20 ms·

Anybody cheering the exclusion of some test or other, because it was a pain to study for in high school, is simply not noticing the frog-boiling secondary effec

• NeverFade 7y ago
  Agree completely. SAT isn't perfect or perfectly objective. No test is. As long as a test controls admission to a highly desirable school, there will be exorbitantly expensive courses for it. However, it is a far more objective test than the rest of the admission packet, and it's being dropped with no alternative. This will make admissions less fair, precisely because SAT is still a test that you can ace with discipline and hard work without much monetary investment, and it will be replaced by other criteria that actually requires more capital.
  • dwaltrip 7y ago
    To clarify, this announcement is only about the SAT subject tests.
    • NeverFade 7y ago
      For now.
      • brewdad 7y ago
        Given that there may be no SAT or ACT tests administered from March until ????, how will colleges deal with the class of 2021?
  • MiroF 7y ago
    Agreed. In my opinion, the best way to make admissions more fair is not to eliminate the SAT but to eliminate score choice.
    • pge 7y ago
      And eliminate legacy preference and ability for sports coaches to influence admissions.
      • WalterBright 7y ago
        I was rejected by MIT even though my father attended. I don't think MIT does legacy admissions, or sports admissions.
        • NikolaeVarius 7y ago
          legacy preference just gives you a +1, not guaranteed.
          • WalterBright 7y ago
            I applied to 10 ivy league universities, and was accepted by 3. It's reasonable to suppose that if MIT gave a +1 for legacy admits, I would have gotten the nod.
            • MiroF 7y ago
              that is not a reasonable assumption at all - it's a dice roll regardless. admission at one good school doesn't guarantee admission at another, even if you have legacy. (and is also highly dependent on which Ivies we're talking about - not all Ivies are HYP, which are more on par with MIT)
              • WalterBright 7y ago
                > that is not a reasonable assumption at all - it's a dice roll regardless. admission at one good school doesn't guarantee admission at another Saying "reasonable assumption" is not at all saying "guaranteed". Please stick to discussing ideas and not deliberately misinterpreting plain language.
  • commandlinefan 7y ago
    > SAT isn't perfect or perfectly objective But it is the closest thing anybody's ever come up with.
• swiley 7y ago
  >mean more advantage for smooth talking, photogenic, well-connected people. The whole point of the American University is to produce these kind of people so that shouldn’t be surprising. Otherwise you could earn a degree via self study proctored exams. Lack of objectivity during the application is a symptom not a cause.
  • bumby 7y ago
    Colleges have lost their monopoly on education but still hold the monopoly on accreditation. If we can figure out how to reduce that latter monopoly colleges will lose a lot of their power
  • jfengel 7y ago
    I'd like to see more people being able to take self-study proctored exams, for those fields that can do it. There's a lot to be said for what is essentially a vo-tech education. It's purely objective and very useful. That would leave a lot more space open in schools for creative work. That includes both academic research and the humanities, which are less objective but nonetheless valuable. As has been pointed out before, during the current health crisis, people turn to the arts: TV, books, podcasts, video games, etc. These are things that are hard to learn with self-study and impossible to test for -- except for the test of whether people will want to consume them. Even programmers eventually need at least some of this. A development team requires a lot of people trained at a purely vo-tech, objective level to be experts in the various technologies. But for a product to be successful, it also requires people who know what its users want, which is much harder to judge objectively, and harder to learn from a book. I believe too many programmers go to university to learn what they could learn on their own, or at a much less expensive school that doesn't try give a broad education. We need a lot of those, and employers make a mistake in rejecting people who don't have that university degree. Worse, even among those with that university degree, they test them purely on their objective skills, and then later complain that they produce ugly interfaces and write terribly.
