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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

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.
    - malandrew 6y ago
      > since you’ve been cramming for 4 years. You could say the same for pretty much every educated person who has done an undergraduate or postgraduate degree. Seems like a lot of human progress has been made as the result of people that have been "cramming for 4 years"
    - zeroonetwothree 6y ago
      Any evidence to support this?
    - hackinthebochs 6y ago
      It turns out actually learning the material on a test over the span of a few years helps you do well on the test. That used to be called getting an education.
      - Spivak 6y ago
        Right! But the problem is that you don’t actually get much of an education along the way. You get a bunch of not super useful knowledge that you’ve almost surely forgotten and some test taking skills. This is the downfall of so many programs that teach to the test.
        hackinthebochs 6y ago
        The problem with this reasoning is that the SAT isn't an arbitrary test. Presumably the course material came before the SAT was developed to test mastery of the material. Sure, the course material then changes to better capture what the SAT measures, and the SAT adjusts in kind. But this adversarial process doesn't optimize arbitrarily. Learning SAT material (rather than say learning tricks) is learning substantial math and reading skills, the kind that serves you well in college. So characterizing this as anything other than getting an education is disingenuous.
  - zeroonetwothree 6y ago
    That’s right, the average effect of test prep is around 0 increase.
  - csa 6y ago
    You are greatly mistaken, although it does depend on the quality of the preparation. I have seen scores improve 100-200 points per skill on average for middle range scores, and 50-100 points per skill for higher range scores with quality preparation. Reasons: - familiarity with test format - improved test taking strategies - familiarity with test content - developing the mental stamina to perform at a high level throughout the relatively long test - lowered anxiety and (often) increased confidence
    - yasp 6y ago
      Is this just personal anecdata?
      - csa 6y ago
        An acquaintance of mine runs a high end SAT training program. He gets these results reliably for folks who have had little or no preparation before coming to him. Trained test takes is in the hundreds (maybe more). Is this data or anecdata? You be the judge. He finds it easy to bank on professionally. I encourage you to talk to someone who has worked at a high-end SAT training program (not Kaplan or that type). They can tell you the real deal, both successes and failures. Don’t rely on talking to the businesses themselves, because they will be selling their services rather than telling the complete truth (unless you know them personally). Fwiw, failures are usually due to one of a few factors: 1. anxiety 2. learning blocks 3. physical issues (e.g., lack of sleep, sick, etc.).
    - georgeecollins 6y ago
      The SAT goes from 200 - 800. If test prep raises average score by 100 points, there still is some room for the test to show actual knowledge. The college board says that an SAT is better predictor of success in college than GPA, which based on my experience of American high schools makes sense. I get that wealth probably has a positive correlation to both. But it seems that should matter a little.
    - hackinthebochs 6y ago
      Why do you exclude learning the material as a reason? My test prep was largely a matter of learning material that I missed or wasn't taught effectively during school.
- mattmcknight 6y ago
  >Test scores don’t prove much except who had the resources, time, and motivation to study the most. Aren't colleges looking for people who will study the most? Who have the motivation and the ability for the motivation to translate into results?
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Yes! That’s pretty much the point. The ACT and SAT are really good at finding some of those people but there’s a lot a lot a lot of type two errors. Letting people demonstrate their motivation in other ways and not immediately disqualifying them based on test scores goes a long way.
- malandrew 6y ago
  > Test scores don’t prove much except who had the resources, time, and motivation to study the most. Dunno about you, but even if this is true, something that shows you were highly motivated and took time to do something seems very valuable if your goal is to produce people what produce. In most areas of study, being motivated and investing time are key contributors to success. They aren't the only one. Intelligence, diversity of thought and resources matter too, but they certainly aren't negligible or dismissible.
- SeanAppleby 6y ago
  My understanding is that SAT scores are significantly correlated with wealth (resources, time, externally imposed motivation), but not by as much as other admissions criteria, and that equity in educational attainment dramatically improved after standardized tests were introduced.
gruez 6y ago
>improving the prestige of the college by admitting top athletes What's the logic here? I'll admit I'm not a big fan of college sports myself, but who assesses the credibility of a college by their athletics program?
- mattmcknight 6y ago
  I think athletic success increases the awareness of the college among potential applicants, more people apply, the selectivity percentage goes down, the college looks more selective from a naive perspective used by college ranking formulas, its ranking increases, and thus its prestige increases.
  - secabeen 6y ago
    It's a high-variance form of marketing.
  - mennis16 6y ago
    I think it depends on the school how important this is, I kind of doubt Harvard needs to raise awareness. But there are other benefits of sports that will also depend on the particular school. One factor that comes to mind is location- Notre Dame is in the middle of damn nowhere, if they did not have the appeal of the football team I think they would have a harder time attracting students to actually go there (regardless of name recognition). It also will probably depend on how much the rich alums care about sports, so again for a school like Notre Dame that has always been big on sports and is also very big on legacies and promoting alum community and what not, it makes sense. To be honest I don't see why it matters much for today's Harvard though, at least none of the benefits I can think of really line up. Plus Harvard can never attract the truly best athletes because no Ivy scholarships/the generally lower level of Ivy competition in most sports. Maybe they just care about being better than Yale.
- chrisandchips 6y ago
  Well, any student who's interested in playing sports at school will likely be interested in that sort of thing. I think more generally it adds to the general culture of the school - people will pick up on the fact that some athlete they know went there and think that's cool, even if it doesnt impact their academics at all. More cynically, lots of students love to associate their school's legacy with their own ego
iagovar 6y ago
That sounds bad if you're a white non-rich kid.
- wait_a_minute 6y ago
  Who cares about those? Definitely not the new American left.
  - lallysingh 6y ago
    Because it's definitely a zero-sum game.
    - wait_a_minute 6y ago
      The new American left does treat it as a zero sum game. That is why they focus on disparities instead of universal programs that would eliminate the largest absolute amounts of poverty and suffering.
      - germinalphrase 6y ago
        What falls in the bucket of “universal programs”?
        eli_gottlieb 6y ago
        Basically, go check if Bernie Sanders supports it. If so, it's probably a universal program. Not a guarantee, but a very good heuristic.
      - tharne 6y ago
        Zero sum thinking is probably the most central tenet of the broader philosophy of the American left. That's why there's so much talk of "disparity" or "inequality" vs. actual improvements to standards of living and quality of life. Almost all economic growth creates inequality for the simple reason that the more wealth there is, the more potential you have for skew. In China, for instance, there was much less income inequality back in the 60's but I don't think too many folks want to go back to those days. Similarly, I don't really care how much a CEO makes, I care about my own quality of life. To hear the new American left tell it though, we'd be better off all being equally poor instead of generally wealthier with a big differences between individual incomes.
KoftaBob 6y ago
Couldn't have said it better.
Chathamization 6y ago
> Of course colleges do all these things already That's an important thing to keep in mind. Particularly with the more elite schools, the goal isn't to educate as many people as possible, but to keep their inflated prestige through artificial scarcity. The Harvard Extension School is a great example of this - they have tens of thousands of students and advertise themselves as giving students a true Harvard education taught by Harvard educators, but the students aren't "official" Harvard graduates because the institution wants to keep that number artificially low and selective. edX is another good example - sure, we'll give you the opportunity to learn these things, we'll even offer to assess you and give you a certificate, but we're not going to use technology to really open up the education system. These institutions will pay lip service towards increasing underrepresented demographics (including racial and economic), but they're never going to embrace truly substantive solutions because they desperately want to keep the education credentials scarce.

