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Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles

• tonyhan 5y ago
  Well, in Canada we don’t have standardized exam like ACT and SAT but we do have provincial exams that account for 20% of your grade in major courses from Gr 10 to 12. I didn’t do fancy extra curriculars. I merely joined student council to organize events, started an announcement club (just me reading a school events over the PA), and didn’t do any sports (but did music and band). None of these are costly. I think the truth is you need to look at a diverse rage of factors. If someone is not into sports, let’s look at what else they did. If grades are high, why do they need to engage in other extracurricular? Obviously, the motive is different. Students want education to find what they want to do or gain skills, reps and network to find a job that pays descent. Universities however look at other criteria - % alumni finding a job, average alumni pay, etc. What we do should ultimately help the students achieve what they want while balancing the motives for universities.
• smokey_circles 5y ago
  America deserves to go downhill if this seems like a good idea. Standardized testing is a joke. There are other, better forms of tests. See: Europe
  • throw_m239339 5y ago
    > Standardized testing is a joke. There are other, better forms of tests. See: Europe Europe isn't a country. France has BAC and BEPC and plenty of other forms of standardized tests at every step of its education system, as a requirement to integrate highschool or college. Same in Spain or Germany. If anything most countries in Europe have a more conservative approach when it comes to candidate selection: strict standardized tests.
  • not_a_pet_rock 5y ago
    All Nordic countries have (Standardized) national level testing and also have tests that have to do with the local school. All of them are top performers when it comes to education.
• deleted 5y ago
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• ken47 5y ago
  I understand the audience here, but we don't need more emphasis on iq. We need more emphasis on ethics. We already have the power to destroy ourselves many times over, and within a century, will likely be seeing AI that can best a human in any intellectual endeavor, by an order of magnitude. Ethics first, with some baseline level of intellect, will be the only way out of this impending disaster.
• jounker 5y ago
  One of the things the SAT appears to actually measure is income. More specifically it measures access to expensive preparatory courses, which is a good proxy for income. This American Life has an excellent show discussion the SAT: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/734/the-campus-tour-has-been-cancelled https://www.thisamericanlife.org/734/the-campus-tour-has-bee...
  • bzbarsky 5y ago
    The "expensive preparatory courses" offer something like a 10-30 point benefit over checking out an SAT prep book from the library, if you control for the time spent on preparation, last I checked. What the courses do offer, of course, is the structure to force indifferent students to sit through the preparation. There's a lot of bad statistics, whether by accident or with an agenda, being done around the SAT.... But more important than all that, as the MIT post says, pretty much all the other measures elite colleges use for admitting students correlate even _more_ with income than the SAT does.
• bannedbybros 5y ago
• red_admiral 5y ago
  The 1k+ comment count speaks for itself, but it's hard to overstate the importance of this decision. Maybe the wind has changed on some very lofty peaks. My opinion has always been that the SAT/ACT is the best method we currently have to achieve any reasonable goals that you might have for an admissions process, with one possible exception. In fact the SAT/ACT looks to me like a better method to achieve the aims that the anti-SAT faction claims they're fighting for, than any other method on the table, again with one exception. As such I'm delighted with this decision. (Sure, you could spend a lot of time and money designing a test that's even better calibrated than the SAT/ACT, and then switch to that. Until you've done that, I'm in favour of sticking with the SAT/ACT.) The one exception is if you want a quota-based affirmative action program (or, to be more precise, a back door to get around the legal ban on an openly quota-based admissions system in the US). It is possible for two people to disagree on whether this is a good thing while both of them remain decent human beings, as far as I'm concerned.
• known 5y ago
• paulpauper 5y ago
  our ability to accurately predict student academic success at MIT 02 Our research shows this predictive validity holds even when you control for socioeconomic factors that correlate with testing. It also shows that good grades in high school do not themselves necessarily translate to academic success at MIT if you cannot account for testing. Of course, we can never be fully certain how any given applicant will do: we're predicting the development of people, not the movement of planets, and people always surprise you. However, our research does help us establish bands of confidence that hold true in the aggregate, while allowing us, as admissions officers, to exercise individual contextual discretion in each case. The word 'significantly' in this bullet point is accurate both statistically and idiomatically.is significantly improved by considering standardized testing — especially in mathematics — alongside other factors So much for that common, popular notion that standardized tests do not predict anything of value.
  • globuous 5y ago
    What's surprising though, is that APs and similar exams are not enough. In the UK, I though they essentially looked at A Level results, which are much more representative of what you'll actually study at uni. But I guess both SAT/ACTs & APs must be a better measure that just APs. I just remember fucking hating studying for the SATs though. So boring. SAT IIs were somewhat fun to study for though. In France for instance, they mostly just look at the baccalaureat to get into prep schools / first year at uni. Then exams to get into engr/business/vet schools are actually very interesting topics and very close to what you'll actually study. Same with exams at the end of the first year of med school (which you get into right after 12th grade, unlike in the US where it's after your bachelors). That being said, they seem to have backed up their numbers, and MIT knows how to count, so they must be right! I just always hoped SAT/ACTs weren't that conclusive so that we didn't have to go through them anymore and could focus on the funner AP/A Level stuff :)
    • amalcon 5y ago
      The boringness could actually be a big part of the effectiveness. Efficient study habits and ability to work through boredom certainly help with some undergrad classes. The test would have some predictive power even if it's just measuring those.
• notacoward 5y ago
  This is just so beautifully written it brings a tear to my eye. It explains their rationale, points to evidence, acknowledges shortcomings or gaps in knowledge, and shows empathy for those affected. Worth reading just for its pedagogical value, plus it's on an important topic near and dear to many hearts.
  • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Yeah, when you're doing something that is politically/ideologically unpopular or in the minority you tend to need to have bulletproof justification if you want to get away with it. Then again, with these sorts of things you can never be sure how much the tail wags the dog.
    • 0des 5y ago
      I think I get where you are going with this, can you expand a little bit on the wagging the dog part? I am not familiar with that term. I get what it means, having looked it up, but being new to the concept I want to make sure I understand the context of that segment of the comment correctly.
      • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        The actions of big prestigious institutions like MIT have an effect on opinion. So if MIT starts doing something tons of people will just knee jerk take their side on whatever the thing is. So another few institutions might follow suit and it might snowball and standard testing could become back in fashion as fast as it went out of fashion.
        • 0des 5y ago
          Ah ok thank you for taking a moment to help me understand that. Having looked up the term and re-read the comment, I see what was meant.
        • IncRnd 5y ago
          That's a great point. However, you're using the idiom of the tail wagging the dog incorrectly. The tail wagging the dog usually means something important or influential being controlled by something less so. In other words, the tail would be wagging the dog if I wrote a blog post that made people change their opinions on the SAT.
• bluenose69 5y ago
  Footnote 21 (containing "the most important components to demonstrate academic readiness in the absence of SAT/ACT scores would be other standardized exams") is quite telling.
  • Robotbeat 5y ago
    How so? Things other than standardized tests are easier to game. Letters of recommendation, extracurriculars, GPA, etc.
    • bluenose69 5y ago
      You're right. That's what I meant by "telling"; MIT are making it clear that standardized tests are valuable.
    • gmadsen 5y ago
      I think that is the implied meaning of "quite telling". Many institutions hastily removed SAT scores due to social pressure that standardized tests weren't effective or equitable, while the data shows the opposite
      • danans 5y ago
        > due to social pressure that standardized tests weren't effective or equitable Effectiveness and equity shouldn't be confused. The tests are effective for assessing academic preparedness. However, there is a strong argument that they aren't equitable. MIT isn't claiming here that SAT/ACT are equitable. They are just claiming that they are a valuable data point in addition to other factors that they consider to deal with equity.
