Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement • Hacker News Board

Re: Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

#81

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Sat, Oct 19, 2019, 5:26 PM UTC

TomVDB wrote: post #56

kthejoker2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a really useful signal detector then.

The SAT and ACT are a fantastic detector to identify rich and motivated parents who are willing to drop off their kid for 2 years at cramming centers for weekly tutoring sessions and trial tests... and who are willing to pay thousands for it. I’ve been there, his scores went up significantly. I don’t think it made him smarter in any way. Combine that with our ability to buy a house in a very good school district and…

> "The SAT and ACT are a fantastic detector to identify rich and motivated parents who are willing to drop off their kid for 2 years at cramming centers for weekly tutoring sessions and trial tests... and who are willing to pay thousands for it."

It was great for me, as a poor minority who was highly dedicated to education and self-learning. Felt pretty good to do as well or better than the wealthier kids despite not having access to a tenth of resources they did.

> "It’s all bullshit."

Sure, if you're wealthy, you can find a bullshit way to get your kids into a better school that they deserve. But this changes nothing; the wealthy will find some new way to leverage their wealth to do the same and it will be back to business as usual. Meanwhile, it shafts the poor but hard-working students (including minorities!) who had a (semi-)objective way to show that they had talent and dedication, all in the name of pretend "diversity".

That's the real bullshit here.

Re: Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

#82

Post by travisoneill1 » Sat, Oct 19, 2019, 5:32 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #60

zelly wrote: post #55

How about a SAT test but instead of getting into a college you get a job. Bring back aptitude testing for employment so we don't have to go through this college rigmarole.

I don’t think employers want that. They like 4 year college degrees not only because they demonstrate a modicum of intelligence but also because they demonstrate conformity and conscientiousness, as well as the ability to delay gratification. Employers like conformist workers who will put up with boring work without complaint. A person who does really well in high school and aces their SATs but refuses to go to colle…

I am an employer. Why the fuck would I ever want that type of employee?

Re: Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

#83

Post by turtlecloud » Sat, Oct 19, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

This is just anti-asian American bias.

Harvard lawsuit scares the colleges. They will need a new way to discriminate.

I find it funny that historically the standardized tests were primarily used to help get Jewish students into elite universities and once they make up the majority they remove it.

Re: Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

#84

Post by xyzzyz » Sat, Oct 19, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #79

xyzzyz wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve also learned a lot in my degrees, and greatly enjoyed my time in the university. However, I’ve only ever needed a tiny fraction of what I learned there in my jobs at Google and Facebook.

> " However, I’ve only ever needed a tiny fraction of what I learned there in my jobs at Google and Facebook. " That's interesting. What did you do at those positions? I was at a different FAANG and used the hell out what I learned at university. RF knowledge, embedded systems, creating physics simulations, and a bunch of other stuff. Hell, I wish I'd learned more; some DSP knowledge would be hella handy right about…

I worked in Chrome for a while, but for past few years I worked in security related areas, both at Google and at Facebook. You could make the case that the mathematics I’ve learned helped me understand how RSA and ECC work, but that has actually been mostly irrelevant in my experience, unlike things like system design, vulnerability detection and management, fuzzing, reverse engineering, which I have mostly learned on the job, not at university.

If people are finding that they aren't using what they learned at university in their career, it's the career that's the problem, not the university education.

This is a bit myopic with respect to how normal people view university education. For a typical person, the point of education is not to learn things, but to obtain a degree. The point of degree is to get a good job. If they manage to get a good job, that’s a success, and nothing more is expected from the university education: people learn how to do the job mostly on the job anyway. In this context, if people don’t use what they learned in the university in the careers, that’s okay, what matters for normal people is the career, not the learning. Of course, it might be different for you (it is different for me, I love learning for learning’s sake), but that’s observably not how most people approach life.

Re: Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

#85

Post by travisoneill1 » Sat, Oct 19, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

downrightmike wrote: post #57

SamReidHughes wrote: post #7

This is because they want to enroll people too stupid to solve basic math problems.

