8 ms·

I always found it wildly fascinating how US schools have things like legacy admissions, athletic scholarships, standardized admission test, admission letter, le

I always found it wildly fascinating how US schools have things like legacy admissions, athletic scholarships, standardized admission test, admission letter, letters of recommendation, extracurricular activities, and what have you. Such a contrast to other systems where for example your HS grades will count 100% - and similar "ungameable" systems.

huevosabio 1y ago
Standardized tests are the least gameable. HS grades are pretty poor proxy given the wide range of quality in HS.
- morpheos137 1y ago
  Other countries probably have a more centralized, standardized schooling system. In the USA schooling is at the local and state level.
  - throw0101d 1y ago
    > Other countries probably have a more centralized, standardized schooling system. Which is basically what the SATs are: * https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT
  - DiogenesKynikos 1y ago
    This is what Baccalaureates, Abitur, Gaokao, etc. are: much more standardized high-school final exams, used as a metric for university admissions.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  These days, people game them by claiming a disability so they get extra time.
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    I doubt the typical students scoring 1540+ have time pressure on the SAT. Sure extra time might help someone get from 1400 to 1440, but it’s not going to get you 1400 to 1600.
    - WalterBright 1y ago
      40 points is 40 points.
- darth_avocado 1y ago
  HS grades are a joke. All it takes is an unforeseen medical emergency or a teacher who hates you to tank your future. Thank god for standardized tests, otherwise I’d be living a very different life.
  - adastra22 1y ago
    On the other hand, I didn’t even graduate high school yet have led a very successful life.
rayiner 1y ago
High school grades in the U.S. aren’t standardized and aren’t reliable. A standardized test like the SAT is the strongest predictor of college success: https://www.reddit.com/r/Sat/comments/1alp6vh/the_evidence_is_overwhelming_that_test_scores_are/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button https://www.reddit.com/r/Sat/comments/1alp6vh/the_evidence_i... (collecting evidence)
- ghaff 1y ago
  I took a grad marketing class once with a business professor who studied this sort of thing. GMATs rather than SATs but same idea. Basically GMATs mattered more than anything else especially metrics such as letters of recommendation that were basically worthless. I knew the director of admissions somewhat at an elite school and he said that they basically put a couple of quantitative metrics (like SAT) on one axis and read essays and considered other metrics like interviews on the other axis for diversity before that term became popular. The upper right more or less got in, the lower left didn't, and then they debated the middle ground.
- orochimaaru 1y ago
  The SAT isn't strong enough to predict anything. It can generally be answered by someone in their sophomore year at college or even their freshman, depending on what level of courses they are taking. The problem finding a hard enough test with as little human intervention for assessments. Because human intervention brings with it subjectivity. This subjectivity was manageable when there weren't so many people applying for top schools (e.g. in the early 1900's). But right now its not. SAT/ACT/GRE are no indicator of success. What this "study" is merely proving is that schools may have regressed in their rigor for grading hard courses.
  - malfist 1y ago
    Why does it matter if a college student, after three years of education, can do well on the entrance exam? Isn't that a given?
    - 1y ago
trenchpilgrim 1y ago
If HS grades were used for admissions in the US, it would incentivize college-bound high schoolers to avoid challenging classes like AP classes, advanced STEM classes, history classes beyond state requirements, etc. The optimal strategy would be to take the easiest classes required to graduate, since there's no national authority to normalize grades across classes.
- IncreasePosts 1y ago
  You just give multipliers for advanced classes then. That's how my high school calculated GPA - if you took all "A" level classes your max GPA was 4.0, but if you took AP classes and aced them you could end up with a 4.3 or something like that
  - BobaFloutist 1y ago