        • Robotbeat 5y ago
          They are claiming that it’s maybe helpful for being more equitable than the other measures.
• vmception 5y ago
  Major factor reduced to a bullet point: they acknowledge the existence of other testing and evaluation frameworks, but that those are even worse distributed in socioeconomic access than the SAT Thats pragmatic, and sobering, since people hoping for more diverse representation in admissions are faulting the SAT pipeline itself (access to study prep, study materials, wording of questions in the test) but the known alternatives are more niche exacerbating the outcome
• artful-hacker 5y ago
  SAT scores correlate with IQ test scores. SAT is just a 'legal' thinly veiled version of IQ test.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • Someone1234 5y ago
    IQ Tests aren't illegal though? If colleges wanted to administer IQ tests they absolutely could.
    • artful-hacker 5y ago
      Maybe "more politically correct" or "easier to get away with" would be a better way to phrase what I meant.
  • shakezula 5y ago
    > SAT scores correlate with IQ test scores. Do you have a source on this?
    • artful-hacker 5y ago
      Howard Gardner's "Intelligence Reframed" (1999)
    • hiq 5y ago
      You can look for "intelligence" on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT. From memory, Human Intelligence by Earl Hunt has plenty of references as well if you're into this topic.
  • jsnodlin 5y ago
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • 5y ago
• Strilanc 5y ago
  I was kind of hoping that the inline citations would lead to how they reached their conclusions. But it's just more "our research shows" conclusions without the meat underneath. Do they publish their methodology anywhere? (It's pretty funny that the first red highlight hover is explaining that you can hover over red highlights to see more information. The only people reading it are the ones who no longer need to be told.)
  • mike00632 5y ago
    I had the same observation. There is no data. It's nonsensical if you think about it: MIT stops using SAT/ACT in 2020 and now in March 2022 they have "robust" data that those students don't perform as well academically.
    • barry-cotter 5y ago
      They’ve had a year with the students they admitted with no SAT. So they have one year of instructor experience with students selected without benefit of SATs. 700 or so students, two semesters of examinations. That’s plenty of data to see a dramatic fall in student preparedness.
      • mike00632 5y ago
        It's most certainly not enough data. There is no way that academic OUTCOMES of a 4-year degree program can be measured by a couple exams from introductory courses during a time when classes were moved to being online. Even if this "robust" data indeed showed that academic outcomes were worse over the course of one year, how can that possibly be attributed to not viewing students' SAT scores instead of, say, the entire classroom experience being upended and moved online?
• Animats 5y ago
  All MIT students, regardless of intended major, must pass two semesters of calculus, plus two semesters of calculus-based physics, as part of our General Institute Requirements. ... There is no path through MIT that does not rest on a rigorous foundation in mathematics, and we need to be sure our students are ready for that as soon as they arrive. For a period in the 1980s-1990s, you could argue that calculus was not essential in computer science. It was all discrete math for a while. But then came machine learning, and it's all about hill climbing and gradients now.
  • rossdavidh 5y ago
    True, but the usefulness of calculus to a working developer in ML is pretty marginal. The difference between different ML algorithms for hill climbing or gradients, is orders of magnitude less than the effect of having the right training data, formatted the right way. Statistics or data science is far more applicable to nearly any field on real-world programming. But, you know, like Latin in the 19th century was always still useful to one's education, calculus is still useful. It is also something a lot more people know how to teach, than know how to teach statistics (or other more useful topics). I think the latter is the primary reason it remains central to most engineering programs.
    • dontreact 5y ago
      I disagree with this. Being able to read and understand the math in the paper of the algorithm you are implementing is useful, and calculus is common in ML papers. You may have some short term success without understanding the algorithms at all, but as the field changes and you are no longer in school, being able to keep up at least somewhat with papers is very useful. I agree that the day to day is mostly about formatting data though!
      • rossdavidh 5y ago
        Well I took calculus, and I did a Master's thesis (much smaller than Ph.D., obviously) on neural networks, and I didn't find much application. Plus, the vast majority of work on ML is not going to be taking an ML paper and implementing it in code. It's going to be transforming this raw data into a format that the existing ML library can accept as input, selecting which cases are useful for training (e.g. making sure each important sub-case is adequately represented), and other things surrounding the data and how it is fed into the (already existing) ML library. Perhaps also playing with the options of the ML library, as to what kind of model you build. But 99% of the alterations you can make to an ML library, will not make nearly as much difference as what data you feed into it and how. If it's the right data, many ML models will work, and if it's not the right data, none of them will. But regardless, none of this requires, or even really benefits from, calculus.
• endisneigh 5y ago
  Did a quick skim - did they release the data? What does this mean: > when you control for socioeconomic factors that correlate with testing. Which factors are these exactly?
• jordanpg 5y ago
  Part of the problem I see with standardized testing is that the stakes are so high. Some fraction of the people out there just get nervous or have a bad day. Nothing about these high pressure situations really reflects anything important in the real world. I'm a law student now. In law school, your entire grade usually comes from one 3-4 hour essay exam. Much depends on luck, how well you slept the night before, and how frantically you can type. It's absurd. It's been that way for some 100 years. I've always been able to play ball with standardized, timed exams, but I have had enough exposure to neuro-diversity that I can empathize with many. I just wish there was a way to de-stress these kinds of exams somehow. I don't know the solution, but I think it would answer of a lot of objections to them.
  • rossdavidh 5y ago
    I can't comment on law, but back when I took the SAT and ACT (granted, it was a previous millenium) you could retake the test. The issue was, unless you were sick or otherwise in an abnormal state, you would usually get a pretty similar score the second time. They provide a few examples of old tests, so you know going in what your score is likely to be, thus you will know if it is likely to improve much if you take it again.
    • deleted 5y ago
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  • criddell 5y ago
    I think I'd have less of a problem with the tests if the time limit was removed and you could bring reference materials with you.
  • TulliusCicero 5y ago
    > Nothing about these high pressure situations really reflects anything important in the real world. Then why do the rest scores correlate better with college performance than other factors? If SAT scores also correlate well with, say, income, would you then accept that they actually reflect something important in the real world?
• diebeforei485 5y ago
  Kudos. SAT Prep is freely available online at places like Khan Academy. Extracurriculars, not so much.
• timcavel 5y ago
• ok123456 5y ago
  This explanation could have benefited from histograms showing the distribution of grades pre-and-post making the test optional, and then showing statistical tests that the null-hypothesis, that the grades are the same, could be rejected.
• apayan 5y ago
  The implementation of footnotes on the right side of the screen is really cool, and not something I've seen before. Such a cool idea. I think it would be interesting for news publications to try that out in articles as well. It could allow for brevity in the main article text, but still allow those who want to know the source of a statement/fact or more detail the option to obtain it.
  • raphman 5y ago
    https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/ https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/
• TrinaryWorksToo 5y ago
  Buried in the details it says that MIT will be accepting anyone over a (presumably secret) threshold, not using it as a ranking tool as some people might indicate.
  • JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > MIT will be accepting anyone over a (presumably secret) threshold I don’t think it’s a hard threshold. Some people are bad standardised test takers. If the rest of their application shows they won’t flunk their math tests, a lower score could be fine. If, on the other hand, it looks like a pattern, a marginal score could be seen to not make the cut.
    • TrinaryWorksToo 5y ago
      Yeah that's probably right. It's not a ranking mechanism which is what I think some people believe it is advocating. More isn't necessarily better.
  • adamsmith143 5y ago
    This seems a bit ridiculous. One would assume they could fill their entire class with 1600 SAT scorers but they don't and I think it's well known that isn't even sufficient.
