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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 cl

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.
ryan93 5y ago
Top 6% now FWIW
- briliantbrandon 5y ago
  Yeah I wanted to point this out. In Texas it is the top 10% for every public university except the University of Texas at Austin which varies the percentage from year to year depending on the expected number of applicants. 6% is the lowest I have seen it. I believe it was 8% the year I was accepted.
Aperocky 5y ago
All system can be gamed. I guess UT isn't that prestigious to create strong enough incentives. Imagine if Harvard said you'd get admission if you're top 1% of the class. Imagine how many parent would just stick their kid into the worst school for 1-2 years to get that. California just made it very hard to game.
- Causality1 5y ago
  That wouldn't be a good thing? Students are assigned to schools based on their address. To put their kid in a bad school would require moving into a bad neighborhood. That means the poor town gets more tax money, which all the students benefit from.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    The overwhelming majority of towns do not impose an income tax and presumably the property tax would be the same regardless of whether a "typical" or "college admissions gaming" resident lived there. The only small difference in tax income to the town would be any minuscule difference in excise taxes on vehicles or local sales tax. Do you have a larger difference in tax income to the town in mind that I'm not seeing?
    - mattmcknight 5y ago
      Not to mention that you could just rent an apartment in that area to get an address and drive your kid to school.
- usaar333 5y ago
  Well, UC doesn't consider your skin color in said evaluation (the evaluation criteria is constructed in a weigh that does boost racial diversity, but that's different from considering at the individual criteria), and it has similar gaming dynamics. As the article notes, you absolutely can go to a weaker high school to boost your chance into a UC (parents can also try dropping their income lower to boost their kids as well). Though, neither might not be a good strategy for the long-run anyway.
- 5y ago
josephcsible 5y ago
> If you graduate in the top 10 percent of your class, then you are guaranteed admission to all state funded universities. Aren't most schools small enough that this incentivizes sabotaging classmates to boost your relative rank?
- mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
  Yes, this is a side effect of stack ranking and it exists even when the class sizes are large. It also encourages zero-sum thinking generally.
- klyrs 5y ago
  That would be a ton of work (liable to expose the plot) unless you're right at the threshold and you know who's immediately in front of you.
- mattpratt 5y ago
  In my experience the more common narrative was gaming the system to keep your GPA high. AP/DC/Advanced classes are typically shifted a GPA point up. For example, you may not take an elective (Photography) because getting the top grade in the class would still drop your overall GPA. Despite Spanish being available in middle school, our valedictorian waited until high school because it would count a point higher -- by the time you realize how to play the game, it might be too late. The other example cited was kids attending a very competitive school up until their senior year and then moving to a less competitive school and graduating a higher rank.
  - stanford_labrat 5y ago
    My favorite example of this is a CISCO/networking class offered at my old high school. It counted as 2 classes when it came to calculating your GPA...and accordingly was supposed to take up 2 "slots" on your schedule. However it didn't and instead the 2nd slot was always after school, which nobody went to anyways. So it allowed you to fit N+1 AP classes into what would normally be a N class schedule and gave a major advantage when calculating class rank. As a result you got some very interesting people taking this class who you would never expect, simply to boost their class rank. It saddens me a little now to realize that these kids schedules were planned out from the beginning from fall freshman year to optimize their GPA...but I went to a very competitive school so in retrospect it makes sense. Bonus, to your point they offered ap options for most arts and electives! You could take AP photography or "honors" art/music which counted as an AP for weighted gpa calculations :P
duxup 5y ago
I think a lot of the meme form of 'conservative' and 'liberal' concepts OFTEN don't fit if you define it by politics or a state policy... especially any policy as time goes on. A state government might have a very liberal or conservative party in power ... and a given policy might be considered the opposite, but they're not going to revisit it all the time. The reasons for the policy too might have nothing to do with 'conservative' and 'liberal'. Personally, I'm not really sure I buy into the idea that any given University has to have a given admissions policy and be 'liberal' or 'conservative'. There's room for a mix of policies across universities IMO / should be a mix. Fankly I think you could tell most people any random policy is 'conservative' or 'liberal' and they'd just support or oppose it based on that label. Definitions are all dorked up... and 'conservative' and 'liberal' is too weird and narrow a lens to view everything through. Just as an example George W. Bush ran a campaign that very vocally opposed "nation building", it was thought to be a very important conservative value. George W. Bush then started the largest / longest nation building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan in decades ... These terms often don't make any sense when applied.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  TBF, I think when OP was talking about "conservative" vs "liberal" s/he was more less talking about progressive vs regressive systems. A regressive system takes away from those that don't have much to give to people that already have a lot. In this way - a blanket statement of guaranteeing the top x% of students admission into state schools is - I would argue fair and reasonable - but I would also argue is regressive. This is assuming the top x% of students come from wealthier & more educated families. It's possible this assumption isn't true. I think progressive policies would be like those that make it easier for certain groups to get admitted (i.e. harder for other groups). This seems unfair, but if you want change, I don't see how you do it fairly.
  - bayesian_horse 5y ago
    Affirmative action is a shortcut, but sometimes the shortcut is the only way to make any progress. There may be a few very large issues, but also a gazillion small factors that make up systemic discrimination, both racially and against women. It is impossible for minorities to fight those individually, especially not from a position of weakness. It is more effective to counter at least a small part of the net discriminative effect by relatively simple quotas. And usually those policies don't make up the balance anyway.
mchristen 5y ago
The downside of that system is that the 10% at one school is definitely not equivalent to the top 10% in another school. When you compare rural school districts to the suburbs of the major cities a kid in the top 10 people at one school might not even rank in the top quarter at another school.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  But that's an upside if you're looking to be equitable.
  - Manuel_D 5y ago
    Not necessarily. Wealthier parents are more mobile, and can move residences such that their children are in the top 10%.
    - PEJOE 5y ago
      You're losing the forest for the trees. Wealthier parents most often send their children to good private schools, and their children have lots of options for college if they are talented and hard working.
      - analog31 5y ago
        Where I lived in Texas, no middle class family sent their kids to public schools.
