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I know some people protest measures that are considered more "objective" over measures that are more "holistic", whether this is in school admittance, performan

• andi999 6y ago
  If one leaves out the 'what is fair' part, then it is ok (and probably best for society) that a student gets favored who can learn/absorb the material (no matter how).
• anon102010 6y ago
  I didn't have a tutor, I got relatively bad grades in school (was boared?) - SAT was a game changer for me - got me into a good school -> learned some stuff -> making great money. The question is not, is the SAT bad, it is, what about the new system will be better and fairer. The other factor - this is likely a way to reduce asian american attendance at the top UC schools. The Harvard case really revealed how legacy admits etc came in with MUCH lower scores. Same thing with the scandal around sports admits, a way to get in with MUCH lower SAT scores. I'm not against either, but getting away from SAT will help hide this fact (ie, big donor gets kid in even if they are 200 points lower than average).
  • applecrazy 6y ago
    > this is likely a way to reduce asian american attendance at the top UC schools This is exactly what I was thinking when I read the Times article about this yesterday. I also applied to college last year, so I have a pretty recent knowledge of the process. I spent a grand total of $28 and managed to get a 99th percentile score on the SAT. To claim it’s impossible to score high on that test without money is absolutely false. There are many free or low-cost resources out there, including Collegeboard sponsored Khan Academy prep (free for everyone). All it really requires is time and discipline (as do other things in life). Sure, it’s not perfect, but GPA and extracurriculars can vary vastly across schools, and the SAT provides a pretty good indicator of one’s academic ability in comparison to others. The supreme irony in my case is that I go to a school in Texas for completely free thanks to merit scholarships funded in part by Texas taxpayers, while the schools in my state (California) are charging $30k per year despite being funded by my parents’ taxes. Basically, going out of state was more affordable in my situation.
    • zamfi 6y ago
      > I spent a grand total of $28 and managed to get a 99th percentile score on the SAT. To claim it’s impossible to score high on that test without money is absolutely false. No one is claiming it's "impossible", and I don't want to minimize your experience -- 20 years ago, I also scored 99th percentile on the SAT with only $15 spent on practice books -- but it's absolutely not the norm. The reality is that a SAT scores correlate with wealth. Both directly, in that while you and I may not need tutoring to improve our scores, there are also millions of kids out there who do benefit from expensive tutoring, and millions of kids who would benefit, but don't because they can't afford it. But also indirectly: I'd be willing to bet you don't come from a low-SES background: i.e., living in poverty, unable to afford basic needs, parents or guardians infrequently present, with unsteady income, etc. (For the record, I don't have this background.) If I'm wrong about your background, you are truly an exception, not merely in the 1% of SAT scorers. Using the SAT in college admissions means that admissions is biasing -- at the margins -- towards, of those students who would benefit from expensive tutoring, the subset who can afford it.
      • applecrazy 6y ago
        > I'd be willing to bet you don't come from a low-SES background That’s true, I don’t. I come from a middle-class background (at least, what counts for middle class in CA) > Using the SAT in college admissions means that admissions is biasing -- at the margins I agree with you here. However, removing the SAT requirement does little to improve the status quo. I’ve personally seen parents do things like move their kids to different schools so that a bad semester grade wouldn’t stick on their transcript, and of course, rich parents funding/helping establish startups and nonprofits that their kids claim they founded/ran for college application purposes. The truth is, having a good GPA or resume is more likely to get you in, and some of the more impressive/rare “accomplishments” that students like to tout in their activity summaries and essays are simply unavailable to lower income students, making it harder for them to appear competitive to an admissions committee.
        • zamfi 6y ago
          > The truth is, having a good GPA or resume is more likely to get you in, and some of the more impressive/rare “accomplishments” that students like to tout in their activity summaries and essays are simply unavailable to lower income students, making it harder for them to appear competitive to an admissions committee. Yes, but admissions officers know this, so I don't think the inability of students whose parents don't found startups for them to play with is really that much of a hit. In reality, if all else is equal, a student from a low-SES background has a much better shot at admission -- because doing all those upper-middle-class college-signaling things is much harder when you're not upper-middle-class, and thus much more impressive because it indicates a level of ability above and beyond the equivalent upper-middle-class student. I posted about this elsewhere in the thread, but admissions committees are not actually trying to optimize over the set of various typical middle-class college-aspirational things -- they are trying to optimize for success & fit both in college and post-college, so they'll students in the incoming class will become good friends, have fond feelings, and bring both financial and prestige rewards to the university. They don't care -- and shouldn't care -- who can perform the motions the best.
