9 ms·

The whole "holistic review" crap should be banned. It was originally invented to reduce the number of Jewish people [1]. It is still being used for illegal or i

The whole "holistic review" crap should be banned. It was originally invented to reduce the number of Jewish people [1]. It is still being used for illegal or illicit discrimination of one kind or another. This article [2] says "holistic review" is subterfuge... it is how colleges make admission decisions based on factors they would rather not talk about. [1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit-reveals-how-peculiar-harvards-definition-of-merit-is https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-false-promise-of-holistic-college-admissions/282432/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-fa...

lr4444lr 4y ago
Holistic review can still exist on the basis of impartial factors subject to quantitative analysis. The strength of the SFFA case is that there's no way the numbers the public or perhaps even the plaintiffs have privileged access to can avoid reasonable doubt that quotas exist in the current system. That's why many top colleges have recently announced they will stop requiring SAT scores, because the data on their racial breakdown can be easily obtained.
- HyperSane 4y ago
  > many top colleges have recently announced they will stop requiring SAT scores What will they use instead? SAT scores do a good job of predicting success in college.
  - scarmig 4y ago
    In theory, other measures of student achievement: grades, extracurricular activities, personal statements, letters of recommendation. GPA by itself isn't terrible for this, though pairing it with test scores is an improvement over both it by itself and test scores by themselves for prediction of academic success in college. In practice: things that satisfy ideological goals and maximize fundraising outlook for the institution.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      According to a professor I know, the average quality/preparedness of students has dropped with the removal of the SAT where he teaches. A high SAT score was never going to get you accepted to a good school, but a low SAT score used to get you rejected. Removing that filter makes room for less objective measures (I know the SAT isn't particularly objective either) to get more weight.
      - scarmig 4y ago
        To be clear, I strongly oppose removal of SATs as a metric used to evaluate candidates. That said, there's a confounder here: schools which remove SATs as an admissions metric are schools that are looking for different things than academic preparedness/quality. It's likely that they're using methods and rubrics to deemphasize the predictive quality of GPAs as well. GPA is fairly objective (though less so than the SAT) and predictive (more so than the SAT) as a standard. Accounting for the courses taken and the high schools the courses are taught at, you could select a class purely based on grades that is highly qualified and prepared (and incidentally would also have high SAT scores; GPA and SAT are correlated). But a university removing the SAT from admissions is also likely to be trying deemphasize the component of GPA that's predictive of quality as well.
        pclmulqdq 4y ago
        To add one thing here: the professor in question is at a school in the top 20 worldwide. Almost every applicant had a basically perfect GPA from high school, but some of them had SAT scores that were 70th percentile or below. The SAT seems to "scale up" to that market much better than GPA as a predictor.
        scarmig 4y ago
        Right; GPA is a coarse representation of performance on coursework. A 4.0 at Stuy with coursework on real analysis and organic chemistry means something very different than a 4.0 at a struggling inner city public school where the hardest math class is Algebra 2. My point is more that universities can (and do!) create a different representation of coursework performance that accounts for rigor. But a university that eliminates the SAT is also likely intentionally making that representation less predictive of undergraduate performance to allow weighing of things more than preparedness/quality as indicated by grades. What makes SATs so important is that you get a very limited preparedness signal from kids with 4.0 at the crappy school; combining test scores with GPA allows for a selective school to get a much more meaningful signal for quality/preparedness. My motivation here is to push back against the scores alone are enough idea, though it's an understandable reaction to the people who by all appearances think quality/academic preparedness should be a secondary concern in admissions.
  - antiquark 4y ago
    DEI points will replace SAT scores. (DEI = Diversity, Equity, Inclusion).
    - klipt 4y ago
      Don't send your kids to extra math classes, send them to extra Spanish classes so they can plausibly tick the Hispanic box!
      - 908B64B197 4y ago
        You don't need to speak Spanish to be Hispanic! [0] [1] There are many White and Asian people who tick the Hispanic box, thanks to Hispanic-sounding names... Often at the suggestion of their high school counselor. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/why-dont-you-speak-spanish-for-julian-castro-and-millions-of-latinos-the-answer-is-not-so-simple/2019/07/14/681c13c6-a4c6-11e9-bd56-eac6bb02d01d_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/why-dont-... [1] https://www.thenation.com/article/society/latinidad-spanish-exclusionary/ https://www.thenation.com/article/society/latinidad-spanish-...
- onetimeusename 4y ago
  > quotas exist This is kind of a nitpick but the SFFA case doesn't try to argue that there are racial quotas, instead, they argue that whites, specifically, are admitted where Asians should be. This, despite whites being the only race that is accepted disproportionately less relative to their general population percentage. SFFA doesn't attempt to say anything about other racial categories but that Harvard has designed backdoors to admit whites at the expense of Asians. The case may not have any impact on racial quotas or affirmative action if it wins. If it wins, there will just be fewer white people admitted I assume.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
at-w 4y ago
