23 ms·

Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

• paxys 5y ago
  In the very first line: > but out here in the crumbling state of California Yup, no need to read any more.
  • warent 5y ago
    California is crumbling, socially. Have you seen the homelessness epidemic from San Fransisco and everywhere south? I work in a lucrative upper engineering management role and still cannot afford to buy a house... That's not really an indicator of a healthy state.
    • pie420 5y ago
      Then ask for a raise. Two people making $140k should easily be able to save up $400k in 5-8 years for a mortgage down payment. And single people don't need an entire house.
      • jessaustin 5y ago
        With the $400k, they should forget the down-payment, move somewhere with reasonable real estate, and buy two houses outright.
      • Aperocky 5y ago
        Should just move to somewhere in Montana with fiber. Buy a house with a forest attached to it and only one person need to work making $100K to live the same life. The downside being lack of good sushi restaurants anywhere near, but ones got to make choices.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • b9a2cab5 5y ago
        Clearly you've never tried to purchase real estate in the Bay or done the math. $140k after taxes is more like 90k, and then rent eats up $25k of that alone. Subtract another $25k for living expenses (food, insurance, car, etc.) and you're left with 40k, which realistically you'd be dumping into a retirement fund. 2 bedroom house in a decent location with decent schools costs well over $1.5M, plus the insane property taxes due to Prop 13., and you need to pay cash or you won't win the bidding wars. In states with functioning real estate markets, a decent house in a decent location costs $700k tops and you don't pay $3-4k/mo in rent for a shitty, tiny apartment next to a homeless encampment. My friend rents a highrise penthouse in Chicago for the same price as a 1930s 3bd apartment in SF.
        • _RPL5_ 5y ago
          "functioning real estate markets" Is the housing market in the Bay area really uniquely dysfunctional? High property prices are a result of demand outstripping supply. It's what you get for concentrating the entire tech industry in one place. Similar to Manhattan and the financial industry. In that regard, the real estate market in the Bay area is basically working as intended. Or am I missing something?
          • b9a2cab5 5y ago
            By functioning, I mean markets where the local property owners haven't colluded to restrict supply via bullshit environmental assays, zoning, etc. Or at least they haven't sufficiently colluded to the level of straight up preventing new housing from being built.
  • pie420 5y ago
    Yep, recently moved to California from the Midwest and I am regretting not moving earlier. Its been 3 months but I am still blow. Away by how amazing everything. Sure, it's expensive, but you get what you pay for.
  • Aperocky 5y ago
    California is doing well on a lot of things but is it because of the state or despite of the state?
  • jimbob45 5y ago
    There may be some political slant to this article but I found it genuinely interesting with some largely unknown facts.
  • toomim 5y ago
    Are you dismissing this argument simply because it is negative towards california?
• lokar 5y ago
  There is no real evidence for the idea that a difference in scores predicts a difference in performance, once you are above some threshold. They should keep the test, but use a threshold (per major and school) with a lottery for everyone above the threshold. And admit a small number below at random to keep evaluating what the threshold should be.
  • Aperocky 5y ago
    I don't understand why lottery are used so much in official context. Instead of the best, you select randomly and hoping RNGesus is on your side. I agree about the threshold, but how about using other criterias instead of RNG.
    • renewiltord 5y ago
      The idea of the randomness is to calibrate your criteria against general population. I wonder if it works.
    • tornato7 5y ago
      You mean like, read the student's application and use critical thinking to evaluate whether they're a good fit for the school based on their essays and individual accomplishments? Say it ain't so!
      • LorenPechtel 5y ago
        In other words, use subjective criteria that allow them to slip discrimination in under the radar.
        • corlinp 5y ago
          When you admit as many students as a UC, you can easily run regressions to determine whether a particular admissions officer is being discriminatory. They should also be able to anonymize applicants pretty well.
• MikeUt 5y ago
  > Here are some more of the fiercely held arguments for dumping the tests: Test scores don’t reflect the character-forging aspects of life as a poor teenager; the tests force students from underfunded schools to compete against “affluent whites” who can afford expensive test prep; While the article does offer some rebuttal to that claim, I'd like to give a stronger one*: California is 31% white, University of California students are 25% white - they are underrepresented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California#Student_profile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California#Stude... *Edit: On second thought, grardb is correct: Comparing with K-12 demographics, as the article does, is better.
  • vehemenz 5y ago
    Considering that international students are overwhelmingly nonwhite, I don't think those numbers really hold up. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/fall-enrollment-glance https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/fall-enrol...
    • recursive 5y ago
      According to the article, university and K-12 students in CA are also overwhelmingly nonwhite. You'll need to be more specific.
    • BitwiseFool 5y ago
      I know many public universities court international students because they have to pay full price.
  • grardb 5y ago
    I'm not following how that's a stronger rebuttal than the one in the article: > But white students are also underrepresented, if only ever so slightly, at the UC: They make up 21 percent of the undergraduate population and 22 percent of K–12 schoolchildren. If we're talking about college admissions, I think the percentage of white K-12 students is more important than the percentage of white people of any age. Obviously, some people start attending college later in life, but that number isn't high enough to make the demographics of the general population more important than the demographics of K-12 students.
• walkedaway 5y ago
  Thomas Sowell has broken this down very well over the last 50 years. https://www.hoover.org/research/affirmative-action-around-world https://www.hoover.org/research/affirmative-action-around-wo... https://www.commentary.org/articles/thomas-sowell-2/affirmative-action-a-worldwide-disaster/ https://www.commentary.org/articles/thomas-sowell-2/affirmat... And of course the Bible on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sowell-ebook/dp/B07JLS7P8D https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sow...
  • seriousquestion 5y ago
    Thomas Sowell is easily in the top 5 intellectuals alive, and yet most people are barely aware of him and his work. Why? I genuinely don't understand why he is so ignored.
    • zzt123 5y ago
      Whether he is ignored or not depends on the thought circle of discourse and how that circle sets, or does not set, expectations based on skin color. He’s ignored for the same reason Clarence Thomas is ignored - the juxtaposition between the color of his skin and his words.
      • failwhaleshark 5y ago
        Clarence Thomas' skin color is irrelevant. He believes the US should be a Gilead as much as the Taliban wants to turn Afghanistan into an Islamic nation: Christian state religion, no abortions, women and children as property, patriarchy, women at-home/barefoot/pregnant, no porn, no LGBT rights, no accommodations for disabilities, no dancing, no premarital sex, no divorces, criminalize adultery, decriminalize sexual harassment (irony!), no welfare except for the rich, no unions, and only teach abstinence and Creationism.
      • iammisc 5y ago
        Thomas isn't just ignored, he is actively campaigned against (As a person, rather than his views) and 'unpersoned'. For example, there is a wonderful PBS documentary, Clarence Thomas in his own words, that was removed from Amazon Prime TV during Black History month at a time the company chose to 'center' black voices. Apparently only black voices with the correct political leanings. Love him or hate him, I highly recommend the documentary. It's very humanizing.
