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University of California Will No Longer Consider SAT and ACT Scores
- oogabooga123 5y agoHow did this expand from “SAT vocab section is biased” to “the entire standardized testing system is biased”?? How can a math test be biased? Please keep it concrete, related to these actual tests, and not reach for hypotheticals
- nknealk 5y agoSome would argue the standardized tests select for those who can afford test preparation services, regardless of what section of the test is in question.
- salamandersauce 5y agoWell for starters, kids with rich parents can afford tutors to teach specifically to the content on the SATs that may not have been covered by some schools. So if you're a smart but poor kid whose school doesn't go into tremendous detail with trig for whatever reason, the rich kid whose tutor helped him do 1000 practice SAT trig questions is going to do better even though the smart but poor kid may be just as capable or more so at doing university course work than rich kid with tutor.
- azangru 5y agoSo what bias-free and tutor-proof tools do universities have at their disposal to assess whether a kid is smart? If that is a selection criterion anymore, of course. Also, are untrained smarts more valuable than lesser but tutored smarts?
- HarryHirsch 5y agoIt's too late when the kids pull up at university, the damage has been done. In Bullock County High School, that's the school serving Union Springs, AL, 20 % of students pass the state reading test and 15 % the state math test. How is this acceptable in a civilized country?
- ryan93 5y agoI never got tutoring and passed state tests with ease. More likely lower class people have students less capable of learning in average
- HarryHirsch 5y ago80 % of the black population of Union Springs (because the white people send their children to the segregation academy) are genetically incapable of reading? That's not really credible.
- ryan93 5y agoNo I bombed math in college. I’m not particularly capable. I’m saying on average children of professionals are smarter than children of very poor people
- chris11 5y agoI've read there's a high correlation between family income and standardized test scores. But I think the sat and act are better for finding outliers than gpa.
- tfehring 5y agoFor what it’s worth, test prep has little effect on scores, wealthy families use it at (at most) only a slightly higher rate than poor families, and black students use it at a slightly higher rate than white students. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/the-sat-test-prep-income-and-race.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/th...
- rahimnathwani 5y ago"test prep has little effect on scores" You can consider SAT performance reflects: A) SAT test prep B) Other things that only more wealthy/affluent parents can easily provide. C) Other stuff. It's possible that A (test prep) has little effect on its own, but that A+B has a massive impact. The linked article talks only about the impact of test prep. I can't access the cited sources, so don't know whether they've attempted to control for any correlation between those students who received test prep, and those students who received other special advantages that may also have increased their SAT scores.
- tfehring 5y agoI completely agree! It's well established that the impact of (B) is substantial, I just wanted to make the (somewhat tangential) point that wealthier students' empirical advantage at standardized tests is mostly not due to test prep, contrary to popular belief and to the GP comment's example.
- JamesBarney 5y agoWhat if B is being smart and well educated?
- rahimnathwani 5y agoThen there is room for disagreement about what is fair. Some folks believe that fair is measuring everyone on the same objective criteria. Others believe that students shouldn't lose higher education opportunities just because they were poor or disadvantaged through no fault of their own. There are good arguments on both sides. But, as other commenters have pointed out, the conflict only exists because: 1. We rely on university degrees as a credential to filter people for jobs and other desirable opportunities. 2. To maintain the value (and price) of the credential, the best universities must restrict supply. 3. Outcomes from the USA's public grade/high school systems vary widely, and no one has figured out how to give everyone a good (if not equal) shot. So perhaps there's no perfect solution possible from tweaking one thing (university undergraduate admissions). The whole system needs work, from K onwards. But such an overhaul would need people to agree on what they're trying to optimize for.
- parineum 5y agoRich kids who can afford all of that are actually more educated than those that can't. To suggest otherwise would be to suggest that education and tutoring has no effect, in which case, why go to college at all? If you're a smart and poor kid you're more likely to be undereducated and unprepared for college level academics.
- rayiner 5y agoHow “rich” you have to be to afford SAT prep is vastly overstated: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/06/21/asian_study_art.html https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/06/21/... > For the most part, wealthy families who can afford private tutoring for their kids at $150 or more an hour, generally don't send their kids to the Jiechu School for help on the SHSAT. It serves families of modest means, especially recent immigrants, many of them from Fujian province, who constitute the lowest socio-economic layer of the Chinese-American population. > For them, Jiechu's price – $650 for a seven-week summer course, four hours a day, Monday to Friday – is a doable stretch. That
- xyzzyz 5y ago$650 for seven weeks of half-day school? If they ran regular school, 35 weeks of full day school would cost $650 * 2 * 35/7 = $6500 per student per school year. That’s like half of what the government spends per student in regular public schools. If Jiechu is so amazing that its students get significant boost over public schools, maybe we should abolish normal public schools and instead send all kids to Jiechu, to both get better results and save money at the same time.
