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Harvard won’t require SAT or ACT through 2026 as test-optional push grows

• Jerry2 5y ago
  Who needs meritocracy, hard work and hours dedicated to studying when you can just hop on one of the personal identity trains and build your brand around that instead?
• Manuel_D 5y ago
  How many students who refuse to report SAT/ACT scores will actually be admitted? In practice I suspect it's effectively required for those who want a serious chance at admissions, unless the applicant is a legacy or otherwise notable.
• ren_engineer 5y ago
  I see this as another way to pull the ladder to success away from talented poor kids under the guise of somehow being more fair. This really only benefits rich kids who can pad their applications in other ways and makes admissions standards even more opaque. Any kid can get a used copy of an SAT prep book for cheap and get similar results to a rich kid getting private test tutoring.
  • dsizzle 5y ago
    Right, and won’t the fancy private school count for more comparatively now?
    • kenhwang 5y ago
      Relative performance compared to peers at the same school will likely be weighed much more heavily.
      • vasilipupkin 5y ago
        if you have a shitty class rank and you submit a stellar ACT score, it will still count in your favor, that has not changed. They just don't require you to submit it.
  • dominotw 5y ago
    > Any kid can get a used copy of an SAT prep book for cheap and get similar results to a rich kid getting private test tutoring. I would say the environment, social/parental expectations, exemplars within family/friends, peers ect matter more than a book. Talented poor kids acing SAT by reading a cheap book is stuff from the movies.
    • ren_engineer 5y ago
      only way to effectively end that would be to have government seize all children upon birth so every child has an identical environment growing up. The fact is a standardized test is far less biased than the metrics they will use to replace them. That's the reason they were created in the first place
    • ekam 5y ago
      My sibling and I are were like this and we were definitely not the only ones. You’re out of touch if you think this just stuff from the movies.
    • echlipse 5y ago
      There are many such examples in the real world. That's not stuff from the movies. I don't think these things get reported in US but in India we see this in the news all the time. You can make a generic google search[1] and find tons of such people. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=poor+family+child+tops+exam+india https://www.google.com/search?q=poor+family+child+tops+exam+...
      • naravara 5y ago
        If it's being reported in international media I would guess it's still newsworthy enough to not be a regular occurrence. Like India is huge so you'll find a steady stream of events that are common enough to be frequent in absolute terms, but still unusual in proportional terms.
      • dominotw 5y ago
        This doesn't counter my point through. From the first link[1] > "I could not study because of financial problems, so I thought I must send my children to school and wipe out the darkness from their lives," > "I got tremendous support from my school teachers," he said. This is exactly what i said. Environment of achievement is more important. "poor" doesn't mean just lack of financial resources. you cannot simply overcome lack of parental and social investment and care by reading a SAT book. > I would say the environment, social expectations, exemplars within family/friends, peers ect matter more than a book. 1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-32791175 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-32791175
  • MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    Interesting. I see it as another way to pull another ladder up so that the kid who didn't get to go to the private prep school to train to take a test isn't being discriminated against for his parents' financial position. There are literally entire private schools where I grew up whose average student performs better than the best public school student.
    • chernevik 5y ago
      That's probably selection bias. The SAT is actually pretty tough test to game. Anxiety drives parents to pay a lot for test prep, but there isn't much indication that it actually improves scores.
      • canaus 5y ago
        Do you have any verifiable information to back up the claim that test prep doesn't improve scores? I have a handful of sources that disagree. https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/R1710-investigating-test-prep-impact-2018-07.pdf https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/R171... https://collegefinance.com/college-admissions/does-sat-prep-make-a-statistical-difference https://collegefinance.com/college-admissions/does-sat-prep-... https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/04/why-should-sats-matter/who-benefits-most-from-sat-prep https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/04/why-should-...
        • simplestats 5y ago
          Your third source summarizes the common knowledge that has already been stated here: anyone can practice on their own with cheap or free materials to achieve the same benefit of those expensive classes.
          • sanxiyn 5y ago
            "Anyone can practice" is pretty meaningless. The largest component of benefit of expensive classes is how they motivate students. Motivating students (unless they are already self-motivated) is very difficult and skill and resource intensive, that's why the service is expensive.
  • foobarian 5y ago
    If the rich kids are also getting SAT prep books AND tutoring on top, and everyone gets maxed out scores, seems like it's a waste of everyones's time and we're better off just skipping it.
    • stephenhuey 5y ago
      I don’t think you should be downvoted for asking an honest question. As someone who tutored in SAT test prep a couple decades ago, I’m aware of the issues with standardized testing. However, the solution you propose is not so simple. The parent had a good point: high test scores may have given many students a boost in the eyes of admissions teams, especially if they did not attend a high school that is notable in the eyes of those admissions teams. They may not see top grades as equitable to those from a top prep school if they don’t know much about the school and don’t have high test scores to confirm their view of the student. Again, it’s not fair, but for these students, it’s a way to stand apart. If you take that away, it could be harder for them to be noticed until we have something else that’s sufficient.