• charlesju 5y ago
  Isn't GPA even easier to game than SATs? -- Private schools can curve more leniently so its pay to play -- Rich schools tend to have more AP/Honor courses which inflate weighted GPAs I went to one of the best public schools in America and it was not uncommon for someone to take 100% AP/Honors and get a 4.5+ GPA.
  • dahfizz 5y ago
    I don't see how taking more advanced classes and scoring well is "gaming" your GPA. You are legitimately taking harder / more in depth classes and performing well. The fact that your GPA is higher as a result seems legitimate. You can argue about availability of AP classes / funding / etc, but that doesn't detract from the hard work of the AP students. Plenty of rich white kids take hard AP classes and get D's.
    • danaris 5y ago
      In some schools, so I understand, AP and Honors courses come with a "bonus" to GPA—so if you get 100% in the course, it may go down on your transcript as a 110%, that sort of thing.
      • TchoBeer 5y ago
        My school had a pretty good system, where AP grades got a boost proportional to how far from 100 they were, something like 40%, so if you got an 80 raw it would be boosted by 20x.4 = 8 to 88 final score. This effectively means that weaker students aren't penalized for chosing harder classes whilst very strong students don't get rediculously inflated grades.
        • danaris 5y ago
          Oh, at my school it was just a flat addition. That's how the valedictorian and salutatorian a year or so after me ended up with final grades of something like 103.4 and 103.5.
    • lostcolony 5y ago
• black6 5y ago
  > People in power today would much rather do something that seems to promote “equity” than make an evidence-based choice that could lead to accusations of racism. "Wokeness" and CRT are steps back in logical and rational discussion. Sometimes the truth hurts, and instead of plugging our ears, shouting "LALALALALA", and denigrating the purveyors of said truth, we should accept the truth for what it is and look to the underlying causes. The modern western allopathic medicine treat-the-symptoms-with-drugs school of thought pervades more than just healthcare.
• pfisherman 5y ago
  I think the University of Texas has one of simplest and most egalitarian admissions policies that I have seen. If you graduate in the top 10 percent of your class, then you are guaranteed admission to all state funded universities. As a Californian I find it quite ironic that many policies in “conservative” Texas (ex. university admissions, property tax, income tax) are more much more progressive than what we have in “liberal” California. If anybody from Texas has a different perspective on UT admission policy (I am sure it has its pathological edge cases) then I would be curious to hear.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > If you graduate in the top 10 percent of your class, then you are guaranteed admission to all state funded universities. UC is the more elite of two separate state funded university systems in CA, but it has a similar guarantee (but not campus-of-choice), that evaluates earlier (counts only 10th and 11th grade) and has a 9% cutoff for the “in your class” guarantee, which is called “Eligibility in Local Context”. https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requirements/freshman-requirements/california-residents/local-guarantee-elc.html https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi... They also guarantee admission to the top 9% statewide, even if they aren't top 9% of class. https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requirements/freshman-requirements/california-residents/statewide-guarantee/ https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi... California State University, the larger state-funded system, has a process called “redirection” which functions as a kind of admission guarantee for qualified California residents who are applying as first-time freshman or certain transfer statuses, but I can’t easily find clear documentation of the cutoff (which may just be the minimum CSU eligibility cutoffs), but in any case is broader than UCs. I'm not convinced that Texas is more progressive here. (Even before considering the sibling comments that indicate that the actual current guarantee is less than the top 10%.)
    • matthewowen 5y ago
      Right, but the campus of choice difference is huge! The UC system includes schools like UC Merced which just aren't that competitive or prestigious to begin with, just as the UT system includes schools that are much less competitive/prestigious than UT Austin.
• criddell 5y ago
  The author doesn't spend much time arguing why the tests should be kept. This is one defense and it feels pretty weak to me: > standardized test scores say more about which applicants are likely to earn a degree and to do it in less than eight years; they also correlate strongly with students’ GPA at the university
  • Aperocky 5y ago
    Given that one go to the university to earn a degree (for the most part), I think this defense is pretty on point.
  • ryan93 5y ago
    Maybe the dumbest comment in HN history.
    • dang 5y ago
      Please stop breaking the site guidelines, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. We've had to ask you this before and you're breaking the rules here pretty frequently. We ban that sort of account. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
  • namelessoracle 5y ago
    "this metric shows better than the one they want to go with who will actually succeed" is a weak defense? What would a strong one look like?
    • criddell 5y ago
      The metric is basically just confirming that people who are good at writing tests in high school continue to be good at tests in college. If a college thinks an SAT is not a good way to judge candidates, maybe tests in general aren't a good way to evaluate their own students.
• nr2x 5y ago
  Having spent a lot of time doing MS admissions at a top-tier CS program, I never really cared that much about specific scores unless they were absolutely terrible. Tests don’t tell you much about an applicant, essays are more helpful to know if somebody can be successful. We did away with tests and I didn’t miss them.
  • vharish 5y ago
    Can't essays be gamed? And if one is better at writing essays, it doesn't necessarily mean he is better at other stuff. MS admissions in particular have people applying from different countries, countries where English is not the primary language.
    • panda88888 5y ago
      IMO essay is easier games than the SAT. There is no guarantee on how much essay is actually written by the student compared to SAT, where it actually checks the ID. If anything, if I have the means I would have consultants work with my kid on choosing a topic, then heavily edited for impact while retaining the student’s writing style.
      • nr2x 5y ago
        To my point above, it’s easy to spot a “fake” essay. More so than fraudulent test scores actually.
    • nr2x 5y ago
      You learn to spot it pretty fast, especially b/c we did a video screen as well.
  • nyc640 5y ago
    I can see how essays for graduate admissions can be more useful since you have to make a personal statement about your academic/research interests, how the program would help you accomplish your goals, etc. But for undergraduate admissions, the essays are the easiest part of your application to game since they ask about very generic life experiences (e.g. tell us about a hardship you overcame) that are unverifiable. This is especially true for people with money: either through major editing from professionals ($$$), or just outright paying someone to write them for you ($$$). As someone who went to a rich high school in a large city (as a diversity student), I can tell you the number of students I knew who paid to have their essays written or heavily edited outnumbered those who didn't.
• throwaway284534 5y ago
  All this gnashing over test scores and booster programs is just showboating. If states really want to fix poor schools they should make school funding occur at the state level, rather than whichever random zip code you’re born into. Seriously, you can’t justify a wealthier neighborhood being entitled to better schools when they’re public institutions receiving state and federal funds. Evening out this funding is the only real step to giving students a more equitable future, but nobody would dare try it and put their own school district’s budget in jeopardy! They want to fix the problem? Create an executive order requiring that all public schools who receive federal funding must have a percentage of their local funds be distributed at a state level, inversely to the funds generated locally.
  • srswtf123 5y ago
    This is the most important task required to fix education. Its so obvious and it’s never on the table, which tells me everything I need to know about “reformers”. Until this is done, most everything else it shuffling deck chairs.
    • SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
      As noted in the sibling comment - this has already been implemented in Texas for almost 30 years now. While studying the outcomes and the way it was implemented is an exercise for the reader, it's hardly the silver bullet your comment makes it out to be.
      • nishs 5y ago
        I found this criticism of the Robin Hood plan: https://www.keranews.org/archive/2005-12-12/texas-schools-and-the-robin-hood-plan-a-good-idea-poor-implementation-a-student-voices-editorial https://www.keranews.org/archive/2005-12-12/texas-schools-an.... Let's examine the substance of the points the article makes. > Yet when the money is being transferred to other districts, it becomes a state issue and is therefore a state property tax, which is illegal in Texas. Ah, geez. > Furthermore, taking funds from one district to another makes accountability for funding convoluted [...] how will they ever know if their money is being used constructively? Sure, there's also no way to definitively say that the money is _not_ being used constructively. > The percentage of Texans graduating was stagnant from 1993 to 2003 - stuck at 77%. If the "Robin Hood" system is supposed to bring up the weaker districts (which tend to be the poorer ones), the statistics show no signs of improvement. The graduation rate isn't the sole metric that should be considered to make this argument. And even if it is considered, you'd only want to consider the graduate rate change across time in the weaker/poorer districts, not across the whole state. Is there an article with better criticism? The English Wikipedia entry doesn't really mention any, besides "oh no it's actually a state tax".
• flowerlad 5y ago
  Some parents move to areas with better schools in order to give their kids an advantage (such as Cupertino or Los Altos school districts if you are in silicon valley). This may seem like a sensible thing to do, but because of the weird admissions process in US colleges, this may actually work against the kid. It may make more sense to move to an area where the kid can stand out, where schools offer fewer AP courses, and where the same accomplishment is considered to be a bigger deal. See link below for details. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-college-admissions-season-brings-rejection-heartbreak https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co... Excerpts: UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many. A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower class rank at a more high-achieving school.
  • 908B64B197 5y ago
    There's a selection bias here; the parents willing to do that are those who care the most about education.
  • hackitup7 5y ago
    School size is a related factor. For example, Harvard is not going accept 50 applicants from the same school, even if it's a relatively large and exceptionally competitive one like Stuyvesant in NY or Thomas Jefferson in DC. But Harvard will totally accept 8-10 applicants from a small exclusive private or parochial school. The ratio plays in favor of smaller high schools if (say) the population of students going to any one college is capped at 5% for a large school and 10% for a small one. This bears out in what I've observed (all anecdotes ofc). Many people who go from these sorts of large south bay high schools to top-5 UCs are head and shoulders smarter than the graduates of the small private school => Ivy League pathway, despite the Ivy schools ranking better. When you see it in action (brilliant kid who went to a large, highly competitive public high school who was rejected from every Ivy, and is way smarter than many students who went to the schools that rejected them), it feels rotten. Happily most of the folks I've met in this category have great careers but their confidence often takes a hit at the age of 17-18.
• duped 5y ago
  I wonder what the second order effects of this change will have on the curriculum and scheduling in K-12 schools in CA.
• xbar 5y ago
  "People in power today would much rather do something that seems to promote “equity” than make an evidence-based choice that could lead to accusations of racism." My experience was that the system worked just fine for all kinds of people that got to the point that they wanted to go to a UC. Among my siblings and our offspring family of 12, we put 6 of family members through the UC system (Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD). 3 went through the community college system with no reliance on standardized test scores. 2 took SATs and GPAs. 1 got in this fall on GPA alone.
• ZanyProgrammer 5y ago
  Longform journalism can be reduced to the simple formula of ostensibly liberal journalists writing pieces that appeal to conservatives.
  • throwaway894345 5y ago
    I think you have it backwards. Standardized testing was a liberal policy to promote egalitarianism and civil rights, and it was historically opposed by conservatives. Liberals persuaded conservatives that standardized testing was a Good Thing, but as with segregation, opposition to mixed-race relationships, and general race essentialism, leftists are copying right-most folks in opposing standardized testing. It's not "liberals appealing to conservatives".
  • throwawaysha 5y ago
    And we've gone full circle: objective analysis, facts, longform journalism, etc. are now what "appeals to conservatives".
• Causality1 5y ago
  Aligning enrollment with state demographics would require cutting the share of those students by almost two-thirds. My best friend growing up was Korean. I saw firsthand the amount of effort he put into his studies. Why should we allow any institution to invalidate his work because our culture produces lazier, dumber students? Why should we artificially prop up patterns of thought and behavior that have negative effects on the people subjected to it?
  • gedy 5y ago
    From the article: "People in power today would much rather do something that seems to promote “equity” than make an evidence-based choice that could lead to accusations of racism. This is the kind of infuriating policy decision that looks like it is going to help poor, minority students but will actually harm them."
    • visarga 5y ago
      Removes the motive to excel for all groups of students, why strive when you get accepted by quota instead of test score? It's how communist countries allocate admissions and jobs, what mattered most was not merit, but collusion to the party. So there was no reason to try to be very good in any field.
  • 908B64B197 5y ago
    I can only wonder if in a few years some company will have an unspoken rule about scoring candidates, thanks to all the affirmative action and "holistic admissions". With these policies, an Asian male has to be extremely talented to land a spot at a good state school/ivy.
    • rejectedandsad 5y ago
      I'm an extremely unimpressive Asian male and I got into my state's flagship, which is considered a public ivy according to the 1985 list [0]. If going to a state school is beneath these people (and therefore, even associating with people like me is beneath them) then perhaps I'm perfectly fine with them feeling a tiny bit of discomfort. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Ivy#Original_list_published_in_1985 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Ivy#Original_list_publi...
• usaar333 5y ago
  This is not a particularly strong article. Here's a much more data-backed one arguing similar points (though still with some bias): https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-arent-actually-mad-at-the-sats https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-arent-actually-mad-... Issues with this particular article (addressed by above): * It's ignoring the racial gap in SAT scores (and other standardized tests) that exists even after controlling for family income. A large part of the political narrative here (including the university backing Prop 16 which would allow it to consider race) is coming from this fact, not just the income gap in itself (Note that I don't think the university ever took the position that the tests were per se discriminatory, which the author claims). * It's not really defining what "worst" school means; you need to be careful here as you might just be saying the tautological "students at schools with low-performing students on average on low performing". It's making the common claim these schools are underfunded, but on average, lower performing schools are receiving more money. (Example from LA - http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed04m.php http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed04m.php -- LAUSD, which some of the lowest ranking schools, is well over average funding - areas with top schools - e.g. Arcadia - get the least). Perhaps the author means "underfunded schools relative to what I think they should get", but that's a different statement. * UC admission data for 2021 is out (https://ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/content-analysis/ug-admissions/ug-pages/admissions.html https://ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/co...), so it's possible to start objectively assessing the impact of the policy.
