19 ms·

UC slams the door on standardized admissions tests, nixing any SAT alternative

134 points by djkivi 5y ago

anonuser123456 5y ago
I for one welcome the UC systems choice to erode the signaling value of their degree. Hopefully more universities adopt this approach. Employers may in turn value said degrees less and eventually maybe we can burn down all of higher ed.
- mrjangles 5y ago
  I agree and not even remotely jokingly. Higher education outside of STEM has been nonsense for quite some time. Inside of STEM, it has been an outdated form of education for just as long. The encroachment of socialism into the educational sphere needs to accelerate. The sooner it destroys itself the better.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    That's great if your only requirement is to train software developers to write CRUD apps - you can learn to do that by watching youtube videos, reading self-study materials, and taking MOOC classes - but if you want mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, electrical engineers, and be a leader in materials science or chip manufacturing, then you still need universities. So the price of this "equity" movement is going to be (and always was) mass de-industrialization and transforming the economy to third world status in which only immigrants educated in more sane institutions overseas drive all of the technological innovation. I just don't see a how a nation can build state of the art planes, missiles, satellites, ships, and chips if its universities decide to eliminate objective measures of intelligence.
    - alphabettsy 5y ago
      I don’t believe objective measures of intelligence tell you all that much about someone. There are plenty of extremely intelligent people who for various reasons accomplish nothing and plenty of dropouts bringing enormous value to the world.
      - alex_sf 5y ago
        It’s not solely sufficient, but absolutely the baseline for excellence in any technical field.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        I don’t think objective measures of physical strength tell you much about someone either, but if you’re testing strength to find the strongest people (for whatever reason), I’d still recommend using standardized methods.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        How many dropouts have successfully designed a jet engine? any of the critical parts on a rocket? a suspension bridge? a building more than 10 stories high? a submarine hull? a utility powerplant?
        nitrogen 5y ago
        How many have been given the opportunity to do so? Could a pure apprenticeship model without universities (but still with lots of theory) work for engineering professions?
        b9a2cab5 5y ago
        Lambda School shows it doesn't work for software engineering. A so-called "apprenticeship" model for something like mechanical engineering would basically be the exact same set of (difficult) math and physics courses but without the garbage breadth requirements, which doesn't exactly sound attractive to dropouts.
        alphabettsy 5y ago
        Or maybe Lambda school doesn’t work?
        nitrogen 5y ago
        without the garbage breadth requirements, which doesn't exactly sound attractive to dropouts. Idk, I can imagine a class of "dropout" who would find that very appealing. And I've worked with devs who used Lambda or other bootcamps to transition from another technical/professional career into software, so it's not a completely useless model.
    - throwaway34241 5y ago
      > So the price of this "equity" movement is going to be (and always was) mass de-industrialization and transforming the economy to third world status I also disagree with these sort of decisions but this seems a bit hyperbolic. Certain institutions will probably admit fewer students who are able to excel in those fields, and if the change is large enough it will affect the quality of those degree programs (although in probably any admissions process talented students will be better able to game it). But the likely eventual outcome to that seems like it would be other institutions attracting the most talented students and professors. It's hard for me to imagine every single university getting on board with this, although I could imagine STEM being increasingly concentrated at universities with that focus like Caltech instead of general liberal-arts schools. It also might be kind of interesting if the brightest students tried to excel more in things that aren't directly competitive (kind of like Thiel fellows), although I don't think that's the purpose behind these sorts of changes.
      - angelzen 5y ago
        "It's hard for me to imagine every single university getting on board with this" Think for a bit how many things that were hard to imagine 10 years ago are now common place in the corporate world. Social conformity pressure is a real b*tch. The best we can hope is that the occasional larger-than-life professor will be left alone to teach his craft the way he sees fit. Pray that your kids have a chance to meet one of them and the wisdom to subject themselves to the gauntlet.
        throwaway34241 5y ago
        The corporate world isn't a bad analogy. But corporates are still by and large very profitable, some companies operate as they always have (although that isn't newsworthy, and it isn't a marketing point), and on this specific topic (testing) leetcode type questions are still ubiquitous. If social trends seriously impaired companies' competitiveness I might expect to see the companies that are more on board underperform. But when I think of recent corporate failures (maybe Google failing to compete with FB on chat / VR / Google plus etc), garden variety mismanagement still seems like it has more impact. So I also disagree with the policy, but worrying about "transforming the economy to third world status" like the OP seems like it is going overboard. If suboptimal policy choices or social trends destroyed society it would have been destroyed a long time ago many times over (and San Francisco wouldn't be a startup hub).
    - mrjangles 5y ago
      I learned absolutely nothing in my degree that I couldn't have learned from a book. In fact, everything I learned in my degree was from a book. The lecturers themselves were often terrible, and the lectures would have been far better if I was watching them on youtube and could rewind anyway. The future learning institutes will simply be places that administers tests and organize group projects at 1/10th the cost of current universities.
- mateo1 5y ago
  I wonder what kind of bizarre, dysfunctional thought process would lead one to desire the complete destruction of all higher education.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    I am down for higher education that includes technical schools and apprenticeships as well. Colleges are great! What I am not OK with is creating illiberal propaganda machines using public funds where no dissent is allowed and adolescents at a tender age get to them hypersensitized to identity and identity-politics. Fuck everything about that.
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      Edit: adolescents at a tender age get hypersensitized to identity and identity-politics.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
zephrx1111 5y ago
As Nasim Taleb said: The Most Intolerant Wins. UC has a long slope to slide - down to the tipping point. As long as UC is not burnt right now, these expert wouldn't stand up and open their mouth, till there is no need to stand up anymore. The solution, well, as Taleb said: we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities. Stand up and fight right now.
xyzzy21 5y ago
UC schools have already become dubious - the entitlement of grads, the actual LACK of skills, not remotely "hungry" enough to have any grit or motivation, etc. My father (an engineering manager) always said: "If you want GOOD employees, you never want to hire from UCB, Stanford, Cal Tech, etc. The best engineers in California come from Cal Poly SLO and Cal Poly Pomona. They are actually trained as engineers". This is only proving that a college degree is not enough to qualify most graduates for any job. Better to hire from 2nd tier schools instead and even to consider HS grads on some cases. If they are more trainable than your typical entitled university degree holder, they are a better ROI, hands-down.
- legerdemain 5y ago
  How many Cal Poly SLO grads at Stripe (or choose any stratospheric make-you-rich company you like) compared to Stanford grads?
  - 0des 5y ago
    Show me how many GED students who had to fight certificate bias with get hired out of sheer skill.
    - legerdemain 5y ago
      At Stripe? None, to the best of my knowledge. It is what it is, sorry.
      - 0des 5y ago
        You don't have to be sorry, I'm lucky to be comfy with my current workplace. To me though, this is the dividing line in places that care about abilities, and places that are focused on 'checking boxes'.
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    This might just be a numbers thing because their program isn't as large. It has a top-10 engineering program for schools that don't offer doctorates, so I'd be surprised if it's CS program isn't at least solid.
jwilber 5y ago
As a Cal grad this is an easy reason to point to the next time I reject an alumni donation call. If the goal is to accept more students on merit, this is a big failure in my opinion: rich kids can just game the “holistic” admissions with opportunities not available to middle/lower class students (“volunteer” trips, extracurriculars, etc.).
- spoonjim 5y ago
  Can they “game” themselves into being designated as African American?
  - Iefthandrule 5y ago
    Aka "Does anyone else think black people have it too easy and are the real racists?" Refreshingly honest, I suppose.
  - 1cvmask 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal And more do Native American. That's an easier one to check on the checkboxes for whites. That's why there has been an exponential increase of the self-identified "Native American" population since the 1960s. Elizabeth Warren is one of the more famous self-identified Native Americans (her siblings never knew they were). In the last census their increase has been the most in the richest counties in the US with the most number of applications to elite colleges.
    - Erik816 5y ago
      To be fair to her siblings, they didn't know they were Native American because they were not in fact Native American.
    - protomyth 5y ago
      That's why they should have to list tribe enrolled & blood quantum. At this point, I wish the tribes could sue these people for fraud. The continued closing of doors on the most downtrodden minority is pathetic.
coolspot 5y ago
https://archive.md/FBvmb https://archive.md/FBvmb
everybodyknows 5y ago
Wonderfully empowering for the admissions administrators! Schools will be needing to keep on a lot of low-level staff: >record-breaking number of freshman applications for fall 2021 — more than 200,000 >evaluate the flood of applications without test scores, using 13 other factors And will be able to produce whatever demographics are demanded by the politics of the moment: https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/freshman/comprehensive-review/ https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/fres... >Factors we consider ... >Identification by UC as being ranked in the top 9 percent of their high school class ("eligible in the local context," or ELC). ... >Academic accomplishments in light of a student's life experiences and special circumstances. >Location of a student's secondary school and residence. Cupertino tiger mothers, note well.
- toast0 5y ago
  What's the play? College prep K-8, then move to Fresno for 9-12 so you can be in top 9%?
  - b9a2cab5 5y ago
    More likely, hire private tutors while you go to a Title 1 school in Santa Ana or some other impoverished area, then mark yourself as part-Native American and non-binary on your college application. If you can't afford private tutors, well, guess you had the bad luck to be born Asian.
    - cudgy 5y ago
      It worked for Elizabeth Warren.
  - jimbob45 5y ago
    Why not fuck around in high school and then go get a 4.0 at a semi-prestigious community college?
    - hn_go_brrrrr 5y ago
akomtu 5y ago
"faculty could find no alternative exam that would avoid the biased results" They are too weak to say "SAT hasn't produced the results we wanted, so we're going to..." "seek more equitable ways to assess a student" They're again, too weak to say "from now on, admissions will be based on color". "the state exam ... would disproportionately favor Asian Americans" Oh, the horror, tests show that Asians are smart. Can't let that happen. If a square peg doesn't fit a round hole, we just need to use a bigger hammer.