• quotemstr 7y ago
  > Anybody cheering the exclusion of some test or other, because it was a pain to study for in high school, is simply not noticing the frog-boiling secondary effects going on. Every bit of emphasis taken out of objective results mean more advantage for smooth talking, photogenic, well-connected people. Absolutely right. Standardized testing become popular in the first place as an egalitarian measure, a way to combat inherited wealth and privilege. But wealth and privilege always want to propagate themselves to the next generation. Nowadays, we see rich parents paying crazy amounts of money to get their mediocre children into high-end schools, sometimes to the point of straight-up bribery [1]. They bribe crooked doctors into lying about their kids needing extra time on exams. After they get their mediocre kids into "top" schools, parents demand grade inflation. Once the kids graduate, they spend years supported by their parents in unpaid internships smarming their way into positions of power and influence unavailable to anyone who has to get paid to live. We have a thoroughly corrupt system that promotes stagnation, corruption, and incompetence. Standardized testing is extremely inconvenient for the kind of person who uses these dirty tricks. It's hard to buy a university enough libraries to cover up your kid's 1100 on the SAT. This whole push to deprecate standardized testing is just corruption justified with twisty self-serving rhetoric about fake justice. Only standardized testing should count toward university admission, because the only thing that matters is the competence of the next generation of decision-makers. We can only have a functioning society because good decisions get made, and status corruption damages society's ability to make good decisions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_bribery_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_briber...
  • knzhou 7y ago
    The bribery scandal especially depresses me, because a lot of the colleges impacted had official bribery systems in place -- you're supposed to donate to the "Development Office" to get on the "Dean's List", or some other set of euphemisms. What the colleges were actually outraged about is that these middling-rich people tried to cheap out by paying a smaller bribe to some other office.
    • ThrowawayR2 7y ago
      If someone donates enough money for a lab or an entire building or something that can be used by students for decades as a means to get their underperforming kid in, yeah, that's technically a bribe but I'm kind of okay with that because the good so vastly outweighs the bad.
• systemvoltage 7y ago
  College Prep is a giant business that needs to be dismantled. They have a monopoly in this area. IMO each college should be doing their own objective test. Definitely agree about subjective tests - smooth talkers will get ahead. But that's already the case in getting a job after they graduate - interviewing process is already broken.
  • psutor 7y ago
    Won't each college having to have their own test lead to many/most colleges, especially smaller ones, finding it easier or more cost effective to purchase their test from a central source, leading to some large College Board-like company making exams and a prep industry for that standard exam?
    • systemvoltage 7y ago
      I think it’s pretty insane that a single company is a gatekeeper to elite institutions. I’m honestly not sure of the solution, but the problem is pretty evident. College Prep could raise exam fees by 200% tomorrow and you have no law, no oversight from the government or anything preventing them from doing so. Absolute monopoly. They’re no different than professors in bed with book publishers, mandating a particular book for the course. Students need to spend $350 on a textbook is insanity.
      • filoleg 7y ago
        >I think it’s pretty insane that a single company is a gatekeeper to elite institutions. Not just elite institutions, I would say 99% of accredited institutions in the US. You would be hard pressed to find an accredited college program in the US that doesn't require either SAT or ACT (talking about the general test, not the subject ones). P.S. That 99% estimation is obviously made up, but I am yet to find a college that doesn't require an ACT or SAT score, and I applied to many different kinds of colleges in early 2010s (out of state, in-state, public, private, etc.), with almost none of them being MIT-tier elite.
  • MiroF 7y ago
• MisterBastahrd 7y ago
  Maybe if money weren't an obstacle for getting a good education, then we could actually have the best and brightest going to schools like these instead of just the most well-prepared because of family money and the advantage that wealth brings.
• nilkn 7y ago
  I think it's important to clarify that that SAT is not the same as the SAT Subject Tests. The latter are being excluded, but not the former. One could reasonably argue at this point that the Subject Tests are simply redundant with AP tests.
• dawg- 7y ago
  What you call a "smooth-talker" is what someone else would call an articulate, socially well-adjusted person who can communicate their values and opinions in an intelligent way and who is comfortable making connections with others. Perhaps if this was the standard college admissions used, public schools would have more incentive to educate students as functional humans rather than test-taking drones.
