6 ms·

The modern equivalent = national university entrance exam

by oc852 4y ago

PaulHoule 4y ago
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaokao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaokao My understanding is that Beijing University gets the test results for every high school graduate in the country and automatically admits the top scorers. It's a method of elite production that allows for social mobility and limits the ability of parents to pass their status on to their children. I've wondered if much of reason why Harvard-associated people have been negative about standardized tests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man is precisely because a test-based system wouldn't produce the same elite Harvard produces.
- ghaff 4y ago
  At the end of the day, the purpose of the standardized tests is to provide a reasonable guide to admitting students who are (subject to various caveats) capable of doing the academic work. It's mostly true to say that elite universities are not looking to admit students solely (or maybe even primarily) on the basis of their scores on standardized test(s). And, yes, other factors are perhaps more influenced by family background but can be influenced by many other non-academic qualities as well.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    Then they should just test for that and make it a lottery for everyone over the bar. Anyone who's been to an elite university will tell you that a lot more people could handle it than are admitted.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Why? Because there's no signal other than standardized test scores? If you believe that then you probably should just admit the highest scores. When I last looked at the research many years ago, other signals certainly tended to be noisier but there's no particular reason to think that admissions would be better if universities simply set a test floor then rolled a dice.
      - lordnacho 4y ago
        We can't really resolve this with the current data, because the current system encourages people to get as high a score as possible at the cost of maximum stress. How do we know whether changing the system would lead to a less stressed system where people just do enough to leap the bar, perhaps like the diving test?
      - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
        The selection process has a cost. If it doesn't produce value it should be replaced with a lottery.
        ghaff 4y ago
        It's pretty clear however that the selection process at elite universities, however imperfect and to whatever degree it factors in things (like legacy admissions) that you may think shouldn't be factored in, still produces better results than just randomly admitting some percentage of whoever applies. (Especially if applicants knew it would be a completely random process.)
        LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
        It's not clear that the existing selection processes at most universities actually adds value in proportion to its cost. What value, and to who? What are the shortcomings you think they're trying to fix? Even if everyone agreed on a standard and its impact on admissions (+3 for participation in the Model UN, for example) it's not clear how we'd judge "better results" as we evaluate our admissions criteria. Are we optimizing for an even racial/religious mix of students? Higher output grades? Higher wages? More children raised successfully by the age of 40? Then even with an agreed upon goal and some objective measures to used to approach it - is it worth doing? If we could get 1% better results by doubling the difficulty of the application process for the students then it probably wouldn't be worth doing it when the plan was considered holistically. What's an acceptable trade-off? What's the cost on transparency and perception of bias when we start considering subjective criteria?
        4y ago
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      A lot more people could handle it than are admitted because you can pick the classes you want to take. If you are saying a lot more people could handle taking the top level classes than are admitted, I would also agree - but most of those people go to similarly elite unis.
      - lordnacho 4y ago
        I'm only looking at own experience, where you couldn't just choose whether classes you liked.
        whimsicalism 4y ago
        Right, but as one of those "anyone" who has been to an elite university, I'm giving my two cents.
        ghaff 4y ago
        My US experience, which is probably pretty typical, is some choice of core courses, choice of major, with some required and some options within that major. Undergrad I'm pretty sure I could have made choices that would have made it pretty much impossible for me to graduate and I could have made choices which--while they certainly wouldn't have made my undergraduate education trivial--would have made things easier.
        whimsicalism 4y ago
        I'm saying for almost every major there is a very easy path. But I absolutely disagree if they're saying that there are tons of people who could grok the advanced first-year physics classes like Physics 16 @ Harvard who are just being turned away and also not getting into other similarly good schools.
        lordnacho 4y ago
        I went to a selective uni where I thought basically half my year at high school would have been just fine there. The other half were not particularly interested in studying anything and would have screwed up at any university. It's not like the laws of physics depend on what college teaches them, right? The content of just about any course is going to be more or less the same. A lot of the books were the same as well, comparing notes with friends who didn't get in.
    - fallingknife 4y ago
      They should increase difficulty until the number who can handle it matches the number they can admit.