- seneca 5y ago
  It really is madness. "We tested as many ways as we could think of, but we couldn't game it to get the results we want so we just decided testing doesn't work". These are the people in charge of training our children, and they think this these are valid conclusions.
tomatofarmer 5y ago
This is a positive development. We need to minimize the extent to which people are exposed to math (which quite obviously reeks of white supremacy, according to like everyone I know including the Gates Foundation) [1] https://www.newsweek.com/math-suffers-white-supremacy-according-bill-gates-funded-course-1571511 https://www.newsweek.com/math-suffers-white-supremacy-accord... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29273406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29273406
- userbinator 5y ago
  Asians are considered white now? Because apparently they consistently come out on top in maths testing. China must be laughing like crazy while the US slowly destroys itself in a blaze of wokeism.
- akomtu 5y ago
  The problem with math is its cornerstone concept of "one truth" that can be objectively proven based on other absolute truths. This one dogmatic truth, created by whites (here I'm spitting on the floor), completely disregards personal experiences and the fact that some people may want to see the truth differently. On a serious note, I remember the day a math professor explained the concept of "proof" to me, that was a revelation that fixed my mind. I totally expect that the majority sees math as a sorcery that can be amended to personal needs.
  - 0des 5y ago
    > his one dogmatic truth, created by whites You mean Arabs. Arabic numerals are the basis for these numbers we see today.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- esrauch 5y ago
  You're referencing one weird out of context quote (which sounds like it was since clarified) from one nonprofit who got funding from the Gates Foundation. It seems somewhat disingenuous to make the claim that the Gates Foundation thinks Math is White Supremacy based on that.
spoonjim 5y ago
I feel like with a 5-4 Supreme Court (6-3 if Breyer doesn’t retire) the explicit rationale of race percentages sets this up for a Supreme Court defeat.
- tasty_freeze 5y ago
  Breyer is one of the three liberal justices. If he retires and Biden gets to choose a replacement, it would still be 6-3.
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    I consider Roberts a liberal for a case like this so I think the court is 5-4 now and if Breyer doesn’t retire before 2022 (when Republicans are 99% likely to take the Senate) it will be 5-3 until there’s a Republican President.
    - tasty_freeze 5y ago
      If you classify Roberts a liberal, then your math makes sense. Roberts might not be as far right as some, but there is no way he could ever be classified as a liberal court member.
Rebelgecko 5y ago
>a student’s high school grade-point average, the rigor of courses taken, special talents, essays and extracurricular activities. All of these metrics seem MUCH more gameable than the SAT. Sure, buying an SAT practice test book might bump your score up by 20 points. But if you look at the rigor of courses available, that is going to vary DRASTICALLY from school to school. At least when I was in high school, poorer schools had a lot less to offer in terms of AP classes, and wealthy people have obvious advantages when it comes to extracurricular activities and some "special talents"
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  That's the point. UC wants to implement affirmative action but can't because voters rejected Prop 16. So they do this to make it easier to justify that their target demographics are "qualified" because now there's no objective measurement metric to judge people by.
  - reducesuffering 5y ago
    I can’t believe how much it feels like 1984. “War is peace.” ‘University of California Regents Chair John Perez said, "The failure of Proposition 16 [repealing that the government and public institutions cannot discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to persons on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, and public contracting.] means barriers will remain in place to the detriment of many students, families and California at large. We will not accept inequality on our campuses and will continue addressing the inescapable effects of racial and gender inequity."’ https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Proposition_209_Affirmative_Action_Amendment_(2020) https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...
1cvmask 5y ago
These false flag diversity initiatives are there to entrench the privileged white elite who are threatened by the children of often 1st generation immigrants. From the article: UC admissions officers have said they were able to thoroughly evaluate the flood of applications without test scores, using 13 other factors in the system’s review process, such as a student’s high school grade-point average, the rigor of courses taken, special talents, essays and extracurricular activities. - Special talents and extracurricular activities are great filters for the privileged. Nothing like the academic promise of fencing and rowing. The Winkelvoss twins from Greenwich Connecticut attended Harvard through the white elite loophole of rowing. - This is why there is an allergy to making it based on class and being poor. I doubt any poor blacks or Hispanics will benefit from this. - Interesting book on this matter: Reflections Of An Affirmative Action Baby Paperback – August 24, 1992 https://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Affirmative-Action-Stephen-Carter/dp/0465068693 https://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Affirmative-Action-Stephe...
- gibbonsrcool 5y ago
  Let’s separate sports from academics. Sports organizations can exist outside the school. I’m suggesting this for all ages. Players can compete in divisions based on skill without school grouping as a factor. A lot of kids don’t play sports because they’re not competitive enough at their school. With these extra-academic divisions there’s more players for each pool of skill level. Another benefit is connecting people across different socioeconomic backgrounds.
  - droidist2 5y ago
    I always thought it was weird that colleges have sports teams, then again in Japan companies often have sports teams.
    - downrightmike 5y ago
      American corps also have sports teams, they just typically run under a shell of a rich guy.
- 5y ago
lokar 5y ago
I feel like a good middle ground would be to use the SAT or alternative as a threshold for consideration, but not for ranking. I could believe that there could be a good evidence based cut off (perhaps with other quantitative measures) to answer "does this student meet the basic requirements" much more so then "will a student who scored 50 points higher do well after 4 years of study"
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  According to the College Board, which administes the SAT, the basic requirements cutoff is 530 for math, and 480 for English, i.e. total SAT score of 1010 out of 1600. The mean score for people attending UC Berkeley is 1415 out of 1600. If the UC admissions office were to use a threshold, it would have to be low enough that they don't get more Asians than they want. That threshold might end up being as low as 1010.
  - lokar 5y ago
    Are you saying the racial demographics of students who score above 1010 are very different from that of all graduating students who intend to go on to post secondary education, and that fact would be politically unacceptable?
    - rahimnathwani 5y ago
      No, I'm not saying that, and had not considered that question. But FWIW my guess is that the two groups you list have similar demographics (racial, socioeconomic etc.). What I was saying: GP suggested having a threshold used for qualification, and then selecting from qualified candidates using other criteria. If you support this proposal, there's an upper limit to the threshold you choose. If you choose too high a threshold, then the % of students who are Asian will exceed the % of Asians in the applicant pool (or general population, whatever) and you will be accused of having a racist admissions policy. So you must choose a threshold which is low enough that you have lots of freedom to pick on opaque/subjective criteria. Then you can achieve any demographic mix you want. But if you choose a threshold as low as 1010, then it's probably not going to be any different from UC's current system, which ignores SAT altogether.
temp8964 5y ago
I found what is funny / pathetic about this is that there are tons of psychology / education / especially educational measurement top experts in the UC system, and they know how wrong it is, while they just keep mouth shut. The whole anti-standard-testing movement is pushed by ideology leftists and corrupted bureaucrats, but the supposed experts just quietly watch the world burn. Lol. Update: I found experts in the UCLA were tasked to make the suggestion. They suggested a new admission assessment. So the bureaucrats just totally disregarded their recommendation . See https://50.cresst.org/2020/05/20/cresst-recommendation-for-new-assessment-system-for-uc-admissions/ https://50.cresst.org/2020/05/20/cresst-recommendation-for-n... Also quote: The Task Force in its review found—to some surprise—that tests such as the SAT provide a useful tool to support admissions leading to a more diverse pool of admitted students than UC otherwise would have had. The Task Force found that approximately 25% of low-income, first-generation, and underrepresented minor students earned their guaranteed admission into UC because of test scores. The Task Force’s report showed that test scores are better predictors of success for underrepresented minority students, first-generation students, and those whose families are low- income. Using recent UC-specific data, the Task Force found that test scores remain predictive of success even after student demographics are taken into account. That is especially true when compared to high school grades, whose predictive power has gone down due, in part, to grade inflation. These findings tell us that there is value in the evidence that educational assessments provide, but they can be improved—and so can the UC admissions process as a result. In a vote of confidence in its veracity, the Task Force report was unanimously endorsed by faculty members of the UC’s Academic Senate, 51–0.
- anonuser123456 5y ago
  I have a friend that’s a CSU faculty member in science/engineering. The amount of ideological crap coming down the pipeline is shocking to him… and he’s a pretty liberal guy. But he has a mortgage to pay and dealing with protesting students doesn’t really interest him. He became a professor because he liked teaching, not to become a target.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > he has a mortgage to pay and dealing with protesting students doesn’t really interest him The great irony being it's decisions like this that are undermining support for the University of California. We're not there yet. But a few more of these, and I could see an off-year proposition that dramatically cuts the UC budget.
josephcsible 5y ago
Doesn't this make the admissions process less fair, more arbitrary, and more susceptible to biases?
- CMdH8 5y ago
  Only if you believe that these tests don't introduce unfairness. Given the preparation economy around the SAT, the current situation seems to favour whoever can spend more for preparation courses. Also, such tests have the tendency to test your ability to take the specific test, rather than knowledge and skill. Full disclosure, I never took the SAT as I'm European. But I took other such tests as some places in Europe.
- gedy 5y ago
  Yes unfortunately that's the point basically
siruncledrew 5y ago
Are there any reasons why a private or public university wouldn’t want to maximize the number of tuition paying students? I’m just wondering because why not just admit as many people as you could for various price tiers of: in-person, hybrid, and online education. So in that sense, as long as money wants to come in, why reject anyone other than to fake exclusivity?
- wrp 5y ago
  Because student tuition does not cover anywhere near the full cost of running a school.
WalterBright 5y ago
