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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

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.
- Spivak 4y ago
  You’re glossing over the core issue which is that universities (and employers when hiring juniors for that matter) need to measure potential and many of the objective measures do correlate but do so weakly. It’s why we don’t hire based on Leetcode, whiteboard algorithms problems or GPA. Doing better on those is a positive sign but I can get a much much stronger signal through a conversation, probing to find out their strengths and passions and then setting them up to show off. And look, race and gender ends up being a component but not in the way you’re describing. I’m not being like “woman good” it’s that a woman sitting across the table describing her technical achievements is made more impressive because I know first hand what women have to go in CS programs — you don’t put up with all the bullshit unless you’re really passionate. An example based on real life, a woman leading her capstone project group is unfathomably impressive because of how decisively strong her technical and communication skills have to be to earn the respect of the men in her class.
  - subradios 4y ago
    Who is we? Literally every major tech company hires on effectively leetcode alone. https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/ https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma... Men perform (slightly) etter on technical interviews when modulated as women, and women perform the same. The idea that women are "putting up with so much more bullshit" when we have every major university and large tech employer bending over backwards to find more women who are interested, sky high salaries, and that we can show notable although weak bias in favor of women in settings where gender is obscured is out of date at a minimum.
    - Spivak 4y ago
      > when we have every major university and large tech employer bending over backwards to find more women who are interested I swear this is always at the core of it. Trust me it’s not as glamorous as you make it out to be. Yes tech companies are bending over backwards to find and hire competent women because we’re rare (and why!) but that statement is not at all the same as women have lower standards. You have to understand that literally no team ever is going to burn their hire on a perceived less qualified woman because she’s a woman. The desire to have the best person because the team is lazy and wants someone who will make their lives easier always wins. And not to put too fine a point on it but your average team of tech folks is pretty anti-woke liberal-tarian meritocracy so you’re not getting a whole lot social justice bias there. I guess this could happen if you have HR hiring in a vacuum but I’ve never seen a place where the team doesn’t have the final say. > putting up with so much more bullshit The bullshit is the culture. Look I wish this wasn’t true but it’s the unfortunate reality of being a woman in a CS major. Your male classmates do not see you as an equal. there is an in-built presumption that you don’t know what you’re doing; any normal mistake you make that guys make too just cements it. When you’re doing group work nobody listens to you and you get the “fun” experience of waiting for them to catch up and then having no recognition at all that you had already told them. Getting study groups together is awful one because guys will not let you join because they think you’ll be a drain, or they will let you join and then hit on you. Do you know how many fucking times I got told to go make me a sandwich? In more than one class I just asked the professor to do group projects alone. And that’s before dealing with how isolating it is to be the only girl in class and having the shock and head turns the first time you speak. It’s not perfect by any stretch of imagination but I would have been driven out of tech had I not by chance landed at a few companies with older teams and realized that maturity makes a huge difference. > and that we can show notable although weak bias in favor of women Well yeah, of course you expect that. I just talked about a situation where a woman saying something is more impressive than a man saying the same thing. Context matters.
antasvara 4y ago
Removing SAT scores doesn't remove the subjective and complex elements, but it does give a measure that took more than 8 minutes to arrive at. As a previous commenter mentioned, UW spends about 8 minutes looking at applications at first. This isn't nearly enough time to make a "holistic" decision, especially when the application is largely subjective. SAT scores, on the other hand, take longer than 8 minutes to arrive at. The subjective evaluations that go into designing the test can be determined over the course of months, leading to a measure that is imperfect but likely better than 8 minutes of a grad student's time. The larger point is that in order for "holistic" admissions to work, you need to design an admissions process that actually evaluates candidates holistically. Removing SAT scores doesn't automatically fix those issues, it just removes one more piece of data to aid the process.
0x445442 4y ago
> Sure, an SAT score is just a simple number. But how the test is constructed to arrive at that number is much more complicated. But you’re ignoring the other side of that number. That test score provides a hell of a lot of information about the individual beyond just doing well on a single test.

