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Harvard will require test scores for admission again

105 points by msravi 2y ago

nonethewiser 2y ago
There are some very bad ideas very deep in education. Always encouraging to see some reversal.
- bitcharmer 2y ago
  True, wasn't this move away from meritocracy dictated by the nonsensical critical race theory? Academia and its policies should be driven by science and not feelings. It's a good sign that they turned around on this.
  - giraffe_lady 2y ago
    What is critical race theory? What does science say about who should get into which schools?
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    > True, wasn’t this move away from meritocracy dictated by the nonsensical critical race theory? No, this was dictated by exigencies of the COVID pandemic. Critical race theory doesn’t dictate any policies. > Academia and its policies should be driven by science and not feelings. All policies are driven by feelings; science can tell you what is, and how to achieve a given goal, but it takes values/preferences – which, ultimately, are feelings – to have goals in the first place.
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ubj 2y ago
MIT did this a few years ago, and their analysis of the benefits of standardized testing is worth a read: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our-sat-act-requirement-for-future-admissions-cycles/ https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...
- ghaff 2y ago
  Two main points: - If you don't hit some level of Math score, that's sort of a red flag that you'll struggle with at least calculus and physics right off the bat. - If you have strong SATs, that's also a flag that you may be worth a deeper look even if you don't have other things on your resume that jump out, possibly for socioeconomic reasons.
  - sgift 2y ago
    For someone not from the US: From the second point I understand that the SAT is not the only thing used to decide who gets in? So, it's not "we have 100 slots this year, the 100 best get in"? What else is used?
    - ghaff 2y ago
      High school grades/class rank. And then (at least this is how MIT used to do it although I'm sure most schools have some variant of the process) you have all the qualitative stuff on the other axis: letters of recommendation, interview, high school activities, sports, other types of projects, etc. I expect very few schools just mechanically admit based on SATs.
      - Filligree 2y ago
        Sports? What does sports have to do with schooling?
        ghaff 2y ago
        (Even leaving aside schools that are admitting athletes for their sports programs) they require hard work, dedication, teamwork, etc.
a2tech 2y ago
Probably the best to ensure high quality students are admitted. I think the idea of non-test admission is interesting and has merits, but looking at people I know and their kids performance and where they're going...not great for the schools.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  I have always considered testing the least worst option. Rich kids might get some advantage, but they will get those advantage and more in any system. Pure lottery combined with auction might be the fairest solution. The rich paying for the rest...
- janoc 2y ago
  The problem is that tests do not ensure that high quality students are admitted. Tests measure only that you are good at answering tests under heavy stress and at cramming for them. The whole teaching/learning to test thing - you don't learn to be able to understand and practically use the knowledge but cram to pass the tests and will usually promptly forget most you have "learned" in this way after the tests are over. Not really a lot more. There are plenty of very good students that are just terrible at tests - either because they don't cope well with time pressure or because they learn in a different way and standardized testing is unable to capture that because of its "least common denominator" focus. And don't get me started on people with very common disabilities like dyslexia or dyscalculia - neither of which has anything to do with intellect and sufferers of either can be excellent students. However, they will fail horribly at any kind of standardized testing. So it is only a cheap to administer and easy to evaluate (just count the points) proxy for actual performance and knowledge that are much harder to objectively assess. But a very poor one. And then there are the various sports stipendia and legacy admissions and ... that basically bypass the entire process as long as you are either good at football/whatever or been born to a well to do alumni family. Let's call tests what they are - a cheap and somewhat objective filter to fit the large amount of applicants to the much smaller amount of available places. And don't delude ourselves it has anything to do with quality. (I am a former university teacher and have done a specialized course in university pedagogy, including assessment)
  - 2y ago
brodouevencode 2y ago
How interesting is it that the institutions that lead the world flip-flop so easily on public perception and not on values and principals.
- ketchupdebugger 2y ago
  just like how a public company have share holders, an institution like Harvard have donors. They have to listen or else their source would dry up.
  - fullshark 2y ago
    I'm pretty sure Harvard's endowment will thrive even if the donors go to zero. Harvard is more interested in prestige and public perception. That is their currency.
    - vondur 2y ago
      I see that Harvard's endowment is currently around 50 billion dollars. I suppose with good investments that could last for a long time, provided that Harvard doesn't need to dip into it to fund daily operations. Harvard's annual budget currently is around 5 billion per year.
  - dgacmu 2y ago
    I can't speak for Harvard, but I can address my own university: The pressure to resume using test scores came from the faculty, because we observed that there were an unusually high number of students admitted who were failing the math (and math-y) courses. We want people to succeed in our classes, not enter and fail out. No donors involved. It doesn't seem like a bad experiment to have tried, but the results were negative and bad for the students, so time to back it out.
    - mathgradthrow 2y ago
      Public institutions get paid the full amount by everyone who receives a degree. Failing out is a discount that the school administrators don't want to offer. For instance we're instructed by admin to never encourage students to pursue mathematics. They "must" be funneled through an academic advisor, who can establish whether or not this is worth the financial risk of them potentially failing. This is regularly presented as "improving equity".
darth_avocado 2y ago
But will it fix legacy admissions?
londons_explore 2y ago
AKA... Everyone must submit this info, and we reserve the right to ignore it to get the outcomes we want.
- CogitoCogito 2y ago
  That’s how admissions used to be run. No single aspect of an application ever guaranteed admission.
  - cvadict 2y ago
