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I have a hard time understanding the logic here. GPAs are essentially useless, so what else do we have to go off of? "Hollistic admissions" processes seem to be

• travisoneill1 6y ago
  How else are you going to keep the Asians out?
  • jerf 6y ago
    Sarcastically phrased, but it's the real answer. The colleges need to shed objective measures so they can continue their social programs unimpeded by any objective standards that might reveal their increasingly obvious biases. If you want to get into Harvard, I recommend striving to demonstrate greater fealty to the hardest of hard left-wing ideals than your fellow applicants, as that will become the real criterion for admission as fast as they feel like they can make it.
    • new2628 6y ago
      You made an insightful if uncomfortable comment. You will be voted down into oblivion.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • mauflows 6y ago
      Couldn't diversity be considered an objectively good thing to strive to have? Anecdotally, I went to a technical school but some of my biggest shifts in perspective came from interacting with liberal arts and minority students.
      • gizmo686 6y ago
        Yes. The legal justification for affirmative action getting an exception to anti-discrimination laws is that a diverse student body improves the quality of eduaction for all students; so there is a compelling interest to discriminate.
        • oh_sigh 6y ago
          It certainly doesn't improve the quality of education of the students who were rejected in favor of someone with a different color skin.
  • eli_gottlieb 6y ago
    By throwing them in a gladiatorial death-match with the Jewish applicants, of course. The winner has an athletic character, and is therefore real Harvard material!
    • selimthegrim 6y ago
      This is like that story where Dershowitz drops into Stephen Jay Gould’s class and asks the students how to deal with a pushy Jewish mother who insists her rejected kid is Harvard material
  • seibelj 6y ago
    You are probably being facetious, but my wife is Vietnamese and her parents were boat people who fled the communists, didn't speak any English and had no money, then her dad got a job washing dishes, learned English at night, got into college, then got into medical school, started a chain of clinics, and retired a millionaire. You would not believe how much they despise current "progressive" politics and speaking with them about politics is basically impossible. They and their community / family follow what is happening with things like Harvard and partially as a result they are die-hard Trump supporters (among other things like their belief in religion, police, etc.). I do not agree with all of these opinions, I am just telling you how this community, which is mostly still poor and not "model minority", views a lot of what is coming out of elite institutions in the name of progress and equality.
    • travisoneill1 6y ago
      Why wouldn't they feel that way? As bad as Trump may be, he isn't trying to keep their kids from following the same successful path.
      • user982 6y ago
        The same successful path that begins with the US welcoming non-white, non-English-speaking refugees from countries they've bombed? Trump is not actively on the record against all of that?
        • magicsmoke 6y ago
          If they're refugees from South Vietnam, they probably wish the US kept bombing so they didn't have to flee the communists. Hell, if they were well off in South Vietnam before the communists came, it just goes to show that if your family had the mental foundations necessary for success, even if you hit rock bottom you still have the attitude to climb back up.
    • malandrew 6y ago
      Great comment. What's not appreciated is that Asians in the US have the greatest Gini coefficient of any racial group in the US: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/07/12/income-inequality-in-the-u-s-is-rising-most-rapidly-among-asians/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/07/12/income-inequality... John McWhorter made a comment in a Reason interview that affirmative action really should be about socioeconomic status and not race. Back in the day race would have been a highly correlative proxy for income and wealth, but that it is becoming increasingly less predictive and advantaging middle and upper class minorities when today they almost no meaningful disadvantages relative to their white and asian peers of the same socioeconomic class.
  • ylem 6y ago
    I'm a bit confused, but isn't this a one year response to the effects of Covid? I saw that there were difficulties even with AP exams this year.
    • travisoneill1 6y ago
      Nothing to do with COVID. Harvard systematically discriminates against Asian applicants by giving them lower "personality scores" than other races. There is a big lawsuit about this going on.
  • fortran77 6y ago
    Exactly. They had similar quotas to keep Jews out several generations ago. > Certain private universities, most notably Harvard, introduced policies which effectively placed a quota on the number of Jews admitted to the university. According to historian David Oshinsky, on writing about Jonas Salk, "Most of the surrounding medical schools (Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Yale) had rigid quotas in place. In 1935 Yale accepted 76 applicants from a pool of 501. About 200 of those applicants were Jewish and only five got in." He notes that Dean Milton Winternitz's instructions were remarkably precise: "Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all."[16] As a result, Oshinsky added, "Jonas Salk and hundreds like him" enrolled in New York University instead.[17] Physicist and Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman was turned away from Columbia College in the 1930s and went to MIT instead. See also Numerus clausus in the United States. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota ) Today it's "too many asians"
    • devmunchies 6y ago
      Yeah but not anymore. There is a higher jewish population at harvard (~28%) than non-jewish whites (~22%) despite non-jewish whites making up 60% of the population of the US and jews making up less than 2% of the population. No skin off my nose since I went to a mormon school in Utah. There is clearly an anti-white, anti-asian agenda at these top schools now.