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.
  - malandrew 6y ago
    > since you’ve been cramming for 4 years. You could say the same for pretty much every educated person who has done an undergraduate or postgraduate degree. Seems like a lot of human progress has been made as the result of people that have been "cramming for 4 years"
  - zeroonetwothree 6y ago
    Any evidence to support this?
  - hackinthebochs 6y ago
    It turns out actually learning the material on a test over the span of a few years helps you do well on the test. That used to be called getting an education.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      Right! But the problem is that you don’t actually get much of an education along the way. You get a bunch of not super useful knowledge that you’ve almost surely forgotten and some test taking skills. This is the downfall of so many programs that teach to the test.
      - hackinthebochs 6y ago
        The problem with this reasoning is that the SAT isn't an arbitrary test. Presumably the course material came before the SAT was developed to test mastery of the material. Sure, the course material then changes to better capture what the SAT measures, and the SAT adjusts in kind. But this adversarial process doesn't optimize arbitrarily. Learning SAT material (rather than say learning tricks) is learning substantial math and reading skills, the kind that serves you well in college. So characterizing this as anything other than getting an education is disingenuous.
- zeroonetwothree 6y ago
  That’s right, the average effect of test prep is around 0 increase.
- csa 6y ago
  You are greatly mistaken, although it does depend on the quality of the preparation. I have seen scores improve 100-200 points per skill on average for middle range scores, and 50-100 points per skill for higher range scores with quality preparation. Reasons: - familiarity with test format - improved test taking strategies - familiarity with test content - developing the mental stamina to perform at a high level throughout the relatively long test - lowered anxiety and (often) increased confidence
  - yasp 6y ago
    Is this just personal anecdata?
    - csa 6y ago
      An acquaintance of mine runs a high end SAT training program. He gets these results reliably for folks who have had little or no preparation before coming to him. Trained test takes is in the hundreds (maybe more). Is this data or anecdata? You be the judge. He finds it easy to bank on professionally. I encourage you to talk to someone who has worked at a high-end SAT training program (not Kaplan or that type). They can tell you the real deal, both successes and failures. Don’t rely on talking to the businesses themselves, because they will be selling their services rather than telling the complete truth (unless you know them personally). Fwiw, failures are usually due to one of a few factors: 1. anxiety 2. learning blocks 3. physical issues (e.g., lack of sleep, sick, etc.).
  - georgeecollins 6y ago
    The SAT goes from 200 - 800. If test prep raises average score by 100 points, there still is some room for the test to show actual knowledge. The college board says that an SAT is better predictor of success in college than GPA, which based on my experience of American high schools makes sense. I get that wealth probably has a positive correlation to both. But it seems that should matter a little.
  - hackinthebochs 6y ago
    Why do you exclude learning the material as a reason? My test prep was largely a matter of learning material that I missed or wasn't taught effectively during school.
mattmcknight 6y ago
>Test scores don’t prove much except who had the resources, time, and motivation to study the most. Aren't colleges looking for people who will study the most? Who have the motivation and the ability for the motivation to translate into results?
- Spivak 6y ago
  Yes! That’s pretty much the point. The ACT and SAT are really good at finding some of those people but there’s a lot a lot a lot of type two errors. Letting people demonstrate their motivation in other ways and not immediately disqualifying them based on test scores goes a long way.
malandrew 6y ago
> Test scores don’t prove much except who had the resources, time, and motivation to study the most. Dunno about you, but even if this is true, something that shows you were highly motivated and took time to do something seems very valuable if your goal is to produce people what produce. In most areas of study, being motivated and investing time are key contributors to success. They aren't the only one. Intelligence, diversity of thought and resources matter too, but they certainly aren't negligible or dismissible.
SeanAppleby 6y ago
My understanding is that SAT scores are significantly correlated with wealth (resources, time, externally imposed motivation), but not by as much as other admissions criteria, and that equity in educational attainment dramatically improved after standardized tests were introduced.

