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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 n

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?
    - zdragnar 5y ago
      The lower performing areas in the US tend to have one of two problems: 1) Very high percentage of immigrants and / or English as a second language learners. These students have multiple disadvantages. 2) A local culture that dismisses education. Two personal anecdotes: One poor rural white 6 year old boy swore at and otherwise rejected his teachers authority. She was a friend of mine and mentioned many kids are like that there because the parents are passing on their own behaviors. Other anecdote, a black friend who grew up in an dense inner city said he was locked at school by his peers for "acting white" when he tried to get decent grades. Number 2 is obviously more prevalent, likely due to most jobs not actually needing a college diploma and not caring about your grades in some areas, and the persistent crime culture in others (gangs in the cities, meth in the country).
      - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
        Well yeah, but you still want the best performers in college (and later too), and things like these should be solved "back then" (eg. extra language classes... fixing culture is hard, but again, if your peers make you a worse student, you're still a worse student, even though you blame your peers). Giving some groups a push, especially on racial grounds (where you group together bill gates' kids with bobby from a trailer park in bumfuck alabama on one side, and Will smiths kids vs some random kid from philadelphia fighting on a basketball court) is really bad... both for people who should be accepted on merit, but don't, because they're in the wrong group, and also for their later careers (do you really want a doctor, who only got accepted to college because of affirmative action?). Government paying for books for the poor, programmes for gifted students, actually "leaving bad students behind" (and having special schools for them, like we had), etc. would help more.
    - charlieyu1 5y ago
      School grades and ranking should never be used for admission. Just standardised testing is good enough. It brings everyone to the level field. I don’t know the situation in Chile but surely even the poor can buy books that tells you how to do standardised tests right?
    - 5y ago
davesque 5y ago
> Of course the real tragedy is that we fixate so much on college This is what gets me. The whole concept of college, and especially selective, high profile colleges such as Harvard, MIT, etc., seems antiquated and almost entirely manufactured at this point. It's artificially crafted scarcity designed to create a market and brand. I feel the true, primary function of these institutions is to give the rich and powerful a means to identify each other and their respective pedigrees. Sure, they throw the unwashed a few bones and let them take home some degrees. But what do you actually get for your effort and money? I can't believe the competitiveness is justified by an actual difference in the quality of the experience or the person that results from it.
- aj7 5y ago
  No no no. The thesis topics are in graduate schools are more cutting edge, and the opportunity to interact with real science as an undergraduate are invaluable. I would tend to agree that excelling at a second tier university with a comprehensive program is an acceptable start. It generally gets you to a higher level. Competitiveness is about speed. Anyone can look something up. It’s about knowing things right off the bat, knowing what’s an unreasonable answer, estimating things, knowing what’s important. That takes years of education and practice. In the US, we have probably had 750,000 excess deaths in the last two years because politicians do not have an intuition about probability and statistics. This was generally true in the West, but NOT in China and Asia in general, where the leaders were more numerate.
  - Stupulous 5y ago
    We did lockdowns and mask mandates and rapidly created and distributed a vaccine. I don't think the US response was perfect, but I find it unlikely that politicians' numeracy would reduce the death toll by a further 80% when we've already picked the low-hanging fruit. Are there specific shortcomings that you think would account for that gap?
  - yes_really 5y ago
    Chinese leaders were the ones that let COVID leak out of the lab and censored the doctors that tried to warn the population.
johnnyanmac 5y ago
>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.. I'm ambivalent because I sympathize with both sides of the equation. One one hand, I have the hindsight now that I didn't at 18 to realize that the world didn't end because I couldn't get into Harvey Mudd. And in many ways it turned out 100x better; instead of staying in LA-ish areas, I explored a whole new area I never would have considered otherwise, still got a great education for a small fraction of what Mudd woulda cost me, and was exposed to a completely different flavor of computer science that helped me decide my career. But on the other hand, college really does open a ton of doors that for many non-upper class people would never open otherwise. While I was still in tech and had many choices, I imagine people at MIT or Mudd would be fighting off recruitment at top companies with a stick, with many opportunities coming from certain companies who only recruit at such universities. It can accelerate your career on the order of 5-10 years if you stick it out. And you'd likely be unparalleled in resources and opportunities if your focus is on research. If your goal is as lofty as being the next household name or to pivot into creating your own business, there are oodles more oppurtunities there. I wouldn't trade the education I got for an MIT one, but I can understand why 18YO me (and many others) do feel that way.
- aj7 5y ago
  Yes, prestigious schools open a huge number of doors. But more importantly, they teach elite mannerisms, standards and beliefs, and prejudices. If you are not a true genius (true geniuses can always make their way, but they are rare, even at MIT et al), this knowledge is invaluable and irreplaceable. I’ll give you an example from my own career. I went to MIT/Berkeley, SB/PhD. But I practically washed out of grad school, not due to lack of ability, but because I hated it. What I did like was making things and explaining things, and had a successful career in the more business aspects of science where successful scientists were the customers and decision makers. I understood, in a fundamental way, how these people thought and what they expected. This was invaluable, and was conveyed, in an irreplaceablely concentrated way, by my being a 30th percentile student in a 95th percentile university.
rayiner 5y ago
Also foreigners—a lot of these side activities and volunteer opportunities depend on having social capital and connections. Same thing with essays. I’ve observed that working class Americans are reticent to talk about diversity and adversity in the way college admissions officers expect, and recall having a similar experience. My wife’s parents grew up so poor in rural America that “store bought meat” was a phrase they used when she was growing up. Meanwhile, my family left Bangladesh when I was 5 under political circumstances where one day my mom’s brother (a military officer) showed up to our house in uniform and my dad thought that he was coming to detain us (it was a social call). But she would have been embarrassed to write about how her father grew up poor or that she faced any adversity, and I would have been embarrassed to write about how I was a foreigner instead of a middle class kid from Virginia.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Kind of the same. I was too poor to participate in extracurriculars. I was lucky to have clothes on my back and food on the table and electricity to do my homework and run my hacked together computer. I still graduated valedictorian. No sports, no music, nothing. I was on the chess team as a senior because we moved closer to the school, and I was able to walk to school in only 15 minutes which was huge for me. I was already a senior at that point, and it felt silly to start joining extracurriculars at that point. I had more time than some of the rich kids who were in everything in addition to keeping their grades top-notch. Between my great SAT scores and being valedictorian, I was able to go to great university that I might not have been able to attend otherwise.