      • fortran77 6y ago
        Only 6% of the 2020 class at Harvard self-reported as Jewish. See https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-vanishing-ivy-league-jew https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-vanishi...
      • dartdartdart 6y ago
        Anti-asian for sure, probably not as much anti-white since white applicants can get lower academic scores than Asian people and still get accepted. Discriminating against a minority that makes up only 5% of the population is ridiculous.
  • wait_a_minute 6y ago
    Identity politics is a cancer. Glad Asians are starting to realize that they were simply the logical next target.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• jariel 6y ago
  Neither GPAs nor SATs are 'useless' they just need to be contextualized.
• TechBro8615 6y ago
  SAT scores are also pretty useless, when Harvard has enough applications with perfect scores to fill their class multiple times.
  • crimsonalucard5 6y ago
    How does that make SAT scores useless?
    • cosmodisk 6y ago
      If every candidate has the same score, the score itself becomes meaningless. Imagine getting 200 identical applications for a job,where all you see is John Smith with x years at corp Y. How do you select the best candidate on this info?
      • mc32 6y ago
        Right so you’re saying they could randomly pick from their applicant pool because right now only perfect scores apply. But wouldn’t that cease being the case once scores are not taken into account? Presumably (retroactively speaking) I could have applied or my friends could have applied... now if they do a random selection they could get one of us...
        • ylem 6y ago
          This is an excellent question--that should be answered by data. Is there a thresholding effect? It could be that say there's not much difference in a hundred points in the SAT. But, maybe GPAs actually are more predictive. I assume that rec letters are useless to first approximation unless the recommender writes something about the student that raises flags.
        • devalgo 6y ago
          >Right so you’re saying they could randomly pick from their applicant pool because right now only perfect scores apply. This would actually be a reasonable way to go. Set a cut off ACT/SAT/GPA and just do a lottery for kids that are above it. Actual fairness. Of course thats not what HPY + Stanford etc. are interested in. They are still just finishing schools for the elite. If you want actual meritocracy go to MIT or Caltech
• eplanit 6y ago
  "GPAs are essentially useless, so what else do we have to go off of?" I think race will replace the tests.
• zebraflask 6y ago
  I think you might have that backward. Test scores are somewhat influenced by the income level of the student's parents: wealthier families can afford to give their kids resources like study time, books, tutors, a home environment that values academic success, etc., that result in higher scores. A holistic process mitigates that disparity. I highly doubt the intent of this change is to "favor rich kids" or any of the things in the other comments in this thread, which strike me as exceptionally mean-spirited.
  • crimsonalucard5 6y ago
    High test scores are correlated with income but income is not a causative factor. Most asian immigrants came here with nothing and much less resources than the caucasians who've already been here for years. They worked hard and performed well on the SATs and got into great schools and as a result are now generating a higher than average income than caucasians. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_Uni... Not trying to brag about asians here. It's really just part of the culture and it can get really extreme. It stems mostly from parenting... the memes below are really illustrative: https://www.pinterest.com/lindaschloss/asian-father-memes/ https://www.pinterest.com/lindaschloss/asian-father-memes/ I think one time when I was a kid I mentioned to my dad I was interested in becoming an artist. My dad beat the shit out of me. Now I'm on hacker news and I'm definitely not an artist. I would argue that what is causing the income disparity is the ability to work hard and study. This ability leads to higher test scores and higher income.
    • cosmodisk 6y ago
      What you mention here is more of a cultural thing.In some, there's emphasis,if not obsession, to make sure the kids do learn so they could go to college/university/whatever. This is also pushed quite heavily at family level too. This may not be the same in other groups.
      • C1sc0cat 6y ago
        Its also pushing kids into career directions that they may not really want to do and in some cases are not just suited to. The only time I have seen some one who was just not suited to development was case of this.