  • fn-mote 5y ago
    I think the parent means "a score above a threshold gets the rest of your application read." Certainly the article would not support reading "accepting" as "admitting". "We do not prefer people with perfect scores" "our research shows students also need [...] the resilience to rebound from its challenges, and the initiative to make use of its resources. That’s why we don’t select students solely on how well they score on the tests, but only consider scores to the extent they help us feel more confident about an applicant’s preparedness ..." I read this as saying two extremely important traits are: * resilience * initiative Not test scores.
• newaccount2021 5y ago
• spoonjim 5y ago
  MIT stepping back from the insanity of the Current Thing. Will anyone else follow?
  • gred 5y ago
    I suspect the engineering schools will be the least affected / first to recover from this trend.
• SodiumMerchant0 5y ago
• rg111 5y ago
  > as a result, not having SATs/ACT scores to consider tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education It all come down to me to what this point touches. When you have a test, you have something definite to prepare for. Even if you do not have dedicated mentors or well-wishing, caring teachers, you simply know there is a test that significantly improves your chances for MIT. When you don't have a test, you have to study all the year round, do all homeworks, be active members of math, chess, or debate club all the year round and win at least province-level competitions, play an instrument at the school band, be elected the class monitor, create social equity clubs, do social service and so on. Which path do you think will be easier for someone from an impoverished, troubled background? Is it easier to prepare for a test for three months or be a whole different person severely constrained by your background? Whom does no-test policies benefit? The rich White student living in a gated community, or a Black/Hispanic person living in slum-like condition? ____ I have little first hand experience (was born in a middle-of-nowhere small town, but wasn’t truly poor), and a lot of second-hand experience. I know a lot of friends, acquaintances who moved up the socio-economic ladder just because test-score based admission policies existed. The people who promote no-test policies are deluded ivory-tower dwellers detached from reality.
  • caffeine 5y ago
    The no-test policy is espoused by two groups who find themselves to be unlikely allies: naive progressives and actual racists. The naive progressives think what you’d expect: “Minorities and poor people can’t possibly be expected to do well on anything objective, so it’s unfair to test them”. It is bigotry, but at least it’s well-meaning. The actual racists are more cynical: “I don’t want Yale to be 67% Asian.” Obviously, this is even worse.
    • opportune 5y ago
      There are other groups too. Like Big Rich Daddy who wants his kid to go to Yale as a legacy but he only has a 26 ACT and has only donated like $1m. When test scores are required, top schools basically have a “budget” of 25% of their student body they can admit with any score without it adversely affecting college rankings. Making tests optional makes it easier to admit more students that don’t “meet the bar” otherwise, since they don’t count against the 25% quota.
• justconfirming 5y ago
• jackblemming 5y ago
  Have they considered trying leetcode instead? It seems to work for FANG.
  • renewiltord 5y ago
    You want to do a calc test instead? I wouldn't even complain. If the average leetcode is hard for someone they're probably going to suck at even just integration e^z over the unit circle showing your work.
    • jackblemming 5y ago
      We could even tell them it demonstrates “problem solving” and “critical thinking” skills when they ask how leetcode is relevant on day to day university life.
• slackfan 5y ago
  Good.
• xyst 5y ago
  • aatharuv 5y ago
    The page states pretty much the opposite. If you read the link, they state how, amongst other things: Good SAT scores can help find students from poorer high schools who didn't have the opportunity to take as many advanced classes in high school. Also, to quote the paper "College admission protocols should attend to how social class is...encoded in non-numerical components of applications" Like admissions essays touched up by educational counsellors, who can also get children of rich parents into "volunteering programs" that touch up experience, while poorer kids have to work after school.
• tedmiston 5y ago
  It's very difficult to read a webpage with huge red rectangles covering up so much of the text that it looks like a redacted document [1]. I imagine it must not look like this for everyone... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Edit: It seems like this is an issue with the Dark Reader extension. Here's an archived version that renders as expected [2]. I wish they'd used an existing popular tool like Hypothes.is [3] for annotations rather than rolling their own isolated system. [1]: https://imgur.com/a/jWkVFgd https://imgur.com/a/jWkVFgd [2]: https://archive.ph/v1Rm1 https://archive.ph/v1Rm1 [3]: https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/
• ShaveTheTurtles 5y ago
  A lot of folks focus on act/sat scores when talking about diversity when really these ivy league schools shouldn't have an express lane for legacy entrants. If you are trying to be different than how it was previously, how can you expect that to happen when you give preference to folks that benefited previously?
  • tzs 5y ago
    MIT is not an Ivy League school, and does not give any preference to legacy applicants.
  • raunak 5y ago
    Without legacy and the prestige and the entire shebang of old English style college, the Ivy Leagues aren't the Ivy League. I agree with you that eliminating legacy would solve the issue of making the school different - it's never gonna happen though, so there's no point in talking about it honestly. Also yeah, MIT is not a legacy giving school
    • johnaspden 5y ago
      > shebang of old English style college, the Ivy Leagues aren't the Ivy League I'm not quite sure what this legacy thing is, but I don't think English universities do it. It sounds corrupt to me, and I think it would be a national scandal.
      • mupuff1234 5y ago
        Not sure why down voted, Oxford and Cambridge don't take legacy into account. (Well at least officially)
  • icelancer 5y ago
    I agree, but MIT doesn't care about legacy admissions. They're one of the few schools that doesn't.
  • musicale 5y ago
    Here's how "former MIT admissions director" McGreggor Crowley justified providing preferences to children of alumni and wealthy donors: "What about university donors, though? Don’t they have an unfair advantage in this process? In truth, for every office of admissions there is a development office that builds a university’s endowment through donations from alumni and wealthy individuals. And every year, regardless of what a college or university says publicly, a number of children of wealthy donors and alumni get a nod in their direction while other applicants are rejected. The reality is, the money generated by admitting wealthy students often serves to subsidize the financial aid of those less fortunate. If one squints, one might see here a karmic balance enabling many students to attend a college they otherwise could never afford." Note he said "every office of admissions" and "regardless of what a college or university says publicly." If MIT were an exception, presumably he would have mentioned it. The "regardless of what a college or university says publicly" implies that MIT may be not stating the entire truth when they claim "we don't do legacy"[2] or that MIT's internal behavior may have changed since Crowley worked there. I'm not sure what MIT has to say about providing admissions preferences to children of wealthy donors the way many (most?)[3] universities including Stanford[4] do. [1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2019/03/13/confessions-former-admissions-director/qPQppf0AhpJIbIJ8mZ6q9L/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2019/03/13/co... [2] https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/just-to-be-clear-we-dont-do-legacy/ https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/just-to-be-clear-we-do... [3] https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-college-admissions-scandal-legal-ways-20190318-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-college-admissi... [4] https://provost.stanford.edu/2020/06/26/admissions-considerations/ https://provost.stanford.edu/2020/06/26/admissions-considera...
