6 ms·

Imagine what would happen if colleges fired their admissions departments, set aside all considerations of wealth and race, and had a database admit students wit

Imagine what would happen if colleges fired their admissions departments, set aside all considerations of wealth and race, and had a database admit students with a single query on a result of standardized test results ordered from highest score to lowest, accepting students in that order until the year's class was filled.

graphe 4y ago
Then we'd have heavy cramming, less fun, suicides and pressure like china south Korea or Japan. For better or worst.
rfrey 4y ago
Then you would have universities exclusively populated by people who are good at taking whatever type of standardized test you're administering.
- Telemakhos 4y ago
  Are you suggesting that having people capable of scoring well on exams of common necessities for college education, like mathematics and language skills, is not desirable? The SAT is not a trivia test: a student who can pass a test on math up through precalculus is going to get more value out of college than one who does not understand algebra and has to spend time in remediation. I would much prefer to have a university exclusively populated by people good at solving math problems and comprehending readings than by people selected for their "good vibes" and to fit a diversity quota.
  - jonnybgood 4y ago
    You didn’t address the comment you’re responding to. You won’t have students who are good at math and language skills. You’ll have students who are good at taking math and language skills standardized tests. Being good at math and being good at taking a math standardized test is two different things. A student can excel at math but be terrible at taking tests for many reasons. You’ll have bright students falling through the cracks if this was the only consideration for admission.
    - janalsncm 4y ago
      How do you know that this hypothetical student “excels” at math if their performance can’t be measured? Students can and are already given reasonable accommodations. Sure tests may be imperfect but I am highly skeptical of any claim that math test performance and academic math performance are not highly correlated.
      - matthewdgreen 4y ago
        At the levels we’re talking about, the difference between “perfect score” and “still excellent but imperfect score” can be down to one or two errors on the test, basically noise. Given the number of applicants and the willingness to drill testing skills, going by scores would eliminate anyone who makes a minor error. The ability to perform perfectly in high-stress situations is a useful (and learnable) skill - like the ability to win quiz games, or perform classical music at concert level - but it is not the same thing as academic potential. (As an aside: as an advisor of PhD students in computer science, I sometimes have to train students out of these habits. Research doesn’t happen if you’re used to getting the shallow answer more quickly, or if you’re afraid to be wrong.)
        janalsncm 4y ago
        Yes, and that’s one of the reasons why tests are imperfect. That doesn’t mean that introducing any additional variables is warranted, especially given their associated noise. GPA is garbage, for example, which is why I ignore it on resumes. If the test has unacceptably high variance as you mentioned, the solution is to make the test longer not discount it.
        matthewdgreen 4y ago
        I see no evidence that making tests longer will optimize for the variables that matter in academic performance (which are not 1-dimensional anyway) as opposed to simply optimizing for people who have poured resources into test preparation. You seem to be coming from the perspective that testing must be the best metric, and then trying to develop a methodology based on that assumption. Purely as a thought exercise: it might be helpful to start from the assumption that testing isn’t an option, and think about what you might do instead.
  - halostatue 4y ago
    I took the SAT decades ago, so the predictive nature of the SAT may have changed since — but I doubt that it has changed that much. At that time, the SAT was good at predicting the likely performance of a prospective college student … for one term. That’s it. I got an excellent score on my SAT (not a perfect score, but I thought that it was a bullshit measure — which, like all standardized testing, it is — so I didn’t care). I did well in my first term, and then not so well after that (I ended up doing fine in the end, but it took longer to get through a degree program because I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up; I think that Americans, by and large, put too much focus on going to university too early and we would be better served by an extra year of high school and/or a gap year). One other thing I remember from that time period is that a better predictor of overall success in school was NOBITH, the Number Of Bathrooms In The House. That is, socioeconomic indicators were a better predictor than anything else, including nonsense standardized tests like the SAT. And given that socioeconomic indicators are a better indicator, that is a strong indication that there’s seriously wasted potential at all levels of eduction because we mistakenly equate family socioeconomics with success in general.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
therealcamino 4y ago
What would happen is you'd still get a result shaped by wealth and race, just laundered through a layer of standardized testing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- graphe 4y ago
  Which races are barred from wealth?
  - l33t233372 4y ago
    The post didn’t say barred. It said “shaped by.” Because of various historical factors, BIPOC are surely disproportionately “barred from” wealth.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
jedberg 4y ago
That's how University of California admissions used to work for the most part. The formula was: Weighted GPA * 1000 + SAT Score + SAT II English + SAT II Math + max(remaining SAT II scores) Then they ordered everyone by that number, and if say they were offering 5000 kids admission, the top 2500 would automatically get an offer letter. Then they would work their way down the list reading essays and adding bonuses for things like growing up in a rural area or an underfunded district with fewer AP classes. They would then just keep admitting people until they hit 5000 offers. Then they got accused of racism because that process ended up overweighting Whites and Asians compared to the applicant pool for all the top schools. There is/was a lot of debate on why Whites and Asians did better, but when you dug in it turned out they tended to almost all be upper-middle class or wealthy. So basically it was wealth and systemic racism, masked by "standardized testing". Also it should be noted that wealthy people had a better chance at a higher weighted GPA because their schools offered more AP courses.
