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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. I

• 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.
    • thehappypm 5y ago
      To be fair I think the whole Model UN, volunteer kind of thing is a way for mediocre students without athletic skills to juice their resumes. If you’ve got good SATs you’ll go to a good college. If you’re an athlete that opens tons of doors too.
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• lern_too_spel 5y ago
  I am also happy to see this, but requiring test scores and class building are not mutually exclusive. Test scores are a useful input to good class building. How else are you going to choose which student from a backwater school to put in the class if these students don't have access to the advanced classwork and research support that the rest of the class had?
• david927 5y ago
  Similar opinion and story. We live in Boise, Idaho and my daughter does a hybrid model of home school and high school. She knew she got top grades and 5's on all her APs but it didn't give her any idea of where she sat, nationally. She was planning on going to art school until a year ago, when she sat for her first standardized test, the PSAT. She saw the score, which was national merit range and realized that she should have higher ambitions. She took the SAT last October (she's a Junior) and got a great score. So now she's considering top schools. She wasn't before. Without these types of tests, you could end up being biased toward a measure of "how hard did the parents push."
  • vxNsr 5y ago
    Arguably 5s on her APs tells her where she sat nationally, I was under the impression that AP tests were the same across the board, while they don’t rank you against other students the test is made to be just as difficult for the top elite college prep private school students as it is for the inner city public school students. The assumption being the AP class material is the same.
    • kragen 5y ago
      Sure but 38% of AP Calculus BC takers get a 5 so it doesn't give you much information.
      • colinmhayes 5y ago
        Taking the Calculus BC test already puts you in the upper echelon of high school math students though. According to a quick google only 15% of high schoolers will take the BC exam, so getting a 5 is something only 5% of students achieve.
        • kragen 5y ago
          That's the student providing 2.7 bits of information ("I want to take this exam") and getting an additional 1.4 bits from the result. By contrast, being valedictorian is about 10 bits of information, and being in the 99th percentile on a test (1510+ on the SAT) is 6.6 bits. Scoring 1600 on the SAT is 12 bits. So the SAT can easily give you 7 times as much info as the AP BC, and it's more about your aptitude than your achievement.
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• adamsmith143 5y ago
  >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 agree with most of this but Exams are absolutely gameable. There's a reason there is a multibillion dollar industry focused on them. There's a reason why Cram School exists across Asia and there's a reason why parents will pay thousands for ACT/SAT tutoring. Because it flat out works. You can increase your scores substantially by paying for these services. All else being equal I would expect that between 2 students with identical aptitudes where one has paid thousands of dollars for tutoring that the student with tutoring will score higher than the other. This can't be ignored. Can you mitigate this with self motivated preparation? Sure. But again, all else being equal and between 2 equally talented and motivated testers the one whose parents paid for a tutor that achieved a perfect score is almost always going to score higher.
  • opportune 5y ago
    IMO there is a difference between gaming a test and just getting better at what a test means to cover. For example, programs like Kumon allow students to learn math more rigorously/at a higher level than what they may get exposed to in a classroom. That doesn’t mean they’re gaming the test, they’re just getting a better education. While it’s perhaps unfair that some students don’t get this opportunity, I don’t think giving children legitimately better educations is something to discourage. There was another near-top comment when I posted that pointed out that test prep classes only conferred a 30 point benefit. Likely because it’s just familiarizing students with the test and covering basic testing strategies (like skipping a hard section and coming back to it last). I agree the benefit should ideally be 0 but 30/2400 is not much. That’s what I meant in my post. Also, I’ve heard that in the past the SAT in particular was much more gameable due to the vocabulary/analogy sections, which incentivized students to study specific known topics or cram vocab terms. I’m not sure if they added it back but they’d been removed by the time I took the exam.
• ceeplusplus 5y ago
  > huge slap in the face to social mobility out of the middle class No, it was an intentional move to restrict the number of Asians admitted because despite their best efforts to hide it, prestigious universities' data showed systemic discrimination against Asians in the admissions process (see: SFFA vs Harvard). Removing the SAT removes some of the data that opponents can use to sue them. One of the reasons the UC removed the SAT was to "diversify" their admit pool because Asians disproportionately did really well on the SAT and they aren't allowed to discriminate based on race by state law. My hope is that the Supreme Court, now that it's a 6/3 conservative majority, finally strikes down race based "affirmative action".
  • thenanyu 5y ago
    If Judge Jackson gets confirmed, it will be 6-2 since she has promised to recuse herself from this case.