    That’s how admissions used to be run ish... TBF, now you have to do an additional secret indirection dance to get around the Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action.
timmg 2y ago
I, personally, grew up in a small, (lower-ish) middle-class mid-western town with below-average (I think!) schools. I did not get good grades (I just didn't care that much). But I got really good test scores. So I got into a pretty decent (state) school with a legit engineering program. One could argue that my lack of grades is a good reason for me to not get into a good school. But without the tests, I definitely wouldn't have. I shutter to think how my career/life would be different had I not gotten into a decent school. So, at least for me, I have a real affection for these kinds of tests. And, as far as I know, I think the US is like the only place that doesn't use tests as the primary decider for higher education. It seems like the move away from testing was "not based on science". Though it was sometimes couched that way. I'm glad to see sanity (and science) prevail. But it all seems very fragile to me right now.
- bko 2y ago
  I think standardized tests correlate very highly (perhaps highest of any measure) to performance. I regularly see schools in the US with a 10% math proficiency and 40% literacy proficiency with a 99% graduation rate. What's up with that? Standardized tests are the most fair and simplest way to evaluate students. Plus gaming the test is what exactly? Hiring a tutor and spending hours studying, much of it alone? And it's not a shock that success on studying and doing well on exams correlates to college where you're evaluated on how well you study and do on exams It reminds me of that Key and Peele sketch where they're planning a long con bank heist but by the end it's obvious they're just working a job and saving for retirement https://youtu.be/jgYYOUC10aM?si=uiceINWHRRf3brZ5 https://youtu.be/jgYYOUC10aM?si=uiceINWHRRf3brZ5
  - ghaff 2y ago
    You probably want to do some test prep but you can do that with a test prep book at your local library. Years ago, in a grad course of some sort, we looked at some papers of predicting performance in school. Basically, even at the grad level, GMATs were far and away the best predictor of academic performance, followed by undergrad grades. Things like letters of recommendation were pretty worthless.
  - 2y ago
red_admiral 2y ago
I'm afraid the scientific evidence is so strong, that I personally lump the "SAT scores don't predict anything!" crowd in the same bucket as the "Covid isn't real!" and "AIDS is caused by gay!" crowds. As Harvard said in the article: yes, the tests may have some bias, but every other measure suggested so far to replace them --- especially "personal statements" --- has an even higher bias.
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- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  It's not that SAT scores don't predict anything, it's perhaps the case that the very loud signal it provides will overwhelmingly favor those with more resources. Using the SAT as the sole or primary factor for selection means that we are going to end up widening the wealth gap over the long run. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be used, but that if we want to converge towards a more egalitarian society, then these institutions also need to properly weigh other factors when selecting candidates and also provide more support to students from less advantageous backgrounds and with less resources.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    > It’s not that SAT scores don’t predict anything, it’s perhaps the case that the very loud signal it provides will overwhelmingly favor those with more resources. The problem is that most of the alternative measures, which not using test scores make more prominent, also do this, some much more than test scores. Personal statements were particularly mentioned upthread, but looking at grades does this, too (and doing it in combination with looking at what classes were taken does so even more), looking at extracurriculars favors resources probably more than any other factor typically examined in admissions (though personal statements are in the running here, too.) Standardized test scores may be the least problematic factor commonly used in admissions.
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yasp 2y ago
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- dang 2y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Bostonian 2y ago
Harvard won't admit it, but I think it's likely that when schools like Dartmouth and Yale reinstated the SAT or ACT for admissions, Harvard did not want to look less academically selective than them.
alchemist1e9 2y ago
MIT has a limited number of seats to receive possibly the best education in the world. The idea that anything but merit and quantitative assessment of such should be used to fill those seats is self destructive to a society. Next they should remove all collection of race information, just as it is illegal in France to ask your race or ethnicity for anything. If it means 75% of the seats are Asian-Americans so be it. The overall cost to society of not educating the most skilled for the future far outweighs any so called diversity virtues. Sorry to be blunt. I’m expecting the downvotes and perhaps even ban/block/retaliation for my “incorrect” views. I don’t care anymore if you are offended by opinions that don’t agree with your belief systems.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I guess I just don't agree that a university--and its students--is best-served by just lazily admitting the top scores on a single standardized test and ignoring everything else. But, yes, that's probably a different belief system than the one you have.
  - alchemist1e9 2y ago
    Obviously not only a single standardize test is needed, your projects, extracurriculars, all relevant to a cold quantitative analysis of a candidate’s ability to perform and receive the highly advanced education. Do you need someone’s racial and ethnic background as part of that process? why? for what purpose? diversity of backgrounds is supposedly the value it provides, I understand the argument but don’t agree with it.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      A lot of the things you list are not "cold quantitative analysis." I don't have strong feelings about considering racial/ethnic data but I expect a lot of qualitative factors would end up being racial/ethnic proxies.
- _ish1 2y ago
  Let's say you have a Black student and a white student that have the exact same everything on their application. I feel like it makes sense to admit the Black student, because it is very likely that they have persevered more.
chatmasta 2y ago
They’re still only marginally useful because the SAT is too easy. Harvard has enough applicants with 99 percentile scores to fill their incoming class multiple times over.
- function_seven 2y ago
