4 ms·

How are they going to boil all this down to a single number? So ridiculous. All these pseudoscientific people have taken the comfy position of unaccountable ga

How are they going to boil all this down to a single number? So ridiculous. All these pseudoscientific people have taken the comfy position of unaccountable gatekeepers. Society's true vultures.

dangerbird2 7y ago
I mean, the reason of the SAT's existence is the convenience of boiling down one's entire academic experience into one number. Perhaps the real problem is that university admissions allow the dualopoly of College Board and ACT control the academic fates of the nation's students with no public accountability.
- colechristensen 7y ago
  A university has to reduce a person down to a binary decision to admit or not, not much of a way around that.
  - shriphani 7y ago
    It is different when college board does it. When a university makes that decision, that is the student pool they are going to bring in and they take the risk with their graduation stats, employment stats and failure rates. When college board does it, they have literally zero skin in the game. They bill both the prospective student and the institution, produce this arbitrary number and there is no penalty for getting it wrong since they can just move the goalposts and declare success.
  - lazyasciiart 7y ago
    Set a standard (SAT score, whatever) and say that students who meet that standard should be capable enough to admit. Then pick randomly from among the applicants who meet your standard. Sounds fair, right?
thatfrenchguy 7y ago
And they’re a private company too !
avocado4 7y ago
I think this is simply a service for universities to easily get info which they already estimate manually. Some colleges will like and use this service, others (schools who already have systems in place to measure these disadvantage points) won't.
- shriphani 7y ago
  With a number like this the typical outcome is that it becomes a factor in a school's US News ranking (average adversity score of incoming class for example). At that point a cottage industry is formed around this metric.

How are they going to boil all this down to a single number? So ridiculous. All these pseudoscientific people have taken the comfy position of unaccountable gatekeepers. Society's true vultures.

dangerbird2 7y ago

I mean, the reason of the SAT's existence is the convenience of boiling down one's entire academic experience into one number. Perhaps the real problem is that university admissions allow the dualopoly of College Board and ACT control the academic fates of the nation's students with no public accountability.

colechristensen 7y ago
A university has to reduce a person down to a binary decision to admit or not, not much of a way around that.
- shriphani 7y ago
  It is different when college board does it. When a university makes that decision, that is the student pool they are going to bring in and they take the risk with their graduation stats, employment stats and failure rates. When college board does it, they have literally zero skin in the game. They bill both the prospective student and the institution, produce this arbitrary number and there is no penalty for getting it wrong since they can just move the goalposts and declare success.
- lazyasciiart 7y ago
  Set a standard (SAT score, whatever) and say that students who meet that standard should be capable enough to admit. Then pick randomly from among the applicants who meet your standard. Sounds fair, right?

thatfrenchguy 7y ago

And they’re a private company too !

avocado4 7y ago

I think this is simply a service for universities to easily get info which they already estimate manually. Some colleges will like and use this service, others (schools who already have systems in place to measure these disadvantage points) won't.

shriphani 7y ago
With a number like this the typical outcome is that it becomes a factor in a school's US News ranking (average adversity score of incoming class for example). At that point a cottage industry is formed around this metric.