• awillen 6y ago
  Yeah, I agree with this 100% - these students are going to be compared to each other somehow, and it's always going to be imperfect and favor those who are better off. Still, these tests are at least relatively objective, and if you remove them the kids will be compared with less objective measures that allow for more bias to be introduced. The SAT/ACT are the worst form of college admission criteria very much in the same way that democracy is the worst form of government... except for all the others. A lot of people criticize them, but those critics haven't come up with anything better.
  • Shoue 6y ago
    Finland, often touted as the best in education, does not use SAT. The same can be said for many other European countries with excellent education. Are you implying there is no correlation? Have you looked at their systems before making a claim such as "haven't come up with anything better"?
    • MattGaiser 6y ago
      Finland has its own national exam. Many European countries have something like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriculation_exam_(Finland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriculation_exam_(Finland)
    • Rebelgecko 6y ago
      Would you mind explaining the difference? From a perfunctory search online it looks like Finland also has a system of university entrance exams (although of course theirs aren't called the SAT)
    • awillen 6y ago
      I'm obviously speaking about the SAT/ACT in the context of the US system. The entire Finnish education system is extremely different than the one in the US - to say that they don't use the SAT and have better educational outcomes while ignoring everything else is just not a valid comparison. It would be equally valid to say "Finland teaches school in Finnish and they have better outcomes, so we should be teaching school in Finnish!"
• mc32 6y ago
  One thing I’d like to see is freezing grade inflation. A more normal distribution curve for grades rather than an abnormal amount being rated A/A+.
  • jdashg 6y ago
    You can't without standardized metrics, is the problem! If no one's failing, must someone always get a D?
    • mc32 6y ago
      Not in a given class, but across all instances of that class, surely it will be more normal.
      • barry-cotter 6y ago
        Not if the population is not a random sample. Cal Tech admits would have no problem doing a two year A.S. in CS in one semester. Doesn’t mean you can expect the same of the average community college student. A highly selected student population could easily have the worst student in class at Harvard doing better than the best student at Directional State U.
  • henryfjordan 6y ago
    I think that universities can normalize a student's grades using their high school's distribution to level playing field amongst all schools, meaning the grade inflation isn't even working. The UC system is going to have more than enough data to figure out those distributions.
    • MattGaiser 6y ago
      Plenty of schools fiddle with that or just refuse to provide the data.
  • danhak 6y ago
    Why does this make any sense? Generally speaking, students at top universities are intelligent and hard-working. Their talent is not normally distributed, and this is increasingly the case as admissions becomes hyper-competitive. Not to mention, students self-select into courses to which they are most suited and likely to perform well. If all students in a particular class master the subject matter, why should some students be forced to receive failing grades? Should the purpose of higher education be to rank students on increasingly marginal criteria or to...educate?
• resfirestar 6y ago
  I worry that "holistic" admissions in universities with highly competitive admissions are already disadvantaging groups that aren't culturally aligned with university administrators and their donors: Asian Americans, people from the South and rural areas regardless of race, and people brought up in religious households where most time spent on "extracurricular activities" is church-related. I personally think that people pushing against standardized tests and for holistic admissions have good intentions and aren't trying to systemically ensure that all students at prestigious and elite universities in the US talk, think, and act like them, but I can't blame anyone for thinking so. And I worry that will be the main result while the inequities they seek to fix will be obscured rather than improved.
  • jeffbee 6y ago
    Did you just claim that Asian Americans are disadvantaged by UC admissions?
    • resfirestar 6y ago
      No, I referred to the broad category of "universities with highly competitive admissions". More of those are on the east coast than the west coast. California is a bit of an outlier in the US in both Asian American population and integration, so maybe UC is better and they'll be able to do away with standardized tests without hurting Asians too much. Anecdotally, though, people I know who grew up in California tend to think that UC lets in too many rich mainland Chinese and not enough from the large but poor and less integrated (vs. Vietnamese and Koreans) Filipino and Lao populations. Not sure how true that is, and I don't think UC records demographic info that granular, but as I mentioned the perception matters.
