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Alternate headline: "Colleges that ditched admissions tests have to actually holistically evaluate applicants rather than reduce them to two numbers" No dou

Alternate headline: "Colleges that ditched admissions tests have to actually holistically evaluate applicants rather than reduce them to two numbers" No doubt that it's more subjective and more difficult; human beings are complex, multi-dimensional entities and I find it sad that in many of these selection processes, they are reduced to a few numbers for the sake of low effort filtering.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
There is plenty of evidence to doubt the whole "holistic evaluation" line of thought, which is often a tool for subtle discrimination. And pretty much all of these schools already did "holistically evaluate" students; test scores were just one part of that evaluation. Besides, at the end of the day everything boils down to a single number - applicants are ranked and those that make the cutoff get in, those that are below the cutoff don't.
- Spivak 4y ago
  Holistic evaluation in practice really means “present your best self in your application whatever that might be.” It allows for a range of impressive feats outside “was good at the arbitrary selection of school subjects and extracurriculars.”
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    In practice it also often means, "This Asian isn't 'well rounded' enough and they're only into math and chess club." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
    - Spivak 4y ago
      I don’t really know what you do to combat this kind of thing because what would you do as an admissions officer trying to create a student body with a wide range of skills and experiences but you have thousands of applicants who are “focused on having perfect grades to the detriment of everything else and participated in the ‘look how smart I am clubs’.” And I say this with full self-awareness that this was me. It’s probably the thing I regret most about my high school experience because of how unnecessary it was and how much it set me back on all the things that mattered. I consider myself extremely lucky that any university took a chance on me because my application was 100% “I have no real interests except playing the game of school and winning by min-maxing the point system” which looking back is so obviously the worst applicant. I for sure lost out on my dream school because of it.
      - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
        Easy: 1. Have some minimum objective criteria (test scores, grades, class rank, etc.) 2. Accept students who meet that minimum with a lottery. Of course, that would never happen at highly selective colleges, because it would shatter the notion that "only the best and brightest" got in and would ruin colleges' role as a maintainer of social hierarchy in the US. I say this as a person who went to one of the most selective colleges in the world: the idea that colleges set up their application systems to build a "diverse" student body is complete and total bullshit. The reason being that some of the most important diversity comes from interacting with people of widely varying economic levels and intelligence levels. The idea that you can have a socially diverse student body, but only made up of people who got 4.0 GPAs and above, is bullshit on its face.
- CharlieDigital 4y ago
  > Besides, at the end of the day everything boils down to a single number This is about as silly as dating app profiles that cut off at 6'.
  - boppo1 4y ago
    >This is about as silly as dating app profiles that cut off at 6'. But it's reality. Women extremely rarely think of men under 6' as ideal mates.
rainsford 4y ago
Exactly. Of course having numerical values you can directly compare is going to be the easiest way to select students, but it's only "fair" to the degree those numbers accurately reflect the relative academic performance and potential of the students. I think the reason people so vigorously defend the use of standardized test scores in admissions is that we all have a built in bias towards viewing quantifiable comparisons as inherently more objective because it's easy to justify how you arrived at a decision. After all, who can argue with a decision based on one number being larger than the other? The problem though is that this approach doesn't really remove the subjective, complex elements at all, it just moves them from the decision step to the measurement step. Sure, an SAT score is just a simple number. But how the test is constructed to arrive at that number is much more complicated. And the value of a simple score comparison is only as good as the process of constructing the test, leaving you with the illusion of having made the decision simpler and more objective when you really just move the complexity behind a curtain. In tech terms, I think the analogy is project managers trying endless different ways to measure software development performance. Number of tickets closed, "velocity", commits, releases, etc, (lines of code if you're very unlucky), all give you nice simple numbers to look at. And while they're not entirely useless, it's easy to become overly reliant on them and assume they are more objective measures than they actually are.
- luckylion 4y ago
  > But how the test is constructed to arrive at that number is much more complicated. Is that done per student behind closed doors though, with the people calculating the score knowing who the student is and the ability to alter the scoring based on that knowledge? Standardized tests are bad, but they're a giant step up from the corruption that is other forms of selection.
- subradios 4y ago
  On the contrary, test scoring is the most objective thing we had to evaluate students based on the diligent work of a company whose entire business is maintaining that perception of objectivity. Sure, it's "the perception of", but if you think there aren't smart people analyzing college board exam scores across the country for signs of skewed testing so they can write an expose on it, you're far from reality. In fact - the line that you're walking is the reason there was briefly a suggestion of an "adversity score": https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/college-board-is-adding-adversity-score-to-sat-2019-5%3famp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/college... Which is the first time that's been considered, because in the current climate - working extremely diligently to try to ensure that no particular student or group of students has an advantage, some students do have an advantage. They are smarter, or have better parenting, or better education, or their parents simply have more money to throw at tutoring You can say "that's unfair! This is about selecting the best students and locks smart people from worse off backgrounds out of university!" It does the second thing, sometimes, as a side effect - but it is also true that those students are still better students, regardless the path dependence. Meanwhile, universities are enacting racial and gender preference schemes, Cites: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/tje/files/espenshade_diversity_outcomes_chapter_sat_wars_soares.