I agree that much of their use of "holistic" factors is simple discrimination and should be illegal, but considering other non-academic factors (arguably including character) seems reasonable, if not necessary, given the intent of these schools to build future leaders in various fields. Quantitative measures can only give you so much information about a student. GPA is questionably useful past a point, where it starts to have more to do with grade inflation and gaming the system than differences in hard work or ability. That leaves the SAT, which is far more of a level playing field than things like extracurriculars or "personal statements" that also end up reflecting your social class and ability to play the admissions game more than ability. Yet admitting students based solely on a single standardized test seems to disincentivize working hard at other pursuits that may actually bring more to the classroom than slightly higher test scores.
- crop_rotation 4y ago
  If there is a magical way to gauge character in a short amount of time then sure, however I doubt most people will do any better than a coin flip when asked to predict the "character" of someone without having known the person deeply.
  - petilon 4y ago
    > If there is a magical way to gauge character in a short amount of time then sure This is key. Many universities that claim to do "holistic reviews" don't have the time or resources to actually do holistic reviews. University of Washington is an example. UW gives application reviewers 8 minutes per application. And who are these reviewers? Do they have the knowledge and experience to do a "holistic review" in 8 minutes, including reading essays and personal statements and so on? Nope! They hire grad students, retirees etc. to act as application reviewers [1]. [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...
  - kelipso 4y ago
    Character gauging is basically does the prospective student show enough characteristics that upper middle class people have.
chollida1 4y ago
> The whole "holistic review" crap should be banned. I'd very strongly disagree with this. If you just use grades then you are benefiting the rich to a very high degree. As the rich can pay any amount for tutors and the kids don't need to work, hence being able to use a far higher amount of their waking time for studying than someone who needs to work can. Other factors should be factored into admissions. But the moment you agree that grades alone should be the only determination of who you allow in then you are by definition back to holistic admittance requirements. How would you balance who to let in between a kid who has tutors and no job who gets higher marks than a kid who has to work to feed their family and has lower marks if you don't have a holistic review process? Grades alone just doesn't seem fair and would only make wealth inequality worse as the rich get richer and the poor would fall further behind.
- michaelt 4y ago
  You think they're using 'holistic review' to disadvantage the rich? A college that literally has a legacy admission policy?
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    You need to separate the types of rich. Yes, if your family is rich enough to name a Harvard building, you'll be in the legacy admissions pipeline, but for those who are merely upper middle class, they have a much higher chance of getting in via only test scores than those who don't have the means to hire outside tutors for their children.
    - HFguy 4y ago
      Legacy at top schools means if your parents went there, you are fast tracked to admissions. It matters a lot. More than test scores. If you are in that group, you have way higher chance of admission. TBC, you still need high test scores. The point here is that good test scores and grades prob won’t get you in today unless you are legacy or a preferred group.
- scarmig 4y ago
majormajor 4y ago
It's a hard problem and anyone who says it's easy (including "just look at SAT/GPA!!") shouldn't be taken seriously. The problem with SAT, GPA is that once everyone knows what you're measuring, they optimize for that measure, and it loses its meaning. Of ten kids with no particular extra tutoring over what they got in their average public school, SAT and GPA are going to tell you a lot about underlying aptitude. Have one of those kid's parents send the kid to a bunch of extra tutoring, and it ruins the ability to do the comparison. Have every kid get all that exact same level of tutoring and it's back to an even playing field, but you've managed to ruin everyone's childhood. And you might've beaten a lot of creativity and other useful-for-real-life but less useful for mass-produced-college-education skills out of them. Today we're somewhere in between - well-off kids often get the helicopter-parent-study-to-the-test short-term-maximization childhood; less well-off ones do not. So you need a new metric, or some secret sauce, but the secret sauce is only useful if it's secret. And if it's secret, it's hard to tell if it's legitimately trying to value the right things... If we were starting schools greenfield it might make sense to just let them all do whatever they want, and then see how their graduates do, but... we're saddled with a lot of legacy shit from existing wealth, past wrongs, etc, that make that real tough. And then some people put crazy expectations on colleges to do things like fix those historical problems, too, when in reality so much damage to some kids prospects are done WAY earlier: https://crookedtimber.org/2023/02/06/can-college-level-the-playing-field-no-it-really-cant/ https://crookedtimber.org/2023/02/06/can-college-level-the-p...
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  How much does tutoring raise an SAT score typically?
- tomsthumb 4y ago
  The impact of test prep is commonly overstated. According to Washington Post and Slate, both being rather progressive, SAT prep might improve scores 10-20 points on average, with greater effect on the math section. There is a paper on the ACT website suggesting 30-60 points. Downward adjustments for high performing demographics can be double that. A cup of coffee would probably see similar or better improvements than test prep. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/09/can-coaching-truly-boost-sat-scores-for-years-the-college-board-said-no-now-it-says-yes/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/... https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-they-work-bias.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the... https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/R1710-investigating-test-prep-impact-2018-07.pdf https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/R171...

lr4444lr 4y ago

Holistic review can still exist on the basis of impartial factors subject to quantitative analysis. The strength of the SFFA case is that there's no way the numbers the public or perhaps even the plaintiffs have privileged access to can avoid reasonable doubt that quotas exist in the current system. That's why many top colleges have recently announced they will stop requiring SAT scores, because the data on their racial breakdown can be easily obtained.