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.

Spivak 4y ago
You’re glossing over the core issue which is that universities (and employers when hiring juniors for that matter) need to measure potential and many of the objective measures do correlate but do so weakly. It’s why we don’t hire based on Leetcode, whiteboard algorithms problems or GPA. Doing better on those is a positive sign but I can get a much much stronger signal through a conversation, probing to find out their strengths and passions and then setting them up to show off. And look, race and gender ends up being a component but not in the way you’re describing. I’m not being like “woman good” it’s that a woman sitting across the table describing her technical achievements is made more impressive because I know first hand what women have to go in CS programs — you don’t put up with all the bullshit unless you’re really passionate. An example based on real life, a woman leading her capstone project group is unfathomably impressive because of how decisively strong her technical and communication skills have to be to earn the respect of the men in her class.
- subradios 4y ago
  Who is we? Literally every major tech company hires on effectively leetcode alone. https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/ https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma... Men perform (slightly) etter on technical interviews when modulated as women, and women perform the same. The idea that women are "putting up with so much more bullshit" when we have every major university and large tech employer bending over backwards to find more women who are interested, sky high salaries, and that we can show notable although weak bias in favor of women in settings where gender is obscured is out of date at a minimum.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    > when we have every major university and large tech employer bending over backwards to find more women who are interested I swear this is always at the core of it. Trust me it’s not as glamorous as you make it out to be. Yes tech companies are bending over backwards to find and hire competent women because we’re rare (and why!) but that statement is not at all the same as women have lower standards. You have to understand that literally no team ever is going to burn their hire on a perceived less qualified woman because she’s a woman. The desire to have the best person because the team is lazy and wants someone who will make their lives easier always wins. And not to put too fine a point on it but your average team of tech folks is pretty anti-woke liberal-tarian meritocracy so you’re not getting a whole lot social justice bias there. I guess this could happen if you have HR hiring in a vacuum but I’ve never seen a place where the team doesn’t have the final say. > putting up with so much more bullshit The bullshit is the culture. Look I wish this wasn’t true but it’s the unfortunate reality of being a woman in a CS major. Your male classmates do not see you as an equal. there is an in-built presumption that you don’t know what you’re doing; any normal mistake you make that guys make too just cements it. When you’re doing group work nobody listens to you and you get the “fun” experience of waiting for them to catch up and then having no recognition at all that you had already told them. Getting study groups together is awful one because guys will not let you join because they think you’ll be a drain, or they will let you join and then hit on you. Do you know how many fucking times I got told to go make me a sandwich? In more than one class I just asked the professor to do group projects alone. And that’s before dealing with how isolating it is to be the only girl in class and having the shock and head turns the first time you speak. It’s not perfect by any stretch of imagination but I would have been driven out of tech had I not by chance landed at a few companies with older teams and realized that maturity makes a huge difference. > and that we can show notable although weak bias in favor of women Well yeah, of course you expect that. I just talked about a situation where a woman saying something is more impressive than a man saying the same thing. Context matters.

antasvara 4y ago

Removing SAT scores doesn't remove the subjective and complex elements, but it does give a measure that took more than 8 minutes to arrive at. As a previous commenter mentioned, UW spends about 8 minutes looking at applications at first. This isn't nearly enough time to make a "holistic" decision, especially when the application is largely subjective. SAT scores, on the other hand, take longer than 8 minutes to arrive at. The subjective evaluations that go into designing the test can be determined over the course of months, leading to a measure that is imperfect but likely better than 8 minutes of a grad student's time. The larger point is that in order for "holistic" admissions to work, you need to design an admissions process that actually evaluates candidates holistically. Removing SAT scores doesn't automatically fix those issues, it just removes one more piece of data to aid the process.

0x445442 4y ago

> Sure, an SAT score is just a simple number. But how the test is constructed to arrive at that number is much more complicated. But you’re ignoring the other side of that number. That test score provides a hell of a lot of information about the individual beyond just doing well on a single test.