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjF-87njPT6AhVfIDQIHb3pBe0QFnoECEQQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2hsYHX2DNwK-n49nStMDMW https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/... https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/students-for-fair-admissions-inc-v-president-fellows-of-harvard-college/amp/&ved=2ahUKEwjo4f_6jvT6AhX2BjQIHSEvB18QFnoECAsQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0OwAgq0ZGFh3Qkgd8ZWZlG https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/... Additionally, the primary winner of the policies this line of argument promotes are white women - with the primary loser being Asian men. Asian students in particular are bringing the suit against Harvard for these practices. So while your epistemic humility ("is this REALLY objective? How do we measure that?") is well intentioned, it's the exact sort of reasoning used to cover up a strict ideology of "more black good, more women good, less white good, less men good" in universities, and the actual behavior of universities shoe that.
petilon 4y ago
With the 10s of thousands of applications top universities get, there isn't enough time to evaluate the "complex, multi-dimensional entities" behind each application. At University of Washington, applications are not reviewed by "admissions people". They hire temporary workers (grad students, retirees etc.) to review applications, and give them 8 minutes per application [1]. And this is typical of most universities. [1] https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/a-look-inside-admissions-at-the-university-of-washi/281-85f98fa9-ca4c-46de-a720-02dc415dddd7 https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/a-look-inside-admis...
- kenjackson 4y ago
  But at highly competitive schools you still have several times more students with 1500 SATs than you have available spots. So you eventually need to use holistic judgement anyways.
  - bradleyjg 4y ago
    They could just admit at random from among that group. What would be the downside?
    - kenjackson 4y ago
      So no cutoff, just an SAT score? And then a cutoff based on that? What about GPA? Weighted GPA? AP tests matter? Creating a cure for COVID matter? I think for the very top schools they care about the intangibles. For mid-tier schools the SAT cutoff lottery is fine. But the cut off is probably like 1150, and these arguments aren’t about those schools.
      - bradleyjg 4y ago
        Just an SAT cutoff. Maybe cure Covid kid ends up at Vassar instead of Princeton. So what? Will his life be over? Will the US decline into irrelevance?
        4y ago
inglor_cz 4y ago
"holistically evaluate applicants" How likely is it that this holistic evaluation will end up preferring individuals conforming to the current Zeitgeist (e.g. using all the momentarily popular buzzwords in their applications) rather than truly talented candidates? Thus contributing to further ossification of current elites?
- CharlieDigital 4y ago
  An academic institution shouldn't only be about picking truly talented candidates; that's the exact opposite of holistic. My take is that part of the function of an academic institution is to help individuals discover and develop talents. A good teacher isn't one that helps A students get A's but one that can develop any student into an A student. To merely select and propel those who already have the talent rather than select for the capacity to grow and develop talent is precisely why score based systems are biased in the first place.
ferrocarraiges 4y ago
Unfortunately, in practice they now rely on one number: GPA, quietly weighted based on the high school's reputation.
Jabbles 4y ago
Well you have to reduce them to a single bit eventually: either they get admitted or not.
derbOac 4y ago
Yeah, I almost felt like flagging this submission. It's taking something that on its own could be interpreted in many ways and giving it a strong political spin. For the sake of argument, let's imagine a college doing the opposite: admitting students solely on the basis of a standardized test score. You submit your SAT score, and everyone above a certain percentile is admitted. People below the threshold are not. Many of the comments here seem to think this is optimal. In that scenario, there wouldn't be any complaints from admissions committees at all about them having to put effort into the situation, because they wouldn't be involved at all. So is it being difficult a sign that reality is more complex than suggested by a test score, or that they've lost an objective indicator? Most of the statistics thrown around in the article could also be turned on their head. For instance, just hypothetically, if getting rid of the test isn't changing the student body, what's the point of the test? Having an objective number is useless on its own. Even if it's roughly correlated with the outcomes you desire, if it's that roughly correlated with outcomes, and subject to biases, there's no point in having it. I feel like these tests are kind of like buying a house based on nominal square footage alone. Sure, it's probably correlated with satisfaction and resell value, it's an objective indicator that involves some measurement, and so forth, but no one would buy a house that way. It's subject to all sorts of manipulation and fuzziness, and doesn't tell you anything about the architecture, lot, or anything else. And yet that's kind of how standardized tests are used. I'm fine with using standardized tests in theory, but they're far too abused and misused. It's not so much the tests I have problems with, as it is how it seems once you introduce them, it seems they can't be interpreted rationally in making any sorts of decisions about human beings. It's like people take something that has a sliver of information value with all sorts of limitations, and then treat it like an infallible signal just because it's easy to use. Its ease of use could be seen as a problem, not something desirable.
- CharlieDigital 4y ago
  > I feel like these tests are kind of like buying a house based on nominal square footage alone Great analogy. Buying a house is about far, far more than just the square footage. How are the neighbors? How's the walkability? Noise levels? Schools? Access to transport routes? Access to jobs? Property taxes? HOA fees? Access to activities of interest? There are so many factors to buying a house that it would be ridiculous to look at any single dimension alone and make a determinate based on that one dimension.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