    • hpoe 5y ago
      The alternative is to make it completely subjective and based on the whims of the committee. I can't see that going wrong at all, like because there are no committee members who might be racist or sexist or have a bias against religious people or anything like that. No the college acceptance committee stands as paragons of virtues moral giants in this land of ethical pygmys they alone are incorruptible unswayable and perfectly and completely fair in all things. So standardized merit based metrics serve only as a barrier to their ineffable judgement and pure deductions let it be them alone and their powerful "algorithm" that is too pure and holy for mortal eyes to sully with their gaze be the new standard by which we determine if a student can go to Harvard, for clearly this is the one true way forward and will never be manipulated by self serving or short sighted beauracrats to manipulate and politic in.
    • bryan0 5y ago
      SAT proposed an adversity score to address this, but it was extremely controversial and abandonded: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/us/sat-adversity-score-college-board.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/us/sat-adversity-score-co...
  • thehappypm 5y ago
    Let’s say there’s two high schools, one is the ritzy private school (Eagleton Academy) and the public school that has a lot of poorer students (Pawnee High). Harvard needs a way to distinguish between students across schools. An A at Academy, after all, might be harder to achieve than an A at High, after all, Academy is a world-class institution. So, Harvard needs to tune its algorithm to factor that in. So, the A+ prodigy at High might not stand out against a sea of B+ students at Academy, after all, Academy is much more rigorous. Enter standardized testing: the prodigy gets a 2400 and the B+ students at High get ~2000s. Suddenly the prodigy can actually catch the attention of the Harvard admissions.
    • abduhl 5y ago
      Yes, but the prodigy at Pawnee High happens to be Asian and we're full up on them so we take the B+ students at Academy whose parents went to Harvard. Sorry, we've been advised by legal to say that we're not really "full up" because that would imply we have quotas and also that we only consider race peripherally and only ever as a plus factor. It just so happens to not be a plus factor here, while it's a default plus factor for some other candidates.
      • ajsnigrutin 5y ago
        I'm glad I live in a country where only grades and standardized tests are taken in account, and colleges don't even know the race or background of anyone.
        • boppo1 5y ago
          Where? Seems like DEI is turning up in most western universities.
          • ajsnigrutin 5y ago
            Slovenia. But the system is pretty much the same in other former socialist countries (atleast the end results... some colleges have specialised entry exams in some countries or even a combination of both, but in the end, the students are sorted by whatever score they get (based on grades and exam scores, not race or whatever), top X get acceppted, and only the cutoff score is published - everyone with that score or more is accepted, everyone below is not). This may be a leftover of socialism though, because in yugoslavia everyone was considered equal to everyone else.
  • DnDGrognard 5y ago
    The poor kid will have more motivation than "Tim nice but dim" who would need pushing by his parents.
  • dilap 5y ago
    Yep, defnly matches my experience as a dirt-poor high-school dropout. SAT saved me. It's very sad to me to see these developments.
    • smoldesu 5y ago
      Same story here. I graduated with my GPA in the bottom 10th percentile of my class. My SAT scores were in the top 95th percentile across the nation though. Seeing this change just makes me reflect on how much it will harm the disadvantaged kids, while giving a free pass to the people who learned how to Google the answers to their homework. It's been said many times, many ways, but the education system is totally broken.
      • vasilipupkin 5y ago
        Nothing in this change says that a kid like you wouldn't be able to get into Harvard under new policy. They won't REQUIRE SAT scores, they aren't saying they won't use them if you submit them.
        • dominotw 5y ago
          > they aren't saying they won't use them if you submit them. gp is wants others won't be rejected because of low sat scores
          • vasilipupkin 5y ago
            right, harvard reserves the right to admit someone who may potentially have really bad SAT scores. But that's fine, if admission officers see that person as Harvard material, why shouldn't they? Most candidates will still submit ACT/SAT scores, and average ACT/SAT score of the incoming class will likely still be high.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • TechnoTimeStop 5y ago
    But but ... insert racist ass shit about a specific race ='s the main reason stupid things like this even get accepted to begin with.
  • garbagecoder 5y ago
    Look at what happened in San Francisco when they dumbed down the math for these same reasons. The rich kids just supplemented it with private tutoring. Which is what they will always do and you aren't ever going to be able to stop people with money from spending it on their children, at least not in a semi-free society. I was poor growing up and got into Pomona College because of my test scores.
  • throw_m239339 5y ago
    It certainly targets "asians" students who are deemed too successful at school, despite their diverse economic background, as they are already discriminated against in Ivy league colleges right now. It's just obfuscate discrimination. Yes, when you are told "you're too successful as a community" to get in, it's not only discrimination, it's straight out racism. It will change absolutely nothing for actual rich kids, no matter their race, who can buy in admission through donations, unlike what some people are claiming here. For these kids, SAT scores already don't matter.
• mrkramer 5y ago
  Yea go to hell with standardization. Smart idea.
• ipaul 5y ago
  It's Harvard - about a third get in, preferentially, because their parents got in: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/10/28/high-time-to-end-legacy-admissions/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/10/28/high-time-to-e...