  • olalonde 7y ago
    > an articulate, socially well-adjusted person who can communicate their values and opinions in an intelligent way and who is comfortable making connections with others If there's any correlation with this and academic success, it's not necessarily a positive one. There's a grain of truth to the stereotype of "nerds" not having great people skills.
  • BurningFrog 7y ago
    Well, maybe. But being the kind of articulate person college people appreciate is also a strong cultural marker that you come from the "college tribe".
    • newen 7y ago
      Exactly. People don't talk about class enough in this topic. The kind of people that college interviewers appreciate (in terms of behavior) will almost always be upper middle class people and those who know enough to behave like upper middle class people.
      • lonelappde 7y ago
        That's not true anymore in the "diversity" era. Harvard just had a huge lawsuit about that.
  • j88439h84 7y ago
    Valuable point, I don't see this framing enough.
  • 7y ago
• fallingknife 7y ago
  But that's entirely the point. The people bitching about how the SAT isn't fair aren't smart poor people who are being beaten out by upper middle class losers, but rather upper middle class losers being beaten out by smart poor people. They tell themselves that the test isn't fair, but a part of them knows that they could never get into the 1500's even with all the prep in the world, so they try to get the admissions changed to a more bullshit-centric approach that they know favors them. And they say they are doing it to help the poor and disadvantaged to give themselves moral cover.
  • llcoolv 7y ago
    On top of that exam dumps are much less efficient when it comes to SAT IIs, where questions are much more diverse an subject knowledge is essential. SAT I is the one that is easy to game.
    • jzoch 7y ago
      Eh its all easily game-able. The SAT (and ACT) is a joke. So are the subject tests. The only subject test that wasn't laughable are the language ones (since you can't "intuit" spanish as easily as math or physics or chemistry). Its not bad if you are a good test taker (a dumb skill but a useful one) or wealthy. My friends were tutored idiots and did well (2200+ SAT, 700+ subject tests) and i was a good test taker (same scores). Its all garbage
      • knzhou 7y ago
        You're just bragging that you hit the ceiling on those tests. That doesn't mean tests don't work; if you wanted to, you could have found much harder ones. (That's what I did, out of necessity. They wouldn't have given my app a second look if I hadn't.)
      • mgkimsal 7y ago
        30 years ago, the ACT test changed enough that it was no longer a valid test to use as entry for Mensa. Prior to 1990, an ACT test could be used as evidence for Mensa admission. So... the ACT wasn't always 'a joke', but doesn't have the same impact that it had decades ago.
• BoiledCabbage 7y ago
  How is this comment upvoted? MIT has not removed the requirement to take SAT tests. > We will continue to require the SAT or the ACT, because our research has shown these tests, in combination with a student’s high school grades and coursework, are predictive of success in our challenging curriculum. This is typical of a knee-jerk reaction without even understanding their policy. Let alone reading the actual post. It's the answer to the very first question at the top of the post. I thought HN would do better than this.
  • RandallBrown 7y ago
    Probably because many (most?) people don't take or know about the subject tests. I thought I had never heard of them, but after looking at wikipedia, it looks like they were called the SAT II when I was in high school. I remember that existing, but never knew why you would take them and never knew anybody that did. It's not a stretch to imagine people being confused. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT_Subject_Tests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT_Subject_Tests
    • ghaff 7y ago
      And way back, they were apparently called the Achievement Tests. I vaguely remember taking a few but don't otherwise remember much about them or what the requirements were.
    • lonelappde 7y ago
      It's explicitly explained in the very short article. Yet somehow people lacking basic reading comprehension are en masse bemoaning the dumbing down of kids these days.
    • 80386 7y ago
      SAT IIs are pretty obscure, and I don't think there's any benefit to taking them over AP tests, since APs can sometimes be translated into college credits and have much more support in public schools. One of the points of metrics is to reduce the relevance of how savvy your parents are. But you have to have pretty savvy parents to take the SAT IIs. Metrics get a lot of heat from people who don't realize what the alternative is, but I know a guy who got into Harvard because his grandparents go to the same synagogue as some admissions people and called in a favor. _That's_ the alternative to metrics.