There is plenty of evidence to doubt the whole "holistic evaluation" line of thought, which is often a tool for subtle discrimination. And pretty much all of these schools already did "holistically evaluate" students; test scores were just one part of that evaluation. Besides, at the end of the day everything boils down to a single number - applicants are ranked and those that make the cutoff get in, those that are below the cutoff don't.

Spivak 4y ago
Holistic evaluation in practice really means “present your best self in your application whatever that might be.” It allows for a range of impressive feats outside “was good at the arbitrary selection of school subjects and extracurriculars.”
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  In practice it also often means, "This Asian isn't 'well rounded' enough and they're only into math and chess club." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
  - Spivak 4y ago
    I don’t really know what you do to combat this kind of thing because what would you do as an admissions officer trying to create a student body with a wide range of skills and experiences but you have thousands of applicants who are “focused on having perfect grades to the detriment of everything else and participated in the ‘look how smart I am clubs’.” And I say this with full self-awareness that this was me. It’s probably the thing I regret most about my high school experience because of how unnecessary it was and how much it set me back on all the things that mattered. I consider myself extremely lucky that any university took a chance on me because my application was 100% “I have no real interests except playing the game of school and winning by min-maxing the point system” which looking back is so obviously the worst applicant. I for sure lost out on my dream school because of it.
    - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
      Easy: 1. Have some minimum objective criteria (test scores, grades, class rank, etc.) 2. Accept students who meet that minimum with a lottery. Of course, that would never happen at highly selective colleges, because it would shatter the notion that "only the best and brightest" got in and would ruin colleges' role as a maintainer of social hierarchy in the US. I say this as a person who went to one of the most selective colleges in the world: the idea that colleges set up their application systems to build a "diverse" student body is complete and total bullshit. The reason being that some of the most important diversity comes from interacting with people of widely varying economic levels and intelligence levels. The idea that you can have a socially diverse student body, but only made up of people who got 4.0 GPAs and above, is bullshit on its face.
CharlieDigital 4y ago
> Besides, at the end of the day everything boils down to a single number This is about as silly as dating app profiles that cut off at 6'.
- boppo1 4y ago
  >This is about as silly as dating app profiles that cut off at 6'. But it's reality. Women extremely rarely think of men under 6' as ideal mates.

