive, but you get the point
|
| What if I were attending those for whole year? 2? 3? hard to
| say.
| MiroF wrote:
| The SAT doesn't testing anything as high level as that.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Anecdotally I think it raised my scores by maybe 100 points.
| Not coaching so much as just doing practice tests to learn
| that, especially for the reading, the questions were actually
| pretty dumb. Lots of them are asking for the most basic
| insights. This is surprisingly non obvious or at least was
| not to me at the time. Many questions were filled with
| "traps" of answers that felt more insightful and more broadly
| relevant; but less relevant to the specific passages being
| questioned on.
| ar_lan wrote:
| For anecdotal/lived experience, to your point:
|
| The rich kids in my (public) school were the ones afforded
| not only tutors, but also just the insight into extra-
| curriculars. They were the ones who had parents who knew to
| sign them up for college courses at ~15-16 years old to
| ensure they could maximize their GPA (5.0 scale, so getting a
| 5.0 was literally impossible unless you did this). This
| created a competitive disadvantage for kids who just really
| didn't realize these resources existed (plus, having parents
| that would support it + take you to the local college to take
| additional courses).
|
| Not to mention that, but there were sports our school didn't
| participate in, but the richer kids had levels of access to
| that looked great on college applications - rowing and
| lacrosse specifically come to mind.
|
| So, essentially - rich kids have many _easier_ ways to pad
| their college applications. It 's not that they aren't
| working hard(er) - they are. But they have easily acccessible
| opportunities that middle-to-lower-class students (like
| myself) did not have access to.
|
| --
|
| Coming to the SAT, I'm not surprised by that study. I wasn't
| afforded the same opportunities as these richer kids, but my
| SAT score was highly competitive with them. I was ranked 50th
| in my class with a 4.55 GPA (my 4.0s were gym each year, and
| I think one or two electives that weren't AP), but my SAT
| score was a 2300, which was relatively similar to most of the
| hyper-performant, wealthier kids.
|
| --
|
| This is all super anecdotal. I was definitely upset by all of
| this at the time - but it didn't affect my life very
| negatively. I still was able to get into a great school, and
| have a great career now. But these disadvantages certainly
| persist against others, and re-adding standardized tests
| likely will help level the playing field in my mind.
| WalterBright wrote:
| As far as extra-curricular activities go, like sports,
| etc., those aren't really the point. The point is for the
| candidate to demonstrate that they can accomplish
| significant things other than academics.
|
| This can be anything. For me, I didn't do sports, or any
| school extracurriculars. What I did do was run a small
| business (paper route), used the money to fund my
| hotrodding efforts, was an Eagle scout (back in the days
| when that was something), etc.
|
| Basically, you just gotta find something non-trivial to do
| that demonstrates motivation.
| KMag wrote:
| I went to MIT 20 years ago. Plenty of people smarter than
| me failed out. MIT seems to do a pretty good job of
| screening out people who won't pick up the material fast
| enough. In my experience, the ones who failed out were
| the ones who were plenty smart but didn't adjust fast
| enough to having to work hard for the first time in their
| lives. If you get into MIT, you've probably gotten
| special treatment from teachers your whole life, and not
| really had to work hard before.
|
| My high school had just shy of 4,000 students in 4
| grades. My senior year, I took slightly over a "full
| course load" at the local state university, plus went to
| high school 1/4 time. Technically, that wasn't supposed
| to happen, but administrators look the other way for
| smart kids. I wasn't really competing against others in
| my grade. People asked if I was smarter than the girl a
| year ahead of me who went to Harvard. She was my
| competition. I'm sure something similar happened with a
| kid a year behind me.
|
| I knew that at MIT, I'd probably just be an average
| student. However, I really underestimated how hard it is
| to learn to work hard when you've been able to coast
| through your first 18 years, despite taking honors
| courses at the nearby state university, etc. I think the
| SATs are probably generally pretty good at measuring how
| quickly students learn, but there's a certain grit it
| takes to succeed at MIT that the SATs don't cover at all.
|
| Edit: I'm also an Eagle Scout, but I came through after
| it became significantly easier. It seemed to me that
| probably at least 10% of the men at MIT were Eagle
| Scouts. If nothing else, it shows an ability to stick
| with something for at least a few years, despite it being
| uncool for most of your peer group.
| varenc wrote:
| MIT has a ~95% graduation rate, so most students really
| do graduate. And for the 5% that don't it's unclear how
| many dropped out due to the workload vs dropped out to
| found a company, etc. MIT has tons of internal resources
| to help you if you're struggling.
|
| The shock for entering freshman is very real. I really
| like the practice of making your first semester Pass/No
| Record so that there's less pressure to try and get an A,
| and if you do fail it won't even be on your transcript.
| Second semester still treats F as No Record as well.
| KMag wrote:
| There's a certain subtle ego disorder that creeps up on
| you slowly when you're used to regularly being introduced
| as the smartest person someone has met, and you let that
| slowly become part of your identity. The people I knew
| who failed out had too big of an ego to seek help, and
| even were afraid to work too hard, because that made them
| feel less smart. They didn't outright brag, but were used
| to others doing their bragging for them, and had a kind
| of false modesty about them.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I, too, had a disastrous freshman year due to my attempts
| to laze through it like I had all through public school.
| Fortunately, I was able to change before I was forced
| out.
|
| I also got my comeuppance about being "smart".
|
| At the time, being an Eagle wasn't cool anymore, either,
| and I never talked about it. I was reluctant to even
| mention it here. Also, these days, it seems that being an
| Eagle is a project for dad, while the kid is along for
| the ride. My parents had zero involvement with scouting.
| runarberg wrote:
| Intention is irrelevant, the outcome is the same. A
| parent driving a kid to lacrosse practice every
| Wednesdays and Fridays shows as much potential to
| accomplishments as a parent asking their kid to help them
| with their under the table car mechanic job every
| weekend. Yet I bet only the former is evaluated as
| significant. I wonder why that is.
| pishpash wrote:
| Your bet is based on anything? The second story is a
| potential sob story that plays better, barring subjective
| classist biases counteracting. That only points to
| objective test scores being a better measure.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Yet I bet only the former is evaluated as significant.
|
| Are you sure about that, especially for an engineering
| school like Caltech or MIT?
|
| I didn't play lacrosse, football, row, track, baseball,
| swimming, yachting, nope nope nope.
| jancsika wrote:
| > What I did do was run a small business (paper route),
| used the money to fund my hotrodding efforts, was an
| Eagle scout (back in the days when that was something),
| etc.
|
| If I were a college admissions officer strapped for time,
| I'd let the app through on proof of "Eagle Scout" and
| ignore the other two.
|
| The only easier bet would be seeing the words "I'm
| Hungarian" on an app for a secret world-saving advanced
| math project.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| There's also a lot of room to disagree as to whether
| playing sports counts as a meaningful accomplishment.
| Professional sports are pure entertainment, and
| succeeding even at that is extremely rare. The best
| argument for caring about it is that it's better than
| nothing, and it's something that ensures more average
| people have a chance to get to MIT too, even if they
| aren't all that intellectually minded.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Succeeding in sports means you have put out focused
| effort over a period of time to accomplish something that
| nobody made you do.
|
| This is worth something.
| airstrike wrote:
| > something that nobody made you do
|
| Uhh, that is definitely not a given
| tmitech wrote:
| I disagree completely. You could literally give zero
| effort, focused or not, and sit on the bench of a winning
| team. On top of that, your parents could have 100% made
| you do those things.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You could. You can just phone it in at work too, but most
| people don't. Sports are _a_ place where kids figure out
| who they are. Not the only place, but an important one to
| many.
|
| My son is 11 and loves baseball, I've coached a few times
| as well and it's been a great shared experience. There
| are definitely kids in Little League / Cal Ripkin who are
| there because mom & dad said so. But... I've gotten to
| see my son and a few of his teammates build friendships
| and mentor relationships with the kids ahead of and
| behind him that are difficult to do in a school setting.
|
| It's a big deal. When a ten year old stops and is there
| to help teach an eight year old how to do something, etc
| those are valuable skills/processes/habits to build. They
| learn to lose and how to practice.
|
| Part of the "package" a student brings to an application
| is how they apply those experiences. You can send a
| laundry list of things, or use your essay/interview to
| tie it together.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| This rings true with my Gen Z high school experience as of
| ~7 years ago.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| > Not to mention that, but there were sports our school
| didn't participate in, but the richer kids had levels of
| access to that looked great on college applications -
| rowing and lacrosse specifically come to mind.
|
| Exactly. I went to smallish rural school. We had soccer,
| basketball, baseball. Youth soccer in my area was a rigged
| game where only people who were enrolled in the coaches
| summer camp would make the varsity team. Basketball had 75
| kids try out for 12 spots. Baseball is ruthlessly
| competitive, and while I was a really good little league
| player, I had no chance against kids who were in multiple
| travel leagues, etc. I probably played 50 baseball games
| from age 9-12. The best players played at least 500.
|
| My cousins went to a fancy private school. Everyone played
| on a varsity team; it was how they did gym. My older cousin
| did fencing, the middle one did basketball, the younger
| twins played squash. The squash guys sold themselves as a
| package and ended up getting a couple of ivy league places
| fighting for them.
|
| I think we have a similar outlook on this. For me, getting
| good SAT/ACT scores let me "punch higher", and got me into
| some really good schools that I would not have be admitted
| to. Ultimately, I went to a state school, but was able to
| parlay the competitive nature of things to get a better
| grant package.
| brimble wrote:
| > Baseball is ruthlessly competitive, and while I was a
| really good little league player, I had no chance against
| kids who were in multiple travel leagues, etc. I probably
| played 50 baseball games from age 9-12. The best players
| played at least 500.
|
| Same thing drove me out of baseball after age 12 or so. I
| had more than a little natural talent and put in some
| time drilling with my parents, so I could keep up with
| the kids doing the traveling leagues and such until (a
| little before) then. After that it became clear that my
| parents and I were gonna have to devote hundreds more
| hours per year (plus not a small amount of money),
| realistically, for me to keep playing. The gap was just
| growing way too fast, otherwise. What was left were bad
| teams/leagues where few players were really trying, so
| that's no fun, and ones for which I couldn't make the
| cut. Someone who liked it but just wanted to put in a
| high-side-of-normal amount of time and effort for a youth
| sport, had no place.
| parkingrift wrote:
| >It's far easier for rich students to game GPA, college
| essays and extracurriculars than it is for them to game the
| SAT.
|
| Disagree. I worked for the Princeton Review while in college
| back in the day. We would outright guarantee 99th percentile
| for one on one tutoring. If you didn't get 99th percentile
| the course was refunded or you could take it again. For
| classroom tutoring we would guarantee some improvement of I
| believe 200 (out of 1600) with the same refund or take it
| again option. Candidly, no one would pay for a prep course
| for a 30 point gain. These course are expensive. Some of them
| hundreds of dollars per hour.
|
| The cited research is pretty fundamentally flawed.
|
| "Although extensive, the academic research base does have
| limitations. Most notably, few published studies have been
| conducted on students taking admission tests since 2000. Only
| two studies have been published on the effects for ACT
| scores, and no studies have been published since the 2005
| change to the SAT, which added the Writ- ing section among
| other changes."
|
| This position also doesn't pass the sniff test. GPA is
| accumulated over four years of study. SAT/ACT is a single
| test. You can't retroactively improve your GPA by doing
| better in the past. But you can dramatically improve your
| SAT/ACT results.
| mgh2 wrote:
| Maybe there was another variable at play: language. SATs
| are in English.
|
| If English is not a student's primary language and fluency
| improves as they advance academically, up to a plateau with
| age.
|
| Not sure if this was properly controlled in SAT studies.
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11007/
| hn_user82179 wrote:
| Glad you mentioned this. I went to a strong wealthy
| public high school with a high asian population (~50%?).
| When I was there, a lot of my friends were 2nd generation
| immigrants and their parents still spoke their native
| language at home. Their kids (my friends) were perfectly
| fluent/native in English but didn't do as well in the
| "edge vocabulary" parts of the SAT and I always figured
| that was why (in comparison to me and my english-at-home
| parents).
| nullc wrote:
| > If you didn't get 99th percentile the course was refunded
| or you could take it again
|
| Plenty of other domains have study programs with similar
| guarantees where the program has little to no effect-- it's
| a simple economic calculation: Set your rates so you make a
| good profit even if the program has no effect (even if you
| allow retaking the course, students won't be willing to
| waste their time and yours forever).
|
| It would be more informative if you knew the actual
| before/after performance for the program. Elsewhere this
| has been studied (see links in the thread) and the
| improvement wasn't that substantial.
|
| > You can't retroactively improve your GPA by doing better
| in the past.
|
| Indeed, which means that people who's families have been
| carefully shepherding their education since they were much
| younger have an _insurmountable_ advantage in the GPA game.
| For people people who don't come from highly educated
| families, they only learn about the GPA boosting games as
| they start thinking about college years to late to take
| full advantage of them.
| parkingrift wrote:
| >Plenty of other domains have study programs with similar
| guarantees where the program has little to no effect--
| it's a simple economic calculation: Set your rates so you
| make a good profit even if the program has no effect
| (even if you allow retaking the course, students won't be
| willing to waste their time and yours forever).
|
| They offer a refund or to retake the course. It is indeed
| a simple economic calculation. The company would quickly
| go bankrupt if a sizable percentage of students were
| refunding. The company itself, and the location I worked,
| had excellent reviews. Even today it has a 4.9 star
| rating on Google Maps. Quite a high rating for a service
| that people in this comment section proclaim has no
| impact.
|
| Intuitively, how could it be correct that people pay
| thousands of dollars on these courses and receive zero or
| near to zero benefit from them? If this were true no one
| would take the courses, the courses would be rated
| poorly, and the underlying business would fail.
|
| >Indeed, which means that people who's families have been
| carefully shepherding their education since they were
| much younger have an _insurmountable_ advantage in the
| GPA game.
|
| Sure, but the context is "which is easier to game." To
| game the GPA takes four years of study and prep and you
| must start doing it at the beginning of grade 9. Tens of
| thousands of dollars and preparation+work over multiple
| years. To game the SAT or ACT you must spend a few
| thousand dollars during grade 11 or grade 12.
| nullc wrote:
| > To game the SAT or ACT you must spend a few thousand
| dollars during grade 11 or grade 12.
|
| "Or check out a SAT book or two for free from the
| library.", says my partner from an extremely poor family
| who got into college on the basis of her perfect SAT
| score and whom never would have qualified to a
| prestigious school on a GPA basis. (And whom was also
| admitted to law school on the basis of a nearly perfect
| LSAT, which she studied for only with free and extremely
| low cost used materials)
|
| > Intuitively, how could it be correct that people pay
| thousands of dollars on these courses
|
| People, particularly those to whom a thousand dollars
| isn't a big deal, spend all kinds of money on speculative
| and outright ineffective treatments. Including mystical
| mumbojumbo, quack medical treatments, and products and
| services which accomplish nothing except contributing to
| the 'identity' they present to themselves and others. ("I
| am a parent who cares, look I spent $zillions getting Jr
| the best opportunities!").
|
| > To game the GPA takes four years of study and prep and
| you must start doing it at the beginning of grade 9. Tens
| of thousands of dollars and preparation+work over
| multiple years. To game the SAT or ACT you must spend a
| few thousand dollars during grade 11 or grade 12.
|
| I think on this point we're agreeing to a great extent
| but we're drawing opposite conclusions. I agree SAT
| improves with focused study, though I believe that
| improvement is available for free (other than time and
| knowing you should do it).
|
| You seem to agree with me that it is very expensive to
| hyper-optimize GPAs, requiring costs and actions
| extremely early and on a sustained basis.
|
| My conclusion from this is GPA optimization relatively
| more available to students with more affluent families,
| because it takes more time, more money, and requires it
| earlier and more speculatively. -- we don't have an
| option where you can't improve your performance with the
| input of time,money, care but we can choose metrics where
| the available improvement is available to more people.
| BadCookie wrote:
| I vaguely recall a question on the Duke University
| application about what assistance you received with your
| college application efforts. (I can't remember if test prep
| was included specifically.) I'm sure that some people lie
| by omission, but maybe asking this question is better than
| not asking it.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| It's been decades, but back when I was in high school rich
| kids paid people to fake their identity to take the tests
| (with fake IDs). I heard rumors that it was a dozen kids in
| my graduating class, and witnessed 2 myself. 1 was caught.
|
| Does anyone know if they have better checks for this now?
| qubitcoder wrote:
| I'm not so sure about that. About 20 years ago, counselors
| advised taking the SAT/ACT only once, since your score
| wouldn't really change.
|
| I took the SAT several times. Each time my score went up
| significantly. My high school ended up creating a new award
| category for "greatest score increase", or something to that
| effect. I believe it was ~200 points.
|
| I'd taken a prep course being offered by a local instructor.
| However, the biggest benefit was from dedicated self-study
| (Kaplan books, as I recall).
| paulpauper wrote:
| This times 10. GPAs have been rendered close to useless,
| especially at identifying above average ability, due to grade
| inflation, and also extreme variability between schools. Same
| for valedictorian and other appellations.
| david38 wrote:
| Exactly. What teacher is going to fight for the B when the
| parents are complaining to the administration she's keeping
| their precious angel from Harvard?
| paulmd wrote:
| yeah this is a really hard problem and I don't see a fix
| outside of standardized testing. Every school is
| individually incentivized to use every trick - grading out
| of 5.0, grading loosely, giving a bonus score for AP/IB
| courses "because of difficulty", etc and teachers are
| obviously very sympathetic to the future of their students
| and the impact that being a Grading Nazi could have. And
| parents are obviously incentivized to find the school
| that's going to make Little Billy look best (best educated
| is great but not sufficient, that's why we're discussing
| testing).
|
| You need a uniform grading system, which means a uniform
| material and a uniform grading process, which is...
| standardized testing, or at least AP/IB courses.
| satsuma wrote:
| i came from a rural high school that didn't have any
| ap/ib courses. i wonder how much that affected my college
| applications.
|
| i still got to go to the college of my choice (fire up
| chips!) but i have to wonder -- if i was able to boost my
| gpa using ap/ib courses, would i have received more
| scholarship opportunities/better offers from other
| schools?
| mason55 wrote:
| That assumes the AP classes would have boosted your GPA.
| If the harder class knocked you from an A to a B then it
| would have been a net negative, at least at my high
| school (AP counted as a 1.2 weighting, so an A in a
| regular class is 4.0 and a B in an AP class is 3.0 * 1.2
| = 3.6).
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Admissions officers will tell you they are aware of what
| programs schools have, and take that into account. If
| your school has no AP with GPA inflation your 3.x is the
| same as a 4.x at some bigger high school. How true that
| is idk.
| paulmd wrote:
| that may be true for colleges looking at local feeder
| schools ("northwestern knows that my high school doesn't
| have grade inflation"), but I don't know how that idea
| scales nationwide or internationally. To steal an
| example, how does a college in Seattle know that a high
| school in Illinois has grade inflation or not? is that
| tracked anywhere centralized?
|
| you could certainly look at past performance of students
| from that school but that turns into a "legacy system
| with more steps"...
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Anecdotal, but it seems universities have solved this by
| figuring out which schools have grade inflation. I went
| to a gifted school in Chicago that was quite competitive
| and did not have grade inflation. 20% of the school went
| to Northwestern every year because they'd accept every B
| student.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| I've met people from elite private day schools. Their
| education in a different world than 99.99% of public high
| schools, except maybe a few like Stuyvesant in NYC and
| Lowell in SF, or the fortunate few where 3/4 of the kids
| have parents who are doctors or college professors (why
| not both?).
| michaelt wrote:
| That method has its own problems, though.
|
| For one thing, if a school has grade inflation so bad
| that even an A+ from that school isn't enough to get into
| Yale - is that a problem?
|
| For another example, if adjustment for grade inflation
| means Yale will ask for an A+ from Martin Luther King
| High, Detroit while they'll accept a B from Phillips
| Academy, Andover - is that a problem?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Well the thing is I went to an inner city public high
| school. It was much closer to "Martin Luther King High,
| Detroit" than it was to a prep school. Majority of
| students were below the poverty line, yet almost half
| were accepted to Northwestern every year, many with full
| rides.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| I took one of those expensive SAT prep courses and yes, I
| agree that those don't increase scores very much, the program
| I took was awful.
|
| However, I totally disagree that rich people can't game the
| SAT. I used to be a moderator at /r/SAT and /r/ACT on reddit.
| All of the questions and answers for all of the exams,
| including subject tests are known and published online. Both
| SAT and ACT routinely reuse exams from prior years, and
| anyone who puts in enough time to study the old exams can do
| well on the exams. And rich people have the luxury of more
| time to study, because they don't have to work second jobs or
| cook for their families or clean the house after school and
| have more services that can save them time.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| What's great is /r/SAT and /r/ACT are available to
| basically everyone, even with a very slow internet
| connection. Extracurriculars, not so much.
| visarga wrote:
| > And rich people have the luxury of more time to study
|
| Those rich students, they cheat by studying harder!
|
| Btw, I don't actually think being rich correlates with
| better academic achievements. It's better to be in the
| middle, not rich, not poor. To keep motivated.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Nah, there is a straight linear correlation between
| parental income and sat score.
|
| https://static01.nyt.com/images/2009/08/27/business/econo
| my/...
| aliston wrote:
| Did you bother to read the letter? This is directly
| addressed:
|
| "This may seem like a counterintuitive claim to some,
| given the widespread understanding that performance on
| the SAT/ACT is correlated with socioeconomic status.
| Research indeed shows some correlation, but
| unfortunately, research also shows correlations hold for
| just about every other factor admissions officers can
| consider, including essays, grades, access to advanced
| coursework (as well as opportunities to actually take
| notionally available coursework), and letters of
| recommendations, among others. Meanwhile, research has
| shown widespread testing can identify subaltern students
| who would be missed by these other measures."
| MaximumYComb wrote:
| Why do you say rich kids have more time? I grew up in an
| underprivileged area and I very much disagree that poorer
| kids are getting their free time hammered.
| scarmig wrote:
| > And rich people have the luxury of more time to study,
| because they don't have to work second jobs or cook for
| their families or clean the house after school and have
| more services that can save them time.
|
| Unlike tricks for getting into university like studying
| after school for classes, hiring private tutors, or taking
| extracurriculars like lacrosse or rowing, which are great
| levelers equally accessible to the rich and the poor.
| david38 wrote:
| I live in a very rich town, like super rich. I work in tech
| so am rich by the standards of general population, but by the
| standards of Silicon Valley.
|
| My child did very well on the ACT. All she did was buy a $35
| practice book, which almost anyone can do. Literally this was
| it. Furthermore, she doesn't know of a single friend or
| acquaintance that hired a private tutor.
|
| All the nay-sayers belly-ache about this but for most
| children, even the "rich" ones, this simply isn't true. It's
| most definitely not necessary.
|
| Considering the weight of the SATs/ACTs you would figure a
| student would at least buy a cheap book and put in two hours
| per week for a few weeks in practice. In practice, the vast
| majority of students who do this do quite well. The
| improvement is dramatic.
|
| Everyone wants to always blame "the system" which yes, has an
| influence, but nobody wants to put ANY responsibility on the
| student themselves.
| dayvid wrote:
| I agree. I spent some time as a Kaplan tutor. The students
| in my experience fell into a few buckets:
|
| 1. They already know the material/are serious and would do
| fine without tutoring (maybe some small help here and
| there) 2. They kind of care, but need structure to study.
| They probably wouldn't study or study effectively without
| being in a class or having someone for accountability. 3.
| They don't care and their parents are paying for someone to
| babysit them to study
|
| Most students were in camps 2 and 3.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| >I live in a very rich town, like super rich.
|
| >My child did very well on the ACT. All she did was buy a
| $35 practice book, which almost anyone can do.
|
| I don't intend to belittle anyone's accomplishments, but
| there's _a lot_ more to high ACT scores than a $35 book,
| no?
| david38 wrote:
| Indeed, and primary among them are parents.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| You aren't rich if you have to work and you're relying on
| what a high school student tells you who doesn't know all
| the details of the lives of other students, just what they
| tell her. In my experience as a student, other students
| will keep their tutoring and hand-ups under wraps.
| david38 wrote:
| I talk to a lot of parents. Most are quite open with
| their tactics.