- neonsunset 4y ago
  This was going so well until the pivot in the last two paragraphs. Is admitting the most capable students unfair? It is inherently discriminatory based on their knowledge and ability, which seems is what people want, but it also means that having more resources to be better equipped aka better nurture, which tends to positively influence individual's prospects, is suddenly something many are not okay with? Obviously, the SAT tests are flawed one way or another. But then again, they don't care for students' superficial characteristics. If not that, then implied statement is very reminiscent to slogans used in USSR or during cultural revolution in China.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    > Is admitting the most capable students unfair? Are they actually the most capable students, or did they just have a better chance of getting higher scores on the arbitrary metrics chosen? And if so, why did they have a higher chance? There is a difference between better nurture and lack of opportunity. It's true, we shouldn't be correcting for lack of opportunity at the college admissions level, we should be doing it at the elementary level and younger. But it's a lot easier to correct it at the college admissions level, which is a good choke point in one's life path, so for now, that is where the focus is.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
thesausageking 4y ago
It would be a lot worse. Harvard could fill its classes 4x over with students with perfect SATs and GPAs. They would miss out on the ones who published ground breaking biology papers, wrote code for important open source projects, etc. It would also put a ton of pressure on high school students to get perfect scores, creating a ton more stress than they already have. And at the expense of much more valuable things they could be doing with their time. The current system has issues, but there are worse ways to do things.
- janalsncm 4y ago
  This suggests to me that the SAT isn’t hard enough then. That many students should not be able to get perfect scores. The number of high school or undergrads who wrote groundbreaking biology papers is vanishingly small, but you do raise a good point. There’s a chicken and egg problem. Because schools aren’t just weighting test scores (because the score is flawed) there is incentive to work on other, more subjective things.
  - l33t233372 4y ago
    > This suggests to me that the SAT isn’t hard enough then That’s tricky. In a massive country with many incredible students, it seems to me that it’s going to be possible for the top .1% of students to do as well as is possible on any reasonable exam. Do you disagree?
    - fallingknife 4y ago
      Then you have tiered exams. e.g. if you score >1500 on the SAT, you can take the harder SAT-2 which would be used for admissions to top schools.
      - juve1996 4y ago
        Diminishing returns, really. As you continually test the margins will get smaller and smaller and the outcomes won't change much. Someone scoring >1500 on the SAT will likely just as well graduate from ivy league as someone who scored 1550.
cm2187 4y ago
You are describing the French elitist educational system until maybe 15y ago. This counterintuitively resulted in very little diversity. There might be natural reasons for that but there were also clearly some perverse effects: because those exams became effectively competitive exams (fixed number of seats available), they require intense preparation in preparatory schools which became the educational equivalent of a 2-3y navy seal bootcamp (it's not enough to have good grades, you need the best grades). Teachers in poor area high schools were often unfamiliar and intimidated by this system (they didn't go through it themselves), and were actively discouraging good students from taking that path. Students not having educated parents who knew the system were not pushed to work really hard to get into, and survive that system either. And you ended up with 80%-90% of the kids in those colleges coming from families from similar colleges. Money wouldn't be a major factor, the top colleges and preparatory schools are free. Now the natural ratio shouldn't be 3-5% (elite college educated parent as % of general population), probably around 50-60%, certainly not 80-90%. For the past 15y, France has opted to break the thermometer instead, ie to bypass those exams for the majority of the recruitment, and to select students on file which grants them full latitude for subjectivity. I suspect they also nationalised the selection process of those preparatory schools (not super familiar with the latest developments). I think the main consequence is that those elite colleges will quickly lose their prestige, and it might actually be the unstated intention, i.e. converge to a german like education system where the name and prestige of the university matters little vs the profile of the student. It might be a good thing or perhaps it will just ruin the french educational system, it's hard to tell.
yterdy 4y ago
I think it would work better with a slight twist: set a reasonable score floor, run a lottery for everyone above it. Instead of giving the world to people who(se parents have paid to) optimize their studies to a particular test, everyone who proves a certain degree of capability has a chance. Students simply do their best, and fate and the RNG takes care of the rest. If it becomes a problem, that we're underserving too many bright and promising youth because too few are getting into Ivies under this regime... maybe create more Ivy-likes (Stanford says hi). And for anyone who thinks it's unfair: not anymore so than the parent lottery. And I think institutional acknowledgment of the role pure dumb luck plays in our lives would go a long way towards dispelling our inclination to actively punish people for acts of the cosmos and/or dysfunctional policy.

graphe 4y ago

Then we'd have heavy cramming, less fun, suicides and pressure like china south Korea or Japan. For better or worst.

rfrey 4y ago

Then you would have universities exclusively populated by people who are good at taking whatever type of standardized test you're administering.