• new2628 6y ago
  I think you understood the logic perfectly well, holistic admissions are more deliberate and less prone to those pesky objective outside factors.
• mrfredward 6y ago
  A very cynical answer to what's the logic here: objective measures get in the way of many non-academic college admission goals, so colleges want to do away with them. One of those goals is racial diversity, and that's the only one colleges openly talk about because it's the only one that can positively impact society. Other goals include raising more money by admitting the children of major donors, improving the prestige of the college by admitting top athletes (even when they lack academic ability and motivation), and connecting the college with as many important and powerful people as possible(to bring both money and prestige to the college, and/or to help high ranking administrators make connections). Of course colleges do all these things already, but imagine how much easier it will be for them when they don't have these pesky test scores showing the students they want to admit aren't qualified.
  • Spivak 6y ago
    I think there’s a silver lining to all of this behavior in that it demonstrates that nothing really matters when it comes to determining if you’ll be successful in college. Test scores don’t prove much except who had the resources, time, and motivation to study the most. You could replace the SAT and ACT with obscure movie trivia and you’d see roughly the same distribution of scores and it would have the same predictive power. The people who signal that they’re willing to put it a lot of time, money, and effort into their education do well… surprised pikachu. There’s no such thing as qualified for college outside of a genuine desire and motivation to do it. So I don’t see any sort of contradiction in colleges admitting people based on novelty, coolness, and straight-up effort.
    • yasp 6y ago
      >Test scores don’t prove much except who had the resources, time, and motivation to study the most. I was under the impression that SAT prep doesn't move the needle much. Am I mistaken?
      • Spivak 6y ago
        Cramming for the test right at the end with SAT prep will add a few points but won’t do anything dramatic. But if you get put in the “honors” track of a lot of high schools where the name of the game is to teach material informed by the SAT, ACT, AP, and IB teats then you almost can’t help but do well since you’ve been cramming for 4 years.
• rediguanayum 6y ago
  Harvard will use family donations and legacy (siblings, parents and grand parents who were alums) as replacement signals. It can't hurt to know some faculty personally via family connections too, and get them to send a letter of recommendation.
• ylem 6y ago
  Dumb question, but are GPAs useless? I mean a plot of say high school GPA vs say college graduation rate or college GPA would be rather informative.
  • throwawaygh 6y ago
    > I mean a plot of say high school GPA vs say college graduation rate or college GPA would be rather informative. You'd have to be very careful in how to measure both the inputs and the outputs. First, "weighting" makes high school GPAs pretty difficult to interpret without a lot of context. This is compounded by the fact that "weighting" is a bad solution to the underlying problem of trying to compare fundamentally incomparable coursework. There's really no numerical way to compare a grade in a remedial Biology course to a grade in an AP Biology course. Second, grading varies wildly from school to school and teacher to teacher, and what an "A" means will also vary wildly. Some teachers emphasize understanding, some emphasize busy work, and some hand of "A"s like candy. To give one example that might be useful to the HN audience: I've volunteered in several AP CS courses: - In one course, getting an "A" required writing thousands upon thousands of lines of if-else conditions following inane string formatting guidelines. Barely any looping. AFAICT the teacher was the least competent math teacher that was removed from teaching any math courses that were tested for in state standardized tests (never taught algebra or geometry -- just all the random remedial courses and electives). - In another course, getting an "A" required writing real programs, using some data structures appropriately, knowing the difference between constant/linear/"not linear" algorithm, etc. Students even wrote some simple proofs. Teacher was a CS major. - In a third course, basically everyone got in "A". Teacher was, I shit you not, a gym teacher. Literally a warm body. Course was basically self-study on days I wasn't there. So, even in relatively "standardized" AP courses, there's often not a nice bell curve, teachers aren't using the same rubrics or even assignments, and you really have no clue whether that grading reflects ability to put up with bullshit busywork or actual understanding. Third, you also have to be careful about how you're measuring the results. College GPA and graduation rates are not field-agnostic. A 4.0 in CS or Physics or Math is not easily comparable to a 4.0 in Communications. Also, universities aren't comparable. A degree/GPA at Small Noncompetitive Liberal Arts College is simply not comparable to a degree/GPA at MIT or Stanford. Also, dropping your lucrative major for a useless major can have an even bigger impact on your life than dropping out. The number of people who start in STEM and end up with a Communications or Business degree is just as relevant, or arguably even more relevant, than the number of Communications or Business majors who end up without a degree.