| caffeine wrote:
| The $250k to put a totally unqualified student through
| school would pay for a lot of test prep hours at some
| impoverished schools.
|
| It would likely take about 10 contact hours (1h/week, 10
| weeks), basically enough coaching so that the result is not
| artificially low through under-preparation.
|
| Let's say it costs $100/hr all-in to coach 10 kids. So for
| $1k you can get 10 applications from motivated,
| underprivileged kids whose SATs are representative of their
| ability.
|
| For one $50k annual ride you could run this in 50 low
| income schools and get 500 underprivileged applicants and
| then actually admit some of them who might _benefit_.
|
| Rather than refusing to test, and wasting those resources
| supporting some kid who obviously won't hack it.
| mbesto wrote:
| > All the nay-sayers belly-ache about this but for most
| children, even the "rich" ones, this simply isn't true.
| It's most definitely not necessary.
|
| I'd rather trust studies than your anecdote. Just saying.
| david38 wrote:
| Of course. Show me a study that compares motivated self-
| study with classes.
|
| Two SAT tutors have responded to the thread and supported
| me.
| MaximumYComb wrote:
| IQ is quite heritible. This is especially so when
| upbringing is not neglectful. People who land very high
| paying tech roles are probably average higher in IQ than
| the general population.
|
| Your daughter likely has the benefit of strong academic
| genetics. A child like that who puts in effort (i.e. works
| through a book) is going to do amazingly well. I'd also
| argue that families who value academics are also more
| likely to buy the books to do a couple hours per week in.
| david38 wrote:
| IQ also fluctuates a lot, but yes, she is a lot like me
| (reads, thinks math/science is interesting, etc).
|
| She bought only one prep book, for $35, with her own
| money. I guarantee the very poorest can get that one
| book, even from the library.
|
| Parents absolutely influence children, otherwise what's
| the point of parenting? This is a good thing. I'm just
| saying the $$ part is way overblown.
| scarecrw wrote:
| As one of those private tutors that the ultra-rich hire, I
| can definitely support most of what you've said here.
|
| The greatest service that private tutoring provides is
| structure, accountability, and guidance. A dedicated
| student working independently through quality practice
| materials (many of which are cheap or free) can absolutely
| attain most if not all of the beneficial outcomes of
| preparing with a tutor/service.
|
| I think when people look at inequity in college admissions,
| standardized testing ends up being an easy, tangible
| target, but not a particularly important one. If you want
| to look at how wealth impacts standardized test scores,
| focusing on paid preparation programs is missing the larger
| picture.
|
| Wealthy students have had literate parents who can afford
| books and have the time to read to them when they're
| toddlers. They've gone to safe schools where the teachers
| can focus on teaching rather than making sure the students
| are well fed. They are surrounded by adults who have gone
| to college and can serve as role models for positive
| academic behavior. They have friends who are all taking the
| same tests and applying to the same schools to provide
| emotional and thoughtful support.
|
| The collegeboard markets the SAT as measuring preparedness
| for secondary education. These students have been preparing
| for college their entire lives; is it any wonder that they
| score higher?
| david38 wrote:
| Thank you. You absolutely validate my own observations.
|
| I went to college. My parents did, as did my extended
| family on one side. I saw both sides and chose this one.
|
| I picked a town where my children would be surrounded by
| an environment where cool was defined as "good at
| school". I didn't want external influences contradicting
| my influence.
|
| My child is dedicated, but I taught that dedication.
|
| A parent doesn't have to be rich to understand the
| importance of a good education. My mother came from a
| dirt poor background.
|
| People never say it's an advantage to have parents that
| care about education. They always put the blame somewhere
| else. The parents worked too hard, whatever. For
| different traits, some parents are just better than
| others. Academics is just one trait. Is the most
| important? No, but it's one that's easy to measure.
| [deleted]
| hooande wrote:
| Do you honestly believe that if you were from a very poor
| town, poor by the standards of african american
| neighborhoods in Detroit, that giving your child a $35
| practice book would have a similar outcome?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Those places are sadly lacking even in the most basic
| standards of education, so their potential ACT scores are
| frankly irrelevant as is admission to MIT. You gotta
| learn to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you
| can run.
| runarberg wrote:
| Not only is this analogy wrong (there are plenty of
| animals that run the moment they are born) but it is also
| deeply insensitive.
|
| The reason people do worse from underprivileged is not
| only the lack of quality education, but a fundamental
| difference in the quality of life. Everything from the
| diet, to available time, and noise pollution, all makes a
| difference on education level. Our education system
| relies heavily on outside help, and poorer neighborhoods
| often don't have the time and energy to give their kids
| even the most basic help with their homework.
| david38 wrote:
| The analogy is correct because we're talking about
| people.
|
| Parents are the primary educators. When they aren't
| educating, or need to educate on too many other things,
| academics suffer. This is news to nobody. It would be
| highly suspicious if environment had no influence on
| educational outcomes.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Everything from the diet, to available time, and noise
| pollution, all makes a difference on education level. Our
| education system relies heavily on outside help, and
| poorer neighborhoods often don't have the time and energy
| to give their kids even the most basic help with their
| homework.
|
| Well said. Thanks for elaborating on my point.
| david38 wrote:
| My mother was an orphan at 15 in Honduras. When she had
| me, she shared a 400 square foot house with six of her
| sisters.
|
| Look up the crime stats for Honduras and try again.
|
| Also, looking at the very worst situations is not a valid
| argument. By that rational, what about the poor girl who
| is kept a sex slave in her basement by her father for
| twenty years?
|
| Do you think sending your African American example to SAT
| prep will make a difference? Coming from the poorest and
| sketchiest towns in America? Such a child would likely be
| better served by starting at a community college. After
| that, SATs are not accepted.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| My experience with "10 Sample SATs" which was my only
| prep was about 500 points of improvement. IIRC I was
| about a 1050-1100 on my first, and my best V/M combo was
| 1450 (back in early 90s, so pre-recentering). I actually
| did about 1380, I had a so-so actual one.
|
| It probably is the best bang for the buck, if you're
| already 1-2 standard deviations on general intelligence.
| Because the test is a game like admissions is a game, so
| if you're smart enough to see the game, it's easier and
| most effective to practice with that.
|
| For the "normals", I have no idea if it will work. But
| we're specifically discussing MIT, who do NOT want
| normals, I'm not good enough. They want 2-3 standard
| deviations people.
|
| MIT should be able to weight for socioeconomic and
| location/environment given the amount of information
| required for financial aid and "the internet".
|
| If this becomes ubiquitous, I can see suburbanites
| getting ghetto apartments for the address to game the
| weights :-)
| pvarangot wrote:
| As a middle class going poorer higschool student (dad lost
| his desk job, mom had to start working again to keep the
| house, tried moving to cheaper city and it didn't work out,
| had to apply for scholarships for stuff, never had money to
| go out weekends, etc, etc) I think the thing resourceful
| people overlook that "rich" kids have in higschool and
| "poor" kids don't, is a space to study. Just a personal
| quiet space where you can deploy your book or laptop and
| write some stuff maybe with headphones maybe not but
| definitely without your parents screaming or the TV
| blasting stuff about social protests or whatever.
|
| In college most of my other "poor" friends that made it
| either also had a space like that or were taught by their
| parents to study in public libraries or other spaces
| designed for concentration.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I personally went up 300 points with tutoring, and that was
| when it was out of 1600.
|
| n=1
| sokoloff wrote:
| I went up 240 points by taking the test an additional time
| and a grade later, without any tutoring in between.
|
| Also n=1.
| paulmd wrote:
| I don't really have evidence for this, but it's always felt
| like SAT/ACT coaching doesn't improve scores so much as get
| rid of some of the "dumb mistakes" that cost you score.
|
| It's gonna help you when the test writer was playing some
| gotcha tricks with phrasing or whatever, but if you don't
| understand the material, even narrowing it down to a 50/50
| isn't going to get you a good score, and if you truly don't
| understand the material you probably won't be able to
| eliminate half the answers anyway. And they are absolutely
| aware of the "answer b/c if you don't know" nugget, that's
| nothing special either.
|
| Also "adaptive difficulty" systems where the system throws
| harder questions at you after successfully answering the
| easier ones are basically the "elo rating" of academics.
| Everyone hates elo but... it slots you into a very
| statistically accurate ranking. If you score highly on Level
| 600 questions but you are failing on the Level 700 questions,
| odds are good you are somewhere between 600 and 700. My
| understanding is that's what SAT/ACT were moving towards
| about 10 years ago, that it would be computerized and
| "everyone's test is personalized" by the elo system probing
| your exact knowledge level from a bank of questions with
| difficulty scores dynamically based on how "similar ranked"
| students performed on that question.
| screye wrote:
| Yeah, I have found that it improves 3 things. (this is for
| GRE, which is similar)
|
| 1. Basics: If you don't know standard permutations and
| combinations then knowing those formulae off the top of
| your head is nice to have. The language portions in
| particular, take a lot of preparation for non-native
| speakers.
|
| 2. Speed: Giving a decent number of sample tests helps put
| you in game mode for the real thing. It also acquaints you
| to the manner in which questions are phrased and their
| intended meanings. (big deal for non-native speakers)
| Lastly, it helps ease anxiety.
|
| 3. Gotcha-proofing: Every examination has some familiar
| gotcha patterns. Some training helps in looking out for
| them helps.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The gotchas are answers that match common student
| mistakes.
|
| What I'd do is solve the problem without looking at the
| answers so they wouldn't bias me. Then look for a match
| of mine with one of the answers.
| scarecrw wrote:
| > My understanding is that's what SAT/ACT were moving
| towards about 10 years ago, that it would be computerized
| and "everyone's test is personalized" by the elo system
| probing your exact knowledge level from a bank of questions
| with difficulty scores dynamically based on how "similar
| ranked" students performed on that question.
|
| That is indeed where they're moving. They've recently
| announced that the SAT will be transitioning to a digital,
| adaptive test in the next 1-2 years. [1]
|
| Notably, the upcoming iteration of the test will only be
| semi-adaptive, adjusting the version of the second half of
| the test based on your performance on the first half,
| rather than adapting to your performance on a question-by-
| question basis.
|
| I suspect overall this will be an improvement in the
| accuracy of the results. As it stands, for students with a
| strong math background, a majority of the math questions on
| the current test are far too easy and cloud their results
| on the rest. With the recent removal of the CollegeBoard's
| math subject tests, high-level math students have very few
| opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge using a
| standardized metric.
|
| [1]: https://newsroom.collegeboard.org/digital-sat-brings-
| student...
| caffeine wrote:
| > high-level math students have very few opportunities to
| demonstrate their knowledge using a standardized metric.
|
| AP math and physics exams? Or IB?
|
| True that these are not accessible to everyone though..
| MaximumYComb wrote:
| I think that is great. Once you get past a certain
| threshold, the test loses prediction value. Giving the
| kids in the top 5% a way to differentiate is great.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > SAT/ACT coaching doesn't improve scores so much as get
| rid of some of the "dumb mistakes"
|
| If so, that still doesn't imply that rich kids with access
| to private tutors will necessarily do better on these tests
| than poor kids - just that anybody with the motivation to
| read a test-prep book will.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Coaching and studying improves SAT scores. People learn the
| type of questions they do poorly on and can study to
| improve. The SAT is a test you can study for.
| ghaff wrote:
| And there are books available to help with a lot of that.
| (And I actually agree with the point that doing _some_
| amount of test prep /sample tests is helpful. But it
| doesn't need to be super-expensive/time-consuming. I do
| understand that the playing field has probably upleveled
| over the decades but it's still probably as democratized
| as any such thing is.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| The SAT is a test of your academic preparation, not
| Raven's progressive matrices. That you can study for it
| is not inherently a bad thing. Portions that are highly
| susceptible to coaching _are_ bad, and that 's why there
| aren't analogies any more.
|
| If students learn the vocabulary and practice the math to
| do better on the test, at some point it just becomes the
| Key and Peele Heist sketch: "That's called a job!"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYYOUC10aM
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Unfortunately for a lot of people it seems to be the Rick
| and Morty heist sketch at this point
| GCA10 wrote:
| Agreed. I spent a bunch of time a few years ago doing
| home-coaching for our two teenagers as they rolled into
| SAT time. The way you get better at the math section is
| to genuinely fix whatever gaps might exist in your
| knowledge of algebra and geometry. As OP says, that "is
| not an inherently bad thing."
|
| There's probably another 20 points that can be picked up
| by learning to read the questions very carefully -- so
| that you don't race to show how quickly you can spin-up
| an off-task answer that precisely matches the wrong
| question. Getting that right also "is not an inherently
| bad thing."
|
| The verbal section is a bit more of a swamp, and there
| might be a larger element of gamesmanship there. But for
| schools like MIT, where math aptitude is the main event,
| I think keeping a math-focused role for the SAT can help
| a lot.
|
| It identifies not just the elite-school wizards with lots
| of AP and math SAT 800s -- but also the teens from
| humbler public schools that didn't have an AP track, but
| whose 790s on the (pre-calc focused) math SATs speak to
| their ability to play at a higher level.
|
| Apropos of analogies, I think the test-takers got rid of
| those because they can be ridiculously skewed to
| particular (affluent) cultures. For some people, it's
| obvious if yacht-to-dingy is akin to symphony-to-quartet.
| For people who grew up with less money, it is a total WTF
| moment.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I remember an analogy question that required knowledge of
| alcoholic drink formulations. I was way under drinking
| age, and had no idea what went into a martini.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| You might be under drinking age, but you should have
| years of practice making mummy and daddy martinis at the
| end of their work days if you want any chance of
| succeeding at $PRESTIGIOUS_OLD_INSTITUTION
| likpok wrote:
| The top link is a study that shows that the improvement
| is pretty marginal in practice.
|
| It does miss something: in specific ethnic enclaves SAT
| coaching is much more effective, perhaps because of a
| culture of out-of-school schoolwork and teaching beyond
| SAT prep. Those enclaves aren't particularly wealthy
| either (if I recall correctly it was a Korean enclave).
| Even then we're talking 70 points -- not nothing, but
| also not a radical transformation.
| hhs wrote:
| > Even then we're talking 70 points -- not nothing, but
| also not a radical transformation.
|
| That would depend on the baseline score. For instance, if
| it was a 1510 baseline and then went up +70, then it
| would be useful.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think it's usually not improvement at the highest
| levels.
| chernevik wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if those improvements were mostly
| moving below-average scores toward the average, by giving
| deprived students basic skills that their "education"
| didn't.
| boringg wrote:
| I don't know many tests you can't study for especially
| tests that are run on an annual basis.
| msdrigg wrote:
| My own anecdotal experience confirms that sat and act
| tests are very studiable. Honestly even more than average
| tests just because there is so much material available to
| study with.
| pooper wrote:
| In my personal experience, about seventeen years ago,
| retaking the test raised my score some 90 points (iirc)
| out of 1600, excluding writing section.
| someguydave wrote:
| the relevant question in that in that case is: what would
| your average score be with and without prep over say 10
| tests
| TuringNYC wrote:
| >> I don't really have evidence for this, but it's always
| felt like SAT/ACT coaching doesn't improve scores so much
| as get rid of some of the "dumb mistakes" that cost you
| score.
|
| As i learned in college, the real "coaching" was rich
| parents getting rich kids more time on the SAT by getting
| psychiatric diagnostic classifications that give you more
| time.
|
| Time has been the real challenge on SATs for most people
| beyond a certain score threshold, and money can buy time.
| fhood wrote:
| From my, albeit rather distant, recollection, if you
| desperately needed more time on the SAT you are probably
| already screwed.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| For students in the category of "exam easy. finished the
| exam w/o any time issues", the whole sub-thread is
| irrelevant. You're going to ace the exam rich, or poor.
|
| The sub-thread and discussion is about wealth bias for
| exam scores.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I finished the SAT early, and used the extra time to go
| back to the beginning and verify each answer. More time
| wouldn't have done much. If you can answer the questions,
| there's enough time to complete the test.
| mlyle wrote:
| I understand your perspective-- my test memories were all
| breezing through tests with copious extra time... But as
| an educator I've noticed that there is a _wide_ variation
| in the amount of time needed for a test between students.
| For some tasks it is _nearly an order of magnitude_.
|
| The students who are quick and on the competitive math
| team finish something in 6-7 minutes and some other
| students are doing correct work but not quite done in 45
| minutes. More practice doesn't seem to make them much
| quicker, either.
|
| And this is in students without a formal diagnosis that
| allows them to spend extra time.
|
| [There _was_ one time I crashed and burned on a test and
| ran out of time... where I didn 't memorize enough of a
| big table of identities for a trig test and ended up
| having to derive everything from scratch]
| WalterBright wrote:
| I hypothesize that the student who took 8 times longer
| isn't going to do so well at MIT.
|
| A typical exam at Caltech would be 4 problems and 2
| hours.
|
| I never memorized the trig identities. I simply knew them
| from using them a lot. And having worked enough
| algebra/trig problems, you can just see the answer in
| your head as you read the problem. (This turns out to be
| a big timesaver at Caltech, where every course was a math
| course. When you're dealing with calculus, you really
| need to have moved past struggling with trig.)
|
| At some point in the last 40 years, however, they've
| slipped my mind.
| stillsut wrote:
| I'd say one of the valuable things an SAT tutor could teach
| is an attitude: to take initiative, and reject resignment
| to failure.
|
| The biggest difference I noticed in how I would take a test
| versus other people I tried to coach is that I viewed the
| test as a fun game like a challenging video game level. And
| those who struggled on the test viewed it as dreadful
| judgement being rendered on them.
|
| It's like when you can tell someone is extremely self-
| conscious while dancing: Beyond teaching them any actual
| dance moves, you have to turn off the part of their brain
| which is blocking their natural mental resources for
| problem solving, and that's often the fear they are
| inadequate to the task, will disappoint their supporters,
| and that it will hurt their future prospects.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| The SAT, ACT, and even IQ tests, were originally created in
| part to help identity promising students who weren't from
| upscale backgrounds.
|
| I'm not 100% sure that the tests can't be coached, but
| certainly not like the "leadership", etc.
|
| And even if they can't be raised by coaching, the scores can
| certainly be lowered by poor education and a chaotic living
| situation.
|
| EDIT: Most people who can pay for coaching are already
| sending their kids to the kind of high schools that serve to
| get them ready, so they are close to their peak already.
|
| Even things like summer public service, there are consultants
| who can tell you, based on your target school, the best one
| for that school, like is it better to work on a clinic
| project in Honduras, or teach basic literacy in Burkina Faso.
|
| Never mind that the plane fare to get your youth group to
| Burkina Faso would pay the school fees for an entire village,
| with enough left over to pay 1/2 the teacher's salary for a
| year.
| hatsunearu wrote:
| Anecdotally I improved 600 to 400 points from test prep,
| depending on what you count as my "first SAT test" and my
| last SAT test.
| balls187 wrote:
| > The NACAC did a study on this and they found that average
| gains of test-prep students is ~30 points (this was when the
| SAT was 2400 points).
|
| When I took the SAT it was only 1600 (pre 2400), and SAT prep
| did in fact help scores significantly.
|
| Back than, the test was designed not for scholastic aptitude
| (as it's name suggests) but instead to guarantee a standard
| distribution of scores.
|
| It's been a long time since I cared about the SAT's so I
| assume once the word got out that the test could be gamed,
| the people behind it updated it.
|
| > It's far easier for rich students to game GPA, college
| essays and extracurriculars than it is for them to game the
| SAT.
|
| Rich students don't need to game anything. They simply get
| admitted because their family name is on a building.
| paulpauper wrote:
| >Rich students don't need to game anything. They simply get
| admitted because their family name is on a building.
|
| The mean parental income for Ivy League students is 170k,
| which is above middle class, but not Bezos-level rich.
|
| What is considered to be rich is a huge spectrum. The
| difference between 7 figure rich vs. 9 figure rich..is up
| to a factor of 1000. Those whose parents can donate enough
| to be commemorated on a building, is an outlier even for
| the rich. Unless your parents are dynastically rich, being
| rich is not that much of an advantage for admissions.
| samatman wrote:
| > _instead to guarantee a standard distribution of scores_
|
| Which is precisely what you want in an assessment test. Any
| assessment test.
|
| You only want a normal distribution if the quality under
| assessment is normally distributed, but you do want a test
| where the worst candidate does better than chance, and
| exactly one candidate gets a perfect score. That's an ideal
| which is only approximated, but it is the ideal.
| balls187 wrote:
| For context I graduated high school in the late nighties
| (I took the paper/scantron test).
|
| At the time, the SAT was purported to provide a score
| that predict ability to perform academically at higher
| learning institutions.
|
| Along with other factors such as GPA, and participation
| in extra curricular activities, a school could reasonably
| determine how well a student would do.
|
| In practice, the normal distribution for scores
| correlated with the distribution of college performance.
| It was a reasonable predictor of success, but it did
| penalize students from certain backgrounds.
|
| Because the test was devised by psychologists and
| statisticians, uncovering the pattern to the types of
| questions and the expected answered allowed test prep
| people to devise tricks to improve scores beyond the
| expected deviation.
| samatman wrote:
| Your first post claims it isn't a test of scholastic
| aptitude, and then this one says that it does predict
| scholastic success, and what could reliably predict
| scholastic success other than a test of scholastic
| aptitude?
|
| Sure, a big donation by the student's dad, but that's a
| known quantity. I took the same SAT you did if it
| matters.
|
| Which certain backgrounds are you referring to? I'd ask
| you for the references to show the supposed boost that
| test prep gives to SAT scores, but then I'd have to find
| the papers that fail to reproduce it...