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?
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    The lower performing areas in the US tend to have one of two problems: 1) Very high percentage of immigrants and / or English as a second language learners. These students have multiple disadvantages. 2) A local culture that dismisses education. Two personal anecdotes: One poor rural white 6 year old boy swore at and otherwise rejected his teachers authority. She was a friend of mine and mentioned many kids are like that there because the parents are passing on their own behaviors. Other anecdote, a black friend who grew up in an dense inner city said he was locked at school by his peers for "acting white" when he tried to get decent grades. Number 2 is obviously more prevalent, likely due to most jobs not actually needing a college diploma and not caring about your grades in some areas, and the persistent crime culture in others (gangs in the cities, meth in the country).
    - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
      Well yeah, but you still want the best performers in college (and later too), and things like these should be solved "back then" (eg. extra language classes... fixing culture is hard, but again, if your peers make you a worse student, you're still a worse student, even though you blame your peers). Giving some groups a push, especially on racial grounds (where you group together bill gates' kids with bobby from a trailer park in bumfuck alabama on one side, and Will smiths kids vs some random kid from philadelphia fighting on a basketball court) is really bad... both for people who should be accepted on merit, but don't, because they're in the wrong group, and also for their later careers (do you really want a doctor, who only got accepted to college because of affirmative action?). Government paying for books for the poor, programmes for gifted students, actually "leaving bad students behind" (and having special schools for them, like we had), etc. would help more.
  - charlieyu1 5y ago
    School grades and ranking should never be used for admission. Just standardised testing is good enough. It brings everyone to the level field. I don’t know the situation in Chile but surely even the poor can buy books that tells you how to do standardised tests right?
  - 5y ago

davesque 5y ago

> Of course the real tragedy is that we fixate so much on college This is what gets me. The whole concept of college, and especially selective, high profile colleges such as Harvard, MIT, etc., seems antiquated and almost entirely manufactured at this point. It's artificially crafted scarcity designed to create a market and brand. I feel the true, primary function of these institutions is to give the rich and powerful a means to identify each other and their respective pedigrees. Sure, they throw the unwashed a few bones and let them take home some degrees. But what do you actually get for your effort and money? I can't believe the competitiveness is justified by an actual difference in the quality of the experience or the person that results from it.