• bradwschiller 5y ago
  It's clear the SAT/ACT has predictive power for highly-selective colleges, such as MIT. And therefore, they are valuable for these colleges – especially for the Math scores as MIT suggests. The value of SAT/ACT scores decreases as selectivity decreases or as math abilities matter less for admission (e.g., liberal arts programs). Here are some related points: - Harvard considers roughly 4 in 5 applicants to be academically capable of doing the work at Harvard (about 50,000 applicants of which Harvard only accepts 2,000). This data is pulled from their court documents, and my team wrote about it here: https://writingcenter.prompt.com/posts/strong-essays-increase-admissions-chances-by-up-to-10-times https://writingcenter.prompt.com/posts/strong-essays-increas.... - This means that most applicants at highly-selective colleges are very similar academically. Colleges are mostly just using grades, academic rigor, and test scores to determine whether the student will be able to succeed doing the work in college. Absent other information on academic preparation (e.g., not having access to AP/IB classes), the SAT/ACT score can be a critical signal of whether the student can do the work. Students with well-above-the-bar academics are admitted at a 3x clip to those just above the academic bar. But other parts of the application (e.g., essays, athletics) can have a much stronger effect on admissions chances (e.g., a strong personal score, much of which is essay-related, can have a 10x increase on admissions chances). - Math SAT really is highly predictive of math abilities. When I was with McKinsey, we asked for applicants' SAT scores because it was highly predictive of people succeeding at McKinsey. People hired with scores below 700 struggled to succeed analytically. So, McKinsey used 700 as a bar. MIT is roughly doing the same thing here. Other colleges do this as well. - Outside of highly-selective institutions, the SAT/ACT can have less predictive power in student success in college than other factors (e.g., GPA). There are a bunch of great analyses at fairtest.org that looks at these exams - e.g., breaking scores down by race. So overall, we tend to give weight to what we know and what data we're looking at. Most of the SAT/ACT analyses out there are looking across all students. Here, MIT is looking at just their proportion of students. So, both things can be true – the SAT/ACT may not be a useful predictor for the vast majority of students. But scores can (and do) matter for the highest performers, the approximately 1% of high school graduates attending the most selective colleges. And as MIT states, a perfect SAT/ACT score doesn't matter all that much. All they're using the scores for is to provide an indication of whether the student is above their bar for being able to do the work (e.g., not failing multivariable calculus). Note: I did go to MIT – some of you may think this is relevant. I also run the largest college essay coaching company globally, Prompt.com. So I've spent a lot of time understanding college admissions.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  > I understand that this announcement may dismay some readers for whom the tests can be a source of stress. Bluntly, if one can't handle the stress of the SAT, then the stress of exams at a university like MIT is going to be overwhelming. Exam week at Caltech was called "compression", and after the exams was "decompression". The moniker is not a joke.
  • WalterBright 5y ago
    P.S. Many people dropped out of Caltech because of the stress of exams.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • mikkergp 5y ago
    I don't know that all stressors are alike. I don't feel stress in exam situations, most of the stress I feel at work is around social stressors. I don't think a university education should be easy persay, but I do think that the stressors of education should not be unique in the world. If success in the face of stresses of examination in school don't predict success in the face of stressors you face elsewhere in life, then maybe they should be re-evaluated.
• femiagbabiaka 5y ago
  Definitely for the best. Standardized testing was pretty much the only reason I and many other working class folks I know could get into good schools -- I was never going to do a million side activities, and my summers were spent working, not building my academic resume. Of course the real tragedy is that we fixate so much on college, even prestigious ones, at all given how unnecessary they are for making people into productive and happy human beings. This change is significant but affects less than one percent of the population each year..
  • ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    I live in slovenia, and the system is pretty much unchanged from the socialist times.... standardized testing + grades are used to get entry into colleges (and previously high schools). No resumes, no diversity/affirmative actions, clubs, volounteering etc... just grades+results.
    • punchclockhero 5y ago
      Same here in Bulgaria. The only extracurriculars that influence university admissions are subject olympiads. Students who reach the national finals are exempted from the corresponding tests (max grade assumed).
    • lliamander 5y ago
      That sounds nice. Those other things are great, but have little value in terms of academic success. I think that for people who do poorly in academics but well in those other areas should have other avenues of advancing themselves rather than being forced through the college funnel.
      • jerojero 5y ago
        It could be nice if access to education is equitable. In chile we also have grades + standardized test + ranking (your position versus your cohort). But the top universities are filled with the top alumni from expensive private schools because they are usually 1. given inflated grades 2. trained to perform well on standardized tests (in their own schools, theyre rich so they can afford this). If you look at OECD statistics with regards to quality of education you will see that not everyone in the USA really gets a good primary (and secondary) education and there are gaps. This tends to not be the case in most of Europe... So are standardized exams good for admissions in the USA? Not sure. But obviously replacing it with curriculum might even be worse. So what's really the answer?
• ecshafer 5y ago
  College Admissions in the US is broken. This is a great move at restoring normalcy though. The SAT or ACT are the best thing for leveling the playing field between the rich and the poor. If anything I would like to see more reliance on this. If I had my way the US would model the college admissions process on the Chinese Gao Kao. Have everyone take the the exam, have students list their preference for university, then sort from top ranked to the bottom ranked filling open positions at universities. This is fair, the only bias is ability, and it removes all legacy, wealth and athletics factors.
  • vxNsr 5y ago
    This is kinda how medical residency is filled in the US, med students rank their top choices, residency programs rank their’s. It’s called The Match, and generally results in a very fair equitable outcome.
    • 542458 5y ago
      While the match isn’t completely terrible, it still has some pretty bad qualities. The most notable one is the “pay for applications” issue. The odds of getting into your top picks is constantly declining, and so the dominant strategy is to apply to many residencies to maximize your chance of a successful match - the number of picks the average applicant submits has doubled in the past 15 years. But applying to more programs can cost thousands of dollars, for no apparent reason other than the enrichment of ERAS to the tune of about $100 million per year. This obviously creates a system where people with more money to burn can artificial create better results for themselves. The simple answer here is to give each applicant a finite number of picks regardless of means, but the ERAS admin has no interest in this for obvious reasons. The other thing this pick arms race has done is produced far more applicants for positions than makes any sense (the average Otho placement gets 150 applicants). Not only does this irritate program directors, this has also led to an increase in automated filtering, and therefore an increase in attempts to game automated filtering though things like bogus publications (see: things like the stupid medbikini publication which seemed like a poor attempt to add another pub to somebody’s resume).
• PaulHoule 5y ago
  I would point to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Webb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Webb as somebody who came from an underprivileged background, showed talent in standardized testing and had an outstanding career as a military officer, author and politician.
• opportune 5y ago
  I am so happy to see this. I went to high school in a bit of a backwater in the US. People don’t really go to selective colleges or care much about applying. It was only doing very well on standardized tests and spending time on the internet looking for info about colleges that led me to believe I could go to one of these places. I got into several and attended one, and I believe it greatly positively changed my life. (For the record, I had more going for me than just tests, but having a more objective way to compare myself to people across the country was very helpful, since I could easily attribute things to my area being backwards). Removing admission tests was a huge slap in the face to social mobility out of the middle class. To reiterate other commenters, admission tests are the hardest part of the process to game and the least biased towards things like having a tiger parent, while being the most predictive indicator of success in college. Wealthy and well connected people can easily game extracurriculars and essays, and HS grades are vastly inflated at this point across the country. That pretty much only leaves standardized tests for your average kid who isn’t being deliberately primed by their environment to stand out for selective college admissions. I hope more colleges are brave enough to reinstitute standardized test requirements. I know they want to do “class building” by hitting minimum representations across many groups (including legacy, but I don’t think that’s as big at MIT), and not requiring test scores makes it easier, but for institutions to keep up high standards and continue to give opportunities to kids, I really think it’s most beneficial to require scores.
  • thehappypm 5y ago
    This wasn’t my path, but many of my peers where I went to college had a similar type of story. They came from very poor areas like rural Texas or rural Georgia, and they got into engineering after getting into things like Lego sets and video games. They got great at math because it intrigued them even in their subpar schools. Aced the math SAT and then doors opened for them. I’d hate to see that door close.