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| I wonder how much taking the SAT multiple times plays a role.
| Personally I took it at least three times, and my score
| improved each time (don't remember by how much).
| Loughla wrote:
| Which is also tied to socioeconomic status. If you can pay,
| your score will go up the more you take it, according to my
| experience, and the college board.
|
| If you can't pay, you take it the one time it's offered for
| free if your school offers that. Then you get what you get.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think we should learn from the gaokao and only test
| once a year. The fact that you can pay for more tests
| (and pay more for "score choice") is the most unjust part
| of the whole thing.
| ericd wrote:
| Counterpoint, you don't want being sick or having a bad
| day to ruin your chances at what you've been working for
| for years. Also, being under pressure is generally not
| good for people's ability to reason calmly - another
| reason not to make it so high stakes. So I really hope
| what you're suggesting doesn't come to pass.
|
| We should probably make the SAT nearly free, though, if
| that price actually keeps people who'd otherwise go to
| college from taking it more than once.
| logifail wrote:
| > being under pressure is generally not good for people's
| ability to reason calmly - another reason not to make it
| so high stakes
|
| Q: Could be that being able to "reason calmly under
| pressure" is something that a future employer might well
| be interested in?
| Loughla wrote:
| A: Should your entire future job prospects be dictated by
| something that an abstract employer in the future might
| want? Or should the test we use try to get at what is
| really important; actual knowledge and skill?
| erdos4d wrote:
| As a counterargument, a fake ID is all that a rich person
| needs to put a smart kid in their place at the testing
| center. Those places are usually huge, nobody knows anyone,
| and if you flash a legit looking ID, you will have no trouble
| sitting the test. GPA and such require effort over years to
| game (and maybe the kid actually learns something from all
| that tutoring, who knows).
| LewisVerstappen wrote:
| Sure. So, 2 things.
|
| 1) The solution to that is to improve security measures.
| Not to remove the SAT entirely.
|
| 2) It is significantly harder to find someone who can score
| well on the SAT and is willing to take the test for you
| compared to gaming GPA, extra curriculars, etc.
|
| I've heard of tons of instances of people hiring homework-
| help services, their dad paying $5k to get their extra-
| curricular club going, private tennis lessons, etc.
|
| But I've never personally heard of someone paying someone
| else to take the SAT for them.
|
| I'm sure it occasionally happens, but it's a lot harder to
| pull off compared to manipulating GPA, extracurriculars,
| college essay.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > It is significantly harder to find someone who can
| score well on the SAT and is willing to take the test for
| you compared to gaming GPA, extra curriculars, etc.
|
| Idk about that. I found people to pay me for taking the
| ACT for them through my alma mater's subreddit. Top
| schools are full of people who got 35/36, I'm sure there
| are plenty of other people who scored there and would be
| willing to take the standardized test for 10k too. In
| fact, in some ways it's easier to find someone to take
| the test for you than it is to find someone to boost your
| extracurriculars because you can structure the payout
| around the score obtained. I got 10k for a 36, 7k for a
| 35... no guarantees with tutors and coaches.
| sct202 wrote:
| If the parents/students are willing to cheat on the SAT,
| they're probably going to have no issue manufacturing
| extracurriculars. The schools for the most part aren't
| auditing run of the mill activities (student org
| leadership, fundraisers, mission trips, local awards),
| and a lot of local newspapers basically let you write
| your own articles for them so cheaters can build up
| documentation if they're really motivated.
| azinman2 wrote:
| How common is this? I would guess not very.
|
| Either way, if you cheated your way into MIT, expect to
| fail out. The hand holding stops there.
| erdos4d wrote:
| Well, Trump did it, that's one data point. Also, he did
| fine at U Penn, an Ivy, so why should we assume MIT is so
| awesome that another rich kid couldn't cheat his way
| through there?
| azinman2 wrote:
| Technically MIT isn't an ivy league school. But either
| way, what makes you think all Ivy's are the same?
| erdos4d wrote:
| I'm just saying that U Penn, being an Ivy, has as much
| "reputation" as MIT, CalTech, etc. Until someone pipes up
| with some sort of proof that it is actually better (which
| I doubt it is), then why should U Penn's reputation allow
| a Trump to go through, but at MIT such a thing could
| never occur? I'm not seeing it frankly.
| jjitz wrote:
| As an MIT grad with many friends at other Ivies, I can
| tell you that it is more rigorous than pretty much all of
| them. Princeton is probably the closest.
| scarmig wrote:
| MIT is absolutely harder and more rigorous than UPenn
| (and, for that matter, HYP). If you compare the GPAs of
| people from those schools and e.g. MCAT scores, MIT
| students exhibit a much stronger positive correlation.
|
| This is pretty common knowledge, in the same way people
| know that Berkeley and CalTech have tougher classes than
| Stanford.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The man is functionally illiterate so it's likely someone
| else did it in his name.
| paulpauper wrote:
| But saying you got into MIT, plus the connections there,
| probably would still help
| azinman2 wrote:
| If you fail out, it doesn't look so good, and everyone
| will know. I wouldn't expect many connections to last if
| you're not someone people respect.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| MIT is one of the more rigorous schools but I expect its
| still pretty easy to avoid failing out.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Do you speak from experience? I attended it for grad
| school and not undergrad, but there was the expectation
| that you stand on your own. I was in one of the rare
| programs that was a terminal masters and you had to
| reapply for the PhD, and only 50% were accepted to the
| PhD.
|
| I think there probably aren't too many failing out of
| undergrad simply because they do a great job of filtering
| in the first place. But I know people who attended that
| certainly struggled... one who came a C student and still
| want on to a great medical school and a successful
| career. There isn't grade inflation.
| KMag wrote:
| > There isn't grade inflation.
|
| That depends on your definition of grade inflation. I
| think most of my undergrad classes at MIT had a median
| grade somewhere in the B range, maybe B-. Edit: I know
| some people consider a non-inflated grade curve to be
| C-centered.
|
| I came to MIT with more than a year's worth of credits
| from the U of MN, including 6 trimesters of honors level
| math[0] (multivariable calc, linear algebra, diff. eq.).
| I had all As, except a B in my Intro to World Politics
| class. My senior year of HS, I was actually taking a bit
| over a "full course load" at the U of MN, plus 1/4 time
| at my HS.
|
| I could sleepwalk through nearly straight A's at a pretty
| well regarded school's honors program. I was a B/C
| student at MIT. I like to think that a lot of it was that
| some "wise" uperclassmen had sat me down my freshman year
| and explained that once you had a degree from MIT, nobody
| would ask for your GPA. (The were wrong, BTW. Work for
| those grades.) I taught myself most of a CS degree while
| earning a degree in Mechanical Engineering. However, I
| was also too slow to put my ego in check and admit to
| myself that I really needed to work hard.
|
| [0] https://cse.umn.edu/mathcep/about-umtymp
| azinman2 wrote:
| Sounds like you're effectively saying there wasn't grade
| inflation. You were an A student elsewhere and then
| become a B/C student at MIT despite working hard. That's
| my point -- now imagine you were only an A student
| because you were rich and somehow swindled those good
| grades in high school. Imagine what would happen at MIT.
|
| Note that Harvard undergrad has something like an A-
| average. That's grade inflation.
| KMag wrote:
| I certainly agree with your broader point: nobody is
| handed a degree from MIT. If they have a degree, they've
| put in the work and have a good grasp of the subject
| matter. (Also, MIT doesn't give out honorary degrees.)
| nradov wrote:
| Some years ago in high school others offered me significant
| amounts of money to take the SAT for them. I didn't do it,
| but based on the security arrangements at the time I'm
| pretty sure I could have done it without getting caught. So
| I have to assume there has been some of that cheating going
| on.
| dayvid wrote:
| I have a family friend who does consulting for rich kids w/
| college admissions.
|
| You basically have someone who's on the board of an elite
| university coaching kids on their essay, clueing them into
| extra-curriculars, etc. They get paid pretty well.
|
| I also had a dinner conversation from a lady with two
| children in Ivy league universities who said she emphasized
| with the parents who went to jail for bribing schools to get
| their childrens admitted and would do it herself if her
| children couldn't get in the school. She also personally
| knows one of the people doing jail time for bribery.
|
| I had basically no adult academic/university guidance growing
| up. I just liked reading books in the library and studying
| things I liked. I was able to receive a scholarship to my
| university through my SAT scores. I'm not sure how I would
| square up in the current academic environment when I see the
| sheer amount of parent involvement in the application
| process. I also went to a smaller university where the level
| of tactics and skullduggery is limited.
| bikenaga wrote:
| Thanks for the interesting link. However, based on the paper,
| it seems like a "30 point increase out of 2400 points"
| _could_ be significant. The study says:
|
| "A survey of NACAC-member colleges unexpectedly revealed that
| in a substantial minority of cases, colleges report either
| that they use a cut-off test score in the admission process
| or that a small increase in test score could have a
| significant impact on an applicant's chances of being
| admitted." (p. 2)
|
| The paper later notes:
|
| "These results indicate that in some cases more than one
| third of postsecondary institutions agreed that a score
| increase on the SAT-M of 20 points, or a score increase on
| the SAT-CR of 10 points, would 'significantly improve
| student's likelihood of admission.' This proportion tends to
| rise as the base level of the SAT score before the 20 or 10
| point score improvement rises. This is especially true for
| the more selective institutions. At lower scores on the SAT
| scale, a small score increase does the most to improve a
| student's chances of admission at less selective
| institutions; at higher scores, the same increase appears to
| have an equally large or even larger impact at more selective
| institutions." (p. 19)
|
| The graphs on pages 18 and 19 give more detail.
|
| The paper also notes that "The College Board gives a specific
| example of a use that should be avoided: 'Making decisions
| about otherwise qualified students based only on small
| differences in test scores'." So it appears that up to a
| third of the institutions surveyed are _not_ following this
| guideline. It would be interesting to know who they are.
|
| I agree with your comment about rich kids gaming GPA, essays,
| and extracurriculars. Daniel Markovits addresses many of
| these points in "The Meritocracy Trap". Since I don't see how
| you can prevent gaming GPA, essays, or extracurriculars,
| given the alternatives, you're probably right that the tests
| may be better in this respect.
| foobarian wrote:
| > A 30 point increase out of 2400 points is not material to
| college admissions.
|
| Not so sure about that. Beyond the fact that that number is
| an average, the question is from where to where. So many kids
| get perfect 2400 scores that going from 2370 to 2400 might be
| the difference of getting eliminated from competitive
| admission pools altogether. Whereas nobody will care about
| you going from 1850 to 1880.
|
| P.s. I am dating myself a bit with the 2400 range, which
| seems to have changed at some point. Transform accordingly
| :-)
| paulpauper wrote:
| But test prep is marketed to people who are average or
| below average. Saying you can gain hundreds of points is
| clearly misleading/deceptive advertising.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Are there really that many kids getting perfect scores?
|
| I got a pretty low/average score, but took the test early
| in junior year so I hadn't taken some of the more advanced
| math courses yet. I never took it again since I got into
| everywhere I applied to (didn't apply to ivy league,
| obviously). Seemed like most other kids I knew did
| similarly with the smartest kids maybe 150 points higher
| (2400 time-frame). Nobody I know got a perfect score, or
| even close to it.
|
| Edit: man, after talking about this I want to see what my
| score was exactly. No way am I paying $30 for an archived
| score though. I want to say it was only 1200/1600 (the
| schools only wanted 2 of the sections). But I'm not sure I
| trust my memory for something so inconsequential from that
| long ago.
|
| Extra edit: found my old score report. It's worse than I
| thought. The writing was 570 (74th percentile) and math was
| 510 (47th percentile). I'm a lot dumber than I remember.
| foobarian wrote:
| I guess not exactly. But still looks pretty crowded at
| the top end:
| https://www.prepscholar.com/sat/s/colleges/Harvard-SAT-
| score...
| giantg2 wrote:
| Looks like it's 1% between 1550-1600. I couldn't find
| stats for an actual perfect score. Saying it's crowded I
| guess is ok, but is a matter of perspective. Like the top
| 1% of income earners saying their yacht club is crowded.
| Maybe true, but only for a very small number of people
| who could choose to go somewhere else if they actually
| wanted to.
|
| http://go.collegewise.com/how-many-people-get-a-perfect-
| sat-...
| LewisVerstappen wrote:
| Yeah no the study was definitely not about test prep
| getting people from 2370 to 2400 lmao. There is no test
| prep service in the world that will claim they can get you
| from a 2370 - 2400.
|
| The mean SAT score is ~1600, so it's a 30 point increase
| for students scoring in that range.
|
| If you're already capable of getting a 2350+, that means
| you know everything and it's just down to variance and not
| making a silly mistake.
|
| A perfect 2400 score is actually really rare. From a stat
| in 2009, the collegeboard reported that 1 student out of
| every 5,000 taking the SAT gets a 2400.
| bombcar wrote:
| I took it back when it was out of 1600 and missed a
| perfect by one question; however I don't think I was
| exceptionally brilliant or anything.
|
| The SAT does _not_ operate in the way the LSAT or some
| other computerized tests work where it keeps giving you
| harder and harder questions until you start getting them
| wrong.
|
| I suspect more people could get a 2400 if those who get
| really close bother retaking it.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > So many kids get perfect 2400 scores
|
| "So many" being ~500 out of a population of ~7 million or
| so
| umanwizard wrote:
| > So much for that common, popular notion that standardized
| tests do not predict anything of value.
|
| It was always an example of people refusing to believe
| something because it would be nicer if it weren't true.
| tharne wrote:
| > So much for that common, popular notion that standardized
| tests do not predict anything of value.
|
| To be fair, I don't think the debate was ever about the quality
| or predictive value of the tests. There is a small, but well-
| organized and vocal subset of the population that hates the
| idea of excellence and differentiation. They want, and have
| been quite successful in, the replacement of standards of
| excellence with vaguely defined (defined by them, of course)
| buzzwords like "equity" and "diversity".
| danShumway wrote:
| I've pushed back against standardized testing at certain
| points of my life, and I don't think this comment even
| remotely summarizes my views.
|
| If anything, I would say that my views are the opposite --
| homogenization creates a lack of differentiation around skill
| and aptitude based on questionable science (and sometimes
| outright pseudoscience) and often leads to an
| oversimplification of human intelligence in general. It
| always feels very strange to me that people trying to
| compress aptitude into a single number say that they're
| defending differentiation or diversity of talent.
|
| MIT's findings here don't really change my view of the value
| of SATs, although the findings are interesting and I think
| they're worth looking into further. I'm not sure "they're
| more predictive than GPAs" is the glowing recommendation that
| SAT proponents think it is. You can agree or disagree with me
| on that point, I'm not here to debate the entire idea of
| testing or IQ or whatever -- I just want to point out the
| above comment is a pretty big oversimplification and (in my
| mind) a borderline complete misrepresentation (I assume
| unintentionally) of what people like me believe. I can only
| speak for myself though, maybe there are people out there who
| do hate the idea of excellence.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Well, what you have written just feels like a more
| favorable to your side explanation of the same thing.
|
| Colleges are not trying to compress aptitude into a single
| number. It's even worse. They are trying to compress
| aptitude into a single Boolean variable, you are either
| admitted or not. That's it. And it seems that subject tests
| and general aptitude tests are very good indicators of
| college fit. I don't know what system you envision, but
| alternatives I have seen always seem far worse.
| danShumway wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand what you mean. GP writes:
|
| > There is a small, but well-organized and vocal subset
| of the population that hates the idea of excellence and
| differentiation.
|
| I don't see how that applies to my comment above, and I
| don't see how saying:
|
| > They are trying to compress aptitude into a single
| Boolean variable, you are either admitted or not. That's
| it.
|
| is doing anything other than backing up what I said. At
| the point where you are dividing a subset of the
| population into binary "in or out" groups, you are in
| fact advocating for homogenization, for less
| differentiation between students, and for fewer
| levels/categories of excellence or exceptionalism.
|
| I'm not here to tell you that's wrong, you do whatever
| you want. MIT is trying to decide who gets into their
| specific college, fine. But if you're arguing that the
| point of SATs is to make a binary determination about
| students, then it's just strictly inaccurate to say that
| it's the SAT critics who are all trying to cut down tall
| poppies.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| You conflate vertical differentiation with horizontal
| differentiation. Horizontal differentiation is what is
| usually understood as "diversity" and considered good
| among certain groups of people. Vertical differentiation
| is what is usually understood as "hierarchy" and
| considered bad among those groups of people.
|
| MIT like many American universities does only general
| admission and that's indeed would be considered weird in
| other countries, but it seems like a whole nother issue.
| danShumway wrote:
| > You conflate vertical differentiation with horizontal
| differentiation.
|
| A binary admissions model reduces both. That's not to say
| a binary admissions model is _wrong_ , but it does reduce
| vertical differentiation. Of course compressing an
| integer value into a binary result reduces
| differentiation, a boolean represents fewer states than a
| number.
|
| To go a step further, even if that wasn't the case,
| vertical and horizontal differentiation still can't ever
| be completely decoupled from each other. Horizontal
| differentiation allows for greater vertical
| differentiation by allowing people to vertically
| differentiate based on their strengths rather than on a
| questionably representative average of all of their
| qualities. And I don't think that's a solely Progressive
| or Left-wing idea, it's a big part of the reasoning
| behind why economic specialization leads to more advanced
| societies.
| zaidf wrote:
| What's a _better_ alternative in your view?
| danShumway wrote:
| I'm not completely sure. I think MIT's conclusions might
| be correct, they might be preferable to GPAs. I also
| think there might be other alternatives that aren't easy
| to implement, that require either a restructuring of how
| we do school or a better distribution of resources than
| we currently have.
|
| One conclusion that MIT hints at (although it doesn't say
| it outright) is that SATs might be a better indicator of
| success across economic levels in part because it's
| harder to buy a better SAT score with money. Looking at
| things like extracurricular activity runs into many of
| the same problems as looking at Github repos during
| hiring processes -- a lot of people don't have time to do
| a bunch of extracurricular activities, and access to
| those extracurricular activities is likely highly
| correlated with socioeconomic status. It might be
| difficult to move in that direction when access to school
| resources varies so much between areas.
|
| I do think the SAT could be improved -- I think one
| really easy way would be to change how it's administered
| so that it optimizes less for formal test-taking skill.
| The really good thing about the SAT is that it's a less
| school-specific measure than GPA. So a better alternative
| might be a version of the SAT that kept a standardized
| metric but that either widened its scope significantly or
| was administered differently.
|
| I also want to put forward the idea that admissions might
| just be really hard, period, and there might not be an
| easy way to assess potential, and trying to figure out
| the easiest way to do it might be like asking, "what's
| the best way to teach a child to play an instrument in a
| single day?"
|
| ----
|
| One really important point that I want to get across:
| there is a difference between a measure being good and a
| measure being "the least terrible option we have at the
| moment" -- and confusing the two can cause real harm.
|
| At the top of this thread I see the quote, "so much for
| that common, popular notion that standardized tests do
| not predict anything of value." And if that's somebody's
| attitude, then they're never going to find a better
| option because the whole thing is being approached
| through the lens of "see, we were right, this _is_ a good
| metric. "
|
| I think a lot of criticism of standardized testing, IQ,
| coding tests for hiring, etc... is not necessarily trying
| to destroy everything, it's just trying to point out that
| many of these measures are really bad and they shouldn't
| be treated with the respect they're often given. I think
| that someone can very easily both have the position,
| "yeah, MIT probably should use SAT scores alongside GPAs"
| and the position, "people place _way_ too much confidence
| in these things as an indicator of success. "
| tharne wrote:
| > If anything, I would say that my views are the opposite
| -- homogenization creates a lack of differentiation around
| skill and aptitude based on questionable science
|
| If that were true, you'd expect countries like South Korea,
| Japan, and German to perform poorly in science and
| engineering, among other things.
|
| Diversity may be a worthy goal for societal reasons, but it
| certainly is not a perquisite for excellence, seeing as
| there are many highly successful countries that are very
| homogeneous.
| danShumway wrote:
| > If that were true, you'd expect countries like South
| Korea, Japan, and German to perform poorly in science and
| engineering, among other things.
|
| It's wild to me that someone can have the view that the
| existence of other countries settles the debate over
| whether or not our school systems encourage well-
| rounded/successful students given that comparisons to
| more homogenized schooling environments like China is
| still one of the more contentious high-level debates
| about educational quality we have today. Again, I'm not
| here to convince you one way or another, but that is not
| a debate that I think most of society considers settled.
|
| > Diversity may be a worthy goal for societal reasons,
| but it certainly is not a perquisite for excellence
|
| If that's the argument you want to make, then fine, go
| for it. But then don't say that you're opposing a group
| that "hates the idea of excellence and differentiation."
| You are arguing for removing differentiation between
| different kinds of intelligence and skillsets and
| compressing that spectrum into an objectively less
| descriptive metric.
|
| Make up your mind whether I'm arguing for more diversity
| and more differentiation between people or for less of
| it.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Is the current push back against coding tests in job hiring
| perhaps similar to this push back against the SAT?
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| The SAT has been demonstrated to be effective at predicting
| success in university. We have almost no evidence about the
| computer industry's hiring practices. It is completely
| unscientific. Interviews operate on folklore, not
| statistics.
| bluGill wrote:
| This is something your HR department should be very
| concerned about. If the questions you ask during your
| interview are not useful in finding a good candidate why
| are you asking. This isn't just about time either,
| interviews have some strong laws around them so asking
| the wrong question could get you in court.
|
| I know when we wanted to do a coding test they told use
| we need to spend 6 months of giving everyone a coding
| test, have it independently graded by someone not
| involved in the hiring process. Then after people have
| worked here for 6 months we examine our actual results
| from those we hired and see if the tests at all predicted
| something useful. (or something like that - there is room
| in the scientific process for some variation)
| alecbz wrote:
| The bar below which HR has to be worried is not "we've
| scientifically determined that our interview questions
| lead to good on-the-job performance". There has to be
| some reasonable sense in which you could argue the
| interview filters for good candidates, but no one is
| requiring you run studies.
|
| Google once did a retrospective study and found that
| interview scores for people we ended up hiring were not
| correlated at all with people's on-the-job performance.
| I'm pretty sure nothing really changed as a result of
| this. I think it's a combination of the industry,
| especially FAANG, being kind of "stuck" on these kinds of
| interviews, and a lack of clearly better alternatives (I
| think there are better alternatives but it's not like I
| can point to studies backing me up).
|
| > I know when we wanted to do a coding test they told use
| we need to spend 6 months of giving everyone a coding
| test, have it independently graded by someone not
| involved in the hiring process. Then after people have
| worked here for 6 months we examine our actual results
| from those we hired and see if the tests at all predicted
| something useful.
|
| This is interesting but also way heavier weight than
| anything I've ever heard of. OOC where do you work? (Like
| vague description of kind of company, if you're not
| comfortable sharing the specific name).
| nullc wrote:
| > Google once did a retrospective study and found that
| interview scores for people we ended up hiring were not
| correlated at all with people's on-the-job performance.
|
| This sounds like an unsound result. If you select based
| on a criteria the correlation with the criteria is
| usually diminished and sometimes even reversed in the
| selected sub-population.
|
| Like if you select only very strong people to move
| furniture then measure their performance. Because they're
| all strong, you won't observe that weak people are bad at
| it-- plus you'll still have some people who were
| otherwise inferior candidates who were only selected
| because they were very strong, resulting in a reverse
| result. But if you dropped the strength test you'd get
| many unsuitable hires (and suddenly find strength was
| strongly correlated to performance in the people you
| hired).
| alecbz wrote:
| > This sounds like an unsound result. If you select based
| on a criteria the correlation with the criteria is
| usually diminished and sometimes even reversed in the
| selected sub-population.
|
| Yeah that's very true and I think was part of why they
| maybe didn't react to it too much. What you really want
| is to find the people you rejected and see how well
| they're doing, but we don't have that data.
|
| Still though, naively I think I would have thought that
| someone who gets great marks across the board should be
| able to be more successful at Google than someone who
| barely squeezes by, and I do think it's kinda telling
| that that's not the case. But I'm maybe just injecting my
| own biases around the interview process.
|
| edit: This reminds me a lot of this informal study that
| found that verbal and math scores on SATs were inversely
| correlated, which seemed surprising, until people
| realized they were only ever looking at samples all from
| a single school. Since people at any given school
| generally probably had ~similar SAT scores (if they were
| lower they wouldn't have gotten in, if they were higher
| they would have gone to a more selective school), the
| variation you see within a given school will be inverse
| (the higher you do on math, the lower you must have had
| to do on verbal to have gotten the "target" score for
| that school).
| nullc wrote:
| At google's scale, if they had an alternative basis for
| hiring people they could judge candidates by both and
| hire randomly use one method or the other method to make
| some of their hires, then compare their performance over
| time and at least say if there is a significant
| difference or not.
|
| But as you note, the lack of obvious good alternatives is
| an issue... and we can't pretend that there isn't an
| enormous difference among candidates. If we though that
| unfiltered candidates were broadly similar then "hire at
| random, dismiss after N months based on performance"
| would be a great criteria, but I don't think anyone who
| has done much interviewing thinks that would be remotely
| viable.
|
| (Though perhaps the differences between candidates are
| less than we might assume based on interviewing since
| interviewees should be _worse_ than employment pool in
| general, since bad candidates interview more due to
| leaving jobs more often and taking longer to get hired)
| stillsut wrote:
| This is actually confirmed with real world data on this
| for professional football with player weight and
| professional basketball with player height.
|
| For Offensive Linemen in the NFL, there is no correlation
| between weight (which range from 300-360 pounds) and
| overall performance. A "heavy" 350 pound player is not
| more likely to do better than a "light" 310 player. But
| nobody who weighs a mere 250 pounds could realistically
| make the cut or perform well at the highest level.
|
| For basketball players there is no correlation between
| height and performance, and there _are_ several standouts
| examples of players below six feet so there 's no cutoff.
| But if you compare the distribution of the subpopulation
| versus the general population, you'll see an extremely
| strong height bias.
| bluGill wrote:
| > OOC where do you work
|
| Big tractor.
| hiq wrote:
| > Is the current push back against coding tests in job
| hiring
|
| Is there such a pushback? As in, is the percentage of the
| workforce refusing to take such tests increasing?
| neon_electro wrote:
| It very much depends on the style of coding test -
| personally, I'm more than happy to do take-home style
| tests where I prepare something in a matter of a few
| hours, but I can't stand "leetcode" interviews or
| anything where I'm pressured to produce in 30 minutes or
| less; perhaps that's because that's typically not how I
| work in the real world and in my experience, they do a
| really poor job of demonstrating my skill set and
| experience.
|
| I have terminated interviews before they even got started
| because of poor interview loop design from employers.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| From the other part of the table - we'd lose more
| candidates if we did take-homes. People in general prefer
| to study once and use that knowledge for multiple
| companies at once, you can't optimize take-homes like
| that.
