7 ms·

Grade inflation and bonus points for honors or AP classes has long made GPA a useless metric. One persons 4.0 is another school’s 4.27 (on a 4 point scale). Sta

by JCM9 3y ago

Grade inflation and bonus points for honors or AP classes has long made GPA a useless metric. One persons 4.0 is another school’s 4.27 (on a 4 point scale). Standardized testing isn’t perfect but it is one datapoint on how everyone did against the same task. Yes there can be differences in prep and training, but that’s life. Some folks will have more advantages than you. Those that work past that will succeed in life. That’s that don’t won’t.

Scubabear68 3y ago
Yep. Universities tried to track relative strength of GPA to school districts, but ultimately that is a hopeless task. Our own district has been guilty of severe grade inflation and teaching 2-3 grades behind grade level to the point where a “B” here would be a D or F in a college prep private school. Standardized tests are imperfect, but they are not entirely flawed the way high school grades are. This will also re level the playing field for poor families with smart kids who can’t afford all the extra-curricular wealthy families lean heavily into.
- bumby 3y ago
  This will also re level the playing field for poor families with smart kids who can’t afford all the extra-curricular wealthy families lean heavily into. Is this really leveling the playing field? If a wealthy, average student can get prep work to score as well as a gifted, poor student, that doesn’t seem like it’s leveling the playing field of socioeconomic disadvantage.
  - jhanschoo 3y ago
    Ime tuition is far more accessible than many extracurriculars, and has better feedback (assuming that standardized testing is the only metric).
  - Scubabear68 3y ago
    Maybe not perfectly level, but more so when colleges did not look at standardized test scores.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    the problem is what better idea do you have? the idea of favoring "holistic student" just selects for students who have the time, money, and parental support to juggle 2-3 extracurriculars in addition to sustained effort in classwork. it's goodhart's law in action: any measure that becomes a target will cease to become effective. for any metric you choose, a wealthy student will be able to deploy their familial resources to fiddle the metric, because that's literally what money is - "stored power and influence". My stored influence allows a pizza to appear at my door or a lawyer to appear to defend me, and it makes a violin and a tutor appear for your kids, if that's what the metric becomes. Wealthy families will always be able to fiddle something. The dirty truth is that a small, fixed, standardized exam is actually not a bad solution to that problem. Things that require sustained effort (grades) actually tend to bias towards wealthy families, as do extracurriculars and other "holistic metrics". Wealth buys all of those things. But getting a smart kid through a standardized test successfully actually is a much smaller, more equitable hurdle. The unpopular answer is that ultimately pretty much anyone short of the completely destitute can afford a couple hundred bucks for a month of test prep (and the book alone gets you most of the way there), and in the cases where that's not true it certainly isn't improved in those cases by requiring 6 years of violin lessons and 2 instruments etc. I mean think of it like a job interview... is it really fair to ask the applicant to do a big take-home assignment that takes a couple nights to complete? Now imagine that you have to start preparing in middle school, and your parents have to provide financial support while you do it. We all have this intuitive sense as developers that a short, deep interview is probably better, and that a long convoluted process is neither fair to the applicant nor particularly useful due to false negatives/etc. And in fact for many positions there is likely a fairly low "good-enough" bar where anyone reasonably competent is probably gonna be fine even if they're not hyperspecialized in the exact thing you're looking for. Honest question, if you are looking at this in the sense of "college as a hiring interview": if you want true equitability, isn't the best approach to "fizzbuzz and give an offer to anyone with no major red flags" (for whatever fizzbuzz/small task is appropriate for an interview question for your position)? Obviously college applications outnumber slots, but if you have 100k "qualified" applications for 25k slots, just give a slot to the top 10k and randomize acceptance for the other 15k? That kinda seems to be what people want for colleges, if you want a true "background-blind system" - cherrypick the best and then just give everyone else who has a reasonable chance of success an equal shot at admission. Otherwise you do end up in these "well candidate X is 82.3% likely to graduate but candidate Y is 82.4% likely to graduate" scenarios and effectively you are making decisions inside the margin of error. And that is the point where your parents' money comes into play - even a small edge helps you in a decision that is made on these super marginal factors.
  - swatcoder 3y ago
    It's not leveling the playing field among social classes, but it is leaving an official door open for individuals who have a knack for tests but lack the support resources of richer folk. That's better then a closed door, and is easier to audit and evaluate than informal "holistic" admissions that may carry all sorts of implicit and hard to detect biases of their own. I'm certainly glad it was a door open to me some decades ago. Truly leveling the playing field of society is probably not a thing that can happen.
    - bumby 3y ago
      I agree that it’s better than a closed door. But I don’t think the argument is between binary options. >easier to audit and evaluate This is where I think a lot of approaches go wrong. Because it’s easier doesn’t mean it’s the best or most meritocratic. At a certain point, it seems like we start optimizing to make HR personnel’s life easier, rather than the true outcome.
      - swatcoder 3y ago