  • mrkramer 5y ago
    Yea remember Michelle Obama. I heard it from Peter Thiel when he said something like this: "Michele Obama said all colleges are good for children not only elite one. The next thing you hear her children are going to Harvard." Edit: here is the Peter Thiel reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz4VYFAQGaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz4VYFAQGaA
    • tfigment 5y ago
      I guess Stanford is not an elite university then either. If he went to state or community college i might care more but his argument is not in good faith anyway.
      • karaterobot 5y ago
        But he's not the one who made the argument, he's saying she was being hypocritical.
    • strikelaserclaw 5y ago
      good enough for plebs not future ruling elites.
    • Brendinooo 5y ago
      One of their daughters is at Michigan, right?
    • hcknwscommenter 5y ago
      This is a weird comment in my opinion. MO says regular colleges are good too. She doesn't say "just as good". Of course going to Harvard can (not necessarily does) provide certain advantages. She didn't deny that.
• evergrande 5y ago
  Contrarian opinion: Harvard devaluing their diploma is good because smart people will get off the credential treadmill and do something productive instead.
  • merpnderp 5y ago
    Not as contrarian as you think. It's not healthy that basically all of the US's ruling class comes from a few schools.
• hellbannedguy 5y ago
  I believe the only reason they removed it was because they see the writing on the wall. They don't want a lawsuit down the line. Harvard knows it a matter of time until the population knows how dumb rich kids get in. They get in because daddy was very wealthy, or very famous. I imagine Princeton will be next. How many idiot celebrities has that school admitted besides Brook Shields?
• Pigalowda 5y ago
  It’s perhaps to address lower scores amongst legacy and athlete students who are accepted? It can’t be controversial if the comparison metric is removed. I’m guessing it also helps eliminate the “blue collar asian” applicants more easily. It removes one of their shining accomplishments. From a 2018 article from politico: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/10/21/harvard-admissions-affirmative-action-221669/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/10/21/harvard-a... “But the data collected by the Education Department contained some explosive information. It showed the athletes and so-called legacies who were actually accepted had lower SAT scores than the rest of the class and were also deemed less attractive candidates by the admissions officers conducting Harvard’s process. Some of the comments those officers wrote on the application folders of admitted legacies strongly suggested something more than a tiebreaker was at work. “Lineage is main thing,” one reader wrote. “Double lineage, but lots of problems … no balance,” the notes on another successful application said. “Lots of lineage here … Hard to explain a NO,” yet another said. “Classical case that would be hard to explain to DAD.”
  • routerl 5y ago
    It's so funny how the class of people who most criticize "entitlements" (read: social services paid for by taxes) are the same class of people who are most "entitled" (to admittance in (so-called) elite institutions).
    • gotoeleven 5y ago
      Umm I think you'll find the criticism of both things comes primarily from the right. To be clear, this push to remove standards is coming from the left (in the guise of racial justice blah blah blah) but the beneficiaries will primarily be the untalented children of the gentry class (the Lori Laughlin's of the world).
      • kenjackson 5y ago
        I get the racial justice angle. I just have a bad feeling that in the long run this sort of thing will end up hurting racial justice more than helping.
• rgergerge3 5y ago
  This is the logical conclusion of our contemporary understanding of privilege. Anything a person does (or does not) accomplish can be directly attributed to the privilege he or she had (or lacked). High SAT scores means the person was privileged enough to afford tutoring, or privileged enough to live in a two-parent household, or privileged enough to be born without any major disability, etc. Once you accept that as your worldview you accept merit is meaningless. What separates Ramanujan and Newton from the average college dropout are extraneous factors. Any difference in outcomes is societal and environmental, and must be corrected.
  • merpnderp 5y ago
    I feel like we closer to the world of Harrison Bergeron than we really should be.
  • kiba 5y ago
    Merit is meaningful, but people confuse meritocracy with a just and equitable society. If you are committed to selecting for the best, then you must select for individuals that are aided by factors outside their 'control', whether that's luck, environment, people, or genes. It does not matter how arbitrary or unfair these factors are, only that they help select the best men and women for a given job or career.
    • rsj_hn 5y ago
      People also confuse a just society with an equal society. There is no particular reason to want everyone to be equal, and there are plenty of reasons you do not want this -- when everyone is equal, people are constantly fighting for who is best because if anyone just slightly increases their wealth/power, they will be the highest of all. People are fundamentally competitive, competing over social prestige, mates, etc. So creating a situation in which anyone can be king is a recipe for constant war. Thus the equal society is the most unjust society, because it is the society in which violence and conflict are maximized. Moreover, it's better to maximize well-being rather than worrying about whether you think it is "fair" that talent is not distributed equally. What you can do is tax those who earn more and use that to provide social benefits to others. That is, set up a society in which everyone benefits from the outperformance of the elite, rather than trying to pretend that everyone can be elite, or that there is no elite at all.