• Spooky23 7y ago
  SAT prep is bullshit that lets rich kids test prep their way up.
  • LanceH 7y ago
    SAT prep is largely a scam. Have kids take the test, mark the score. Do absolutely nothing. Kids take test again and naturally do better. Be a SAT prep company, do the above but insert yourself between tests and take the credit (and the money).
• austincheney 7y ago
  The problem with tests like the SAT is that on one hand they produce quantifiable results and the comparison of one student's score to another student's score is indeed objective, but that does not mean the test itself is an objective measure of performance. The primary fault is that the SAT is essentially a form of convergent IQ test. A convergent test is a test of questions with the accepted answered defined before the test attempt and comparing the test takers answers to the defined answers. This is convergent, or coming together, in that performance is measured against subjective, subject based (inferred acceptance), criteria. I understand the SAT is intended to be used as a measure of general scholarly assessment, but its primarily used as a discriminatory filter to limit access to a preferential segment. As such it is essentially an arbitrary IQ test in practice regardless of its intentions. In contrast IQ tests more generally preferred by the psychiatric community tend, almost exclusively, are divergent tests. A divergent test has questions without any prior identified answer and so there is not a simple right/wrong conclusion. Instead the tests generally seek out things like abstract reasoning, creativity, reasoning, answer diversity, and other aptitude performance criteria. In the few psychiatric administered aptitude tests I have taken I generally test a bit below the genius level. If on a numeric IQ scale genius is 150 or 155 I would be below that at 140 to 150 depending on the test and test criteria. The SAT, on the other hand, rated me as outstanding a math and reasoning but otherwise barely literate. Those SAT scores are clearly at odds with my real world performance and other test results. Confusing the potential for objectivity, such as comparing score results, to actual objectivity, such as whether the scores are a valid measure in the first place is a common error. The most common IQ test is the Stanford-Binet Test formed by Dr. Lewis Terman who made the same error: * https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beautiful-minds/200909/the-truth-about-the-termites https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beautiful-minds/2009... * https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-05-31-bk-1247-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-05-31-bk-1247-s...
  • knzhou 7y ago
    I'm sure the writers of the SAT are well aware of this, but full IQ tests just don't scale. How are you going to provide the same test ten million times a year, when the test has to be administered one-on-one by a trained professional over the course of hours? You're going to have to hire tens of thousands of administrators, so how are you going to keep bias from creeping in? How are you going to prevent the questions from leaking, or keep people from rehearsing scripts on the subjective parts? IQ tests have never dealt with these problems only because they haven't had to scale, not because they're immune to them.
• trentnix 7y ago
  Bingo. The less objective their evaluations are, the easier it will be to hide the cronyism, bribery, and racial bias. Going to be a lot easier to discriminate against Asian kids when you don’t have to notice their test scores are better than the kids you admitted.
  • pulisse 7y ago
    MIT isn't eliminating the SAT. They're not considering SAT subject tests, which are analogous to AP tests (which latter MIT will continue to consider).
    • thatiscool 7y ago
      today they eliminate SAT subject test, tomorrow MIT will eliminate regulart SAT test
• hintymad 7y ago
  Exactly. And it's worth reviewing how the so-called holistic admission process came to be: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in. TL;DR: it's not pretty. A process that lacks objectivity will enlarge inequality gap instead of reducing it. And in general, the more complex a process is, the less transparent it becomes, and the harder it is to be fair to everyone.
• hintymad 7y ago
  The problem of SAT is not that it can be prep'd, but it is too easy to be differentiating, and too simple so people can game it. By the way, isn't depending on SAT for years and everyone bitching about SAT is a gross failure of our education system? Take any serious test, be it STEM competitions, JEE, or NCEE, multiple-choice questions are the easiest part. The differentiating questions are all kinds of word problems. Yet the US can't afford such test, but countries like India and China can. And why do people in the US, the most developed and the richest country in the world, complain that people can prep the SAT. It's truly a shame. In countries like China, it is public schools that produce the best students. It is the public schools that set high standards for the country. It is the public schools that come up with amazing text books and problem sets. Tutoring in China is joke. Classes offered by public schools are legendary. Something is wrong in the US.