  • b9a2cab5 5y ago
    The idea that the SAT is somehow racist is quite laughable. If you controlled for both family income and hours spent per day on academics you'd probably get an equal result. Culture differences mean that Asians are forced by their parents to study longer and harder. As people have pointed out in this thread, parental involvement is the biggest contributing factor to student success, even more than income and school funding. If white/black/whatever parents aren't getting as involved as Asian parents then obviously even if you control for income there will be disproportionate outcomes. I will ask you this: why do you think black people are overrepresented in the NBA relative to their share of the population? Could it be because black culture highly values sports and black kids tend to spend more time than the average kid playing sports due to parental or cultural influence? That same logic applies to Asians and education.
• 41209 5y ago
  For one , you don't need to go straight to college , or attend college at all. Even before I got my BA I was making more than the Ivy League Alum in my family. That's the first myth. California has what's probably the best community college system in America. It was very easy for me, as a poor kid to meet ( and at times date) people from all over the world. Maybe you dropped out of high school due to just not liking it. You can still attend a community college, transfer to a UC and have a great career. I did very poorly in highschool since I was constantly ether getting kicked out or evicted. Still I had morons in my family pressuring me to shrug it off. If anything I'm angrier now than I was back then I was exceptionally lucky to be able to find an affordable place to live at 19. My family is pretty horrible, all I really needed was a stable place. But that's impossible now, the same apartment that used to be $600 is now $1,300 or 1400. For the record I've had several Asian friends who come from similar backgrounds, where there's extreme domestic violence at home and they just need a stable place to live. This is very much not a race issue, it's a 'people who don't have stable households aren't going to be able to get into top schools' issue. If you want to fix test scores or whatever, you need to look at actually fixing the economic situation many of these kids are in. Make it possible to afford your own place with a full time minimum wage job. At least then when a kid from a messed up family turns 18 they can move out.
  • brailsafe 5y ago
    Amen
  • hindsightbias 5y ago
    I would encourage any Californian who lives near a CC to consider taking in a younger relative and helping them get established. Even a year lets them find friends/jobs where 2 or 3 of them can get together and find a apt/house if they want or you can't support a 2 or 4 year program.
• failwhaleshark 5y ago
  UCD 2009 CS&E alum. This is as dumb as when California threw away phonics or when it forced longer-distance busing of white and Asian kids to inner-city schools. I took the SAT-I (1600) without studying and got a 780 on the math section. How is math racist? If some schools suck, fix the schools. If some kids aren't getting enough to eat, feed them. If some kids aren't in an environment where they have everything they need, put them in quality foster care. It's not a feel-good, quick fix to lower the bar because it leads to a sense of entitlement, lower confidence, lower competence, and ruins an educational system that the world may decide its not worth sending their students to. If this is normalized, then academia becomes a center of victimhood codependency rather than a center of knowledge, accomplishment, and excellence.
• jlangemeier 5y ago
  Higher Ed Number cruncher here (who also read the report, which apparently was a big deal to the author since they cited the page count - and many of their arguments hinge on you taking their word for it and not reading at least the exec summary yourself - which is only 8 pages): So, fun thing about the actual study that the author references... the committee actually __DIDN'T__ tell UC regents to not get rid of the test; they recommended against making it test optional due to variability in assessment requirements between institutions - and the exec summary doesn't include any recommendation for or against fully excising standardized testing from their eval process. Further, the committee found that while the tests over HSGPA (high test score, low GPA) weighting was used in a subset of cases it was more likely that a student was admitted with just the opposite (low test score, high GPA); and overall it looks like the strongest recommendation was to disincentivize the HSGPA due to it losing almost 25% predictive effectiveness over the tested time period. This article reads fine until it gets to the last couple of paragraphs, covering "affirmative action" and over-representation of AAPI students; and this is where a glaring issue comes through with their analysis. Like any higher ed institution there is a monetary incentive to get international students; as there isn't usually an out for lower tuition like WUE/WGE (which coincidentally the UC system no longer participates in), interstate compact agreements, and the like for tuition reduction; and the home country in many cases subsidizes the student so the higher ed institution gets full out-of-state tuition rates on a nearly guaranteed basis. So, by using AAPI students as a proxy argument for their weird screed at the end while leaving off factors like what percentage of that UG population is in-state v. out-of-state v. international does a disservice to that over/under-represented claim; while also leaving them off of the earlier analysis pieces moves the slant of the article in a weird way. For further reference; AAPI students are __NOT__ included in Underrepresented Minority (URM) calculations - even though in many cases a layperson __WOULD__ include them; so by not mentioning them until you reach the point you're calling out the discrepancy they end up begging the question around the "model minority" bs; when it really may be explained more concretely through international and out of state student draw.
  • zzt123 5y ago
    Ah. So when the article says that by percentage, white students are underrepresented, that’s because the denominator for the student body population includes all students (thus also international and out of state students), rather than just in-state California students? Tricky article!
• jessaustin 5y ago
  It's possible that dropping standardized tests will have the demographic effects that TFA fears, but it isn't certain. Standardized tests aren't the only reason that Asian-Americans are "over"-represented and other groups are "under"-represented. Another reason is that Asian-Americans are good students. Standardized test scores are not the only indicator of that. Of course, the people who have decided to drop these tests claim to want some sort of demographic change. As long as California public universities have a limited number of open seats, that will hurt some groups if it helps others. Personally I hope that this doesn't just turn into helping whites at the expense of Asians, but that isn't impossible.
  • usaar333 5y ago
    We already know what happened as 2021 data is out: Applications: https://ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/content-analysis/ug-admissions/ug-pages/applications.html https://ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/co... Admissions: https://ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/content-analysis/ug-admissions/ug-pages/admissions.html https://ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/co... System-wide, any demographic change looks insignificant. No change at Berkeley (which had already increased SES weighing in 2020). UCLA slightly boosted URG, but it looks like some of that might have been application demographic changes (which removing the SAT might have caused to some degree - a small number of students may be discouraged by it)
• flowerlad 5y ago
  In most countries students apply to just 1 or 2 colleges. Because college admissions are predictable in other countries. In the US students apply to a dozen or more colleges, and each college requires custom essays. Then these applications go through "holistic reviews". In reality, because of the huge volume of applications, colleges spend 6 to 8 minutes reviewing each application, and the reviewer is often an inexperienced 22-year-old graduate student. The system of "holistic reviews" and unpredictability was introduced to control the number of Jewish people being admitted to top universities. More here: https://circles.page/5680a56b5c28af0998656e09/College-Admissions-in-the-US https://circles.page/5680a56b5c28af0998656e09/College-Admiss...
  • rejectedandsad 5y ago
    It's literally the same in America. What you're seeing is the "dream hoarder class" lashing out. These are elites that seem to have nothing but contempt for normal folks like me and I'm tired of it. At my high school most people didn't apply to more than 3 schools (1 or 2 less selective state schools + 1 flagship). I only applied to 4 and only actually had a chance at the two I got into. The undergrad I graduated from didn't require an essay or anything, just SAT scores and GPA. Even my flagship university - a public Ivy - effectively just judges in-state applicants using a GPA/SAT grid system. I'm not alone in this, my university has about 40,000 students enrolled today.