    • ryandrake 5y ago
      I grew up in a very rural, working class community. There was a mill in town, and a factory two towns over, and all the kids in my high school were pretty much expected to either work for those two businesses or go into the military after school. That's what probably 80 out of the 100 kids in my graduating class did. We didn't have AP classes and Rowing Club and Mock United Nations and all that upper-middle-class qualitative stuff people jam into their college admissions. But we did have access to the SAT and I crammed for it and knocked it out of the park. If it wasn't for the SAT I probably would still be slummin it in that same town (minus the mill and factory which have long since closed) and would not be here on the west coast working in tech.
• grego61 5y ago
  One way that rich parents can game SAT/ACT is through aggressive seeking of test accommodations for disabilities. There was common knowledge of up to 50% of test takers having extended time in some affluent private schools in the SF Bay Area prior to the Covid pause.
  • roflulz 5y ago
    isn't that already the case for all grades? and all extracurriculars? (i.e., picking teams that allow anyone to join, or giving students who couldn't make the cut a pity position on a team such as `team manager` so they can add it to their college application?)
  • tzs 5y ago
    In the case of students trying to get into MIT I wonder if there is actually much point in gaming the test? The article says they are using the tests as a threshold. It sounds like they don't care by how much you pass the threshold, just that you have passed it. I'd expect that most students who will be able to survive at MIT can make the SAT threshold with no gaming of the test and no test prep other than maybe doing one or two free sample tests. Someone who could not easily make the threshold on their own who games their way in is just going to find that the coursework crushes them. All that gaming their way in gains them is the ability to in a year or two add "flunked out of MIT" to their bio.
    • MiroF 5y ago
      > I'd expect that most students who will be able to survive at MIT can make the SAT threshold with no gaming of the test and no test prep other than maybe doing one or two free sample tests. Eh, not so sure. The "threshold", if we really trust that they do threshold and don't consider overperformance beyond that threshold (something I am skeptical of), is likely quite high.
      • SamReidHughes 5y ago
        The MIT threshold is 800 minus noise. So MIT can't consider overperformance on the SAT (math section) because the test is designed to make students indistinguishable at the top. All it does is help them weed out the chaff who won't be able to handle the mandatory math and physics classes that all students have to pass.
• icelancer 5y ago
  Quite surprising that they went back on their policy, but it's a welcome change. Removing standardized tests and replacing them with more subjective methods necessarily reduces outcomes surrounding academic excellence, and almost always exacerbates socioeconomic/racial inequity (with a strong anti-Asian bias, as shown in almost all studies when test scores are blinded/dropped).
• deleted 5y ago
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• WaitWaitWha 5y ago
  To deal with socioeconomic issues in STEM, start early; very early like K-12. In a vague fantasy world in the USA, I would reduce the Department of Education to a fraction, shift education to the States, take the best parts of the winning systems fom all States, and make Federal recommendations accordingly. Rinse, repeat. I am saddened that most of the children I come across in first-world nations, lack the ability to rationally think through a real-world problem.
  • r00fus 5y ago
    It seems like a good approach but the funding of things like special needs education (FAPE) is federal in nature; cutting those would likely nuke special needs programs nationwide. You would need to start with your 2nd or 3rd "approximation" of your iterative approach (ie, pre-calc which programs are already popular/effective and keep those) unless your goal is to cause maximum disruption and possibly jeopardize your ability to do the "make Federal recommendations" effectively.
  • davidgay 5y ago
    I'm always mildly assumed that Switzerland has 26 widely-different (far more variety than found in the US) school systems with only ~8 million people. And a high-school degree that guarantees entrance into any university in any subject. Their are federal standards for said high-school degree (also for earlier education stages). And it's a relatively hard degree to get (22% of students get it).
• gumby 5y ago
  This would have been good news for me were I planning to apply today. I got very poor grades in high school and if they had ranked the students or calculated a gpa I doubt anyone would have looked at my application at all. I’m really glad to see this part; I hope it’s true: > At the same time, standardized tests also help us identify academically prepared, socioeconomically disadvantaged students who could not otherwise demonstrate readiness When I was at MIT I felt that the institute was working hard on this area and took it seriously (for undergrads at least), though how well I could not tell — I was most definitely not of any cohort that deserved any special treatment.
• tomkat0789 5y ago
  I hated taking the SAT/ACT, but holy cow are we in the US in a better situation than Chinese students dealing with the Gaokao. A Chinese pen-pal once showed me some calculus problems from the Gaokao and the example I saw (a bunch of integrals) looked like a math test a sadist would create: long, complicated expressions just for the sake of complexity, "ugly" numbers that turned into messy fractions you have to carry around. I (a graduate engineering student at the time) couldn't identify any trick or educational point to the complexity, only the malice of the people giving the test. EDIT: wording
  • ken47 5y ago
    As someone who uses to be very good at this kind of "math" in high school...it's not even real math. It's a bunch of teenagers being tested on how good they are at being poor man's computers. And I don't just mean standardized tests - almost the entirety of the high school math "education" is sad.
  • wraptile 5y ago
    I really don't understand how many tests still allow trick questions like that when we have so much data that indicates that it's an awful metric. To me it indicates incompetence of the test creators.
  • Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    In the software development world, we simply moved it from university admissions to employment interviews.
  • fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
    Yeah, a lot of tests like that are actually testing for memorization, and not problem solving ability.
    • frankchn 5y ago
      I don't think the math part of the Gaokao tests memorization. Looking at a sample paper (https://medium.com/@yujia_jo/2016-jiangsu-gaokao-national-higher-education-entrance-exam-mathematics-2beefb93cec7 https://medium.com/@yujia_jo/2016-jiangsu-gaokao-national-hi...), it seems like the examination really tests for the ability to do math and problem solve under fairly heavy time pressure (150 minutes total for all questions if you are in the science stream).
• 8bitsrule 5y ago
  My brother-in-law was ill-prepared for technical coursework because he had no choice but to attend a shitty (undemanding, backwoods, rubber-stamp) high school in Minnesota. He got talked into vo-tech training for transmission repair. Years later, his weaknesses were evaluated at a Community College. He went to work on a one-year remedial skills plan. Then he was admitted to a state University. Four years later got a chemistry degree with honors. IMO it's likely he'd have succeeded at MIT as well. The man was a born techie. Moral: shitty schools are everybody's loss. And we've continued to lose a lot because some of them are designed that way. Slyly, deliberately, officially sanctioned sly.
• crackercrews 5y ago
  Why is MIT Admissions on a domain other than MIT.edu?
  • tech234a 5y ago
    https://mitadmissions.org/about/about-web/ https://mitadmissions.org/about/about-web/
• 0x20cowboy 5y ago
  I grew up poor, and from my anecdotal experience people do better on the SAT if they "are rich". You can also pay people to take the test for you. Maybe it's because they don't have to spend their days worry about getting shot, stabbed or beaten to the ground by gangs. Maybe it's because they get to eat every day. I guess, perhaps, they get more quality study time. Or, heck maybe you're all right, random questions - your ability to regurgitate the points on the unit circle at will - indicates the level of education you are qualified to attempt. Thank goodness these tests will let you know what you are capable of. To be fair, I tried to get into several universities (over the pandemic) to round out my self taught education, but I was rejected everywhere I applied. So, I guess for some people - tests or no tests - it doesn't really matter. Apparently, I am too stupid to get an education. Good to know. For anyone who is salty about this (I used to be quite angry about this and the "Google style" hiring process (which is essentially the same thing)), this realization helped me get over this: _These tests are designed to filter out people like you. You have a qualities they do not want. That's why they are used. The tests are working from their point of view. They wont stop using them. Your life will be much easier if you just accept it, let it go, and go do something else._
  • tonymet 5y ago
    i grew up poor and SAT helped me escape poverty. are we forced to only accept negative outcomes when sharing experiences ?