• dayvid 5y ago
  Malcolm Gladwell has a great series of podcasts in Revisionist History on elite colleges and admissions that made a lot of this stuff click. Elite colleges want to be a desired place for the high class to attend. As a result of this, they have to keep a consistent ratio of high class students (with some baseline/distribution of ability) to talented students to miscellaneous students. Too many high class students, and they lose their academic prestige only to be an expensive private school. Too many talented students, then very few high class students can attend and the higher class will focus on other schools. If it's mainly other students, then it won't be a notable school. Viewing elite college admissions from this level makes a lot of their actions more sensible. People are now able to game their old system so they have to adjust things to keep the ratio intact. I imagine at the graduate level, things are lot more performance/talent based and less political (excluding maybe MBAs or Law School). https://open.spotify.com/episode/4CM4Q8lOoGrEOSnXmqp1D1?si=697c7b0330a24a26 https://open.spotify.com/episode/4CM4Q8lOoGrEOSnXmqp1D1?si=6...
  • Erik816 5y ago
    I'm getting old, but at least 15 years ago, law school admission was almost purely LSAT score + College GPA (weighted by perceived difficulty/prestige of College).
    • divbzero 5y ago
      That was my impression too from 15 years ago, curious if this has changed at all.
    • xapata 5y ago
      Anecdotally, I've found that more prestigious professional schools -- law, medicine -- weight standardized testing higher. The less prestigious, more regionally focused ones, care more about GPA. This is different from undergraduate schools. I've met several people who applied to a large number of professional schools and were only admitted to the top tier. It could be due to the randomness of admissions, but the sample is large enough to convince me.
  • reducesuffering 5y ago
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  This must be good for everyone else. In particular european universities might want to attract those disillusioned hard-working asian students.
  • kwere 5y ago
    and saving few bucks too going to world class uni
• Claude_Shannon 5y ago
  I don't see the logic with this. Standardised scores are the only thing that you can measure, and so only that should matter.
• gao8a 5y ago
  As a Canadian who never grew up with standardized testing, and also graduating with an IB cohort (from a public school) whom none of them actually went to the US (just took their boosted canadian grade equivalents or went somewheres in europe), I really fail to see how this could be that bad of a thing. The first year, or semester even is a great filter that cuts a significant amount of folks where school isn't for them. I can also see this as a move like china did to kill tutorial services to give kids back their teen years. In a land where school is so expensive I think its worth it to spend summers working a job (and all the merits that come with that) to better prep for possibly the biggest financial decision ever for a still developing brain.
  • opportune 5y ago
    In the US private universities do not use the first 1-2 years as filters deliberately. It’s common to see 4 year graduation rates above 90% especially for schools like Harvard
  • impostergc 5y ago
    Your point about schools filtering students who are not able to cut it is moot. Do you think standards won't (or haven't already) change to keep as many students as possible? Universities want money, the more students the better. The idea that this change happens in isolation shows a lack of systemic thinking.
    • davidgay 5y ago
      My undergrad (EPFL) would like a word with you... Pass rate for the first year was 50% (as was the overall pass rate over 4 years). Of course, it is a public university, so money is a bit different.
  • Kranar 5y ago
    It's one of the worst aspects of some (not all) Canadian universities that they use the first or second year as a way to filter students out and the impact it has on students is rather devastating in terms of lost opportunity. Almost 20 years ago I went to the University of Toronto's computer science program which is notorious for this practice and can see first hand the effect that this practice has on friends of mine even decades later. It's not just a matter of filtering students out, the issue is that there is a strict cut-off point that is unknown to people in advance, so you have students investing one to two years pursuing a program and then having those years go to waste because they're below the cut-off. It's basically a system that traps students with aspirations of going into one program and then when most of them fail due to uncertain admissions guidelines, those students end up with a great deal of pressure to continue studying at the university but under a less prestigious or financially sound program. The result of this system speaks for itself, with the building used by the computer science department being the site of 3-4 suicides per year (which I am admittedly speculating is due to people not hitting the admissions cut-off). Whatever one's opinion of standardized testing may be, the Canadian model of accepting as many students as possible into a program and then kicking them out or shoving them into a different program on the basis of rather volatile and uncertain criteria is not the one to go by.
• ijidak 5y ago
  As a black person, standardized tests saved me from racism/prejudice. At my blue blood private school, I had a math teacher who explicitly told my dad that he gave me a bad letter of rec on an MIT summer camp application, because as a black person affirmative action would make life too easy for me. I'm happy it was only a summer camp and not my real college admissions the following year. Even though I was a top five math student in my class across the entire private school, he and the dean of the math department gave me lower grades for the same work. They also didn't let me test out of classes (wouldn't show me test results), etc. Thank God for SAT II's and AP exams. I destroyed those tests. 5's and 790's. Highest marks in the class for Math SAT II's. But it didn't help my GPA from those biased teachers. I did get into MIT for real the next year. Standardized tests helped protect me from teacher bias. Ultimately, the world is just a mess. Now, I just focus on teaching people that the only fix for our problems will not come from mankind (to see what I'm talking about, take a look at: https://jw.org https://jw.org). Humans are a mess.
  • 533474 5y ago
    I agree that humans are a mess. Well done on making it to MIT, it is not the first time I read or hear an experience like yours. Still, some kids are not privileged enough to get good math education but they might be late bloomers. I've met a genius with horrible SAT scores, a late bloomer, self-taught who now publishes in renowned math journals
  • sheepdestroyer 5y ago
    Not sure what I should take away from "taking a look" at your link. Do you mean "look at what comes from mankind ; we can't expect anything good from it when results like these are some of its outputs"? I'd hope that's what you intended but I fear that it's not. I personally do hope for either AGI or a 3rd type encounter to expend Humanity's philosophy.