        rootusrootus 5y ago
        That's a hell of an indictment of the local schools. Where I live (Portland, Oregon suburbs) most middle/upper middle class families send their kids to public school.
        rdtwo 5y ago
        Idk Seattle for example is liberal as hell but 25% go to private schools. Likely because equity goals are not good for non target groups
akomtu 5y ago
The top 10 percent policy is a merit based system and the most recent flavor of "progressivism" says that merit based systems are racist and should be abolished. Lottery and quota based admissions is what considered progressive today.
- wavefunction 5y ago
  This reads like a straw man argument.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  Lottery systems with an initial cutoff make sense if you have a large surplus of applicants who surpass your lower quality threshold. Rather than make asinine minuscule decisions over who exactly the top 1,526 out of 10,000 are, cull the 7,234 that don’t make the cut and randomly select from the survivors.
  - akomtu 5y ago
    I'd rather prefer my surgeon, should I ever need one, be one of those "asinine miniscule" top 1526 applicants selected based on pure merit.
    - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      The entire point is that you set the initial cutoff such that the differences in “pure merit” between your threshold and the lowest candidate if you went anal-retentive on ranking do not translate into meaningfully different outcomes.
usaar333 5y ago
It's top 7% now and it has a holistic system to handle students outside that cohort. The reason this exists is that it's effectively an affirmative action program for both urban segregated schools and rural schools, which combined have enough political power to pull this off. I believe political dynamics in CA wouldn't allow for this to be constructed - note that suburbs in general fight against such policies. UT itself generally doesn't like the state mandated policy because it results in a less academically strong cohort than other flagship universities, reducing its rank. Whether one school's admission program is "better" or not depends on what you view as the purpose of universities (something often lost in these conversations). Are you weighing more academically similar cohort (in which case purely predictive measures of performance are most appropriate) or some sort of equity metric where putting students from less socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds with stronger ones can result in higher upward mobility? One can certainly make the case that the Texan system could be failing on both accounts compared to say UCs, but you'd need to try to build a causal model to understand which school is producing better results for students that arrive.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  > reducing its rank Do universities exist for students? Or do students exist for universities? I'm sure university administration believe the latter, but given that they're supported by the state (in UT's case, ~25% of their budget?) there's a pretty strong argument that they owe the people of the state education.
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    University Presidents and Trustees have this bizarre fixation on rankings. I have no clue why, especially considering the fact that that composition of the top 100 is fairly stable. Rarely does a university experience a big swing, up or down. Most universities are never going to dethrone the top 20, no matter how hard they try. And it's not like they are in desperate need for enrollment either.
    - nemo44x 5y ago
SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
I am a Texas resident (born here and also graduated from high school in Texas) and would like to point out that it's not just UT, every state school (the other big ones with a decent amount of competition are Texas Tech and Texas A&M) follows this policy. In actuality, it appears that because the demand is so high for UT they have had to lower the number to 6%: https://news.utexas.edu/key-issues/top-10-percent-law/ https://news.utexas.edu/key-issues/top-10-percent-law/ The primary flip side to the top 10% law is that urban centers have much higher levels of competition than rural ones. If you happen to go to high school in Nowhere, Texas, it's quite easy to go to UT since achieving that top 6% is a somewhat trivial endeavor. Whereas if you go to an urban high school in a population center such as Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio, you have to really apply yourself.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Aside from quantization errors for high school classes with fewer than 16 students, why would it be easier to get the top 6% in a rural school?
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    Because on average the children of urban/suburban professionals have more academic support, higher expectations placed on them, and more competition, and as a result end up with more academic practice/preparation, compared to rural or working-class children.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      You're saying it would be easier if you imported the support and expectations with you? Otherwise I still don't get it. If rural school students as a class are poorly supported and have low expectations, and you are a member of that class, I don't see where your advantage arises.
      - jacobolus 5y ago
        The same amount of effort spent on academic pursuits (or the same amount of external support) will get you further on a local–relative scale in a less competitive environment. Even the 75th %ile students at many schools filled with children of upper-middle-class professionals work insanely hard. But sure, being one of the few academic strivers in a less competitive school has its own challenges. I think making the system more equitable by supporting kids from all backgrounds is socially beneficial, even if it sometimes makes suburbanites complain.
wavefunction 5y ago
The problem arises when most of them want to attend UT-Austin rather than UT-El Paso or UT-Permian Basin or UT-Rio Grande. And as noted by others the threshold had to be revised downwards from 10%. I personally believe you can receive an excellent education from most institutions but there's prestige associated with UT-Austin that isn't with the satellite campuses.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
Well, there are problems with that right out of the gate. * Consider a family where the highschool student has to work to help out with rent and food bills, so they miss school or don't have time to work on assignments. Compare this to a wealthier family where the student has all the free time in the world. * Or consider a district that skews wealthier and tutors push the haves up into the 10%, and push the have nots below. Plenty of the have nots would have hit the 10% threshold if only they had money. * Or consider being a minority in a very white district that isn't fond of minorities. These are just a few I've read about off the top of my head. The idea of standardized testing is fair, but only if it is aware of inequities in the system. This has been a debate since the 70's. In fact, the popular TV show "Diff'rent Strokes" did an episode about systemic racism in standardized testing the early 1980's. I'm not arguing if Cali has it right or wrong, but there are problems with using just testing.
- drdec 5y ago
  IMHO you are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good by pointing out situations the 10% (now 6% apparently) rule doesn't cover. Second, you are not offering an alternative solution that would be preferable. Also, you are not recognizing that fixing in the top 6% is not a requirement for admission so it is possible for the situations you list to be addressed. Finally you end with an argument against standardized testing which has nothing to do with the comment you are replying to. In fact the 6% policy allows a student to get into the university without ever taking a standardized test.