HyperSane 4y ago
> many top colleges have recently announced they will stop requiring SAT scores What will they use instead? SAT scores do a good job of predicting success in college.
- scarmig 4y ago
  In theory, other measures of student achievement: grades, extracurricular activities, personal statements, letters of recommendation. GPA by itself isn't terrible for this, though pairing it with test scores is an improvement over both it by itself and test scores by themselves for prediction of academic success in college. In practice: things that satisfy ideological goals and maximize fundraising outlook for the institution.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    According to a professor I know, the average quality/preparedness of students has dropped with the removal of the SAT where he teaches. A high SAT score was never going to get you accepted to a good school, but a low SAT score used to get you rejected. Removing that filter makes room for less objective measures (I know the SAT isn't particularly objective either) to get more weight.
    - scarmig 4y ago
      To be clear, I strongly oppose removal of SATs as a metric used to evaluate candidates. That said, there's a confounder here: schools which remove SATs as an admissions metric are schools that are looking for different things than academic preparedness/quality. It's likely that they're using methods and rubrics to deemphasize the predictive quality of GPAs as well. GPA is fairly objective (though less so than the SAT) and predictive (more so than the SAT) as a standard. Accounting for the courses taken and the high schools the courses are taught at, you could select a class purely based on grades that is highly qualified and prepared (and incidentally would also have high SAT scores; GPA and SAT are correlated). But a university removing the SAT from admissions is also likely to be trying deemphasize the component of GPA that's predictive of quality as well.
      - pclmulqdq 4y ago
        To add one thing here: the professor in question is at a school in the top 20 worldwide. Almost every applicant had a basically perfect GPA from high school, but some of them had SAT scores that were 70th percentile or below. The SAT seems to "scale up" to that market much better than GPA as a predictor.
        scarmig 4y ago
        Right; GPA is a coarse representation of performance on coursework. A 4.0 at Stuy with coursework on real analysis and organic chemistry means something very different than a 4.0 at a struggling inner city public school where the hardest math class is Algebra 2. My point is more that universities can (and do!) create a different representation of coursework performance that accounts for rigor. But a university that eliminates the SAT is also likely intentionally making that representation less predictive of undergraduate performance to allow weighing of things more than preparedness/quality as indicated by grades. What makes SATs so important is that you get a very limited preparedness signal from kids with 4.0 at the crappy school; combining test scores with GPA allows for a selective school to get a much more meaningful signal for quality/preparedness. My motivation here is to push back against the scores alone are enough idea, though it's an understandable reaction to the people who by all appearances think quality/academic preparedness should be a secondary concern in admissions.
- antiquark 4y ago
  DEI points will replace SAT scores. (DEI = Diversity, Equity, Inclusion).
  - klipt 4y ago
    Don't send your kids to extra math classes, send them to extra Spanish classes so they can plausibly tick the Hispanic box!
    - 908B64B197 4y ago
      You don't need to speak Spanish to be Hispanic! [0] [1] There are many White and Asian people who tick the Hispanic box, thanks to Hispanic-sounding names... Often at the suggestion of their high school counselor. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/why-dont-you-speak-spanish-for-julian-castro-and-millions-of-latinos-the-answer-is-not-so-simple/2019/07/14/681c13c6-a4c6-11e9-bd56-eac6bb02d01d_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/why-dont-... [1] https://www.thenation.com/article/society/latinidad-spanish-exclusionary/ https://www.thenation.com/article/society/latinidad-spanish-...
onetimeusename 4y ago
> quotas exist This is kind of a nitpick but the SFFA case doesn't try to argue that there are racial quotas, instead, they argue that whites, specifically, are admitted where Asians should be. This, despite whites being the only race that is accepted disproportionately less relative to their general population percentage. SFFA doesn't attempt to say anything about other racial categories but that Harvard has designed backdoors to admit whites at the expense of Asians. The case may not have any impact on racial quotas or affirmative action if it wins. If it wins, there will just be fewer white people admitted I assume.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

at-w 4y ago

I agree that much of their use of "holistic" factors is simple discrimination and should be illegal, but considering other non-academic factors (arguably including character) seems reasonable, if not necessary, given the intent of these schools to build future leaders in various fields. Quantitative measures can only give you so much information about a student. GPA is questionably useful past a point, where it starts to have more to do with grade inflation and gaming the system than differences in hard work or ability. That leaves the SAT, which is far more of a level playing field than things like extracurriculars or "personal statements" that also end up reflecting your social class and ability to play the admissions game more than ability. Yet admitting students based solely on a single standardized test seems to disincentivize working hard at other pursuits that may actually bring more to the classroom than slightly higher test scores.

