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I didn't really state my whole view, but hard exams like Oxford and Cambridge use make sense for elite colleges to use (rather than unrelated extracurriculars),

I didn't really state my whole view, but hard exams like Oxford and Cambridge use make sense for elite colleges to use (rather than unrelated extracurriculars), but reforming the whole education system to be oriented around a single high stakes test like in China or Korea has its own severe costs. I do not want high schoolers to spend 20 hours a week at hagwons, and the current resume filler system is also terrible. I do not think declining admissions rates at elite universities reflect that the students are any smarter or more prepared than they were 20 years ago, but rather they are much more cutthroat about many things that are orthogonal to being successful adults. Ideally we'd follow a more exam focused system more like the UK, though I wouldn't want to require all students to only study 3-4 subjects towards the end of high school. But something in the european model of IB/Abitur/A Levels, where there are serious exams in various subjects at the end of high school for all uni bound students, plus some special higher level exams for the most elite unis (in the vein of Cambridge's Sixth Term Examination Paper). We could probably repurpose AP exams to fill a similar admissions role to A Levels, and possibly use the AMC/AIME/USAMO more explicitly for admission. Edit: this doesn't let me reply again, I think the chain got too deep. But the point is that we're not just using AP exams and USAMO scores, we're also using a pile of other metrics around extracurriculars, GPA, and honors societies, and the end result is stressed out children and not actually having better outcomes than we did two decades ago. Declining admissions rates at elite colleges do not reflect smarter and more productive incoming students.

alephnerd 4mo ago
> We could probably repurpose AP exams to fill a similar admissions role to A Levels They are already being used like that in college admissions today. > possibly use the AMC/AIME/USAMO more explicitly for admission Already in use explicitly at most of the top CS programs today > I do not think declining admissions rates at elite universities reflect that the students are any smarter or more prepared than they were 20 years ago, but rather they are much more cutthroat about many things that are orthogonal to being successful adults The cutthroatness is what we should be optimizing for long term. Competition is what begets innovation. Also, even at solid middle tier universities like UC Riverside, the calibre of student has increased dramatically over the past decade [0] [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39369724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39369724
- tavavex 4mo ago
  > The cutthroatness is what we should be optimizing for long term. Competition is what begets innovation. The difficult pill that society refuses to swallow is that most of the simple innovations that are feasible under our constraints have already been innovated. There are no more individual 'inventors'. The source of modern technological innovation are lucky discoveries that manage to scrape from the bottom of the easy-to-find barrel, genuine one in a million genuises and (mostly) the hard work of large groups over many years. Even the brightest top 0.1% of people mostly won't be coming up with ideas that a thousand people before them didn't already have. Yet people will not settle for this. Instead of acknowledging it, we'd rather apply the good old human model of 'if 1x of something is good, then we need 1000000x of that' and take healthy competition to transform it into a ruthless race to the bottom. Past a certain point of competition, you stop selecting for the metric you care about (academic performance, curiosity, creativity) and start selecting for people who are willing to slave away sunrise-to-sunset to work on tasks they know are almost meaningless but that contribute to your selection criteria. The metric becomes the only goal. You're also indirectly selecting for wealth, because rich parents can afford to spend lots of time with their child, not make the child work, pay for all their extracurriculars and tutoring. The diminishing returns are immense, and we can already see that in countries that never fought this race to the bottom. Their students are more miserable than ever, and for what? Frankly, forcing children to waste away their best days to make them clear arbitrarily rising barriers that we know are meaningless is unthinkably heartless.
cyberax 4mo ago
Yeah, Chinese-style gaokao would be impossible in the US. And I think it goes _too_ far into the "competitive high pressure" direction. There are many ways to make a more competitive and objective system. I honestly don't have a lot of professional experience with any particular one, so I don't have strong opinions on a particular form it should take. A European model is good, some kind of mix of Chinese+European would also be great. And ultimately, these systems would be more fair for applicants. And the current topic just highlights the ridiculousness of the status quo. For most people in the US, SAT is the _only_ objective test score that they have.

alephnerd 4mo ago

> We could probably repurpose AP exams to fill a similar admissions role to A Levels They are already being used like that in college admissions today. > possibly use the AMC/AIME/USAMO more explicitly for admission Already in use explicitly at most of the top CS programs today > I do not think declining admissions rates at elite universities reflect that the students are any smarter or more prepared than they were 20 years ago, but rather they are much more cutthroat about many things that are orthogonal to being successful adults The cutthroatness is what we should be optimizing for long term. Competition is what begets innovation. Also, even at solid middle tier universities like UC Riverside, the calibre of student has increased dramatically over the past decade [0] [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39369724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39369724

tavavex 4mo ago
> The cutthroatness is what we should be optimizing for long term. Competition is what begets innovation. The difficult pill that society refuses to swallow is that most of the simple innovations that are feasible under our constraints have already been innovated. There are no more individual 'inventors'. The source of modern technological innovation are lucky discoveries that manage to scrape from the bottom of the easy-to-find barrel, genuine one in a million genuises and (mostly) the hard work of large groups over many years. Even the brightest top 0.1% of people mostly won't be coming up with ideas that a thousand people before them didn't already have. Yet people will not settle for this. Instead of acknowledging it, we'd rather apply the good old human model of 'if 1x of something is good, then we need 1000000x of that' and take healthy competition to transform it into a ruthless race to the bottom. Past a certain point of competition, you stop selecting for the metric you care about (academic performance, curiosity, creativity) and start selecting for people who are willing to slave away sunrise-to-sunset to work on tasks they know are almost meaningless but that contribute to your selection criteria. The metric becomes the only goal. You're also indirectly selecting for wealth, because rich parents can afford to spend lots of time with their child, not make the child work, pay for all their extracurriculars and tutoring. The diminishing returns are immense, and we can already see that in countries that never fought this race to the bottom. Their students are more miserable than ever, and for what? Frankly, forcing children to waste away their best days to make them clear arbitrarily rising barriers that we know are meaningless is unthinkably heartless.

cyberax 4mo ago

Yeah, Chinese-style gaokao would be impossible in the US. And I think it goes _too_ far into the "competitive high pressure" direction. There are many ways to make a more competitive and objective system. I honestly don't have a lot of professional experience with any particular one, so I don't have strong opinions on a particular form it should take. A European model is good, some kind of mix of Chinese+European would also be great. And ultimately, these systems would be more fair for applicants. And the current topic just highlights the ridiculousness of the status quo. For most people in the US, SAT is the _only_ objective test score that they have.