8 ms·

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 standardize

• 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.
  • danielg6 7y ago
    Exactly. I took all of the AP equivalents of the SAT2s senior year before starting at MIT. It seemed pointless. And my parents paid for each one. Edit: I meant I took the SAT subject tests along with their AP equivalents.
    • snazz 7y ago
      Aren't the AP tests far more difficult than the SAT subject tests? That's what I remember at least for chemistry (maybe?) back when I took both exams.
      • lonelappde 7y ago
        Yes, AP is college level, and SAT is high school level.
      • danielg6 7y ago
        To clarify, I meant to say “along with”. I took the APs and their SAT subject equivalents
        • danielg6 7y ago
          Also, I wouldn’t necessarily agree that AP exams are more difficult than the SAT subject tests. School curriculum is not uniform. In fact, in my high school the material for certain SAT subjects tests was _only_ taught in AP classes.
  • ummwhat 7y ago
    My school had a deal where when you signed up for an AP class you had to take the AP test. But if you pass the AP test (3 or higher) the school would reimburse you. I took 5 tests and never paid for one. Including the one where we didn't have a teacher for half a year (long story). I think this is the fairest way to do it. If you got talent but no money, the opportunity is still there.
    • 7y ago
• bsanr2 7y ago
  While I agree, let's acknowledge the fair critique from the end that is not, "Keeping high-achieving Asian kids out": the part where the tests themselves cost money parents (and school systems) don't have; the part where the study guide in and of itself is not enough to prepare for these exams, leaving us the true, astronomical cost of preparation; the part where this is all begging the question of what admissions tests are for anyway (generally, the same things poll taxes and quizzes were for). I agree that the answer is the base SAT, but with an addition of a lottery past a point threshold. Luck (of birth) got us into this mess, and luck could get us out.
  • Yhippa 7y ago
    > Luck (of birth) got us into this mess, and luck could get us out. I'm all in favor of adding some kind of RNG to this process. The overpreparation of the wealthy in all kinds of aspects of admissions gives them a big advantage over those who don't. RNG evens it out.
    • smilekzs 7y ago
      I disagree. A raffle system, while inevitable in some cases (H-1B lottery comes to mind), is totally inappropriate when applied to a standardized test. Quite on the contrary, a standardized test aims to measure capability (however abstract it is), not luck.
      • mywittyname 7y ago
        I think it's perfectly reasonable to go with a lottery system after some point. Most people with a ACT over ~30 are going to be completely capable of performing the coursework for an undergraduate degree at MIT. And anyone with a perfect score is going to be fine anyway. There are plenty of world-class institutions in the USA that would be more than happy to accept these peopl.
        • alasdair_ 7y ago
          >I think it's perfectly reasonable to go with a lottery system after some point. Only the wealthy can afford to apply to every single "prestige" college and university available. A lottery where some people get twenty tickets and others get one or two seems just as silly.
• thebradbain 7y ago
  The tests don't not work (I believe that within the middle of bell-curve they accomplish their goal well), but at the extremes they are prone to gamification, especially to those in the know. For example, the pre-2017 SAT had some well known (and some lesser known) tricks that you would only know by studying the test, rather than the material: - ALL sections (and sub-sections) have questions that strictly increase in difficulty / projected "miss-rate" as time goes on. This is to keep test takers from coming back to answers they're unsure about but may themselves know how to solve -- so if you find yourself struggling with questions in a row, it's better to stop and go back rather than miss out on what you may already know trying to solve questions that you don't. For the reading section, the scale is scoped to each passage. For the vocab section, where there are 3 sections (vocab, grammar, and multiple-choice fill in the blank), the scale is scoped to each subsection. For the math section, it is scoped to the whole thing. - The "Free Section" (e.g. the one that doesn't count toward your score, which instructors tell you before you start that section, so you can use it as a break if you wish) is usually section 4 or 5 of the test, to help plan your breaks. Some students, not previously-knowing or confused that the "free section" is ungraded, still take it thinking there must be a penalty of some sort. - The word "equivocal" is tested within the SAT Vocab in around 60% of tests. Unequivocally, these questions have some of the highest wrong-rates of any question on the test. - Within the grammar questions, Choice (e) "None of the above" is 99% of the time NEVER the answer. This is one of the most certain things on the test. - The math questions will usually have (1) answer that is an outlier. 95% of the time, this is not the correct answer; (2) will be similar to the correct answer in different ways; and (1) will be the correct answer (e.g., say you're supposed to subtract "x" by 5 to get to the real answer. The obviously fake one might be multiplied by 5. One of the slightly-wrong answers might have 5 added rather than subtracted, another might just be off by 1). If you're ever in doubt, you can drastically increase your chances at guessing on a question by picking the question "most similar" to all of the others -- something like 65% chance, rather than 25% in the naive case. - Again for math questions -- particularly the "word riddle" type ones -- the SAT will generally purposely pick questions that could have multiple seemingly-correct questions if you plug in 1, 2, 5, or 10 for the variables. 3 is almost always a safe bet, though I particularly liked to choose 7, because who thinks you'd ever choose to plug in 7. - The essay is funny. Per the SAT's own published rules, they are not graded on fact at all; purely rhetoric, vocabulary choice, and clarity. All of the prompts also usually include a historical figure or event of some sort -- you don't need to know anything about them other than what the prompt tells you, but a well-known and easy way to win points with the graders is to make up a fake quote from someone adjacent to the event / historical figure as a hook: e.g. "Disconsolate upon hearing the tragedy of [EVENT X], [FIGURE Y]'s au pair journaled 'His life was short, but his memory will last forever'. Previously unknown to historians until then, Y's au pair embodied Y's belief that [SOMETHING FROM THE PROMPT]. [then THESIS STATEMENT on 3rd or 4th sentence, always]." (this is an objectively wrong and terrible sentence that I would hate to read in any other context. This is, however, similar to the SAT's example of a top-tier intro). This is just the tip of the iceberg, too. It's a very predictable format and pattern (it has to be, as it's given multiple times during the same academic year; tests must be similar, lest one session of test takers do statistically significantly better than an equally-talented group which takes the test a month later) So yes, while I believe the SAT does attempt to test for knowledge, it's that same pursuit of a bell curve that makes it easily gamifiable for those who know the test and not the material -- who are, once again, usually already the wealthy and connected.
