This is a 2005 article by Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice [1].
Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
81–90 of 307 posts
Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
#82Colleges are in for an extremely rude awakening. No more int'l student tuition coupled with the fact that most people don't need college anymore when you can learn better than some two-bit "professor" could teach you with just a set of instructional videos. Add in a take home exam and now you are running your own ivy league education for free.
Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
On average people with slightly-higher scores/grades/etc should still be smarter. Anyway the alternative proposed here is replacing lucky question guesses with luck via a lottery.
> Anyway the alternative proposed here is replacing lucky question guesses with luck via a lottery.
Yes, this proposal is more transparent and honest about the factor luck plays in the outcomes. It doesn't try to launder luck through some test numbers and essays to pretend it's purely meritocratic.
Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
#84Commenters 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…
We really need to interrogate the concept of meritocracy a lot more: "Many deride our meritocracy for not really working for the poor, for people of colour, for women; they see structural impediments to these groups as preventing a real meritocracy from flourishing. But I would put it to you a different way: What could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled?" Because once we acknowledge that n…
I think wealth is essentially a means of distributing, directing and exchanging social power. So wealth and scarcity are not necessarily cruel, unless you feel like cruel deprivation is necessary to maintain social power. Then the question is not how do you distribute cruelty and wealth, but rather, how do you direct society in order to minimize cruelty?
I think meritocracy would be a really bad way to go about this, because rooting power in 'merit' would very quickly lead to merit being defined as whatever maintains incumbent power. So you'd end up with not only something that isn't meritocratic in any reasonable sense, but also corrupts the idea of merit. And since that's often knowledge-based merit, you'd end up with a situation where whatever 'knowledge' incumbents had proved proficiency in would become something they would protect against all challengers. Intellectual stagnation and extreme discouragment of creativity would be the norm.
Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 "fals…
False as in we don’t know the person ranked 1,001 has less academic potential than the person ranked 999. We know, with a decent likelihood, that the person ranked 1 has more than the person ranked 750. But someone at 1,250 is quite likely to exceed the academic potential of someone at 900. Hence the “falseness” of the cut-off.
Sure, but this is like insisting that every guy with Olympic gold holds a "false" medal, every time. While the stated rule is that it goes by who crosses the line first on the day, this obviously isn't a perfect measure of who's ultimately really in some other abstract sense the fastest man alive.
I guess the common way of deliberately adding noise is by rounding off scores, such as giving A/B/C instead of rank order. Which means that nobody gets a letter saying that their score (the one from the exam) has rank 1001.
Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using merit as a proxy for competence is where a lot of the trouble starts. They are very different. Merit really means ladder-climbing - plenty of incompetent and amoral people are are good at climbing the ladder. It is the ladder itself that is the core of the problem.
> Using merit as a proxy for competence is where a lot of the trouble starts These debates tend to get diluted absent a specific meritocratic measure. With respect to college, I think the sole question to be answered by such a measure is probability of the admitee graduating. We are able, to some degree, to predict this. Given such a measure, it doesn’t make sense to give a seat to someone who has a 5% chance of grad…
> I think the sole question to be answered by such a measure is probability of the admitee graduating.
A society where the only criteria for access to higher education is that one graduates - and then perhaps goes on to do nothing with their education, or even just maintains the status quo - is a failure in my book.
If we wanted to look at their contributions to capitalism using a market measure (I'm not claiming this is even a good measure) then university dropouts like Bill Gates and Zuck are already examples of how your measure fails.
(Although Gates did eventually graduate 34 years after starting, hopefully the point is clear and we don't need to get pedantic about a simple example).
Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
On average people with slightly-higher scores/grades/etc should still be smarter. Anyway the alternative proposed here is replacing lucky question guesses with luck via a lottery.
> Anyway the alternative proposed here is replacing lucky question guesses with luck via a lottery. Yes, this proposal is more transparent and honest about the factor luck plays in the outcomes. It doesn't try to launder luck through some test numbers and essays to pretend it's purely meritocratic.
Downvoted over "luck laundering"...
Definitely time to quit get back to work.
Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
False as in we don’t know the person ranked 1,001 has less academic potential than the person ranked 999. We know, with a decent likelihood, that the person ranked 1 has more than the person ranked 750. But someone at 1,250 is quite likely to exceed the academic potential of someone at 900. Hence the “falseness” of the cut-off.
Sure, but this is like insisting that every guy with Olympic gold holds a "false" medal, every time. While the stated rule is that it goes by who crosses the line first on the day, this obviously isn't a perfect measure of who's ultimately really in some other abstract sense the fastest man alive. I guess the common way of deliberately adding noise is by rounding off scores, such as giving A/B/C instead of rank order…
> this is like insisting that every guy with Olympic gold holds a "false" medal, every time
Bad comparison. We have loads of statistics from sports showing there are highly-precise rankings. Run certain races repeatedly and you’ll find persistent rankings. Particularly at the most-competitive levels, where innate biology dominates in most sports.
Have a cohort of students re-take a standardised test a few times, on the other hand, and you’ll get a spread. Try to relate that spread to the things you’re actually trying to measure, academic potential, and it’s a hair better than a crap shoot.
Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
#89Commenters 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…
The concrete example I often give is that as a conference organizer we decide to be a meritocracy. Great! As a fair meritocracy, all else being equal between speakers a tie breaker is how many talks you have already done. Experience should count right? So let's look at it in detail. Fred and Sarah both submit great talk proposals. But Fred has done ten talks and Sarah has done nine, so he gets the slot. Looking back…
> A true meritocracy can't really exist unless you have knowledge of all prior decisions, which is impossible.
This is a good point but your argumentation isn't really convincing. Here's a simple fix for your scenario: only use talks in your circuit as tie breaker. The other concern("possibly even the less qualified person") is an impossibility given your assumptions("all else being equal between speakers"). If you have a perfect meritocracy, and only use your own tests to measure merit, then you would maintain it.
Of course, as you said, achieving perfect meritocracy is impossible, which means we should always consider how to work around the flaws in our existing approach. I like the idea of randomization, but you have to consider that it has its own flaws - drawing from a small pool wouldnot have the desired diversifying effect, but drawing from a too large pool might introduce too many students that are not at the same academic level, with all the problems that brings. In a sense, random choice has similar problems of not being able to achieve "perfection" as meritocracy, and they would need to be balanced together.
To me, all of this concern over the admissions process of the top tier schools tells me that there's a growing need for an even more elite tier of schools. Those schools will undoubtedly have a diversity problem, but it does not sit right with me to limit the ceiling for the most academically gifted students just because most of them come from a privileged background. What this tends to do is exacerbate the problem, as the more wealthy can afford more expensive, privately tailored programs to their kids - the brilliant underprivileged kids will not have this opportunity. Just like we'll never achieve perfect meritocracy, we'll never eliminate privilege - our pursuit of equality should be tempered by the same concerns of unintended, negative consequences due to our imperfect approach.
Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
#90Earlier 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.
That's not my point. My point is that the 'geometric increase' for real competence or aptitude is not the same as the compounding 'merit' of a billionaire which may well just be some monotonic increase in the value of some company within which they have a stake. Your issue is a different one, and yes, if both of them are 'good enough' perhaps they should go through a random selection process.