    • barry-cotter 6y ago
      > Part of the Mare report -- obtained by Sander through an open-records request -- looks at applicants by race/ethnicity for several years, noting those who -- all other factors being equal -- would have been admitted based on standard criteria. Over a five-year period, he notes that more than 1,300 Asian American applicants in this group were denied admission, while black and Latino applicants were admitted. https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2018/11/19/new-lawsuit-suggests-u-california-has-been-considering-race-admissions https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2018/11/19...
• seph-reed 6y ago
  Crazy idea: What would happen if there was a circulating board of "shit testers" who each had their own very explicit, formal, and pre-meditated method which they had to apply equally to all people they were judging? The intentional net effect being something like a pool of unpredictable ever-changing criteria that pokes at person from all sides to see whether or not they're a polished turd. I think if it worked it would introduce a lot of chaos, but it would also be (hopefully) extremely difficult to game.
• slg 6y ago
  I don't have WSJ subscription, but the part that cuts off right before the paywall says they are creating their own test. Maybe the hope is that they can create a test with less biases, but I have little optimism for a system that replaces two standardized and widely used tests with each school system creating their own versions as a replacement. This will make the process more complicated for all applicants and might inadvertently increase the advantage that wealthy have as now each school's test would need a different approach requiring more individualized and therefore more expensive prep.
  • eej71 6y ago
    Exactly. "Creating their own test". Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
    • slg 6y ago
      Except if most other schools follow this path, the average student will go from 1 boss to 5+. That end result would almost unquestionably be worse for the kids this is trying to help.
      • eej71 6y ago
        Very much agree. Of course this will drive up the cost of these elite prep programs because you'll need to find one that has the capability to summarize so many different tests and provide essentialized coaching. That won't come cheap. So only the very wealthy will have the means for this. Another fine piece of work brought to us by the good intentions paving company.
• TuringNYC 6y ago
  "Holistic" often ends up meaning "I'll make up the rules, and you dont get to know what the rules are" I'd rather take my chances on an unfair system with open rules than on an unfair system with opaque rules. Edit: spelling
  • caseysoftware 6y ago
    > I'd rather take my changes on an unfair system with open rules than on an unfair system with opaque rules. I think this is a perfect summary. No system is perfect but at least the flaws are consistent and well-known, not subject to the whims of a particular group on a particular day.
    • rgblambda 6y ago
      While I would personally take the unfair system with open rules, the system with opaque rules has an advantage in that it's more difficult to game the system. With open rules, you work off a formula for maximising your chances, which may defeat the purpose of the system.
      • TuringNYC 6y ago
        I'm a bit confused - how is prepping and/or studying for the SAT "gaming the system"? I realize SATs are not a prefect reflection of learning, and I also recognize we can make the tests better and better -- but -- what better system is there to gauge learning across millions of people in a consistent manner? I'm honestly interested in some measure that is better, and isnt subject to corruption and whims of the few and stacked in favour of the 1%. >> opaque rules has an advantage in that it's more difficult to game the system You are right that with opaque rules, you cannot study your way into college anymore -- because it will depend on who you know, which charitable boards your parents are part of, which civic organizations you support, how good your sports videos are choreographed, how good an essay writer you hire for your college application, how genuine your weekend "service trip to country x" photos look, etc. When you get rid of tests and replace them with opaque measures that is the sort of gaming you end up with -- and that seems like a far worse type of gaming. I'm comfortably middle class, studying way into a good college from below poverty. Prep books on weekends for 2yrs. I realize it is hard, it isn't fair -- but I dont want to replace that system where my children have to buy their way into college -- which is where we'll end up. I'm not wealthy enough to donate a building. I'm not connected enough to land on a charitable board with a college administrator. My kids have to study their way in. Now...i'm hearing there is no way to study their way in. Rather, we need to figure out how to please each individual school's decision makers. Is that really what is more fair? Is that what the 99% want?
