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Most of this is to obscure their admission criteria. Harvard has come under fire for actively discriminating against Asian applicants. By removing a standard te
by codingslave 7y ago
Most of this is to obscure their admission criteria. Harvard has come under fire for actively discriminating against Asian applicants. By removing a standard test, these colleges can actively discriminate whilst making it more difficult to prove admissions bias from a numerical and arguably more objective standard.
- krastanov 7y agoThey are removing the extra optional tests, not the main SAT test. Sounds great to me, as these extra tests just show you have the money to take them. Your comment is an unfounded opinion, please do not present it with the certainty of a fact.
- lainga 7y agoThe first sentence of GP was, but the second statement was fact, and the third a description of a plausible possibility.
- metalforever 7y agoLow income students get a fee waiver
- gnicholas 7y agoThe SAT IIs are not extra/optional if you're applying to most selective colleges/universities. They aren't the main SAT, but they are far from optional for students who would be considering MIT.
- tryptophan 7y agoSee also the recent restructuring of the SAT, which changed the scoring so more people have perfect/high scores. Harvard et al can now pick from a wider pool and still claim they have the "best and brightest".
- DiogenesKynikos 7y agoThere's been a similar debate over subject GREs in my field. The argument has been made that subject GREs are racist/sexist, because of the differing distributions of test scores in different demographic groups. There is a strong social pressure to accept this argument, despite its obvious absurdity, leading most people in the field to do so (and if they disagreed, they probably wouldn't tell you). The problem is that graduate school admissions committees are left with very few quantitative measures. Undergrad grades are difficult to compare, because every university grades differently, and applicants come from different countries with completely different grading scales. So many people score perfectly on the quantitative GRE that it's nearly useless. The verbal GRE seems irrelevant to a scientific field, and it seems pointless to rule out international applicants because they don't know the meaning of the word "garrulous." In short, the subject GRE was one of the only uniform quantitative measures available to admissions committees, and now it's considered "racist." There upshot, ironically, is that the elimination of quantitative measures makes discrimination easier to hide. This discrimination is meant to be positive, helping increase representation of underrepresented groups. The applicants who suffer most from this policy are those who are just on the line between admission and rejection, and who don't come from the "correct" demographic. The people pushing these policies think they're changing the world for the better, but it sure looks unfair to the individuals they're denying entry to. Applicants are being treated as representatives of their race or gender, rather than as individuals who should be considered individually.
- jimmyvalmer 7y agoMIT's grad schools jettisoned GRE consideration a while ago. As you say, the GRE quant is trivial by MIT's standards, and the GRE verbal largely irrelevant. It's fairly easy to spot the "heavy-hitters" just from recommendations, undergraduate publication record, thesis, and GPA. In short, MIT and its elite cohort (CMU, Caltech, etc.) only accept undergrads who found their way into their professor's research groups -- this feat in and of itself is a superior indicator.
- knzhou 7y agoAbsolutely! I have a lot more faith in grad admissions than undergrad, because there's so much more good signal. Unfortunately nothing like this is available when people are in high school.