  But if they're not looking at test scores, then they start admitting 80th-percentile applicants without knowing it. Applicants that got help writing their personal statements, or padded their time in high school with the "right" extracurriculars. The ones who have a 4.5 GPA because grades don't mean shit anymore. Plenty of high school graduates have the 4.5 GPA and a snazzy personal statement and all the right "add-ons", but aren't actually equipped to succeed at Harvard. The SAT is plenty useful to evaluate that.
  - chatmasta 2y ago
    Agreed. That’s why I called them “marginally” useful - they’re an additional datapoint but not useful as the primary discriminator (pun intended).
- ausbah 2y ago
  maybe these gigantic institutions with billions and billions in endowment and reputation should use those resources to expand access to their school instead keeping access as low as possible
  - ghaff 2y ago
    You mean like MOOCs? And there's the Harvard Extension School. But many people want the "real" degrees.
  - gottorf 2y ago
    > keeping access as low as possible That's a feature, not a bug. If everyone has a Harvard degree, nobody has a Harvard degree. A lot of the worth of one derives from its exclusivity, and the cream of the crop you meet there because of that exclusivity. I'd posit that the difference in the quality of the education itself received between Harvard and a good state school isn't worth talking about.
bobse 2y ago
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Ajay-p 2y ago
I think this is the right step forward, again, but we should work very hard to make the tests as unbiased as they can be. They are not perfect but they are a reliable measurement, especially as the creators have gotten better at removing hidden biases.
- bushbaba 2y ago
  Society is biased, and universities prepare students to be successfull in the real world. While yes we should all remove hidden biases where possible, but we also need to be cognizant of some of those biases to BE successful.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    > Society is biased, and universities prepare students to be successfull in the real world. So, if any bias, they should admit with counter-to-general-society biases, since those who satisfy the biases of the general society don’t need preparation. (Unless the goal is to just appear to be preparing people for success while doing nothing, in which case having biases aligned with those of the general society is the ideal strategy: pick the people that were going to succeed no matter what, and claim credit for preparing them.)
    - waterhouse 2y ago
      > pick the people that were going to succeed no matter what, and claim credit for preparing them. I do think this is what lots of schools do. I mean, "the best people available" will be roughly identical with "the pool of people that contains the highest fraction of those who would succeed no matter what". And if your alumni are successful, then you claim credit. Why not? (I've occasionally seen people attempt to calculate "value added", but completely accounting for selection effects is difficult.) And, by the way, just because someone would have succeeded no matter what doesn't mean you can't increase their success. It's plausible that some highly-driven highly-competent genius would have ended up becoming a top engineer going to school X, but would have co-founded a billion-dollar company going to school Y, due to some combination of getting a somewhat better education and meeting the right people. So the value proposition may be real.
BenFranklin100 2y ago
Pro tip: don’t hire recent Harvard grads. Between the legacy admissions and affirmative action the S/N is too low to justify the salary demands. I’ve always had a better return on my dollar with a good candidate from a state school. Better work ethic too.
- FourHand451 2y ago
  I couldn't help but hear this in my head in the voice of Montgomery Burns.
  - BenFranklin100 2y ago
    Excellent.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  State school here: the Harvard grad is lower variance. If you need to reliably fill roles with people who won’t embarrass you, they’re polished and predictable. If you’re looking for diamonds, they certainly are more frequent among the Ivy League graduates, but you’ll pay up for them unlike sifting for them in the rough.
  - busterarm 2y ago
    The absolute best software engineers that I've ever worked with most typically have music degrees, by a wide margin. Next most typically they went to Waterloo and then MIT, RIT or CMU. Next group are the self taught ones and then everywhere else.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Waterloo The fact that Waterloo maintains a monopoly on its internship/coop model blows my mind every year we do recruiting.
      - busterarm 2y ago
yedava 2y ago
There seems to be quite a bit of outrage against the idea that merit doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. Let's consider the times when these institutions have had meritocratic admissions. What exactly have the meritorious students from these institutions contributed to society? The primary accomplishment is that they've engineered a corporate take over of society. The 2008 financial crisis, the tech driven surveillance society, all came from the talented minds of the merited elite. So it is any surprise that there is support for the idea that merit is a meaningless idea? The gifted class hasn't made life any better for the rest of the society.
- bjornsing 2y ago
  Meritocracy is a lot like how Winston Churchill described democracy: the worst of all systems, until you consider the alternatives. What’s your alternative? Hereditary aristocracy?
  - ProfessorLayton 2y ago
    Considering the biggest predictor of academic success is wealth, it's difficult to square admissions to top schools as a "meritocracy". The root of the problem here is the vast wealth inequality, and the way schools are funded via property taxes — something with a lot of problems and bias on its own. One way to address some of this is to properly fund all public schools so academic success isn't largely a tossup of where one's parents could afford to live. Trying to correct for this at the admissions level is a divisive and bandaid solution.
    - sickofparadox 2y ago
      Baltimore City schools are just another few thousand per student away from producing a student body GPA above 2.0!
      - ProfessorLayton 2y ago
        There's a lot more to this issue than school funding, but teaching as a profession should pay for a solid middle class life to attract the best talent. Could we at least agree on that?
BWStearns 2y ago
I'm happy to see testing come back, might give school another look in a couple years when more follow suit. I was looking at applying to grad schools last year. I've been out of school for, uh, a bit, and my undergrad was neither stellar nor relevant. I do great on standardized tests but basically none of the programs I wanted to apply to even accepted them and there's not a lot of room to communicate non-academic learning, so I just didn't bother.
vladgur 2y ago
