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Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

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

#101

Post by bsanr2 »

zaroth wrote: post #52
vntx wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, this approach is misguided. Removing standardized tests removes a useful metric admissions can use to analyze applicants as part of a holistic process. Is it a perfect metric? No, but the scores are good predictors for diligence which is crucial for college success. If you need to go to college to develop fundamental critical thinking skills, then something is very, very wrong with your basic education system…

The challenge is that the environment that is predisposed to produce teenagers with a well rounded educational foundation and well developed critical thinking and studying skills... tend to be affluent households that can afford to move to areas with great schools, and send their kids to a constant stream of extracurriculars. That’s not to say it’s impossible to succeed in adverse conditions, but it’s inane to preten…

>For people who want to go to college purely for rigorous academic study with the brightest young academic minds, this is going to be a shift.

Will it? The academic cheating scandal and what we know about legacy admission tells us that many prestigious colleges very decidedly don't put pure academic rigor above all else. I've heard tell that getting into Harvard and surviving its social scene is harder than actually graduating from it. Anecdata, but of all the big-name schools, I've only heard of a handful that deliver on their "chew you up if you're not intellectually ready" reputations: MIT, CalArts, several UCs... That's about it.

I'm of the opinion that the radical and purposeful shift we should be moving towards is one of parity in rigor and support for all students passed a certain level of demonstrated competence. Then, lottery.

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

#102

Post by dxbydt »

Speaking as a current grad student, this whole anti-test movement in America is a complete train wreck and will devastate the nation over the long term. Short term, yes, lots of kids will get into lots of programs they are mentally unequipped for. But once they get in, a few will get their shit together and actually do well. Good for them! But the vast majority simply withdraw in the 3rd week before the W shows up on the transcript. The ones who don’t withdraw and don’t get their shit together are the toxic bunch. That’s a significant bunch. They are the ones who show up in labs & loudly say God I hate this class so much! They are trying to build sympathy for their case that the course is too hard. But perhaps it’s too hard because they are just not ready for it - haven’t taken the prereqs, or not doing homework, or not mentally mature. The SAT is supposed to test to precisely these things. But they’ve bypassed that hurdle. So now the TAs and adjuncts have to gently break the truth to them. That no, 7/0 + 5/0 is not 12/0. No I won’t give you a point for that because it’s the most obvious conclusion. I actually had to escort the kid to the Professor because he threw a tantrum and said stats is supposed to be easy, it’s mostly arithmetic!

But in the grand scheme of things, undergrads are mostly harmless. They don’t produce research, they are just there to pass courses and join the economy as worker bees. The really harmful cohort are grad students who get into grad programs without passing the subject GREs. In my opinion, the Physics subject GRE and the Math Subject GRE are probably the 2 toughest exam papers we have in the USA. The vast majority of students cannot for the life of them pass it. The ones who do pass tend to do incredibly well in the grad courses. Especially the math GRE, which tests calculus, gradient, hessian, lagrange’s theorem, greens theorem, stokes, very basic algebra like elementary group theory, abelian & non commutative groups, cosets, fields & rings, basic number theory, chinese remainder, basic analysis like cauchy schwartz and mean value theorems. If you don’t know this material and get into grad school in some math-heavy discipline like math/stat/applied math/... you are going to struggle a lot. If it’s some lightweight discipline like OR/IE/Applied Stats/CS/Eng, ok maybe you don’t need to know this shit. But then, you shouldn’t also show up to graduate probability /statistics classes and then raise your hand in middle of lecture and say you don’t know how to compute the distribution of the ratio of 2 gaussians. This is exactly why have the Math GRE, so you can take a few practice tests for free, realize you don’t know how to integrate, and maybe work some calculus problems before you apply to grad school, not after. End of rant.

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

#103

Post by jseliger »

alpineidyll3 wrote: post #47
spamizbad wrote: post #29

It's a cynical move to hit their enrollment numbers, sold to the public as something to improve "diversity". But it's really just laying the groundwork for schools to cope with life after the college boom is over. For elite schools, it also makes it easier to provide cover for legacy and donor admissions. You no longer have to explain how Keese James Shackleford IV got into the the Shackleford school of dkljalfjaf wh…

Exactly. Colleges are in the business of marketing prestige, why lend credibility to a test anyone can take to prove they are intelligent without paying to attend for four years. Ex professor here. Faculty have the power to end this bezzle if we admit students are learning nothing and we'd all be better off with real jobs.

Ex professor here. Faculty have the power to end this bezzle if we admit students are learning nothing and we'd all be better off with real jobs.

Some already have. https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-educatio...

Moreover, almost everyone involved figures out what's going on, sooner or later: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz..., and typically sooner.

Notice the date stamp on both of those. This is hardly new news. Years ago I was teaching the LSAT and the guy who owned the company told me to read Beer & Circus by Murray Sperber, which fits the genre.