aj7 5y ago
No no no. The thesis topics are in graduate schools are more cutting edge, and the opportunity to interact with real science as an undergraduate are invaluable. I would tend to agree that excelling at a second tier university with a comprehensive program is an acceptable start. It generally gets you to a higher level. Competitiveness is about speed. Anyone can look something up. It’s about knowing things right off the bat, knowing what’s an unreasonable answer, estimating things, knowing what’s important. That takes years of education and practice. In the US, we have probably had 750,000 excess deaths in the last two years because politicians do not have an intuition about probability and statistics. This was generally true in the West, but NOT in China and Asia in general, where the leaders were more numerate.
- Stupulous 5y ago
  We did lockdowns and mask mandates and rapidly created and distributed a vaccine. I don't think the US response was perfect, but I find it unlikely that politicians' numeracy would reduce the death toll by a further 80% when we've already picked the low-hanging fruit. Are there specific shortcomings that you think would account for that gap?
- yes_really 5y ago
  Chinese leaders were the ones that let COVID leak out of the lab and censored the doctors that tried to warn the population.

johnnyanmac 5y ago

>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.. I'm ambivalent because I sympathize with both sides of the equation. One one hand, I have the hindsight now that I didn't at 18 to realize that the world didn't end because I couldn't get into Harvey Mudd. And in many ways it turned out 100x better; instead of staying in LA-ish areas, I explored a whole new area I never would have considered otherwise, still got a great education for a small fraction of what Mudd woulda cost me, and was exposed to a completely different flavor of computer science that helped me decide my career. But on the other hand, college really does open a ton of doors that for many non-upper class people would never open otherwise. While I was still in tech and had many choices, I imagine people at MIT or Mudd would be fighting off recruitment at top companies with a stick, with many opportunities coming from certain companies who only recruit at such universities. It can accelerate your career on the order of 5-10 years if you stick it out. And you'd likely be unparalleled in resources and opportunities if your focus is on research. If your goal is as lofty as being the next household name or to pivot into creating your own business, there are oodles more oppurtunities there. I wouldn't trade the education I got for an MIT one, but I can understand why 18YO me (and many others) do feel that way.

aj7 5y ago
Yes, prestigious schools open a huge number of doors. But more importantly, they teach elite mannerisms, standards and beliefs, and prejudices. If you are not a true genius (true geniuses can always make their way, but they are rare, even at MIT et al), this knowledge is invaluable and irreplaceable. I’ll give you an example from my own career. I went to MIT/Berkeley, SB/PhD. But I practically washed out of grad school, not due to lack of ability, but because I hated it. What I did like was making things and explaining things, and had a successful career in the more business aspects of science where successful scientists were the customers and decision makers. I understood, in a fundamental way, how these people thought and what they expected. This was invaluable, and was conveyed, in an irreplaceablely concentrated way, by my being a 30th percentile student in a 95th percentile university.

rayiner 5y ago

Also foreigners—a lot of these side activities and volunteer opportunities depend on having social capital and connections. Same thing with essays. I’ve observed that working class Americans are reticent to talk about diversity and adversity in the way college admissions officers expect, and recall having a similar experience. My wife’s parents grew up so poor in rural America that “store bought meat” was a phrase they used when she was growing up. Meanwhile, my family left Bangladesh when I was 5 under political circumstances where one day my mom’s brother (a military officer) showed up to our house in uniform and my dad thought that he was coming to detain us (it was a social call). But she would have been embarrassed to write about how her father grew up poor or that she faced any adversity, and I would have been embarrassed to write about how I was a foreigner instead of a middle class kid from Virginia.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Kind of the same. I was too poor to participate in extracurriculars. I was lucky to have clothes on my back and food on the table and electricity to do my homework and run my hacked together computer. I still graduated valedictorian. No sports, no music, nothing. I was on the chess team as a senior because we moved closer to the school, and I was able to walk to school in only 15 minutes which was huge for me. I was already a senior at that point, and it felt silly to start joining extracurriculars at that point. I had more time than some of the rich kids who were in everything in addition to keeping their grades top-notch. Between my great SAT scores and being valedictorian, I was able to go to great university that I might not have been able to attend otherwise.