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the problem is and always has been that the particular school you attend has too much weight, irrespective of ability or aptitude. if college admissions were hi

the problem is and always has been that the particular school you attend has too much weight, irrespective of ability or aptitude. if college admissions were high school blind then this wouldn't even matter to begin with. simply being great, regardless of which school you attend would be enough. re: TJH admissions: > In 2020, during the summer after George Floyd’s death, the Virginia state government announced that it would be requiring schools to step up their efforts in diversity. Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Brabrand’s response was fairly simple. To create a new, broader admissions pool, he proposed eliminating the $100 application fee, the standardized test, and teacher recommendations in favor of a “merit lottery.” The district would be carved into regions, and each region would be given 70 seats in the incoming TJ class. As long as you applied and had the minimum required GPA of 3.5, you would have as good a chance at getting in as any other student from your group. What exactly is the problem with this?

woodruffw 5y ago
> the problem is and always has been that the particular school you attend has too much weight, irrespective of ability or aptitude. if college admissions were high school blind then this wouldn't even matter to begin with. simply being great, regardless of which school you attend would be enough. Concisely said. Blinding applicants' high schools would reveal the inequality in treatment latent in our educational system.
- gruez 5y ago
  >Blinding applicants' high schools would reveal the inequality in treatment latent in our educational system. Which way? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri... (Not saying this study is necessarily predictive of "inequality in schools", just that we shouldn't expect it to be a sure thing like you suggest)
mattnewton 5y ago
> As long as you applied and had the minimum required GPA of 3.5, GPA is not a useful measurement across schools in the US, because the scope of difficulty and curriculum varies widely between states and municipalities. It's also easy to game in schools that offer advanced courses- just don't take them. At my school, the people who had the highest GPA did so by avoiding classes like AP calculus BC. Any one of these measurements in a vaccum is going to have problems. The GPA without the school and curriculum is like knowing that something is 25% off without knowing the original price. That being said, the lottery is probably a better method than people give it credit for. It's guaranteed to have the fair distribution over time people want if the lottery is administered fairly.
- godelski 5y ago
  > GPA is not a useful measurement across schools in the US Didn't Google do some hiring study and find that grades didn't matter as long as they were above a 3.0 or something? I know there is a lot of noise in grades, but there's probably some threshold. Here's some source https://web.archive.org/web/20210610101258/http://qz.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210610101258/http://qz.com/
  - gruez 5y ago
    The actual underlying phenomena is probably that as GPA increase, there is "diminishing returns" to skill. With this in mind, you can improve the lottery by assigning probability of winning relative to ln(x) or 1-1/x, which awards additional hard work, but doesn't give undue credit to the very top performers.
  - trhway 5y ago
    If I remember Google's racial makeup is pretty close to the racial makeup of {x: SAT(x) > 1450}
  - mjevans 5y ago
    Not exactly sure where the real cutoff might be, that too probably varies with the curriculum, but generally yeah. Either someone gets something or they don't, and if someone gets how to do the work they can be taught and thus will at least do OK learning most other things they care about. If someone doesn't get how to do the work, but does care, that's probably a medical defect. Hopefully we can treat that someday, if not today. Getting lead out of the pipes and similar efforts would sure help. If someone doesn't care, that's entirely another matter and we should be more introspective as a society about how to fix it. That's more a political problem than a science problem.
lazide 5y ago
Grade inflation has made GPA pointless at most schools.
- ejb999 5y ago
  that, and then the highschools where they have 30 or 40 'valedictorians' in one graduating class. Now the term 'valedictorian' has also become meaningless as well. When everyone is a valedictorian, nobody is.
  - tremon 5y ago
    They have 30 or 40 students saying a farewell speech?
  - DebtDeflation 5y ago
    >the highschools where they have 30 or 40 'valedictorians' in one graduating class. What? The definition of a valedictorian is literally "the student (singular) with the highest academic standing in the graduating class" just as the salutatorian is defined as the student (again, singular) with the second highest standing.
    - lazide 5y ago
      Just like ‘literally’ now means ‘not literally’, folks keep changing things when it suits them. Some schools literally don’t give less than a B anymore, and that some would make anyone with an ‘A’ valedictorian is a real thing. According to this [https://www.campusexplorer.com/student-resources/what-is-a-valedictorian/?ref=blog https://www.campusexplorer.com/student-resources/what-is-a-v...] article I ran across, Stratford High School near Houston gave 30 students valedictorian in 2010, and I doubt that has gotten much better. Think of it as ‘scam innovation’ - the first ones to do it get major rewards (for schools it would be acceptance at better institutions for their students), then it spreads as more people figure it out, it hurts the legit folks, then folks start adjusting for it to try to tamp down the scamming.
deepGem 5y ago
In addition, standardised tests do not have any bias about your past or about your education. Anyone can start from scratch, prepare and ace them. All other forms of admissions, GPA, essays etc have biases of other parties. Essays and recommendation letters especially. Also they are so easy to game. They should clearly eliminate the test fees and make free prep material available for those who can't afford them. Conduct free preparation classes for anyone to attend etc. A lot can be done to make standardised tests more accessible. That would serve a greater purpose.
- hedora 5y ago
  The University of California is eliminating them because scores are correlated to race. Ironically, they used to have a set number of seats for people that had bad grades and aced the standardized tests. Blacks, Hispanics and other economically disadvantaged groups were over represented in that admissions pool. (So eliminating the tests will reduce the number of minority kids. According to the WSJ, they did this in Virginia in an attempt to boost enrollment in those groups. UC claimed that was their goal, but the study that they commissioned specifically to evaluate the policy change said it would reduce minority admissions.) Doubly-ironically, a while back, California colleges had explicit quotas for Asian kids to keep them from "taking over". They eliminated the quotas and promised to never do it again. They're still making a big stink about how the student body isn't representative enough. Guess which group is the only overrepresented one in California. (Hint: It's not the Caucasians.) The structural racism in this state continues to amaze me.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
SllX 5y ago
This is the stated reasoning. It came out in the court case that the real reasoning was to discriminate on the basis of race without saying they were discriminating on the basis of race, and they weren’t very careful about hiding the fact that the changes were racially motivated in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. Here’s the opinion: https://pacificlegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Coalition-for-TJ-v.-Fairfax-County-School-Board-Decision.pdf https://pacificlegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Coalitio... The whole opinion is worth reading, but the meat starts from the middle of page 5 onward. Their explicit goal was to change the racial makeup of the school for political purposes, and so the case hinges less upon the changes themselves than the racially motivated reasoning behind them. If you are interested and would like a far better explanation than I can provide that goes into the opinion, the context around the case and alternatives, consider the latest episode of the Advisory Opinions podcast released on February 28th, 2022[1]. [1]: Link to the episode page here but you are better served searching it in a podcast app like Overcast. https://advisoryopinions.thedispatch.com/p/judge-strikes-down-high-schools-racial https://advisoryopinions.thedispatch.com/p/judge-strikes-dow...
brandonmenc 5y ago
> the problem is and always has been that the particular school you attend has too much weight Could it also be that they want the better education? The names on the buildings aren't the only differences. The problem is that demand is way too high for magnet / college prep type education. The solution is to designate more schools as such but as with anything the devil is in the details.
pyuser583 5y ago
It ignores extra-curricular activities, which are one of the best indicators of success in college.
- jpgvm 5y ago
  Maybe but more importantly they are the best proxy indicator of money and privilege.
nova22033 5y ago
What exactly is the problem with this? The problem with the TJ case was that the administrators changed the admission criteria with the express purpose of racial rebalancing...and there are e-mails..
zp333 5y ago
why should a 4.0 student with excellent test scores have "as good a chance" as a 3.5 student with bad test scores?
- endisneigh 5y ago
  why not?

