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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

#431

Post by DuskStar »

kory wrote: post #268
retortio wrote: post #261

Ah, those pesky standardized tests. Sure they're the hardest part of admissions to game and are a major part of establishing an even intellectual playing field for applicants, but it just looks so bad when we discard a much higher proportion of qualified Asian applicants than qualified applicants from other groups! We were even sued over this issue and the suit is going to appeal! And we're trying so hard to increase…

The problem is that standardized tests worsen the gap between the privileged and not. Test performance correlates strongly with how much prep you receive. Wealthy, white & asian students have the advantage there. Not to mention that I am not convinced these tests strongly correlate with one’s ability to successfully complete an undergrad degree.

> Not to mention that I am not convinced these tests strongly correlate with one’s ability to successfully complete an undergrad degree.

I'm pretty sure that they do, at least if you're looking at the set of all students and not "students who got into university X". (If you only look at students who got in, you get issues like this [0] where height does not correlate with performance in the NBA, likely because short guys in the NBA had to be more skilled to get there in the first place)

After all, the ACT/SAT are largely poor IQ tests, and IQ really does predict academic success...

0: https://twitter.com/page_eco/status/1160900306588164096

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

#432

Post by neilparikh »

Spivak wrote: post #215
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.

High Schools are on the student’s side when it comes to college admissions. So when you’re on the honors track of your HS you almost literally can’t fail because your HS is trying to get you into better schools. Your HS is playing the game with you. The secret of being an honors kid isn’t aptitude but being told that you’re smart and your parents/peers expecting it of you.

Universities can adjust for grade inflation. For example, a Waterloo, the Engineering admissions department compares high school averages to first year averages to see how much scores drop, and use that to compute an adjustment factor by school (the logic being that if your marks dropped more than average, then your school was probably inflating your mark from the "true" mark you deserved).

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

#433

Post by malandrew »

aiisahik wrote: post #242

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 poi…

Given my recent experience with quite a few graduates from all three schools you mentioned, I'll take a Berkeley or CalTech graduate over one from Harvard all else being equal. This would not have been the case 10 years ago, but in my observation the quality of the rigor of thinking from undergraduates coming from Harvard has slipped dramatically relative to these two other schools, especially as the most recent vintage of Harvard undergraduates increasingly tend to argue from emotion and feelings instead of reason compared to Berkeley and CalTech graduates.

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

#434

Post by somethoughts »

rococode wrote: post #427
treis wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> top Ivies as rich kid schools They're definitely that as well. Everyone that gets into Harvard is very talented, but the general groups of differentiation on top of that I see is: (1) Rich kids who's parents can buy them opportunity, bribe the school with donations, and legacies. (2) White/Asians from modest backgrounds that are "holy shit" levels of exceptional. (3) Other minorities that are exceptional but more o…

Fair enough, that breakdown sounds about right to me. Though it's important to note that "rich kids" here means really super rich. I recall once hearing some admissions person half-jokingly say that they don't even notice donations under $10m. Which kind of raises the question, if the kid's family is contributing that much to the school, and part of the value for regular folks going to these schools is the opportunit…

Yes using those numbers, Harvard legacy admissions is basically a "Buy One Give One Hundred" concept similar to Tom's Shoes concept of "Buy One Give One"[1] but applied to experiential goods.

With a $10M donation and tuition at ~$100,000, the super donor is essentially buying 1 admission for their student and giving 100 students free admission.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/beyond-buy-one-g...

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

#435

Post by diebeforei485 »

hintymad wrote: post #374
macspoofing wrote: post #327

That's not really a good thing. What they are doing is changing a known transparent standard for entry to something completely arbitrary, ad hoc, and opaque from the point of view of the applicant. Also, the applicant pool will rise because there is no SAT filter. Having said that, I don't think it's a big deal because nobody needs to go to Harvard. In fact, if you aren't affluent enough to afford Harvard tuition, or…

Harvard started the institutionalization of "hollistic admission": https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in . According to the article, it was not about being fair, it was about limiting the admission of a specific group of people. In general, the more complex a system is, the easier it is for people to game the system, and therefore the easier it is to hide inequality. It's hard to believe that Harva…

Generally speaking, the problem sets might seem harder but the average score is also lower, so it's a wash.

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

#437

Post by diebeforei485 »

Ultimately this gives the admissions committee a lot less transparency in terms of whom they choose to admit.

In light of recent scandals, I am not sure that is a good thing. It may be well-intentioned today, but will ultimately be to the benefit of legacy and donor applicants, and to the detriment of others.

Perhaps Harvard with its endowment doesn't need the money and won't give in to the temptation, but this also sets the standard for other universities - and many of them could use the money.

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

#438

Post by neilparikh »

contemporary343 wrote: post #28

I'm a Canadian who went to an ivy for undergrad, and have always found the American attachment to the SAT a bit puzzling. I'm also puzzled at the widespread view that by removing the SAT some grave injustice or lowering in standards is inevitable. Canadian universities manage to admit students mostly just based on high school grades just fine. (Yes, there are provincial final exams but those scores often are not avai…

The Canadian admission system and the American system is very different to start with.

In Waterloo Engineering (and presumably other schools as well), they take your high school marks, add some adjustment factor for your extracurriculars and essays, and then pick the top N students.

In top US schools, they practice holistic admissions, which means they pick N students from the applicants, without specifying an explicit ranking system.

In the first case, an applicant can be relatively aware of where they stand based on the marks they apply with, and they know that the process used to select will be mostly transparent.

In the second case, from the applicant's perspective, it's pretty much a black box as to what the outcomes will be. When one of only 2 predictable parts (SAT scores and grades) are removed, I think it's understandable that there's some concern.

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

#439

Post by thaumasiotes »

Spivak wrote: post #347
thaumasiotes wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The secret of being an honors kid isn’t aptitude but being told that you’re smart and your parents/peers expecting it of you. How much teaching experience do you have? I'm including any time you tried to convey a skill to any other person.

Sure! I tutored the majority of my classmates in Calc and Physics and I did not find one person I believed couldn’t do it. I did find a lot of people who believed they couldn’t do it, weren’t good at math, and wanted to give up though. Some of the main problems: * A lot more people than you would expect have attention issues and just needed someone to give them one-on-one attention. They would get distracted in class…

Your calculus and physics classmates are not a representative sample of people.

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

#440

Post by whotheffknows »

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…

You've obviously never been to a private boarding school where tuition is $40k/year in highschool and in addition to this their parents paid for $5000 classes where the teachers helped them create calculator programs on SAT approved calculators to help solve problems faster and do timed exam grades.

I grew up on welfare until middle school years, made straight A's in a poorly ranked public school applied to every boarding school on the east coast because where I come from those schools are legitmately better (unlike in the northeast where many public schools are legit and fostered by small towns full of rich white people who drive to Manhattan for work everyday) and while I appreciate the people who paid for me to go to boarding school, I still got rejected from a Stanford summer school robotics program despite being qualified because I couldn't pay $10k in cash for it while a peer of mine driving a Porsche to school complained his parents were forcing him to go.

I still couldn't afford the SAT classes many of my peers took after school on campus so while yes my life is measurably better and you are correct money helps pad resumes outside of GPA, you are also incorrect it doesn't also help pad SAT scores.

This has been proven time and time again like a few years ago when sailing terminology was removed from reading comprehension because it was supposed to be derived from the context. Most kids who grew up in the Bronx don't have context for sailing terminology regardless of how well read they might be. This is just one example of money aside, how it is false to believe the tests are any less biased inducing than anything else that might go into a students application.

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