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Harvard University Won’t Require SAT, ACT for Admissions Next Year

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Re: Harvard University Won’t Require SAT, ACT for Admissions Next Year

#241

Post by 0d9eooo »

ylem wrote: post #194
akyu wrote: post #115

I have a hard time understanding the logic here. GPAs are essentially useless, so what else do we have to go off of? "Hollistic admissions" processes seem to be even more skewed towards rich kids, as they have far greater opportunities outside of the class room to pad their resumes in exactly the way that colleges look for. This seems entirely backwards to me. If there is a systemic bias in test scores, it is still b…

Dumb question, but are GPAs useless? I mean a plot of say high school GPA vs say college graduation rate or college GPA would be rather informative.

No. Empirically, they're as predictive as or more predictive of future educational performance (usually first-year college GPA) than test scores, despite grade inflation (which isn't as extreme as some would have you think).

The advantage of GPA is it's an average over a long time period, unlike a test, which is a slice at a very brief moment. The disadvantage of GPA is variability in course difficulty and grading standards.

What's interesting to think about is how variable grades and courses really are across institutions. For example, colleges do try to coordinate content a bit because of transfer issues etc.

Re: Harvard University Won’t Require SAT, ACT for Admissions Next Year

#242

Post by aiisahik »

As an Asian who went to an Ivy, I welcome this change.

Yes, it will mask a policy of keeping the proportion of Asians lower than a race neutral policy.

Yes, it's racially discriminatory.

Yes, it's somewhat unfair to Asians who are trying to get in.

But no, being fair isn't the point of these schools. Nor is having the most academically excellent student population. If you want that, go to Berkeley or CalTech.

The point is to provide an exclusive and desirable brand name. If the school ended up being 50% Asian like Californian colleges, it would be less diverse, less interesting place to go to school, and lose a lot of the cachet. I wouldn't want to go to a college that is 50% Asian and 1% black over a college that reflected the demographics of the country.

Asians parents need to learn that life isn't just about testing better and having a better resume. Their kids will learn that lesson later on in life but time they learned it earlier.

Re: Harvard University Won’t Require SAT, ACT for Admissions Next Year

#243

Post by iagovar »

mrfredward wrote: post #187
akyu wrote: post #115

I have a hard time understanding the logic here. GPAs are essentially useless, so what else do we have to go off of? "Hollistic admissions" processes seem to be even more skewed towards rich kids, as they have far greater opportunities outside of the class room to pad their resumes in exactly the way that colleges look for. This seems entirely backwards to me. If there is a systemic bias in test scores, it is still b…

A very cynical answer to what's the logic here: objective measures get in the way of many non-academic college admission goals, so colleges want to do away with them. One of those goals is racial diversity, and that's the only one colleges openly talk about because it's the only one that can positively impact society. Other goals include raising more money by admitting the children of major donors, improving the pres…

That sounds bad if you're a white non-rich kid.

Re: Harvard University Won’t Require SAT, ACT for Admissions Next Year

#244

Post by selimthegrim »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #79
anonuser123456 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What motivation does CalTech have to retain ownership of credentialing powers? I can't imagine the administration there caring about anything less.

Money? Undergraduate attendance is typically a vastly larger revenue stream.

Most of Caltech's revenue is from government and private research grants, not tuition. They only raised it because they don't have economies of scale for their undergrad program and admissions wanted to keep up with the Joneses at Stanford and Princeton,

Re: Harvard University Won’t Require SAT, ACT for Admissions Next Year

#245

Post by chrisandchips »

gruez wrote: post #218
mrfredward wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very cynical answer to what's the logic here: objective measures get in the way of many non-academic college admission goals, so colleges want to do away with them. One of those goals is racial diversity, and that's the only one colleges openly talk about because it's the only one that can positively impact society. Other goals include raising more money by admitting the children of major donors, improving the pres…

>improving the prestige of the college by admitting top athletes What's the logic here? I'll admit I'm not a big fan of college sports myself, but who assesses the credibility of a college by their athletics program?

Well, any student who's interested in playing sports at school will likely be interested in that sort of thing.

I think more generally it adds to the general culture of the school - people will pick up on the fact that some athlete they know went there and think that's cool, even if it doesnt impact their academics at all.