• gizmo686 6y ago
  (Disclaimer; I only read the non-paywalled preview). The argument is that the SAT/ACT is uniquely broken this year; including in the ability of applicants to take the test. Even among the people who did take the test; circumstances are so weird this year that it would be difficult to interpret the results based on historic data; and the results would be relatively meaningless for future data. With GPA, you can still see the pre-crisis grades of the students; as well as the historic performance of the school that provided those grades. These are signals that can be calibrated against historic data; and which admissions likely already uses.
• 0d9eooo 6y ago
  So I generally agree with you, and have agreed with the position you're outlining, but my thoughts about this have changed over time, having been on graduate admissions committees and doing research on related topics. The admissions committees I've been on have had these discussions about dropping standardized tests; so far they weren't but this sort of trend might put pressure to do so. The thing about this, loosely speaking, is that there's bias and variance. The issue with tests is that there's huge variance in them. Out of your life, how much time is spent actually taking it? With the GRE or SAT you're talking a few hours at most; the same thing could be said of most standardized tests. The problem with this is that now you don't just have bias, you have this huge error/noise/variance associated with the test score. Maybe you don't take tests as well as the person sitting next to you. Maybe there was something weird the day and time you took the test, but it wasn't enough to declare the test invalid because of financial incentives. Maybe it makes assumptions, like that everyone taking the test comes from a common educational background, that are irrelevant to the actual thing the test is measuring. Etc etc. So yes, it predicts things, but if you look at studies, it does so relatively weakly in the grand scheme of things, and even more weakly with reference to even longer-term variables past first-year GPA. The issue is that yes, the SAT, GRE etc is providing some information. I agree that ideally it shouldn't be thrown away. But today you have this opposite extreme in many cases where it's taken very much at face value, as an error-free quantity, or only minimally so. It's difficult to do anything with. Let's say you have someone apply. They're Asian, or white, or black, or whatever. Their test score is relatively low, but they have incredible background, GPA, etc. How do you interpret that individual test score in that context? The appropriate thing to do is to treat it as one bit of information, so that if everything were uncompetitive, it would support that, and if everything were competitive, it would support that, but in the scenario described it's kind of off. If you ignore it though, do you really need the test? If you blindly let the test overrule other things, is that appropriate? Tests I think have become a kind of liability, in that they are useful, but their use is superceded by their misuse. There's always this one person or group who argues that the test score should supercede other bits of information because it's "more objective" ignoring all of its noise. It's almost like information that becomes dangerous because how it's leveraged by admissions committees, politicians, etc. in a way that far exceeds its validity. It's like having a tool that people can't use correctly on average -- if some product were on the market that led to lots of problems because people were misusing it, you might say the tool isn't the problem, people are, but if people were misusing it that much, you might still take it off the market because that's still critical. I feel like there's a lot of this -- it's not just tests -- where a lot about a person gets reduced to a single number, or a couple of numbers, that are treated as fixed properties of that person, which is not true. A number may be more objective, but if its meaning is hazy enough, the objectivity doesn't matter. This all may be moot, because I suspect a lot of this is just due to coronavirus-specific issues and tests will get readopted later. But I could be wrong.
• boomboomsubban 6y ago
  Harvard's reason for doing this is the coronavirus pandemic, standardized testing may skew more heavily towards the rich than usual. They would have better access to extended home schooling during the lockdown, are less at risk for getting ill, and the ongoing financial issues wouldn't hamper their preparation. I don't know why everyone else seems to be talking long term reasons, but both options seem pretty bad.
  • mennis16 6y ago
    I get what you're saying but A) I don't see how they can bring them back after this and B) doesn't the same argument about other application dimensions just extend to the effects of coronavirus? I would imagine richer students are also completing more coursework (possibly paying for online college courses), are more able to find alternative extracurriculars, etc. The SAT actually seems easier to keep somewhat level during this time to me, as long as admissions counselors have some recognition of the drawbacks. I also wonder about the distinction between "not required" versus "not considered". It becomes a weird mental game if submission is still considered just not required.
    • boomboomsubban 6y ago
      >) I don't see how they can bring them back after this What difficulty is there? As they've announced it's removed due to events this year, I honestly can't guess. On B, I said it skews more towards the rich this year. Most years everyone at least has their school day. If it is not required, it just becomes extracurricular. If it's not considered it's useless.