    • flowerlad 5y ago
      So your college didn't require an essay. Is that the rule or the exception in the US? Nearly all colleges require essays. Your college may not have used "holistic reviews" but nearly all colleges in the US do.
  • plandis 5y ago
    I don’t know if it’s changed but when I was applying for colleges in 2007 many of them used the same application process called the “common app”. Any university using that meant you only had to fill out information once, including essays, and then you could send out the same application to multiple universities.
• AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  At this point I'm really wondering what the ostensible purpose of Universities is, as opposed to their true purpose of wealth signaling. We live in an age where university level lectures and materials are available for free. Why are we paying a ton of money to obtain a limited slot that allows us to show up at a building for the same lectures and materials? Is it personal attention? Almost certainly not, but even if it was that can be had on the open market for far less cost. Access to specialized equipment? Well maybe, but surely there's a more efficient solution there. Is it certification? Because in my experience, as well as that of many others, the degrees don't say much of anything about competence so what good are they? Besides, it's again a really expensive way to certify people and surely there must be a better method.
  • SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    One explanation I've heard is insurance - a degree is supposed to prevent someone from making mistakes so egregious that the person ends up in a life of poverty. As you pointed out, degrees are overwhelmingly received by people who already have some family wealth, so it's easy to sell university as the cause of those higher lifetime earnings.
  • logicalmind 5y ago
    In my opinion there are a few reasons to attend college: 1. You legitimately want to expand human knowledge beyond what exists. This should be the ultimate goal of a PHD. Whether or not this produces important output (in the capitalistic sense, aka is profitable) is secondary to attaining the new knowledge. 2. You want to attain high level knowledge of a subject AND the best way you learn is by having a strict course regiment with a decent teacher-to-student ratio. 3. You just want that check mark on your resume when you try to get a job. #1 isn't about getting a job. #2 and #3 have some overlap in that the ultimate goal of both tends to be securing a job. The difference between them is how an individual learns material. Some people can read a book, or view youtube lectures, then take some tests and learn sufficiently that way (#3). But some people require #2 style learning. But let's be honest, the vast majority of people attending college are for #2 or #3. Meaning, it is ultimately about getting a job. So as long as a job in a desired fields requires a degree, people will essentially be required to get them. The trend is recent years seems to be the dramatic split between #2 and #3 style learning.
• fridif 5y ago
  Don't understand the hate for the SAT. Where I went to school, students would just beg their teachers for better grades and it literally worked. I did average on my SAT compared to my ex-gf in college (top 30 US school) but I ran a 3.8 in college compared to her being a C student. Doesn't matter anyway because none of the stuff I learned in college is used in my daily job as a java developer.
  • sjg007 5y ago
    The SAT is basically institutionalized racism. I think this has been well studied, from its origins until today. If you have the means and money you can get tutored test prep and do significantly better than you would otherwise. Next on this list will be scholarships and admissions for elite sports. Rowing and gymnastics all favor the wealthy. https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/views/2020/08/17/history-sat-reflects-systemic-racism-opinion https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/views/2020/08/17/h... Maybe we need randomized admissions when kids qualify above a threshold...
    • fortran77 5y ago
      The linked article may give you another point of view.
      • bayesian_horse 5y ago
        It didn't. The author seems to have a gut-felt conviction that there is no bias or damage in standardized testing or its subsequent use for university admissions.
        • andreilys 5y ago
          The problem is that every approach to university admissions will be flawed. Personally I think there should be a lottery system after a certain grade/extracurricular cut-off. The difference at a certain point between students is negligible and a lottery system would help alleviate some bias. Of course there's plenty of things wrong with this approach as well, you're never going to find something that pleases everyone.
• option 5y ago
  I will ask uncomfortable questions here. How will this change affect UC’s competitiveness (as measured by alumni quality) against Tshinghua University (China), or IIT (India), or MSU (Russia). Or we don’t care about that any more?
  • spoonjim 5y ago
    The top students will remain the top students. The Asian kid who would have gone to UC but now goes to Cal Poly will graduate and completely kick the ass of the UC kid who got in through “holistic” means.
• fortran77 5y ago
  Rich, privileged kids who can buy good extra-curricular "experiences" and bribe their way to better grades at private schools will be the big winners here.
• bayesian_horse 5y ago
  Yes, it would be better if a school system produced racially unbiased test results, rather than abandoning the racially biased tests. Unfortunately the former is vastly more difficult than the latter. So, while you wait for the school system to catch up, why not stop the system from inflicting some of its worst discriminative damage in the meantime?
• honkycat 5y ago
  I went to a RURAL school. My graduating class was 20 people. We didn't really do SAT prep, basically all time was eaten up triaging students who were struggling, and dealing with poorly behaved students. Or the teachers were sometimes completely lazy. I didn't even know AP classes EXISTED. I got to go home for a work study after my first class senior year because I had taken all of the classes available to me. A lot of my peers weren't so lucky and had to sit in study hall for the entire day. The school was gaming attendance because kids in seats means more money, and with how small the school was every student mattered. Either way: Not a great place to be as a reasonably intelligent young person with an aptitude for technology. I was so profoundly unprepared for college, I had to work twice as hard to do half the work as everyone else, but I managed to sneak by with never failing a class. ( OK, I failed one statistics class because I walked into the final without a calculator. ) I had to work during the day to support myself and do night classes my Jr and Sr year of school. I have this memory of all of my classmates going to an "Of Montreal" concert, and I really wanted to go, but I didn't have the money to buy the ticket. Or the time, I never went out, I had to spend my free time on the weekends doing my homework. So yeah, this is a nice gesture. The SAT is easier to study for when you are a product of an achievement driven environment and have mentors to coach you through the process. College is more valuable when you actually have the time and capacity to take advantage of your education and it's opportunities. Same as everything else, there is a massive gulf of education and training between students of wealthy districts, and the rest of us. Personally, I think those of us from the sandlot deserve a swing as well.
  • gotoeleven 5y ago
    The SAT is one of the few ways that smart, poor kids have to move up in the world. It not very study-able. Removing the SAT is just going to take the one semi-objective measurement of ability that exists out of the application process. This is great for university officials because then they can make their student rainbow have all the desired hues but it sucks for kids with real potential. Not very study-able: https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-they-work-bias.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...
  • slownews45 5y ago
    It's funny because in California the SAT is one of the only ways you could basically test into the UC system even if your school didn't offer the required A-G courses. So you could go to a crappy school, but could show you had a reasonable chance to do well in college and test into the UC system from almost anywhere.
• honiti 5y ago
  Any objective measure like the SAT is bad because it is dominated by Asians who the State has deemed undesirable and unworthy of this dominance. They tried changing the objective measures but it didn’t work, they could do Harvard admissions by 100 meter sprint times and Asians would still find a way to dominate. So they need to remove objective criteria as they are roadblocks to ethnically cleaning their universities of Asians.
