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MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

mitadmissions.org

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Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#91

Post by dawg- »

knzhou wrote: post #57

Anybody cheering the exclusion of some test or other, because it was a pain to study for in high school, is simply not noticing the frog-boiling secondary effects going on. Every bit of emphasis taken out of objective results mean more advantage for smooth talking, photogenic, well-connected people. Yes, some misguided parents waste thousands of dollars on SAT courses. But students can also prep using the $20 officia…

What you call a "smooth-talker" is what someone else would call an articulate, socially well-adjusted person who can communicate their values and opinions in an intelligent way and who is comfortable making connections with others. Perhaps if this was the standard college admissions used, public schools would have more incentive to educate students as functional humans rather than test-taking drones.

Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#92

Post by bumby »

swiley wrote: post #67
knzhou wrote: post #57

Anybody cheering the exclusion of some test or other, because it was a pain to study for in high school, is simply not noticing the frog-boiling secondary effects going on. Every bit of emphasis taken out of objective results mean more advantage for smooth talking, photogenic, well-connected people. Yes, some misguided parents waste thousands of dollars on SAT courses. But students can also prep using the $20 officia…

>mean more advantage for smooth talking, photogenic, well-connected people. The whole point of the American University is to produce these kind of people so that shouldn’t be surprising. Otherwise you could earn a degree via self study proctored exams. Lack of objectivity during the application is a symptom not a cause.

Colleges have lost their monopoly on education but still hold the monopoly on accreditation. If we can figure out how to reduce that latter monopoly colleges will lose a lot of their power

Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#93

Post by thaumasiotes »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #34
thaumasiotes wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it's not really true. People spend a lot of money on test prep, but this isn't even a case where the evidence hasn't come in yet. We know perfectly well that test prep has negligible influence on SAT scores.

Those studies were mostly funded and influenced by the college board, and they needed that to be true, so that’s what they found. But there is prep and there is prep!, they are different with different influences. Studying the former (say a few weekend long prep course) to make conclusions about the latter (intensive cram school for a couple of years) is criminal. I’ve seen an SAT cram school in China, and yes...it w…

> Those studies were mostly funded and influenced by the college board, and they needed that to be true, so that’s what they found.

The SAT draws a huge amount of overtly hostile attention. So does SAT prep. But these highly motivated SAT-hostile researchers haven't been able to produce the results they need.

Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#94

Post by knzhou »

quotemstr wrote: post #69
knzhou wrote: post #57

Anybody cheering the exclusion of some test or other, because it was a pain to study for in high school, is simply not noticing the frog-boiling secondary effects going on. Every bit of emphasis taken out of objective results mean more advantage for smooth talking, photogenic, well-connected people. Yes, some misguided parents waste thousands of dollars on SAT courses. But students can also prep using the $20 officia…

> Anybody cheering the exclusion of some test or other, because it was a pain to study for in high school, is simply not noticing the frog-boiling secondary effects going on. Every bit of emphasis taken out of objective results mean more advantage for smooth talking, photogenic, well-connected people. Absolutely right. Standardized testing become popular in the first place as an egalitarian measure, a way to combat i…

The bribery scandal especially depresses me, because a lot of the colleges impacted had official bribery systems in place -- you're supposed to donate to the "Development Office" to get on the "Dean's List", or some other set of euphemisms. What the colleges were actually outraged about is that these middling-rich people tried to cheap out by paying a smaller bribe to some other office.

Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#95

Post by 0x8BADF00D »

systemvoltage wrote: post #84
NeverFade wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how exactly will you "dismantle it"? People want to pay thousands of dollars to try to gain access to elite institutions. No matter what test you'll come up with, someone will offer an expensive prep course for it, because they will have willing customers.

It needs to be dismantled due to monopoly. I’m not sure how. Those are orthogonal.

What you’re getting at is the government creates these types of monopolies due to massive regulations and licensing.

The issue is not with the college prep companies. It’s with government getting involved in education, making it way more expensive than it should be. The free market will drive prices down, especially in the education market.

Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#96

Post by jimmyvalmer »

realtalk_sp wrote: post #18
yardie wrote: post #8

I used to think the SATs were fair. Until I found out how much money was being spent on SAT prep. And those expensive prep courses had the potential to increase scores over 100 points. I took the recommended SAT prep course through my high school. It was 2 weekends of going over material that might be on the exam and a workbook recommended by The College Board. Imagine my surprise going to university and meeting stud…

While it's true that prep courses can help dramatically, the SAT subject tests are also not really that hard. I don't consider myself terribly smart (certainly not MIT level) and I managed to get an 800 on the Math II and 800 on Chemistry with a minimum of studying using pretty inexpensive books. This applied to many of my friends as well.

I was a child of the 80s, and while I agree the Math "Level 2" was a cakewalk, getting an 800 on Chem was definitely something to write home about. I get that scaling may have changed in the past thirty years, but still!

Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#97

Post by seanmcdirmid »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #93
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those studies were mostly funded and influenced by the college board, and they needed that to be true, so that’s what they found. But there is prep and there is prep!, they are different with different influences. Studying the former (say a few weekend long prep course) to make conclusions about the latter (intensive cram school for a couple of years) is criminal. I’ve seen an SAT cram school in China, and yes...it w…

> Those studies were mostly funded and influenced by the college board, and they needed that to be true, so that’s what they found. The SAT draws a huge amount of overtly hostile attention. So does SAT prep. But these highly motivated SAT-hostile researchers haven't been able to produce the results they need.

That simply isn’t true, eg see https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/...

The College Board can’t really have it both ways. And of course: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-...

Which is just one example of pulling out all the stops.

Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#98

Post by knzhou »

jimmyvalmer wrote: post #86
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been a similar debate over subject GREs in my field. The argument has been made that subject GREs are racist/sexist, because of the differing distributions of test scores in different demographic groups. There is a strong social pressure to accept this argument, despite its obvious absurdity, leading most people in the field to do so (and if they disagreed, they probably wouldn't tell you). The problem is tha…

MIT's grad schools jettisoned GRE consideration a while ago. As you say, the GRE quant is trivial by MIT's standards, and the GRE verbal largely irrelevant. It's fairly easy to spot the "heavy-hitters" just from recommendations, undergraduate publication record, thesis, and GPA. In short, MIT and its elite cohort (CMU, Caltech, etc.) only accept undergrads who found their way into their professor's research groups --…

Absolutely! I have a lot more faith in grad admissions than undergrad, because there's so much more good signal. Unfortunately nothing like this is available when people are in high school.

Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#99

Post by koboll »

yardie wrote: post #8

I used to think the SATs were fair. Until I found out how much money was being spent on SAT prep. And those expensive prep courses had the potential to increase scores over 100 points. I took the recommended SAT prep course through my high school. It was 2 weekends of going over material that might be on the exam and a workbook recommended by The College Board. Imagine my surprise going to university and meeting stud…

>And those expensive prep courses had the potential to increase scores over 100 points.

I took one of those expensive scores and got the exact same score after the course as I did before the course.

It turned out the cheap study book was every bit as effective as the expensive course.

Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#100

Post by askafriend »

SkyBelow wrote: post #43
hackinthebochs wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an underrepresented minority and I increased my SAT score by 200-300 from the PSAT to SAT, depending on how you want to measure the change. This was just by doing self-study with off the shelf test prep material. The classes aren't what increases your score, its the consistent structured study and ones innate potential. For some people, no amount of study is going to get them into the 90+th percentile. While othe…

>But this is exactly what SAT is intended to measure, scholastic potential. But if you define the variable like this, you end up opening a can of worms. Do rich kids have more scholastic potential because they have better access to resources? Or should scholastic potential be the measurement of how a child performs assuming they had the same access to resources? Should children who belong to a racial/ethnic group tha…

> Do rich kids have more scholastic potential because they have better access to resources?

Yes. They do. It's maybe not the answer you were looking for, but if you are better prepared, you'll do better at the task at hand. Seems fairly straightforward.

The next question would be how easy are those resources to access (in the case of the SAT)? And the answer is you can do pretty well with a $20 test prep book that you can order from Amazon. The rest is time, effort, awareness etc.

Then we start getting into factors that are much harder to control or evaluate - parental involvement, guidance, nutrition, emotional support, etc.

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