      • mennis16 6y ago
        I think it isn't really comparable to an extracurricular, especially not if similar schools continue to require it. It would basically be an extracurricular that you know everyone has but only some people are choosing to report it. That just seems like something that could subconsciously affect judgement even if admissions tries to be agnostic.
• mFixman 6y ago
  My Latin American State university had a nice solution: a 1 year long introductory course open to everyone which you had to pass to formally enter the university, similar to a centrally-administered course on SAT exams. The system ticked most boxes: poor students had a lot more resources to study and pass the exams, and the evaluation was very correlated to how well you would do in the University compared to doing than a single exam. It also served as a nice introduction of how to properly navigate a University environment. When I did this course I wasn't happy in spending an extra year studying before starting university, but in retrospect this is a better system than anything else I've seen. Additionally, almost failing one of the maths courses was a wake-up call that made me realise that I couldn't just wing exams like I did during High School
  • iagovar 6y ago
    Which country?, it sounds like a good idea.
• devalgo 6y ago
  I get the sentiment but the reality is rich kids can also have massive advantages in test taking. As someone who has taught SAT/ACT prep courses I can tell you I have seen many kids improve their scores by in some cases hundreds of points after taking multi-thousand dollar prep courses. And I believe GPA is actually the only thing that reliably predicts college performance.
• dominotw 6y ago
  my cousin "volunteered" at her dad's hospital to get into harvard( which she did). Now she is doctor. I know for a fact that she had zero passion to be doctor, hated being in the medical school and hates her work. Hard not be cynical and hate the institutions when witness stuff like this.
  • tartoran 6y ago
    This is sad. I had a girlfriend 10 years ago who was studying to become a nurse. She was fantastic at passing tests (rote memorization) and did not care a yota for the science behind it nor had any compassion for people. I had no idea what key answer banks were before she told me how she studies. Shes a nurse now and does it solely for the good money. It’s sad that jobs that require compassion are assailed by motivated test takers. For all she cared she would pursue anything that would make her money and nursing was a low hanging fruit. Now 10 years later the competition in nursing is even more intense and good test takers have a clear advantage.
• ransom1538 6y ago
  You give every new born a random number. If their number % 10 == 3 they go to college. The end. Will that work? My theory is that those kids don't do better than other kids.
• RNCTX 6y ago
  The logic is they want to be less transparent because they have to find room for ever more legacy and donor-based admissions. This will presumably be a lot easier to do without having to maintain a false sense of propriety in admissions.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• MisterBastahrd 6y ago
  The good thing is that, at least in my experience watching the online course presentations, Harvard profs are exceptionally good at explaining course material. I had one prof in my entire college experience who could explain the class material he was teaching as well as the average Harvard prof.
• whotheffknows 6y ago
  You've obviously never been to a private boarding school where tuition is $40k/year in highschool and in addition to this their parents paid for $5000 classes where the teachers helped them create calculator programs on SAT approved calculators to help solve problems faster and do timed exam grades. I grew up on welfare until middle school years, made straight A's in a poorly ranked public school applied to every boarding school on the east coast because where I come from those schools are legitmately better (unlike in the northeast where many public schools are legit and fostered by small towns full of rich white people who drive to Manhattan for work everyday) and while I appreciate the people who paid for me to go to boarding school, I still got rejected from a Stanford summer school robotics program despite being qualified because I couldn't pay $10k in cash for it while a peer of mine driving a Porsche to school complained his parents were forcing him to go. I still couldn't afford the SAT classes many of my peers took after school on campus so while yes my life is measurably better and you are correct money helps pad resumes outside of GPA, you are also incorrect it doesn't also help pad SAT scores. This has been proven time and time again like a few years ago when sailing terminology was removed from reading comprehension because it was supposed to be derived from the context. Most kids who grew up in the Bronx don't have context for sailing terminology regardless of how well read they might be. This is just one example of money aside, how it is false to believe the tests are any less biased inducing than anything else that might go into a students application.
  • amvalo 6y ago
    Talking about the Oarsman-regatta thing? That was 2 decades ago...
    • whotheffknows 6y ago
      No. https://www.clearchoiceprep.com/sat-act-prep-blog/the-most-infamous-example-of-cultural-bias-on-the-sat https://www.clearchoiceprep.com/sat-act-prep-blog/the-most-i...
      • amvalo 6y ago
        What are you saying "No" to? This article says it may have been from the 80s?
• chrischen 6y ago
  Isn’t the process already opaque? They already claim to take many factors into account.