• nvrspyx 6y ago
  I agree as someone from a poor family that went to a tiny school in one of the worst states in terms of education. I was lucky to be accepted to one of the top schools in the world for a combination of grades, near perfect ACT scores, and athletics. I worked hard without the benefit of any tutors and not much thanks to my teachers since most of them taught multiple subjects, most were family members of the school's founder, and they offered no advanced or AP courses. I'm also extremely grateful that my entire tuition was covered by financial aid scholarships because I can't imagine the debt I would be in otherwise as my parents certainly could not have afforded the tuition. One year's tuition was more than their combined income. I was the first in my school to go to a top 10 college in over 20 years, so they made a pretty big deal out of it. I was also one of two people in the entire university from that particular state during my freshman year with the other student having gone to the top private high school in that state (~30k/yr for tuition). In other words, hard work and performance on the ACT was a huge contribution to being accepted to the schools I did, although I do contribute athletics as an equal contribution since it gave me the benefit of early admission. Then again, if the SAT was a requirement, I probably wouldn't have been accepted because I didn't do nearly as well on that one. Personally, I think it should be a combination of academic performance and other more "holistic" measures. The particular university I went to really emphasized being a well-rounded person and are known for rejecting students with perfect ACT/SAT scores because their application didn't reflect any particular drive, motivation, passion, whatever. Just because you can test well and got good grades does not necessarily mean that you'll thrive in such a competitive environment and make the contributions that the school loves to flaunt. They also want to maintain their graduation rate and don't want people that dropout or transfer from getting overwhelmed (or being entitled because that attitude got stomped out quick). Despite being someone that has always thrived in such a high pressure environments, I admit that things got overwhelming for me pretty often and affected my mental health to a great degree. The stress and imposter syndrome took a major toll on my mental health, academics, and athletics. It got so bad for some that they didn't even survive (suicide). I didn't do nearly as well in university as I had hoped in any facet, but I don't regret it because it made me stronger and ready for the world. I'm happy with the success I've found after years of working hard even after graduating. However, I do often wonder if I would have been more successful at a school that was less high stakes. ---- For those potentially applying to college and as cliche of advice as it is, I advise really emphasizing personal hardship and how you've overcome it in your application essays. Basically, demonstrate that you recognize your weaknesses and overcome them and also demonstrate that you don't turn away from obstacles. Give the admission board the perception that you are constantly progressing, not going backwards or maintaining your current progress, and that nothing is going to stop you from doing so. Excellent academic performance is often good supporting evidence of that, but good grades and test scores by itself doesn't necessarily prove that determination. You should provide as much evidence of that as you can, whether it's extracurriculars, succeeding despite social and economic disadvantages, major life events, natural disasters, etc.
• Traster 6y ago
  > if I didn't have a private tutor if I could get a perfect score my chances increase. Sure and if you never played basketball ball but hit a 3 pointer on your first try 100 times in a row you could play for the golden state warriors.
• zamfi 6y ago
  > However it has been my experience that whenever an explicit test or hierarchy is removed another shadow one builds up that is more subjective, more biased, and more subject to abuse. Many people seem to take as given that college admissions should be about "objectively" choosing the most deserving students academically and/or extracurricularly. That is not a complete picture. At the top schools, there's a big focus on constructing an incoming class with students that are likely to succeed both in college and post-college, such that the class is likely to include future stars in law, medicine, business, academia, etc., likely to be able to contribute money or prestige to the institution in 20 years -- these correlate with high school academic performance, for sure, but they also correlate with who your parents are, what types of activities you choose to engage in, your internal initiative and knowledge of yourself, etc. Of course, there's no way to know all this in advance, so admissions officers use a very noisy process to try to guess. That the SAT is game-able with money makes it a less useful indicator, because it starts to correlate with wealth rather than academic ability. Wealth already has plenty of proxies that are visible in the application file, so having another indicator of it is not super helpful. > it also meant that if I didn't have a private tutor if I could get a perfect score my chances increase Sure, if admissions officers ignore everything else they know about you -- which they don't!