| hiepph wrote:
| I recently failed a CS coding test. I was asked to solve
| a problem in 10m. I solved it in 20m and was rejected. I
| came up with a solution and communicate it right from the
| start. My solution was totally clear and readable. I just
| needed time to warm up and attentive to my code. I love
| CS. I love solving problems and reading books about
| Algorithm and Data Structure. I implemented them from
| scratch as a hobby. But the interviewer guy is not caring
| about that and said process is process. I felt
| disappointed at first but felt lucky after that since I
| wouldn't want to work with those people in the future.
| smilekzs wrote:
| 10 mins per problem sounds extreme except for something
| that can be answered in no more than 5 lines of python
| (no code golf of course). Even then its signal-to-noise
| ratio (from an interviewer's perspective) can't possibly
| be too high. Most places would ask you to solve a
| moderately nontrivial problem in 30-50 minutes
| alecbz wrote:
| I don't know if there's a _rising_ pushback but you
| definitely do hear a not-small amount of complaining
| about coding interviews on HN.
| hkt wrote:
| I refuse now and didn't two years ago. Anecdotal, I
| realise. But I think lots of people have decided that the
| message heavily test oriented recruitment processes send
| out indicates a bad work culture and sense of entitlement
| from employers. I subscribe to this view and vote with my
| feet.
| yeahwhatever10 wrote:
| I think that is more about the disconnect between coding
| tests and the actual day to day work and skills required to
| do the job. Example: I could have a high level of
| competency in software engineering and also not care how a
| mouse gets out of a bucket.
| alecbz wrote:
| Those "mouse getting out of a blender" brain-teasers or
| whatever are pretty unheard of at this point I think.
| Most people complain about coding questions, generally
| leetcode-style questions I think.
| artful-hacker wrote:
| It's similar but it also brings in a challenging problem:
| coding tests costs candidates far more than it costs
| employers in terms of time. I am currently interviewing and
| two of the companies I am otherwise excited for sent take-
| home tests that just exhaust me, especially after a long
| day of otherwise productive work. I've got 12 years of
| experience under my belt but somehow great references and a
| killer resume aren't enough to convince them I can find a
| security vulnerability.
| smilekzs wrote:
| I respectfully disagree. Any decent interviewer spends
| the same man-hour as the candidate does.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| I do coding tests for the first interview. Nothing hard,
| just enough to do basic data modeling and writing a unit
| test. I also time cap to under an hour, and the internet
| is available as a resource.
|
| This filters out most people.
| nradov wrote:
| It's more about labor market dynamics and supply versus
| demand. If there are plenty of developers available to hire
| then employers will insert extra hurdles in the process to
| filter out weak candidates (with the understanding that
| there will be some "false negatives"). But when the labor
| market is tight then employers will take a chance on any
| candidate who seems minimally competent because they need
| to fill the req.
| sgustard wrote:
| The MIT article literally says "diversity" is one of their
| goals. Seems like you're arguing against yourself.
| tharne wrote:
| > The MIT article literally says "diversity" is one of
| their goals. Seems like you're arguing against yourself.
|
| Except no one goes to MIT because it's "diverse", whatever
| that even means anymore. They go there because it is one of
| the best schools in the world.
| sgustard wrote:
| We're talking about the school's goals in forming a
| class, not the applicants' goals. Most schools that are
| among the "best in the world" find they can weigh
| multiple factors to decide who to admit, and there's no
| single magic number that does that job for them.
| crackercrews wrote:
| It is actually possible that some people go to MIT
| because it has more diversity [1] than its very close
| competitor, Caltech. [2] But it's true that the first
| filter for these students is undoubtedly world-leading-
| technical-program.
|
| 1: https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/massachusetts-
| instit...
|
| 2: https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/california-
| institute...
| dijit wrote:
| Unsure if I buy this.
|
| I'm definitely not the person you describe, but the idea of
| standardised testing being equivalent across all factors just
| strikes me as being fundamentally untrue.
|
| Personally I am very lucky to test well; and I definitely buy
| the notion that people who test well in SATs may go on to do
| better in University, but the reasons are probably the same:
| freedom from worry about financial circumstances will affect
| grades. 10 times in every 10.
| MaximumYComb wrote:
| I grew up poor and I achieved some of the highest scores
| state wide in my country's standardised tests as a child
| (we get tested at ~8,10,12,14). A lot of my peers at my
| school were from social housing. My assessment is that
| their biggest issue wasn't money but their homelife.
| Parents who didn't value education, or even a basic respect
| for rules/authority. The kids were wild because their
| parents were kind of wild themselves. Money wouldn't fix
| scores for these kids.
|
| If you wish to make a political correct stance, I wouldn't
| go the money route. I'd say that these kids are victims of
| intergenerational poverty cycles.
| psyc wrote:
| Same. My family was below the US poverty line, but my
| parents were college educated and most of the extended
| family placed tremendous emphasis on education, academic
| performance, and college prep. I always get very annoyed
| with modern discourse that reduces all successes, even
| staying out of prison, to family income and nothing else.
| Most of the people I went to school with were from poor
| or working class families, and I guess a "normal"
| proportion went to college, and a "normal" proportion
| were "smart kids." Based on my observations, a large
| factor that I never see discussed is religion. Although
| I'm an atheist, I think the religiosity of the
| communities I grew up in was a highly effective mitigator
| of common social ills.
| MaximumYComb wrote:
| I think the benefit of religion is that a religious
| mother/father is less likely to be off on 3-day meth
| binge compared to a non-religious one. There's a social
| network to help support people. The social network also
| encourages a reduction/removal of typical vices that are
| going to affect a families children (alcohol, drugs,
| etc).
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I agree, and it's not the job of MIT to fix these kids.
| Psyladine wrote:
| >but the idea of standardised testing being equivalent
| across all factors just strikes me as being fundamentally
| untrue.
|
| What's your take on MIT's stance?
|
| _our ability to accurately predict student academic
| success at MIT 02 Our research shows this predictive
| validity holds even when you control for socioeconomic
| factors that correlate with testing._
| dijit wrote:
| My take is exactly what I said.
|
| The same factors that lead to success for SATs can lead
| to further academic success.
|
| I believe that MIT is probably right, in fact, I'm quite
| certain of it. Many people will drop out of university or
| perform poorly than their peers for socio-economic
| reasons, the person working while studying will probably
| do worse than the person who just studies.
|
| MIT wants the most graduates and especially the most
| _successful_ graduates, so the institution is right to do
| this, but I do still think it 's more inhumane than I'm
| personally comfortable with -- but this is part of why I
| live in Europe where university students in general are
| seen as an investment by the state and not _so much_ a
| business to be optimised.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Doesn't most of Europe also rely on standardized testing
| for university admissions? My country definitely does so,
| and has for decades, both ore and post communist times. I
| also know France has the famous Bacalaureat at the end of
| high school.
| tharne wrote:
| > Doesn't most of Europe also rely on standardized
| testing for university admissions?
|
| They sure do. So does India. In fact, a lot of other
| countries rely on testing a whole lot more than the U.S.
| which has interviews, essays, sports, teacher
| recommendations, etc.
| tharne wrote:
| > this is part of why I live in Europe where university
| students in general are seen as an investment by the
| state and not so much a business to be optimised
|
| In this specific case, though, I don't think these two
| things are in conflict at all. By selecting the best
| candidates on the basis of merit, MIT is doing what's
| best for both MIT as well as the broader society.
|
| We all benefit from living in a country that produces
| top-tier scientists and engineers, and MIT benefits from
| being a place that is known for producing top-tier
| scientists and engineers.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Funny that you bring up Europe. As far as I know European
| countries don't rely on extracurriculars and other
| nebulous measures as much as US colleges do.
| chernevik wrote:
| What's "inhumane" about trying to select those who will
| benefit most from your program?
| danShumway wrote:
| Not GP, but you should approach this using Bayes' Theorem
| just like anything else. If one study from MIT causes you
| to completely flip on any of your beliefs, you need to
| rethink how you form these kinds of opinions.
|
| MIT's conclusions should cause you to adjust your priors
| by a certain amount, but they should not cause you to
| completely flip by themselves -- particularly if you're
| not in the camp that thinks literally every decision MIT
| makes is correct by virtue of it being MIT.
|
| If you wouldn't have looked at MIT's original plan of
| abandoning SAT scores as proof that they didn't matter,
| you probably also shouldn't look at them picking up SAT
| scores again as proof that they do matter. MIT's
| conclusions should lead you to update your priors by some
| amount dependent on how much you trust you currently have
| in the accuracy of college admissions processes when they
| assess student qualifications and outcomes.
|
| ----
|
| My personal take on this is that I do absolutely buy that
| SAT scores could be a leveling factor between kids from
| different socioeconomic backgrounds and that they could
| be a better metric than GPA for determining admission.
| But of course, that's a pretty low barrier of entry to
| clear, GPA scores are probably close to meaningless when
| compared across schools. It seems to me that there's a
| lot of room here for SAT scores to be simultaneously
| mostly meaningless and at the same time also a reliably
| better predictor of school success than GPAs.
|
| It's also important to ask what exactly MIT is measuring
| -- what does it mean by academic success and how much
| does that definition overlap with "fits in when placed in
| an environment optimized for people who are good at
| standardized testing?" And again, even if they are kind
| of circular or if they're measuring the wrong things,
| it's still plausible that they're more reliable than
| GPAs; it's a low bar to clear.
| mbesto wrote:
| We have to read the sentence very carefully. It's saying
| that regardless of socioeconomic factors, the number
| correlates with graduate success rate. This seems like a
| very easy "duh". The way I read that is "if a student
| gets in the 99th percentile regardless of whether they
| grow up rich or poor, they are likely to do well at MIT".
| This doesn't talk about acceptance rates based on
| socioeconomic factors.
|
| The point in question is whether the students in a lower
| socioeconomic situation even has a chance to get _into_
| MIT.
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| The debate is about the quality and predictive value of the
| tests. Opponents claimed that the tests had a cultural bias
| so students from some backgrounds would do better than
| others, that students who had a good education before
| university would be better prepared, and that studying for
| tests or taking tests repeatedly has been shown to improve
| scores but is only accessible to people who can afford it.
| These are all claims that the tests are not good at
| predicting aptitude.
|
| The arguments against these tests are, of course, awful.
| Objective tests are the best way we know of to remove human
| bias. Aptitude tests (basically IQ tests) are the best way we
| know of to measure someone's natural ability (determined in
| early childhood) with little influence from their experience.
| Since their arguments make so little sense, it is reasonable
| to wonder about the psychology of opponents of standardized
| testing. But their arguments are, at least on the surface,
| about predictive value.
| hkt wrote:
| > it is reasonable to wonder about the psychology of
| opponents of standardized testing
|
| It is, at its core, a fear that testing largely reproduces
| the status quo. If one accepts the idea that there is an
| intellectual elite who constitute the highest strata of
| society, and that their gifts are innate and heritable
| rather than trained, it follows that social mobility is
| pretty much dead. It is a bleak vision.
|
| Personally I think there are different problems that are
| much bigger and woollier which keep people from non-elite
| backgrounds down, regardless of test outcomes. The
| structure of the education sector and employment more
| widely. Expectations about life and the distribution of
| rewards etc. We rarely have good quality, nonpartisan
| discussions about these things which I think pushes people
| to take views which are instrumental rather than informed.
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| >it follows that social mobility is pretty much dead. It
| is a bleak vision.
|
| I have always found the idea of social mobility
| depressing. It assumes that we will always have a
| hierarchy, with some people who are powerful and
| prestigious and others who are poor and always feel
| inadequate. It assumes that we will always have an
| underclass but at least people can leave it.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The kind of social mobility that SAT has some influence
| on is not really about "power and prestige", which I also
| think of as generally pathological dynamics. It's
| literally about how competent and professional you want
| to be, and how well you can perform your work duties.
| It's social mobility _within_ the 'working' class, not
| really away from it.
| hkt wrote:
| Yes. The old saying among Labour party socialists in the
| UK was "rise with your class, not above it". They were in
| favour of a high floor on living standards and a low
| ceiling on wealth. It isn't a stretch to think that a
| more even playing field would be a better substitute for
| mobility.
| paulpauper wrote:
| >To be fair, I don't think the debate was ever about the
| quality or predictive value of the tests.
|
| It is. The common argument is that GPAs are as predictive as
| SATs. MIT says it is not. I think the problem is you only
| need average ability to a good GPA, but a top 1-5% SAT score
| confers a higher ceiling of ability. MIT wants to admit
| exceptional students, not just average or above average ones.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Just an interesting anecdote on the predictive power of
| standardized tests:
|
| When I took the ACT in 2006, I scored around a 24 or 26 for
| composite score. Not very good. I didn't prep nor study for it
| because I was pretty apathetic about school and did my best to
| coast on whatever natural talent I could muster. Since my score
| wasn't very good, I retook it several weeks later. About
| halfway through I realized I was given the exact same question
| set as the first time I took it. I had of course not studied
| nor prepped for the second time, being the apathetic teenager I
| was. However this time I score around 32 or 34 or so. I don't
| remember exactly.
|
| What was different? Why did my score go up about 8 points?
| Better mood that day? Which score was the "real" one that best
| represented my abilities?
|
| Did I eat a better breakfast beforehand? I recognized some of
| the questions but of course I never expected to see the same
| questions a second time so I didn't prep for that. I didn't
| prep for anything about it.
|
| I wonder how many kid's college admissions results are
| ultimately because of one bad or good day? I suppose the other
| lesson is if you get a bad score, try again. You only need one
| good score.
| fortran77 wrote:
| > So much for that common, popular notion that standardized
| tests do not predict anything of value.
|
| To people with a particular agenda -- that society will be
| improved if equal outcomes are mandated -- I suppose
| standardized tests aren't "valuable" to them.
|
| I am very grateful for the SAT. I wasn't a good student. I was
| unable to do any work outside of school because of a bad home
| (my brother did hours long "hand-clapping/stimming" and
| chanting rituals, my mother drank, and my father was violent).
| But I did well on the SAT -- enough to get a national merit
| scholarship and a scholarship from Hofstra University where I
| got my BA in Math in the early 80s.
|
| If it wasn't for the SAT I don't know what I would have done.
| Standardized tests are the only answer, and I was very upset
| when I read of schools getting rid of using them for admission.
|
| SATs are also a great predictor of a person's ability to
| complete college. That was one of their original uses. So
| without SATs, you'll get more people doing poorly, and more
| people with no degrees and a lot of debt. And if these people
| are members of what's considered an "under-represented
| minority" then there will be even more remedial action required
| elsewhere to fix the problem of the high failure rate (like
| giving them degrees anyway, etc).
| sgustard wrote:
| > common, popular notion that standardized tests do not predict
| anything of value
|
| It's backed up by research, for example:
| https://news.uchicago.edu/story/test-scores-dont-stack-gpas-...
|
| I don't doubt that MIT's study showed otherwise for their
| needs. But UChicago is also a top-tier school and is not
| requiring standardized tests, for educational not political
| reasons.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| The current discussion I thought focuses around the idea that
| higher scores should just about guarantee acceptance due some
| fantasy notion of objective merit, and here they pretty much
| say that's not the case here:
|
| > To be clear, performance on standardized tests is not the
| central focus of our holistic admissions process. We do not
| prefer people with perfect scores; indeed, despite what some
| people infer from our statistics, we do not consider an
| applicant's scores at all beyond the point where preparedness
| has been established as part of a multifactor analysis
| JustLurking2022 wrote:
| Seems like semantics - maybe they don't explicitly prefer
| perfect scores but it sounds like they're filtering out using
| a minimum bar, and I'd bet it isn't too far off perfect.
| screye wrote:
| MIT and Caltech have always held a 'number-oriented
| universities' perception in my mind. This is in contrast to a
| 'prestige-oriented or identity-oriented' perception that I hold
| for Ivies.
|
| It is nice to see MIT do justice to those priors.
| hintymad wrote:
| I wonder why we can't hire more teachers to grade word problems
| in tests like SAT, like Asian countries do. Those problems are
| much harder to game or cram.
| tptacek wrote:
| It's important to keep in mind that the context here is the
| SAT/ACT versus the _currently available alternatives_. They 're
| not saying that the SAT/ACT is good, but simply that it's
| better than other options. Some of those options, like
| alternative standard tests, may be significantly better, but in
| the world as it is today, it doesn't matter if they are,
| because lower-income candidates don't have access to them.
| hooande wrote:
| The problem with testing isn't that it's inaccurate, but that
| it's a poor tool for the problem that it's being used to solve.
| You can't express "likelihood of success in college" in one
| number. Looking back on my time in college, the idea that my
| success could be predicted by my knowledge of geometry and
| vocabulary words is laughable.
|
| If there was a test that could accurately predict someone's
| chances of "success", be it SAT or IQ test, it would be used by
| everyone for everything. Billion dollar companies would be
| giving CEOs a version of that test before hiring them. A near
| perfect SAT score is noteworthy personal trivia, but other than
| that it loses all meaning as soon as someone steps on campus.
|
| Schools with strong brands use tests because they have way more
| applicants than they can properly review. Standardized testing
| is made necessary by scale, not predictive accuracy. I'm sure
| that anyone who has worked in college admissions for years has
| a very clear picture of what a successful student looks like.
| But there doesn't seem to be a way to quantify and codify that
| knowledge. And there likely wouldn't be time to apply it to
| tens of thousands of people in a few months anyway. So,
| standardized testing is what we have until someone comes up
| with something better.
| toomim wrote:
| > the idea that my success could be predicted by my knowledge
| of geometry and vocabulary words is laughable.
|
| You really should look into the g-factor research. This isn't
| about _knowledge_ , but rather _performance_. It turns out
| that your performance on geometry and vocabulary tests _is_
| highly correlated with your performance on tests in such
| disparate fields as Classics and Music:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)#Cogni.
| ..
|
| The crazy result in general intelligence is that your
| performance in all these areas is highly correlated, and
| incredibly correlated with career success:
|
| > "Research indicates that tests of g are the best single
| predictors of job performance, with an average validity
| coefficient of .55 across several meta-analyses of studies
| based on supervisor ratings and job samples."
| didibus wrote:
| I guess the issue in their analysis is that they are trying to
| predict MIT grade success, which is possibly another flawed
| metric. If say exams at MIT resembled SAT, it seems more
| logical that you'd find a correlation between SAT success and
| MIT academic success.
|
| What would be a more interesting measure of real value is to
| study for academic innovation and invention (valuable to
| society), as well as future success on the job market or at new
| business ventures (valuable to the student and economy).
|
| I'm making the assumption here that since we have limited
| educational resources, we'd want to provide the best education
| to those most likely to advance an academic field through new
| discovery or insight or invention, as well as those who'd best
| innovate or provide for existing business and services to
| society.
|
| And I'm curious if we've ever had any study looking into that?
| Or if this one did?
| macrolocal wrote:
| Don't underestimate the value of the kind of conscientiousness
| it takes to do well on these tests! I found grit much more
| useful than cleverness when I was an academic researcher.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| Many years ago--business grad school--one of the professors
| (forecasting?) had done research into GMATs and various post-
| school success metrics. Like it or not, the standardized test
| scores were a better predictor (by far) than anything else.
|
| In terms of gaming scores on standardized tests generally, yes
| people with more money can take prep classes and the like, but
| there are also test prep books available--presumably even from
| the library--that probably get you a lot of the way there.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The University of California commissioned a study to determine
| the predictive value of SATs for college success. A strong
| positive correlation was found. The test requirement was
| dropped anyway.
| tomkat0789 wrote:
| I hated taking the SAT/ACT, but holy cow are we in the US in a
| better situation than Chinese students dealing with the Gaokao. A
| Chinese pen-pal once showed me some calculus problems from the
| Gaokao and the example I saw (a bunch of integrals) looked like a
| math test a sadist would create: long, complicated expressions
| just for the sake of complexity, "ugly" numbers that turned into
| messy fractions you have to carry around. I (a graduate
| engineering student at the time) couldn't identify any trick or
| educational point to the complexity, only the malice of the
| people giving the test.
|
| EDIT: wording
| jxramos wrote:
| sounds painful, the only thing I could think of would be to
| test the precision of transcribing step by step. Sounds like
| the surface area for loss of precision is wider when you just
| add the noise of messy figures into a problem. A clever student
| could just replace the messy figures with constant variables
| that are shorter to write of course and at the very end
| substitute everything back to evaluate what comes out in the
| end.
| gime_tree_fiddy wrote:
| I am not sure how it compares but India suffers through the
| same problem. It is essentially a rat race. A lot of those
| problems could be trick questions, but to be able to identify
| it, especially on a regular basis takes longer(when the
| question has less than a minute dedicated to it).
| shmde wrote:
| Yes exactly, I remember our Physics teacher in 11-12th grade
| used to just solve trick questions and asked us to remember
| shortcuts and rote memorise formulae. I completely fucked up
| the physics portion of entrance exam and got a mere 7 out of
| 120 on a national test. I fucking hate physics now.
| jp0d wrote:
| The Indian education system doesn't care about learning at
| all. It's all about scoring good grades and getting a job
| at the end. It's quite important as every individual needs
| to be able support themselves. However, it's really bad for
| learning. I'm a product of that. I've been struggling a lot
| with an online course from MIT but at least I'm enjoying
| learning a lot of stuff as I'm employed now. Physics and
| Mathematics are the most beautiful things if done right and
| not under stress. Good luck, man!
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| Yeah, a lot of tests like that are actually testing for
| memorization, and not problem solving ability.
| frankchn wrote:
| I don't think the math part of the Gaokao tests memorization.
|
| Looking at a sample paper
| (https://medium.com/@yujia_jo/2016-jiangsu-gaokao-national-
| hi...), it seems like the examination really tests for the
| ability to do math and problem solve under fairly heavy time
| pressure (150 minutes total for all questions if you are in
| the science stream).
| justconfirming wrote:
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I would point to
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Webb
|
| as somebody who came from an underprivileged background, showed
| talent in standardized testing and had an outstanding career as a
| military officer, author and politician.
| bluenose69 wrote:
| Footnote 21 (containing " _the most important components to
| demonstrate academic readiness in the absence of SAT /ACT scores
| would be other standardized exams_") is quite telling.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| How so? Things other than standardized tests are easier to
| game. Letters of recommendation, extracurriculars, GPA, etc.
| bluenose69 wrote:
| You're right. That's what I meant by "telling"; MIT are
| making it clear that standardized tests are valuable.
| gmadsen wrote:
| I think that is the implied meaning of "quite telling". Many
| institutions hastily removed SAT scores due to social
| pressure that standardized tests weren't effective or
| equitable, while the data shows the opposite
| danans wrote:
| > due to social pressure that standardized tests weren't
| effective or equitable
|
| Effectiveness and equity shouldn't be confused.
|
| The tests are effective for assessing academic
| preparedness.
|
| However, there is a strong argument that they aren't
| equitable.
|
| MIT isn't claiming here that SAT/ACT are equitable. They
| are just claiming that they are a valuable data point in
| addition to other factors that they consider to deal with
| equity.
| QuikAccount wrote:
| My problem with SAT/ACT actually has nothing to do with the test
| itself. I grew up very poor in suburban middle of nowhere and
| even with a waiver for the fee, I had no way of actually getting
| to a testing center. Parents worked 24/7 to make ends meet, no
| real public transport and this was before Uber and Lyft. The real
| culprit here is the lack of public infrastructure.
| beamatronic wrote:
| I took AP classes in high school, but couldn't afford to pay
| $65 per exam (at the time) to take the AP test for college
| credit.
| whoisburbansky wrote:
| How were you able to afford taking the classes for credit
| instead, at a cost of over two orders of magnitude more per
| class?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I imagine through either scholarships or taking on bunches
| of debt. I was nowhere near as aggressive as some other
| classmates, but I managed to grab ~20k of total
| scholarships that helped me out immensely for college.
| Still a small chunk of what was needed for college, but it
| was an option I had compared to high school just making me
| eat the admissions and AP test costs wholesale.
|
| Fortunately my parent did cover these costs, but I know
| others weren't so fortunate.
| [deleted]
| QuikAccount wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like you assuming they
| took the class for credit at university. Community college
| is also a possibility where it would be cheaper or around
| the same price. That also comes with the benefit of
| financial aid.
| kbelder wrote:
| That was my situation, also. It sucked because in general,
| all the other kids in school who were academically gifted
| were from well-to-do families, and I think I was the only one
| taking AP calc or physics whose family couldn't afford the
| test.
| duckhelmet wrote:
| Have you ever tried using a bicycle?
| munk-a wrote:
| I heard bicycles works great with bootstraps. Maybe you
| should suggest bootstraps as well - they'd probably do the
| trick!
| thewebcount wrote:
| Have you ever been to the rural US? Things are very far apart
| (often 10s of miles) and riding a bike may not be practical
| for things in the same way as in an urban or suburban area.
| teirce wrote:
| Yep - this. I wasn't even in /that/ rural of an area, but I
| was still ~20 miles (32 Kilometers) away from the nearest
| testing center. No vehicle to take myself.
| avs733 wrote:
| this is a perfect example of why governmental services are so
| important - even if they are often run poorly. Without them,
| dis-equities inherently perpetuate due to external incentives.
|
| The SAT is treated as a standardized test but it, as you note,
| is inaccessible to many. It is not government run or organized.
| I've found, from teaching undergraduates, that most of the
| students who go to college _presume_ that everyone takes the
| SATs, that it is government administered, and that it is free.
|
| compare this to the, still far from perfect and problematic in
| other ways, centralized university admissions testing system in
| many other countries.
| verve_rat wrote:
| Wow. As someone that isn't in the US, but grew up watching a
| lot of US TV, I had this same assumption. How the fuck is the
| primary method of judging student admission to University not
| a government run service? Wow.
|
| As you say, contrast that to my experience where everyone
| took University Entrance exams in their final year of school.
| Score over X and you have the right to go to a university.
| Don't score high enough? The university can still choose to
| admit you at their discretion.
| annexrichmond wrote:
| many schools are not public as with the SAT which is also
| "not-for-profit"
|
| I wonder how one could codify a regulation for schools
| requiring entrance test to provide "reasonable"
| accommodations for prospective students to take it; like
| some parent comments mentioned not everyone can feasibly
| get to a testing center
| jimbob45 wrote:
| College Board is a nonprofit organization[0] and thus is
| partially funded by the government to say nothing of any
| other grants they may have received. ACT Inc is the same
| way.
|
| Instead of funding The One True Test, the US government
| partially funds every test competing to be the best college
| placement test.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Board
| mypalmike wrote:
| How does being a nonprofit imply "partially funded by the
| government"?