        Not to say there's no better alternative being used somewhere, but "holistic" admissions practices often amount to rewarding nontraditional students who prove good at mimicking at WASP class signals or who fit some patronizing, objectifying trope. If you're aiming for meritocracy, those are not an improvement over standardized tests or prior academic acheivement (and neither are they doing a good job of culturing authentic, plurlistic diversity).
        bumby 3y ago
        Yeah, I wasn’t making a case for the current “holistic” approach
  - stevage 3y ago
    It's a big question. You could also argue that the poor student has an unfair advantage for being born with better intelligence, and the money is helping even that out.
    - Clamchop 3y ago
      You could but you shouldn't.
    - bumby 3y ago
      Sure. But it would also acknowledge we’re not optimizing for intellectual ability. Now which of these do you think most of society would have a problem with: 1) College should optimize admissions for intellect. 2) College ships optimize admissions for familial wealth.
      - stevage 3y ago
        You could also frame it as a dichotomy between rich kids money spent to either: 1. provide tutoring so they can go to university 2. Do something frivolous like learning to sail.
        bumby 3y ago
        But that implies the rich kid has the choice, no? That, in itself, is part of the disparity. This is such a weird, odd take to defend.
  - philwelch 3y ago
    You run into diminishing returns on test prep pretty fast. You obviously could blow thousands of dollars on a private test prep tutor but you’d be wasting your money compared to the poor kid with a $40 book grinding away at practice problems every night.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      I've worked as a teacher. I realized some kids really need people to help them learn. A book wont do them any good until they have figured out how to learn from books. Having a personal tutor if struggling is really helpful. There need to be this "click" moment.
      - westhanover 3y ago
        Learning styles and all of that associated nonsense have been definitely disproven, please stop perpetuating these harmful ideas.
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    Does prep work have that big of an effect? I don’t think it can make an average student beat a gifted one unless the gifted one completely phones it in.
  - meowtimemania 3y ago
    It's not perfect but IMO it's the best acceptance criteria available. The alternative is evaluating people based on subjective criteria like "well roundedness".
    - bumby 3y ago
      I think this is a false dichotomy. For example, we could also fund test prep programs for socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals.
      - rightbyte 3y ago
        It is graded on a curve. Raising the student body score on a synthetic measure is pointless. (Edit: You could argue "exam technique" is a good skill though, maybe?) But ye, since rich families buy prep courses it becomes an arms race, and poor kids need them too.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    The cost of test prep is a red herring. A test prep course is a couple of thousand dollars, a one-time expense per kid. From K-12, the school system will spend $150,000 or more on the same kid. If a $1,500 test pre course can teach anything a decade of schooling that costs the public $15,000-$25,000 a year can’t teach, then those test prep companies are working magic. And if $1,500 of test prep was really the difference, then it would be a no brainer to spend that money to level the playing field. In reality, the lack of level playing field comes from cultural capital. Americans see standardized testing as beneath them and don’t prepare for it. When my uncle came to America, he moved with his wife and two adult kids into a tiny 2BR apartment in a shitty part of Queens. But I’m sure they scrounged together the $1,500 for my cousin to prep for her GRE. Meanwhile, despite extensive prodding, my wife couldn’t get her younger siblings to study for the SAT. Both were much better of economically than my cousin, and could definitely afford a prep course, they just didn’t do it. It’s not clear to me what you can do to level the playing field in a way that’s actually fair. If you don’t have the cultural capital to know to study for a test, you sure as hell don’t have the cultural capital to know how to stand out in an admissions process based on soft factors. I spend $30,000 per year per kid to send my kids to a private school with old money Annapolis WASPs, precisely so they can get access to that cultural capital. It’s a terrible idea to make that sort of capital more important by reducing the emphasis on objective factors.
    - Scubabear68 3y ago
      You don’t need a prep course to do well in the SAT. I did quite well with no work at all beyond school work, and I know kids today where it’s the same. As others have indicated, you can just buy a prep book if you want and be done with it. The prep courses are just separating parents from their money.
      - rightbyte 3y ago
        You get way better result by practicing on old standardized tests before the real one. Preparation for those is the most value you can get from your time studying. I.e. study for the exam, not for what the SATs try to measure.
  - jononomo 3y ago
    I have been a standardized test coach and I can assure you that standardized tests are not as coachable as people think they are. Students plateau pretty quickly and you simply can't move their scores higher.
bumby 3y ago
>Yes, there can be differences in prep and training, but that’s life Some feel that we should be working towards evening out that playing field of opportunity. That doesn’t mean using standardizing is wrong, but that we shouldn’t be treating it as a panacea. It’s a brick in a bigger wall.
- slily 3y ago
  That's perfectly reasonable as long as you don't have unrealistic expectations, like thinking that differences can or must be completely eliminated, as if students are dolls we're playing with and don't have their own agency and varying abilities.

