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Why does a university have a personality test?
by ganzuul 8y ago
Why does a university have a personality test?
- Someone1234 8y agoThat's how you maintain a certain reputation, create a harmonious atmosphere where nobody who would rock the boat gets in.
- Nimitz14 8y agoSeems to me they're doing it to achieve the opposite effect (Asians are stereotypically the most docile).
- _jal 8y agoBecause they want something that provides a subjective element for making decisions. Admissions is high-stakes for everyone, including Harvard. Having some opaque, non-mechanical criteria lets them pick and choose without giving as much of a lever to lawyers.
- ed_balls 8y agoBut why they need it?
- cascom 8y agoTheoretically - so they can decide between two students that both had 4.0 GPAs, perfect SAT scores, and were class presidents, etc. Cynically - it gives them cover to manage to "other goals" and chalking it up to a subjective measure that can't be proved/disproved
- xapata 8y agoMany organizations create processes that are essentially random number generators. It allows bureaucrats to insert their personal preferences under a veneer of technocracy. Hang out at a corporate budget allocation meeting sometime.
- ganzuul 8y agoI wonder if the processes are created for that purpose, or if that is just how they end up getting used.
- xapata 8y agoUsually an accident, or unconscious. In this case, I suspect intentional. It's pretty common for someone with good intentions to institute a policy for deciding what they thought was previously disorganized and substandard. Instead, all they've done is create a way for powerful people to hide their choices behind the "objective" policy. The trick is that the folks in power control the inputs, even if they don't control the algorithm. As a management consultant, the client boss didn't tell me what to say, but they decided who I could talk to. Note the current trend in machine learning. Imagine if Harvard had fed its past admissions into an artificial neural network! Maybe they could have hid behind that back box.
- dv_dt 8y agoI suspect all of the above
- tozeur 8y agoBecause every applicant has the best grades and extracurriculars in the world, the only thing left to use for admissions is “How pleasant of a person is this student to be around?”
- ganzuul 8y agoThat is an acceptable answer, even if not a self-consistent one. Truly pleasant people would not have problems with the less socially adept ones.
- rb808 8y agoBecause future leaders aren't the ones with the best academic test scores.
- ganzuul 8y agoIn light of how academic testing is done, that might not be a bad thing on its own.
- throwaway37585 8y agoAnd who are?
- CompanionCuuube 8y agoSomeone with personality: "the guy you'd want to have a beer with"
- fapjacks 8y agoUnderrated comment of the century.
- mynameishere 8y agoIt's a cliche.
- fapjacks 8y agoYes, but its exceptionalism is its aptitude!
- vinceguidry 8y agoThe best way I've been able to find to think about this is the fundamental axiom of geopolitics, which is basically tribalism defined mathematically. People want to work with and help others who are closer to them, who they feel are neighbors, brothers. This gets more and more true the more money and resources you have. While you and I are more tribally identified with Asian Americans, America's upper crust considers them a threat. An elite university is a gateway into the upper crust, so it makes tribal sense for them to limit their access on grounds that to everyone else looks blatantly racist but doesn't really feel that way to them. If I had to wager a guess, I imagine that the upper crust justifies this morally by saying that without Harvard and other elite schools, no Asians would get to climb that ladder. And also to note that not even the paragons of democracy, the Greeks, were immune to tribal identification and social stratification and racist policies to enforce them. Sparta was especially egregious in this regard. From Harvard's perspective, in order to maintain their prestigious reputation, they have to cater to the tribal whims of the upper class, even if they don't want to. Otherwise Harvard, well, wouldn't be Harvard anymore, the prestige will move on to other universities that are willing to play ball. Remember, it's not us that determines Harvard's prestige status, it's the elites. Expect Harvard to dream up an endless array of subjective metrics that pay lip service to inclusivity while in practice serving exclusive goals. I believe that if we succeed in forcing an inclusivity agenda onto the Ivy League, then it'll just cause the elites to make even more ultra-exclusive educational institutions and send their kids there, revoking not just Harvard's, but the whole Ivy Leagues' cool card. While this will democratize Harvard, it will ultimately increase stratification and inequality. Tragedy of the commons writ large.
- fapjacks 8y agoI agree with you, but this is not a tragedy of the commons.
- vinceguidry 8y ago> The tragedy of the commons is a term used in social science to describe a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action. The Ivy League is a resource shared by both the commons and the elites. The belief stated at the end of my comment, that collective action taken to make Harvard more inclusive will inevitably strip it and all the other Ivy League schools of its vitality, will spoil that resource, forcing the elites to stop sending their kids there and snuffing the Ivy League's social ladder aspect out of existence. That's a classic case of a tragedy of the commons. It's both a tragedy, in that nobody wanted that outcome, and it's driven by the collective action of the commons.
- threatofrain 8y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/books/review/the-chosen-getting-in.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/books/review/the-chosen-g...