    That's how almost all highschools and colleges do advanced classes, Honors classes are graded on a 4.5 scale and AP classes on a 5.0 scale (and also count for college credit so you get to skip some intro classes after admission). This, of course, leads to yet more grade inflation. Hard to compete with a >4.0 student when your school doesn't even offer advanced courses!
typeofhuman 1y ago
HS grades are gameable. Just look at public highschools across the US. A significant percentage of graduates can't read. And the policies won't let teachers fail or hold-back students so they cook their grades to push them through the system. The ratione behind this was "ending the school to prison pipeline." They saw the correlation between drop out rates and incarceration and thought they could reduce the latter by gaming the former. This is why you see a lot of college dropouts from that corpus because they can't make it. They were lied to.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Also not that uncommon for the star HS quarterback to be functionally illiterate yet passing all classes with the required GPA for athletics participation.
  - watwut 1y ago
    To be fair, the absurd thing is that in order to have a career in sport he excellent at, he needs to go to university. Not being university material is stupid reason for not being able to do sports professionally.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      Agreed. And it's becomming more common in the US pro leagues to see players who only completed high school. But the majority still play at least a year or two at the college level. It's a filter, and D1 college sports is a big business in its own right.
breadwinner 1y ago
Right. It is called holistic review. Originally invented to limit the number of Jewish people in top universities (not kidding)! Now being used to limit the number of Asians. Elite-College Admissions Were Built to Protect Privilege https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/history-privilege-elite-college-admissions/585088/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor... The new holistic admissions policy worked as intended, successfully suppressing Jewish admissions. 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... The 'holistic' admissions lie - The Daily Californian https://www.dailycal.org/2012/10/01/the-holistic-admissions-lie/ https://www.dailycal.org/2012/10/01/the-holistic-admissions-... The False Promise of 'Holistic' College Admissions - The Atlantic 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... Lifting the Veil on the Holistic Process at the University of California, Berkeley - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-the-veil-on-the-holistic-process-at-the-university-of-california-berkeley.html?pagewanted=all https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- fvgvkujdfbllo 1y ago
  This is very eye opening. As a geek with strong academic background always felt cheated by the system. My professor explained that academics alone is not enough for success in life. He explained that some of the smartest engineers report to average business majors in companies. And he explained that that I cannot get any scholarships with perfect GPA while my roommate, a B student, has scholarships because he plays basketball and will likely get in leadership role in early on. That is good for the university as their graduates are seen as more successful. It was a hard thing to listen to but I accepted it. I wish he told me the truth though.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    Just being smart won't get you anywhere.
LudwigNagasena 1y ago
I thought most countries just do general country-wide admission tests?
- PeterStuer 1y ago
  No, at least not for all subjects. I think over here medicine still has an admission test. Engineering used to have one long ago. All the rest, there are very lenient high school diploma requirememts, and no crazy costs like the US. All that want can basically attend, until they fail to pass a few times.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
diggernet 1y ago
Having HS grades count 100% is a really bad idea. Not because of anything about the schools, but because HS age isn't representative of people's abilities. I had terrible HS grades due to a complete lack of interest. After growing up a little and getting my act together, I got A's in college. Thank goodness they didn't base my admission on HS grades.
philwelch 1y ago