- jhgb 5y ago
  You're describing certain individuals who might suffer from such an arrangement, but what's the opportunity cost here? If you will make a different arrangement, different people will suffer from it. I'm not convinced that there's a scenario where nobody at all gets hurt so I don't believe that listing a few examples of some people getting the short end of the stick in itself warrants outright rejecting this approach. > Or consider being a minority in a very white district that isn't fond of minorities For example these people by your own definition will be rare. They might also be disadvantaged in other ways should they live elsewhere, which means that that the same person in two different places would simply face a different set of disadvantages which might even themselves out. Likewise "a district that skews wealthier" should naturally have fewer "have-nots" than other districts so "have-nots" themselves would not be disadvantaged on average.
mattpratt 5y ago
I'd point out that this only guarantees you admission into the general studies / undeclared school. It can still be difficult and competitive to get into the engineering or business school for example. A law was passed in 2009 for the University of Texas specifically, that stated "the university must automatically admit enough students to fill 75 percent of available Texas resident spaces" [1]. That 10% number has dwindled down to the top 6%. As a past automatic admission, I'm horrified hearing stories from coworkers. The process was never stressful for me -- I sent in one application, heard back before the holidays and was done. [1] https://admissions.utexas.edu/apply/decisions#fndtn-freshman-admission https://admissions.utexas.edu/apply/decisions#fndtn-freshman...
- mcguire 5y ago
  At the time I entered UT Austin, in 1986, they had that 10% policy---it's how I got in. Some programs (nursing and business are the two I remember) had competitive admissions, though, but that was for sophomores or juniors. The University had 50,000 students at that time. During my time there, they were constantly trying to find a way to reduce that number and succeeded at some point, so the 2009 law may have been a result.
enraged_camel 5y ago
>> 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. There isn't much that is progressive about property taxes. They affect the middle class much more than the poor (who often aren't homeowners) and the rich (who can afford high tax rates). Texas specifically has some of the highest property taxes in the nation, and that's in part because we have no income tax. Income taxes, though, are actually progressive. Note that Texas's high property tax rates is one of the significant contributors to gentrification.
- jmclnx 5y ago
  > Income taxes, though, are actually progressive. For some states it is a flat rate, I know of one. But to me is the largest issue is funding for public schools and quality. At one time you would leave high-school with an education that was similar to what you get now in a 4 year college. These days all we are doing is running a kind-of day care until the public school student leaves to work at McDonalds in the afternoon once the School Day ends. I also remember some Profs saying in many cases, the first year of collage is a re-education of what the student should already know.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > They affect the middle class much more than the poor (who often aren't homeowners) and the rich (who can afford high tax rates) Absolutely not. The burden of property taxes falls largely on the capitalized asset-value of real estate, so a typical middle-class household can offset much of that burden by paying for a smaller mortgage in the first place. And poor renters largely benefit by not having to pay local income or sales taxes, since the burden of the tax will fall on their landlords. Property taxes are in fact quite progressive.
  - enraged_camel 5y ago
    Property taxes are fundamentally regressive because if two individuals in the same tax jurisdiction live in properties with the same values, they pay the same amount of property tax, regardless of their incomes. That's the literal distinction between progressive and regressive taxation. The fact that the middle class household can offset the burden by getting a smaller place is quite irrelevant. In addition, it's erroneous to think that property taxes are shouldered by landlords. They are, in fact, passed on to renters.
ecf 5y ago
Well to be fair University of California has a policy that is more or less the same. https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requirements/freshman-requirements/california-residents/statewide-guarantee/ https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
- an_opabinia 5y ago
  Most people who weren’t 18 and living in CA in the last 3 years don’t know much about how UC admissions work.
kristjansson 5y ago
California does that too: https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requirements/freshman-requirements/california-residents/local-guarantee-elc.html https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
- mochomocha 5y ago
  Yep. And the data that shows it at play is here: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions-source-school https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions...
nitwit005 5y ago
If the goal is to somehow boost black or hispanic admissions, it won't work at many schools due to other groups dominating the top 10%.
genedan 5y ago
I'm from Texas, went to UT when it had the 10% rule. It was a problem for kids who went to competitive/affluent schools that were so competitive that one or two Bs would put you out of the running. So you would get some lopsided scenarios where some kids would get into MIT but also be rejected from Texas because the standards were that high. Meanwhile the valedictorian of a bad school with a 900 SAT score would get in. Some kids would move to less competitive high schools to have a chance at going to UT.
- failwhaleshark 5y ago
  Disclaimer: I'm in ATX around UT. The high school I went to was public but it had 15 perfect SAT scores in my grade, numerous full rides to Harvard, and such. Good luck with getting into the top 10% of that. A fairer way would be to rank the top 10% of students statewide by SAT/ACT and GPA.
deleted 5y ago
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david38 5y ago
This is a terrible policy. Anyone who has kids in high school and sees the lengths people go to game their grades will tell you this.
- 3GuardLineups 5y ago
  Maybe an unpopular perspective, but IMO its not that hard to be top 10% even with people gaming grades. Source: went to one of the top public high schools in Texas, graduated top 1%, am not that smart and didn't go to any great lengths for school. I payed attention in class, did (most of) the homework, and reviewed for final exams.
weeblewobble 5y ago
Irony is when the nuances of reality conflict with facile binary stereotypes
mountainb 5y ago
The reason being that US conservatism is often a more egalitarian branch of liberalism. In states like California and New York, they're animated by a more hierarchical and traditional type of (small-r) republican politics in which they cultivate client groups which they support through direct cash payments and favored policies. In California the worthies are untitled hereditary aristocrats who secure political power by accumulating and supporting vast client populations. These clients vote for the aristocratic party and provide it with a patina of moral justification. It is an intensely traditional political form that can be found in other societies going back thousands of years. These aristocrats in turn ensure that big corporate interests get favored tax treatment (often effectively zero tax) while preventing small business competition through hyper regulation. BigCo gets subsidized and pays zero tax, LilCo gets hit with endless demands for paperwork and fines. You can find similar social forms in many societies throughout history: it's not special or unique.