I am glad to see this experiment on our kids access to higher education to finally seeing its end. When I saw state and other universities move away from standardized tests as acceptance criteria during the COVID era my only thoughts were - my kid was will not be college age for years and years and this should be over by the time it may impact him. As someone who immigrated to the US during at a high school age with a non-negligible language barrier and culture shock, getting excellent grades across all subjects in school was impossible, but excelling at written tests especially in Math is what got me into a great state school and opened many doors for me later on. This chance was being taken away from the kids of 2020s. I’m glad this is over. My next hope is that any identity-based acceptance criteria are deemed illegal and acceptance is blindly merit and experience based to give a chance for my kid who may not fall into any protected categories to get into any school that his merit allows
IncreasePosts 2y ago
I think standardized tests are better than no tests, but how do you weight the test scores to avoid the situation where you have one person who devotes their life to only studying for the SAT and does well, versus a person who can barely study for the SAT because they're, I don't know, working a job or helping raise their siblings, and only does marginally worse than the person who devoted their life to it?
- vladgur 2y ago
  You’re describing an edge case which will arguably prevent the imaginary second person from succeeding in college even if they get accepted. Instead we should leave criteria merit based and invest in social programs that give the high school student in question ability to be a student instead of a parent and caregiver
  - IncreasePosts 2y ago
    It's probably not an edge case, considering that East Asians are the most likely to attend SAT prep classes, and also the group that does the best on the SAT[0]. Yes, I guess we should completely reinvent American society to make it better, but in the meanwhile, tweaking college admissions standards seems like an okay stop gap measure. We should also work to systemically eliminate homelessness and hunger, but that doesn't mean we should be shutting down shelters and soup kitchens in the meanwhile. [0] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/19/study-finds-east-asian-americans-gain-most-sat-courses https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/19/study-finds-e...
    - vladgur 2y ago
      the edge case i meant was the second person: "person who can barely study for the SAT because they're, I don't know, working a job or helping raise their siblings, and only does marginally worse than the person who devoted their life to it" The circumstances of this imaginary person would prevent that from succeeding in college if they are accepted and we should be able to attack the circumstances that prevent highschool students from being the best student they can with social programs, instead of moving away from merit-based college acceptance criteria.
minighost 2y ago
I didn’t do well on my SATs back in the 90s. I’m not a good standardized test taker and I was working at a dialup internet provider while in high school, probably 30 hours a week. It left next to no time for studying for the SATs. As a result I got pretty bad scores because I was perpetually exhausted. Still, I ended up getting a SWE job at Google in 2004 and working my way up to L8. I think standardized tests are fundamentally bullish!t because they test more your ability to have time to prepare and study and think mechanically under artificial time constraints. None of which are associated with success in college. Some jobs, say a trauma surgeon, need to evaluate for the time constraint decision making, but a software engineer does not.
- nullc 2y ago
  So you would have had an easier time getting admitted based on your participation in lacrosse, unpaid internships at non-profits, and so on?
  - minighost 2y ago
    No I ended up going to a university where CS was probably the smallest major on campus. But I worked my ass off to learn CS on my own. The tests wouldn’t have predicted the outcome I’ve been able to enjoy based on scores I received.
- listenallyall 2y ago
  > None of which are associated with success in college How much of college is associated with success at software development? Especially if you're essentially full-time employed in the industry (at an ISP) during high school?
- beej71 2y ago
  I think you're touching on something else important, which is that, left to their own devices, virtually no one learns new things by cramming for a test. I'd wager that when you were studying your ass off, you had books open and were hacking away trying stuff out, figuring what works and what doesn't, yeah? You're the person I'd want to admit to university or hire for my work, and it has jack-all to do with your test-taking ability.
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paulpauper 2y ago
wow require. they are not messing around. I am guessing test-optional has not worked, either because now admittees who fail to submit test scores are not up to par, or test-optional hurts low-SES students who may not be able to participate in expensive extracurriculars or 'character building'.
- uberman 2y ago
  One of the pretext that ivies are using can be summed up by Brown's statement: "Further, the data suggested unintended adverse outcomes of test-optional policies in the admissions process itself, potentially undermining the goal of increasing access. The committee was concerned that some students from less-advantaged backgrounds were choosing not to submit scores under the test-optional policy, when doing so could actually increase their chances of being admitted." If you believe that, I have a bridge you might want to buy...
reducesuffering 2y ago
Just imagine, the leaders in charge of running one of the world's most prestigious academic institution are collectively less intelligent about this than a majority of HN opinion that knew dropping test scores was a stupid idea...
hintymad 2y ago
Either people are stupid to know or too evil to pretend not to know that the more complex a rule is, the easier it is to game it. So it is much easier for the wealthy to game the essay writing or whatever that "holistic admission". Besides, SAT is a filter. SAT is objectively easy compared to the college entrance exams in other countries. Those who do well in SAT may not do well in school, but those who do badly in SAT or CAT are certainly academically inept, at least probabilistically. Of course, there are some corner cases, such as for the unfortunately students in those miserable Baltimore schools, where the median GPA is 0.5 (or 1.5?). It's so sad that the US got into this Animal Farm shit, and far too many people cheered for it.
bumbledraven 2y ago
> In making the decision, the college said it had been persuaded by research that found that standardized testing was a valuable tool to identify promising students in disadvantaged environments and struggling schools, especially when paired with other credentials. Was this research not available when the universities decided to make the tests optional in the first place? The listed benefits of standardized testing should have been well-known. There seems to be a lack of reflection here about just what went wrong in the decision-making process.