High school grades are gameable, probably moreso than athletic scholarships or standardized tests. Legacy admissions are part of the hereditary class system. The reason people go to elite schools isn’t just to receive an education, it’s also a status symbol and networking opportunity. If you do manage to get accepted by an elite school purely on merit, that’s not just an opportunity for you personally, it’s a chance to pass that status down to your children. But yeah the rest of it is bullshit (and often a fig leaf for discrimination).
JoshTriplett 1y ago
Standardized tests work much better than high school grades, and also handle cases like young students who go to university at or before the "normal" age of a high school student. The SAT and GRE aren't perfect, but they're a massive help to students who would otherwise be outside the normal path. Get a high score on the SAT, and nobody cares whether you went through traditional K-12.
- elashri 1y ago
  > GRE aren't perfect This is understatement, GRE being required for STEM postgraduate studies was always university requirement for all not something the STEM department would want. One can argue that the quantitative part have a point but for the language part, you must be kidding me. Unless you are going to English literature it is just plain stupid (maybe even if you study literature).
  - DiogenesKynikos 1y ago
    For native speakers of English, the language part of the exam is just seen as a general test of intelligence. For non-native speakers, it's just a test of how well they learned English, and nobody in admissions expects them to score as well as native speakers. Beyond this, there are subject-specific GREs. They're far from perfect, but they're more uniformly comparable across all candidates than grades are.
    - elashri 1y ago
      Have you actually taken the exam or looked into a sample test? There is no intelligence in most parts, it is just you memorizing a lot of words that you will never hear or use. Maybe you are confusing different parts of the exam. > For non-native speakers, it's just a test of how well they learned English, and nobody in admissions expects them to score as well as native speakers. That's different test/s. Programs will require TOEFL/IELTS for that purpose.
      - DiogenesKynikos 1y ago
cortesoft 1y ago
Athletic scholarships and standardized test admissions are way less gameable than HS grades
- odo1242 1y ago
  Yea, especially since the people who get the highest grades in HS, in the US where you have a decent amount of latitude to pick your classes, are generally just the students who refused to take any hard class.
  - liquidpele 1y ago
    Or the ones that do 10+ faked “AP” classes over the summer and transfer those credits in. Not kidding.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    In my high school, the honors classes gave an extra point for your GPA average. So the "easy A" classes weren't quite the ticket.
    - daemonologist 1y ago
      My high school gave an extra half point for honors and a whole point for AP classes*, but my experience was that regular classes were easier by _far_ more than that (at least in cases where all three levels were offered). I had disliked biology in middle school and separated from the "AP crowd" to take honors environmental science instead, and it felt at least two or three letter grades easier than the other AP sciences. Of course the top tier students were likely to achieve an A regardless, so the more challenging courses would look better. For me though it probably would've been optimal to choose easier classes; admissions might not even be aware that a more difficult option was offered. * If I recall correctly though, colleges were usually interested primarily in the unweighted GPA.
- peterfirefly 1y ago
  Athletics + Test cheating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2023-12-01/felicity-huffman-breaks-silence-college-admissions-scandal https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2023-12-01/... https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2019/03/admission-case-info https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2019/03/admission-case-inf...
liquidpele 1y ago
Ungameable… lol. Take a look at Asian countries for what happens when you rely only on grades… cheating becomes the norm since numbers are all that matter.
- DiogenesKynikos 1y ago
  Cheating is not the norm in Asian countries. The real downside is that school is insanely competitive, students study incredibly long hours, and they feel intense pressure to perform well on their exams. The upside is that the students are much more serious about their studies than in the US, in general.
  - corimaith 1y ago