    • 0x20cowboy 5y ago
      Absolutely not! Good on ya! I'd rather everyone got a fair go, but mate, I am very happy for you. Keep on keeping on.
    • deleted 5y ago
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  • adam_arthur 5y ago
    I do think the standard leetcode style interviews are often administered poorly. But I also think that if you create a fairly complex mousetrap, the profile of the average person who gets to the other side will be decent enough. So likely many false negatives, but works at scale. I'd do it very differently for my own company. But I think some of the bigger cos have actually gotten better, e.g. not asking certain types of questions too far removed from 99% of programming work.
• lucidbee 5y ago
  I was a crappy student in HS and the only good thing about me was my SAT scores. They got me into a good school. I ended up as a highly ranked engineer at Microsoft. My heart sank when people started not using the SAT. I hope this becomes a trend. I have also read that it is really really hard to show that tutoring pays off for the SAT. I think the SAT is the fairest part of the admissions package.
• deleted 5y ago
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• QuikAccount 5y ago
  My problem with SAT/ACT actually has nothing to do with the test itself. I grew up very poor in suburban middle of nowhere and even with a waiver for the fee, I had no way of actually getting to a testing center. Parents worked 24/7 to make ends meet, no real public transport and this was before Uber and Lyft. The real culprit here is the lack of public infrastructure.
  • avs733 5y ago
    this is a perfect example of why governmental services are so important - even if they are often run poorly. Without them, dis-equities inherently perpetuate due to external incentives. The SAT is treated as a standardized test but it, as you note, is inaccessible to many. It is not government run or organized. I've found, from teaching undergraduates, that most of the students who go to college presume that everyone takes the SATs, that it is government administered, and that it is free. compare this to the, still far from perfect and problematic in other ways, centralized university admissions testing system in many other countries.
    • verve_rat 5y ago
      Wow. As someone that isn't in the US, but grew up watching a lot of US TV, I had this same assumption. How the fuck is the primary method of judging student admission to University not a government run service? Wow. As you say, contrast that to my experience where everyone took University Entrance exams in their final year of school. Score over X and you have the right to go to a university. Don't score high enough? The university can still choose to admit you at their discretion.
      • orangepurple 5y ago
        > How the fuck is the primary method of judging student admission to University not a government run service? Wow. Probably the same reason that the Federal Reserve Bank is not a government entity (they only have a meaningless government "oversight board") even though it loans all money to the US Government with interest and has never been audited.
• lliamander 5y ago
  > Our research can’t explain why these tests are so predictive of academic preparedness for MIT Can't explain why an IQ test predicts success in cognitively demanding work?
  • meepmorp 5y ago
    The SAT/ACT aren't IQ tests.
    • lliamander 5y ago
      Yes they are: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/
      • meepmorp 5y ago
        They aren't. It says in the first line of the abstract that they correlate with general measures of intelligence, which is a different thing.
        • lliamander 5y ago
          IQ means Intelligence Quotient, which is simply a way of representing a score on an intelligence test by dividing the individual's score by the population mean (and then doing transformation to make the numbers look nice). An IQ test is simply short-hand for a test of general intelligence.
• giardini 5y ago
  I'm grateful for the SAT/ACT being present when I was in high school(HS). Without it I might not have a decent education, mostly b/c I was drifting along and paying little attention to life. Junior year I had high PSAT scores and received letters from various universities expressing interest. Yet I hadn't even considered what I would do after HS. I was amazed to see anyone expressing interest, decided it was a fluke and dropped it all in the trash. Next year I scored high on the SAT and unexpectedly received multiple offers for full scholarships, room and board et al from universities. I asked around and realized my peers had been applying to colleges for months while I, the quintessential apostle of Lao Tzu (OK, I'm lazy!), had done absolutely nothing. I hesitated to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when there were several. I picked one and was off to college. My Dad was pleased to get off the hook for college costs, Mom was proud, but I mostly felt sorry for friends who had to work hard to get into university. tl;dr: PSAT and SAT made getting into college easy for me and I am thankful.
• rafale 5y ago
  Unpopular opinion: SAT/ACT correlates with X where X = IQ × work ethic
  • danans 5y ago
    That opinion is unpopular because it is incomplete. SAT/ACT scores correlate with lots of things, not just IQ and work ethic. Another huge correlation is with family income: https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2021/9/28/is-income-implicit-in-measures-of-student-ability#:~:text=SAT%20math%20and%20ACT%20scores,ranging%20from%200.06%20to%200.10 https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2021/9/28/is-in....
    • bzbarsky 5y ago
      Yes, but is that correlation after controlling for IQ and work ethic? Because family income correlates with IQ and work ethic... As far as I can tell, the thing the SAT really correlates with most is the thing it's actually designed to predict: ability to succeed in college, as measured by college GPA. (In particular, the correlation between college GPA and SAT score is higher than between college GPA and high school GPA.)
    • rory 5y ago
      ~.2 isn't really "huge".. Your source shows that the SAT is much more strongly correlated with other measures of aptitude. The SAT does indeed correlate slightly more strongly with income than the AFQT does, which could show the "gaming" of the test. Only a ~.03 stronger correlation though. Not particularly dramatic.
  • jdmichal 5y ago
    I had a high school teacher that liked to say the following: You can be smart and lazy and do fine. You can be dim and hard-working and do fine. But smart and hard-working will always beat them both. I was pretty clearly in the smart and lazy camp, and was OK with that lot. And, as he said, I've done fine. EDIT: I should add, though, that I'm very happy the SAT did not have the writing section when I took it. I severely doubt it would have improved my relative score.
• eruci 5y ago
  Score back to 1 for merit based admissions, 0 for politics of the day.
• rayiner 5y ago
  I don't think people appreciate the radical nature of the attacks on standardized testing. Standardized tests have been critical to higher education and the professions for almost a century. Virtually everyone in an elite academic, government, scientific, legal, medical, or financial role attained that role based, in part, on the SAT and similar exams like the LSAT or MCAT. Not only them, but everyone who taught and mentored them, and everyone who taught and mentored those people. If the SAT is not predictive, as some claim, we've been selecting our elites and professionals the wrong way for three generations.
  • BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
    > If the SAT is not predictive, as some claim, we've been selecting our elites and professionals the wrong way for three generations. Yes, and? The easiest way to understand the shortcomings of these tests (at least their older versions) is to realize that students who use paid SAT/ACT-prep materials and services get higher scores than students who don't. Yes, there are confounding factors, but this fact alone is fairly damning evidence that these tests can be "defeated" using techniques beyond simply learning the things taught in high school. A better-designed test would not yield higher scores to test-takers with more specific knowledge of how the test itself is constructed. (In software terms, think "property based testing" as opposed to "unit test cases written in a predictable manner", with the assumption that your implementation under test has adversarial motives to obtain passing builds.)
    • rayiner 5y ago
      > The easiest way to understand the shortcomings of these tests (at least their older versions) is to realize that students who use paid SAT/ACT-prep materials and services get higher scores than students who don't. Yes, and affluent people with family friends on the boards of non-profits can show volunteer work that’s way more interesting in an application than being actively involved in your church or mosque. Rich people can hire essay consultants to understand what the (mostly white American) admissions officers are looking for: https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/essay-content-strongly-related-household-income-and-sat-scores-evidence-60000-undergraduate-applications https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/essay-content-strongly-rel... Of all these measures, the SATs show the smallest benefits from paying to prep.
• myle 5y ago
  Just two hours ago, there was a very engaging talk from Daskalakis, a professor at CSAIL at MIT, that is very related to the topic: https://youtu.be/9sePKcQnrXE https://youtu.be/9sePKcQnrXE The research he talks about includes college admissions.