fortran77 5y ago
California has an even better program. If you go to a California community college and have a 2.7 GPA you are guaranteed admission to a CA State University.
bachmeier 5y ago
> many policies in “conservative” Texas Just want to point out that the policy you're referring to was put in place while Democrats ran Texas. Historically Texas was a Democratic state, with only eight years of Republican governors from 1874-1995. > more progressive than what we have in “liberal” California And also that California was historically a Republican state. For most of the years from 1943-1999, they had a Republican governor.
- KerrickStaley 5y ago
  Note that until recently, there was little correlation between the progressive/conservative axis and the Democratic/Republican axis. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 led to the downfall of the Dixiecrat faction of the Democratic party and the current ideological sort. Ezra Klein's book "Why We're Polarized" has a lot of good background on this.
asimpletune 5y ago
I went to UT and having this program in was a great experience. It allowed for a lot of variety and kids from all sorts of backgrounds, but you still had crazy smart people. If you're from the city, the school's super hard to get into. I don't know about the more suburban or rural areas. That being said, my classmates were very diverse and it was a blast. CS education was phenomenal there and I still think their approach puts them in the best of the best globally. Everything else was really nice too, can't have asked for a better experience.
namdnay 5y ago
So basically stack ranking?
wyldfire 5y ago
I've heard of some families gaming this system by having their students attend less competitive high schools in order to improve their rank.
- mcguire 5y ago
  The problem I see with that is that, if you are rich enough to game the system that way, you are probably rich enough to be gaming the system in order to get your kids into something other than a state school. Unless we involve football, for example. Sports break the model.
mochomocha 5y ago
As mentioned below, this is also how the UCs are doing admissions. You can look at the data for yourself here: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions-source-school https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions... You'll find out that there's a ~5-10% acceptance rate per high school.
mcguire 5y ago
"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." While I (as a graduate of UT Austin) agree with most of your comment, I would like to know why you believe Texas' tax policies are progressive? (Texas does not have an income tax, but does have (very high) property taxes. A resident of Texas with a large income but a small real-estate footprint pays relatively few taxes (which is why many wealthy individuals choose Texas as their state of residence) while an average homeowner, whose house is the largest asset, pays a greater relative tax rate.)
sam-2727 5y ago
I'm skeptical of how egalitarian the top 6% (for UT Austin) policy actually is. All this does is guarantee you admission to the university, not a specific major. So, while you can gain admission easily to a liberal arts major, you aren't guaranteed admission to a STEM major and will still have to be a competitive applicant to gain admission into a STEM major.
truffdog 5y ago
Doesn't the UC have the same policy? It is the top 9%, but still- https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requirements/freshman-requirements/california-residents/statewide-guarantee/ https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
hoten 5y ago
> 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. Texan here. I'll share my story, at risk of coming across as big headed: I feel the 7% percent policy unfairly shut me out of a "better" school. I can't tell if it negatively or positively impacted my career. It either allowed me to focus more on becoming a better programmer (going to an easier school); or it made me lag in my career 1-2 years (not being able to go from a top school directly into FAANG/a SV startup). For my first 1-2 years of HS, I had a somewhat challenging personal life and didn't take any advanced courses. It wasn't until the 3rd year I stepped up in every way possible, taking all AP courses, and getting 4-5s in 8 AP tests by graduation. I don't recall what my GPA was, but thanks to my false start it didn't meet the threshold, and I attribute being not accepted to UT to the fewer spots available due to the 7% rule. ( an aside, I'm still baffled at how this happened. By all accounts I was overqualified: won a regional UIL CS championship, had multiple gaming projects, knew multiple programming languages. There's a larger critique here about how the hell colleges determine admissions. I assume the quantitative, filterable metrics like GPA precluded anyone of importance from reading any of my qualitative attributes ) GPA is something you can game, and people in my school did. For example, the two highest level math courses you can take in HS is Calculus AB and Calculus BC–the former covers half a year of college-level math, and the latter covers a full year, both over the course of senior year. I chose BC due to an interest in math. Many others chose AB simply because they would both be weighted the same in GPA calculations, and clearly AB would be easier. The result is that the BC class had a dozen students and AB had 30. By informal surveying, the highest ranking students in the graduating class took AB, not BC. This is just one example: there are other ways a students can reduce how much they learn in favor of a higher GPA. I absolutely do not regret taking BC, it was the best part of my HS education. It's a shame it possibly harmed my college admissions. In the end, I was rejected from my first choice (UT Austin), was accepted to University of Houston on a half-free ride, but was very disillusioned with the quality of their CS program during my entire tenure. I landed in a subpar job right out of college, and after a year at a software consulting firm for the oil industry I managed to get myself to Silicon Valley (after throwing a hail mary and moving to Seattle without a job–and then using a connection to a friend I met in Calculus BC to get a referral at a startup), where my career really started. In hindsight it was just a year or two, and perhaps this is just wishful thinking, but I think the admissions process at UT really failed to identify me as a worthy entrant, and I think the 7% rule exacerbated this. I used to be salty about this (in college / in my subpar job), but now I don't give it any thought. I count myself lucky because, like many in this field, I was motivated to develop my programming skills outside school. Perhaps going to a weaker CS college allowed me to focus more on skills more relevant to software engineering (I even had time to consult in college). ________ btw, UT Austin has a unique provision in the Texas law that reduces the 10% requirement to slightly less, hence my usage of 7%. See https://news.utexas.edu/key-issues/top-10-percent-law/ https://news.utexas.edu/key-issues/top-10-percent-law/
jetpackjoe 5y ago
Am I wrong in thinking that the top third are guaranteed admission to a CSU?
nullc 5y ago
For many people, finishing in the top of your class in highschool is challenging if you are capable but have had a relaitively difficult home life -- it requires broad spectrum high performance across years. Getting a good score on a single test is more achievable for some. Now imagine the situation for a student with a poor family who finds themselves in a school mostly with students from wealthy families? The "top-%" metric would doubly harm them. On the plus side, at least the top-% metric provides an incentive for students to attend 'worse' schools, which to the extent that students are benefited by mixing with more capable students, could help everyone.
jl2718 5y ago
If egalitarian means teachers pick the winners and test performance is irrelevant.