rainsford 4y ago

Exactly. Of course having numerical values you can directly compare is going to be the easiest way to select students, but it's only "fair" to the degree those numbers accurately reflect the relative academic performance and potential of the students. I think the reason people so vigorously defend the use of standardized test scores in admissions is that we all have a built in bias towards viewing quantifiable comparisons as inherently more objective because it's easy to justify how you arrived at a decision. After all, who can argue with a decision based on one number being larger than the other? The problem though is that this approach doesn't really remove the subjective, complex elements at all, it just moves them from the decision step to the measurement step. Sure, an SAT score is just a simple number. But how the test is constructed to arrive at that number is much more complicated. And the value of a simple score comparison is only as good as the process of constructing the test, leaving you with the illusion of having made the decision simpler and more objective when you really just move the complexity behind a curtain. In tech terms, I think the analogy is project managers trying endless different ways to measure software development performance. Number of tickets closed, "velocity", commits, releases, etc, (lines of code if you're very unlucky), all give you nice simple numbers to look at. And while they're not entirely useless, it's easy to become overly reliant on them and assume they are more objective measures than they actually are.

luckylion 4y ago
> But how the test is constructed to arrive at that number is much more complicated. Is that done per student behind closed doors though, with the people calculating the score knowing who the student is and the ability to alter the scoring based on that knowledge? Standardized tests are bad, but they're a giant step up from the corruption that is other forms of selection.
subradios 4y ago
On the contrary, test scoring is the most objective thing we had to evaluate students based on the diligent work of a company whose entire business is maintaining that perception of objectivity. Sure, it's "the perception of", but if you think there aren't smart people analyzing college board exam scores across the country for signs of skewed testing so they can write an expose on it, you're far from reality. In fact - the line that you're walking is the reason there was briefly a suggestion of an "adversity score": https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/college-board-is-adding-adversity-score-to-sat-2019-5%3famp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/college... Which is the first time that's been considered, because in the current climate - working extremely diligently to try to ensure that no particular student or group of students has an advantage, some students do have an advantage. They are smarter, or have better parenting, or better education, or their parents simply have more money to throw at tutoring You can say "that's unfair! This is about selecting the best students and locks smart people from worse off backgrounds out of university!" It does the second thing, sometimes, as a side effect - but it is also true that those students are still better students, regardless the path dependence. Meanwhile, universities are enacting racial and gender preference schemes, Cites: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/tje/files/espenshade_diversity_outcomes_chapter_sat_wars_soares.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjF-87njPT6AhVfIDQIHb3pBe0QFnoECEQQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2hsYHX2DNwK-n49nStMDMW https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/... https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/students-for-fair-admissions-inc-v-president-fellows-of-harvard-college/amp/&ved=2ahUKEwjo4f_6jvT6AhX2BjQIHSEvB18QFnoECAsQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0OwAgq0ZGFh3Qkgd8ZWZlG https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/... Additionally, the primary winner of the policies this line of argument promotes are white women - with the primary loser being Asian men. Asian students in particular are bringing the suit against Harvard for these practices. So while your epistemic humility ("is this REALLY objective? How do we measure that?") is well intentioned, it's the exact sort of reasoning used to cover up a strict ideology of "more black good, more women good, less white good, less men good" in universities, and the actual behavior of universities shoe that.

petilon 4y ago

With the 10s of thousands of applications top universities get, there isn't enough time to evaluate the "complex, multi-dimensional entities" behind each application. At University of Washington, applications are not reviewed by "admissions people". They hire temporary workers (grad students, retirees etc.) to review applications, and give them 8 minutes per application [1]. And this is typical of most universities. [1] https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/a-look-inside-admissions-at-the-university-of-washi/281-85f98fa9-ca4c-46de-a720-02dc415dddd7 https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/a-look-inside-admis...