    • ijidak 5y ago
      So, I look at climate change, division and gridlock in the world's great democracies, as well as social issues and unrest. Despite all of our wonderful technological and scientific advances, our basic problems still involve moral division and disagreement. This is in harmony with what the Bible predicted. Commenting on our intellectual capacity: "there is nothing that they may have in mind to do that will be impossible for them" Commenting on our moral situation: "men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money...not open to any agreement" So, the Bible's thesis seems very accurate to me. We have unlimited scientific and engineering ability. But very limited ability to create harmony. That's why prejudice, jingoism, injustice, racism, and numerous other issues are stubbornly difficult to get rid of. But since the Bible's thesis is correct, I believe its proposed solution is likely correct as well.
• gotoeleven 5y ago
  It seems like society is hard-wired to create an aristocracy, one way or another. We tried using merit instead of nepotism for a while but I guess the pressure from "elite" parents with idiot children was too great. Human society, at least in the west, is reverting back to the old ways of doing things.
  • reducesuffering 5y ago
    Plato's Republic still relevant 2,400 years later: "...the earth, as being their mother, delivered them, and now, as if their land were their mother and their nurse, they ought to take thought for her and defend her against any attack and regard the other citizens as their brothers and children of the self-same earth...While all of you, in the city, are brothers, we will say in our tale, yet god, in fashioning those of you who are fitted to hold rule, mingled gold in their generation, for which reason they are the most precious—but in the helpers, silver, and iron and brass in the farmers and other craftsmen. And, as you are all akin, though, for the most part, you will breed after your kinds, it may sometimes happen that a golden father would beget a silver son, and that a golden offspring would come from a silver sire, and that the rest would, in like manner, be born of one another. So that the first and chief injunction that the god lays upon the rulers is that of nothing else are they to be such careful guardians, and so intently observant as of the intermixture of these metals in the souls of their offspring, and if sons are born to them with an infusion of brass or iron they shall by no means give way to pity in their treatment of them, but shall assign to each the status due to his nature and thrust them out among the artisans or the farmers. And again, if from these there is born a son with unexpected gold or silver in his composition they shall honor such and bid them go up higher, some to the office of guardian, some to the assistanceship, alleging that there is an oracle that the city shall then be overthrown when the man of iron or brass is its guardian." Socrates proposes and claims that if the people believed "this myth...[it] would have a good effect, making them more inclined to care for the state and one another." This is his noble lie: "a contrivance for one of those falsehoods that come into being in case of need, of which we were just now talking, some noble one..."
    • AlexanderTheGr8 5y ago
• GoodJokes 5y ago
  About time. Money and connections has been the biggest and most important requirement for awhile. Ridiculous that I had a smooth talk 3 or 4 admission officers AND get my child game the SAT to get into harvard. Absurd.
• Beaver117 5y ago
  Why don't they add IQ tests as a parameter? Instead of SATs we can identify smart individuals from bad schools. No more privilege excuses.
  • jacobr1 5y ago
    Because those have similar uneven racial distributions.
  • salt-thrower 5y ago
    An IQ test is just another form of standardized test, isn't it?
  • Rebelgecko 5y ago
    IQ tests have similar characteristics to the SAT. Practice makes you better, uneven distribution across the population, etc
    • chillacy 5y ago
      Do you have a source for “practice makes you better”? Last I checked only N-back benefits from practice, the rest doesn’t.
      • Rebelgecko 5y ago
        "Retest effects in cognitive ability tests" by Scharfen & friends is a good overview that mentions other studies that go into more detail and tweak different parameters (e.g. time between tests, tests that are more repetitive than others, etc). The meta-analysis found that retaking a test can add a couple points each time. So taking an IQ test 4 times on average yields an 8 point increase, almost an entire standard deviation.
        • chillacy 5y ago
          Thanks, this actually matches my initial intuition about the matter. It's been awhile since I've looked up info in this area, partly due to the fact that a lot of IQ test proponents I spoke to seemed to have a great deal of personal identity staked in its significance.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  I predict the next step for Harvard will be to eliminate grades for their courses.
  • frozenport 5y ago
    They already did. Ivy League schools are known for grade inflation.
• neonate 5y ago
  https://archive.md/0JRvz https://archive.md/0JRvz
• odiroot 5y ago
  (Article was behind a paywall) As a European, I have to ask, how can a university qualify the students without having any standardised test? At every level of my education I had country-level-standardised test. It was always the most important factor in getting in. It also had an effect of allowing students from very remote, small towns to study in the capital, because of their top scores.
  • NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
    They can't, obviously. What they're doing is making it very difficult to blame them for doing whatever they want to do.