105 points by msravi 2y ago

nonethewiser 2y ago

There are some very bad ideas very deep in education. Always encouraging to see some reversal.

bitcharmer 2y ago
True, wasn't this move away from meritocracy dictated by the nonsensical critical race theory? Academia and its policies should be driven by science and not feelings. It's a good sign that they turned around on this.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  What is critical race theory? What does science say about who should get into which schools?
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > True, wasn’t this move away from meritocracy dictated by the nonsensical critical race theory? No, this was dictated by exigencies of the COVID pandemic. Critical race theory doesn’t dictate any policies. > Academia and its policies should be driven by science and not feelings. All policies are driven by feelings; science can tell you what is, and how to achieve a given goal, but it takes values/preferences – which, ultimately, are feelings – to have goals in the first place.

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ubj 2y ago

MIT did this a few years ago, and their analysis of the benefits of standardized testing is worth a read: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our-sat-act-requirement-for-future-admissions-cycles/ https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...

ghaff 2y ago
Two main points: - If you don't hit some level of Math score, that's sort of a red flag that you'll struggle with at least calculus and physics right off the bat. - If you have strong SATs, that's also a flag that you may be worth a deeper look even if you don't have other things on your resume that jump out, possibly for socioeconomic reasons.
- sgift 2y ago
  For someone not from the US: From the second point I understand that the SAT is not the only thing used to decide who gets in? So, it's not "we have 100 slots this year, the 100 best get in"? What else is used?
  - ghaff 2y ago
    High school grades/class rank. And then (at least this is how MIT used to do it although I'm sure most schools have some variant of the process) you have all the qualitative stuff on the other axis: letters of recommendation, interview, high school activities, sports, other types of projects, etc. I expect very few schools just mechanically admit based on SATs.
    - Filligree 2y ago
      Sports? What does sports have to do with schooling?
      - ghaff 2y ago
        (Even leaving aside schools that are admitting athletes for their sports programs) they require hard work, dedication, teamwork, etc.

a2tech 2y ago

Probably the best to ensure high quality students are admitted. I think the idea of non-test admission is interesting and has merits, but looking at people I know and their kids performance and where they're going...not great for the schools.

Ekaros 2y ago
I have always considered testing the least worst option. Rich kids might get some advantage, but they will get those advantage and more in any system. Pure lottery combined with auction might be the fairest solution. The rich paying for the rest...
janoc 2y ago
The problem is that tests do not ensure that high quality students are admitted. Tests measure only that you are good at answering tests under heavy stress and at cramming for them. The whole teaching/learning to test thing - you don't learn to be able to understand and practically use the knowledge but cram to pass the tests and will usually promptly forget most you have "learned" in this way after the tests are over. Not really a lot more. There are plenty of very good students that are just terrible at tests - either because they don't cope well with time pressure or because they learn in a different way and standardized testing is unable to capture that because of its "least common denominator" focus. And don't get me started on people with very common disabilities like dyslexia or dyscalculia - neither of which has anything to do with intellect and sufferers of either can be excellent students. However, they will fail horribly at any kind of standardized testing. So it is only a cheap to administer and easy to evaluate (just count the points) proxy for actual performance and knowledge that are much harder to objectively assess. But a very poor one. And then there are the various sports stipendia and legacy admissions and ... that basically bypass the entire process as long as you are either good at football/whatever or been born to a well to do alumni family. Let's call tests what they are - a cheap and somewhat objective filter to fit the large amount of applicants to the much smaller amount of available places. And don't delude ourselves it has anything to do with quality. (I am a former university teacher and have done a specialized course in university pedagogy, including assessment)
- 2y ago

brodouevencode 2y ago

How interesting is it that the institutions that lead the world flip-flop so easily on public perception and not on values and principals.

ketchupdebugger 2y ago
just like how a public company have share holders, an institution like Harvard have donors. They have to listen or else their source would dry up.
- fullshark 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure Harvard's endowment will thrive even if the donors go to zero. Harvard is more interested in prestige and public perception. That is their currency.
  - vondur 2y ago
    I see that Harvard's endowment is currently around 50 billion dollars. I suppose with good investments that could last for a long time, provided that Harvard doesn't need to dip into it to fund daily operations. Harvard's annual budget currently is around 5 billion per year.
- dgacmu 2y ago
  I can't speak for Harvard, but I can address my own university: The pressure to resume using test scores came from the faculty, because we observed that there were an unusually high number of students admitted who were failing the math (and math-y) courses. We want people to succeed in our classes, not enter and fail out. No donors involved. It doesn't seem like a bad experiment to have tried, but the results were negative and bad for the students, so time to back it out.
  - mathgradthrow 2y ago
    Public institutions get paid the full amount by everyone who receives a degree. Failing out is a discount that the school administrators don't want to offer. For instance we're instructed by admin to never encourage students to pursue mathematics. They "must" be funneled through an academic advisor, who can establish whether or not this is worth the financial risk of them potentially failing. This is regularly presented as "improving equity".

darth_avocado 2y ago

But will it fix legacy admissions?

londons_explore 2y ago

AKA... Everyone must submit this info, and we reserve the right to ignore it to get the outcomes we want.