From their criteria page: https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/freshman/comprehensive-review/ https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/fres... "Special talents, achievements and awards in a particular field, such as visual and performing arts, communication or athletic endeavors; special skills, such as demonstrated written and oral proficiency in other languages; special interests, such as intensive study and exploration of other cultures; experiences that demonstrate unusual promise for leadership, such as significant community service or significant participation in student government; or other significant experiences or achievements that demonstrate the student's promise for contributing to the intellectual vitality of a campus." Notably absent is achievement in any STEM field.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- stadium 5y ago
  > Notably absent is achievement in any STEM field. It's covered by the first line of your quoted comment, right? "Special talents, achievements and awards in a particular field."
  - msravi 5y ago
    ...such as visual and performing arts, communication or athletic endeavors. The lack of emphasis on STEM in the examples is apparent.
    - stadium 5y ago
      As a native English speaker I read "such as" to mean "including but not limited to." STEM is a field (although still broad) and they are looking for accomplishment in a field.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        STEM is a very broad field, and core, not an incidental.
stadium 5y ago
Does this mean we are past peak-leetcode too?
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  No, firms will need to do much more leetcode as the signaling value of a degree decreases.
  - stadium 5y ago
    Good luck to those firms that have the fastest b-tree optimizations physically possible, and no customers.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      Having an abundance of talented developer labor so even money losing companies can afford to buy it is not a problem that exists in the world. What usally happens now is that developers leave if there are no customers, but yes, if we ever reach that state where even the companies with the worst products can hire the best developers, then wages will have fallen quite a bit.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      Do product managers become worthless at companies where coders understand algorithms? Or what is your point?
dehrmann 5y ago
Wonder what's going to happen when they realize this just defers testing to exams in courses.
- Scramblejams 5y ago
  They realize it already. The squishier the subject, the faster quantitative testing will disappear.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
  In my country, around the same time top public universities adopted affirmative-action quotas, they also stablished a "pre-calculus" summer course, to get everyone up to speed in all high-school math before starting their first semester (not specific for affirmative action students, plenty of non-AA students also had some catching up to do). From what I've heard it worked very well as an equalizer, with AA students who entered with lower test scores, ending up with final scores mixed with every one else.
abhiyerra 5y ago
I was on the UC Berkeley campus on Tuesday. So many more black and latino students than when I was on campus. It was nice. I had many black friends in high school and none when I went to Berkeley in 2005-2010. I can say the SAT, ACT, etc. are biased against anyone who doesn't have the money to get the prep for them.
- zzt123 5y ago
  I don’t know about the ACT, but the SAT in that time period was trivial to study for. I had one Barrons book, and the rest was accomplished by being a student in a public school. There were no surprises come test day. I genuinely don’t understand when people say the SAT is so biased, because it seemed quite fair to me compared to alternative metrics. Unless asking someone to spend a lot of time studying is too much to ask.
  - abhiyerra 5y ago
    The SAT isn't hard to study for, but the question is, if your dad is in jail (which many of my black friend's dads were), you are feeling uncertain about the world because of the color of your skin, would you put in the effort? I think people look at tests like the one and all, but many kids have other stuff to work out.
    - keeganpoppen 5y ago
      what part of this is fixed by getting rid of the SATs, exactly? do all the other problems that are making it hard to get on top of school suddenly disappear? do they magically disappear in college? how is it even beneficial to remove one possible avenue for demonstrating aptitude beyond the ability to succeed in a classroom environment, which is profoundly tilted toward rich families who can help kids with homework, bitch at teachers about bad grades, etc.?
      - abhiyerra 5y ago
        Strength leads to strength. If you can get to a place of prestige and that place continues to have high standards, then the people who are bound for the streets or no purpose have a means to a higher goal. Maybe I believe that if you give people a little bit of chance, they end up better?
golemiprague 5y ago
I can understand not relying exclusively on SAT, not because it is discriminating in any way but because it just gives one signal out of many other important signals which a university should take into account. Excelling in some ghetto school shows some other signals, like being a non conformist, fighting against adversity by "acting white" and ability to deal with distractions, something the children of a tiger mum might lack. However, ignoring the SAT completely is also stupid, it is a good signal for a combination of talent and/or dedication which should not be ignored.
kragen 5y ago
Historically the SAT was designed as an anti-Semitic discrimination measure; the racist belief that underlay it was that Jewish people were doing well on college admission criteria because they worked too hard, so designing a test that it was impossible to study for --- a test that measured academic aptitude rather than achievement --- would restore the racist world order in which non-Jewish white people constituted virtually the entire student body. Much to the racists' surprise, Jewish people continued to excel on the SAT, and it turned out to be easy to study for. Today, alongside Jewish people, US universities want to discriminate against Asian-Americans, who have the same high test scores, high academic achievements including grades, and stereotypes of working too hard; often they carry out this discrimination by requiring higher test scores from Asian-Americans than from white people https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/08/07/look-data-and-arguments-about-asian-americans-and-admissions-elite https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/08/07..., but this practice is illegal in California and under attack elsewhere. Consequently Asian-Americans constituted 40% of in-state UC freshmen in 02019, double their share of the population https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-11-01/affirmative-action-divides-asian-americans-ucs-largest-overrepresented-student-group https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-11-01/affirmat... and this explains why UC wants to drop objective admission requirements like SAT scores in order to admit a more balanced (read "white") student body, provoking strong opposition from Asian-American groups: https://asianamericanforeducation.org/en/pr_20200519/ https://asianamericanforeducation.org/en/pr_20200519/ Unsurprisingly standardized testing increases representation of low-income students https://50.cresst.org/2020/05/20/cresst-recommendation-for-new-assessment-system-for-uc-admissions/ https://50.cresst.org/2020/05/20/cresst-recommendation-for-n... because, within a context of inequality, the only alternative to meritocracy is inherited privilege. This is closely related to why US tech companies, who hire you based on whether you can program in an interview, are dramatically more diverse than, for example, US tech journalism companies, who apparently hire you based on whether you're white: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29277661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29277661
alphabettsy 5y ago
Aren’t standardized tests a poor indicator of thinking and capability? Don’t they favor those who can memorize over abstract thinking?
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > Don’t they favor those who can memorize over abstract thinking? No. But if your vocabulary is limited, you'll do poorly on the verbals. I never did any prep for the SATs, and nobody I knew did. Of course, this was back in the 70s.
WalterBright 5y ago
"UC admissions officers have said they were able to thoroughly evaluate the flood of applications without test scores" Of course, there's no way to determine if they were thorough or not.
- ngc248 5y ago
  hahah .... who will evaluate the evaluator's evaluations? Seems to be extremely subjective. May be they should go with a 50/50 split for SAT and the subjective criteria. This won't be perfect but both camps would be covered.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    I’d love to see 2/3rds of the class admitted on long-standing, well-tested policies and the remainder allocated via whatever other processes the school wants to test. Want to let in 1/9th via pure random lottery? Have at it! Want to let in 1/9th via racial or socioeconomic profiling? Have at it! Then look at successful completion rates of year 1, degree by year 4, degree by year 5, and position (as self-reported) 10 years after admission for each group. Either we’ll discover that there’s a better way to do admissions or we’ll discover that the current way is close to optimal.
rackjack 5y ago
In China there is 1 exam, the Gaokao. This exam in no small part decides your future. In the past, you had one attempt, and if you failed, tough luck. Now they let kids retake it a couple times. One exam. One billion people. One standardized metric to determine who goes where. There are flaws to this of course. The rich, with better access to tutoring and such, naturally have an advantage over the poor. But herein lies the benefit of such a system -- it is an explicit advantage. Everybody knows it. Everybody can see it. The path to obtain it is as clear as day -- "simply" have enough money. Similarly, the path to obtain success is clear -- succeed on the Gaokao (besides cheating, which is a whole other thing, and corruption, which is yet another thing). People naturally stratify themselves in competition. When you eliminate standardized metrics to distinguish people, they will find other ways. Your friend has an internship opening that your kid can fill. Your boss lets your kid work under him. You know people who can help your kid get ahead. Meanwhile, the underprivileged are still pushed down, but in a much more subtle way. It is not scores that divides them and the privileged. It is connections -- and when you are a kid, these connections come from your family. And if you are poor, you do not have these connections. And unlike the singular exam, the path to obtaining these connections is not so clear. Removing entry exam requirements does not help underprivileged students. It hurts them, but because it is a subtle hurt that ties to their family's place in society instead of a loud hurt like the cost of tutoring, people pretend it is somehow better. It is not. It is worse.
- TeeMassive 5y ago
  It has been my impression from people who lived in China that guanxi (connections) is far more important than the Gaokao and the main difference between the have and the have-nots is whether you and or your parents have a permit to live in a city. When I bring the point of the standard exam as a great equalizer they immediately laughed and told me that the US is a egalitarian paradise compared to what goes on there.
  - malwarebytess 5y ago
    Did you even read the comment?
  - 5y ago
jchonphoenix 5y ago
Sounds like a UC degree is getting less and less valuable from a signaling perspective. They ignored the research results of their own team and professors which conclusively showed standardized testing was the highest signal for academic success across all races. Talk about political bureaucracy
- eesmith 5y ago