• spamizbad 5y ago
  Admissions are already way too complicated. Just have a GPA cutoff and randomly select people via a lottery.
  • crackercrews 5y ago
    That will work great for students in schools with grade inflation. I wonder if private schools would cater to that?
• crackercrews 5y ago
  > There is only one group of students who are “overrepresented,” to use the chilling language of social engineering, at the university: Asian Americans. This is partly because of the yield rate of Asian students. This refers to the rate that admitted students choose to attend UC. White, Black, and Hispanic students all choose to attend UCs at less than 40%. The yield rate for Asian students is 48%. If Asians had the same yield rate as the other racial groups, their share of UC enrollment would drop from 37% to 31%. This is pretty close to their share of the UC applicant pool, 28%. This comes from the most recent data available, from 2020. [1] 1: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions-residency-and-ethnicity https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions...
  • phillypham 5y ago
    It wouldn't surprise me if at least one factor contributing to the higher yield of Asian American students is that they are being discriminated against at Ivy+ schools and have to "settle" for UCs that don't practice affirmation action.
• panda88888 5y ago
  I personally feel that colleges are dropping the SAT and ACT because those scores show correlation between race and higher/lower admission criteria in the admitted student body. See the Harvard lawsuit. Without the scores it is easier for colleges to shape the incoming student population to better approximate the desired demographic distribution.
• ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  I was born in yugoslavia (later slovenia), under the red star, communism, brotherhood, unity, equality, and all other communist bullshit back then. ...and even then we had standardized testing, and it worked. You went to elementary school, usually the closest to your house (from about 6/7yo to 14/15, =8 years), and at the end of that, you'd apply to a highschool of your choice (either general "gymnasium", or 3 or 4 year technical, trades, economic etc. school), and then you'd have standardized tests. Your grades in last three years and your test scores would be calculated into points (i think it was 120 points max), high schools would sort the applicants by points, and however many spots were available, that many top students would get accepted and a cuttoff point value was published (everybody above X points got accepted). In high school it was a bit more complicated, because standardized testing had three core subjects (slovene, math and usually english (1st foreign language)) plus two subjects chosen by the students. Colleges would post requirements in advance - most had just 40% grades, 60% standardized testing, some (i think medicine) required one of the two chosen subjects to be either biology or chemistry (and it was 20% that subject, 40% grades, 40% other subjects), and only a few (art, acting, music) had entrance exams. And the process was the same as before... everybody did the tests, results got calculated into points (i think 0-100), top X got accepted. The exams included knowledge from all the years of schooling, and tutors were a thing for "bad" students, who couldn't learn enough from the teacher (or didn't listen, did other stuff, failed, and had to get a higher grade, not to fail the whole year). With math, you had to know math... there was a lot of practice in school with every part of math, and tutoring was no better than just doing the work from regular workbooks. With history, well.. you had to memorize a lot of stuff, but you knew that when you chose the subject. There was no way to game the system, because everybody did the same programme. I have no idea why only america has issues with standardized tests... IMHO, using grades is worse than testing, because an average students with shitty classmates will in general get better grades, than in a class with mostly "geniouses".
  • ldiracdelta 5y ago
    Some people in America don't like SAT's because of "disparate impact" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact
• shawndrost 5y ago
  In this article about the impacts of dropping the SAT, I would hope to find a coherent analysis of the impacts of that policy vs. the status quo. Unfortunately, that analysis seems internally inconsistent: "In short, this decision will probably hurt thousands of Asian American teenagers, backfire for Black, Latino, and low-income students, and make little difference for affluent whites." Wait a second. If this policy is going to reduce enrollment of non-white and low-income students, and make little difference for affluent whites, then which demographics will see increased enrollment?
  • aynyc 5y ago
    Middle class blacks and Latinos, as well as women.
• whoaisme 5y ago
  When are we going to start talking about black privilege?
• zarkov99 5y ago
  Because the SAT correlates with IQ and IQ tests are racist. Next leetcode style interviewing will be made illegal for the same reasons. Employers will then find something else to approximate IQ, and so on.
• fleddr 5y ago
  You don't change a test to serve the needs of student, you change students to serve the needs of the test.
• kart23 5y ago
  The article makes no mention of the lawsuit that was brought against the UC system. They ended up settling, with the UC system agreeing to stop using the SAT for the next 5 years. I think the lawsuit had a lot more influence on the decision than most people think. https://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/Judge-bars-University-of-California-from-all-use-15531662.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/Judge-bars-Uni... https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/UC-settles-student-lawsuit-agrees-not-to-use-16178677.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/UC-settles-student...
  • visarga 5y ago
    If the test is unfair they should demand more support for preparation rather than removing the test.
  • ejstronge 5y ago
    > The article makes no mention of the lawsuit that was brought against the UC system. The article very clearly references the lawsuit: "Do the tests prevent low-income Black and Latino students from getting college degrees? This is the charge of a lawsuit filed in 2019 and settled by the university in May"
    • kart23 5y ago
      oops, good catch.
  • crackercrews 5y ago
    The lawsuit appears to be limited to pandemic conditions. The judge said it's not fair to some students who don't have good enough access during the pandemic. He doesn't say anything about using the SAT after the pandemic. So this policy is much broader than what was required.
• umvi 5y ago
  > If we were to think about this assertion rationally instead of emotionally, we would have to face what California has done: consigned its most vulnerable students to some of the worst K–12 schools in America ...assuming a given school is responsible for 100% of its students' SAT scores. In reality parents are responsible for at least 50% of a kid's performance in school and so even if you put low income students into gold-plated schools they would still underperform because they lack a strong family life outside of school (i.e. educated, non single, motivational parents) that would have prepared them. Take a truant kid from Baltimore and put them in the finest high school in America and they would still fail because the problem is the family life enabling truancy, not how much money the school has.
• starchild_3001 5y ago
  Cancelling SAT (especially subject exams) is the stupidest decision I've seen anywhere. Make access more fair? Sure. Cancel it? Plain wrong! How do I know? I'm one of those students who didn't have stellar high school grades, but I excelled in subject exams --- those subjects were genuinely interesting to me (math, science). I didn't find the rest of high school interesting, and I wasn't a nerd nerd studying anything my parents told me to study. I turned out "ok" (graduated as the top my class in college, then had a successful career in top tech companies). Without that final exam that gave me the opportunity, I probably wouldn't be typing this message today. I'm not even counted as "diverse" (because I'm not black or hispanic) despite coming from a muslim family and middle eastern background. I can only select "white", though I'm not really white (european). Today's admission debates and anti-racist treatments are wrong at so many levels, I don't know where to start.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Cancelling SAT (especially subject exams) is the stupidest decision I've seen anywhere. Make access more fair? Sure. Cancel it? Plain wrong! UC doesn’t control access to the SAT, it does control whether it uses the SAT. Not using it in its current form is the strongest influence it has to incentivize change.