• programmertote 6y ago
  I second this. I grew up in a poor SE Asian country. There, we don't have prep school and such for SAT. But I went to US embassy library; borrow SAT prep books whenever they are available; make lots of photo-copies of some books (like Barron 3500 words) or just do practice tests at the library; and took these tests. I scored pretty well in SAT and SAT 2 subject tests that I won full scholarship at one of the good schools in the US. It took me ~1.5 years to prepare for these tests (English was the hardest; math, physics, bio and chemistry are fairly easy because I finished high school there and the curriculum there is much tougher than the ones in the states), but in the end it's 100% worth it because without the scholarships, I'd never have been able to study in the US and be able to support my family (siblings and widowed mom) back home. If the admission committee decides solely based on holistic view like volunteering and other extracurricular activities, how could I compete with other well-off kids in the US for admission?
  • Kalium 6y ago
    Until you mentioned it, I had no idea that so many embassies ran libraries. Thank you for teaching me something new.
    • programmertote 6y ago
      Thank you. :) The US embassy library in Rangoon (Yangon) is a good resource (at least when I was there back in 2000-2005). There is favoritism (library staff giving favors to people they know by keeping some books off the shelf and letting their favorite/connected people borrow first), a lot of boot-licking (library and embassy staff, who are mostly local people, licking the boots of foreigners while looking down on native/local people), and class hierarchy (mostly the rich kids have access to the library; sure there are some people like me from less well-off families, but that's not common). If one can ignore these ugly aspects and one can be patient to wait for the books needed to show up on the shelf (I took a bus for 45 minutes one way to go to the embassy almost everyday and stay there from 9am-2pm every day to catch the book I want being returned), the embassy is still the best resource we had.
• jameslk 6y ago
  Yes exactly. This is why every tech company should apply this type of standardized testing to software engineers as well. We can test for specific types of algorithms and have them regurgitate them on whiteboards, making it easy to compare each candidate on highly relevant skills they will be using on the job. It's not perfect because there's still rampant ageism in our industry but it's better than letting ourselves use inferior shadow subjective judgement (cue loud dog whistle). Otherwise we might become biased and look at completely irrelevant things that don't measure a model programmer correctly. /s
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • gowld 6y ago
    Obviously we shouldn't throw away the kinds of tests that I score highly on. Only the bad tests that reject my genius.
  • collegeburner 6y ago
    Okay, I hated taking SATs as much as anyone, and have an AP exam in a few hours, so I'm no standardized test fan. But there are reasons for it that obviously don't apply in the same ways when evaluating job applicants. While some objective comparison might be helpful, this is a massive apples-and-oranges issue. * College applicants have, by and large, no real-world experience that demonstrates their competency. There are obviously exceptions, but this remains true of the vast majority. Most job applicants have at least some experience, so it's easier to weed out the fruit loops by taking a look at their resumes. There's a lot more high-quality objective information by which one could compare job applicants than college applicants. * Job applications typically narrow the pool to a few candidates to be seriously evaluated. College bureaucrats have thousands. It's more realistic for a potential employer to perform more "holistic" evaluations then for a college to do so simply because of problems of scale. The interviews used to fill most of this role, but bureacrats have gradually shouldered that role: my parents had interviews of two hours for most of their colleges, which seemed to be common for that day. I had interviews of forty-five minutes when they went well, and this was true for my peers as well. Now I guess some administrator sits in a dark room and by the light of a single candle looks up your extracurriculars to determine your zodiac sign and thus your fitness for the school, or whatever garbage they came up with. Where do you usually see the subjective, interview-style evaluations break down in favor of whiteboarding? Big FAANGs that have a scale that makes that sort of individual evaluation difficult and may necessitate whiteboarding. Universities hit this same problem, only with the added concern that there's even less consistent basic competency: about one third [0] of students require remedial courses and therefore probably ought not to have been admitted to college. So there has to be at least some metric by which they can consistently compare. On the other hand, I applied to a bunch of "elite" schools that all had black-box "holistic admissions" processes. What frustrated me wasn't that "Oh no, now I can't game the system; drat!" Rather, I didn't know what to emphasize for best effect because they didn't make what they valued clear. I had enough stuff about which I could write that I could pick and choose, and I wasn't sure which I ought to pick. This made things like ordering my resume and writing my essays more difficult. You know who probably could have told me what to write about and how to order my resume, though? A fancy, expensive college consultant. Making the process more opaque only helps those who literally pay people to sit around and figure out how to game the system. [0]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5184995_Shape_Up_or_Ship_Out_The_Effects_of_Remediation_on_Students_at_Four-Year_Colleges https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5184995_Shape_Up_or...