  • fma 5y ago
    As an American - it is an interesting question. I'm no history buff by any means....but one of the strengths of the United States is that the federal government is supposed to have limited powers. It's also a weakness (IMHO) and being able to 'universally qualify' students is one of them. Education standards & curriculum is controlled at the state. How can you compare two students between 2 different states, when even the GPA levels can be different despite have the same grades? I have family in China...and in China there are national tests to be able to compare students. If we start doing a national tests you'll have people start yelling "States rights!". We can't even have states accept free money to give their people insurance. I don't think all states would accept a national test.
  • jacobr1 5y ago
    The problem is the reality that outcomes on standardized tests show very different distributions for different racial categories [1]. If you focus on the tests, you will get strongly undesired outcomes. So the admission process needs to find other methods to identify candidates that are both academically likely to succeed and roughly match the racial distributions of entire population. On a societal level, in my opinion, the right thing to do would be to address the causes of why certain groups have very low scores, ideally in a non-racial way, such a universal pre-K or more funding for math education and lower-performing schools or whatever. But universities have decided that more subjective evaluations are the way forward for their short term needs. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-highlight-inequality-and-hinder-upward-mobility/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-h...
• jlos 5y ago
  One of the best ideas I've heard for college admissions is the following: - Small percentage (10-20%) based purely on performance (either academic or athletic) - All other admitted applications drawn randomly from a pool who achieve a base score on SAT's. With the following benefits: - Student population reflective of national demographics due to random sampling. - Elimination of bias and discrimination endemic to these institutions history - Could even mark our 5% for "legacy" status students to keep the elite donors happy. - Motivation for students: anyone who can achieve a baseline has a real chance of attending an elite university
  • nwah1 5y ago
    The entire basis of elite status comes from the notion that not just anyone can attend. Your proposal effectively removes college as a signal of elite status, and thus people will organically invent new symbols that most will lack and we will be back to where we started very quickly.
    • fallingknife 5y ago
      Good. We will always have elite status symbols. They don't have to take 4 years of your life like college.
      • chii 5y ago
        well it can just be decided by your birth instead then?
  • carabiner 5y ago
    Have you seen the SAT score vs. race charts? This would just make Harvard 50+% Asian (like Caltech), when they make up 7% of the US.
    • jacobr1 5y ago
      Wow, I looked up the data to refute this, but it was worse than I presumed: https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-highlight-inequality-and-hinder-upward-mobility/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-h... My initial thought was we could just have a floor. We don't need to ensure a perfect score amongst the pool that gets randomly selected, so if there there is minimum that is still "high," and that isn't biased toward outliers from any race, then it would work. But it looks like the floor we'd need to have a reasonable representation would be something like a 500/800 math score. That is much too low, at least for elite schools. Choosing something like a 700 cut-off ends up being very racially selective.
• deleted 5y ago
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• akyu 5y ago
  The American Brahmin class asserts its dominance.
  • kwere 5y ago
    its about helping those pesky shudra not creating backdoors.
• zarkov99 5y ago
  Yes! Finally the admissions committee can admit exactly who it wants, without any pesky objective criteria to hamper their social justice ideals!
  • karmasimida 5y ago
    I think for Harvard SAT isn't that important anyway right?
    • nfw2 5y ago
      It's important if your score is bad
      • karmasimida 5y ago
        I would assume it is already balanced based on various factors before evaluation BTW Canada didn't have SAT requirement for college application I think they are doing OK. They do look at GPA during high school though.
    • drak0n1c 5y ago
      During college tours at Harvard in 2007 I had an informational interview with an admissions Dean, and when he learned my SAT was 2110 he asked if I was planning to retake and cut the interview short.
    • MR4D 5y ago
      Not nearly as important as who your parents are (or how rich they are).
      • karmasimida 5y ago
        That is my impression as well. It doesn't make too much sense to over indexing on this when it is already discounted in a significant way.
    • freyir 5y ago
      It’s extremely important if you’re a white or Asian applicant whose parent didn’t attend or donate a large sum of money to Harvard.
• User23 5y ago
  Harvard’s primary admission criteria is “will this person write us giant checks in 20 years?” It’s a solid business model that’s worked for longer than the USA has existed. Legacies and athletes are the most reliable donors which is why they get an admission preference. Dispensing with testing makes it much easier to grow the endowment. Being able to justify it with the diversity fad is, frankly, smart. And if there’s one thing Harvard is, it’s smart.
• whymauri 5y ago
  I feel like the pandemic has to be tied to this somehow or else they would be test-optional indefinitely. There's some people who probably cannot take an SAT/ACT in the online format, or the conditions of the online format are too poor for it to be a valid assessment. Also, people in this thread are confusing testing optionality with testing not considered. The smart low-income kid that kicks ass on the SAT/ACT can still submit their score. I'm also interested in how this might affect recent immigrant applicants, actually (strong on quantitative aspects with strong narrative writing for essays, but weak in timed verbal/English exams due to comprehension). Just a couple thoughts.
• wly_cdgr 5y ago
  What do they propose to do instead that is gonna be as close or closer to objective while also not being prohibitively more expensive?
• jp42 5y ago
  On a slightly tangent, going forward universities will be less and less relevant compared to past. Except few areas where you cant learn things online (e.g medical), universities will be competing with online courses. If university help to get real jobs by innovating itself, it will stay relevant otherwise it will perish. The trend is clear.