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.

ryan93 5y ago

Top 6% now FWIW

briliantbrandon 5y ago
Yeah I wanted to point this out. In Texas it is the top 10% for every public university except the University of Texas at Austin which varies the percentage from year to year depending on the expected number of applicants. 6% is the lowest I have seen it. I believe it was 8% the year I was accepted.

Aperocky 5y ago

All system can be gamed. I guess UT isn't that prestigious to create strong enough incentives. Imagine if Harvard said you'd get admission if you're top 1% of the class. Imagine how many parent would just stick their kid into the worst school for 1-2 years to get that. California just made it very hard to game.

Causality1 5y ago
That wouldn't be a good thing? Students are assigned to schools based on their address. To put their kid in a bad school would require moving into a bad neighborhood. That means the poor town gets more tax money, which all the students benefit from.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  The overwhelming majority of towns do not impose an income tax and presumably the property tax would be the same regardless of whether a "typical" or "college admissions gaming" resident lived there. The only small difference in tax income to the town would be any minuscule difference in excise taxes on vehicles or local sales tax. Do you have a larger difference in tax income to the town in mind that I'm not seeing?
  - mattmcknight 5y ago
    Not to mention that you could just rent an apartment in that area to get an address and drive your kid to school.
usaar333 5y ago
Well, UC doesn't consider your skin color in said evaluation (the evaluation criteria is constructed in a weigh that does boost racial diversity, but that's different from considering at the individual criteria), and it has similar gaming dynamics. As the article notes, you absolutely can go to a weaker high school to boost your chance into a UC (parents can also try dropping their income lower to boost their kids as well). Though, neither might not be a good strategy for the long-run anyway.
5y ago

josephcsible 5y ago

> If you graduate in the top 10 percent of your class, then you are guaranteed admission to all state funded universities. Aren't most schools small enough that this incentivizes sabotaging classmates to boost your relative rank?

mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
Yes, this is a side effect of stack ranking and it exists even when the class sizes are large. It also encourages zero-sum thinking generally.
klyrs 5y ago
That would be a ton of work (liable to expose the plot) unless you're right at the threshold and you know who's immediately in front of you.
mattpratt 5y ago
In my experience the more common narrative was gaming the system to keep your GPA high. AP/DC/Advanced classes are typically shifted a GPA point up. For example, you may not take an elective (Photography) because getting the top grade in the class would still drop your overall GPA. Despite Spanish being available in middle school, our valedictorian waited until high school because it would count a point higher -- by the time you realize how to play the game, it might be too late. The other example cited was kids attending a very competitive school up until their senior year and then moving to a less competitive school and graduating a higher rank.
- stanford_labrat 5y ago
  My favorite example of this is a CISCO/networking class offered at my old high school. It counted as 2 classes when it came to calculating your GPA...and accordingly was supposed to take up 2 "slots" on your schedule. However it didn't and instead the 2nd slot was always after school, which nobody went to anyways. So it allowed you to fit N+1 AP classes into what would normally be a N class schedule and gave a major advantage when calculating class rank. As a result you got some very interesting people taking this class who you would never expect, simply to boost their class rank. It saddens me a little now to realize that these kids schedules were planned out from the beginning from fall freshman year to optimize their GPA...but I went to a very competitive school so in retrospect it makes sense. Bonus, to your point they offered ap options for most arts and electives! You could take AP photography or "honors" art/music which counted as an AP for weighted gpa calculations :P

duxup 5y ago

I think a lot of the meme form of 'conservative' and 'liberal' concepts OFTEN don't fit if you define it by politics or a state policy... especially any policy as time goes on. A state government might have a very liberal or conservative party in power ... and a given policy might be considered the opposite, but they're not going to revisit it all the time. The reasons for the policy too might have nothing to do with 'conservative' and 'liberal'. Personally, I'm not really sure I buy into the idea that any given University has to have a given admissions policy and be 'liberal' or 'conservative'. There's room for a mix of policies across universities IMO / should be a mix. Fankly I think you could tell most people any random policy is 'conservative' or 'liberal' and they'd just support or oppose it based on that label. Definitions are all dorked up... and 'conservative' and 'liberal' is too weird and narrow a lens to view everything through. Just as an example George W. Bush ran a campaign that very vocally opposed "nation building", it was thought to be a very important conservative value. George W. Bush then started the largest / longest nation building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan in decades ... These terms often don't make any sense when applied.

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
TBF, I think when OP was talking about "conservative" vs "liberal" s/he was more less talking about progressive vs regressive systems. A regressive system takes away from those that don't have much to give to people that already have a lot. In this way - a blanket statement of guaranteeing the top x% of students admission into state schools is - I would argue fair and reasonable - but I would also argue is regressive. This is assuming the top x% of students come from wealthier & more educated families. It's possible this assumption isn't true. I think progressive policies would be like those that make it easier for certain groups to get admitted (i.e. harder for other groups). This seems unfair, but if you want change, I don't see how you do it fairly.
- bayesian_horse 5y ago
  Affirmative action is a shortcut, but sometimes the shortcut is the only way to make any progress. There may be a few very large issues, but also a gazillion small factors that make up systemic discrimination, both racially and against women. It is impossible for minorities to fight those individually, especially not from a position of weakness. It is more effective to counter at least a small part of the net discriminative effect by relatively simple quotas. And usually those policies don't make up the balance anyway.

mchristen 5y ago

The downside of that system is that the 10% at one school is definitely not equivalent to the top 10% in another school. When you compare rural school districts to the suburbs of the major cities a kid in the top 10 people at one school might not even rank in the top quarter at another school.