by JCM9 3y ago

Scubabear68 3y ago

Yep. Universities tried to track relative strength of GPA to school districts, but ultimately that is a hopeless task. Our own district has been guilty of severe grade inflation and teaching 2-3 grades behind grade level to the point where a “B” here would be a D or F in a college prep private school. Standardized tests are imperfect, but they are not entirely flawed the way high school grades are. This will also re level the playing field for poor families with smart kids who can’t afford all the extra-curricular wealthy families lean heavily into.

bumby 3y ago
This will also re level the playing field for poor families with smart kids who can’t afford all the extra-curricular wealthy families lean heavily into. Is this really leveling the playing field? If a wealthy, average student can get prep work to score as well as a gifted, poor student, that doesn’t seem like it’s leveling the playing field of socioeconomic disadvantage.
- jhanschoo 3y ago
  Ime tuition is far more accessible than many extracurriculars, and has better feedback (assuming that standardized testing is the only metric).
- Scubabear68 3y ago
  Maybe not perfectly level, but more so when colleges did not look at standardized test scores.
- paulmd 3y ago
  the problem is what better idea do you have? the idea of favoring "holistic student" just selects for students who have the time, money, and parental support to juggle 2-3 extracurriculars in addition to sustained effort in classwork. it's goodhart's law in action: any measure that becomes a target will cease to become effective. for any metric you choose, a wealthy student will be able to deploy their familial resources to fiddle the metric, because that's literally what money is - "stored power and influence". My stored influence allows a pizza to appear at my door or a lawyer to appear to defend me, and it makes a violin and a tutor appear for your kids, if that's what the metric becomes. Wealthy families will always be able to fiddle something. The dirty truth is that a small, fixed, standardized exam is actually not a bad solution to that problem. Things that require sustained effort (grades) actually tend to bias towards wealthy families, as do extracurriculars and other "holistic metrics". Wealth buys all of those things. But getting a smart kid through a standardized test successfully actually is a much smaller, more equitable hurdle. The unpopular answer is that ultimately pretty much anyone short of the completely destitute can afford a couple hundred bucks for a month of test prep (and the book alone gets you most of the way there), and in the cases where that's not true it certainly isn't improved in those cases by requiring 6 years of violin lessons and 2 instruments etc. I mean think of it like a job interview... is it really fair to ask the applicant to do a big take-home assignment that takes a couple nights to complete? Now imagine that you have to start preparing in middle school, and your parents have to provide financial support while you do it. We all have this intuitive sense as developers that a short, deep interview is probably better, and that a long convoluted process is neither fair to the applicant nor particularly useful due to false negatives/etc. And in fact for many positions there is likely a fairly low "good-enough" bar where anyone reasonably competent is probably gonna be fine even if they're not hyperspecialized in the exact thing you're looking for. Honest question, if you are looking at this in the sense of "college as a hiring interview": if you want true equitability, isn't the best approach to "fizzbuzz and give an offer to anyone with no major red flags" (for whatever fizzbuzz/small task is appropriate for an interview question for your position)? Obviously college applications outnumber slots, but if you have 100k "qualified" applications for 25k slots, just give a slot to the top 10k and randomize acceptance for the other 15k? That kinda seems to be what people want for colleges, if you want a true "background-blind system" - cherrypick the best and then just give everyone else who has a reasonable chance of success an equal shot at admission. Otherwise you do end up in these "well candidate X is 82.3% likely to graduate but candidate Y is 82.4% likely to graduate" scenarios and effectively you are making decisions inside the margin of error. And that is the point where your parents' money comes into play - even a small edge helps you in a decision that is made on these super marginal factors.
- swatcoder 3y ago
  It's not leveling the playing field among social classes, but it is leaving an official door open for individuals who have a knack for tests but lack the support resources of richer folk. That's better then a closed door, and is easier to audit and evaluate than informal "holistic" admissions that may carry all sorts of implicit and hard to detect biases of their own. I'm certainly glad it was a door open to me some decades ago. Truly leveling the playing field of society is probably not a thing that can happen.
  - bumby 3y ago
    I agree that it’s better than a closed door. But I don’t think the argument is between binary options. >easier to audit and evaluate This is where I think a lot of approaches go wrong. Because it’s easier doesn’t mean it’s the best or most meritocratic. At a certain point, it seems like we start optimizing to make HR personnel’s life easier, rather than the true outcome.
    - swatcoder 3y ago
      Not to say there's no better alternative being used somewhere, but "holistic" admissions practices often amount to rewarding nontraditional students who prove good at mimicking at WASP class signals or who fit some patronizing, objectifying trope. If you're aiming for meritocracy, those are not an improvement over standardized tests or prior academic acheivement (and neither are they doing a good job of culturing authentic, plurlistic diversity).