gruez 6y ago

>improving the prestige of the college by admitting top athletes What's the logic here? I'll admit I'm not a big fan of college sports myself, but who assesses the credibility of a college by their athletics program?

mattmcknight 6y ago
I think athletic success increases the awareness of the college among potential applicants, more people apply, the selectivity percentage goes down, the college looks more selective from a naive perspective used by college ranking formulas, its ranking increases, and thus its prestige increases.
- secabeen 6y ago
  It's a high-variance form of marketing.
- mennis16 6y ago
  I think it depends on the school how important this is, I kind of doubt Harvard needs to raise awareness. But there are other benefits of sports that will also depend on the particular school. One factor that comes to mind is location- Notre Dame is in the middle of damn nowhere, if they did not have the appeal of the football team I think they would have a harder time attracting students to actually go there (regardless of name recognition). It also will probably depend on how much the rich alums care about sports, so again for a school like Notre Dame that has always been big on sports and is also very big on legacies and promoting alum community and what not, it makes sense. To be honest I don't see why it matters much for today's Harvard though, at least none of the benefits I can think of really line up. Plus Harvard can never attract the truly best athletes because no Ivy scholarships/the generally lower level of Ivy competition in most sports. Maybe they just care about being better than Yale.
chrisandchips 6y ago
Well, any student who's interested in playing sports at school will likely be interested in that sort of thing. I think more generally it adds to the general culture of the school - people will pick up on the fact that some athlete they know went there and think that's cool, even if it doesnt impact their academics at all. More cynically, lots of students love to associate their school's legacy with their own ego

iagovar 6y ago

That sounds bad if you're a white non-rich kid.

wait_a_minute 6y ago
Who cares about those? Definitely not the new American left.
- lallysingh 6y ago
  Because it's definitely a zero-sum game.
  - wait_a_minute 6y ago
    The new American left does treat it as a zero sum game. That is why they focus on disparities instead of universal programs that would eliminate the largest absolute amounts of poverty and suffering.
    - germinalphrase 6y ago
      What falls in the bucket of “universal programs”?
      - eli_gottlieb 6y ago
        Basically, go check if Bernie Sanders supports it. If so, it's probably a universal program. Not a guarantee, but a very good heuristic.
    - tharne 6y ago
      Zero sum thinking is probably the most central tenet of the broader philosophy of the American left. That's why there's so much talk of "disparity" or "inequality" vs. actual improvements to standards of living and quality of life. Almost all economic growth creates inequality for the simple reason that the more wealth there is, the more potential you have for skew. In China, for instance, there was much less income inequality back in the 60's but I don't think too many folks want to go back to those days. Similarly, I don't really care how much a CEO makes, I care about my own quality of life. To hear the new American left tell it though, we'd be better off all being equally poor instead of generally wealthier with a big differences between individual incomes.

KoftaBob 6y ago

Couldn't have said it better.

Chathamization 6y ago

> Of course colleges do all these things already That's an important thing to keep in mind. Particularly with the more elite schools, the goal isn't to educate as many people as possible, but to keep their inflated prestige through artificial scarcity. The Harvard Extension School is a great example of this - they have tens of thousands of students and advertise themselves as giving students a true Harvard education taught by Harvard educators, but the students aren't "official" Harvard graduates because the institution wants to keep that number artificially low and selective. edX is another good example - sure, we'll give you the opportunity to learn these things, we'll even offer to assess you and give you a certificate, but we're not going to use technology to really open up the education system. These institutions will pay lip service towards increasing underrepresented demographics (including racial and economic), but they're never going to embrace truly substantive solutions because they desperately want to keep the education credentials scarce.