CogitoCogito 2y ago
That’s how admissions used to be run. No single aspect of an application ever guaranteed admission.
- cvadict 2y ago
  That’s how admissions used to be run ish... TBF, now you have to do an additional secret indirection dance to get around the Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action.

timmg 2y ago

I, personally, grew up in a small, (lower-ish) middle-class mid-western town with below-average (I think!) schools. I did not get good grades (I just didn't care that much). But I got really good test scores. So I got into a pretty decent (state) school with a legit engineering program. One could argue that my lack of grades is a good reason for me to not get into a good school. But without the tests, I definitely wouldn't have. I shutter to think how my career/life would be different had I not gotten into a decent school. So, at least for me, I have a real affection for these kinds of tests. And, as far as I know, I think the US is like the only place that doesn't use tests as the primary decider for higher education. It seems like the move away from testing was "not based on science". Though it was sometimes couched that way. I'm glad to see sanity (and science) prevail. But it all seems very fragile to me right now.

bko 2y ago
I think standardized tests correlate very highly (perhaps highest of any measure) to performance. I regularly see schools in the US with a 10% math proficiency and 40% literacy proficiency with a 99% graduation rate. What's up with that? Standardized tests are the most fair and simplest way to evaluate students. Plus gaming the test is what exactly? Hiring a tutor and spending hours studying, much of it alone? And it's not a shock that success on studying and doing well on exams correlates to college where you're evaluated on how well you study and do on exams It reminds me of that Key and Peele sketch where they're planning a long con bank heist but by the end it's obvious they're just working a job and saving for retirement https://youtu.be/jgYYOUC10aM?si=uiceINWHRRf3brZ5 https://youtu.be/jgYYOUC10aM?si=uiceINWHRRf3brZ5
- ghaff 2y ago
  You probably want to do some test prep but you can do that with a test prep book at your local library. Years ago, in a grad course of some sort, we looked at some papers of predicting performance in school. Basically, even at the grad level, GMATs were far and away the best predictor of academic performance, followed by undergrad grades. Things like letters of recommendation were pretty worthless.
- 2y ago

red_admiral 2y ago

I'm afraid the scientific evidence is so strong, that I personally lump the "SAT scores don't predict anything!" crowd in the same bucket as the "Covid isn't real!" and "AIDS is caused by gay!" crowds. As Harvard said in the article: yes, the tests may have some bias, but every other measure suggested so far to replace them --- especially "personal statements" --- has an even higher bias.

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CharlieDigital 2y ago
It's not that SAT scores don't predict anything, it's perhaps the case that the very loud signal it provides will overwhelmingly favor those with more resources. Using the SAT as the sole or primary factor for selection means that we are going to end up widening the wealth gap over the long run. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be used, but that if we want to converge towards a more egalitarian society, then these institutions also need to properly weigh other factors when selecting candidates and also provide more support to students from less advantageous backgrounds and with less resources.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > It’s not that SAT scores don’t predict anything, it’s perhaps the case that the very loud signal it provides will overwhelmingly favor those with more resources. The problem is that most of the alternative measures, which not using test scores make more prominent, also do this, some much more than test scores. Personal statements were particularly mentioned upthread, but looking at grades does this, too (and doing it in combination with looking at what classes were taken does so even more), looking at extracurriculars favors resources probably more than any other factor typically examined in admissions (though personal statements are in the running here, too.) Standardized test scores may be the least problematic factor commonly used in admissions.
- deleted 2y ago

yasp 2y ago

[flagged]

dang 2y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Bostonian 2y ago

Harvard won't admit it, but I think it's likely that when schools like Dartmouth and Yale reinstated the SAT or ACT for admissions, Harvard did not want to look less academically selective than them.

alchemist1e9 2y ago

MIT has a limited number of seats to receive possibly the best education in the world. The idea that anything but merit and quantitative assessment of such should be used to fill those seats is self destructive to a society. Next they should remove all collection of race information, just as it is illegal in France to ask your race or ethnicity for anything. If it means 75% of the seats are Asian-Americans so be it. The overall cost to society of not educating the most skilled for the future far outweighs any so called diversity virtues. Sorry to be blunt. I’m expecting the downvotes and perhaps even ban/block/retaliation for my “incorrect” views. I don’t care anymore if you are offended by opinions that don’t agree with your belief systems.

ghaff 2y ago
I guess I just don't agree that a university--and its students--is best-served by just lazily admitting the top scores on a single standardized test and ignoring everything else. But, yes, that's probably a different belief system than the one you have.
- alchemist1e9 2y ago
  Obviously not only a single standardize test is needed, your projects, extracurriculars, all relevant to a cold quantitative analysis of a candidate’s ability to perform and receive the highly advanced education. Do you need someone’s racial and ethnic background as part of that process? why? for what purpose? diversity of backgrounds is supposedly the value it provides, I understand the argument but don’t agree with it.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    A lot of the things you list are not "cold quantitative analysis." I don't have strong feelings about considering racial/ethnic data but I expect a lot of qualitative factors would end up being racial/ethnic proxies.
_ish1 2y ago
Let's say you have a Black student and a white student that have the exact same everything on their application. I feel like it makes sense to admit the Black student, because it is very likely that they have persevered more.

chatmasta 2y ago

They’re still only marginally useful because the SAT is too easy. Harvard has enough applicants with 99 percentile scores to fill their incoming class multiple times over.