  - thelock85 4y ago
    I don't agree but I think it's fair to say standardized tests are a very mediocre solution for measuring students' capacity for academic work at any institution that requires them, and few universities have the resources to develop and implement better admissions procedures and entrance exams that are more reflective of their institutional values on their own. It's much easier just to get on board the College Board gravy train. My two cents are standardized tests greatly reduce the function of MS/HS education. They are tied to school funding, teacher effectiveness, local/regional reputation and create a trickle down effect from SAT/ACT > PSAT > state-level tests so that the worst-served students are practicing multiple choice and boilerplate prompts from February to May every year. And these students hardly even go to college if they graduate, so that's time that could have been spent exploring trades, developing life skills (civics, taxes), understanding how to cope with any learning differences, etc. Then there's the fact that a student can be taught to bump their score past a nominal requirement, gain admission, take out loans and never graduate. Not necessarily the fault of the test but part of the overall complex.
    - michaelt 4y ago
      > My two cents are standardized tests greatly reduce the function of MS/HS education. Eh, depends on how your country's standardized tests are set up. You don't have to ask multiple-choice questions. There's no reason you shouldn't use standardized tests in trade education - if you're teaching plumbing with copper pipe, have them solder some joints and quiz them about air locks and suchlike. You can cover things that are truly impossible to examine by just requiring a certain number of hours. If you want people in the first year of high school to receive sex ed but don't want to do exams on it, you can just require that schools deliver a certain number of hours of it.
- YoumuChan 4y ago
  It is not how it works. Depending on the province, student submits a list of preferred universities with majors before taking the test, after taking the test, or after knowing the score. The list is divided in groups, and also depending on the province, the universities in each group may or may not be ordered. In a province where the universities are ordered, students with the same first choice are grouped together and the said university gets the result and admits top scores within quota. If there are more quota than students, university looks at students putting it as second choice AND not admitted by another university yet. Never figured out how unordered group works so I won't explain that. There are also nuances if students could submit list after knowing their scores, because universities can approach top students in private and negotiate terms with them to lure them into putting the universities as first choice. Hence Beijing University only gets results if it is on the list of a student. And it is not always a good idea to put Beijing U as the first choice since in a province with ordered group, not getting admitted by first choice hugely decreases the chance of getting into second choice university.
  - NhanH 4y ago
    Same thing here in Vietnam. But I don’t think it detracts from the point (standardized testing is good for social mobility). Normally almost everyone know roughly how competitive your own self is, so only people at the margin of admission has to care. There are some majors where everyone is at the margin (sometimes it get to 29.75 out of 30 as the cutoff), but at that point, it really doesn’t matter who you would get among all those people, and the effect is roughly the school pick a subset of very talented and hardworking student at random. Again, doesn’t affect the mobility issue
    - lordnacho 4y ago
      And you have one bad day and you lose your lottery ticket... You catch a flu, your grandma dies, maybe you menstruate...
      - cuteboy19 4y ago
        Can't you try next year?
- glitchc 4y ago
  I don't believe that for a second. Are you saying Xi's children and grandchildren would be denied admission at Beijing University if they wanted it? I'm betting the answer is no. Now extend that thinking to the Standing Committee? Would any of their kids/grandkids be rejected? Now extend that to the entire Politburo. Now we can ask the question: Is it the grades that decide admission or the number if steps removed from the Premier? Merit, my ass.
  - kelipso 4y ago
    Even if that's true, it's an entirely different scale from an entire class of people being able to pass their status onto their children through college admissions like the upper middle class and richer people can do in the US.