• outlace 5y ago
  I used to be against standardized tests, but I grew up as a low-income minority in a single-parent household and I ended up getting into good schools pretty much only due to my high test scores, which has been a life changer. Other than test scores, I couldn't afford to do any fancy extra-curriculars. It felt a lot more achievable to know I can change my life if I just focus and do well on a test than it would if I had to somehow do a bunch of random things to look competitive on paper.
  • devwastaken 5y ago
    Using that as a metric for society is exactly why we have out of control poverty, drug abuse, and homelessness. If you were able to get good grades in school it wasn't because of your efforts, as a child and teen your brain is largely programmed by the community and environment you grow in. There are no gifted children, only those with educated parents that started early. This is becoming an ever more common theme, especially of kids with teachers for parents whom make too little yet know the systems enough to know exactly how to get their kid past the trite systems created for class warfare. The solution is to defund universities and stop this elitist nonsense. Just like COVID has shown we don't need to show up to the office, we don't need universities either. We are a better society without their control and political agendas. There is little of value that isn't better done by a YouTube video today.
    • wh313 5y ago
      Could you elaborate on these points you made? > The solution is to defund universities and stop this elitist nonsense. We are a better society without their control and political agendas. As someone currently doing a PhD, I definitely agree that there is some elitism in academia, and that school administration usually sucks. However, I also love the work I do, which I couldn't really do anywhere else, and the community of students and faculty, which is pretty unique. What makes you condemn the institution as a whole? > There is little of value that isn't better done by a YouTube video today. As someone who enjoyed the liberal arts education portion of their education, it seems like we don't have the same way of defining "value." Could you describe how you measure if something has value?
  • 5y ago
• temptemptemp111 5y ago
• armchairhacker 5y ago
  I’m genuinely curious about the advantages of going to MIT or any other super competitive CS college for undergrad instead of say, UMass or another less-competitive CS university. From limited knowledge and experience at other colleges (all pretty well-ranked but not as well as MIT), it’s the prestige and graduate research which makes colleges like MIT superior. Otherwise, for most undergrads it’s like a typical college experience, but with harder courses and smarter peers, but even that is flexible (since they have access to graduate students and grad-level courses). It’s particularly relevant today because apparently college admissions are really competitive. A lot of high schoolers are upset because they got rejected from everything but their safeties, except their safeties are like Georgia Tech, Rutgers or the UCs.
  • fuzzyset 5y ago
    Compare a list of companies that attend MIT's career fair vs those that attend UMass. There will be some overlap, and it's not a closed door if you don't go to MIT/Stanford/etc. But, if you want to land an internship at "the best" companies (which can often lead to jobs), being recruited at a college career fair is the best option.
  • frankchn 5y ago
    Speaking from personal experience, it does help in at least two ways: (1) Being surrounded by other hard-working students pushes you to do better and exposes you to more advanced classes and research early on (a majority of my friends in CS started taking graduate courses by their sophomore year and did undergraduate research at least for a summer in one of research labs on campus). (2) Recruiting/Ability to get interviews. It isn't a problem in getting interviews for software engineering internships/full-time positions if you have MIT, Stanford or Berkeley on your resume.
• deleted 5y ago
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• lightup 5y ago
  My son found out 2 days ago he didn't get accepted to his in-state land grant public university. The University of Minnesota. This was his fall back plan. Now he's screwed and may not be able to start college in fall. His sins: - a 35 ACT score (legit with no studying or ACT prep classes) - a 3.8 weighted GPA (because he took multiple AP classes and actually was in college for his junior and senior years through Minnesota's PSEO program) - leader on robotics team - lettered in 2 extra curriculars - etc etc Why? Because U of MN doesn't consider weighted grades nor do they accept test scores anymore. So why even try hard? The only upside is that we weren't stupid enough to put his college savings in a 529 tied to MN. We would be superscrewed if we'd done that. 35,000 applicants. 7,000 freshman admissions. My kid not even in top 1/5 of applicaents? Complete BS. EDITs: 2021 UMN Twin Cities admission stats: https://admissions.tc.umn.edu/competitive-admission-rate https://admissions.tc.umn.edu/competitive-admission-rate (20%) MN 529 plan 20 years ago was MN-only from what I remember. Honestly don't care. [redacted] is "okay" school for CSci. However they have a 120MM budget and are facing 15MM shortfall for the college that hosts it. Out of state tuition for this school is 20k per year with max scholarships.
  • saagarjha 5y ago
    I’m not too familiar with UMN admissions stats are, but a 3.8 weighted GPA might have hurt your son considering a lot of people applying for computer science will have an unweighted GPA that is around that or higher. You haven’t shared the unweighted GPA here but if it’s substantially lower colleges will not like that, especially state ones, since they think it shows you just take classes beyond your level.
  • kizer 5y ago
    35 ACT and he was rejected to University of Minnesota? Tell your kid that he’s perfectly fine and that their admissions are FUBAR. Try UIUC (my alma). Though I was in-state. It’s gotten more selective but a top one for CS. They admitted me into CE but it was easy to transfer after doing well in my first few CS classes.
  • ffggvv 5y ago
• dom96 5y ago
  As someone from the UK I am confused by this. What were they using to decide who to admit without SAT/ACT tests? In the UK all students pick at least 3 A levels at the end of their high school. Each degree and university then has different requirements like 3 As in Math, Physics, IT (with some alternative subjects) for Computer Science. So my understanding of SAT/ACT testing is limited.
  • lightup 5y ago
    Feelings and "demographics" and surnames.
  • tomatowurst 5y ago
    because certain demographics performed poorly at it, that was grounds to label it systematic racism and justifying affirmative action vs. meritocracy by discriminating other demographics in favor of ones that were perceived to be victims of systematic racism if you are confused so am I. I still don't understand how they can discriminate against americans of asian descent who do well on standardized tests but not call it for what it is.
    • DownUnde 5y ago
• peter303 5y ago
  MIT grad here. The achievement tests are more of a counter-indicator If you score under 700 on either test, you probably cant handle the coursework. The tests only test a 10th grade level. I likely would not get into MIT this decade this decade with my test score 1480.
  • jmole 5y ago
    I doubt it - 1480 could easily be indicative of stress-related or attentional mistakes, rather than lack of mastery.
  • pcurve 5y ago
    While acceptance rates have gotten lower, some of it is due to more people applying. Average scores are higher because more people are studying for exams than 20 years ago. But I don't think the course work has necessarily gotten any more difficult. So while it's true that 1480 wouldn't get you in MIT these days, if the same exact "You" were born amongst the kids applying to college these days, your score would likely be higher.
  • blip54321 5y ago
    Yeah.... no. Number of stupid mistakes on a test is not indicative of success at MIT. I was lucky in that I test well from having competed in different math contests, but I don't confuse that with being better. If I didn't compete in those, I would have been no less qualified. The article is spot-on. MIT ignores test scores above some threshold. That's a reasonable way to go.
• jmole 5y ago
  meta comment here, but I love the presentation of these interactive footnotes.
• ffggvv 5y ago
  As a minority, i think those pushing for removing the SAT/ACT are racist in that they think certain minorities cannot perform as well as others. The whole point is that the SAT is the only objective piece of an application that can be easily compared between applicants. They want to reduce to only subjective qualifications which they can easily manipulate to benefit groups they deem under-represented. Its the bigotry of low expectations. Their problem isnt that the SAT can be gamed, its that it has an objective score which cant be manipulated to benefit who they deem worthy.
