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Entrance exams treat undergraduate admissions as an O(n) problem. As anyone who has worked in undergraduate admissions will tell you, it is far more complex th
by jmduke 13y ago
Entrance exams treat undergraduate admissions as an O(n) problem.
As anyone who has worked in undergraduate admissions will tell you, it is far more complex than that. But when n grows prohibitively large, you have to go with solutions that are less than ideal.
My alma mater, thirty years ago, eschewed the traditional college application in favor of a more homebrew approach: since it was a small liberal arts college, it felt that the best way to see if a student was a fit for the college was to place him there for a span of a week or so: meeting with professors, faculty, taking a tour of the place, making sure things 'clicked'. He or she took an exam at the end of it, focused less on trying to define the student intellectually and more whether or not they were engaged with the college: there were quizzes on campus trivia (we're the second oldest college in the nation, and talk about our history incessantly), open-ended questions about what they liked, et cetera -- all designed to see if the student was really meant to be a part of the college.
This worked twofold: it let the admissions faculty see whether or not the student was really taking the experience seriously, and it let the student see whether or not they wanted to take it seriously.
(Why no math tests? When a professor spends a few hours with a prospective student, they can generally deduce whether or not they're smart enough to handle the rigor.)
Today, such a practice is impossible: the number of applicants has increased by at least 20x. There literally are not enough days in the calendar.
- awakeasleep 13y agoWilliams and Mary Represent
- anon-cheater 13y agoThat is a great system, but unsustainable for the volume, you are right. As a non-cheater who has been blessed with a lot of academic success, this article upsets me so much. my academic success has been dearly earned and I feel like cheaters completely undermine my efforts. True, cheaters don't have the knowledge and maybe I am a step ahead of them, because I actually put in the effort. But still, it feels like someone stole a taxi medallion and I bought one.
- ishansharma 13y agoSame here! It feels bad when people think that cheating is a RIGHT! I'm from India and 70% of people in my class think that cheating is fine. They'll copy assignments, cheat in tests and even exams. Though situation is not so bad here that people DEMAND for cheating but everything else is same. I guess this is because of society and pressure. I don't know about China but in India, professions are like fashion. When doctors seem to be making money, there is a large portion of students wanting to be doctors and there is pressure from parents and society as a whole. Academic qualification is treated as the ONLY thing that one will be judged on and this also leads to parents stopping kids form going into sports, music and arts. And poor kids who can't cope up with all this have to cheat.
- ttflee 13y agoIronically, in this case, the Chinese students who demanded rights to cheat were about to compete opportunities to enter SPORTS, MUSIC and ARTS colleges. The way many things work in Chinese societies is deviated far away from common knowledge, moral standard and laws. It is an eternal mystery how and why something is done for anybody outside of certain society. Although schools I attended never encouraged cheating, but the teachers did mention that gaps existed between the social reality and textbooks.
- miguelrochefort 13y agoHow does it feel like when people think that privacy is a RIGHT?
- calibraxis 13y agoI get the impression that these people are fighting for the right to have more decent lives and better schools. If so, organized cheating is a cost of the unequal system they live under. Reminds me of Basho's chief architect (the Riak company), who advised at Ricon's closing keynote that you should lie and misrepresent yourself to anyplace doing interesting things, as he did at Apple (where he got to write a distributed filesystem), Akamai, etc. Once in "the real world", we discover that corporations and governments routinely lie, cheat and steal. Because it's effective. Does anyone honestly think Steve Jobs was averse to sociopathic behavior, or went unrewarded for it? We live in institutions which reward such sheer winning over obeying rules. (Regardless whether those rules are important or terrible.) The people who make the rules themselves are subject to such pressures. The mass of cheaters here on HN simply are too wise to speak up and admit it. I say that as someone who never cheated on a school test or homework. I don't begrudge those who did, because the mainstream educational systems are disgusting. I have no fear that a cheater will make my worklife hard, because that's what interviews are for. I'm more concerned about play-by-the-rules people who've stuck to conventional wisdom all their lives, and defer to bosses.
- moonese 13y agoEntrance exam is a big thing in China, it will determine one's future, and we all take it quite seriously. Cheating is reported every year, but not in large cities, and this is the first time that someone will 'fight' as their children will not being able to cheat. Comparing to the total number of students who take the exam, 9,120,000 this year, cheating is really really quite small, from my experience, I never heard of cheating around me for entrance exam; and we also feel very ridiculous for such thing could happen here in China.
- fspeech 13y agoThe dilemma here is that admission quota is by province, so there is incentive for municipalities to go easy so that local students gain more seats at the prestigious schools. In other words the local education bureaus administering the tests are not disinterested parties.