• isitdopamine 5y ago
  Any kind of leftism will eventually want to erase merit.
  • kwere 5y ago
    leftism in america is non existent
• specialist 5y ago
  I support any move towards an admissions lottery. If eliminating standardized testing does that, count me in.
• Proven 5y ago
  20% lower offers for all new H grads may be in order.
• usaar333 5y ago
  I'd think for Harvard of all schools SAT probably doesn't matter much today. Their range is 1460-1580 with a mean of 1520. Broadly speaking, the test is too "easy" (especially for the class Harvard admits) - over 25% of enrolled students are pulling an 800 on math. And needless to say, Harvard will reject plenty of students getting perfect scores. I imagine SAT provides little signal at Harvard conditioned on GPA, APs, and other extracurricular demonstrations of academic merit.
  • dbsmith83 5y ago
    > Their range is 1460-1580 with a mean of 1520 I wonder what this will do to the mean once it becomes optional. It seems mostly people with very high scores would be the ones to bother submitting them because otherwise it could hurt the applicant.
• vasilipupkin 5y ago
  lots of people on this thread are confusing "Won't use ACT scores" with "Don't require ACT scores". If someone is super accomplished in other things, Harvard lets them appply even if their ACT score is bad. But that doesn't mean that, all things being equal, a high ACT score won't help an applicant.
• kevinventullo 5y ago
  Glad they got rid of this but legacy admissions are alive and well.
• LudwigNagasena 5y ago
  I can’t imagine that while the whole world moves towards merit-based university admission, the US moves away from it.
  • twobitshifter 5y ago
    Everyone always thought that being smart was the only way into Harvard, but it’s not true. This change will make that obvious. Hopefully, the smartest people will no longer try to go to Harvard and it will just turn into an old crusty university. The idea that Harvard even produced intelligence needs to be questioned but it hasn’t been. The truth is - if you take the smartest high school students you’ll end up with the smartest college graduates. The quality of the Harvard education really isn’t what separates people.
• platz 5y ago
  Harvard is a research institution. It's primary mission just isnt about education.
  • thisiscorrect 5y ago
    Harvard is a hedge fund with a university attached for tax-exempt status.
• ConanRus 5y ago
  "“Students who do not submit standardized test scores will not be disadvantaged in their application process, their applications will be considered on the basis of what they have presented" Yeah, a mugshot with clearly visible tattoos will get them to Harvard, for sure
• forkLding 5y ago
  Coming from a private school where many of my friends went to Ivy Leagues, a lot of them took SAT Prep, which honestly does not teach much except for how to practice for SAT so that you get a high score, also its a bit of an unfair advantage as you're basically paying for classes while others don't have the same opportunities or time.
• tamaharbor 5y ago
  A college education is not worth much any more. And a free college education for all will just make things worse.
• eruci 5y ago
  Who cares. Universities are becoming irrelevant anyways.
• throwawaysea 5y ago
  This is just racism. They’re undoing a meritocracy to admit their favored demographic groups.
• etempleton 5y ago
  A couple things people are missing with this: 1. Test optional - Students can still submit SAT and ACT scores. So if you get a perfect score you can, and probably should, submit your test score and it will look good and the admission committee will weigh that. 2. The issue with standardized tests is not if the SAT or ACT is objective or not. The issue is what those tests objectively measure. Ends up mostly family income and, well, ones ability to take standardized tests. It is like the 40 yard dash in football. Everyone obsesses about it as an objective measure, but it doesn’t really mean too much one way or another as it pertains to football. As an aside, has anyone gone back and tried taking a sample SAT test? If you have not exposed yourself to the unique framing of standardized test questions in awhile it is quite jarring if you are not used to it.
  • Auracle 5y ago
    Could it not be that it corresponds with family income because intelligent, hard working people tend to pass on those genes to their children?
• diebeforei485 5y ago
  They should get rid of legacy admissions before doing this.
• hindsightbias 5y ago
  They might as well wear Make Ivy’s White Again hats… This is what happens when a minority doesn’t play hard at social politics. Time for them to start punching their weight.
• pessimizer 5y ago
  Harvard can do this because they're rich and they're Harvard. The SAT and ACT simply don't work well to predict good students. Harvard is going to run applicants through an insane gauntlet anyway, and they trust their admissions personnel to perform as well without the tests as with. In their case, the tests probably add more noise than signal, especially with applicant self-selection. Other, worse universities, are not going to have the resources to significantly evaluate applicants at all, and still need those tests just to insure that students have minimal math and language skills.
  • NoSorryCannot 5y ago
    Lots of lesser schools are trialing test optional and sometimes the stronger "test blind" right now, for a variety of reasons including covid and competition from their peers. Off the top of my head, the University of Oregon, the University of Utah. All UC and California State schools are test blind right now. Universities devote a tremendous amount of resources to the admissions process because it is, of course, extremely important to their business that they get the right number of enrollments from the right kinds of students.
• daxfohl 5y ago
  I find it interesting that the general sentiment here is to disagree with this change, but HN folks also generally seem opposed to whiteboard interviews. That seems contradictory. What's the difference? Or is it just a different group of people responding here?