• 0000011111 5y ago
  My dyslexia is so bad that these types of tests were/are a total barrier to entry for me and folks like myself. Fortunately, tech is one high-paying industry where an IT degree from a great university and certifications are not required to get a job making good money. I was able to learn system administration - network engineering at the community college and use online resources. If there is one positive is that MIT has a very small undergraduate class so the impact will be minimal across the global cohorts of future college students. Perhaps perspective students will stop applying to that school and focus their application strategy on schools that do not have this requirement.
• ralmidani 5y ago
  I would like to know how much of an “improvement” in outcomes these tests bring. From another article linked in the one from this discussion: “In short: Our research has shown that, in most cases, we cannot reliably predict students will do well at MIT unless we consider standardized test results alongside grades, coursework, and other factors. These findings are statistically robust and stable over time, and hold when you control for socioeconomic factors and look across demographic groups. And the math component of the testing turns out to be most important.” There seems to be a lot of hand-waving in that quote. If the improvement is only marginal, we really need to ask, as a society, if the improvement is worth all the money, potential for cheating, angst, and outright conflict that come with maintaining these tests. If we want better talent, we can invest more money and energy into building better schools and paying better salaries to teachers. If we want more diversity, we can target vulnerable communities specifically. The test prep industry is milking families that care about (and might even be obsessed with) education. It encourages folks to think of the whole system as a rat race, and leads to selfishness and hoarding of knowledge. If we did away with standardized testing and spent more money on schools and teachers, we could cultivate a perception of education as a public good. It would be less about who has more resources and more about raising the tide and giving more people a fair shot.
  • blip54321 5y ago
    I think the bigger question is whether we should have exclusive schools like MIT. Screening for college admissions made sense a century ago, when 5% of people went to college. Today, not so much. From an undergrad class perspective, the difference between MIT and a better state school is mostly the brand stamp and the admissions department. Why do we want to stamp people with a stamp like "MIT"?
    • johnnyanmac 5y ago
      If you want to be brutally honest, because other people in industry have the stamp of "MIT". There will just be natural bias when hearing that a prospective candidate attended your alma mata where you know (in your own personal experience) that the school runs you through the ringer. Nothing more relatable than saying "Hey is Professor Bob still teaching Astro 401? his tests were brutal" and instantly understanding how "this person survived that, he can survive JobCo". If nothing else, the branding is reflective of how the world at large works, I guess.
• TimPC 5y ago
  The SAT being a help to low-income students shows how messed up the US high school system is. Normally standardized tests hurt low-income students because they require extra-curricular resources to do well on. In the US they hurt poor students less because the GPA system is so badly broken. AP courses are not offered in the poorest schools but offer such large bonuses to GPA that a 4.0 GPA is considered very poor for applying to university. A student can literally have a perfect GPA in the best courses offered by their school and be considered a very poor applicant academically.
  • 30829984 5y ago
    > A student can literally have a perfect GPA in the best courses offered by their school and be considered a very poor applicant academically. Do you have a source for this?
    • TimPC 5y ago
      It’s literally two straightforward google searches. Search “university entrance GPA admissions USA” has a top result that shows that Ivy League admissions have weighted GPAs above 4.0. Searching “course offerings poor us high schools” shows some high schools only offer courses where 4.0 is the top GPA.
• smsm42 5y ago
  I understand their reason for suspending SAT was COVID-19: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-suspending-our-sat-act-requirement-for-the-2020-2021-application-cycle/ https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-suspending-our-... so it makes sense with the removal of most COVID limitations they will also go back to the old system?
• tomohawk 5y ago
  A long time ago, there used to be standardized tests for all sorts of things. These allowed people of all backgrounds to pursue career paths in many industries, without requiring the time and money involved in getting a college degree. They were sued into oblivion because of what we now call equity. The pernicious idea that if equality of outcome is not observed, then it must be due to racism. The industries that used these ended up de-risking by just requiring college degrees. Guess who suffered the most?
• zephrx1111 5y ago
  The purpose of college admission should make sure that students sitting in the same room should have similar learning ability. Denying the existence of uneven learning ability in students only makes things worse.
• newbie2020 5y ago
  Seems like another “no shit” moment. Do these things even have to be considered? What is happening these days in education?
• unityByFreedom 5y ago
  In 2016 you could buy SAT scores in Asia. Does that still happen? https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-cheating-iowa/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-...
• xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
  Many Americans in the comments here acknowledge that the admissions system in the United States is broken and prejudiced, and then continue on to celebrate what is otherwise a band-aid for a systemic disorder. To me, standardized tests like the SAT scream "our education is so inconsistent across our country that instead of attempting to improve it we simply ignore it and focus on an entirely different artifact." Standardized tests are good for one thing: measuring how good examinees are at taking standardized tests. Shouldn't a dataset collected over four years be more thorough and representative of a prospective student's capability of successfully navigating what is usually a four year undergraduate program? After all, the purpose of a system is what it does.
• fsckboy 5y ago
  as an MIT alum, a wealthy one who thought he would leave his fortune to MIT, I applaud this move, but it doesn't get me back to giving. MIT shouldn't have stopped requiring the tests in the first place, shouldn't have participated in that anti-intellectual "shut down tech" day or whatever that was, and shouldn't have done a dozen other things like cancel speakers to bow to a woke mob. MIT needs to sign up to the Chicago principles on free speech https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/reports/FOECommitteeReport.pdf https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/r... and MIT needs to stop writing stuff like this (from TFA): Our research can’t explain why these tests are so predictive of academic preparedness for MIT, but we believe it is likely related to the centrality of mathematics — and mathematics examinations — in our education. IQ science is well established, and it is well known that the SAT is an IQ test, plain and simple. To pretend otherwise is to dissemble, to be anti-science. Hopefully, MIT will save itself, but I'm sadly not expecting miracles.
  • gpt5 5y ago
    > IQ science is well established, and it is well known that the SAT is an IQ test, plain and simple. To pretend otherwise is to dissemble, to be anti-science. Hopefully, MIT will save itself, but I'm sadly not expecting miracles. The "woke mob" you called is also well established, and people in academia have been fired before for recognizing aspects of IQ tests (e.g. Ronald Sullivan, a dean at Harvard). I agree with your sentiment, but also want to recognize that it takes time for the policy makers at MIT to fight against this trend.
  • ImaCake 5y ago
    I read that sentence as they think SAT scores are correlated with but not causal for MIT student success. You would need to do a randomised controlled trial or a mendelian randomisation analysis (requires a lot of genotyping of students) to establish any kind of causality. Those experiments have not been done, so the relationship is correlated.
    • fsckboy 5y ago
      there are other factors that are correlated with success beyond IQ, but IQ is also very highly correlated with success, that's part of what's been established by IQ science.
• neilv 5y ago
  What support did they give to newly-matriculated students who didn't have better preparatory schools? Or who weren't already familiar with how to operate in a school like MIT? Or who might need help assimilating into the culture?
• fumeux_fume 5y ago
  "Our research can’t explain why these tests are so predictive of academic preparedness for MIT..." Because you're selecting students who test well? Hilarious how clueless academia is about what they're actually measuring here.
• karthickgururaj 5y ago
  The question is, should a university a. maximize for absolute value of success of its alums (for some definition of "success"), or b. maximize for the value it adds to the student (and hence the society) by considering the difference in the said measure as a result of the student joining the univ. (a) is easier to measure and optimize for. But it will select for students who will do well in later life - irrespective of what the univ has to offer. The univ's entrance criteria will exhibit this bias. Of course, some biases can be explicitly countered - by having a quota system for those with less privilege. But in each of those subsets, the univ still tries to maximize for absolute success of the individual. (b) is harder to measure - as it seeks to quantify the portion of individual's success that can be attributed to the univ specifically.