woodruffw 5y ago

> the problem is and always has been that the particular school you attend has too much weight, irrespective of ability or aptitude. if college admissions were high school blind then this wouldn't even matter to begin with. simply being great, regardless of which school you attend would be enough. Concisely said. Blinding applicants' high schools would reveal the inequality in treatment latent in our educational system.

gruez 5y ago
>Blinding applicants' high schools would reveal the inequality in treatment latent in our educational system. Which way? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri... (Not saying this study is necessarily predictive of "inequality in schools", just that we shouldn't expect it to be a sure thing like you suggest)

mattnewton 5y ago

> As long as you applied and had the minimum required GPA of 3.5, GPA is not a useful measurement across schools in the US, because the scope of difficulty and curriculum varies widely between states and municipalities. It's also easy to game in schools that offer advanced courses- just don't take them. At my school, the people who had the highest GPA did so by avoiding classes like AP calculus BC. Any one of these measurements in a vaccum is going to have problems. The GPA without the school and curriculum is like knowing that something is 25% off without knowing the original price. That being said, the lottery is probably a better method than people give it credit for. It's guaranteed to have the fair distribution over time people want if the lottery is administered fairly.

godelski 5y ago
> GPA is not a useful measurement across schools in the US Didn't Google do some hiring study and find that grades didn't matter as long as they were above a 3.0 or something? I know there is a lot of noise in grades, but there's probably some threshold. Here's some source https://web.archive.org/web/20210610101258/http://qz.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210610101258/http://qz.com/
- gruez 5y ago
  The actual underlying phenomena is probably that as GPA increase, there is "diminishing returns" to skill. With this in mind, you can improve the lottery by assigning probability of winning relative to ln(x) or 1-1/x, which awards additional hard work, but doesn't give undue credit to the very top performers.
- trhway 5y ago
  If I remember Google's racial makeup is pretty close to the racial makeup of {x: SAT(x) > 1450}
- mjevans 5y ago
  Not exactly sure where the real cutoff might be, that too probably varies with the curriculum, but generally yeah. Either someone gets something or they don't, and if someone gets how to do the work they can be taught and thus will at least do OK learning most other things they care about. If someone doesn't get how to do the work, but does care, that's probably a medical defect. Hopefully we can treat that someday, if not today. Getting lead out of the pipes and similar efforts would sure help. If someone doesn't care, that's entirely another matter and we should be more introspective as a society about how to fix it. That's more a political problem than a science problem.