Telemakhos 4y ago
Are you suggesting that having people capable of scoring well on exams of common necessities for college education, like mathematics and language skills, is not desirable? The SAT is not a trivia test: a student who can pass a test on math up through precalculus is going to get more value out of college than one who does not understand algebra and has to spend time in remediation. I would much prefer to have a university exclusively populated by people good at solving math problems and comprehending readings than by people selected for their "good vibes" and to fit a diversity quota.
- jonnybgood 4y ago
  You didn’t address the comment you’re responding to. You won’t have students who are good at math and language skills. You’ll have students who are good at taking math and language skills standardized tests. Being good at math and being good at taking a math standardized test is two different things. A student can excel at math but be terrible at taking tests for many reasons. You’ll have bright students falling through the cracks if this was the only consideration for admission.
  - janalsncm 4y ago
    How do you know that this hypothetical student “excels” at math if their performance can’t be measured? Students can and are already given reasonable accommodations. Sure tests may be imperfect but I am highly skeptical of any claim that math test performance and academic math performance are not highly correlated.
    - matthewdgreen 4y ago
      At the levels we’re talking about, the difference between “perfect score” and “still excellent but imperfect score” can be down to one or two errors on the test, basically noise. Given the number of applicants and the willingness to drill testing skills, going by scores would eliminate anyone who makes a minor error. The ability to perform perfectly in high-stress situations is a useful (and learnable) skill - like the ability to win quiz games, or perform classical music at concert level - but it is not the same thing as academic potential. (As an aside: as an advisor of PhD students in computer science, I sometimes have to train students out of these habits. Research doesn’t happen if you’re used to getting the shallow answer more quickly, or if you’re afraid to be wrong.)
      - janalsncm 4y ago
        Yes, and that’s one of the reasons why tests are imperfect. That doesn’t mean that introducing any additional variables is warranted, especially given their associated noise. GPA is garbage, for example, which is why I ignore it on resumes. If the test has unacceptably high variance as you mentioned, the solution is to make the test longer not discount it.
        matthewdgreen 4y ago
        I see no evidence that making tests longer will optimize for the variables that matter in academic performance (which are not 1-dimensional anyway) as opposed to simply optimizing for people who have poured resources into test preparation. You seem to be coming from the perspective that testing must be the best metric, and then trying to develop a methodology based on that assumption. Purely as a thought exercise: it might be helpful to start from the assumption that testing isn’t an option, and think about what you might do instead.
- halostatue 4y ago
  I took the SAT decades ago, so the predictive nature of the SAT may have changed since — but I doubt that it has changed that much. At that time, the SAT was good at predicting the likely performance of a prospective college student … for one term. That’s it. I got an excellent score on my SAT (not a perfect score, but I thought that it was a bullshit measure — which, like all standardized testing, it is — so I didn’t care). I did well in my first term, and then not so well after that (I ended up doing fine in the end, but it took longer to get through a degree program because I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up; I think that Americans, by and large, put too much focus on going to university too early and we would be better served by an extra year of high school and/or a gap year). One other thing I remember from that time period is that a better predictor of overall success in school was NOBITH, the Number Of Bathrooms In The House. That is, socioeconomic indicators were a better predictor than anything else, including nonsense standardized tests like the SAT. And given that socioeconomic indicators are a better indicator, that is a strong indication that there’s seriously wasted potential at all levels of eduction because we mistakenly equate family socioeconomics with success in general.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

therealcamino 4y ago

What would happen is you'd still get a result shaped by wealth and race, just laundered through a layer of standardized testing.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
graphe 4y ago
Which races are barred from wealth?
- l33t233372 4y ago
  The post didn’t say barred. It said “shaped by.” Because of various historical factors, BIPOC are surely disproportionately “barred from” wealth.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

jedberg 4y ago

That's how University of California admissions used to work for the most part. The formula was: Weighted GPA * 1000 + SAT Score + SAT II English + SAT II Math + max(remaining SAT II scores) Then they ordered everyone by that number, and if say they were offering 5000 kids admission, the top 2500 would automatically get an offer letter. Then they would work their way down the list reading essays and adding bonuses for things like growing up in a rural area or an underfunded district with fewer AP classes. They would then just keep admitting people until they hit 5000 offers. Then they got accused of racism because that process ended up overweighting Whites and Asians compared to the applicant pool for all the top schools. There is/was a lot of debate on why Whites and Asians did better, but when you dug in it turned out they tended to almost all be upper-middle class or wealthy. So basically it was wealth and systemic racism, masked by "standardized testing". Also it should be noted that wealthy people had a better chance at a higher weighted GPA because their schools offered more AP courses.