• MyHypatia 5y ago
  If students can still submit AP test scores as part of their application, then I don't have a problem with them eliminating the SAT. AP tests are much harder than the SAT, and more representative of college material anyway. Studying for the SATs was a giant waste of time, while I actually learned a lot studying for AP tests. Not all highschools have AP classes, so AP tests should not be required to apply, obviously. AP tests provide an objective metric to compare students who go to high schools with AP courses. For students who don't have AP courses, I think using grades is reasonable. All students can still submit additional non-required test scores and other supporting material for their application. At least now we are not wasting students time with this SAT bullshit. I think the SATs are like Leetcode but even less useful. Obviously Leetcode is some indication that someone can program, but we're all aware that Leetcode is nothing like actual programming in a job. Similarly, the SAT is some indication that someone can do college, but nothing like actual college. I just think the cost of wasting millions of kids' hours studying for the SAT is a tragic waste of time, when they can be studying for their classes or more rigorous tests that test actual subject material like AP tests.
  • Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    > while I actually learned a lot studying for AP tests. Well, I guess that's where we'll agree to disagree, because I didn't. As I see it, AP courses are test prep taking over the entirety of the curriculum. That's way worse.
    • MyHypatia 5y ago
      I do see your point about test prep taking over the entire curriculum. And I can agree that's an issue as well. I guess I just find a test in an actual subject to be less BS than a general "aptitude" test, whatever that means. With AP tests, I can say "I tried learning chemistry, so I studied chemistry, and took this standardized test, and here is my chemistry score." With SATs I'm studying random "aptitude" stuff and I'm not even sure what I'm really demonstrating or what is really being measured.
  • bsmith0 5y ago
    Senior year AP scores aren't available for seniors until way after the application process. I think I ended up having 7/11 of my tests during senior year. Imo the main advantage APs brings is GPA weighting/more impressive looking transcripts. I think scores often aren't even considered by admissions -- purely used for college credit.
• onos 5y ago
  Interesting points I’ve read recently in this area: A national test creates cohesion in a society in that it defines what knowledge is valued and aligns people around it. Will we lose this benefit if the test is dropped? The tests and other admission criteria are heuristics for talent, motivation, etc. those motivated to gain prestige in this way will attempt to max these out. But might we not encourage a better use of this energy than the maxing out of simple skills(eg error free, quick arithmetic vs going forward to study number theory)?
• another_story 5y ago
  The ACT and SAT have been to heavily relied on. Getting rid of them seems overkill, but they really shouldn't play as big as a role as they do.
• dehrmann 5y ago
  I have my guesses, but I'm very curious what the outcome of this ends up being. Sadly, a lot of these experiments will be polluted by the pandemic, so meaningful comparisons will be hard.
• deleted 5y ago
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• 1cvmask 5y ago
  Harvard has never been a meritocracy and never will be. It is an elite establishment and will protect the elites of the world and offer them safe harbor for 4 years. It is good of them that they removed the facade of requiring exams at all since they can now be open about choosing the future elites from the children of the current elites. The diversity trope is just pure performative art to justify more rich elite whites. They do this discrimination while having a massive endowment and still receiving huge taxpayer handouts.
• fqye 5y ago
  China tried the US elite college admission approach by alllowing top universities to accept a small number of students before Gaokao as pilots. And corruption ensured. Lots of complaints from the public. It was reverted back to purely based on Gaikao scores. Not ideal but it is the closest to fair admission it can get in China.
• elisbce 5y ago
  Just make it explicit already: "Test scores optional. Qualifications optional. Minority (non-White, Asians excluded) required.
• ohiovr 5y ago
  College is a poorer education than high school 100 years ago. Reading levels of today's senior level high school students are actually 6th grade levels 100 years ago. It is easy to prove. Just look at what reading assignments are given today compared to yesteryear and calculate the flesch kincaid scores on it.
• myrandomcomment 5y ago
  My daughter is currently applying for collage. Harvard is on the list. Her GPA is a 3.9 (unweighted) with a ton of additional plus items (3 languages, 2 varsity sports, leadership roles, 12 years as a Girl Scout, etc.) She struggles with testing like the SAT scoring only 1350 (I scored higher back in the day, but we had a very different educational upbringing - mine was regimented, where I made a different choice in her upbringing with a focus on allowing her to explore). She is scary smart (not just a proud father talking, she really very impressive in how she thinks) and driven like I never was. She decided to not submit the SAT scores as all she sees is the numbers. I have done a bit of research on the admission at Harvard and it is clear that the interviews play a huge part. The interviewers look at are they a leader, can they add something to Harvard, and they even consider if they will make a good dorm roommate. The internet hurts kids today as they can see the scores and the data without understanding it as they are still kids. It is discouraging as the raw data without digging does not show them that there are people with scores above the line that do not get admitted and those below the line that do. It is the whole package that really counts, and test scores are not a true measure. Let see how this plays out.
• fuck_dang_1 5y ago
  Interesting that many comments against this blatant racism are dead and remain dead, while blatantly racist nonsense claiming asians should be limited to their population proportion is still alive. How does it feel to support a community of racists, dang?