    But social mobility for serious kids is much easier in the United States than elsewhere. It's also in USA that going to your local state university or community college isn't a large barrier to your future career, and transfers are common. And when it comes to the levers of power, connections are still what defines future leaders in Asia, not grades. This entire idea of "serious students" are ultimately just a bone to throw to the masses.
    - sahila 1y ago
      > But social mobility for serious kids is much easier in the United States than elsewhere. This is an unrelated point, is your contention that the US is better off with unserious students? Social mobility / wealth accumulation for the masses does suck in other countries but it's great that people are still seriously motivated by schools. It's a big reason those students immigrant to the US and companies here hire those people in masses.
      - corimaith 1y ago
        >This is an unrelated point, is your contention that the US is better off with unserious students? It's that America has the capacity to fully absorb it's talent so it's not a problem. The reason why other countries have more is because they don't have the capacity to absorb them due to less opportunities so the competition is higher. Many of those "serious" students in China or India will still end working in factory jobs and delivery drivers because they weren't good enough. >It's a big reason those students immigrant to the US and companies here hire those people in masses Eh, if they were hiring domestic students I wouldn't say there would be much of difference. Unless if you are running a startup, most of these "serious" students will be just writing basic CRUD apps. Value comes from experience here, not talent. Well, if I was American though, I wouldn't bother competing againt millions of desperate Chinese or Indians for opportunity cost anyways, I'd be going more into law or finance. And those fields are less diverse.
SilverElfin 1y ago
They had that previously in some places. California universities used to not have affirmative action (quotas) but they apparently removed consideration of test scores to help achieve the racial composition they felt was “correct” in another way, since it was resulting in a skew towards whites and Asians in their view. Not sure what the process is today.
WalterBright 1y ago
I was the valedictorian in my high school. I did nothing to earn it, never did any work, and wound up at Caltech grossly underprepared. It took me over a year and a half to figure out how to work and study. Admissions required a triad - top grades, top test scores, and something significant in extra-curricular activities. And finally, an interview. Bomb any of those, and you're out. I was rejected by MIT because of the interview.
- ghaff 1y ago
  I think it depends on the school at the time. I got rejected by one school probably because I didn't have a varsity letter and had a so-so interview. I got accepted to at least two others that were at least as "good" at the time. There's a lot of luck of the draw when you're applying to schools with a pretty low admittance rate. I joke with someone I know pretty well in my alma mater's alumni office that I'd probably never get in today and they smile and follow it up with an "oh well, you're fine." :-) And they're not unhappy that I'm an alumnus. 3 people from my school's 59 person graduation class got in; certainly would never happen now.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    I found out years later that I was a marginal candidate, and ironically it was the interview that made the difference.
    - ghaff 1y ago
      Which is the luck of the draw thing. If you're on the bubble for whatever random reasons, a decline or accept on even a marginal measure because you did/didn't click with someone can make the difference.
      - WalterBright 1y ago
        I was well aware of the vagaries of chance, which is why I applied to the top 10 engineering universities in the country. I was accepted by Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, and Caltech. As a backup I had ASU. I knew nothing about Caltech, and by amazing luck it was perfectly suited to what I wanted and my personality. For a while now, I've been running the D Coffee Haus monthly meetings, where myself and fellow nerds meet and talk about nerdly stuff. It's as much fun as the same thing at Caltech.
adastra22 1y ago
HS grades are quite gamble—-the high school wants to show off better admissions stats and so gives out easy A’s. This is not a hypothetical btw, this really happens.