neonsunset 4y ago
This was going so well until the pivot in the last two paragraphs. Is admitting the most capable students unfair? It is inherently discriminatory based on their knowledge and ability, which seems is what people want, but it also means that having more resources to be better equipped aka better nurture, which tends to positively influence individual's prospects, is suddenly something many are not okay with? Obviously, the SAT tests are flawed one way or another. But then again, they don't care for students' superficial characteristics. If not that, then implied statement is very reminiscent to slogans used in USSR or during cultural revolution in China.
- jedberg 4y ago
  > Is admitting the most capable students unfair? Are they actually the most capable students, or did they just have a better chance of getting higher scores on the arbitrary metrics chosen? And if so, why did they have a higher chance? There is a difference between better nurture and lack of opportunity. It's true, we shouldn't be correcting for lack of opportunity at the college admissions level, we should be doing it at the elementary level and younger. But it's a lot easier to correct it at the college admissions level, which is a good choke point in one's life path, so for now, that is where the focus is.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

thesausageking 4y ago

It would be a lot worse. Harvard could fill its classes 4x over with students with perfect SATs and GPAs. They would miss out on the ones who published ground breaking biology papers, wrote code for important open source projects, etc. It would also put a ton of pressure on high school students to get perfect scores, creating a ton more stress than they already have. And at the expense of much more valuable things they could be doing with their time. The current system has issues, but there are worse ways to do things.

janalsncm 4y ago
This suggests to me that the SAT isn’t hard enough then. That many students should not be able to get perfect scores. The number of high school or undergrads who wrote groundbreaking biology papers is vanishingly small, but you do raise a good point. There’s a chicken and egg problem. Because schools aren’t just weighting test scores (because the score is flawed) there is incentive to work on other, more subjective things.
- l33t233372 4y ago
  > This suggests to me that the SAT isn’t hard enough then That’s tricky. In a massive country with many incredible students, it seems to me that it’s going to be possible for the top .1% of students to do as well as is possible on any reasonable exam. Do you disagree?
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    Then you have tiered exams. e.g. if you score >1500 on the SAT, you can take the harder SAT-2 which would be used for admissions to top schools.
    - juve1996 4y ago
      Diminishing returns, really. As you continually test the margins will get smaller and smaller and the outcomes won't change much. Someone scoring >1500 on the SAT will likely just as well graduate from ivy league as someone who scored 1550.

cm2187 4y ago

You are describing the French elitist educational system until maybe 15y ago. This counterintuitively resulted in very little diversity. There might be natural reasons for that but there were also clearly some perverse effects: because those exams became effectively competitive exams (fixed number of seats available), they require intense preparation in preparatory schools which became the educational equivalent of a 2-3y navy seal bootcamp (it's not enough to have good grades, you need the best grades). Teachers in poor area high schools were often unfamiliar and intimidated by this system (they didn't go through it themselves), and were actively discouraging good students from taking that path. Students not having educated parents who knew the system were not pushed to work really hard to get into, and survive that system either. And you ended up with 80%-90% of the kids in those colleges coming from families from similar colleges. Money wouldn't be a major factor, the top colleges and preparatory schools are free. Now the natural ratio shouldn't be 3-5% (elite college educated parent as % of general population), probably around 50-60%, certainly not 80-90%. For the past 15y, France has opted to break the thermometer instead, ie to bypass those exams for the majority of the recruitment, and to select students on file which grants them full latitude for subjectivity. I suspect they also nationalised the selection process of those preparatory schools (not super familiar with the latest developments). I think the main consequence is that those elite colleges will quickly lose their prestige, and it might actually be the unstated intention, i.e. converge to a german like education system where the name and prestige of the university matters little vs the profile of the student. It might be a good thing or perhaps it will just ruin the french educational system, it's hard to tell.

yterdy 4y ago

I think it would work better with a slight twist: set a reasonable score floor, run a lottery for everyone above it. Instead of giving the world to people who(se parents have paid to) optimize their studies to a particular test, everyone who proves a certain degree of capability has a chance. Students simply do their best, and fate and the RNG takes care of the rest. If it becomes a problem, that we're underserving too many bright and promising youth because too few are getting into Ivies under this regime... maybe create more Ivy-likes (Stanford says hi). And for anyone who thinks it's unfair: not anymore so than the parent lottery. And I think institutional acknowledgment of the role pure dumb luck plays in our lives would go a long way towards dispelling our inclination to actively punish people for acts of the cosmos and/or dysfunctional policy.