  • knzhou 7y ago
    > By the way, isn't depending on SAT for years and everyone bitching about SAT is a gross failure of our education system? Take any serious test, be it STEM competitions, JEE, or NCEE, multiple-choice questions are the easiest part. The differentiating questions are all kinds of word problems. Yet the US can't afford such test, but countries like India and China can. We do have this kind of system in place, I'm closely involved in it. The Olympiads in the US basically fill the vacuum of objective assessment at a high level. The entry round for each Olympiad is pretty similar in level to, e.g. what you would get in JEE-Advanced. But they're also far less popular...
    • hintymad 7y ago
      Yeah, the Olympiad in the US is well organized. Probably the best in the world. I'm more concerned with the middle tier, to which the majority of the students belong. The best students in the US have access to vast resources, the academically challenged students do not feel the same harsh pressure as kids in other countries do. It is the middle majority that suffer from insufficient training.
  • underpand 7y ago
    It's hard enough such that schools have to lower their SAT standards to accept underrepresented minorities. Otherwise, for non-URMs, the top schools do agree with you. SAT (and school GPA) are usually used in threshold-y way with other factors mattering more.
• gedy 7y ago
  > mean more advantage for smooth talking, photogenic, well-connected people. But see it's all okay if those smooth talking, photogenic, well-connected elites are more diverse in race/gender/etc
• jldugger 7y ago
  IMO, the subject tests are kind of a niche environment. You can't prep for them with the $20 official book and there are like 20 of them. (Also Amazon lists it for 30 but we get the point). You basically need to go to a school where they offer AP coursework, and pay something close to $100 bucks to the College Board to take subject tests. When I was doing college search, the only college I recall that requested these subject tests was MIT.
  • leetcrew 7y ago
    note that the SAT subject tests are actually different from AP tests. when I was applying to college, a smart kid from the regular section of <subject> could expect to do fairly well on the SAT subject test for that topic. the AP tests ask questions on material that isn't typically covered in the regular classes, so it's hard to do well on them if you haven't taken the AP course or done a lot of extracurricular study.
    • jldugger 7y ago
      TIL. Never took one.
    • saagarjha 7y ago
      Depends on the AP exam.
• beepboopbeep 7y ago
  I did well on the SATs because there is a method to taking the tests that is agnostic of the underlying knowledge. I was only able to learn that because I could afford the classes. The SAT is a silly game.
• quartzite 7y ago
  This is exactly correct. Those who fight for fair admissions on the basis of intellectual ability and academic potential should hold up the SAT and standardized testing as a cornerstone of the admissions process. Standardized testing significantly levels the playing field for students across income brackets. Returns on study investment quickly diminish, and reaching a plateau on returns doesn't require much investment at all (internet connection and the purchase of a few large study manuals). At my high school in sophomore year I remember speaking with a wealthy friend whose father had signed him up for flying lessons so he could "stand out in college admissions". There are many, many cases like this. Admissions should disregard such superficial peacocking and focus on metrics like the SAT that disentangle intellectual and academic potential from wealth.
  • aitait 7y ago
    "Admissions should disregard such superficial peacocking and focus on metrics like the SAT that disentangle intellectual and academic potential from wealth." Why? Not trying to troll here but you assume that intellectual potential leads to success. I remember reading an article - unfortunately I am not able to track it down/google it - that looked into exactly this issue. There were free US high school selecting on just intellectual ability and when they looked at the careers of the students they were far less successful in their careers than you would expect from such a selection. (What stood out was that they seem to be much happier than average persons). The counter example was Harvard that selected on many criteria. The article mentioned a guy getting rejected because he had "pig ears" (not the official rejection but a note taken in an interview or something). The unfortunate fact is that rich, famous, driven, well connected people will be the better selection of success than intellectual ability. George W Bush was unlikely a brilliant intellectual. Yet he went to the top schools and him becoming president showed that this was the right decision by the schools that took him.