huevosabio 1y ago

Standardized tests are the least gameable. HS grades are pretty poor proxy given the wide range of quality in HS.

morpheos137 1y ago
Other countries probably have a more centralized, standardized schooling system. In the USA schooling is at the local and state level.
- throw0101d 1y ago
  > Other countries probably have a more centralized, standardized schooling system. Which is basically what the SATs are: * https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT
- DiogenesKynikos 1y ago
  This is what Baccalaureates, Abitur, Gaokao, etc. are: much more standardized high-school final exams, used as a metric for university admissions.
WalterBright 1y ago
These days, people game them by claiming a disability so they get extra time.
- sokoloff 1y ago
  I doubt the typical students scoring 1540+ have time pressure on the SAT. Sure extra time might help someone get from 1400 to 1440, but it’s not going to get you 1400 to 1600.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    40 points is 40 points.
darth_avocado 1y ago
HS grades are a joke. All it takes is an unforeseen medical emergency or a teacher who hates you to tank your future. Thank god for standardized tests, otherwise I’d be living a very different life.
- adastra22 1y ago
  On the other hand, I didn’t even graduate high school yet have led a very successful life.

rayiner 1y ago

High school grades in the U.S. aren’t standardized and aren’t reliable. A standardized test like the SAT is the strongest predictor of college success: https://www.reddit.com/r/Sat/comments/1alp6vh/the_evidence_is_overwhelming_that_test_scores_are/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button https://www.reddit.com/r/Sat/comments/1alp6vh/the_evidence_i... (collecting evidence)

ghaff 1y ago
I took a grad marketing class once with a business professor who studied this sort of thing. GMATs rather than SATs but same idea. Basically GMATs mattered more than anything else especially metrics such as letters of recommendation that were basically worthless. I knew the director of admissions somewhat at an elite school and he said that they basically put a couple of quantitative metrics (like SAT) on one axis and read essays and considered other metrics like interviews on the other axis for diversity before that term became popular. The upper right more or less got in, the lower left didn't, and then they debated the middle ground.
orochimaaru 1y ago
The SAT isn't strong enough to predict anything. It can generally be answered by someone in their sophomore year at college or even their freshman, depending on what level of courses they are taking. The problem finding a hard enough test with as little human intervention for assessments. Because human intervention brings with it subjectivity. This subjectivity was manageable when there weren't so many people applying for top schools (e.g. in the early 1900's). But right now its not. SAT/ACT/GRE are no indicator of success. What this "study" is merely proving is that schools may have regressed in their rigor for grading hard courses.
- malfist 1y ago
  Why does it matter if a college student, after three years of education, can do well on the entrance exam? Isn't that a given?
  - 1y ago

trenchpilgrim 1y ago

If HS grades were used for admissions in the US, it would incentivize college-bound high schoolers to avoid challenging classes like AP classes, advanced STEM classes, history classes beyond state requirements, etc. The optimal strategy would be to take the easiest classes required to graduate, since there's no national authority to normalize grades across classes.

IncreasePosts 1y ago
You just give multipliers for advanced classes then. That's how my high school calculated GPA - if you took all "A" level classes your max GPA was 4.0, but if you took AP classes and aced them you could end up with a 4.3 or something like that
- BobaFloutist 1y ago
  That's how almost all highschools and colleges do advanced classes, Honors classes are graded on a 4.5 scale and AP classes on a 5.0 scale (and also count for college credit so you get to skip some intro classes after admission). This, of course, leads to yet more grade inflation. Hard to compete with a >4.0 student when your school doesn't even offer advanced courses!

typeofhuman 1y ago

HS grades are gameable. Just look at public highschools across the US. A significant percentage of graduates can't read. And the policies won't let teachers fail or hold-back students so they cook their grades to push them through the system. The ratione behind this was "ending the school to prison pipeline." They saw the correlation between drop out rates and incarceration and thought they could reduce the latter by gaming the former. This is why you see a lot of college dropouts from that corpus because they can't make it. They were lied to.

SoftTalker 1y ago
Also not that uncommon for the star HS quarterback to be functionally illiterate yet passing all classes with the required GPA for athletics participation.
- watwut 1y ago
  To be fair, the absurd thing is that in order to have a career in sport he excellent at, he needs to go to university. Not being university material is stupid reason for not being able to do sports professionally.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    Agreed. And it's becomming more common in the US pro leagues to see players who only completed high school. But the majority still play at least a year or two at the college level. It's a filter, and D1 college sports is a big business in its own right.

breadwinner 1y ago

Right. It is called holistic review. Originally invented to limit the number of Jewish people in top universities (not kidding)! Now being used to limit the number of Asians. Elite-College Admissions Were Built to Protect Privilege https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/history-privilege-elite-college-admissions/585088/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor... The new holistic admissions policy worked as intended, successfully suppressing Jewish admissions. 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... The 'holistic' admissions lie - The Daily Californian https://www.dailycal.org/2012/10/01/the-holistic-admissions-lie/ https://www.dailycal.org/2012/10/01/the-holistic-admissions-... The False Promise of 'Holistic' College Admissions - The Atlantic 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... Lifting the Veil on the Holistic Process at the University of California, Berkeley - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-the-veil-on-the-holistic-process-at-the-university-of-california-berkeley.html?pagewanted=all https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-...

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
fvgvkujdfbllo 1y ago
This is very eye opening. As a geek with strong academic background always felt cheated by the system. My professor explained that academics alone is not enough for success in life. He explained that some of the smartest engineers report to average business majors in companies. And he explained that that I cannot get any scholarships with perfect GPA while my roommate, a B student, has scholarships because he plays basketball and will likely get in leadership role in early on. That is good for the university as their graduates are seen as more successful. It was a hard thing to listen to but I accepted it. I wish he told me the truth though.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  Just being smart won't get you anywhere.

