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I hate to burst your bubble but unfortunately this just kicks the can down the road. How do you measure merit? Because [EDIT] many measures of "merit" (was: s
by lisper 3y ago
I hate to burst your bubble but unfortunately this just kicks the can down the road. How do you measure merit? Because [EDIT] many measures of "merit" (was: standardized testing) can be (and often are) biased by race, cultural background, and economic status. For example:
Student 1 has built a fully automated chip manufacturing line in his basement.
Student 2 has build a robot that solves a maze in fifteen minutes (against the current state of the art which is a few seconds).
Which one would you admit?
Student 1 is the child of billionaires, and it's not clear how much of the work was actually done by him/her and how much was done by employees hired by the kid's parents.
Student 2 lives in Sudan and built their robot out of locally available materials, in the process inventing a new kind of motor built out of coconut fronds.
Now which one would you admit?
- endtime 3y agoHow is that an example of standardized testing?
- lisper 3y agoGood point. I've edited my comment.
- nashashmi 3y agoStudent 1. He has the resources needed to move ahead. And unless my university can provide self help to the motivated, student 2 may not work out well here.
- boeingUH60 3y agoIt’s as if you’re trying to make perfect the enemy of good. Standardized tests aren’t perfect but they give less privileged kids the best choice at attending a good college. The kids of the upper class and the rich will always have an upper hand compared to the poor. However, standardized tests limit how wide the upper hand is. An upper class kid still has to study and pass the test, and the poor kid can also do that. If admissions become “holistic”, poor kids would have little chances. Good luck to that poor kid competing subjectively with kids whose parents send them on impressive charity trips and get them unpaid internships at the most prestigious companies.
- lisper 3y agoI think you are underestimating the extent to which standardized tests can be (and have been) biased. https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/racist-beginnings-standardized-testing https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/racis...
- nancyhn 3y agoThat's soft bigotry of low expecations. All you have to do is look at data that includes Asian Americans, which is always conveniently omitted from these racist narratives. Even non-Americans routinely do better on American standardized tests.
- underlipton 3y agoIt is not. GP is saying that the "expectations" in question aren't as applicable to potential as they're purported to be. >Asian Americans, which is always conveniently omitted from these racist narratives. Ironically, so is the diversity of the Asian American community.
- MostlyStable 3y agoI think you're underestimating how biased literally every other possible metric of admissions can be.
- nradov 3y agoEveryone understands that standardized tests are biased. They are still the least bad way to identify students from underprivileged backgrounds who have high potential to succeed in college.
- jpadkins 3y agoI am someone, and I don't understand why they are. Do you have a primer handy on this subject?
- 3y ago
- coding123 3y agoS1 S1 definitely.
- zuzu89 3y agodepends on their race
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago> Now which one would you admit? Why not both? I think a lot of the debate over college admissions misses the fact that so much of this is artificial scarcity. Some of the big schools like Harvard/Yale/Princeton etc. could easily increase the size of their incoming classes many times, and still have them only be filled with highly qualified candidates. Top schools exist not just to educate, but to ensure that the social hierarchy is maintained. If it were purely to educate or to ensure diverse learning environments, the top Ivies could solve this easily by quadrupling the size of their classes, but then this would of course dilute the exclusivity that is the primary reason for these institutions in the first place.
- dfadsadsf 3y agoMagic that happens in top universities in US is combining money (kids of billionaires) with smarts (kids with 1600 SAT) in one place. Both bring different skills to the table and result is disproportionate share of top scientist, business and political leaders produced by those universities (from both classes of people). Removing either group from university will just lead to university stopping being elite. Considering that number of billionaires is measured in hundreds (so only a dozen or so kids of billionaires enter universities every year), university may just admit that one kid. On Student 2 who build something in Sudan from stick and rocks. Unless he is from elite family he most likely did not get proper school education and won't be able to keep up with rigors of studying in top university even if he is very smart. Harvard is not really in a business of providing remedial education. With that if he is really smart and resourceful, he had a very good chance of doing very well for himself in Sudan (becoming entrepreneour, building soemthing local, become warlord, etc) and then his kids will be fully equipped to go to top university.
- Brusco_RF 3y agoYeah I see this take all the time. Admissions offices are allowed to take a student's means into account! So in deciding between two students with equal SAT scores, one from a Greenwich private school and one from South Tucson, the one from Tucson is the more impressive student. Affirmative action was misguided because it assumed that because one student was Korean and the other Mexican, the Mexican kid must be disadvantaged. Besides the fact that there's an inherently racist worldview baked into that, Newsflash! There are tons of poor Korean kids and rich Mexicans!
- nancyhn 3y agoSpot on. I don't see why this is so hard for people to comprehend and why they are fighting the obvious. That very basic level of nuance tends to be missing from these conversations.
- infamouscow 3y ago> I don't see why this is so hard for people to comprehend and why they are fighting the obvious. It's because these people only see the world through the one-dimensional lens of skin color. Further, it's an attractive way to view the world when you're a complete idiot with nothing of substance to offer society. It leads these people to infecting society with parasitic and fallacious ideas that you see manifested in the extremes of both political parties.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- criddell 3y agoWhy is SAT score a good way to decide which student is more deserving of a spot? There should be some SAT score floor. But beyond that other factors should take over. If the floor is at n and two applicants appear - one with a score of 1.1n and the other 1.2n, I don’t think that’s enough information to decide who should get the spot.
- 3y ago
- moduspol 3y agoWe'll never have a perfect way to measure merit, but that doesn't justify the status quo. It would likely reject both students for a third student that checks the right intersectional boxes, even if coming from a more privileged upbringing than the other two students. We should be constantly improving our ways of measuring merit, not throwing up our hands and pretending it's meaningless to try.
- anon291 3y agoI'm confused here. Both facts are salient (what was built and under which circumstances was it built) to any discussion of merit. The main complaint I see here is that admissions committees should use as much information as possible, which I doubt anyone disagrees with. What is racist is someone saying 'Oh, student 2 is black, thus without any further information, I'm going to assume he's poor and from Sudan'. Case in point, we had a very wealthy black student in my college. This woman was not disadvantaged in any way, yet she played the race card all the time in order to claim a disadvantaged background. I'm talking about a family that would take their kids to France and England to summer. That level of wealth, yet framing all her accomplishments as if she came from the inner city. That's disingenuous, yet the (now-gone) affirmative action camp would have gladly taken her checking the 'African-American/Black' checkbox as a sign that all her accomplishments should be judged on a poor disadvantaged upbringing. How is that not racist?
- bluepod4 3y agoI believe that GP would admit the child of billionaires. People who promote the meritocracy myth have an agenda and are sticking to it. Do you really think you can change GP’s mind with logic?
- hnburnsy 3y agoIs this a need-blind or need-aware institution? If need-aware, does the admitting class have enough full pay to cover the costs of those needing scholarships (wouldn't want to actually tap into that tax-free endowment)? If they need more full pay, then S1, if there are already enough full pay, then S2.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jononomo 3y agostandardized tests are not biased.
- jononomo 3y agoWell, I'm getting down-voted even though I'm correct. This is one of the problems in our society generally -- people have decided that what they think is just must be correct because they assume that life is fair.
- rcme 3y agoI hate these types of arguments that create an extremely contrived example. If we’re making a choice between these two students, then you can’t really go wrong. But that’s not the choice being made.
- Apocryphon 3y agoWhat kind of child, even that of billionaires, wants to build an automated chip manufacturing line? Maybe in Minecraft. Or in Roblox.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]