Yes and because that will at least get them one semester out of these kids, which will probably need student loans. Even in state tuition will be many thousands of dollars that will trap these kids.

Then they will dumb down the curriculum even more.

Re: Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

#86

Post by Pfhreak » Sat, Oct 19, 2019, 5:35 PM UTC

freetime2 wrote: post #75

As someone who dealt with severe depression during high school, I feel like the SATs really helped me out during college admissions time. Just getting out of bed every day was a real struggle for me and as a result my attendance was poor, my grades were spotty, and I didn’t have any formal extra curriculars I could show off. But I did get the highest SAT scores in my class, and I feel like that helped demonstrate tha…

I had the opposite -- near perfect test scores and shoddy grades. Ended up having to go to community college because no schools would have me. (It ended up working out for the better, I eventually made my way through an associates and saved a TON of money, got my bachelors, and have been quite successful.)

Re: Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

#87

Post by Pfhreak » Sat, Oct 19, 2019, 5:36 PM UTC

turtlecloud wrote: post #83

This is just anti-asian American bias. Harvard lawsuit scares the colleges. They will need a new way to discriminate. I find it funny that historically the standardized tests were primarily used to help get Jewish students into elite universities and once they make up the majority they remove it.

Whole lot of citations needed there, bub.

Re: Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

#88

Post by zelly » Sat, Oct 19, 2019, 5:38 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #60

zelly wrote: post #55

How about a SAT test but instead of getting into a college you get a job. Bring back aptitude testing for employment so we don't have to go through this college rigmarole.

I don’t think employers want that. They like 4 year college degrees not only because they demonstrate a modicum of intelligence but also because they demonstrate conformity and conscientiousness, as well as the ability to delay gratification. Employers like conformist workers who will put up with boring work without complaint. A person who does really well in high school and aces their SATs but refuses to go to colle…

So you agree that college has nothing to do with education or job preparation, but rather some abstract general measure of character.

There are other ways to filter for people with these traits. Being smart in general (or being conscientious enough to study hard for the knowledge-based SATs) highly correlates to low time preference, so it may be redundant to do any other tests. There are other ways to teach a job skill without spending 4 years to do it or making a competition out of getting access to learning. In the last century before the college boom, big employers would expect to have to train new employees.

Forcing young people to incur significant unforgivable debt to the education-industrial complex just to prove they have some brain configuration seems wasteful and cruel.

Re: Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

#89

Post by mhuffman » Sat, Oct 19, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

wyxuan wrote: post #49

mhuffman wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Common sense should tell us that standardized tests like this are not fair assessments of actual student academic potential. Common sense should tell you no such thing! Why wouldn't a test that measures a list of aptitudes (writing, comprehension, logic, math, etc.) not correlate to some extent to academic success in a liberal arts degree? Literally the classes you have to take are related to writing, comprehension…

If you actually take the SAT, you realize that the content is very easy. Instead, its just a test taking strategy test. Who had the better tutor. It doesn't test any 'real' skills, only how well they can bubble answer sheets.

I did actually take the SAT! Granted it was a long time ago, but I thought that it was challenging.

I did very well on it and it helped me move forward in my academic career because I was from a very, very poor family where going to college wasn't in the cards otherwise.

Re: Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

#90

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Sat, Oct 19, 2019, 5:41 PM UTC

ronnier wrote: post #4

The GRE is increasingly being dropped as well. The motivation is racial diversity. For example at Brown: https://www.brown.edu/news/2019-10-03/gre The GRE is no longer needed for... American Studies Biotechnology Biomedical Engineering Chemistry Comparative Literature Computational Biology Computer Science Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences Ecology and Evolutionary Biology English French Studies German Studi…

> "Computer Science"

While I like to rag on pseudo-diversity as much as the next person, the Computer Science GRE was discontinued in 2013; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_Record_Examinations#G.... Can't require something that no longer exists.