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Tax exemptions.
| mypalmike wrote:
| Assuming you claim tax exemptions annually, are you
| partially funded by the government? :-P
| cyberpunk wrote:
| > How the fuck is the primary method of judging student
| admission to University not a government run service?
|
| Well, I mean.. America is experimental capitalism. Why run
| anything government when it can be for profit and 'the
| market' will solve any and all issues with it?
|
| It turns out 'the market' will skew in favor of making a
| small amount of people rich over actually improving the
| lives of anyone, but hey, that's freedom baby!
|
| They're really precious about it though, so don't criticise
| this system out loud.
| Anon1096 wrote:
| That's nice and all but the College Board is nonprofit
| and they administer the SAT.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Uk qualification exams (GCSE and ALevels) are run by
| private boards. (Cambridge and Edexcel are the two big
| ones). These are effectively entrance exams, in that
| university offers are strongly dependent on them.
| orangepurple wrote:
| > How the fuck is the primary method of judging student
| admission to University not a government run service? Wow.
|
| Probably the same reason that the Federal Reserve Bank is
| not a government entity (they only have a meaningless
| government "oversight board") even though it loans all
| money to the US Government with interest and has never been
| audited.
| achandlerwhite wrote:
| You think the Board of Governors is meaningless? Do you
| realize the Fed turns over interest it earns to the US
| Treasury? What an odd thing to bring up in this context.
| mikestew wrote:
| Now that we know that you have a dislike of the Federal
| Reserve system, you didn't actually answer the question
| by stating a reason. What would "the same reason" be?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| How can you seriously believe the Fed isn't a government
| entity? I'm legitimately struggling to understand how you
| came to such a misguided conclusion.
| mypalmike wrote:
| The ownership structure of the Federal Reserve's 12
| constituent reserve banks makes the Fed a mix of private
| and public banking. Commercial banks hold shares in each
| of the reserve banks. As shareholders, they elect 6 of
| the 9 regional directors. So while it's largely a
| governmental organization, ownership and influence from
| private banking is certainly present.
| tonguez wrote:
| How can you believe it is? I'm legitimately struggling to
| understand how you came to such a misguided conclusion.
| Hasu wrote:
| Because it:
|
| - was created by the US government
|
| - is ran by US government appointees, who are nominated
| by the President and confirmed by the Senate
|
| - has to make annual reports to Congress
|
| - returns all its profits to the US government
|
| - describes itself as a government agency. [0]
|
| Does the Fed have more independence than, say, the
| Department of Agriculture? Yes, but an independent
| government agency is still a government entity.
|
| [0] "The Federal Reserve, like many other central banks,
| is an independent government agency..."
| https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_12799.htm
| d110af5ccf wrote:
| I really hate this meme. The federal reserve is very much
| under the purview of the legislature. If the legislature
| isn't choosing to act in the way you would like, well,
| then that's a completely separate complaint. Implying
| that the federal reserve is somehow independent from the
| government is dishonest.
| d110af5ccf wrote:
| > How the fuck is the primary method of judging student
| admission to University not a government run service?
|
| Because it's only de facto the primary method, as evidenced
| by MIT dropping it for a while there. They didn't need
| government permission to do that. Even public universities
| here generally have a high degree of autonomy regarding
| such things.
| cma wrote:
| MIT is private unlike most of the other land-grant
| schools.
| satthesat wrote:
| > The real culprit here is the lack of public infrastructure.
|
| What was your area like? I grew up similarly poor but in a
| wealthy area and would walk several miles to a public library
| for early computer access, biked to school, etc.
|
| Even then, our school offered SAT, etc.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| My SAT's weren't on campus. It was on some other campus I
| never heard of on the other side of town. I biked the school
| but without a parent would have needed to trek across town on
| a saturday morning (easily 20+ miles, in the mid 00's right
| before smartphones would just provide a GPS, so I'd be
| juggling printed MapQuest directions on a bike) to get there.
| I'd be cutting it if I took a bus since they ran hourly and I
| believe the weekend buses started at 8Am for a 9AM test time.
|
| Also note that I could drive by this time but we only had one
| car between my mother and I.
| QuikAccount wrote:
| Not sure I would call the area I lived in wealthy. Probably
| middle-class suburban area. My high school at the time did
| not offer SAT/ACT testing on campus. If I recall correctly,
| and it's been a while so I might be misremembering, the
| closest SAT/ACT testing location was at the community college
| in the next city over.
| matheweis wrote:
| It's not just the getting to a testing center, it's awareness
| (and cost) of the process.
|
| Was a long time ago now, but parents weren't really worried
| about or involved in my college prep process, so I had to
| figure it out for myself.
|
| It wasn't until later I realized it would have been better to
| start taking the test way before graduation. To say nothing of
| the benefits of test prep..
| [deleted]
| pishpash wrote:
| That's not the political argument being made against them
| though.
| QuikAccount wrote:
| Yes, I'm aware. That's why I'm giving a different
| perspective.
| [deleted]
| gpt5 wrote:
| It's really weird to see this as the top comment.
|
| Is there evidence physical access to the test center still a
| problem today (small or large)?
|
| Is SAT worse than other criteria (such as extra-curriculum
| achievements) when looking at those poor suburbun middle of
| nowhere students? i.e. even in this example, did SAT actually
| made thing worse for those people when comparing against the
| alternative.
| QuikAccount wrote:
| Sorry buddy, I can't give you anything other than my
| anecdata. No knowledge on whether anyone has done any studies
| on this specifically but lack of public infrastructure
| contributing to the income disparity has been widely studied.
| timcavel wrote:
| lliamander wrote:
| > Our research can't explain why these tests are so predictive of
| academic preparedness for MIT
|
| Can't explain why an IQ test predicts success in cognitively
| demanding work?
| meepmorp wrote:
| The SAT/ACT aren't IQ tests.
| lliamander wrote:
| Yes they are:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/
| ralmidani wrote:
| I would like to know how much of an "improvement" in outcomes
| these tests bring.
|
| From another article linked in the one from this discussion:
|
| "In short: Our research has shown that, in most cases, we cannot
| reliably predict students will do well at MIT unless we consider
| standardized test results alongside grades, coursework, and other
| factors. These findings are statistically robust and stable over
| time, and hold when you control for socioeconomic factors and
| look across demographic groups. And the math component of the
| testing turns out to be most important."
|
| There seems to be a lot of hand-waving in that quote.
|
| If the improvement is only marginal, we really need to ask, as a
| society, if the improvement is worth all the money, potential for
| cheating, angst, and outright conflict that come with maintaining
| these tests.
|
| If we want better talent, we can invest more money and energy
| into building better schools and paying better salaries to
| teachers. If we want more diversity, we can target vulnerable
| communities specifically.
|
| The test prep industry is milking families that care about (and
| might even be obsessed with) education. It encourages folks to
| think of the whole system as a rat race, and leads to selfishness
| and hoarding of knowledge.
|
| If we did away with standardized testing and spent more money on
| schools and teachers, we could cultivate a perception of
| education as a public good. It would be less about who has more
| resources and more about raising the tide and giving more people
| a fair shot.
| dom96 wrote:
| As someone from the UK I am confused by this. What were they
| using to decide who to admit without SAT/ACT tests?
|
| In the UK all students pick at least 3 A levels at the end of
| their high school. Each degree and university then has different
| requirements like 3 As in Math, Physics, IT (with some
| alternative subjects) for Computer Science. So my understanding
| of SAT/ACT testing is limited.
| lightup wrote:
| Feelings and "demographics" and surnames.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| because certain demographics performed poorly at it, that was
| grounds to label it systematic racism and justifying
| affirmative action vs. meritocracy by _discriminating other
| demographics in favor of ones that were perceived to be victims
| of systematic racism_
|
| if you are confused so am I. I still don't understand how they
| can discriminate against americans of asian descent who do well
| on standardized tests but not call it for what it is.
| jackblemming wrote:
| Have they considered trying leetcode instead? It seems to work
| for FANG.
| renewiltord wrote:
| You want to do a calc test instead? I wouldn't even complain.
| If the average leetcode is hard for someone they're probably
| going to _suck_ at even just integration e^z over the unit
| circle showing your work.
| peter303 wrote:
| MIT grad here. The achievement tests are more of a counter-
| indicator If you score under 700 on either test, you probably
| cant handle the coursework. The tests only test a 10th grade
| level.
|
| I likely would not get into MIT this decade this decade with my
| test score 1480.
| pcurve wrote:
| While acceptance rates have gotten lower, some of it is due to
| more people applying.
|
| Average scores are higher because more people are studying for
| exams than 20 years ago.
|
| But I don't think the course work has necessarily gotten any
| more difficult.
|
| So while it's true that 1480 wouldn't get you in MIT these
| days, if the same exact "You" were born amongst the kids
| applying to college these days, your score would likely be
| higher.
| jmole wrote:
| I doubt it - 1480 could easily be indicative of stress-related
| or attentional mistakes, rather than lack of mastery.
| opportune wrote:
| I am so happy to see this.
|
| I went to high school in a bit of a backwater in the US. People
| don't really go to selective colleges or care much about
| applying. It was only doing very well on standardized tests and
| spending time on the internet looking for info about colleges
| that led me to believe I could go to one of these places. I got
| into several and attended one, and I believe it greatly
| positively changed my life. (For the record, I had more going for
| me than just tests, but having a more objective way to compare
| myself to people across the country was very helpful, since I
| could easily attribute things to my area being backwards).
|
| Removing admission tests was a huge slap in the face to social
| mobility out of the middle class. To reiterate other commenters,
| admission tests are the hardest part of the process to game and
| the least biased towards things like having a tiger parent, while
| being the most predictive indicator of success in college.
| Wealthy and well connected people can easily game
| extracurriculars and essays, and HS grades are vastly inflated at
| this point across the country. That pretty much only leaves
| standardized tests for your average kid who isn't being
| deliberately primed by their environment to stand out for
| selective college admissions.
|
| I hope more colleges are brave enough to reinstitute standardized
| test requirements. I know they want to do "class building" by
| hitting minimum representations across many groups (including
| legacy, but I don't think that's as big at MIT), and not
| requiring test scores makes it easier, but for institutions to
| keep up high standards and continue to give opportunities to
| kids, I really think it's most beneficial to require scores.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| I am also happy to see this, but requiring test scores and
| class building are not mutually exclusive. Test scores are a
| useful input to good class building. How else are you going to
| choose which student from a backwater school to put in the
| class if these students don't have access to the advanced
| classwork and research support that the rest of the class had?
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| > huge slap in the face to social mobility out of the middle
| class
|
| No, it was an intentional move to restrict the number of Asians
| admitted because despite their best efforts to hide it,
| prestigious universities' data showed systemic discrimination
| against Asians in the admissions process (see: SFFA vs
| Harvard). Removing the SAT removes some of the data that
| opponents can use to sue them. One of the reasons the UC
| removed the SAT was to "diversify" their admit pool because
| Asians disproportionately did really well on the SAT and they
| aren't allowed to discriminate based on race by state law.
|
| My hope is that the Supreme Court, now that it's a 6/3
| conservative majority, finally strikes down race based
| "affirmative action".
| opportune wrote:
| Sure, I think that's in many ways covered by what I mean
| about middle class mobility. Given that Asians are less
| likely to be legacies and dont benefit from Affirmative
| Action, pretty much all their "slots" come out of the high-
| achieving-middle-class bucket
| [deleted]
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| And this benefit the rich kids who can spend thousands of
| dollars per year to hire someone to plan a good resume for
| them
| kenjackson wrote:
| > No, it was an intentional move to restrict the number of
| Asians admitted
|
| This always seemed short-sighted to me. I think standardized
| tests provide one of the clearest opportunities for less
| advantaged students to make inroads. And while certain groups
| do better now, I don't think there is a better way than this
| clear metric for other groups to improve their standing.
|
| Also, I think we simply overvalue going to Harvard. So
| instead you go to UVa or Puget Sound University. You "can"
| learn a great deal at these other places as well -- and maybe
| learn more given your existing level of achievement.
|
| If we think long game on this, we will see that this is one
| of the best things to lift all boats.
| Bahamut wrote:
| As an American born Asian myself, the "unofficial" quota
| system process colleges use is painful to me - I was an
| extremely academic high performing student before college,
| netting national level recognition in some areas with a lot
| of extracurriculars & came from a very poor background, yet
| my ethnicity worked against me.
|
| At the same time, I recognize that this is also some of the
| challenge that underrepresented minorities face in general in
| American society where there are others who have more closed
| doors than I (I went to a high school with over 70%
| minorities, mostly African-Americans + hispanics). I don't
| pretend to know what the solution to the problem is, but
| given that high prestige colleges have created a high risk
| high reward situation with how they handle admissions, I feel
| like a lot of the problem is how academia has created this
| artificial situation - maybe this is by design, I don't know,
| but if we truly value diversity & equity in higher
| educational opportunities, there needs to be a significant
| change.
| david927 wrote:
| Similar opinion and story. We live in Boise, Idaho and my
| daughter does a hybrid model of home school and high school.
| She knew she got top grades and 5's on all her APs but it
| didn't give her any idea of where she sat, nationally. She was
| planning on going to art school until a year ago, when she sat
| for her first standardized test, the PSAT. She saw the score,
| which was national merit range and realized that she should
| have higher ambitions. She took the SAT last October (she's a
| Junior) and got a great score. So now she's considering top
| schools. She wasn't before.
|
| Without these types of tests, you could end up being biased
| toward a measure of "how hard did the parents push."
| vxNsr wrote:
| Arguably 5s on her APs tells her where she sat nationally, I
| was under the impression that AP tests were the same across
| the board, while they don't rank you against other students
| the test is made to be just as difficult for the top elite
| college prep private school students as it is for the inner
| city public school students. The assumption being the AP
| class material is the same.
| kragen wrote:
| Sure but 38% of AP Calculus BC takers get a 5 so it doesn't
| give you much information.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Taking the Calculus BC test already puts you in the upper
| echelon of high school math students though. According to
| a quick google only 15% of high schoolers will take the
| BC exam, so getting a 5 is something only 5% of students
| achieve.
| kragen wrote:
| That's the student providing 2.7 bits of information ("I
| want to take this exam") and getting an additional 1.4
| bits from the result. By contrast, being valedictorian is
| about 10 bits of information, and being in the 99th
| percentile on a test (1510+ on the SAT) is 6.6 bits.
| Scoring 1600 on the SAT is 12 bits.
|
| So the SAT can easily give you 7 times as much info as
| the AP BC, and it's more about your aptitude than your
| achievement.
| doetoe wrote:
| If I understand you correctly you are assuming that being
| valedictorian, scoring 1510+ and scoring 1600 are all
| independent events.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| You don't need information theory to tell me that 1% is
| less than 5%. Obviously scoring in the top 1% of a test
| everyone takes provides more information than getting a 5
| on an AP test. But that 5 still provides, as you put it,
| 4ish bits of information, which is a lot more than the 0
| you have without it or other standardized tests.
|
| How many bits do you really need to know that you're a
| good candidate for continued education? Is being in the
| top 5% really not enough?
| crdrost wrote:
| They might be the least gameable, but this is kind of a "bare
| minimum" for diversity/equity practices. It is the cheapest way
| to get little bit of reliable signal.
|
| Because let's be clear about the standardized test situation.
| Test takers had _time_ to take the test, they weren 't doing
| work on the side for their parents instead to make ends meet.
| They had _transportation_ to the test location, they were able
| to pay the fees, and they were not being discouraged from
| college as "we can never afford that, I'm sorry."
|
| Standardized tests themselves have mostly tested not IQ or
| domain knowledge, but how anxious you are taking tests. This
| _does_ predict later academic performance, sure, but to say
| that this anxiety is _disconnected from demographics_ sounds
| like a rather strong claim. Instead you have that it is _more
| disconnected than GPA and essays and extracurriculars_ which is
| not saying much.
|
| If you want to be serious about diversity and equity, you
| invest some actual cash into it... The easiest way is talent
| scouting, you send people (trained, you can reduce bias) to
| underrepresented communities and allow folks there to interview
| with them. My wife worked at place that did this, it sounds
| financially intractable at first but it scales to whatever
| budget you want to put into it... Her place would send folks
| out to like Singapore as well as to inner city schools. But the
| point is that you have to leave the door open to the people who
| _can_ come to you, but you also go to the people who cannot.
|
| (This is also a startup idea... The reason the schools don't
| send out their best is that there are too many colleges, the
| reason the colleges don't canvas the schools that there are too
| many schools, these are obviously inverse problems that could
| cancel each other out in the appropriate sort of network, the
| recruiters just need to be common to both. The problem is
| getting people to pay for it--the schools who you want most are
| precisely the underfunded ones that cannot pay you, the
| colleges meanwhile are less willing to go in on these sorts of
| weird experiments, they, they have an admissions department
| already. So the idea has a dangerous scope creep where you want
| to also start a college so that you can dogfood... Not a
| degree-granting educational institution in itself, maybe, but
| just a "first year at college" school which sells its students
| to other top colleges. Obviously that's a much riskier
| investment for VCs.)
| vxNsr wrote:
| > _Because let 's be clear about the standardized test
| situation. Test takers had time to take the test, they
| weren't doing work on the side for their parents instead to
| make ends meet. They had transportation to the test location,
| they were able to pay the fees, and they were not being
| discouraged from college as "we can never afford that, I'm
| sorry."_
|
| This argument can be used to argue against public school,
| against any sort of consequences for anti-social behavior,
| etc. it's a bad argument. Instead find ways to get the kids
| to the test instead of arguing against the test in general.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > Test takers had time to take the test, they weren't doing
| work on the side for their parents instead to make ends meet.
| They had transportation to the test location, they were able
| to pay the fees, and they were not being discouraged from
| college as "we can never afford that, I'm sorry."
|
| In Chicago, the taking the SAT is required to graduate from
| high school. The school district pays for it. It is taken at
| school, during the school day.
|
| Some of these barriers are not the same as they used to be.
| whynotminot wrote:
| > Because let's be clear about the standardized test
| situation. Test takers had time to take the test, they
| weren't doing work on the side for their parents instead to
| make ends meet. They had transportation to the test location,
| they were able to pay the fees, and they were not being
| discouraged from college as "we can never afford that, I'm
| sorry."
|
| How big a proportion of the population is this that we throw
| out our most objective standard? Kids that don't have time to
| take a test? I would wager the vast majority of kids have
| time for an exam.
|
| Seems like we figure out how to get kids to the bus stop
| before we just decide that objective measurement is
| irresponsible as long as there's a kid who doesn't have the
| time for it.
|
| Just to build on this even further, a kid who doesn't have
| time for an exam also probably hasn't had the time to build
| the educational foundation necessary to succeed at a
| university.
|
| I can't imagine some kid who didn't have time for high school
| math succeeding in my engineering program, for instance. It
| might seem charitable to throw out the SAT and admit that
| kid, but you'd just be setting them up for failure.
|
| What you're describing is a different problem that needs to
| be solved. Throwing out the SAT does not solve it.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| >Standardized tests themselves have mostly tested not IQ or
| domain knowledge, but how anxious you are taking tests. This
| does predict later academic performance, sure, but to say
| that this anxiety is disconnected from demographics sounds
| like a rather strong claim. Instead you have that it is more
| disconnected than GPA and essays and extracurriculars which
| is not saying much.
|
| saying 'tests are better than the other primary indicators we
| use to admit students to colleges' isn't saying much? this is
| nonsense
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > Standardized tests themselves have mostly tested not IQ or
| domain knowledge, but how anxious you are taking tests.
|
| So you really think a completely unstudied person off the
| street with a sedative would get a better score than someone
| who does KhanAcademy in their free time?
| lliamander wrote:
| > Removing admission tests was a huge slap in the face to
| social mobility out of the middle class.
|
| I agree, but arguably the benefits of the SAT with regard to
| class mobility is less than it was when it was introduced.
|
| The heritability of IQ, combined with assortative mating, means
| that increasingly class divides are forming around differences
| in IQ. I think many people are rightly concerned that this will
| eventually result in simply a different entrenched class
| hierarchy.
|
| I still think MIT should use the SAT, but the problem of
| maintaining class mobility is one we should continue to assess.
| whynotminot wrote:
| > The heritability of IQ, combined with assortative mating,
| means that increasingly class divides are forming around
| differences in IQ.
|
| Do you have a citation for this?
| notservile wrote:
| The research on IQ heritability is abundant. You'll get
| death threats if you point out the research though.
|
| It's inconvenient and correlates with SAT performance.
| Hence the big push to get rid of the SAT to try to hide the
| disparities in general cognition within groups and between
| groups.