  • bsder 7y ago
    I suspect this is just getting rid of redundancy. Everyone taking the SAT subject tests is probably taking the equivalent Advanced Placement test anyhow. However, the biggest problems with these tests (and the AP tests) is that they are expensive--they cost a non-trivial amount of money to sign up for and they cost a lot of time to prepare for if your school doesn't offer direct AP classes. The expensiveness is the barrier.
• mcnamaratw 7y ago
  In the press release MIT says they are still looking at SAT scores. What they say they stopped looking at is the "SAT subject tests." That's something like the old Achievement Tests.
• adtechperson 7y ago
  SAT scores is heavily correlated with income level (the data I have is for the standard tests, not the subject ones, but I would guess they follow a similar pattern). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280232788_Race_Poverty_and_SAT_Scores_Modeling_the_Influences_of_Family_Income_on_Black_and_White_High_School_Students'_SAT_Performance https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280232788_Race_Pove... I applaud the MIT decision in this area.
  • knzhou 7y ago
    And everything else I mentioned is correlated even more strongly.
    • pfranz 7y ago
      Is it? I've heard about the movement to make the SAT optional for years. The argument was that grades correlate with success much more than SAT scores. That SAT scores were how privileged were "gaming the system" because they could afford tutors, can take it multiple times, and appeal for phony disability claims allowing extra test taking time. I'm all for objective tests, but a single test mostly shows subject knowledge, not necessarily success. When I studied and took them, I always felt like it mostly evaluated standardized test-taking skills (which is a trained skill I feel many smart and successful people lack). It doesn't show anything if people cheat or if the process is gamed. I don't really have a strong opinion either way--this is just what I've gleaned from following the news over the past few years. Here's an article I found that mirrors what I've heard: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/03/19/is-it-finally-time-get-rid-sat-act-college-admissions-tests/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/03/19/is-it-fi...
• anthm1988 7y ago
  > smooth talking, photogenic, well-connected people. you mean the kind of people who have access to private tutors and SAT prep classes?
• danielg6 7y ago
  What’s the point in taking SAT Math 2, SAT Chem, and SAT Physics if you’re already sending scores for AP Calc/Stats/Comp Sci, AP Chem, and 3 different AP Physics lmao? I actually feel silly now for having done that.
• tehjoker 7y ago
  If only we could take the pressure off the need for a prestige college admission to guarantee that you won't suffer for decades...
• RedBeetDeadpool 7y ago
  Personally I feel most standardized tests, including the SAT can be gamed. If you have the right teacher or book or w/e you should be able to learn how to get a certain score. Granted a lot of people simply don't because they never learn the techniques properly. They should still take it into consideration, but more of as a baseline aptitude level, smart enough to actually get past a certain score, but it shouldn't be a ranking system based on performance on the test. More to weed anyone out who are so incompetent they can't figure out the basics. Like everyone above 75% mark should be considered equally, but people beyond that point aren't ranked based on their test scores. As in, if someone scores a perfect score but the only thing they've done is get good grades and get good test scores and someone else scores at the 75% mark but started a small business, or did something remarkable to help with a disaster, then the latter should take precedence in my book. After a certain point, IQ doesn't correlate with success either. Too much focus is placed on objective intelligence, when part of the objectivity is how well someone gamed it.
• walshemj 7y ago
  You mean average white middle class kids who have "smooth talking, photogenic, well-connected parents" who can pay for the tutoring? This is like the old Uk secondary Modern vs Grammar schools - but with the total destruction of the skilled vocational path. It interesting that if I had staying Birmingham (UK) my mum was keen to use family connections to get me into King Edwards :-) For those not familiar with the UK education hierarchy its always in the top 3 in the entire UK and was Tolkien's old school - Rich Thickos go to Eaton
• hyperpallium 7y ago
  So, over time, MIT researchers decrease in quality, and it loses prestige to other institutions, perhaps overseas, perhaps China. Instead, I think they will continue to try to evaluate genuine merit. SAT can be and is routinely gamed, through prep. You have to be truly outstanding to manage it alone.