rootusrootus 5y ago
But that's an upside if you're looking to be equitable.
- Manuel_D 5y ago
  Not necessarily. Wealthier parents are more mobile, and can move residences such that their children are in the top 10%.
  - PEJOE 5y ago
    You're losing the forest for the trees. Wealthier parents most often send their children to good private schools, and their children have lots of options for college if they are talented and hard working.
    - analog31 5y ago
      Where I lived in Texas, no middle class family sent their kids to public schools.
      - rootusrootus 5y ago
        That's a hell of an indictment of the local schools. Where I live (Portland, Oregon suburbs) most middle/upper middle class families send their kids to public school.
        rdtwo 5y ago
        Idk Seattle for example is liberal as hell but 25% go to private schools. Likely because equity goals are not good for non target groups

akomtu 5y ago

The top 10 percent policy is a merit based system and the most recent flavor of "progressivism" says that merit based systems are racist and should be abolished. Lottery and quota based admissions is what considered progressive today.

wavefunction 5y ago
This reads like a straw man argument.
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
Lottery systems with an initial cutoff make sense if you have a large surplus of applicants who surpass your lower quality threshold. Rather than make asinine minuscule decisions over who exactly the top 1,526 out of 10,000 are, cull the 7,234 that don’t make the cut and randomly select from the survivors.
- akomtu 5y ago
  I'd rather prefer my surgeon, should I ever need one, be one of those "asinine miniscule" top 1526 applicants selected based on pure merit.
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    The entire point is that you set the initial cutoff such that the differences in “pure merit” between your threshold and the lowest candidate if you went anal-retentive on ranking do not translate into meaningfully different outcomes.

usaar333 5y ago

It's top 7% now and it has a holistic system to handle students outside that cohort. The reason this exists is that it's effectively an affirmative action program for both urban segregated schools and rural schools, which combined have enough political power to pull this off. I believe political dynamics in CA wouldn't allow for this to be constructed - note that suburbs in general fight against such policies. UT itself generally doesn't like the state mandated policy because it results in a less academically strong cohort than other flagship universities, reducing its rank. Whether one school's admission program is "better" or not depends on what you view as the purpose of universities (something often lost in these conversations). Are you weighing more academically similar cohort (in which case purely predictive measures of performance are most appropriate) or some sort of equity metric where putting students from less socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds with stronger ones can result in higher upward mobility? One can certainly make the case that the Texan system could be failing on both accounts compared to say UCs, but you'd need to try to build a causal model to understand which school is producing better results for students that arrive.

ethbr0 5y ago
> reducing its rank Do universities exist for students? Or do students exist for universities? I'm sure university administration believe the latter, but given that they're supported by the state (in UT's case, ~25% of their budget?) there's a pretty strong argument that they owe the people of the state education.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  University Presidents and Trustees have this bizarre fixation on rankings. I have no clue why, especially considering the fact that that composition of the top 100 is fairly stable. Rarely does a university experience a big swing, up or down. Most universities are never going to dethrone the top 20, no matter how hard they try. And it's not like they are in desperate need for enrollment either.
  - nemo44x 5y ago

SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago

I am a Texas resident (born here and also graduated from high school in Texas) and would like to point out that it's not just UT, every state school (the other big ones with a decent amount of competition are Texas Tech and Texas A&M) follows this policy. In actuality, it appears that because the demand is so high for UT they have had to lower the number to 6%: https://news.utexas.edu/key-issues/top-10-percent-law/ https://news.utexas.edu/key-issues/top-10-percent-law/ The primary flip side to the top 10% law is that urban centers have much higher levels of competition than rural ones. If you happen to go to high school in Nowhere, Texas, it's quite easy to go to UT since achieving that top 6% is a somewhat trivial endeavor. Whereas if you go to an urban high school in a population center such as Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio, you have to really apply yourself.

jeffbee 5y ago
Aside from quantization errors for high school classes with fewer than 16 students, why would it be easier to get the top 6% in a rural school?
- jacobolus 5y ago
  Because on average the children of urban/suburban professionals have more academic support, higher expectations placed on them, and more competition, and as a result end up with more academic practice/preparation, compared to rural or working-class children.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    You're saying it would be easier if you imported the support and expectations with you? Otherwise I still don't get it. If rural school students as a class are poorly supported and have low expectations, and you are a member of that class, I don't see where your advantage arises.
    - jacobolus 5y ago
      The same amount of effort spent on academic pursuits (or the same amount of external support) will get you further on a local–relative scale in a less competitive environment. Even the 75th %ile students at many schools filled with children of upper-middle-class professionals work insanely hard. But sure, being one of the few academic strivers in a less competitive school has its own challenges. I think making the system more equitable by supporting kids from all backgrounds is socially beneficial, even if it sometimes makes suburbanites complain.

wavefunction 5y ago

The problem arises when most of them want to attend UT-Austin rather than UT-El Paso or UT-Permian Basin or UT-Rio Grande. And as noted by others the threshold had to be revised downwards from 10%. I personally believe you can receive an excellent education from most institutions but there's prestige associated with UT-Austin that isn't with the satellite campuses.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

Well, there are problems with that right out of the gate. * Consider a family where the highschool student has to work to help out with rent and food bills, so they miss school or don't have time to work on assignments. Compare this to a wealthier family where the student has all the free time in the world. * Or consider a district that skews wealthier and tutors push the haves up into the 10%, and push the have nots below. Plenty of the have nots would have hit the 10% threshold if only they had money. * Or consider being a minority in a very white district that isn't fond of minorities. These are just a few I've read about off the top of my head. The idea of standardized testing is fair, but only if it is aware of inequities in the system. This has been a debate since the 70's. In fact, the popular TV show "Diff'rent Strokes" did an episode about systemic racism in standardized testing the early 1980's. I'm not arguing if Cali has it right or wrong, but there are problems with using just testing.

drdec 5y ago
IMHO you are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good by pointing out situations the 10% (now 6% apparently) rule doesn't cover. Second, you are not offering an alternative solution that would be preferable. Also, you are not recognizing that fixing in the top 6% is not a requirement for admission so it is possible for the situations you list to be addressed. Finally you end with an argument against standardized testing which has nothing to do with the comment you are replying to. In fact the 6% policy allows a student to get into the university without ever taking a standardized test.
jhgb 5y ago
You're describing certain individuals who might suffer from such an arrangement, but what's the opportunity cost here? If you will make a different arrangement, different people will suffer from it. I'm not convinced that there's a scenario where nobody at all gets hurt so I don't believe that listing a few examples of some people getting the short end of the stick in itself warrants outright rejecting this approach. > Or consider being a minority in a very white district that isn't fond of minorities For example these people by your own definition will be rare. They might also be disadvantaged in other ways should they live elsewhere, which means that that the same person in two different places would simply face a different set of disadvantages which might even themselves out. Likewise "a district that skews wealthier" should naturally have fewer "have-nots" than other districts so "have-nots" themselves would not be disadvantaged on average.