    • waterhouse 5y ago
      So is your position that, while the SAT is still the best choice for admissions, UC should stop using it for some years in the hopes that this will motivate College Board to improve it more quickly, after which UC should resume using the SAT? That the impact (on future applicants and everyone else involved) of using a worse admissions process for some years is less than the bargaining-chip value?
      • dragonwriter 5y ago
        > So is your position that [...] the SAT is [...] the best choice for admissions No
• KingMachiavelli 5y ago
  IMO a solution the higher-education issue both in terms of cost & acceptance is to force any public or publicly funded school (i.e all of them just like Title IX did) to: 1. Offer all undergrad classes online, without capacity limits , and at a lower price. [1] 2. Degrees are awarded on some tiered scale (instead of the college's name?). 3. All student outcomes are published including % that get a job within 6 months & average starting salary. 4. Most classes can be passed/skipped via an exam of some sort. 5. All amenity/building costs are optional or part of the in-person price. Certainly lots of students prefer or say they prefer small, physical classes but if the online cost is 1/10 of the physical price then you can prioritize which classes you prefer in person vs online. The cost breakdown would be like this: * ~$200 to take the class online or ~$2000 to take it in-person. * ~$50 to just take the exam. If you take 8/10 classes online and take 1/10 as an exam and 1/10 in-person; then you save ~82% ($3,650 vs $20,000). This puts the cost easily within a summer job. The tiered scale would probably just be putting the GPA on the degree. (It will never happen but I think it would be good if the degree lacked the school's name and school's would not disclose if the student attend that specific school.) This would be a drastic change but the current system is extremely biased to the kind of student/person that schools like for their 'culture'. We essentially have an Instagram version of education that's pay-to-play and pay-to-win. The counter argument is always that college is about network effects that can only be accessed in person. I think this is absurd since a good portion of students don't have the luxury/desire to build those connections. In undergrad, I bet it's less than 5% that benefit (but those 5% benefit a lot). In any case, schools shouldn't be using admission requirements to boost their schools reputation. e.g taking Calc 1 at a Ivy school isn't very impressive besides the fact you are at an Ivy league school. There are certainly a lot of other issues to resolve. Schools would hate it because they couldn't be prestigious simply because they are very selective and wouldn't be able to spread costs around between colleges/classes. Professors would hate it because they would have to have an online class (which they seem to hate). Etc. [1] Obviously lab classes cannot be 100% online but in this the student should be mostly free to take the class at any physical school. A titration lab is still just a titration whether it is at MIT or the local community college. Even STEM programs are made up of mostly lecture classes. And obviously there is an upper limit per class/semester but it's probably like 10x the current class size.
• mchusma 5y ago
  The SAT is the single biggest determiner of intelligence I've come across (at least from people taking the test 10-20 years ago). It's the only number I've come across that people commonly have, and is ballpark correct. Throwing it away is insanity.
• enaaem 5y ago
  Im from the Netherlands and US education seems to be worst of both socialism and capitalism: lack of choice and sky high prices. In the Netherlands we have: Free choice of high school. I grew up in the poorest neighbourhood of the city and I still went to a very decent high school with classmates from all backgrounds. More and smaller high schools. More choice and competition between schools. Schools are subsidised based on the amount of students they attract. High school programs have different difficulty levels. Everyone follows a program that matches their academic ability. If you finish the highest level (VWO) you are generally granted access to all universities. American university application feels like a job interview. You have one chance to impress. Dutch (European) university application is like a 6 year internship where you can proof yourself.
  • slownews45 5y ago
    Note that because of diversity issues the US is moving away from any form of levels (called tracking). The problem they had was that the advanced / AP / pre-med / doctor levels etc had over-reps in white / asian. The push in the US is for more group work, less tracking so that all students including various racial groups that have historically not done as well can move together through system. Europe had tracks for things like trade schools / skill based schools and other programs - US is very focused on academics / college / university etc.
  • mattmcknight 5y ago
    >"Free choice of high school" How does this work when 25% of the students want to go to the "best" one? Is it really not free choice, but free choice of schools for which your exam scores qualify you?
    • enaaem 5y ago
      There are many great schools here. Some schools have a better reputation, but differences ar small.
• deleted 5y ago
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• contemporary343 5y ago
  We don't use the SAT in Canada. Instead it's course grades plus provincial final exams which are subject specific. Generally works pretty well..
• anonuser123456 5y ago
  Good; the sooner we make university credentialing irrelevant the better.
• tdhz77 5y ago
  I’m thankful for the diverse group of people that I studied with at the University of Missouri. Different backgrounds, point of views, and experiences added so much to the college experience. Diversity is such a great thing. We should do everything we can to promote it. My life is better, more enriched because of affirmative actions over the years.
• rayiner 5y ago
  What I find very odd about this is the assumption that kids in challenging circumstances would have more problem with test prep than with keeping up their GPA. Poor people can afford test prep. Stuyvesant, NYC’s selective admission high school, has 50% of students living in poverty, and a 1300+ average SAT score. A couple of thousand dollars one time is something most Americans can scrape together. Gaming GPA is much easier for privileged kids. My wife and I carefully manage her younger step siblings’ course schedules to maximize GPA. We schedule meetings with professors, counselors, schedule retakes and extra credit, etc. I can’t imagine how it would be easier for a kid with an unstable home life, who is moving around, maybe has parents getting divorced, etc., to keep up their GPA over several years than to do well on one test.
  • an_opabinia 5y ago
    Indeed, because of diminishing marginal returns on studying, even being in the 50th percentile of SAT test prep hours can improve your score by 10 percentiles. It’s hard to know how many students spend 0 hours studying but it is definitely the plurality if not more than 50%. However, implementing such a study program in schools has two obstacles: (1) is forcing a student to do more than zero hours of studying the same as doing more than zero hours of studying? Will such a student just zone out and get 0 gains, but your study will book positive time spent studying? (2) 80% of the exam score will still be explained by G factor. I don’t know how many hours of studying 50th percentile is or whatever, by the way. This just comes from the math and the fact that the test scores are “ex Gaussian” - skewed normal, where the small skew is explained by everything that isn’t G, like studying.
  • ubiquitysc 5y ago
    I'm not too sure about your guess that most Americans can afford even a one time payment of a couple thousand dollars. That seems to way underestimate how impoverished many families are. To your note about GPA being easy to game, that's definitely true. The real issue is that families with means will likely always be able to game the system in some way. Testing and college admission coaches can be hired, opportunities can be acquired through family/connections, etc. I think colleges are struggling to reduce game-able metrics (like dropping the SAT), but it really feels like an almost intractable problem.
• LatteLazy 5y ago
  Man up. Admit everyone who applies. Let the ones that can't meet the standard fail out and the ones that can stay. Everyone gets what they want.
• mbostleman 5y ago
  My two cents. Be color blind for access to things like this. Then, when you see cultural groups that don't seem to getting through in the numbers you'd like, study the success factors from other groups and help promote those from the bottom up, within the culture. Sounds cliche, but it's better to build naturally occurring desirable attributes in communities than providing the benefits despite the absence of the attributes.