  Please clarify. My understanding is that it's the opposite. Eg, quoting https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0013189X20902110 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0013189X2090211... > Yet, the emphasis on test scores over grades in policy and practice recommendations stands in contrast to research showing high school grade point averages (HSGPAs) are stronger predictors than test scores of college outcomes (Bowen et al., 2009; Geiser & Santelices, 2007; Hiss & Franks, 2014; Kobrin et al., 2008).
  - almeria 5y ago
    And what about predictions based on GPA and test scores? As has been in use at UC and just about everywhere else, up until now. In math terms: just because predicts(A) > predicts(B), it does not follow that predicts(A) > predicts(A ∪ B).
    - eesmith 5y ago
      I take it you haven't consulted the references I listed second-hand? They are likely far more insightful than anything I can write here. Before making my earlier comment, I read the start of the the Hiss and Franks paper is at https://web.archive.org/web/20140310113612/http://www.nacacnet.org/research/research-data/nacac-research/Documents/DefiningPromise.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20140310113612/http://www.nacacn... to make sure the citation I gave wasn't misrepresenting the topic (it wasn't). Here's text from the abstract: It "examines the outcomes of optional standardized testing policies in the Admissions offices at 33 public and private colleges and universities, based on cumulative GPA and graduation rates." That is, UC isn't the first to do this, and we can look at real-world evidence from previous universities where test scores were optional, to gauge how useful test scores are and what effect they have. It found: "Few significant differences between submitters and non-submitters of testing were observed in Cumulative GPAs and graduation rates, despite significant differences in SAT/ACT scores." That is, SAT/ACT scores don't seem to affect metrics like Cumulative GPAs and graduation rates. (As I recall from elsewhere, they do correlate with first year grades, but that's a different and less important metric.) Further: "Optional testing policies also help build broader access to higher education: non-submitters are more likely to be first-generation-to‐college students, minorities, Pell Grant recipients, women and students with Learning Differences." That is, using SAT/ACT scores in the selection process appears to have measurable effect on the student population; reducing what is sometimes referred to as "diversity." As to your correct observation, "it does not follow that predicts(A) > predicts(A ∪ B)", one of the issues is that college success is also correlated with other factors, including parental wealth. And success on the SAT/ACT is also correlated with parental wealth, who can afford special training on how to pass those tests. We know this by looking at the early history of college boards, which emphasized the topics taught at prep schools (like Latin grammar) than public school, because college admissions preferred rich white male Protestants, who were likely to go to prep school. To be clear, the SAT has done a lot of work to de-bias their tests, and I don't know enough about to topic to say anything what factors are actually involved. But I don't need to, since the tests don't seem to be that effective in predicting college success.
fortran77 5y ago
Because of unstable home issues, I was unable to do well in high school classes because I couldn't spend time outside of school studying and doing homework assignments. But I did extremely well on the SAT, and PSAT, which got me several scholarships and college admission. Without the SAT to accurately gauge my potential, I wouldn't have succeeded. This is a disgusting new policy, and will harm people.
chmod600 5y ago
Another way to look at this is, like so many things, a conflict of visions. Vision one is that college is an elite institution meant to bring together smart, rich, and connected people in a learning and growth environment. This is sort of a perti-dish of success. In this vision, standardized tests bring in the smart people to compliment the rich and connected. Vision two is that college is an institution for everyone to have a chance to get ahead. It's a natural extension of high school as we move into a period where we depend on knowledge workers. In this vision, standardized tests exclude people from opportunities. Clearly the UC is adopting vision two. Whether the tests are racist or not is a distraction. The problem with vision one is basic fairness, especially when public money is involved. The problem with vision two is that, if we want real success, we do need elite institutions to concentrate a mix of people likely to produce amazing things. And also, I predict that the noble shine of college as a gateway to opportunity will wear off pretty quickly once they cease being elite institutions, and succumb to bureaucratic stupidity and financial recklessness.
- Viliam1234 5y ago
  I see a hope here. Educational system seems broken in USA: the costs of education are insanely high, but you need the diploma in order to get a good job, so the costs will keep growing, because why not (from the perspective of the universities). And this perfectly designed system to extract money from everyone... just decided to destroy itself from inside. If universities become stupid enough, so that employers stop preferring people who have a diploma, there will no longer be a reason to pay. The universities can become ideological strongholds for the woke, but most of the population will simply ignore them. There are a few problems with this hope, though. First, what about research? Second, government can protect universities, regardless of their quality, by requiring a university diploma if you want to work for any public institution. > Vision two is that college is an institution for everyone to have a chance to get ahead. Although I like the sentiment, the only way to actually achieve it would be to make the college free and with no admission tests (that is, there is literally a place for everyone, including insane or retarded people). Otherwise, there will still exist criteria that separate the "diploma haves" from the "diploma have nots", only those criteria will be less transparent than now.
guard0g 5y ago
Too much effort on racial equality in the admissions process, too little on ensuring success in college, graduation and beyond. My top 10 college was hyper focused on diversity admissions, but the graduation rate of the under represented population was under 50%. Students shifted down due one tier due have a much higher rate of success than students shifted up one tier. If we want to be serious about equity and equal opportunity, we should focus on eliminating legacy.
zenta 5y ago
The comments on these articles seem to generally come out in favor of standardized testing (specifically the SAT). I find that interesting because college admissions seemingly generalizes to candidate evaluation. And if you were to suggest a standard leetcode test for software engineering job candidates? Man, this place would go up in flames.
- nickkell 5y ago
  I’m not for or against these leetcode style tests, but I think the difference is that they see a correlation between admission test score and how well they’d actually do on the course. Can the companies using “leetcode” tests prove the same?
  - omegalulw 5y ago
    A common thing I see missed in arguments against like leetcode is that good hiring pipelines would not look at just leetcode scores. You want leetcode + good project + system design. Leetcode is excellent for testing data structures and algorithms, reasoning about code and edge case etc. These are absolutely necessary but not sufficient to build good software.
- yosito 5y ago
  > And if you were to suggest a standard leetcode test for software engineering job candidates? Man, this place would go up in flames. I'd love to have a standard test for software engineering jobs that was accepted in the place of building yet another 8-hour sample React app.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Singular leetcode exam with large enough cohort repeated let's say twice a year and then graded on curve done in reasonably secure and controlled testing center would seem pretty reasonable alternative. Do it one time, get high enough grade and then use it for rest of your career. It starts to sound pretty enticing. Essentially a certification that at least one time you performed at certain level. Ofc, verification is bit more complicated, but not impossible anymore.
Jensson 5y ago
I'd like to see the SAT scores of the people deciding these things. Something tells me they aren't that great at it and wants it gone, especially the math part.
chuckee 5y ago
Totally unrelated: Diversity statements required for one-fifth of academic jobs: https://freebeacon.com/campus/study-diversity-statements-required-for-one-fifth-of-academic-jobs/ https://freebeacon.com/campus/study-diversity-statements-req...
sjg007 5y ago
Fascinating. I hope they are running a controlled study where at least some non trivial, say 10%, of the kids are randomly selected on the basis of just applying. That you can track the outcomes and see if your selection criteria is better than random. We know you can take "underachieving" students and put them in high achieving programs (such as law school) and that the students will rise to the occasion and do well.
ThinkBeat 5y ago
There are a lot of problems with this approach and a regression in methodology. There are inherent problems with a standardized test and any form of exam. Yet they are the best we have so far. Ideally, I think everyone should be allowed into the university. I have several friends who did poorly in high school. Back then they wanted to have fun, party, and were not interested in academic achievement. Once they got older, they decided to go back to school. They had to study hard and retake a lot of high school exams to get to the university. One woman is a somewhat famous and well respected lawyer. One is an electrical engineer with a great job. One architect, and the last one a psychologist. They all had the "intelligence" / endurance to do well academically they just did not follow the same schedules. People who did not do so well in high school but have passing grades can really perk up at the university. Of course, if you lot everyone in, most will fail. The distribution of who fails and who does not might surprise people. However, we do not have limitless resources to allow everyone who wants to a shot in whatever field they feel like. There is not enough physical space, there are not enough professors and teachers, nor labs etc Basing entry on standardized merit is in my opinion, the best we have so far. I wonder if a future were Batchlor degrees are possible to take online if the system could scale to allow everyone a shot.
- MrMan 5y ago
  Well I agree that trying to force everyone to a fixed schedule in time is not correct. If you divide your life into 20 or even ten year chunks, those are your batche sizes for endeavor. You are not the fixed product of one batch of applicants at one arbitrary point in your life. What things are scarce? Human resources to teach, capital to start businesses, bandwidth, computing power, physical security and time are some things I can think of that are scarce to varying degrees. I don't mind if I got shut out of the ivy league Lottery at 18 ad long as I can get what I need to succeed at 36 when I finally get my act together. At 36 as a male I might still have 40 or 50 years ahead of me to work on one or more career projects. To some extent we need to stop worrying so much about who gets the spoils of any given lottery and just try to make it possible for people to get more bites at the apple. The biggest problem isn't weeding out false positives and keep them from sullying Caltech or Stripe. Within reason this is a non problem. The real problem are the people with aptitude who never get educated and don't get time and physical security in enough amounts to train themselves up to be good candidates to win capital to start ventures that will help advance society. Tldr False negatives worse than false positives to all you evil gatekeepers
RickJWagner 5y ago
This will take care of those pesky yardsticks that provide evidence of admissions scandals. They can justify admitting anyone.
spicyusername 5y ago
I say no grades, no tests, no degrees, free schooling, and government subsidizes the first month of every new hires salary and the first month of every layoff. Who cares what happens before you hire someone. The only thing that matters is the results and that you can quickly fire and replace someone that doesn't fit without you or them suffering. Motivated people will rise to their abilities either way.