LudwigNagasena 1y ago

I thought most countries just do general country-wide admission tests?

PeterStuer 1y ago
No, at least not for all subjects. I think over here medicine still has an admission test. Engineering used to have one long ago. All the rest, there are very lenient high school diploma requirememts, and no crazy costs like the US. All that want can basically attend, until they fail to pass a few times.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

diggernet 1y ago

Having HS grades count 100% is a really bad idea. Not because of anything about the schools, but because HS age isn't representative of people's abilities. I had terrible HS grades due to a complete lack of interest. After growing up a little and getting my act together, I got A's in college. Thank goodness they didn't base my admission on HS grades.

philwelch 1y ago

High school grades are gameable, probably moreso than athletic scholarships or standardized tests. Legacy admissions are part of the hereditary class system. The reason people go to elite schools isn’t just to receive an education, it’s also a status symbol and networking opportunity. If you do manage to get accepted by an elite school purely on merit, that’s not just an opportunity for you personally, it’s a chance to pass that status down to your children. But yeah the rest of it is bullshit (and often a fig leaf for discrimination).

JoshTriplett 1y ago

Standardized tests work much better than high school grades, and also handle cases like young students who go to university at or before the "normal" age of a high school student. The SAT and GRE aren't perfect, but they're a massive help to students who would otherwise be outside the normal path. Get a high score on the SAT, and nobody cares whether you went through traditional K-12.

elashri 1y ago
> GRE aren't perfect This is understatement, GRE being required for STEM postgraduate studies was always university requirement for all not something the STEM department would want. One can argue that the quantitative part have a point but for the language part, you must be kidding me. Unless you are going to English literature it is just plain stupid (maybe even if you study literature).
- DiogenesKynikos 1y ago
  For native speakers of English, the language part of the exam is just seen as a general test of intelligence. For non-native speakers, it's just a test of how well they learned English, and nobody in admissions expects them to score as well as native speakers. Beyond this, there are subject-specific GREs. They're far from perfect, but they're more uniformly comparable across all candidates than grades are.
  - elashri 1y ago
    Have you actually taken the exam or looked into a sample test? There is no intelligence in most parts, it is just you memorizing a lot of words that you will never hear or use. Maybe you are confusing different parts of the exam. > For non-native speakers, it's just a test of how well they learned English, and nobody in admissions expects them to score as well as native speakers. That's different test/s. Programs will require TOEFL/IELTS for that purpose.
    - DiogenesKynikos 1y ago

cortesoft 1y ago

Athletic scholarships and standardized test admissions are way less gameable than HS grades

odo1242 1y ago
Yea, especially since the people who get the highest grades in HS, in the US where you have a decent amount of latitude to pick your classes, are generally just the students who refused to take any hard class.
- liquidpele 1y ago
  Or the ones that do 10+ faked “AP” classes over the summer and transfer those credits in. Not kidding.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  In my high school, the honors classes gave an extra point for your GPA average. So the "easy A" classes weren't quite the ticket.
  - daemonologist 1y ago
    My high school gave an extra half point for honors and a whole point for AP classes*, but my experience was that regular classes were easier by _far_ more than that (at least in cases where all three levels were offered). I had disliked biology in middle school and separated from the "AP crowd" to take honors environmental science instead, and it felt at least two or three letter grades easier than the other AP sciences. Of course the top tier students were likely to achieve an A regardless, so the more challenging courses would look better. For me though it probably would've been optimal to choose easier classes; admissions might not even be aware that a more difficult option was offered. * If I recall correctly though, colleges were usually interested primarily in the unweighted GPA.
peterfirefly 1y ago
Athletics + Test cheating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2023-12-01/felicity-huffman-breaks-silence-college-admissions-scandal https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2023-12-01/... https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2019/03/admission-case-info https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2019/03/admission-case-inf...

liquidpele 1y ago

Ungameable… lol. Take a look at Asian countries for what happens when you rely only on grades… cheating becomes the norm since numbers are all that matter.