function_seven 2y ago
But if they're not looking at test scores, then they start admitting 80th-percentile applicants without knowing it. Applicants that got help writing their personal statements, or padded their time in high school with the "right" extracurriculars. The ones who have a 4.5 GPA because grades don't mean shit anymore. Plenty of high school graduates have the 4.5 GPA and a snazzy personal statement and all the right "add-ons", but aren't actually equipped to succeed at Harvard. The SAT is plenty useful to evaluate that.
- chatmasta 2y ago
  Agreed. That’s why I called them “marginally” useful - they’re an additional datapoint but not useful as the primary discriminator (pun intended).
ausbah 2y ago
maybe these gigantic institutions with billions and billions in endowment and reputation should use those resources to expand access to their school instead keeping access as low as possible
- ghaff 2y ago
  You mean like MOOCs? And there's the Harvard Extension School. But many people want the "real" degrees.
- gottorf 2y ago
  > keeping access as low as possible That's a feature, not a bug. If everyone has a Harvard degree, nobody has a Harvard degree. A lot of the worth of one derives from its exclusivity, and the cream of the crop you meet there because of that exclusivity. I'd posit that the difference in the quality of the education itself received between Harvard and a good state school isn't worth talking about.

bobse 2y ago

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Ajay-p 2y ago

I think this is the right step forward, again, but we should work very hard to make the tests as unbiased as they can be. They are not perfect but they are a reliable measurement, especially as the creators have gotten better at removing hidden biases.

bushbaba 2y ago
Society is biased, and universities prepare students to be successfull in the real world. While yes we should all remove hidden biases where possible, but we also need to be cognizant of some of those biases to BE successful.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > Society is biased, and universities prepare students to be successfull in the real world. So, if any bias, they should admit with counter-to-general-society biases, since those who satisfy the biases of the general society don’t need preparation. (Unless the goal is to just appear to be preparing people for success while doing nothing, in which case having biases aligned with those of the general society is the ideal strategy: pick the people that were going to succeed no matter what, and claim credit for preparing them.)
  - waterhouse 2y ago
    > pick the people that were going to succeed no matter what, and claim credit for preparing them. I do think this is what lots of schools do. I mean, "the best people available" will be roughly identical with "the pool of people that contains the highest fraction of those who would succeed no matter what". And if your alumni are successful, then you claim credit. Why not? (I've occasionally seen people attempt to calculate "value added", but completely accounting for selection effects is difficult.) And, by the way, just because someone would have succeeded no matter what doesn't mean you can't increase their success. It's plausible that some highly-driven highly-competent genius would have ended up becoming a top engineer going to school X, but would have co-founded a billion-dollar company going to school Y, due to some combination of getting a somewhat better education and meeting the right people. So the value proposition may be real.

BenFranklin100 2y ago

Pro tip: don’t hire recent Harvard grads. Between the legacy admissions and affirmative action the S/N is too low to justify the salary demands. I’ve always had a better return on my dollar with a good candidate from a state school. Better work ethic too.

FourHand451 2y ago
I couldn't help but hear this in my head in the voice of Montgomery Burns.
- BenFranklin100 2y ago
  Excellent.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
State school here: the Harvard grad is lower variance. If you need to reliably fill roles with people who won’t embarrass you, they’re polished and predictable. If you’re looking for diamonds, they certainly are more frequent among the Ivy League graduates, but you’ll pay up for them unlike sifting for them in the rough.
- busterarm 2y ago
  The absolute best software engineers that I've ever worked with most typically have music degrees, by a wide margin. Next most typically they went to Waterloo and then MIT, RIT or CMU. Next group are the self taught ones and then everywhere else.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Waterloo The fact that Waterloo maintains a monopoly on its internship/coop model blows my mind every year we do recruiting.
    - busterarm 2y ago

yedava 2y ago

There seems to be quite a bit of outrage against the idea that merit doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. Let's consider the times when these institutions have had meritocratic admissions. What exactly have the meritorious students from these institutions contributed to society? The primary accomplishment is that they've engineered a corporate take over of society. The 2008 financial crisis, the tech driven surveillance society, all came from the talented minds of the merited elite. So it is any surprise that there is support for the idea that merit is a meaningless idea? The gifted class hasn't made life any better for the rest of the society.

bjornsing 2y ago
Meritocracy is a lot like how Winston Churchill described democracy: the worst of all systems, until you consider the alternatives. What’s your alternative? Hereditary aristocracy?
- ProfessorLayton 2y ago
  Considering the biggest predictor of academic success is wealth, it's difficult to square admissions to top schools as a "meritocracy". The root of the problem here is the vast wealth inequality, and the way schools are funded via property taxes — something with a lot of problems and bias on its own. One way to address some of this is to properly fund all public schools so academic success isn't largely a tossup of where one's parents could afford to live. Trying to correct for this at the admissions level is a divisive and bandaid solution.
  - sickofparadox 2y ago
    Baltimore City schools are just another few thousand per student away from producing a student body GPA above 2.0!
    - ProfessorLayton 2y ago
      There's a lot more to this issue than school funding, but teaching as a profession should pay for a solid middle class life to attract the best talent. Could we at least agree on that?