- rayiner 5y agoIt’s a prep course. The point is that it’s within the reach even of quite poor Chinese immigrants.
- rahimnathwani 5y ago"That’s like half of what the government spends per student in regular public schools" I had never heard of Jiechu until just now, but you could achieve this 50% cost reduction simply by having class sizes closer to those of China's high schools (~48 per class) than those in the US (~24 per class). This is before you consider other potential cost savings, e.g. - contract teachers can be cheaper than unionized employees - no costly central bureaucracy
- scarmig 5y agoThe issue is that whatever qualification process you have is gameable by rich people. Stats are less gameable than alternatives like grades, lacrosse trophies, and interviews/subjective chemistry evaluations.
- ThrowawayR2 5y agoAs a poor Asian who got their education from a small, ill-funded school district, the above narrative doesn't stand up to examination. The whole point of the SAT and ACT, as an at least reasonably objective measure of educational achievement, was that people like me could compete with wealthier but less talented/motivated students by using our hard work and what intelligence we possessed to master enough educational material to excel on them. Even back in the pre-internet era and even in a poor school district, high school level educational material was plentiful and teachers more than willing to answer questions and provide extra instruction (it's their profession after all). The SAT levels the playing field for the poor but smart.
- throwawaysea 5y agoI don’t buy this narrative at all. It is frequently repeated but without evidence. Most high test scorers do not have tutoring. The majority of high scorers learn using cheap test prep books (which are cheap enough for everyone to afford), their talent, and plain old hard work. This lawsuit uses vague claims to try and make it seem like all high scorers don’t deserve their score but the reality is almost all of them do deserve it.
- oogabooga123 5y agoIsn’t this true for ANY measure of “intelligence” or “hard work” or anything else? This bias is going to appear everywhere, should universities not be allowed to filter students at all? What would you suggest, concretely?
- Decker87 5y agoIt disadvantages people who aren't good at math.
- toast0 5y agoWord problems often reference cultural knowledge, and also require language abilities nit strictly needed for testing math abilities.
- baggy_trough 5y agoTerrible news for smart poor people.
- chrisulloa 5y agoTerrible news for dumb rich people, really.
- baggy_trough 5y agoWhy would that be? Rich people can game a system without standardized testing more easily.
- davidf18 5y agoActually the tests help the poor to get admitted against quotas. 100 years ago there were Jewish quotas in Ivy League schools and others. The way that they finally were able to get over the quotas was when universities started accepting the SAT for admission, thus making admissions merit-based. This is easy history to look up on the web, so the reality is that merit-based exams help to overcome quotas. I wonder if now the universities will re-instate the quotas for Jews, since Jews are overrepresented in universities compared with the proportion of those that appear in US population. Any opinions about this?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throwawaysea 5y agoPrivate universities already have quotas for Jews, Asians, Whites, and other groups they claim are over represented. They won’t call it that, but policies like affirmative action, holistic admissions, and so on are all euphemisms for quotas by ethnicity or other demographic trait. No one stops to consider that maybe there are cultural and behavioral practices that lead to these merit gap. Now the UC system will do the same by simply banning the measurement of aptitude. It lets them regress student demographics towards a desired distribution without controversy.
- MyHypatia 5y agoIs SAT performance actually a better predictor of college readiness than just using grades, an essay, and AP test scores? It's worth considering that we have been wasting an enormous amount of people's time and energy training them to answer contrived questions that have very little to do with how prepared they are for college and how likely they are to succeed. Just because I had to do it, I see no reason to inflict that BS on today's kids.
- JamesBarney 5y agoIt's not a better predictor than all 4 of those things combined. And grades are a better of future grades than just an sat score but sat score plus grades are better than just grades. But I also wonder how well they correlate with job success after school.
- babyshake 5y agoThe answer isn't to be more fair about how you select people for your exclusive school. The answer is to make the school and its resources not scarce and exclusive.
- ayyy 5y agoThat would be nice, but the real answer is to make it easier to work without a degree. Most people aren't really there for a liberal arts education; they're there to try and secure future employment.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoSuch innovation will need to come from organizations that aren’t entrenched and whose existence doesn’t depend on scarcity. Higher Ed isn’t going to voluntarily obsolete itself. (See the book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”) Support apprenticeships and on the job training alongside online courses and universally accessible community college.
- the_only_law 5y ago> Such innovation will need to come from organizations that aren’t entrenched and whose existence doesn’t depend on scarcity. It won’t happen without a significant cultural shift either. There seem to have been a number of institutions that have attempted to make education affordable and they all fail for various reasons. One being that at the end of the day a college degree is the only sort of credential considered respectable and even those can be worthless depending on a number of factors.
- ryan93 5y agoHow does Berkeley expand the number of kids who can handle its difficult science and engineering classes?
- tfehring 5y agoThat seems like a secondary concern and also mostly not Berkeley’s responsibility. The part that Berkeley is (or should be) responsible for is that the number of students who could get through its STEM coursework is orders of magnitude higher than the number it currently admits.
