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This seems terrible incentives. You are now in a purely adversarial relationship with your peers and hurting them helps you
by john-h-k 9mo ago
This seems terrible incentives. You are now in a purely adversarial relationship with your peers and hurting them helps you
- Mountain_Skies 9mo agoIt's not unusual for families to change their school district so their kid can play for a better sports program and of course it's extremely common for families to want to live in the best district for education quality, but maybe some are now incentivized to move into a district with lesser competition for the top spots.
- bradchris 9mo agoTexan here. There’s still ways to get in if you don’t make the top X% of your class (the percentage is shrinking every year as the school climbs up the rankings and more people want to go… I think it’s near top-4% now? It used to be top 15% I recall), and many of those high achievers go onto other out of state schools, so it’s in the interest of UT system to offer automatic admission to the top achievers from across the state. Just because the top X% is guaranteed admission, that does not mean all (or even most) of the school is from the top X%.
- dustincoates 9mo agoI believe it's only UT Austin that's shrunk the percentage. All of the other public universities are still at the original top 10%.
- terribleidea 9mo agoHow much control can your classmates have over your own GPA? What percentage of 'control' over your GPA is up to you vs. your teachers, parents, classmates, and everyone else? I put those in order intentionally, as I think your classmates are below teachers and parents on the hierarchy.
- john-h-k 9mo agoDisincentives group learning, collaboration, teaching each other. Many good cases to have a strict zero sum competition but you won’t see collaboration in these (eg olympiads, competitions). That’s fine for a short term event but for long term learning in a persistent social group it seems good to encourage collaboration
- wyldfire 9mo agoThis kind of competition happens in other areas of academic pursuits too. Is that strictly a bad thing? The bad thing about UT's policy is that it encourages well-off students to move to a less-competitive school district (usually rural) in order to improve their chances.
- derektank 9mo agoThis seems like a good thing to me actually, lower performing students generally benefit from having high performers in their social circles
- john-h-k 9mo agoIf we were really optimising for this, we’d ban colleges using anything other than geographic area. Keeping all the high performers at high performing unis will hurt the lower performers
- LarsDu88 9mo agoNot only that, but high performers are incentivised to move to worse schools. It may actually improve mean outcomes, but harm societal outcomes, as the scientific impact of educated individuals may tend to be power law distributed (e.g. the most important breakthroughs come from a small sector of the population with wildly disproportionate impact)
- SoylentGreenGPT 9mo agoWhat breakthroughs are coming from high school students?
- LarsDu88 9mo agoExample: A high school student, Noam Shazeer placed Silver in the international math olympiad. Went on to build the foundations of LLMs in multiple papers including the transformer paper. Founded Character.AI... Forget the fact that he's now a 50 year old dude, this kind of stuff started in high school There are multiple examples of highly citied ML papers coming from essentially people in the middle of undergrad, meaning they essentially learned all their shit in high school. The first protein diffusion paper, the single cell autoencoder paper, diffusion autoencoder paper... these were all from essentially high school prodigies publishing in undergrad or first year of graduate school.
- gizmo686 9mo agoThe bottleneck on research is funding. We have a glut of students wanting to go into research who don't because of how competitive the field is. We then have researchers constantly leaving the field for the same reason.
- kelipso 9mo agoThe thing is the people who do get the funding should be the smartest of the smartest. That funnel needs to be there and this nonsense is destroying it.
- lostmsu 9mo agoIt is hard to hurt someone when their score is a standardized test.
- apparent 9mo agoUCs don't consider standardized tests.
- lostmsu 9mo agoIMO they'll roll back. It was a bad decision, and a few unis already rolled back.
- apparent 9mo agoMany other schools have rolled back their temporary suspensions of SAT-optional/blindness, but UC made a decision that was permanent. And when they made the decision, it was over the objection of the UC faculty recommendation. They might roll it back, but I'm not holding my breath.