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-
| biosocial...
| whynotminot wrote:
| I was asking more about class divides becoming IQ based.
| Do you have a citation for that.
| lliamander wrote:
| That's the whole thesis of _The Bell Curve_ and also
| _Coming Apart_ , both works by Charles Murray. There's
| plenty of citations in those works as well.
|
| Edit: but beyond that, IQ-based class divides seems like
| a rather logical consequence of the following:
|
| 1. The heritability of IQ
|
| 2. Assortative mating
|
| 3. IQ being a significant determining factor of success
| in a given society
| whynotminot wrote:
| Maybe. I'm just more than a little skeptical given that
| GP has a scant post history, and spends his other posts
| railing on about CRT being marxism.
|
| There's a lot of people pedaling this kind of IQ stuff to
| justify blatant racism, so you'll forgive me for wanting
| to see the data and not just let statements like that fly
| by unchallenged.
| notservile wrote:
| Class divides have always been around IQ in every society.
|
| Which is why CRT being pushed on children is so sick. They're
| literally teaching children race Marxism. They've replaced
| the idea of class with race and now demand equity not between
| classes, but between races.
| lliamander wrote:
| > Class divides have always been around IQ in every
| society.
|
| Given by the positive effects of SAT testing on social
| mobility in the mid 20th century, I rather doubt that.
|
| And to be honest, if we are going to have a class system
| one way or the other, IQ might be the better approach. But
| IQ is not wisdom, and I worry that the elites of such a
| society would be disposed to unprecedented levels of ego
| and hubris.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| CRT is an outgrowth of critical _legal_ theory, which upon
| examination of the career of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Bean has ample
| justification for existing.
| notservile wrote:
| Cool story bruh. I escaped communism under threat of
| death. CRT is carefully repackaged Marxist garbage.
|
| And I'll take a stand with other Americans to make sure
| our children don't die slaves in America when the time
| comes.
| torginus wrote:
| The heritability of wealth, combined with assortative mating,
| means that increasingly class divides are forming around
| differences in wealth. I think many people are rightly
| concerned that this will eventually result in simply a
| different entrenched class hierarchy.
| lliamander wrote:
| That's how class divides have historically worked, yes.
| Previously those differences were also enforced through
| explicit class-based laws (the actually meaning of
| _privilege_ ).
|
| The introduction of free markets, and later IQ testing,
| disrupted a great deal of the entrenched social class
| structure within western societies and allowed many people
| of rather humble backgrounds to achieve great things.
|
| The concern I express is about whether IQ testing will
| continue provide the same level of social mobility in the
| future.
| com2kid wrote:
| > The heritability of IQ,
|
| For better or for worse, regression to the mean is a thing.
| lliamander wrote:
| That's a fair point.
| thehappypm wrote:
| This wasn't my path, but many of my peers where I went to
| college had a similar type of story. They came from very poor
| areas like rural Texas or rural Georgia, and they got into
| engineering after getting into things like Lego sets and video
| games. They got great at math because it intrigued them even in
| their subpar schools. Aced the math SAT and then doors opened
| for them. I'd hate to see that door close.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I grew up in a very rural, working class community. There was
| a mill in town, and a factory two towns over, and all the
| kids in my high school were pretty much expected to either
| work for those two businesses or go into the military after
| school. That's what probably 80 out of the 100 kids in my
| graduating class did. We didn't have AP classes and Rowing
| Club and Mock United Nations and all that upper-middle-class
| qualitative stuff people jam into their college admissions.
| But we did have access to the SAT and I crammed for it and
| knocked it out of the park. If it wasn't for the SAT I
| probably would still be slummin it in that same town (minus
| the mill and factory which have long since closed) and would
| not be here on the west coast working in tech.
| [deleted]
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >Removing admission tests was a huge slap in the face to social
| mobility out of the middle class. To reiterate other
| commenters, admission tests are the hardest part of the process
| to game and the least biased towards things like having a tiger
| parent, while being the most predictive indicator of success in
| college. Wealthy and well connected people can easily game
| extracurriculars and essays, and HS grades are vastly inflated
| at this point across the country. That pretty much only leaves
| standardized tests for your average kid who isn't being
| deliberately primed by their environment to stand out for
| selective college admissions.
|
| I agree with most of this but Exams are absolutely gameable.
| There's a reason there is a multibillion dollar industry
| focused on them. There's a reason why Cram School exists across
| Asia and there's a reason why parents will pay thousands for
| ACT/SAT tutoring. Because it flat out works. You can increase
| your scores substantially by paying for these services. All
| else being equal I would expect that between 2 students with
| identical aptitudes where one has paid thousands of dollars for
| tutoring that the student with tutoring will score higher than
| the other. This can't be ignored. Can you mitigate this with
| self motivated preparation? Sure. But again, all else being
| equal and between 2 equally talented and motivated testers the
| one whose parents paid for a tutor that achieved a perfect
| score is almost always going to score higher.
| opportune wrote:
| IMO there is a difference between gaming a test and just
| getting better at what a test means to cover. For example,
| programs like Kumon allow students to learn math more
| rigorously/at a higher level than what they may get exposed
| to in a classroom. That doesn't mean they're gaming the test,
| they're just getting a better education. While it's perhaps
| unfair that some students don't get this opportunity, I don't
| think giving children legitimately better educations is
| something to discourage.
|
| There was another near-top comment when I posted that pointed
| out that test prep classes only conferred a 30 point benefit.
| Likely because it's just familiarizing students with the test
| and covering basic testing strategies (like skipping a hard
| section and coming back to it last). I agree the benefit
| should ideally be 0 but 30/2400 is not much. That's what I
| meant in my post.
|
| Also, I've heard that in the past the SAT in particular was
| much more gameable due to the vocabulary/analogy sections,
| which incentivized students to study specific known topics or
| cram vocab terms. I'm not sure if they added it back but
| they'd been removed by the time I took the exam.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| you're refuting a strawman. The claim wasn't that tests are
| impossible to game, only that they're harder to game than the
| other components used in the admissions process
| jmole wrote:
| meta comment here, but I _love_ the presentation of these
| interactive footnotes.
| vmception wrote:
| Major factor reduced to a bullet point: they acknowledge the
| existence of other testing and evaluation frameworks, but that
| those are even worse distributed in socioeconomic access than the
| SAT
|
| Thats pragmatic, and sobering, since people hoping for more
| diverse representation in admissions are faulting the SAT
| pipeline itself (access to study prep, study materials, wording
| of questions in the test) but the known alternatives are more
| niche exacerbating the outcome
| grego61 wrote:
| One way that rich parents can game SAT/ACT is through aggressive
| seeking of test accommodations for disabilities. There was common
| knowledge of up to 50% of test takers having extended time in
| some affluent private schools in the SF Bay Area prior to the
| Covid pause.
| tzs wrote:
| In the case of students trying to get into MIT I wonder if
| there is actually much point in gaming the test?
|
| The article says they are using the tests as a threshold. It
| sounds like they don't care by how much you pass the threshold,
| just that you have passed it.
|
| I'd expect that most students who will be able to survive at
| MIT can make the SAT threshold with no gaming of the test and
| no test prep other than maybe doing one or two free sample
| tests.
|
| Someone who could not easily make the threshold on their own
| who games their way in is just going to find that the
| coursework crushes them. All that gaming their way in gains
| them is the ability to in a year or two add "flunked out of
| MIT" to their bio.
| MiroF wrote:
| > I'd expect that most students who will be able to survive
| at MIT can make the SAT threshold with no gaming of the test
| and no test prep other than maybe doing one or two free
| sample tests.
|
| Eh, not so sure. The "threshold", if we really trust that
| they do threshold and don't consider overperformance beyond
| that threshold (something I am skeptical of), is likely quite
| high.
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| The MIT threshold is 800 minus noise. So MIT can't consider
| overperformance on the SAT (math section) because the test
| is designed to make students indistinguishable at the top.
| All it does is help them weed out the chaff who won't be
| able to handle the mandatory math and physics classes that
| all students have to pass.
| MiroF wrote:
| I don't know what "800 minus noise" means. All 800s is
| something only about 500 people achieve a year, and not
| all of them are going to MIT.
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| 800 on the math section is something a ton of people get.
| Way way more than 500. More like ten thousand per year,
| maybe more.
| MiroF wrote:
| I thought you meant 800 across the categories.
| KMag wrote:
| Roughly nobody at MIT brags about SAT scores (at least when I
| was there 20 years ago). Any test is most sensitive around a
| given range. I think most MIT students are performing well
| enough in math that most of their mistakes in the SAT I and
| SAT II math subject tests are roughly statistical noise. I
| happened to get 800 on the math sections of both the SAT I
| and SAT II, and I got the impression most of the other
| students at MIT did similarly. I'm sure there are plenty of
| people with better mathematical ability than me who got 760s
| because of a loud neighbor or a bad breakfast burrito.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| Very good point, and explains exactly why there should be no
| extra time on these tests. Give everyone the same time, same
| test, see how they do on the curve, and then you can make
| accommodations for disabilities ie 'how do you do among
| students with your disability or disabilities.
| artful-hacker wrote:
| SAT scores correlate with IQ test scores. SAT is just a 'legal'
| thinly veiled version of IQ test.
| jsnodlin wrote:
| [deleted]
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| So let's cut the shit then and just do IQ tests.
|
| This is the best technical university in the world offering the
| best technical education in history. It's where the smartest
| minds learn foundational knowledge that will enable them to
| make amazing technological contributions to mankind.
|
| Not everything needs to be a battleground for the boring
| diversity of skin color. It's actually important that we get
| the most qualified people in these seats.
| MiroF wrote:
| But shouldn't starting points be taken into consideration
| when you are judging someone's merit?
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| No, not here. 100% of MIT admissions should go to pupils
| who are the most capable of succeeding and who are already
| the best prepared to succeed before they arrive. Utopia
| aside, as a society we require elite science and
| engineering ability. If we don't have it we lose out to
| another society that doesn't do this incessant navel
| gazing, simple as that. To whatever extent "starting point"
| is a problem it should be remediated entirely upstream from
| admission into the world's most prestigious technical
| university.
| MiroF wrote:
| If someone has "elite science and engineering" ability
| and came from a background where they were raised by a
| family with a household wealth of $5, and someone has a
| slightly more "elite science and engineering" ability and
| was raised by a family with a household wealth of
| $1,000,000, I am not confident that long term the second
| person will be the greater innovator.
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| I agree with you completely, and a lot of talent surely
| goes to waste. I'm not sure what difference you think
| that makes. If the kid from the poor family isn't well
| prepared by the time he gets to MIT on day one, all of
| the natural talent in the world isn't going to change
| that.
|
| One of two things will happen: He'll fail out; this is
| common for diversity admits. Or, he may require a
| remedial curriculum to develop these natural talents he
| is believed to have, but may not, nobody's really sure
| yet because he can't demonstrate them as well as the
| other students from richer households. Either way, a
| prestigious university is not the proper forum for that.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I've never seen somebody who opposes meritocracy actual
| suggest taking starting points into consideration -
| instead, they demand that easily observable, intrinsic
| physical characteristics be used as a proxy for "starting
| point".
| MiroF wrote:
| But there are a number of studies demonstrating how race
| & class impact things (when controlled for other factors)
| like teacher perception, grading, letters of
| recommendation, not to mention just the fact that if you
| are growing up in a black (or white) household that has
| $5 in wealth, you'll have less access to educational
| opportunity than the white (or black, albeit far more
| rarely) household with $200,000 in wealth.
|
| We shouldn't seek to control for these factors?
| pishpash wrote:
| No. That only tells you to fix those factors but the
| outcome is what they are. By the time of the ACT/SAT test
| it's too late to fix those things. Fix those upstream.
| MiroF wrote:
| > By the time of the ACT/SAT test it's too late to fix
| those things. Fix those upstream.
|
| Based on?? If someone is smart, but denied opportunity,
| often times this can be resolved by exposure to things -
| even for an 18 year old.
|
| Indeed, environmental factors become less important for
| intelligence starting precisely at this age.
| rosmax_1337 wrote:
| Why are IQ tests controversial?
| throwaway7033 wrote:
| The Griggs v. Duke Power Co. decision
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.)
| makes them legally problematic.
| slavboj wrote:
| Because blacks have lower average scores on them.
| sin7 wrote:
| Whites also have lower average scores on them. Lower than
| Asians and Jews.
|
| At the elite level this would make a huge difference. At
| the state level not at all.
| nafix wrote:
| What do you mean by "whites". American "whites"? The last
| IQ report has many Asian countries at the top followed by
| "white" European countries. Whites and blacks are such
| generic terms. There are many different types of white,
| black, asian, etc peoples that have different cultures
| and phenotypes based on the region.
|
| https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-
| rankings/average-i...
| grumple wrote:
| That site is a mess. Shows a chart where the average IQ
| is 82, links to a page saying the average IQ is 100
| (which is the original design). Also cites a eugenicist
| and thinks that worthy of a passing footnote. Frankly, I
| wouldn't trust anything I read there.
| car_analogy wrote:
| Can we somehow blame this on oppression?
| sin7 wrote:
| No need. Just attribute an unmeasurable quality such as
| creativity to your racial group.
| icelancer wrote:
| Because they're largely accurate in the aggregate and project
| outcomes quite well, and no one likes this.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| shakezula wrote:
| > SAT scores correlate with IQ test scores.
|
| Do you have a source on this?
| hiq wrote:
| You can look for "intelligence" on
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT. From memory, Human
| Intelligence by Earl Hunt has plenty of references as well if
| you're into this topic.
| artful-hacker wrote:
| Howard Gardner's "Intelligence Reframed" (1999)
| Someone1234 wrote:
| IQ Tests aren't illegal though? If colleges wanted to
| administer IQ tests they absolutely could.
| artful-hacker wrote:
| Maybe "more politically correct" or "easier to get away with"
| would be a better way to phrase what I meant.
| thedougd wrote:
| A is for aptitude.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| To deal with socioeconomic issues in STEM, start early; very
| early like K-12.
|
| In a vague fantasy world in the USA, I would reduce the
| Department of Education to a fraction, shift education to the
| States, take the best parts of the winning systems fom all
| States, and make Federal recommendations accordingly. Rinse,
| repeat.
|
| I am saddened that most of the children I come across in first-
| world nations, lack the ability to rationally think through a
| real-world problem.
| r00fus wrote:
| It seems like a good approach but the funding of things like
| special needs education (FAPE) is federal in nature; cutting
| those would likely nuke special needs programs nationwide.
|
| You would need to start with your 2nd or 3rd "approximation" of
| your iterative approach (ie, pre-calc which programs are
| already popular/effective and keep those) unless your goal is
| to cause maximum disruption and possibly jeopardize your
| ability to do the "make Federal recommendations" effectively.
| davidgay wrote:
| I'm always mildly assumed that Switzerland has 26 widely-
| different (far more variety than found in the US) school
| systems with only ~8 million people. And a high-school degree
| that guarantees entrance into any university in any subject.
|
| Their are federal standards for said high-school degree (also
| for earlier education stages). And it's a relatively hard
| degree to get (22% of students get it).
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| My brother-in-law was ill-prepared for technical coursework
| because he had no choice but to attend a shitty (undemanding,
| backwoods, rubber-stamp) high school in Minnesota. He got talked
| into vo-tech training for transmission repair.
|
| Years later, his weaknesses were evaluated at a Community
| College. He went to work on a one-year remedial skills plan. Then
| he was admitted to a state University. Four years later got a
| chemistry degree with honors. IMO it's likely he'd have succeeded
| at MIT as well. The man was a born techie.
|
| Moral: shitty schools are everybody's loss. And we've continued
| to _lose a lot_ because some of them are _designed that way_.
| Slyly, deliberately, officially sanctioned sly.
| Strilanc wrote:
| I was kind of hoping that the inline citations would lead to how
| they reached their conclusions. But it's just more "our research
| shows" conclusions without the meat underneath. Do they publish
| their methodology anywhere?
|
| (It's pretty funny that the first red highlight hover is
| explaining that you can hover over red highlights to see more
| information. The only people reading it are the ones who no
| longer need to be told.)
| ffggvv wrote:
| As a minority, i think those pushing for removing the SAT/ACT are
| racist in that they think certain minorities cannot perform as
| well as others. The whole point is that the SAT is the only
| objective piece of an application that can be easily compared
| between applicants. They want to reduce to only subjective
| qualifications which they can easily manipulate to benefit groups
| they deem under-represented. Its the bigotry of low expectations.
|
| Their problem isnt that the SAT can be gamed, its that it has an
| objective score which cant be manipulated to benefit who they
| deem worthy.
| ok123456 wrote:
| This explanation could have benefited from histograms showing the
| distribution of grades pre-and-post making the test optional, and
| then showing statistical tests that the null-hypothesis, that the
| grades are the same, could be rejected.
| slackfan wrote:
| Good.
| crackercrews wrote:
| Why is MIT Admissions on a domain other than MIT.edu?
| tech234a wrote:
| https://mitadmissions.org/about/about-web/
| gumby wrote:
| This would have been good news for me were I planning to apply
| today. I got very poor grades in high school and if they had
| ranked the students or calculated a gpa I doubt anyone would have
| looked at my application at all.
|
| I'm really glad to see this part; I hope it's true:
|
| > At the same time, standardized tests also help us identify
| academically prepared, socioeconomically disadvantaged students
| who could not otherwise demonstrate readiness
|
| When I was at MIT I felt that the institute was working hard on
| this area and took it seriously (for undergrads at least), though
| how well I could not tell -- I was most definitely not of any
| cohort that deserved _any_ special treatment.
| [deleted]
| TimPC wrote:
| The SAT being a help to low-income students shows how messed up
| the US high school system is. Normally standardized tests hurt
| low-income students because they require extra-curricular
| resources to do well on. In the US they hurt poor students less
| because the GPA system is so badly broken. AP courses are not
| offered in the poorest schools but offer such large bonuses to
| GPA that a 4.0 GPA is considered very poor for applying to
| university. A student can literally have a perfect GPA in the
| best courses offered by their school and be considered a very
| poor applicant academically.
| xyst wrote:
| aatharuv wrote:
| The page states pretty much the opposite. If you read the link,
| they state how, amongst other things:
|
| Good SAT scores can help find students from poorer high schools
| who didn't have the opportunity to take as many advanced
| classes in high school.
|
| Also, to quote the paper "College admission protocols should
| attend to how social class is...encoded in non-numerical
| components of applications"
|
| Like admissions essays touched up by educational counsellors,
| who can also get children of rich parents into "volunteering
| programs" that touch up experience, while poorer kids have to
| work after school.
| 0x20cowboy wrote:
| I grew up poor, and from my anecdotal experience people do better
| on the SAT if they "are rich". You can also pay people to take
| the test for you.
|
| Maybe it's because they don't have to spend their days worry
| about getting shot, stabbed or beaten to the ground by gangs.
| Maybe it's because they get to eat every day. I guess, perhaps,
| they get more quality study time. Or, heck maybe you're all
| right, random questions - your ability to regurgitate the points
| on the unit circle at will - indicates the level of education you
| are qualified to attempt. Thank goodness these tests will let you
| know what you are capable of.
|
| To be fair, I tried to get into several universities (over the
| pandemic) to round out my self taught education, but I was
| rejected everywhere I applied. So, I guess for some people -
| tests or no tests - it doesn't really matter. Apparently, I am
| too stupid to get an education. Good to know.
|
| For anyone who is salty about this (I used to be quite angry
| about this and the "Google style" hiring process (which is
| essentially the same thing)), this realization helped me get over
| this:
|
| _These tests are designed to filter out people like you. You have
| a qualities they do not want. That's why they are used. The tests
| are working from their point of view. They wont stop using them.
| Your life will be much easier if you just accept it, let it go,
| and go do something else._
| lucidbee wrote:
| If I were you I wouldn't apply right away to a 4 year college.
| Do community college in your chosen field and then transfer.
|
| In California if can do 2 years in a community college you are
| guaranteed a spot in a school in the UC system. Not UC
| Berkeley, but still some place great. I think to qualify for
| this transfer you need to have a 'C' or 'B' average.
|
| If you stay on the pity pot you won't get anywhere. Also, in
| California, community college is very cheap.
| 0x20cowboy wrote:
| I don't live in the states any more, but thank you for the
| suggestion!
|
| Also I am not on the pity pot, my life is awesome compared to
| where I came from. I'd like others not to have to go though
| it, but such is life.
|
| Although, I am realising that the way I say things might give
| people the wrong impression...
| tonymet wrote:
| i grew up poor and SAT helped me escape poverty. are we forced
| to only accept negative outcomes when sharing experiences ?
| [deleted]
| 0x20cowboy wrote:
| Absolutely not! Good on ya!
|
| I'd rather everyone got a fair go, but mate, I am very happy
| for you. Keep on keeping on.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| I do think the standard leetcode style interviews are often
| administered poorly.
|
| But I also think that if you create a fairly complex mousetrap,
| the profile of the average person who gets to the other side
| will be decent enough.
|
| So likely many false negatives, but works at scale.
|
| I'd do it very differently for my own company. But I think some
| of the bigger cos have actually gotten better, e.g. not asking
| certain types of questions too far removed from 99% of
| programming work.
| namdnay wrote:
| I think you're focusing your anger on the wrong target. Is it
| Google's fault for performing blind objective skill tests? Or
| is it your society's fault for not giving you the chance to
| grow up fed and safe enough to study?
| 0x20cowboy wrote:
| Absolutely not! Sorry if you thought I was angry. I sometimes
| have a funny way of expressing myself, but there is no anger
| here at all. Just acceptance of the way the world works -
| kind of my point actually :)
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| I grew up poor enough that I got a full need-based ride to a
| state school. The SAT helped me differentiate myself from all
| the kids with expensive summer camps, tutoring for
| competitions, and expensive sports lessons that didn't actually
| do that well in school.
|
| > Google style hiring process
|
| A couple leetcode questions is hardly a difficult task compared
| to getting matched for residency as a doctor or accruing enough
| volunteering experience as a poor college kid for law school.
| Don't even get me started on investment banking.
|
| Sorry that reality has hit you I guess? My perspective has
| always been that if you fail you should get up, evaluate what
| went wrong, and try again.
|
| > but I was rejected everywhere I applied
|
| Did you try going to community college and transferring?
| 0x20cowboy wrote:
| Don't want to go too much into this, but thanks for the
| thoughtful response.
|
| > A couple leetcode questions is hardly a difficult task
|
| I don't have a problem with data structures and the like.
| I've been building software for >20 years. I can do pretty
| much anything I want with a computer. However, and I can't
| articulate this well, but where I come from "high pressure"
| things mean people are getting killed - it's not fun. I don't
| do hackathons either for the same reason. The whole
| argumentative style of communication doesn't work so I just
| stop answering. Like I said, they are filtering out people
| like me on purpose, and it's fine.
|
| > Did you try going to community college and transferring?
|
| That is not something I could do at this stage. I tried to
| get into a few online degrees which have a more flexible
| schedule.
|
| Several years ago, I did try to go to a community college,
| but none of my current bachelors credits would transfer (they
| are from an online school which no institution apparently
| counts as valid). So I'd have to start over from scratch.
|
| This is turning into a life story here. I have indeed tried -
| for a very, very long time. I've given up on the idea of
| going to school or working at some hip company now, and I've
| made peace with it.
|
| Anyway, thanks for asking.
| outlace wrote:
| I used to be against standardized tests, but I grew up as a low-
| income minority in a single-parent household and I ended up
| getting into good schools pretty much only due to my high test
| scores, which has been a life changer. Other than test scores, I
| couldn't afford to do any fancy extra-curriculars. It felt a lot
| more achievable to know I can change my life if I just focus and
| do well on a test than it would if I had to somehow do a bunch of
| random things to look competitive on paper.
| sparrc wrote:
| 100% agreed. I could also buy a test prep book on amazon plus
| get a few others from the school and public libraries for a
| grand total of $15 spent on test prep.
|
| That's a lot cheaper than dedicating my working summer to
| smarmy volunteer/extra-curricular projects.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| I went to high school in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and
| almost all of the top academic students in my class were
| first or second generation immigrants (mostly Indian) that
| had no interest in extra-curricular activities like sports,
| band, choir, or really anything.
|
| It's important that people, especially immigrants, can get
| into these schools based solely on their test scores and not
| have to do any of the other trivial stuff that demonstrates
| that they can participate in the society in which they live.
| linksnapzz wrote:
| If you recast your civilization as simply the sum total of
| the economic activity generated by fungible worker-units,
| that's the sort of thing you get. A giant. somewhat
| dilapidated luxury shopping mall with a military attached.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| >It's important that people, especially immigrants, can get
| into these schools based solely on their test scores and
| not have to do any of the other trivial stuff that
| demonstrates that they can participate in the society in
| which they live.
|
| So you're saying only studying and not doing anything else
| to eventually become a doctor that serves a community in
| Dallas doesn't demonstrate enough participation in society
| as much as being able to play a sport?
|
| And don't get me wrong, extra curriculars are important,
| but the simplistic reduction of immigrants studying hard
| equates they don't participate in the society is a bit
| much.
| dangle1 wrote:
| I can relate, and I appreciated the doors the PSAT and SAT
| opened for me.
|
| OTOH, I test higher than my actual abilities in my opinion, and
| that was a relatively unfair advantage the test gave me.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| What does testing higher than one's ability actually mean?
|
| I'm guessing either you think the test is an imperfect proxy
| for a different (more important) skill, or otherwise you have
| imposter syndrome.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| There is no exam or test for work-ethic, or (in my case) an
| inability to refrain from constant yak-shaving.
| bombcar wrote:
| I will say I'm of decent peer-inteligence (and the test
| scores put me in the top 1% or higher) but that doesn't
| account for other aspects of "ability".