  - oli5679 4y ago
    Xi’s daughter went to Harvard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Mingze https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Mingze
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
    >Is it the grades that decide admission or the number if steps removed from the Premier? First off, the premier is not the leader of China. Second, while I can imagine that members of the Politburo could get their children in, and perhaps some others with power, this doesn't extend so far out. The CCP has tens of millions of members, more than 99% of them are irrelivant. If that kind of scandle would be revealed it would end their career. It is much safer to send their children abroad: something that Xi Jinping did for his daughter (and Kim Jong Il did for Kim Jong Un). That is what I imagine more likely. Additionally it would be easier to just get them a good job with a degree from a worse college (In their own or their freinds comapny). If you have any evidence otherwise I wouldn't be surprised per se but I think a source for your claim is needed.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  > My understanding is that Beijing University gets the test results for every high school graduate in the country and automatically admits the top scorers. There are quotas for each province, city/rural area (I think the quotas are by major, which have to be declared ahead of time before you take the test). It can be really hard to get in from rural Henan, for example, but much easier to get in from urban Beijing. Someone who gets into Beida from a rural village in the middle of nowhere is going to have a much higher gaokao score than someone who gets in from Shanghai (there is a large quota for Shanghai kids even in Beijing University, but a very low quota for rural Henan). So it actually acts as a way of limiting social mobility for those without urban rich city hukous. It is sort of analogous to America's public university system, where you get differences between in state and out of state tuition (except here, it isn't tuition, but quotas for regions). https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/chinas-unfair-college-admissions-system/276995/ https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/chinas-unf...
- fallingknife 4y ago
  There is a reason that it's pretty much 100% upper middle class people that complain about standardized tests being unfair.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    Huh, poor people who can't afford tutoring complain about it as well. The only people who can opt out are the ones who are either rich or connected enough to choose a different system. In China that might mean Ivy League, in the UK it means you pay a very expensive private school to give the kids the best chance.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    It is mostly the lower classes (or their advocates) complaining about standardized testing not being equitable. And they have a point about biases (not having access to tutoring, or questions that rely on a middle class or better background to answer correctly). Many richer Chinese kids bypass the Gaokao completely and just take the much easier SAT/ACT to go to school in the states (or equivalent in other countries).
    - fallingknife 4y ago
      > or their advocates Not really their advocates, but upper middle class people giving themselves moral cover by saying they want to get rid of standardized test to help poor people. Really they want to make sure smart poor people cant out compete them.
      - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
        I’m not sure where you are getting your info, but rich people do much better on standardized tests (ACT/SAT/GaoKao/etc…) then poor people given the resources they have available to prep for the tests. If you think these are equalizers for poor people (or that they think so), you are misidentifying the problem.

The modern equivalent = national university entrance exam

by oc852 4y ago

The modern equivalent = national university entrance exam

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaokao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaokao My understanding is that Beijing University gets the test results for every high school graduate in the country and automatically admits the top scorers. It's a method of elite production that allows for social mobility and limits the ability of parents to pass their status on to their children. I've wondered if much of reason why Harvard-associated people have been negative about standardized tests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man is precisely because a test-based system wouldn't produce the same elite Harvard produces.

ghaff 4y ago
At the end of the day, the purpose of the standardized tests is to provide a reasonable guide to admitting students who are (subject to various caveats) capable of doing the academic work. It's mostly true to say that elite universities are not looking to admit students solely (or maybe even primarily) on the basis of their scores on standardized test(s). And, yes, other factors are perhaps more influenced by family background but can be influenced by many other non-academic qualities as well.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Then they should just test for that and make it a lottery for everyone over the bar. Anyone who's been to an elite university will tell you that a lot more people could handle it than are admitted.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Why? Because there's no signal other than standardized test scores? If you believe that then you probably should just admit the highest scores. When I last looked at the research many years ago, other signals certainly tended to be noisier but there's no particular reason to think that admissions would be better if universities simply set a test floor then rolled a dice.
    - lordnacho 4y ago
      We can't really resolve this with the current data, because the current system encourages people to get as high a score as possible at the cost of maximum stress. How do we know whether changing the system would lead to a less stressed system where people just do enough to leap the bar, perhaps like the diving test?
    - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
      The selection process has a cost. If it doesn't produce value it should be replaced with a lottery.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        It's pretty clear however that the selection process at elite universities, however imperfect and to whatever degree it factors in things (like legacy admissions) that you may think shouldn't be factored in, still produces better results than just randomly admitting some percentage of whoever applies. (Especially if applicants knew it would be a completely random process.)
        LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
        It's not clear that the existing selection processes at most universities actually adds value in proportion to its cost. What value, and to who? What are the shortcomings you think they're trying to fix? Even if everyone agreed on a standard and its impact on admissions (+3 for participation in the Model UN, for example) it's not clear how we'd judge "better results" as we evaluate our admissions criteria. Are we optimizing for an even racial/religious mix of students? Higher output grades? Higher wages? More children raised successfully by the age of 40? Then even with an agreed upon goal and some objective measures to used to approach it - is it worth doing? If we could get 1% better results by doubling the difficulty of the application process for the students then it probably wouldn't be worth doing it when the plan was considered holistically. What's an acceptable trade-off? What's the cost on transparency and perception of bias when we start considering subjective criteria?
        4y ago
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    A lot more people could handle it than are admitted because you can pick the classes you want to take. If you are saying a lot more people could handle taking the top level classes than are admitted, I would also agree - but most of those people go to similarly elite unis.
    - lordnacho 4y ago
      I'm only looking at own experience, where you couldn't just choose whether classes you liked.
      - whimsicalism 4y ago
        Right, but as one of those "anyone" who has been to an elite university, I'm giving my two cents.
        ghaff 4y ago
        My US experience, which is probably pretty typical, is some choice of core courses, choice of major, with some required and some options within that major. Undergrad I'm pretty sure I could have made choices that would have made it pretty much impossible for me to graduate and I could have made choices which--while they certainly wouldn't have made my undergraduate education trivial--would have made things easier.
        whimsicalism 4y ago
        I'm saying for almost every major there is a very easy path. But I absolutely disagree if they're saying that there are tons of people who could grok the advanced first-year physics classes like Physics 16 @ Harvard who are just being turned away and also not getting into other similarly good schools.
        lordnacho 4y ago
        I went to a selective uni where I thought basically half my year at high school would have been just fine there. The other half were not particularly interested in studying anything and would have screwed up at any university. It's not like the laws of physics depend on what college teaches them, right? The content of just about any course is going to be more or less the same. A lot of the books were the same as well, comparing notes with friends who didn't get in.
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    They should increase difficulty until the number who can handle it matches the number they can admit.
- thelock85 4y ago
  I don't agree but I think it's fair to say standardized tests are a very mediocre solution for measuring students' capacity for academic work at any institution that requires them, and few universities have the resources to develop and implement better admissions procedures and entrance exams that are more reflective of their institutional values on their own. It's much easier just to get on board the College Board gravy train. My two cents are standardized tests greatly reduce the function of MS/HS education. They are tied to school funding, teacher effectiveness, local/regional reputation and create a trickle down effect from SAT/ACT > PSAT > state-level tests so that the worst-served students are practicing multiple choice and boilerplate prompts from February to May every year. And these students hardly even go to college if they graduate, so that's time that could have been spent exploring trades, developing life skills (civics, taxes), understanding how to cope with any learning differences, etc. Then there's the fact that a student can be taught to bump their score past a nominal requirement, gain admission, take out loans and never graduate. Not necessarily the fault of the test but part of the overall complex.
  - michaelt 4y ago
    > My two cents are standardized tests greatly reduce the function of MS/HS education. Eh, depends on how your country's standardized tests are set up. You don't have to ask multiple-choice questions. There's no reason you shouldn't use standardized tests in trade education - if you're teaching plumbing with copper pipe, have them solder some joints and quiz them about air locks and suchlike. You can cover things that are truly impossible to examine by just requiring a certain number of hours. If you want people in the first year of high school to receive sex ed but don't want to do exams on it, you can just require that schools deliver a certain number of hours of it.
YoumuChan 4y ago
It is not how it works. Depending on the province, student submits a list of preferred universities with majors before taking the test, after taking the test, or after knowing the score. The list is divided in groups, and also depending on the province, the universities in each group may or may not be ordered. In a province where the universities are ordered, students with the same first choice are grouped together and the said university gets the result and admits top scores within quota. If there are more quota than students, university looks at students putting it as second choice AND not admitted by another university yet. Never figured out how unordered group works so I won't explain that. There are also nuances if students could submit list after knowing their scores, because universities can approach top students in private and negotiate terms with them to lure them into putting the universities as first choice. Hence Beijing University only gets results if it is on the list of a student. And it is not always a good idea to put Beijing U as the first choice since in a province with ordered group, not getting admitted by first choice hugely decreases the chance of getting into second choice university.