134 points by djkivi 5y ago

I for one welcome the UC systems choice to erode the signaling value of their degree. Hopefully more universities adopt this approach. Employers may in turn value said degrees less and eventually maybe we can burn down all of higher ed.

mrjangles 5y ago
I agree and not even remotely jokingly. Higher education outside of STEM has been nonsense for quite some time. Inside of STEM, it has been an outdated form of education for just as long. The encroachment of socialism into the educational sphere needs to accelerate. The sooner it destroys itself the better.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  That's great if your only requirement is to train software developers to write CRUD apps - you can learn to do that by watching youtube videos, reading self-study materials, and taking MOOC classes - but if you want mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, electrical engineers, and be a leader in materials science or chip manufacturing, then you still need universities. So the price of this "equity" movement is going to be (and always was) mass de-industrialization and transforming the economy to third world status in which only immigrants educated in more sane institutions overseas drive all of the technological innovation. I just don't see a how a nation can build state of the art planes, missiles, satellites, ships, and chips if its universities decide to eliminate objective measures of intelligence.
  - alphabettsy 5y ago
    I don’t believe objective measures of intelligence tell you all that much about someone. There are plenty of extremely intelligent people who for various reasons accomplish nothing and plenty of dropouts bringing enormous value to the world.
    - alex_sf 5y ago
      It’s not solely sufficient, but absolutely the baseline for excellence in any technical field.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      I don’t think objective measures of physical strength tell you much about someone either, but if you’re testing strength to find the strongest people (for whatever reason), I’d still recommend using standardized methods.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      How many dropouts have successfully designed a jet engine? any of the critical parts on a rocket? a suspension bridge? a building more than 10 stories high? a submarine hull? a utility powerplant?
      - nitrogen 5y ago
        How many have been given the opportunity to do so? Could a pure apprenticeship model without universities (but still with lots of theory) work for engineering professions?
        b9a2cab5 5y ago
        Lambda School shows it doesn't work for software engineering. A so-called "apprenticeship" model for something like mechanical engineering would basically be the exact same set of (difficult) math and physics courses but without the garbage breadth requirements, which doesn't exactly sound attractive to dropouts.
        alphabettsy 5y ago
        Or maybe Lambda school doesn’t work?
        nitrogen 5y ago
        without the garbage breadth requirements, which doesn't exactly sound attractive to dropouts. Idk, I can imagine a class of "dropout" who would find that very appealing. And I've worked with devs who used Lambda or other bootcamps to transition from another technical/professional career into software, so it's not a completely useless model.
  - throwaway34241 5y ago
    > So the price of this "equity" movement is going to be (and always was) mass de-industrialization and transforming the economy to third world status I also disagree with these sort of decisions but this seems a bit hyperbolic. Certain institutions will probably admit fewer students who are able to excel in those fields, and if the change is large enough it will affect the quality of those degree programs (although in probably any admissions process talented students will be better able to game it). But the likely eventual outcome to that seems like it would be other institutions attracting the most talented students and professors. It's hard for me to imagine every single university getting on board with this, although I could imagine STEM being increasingly concentrated at universities with that focus like Caltech instead of general liberal-arts schools. It also might be kind of interesting if the brightest students tried to excel more in things that aren't directly competitive (kind of like Thiel fellows), although I don't think that's the purpose behind these sorts of changes.
    - angelzen 5y ago
      "It's hard for me to imagine every single university getting on board with this" Think for a bit how many things that were hard to imagine 10 years ago are now common place in the corporate world. Social conformity pressure is a real b*tch. The best we can hope is that the occasional larger-than-life professor will be left alone to teach his craft the way he sees fit. Pray that your kids have a chance to meet one of them and the wisdom to subject themselves to the gauntlet.
      - throwaway34241 5y ago
        The corporate world isn't a bad analogy. But corporates are still by and large very profitable, some companies operate as they always have (although that isn't newsworthy, and it isn't a marketing point), and on this specific topic (testing) leetcode type questions are still ubiquitous. If social trends seriously impaired companies' competitiveness I might expect to see the companies that are more on board underperform. But when I think of recent corporate failures (maybe Google failing to compete with FB on chat / VR / Google plus etc), garden variety mismanagement still seems like it has more impact. So I also disagree with the policy, but worrying about "transforming the economy to third world status" like the OP seems like it is going overboard. If suboptimal policy choices or social trends destroyed society it would have been destroyed a long time ago many times over (and San Francisco wouldn't be a startup hub).
  - mrjangles 5y ago
    I learned absolutely nothing in my degree that I couldn't have learned from a book. In fact, everything I learned in my degree was from a book. The lecturers themselves were often terrible, and the lectures would have been far better if I was watching them on youtube and could rewind anyway. The future learning institutes will simply be places that administers tests and organize group projects at 1/10th the cost of current universities.
mateo1 5y ago
I wonder what kind of bizarre, dysfunctional thought process would lead one to desire the complete destruction of all higher education.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  I am down for higher education that includes technical schools and apprenticeships as well. Colleges are great! What I am not OK with is creating illiberal propaganda machines using public funds where no dissent is allowed and adolescents at a tender age get to them hypersensitized to identity and identity-politics. Fuck everything about that.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    Edit: adolescents at a tender age get hypersensitized to identity and identity-politics.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

zephrx1111 5y ago

As Nasim Taleb said: The Most Intolerant Wins. UC has a long slope to slide - down to the tipping point. As long as UC is not burnt right now, these expert wouldn't stand up and open their mouth, till there is no need to stand up anymore. The solution, well, as Taleb said: we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities. Stand up and fight right now.

xyzzy21 5y ago

UC schools have already become dubious - the entitlement of grads, the actual LACK of skills, not remotely "hungry" enough to have any grit or motivation, etc. My father (an engineering manager) always said: "If you want GOOD employees, you never want to hire from UCB, Stanford, Cal Tech, etc. The best engineers in California come from Cal Poly SLO and Cal Poly Pomona. They are actually trained as engineers". This is only proving that a college degree is not enough to qualify most graduates for any job. Better to hire from 2nd tier schools instead and even to consider HS grads on some cases. If they are more trainable than your typical entitled university degree holder, they are a better ROI, hands-down.

legerdemain 5y ago
How many Cal Poly SLO grads at Stripe (or choose any stratospheric make-you-rich company you like) compared to Stanford grads?
- 0des 5y ago
  Show me how many GED students who had to fight certificate bias with get hired out of sheer skill.
  - legerdemain 5y ago
    At Stripe? None, to the best of my knowledge. It is what it is, sorry.
    - 0des 5y ago
      You don't have to be sorry, I'm lucky to be comfy with my current workplace. To me though, this is the dividing line in places that care about abilities, and places that are focused on 'checking boxes'.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  This might just be a numbers thing because their program isn't as large. It has a top-10 engineering program for schools that don't offer doctorates, so I'd be surprised if it's CS program isn't at least solid.

jwilber 5y ago

As a Cal grad this is an easy reason to point to the next time I reject an alumni donation call. If the goal is to accept more students on merit, this is a big failure in my opinion: rich kids can just game the “holistic” admissions with opportunities not available to middle/lower class students (“volunteer” trips, extracurriculars, etc.).

spoonjim 5y ago
Can they “game” themselves into being designated as African American?
- Iefthandrule 5y ago
  Aka "Does anyone else think black people have it too easy and are the real racists?" Refreshingly honest, I suppose.
- 1cvmask 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal And more do Native American. That's an easier one to check on the checkboxes for whites. That's why there has been an exponential increase of the self-identified "Native American" population since the 1960s. Elizabeth Warren is one of the more famous self-identified Native Americans (her siblings never knew they were). In the last census their increase has been the most in the richest counties in the US with the most number of applications to elite colleges.
  - Erik816 5y ago
    To be fair to her siblings, they didn't know they were Native American because they were not in fact Native American.
  - protomyth 5y ago
    That's why they should have to list tribe enrolled & blood quantum. At this point, I wish the tribes could sue these people for fraud. The continued closing of doors on the most downtrodden minority is pathetic.

coolspot 5y ago

https://archive.md/FBvmb https://archive.md/FBvmb

everybodyknows 5y ago

Wonderfully empowering for the admissions administrators! Schools will be needing to keep on a lot of low-level staff: >record-breaking number of freshman applications for fall 2021 — more than 200,000 >evaluate the flood of applications without test scores, using 13 other factors And will be able to produce whatever demographics are demanded by the politics of the moment: https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/freshman/comprehensive-review/ https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/fres... >Factors we consider ... >Identification by UC as being ranked in the top 9 percent of their high school class ("eligible in the local context," or ELC). ... >Academic accomplishments in light of a student's life experiences and special circumstances. >Location of a student's secondary school and residence. Cupertino tiger mothers, note well.

toast0 5y ago
What's the play? College prep K-8, then move to Fresno for 9-12 so you can be in top 9%?
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  More likely, hire private tutors while you go to a Title 1 school in Santa Ana or some other impoverished area, then mark yourself as part-Native American and non-binary on your college application. If you can't afford private tutors, well, guess you had the bad luck to be born Asian.
  - cudgy 5y ago
    It worked for Elizabeth Warren.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  Why not fuck around in high school and then go get a 4.0 at a semi-prestigious community college?
  - hn_go_brrrrr 5y ago

akomtu 5y ago

"faculty could find no alternative exam that would avoid the biased results" They are too weak to say "SAT hasn't produced the results we wanted, so we're going to..." "seek more equitable ways to assess a student" They're again, too weak to say "from now on, admissions will be based on color". "the state exam ... would disproportionately favor Asian Americans" Oh, the horror, tests show that Asians are smart. Can't let that happen. If a square peg doesn't fit a round hole, we just need to use a bigger hammer.

