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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 d

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...

dragonwriter 6y ago
> You know who probably could have told me what to write about, though? A high school guidance counselor? Black-box holistic admissions processes are nothing new, most selective institutions have overtly had them for decades even if they didn't tend to use the word “holistic” to describe them (they have weighted a wide range of factors beyond GPA and test scores, and have never announced how most of them were measured or how they, once individually measured, were aggregated, but advising on the that has been—since sometime I started preparing to apply to college in the late-1980s—a major function of high school counselors. An expensive college consultant could tell you who and how to bribe to bypass the admissions process applicable to more plebian applicants, though.
- collegeburner 6y ago
  > A high school guidance counselor? I was home-schooled, so not a great option. Also remember that the public schools in some places are pretty awful, and they just don't have experience getting students into those schools because almost none ever apply.
jameslk 6y ago
It's a shame this conversations always has to split into either of two camps: dogmatically for standardized testing or against it. It's almost as if there's no awareness that perhaps it could be beneficial to try both, perhaps where it's appropriate, and see what the outcome is. Just like not every company uses whiteboard interviews.
- collegeburner 6y ago
  Oh don't get me wrong, I really hate standardized testing. It's been the bane of my existence for several years now. I waste time cramming stuff I learned years ago to prove to some pencil pusher that I do in fact know it (even though I've been working on much more advanced stuff since then). However, I also think using some of it as an objective bar to meet is a necessary evil, though not as a sole metric (I think the European model of "take one test to determine your life" is absolutely horrible, but that's what one gets in a planned economy.)

dragonwriter 6y ago

> You know who probably could have told me what to write about, though? A high school guidance counselor? Black-box holistic admissions processes are nothing new, most selective institutions have overtly had them for decades even if they didn't tend to use the word “holistic” to describe them (they have weighted a wide range of factors beyond GPA and test scores, and have never announced how most of them were measured or how they, once individually measured, were aggregated, but advising on the that has been—since sometime I started preparing to apply to college in the late-1980s—a major function of high school counselors. An expensive college consultant could tell you who and how to bribe to bypass the admissions process applicable to more plebian applicants, though.

collegeburner 6y ago
> A high school guidance counselor? I was home-schooled, so not a great option. Also remember that the public schools in some places are pretty awful, and they just don't have experience getting students into those schools because almost none ever apply.

jameslk 6y ago

It's a shame this conversations always has to split into either of two camps: dogmatically for standardized testing or against it. It's almost as if there's no awareness that perhaps it could be beneficial to try both, perhaps where it's appropriate, and see what the outcome is. Just like not every company uses whiteboard interviews.

collegeburner 6y ago
Oh don't get me wrong, I really hate standardized testing. It's been the bane of my existence for several years now. I waste time cramming stuff I learned years ago to prove to some pencil pusher that I do in fact know it (even though I've been working on much more advanced stuff since then). However, I also think using some of it as an objective bar to meet is a necessary evil, though not as a sole metric (I think the European model of "take one test to determine your life" is absolutely horrible, but that's what one gets in a planned economy.)