kenjackson 4y ago
But at highly competitive schools you still have several times more students with 1500 SATs than you have available spots. So you eventually need to use holistic judgement anyways.
- bradleyjg 4y ago
  They could just admit at random from among that group. What would be the downside?
  - kenjackson 4y ago
    So no cutoff, just an SAT score? And then a cutoff based on that? What about GPA? Weighted GPA? AP tests matter? Creating a cure for COVID matter? I think for the very top schools they care about the intangibles. For mid-tier schools the SAT cutoff lottery is fine. But the cut off is probably like 1150, and these arguments aren’t about those schools.
    - bradleyjg 4y ago
      Just an SAT cutoff. Maybe cure Covid kid ends up at Vassar instead of Princeton. So what? Will his life be over? Will the US decline into irrelevance?
      - 4y ago

inglor_cz 4y ago

"holistically evaluate applicants" How likely is it that this holistic evaluation will end up preferring individuals conforming to the current Zeitgeist (e.g. using all the momentarily popular buzzwords in their applications) rather than truly talented candidates? Thus contributing to further ossification of current elites?

CharlieDigital 4y ago
An academic institution shouldn't only be about picking truly talented candidates; that's the exact opposite of holistic. My take is that part of the function of an academic institution is to help individuals discover and develop talents. A good teacher isn't one that helps A students get A's but one that can develop any student into an A student. To merely select and propel those who already have the talent rather than select for the capacity to grow and develop talent is precisely why score based systems are biased in the first place.

ferrocarraiges 4y ago

Unfortunately, in practice they now rely on one number: GPA, quietly weighted based on the high school's reputation.

Jabbles 4y ago

Well you have to reduce them to a single bit eventually: either they get admitted or not.

derbOac 4y ago

Yeah, I almost felt like flagging this submission. It's taking something that on its own could be interpreted in many ways and giving it a strong political spin. For the sake of argument, let's imagine a college doing the opposite: admitting students solely on the basis of a standardized test score. You submit your SAT score, and everyone above a certain percentile is admitted. People below the threshold are not. Many of the comments here seem to think this is optimal. In that scenario, there wouldn't be any complaints from admissions committees at all about them having to put effort into the situation, because they wouldn't be involved at all. So is it being difficult a sign that reality is more complex than suggested by a test score, or that they've lost an objective indicator? Most of the statistics thrown around in the article could also be turned on their head. For instance, just hypothetically, if getting rid of the test isn't changing the student body, what's the point of the test? Having an objective number is useless on its own. Even if it's roughly correlated with the outcomes you desire, if it's that roughly correlated with outcomes, and subject to biases, there's no point in having it. I feel like these tests are kind of like buying a house based on nominal square footage alone. Sure, it's probably correlated with satisfaction and resell value, it's an objective indicator that involves some measurement, and so forth, but no one would buy a house that way. It's subject to all sorts of manipulation and fuzziness, and doesn't tell you anything about the architecture, lot, or anything else. And yet that's kind of how standardized tests are used. I'm fine with using standardized tests in theory, but they're far too abused and misused. It's not so much the tests I have problems with, as it is how it seems once you introduce them, it seems they can't be interpreted rationally in making any sorts of decisions about human beings. It's like people take something that has a sliver of information value with all sorts of limitations, and then treat it like an infallible signal just because it's easy to use. Its ease of use could be seen as a problem, not something desirable.

CharlieDigital 4y ago
> I feel like these tests are kind of like buying a house based on nominal square footage alone Great analogy. Buying a house is about far, far more than just the square footage. How are the neighbors? How's the walkability? Noise levels? Schools? Access to transport routes? Access to jobs? Property taxes? HOA fees? Access to activities of interest? There are so many factors to buying a house that it would be ridiculous to look at any single dimension alone and make a determinate based on that one dimension.