seneca 5y ago
It really is madness. "We tested as many ways as we could think of, but we couldn't game it to get the results we want so we just decided testing doesn't work". These are the people in charge of training our children, and they think this these are valid conclusions.

tomatofarmer 5y ago

This is a positive development. We need to minimize the extent to which people are exposed to math (which quite obviously reeks of white supremacy, according to like everyone I know including the Gates Foundation) [1] https://www.newsweek.com/math-suffers-white-supremacy-according-bill-gates-funded-course-1571511 https://www.newsweek.com/math-suffers-white-supremacy-accord... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29273406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29273406

userbinator 5y ago
Asians are considered white now? Because apparently they consistently come out on top in maths testing. China must be laughing like crazy while the US slowly destroys itself in a blaze of wokeism.
akomtu 5y ago
The problem with math is its cornerstone concept of "one truth" that can be objectively proven based on other absolute truths. This one dogmatic truth, created by whites (here I'm spitting on the floor), completely disregards personal experiences and the fact that some people may want to see the truth differently. On a serious note, I remember the day a math professor explained the concept of "proof" to me, that was a revelation that fixed my mind. I totally expect that the majority sees math as a sorcery that can be amended to personal needs.
- 0des 5y ago
  > his one dogmatic truth, created by whites You mean Arabs. Arabic numerals are the basis for these numbers we see today.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
esrauch 5y ago
You're referencing one weird out of context quote (which sounds like it was since clarified) from one nonprofit who got funding from the Gates Foundation. It seems somewhat disingenuous to make the claim that the Gates Foundation thinks Math is White Supremacy based on that.

spoonjim 5y ago

I feel like with a 5-4 Supreme Court (6-3 if Breyer doesn’t retire) the explicit rationale of race percentages sets this up for a Supreme Court defeat.

tasty_freeze 5y ago
Breyer is one of the three liberal justices. If he retires and Biden gets to choose a replacement, it would still be 6-3.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  I consider Roberts a liberal for a case like this so I think the court is 5-4 now and if Breyer doesn’t retire before 2022 (when Republicans are 99% likely to take the Senate) it will be 5-3 until there’s a Republican President.
  - tasty_freeze 5y ago
    If you classify Roberts a liberal, then your math makes sense. Roberts might not be as far right as some, but there is no way he could ever be classified as a liberal court member.

Rebelgecko 5y ago

>a student’s high school grade-point average, the rigor of courses taken, special talents, essays and extracurricular activities. All of these metrics seem MUCH more gameable than the SAT. Sure, buying an SAT practice test book might bump your score up by 20 points. But if you look at the rigor of courses available, that is going to vary DRASTICALLY from school to school. At least when I was in high school, poorer schools had a lot less to offer in terms of AP classes, and wealthy people have obvious advantages when it comes to extracurricular activities and some "special talents"

b9a2cab5 5y ago
That's the point. UC wants to implement affirmative action but can't because voters rejected Prop 16. So they do this to make it easier to justify that their target demographics are "qualified" because now there's no objective measurement metric to judge people by.
- reducesuffering 5y ago
  I can’t believe how much it feels like 1984. “War is peace.” ‘University of California Regents Chair John Perez said, "The failure of Proposition 16 [repealing that the government and public institutions cannot discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to persons on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, and public contracting.] means barriers will remain in place to the detriment of many students, families and California at large. We will not accept inequality on our campuses and will continue addressing the inescapable effects of racial and gender inequity."’ https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Proposition_209_Affirmative_Action_Amendment_(2020) https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...

1cvmask 5y ago

These false flag diversity initiatives are there to entrench the privileged white elite who are threatened by the children of often 1st generation immigrants. From the article: UC admissions officers have said they were able to thoroughly evaluate the flood of applications without test scores, using 13 other factors in the system’s review process, such as a student’s high school grade-point average, the rigor of courses taken, special talents, essays and extracurricular activities. - Special talents and extracurricular activities are great filters for the privileged. Nothing like the academic promise of fencing and rowing. The Winkelvoss twins from Greenwich Connecticut attended Harvard through the white elite loophole of rowing. - This is why there is an allergy to making it based on class and being poor. I doubt any poor blacks or Hispanics will benefit from this. - Interesting book on this matter: Reflections Of An Affirmative Action Baby Paperback – August 24, 1992 https://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Affirmative-Action-Stephen-Carter/dp/0465068693 https://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Affirmative-Action-Stephe...

gibbonsrcool 5y ago
Let’s separate sports from academics. Sports organizations can exist outside the school. I’m suggesting this for all ages. Players can compete in divisions based on skill without school grouping as a factor. A lot of kids don’t play sports because they’re not competitive enough at their school. With these extra-academic divisions there’s more players for each pool of skill level. Another benefit is connecting people across different socioeconomic backgrounds.
- droidist2 5y ago
  I always thought it was weird that colleges have sports teams, then again in Japan companies often have sports teams.
  - downrightmike 5y ago
    American corps also have sports teams, they just typically run under a shell of a rich guy.
5y ago

lokar 5y ago

I feel like a good middle ground would be to use the SAT or alternative as a threshold for consideration, but not for ranking. I could believe that there could be a good evidence based cut off (perhaps with other quantitative measures) to answer "does this student meet the basic requirements" much more so then "will a student who scored 50 points higher do well after 4 years of study"

rahimnathwani 5y ago
According to the College Board, which administes the SAT, the basic requirements cutoff is 530 for math, and 480 for English, i.e. total SAT score of 1010 out of 1600. The mean score for people attending UC Berkeley is 1415 out of 1600. If the UC admissions office were to use a threshold, it would have to be low enough that they don't get more Asians than they want. That threshold might end up being as low as 1010.
- lokar 5y ago
  Are you saying the racial demographics of students who score above 1010 are very different from that of all graduating students who intend to go on to post secondary education, and that fact would be politically unacceptable?
  - rahimnathwani 5y ago
    No, I'm not saying that, and had not considered that question. But FWIW my guess is that the two groups you list have similar demographics (racial, socioeconomic etc.). What I was saying: GP suggested having a threshold used for qualification, and then selecting from qualified candidates using other criteria. If you support this proposal, there's an upper limit to the threshold you choose. If you choose too high a threshold, then the % of students who are Asian will exceed the % of Asians in the applicant pool (or general population, whatever) and you will be accused of having a racist admissions policy. So you must choose a threshold which is low enough that you have lots of freedom to pick on opaque/subjective criteria. Then you can achieve any demographic mix you want. But if you choose a threshold as low as 1010, then it's probably not going to be any different from UC's current system, which ignores SAT altogether.

temp8964 5y ago

I found what is funny / pathetic about this is that there are tons of psychology / education / especially educational measurement top experts in the UC system, and they know how wrong it is, while they just keep mouth shut. The whole anti-standard-testing movement is pushed by ideology leftists and corrupted bureaucrats, but the supposed experts just quietly watch the world burn. Lol. Update: I found experts in the UCLA were tasked to make the suggestion. They suggested a new admission assessment. So the bureaucrats just totally disregarded their recommendation . See https://50.cresst.org/2020/05/20/cresst-recommendation-for-new-assessment-system-for-uc-admissions/ https://50.cresst.org/2020/05/20/cresst-recommendation-for-n... Also quote: The Task Force in its review found—to some surprise—that tests such as the SAT provide a useful tool to support admissions leading to a more diverse pool of admitted students than UC otherwise would have had. The Task Force found that approximately 25% of low-income, first-generation, and underrepresented minor students earned their guaranteed admission into UC because of test scores. The Task Force’s report showed that test scores are better predictors of success for underrepresented minority students, first-generation students, and those whose families are low- income. Using recent UC-specific data, the Task Force found that test scores remain predictive of success even after student demographics are taken into account. That is especially true when compared to high school grades, whose predictive power has gone down due, in part, to grade inflation. These findings tell us that there is value in the evidence that educational assessments provide, but they can be improved—and so can the UC admissions process as a result. In a vote of confidence in its veracity, the Task Force report was unanimously endorsed by faculty members of the UC’s Academic Senate, 51–0.

anonuser123456 5y ago
I have a friend that’s a CSU faculty member in science/engineering. The amount of ideological crap coming down the pipeline is shocking to him… and he’s a pretty liberal guy. But he has a mortgage to pay and dealing with protesting students doesn’t really interest him. He became a professor because he liked teaching, not to become a target.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > he has a mortgage to pay and dealing with protesting students doesn’t really interest him The great irony being it's decisions like this that are undermining support for the University of California. We're not there yet. But a few more of these, and I could see an off-year proposition that dramatically cuts the UC budget.

josephcsible 5y ago

Doesn't this make the admissions process less fair, more arbitrary, and more susceptible to biases?

CMdH8 5y ago
Only if you believe that these tests don't introduce unfairness. Given the preparation economy around the SAT, the current situation seems to favour whoever can spend more for preparation courses. Also, such tests have the tendency to test your ability to take the specific test, rather than knowledge and skill. Full disclosure, I never took the SAT as I'm European. But I took other such tests as some places in Europe.
gedy 5y ago
Yes unfortunately that's the point basically

siruncledrew 5y ago

Are there any reasons why a private or public university wouldn’t want to maximize the number of tuition paying students? I’m just wondering because why not just admit as many people as you could for various price tiers of: in-person, hybrid, and online education. So in that sense, as long as money wants to come in, why reject anyone other than to fake exclusivity?

wrp 5y ago
Because student tuition does not cover anywhere near the full cost of running a school.