crop_rotation 4y ago
If there is a magical way to gauge character in a short amount of time then sure, however I doubt most people will do any better than a coin flip when asked to predict the "character" of someone without having known the person deeply.
- petilon 4y ago
  > If there is a magical way to gauge character in a short amount of time then sure This is key. Many universities that claim to do "holistic reviews" don't have the time or resources to actually do holistic reviews. University of Washington is an example. UW gives application reviewers 8 minutes per application. And who are these reviewers? Do they have the knowledge and experience to do a "holistic review" in 8 minutes, including reading essays and personal statements and so on? Nope! They hire grad students, retirees etc. to act as application reviewers [1]. [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...
- kelipso 4y ago
  Character gauging is basically does the prospective student show enough characteristics that upper middle class people have.

chollida1 4y ago

> The whole "holistic review" crap should be banned. I'd very strongly disagree with this. If you just use grades then you are benefiting the rich to a very high degree. As the rich can pay any amount for tutors and the kids don't need to work, hence being able to use a far higher amount of their waking time for studying than someone who needs to work can. Other factors should be factored into admissions. But the moment you agree that grades alone should be the only determination of who you allow in then you are by definition back to holistic admittance requirements. How would you balance who to let in between a kid who has tutors and no job who gets higher marks than a kid who has to work to feed their family and has lower marks if you don't have a holistic review process? Grades alone just doesn't seem fair and would only make wealth inequality worse as the rich get richer and the poor would fall further behind.

michaelt 4y ago
You think they're using 'holistic review' to disadvantage the rich? A college that literally has a legacy admission policy?
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  You need to separate the types of rich. Yes, if your family is rich enough to name a Harvard building, you'll be in the legacy admissions pipeline, but for those who are merely upper middle class, they have a much higher chance of getting in via only test scores than those who don't have the means to hire outside tutors for their children.
  - HFguy 4y ago
    Legacy at top schools means if your parents went there, you are fast tracked to admissions. It matters a lot. More than test scores. If you are in that group, you have way higher chance of admission. TBC, you still need high test scores. The point here is that good test scores and grades prob won’t get you in today unless you are legacy or a preferred group.
scarmig 4y ago

majormajor 4y ago

It's a hard problem and anyone who says it's easy (including "just look at SAT/GPA!!") shouldn't be taken seriously. The problem with SAT, GPA is that once everyone knows what you're measuring, they optimize for that measure, and it loses its meaning. Of ten kids with no particular extra tutoring over what they got in their average public school, SAT and GPA are going to tell you a lot about underlying aptitude. Have one of those kid's parents send the kid to a bunch of extra tutoring, and it ruins the ability to do the comparison. Have every kid get all that exact same level of tutoring and it's back to an even playing field, but you've managed to ruin everyone's childhood. And you might've beaten a lot of creativity and other useful-for-real-life but less useful for mass-produced-college-education skills out of them. Today we're somewhere in between - well-off kids often get the helicopter-parent-study-to-the-test short-term-maximization childhood; less well-off ones do not. So you need a new metric, or some secret sauce, but the secret sauce is only useful if it's secret. And if it's secret, it's hard to tell if it's legitimately trying to value the right things... If we were starting schools greenfield it might make sense to just let them all do whatever they want, and then see how their graduates do, but... we're saddled with a lot of legacy shit from existing wealth, past wrongs, etc, that make that real tough. And then some people put crazy expectations on colleges to do things like fix those historical problems, too, when in reality so much damage to some kids prospects are done WAY earlier: https://crookedtimber.org/2023/02/06/can-college-level-the-playing-field-no-it-really-cant/ https://crookedtimber.org/2023/02/06/can-college-level-the-p...

rufus_foreman 4y ago
How much does tutoring raise an SAT score typically?
tomsthumb 4y ago
The impact of test prep is commonly overstated. According to Washington Post and Slate, both being rather progressive, SAT prep might improve scores 10-20 points on average, with greater effect on the math section. There is a paper on the ACT website suggesting 30-60 points. Downward adjustments for high performing demographics can be double that. A cup of coffee would probably see similar or better improvements than test prep. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/09/can-coaching-truly-boost-sat-scores-for-years-the-college-board-said-no-now-it-says-yes/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/... https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-they-work-bias.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the... https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/R1710-investigating-test-prep-impact-2018-07.pdf https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/R171...