  • opportune 5y ago
    Sure, I think that’s in many ways covered by what I mean about middle class mobility. Given that Asians are less likely to be legacies and dont benefit from Affirmative Action, pretty much all their “slots” come out of the high-achieving-middle-class bucket
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  • Bahamut 5y ago
    As an American born Asian myself, the "unofficial" quota system process colleges use is painful to me - I was an extremely academic high performing student before college, netting national level recognition in some areas with a lot of extracurriculars & came from a very poor background, yet my ethnicity worked against me. At the same time, I recognize that this is also some of the challenge that underrepresented minorities face in general in American society where there are others who have more closed doors than I (I went to a high school with over 70% minorities, mostly African-Americans + hispanics). I don't pretend to know what the solution to the problem is, but given that high prestige colleges have created a high risk high reward situation with how they handle admissions, I feel like a lot of the problem is how academia has created this artificial situation - maybe this is by design, I don't know, but if we truly value diversity & equity in higher educational opportunities, there needs to be a significant change.
• crdrost 5y ago
  They might be the least gameable, but this is kind of a “bare minimum” for diversity/equity practices. It is the cheapest way to get little bit of reliable signal. Because let's be clear about the standardized test situation. Test takers had time to take the test, they weren't doing work on the side for their parents instead to make ends meet. They had transportation to the test location, they were able to pay the fees, and they were not being discouraged from college as “we can never afford that, I’m sorry.” Standardized tests themselves have mostly tested not IQ or domain knowledge, but how anxious you are taking tests. This does predict later academic performance, sure, but to say that this anxiety is disconnected from demographics sounds like a rather strong claim. Instead you have that it is more disconnected than GPA and essays and extracurriculars which is not saying much. If you want to be serious about diversity and equity, you invest some actual cash into it... The easiest way is talent scouting, you send people (trained, you can reduce bias) to underrepresented communities and allow folks there to interview with them. My wife worked at place that did this, it sounds financially intractable at first but it scales to whatever budget you want to put into it... Her place would send folks out to like Singapore as well as to inner city schools. But the point is that you have to leave the door open to the people who can come to you, but you also go to the people who cannot. (This is also a startup idea... The reason the schools don't send out their best is that there are too many colleges, the reason the colleges don't canvas the schools that there are too many schools, these are obviously inverse problems that could cancel each other out in the appropriate sort of network, the recruiters just need to be common to both. The problem is getting people to pay for it—the schools who you want most are precisely the underfunded ones that cannot pay you, the colleges meanwhile are less willing to go in on these sorts of weird experiments, they, they have an admissions department already. So the idea has a dangerous scope creep where you want to also start a college so that you can dogfood... Not a degree-granting educational institution in itself, maybe, but just a “first year at college” school which sells its students to other top colleges. Obviously that's a much riskier investment for VCs.)
  • whynotminot 5y ago
    > Because let's be clear about the standardized test situation. Test takers had time to take the test, they weren't doing work on the side for their parents instead to make ends meet. They had transportation to the test location, they were able to pay the fees, and they were not being discouraged from college as “we can never afford that, I’m sorry.” How big a proportion of the population is this that we throw out our most objective standard? Kids that don’t have time to take a test? I would wager the vast majority of kids have time for an exam. Seems like we figure out how to get kids to the bus stop before we just decide that objective measurement is irresponsible as long as there’s a kid who doesn’t have the time for it. Just to build on this even further, a kid who doesn’t have time for an exam also probably hasn’t had the time to build the educational foundation necessary to succeed at a university. I can’t imagine some kid who didn’t have time for high school math succeeding in my engineering program, for instance. It might seem charitable to throw out the SAT and admit that kid, but you’d just be setting them up for failure. What you’re describing is a different problem that needs to be solved. Throwing out the SAT does not solve it.
• lliamander 5y ago
  > Removing admission tests was a huge slap in the face to social mobility out of the middle class. I agree, but arguably the benefits of the SAT with regard to class mobility is less than it was when it was introduced. The heritability of IQ, combined with assortative mating, means that increasingly class divides are forming around differences in IQ. I think many people are rightly concerned that this will eventually result in simply a different entrenched class hierarchy. I still think MIT should use the SAT, but the problem of maintaining class mobility is one we should continue to assess.
  • whynotminot 5y ago
    > The heritability of IQ, combined with assortative mating, means that increasingly class divides are forming around differences in IQ. Do you have a citation for this?
    • notservile 5y ago
      The research on IQ heritability is abundant. You’ll get death threats if you point out the research though. It’s inconvenient and correlates with SAT performance. Hence the big push to get rid of the SAT to try to hide the disparities in general cognition within groups and between groups. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial-science/article/abs/social-mobility-and-iq-components/EA9C417B74DD404D48E3ABC49058CCDE https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial...
      • whynotminot 5y ago
        I was asking more about class divides becoming IQ based. Do you have a citation for that.
        • lliamander 5y ago
          That's the whole thesis of The Bell Curve and also Coming Apart, both works by Charles Murray. There's plenty of citations in those works as well. Edit: but beyond that, IQ-based class divides seems like a rather logical consequence of the following: 1. The heritability of IQ 2. Assortative mating 3. IQ being a significant determining factor of success in a given society