|
| I feel my grades more accurately portrayed me _as a whole_
| but the test was accurate as to _potential_ if that makes
| sense.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| what do you think about people who claim standardized test is
| systematic racism?
|
| standardized test is the only way to measure somebody on their
| aptitude for doing well like the LSAT.
|
| yet somehow asian americans being discriminated at ivy leagues
| even with good standardized test score is not seen as
| systematic racism.
| freedomben wrote:
| I think your question would have been a lot better if it was
| just:
|
| > _What do you think about the argument that standardized
| tests are systemically racist?_
| tomatowurst wrote:
| how is it different? there are people that make that exact
| argument, after all it isn't some tabloid paper claiming it
| as such.
| MichaelApproved wrote:
| I'd say you've got more straw men in that loaded question
| than farmers have in their field.
|
| You're taking poorly summarized opinions and pretending that
| combination of opinions are held by a group of significant
| size.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| I don't think so ivy league discrimination of asian
| american applicants despite high standardized test scores
| is very much a published statistic one that is often met
| with emotional fervor by groups that seek to continue it.
|
| Just my observation as an outsider looking into America.
| Often sensitive debates that don't follow a certain
| mainstream narrative are brushed off as strawman or
| whataboutism.
|
| I'm just seeing this from an objective data driven view and
| puzzled why ppl would react so harshly.
| Animats wrote:
| _All MIT students, regardless of intended major, must pass two
| semesters of calculus, plus two semesters of calculus-based
| physics, as part of our General Institute Requirements. ... There
| is no path through MIT that does not rest on a rigorous
| foundation in mathematics, and we need to be sure our students
| are ready for that as soon as they arrive._
|
| For a period in the 1980s-1990s, you could argue that calculus
| was not essential in computer science. It was all discrete math
| for a while. But then came machine learning, and it's all about
| hill climbing and gradients now.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I'm not sure that elementary calculus is particularly related
| to machine learning (I have a similar opinion of linear algebra
| which is fundamentally geometric in a way that machine learning
| isn't). That doesn't mean that you don't need to know anything
| about calculus or matrix multiplication to understand machine
| learning but knowing eg Green's theorem won't help and neither
| will understanding a tensor as a multi linear map or in the way
| a general relativity physicist might.
|
| I also don't particularly know what goes into calculus (in the
| U.K. we studied something called 'calculus' in high school
| which included integrating/differentiating polynomials, some
| trig functions, easy integration by parts and, in the 'further
| maths' course, some second order linear ODEs with forcing,
| first order ODEs via integrating factors, first order linear
| systems of ODEs via the eigenvectors method, and I think some
| integration by parts based recurrence relations. At university
| things were divided into 'calculus', which contained practical
| tools for applied maths like Green's theorem or partial
| derivatives or contour integration or Sturm-Liouville theory,
| and 'analysis' which had foundational things like epsilon-delta
| stuff or Dedekind cuts or the definition of a limit or Riemann
| integration or the conformal mapping theorem and so on.
|
| I think a first course in the thing I called analysis above is
| very useful for building mathematical maturity (ie the ability
| to not deduce false things but also playing with definitions
| and thinking about counter-examples) but the calculus knowledge
| can be useful for understanding the physical world. But I don't
| know if that understanding should be _required_ for e.g.
| computer scientists.
|
| A few calculus examples I can think of in computer science:
|
| - Some famous story of Feynman 'interning' at Thinking Machines
| and solving some capacity management problem using bizarre
| differential equations with terms representing e.g. 'bits per
| second'. No sufficiently good solutions had been found using
| discrete methods.
|
| - I was once asked an interview question which I suggested
| solving with differential equations but I was quickly directed
| towards not doing that.
|
| - Honestly I can't think of many more but maybe this is a lack
| of imagination. I think there are a few things that are really
| probability theory that you need some understanding of calculus
| for, e.g. emergent behaviour of distributed systems, reasons to
| prefer random cache eviction, some intuition to answer a
| question like 'if the time X takes has some distribution, but
| sometimes we have a gc pause for y milliseconds, how would that
| affect the distribution?
| kragen wrote:
| It's "fundamentally geometric" to understand that the Fourier
| transform diagonalizes a circulant matrix so you can estimate
| the clock skew between two radios?
|
| I think you get into calculus very quickly once you start
| dealing with uncertainty. A bit is 0 or 1, a discrete value.
| A random or unknown bit has some probability of being 1, a
| continuous value. A process that produces a random bit does
| too. An _unknown_ such process has a distribution over such
| probabilities. Things like that are fundamental for things
| like communication or image classification.
|
| Also, though, a major application of computers is modeling
| and controlling the calculus-based physical world, just
| because they are so good at number crunching. Particularly
| popular examples are ray tracing, music synthesis, and motor
| control.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| True, but the usefulness of calculus to a working developer in
| ML is pretty marginal. The difference between different ML
| algorithms for hill climbing or gradients, is orders of
| magnitude less than the effect of having the right training
| data, formatted the right way. Statistics or data science is
| far more applicable to nearly any field on real-world
| programming.
|
| But, you know, like Latin in the 19th century was always still
| useful to one's education, calculus is still useful. It is also
| something a lot more people know how to teach, than know how to
| teach statistics (or other more useful topics). I think the
| latter is the primary reason it remains central to most
| engineering programs.
| deanCommie wrote:
| > Latin in the 19th century was always still useful to one's
| education,
|
| Was it? Or was it perpetuated by a community that happened to
| already know it and so they leveraged it?
| hkt wrote:
| I suspect the answer is "both".
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Bingo.
| nicknow wrote:
| Yes, because learning Latin - as a written language - will
| put your vocabulary far ahead of those who don't. My high
| school had a general elective focused just on learning to
| use Greek and Latin to enhance your vocabulary, it was
| essentially a free SAT prep course for the language
| section.
|
| So many terms can be quickly understood if you understand
| Latin prefixes and suffixes, and the better you understand
| Latin the better you'll understand its use in any of the
| modern Western languages.
| kragen wrote:
| Latin is what almost the entire Western academic literature
| prior to the 19th century was written in. You may or may
| not know this, but Google Translate didn't exist. So, it
| was essential to anyone undertaking academic studies at the
| time (in the West) to read Latin, though not to write it.
| Nowadays English holds that position, despite Google
| Translate.
| dontreact wrote:
| I disagree with this. Being able to read and understand the
| math in the paper of the algorithm you are implementing is
| useful, and calculus is common in ML papers.
|
| You may have some short term success without understanding
| the algorithms at all, but as the field changes and you are
| no longer in school, being able to keep up at least somewhat
| with papers is very useful.
|
| I agree that the day to day is mostly about formatting data
| though!
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Well I took calculus, and I did a Master's thesis (much
| smaller than Ph.D., obviously) on neural networks, and I
| didn't find much application. Plus, the vast majority of
| work on ML is not going to be taking an ML paper and
| implementing it in code. It's going to be transforming this
| raw data into a format that the existing ML library can
| accept as input, selecting which cases are useful for
| training (e.g. making sure each important sub-case is
| adequately represented), and other things surrounding the
| data and how it is fed into the (already existing) ML
| library. Perhaps also playing with the options of the ML
| library, as to what kind of model you build.
|
| But 99% of the alterations you can make to an ML library,
| will not make nearly as much difference as what data you
| feed into it and how. If it's the right data, many ML
| models will work, and if it's not the right data, none of
| them will. But regardless, none of this requires, or even
| really benefits from, calculus.
| dontreact wrote:
| I agree with all of this, but ML will evolve a lot over
| the next 30 years of your career. Being able to read the
| papers as the field evolves is useful, and many of the
| papers (especially the ones that shift the field) will
| assume knowledge of calculus.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Agree. Statistics > calculus for the software engineers.
| Statistics > calculus for most people doing research as their
| papers would need to interpret t-scores, z-scores, confidence
| intervals etc. I don't understand this fetish about calculus.
| rory wrote:
| Well, you need at least some understanding of calculus to
| meaningfully understand statistics, don't you? A basic
| ability to intuit about integrals and derivatives seems
| like table stakes.
| peterhalburt33 wrote:
| Teaching only statistics and no calculus is how you end up
| with people such as Tai reinventing high-school calculus
| and attempting to use statistical methods to validate their
| "method".
|
| https://math.berkeley.edu/~ehallman/math1B/TaisMethod.pdf
| rory wrote:
| Oof. Tough look to name the model after yourself. Why is
| this cited so many times?
| uwuemu wrote:
| I would argue exactly otherwise... with the advent of the web
| platform and frameworks like .net, the vast majority (and I
| mean like 95%) of developers will never touch anything ML
| related in their careers. I mean, I get that this is MIT and
| many of their students _will_ end up working with ML, but
| applying that globally to CS is nonsense. Back when I was
| studying CS (cze) more than a decade ago, we had to pass linear
| algebra, graph theory and calculus, but honestly, that was like
| in the first year and a half and then it completely tapered off
| (later years were all about projects, algorithmization, i.e.
| "doing the work" and very little about hardcore theory) and
| guess what, I never needed it again. A bit of statistics and
| some graph theory here and there, but that's about it.
|
| Contrary to popular belief, there are NOT that many ML jobs out
| there and the ones that are there are more about data science
| and messing with model zoo type of shit than actually coding
| useful programs. Most programmers will be lucky if they get to
| integrate inference of a prepared model into the apps they work
| on.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I remember finding myself in 3rd year Calculus in a Computer
| Science degree, and realizing: I don't _have_ to be here!
| (only two years were mandatory)
|
| I've always enjoyed math and kept enrolling into it out of
| habit, until it became so esoteric, and my actual interests
| more solid and practical.
|
| I find a lot of my university career was fascinating and...
| useless. Not just from "I will never use this directly
| perspective", but also largely from "this will give me
| broader understanding and framework and enable me to learn
| faster" perspective. We can have wonderful philosophical
| discussion on what University should be for - job prep or
| educational enhancement for the sake of it - but truth of the
| matter was that I envied those in Engineering fields who had
| fun AND learned AND were doing practical things AND were
| going to apply some of it. Whereas my 3rd and 4th year maths
| were just maths for the sake of maths.
|
| I may be hanging out with uninteresting crowds, but same
| experience is broadly true for my friends and co-workers -
| Java developer, VMWare architect, Database Administrator, ERP
| developer, etc. We all value education and love learning and
| will go on our vacation with couple of technical books - but
| university Computer Science degree seems very mistailored, or
| at least, sold wrong.
| matwood wrote:
| > I find a lot of my university career was fascinating
| and... useless.
|
| I was in college long ago and for my CS undergrad and
| masters took the usual CS and math courses. When I needed
| electives though I took courses like economics, finance and
| accounting. Many years later, those electives ended up
| being the most useful.
|
| The CS and math courses I wouldn't consider useless though.
| I'm sure I lean on theory I learned without realizing. But,
| at the time I couldn't have predicted working in small
| companies or startups and how important basic finance and
| accounting would end up.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Good luck deriving matrix identities without Calc III.
| gmadsen wrote:
| interesting, I think almost the complete opposite. I am
| happy where I'm at, but I most certainly would have
| preferred doing a math/cs double major rather than all the
| BS busy work of an engineering degree I went through. I
| wouldn't call 60 hours a week of symbol manipulation
| practical...
| paxys wrote:
| This is exactly why so many people (myself included) advocate
| for a pure "software engineering" degree at more
| universities. Let people who are interested study graph
| theory, combinatorics, linear algebra, advanced probability
| and statistics and whatever else. For the rest, provide a
| path to be ready for an industry job building websites and
| applications, which is what 90% of graduates will end up
| doing.
|
| Every other discipline out there has a clear separation of
| pure from applied science. Why can't we do the same for
| software? What we end up with is borderline fraudulent coding
| bootcamps to fill in the gap.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I have been saying for years that we need to treat software
| developers like jedi when it comes to training.
|
| Practical, industry expert-led coursework has been by _far_
| the most outstanding education I have ever received. My DSP
| professor was (is still) an adjunct to the university I
| attended and works a normal job 9-5 during the day at some
| engineering firm. He was easily the best educator I have
| ever experienced because he brought reality into the
| classroom every day. I still vividly recall the
| 20-30-minute lecture /rant about making power point
| presentations that don't suck.
|
| It's all the little things for me... The nuanced details
| like "why are you holding it that way?" are impossible to
| discover until you have a customer complaining at you for a
| while or have someone who experienced it themselves giving
| you a heads-up.
|
| For me, the future of practical software engineering
| education looks a lot more like a machine shop than it does
| a university campus.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I don't think a "pure" software engineering degree really
| needs to be four years.
|
| What you're talking about sounds an awful lot like the
| program I went into initially at a community college. They
| taught you some coding in a few popular languages, some
| database concepts and sent you on your way. I dropped out
| after a year and found a job.
|
| I ended up going to a four year program after a while.
| Turns out, a lot of the good jobs in software engineering
| require understanding those peaky abstract fundamentals.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Software engineering is based on applied mathematics too.
| You'll need at least some basic calculus to make sense of
| O(n) analysis, and Calc II as a prereq for probability.
| Then add plenty of logic, discrete mathematics (needed for
| algorithms and data structures), models of computation and
| concurrency, category theory (which is becoming a shared
| language of everything "compositional"), topology etc. etc.
|
| If you really want a "math free" intro to tech, look into
| Business Information Systems. That tends to be more ad hoc,
| at least for now. At some point, people will start to care
| about software assurance even in that context, and the
| standards will rise accordingly.
| david38 wrote:
| You don't. I've never been asked a O() that requires
| calculus. The vast majority is just understanding if it's
| log(n), n, nlog(n), n^2, etc.
|
| Discrete, sure, but Calc? Not for most.
| fantod wrote:
| You don't really need to know calculus (derivatives and
| such) but it's true that big O notation requires some
| sort of "asymptotic thinking" which is probably only
| explicitly taught in a calculus course.
| Retric wrote:
| That's part of Pre-Calculus or general mathematics
| coursework at most US high schools.
|
| Beyond that it's a very simple idea you can cover at the
| same time as your doing Big O notation in the first
| place.
| jahewson wrote:
| Discrete probability is probably adequate for most
| software engineering. Almost everything we encounter in
| our jobs is discrete. One thing I do think we need more
| of is linear algebra.
| vidarh wrote:
| The thing is people with a maths heavy background tend to
| think you need a much deeper understanding of math for
| this than you actually do.
|
| You need very little beyond high school level math for
| most CS. _Some_ areas, sure.
|
| I've done things in my career that touches on a lot of
| different areas of math. But the number of times I've
| regretted not having taken more math have been pretty
| much non-existent. I wish I remembered a bit more of my
| trig, mostly.
|
| Most software engineers come into contact with far less
| CS subjects where math matters than I do.
|
| I don't have an issue with a place like MIT insisting on
| lots of math, but this notion that you need to understand
| so much math for software engineering is deeply flawed -
| you don't need much even for a lot of theoretical
| computer science.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The point is that even a "shallow" understanding of math
| is much deeper already than many, perhaps most realize.
| Many high-schools don't seriously try to teach math at
| all - there's no such thing as "high school math" in this
| day and age. You need college to even have a chance of
| being exposed to it properly.
|
| (Then there's the whole "learning to code" part, of
| course. This is actually where middle and high school
| math provides useful application domains for learning to
| code, and people have tried to teach coding in schools
| since the 1980s.)
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Not to mention relational calculus for a deeper
| understanding of databases.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| The relational calculus has very little to do with the
| calculus of infinitesimals.
| justsocrateasin wrote:
| I think this line of thinking fails to recognize what a
| general math background does for your critical thinking
| skills.
|
| I'm sure you and I both took plenty of math classes, and
| therefore we won't ever really know what our computer
| science skills would be like without a rigorous math
| background. Even if I never touch anything more complex
| than algebra II again, taking ~30 credits of applied math
| allows me to think in a way that I wouldn't otherwise
| without that background.
| cwp wrote:
| If all you're interested in is getting a good job, you
| don't need a degree at all. The information is available
| for free in a variety of presentations and formats. The
| source code to just about all the software you'll use is
| available for free as are all the tools. You don't even
| need a bootcamp, just time and energy.
| u2077 wrote:
| You may not need a degree to _learn_ the material, but as
| someone new to the field, there are plenty of jobs that
| list a 2 year or 4 year degree as a _requirement_. Having
| that degree will open more doors than just learning on
| your own simply because that's what they're looking for.
| paxys wrote:
| Sure, but in the same vein everything you will ever learn
| at MIT can be found for free online as well. Ultimately a
| 4-year degree does have value, whether just for the
| brand, or as a forcing function to learn, or the constant
| help from teachers and peers or whatever else.
| arcticfox wrote:
| While I spend 99% of my time doing pure "software
| engineering", I'm pretty grateful to have the advanced
| probability / graph theory / combinatorics etc. background
| because it helps me envision possibilities I wouldn't
| otherwise be able to.
|
| That being said, there are probably lighter ways of
| teaching that instinct than full-depth classes. I try to
| listen to podcasts these days as a way of expanding my
| horizons.
| xxxtentachyon wrote:
| Any recommendations for good podcasts in that vein?
| londons_explore wrote:
| If you just want to be a great web developer, MIT may not be
| the best place for you.
|
| MIT best prepares people for those less well defined roles,
| such as _designing the next era of web browsers_. For that,
| you can never know exactly which skills will be needed, so it
| 's probably best to have as many neighbouring skills as
| possible so you don't hit problems you can't solve merely
| because the knowledge required to see the best solution was
| in that topic your course didn't cover.
|
| Who knows, maybe the next era of web browsers will browse the
| web for you, and then condense everything they learned from
| thousands of resources into a single paragraph for the user
| to see. And for that, they might need ML.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Hmm I'm not sure I really agree with this. Does MIT (or any
| university) teach the creativity needed to envision the
| kind of thing you're talking about? Or like most
| universities, is it just teaching some foundational skills
| coupled with whatever has condensed into "required reading"
| from industry over the last couple decades? Just with a
| higher pedigree and ostensibly better prepared student
| body.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > Does MIT [...] teach the creativity needed to envision
| the kind of thing you're talking about?
|
| Absolutely.
|
| Explicitly.
|
| I have just been a bystander, but it's clear.
|
| I don't think that MIT grads are in this thread wasting
| their breath, though. Which I think is a good decision.
|
| [1] https://lemelson.mit.edu/ [2]
| https://innovation.mit.edu/resources/
| whynotminot wrote:
| Alright. You seem to feel pretty confident about this.
|
| Having worked with quite a few MIT grads over the years,
| at least in my anecdotal experience, they were smart
| people who were no more or less likely than any of the
| other smart people working around them to stumble upon
| the next evolution of the web browser.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Of course if I browse linkedin MIT EECS grads, most are
| probably just doing bug fixing at FAANG or the latest
| unicorn and some small fraction are doing anything
| revolutionary. It's also likely that they would have done
| so without an MIT education. See e.g the Collison brothers.
| pishpash wrote:
| Learning about those things aren't necessary for those
| jobs but they prove that you're capable of learning
| _something_ , and as such is a part of the FAANG
| acceptance process.
| rcpt wrote:
| Calculus was the first time in mathematics education where I
| actually had to understand systems and how to derive results
| from first principles. Prior to that everything was just
| memorizing: "this is what logarithm is", "socatoah",
| multiplication tables, etc etc. I straight up hated math
| until calculus (now I have a math PhD).
|
| I'm sure the same could be accomplished with other fields of
| math but I don't feel it's necessary to switch. Would be
| extremely hard to find good teachers and course materials for
| combinatorics or graph theory to.
| simulate-me wrote:
| Calculus underpins almost every scientific advancement since
| its discovery. To exclude it from the curriculum at a school
| focused on technology would be insane.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| Honestly every educated adult should understand calculus, and
| certainly anyone with a technical degree should. Sure many
| people will be unlikely to need to do the raw computation of
| calculating derivatives and integrals (even people doing
| machine learning are typically letting computers do that work),
| but to understand the way these two concepts work together and
| describe the world is really essential to understanding so many
| problems.
| david38 wrote:
| This is hubris. I can think of many adults that know nothing
| of Calc and do very in life and work. Knowing basic
| accounting, being able to fix things around the house, being
| pleasant to work with, etc are far more important.
| simulate-me wrote:
| > Knowing basic accounting, being able to fix things around
| the house, being pleasant to work with, etc are far more
| important.
|
| Those are totally useless skills. If you live in America
| and your only contribution to society is being pleasant,
| knowing how to fix things around the house, and basic
| accounting, then expect your livelihood to be replaced by
| someone willing to do your unskilled work overseas for a
| fraction of the cost in the very near future. Not to be
| harsh, but that's the reality.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| how are overseas workers going to able to fix things
| around the house?
| kragen wrote:
| Seems like that trend will result in wages between
| "America" (I guess you mean the US and don't know Bolivia
| is in America) equalizing with the rest of the world.
|
| Also, fixing things is highly skilled work and very hard
| to offshore.
| simulate-me wrote:
| > Bolivia
|
| Don't you mean the Plurinational State of Bolivia?
| kragen wrote:
| That's the one. Although Gran Bolivia is also in America,
| parts of it have fairly high wages, and it hasn't been
| the common meaning of the name "Bolivia" for 200 years.
| lordnacho wrote:
| The GP talked about being educated, not being pleasant or
| productive.
|
| Everyone needs to learn calculus because it opens up a gate
| into a form of beauty that no amount of work can ever
| satisfy.
|
| The idea that people only need to learn what they need to
| live their external lives, those of work and interpersonal
| relations, is just wrong.
|
| You need to learn calculus as part of your own internal
| life.
| crmd wrote:
| Calculus changed the way I look at the world. I suck at
| math and had to repeat calc ii, but holy hell am I thankful
| it was a core requirement at my school. I wish more liberal
| arts kids could have the same opportunity.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| It maybe "idealistic" but I would hardly call it "hubris".
|
| My undergrad was in a non-technical area and so I never had
| to take calc in undergrad. Having later learned it to solve
| problems, it has become clear to me that it would be
| preferable if everyone with a college degree knew calc. I
| was, in retrospect, wrong to have tried to avoid it.
|
| I'm well aware we don't live in that world, unfortunately
| many people with a college degree also don't know write
| effectively, or perform critical analysis on texts, things
| I also thing should be part of being college educated.
|
| > Knowing basic accounting, being able to fix things around
| the house, being pleasant to work with, etc are far more
| important.
|
| I'm not sure how knowing calculus reduces these things.
| solveit wrote:
| I would argue that calculus is essential in discrete maths, but
| ML is not essential in Computer Science.
| flatiron wrote:
| professional developer for close to 20 years, never used
| calculus. but i also a dumb java on the backend javascript on
| the front end web jockey.
| hkt wrote:
| Some might say that's representative of the majority of the
| field..!
| bmc7505 wrote:
| Calculus is not just about gradients. Fundamentally, calculus
| is about calculation and symbolic logic, a much older concept
| that predates its usage in gradient-based machine learning. In
| this sense, calculus holds deep connections to logical
| reasoning, proof theory and the foundations of computer
| science. [1]
|
| [1]: https://compcalc.github.io/
| [deleted]
| throwawayozy wrote:
| [deleted]
| sandgiant wrote:
| This. The importance of learning calculus and model building
| (physics) is all about learning to reason, making predictions
| and quantify domain validity. It's not about calculating
| derivatives or proving continuity. I think people take these
| requirements too literally.
| hwers wrote:
| I'd like to see 1980s-1990s graphics programmers get away with
| just discrete math for all the innovations they did in that
| period.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| If we need calculus for CS, I wish we'd teach it under the CS
| heading so that exposure to math didn't have to be so biased
| towards real analysis. Students spend years achieving this
| arbitrary (unless you're going to be an engineer) goal and end
| up with the erroneous (and often harmful) intuition that all
| spaces are continuous metric spaces.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| I don't get this take at all--learn _both_ real analysis and
| discrete math. At MIT especially. Knowing calculus (the
| precursor to RA) is essential for quantitatively
| understanding the world in which we live, including the 99.9%
| of it that is not computer science.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I think we're in a circle: I'm objecting that we teach
| people to map everything onto the real line and you're
| saying that it's essential to quantitatively understanding
| the world. But isn't that what "quantitatively" means?
|
| My point is that in the zoo of mathematics, the reals are
| just one exhibit. Equally valid is to map phenomena onto
| topological spaces, inner product spaces, sets, groups,
| rings, fields, lattices, topoi, etc... People have been
| standing on Newton's shoulders for so long that all they
| can see from there is ground well worn by their colleagues
| who stood on the same shoulders.
|
| I think we'd be much better off if you had to specialize in
| _some_ part of math, but that different people specialized
| in different parts of it without necessarily taking a major
| in it. This would maximize the sort of happy accidents that
| lead to discovery because for any given phenomena you now
| have a wider variety of perspectives on it, rather than
| just a classroom full of analysts.
|
| I'm against the reals in particular because I think they're
| especially suited to zero sum games, and I wish we played
| fewer of those.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I could agree with this. The one regret I had was burning
| through all my math classes within my first two years while
| my early CS classes barely seemed to use Algebra to begin
| with.
|
| Then lo and behold, turns out I like computer graphics a few
| years later, and all that linear algebra and multivariable
| calculus I skimmed through slams me back in the face as I
| find out that GPUS chew through such math for breakfast. I
| could never find the application of such math to my career
| track until long after I took those classes.
| vmception wrote:
| and this is why trade schools like coding bootcamps are
| relevant at all
|
| people aren't going to school to learn computer science, they
| are going to school to get a job and be effective in that
| field, but the universities _shouldn 't_ feel obligated to
| adjust to that since they've been for the privileged folks who
| _are_ actually there to pursue education for the sake of higher
| learning for nearly 200 years (or much longer). it is mere
| coincidence that they have to put up with a few decades of
| people needing the school for subsequent employment and the
| school will exist after this phase as well
|
| so with that observation it really is useful to push for trade
| schools again, for the people that actually need it
|
| for the people that are really going for that upper echelon of
| access to other privileged people whether they get a wage-slave
| job or not, yeah they should slog through MIT, but everyone
| else should consider other things that more closely match the
| lane they were born into
| bee_rider wrote:
| Also community colleges. We should fund community colleges to
| the point where bootcamps cease to exist.
| vmception wrote:
| Maybe, I think they serve different niches
|
| But don't have to
|
| Community colleges should have electives and tracks that
| are similar to trade schools: getting you up to speed on
| whats relevant right now
|
| But as long as they are pushing towards associates degrees
| and transferable credits to universities I think the
| utility is less optimal for people looking to be efficient
| at a job
|
| (Also employers should be training people for what they
| actually need too, sparing us all from imagining that the
| Computer Science major is necessary to synthesize better
| outcomes in unknown situations)
| mirker wrote:
| There are discrete forms of "gradients" which generalize
| classical CS concepts. Submodular optimization, for example,
| covers many algorithms that search for optimal configurations
| of discrete sets, and it does so by arguments that are
| analogous to convex optimization.
| kragen wrote:
| Can it approach an optimum in time linear in the number of
| dimensions like gradient descent does, rather than quadratic
| or exponential or something?