• mekoka 7y ago
  The premise of your answer is that MIT wants good "students" and "test takers". What if that's not what they want so much anymore? A test is supposed to be a metric, an indicator of something. But metrics tend to become target as soon as they're exposed. Maybe then they still remain an indicator of something, but not necessarily what they were originally intended to filter for. I understand that it might feel like the goalposts are being moved for people who optimize to score high on such metrics, but such is the nature of this type of games. That's also why search engine companies have to keep refining their algorithms.
  • lmm 7y ago
    MIT has an obvious incentive to admit rich, well-connected people, and an obvious incentive to maintain a reputation for admitting the most intelligent on merit. We should be sceptical of any changes they make that purport to be about getting more meritorious students, especially if those changes result in the admission of more rich, well-connected people.
  • barry-cotter 7y ago
    Good test takers are people who have learned things and know them well enough to pass a test on it. There are many kinds of test. The SAT is the kind designed by psychometricians, experts with Ph.D.s building on millions of man hours of research to make tests that are both valid and reliable, that predict success in college and are as close to ungameable as possible. MIT could drop the real SAT tomorrow and still fill its freshman class with valedictorians who captained their high school sports team and have ten AP 5s. Schools with fewer applicants have the SAT.
    • frequentnapper 7y ago
      >Good test takers are people who have learned things and know them well enough to pass a test on it. Tell that to the massive test prep industry. Many many years ago I took a trial SAT and scored around 1000. Then I took a Kaplan SAT prep course, and lo and behold after learning all the tricks scored a 1300 on a test SAT. Back then the test prep course cost > $1000. I had a car in high school, so I could drive to the test prep school in the evenings. Seems to me that people who prep for the tests (not necessarily learned things through high school) and are willing to spend time and money have a great margin of benefit. It's the same thing for tech interview prep industry. The ones who prep well for the interview, do well in the interview.
• _hardwaregeek 7y ago
  This is not entirely true. SAT scores can be used as ways to admit more privileged students, as they tend to have access to more test prep along with privileges such as extra time: > In 2010 three College Board researchers analyzed data from more than 150,000 students who took the SAT, and they found that the demographics of the two “discrepant” groups differed substantially. The students with the inflated SAT scores were more likely to be white or Asian than the students in the deflated-SAT group, and they were much more likely to be male. Their families were also much better off. Compared with the students with the deflated SAT scores, the inflated-SAT students were more than twice as likely to have parents who earned more than $100,000 a year and more than twice as likely to have parents with graduate degrees. These were the students — the only students — who were getting an advantage in admissions from the SAT. And they were exactly the kind of students that Trinity was admitting in such large numbers in the years before Pérez arrived. > By contrast, according to the College Board’s demographic analysis, students in the deflated-SAT group, the ones whose SAT scores were significantly lower than their high school grades would have predicted, were twice as likely to be black as students in the inflated-SAT group, nearly twice as likely to be female and almost three times as likely to be Hispanic. They were three times as likely as students in the inflated-SAT group to have parents who earned less than $30,000 a year, and they were almost three times as likely to have parents who hadn’t attended college. They were the students — the only students — whose college chances suffered when admissions offices considered the SAT in addition to high school grades. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/10/magazine/college-admissions-paul-tough.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/10/magazine/coll... The article goes on to explain that while grade point average is relatively consistent across income level, SAT scores are skewed towards the rich. Schools have realized this, which is why many schools no longer require the SAT or ACT.
  • graeme 7y ago
    Does that study control for school quality? If grades are normalized for a local school population, then good grades at one school can be worse than mediocre grades at another school. This was exactly the purpose for which tests like the SAT were created. If that factor wasn’t controlled for, then the quote above is misleading.
  • deleted 7y ago
• JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  > Standardized testing significantly levels the playing field for students across income brackets. There's a correlation between parental income and SAT scores. “[S]tudents from families earning more than $200,000 a year average a combined score of 1,714, while students from families earning under $20,000 a year average a combined score of 1,326.” https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/03/rich-students-get-better-sat-scores-heres-why.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/03/rich-students-get-better-sat... An "equalizing effect" would imply students of both parental income groups would have the same score.
  • freepor 7y ago
    But there’s a much greater correlation between parental income and other measures you could use to evaluate applicants. Even height has parental income correlation, you can‘t eliminate it completely.
  • tristor 7y ago
    There's a correlation between parental income and IQ scores too. There's also a correlation between parental income and GPA. It's just a correlation, though, and it does not follow that a good standardized test would result in the average score would match across different parental income groups. Just because a test is standardized doesn't mean it completely eliminates all confounding factors outside of the test, but it does mitigate some of them. Equality and equity aren't the same thing. Certainly, without reliance on standardized testing I'm somehow certain that Braden who got a helicopter pilot's license at 16 so he could fly the family helo from Manhattan to Westchester is going to do better in admissions than Tyrone who excelled in academics and was lucky enough to attend a technology magnet school, but grew up in the projects and had no access to anything outside of what school and the library provided. With SAT tests included, the fact Braden made a 1530 and Tyrone made a 1970 plays a factor. That's what folks are saying.