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Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

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Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#51

Post by AndrewDucker »

hliyan wrote: post #48
giantDinosaur wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right - but are we talking the 'merit' of billionaires or the 'merit' of being an engineer who can pass difficult math exams? Totally different things, and conflating them is not helpful.

Take two individuals with the aptitude and the willingness to learn engineering and pass said exam. Give one person enough money to pursue an engineering degree. Burden the other one with an ailing parent. There is no conflation here.

Similarly. Take two people with the aptitude. Have them both spend a year messing about. One of them has a family who can afford to help them get back on track, the other doesn't.

I'm doing really well despite falling off the rails a bit in my early 20s. If I didn't have my family to help me, I'd not be doing nearly as well.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#52

Post by duncan_bayne »

pinkfoot wrote: post #49
duncan_bayne wrote: post #43

Absolutely. Because we want our doctors and engineers to be just "good enough", none of this elitism for us! I'm sure they'll still cure cancer and get us to Mars, right? And the truly elite who miss out by random chance ... that doesn't matter because justice doesn't require us to recognise and appropriately reward genius. In fact, screw those priviliged geniuses, they're only first in line because they won a geneti…

I upvoted you, but it is true that for most graduates, a degree is just a ticket to the upper middle class where they will mostly do meetings, email, and office documents. Sadly, this is true for a lot of engineering jobs too. Whether they learn anything is irrelevant.

That's true. But, bluntly, and speaking as a member, we don't matter anywhere near as much as the absolute best.

The members of the "upper middle class ticket" group might as well be selected by ballot from the intellectually qualified.

But I'd never suggest that if it in any way imperiled the idenfitifcation and support of the very best and brightest. Which, AFAICT, is exactly what this proposal would do.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#53

Post by johnjj257 »

ForHackernews wrote: post #29
kokooo wrote: post #3

College should be a meritocracy, it's just that we want people to be able to be able to afford it and not be shit out of luck if they can't go to it. This would also reduce stress as you don't have to worry about not getting into a college if you know your life is going to turn out fine either way. Why has this goal been malformed and twisted around to the point where people are coming up with any solution that doesn…

You're assuming that standardized testing procedures, high school grading, and college admissions officers have the precision necessary to correctly distinguish between the 99.9997% perfect candidate and the 99.9998% perfect candidate. All I can say is that's nuts. I got a perfect score on my ACT, and I know for a fact that I guessed on some questions. Am I really a stronger applicant than somebody else who made less…

> Am I really a stronger applicant than somebody else who made less-lucky guesses?

No but that's just dumb luck. In general it will average out somehow cares about getting it 100% perfect?

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#54

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jimhefferon wrote: post #44
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Students from disadvantaged backgrounds would have a really hard time getting into college, even though many are extremely smart and have great potential to succeed at college If they’re smart and have potential to succeed, a meritocratic measure should rank them favourably. The problems with tipping the scales too far are (1) it’s inefficient, in that the total likely production of the student body is lowered and…

> meritocratic measure We have to this point been unable to produce such a measure, despite more than a century of trying.

> We have to this point been unable to produce such a measure

We have not been able to produce a precise measure. But we’re able to e.g. identify quartiles. Compressing the measure to “likely to graduate” tends to take care of a lot of the lifting.

That’s why a random selection component makes sense. It is honest about our limitations. And it removes the stigma from those who met the fuzzy threshold but didn’t get admitted.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#55

Post by MaximumYComb »

ggm wrote: post #13
sunseb wrote: post #10

[flagged]

Selecting randomly from a cohort already judged good enough is a meritocracy. Perhaps you prefer the French model with a linear ranking nationwide and a cap on how many thousands down from the top can go to the ecole normale superieur?

In Australia we have linear rankings, you're placed in allotments of 0.05%. It does favour the kids from rich backgrounds but the smart kids from poor backgrounds get a good shot at attending a solid university.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#56

Post by afarrell »

MagnumOpus wrote: post #14
rusty-rust wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your argument is engaging in “what aboutism” and detracts from the issue this article is trying to address. The problem they are trying to address is that true meritocracy only exists in a perfect system, that is to say that you can not fairly compare individuals across different environments. More concretely one of the problems it is trying to account for the situations where wealth or post code privilege gi…

> There are often situations where students just performed better on a standardized test because they could afford a couch or had better teachers and not because they are “smarter” or more capable The solution is to make sure that students have good teachers and a couch (??) to become more capable, and not to waste limited elite teaching resource on less-capable students.

No university can boil the ocean.

In order to make sure that students have good teachers, one challenge is making it possible for people from impoverished communities to be able to get high-quality schooling so that they can either become teachers or earn money that can go back into those communities.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#57

Post by hombre_fatal »

andrepd wrote: post #37
hombre_fatal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there's something to be salvaged from your idea (I was amazed when some of my expensive courses were taught by a TA, and one we couldn't even understand), unis aren't just vocational schools. One of the most important classes I took during my engineering degree was a philosophy 101 course I procrastinated until my last semester. 11 years later I somehow still periodically get to talk about Callicles (from Gorgi…

Why can't philosophy knowledge be assessed in a test?

How would you do it? There isn't some generic "philosophy" curriculum. The works you study in such a course, including literature and the other arts, are arbitrary.

Either the test's philosophy section chases down so many long-tails that you get most of them wrong just to get one right, or the entirety of your philosophy experience comes down to a few topical questions on a test that just miss the topics your courses covered.

That's the curse of standardized tests and why they ultimately shrink the possible curricula to fit inside of them. Is it the students that really benefit from this? Or are they the ones that suffer from our attempts at making things measurable?

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#58

Post by josephg »

hliyan wrote: post #23

Commenters bringing up "meritocracy" don't seem to realize that fair meritocracies rarely exist in society. Often, your merit allows your to accumulate more merit, making the merit function geometric rather than linear. When the merit function is geometric, all it takes is a small change of fortune to start a rapid rise or a rapid decline. "Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is…

Sure; but we don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of the good. “Fair capitalism” also doesn’t exist in society. But in both cases it’s worth asking - do we want more capitalism / meritocracy or do we want less? Is the problem that our assessment tools are too easy for rich people to game, or is the problem meritocracy itself?

Random selection would get obviously terrible outcomes too, but for different reasons. I’ve yet to hear anyone who complains about the inherent biases in meritocracy propose any system which isn’t just as pathological. Like, what does “fair” actually mean here? Should we select based on IQ tests? That’s illegal. Select based on conscientious? That biases for people who have free time - and hence it biases for wealth. Select randomly? Actually it turns out society benefits more from educating our best and brightest.

“Meritocracy“ is never perfect. But it’s better than any other system I can think of. Complaining is easy. If you were in charge, how would you make it better?

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#60

Post by iguy »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #39
Google234 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s wrong with that? Also there’s has to be a cap somewhere in the process.

> What’s wrong with that? It’s using a ruler to aim an electron microscope. Standardised tests measure academic potential, i.e. probability of graduating and likely value added to society from the educational experience, with a fair amount of error. Taking everyone within a standard deviation of the cut-off and randomly selecting therefrom admits this error and removes the stigma from those just below the previous, f…

> randomly selecting therefrom admits this error

Well, it enlarges the error. All you have done is to add an additional source of noise on top of the existing one.

> and removes the stigma from those just below the previous, false cut-off

This it may do, it may well be psychologically easier to accept that you got unlucky on the coin flip rather than unlucky on which topic came up in question 13.

(Not sure what "false" means, the cut-off is a fact of how the system works.)

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