WalterBright 5y ago

From their criteria page: https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/freshman/comprehensive-review/ https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/fres... "Special talents, achievements and awards in a particular field, such as visual and performing arts, communication or athletic endeavors; special skills, such as demonstrated written and oral proficiency in other languages; special interests, such as intensive study and exploration of other cultures; experiences that demonstrate unusual promise for leadership, such as significant community service or significant participation in student government; or other significant experiences or achievements that demonstrate the student's promise for contributing to the intellectual vitality of a campus." Notably absent is achievement in any STEM field.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
stadium 5y ago
> Notably absent is achievement in any STEM field. It's covered by the first line of your quoted comment, right? "Special talents, achievements and awards in a particular field."
- msravi 5y ago
  ...such as visual and performing arts, communication or athletic endeavors. The lack of emphasis on STEM in the examples is apparent.
  - stadium 5y ago
    As a native English speaker I read "such as" to mean "including but not limited to." STEM is a field (although still broad) and they are looking for accomplishment in a field.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      STEM is a very broad field, and core, not an incidental.

stadium 5y ago

Does this mean we are past peak-leetcode too?

rsj_hn 5y ago
No, firms will need to do much more leetcode as the signaling value of a degree decreases.
- stadium 5y ago
  Good luck to those firms that have the fastest b-tree optimizations physically possible, and no customers.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    Having an abundance of talented developer labor so even money losing companies can afford to buy it is not a problem that exists in the world. What usally happens now is that developers leave if there are no customers, but yes, if we ever reach that state where even the companies with the worst products can hire the best developers, then wages will have fallen quite a bit.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    Do product managers become worthless at companies where coders understand algorithms? Or what is your point?

dehrmann 5y ago

Wonder what's going to happen when they realize this just defers testing to exams in courses.

Scramblejams 5y ago
They realize it already. The squishier the subject, the faster quantitative testing will disappear.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
In my country, around the same time top public universities adopted affirmative-action quotas, they also stablished a "pre-calculus" summer course, to get everyone up to speed in all high-school math before starting their first semester (not specific for affirmative action students, plenty of non-AA students also had some catching up to do). From what I've heard it worked very well as an equalizer, with AA students who entered with lower test scores, ending up with final scores mixed with every one else.

abhiyerra 5y ago

I was on the UC Berkeley campus on Tuesday. So many more black and latino students than when I was on campus. It was nice. I had many black friends in high school and none when I went to Berkeley in 2005-2010. I can say the SAT, ACT, etc. are biased against anyone who doesn't have the money to get the prep for them.

zzt123 5y ago
I don’t know about the ACT, but the SAT in that time period was trivial to study for. I had one Barrons book, and the rest was accomplished by being a student in a public school. There were no surprises come test day. I genuinely don’t understand when people say the SAT is so biased, because it seemed quite fair to me compared to alternative metrics. Unless asking someone to spend a lot of time studying is too much to ask.
- abhiyerra 5y ago
  The SAT isn't hard to study for, but the question is, if your dad is in jail (which many of my black friend's dads were), you are feeling uncertain about the world because of the color of your skin, would you put in the effort? I think people look at tests like the one and all, but many kids have other stuff to work out.
  - keeganpoppen 5y ago
    what part of this is fixed by getting rid of the SATs, exactly? do all the other problems that are making it hard to get on top of school suddenly disappear? do they magically disappear in college? how is it even beneficial to remove one possible avenue for demonstrating aptitude beyond the ability to succeed in a classroom environment, which is profoundly tilted toward rich families who can help kids with homework, bitch at teachers about bad grades, etc.?
    - abhiyerra 5y ago
      Strength leads to strength. If you can get to a place of prestige and that place continues to have high standards, then the people who are bound for the streets or no purpose have a means to a higher goal. Maybe I believe that if you give people a little bit of chance, they end up better?

golemiprague 5y ago

I can understand not relying exclusively on SAT, not because it is discriminating in any way but because it just gives one signal out of many other important signals which a university should take into account. Excelling in some ghetto school shows some other signals, like being a non conformist, fighting against adversity by "acting white" and ability to deal with distractions, something the children of a tiger mum might lack. However, ignoring the SAT completely is also stupid, it is a good signal for a combination of talent and/or dedication which should not be ignored.

kragen 5y ago

Historically the SAT was designed as an anti-Semitic discrimination measure; the racist belief that underlay it was that Jewish people were doing well on college admission criteria because they worked too hard, so designing a test that it was impossible to study for --- a test that measured academic aptitude rather than achievement --- would restore the racist world order in which non-Jewish white people constituted virtually the entire student body. Much to the racists' surprise, Jewish people continued to excel on the SAT, and it turned out to be easy to study for. Today, alongside Jewish people, US universities want to discriminate against Asian-Americans, who have the same high test scores, high academic achievements including grades, and stereotypes of working too hard; often they carry out this discrimination by requiring higher test scores from Asian-Americans than from white people https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/08/07/look-data-and-arguments-about-asian-americans-and-admissions-elite https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/08/07..., but this practice is illegal in California and under attack elsewhere. Consequently Asian-Americans constituted 40% of in-state UC freshmen in 02019, double their share of the population https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-11-01/affirmative-action-divides-asian-americans-ucs-largest-overrepresented-student-group https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-11-01/affirmat... and this explains why UC wants to drop objective admission requirements like SAT scores in order to admit a more balanced (read "white") student body, provoking strong opposition from Asian-American groups: https://asianamericanforeducation.org/en/pr_20200519/ https://asianamericanforeducation.org/en/pr_20200519/ Unsurprisingly standardized testing increases representation of low-income students https://50.cresst.org/2020/05/20/cresst-recommendation-for-new-assessment-system-for-uc-admissions/ https://50.cresst.org/2020/05/20/cresst-recommendation-for-n... because, within a context of inequality, the only alternative to meritocracy is inherited privilege. This is closely related to why US tech companies, who hire you based on whether you can program in an interview, are dramatically more diverse than, for example, US tech journalism companies, who apparently hire you based on whether you're white: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29277661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29277661

alphabettsy 5y ago

Aren’t standardized tests a poor indicator of thinking and capability? Don’t they favor those who can memorize over abstract thinking?

WalterBright 5y ago
> Don’t they favor those who can memorize over abstract thinking? No. But if your vocabulary is limited, you'll do poorly on the verbals. I never did any prep for the SATs, and nobody I knew did. Of course, this was back in the 70s.

WalterBright 5y ago

"UC admissions officers have said they were able to thoroughly evaluate the flood of applications without test scores" Of course, there's no way to determine if they were thorough or not.

ngc248 5y ago
hahah .... who will evaluate the evaluator's evaluations? Seems to be extremely subjective. May be they should go with a 50/50 split for SAT and the subjective criteria. This won't be perfect but both camps would be covered.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I’d love to see 2/3rds of the class admitted on long-standing, well-tested policies and the remainder allocated via whatever other processes the school wants to test. Want to let in 1/9th via pure random lottery? Have at it! Want to let in 1/9th via racial or socioeconomic profiling? Have at it! Then look at successful completion rates of year 1, degree by year 4, degree by year 5, and position (as self-reported) 10 years after admission for each group. Either we’ll discover that there’s a better way to do admissions or we’ll discover that the current way is close to optimal.

rackjack 5y ago

In China there is 1 exam, the Gaokao. This exam in no small part decides your future. In the past, you had one attempt, and if you failed, tough luck. Now they let kids retake it a couple times. One exam. One billion people. One standardized metric to determine who goes where. There are flaws to this of course. The rich, with better access to tutoring and such, naturally have an advantage over the poor. But herein lies the benefit of such a system -- it is an explicit advantage. Everybody knows it. Everybody can see it. The path to obtain it is as clear as day -- "simply" have enough money. Similarly, the path to obtain success is clear -- succeed on the Gaokao (besides cheating, which is a whole other thing, and corruption, which is yet another thing). People naturally stratify themselves in competition. When you eliminate standardized metrics to distinguish people, they will find other ways. Your friend has an internship opening that your kid can fill. Your boss lets your kid work under him. You know people who can help your kid get ahead. Meanwhile, the underprivileged are still pushed down, but in a much more subtle way. It is not scores that divides them and the privileged. It is connections -- and when you are a kid, these connections come from your family. And if you are poor, you do not have these connections. And unlike the singular exam, the path to obtaining these connections is not so clear. Removing entry exam requirements does not help underprivileged students. It hurts them, but because it is a subtle hurt that ties to their family's place in society instead of a loud hurt like the cost of tutoring, people pretend it is somehow better. It is not. It is worse.