  • Spivak 5y ago
    This is the the social equivalent of boiling the ocean. If you could “just” fix all systematic disadvantages then we wouldn’t even be talking about college admissions.
• tonymet 5y ago
  this is common with diversity efforts: over emphasis on admission. I feel this does students a disservice. I was one of these students. Focusing on admission rates sounds nice to a bureaucrat – but to the individual who will drop out, they will be taking the hit on their career and savings– they won't be getting hired, and they will have $100k in debt for nothing. Who would you hire? A graduate from CSUn or a dropout from UCLA? it's telling that people rarely talk about SAT correlation with university graduation rates. I'm guessing they are tightly correlated (which is why they've been used for 60 years).
• deleted 5y ago
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• France_is_bacon 5y ago
  Statistics: The UC system has decreased the white student admissions down to 20%. It varies by school. Asian Americans make up 34% and Latinos are 37% of the UC campuses. It does change by campus, for example, white students are 15% at UC Irvine, and 11% at UC Merced. Additionally, admittance ratio of universities across the nation is 60% women and 40% men, so that means of that 20% of white students admitted to the UC program, only 8% are white males. Drop the SATs in order to concentrate on "lived experience", and then squeeze out the remaining white males? Or get it down to 1 or 2%? A friend of mine, took the most difficult advanced courses at the most challenging high school in all of California, did all kinds of extracurriculars, sports, music, volunteering and never got less than an A in a single class. The very hardest classes. Fluent in several languages. Could not get into a single UC school. Would he have been admitted if he was a POC? I don't know, you tell me.
• foofoo4u 5y ago
  It may sound noble to increase admissions for "marginalized" demographics into the most prestigious universities that California has to offer. But this has the real implication of setting these students up for failure. California's UCs demand the utmost of studious conduct. The SAT is one of the best ways of determining whether a student will succeed in such environments. But with the removal of it, we will see an influx of students who will become overwhelmed by the expectations placed upon them. Math will be too complex. Literature will be difficult to comprehend. Writing and spelling will be subpar. Fellow students will resent them in group projects for dragging down their grades. These initially excited diverse students will find themselves struggling. They will lose motivation. They will likely drop out when feeling such despair. They will find themselves with no degree and settled with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. In effect, they will be in a worse situation than if they were properly selected for a school that they will thrive in.
  • okwubodu 5y ago
    > Math will be too complex. Literature will be difficult to comprehend. Do you think they’re pulling random kids off the street and shoving them into Harvard? Even the lowest achieving students admitted to elite schools were at absolute minimum inside the nation’s top quartile.
• livinginfear 5y ago
  This is one of the most outrageous things I've seen in a while. I really think the academic institutions are hammering the last nails into America's coffin. America is a failed state, the majority of Americans just don't know it yet. The founding mythos, and ideological bedrock of America has been replaced by something toxic and subversive. The ideological upheaval of the last few years has left behind a broken and confused country. One that will inevitably fracture into smaller parts, or devolve unequivocally into a mess like South Africa. If you go to the former USSR (for one example), you can see monuments to the country's tenacity in the face of absolute peril. Statues, monuments, and architecture which proudly memorialise their heroes, and their history. Meanwhile, delinquents in America have been tearing down any statue or monument with a European-sounding name. America will end up a country with no history, and no future.
  • adnmcq999 5y ago
    I want to believe you’re wrong and I really don’t think there is a way to say for sure (too many variables) - but there are a lot of red flags.
  • Spivak 5y ago
    A single university is dropping standardized testing as one of the metrics they use to determine what applicants get into their collages and that's the death of the US as a state? The history of the US is a history of European oppression. The delinquents you're talking about are the ones who actually want to tell the history as it actually was and not memorialize people who actively mistreated (which is generous phrasing) the descendants of the Americans who live here. In some way I'm sympathetic that we're all collectively "meeting our heroes" and it's not great but it's the truth.
• ApolloFortyNine 5y ago
  If you decide to argue that good test scores favor the rich because they can afford test prep, why are grades allowed at all? In reality the bar to afford 10 one hour sat prep classes is much cheaper than 4 years of tutors in different subjects. And, since I have no doubt that'll likely occur eventually, what would we use to decide who gets into colleges? Is it going to be a competition on who tells the best story in their essay? Can you even be held accountable for lying in the essay, could you even prove it? What else is there?
• flippinburgers 5y ago
  This is just going to degrade the quality of the educational experience in California.
• pvelagal 5y ago
  Standardized tests scores help students irrespective of the high schools they went or grades they got. Getting rid of them means eliminating common testing standards. How will that lead to equality ?
• kadonoishi 5y ago
  228-page official report from the University of California on their use of standardized testing [1]. Voluminous data they would’ve referred to while making this decision. SAT and GPA provide significant and independent predictive value for outcomes of interest. See for example the graphs on page 22. [1] https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/sttf-report.pdf https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview...
• bonestormii_ 5y ago
  It's all really stupid, actually. The competition for the best schooling so that you can get the best job can indeed yield significant benefits for the winners. The private sector judges prestigious universities to be high-value; those universities use SATs to judge which students are high-value; and students judge universities as high-value based on their perception of what the private sector values. All of this is apparently a filtration system designed to find the best and brightest candidates. Presumably, as many have mentioned, these are people with high IQ. And indeed, high IQ people are extremely noticeable when you are around them. They are frequently faster, more incisive, and have a knowledge base that is both deep and wide. ...And many of them are unproductive, valueless fuck-ups with poor temperaments for almost any work requiring a social component (i.e. almost all work). They have substance abuse problems. They have personality disorders. They lie. And many of them are also wonderful people. I'll take a medium-bright, tenacious, responsible worker with a degree from a state school or community college any day of the week over some moneyed primadonna who is too busy trying to display their own cleverness to focus on the task at hand. All of this judgement is stupid because it discounts character. Medium aptitude coupled with hard work can and does produce excellence. Focus, care, and attention to detail are at least as important as intelligence. The filtration process closes doors for these people. Lastly, though this only an anecdote, anyone who's worked in the professional world has had the pleasure of running into idiot attorneys from prestigious schools. People who send e-mails full of misspellings, careless factual errors, and incorrect legal assertions beyond their specific scope of legal knowledge. Trust me, these people exist, and it's extremely difficult to explain how they exist if the filtration system is really the meritocracy it claims to be. It is frequently hacked as a vehicle for privilege.
• flippinburgers 5y ago
  Khan Academy offers VERY nice, free resources for practicing. Throwing out the SAT is the wrong move.
  • thethimble 5y ago
    Isn’t the whole idea of practicing for a test that is supposed to measure aptitude wrong? If not it seems like the test is only really measuring the degree to which a student has practiced for it. Is that desirable?
    • flippinburgers 5y ago
      I strongly feel that part of aptitude is effort.