• accurrent 6y ago
  I'm not American, but I have seen a lot of my friends apply for American universities. Personally, I think the whole admission process is super messed up. In most places one would take a nation/international examination and based on the score of that exam one would enter. In the US one has to pay "college counselors" and various middle men for handling all sorts of things. I don;t see how removing SATs would make it "fairer" for students from less well to do backgrounds. Removing college counselors would though. This is not to say I would agree with the fact that the SATs/ACTs are good. To be fair as far as exams go these exams have a lot of loop holes. I have seen people who can't speak proper English get perfect scores on these exams by memorizing hard words. The mathematics section is a bit of a standing joke in many Asian countries. It is almost impossible for a high school student to get less than the full score in many countries as it would not be possible to pass other national/international boards. In all honesty, rather than scrap ACT/SAT, one probably should review these exams. It is possible for one to design an exam such that private tuition doesn't give too much of an advantage.
  • Izkata 6y ago
    > In the US one has to pay "college counselors" and various middle men for handling all sorts of things. That wasn't a thing when I was applying in 2005, is it recent? I just applied directly to the colleges I wanted, filled out the forms myself with some help from my parents.
    • gowld 6y ago
      Today's headline news: "Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli agree to plead guilty in college admissions scam"
    • collegeburner 6y ago
      No, I just went through applications, and that's not a thing, except with a few rich parents who are desperate to get their kid who has slacked off for years into a decent school.
• nickbauman 6y ago
  All education will be biased toward people who have had more resources from early childhood on. But what has been revealed is kids that go to elite colleges but have fewer resources growing up and get worse grades actually do about as well as their better trained and supported counterparts. So the conclusion is that there's probably a cultural bias going on for kids who are underprivileged that goes away once they enter the workforce if given the opportunities.
• ciarannolan 6y ago
  >However it has been my experience that whenever an explicit test or hierarchy is removed another shadow one builds up that is more subjective, more biased, and more subject to abuse. I think it's naive to assume that this is an accident. This is _exactly_ the reason to make admissions more subjective: to give a small group of people carte blanche to pick and choose candidates based on race, origin, etc. This way the annoying statistics about affirmative action that look plainly racist just... disappear.
• dragonwriter 6y ago
  > I know some people protest measures that are considered more "objective" over measures that are more "holistic", I don't think anyone does that; “objective” and “holistic” are on orthogonal axes. The opposite of “holistic” is “narrow” and of “objective” is “subjective”. You can have narrow or holistic subjective criteria, and narrow or holistic objective criteria. > Sure the SAT/ACT does favor students whose parents had enough money to afford private tutors, Well it favors students for whom the cost (both financial and opportunity) of taking it multiple times isn't an issue, even if tutoring isn't a factor.
• an_opabinia 6y ago
  > Sure the SAT/ACT does favor students whose parents had enough money to afford private tutors Not really, most evidence points to private tutors as we know them having a very small impact on test scores. On a large study low-income students controlled I recall something like +30 points and something like a non-statistically-significant difference for high income students. The income difference was still its usual +100 points. The thing you and pretty much everyone else conflates with private tutors as Americans conceive them is cram schools, which are a different beast entirely. If you just punch private tutoring into Google Scholar you'll see they're really talking about cram schools whenever a large effect is observed. Should the University of California system reward parents who coerce their kids into a childhood-robbing experience they will pay dearly for later? Who's going to investigate, "Do kids who endured cram school emerge healthy?" Does that sound like a good policy, cram school? We don't want our regular education system to resemble a cram school. We regularly rally against teaching to the test. We can't have it both ways. Cramming is not valuable, it simply isn't, it is only valuable in a very narrowly delusional, zero sum worldview but it's not a policy.
• svaha1728 6y ago
  I agree. I don’t think I would have gone to the Ivy’s without standardized testing. Rust-belter from a public school. Obviously, there are no easy answers. So many great students, teachers and perspectives... and probably an early realization that no one knows it all - especially me. I still look back at my education with nostalgia. The working world isn’t any more fair than the educational world.