mattpratt 5y ago

I'd point out that this only guarantees you admission into the general studies / undeclared school. It can still be difficult and competitive to get into the engineering or business school for example. A law was passed in 2009 for the University of Texas specifically, that stated "the university must automatically admit enough students to fill 75 percent of available Texas resident spaces" [1]. That 10% number has dwindled down to the top 6%. As a past automatic admission, I'm horrified hearing stories from coworkers. The process was never stressful for me -- I sent in one application, heard back before the holidays and was done. [1] https://admissions.utexas.edu/apply/decisions#fndtn-freshman-admission https://admissions.utexas.edu/apply/decisions#fndtn-freshman...

mcguire 5y ago
At the time I entered UT Austin, in 1986, they had that 10% policy---it's how I got in. Some programs (nursing and business are the two I remember) had competitive admissions, though, but that was for sophomores or juniors. The University had 50,000 students at that time. During my time there, they were constantly trying to find a way to reduce that number and succeeded at some point, so the 2009 law may have been a result.

enraged_camel 5y ago

>> 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. There isn't much that is progressive about property taxes. They affect the middle class much more than the poor (who often aren't homeowners) and the rich (who can afford high tax rates). Texas specifically has some of the highest property taxes in the nation, and that's in part because we have no income tax. Income taxes, though, are actually progressive. Note that Texas's high property tax rates is one of the significant contributors to gentrification.

jmclnx 5y ago
> Income taxes, though, are actually progressive. For some states it is a flat rate, I know of one. But to me is the largest issue is funding for public schools and quality. At one time you would leave high-school with an education that was similar to what you get now in a 4 year college. These days all we are doing is running a kind-of day care until the public school student leaves to work at McDonalds in the afternoon once the School Day ends. I also remember some Profs saying in many cases, the first year of collage is a re-education of what the student should already know.
zozbot234 5y ago
> They affect the middle class much more than the poor (who often aren't homeowners) and the rich (who can afford high tax rates) Absolutely not. The burden of property taxes falls largely on the capitalized asset-value of real estate, so a typical middle-class household can offset much of that burden by paying for a smaller mortgage in the first place. And poor renters largely benefit by not having to pay local income or sales taxes, since the burden of the tax will fall on their landlords. Property taxes are in fact quite progressive.
- enraged_camel 5y ago
  Property taxes are fundamentally regressive because if two individuals in the same tax jurisdiction live in properties with the same values, they pay the same amount of property tax, regardless of their incomes. That's the literal distinction between progressive and regressive taxation. The fact that the middle class household can offset the burden by getting a smaller place is quite irrelevant. In addition, it's erroneous to think that property taxes are shouldered by landlords. They are, in fact, passed on to renters.

ecf 5y ago

Well to be fair University of California has a policy that is more or less the same. https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requirements/freshman-requirements/california-residents/statewide-guarantee/ https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...

an_opabinia 5y ago
Most people who weren’t 18 and living in CA in the last 3 years don’t know much about how UC admissions work.

kristjansson 5y ago

California does that too: https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requirements/freshman-requirements/california-residents/local-guarantee-elc.html https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...

mochomocha 5y ago
Yep. And the data that shows it at play is here: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions-source-school https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions...

nitwit005 5y ago

If the goal is to somehow boost black or hispanic admissions, it won't work at many schools due to other groups dominating the top 10%.

genedan 5y ago

I'm from Texas, went to UT when it had the 10% rule. It was a problem for kids who went to competitive/affluent schools that were so competitive that one or two Bs would put you out of the running. So you would get some lopsided scenarios where some kids would get into MIT but also be rejected from Texas because the standards were that high. Meanwhile the valedictorian of a bad school with a 900 SAT score would get in. Some kids would move to less competitive high schools to have a chance at going to UT.

failwhaleshark 5y ago
Disclaimer: I'm in ATX around UT. The high school I went to was public but it had 15 perfect SAT scores in my grade, numerous full rides to Harvard, and such. Good luck with getting into the top 10% of that. A fairer way would be to rank the top 10% of students statewide by SAT/ACT and GPA.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

david38 5y ago

This is a terrible policy. Anyone who has kids in high school and sees the lengths people go to game their grades will tell you this.

3GuardLineups 5y ago
Maybe an unpopular perspective, but IMO its not that hard to be top 10% even with people gaming grades. Source: went to one of the top public high schools in Texas, graduated top 1%, am not that smart and didn't go to any great lengths for school. I payed attention in class, did (most of) the homework, and reviewed for final exams.

weeblewobble 5y ago

Irony is when the nuances of reality conflict with facile binary stereotypes

mountainb 5y ago

The reason being that US conservatism is often a more egalitarian branch of liberalism. In states like California and New York, they're animated by a more hierarchical and traditional type of (small-r) republican politics in which they cultivate client groups which they support through direct cash payments and favored policies. In California the worthies are untitled hereditary aristocrats who secure political power by accumulating and supporting vast client populations. These clients vote for the aristocratic party and provide it with a patina of moral justification. It is an intensely traditional political form that can be found in other societies going back thousands of years. These aristocrats in turn ensure that big corporate interests get favored tax treatment (often effectively zero tax) while preventing small business competition through hyper regulation. BigCo gets subsidized and pays zero tax, LilCo gets hit with endless demands for paperwork and fines. You can find similar social forms in many societies throughout history: it's not special or unique.

fortran77 5y ago

California has an even better program. If you go to a California community college and have a 2.7 GPA you are guaranteed admission to a CA State University.

bachmeier 5y ago

> many policies in “conservative” Texas Just want to point out that the policy you're referring to was put in place while Democrats ran Texas. Historically Texas was a Democratic state, with only eight years of Republican governors from 1874-1995. > more progressive than what we have in “liberal” California And also that California was historically a Republican state. For most of the years from 1943-1999, they had a Republican governor.