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

#104

Post by xyzzyz »

so_tobeclear wrote: post #97
xyzzyz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the theory that people keep repeating, but research keeps failing to substantiate that. University syllabuses keep teaching people things that is not going to be useful to anyone, or will only be useful to tiny fraction of people, who’d likely just learn it as needed anyway. Experiments show that transfer learning basically doesn’t exist, average people simply cannot apply principles they’ve learned in one con…

Though in large part what you are saying is accurate and studies likely confirm it, the comment above makes the distinction of select courses of study. Engineers, lawyers and doctors aren't average, even within the university context. >...many people have very successful careers in one field despite having a degree in a completely different field... This sounds a great deal like transfer learning. Applying format, st…

Engineers, lawyers and doctors aren't average, even within the university context.

You need to talk to lawyers and doctors too. Lawyers typically know jack shit about the law outside the fields they practice in. Doctor education varies greatly between countries. For example, in Poland medical school is whole 2 years longer than in the US, and the students have to learn all Latin names of all possible bones and muscles in the whole body. Every doctor will tell you that it’s absolutely useless in their actual practice. Do the two missing years make US doctors 25% worse? Clearly not, doctors forget most of what they learn anyway. It’s not like your rheumatologist remembers symptoms of all those rare internal diseases they had to memorize for the test.

Applying format, structures, and approaches to unrelated fields. Much of an engineering degree is designed around learning to learn well. That's the only degree I can speak of, but it has been my understanding that other programs have similar intent.

And engineering students, especially from top programs, typically are great at that, but not because they learned it at university, but rather because you need to be really smart to get into and successfully graduate with science or engineering degree.

Many people in western countries these days, especially the smartest and best educated, have extreme hard time accepting that innate differences in cognitive ability is a real, observable thing, and consequently their models of reality are deficient, because they put the causation on wrong factors.

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

#105

Post by Jorge1o1 »

ajross wrote: post #40
wtvanhest wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just enrollment, but also % of applicants accepted.

Why would a school want to increase their acceptance rate? Generally selectivity is seen as a proxy for "quality".

Acceptance is typically a fixed-ish number, while applications vary.

You want to maximize applications

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

#106

Post by tnecniv »

bsanr2 wrote: post #101
zaroth wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge is that the environment that is predisposed to produce teenagers with a well rounded educational foundation and well developed critical thinking and studying skills... tend to be affluent households that can afford to move to areas with great schools, and send their kids to a constant stream of extracurriculars. That’s not to say it’s impossible to succeed in adverse conditions, but it’s inane to preten…

>For people who want to go to college purely for rigorous academic study with the brightest young academic minds, this is going to be a shift. Will it? The academic cheating scandal and what we know about legacy admission tells us that many prestigious colleges very decidedly don't put pure academic rigor above all else. I've heard tell that getting into Harvard and surviving its social scene is harder than actually…

You might not fail out of a lot of big name schools that like to keep their graduation rate high, but you'll come out with a boatload of C's. You may have a degree, but that's not a great outcome, and why go to school for four years if you aren't learning effectively? I know that people say that it's a networking opportunity, but most of my friends that got good jobs they were happy with out of college were the ones that worked hard. The ones who just floated by continued to float by.

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

#107

Post by tikhonj »

wyxuan wrote: post #50

I think there are a lot cynics here, but they should take the test before you really understand why SAT/ACT is stupid as an admission req. Source: Took the test

I mean, they're not ideal, but that's a wonky standard. I also took high school classes and I can tell you that GPA is an even stupider requirement, and don't even get me started on extracurriculars...

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

#108

Post by xyzzyz »

timmytokyo wrote: post #93
xyzzyz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their result match everyone else’s, so I see no reason to not cite them.

And apparently you see no reason to cite "everyone else's", even when that would have strengthened the persuasiveness of your argument. Hm.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1976-08398-001 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00221546.1998.11... (this one summarizes something like 20 other studies in a nice table) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/S15326977EA0801_... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/073998639301530... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001316447903900... https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1968-09427-001

You want more? I could give you probably 50 more studies. The literature here is vast and consistent.

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

#109

Post by philwelch »

xyzzyz wrote: post #104
so_tobeclear wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though in large part what you are saying is accurate and studies likely confirm it, the comment above makes the distinction of select courses of study. Engineers, lawyers and doctors aren't average, even within the university context. >...many people have very successful careers in one field despite having a degree in a completely different field... This sounds a great deal like transfer learning. Applying format, st…

Engineers, lawyers and doctors aren't average, even within the university context. You need to talk to lawyers and doctors too. Lawyers typically know jack shit about the law outside the fields they practice in. Doctor education varies greatly between countries. For example, in Poland medical school is whole 2 years longer than in the US, and the students have to learn all Latin names of all possible bones and muscle…

In some countries you can even go straight to medical school without a college degree.

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

#110

Post by xyzzyz »

philwelch wrote: post #109
xyzzyz wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineers, lawyers and doctors aren't average, even within the university context. You need to talk to lawyers and doctors too. Lawyers typically know jack shit about the law outside the fields they practice in. Doctor education varies greatly between countries. For example, in Poland medical school is whole 2 years longer than in the US, and the students have to learn all Latin names of all possible bones and muscle…

In some countries you can even go straight to medical school without a college degree.

In most countries, in fact. The pre-med thing that US and some other countries have is bizarre.
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