DiogenesKynikos 1y ago
Cheating is not the norm in Asian countries. The real downside is that school is insanely competitive, students study incredibly long hours, and they feel intense pressure to perform well on their exams. The upside is that the students are much more serious about their studies than in the US, in general.
- corimaith 1y ago
  But social mobility for serious kids is much easier in the United States than elsewhere. It's also in USA that going to your local state university or community college isn't a large barrier to your future career, and transfers are common. And when it comes to the levers of power, connections are still what defines future leaders in Asia, not grades. This entire idea of "serious students" are ultimately just a bone to throw to the masses.
  - sahila 1y ago
    > But social mobility for serious kids is much easier in the United States than elsewhere. This is an unrelated point, is your contention that the US is better off with unserious students? Social mobility / wealth accumulation for the masses does suck in other countries but it's great that people are still seriously motivated by schools. It's a big reason those students immigrant to the US and companies here hire those people in masses.
    - corimaith 1y ago
      >This is an unrelated point, is your contention that the US is better off with unserious students? It's that America has the capacity to fully absorb it's talent so it's not a problem. The reason why other countries have more is because they don't have the capacity to absorb them due to less opportunities so the competition is higher. Many of those "serious" students in China or India will still end working in factory jobs and delivery drivers because they weren't good enough. >It's a big reason those students immigrant to the US and companies here hire those people in masses Eh, if they were hiring domestic students I wouldn't say there would be much of difference. Unless if you are running a startup, most of these "serious" students will be just writing basic CRUD apps. Value comes from experience here, not talent. Well, if I was American though, I wouldn't bother competing againt millions of desperate Chinese or Indians for opportunity cost anyways, I'd be going more into law or finance. And those fields are less diverse.

SilverElfin 1y ago

They had that previously in some places. California universities used to not have affirmative action (quotas) but they apparently removed consideration of test scores to help achieve the racial composition they felt was “correct” in another way, since it was resulting in a skew towards whites and Asians in their view. Not sure what the process is today.

WalterBright 1y ago

I was the valedictorian in my high school. I did nothing to earn it, never did any work, and wound up at Caltech grossly underprepared. It took me over a year and a half to figure out how to work and study. Admissions required a triad - top grades, top test scores, and something significant in extra-curricular activities. And finally, an interview. Bomb any of those, and you're out. I was rejected by MIT because of the interview.

ghaff 1y ago
I think it depends on the school at the time. I got rejected by one school probably because I didn't have a varsity letter and had a so-so interview. I got accepted to at least two others that were at least as "good" at the time. There's a lot of luck of the draw when you're applying to schools with a pretty low admittance rate. I joke with someone I know pretty well in my alma mater's alumni office that I'd probably never get in today and they smile and follow it up with an "oh well, you're fine." :-) And they're not unhappy that I'm an alumnus. 3 people from my school's 59 person graduation class got in; certainly would never happen now.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  I found out years later that I was a marginal candidate, and ironically it was the interview that made the difference.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    Which is the luck of the draw thing. If you're on the bubble for whatever random reasons, a decline or accept on even a marginal measure because you did/didn't click with someone can make the difference.
    - WalterBright 1y ago
      I was well aware of the vagaries of chance, which is why I applied to the top 10 engineering universities in the country. I was accepted by Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, and Caltech. As a backup I had ASU. I knew nothing about Caltech, and by amazing luck it was perfectly suited to what I wanted and my personality. For a while now, I've been running the D Coffee Haus monthly meetings, where myself and fellow nerds meet and talk about nerdly stuff. It's as much fun as the same thing at Caltech.

adastra22 1y ago

HS grades are quite gamble—-the high school wants to show off better admissions stats and so gives out easy A’s. This is not a hypothetical btw, this really happens.