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| I don't remember the details anymore, but my combinatorics
| class required calculus. Something to do with Taylor series.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Generating functions, perhaps?
| pishpash wrote:
| 90% of software engineers don't do algorithms, even in ML --
| nor are they capable of, besides rote memorization of interview
| algorithms. Software engineering these days is mostly a job of
| complexity management and automation, requiring little math and
| more secretarial skills. That's just the ugly truth that nobody
| wants to hear.
| peter303 wrote:
| Curiously, MIT does not have an university-wide computer
| requirement, though some departments do. They have been
| debating this requirement for decades.
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| Very few developers work in machine learning.
| giardini wrote:
| I'm grateful for the SAT/ACT being present when I was in high
| school(HS). Without it I might not have a decent education,
| mostly b/c I was drifting along and paying little attention to
| life.
|
| Junior year I had high PSAT scores and received letters from
| various universities expressing interest. Yet I hadn't even
| _considered_ what I would do after HS. I was amazed to see anyone
| expressing interest, decided it was a fluke and dropped it all in
| the trash.
|
| Next year I scored high on the SAT and unexpectedly received
| multiple offers for full scholarships, room and board _et al_
| from universities. I asked around and realized my peers had been
| applying to colleges for months while I, the quintessential
| apostle of Lao Tzu (OK, I 'm lazy!), had done absolutely nothing.
|
| I hesitated to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when
| there were several. I picked one and was off to college. My Dad
| was pleased to get off the hook for college costs, Mom was proud,
| but I mostly felt sorry for friends who had to work hard to get
| into university.
|
| tl;dr: PSAT and SAT made getting into college easy for me and I
| am thankful.
| apayan wrote:
| The implementation of footnotes on the right side of the screen
| is really cool, and not something I've seen before. Such a cool
| idea. I think it would be interesting for news publications to
| try that out in articles as well. It could allow for brevity in
| the main article text, but still allow those who want to know the
| source of a statement/fact or more detail the option to obtain
| it.
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| rafale wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: SAT/ACT correlates with X where X = IQ x work
| ethic
| tomatowurst wrote:
| Having a high IQ means you can probably retain information
| better with less effort but for the vast majority of students,
| its a question of consistent work ethic.
|
| Important to differentiate places like South Korea has a
| massive privatized cram schools where it does a fantastic job
| of creating high scorers but because it is scaled, it means if
| you are not paying extra and spending ridiculous time in
| privatized cram schools, you are almost certainly going to fail
| unless you can rely on some innate genius. Here in this case,
| it is truly discriminating students based on the economic
| capacity of their parents and it has the highest houshold debt
| not only from real estate but from debt to finance the young
| into educational hell.
|
| Another unpopular opinion: Unhappiness correlates with high IQ
| if a proper outlet is not met due to a variety of factors.
| jdmichal wrote:
| I had a high school teacher that liked to say the following:
|
| You can be smart and lazy and do fine. You can be dim and hard-
| working and do fine. But smart and hard-working will always
| beat them both.
|
| I was pretty clearly in the smart and lazy camp, and was OK
| with that lot. And, as he said, I've done fine.
|
| EDIT: I should add, though, that I'm very happy the SAT did not
| have the writing section when I took it. I severely doubt it
| would have improved my relative score.
| danans wrote:
| That opinion is unpopular because it is incomplete. SAT/ACT
| scores correlate with lots of things, not just IQ and work
| ethic.
|
| Another huge correlation is with family income:
|
| https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2021/9/28/is-
| in....
| rory wrote:
| ~.2 isn't really "huge".. Your source shows that the SAT is
| much more strongly correlated with other measures of
| aptitude.
|
| The SAT does indeed correlate slightly more strongly with
| income than the AFQT does, which could show the "gaming" of
| the test. Only a ~.03 stronger correlation though. Not
| particularly dramatic.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > I understand that this announcement may dismay some readers for
| whom the tests can be a source of stress.
|
| Bluntly, if one can't handle the stress of the SAT, then the
| stress of exams at a university like MIT is going to be
| overwhelming.
|
| Exam week at Caltech was called "compression", and after the
| exams was "decompression". The moniker is not a joke.
| WalterBright wrote:
| P.S. Many people dropped out of Caltech because of the stress
| of exams.
| [deleted]
| mikkergp wrote:
| I don't know that all stressors are alike. I don't feel stress
| in exam situations, most of the stress I feel at work is around
| social stressors. I don't think a university education should
| be easy persay, but I do think that the stressors of education
| should not be unique in the world. If success in the face of
| stresses of examination in school don't predict success in the
| face of stressors you face elsewhere in life, then maybe they
| should be re-evaluated.
| tedmiston wrote:
| It's very difficult to read a webpage with huge red rectangles
| covering up so much of the text that it looks like a redacted
| document [1].
|
| I imagine it must not look like this for everyone... -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| Edit: It seems like this is an issue with the Dark Reader
| extension. Here's an archived version that renders as expected
| [2].
|
| I wish they'd used an existing popular tool like Hypothes.is [3]
| for annotations rather than rolling their own isolated system.
|
| [1]: https://imgur.com/a/jWkVFgd
|
| [2]: https://archive.ph/v1Rm1
|
| [3]: https://web.hypothes.is/
| endisneigh wrote:
| Did a quick skim - did they release the data?
|
| What does this mean:
|
| > when you control for socioeconomic factors that correlate with
| testing.
|
| Which factors are these exactly?
| TrinaryWorksToo wrote:
| Buried in the details it says that MIT will be accepting anyone
| over a (presumably secret) threshold, not using it as a ranking
| tool as some people might indicate.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| This seems a bit ridiculous. One would assume they could fill
| their entire class with 1600 SAT scorers but they don't and I
| think it's well known that isn't even sufficient.
| fn-mote wrote:
| I think the parent means "a score above a threshold gets the
| rest of your application read."
|
| Certainly the article would not support reading "accepting" as
| "admitting".
|
| "We do not prefer people with perfect scores"
|
| "our research shows students also need [...] the resilience to
| rebound from its challenges, and the initiative to make use of
| its resources. That's why we don't select students solely on
| how well they score on the tests, but only consider scores to
| the extent they help us feel more confident about an
| applicant's preparedness ..."
|
| I read this as saying two extremely important traits are:
|
| * resilience
|
| * initiative
|
| Not test scores.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _MIT will be accepting anyone over a (presumably secret)
| threshold_
|
| I don't think it's a hard threshold. Some people are bad
| standardised test takers. If the rest of their application
| shows they won't flunk their math tests, a lower score could be
| fine. If, on the other hand, it looks like a pattern, a
| marginal score could be seen to not make the cut.
| TrinaryWorksToo wrote:
| Yeah that's probably right. It's not a ranking mechanism
| which is what I think some people believe it is advocating.
| More isn't necessarily better.
| ShaveTheTurtles wrote:
| A lot of folks focus on act/sat scores when talking about
| diversity when really these ivy league schools shouldn't have an
| express lane for legacy entrants. If you are trying to be
| different than how it was previously, how can you expect that to
| happen when you give preference to folks that benefited
| previously?
| raunak wrote:
| Without legacy and the prestige and the entire shebang of old
| English style college, the Ivy Leagues aren't the Ivy League.
|
| I agree with you that eliminating legacy would solve the issue
| of making the school different - it's never gonna happen
| though, so there's no point in talking about it honestly.
|
| Also yeah, MIT is not a legacy giving school
| johnaspden wrote:
| > shebang of old English style college, the Ivy Leagues
| aren't the Ivy League
|
| I'm not quite sure what this legacy thing is, but I don't
| think English universities do it. It sounds corrupt to me,
| and I think it would be a national scandal.
| musicale wrote:
| Here's how "former MIT admissions director" McGreggor Crowley
| justified providing preferences to children of alumni and
| wealthy donors:
|
| "What about university donors, though? Don't they have an
| unfair advantage in this process? In truth, for every office of
| admissions there is a development office that builds a
| university's endowment through donations from alumni and
| wealthy individuals. And every year, regardless of what a
| college or university says publicly, a number of children of
| wealthy donors and alumni get a nod in their direction while
| other applicants are rejected.
|
| The reality is, the money generated by admitting wealthy
| students often serves to subsidize the financial aid of those
| less fortunate. If one squints, one might see here a karmic
| balance enabling many students to attend a college they
| otherwise could never afford."
|
| Note he said "every office of admissions" and "regardless of
| what a college or university says publicly." If MIT were an
| exception, presumably he would have mentioned it. The
| "regardless of what a college or university says publicly"
| implies that MIT may be not stating the entire truth when they
| claim "we don't do legacy"[2] or that MIT's internal behavior
| may have changed since Crowley worked there. I'm not sure what
| MIT has to say about providing admissions preferences to
| children of wealthy donors the way many (most?)[3] universities
| including Stanford[4] do.
|
| [1]
| https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2019/03/13/co...
|
| [2] https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/just-to-be-clear-we-
| do...
|
| [3] https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-college-
| admissi...
|
| [4] https://provost.stanford.edu/2020/06/26/admissions-
| considera...
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| This stuff allows for way too many back doors and
| intentionally makes the process more opaque. If they were
| honest they would just name an amount that guarantees
| admission so rich guys could buy their way into the school
| instead of hiding behind "charity".
| tzs wrote:
| MIT is not an Ivy League school, and does not give any
| preference to legacy applicants.
| icelancer wrote:
| I agree, but MIT doesn't care about legacy admissions. They're
| one of the few schools that doesn't.
| icelancer wrote:
| Quite surprising that they went back on their policy, but it's a
| welcome change. Removing standardized tests and replacing them
| with more subjective methods necessarily reduces outcomes
| surrounding academic excellence, and almost always exacerbates
| socioeconomic/racial inequity (with a strong anti-Asian bias, as
| shown in almost all studies when test scores are
| blinded/dropped).
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Definitely for the best. Standardized testing was pretty much the
| only reason I and many other working class folks I know could get
| into good schools -- I was never going to do a million side
| activities, and my summers were spent working, not building my
| academic resume.
|
| Of course the real tragedy is that we fixate so much on college,
| even prestigious ones, at all given how unnecessary they are for
| making people into productive and happy human beings. This change
| is significant but affects less than one percent of the
| population each year..
| rayiner wrote:
| Also foreigners--a lot of these side activities and volunteer
| opportunities depend on having social capital and connections.
|
| Same thing with essays. I've observed that working class
| Americans are reticent to talk about diversity and adversity in
| the way college admissions officers expect, and recall having a
| similar experience. My wife's parents grew up so poor in rural
| America that "store bought meat" was a phrase they used when
| she was growing up. Meanwhile, my family left Bangladesh when I
| was 5 under political circumstances where one day my mom's
| brother (a military officer) showed up to our house in uniform
| and my dad thought that he was coming to detain us (it was a
| social call). But she would have been embarrassed to write
| about how her father grew up poor or that she faced any
| adversity, and I would have been embarrassed to write about how
| I was a foreigner instead of a middle class kid from Virginia.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Of course the real tragedy is that we fixate so much on
| college, even prestigious ones, at all given how unnecessary
| they are for making people into productive and happy human
| beings. This change is significant but affects less than one
| percent of the population each year..
|
| I'm ambivalent because I sympathize with both sides of the
| equation. One one hand, I have the hindsight now that I didn't
| at 18 to realize that the world didn't end because I couldn't
| get into Harvey Mudd. And in many ways it turned out 100x
| better; instead of staying in LA-ish areas, I explored a whole
| new area I never would have considered otherwise, still got a
| great education for a small fraction of what Mudd woulda cost
| me, and was exposed to a completely different flavor of
| computer science that helped me decide my career.
|
| But on the other hand, college really does open a ton of doors
| that for many non-upper class people would never open
| otherwise. While I was still in tech and had many choices, I
| imagine people at MIT or Mudd would be fighting off recruitment
| at top companies with a stick, with many opportunities coming
| from certain companies who only recruit at such universities.
| It can accelerate your career on the order of 5-10 years if you
| stick it out. And you'd likely be unparalleled in resources and
| opportunities if your focus is on research. If your goal is as
| lofty as being the next household name or to pivot into
| creating your own business, there are oodles more oppurtunities
| there.
|
| I wouldn't trade the education I got for an MIT one, but I can
| understand why 18YO me (and many others) do feel that way.
| aj7 wrote:
| Yes, prestigious schools open a huge number of doors. But
| more importantly, they teach elite mannerisms, standards and
| beliefs, and prejudices. If you are not a true genius (true
| geniuses can always make their way, but they are rare, even
| at MIT et al), this knowledge is invaluable and
| irreplaceable.
|
| I'll give you an example from my own career. I went to
| MIT/Berkeley, SB/PhD. But I practically washed out of grad
| school, not due to lack of ability, but because I hated it.
| What I did like was making things and explaining things, and
| had a successful career in the more business aspects of
| science where successful scientists were the customers and
| decision makers. I understood, in a fundamental way, how
| these people thought and what they expected. This was
| invaluable, and was conveyed, in an irreplaceablely
| concentrated way, by my being a 30th percentile student in a
| 95th percentile university.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I live in slovenia, and the system is pretty much unchanged
| from the socialist times.... standardized testing + grades are
| used to get entry into colleges (and previously high schools).
| No resumes, no diversity/affirmative actions, clubs,
| volounteering etc... just grades+results.
| lliamander wrote:
| That sounds nice.
|
| Those other things are great, but have little value in terms
| of academic success. I think that for people who do poorly in
| academics but well in those other areas should have other
| avenues of advancing themselves rather than being forced
| through the college funnel.
| jerojero wrote:
| It could be nice if access to education is equitable.
|
| In chile we also have grades + standardized test + ranking
| (your position versus your cohort). But the top
| universities are filled with the top alumni from expensive
| private schools because they are usually 1. given inflated
| grades 2. trained to perform well on standardized tests (in
| their own schools, theyre rich so they can afford this).
|
| If you look at OECD statistics with regards to quality of
| education you will see that not everyone in the USA really
| gets a good primary (and secondary) education and there are
| gaps. This tends to not be the case in most of Europe... So
| are standardized exams good for admissions in the USA? Not
| sure. But obviously replacing it with curriculum might even
| be worse. So what's really the answer?
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| School grades and ranking should never be used for
| admission. Just standardised testing is good enough. It
| brings everyone to the level field.
|
| I don't know the situation in Chile but surely even the
| poor can buy books that tells you how to do standardised
| tests right?
| davesque wrote:
| > Of course the real tragedy is that we fixate so much on
| college
|
| This is what gets me. The whole concept of college, and
| _especially_ selective, high profile colleges such as Harvard,
| MIT, etc., seems antiquated and almost entirely manufactured at
| this point. It 's artificially crafted scarcity designed to
| create a market and brand. I feel the true, primary function of
| these institutions is to give the rich and powerful a means to
| identify each other and their respective pedigrees. Sure, they
| throw the unwashed a few bones and let them take home some
| degrees. But what do you actually get for your effort and
| money? I can't believe the competitiveness is justified by an
| actual difference in the quality of the experience or the
| person that results from it.
| aj7 wrote:
| No no no. The thesis topics are in graduate schools are more
| cutting edge, and the opportunity to interact with real
| science as an undergraduate are invaluable. I would tend to
| agree that excelling at a second tier university with a
| comprehensive program is an acceptable start. It generally
| gets you to a higher level.
|
| Competitiveness is about speed. Anyone can look something up.
| It's about knowing things right off the bat, knowing what's
| an unreasonable answer, estimating things, knowing what's
| important. That takes years of education and practice.
|
| In the US, we have probably had 750,000 excess deaths in the
| last two years because politicians do not have an intuition
| about probability and statistics. This was generally true in
| the West, but NOT in China and Asia in general, where the
| leaders were more numerate.
| ecshafer wrote:
| College Admissions in the US is broken. This is a great move at
| restoring normalcy though. The SAT or ACT are the best thing for
| leveling the playing field between the rich and the poor. If
| anything I would like to see more reliance on this.
|
| If I had my way the US would model the college admissions process
| on the Chinese Gao Kao. Have everyone take the the exam, have
| students list their preference for university, then sort from top
| ranked to the bottom ranked filling open positions at
| universities. This is fair, the only bias is ability, and it
| removes all legacy, wealth and athletics factors.
| vxNsr wrote:
| This is kinda how medical residency is filled in the US, med
| students rank their top choices, residency programs rank
| their's. It's called The Match, and generally results in a very
| fair equitable outcome.
| 542458 wrote:
| While the match isn't completely terrible, it still has some
| pretty bad qualities. The most notable one is the "pay for
| applications" issue. The odds of getting into your top picks
| is constantly declining, and so the dominant strategy is to
| apply to many residencies to maximize your chance of a
| successful match - the number of picks the average applicant
| submits has doubled in the past 15 years. But applying to
| more programs can cost thousands of dollars, for no apparent
| reason other than the enrichment of ERAS to the tune of about
| $100 million per year. This obviously creates a system where
| people with more money to burn can artificial create better
| results for themselves.
|
| The simple answer here is to give each applicant a finite
| number of picks regardless of means, but the ERAS admin has
| no interest in this for obvious reasons.
|
| The other thing this pick arms race has done is produced far
| more applicants for positions than makes any sense (the
| average Otho placement gets 150 applicants). Not only does
| this irritate program directors, this has also led to an
| increase in automated filtering, and therefore an increase in
| attempts to game automated filtering though things like bogus
| publications (see: things like the stupid medbikini
| publication which seemed like a poor attempt to add another
| pub to somebody's resume).
| 0000011111 wrote:
| My dyslexia is so bad that these types of tests were/are a total
| barrier to entry for me and folks like myself.
|
| Fortunately, tech is one high-paying industry where an IT degree
| from a great university and certifications are not required to
| get a job making good money. I was able to learn system
| administration - network engineering at the community college and
| use online resources.
|
| If there is one positive is that MIT has a very small
| undergraduate class so the impact will be minimal across the
| global cohorts of future college students. Perhaps perspective
| students will stop applying to that school and focus their
| application strategy on schools that do not have this
| requirement.
| lucidbee wrote:
| I was a crappy student in HS and the only good thing about me was
| my SAT scores. They got me into a good school. I ended up as a
| highly ranked engineer at Microsoft. My heart sank when people
| started not using the SAT. I hope this becomes a trend.
|
| I have also read that it is really really hard to show that
| tutoring pays off for the SAT. I think the SAT is the fairest
| part of the admissions package.
| [deleted]
| spoonjim wrote:
| MIT stepping back from the insanity of the Current Thing. Will
| anyone else follow?
| gred wrote:
| I suspect the engineering schools will be the least affected /
| first to recover from this trend.
| bradwschiller wrote:
| It's clear the SAT/ACT has predictive power for highly-selective
| colleges, such as MIT. And therefore, they are valuable for these
| colleges - especially for the Math scores as MIT suggests. The
| value of SAT/ACT scores decreases as selectivity decreases or as
| math abilities matter less for admission (e.g., liberal arts
| programs).
|
| Here are some related points:
|
| - Harvard considers roughly 4 in 5 applicants to be academically
| capable of doing the work at Harvard (about 50,000 applicants of
| which Harvard only accepts 2,000). This data is pulled from their
| court documents, and my team wrote about it here:
| https://writingcenter.prompt.com/posts/strong-essays-increas....
|
| - This means that most applicants at highly-selective colleges
| are very similar academically. Colleges are mostly just using
| grades, academic rigor, and test scores to determine whether the
| student will be able to succeed doing the work in college. Absent
| other information on academic preparation (e.g., not having
| access to AP/IB classes), the SAT/ACT score can be a critical
| signal of whether the student can do the work. Students with
| well-above-the-bar academics are admitted at a 3x clip to those
| just above the academic bar. But other parts of the application
| (e.g., essays, athletics) can have a much stronger effect on
| admissions chances (e.g., a strong personal score, much of which
| is essay-related, can have a 10x increase on admissions chances).
|
| - Math SAT really is highly predictive of math abilities. When I
| was with McKinsey, we asked for applicants' SAT scores because it
| was highly predictive of people succeeding at McKinsey. People
| hired with scores below 700 struggled to succeed analytically.
| So, McKinsey used 700 as a bar. MIT is roughly doing the same
| thing here. Other colleges do this as well.
|
| - Outside of highly-selective institutions, the SAT/ACT can have
| less predictive power in student success in college than other
| factors (e.g., GPA). There are a bunch of great analyses at
| fairtest.org that looks at these exams - e.g., breaking scores
| down by race.
|
| So overall, we tend to give weight to what we know and what data
| we're looking at. Most of the SAT/ACT analyses out there are
| looking across all students. Here, MIT is looking at just their
| proportion of students. So, both things can be true - the SAT/ACT
| may not be a useful predictor for the vast majority of students.
| But scores can (and do) matter for the highest performers, the
| approximately 1% of high school graduates attending the most
| selective colleges.
|
| And as MIT states, a perfect SAT/ACT score doesn't matter all
| that much. All they're using the scores for is to provide an
| indication of whether the student is above their bar for being
| able to do the work (e.g., not failing multivariable calculus).
|
| Note: I did go to MIT - some of you may think this is relevant. I
| also run the largest college essay coaching company globally,
| Prompt.com. So I've spent a lot of time understanding college
| admissions.
| MiroF wrote:
| > Harvard considers roughly 4 in 5 applicants to be
| academically capable of doing the work at Harvard
|
| I have no doubt that this is true of Harvard. I mean, after
| all, you can pick your own classes! That said, I think there
| _is_ a difference between admitting just those capable of doing
| the work vs. a set of some of the best of the best, in that
| that second group will be the one filling the advanced physics
| classes for first years or whatever.
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