      - bumby 3y ago
        Yeah, I wasn’t making a case for the current “holistic” approach
- stevage 3y ago
  It's a big question. You could also argue that the poor student has an unfair advantage for being born with better intelligence, and the money is helping even that out.
  - Clamchop 3y ago
    You could but you shouldn't.
  - bumby 3y ago
    Sure. But it would also acknowledge we’re not optimizing for intellectual ability. Now which of these do you think most of society would have a problem with: 1) College should optimize admissions for intellect. 2) College ships optimize admissions for familial wealth.
    - stevage 3y ago
      You could also frame it as a dichotomy between rich kids money spent to either: 1. provide tutoring so they can go to university 2. Do something frivolous like learning to sail.
      - bumby 3y ago
        But that implies the rich kid has the choice, no? That, in itself, is part of the disparity. This is such a weird, odd take to defend.
- philwelch 3y ago
  You run into diminishing returns on test prep pretty fast. You obviously could blow thousands of dollars on a private test prep tutor but you’d be wasting your money compared to the poor kid with a $40 book grinding away at practice problems every night.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    I've worked as a teacher. I realized some kids really need people to help them learn. A book wont do them any good until they have figured out how to learn from books. Having a personal tutor if struggling is really helpful. There need to be this "click" moment.
    - westhanover 3y ago
      Learning styles and all of that associated nonsense have been definitely disproven, please stop perpetuating these harmful ideas.
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  Does prep work have that big of an effect? I don’t think it can make an average student beat a gifted one unless the gifted one completely phones it in.
- meowtimemania 3y ago
  It's not perfect but IMO it's the best acceptance criteria available. The alternative is evaluating people based on subjective criteria like "well roundedness".
  - bumby 3y ago
    I think this is a false dichotomy. For example, we could also fund test prep programs for socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      It is graded on a curve. Raising the student body score on a synthetic measure is pointless. (Edit: You could argue "exam technique" is a good skill though, maybe?) But ye, since rich families buy prep courses it becomes an arms race, and poor kids need them too.
- rayiner 3y ago
  The cost of test prep is a red herring. A test prep course is a couple of thousand dollars, a one-time expense per kid. From K-12, the school system will spend $150,000 or more on the same kid. If a $1,500 test pre course can teach anything a decade of schooling that costs the public $15,000-$25,000 a year can’t teach, then those test prep companies are working magic. And if $1,500 of test prep was really the difference, then it would be a no brainer to spend that money to level the playing field. In reality, the lack of level playing field comes from cultural capital. Americans see standardized testing as beneath them and don’t prepare for it. When my uncle came to America, he moved with his wife and two adult kids into a tiny 2BR apartment in a shitty part of Queens. But I’m sure they scrounged together the $1,500 for my cousin to prep for her GRE. Meanwhile, despite extensive prodding, my wife couldn’t get her younger siblings to study for the SAT. Both were much better of economically than my cousin, and could definitely afford a prep course, they just didn’t do it. It’s not clear to me what you can do to level the playing field in a way that’s actually fair. If you don’t have the cultural capital to know to study for a test, you sure as hell don’t have the cultural capital to know how to stand out in an admissions process based on soft factors. I spend $30,000 per year per kid to send my kids to a private school with old money Annapolis WASPs, precisely so they can get access to that cultural capital. It’s a terrible idea to make that sort of capital more important by reducing the emphasis on objective factors.
  - Scubabear68 3y ago
    You don’t need a prep course to do well in the SAT. I did quite well with no work at all beyond school work, and I know kids today where it’s the same. As others have indicated, you can just buy a prep book if you want and be done with it. The prep courses are just separating parents from their money.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      You get way better result by practicing on old standardized tests before the real one. Preparation for those is the most value you can get from your time studying. I.e. study for the exam, not for what the SATs try to measure.
- jononomo 3y ago
  I have been a standardized test coach and I can assure you that standardized tests are not as coachable as people think they are. Students plateau pretty quickly and you simply can't move their scores higher.

bumby 3y ago

>Yes, there can be differences in prep and training, but that’s life Some feel that we should be working towards evening out that playing field of opportunity. That doesn’t mean using standardizing is wrong, but that we shouldn’t be treating it as a panacea. It’s a brick in a bigger wall.

slily 3y ago
That's perfectly reasonable as long as you don't have unrealistic expectations, like thinking that differences can or must be completely eliminated, as if students are dolls we're playing with and don't have their own agency and varying abilities.