More cynically, lots of students love to associate their school's legacy with their own ego

Re: Harvard University Won’t Require SAT, ACT for Admissions Next Year

#246

Post by ylem »

throwawaygh wrote: post #225
ylem wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumb question, but are GPAs useless? I mean a plot of say high school GPA vs say college graduation rate or college GPA would be rather informative.

> I mean a plot of say high school GPA vs say college graduation rate or college GPA would be rather informative. You'd have to be very careful in how to measure both the inputs and the outputs. First, "weighting" makes high school GPAs pretty difficult to interpret without a lot of context. This is compounded by the fact that "weighting" is a bad solution to the underlying problem of trying to compare fundamentally…

These are all excellent points! But, I think this is the discussion we should be having. I doubt we can get the data, but universities have data on both the performance of students they have admitted (along with their schools) as well as their performance at the university. It seems like they could do their own analysis.

You mentioned the question of what the A means. I wonder if just the act of working to get the A tells us something and that something may be more predictive of college success than the SAT/ACT.

Or, another thing to imagine looking at would be say AP exam scores. I am biased, but I would imagine these would be more predictive than SAT/ACT and probably more informative than GPA.

The question of change in major is interesting--but I think even the coarse question of say graduates/doesn't graduate would be interesting to see how it correlates with high school GPA (as compared to SAT/ACT) before delving into the more difficult cases that you rase.

Re: Harvard University Won’t Require SAT, ACT for Admissions Next Year

#247

Post by crimsonalucard5 »

usaar333 wrote: post #230
crimsonalucard5 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But whites still are the majority in SF by a huge margin.

? Have you ever been to SF? That's not true for the general population and even less true for youth. And the white youth that are there tend to go to private schools https://priceonomics.com/where-are-all-the-white-people-in-s... .

I live in SF, i grew up in the bay.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Demographics_of_San_Francisco#:~....

Re: Harvard University Won’t Require SAT, ACT for Admissions Next Year

#248

Post by malandrew »

seibelj wrote: post #212
travisoneill1 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How else are you going to keep the Asians out?

You are probably being facetious, but my wife is Vietnamese and her parents were boat people who fled the communists, didn't speak any English and had no money, then her dad got a job washing dishes, learned English at night, got into college, then got into medical school, started a chain of clinics, and retired a millionaire. You would not believe how much they despise current "progressive" politics and speaking wit…

Great comment. What's not appreciated is that Asians in the US have the greatest Gini coefficient of any racial group in the US: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/07/12/income-inequality...

John McWhorter made a comment in a Reason interview that affirmative action really should be about socioeconomic status and not race. Back in the day race would have been a highly correlative proxy for income and wealth, but that it is becoming increasingly less predictive and advantaging middle and upper class minorities when today they almost no meaningful disadvantages relative to their white and asian peers of the same socioeconomic class.

Re: Harvard University Won’t Require SAT, ACT for Admissions Next Year

#249

Post by ylem »

TrackerFF wrote: post #214
ylem wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumb question, but are GPAs useless? I mean a plot of say high school GPA vs say college graduation rate or college GPA would be rather informative.

They're not useless, but it's rather that when everyone's scoring high, it's not the best measure to differentiate candidates. What happens in other countries, where they only use grades/GPA, is that you start using more decimals - but then again, that's only useful when the size/population of "perfect" scores is low enough. If you have 10000 students with a perfect 4.0, and 2000 spots, then it's obviously impossible…

Ok, so you think that say some state schools it might work ok, but not at say Stanford or Harvard. What about say folding in AP exam scores?

Re: Harvard University Won’t Require SAT, ACT for Admissions Next Year

#250

Post by josephcsible »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #168
akyu wrote: post #115

I have a hard time understanding the logic here. GPAs are essentially useless, so what else do we have to go off of? "Hollistic admissions" processes seem to be even more skewed towards rich kids, as they have far greater opportunities outside of the class room to pad their resumes in exactly the way that colleges look for. This seems entirely backwards to me. If there is a systemic bias in test scores, it is still b…

SAT scores are also pretty useless, when Harvard has enough applications with perfect scores to fill their class multiple times.

Ignoring the results of a test seems like the wrong solution to this problem. Why not make the test harder instead, so that a perfect score could be a ticket to the school of your choice?
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