TeeMassive 5y ago
It has been my impression from people who lived in China that guanxi (connections) is far more important than the Gaokao and the main difference between the have and the have-nots is whether you and or your parents have a permit to live in a city. When I bring the point of the standard exam as a great equalizer they immediately laughed and told me that the US is a egalitarian paradise compared to what goes on there.
- malwarebytess 5y ago
  Did you even read the comment?
- 5y ago

jchonphoenix 5y ago

Sounds like a UC degree is getting less and less valuable from a signaling perspective. They ignored the research results of their own team and professors which conclusively showed standardized testing was the highest signal for academic success across all races. Talk about political bureaucracy

eesmith 5y ago
Please clarify. My understanding is that it's the opposite. Eg, quoting https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0013189X20902110 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0013189X2090211... > Yet, the emphasis on test scores over grades in policy and practice recommendations stands in contrast to research showing high school grade point averages (HSGPAs) are stronger predictors than test scores of college outcomes (Bowen et al., 2009; Geiser & Santelices, 2007; Hiss & Franks, 2014; Kobrin et al., 2008).
- almeria 5y ago
  And what about predictions based on GPA and test scores? As has been in use at UC and just about everywhere else, up until now. In math terms: just because predicts(A) > predicts(B), it does not follow that predicts(A) > predicts(A ∪ B).
  - eesmith 5y ago
    I take it you haven't consulted the references I listed second-hand? They are likely far more insightful than anything I can write here. Before making my earlier comment, I read the start of the the Hiss and Franks paper is at https://web.archive.org/web/20140310113612/http://www.nacacnet.org/research/research-data/nacac-research/Documents/DefiningPromise.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20140310113612/http://www.nacacn... to make sure the citation I gave wasn't misrepresenting the topic (it wasn't). Here's text from the abstract: It "examines the outcomes of optional standardized testing policies in the Admissions offices at 33 public and private colleges and universities, based on cumulative GPA and graduation rates." That is, UC isn't the first to do this, and we can look at real-world evidence from previous universities where test scores were optional, to gauge how useful test scores are and what effect they have. It found: "Few significant differences between submitters and non-submitters of testing were observed in Cumulative GPAs and graduation rates, despite significant differences in SAT/ACT scores." That is, SAT/ACT scores don't seem to affect metrics like Cumulative GPAs and graduation rates. (As I recall from elsewhere, they do correlate with first year grades, but that's a different and less important metric.) Further: "Optional testing policies also help build broader access to higher education: non-submitters are more likely to be first-generation-to‐college students, minorities, Pell Grant recipients, women and students with Learning Differences." That is, using SAT/ACT scores in the selection process appears to have measurable effect on the student population; reducing what is sometimes referred to as "diversity." As to your correct observation, "it does not follow that predicts(A) > predicts(A ∪ B)", one of the issues is that college success is also correlated with other factors, including parental wealth. And success on the SAT/ACT is also correlated with parental wealth, who can afford special training on how to pass those tests. We know this by looking at the early history of college boards, which emphasized the topics taught at prep schools (like Latin grammar) than public school, because college admissions preferred rich white male Protestants, who were likely to go to prep school. To be clear, the SAT has done a lot of work to de-bias their tests, and I don't know enough about to topic to say anything what factors are actually involved. But I don't need to, since the tests don't seem to be that effective in predicting college success.

fortran77 5y ago

Because of unstable home issues, I was unable to do well in high school classes because I couldn't spend time outside of school studying and doing homework assignments. But I did extremely well on the SAT, and PSAT, which got me several scholarships and college admission. Without the SAT to accurately gauge my potential, I wouldn't have succeeded. This is a disgusting new policy, and will harm people.

chmod600 5y ago

Another way to look at this is, like so many things, a conflict of visions. Vision one is that college is an elite institution meant to bring together smart, rich, and connected people in a learning and growth environment. This is sort of a perti-dish of success. In this vision, standardized tests bring in the smart people to compliment the rich and connected. Vision two is that college is an institution for everyone to have a chance to get ahead. It's a natural extension of high school as we move into a period where we depend on knowledge workers. In this vision, standardized tests exclude people from opportunities. Clearly the UC is adopting vision two. Whether the tests are racist or not is a distraction. The problem with vision one is basic fairness, especially when public money is involved. The problem with vision two is that, if we want real success, we do need elite institutions to concentrate a mix of people likely to produce amazing things. And also, I predict that the noble shine of college as a gateway to opportunity will wear off pretty quickly once they cease being elite institutions, and succumb to bureaucratic stupidity and financial recklessness.

Viliam1234 5y ago
I see a hope here. Educational system seems broken in USA: the costs of education are insanely high, but you need the diploma in order to get a good job, so the costs will keep growing, because why not (from the perspective of the universities). And this perfectly designed system to extract money from everyone... just decided to destroy itself from inside. If universities become stupid enough, so that employers stop preferring people who have a diploma, there will no longer be a reason to pay. The universities can become ideological strongholds for the woke, but most of the population will simply ignore them. There are a few problems with this hope, though. First, what about research? Second, government can protect universities, regardless of their quality, by requiring a university diploma if you want to work for any public institution. > Vision two is that college is an institution for everyone to have a chance to get ahead. Although I like the sentiment, the only way to actually achieve it would be to make the college free and with no admission tests (that is, there is literally a place for everyone, including insane or retarded people). Otherwise, there will still exist criteria that separate the "diploma haves" from the "diploma have nots", only those criteria will be less transparent than now.

guard0g 5y ago

Too much effort on racial equality in the admissions process, too little on ensuring success in college, graduation and beyond. My top 10 college was hyper focused on diversity admissions, but the graduation rate of the under represented population was under 50%. Students shifted down due one tier due have a much higher rate of success than students shifted up one tier. If we want to be serious about equity and equal opportunity, we should focus on eliminating legacy.

zenta 5y ago

The comments on these articles seem to generally come out in favor of standardized testing (specifically the SAT). I find that interesting because college admissions seemingly generalizes to candidate evaluation. And if you were to suggest a standard leetcode test for software engineering job candidates? Man, this place would go up in flames.

nickkell 5y ago
I’m not for or against these leetcode style tests, but I think the difference is that they see a correlation between admission test score and how well they’d actually do on the course. Can the companies using “leetcode” tests prove the same?
- omegalulw 5y ago
  A common thing I see missed in arguments against like leetcode is that good hiring pipelines would not look at just leetcode scores. You want leetcode + good project + system design. Leetcode is excellent for testing data structures and algorithms, reasoning about code and edge case etc. These are absolutely necessary but not sufficient to build good software.
yosito 5y ago
> And if you were to suggest a standard leetcode test for software engineering job candidates? Man, this place would go up in flames. I'd love to have a standard test for software engineering jobs that was accepted in the place of building yet another 8-hour sample React app.
Ekaros 5y ago
Singular leetcode exam with large enough cohort repeated let's say twice a year and then graded on curve done in reasonably secure and controlled testing center would seem pretty reasonable alternative. Do it one time, get high enough grade and then use it for rest of your career. It starts to sound pretty enticing. Essentially a certification that at least one time you performed at certain level. Ofc, verification is bit more complicated, but not impossible anymore.

Jensson 5y ago

I'd like to see the SAT scores of the people deciding these things. Something tells me they aren't that great at it and wants it gone, especially the math part.

chuckee 5y ago

Totally unrelated: Diversity statements required for one-fifth of academic jobs: https://freebeacon.com/campus/study-diversity-statements-required-for-one-fifth-of-academic-jobs/ https://freebeacon.com/campus/study-diversity-statements-req...

sjg007 5y ago

Fascinating. I hope they are running a controlled study where at least some non trivial, say 10%, of the kids are randomly selected on the basis of just applying. That you can track the outcomes and see if your selection criteria is better than random. We know you can take "underachieving" students and put them in high achieving programs (such as law school) and that the students will rise to the occasion and do well.

ThinkBeat 5y ago

There are a lot of problems with this approach and a regression in methodology. There are inherent problems with a standardized test and any form of exam. Yet they are the best we have so far. Ideally, I think everyone should be allowed into the university. I have several friends who did poorly in high school. Back then they wanted to have fun, party, and were not interested in academic achievement. Once they got older, they decided to go back to school. They had to study hard and retake a lot of high school exams to get to the university. One woman is a somewhat famous and well respected lawyer. One is an electrical engineer with a great job. One architect, and the last one a psychologist. They all had the "intelligence" / endurance to do well academically they just did not follow the same schedules. People who did not do so well in high school but have passing grades can really perk up at the university. Of course, if you lot everyone in, most will fail. The distribution of who fails and who does not might surprise people. However, we do not have limitless resources to allow everyone who wants to a shot in whatever field they feel like. There is not enough physical space, there are not enough professors and teachers, nor labs etc Basing entry on standardized merit is in my opinion, the best we have so far. I wonder if a future were Batchlor degrees are possible to take online if the system could scale to allow everyone a shot.

MrMan 5y ago
Well I agree that trying to force everyone to a fixed schedule in time is not correct. If you divide your life into 20 or even ten year chunks, those are your batche sizes for endeavor. You are not the fixed product of one batch of applicants at one arbitrary point in your life. What things are scarce? Human resources to teach, capital to start businesses, bandwidth, computing power, physical security and time are some things I can think of that are scarce to varying degrees. I don't mind if I got shut out of the ivy league Lottery at 18 ad long as I can get what I need to succeed at 36 when I finally get my act together. At 36 as a male I might still have 40 or 50 years ahead of me to work on one or more career projects. To some extent we need to stop worrying so much about who gets the spoils of any given lottery and just try to make it possible for people to get more bites at the apple. The biggest problem isn't weeding out false positives and keep them from sullying Caltech or Stripe. Within reason this is a non problem. The real problem are the people with aptitude who never get educated and don't get time and physical security in enough amounts to train themselves up to be good candidates to win capital to start ventures that will help advance society. Tldr False negatives worse than false positives to all you evil gatekeepers

RickJWagner 5y ago

This will take care of those pesky yardsticks that provide evidence of admissions scandals. They can justify admitting anyone.

spicyusername 5y ago

I say no grades, no tests, no degrees, free schooling, and government subsidizes the first month of every new hires salary and the first month of every layoff. Who cares what happens before you hire someone. The only thing that matters is the results and that you can quickly fire and replace someone that doesn't fit without you or them suffering. Motivated people will rise to their abilities either way.