- NhanH 4y ago
  Same thing here in Vietnam. But I don’t think it detracts from the point (standardized testing is good for social mobility). Normally almost everyone know roughly how competitive your own self is, so only people at the margin of admission has to care. There are some majors where everyone is at the margin (sometimes it get to 29.75 out of 30 as the cutoff), but at that point, it really doesn’t matter who you would get among all those people, and the effect is roughly the school pick a subset of very talented and hardworking student at random. Again, doesn’t affect the mobility issue
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    And you have one bad day and you lose your lottery ticket... You catch a flu, your grandma dies, maybe you menstruate...
    - cuteboy19 4y ago
      Can't you try next year?
glitchc 4y ago
I don't believe that for a second. Are you saying Xi's children and grandchildren would be denied admission at Beijing University if they wanted it? I'm betting the answer is no. Now extend that thinking to the Standing Committee? Would any of their kids/grandkids be rejected? Now extend that to the entire Politburo. Now we can ask the question: Is it the grades that decide admission or the number if steps removed from the Premier? Merit, my ass.
- kelipso 4y ago
  Even if that's true, it's an entirely different scale from an entire class of people being able to pass their status onto their children through college admissions like the upper middle class and richer people can do in the US.
- oli5679 4y ago
  Xi’s daughter went to Harvard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Mingze https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Mingze
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
  >Is it the grades that decide admission or the number if steps removed from the Premier? First off, the premier is not the leader of China. Second, while I can imagine that members of the Politburo could get their children in, and perhaps some others with power, this doesn't extend so far out. The CCP has tens of millions of members, more than 99% of them are irrelivant. If that kind of scandle would be revealed it would end their career. It is much safer to send their children abroad: something that Xi Jinping did for his daughter (and Kim Jong Il did for Kim Jong Un). That is what I imagine more likely. Additionally it would be easier to just get them a good job with a degree from a worse college (In their own or their freinds comapny). If you have any evidence otherwise I wouldn't be surprised per se but I think a source for your claim is needed.
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
> My understanding is that Beijing University gets the test results for every high school graduate in the country and automatically admits the top scorers. There are quotas for each province, city/rural area (I think the quotas are by major, which have to be declared ahead of time before you take the test). It can be really hard to get in from rural Henan, for example, but much easier to get in from urban Beijing. Someone who gets into Beida from a rural village in the middle of nowhere is going to have a much higher gaokao score than someone who gets in from Shanghai (there is a large quota for Shanghai kids even in Beijing University, but a very low quota for rural Henan). So it actually acts as a way of limiting social mobility for those without urban rich city hukous. It is sort of analogous to America's public university system, where you get differences between in state and out of state tuition (except here, it isn't tuition, but quotas for regions). https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/chinas-unfair-college-admissions-system/276995/ https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/chinas-unf...
fallingknife 4y ago
There is a reason that it's pretty much 100% upper middle class people that complain about standardized tests being unfair.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Huh, poor people who can't afford tutoring complain about it as well. The only people who can opt out are the ones who are either rich or connected enough to choose a different system. In China that might mean Ivy League, in the UK it means you pay a very expensive private school to give the kids the best chance.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  It is mostly the lower classes (or their advocates) complaining about standardized testing not being equitable. And they have a point about biases (not having access to tutoring, or questions that rely on a middle class or better background to answer correctly). Many richer Chinese kids bypass the Gaokao completely and just take the much easier SAT/ACT to go to school in the states (or equivalent in other countries).
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    > or their advocates Not really their advocates, but upper middle class people giving themselves moral cover by saying they want to get rid of standardized test to help poor people. Really they want to make sure smart poor people cant out compete them.
    - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      I’m not sure where you are getting your info, but rich people do much better on standardized tests (ACT/SAT/GaoKao/etc…) then poor people given the resources they have available to prep for the tests. If you think these are equalizers for poor people (or that they think so), you are misidentifying the problem.