lazide 5y ago

Grade inflation has made GPA pointless at most schools.

ejb999 5y ago
that, and then the highschools where they have 30 or 40 'valedictorians' in one graduating class. Now the term 'valedictorian' has also become meaningless as well. When everyone is a valedictorian, nobody is.
- tremon 5y ago
  They have 30 or 40 students saying a farewell speech?
- DebtDeflation 5y ago
  >the highschools where they have 30 or 40 'valedictorians' in one graduating class. What? The definition of a valedictorian is literally "the student (singular) with the highest academic standing in the graduating class" just as the salutatorian is defined as the student (again, singular) with the second highest standing.
  - lazide 5y ago
    Just like ‘literally’ now means ‘not literally’, folks keep changing things when it suits them. Some schools literally don’t give less than a B anymore, and that some would make anyone with an ‘A’ valedictorian is a real thing. According to this [https://www.campusexplorer.com/student-resources/what-is-a-valedictorian/?ref=blog https://www.campusexplorer.com/student-resources/what-is-a-v...] article I ran across, Stratford High School near Houston gave 30 students valedictorian in 2010, and I doubt that has gotten much better. Think of it as ‘scam innovation’ - the first ones to do it get major rewards (for schools it would be acceptance at better institutions for their students), then it spreads as more people figure it out, it hurts the legit folks, then folks start adjusting for it to try to tamp down the scamming.

deepGem 5y ago

In addition, standardised tests do not have any bias about your past or about your education. Anyone can start from scratch, prepare and ace them. All other forms of admissions, GPA, essays etc have biases of other parties. Essays and recommendation letters especially. Also they are so easy to game. They should clearly eliminate the test fees and make free prep material available for those who can't afford them. Conduct free preparation classes for anyone to attend etc. A lot can be done to make standardised tests more accessible. That would serve a greater purpose.

hedora 5y ago
The University of California is eliminating them because scores are correlated to race. Ironically, they used to have a set number of seats for people that had bad grades and aced the standardized tests. Blacks, Hispanics and other economically disadvantaged groups were over represented in that admissions pool. (So eliminating the tests will reduce the number of minority kids. According to the WSJ, they did this in Virginia in an attempt to boost enrollment in those groups. UC claimed that was their goal, but the study that they commissioned specifically to evaluate the policy change said it would reduce minority admissions.) Doubly-ironically, a while back, California colleges had explicit quotas for Asian kids to keep them from "taking over". They eliminated the quotas and promised to never do it again. They're still making a big stink about how the student body isn't representative enough. Guess which group is the only overrepresented one in California. (Hint: It's not the Caucasians.) The structural racism in this state continues to amaze me.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

SllX 5y ago

This is the stated reasoning. It came out in the court case that the real reasoning was to discriminate on the basis of race without saying they were discriminating on the basis of race, and they weren’t very careful about hiding the fact that the changes were racially motivated in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. Here’s the opinion: https://pacificlegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Coalition-for-TJ-v.-Fairfax-County-School-Board-Decision.pdf https://pacificlegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Coalitio... The whole opinion is worth reading, but the meat starts from the middle of page 5 onward. Their explicit goal was to change the racial makeup of the school for political purposes, and so the case hinges less upon the changes themselves than the racially motivated reasoning behind them. If you are interested and would like a far better explanation than I can provide that goes into the opinion, the context around the case and alternatives, consider the latest episode of the Advisory Opinions podcast released on February 28th, 2022[1]. [1]: Link to the episode page here but you are better served searching it in a podcast app like Overcast. https://advisoryopinions.thedispatch.com/p/judge-strikes-down-high-schools-racial https://advisoryopinions.thedispatch.com/p/judge-strikes-dow...

brandonmenc 5y ago

> the problem is and always has been that the particular school you attend has too much weight Could it also be that they want the better education? The names on the buildings aren't the only differences. The problem is that demand is way too high for magnet / college prep type education. The solution is to designate more schools as such but as with anything the devil is in the details.

pyuser583 5y ago

It ignores extra-curricular activities, which are one of the best indicators of success in college.

jpgvm 5y ago
Maybe but more importantly they are the best proxy indicator of money and privilege.

nova22033 5y ago

What exactly is the problem with this? The problem with the TJ case was that the administrators changed the admission criteria with the express purpose of racial rebalancing...and there are e-mails..

zp333 5y ago

why should a 4.0 student with excellent test scores have "as good a chance" as a 3.5 student with bad test scores?

endisneigh 5y ago
why not?