KerrickStaley 5y ago
Note that until recently, there was little correlation between the progressive/conservative axis and the Democratic/Republican axis. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 led to the downfall of the Dixiecrat faction of the Democratic party and the current ideological sort. Ezra Klein's book "Why We're Polarized" has a lot of good background on this.

asimpletune 5y ago

I went to UT and having this program in was a great experience. It allowed for a lot of variety and kids from all sorts of backgrounds, but you still had crazy smart people. If you're from the city, the school's super hard to get into. I don't know about the more suburban or rural areas. That being said, my classmates were very diverse and it was a blast. CS education was phenomenal there and I still think their approach puts them in the best of the best globally. Everything else was really nice too, can't have asked for a better experience.

namdnay 5y ago

So basically stack ranking?

wyldfire 5y ago

I've heard of some families gaming this system by having their students attend less competitive high schools in order to improve their rank.

mcguire 5y ago
The problem I see with that is that, if you are rich enough to game the system that way, you are probably rich enough to be gaming the system in order to get your kids into something other than a state school. Unless we involve football, for example. Sports break the model.

mochomocha 5y ago

As mentioned below, this is also how the UCs are doing admissions. You can look at the data for yourself here: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions-source-school https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions... You'll find out that there's a ~5-10% acceptance rate per high school.

mcguire 5y ago

"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." While I (as a graduate of UT Austin) agree with most of your comment, I would like to know why you believe Texas' tax policies are progressive? (Texas does not have an income tax, but does have (very high) property taxes. A resident of Texas with a large income but a small real-estate footprint pays relatively few taxes (which is why many wealthy individuals choose Texas as their state of residence) while an average homeowner, whose house is the largest asset, pays a greater relative tax rate.)

sam-2727 5y ago

I'm skeptical of how egalitarian the top 6% (for UT Austin) policy actually is. All this does is guarantee you admission to the university, not a specific major. So, while you can gain admission easily to a liberal arts major, you aren't guaranteed admission to a STEM major and will still have to be a competitive applicant to gain admission into a STEM major.

truffdog 5y ago

Doesn't the UC have the same policy? It is the top 9%, but still- https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requirements/freshman-requirements/california-residents/statewide-guarantee/ https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...

hoten 5y ago

> 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. Texan here. I'll share my story, at risk of coming across as big headed: I feel the 7% percent policy unfairly shut me out of a "better" school. I can't tell if it negatively or positively impacted my career. It either allowed me to focus more on becoming a better programmer (going to an easier school); or it made me lag in my career 1-2 years (not being able to go from a top school directly into FAANG/a SV startup). For my first 1-2 years of HS, I had a somewhat challenging personal life and didn't take any advanced courses. It wasn't until the 3rd year I stepped up in every way possible, taking all AP courses, and getting 4-5s in 8 AP tests by graduation. I don't recall what my GPA was, but thanks to my false start it didn't meet the threshold, and I attribute being not accepted to UT to the fewer spots available due to the 7% rule. ( an aside, I'm still baffled at how this happened. By all accounts I was overqualified: won a regional UIL CS championship, had multiple gaming projects, knew multiple programming languages. There's a larger critique here about how the hell colleges determine admissions. I assume the quantitative, filterable metrics like GPA precluded anyone of importance from reading any of my qualitative attributes ) GPA is something you can game, and people in my school did. For example, the two highest level math courses you can take in HS is Calculus AB and Calculus BC–the former covers half a year of college-level math, and the latter covers a full year, both over the course of senior year. I chose BC due to an interest in math. Many others chose AB simply because they would both be weighted the same in GPA calculations, and clearly AB would be easier. The result is that the BC class had a dozen students and AB had 30. By informal surveying, the highest ranking students in the graduating class took AB, not BC. This is just one example: there are other ways a students can reduce how much they learn in favor of a higher GPA. I absolutely do not regret taking BC, it was the best part of my HS education. It's a shame it possibly harmed my college admissions. In the end, I was rejected from my first choice (UT Austin), was accepted to University of Houston on a half-free ride, but was very disillusioned with the quality of their CS program during my entire tenure. I landed in a subpar job right out of college, and after a year at a software consulting firm for the oil industry I managed to get myself to Silicon Valley (after throwing a hail mary and moving to Seattle without a job–and then using a connection to a friend I met in Calculus BC to get a referral at a startup), where my career really started. In hindsight it was just a year or two, and perhaps this is just wishful thinking, but I think the admissions process at UT really failed to identify me as a worthy entrant, and I think the 7% rule exacerbated this. I used to be salty about this (in college / in my subpar job), but now I don't give it any thought. I count myself lucky because, like many in this field, I was motivated to develop my programming skills outside school. Perhaps going to a weaker CS college allowed me to focus more on skills more relevant to software engineering (I even had time to consult in college). ________ btw, UT Austin has a unique provision in the Texas law that reduces the 10% requirement to slightly less, hence my usage of 7%. See https://news.utexas.edu/key-issues/top-10-percent-law/ https://news.utexas.edu/key-issues/top-10-percent-law/

jetpackjoe 5y ago

Am I wrong in thinking that the top third are guaranteed admission to a CSU?

nullc 5y ago

For many people, finishing in the top of your class in highschool is challenging if you are capable but have had a relaitively difficult home life -- it requires broad spectrum high performance across years. Getting a good score on a single test is more achievable for some. Now imagine the situation for a student with a poor family who finds themselves in a school mostly with students from wealthy families? The "top-%" metric would doubly harm them. On the plus side, at least the top-% metric provides an incentive for students to attend 'worse' schools, which to the extent that students are benefited by mixing with more capable students, could help everyone.

jl2718 5y ago

If egalitarian means teachers pick the winners and test performance is irrelevant.