BWStearns 2y ago

I'm happy to see testing come back, might give school another look in a couple years when more follow suit. I was looking at applying to grad schools last year. I've been out of school for, uh, a bit, and my undergrad was neither stellar nor relevant. I do great on standardized tests but basically none of the programs I wanted to apply to even accepted them and there's not a lot of room to communicate non-academic learning, so I just didn't bother.

vladgur 2y ago

I am glad to see this experiment on our kids access to higher education to finally seeing its end. When I saw state and other universities move away from standardized tests as acceptance criteria during the COVID era my only thoughts were - my kid was will not be college age for years and years and this should be over by the time it may impact him. As someone who immigrated to the US during at a high school age with a non-negligible language barrier and culture shock, getting excellent grades across all subjects in school was impossible, but excelling at written tests especially in Math is what got me into a great state school and opened many doors for me later on. This chance was being taken away from the kids of 2020s. I’m glad this is over. My next hope is that any identity-based acceptance criteria are deemed illegal and acceptance is blindly merit and experience based to give a chance for my kid who may not fall into any protected categories to get into any school that his merit allows

IncreasePosts 2y ago

I think standardized tests are better than no tests, but how do you weight the test scores to avoid the situation where you have one person who devotes their life to only studying for the SAT and does well, versus a person who can barely study for the SAT because they're, I don't know, working a job or helping raise their siblings, and only does marginally worse than the person who devoted their life to it?

vladgur 2y ago
You’re describing an edge case which will arguably prevent the imaginary second person from succeeding in college even if they get accepted. Instead we should leave criteria merit based and invest in social programs that give the high school student in question ability to be a student instead of a parent and caregiver
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  It's probably not an edge case, considering that East Asians are the most likely to attend SAT prep classes, and also the group that does the best on the SAT[0]. Yes, I guess we should completely reinvent American society to make it better, but in the meanwhile, tweaking college admissions standards seems like an okay stop gap measure. We should also work to systemically eliminate homelessness and hunger, but that doesn't mean we should be shutting down shelters and soup kitchens in the meanwhile. [0] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/19/study-finds-east-asian-americans-gain-most-sat-courses https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/19/study-finds-e...
  - vladgur 2y ago
    the edge case i meant was the second person: "person who can barely study for the SAT because they're, I don't know, working a job or helping raise their siblings, and only does marginally worse than the person who devoted their life to it" The circumstances of this imaginary person would prevent that from succeeding in college if they are accepted and we should be able to attack the circumstances that prevent highschool students from being the best student they can with social programs, instead of moving away from merit-based college acceptance criteria.

minighost 2y ago

I didn’t do well on my SATs back in the 90s. I’m not a good standardized test taker and I was working at a dialup internet provider while in high school, probably 30 hours a week. It left next to no time for studying for the SATs. As a result I got pretty bad scores because I was perpetually exhausted. Still, I ended up getting a SWE job at Google in 2004 and working my way up to L8. I think standardized tests are fundamentally bullish!t because they test more your ability to have time to prepare and study and think mechanically under artificial time constraints. None of which are associated with success in college. Some jobs, say a trauma surgeon, need to evaluate for the time constraint decision making, but a software engineer does not.

nullc 2y ago
So you would have had an easier time getting admitted based on your participation in lacrosse, unpaid internships at non-profits, and so on?
- minighost 2y ago
  No I ended up going to a university where CS was probably the smallest major on campus. But I worked my ass off to learn CS on my own. The tests wouldn’t have predicted the outcome I’ve been able to enjoy based on scores I received.
listenallyall 2y ago
> None of which are associated with success in college How much of college is associated with success at software development? Especially if you're essentially full-time employed in the industry (at an ISP) during high school?
beej71 2y ago
I think you're touching on something else important, which is that, left to their own devices, virtually no one learns new things by cramming for a test. I'd wager that when you were studying your ass off, you had books open and were hacking away trying stuff out, figuring what works and what doesn't, yeah? You're the person I'd want to admit to university or hire for my work, and it has jack-all to do with your test-taking ability.

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paulpauper 2y ago

wow require. they are not messing around. I am guessing test-optional has not worked, either because now admittees who fail to submit test scores are not up to par, or test-optional hurts low-SES students who may not be able to participate in expensive extracurriculars or 'character building'.

uberman 2y ago
One of the pretext that ivies are using can be summed up by Brown's statement: "Further, the data suggested unintended adverse outcomes of test-optional policies in the admissions process itself, potentially undermining the goal of increasing access. The committee was concerned that some students from less-advantaged backgrounds were choosing not to submit scores under the test-optional policy, when doing so could actually increase their chances of being admitted." If you believe that, I have a bridge you might want to buy...

reducesuffering 2y ago

Just imagine, the leaders in charge of running one of the world's most prestigious academic institution are collectively less intelligent about this than a majority of HN opinion that knew dropping test scores was a stupid idea...

hintymad 2y ago

Either people are stupid to know or too evil to pretend not to know that the more complex a rule is, the easier it is to game it. So it is much easier for the wealthy to game the essay writing or whatever that "holistic admission". Besides, SAT is a filter. SAT is objectively easy compared to the college entrance exams in other countries. Those who do well in SAT may not do well in school, but those who do badly in SAT or CAT are certainly academically inept, at least probabilistically. Of course, there are some corner cases, such as for the unfortunately students in those miserable Baltimore schools, where the median GPA is 0.5 (or 1.5?). It's so sad that the US got into this Animal Farm shit, and far too many people cheered for it.

bumbledraven 2y ago

> In making the decision, the college said it had been persuaded by research that found that standardized testing was a valuable tool to identify promising students in disadvantaged environments and struggling schools, especially when paired with other credentials. Was this research not available when the universities decided to make the tests optional in the first place? The listed benefits of standardized testing should have been well-known. There seems to be a lack of reflection here about just what went wrong in the decision-making process.