- mimikatz 5y agoTesting isn't perfect, but it seems like the best method, least gameable, and lowest barrier to entry compared to all the others. Essays and resumes and have no traceability back proving the applicant even did the work. GPAs and school history, AP courses is tied to the student but very school and zip code dependant.
- nvrspyx 5y agoExactly. My high school didn’t have AP classes, the curriculum was the bare minimum for state requirements, and the grading system allowed for 5 valedictorians all with perfect 4.0s in my graduating class of 50. While I was one of them, the only thing that really made me stand out in college applications was my essays and good ACT scores. In fact, I had never even heard of AP classes and didn’t know what they were until I started applying to colleges.
- MyHypatia 5y agoI think SAT/ACT is a tragic waste of time. If you add up all the hours that all the students spend practicing questions that are not relevant to any college major or job, it's just such a sad way to force kids to spend their time instead of learning actual things. All this time wasted so that the adults can point to a number to decide which kids get in and which don't. In terms of assessment I think grades and essays are sufficient. You might be right that it's more gameable, but is it THAT much more gameable? Should we instead waste literally tens of millions of hours of people's time so that we can say that maybe we prevented some undeserving people from entering the system? If they are truly undeserving they will fail out. And if they do well, then I guess they weren't undeserving. I also think it's important to point out that in California, if you rank in the top 9% of your class you are guaranteed acceptance to a UC. It may not be your first choice, but if you don't get into your top choice, you can go to another UC and transfer, or go to a community college and transfer.
- xyzzyz 5y ago> I think SAT/ACT is a tragic waste of time. If you add up all the hours that all the students spend practicing questions that are not relevant to any college major or job, it's just such a sad way to force kids to spend their time instead of learning actual things. All this time wasted so that the adults can point to a number to decide which kids get in and which don't. Exactly the same thing can be said about the college itself.
- CogitoCogito 5y agoWhat methods are not more gameable by more wealthy students? Grades, letters of recommendation, and essays all seem to be (to me). Am I missing something?
- rayiner 5y agoI’m sure the subjective measures they replace this with will be not at all biased against Asians: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
- rebelos 5y agoHaving a high percentage of Asian Americans at your selective institution is now predictive for woke interventionism. Same thing is happening at Stuyvesant, TJHSST, etc. I'm very likely going to have my kids fudge their ethnicity to game this incredibly racist admissions architecture. I'm Asian but my grandfather was born in Africa, so that's one possibility.
- rayiner 5y agoWhen I was at TJHSST, it was about 1/3 Asian and I’d joke “that’s the right number, any more of us super study Asians in here will kill the culture.” But I was a teenager joking around, I didn’t realize people were taking it seriously. :-/
- rahimnathwani 5y agoSurprisingly, one of the plaintiffs in this case is an organization that represents some Asians: Chinese for Affirmative Action. You can see their reaction to the success of their action here: https://www.facebook.com/68134933006/posts/10159313850238007/ https://www.facebook.com/68134933006/posts/10159313850238007...
- throwawaysea 5y agoWhenever affirmative action or an equivalent action like this is pushed, the proponents identify some activist fringe group of Asians to give the semblance of Asian support, even though it is obvious most Asians wouldn’t support it because these actions directly discriminate against them.
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- yumraj 5y agoThe article talks about the increase in the number of applicants but whether or not there was any impact on the demographic make up of the admitted students. Also we’ll only know in a few years how some of the students are doing once admitted. At the very least they should have kept SAT math and subject SATs for science, engineering and CS admissions. Next are they going to stop considering GPAs and AP scores since I’m sure there is a correlation too. What is going to be the admission criteria now? Random number generator? ‘n’ from each high school?
- poopypoopington 5y agoIn theory standardized tests are good because they provide a standardized way to measure aptitude. Unfortunately, they are relatively easy to game and in fact what they measure is a student's family's wealth because wealth can buy tutors to help them do better on the tests. Sure a few middle class kids might slip through the system through studying on their own with books or in study groups, but it really shuts out low income kids who lack any access to study resources or even a safe place to study.
- JamesBarney 5y agoWhat do you use instead of standardized scores that are less easily gameable? Extra-curriculars are easier to game and require far more money and time. Essays are much more effectively gamed. Same with grades. Also if you don't have a safe place to study that's awful. But that's going to affect your grades and how much you learned the previous 12 years much more.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoSo, what are admissions going to be based on besides merit (and well the problems of legacy)? Looks, victimology points, bought essays? Is this "SATs and ACTs are racist!"?
- jwilber 5y agoAs a Cal grad, I think this hurts more people from my lower/middle class background than it helps. I see the SAT as a way to even the playing field. Now rich people can just pay for ‘experiences’ to game whatever holistic bullshit the admissions are looking for. Reason N to not donate to my alma matter.