• nicholas73 7y ago
  While I agree on the money aspect, other achievements provide more points of differentiation for top candidates. MIT likely is deciding amongst students with about perfect scores anyway. I had a bout of diarrhea during my SAT 2 Math (the harder one, whatever it's called) and still scored 780/800. I was a bit annoyed that one question put me down huge percentiles though, because you could miss like 10 questions and still get 800.
• plandis 7y ago
  Poor people can’t afford that $20 prep book, and they can’t afford the subject tests either. I worked in high school but that money went to my family to help pay for food/rent. Thankfully I had an amazing high school teacher who was willing to pay for the remainder on my AP tests (the company who administers the test has a reduced fee option). My SAT test was free though, never got to take a practice test or even knew that there was a practice test —- that’s the joy of being a first generation college graduate, I suppose. I agree about extra curricular activities. That just signals to colleges that your family is wealthy enough that you can afford to participate in terms of both time and money.
• sgustard 7y ago
  Here's a list of schools that are already "test optional." https://www.fairtest.org/university/optional https://www.fairtest.org/university/optional I leave it an exercise to the reader to decide if these schools are less egalitarian than (say) the Ivies, MIT or Stanford.
• adamsea 7y ago
  IMHO the SAT is no more objective than an essay, grades in school, or any of the other things you listed. What is the SAT objectively measuring? Not math. Not logic. Not writing ability. It's objectively measuring the ability to succeed at a timed test which involves some math, some logic, some verbal ability, and knowing how to "test well". I taught GRE test prep classes for Kaplan for a year or two. What I observed was: - To do well even the bright folks had to block out time and apply study skills, be organized, and "learn the test." - This means having the time to do those things. - Time allocated for test prep and study was a better predictor of success than almost anything else. - Yes, some people who were naturally better at certain things had it easier, but that did not obviate the above. My conclusion for the GRE at least was that it primarily measured the time available to prepare, the study skills of the student, and the test prep resources the student had access to.
  • knzhou 7y ago
    What's "objective" about the SAT is that, at the very least, different people are being made to take the same test. Contrast that with the essay: it looks like the same task (everybody gets 500 words), but for poor kids this task looks like writing an essay, while for rich kids it looks like shopping for the best college counselor to write the essay. At the very least, given an SAT score, I can know that somebody worked alone for 4 hours with a No. 2 pencil to get it... that's more than any other indicator can guarantee.
• ISO-morphism 7y ago
  I agree with this comment. I grew up in a rural area of the midwest. There were no AP courses, let alone robotics or opportunities for international volunteer work. I worked through high school to help keep the pantry stocked above levels that required some figurin'. I didn't apply for scholarships, didn't think about where I was going or what I was going to do, I was worried about other things. My high standardized test scores got me noticed by schools and names that meant something to me. I might not have ended up at MIT, but standardized tests gave me perspective that it wasn't just that I was "good at school" compared to my rural peers, but that truly I did have a shot at these places.
• CalRobert 7y ago
  The SAT is a useful bullshit filter. I graded a physics class in college and the number of students wanting 50%+ credit for a wrong answer "because they tried" was high.
• jfkroo8 7y ago
  Because decades of education needed to be at a level for even considering an SAT is a poor mans normal. SATs are one of the original “My parents bought me a better education.” filters our culture came up with. You’re just defending what’s normal to you but the same concern has been raised over SATs. Let’s not pretend you’ve stumbled upon a lynchpin we’d all overlooked. People bending over to work for money not their own interests has enabled the overall problem you’re highlighting. Yep now there’s a lot of money out there to be used to by our way into shit! Don’t be naive. You don’t want filters like this you need to rethink your life and who you’re giving your agency to.