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Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

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Re: Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

#281

Post by KingMachiavelli »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #178
throwaway284534 wrote: post #35

All this gnashing over test scores and booster programs is just showboating. If states really want to fix poor schools they should make school funding occur at the state level, rather than whichever random zip code you’re born into. Seriously, you can’t justify a wealthier neighborhood being entitled to better schools when they’re public institutions receiving state and federal funds. Evening out this funding is the…

That wont work. Increasing funding of a school does not improve quality. Allowing families to choose what school they go to, and as a result which school they fund, forces schools to compete on quality or go out of business. The only arguments I have heard against school choice are from teacher's unions that claim that nobody would go to their school if they had a choice. Good! That means you are failing at your job.…

> Allowing families to choose what school they go to,

This is a non-starter for any family that depends on public school buses to transport their kids to school. It might help to some extent in regions if schools are in close proximity but overall it just becomes "School choice for people with parents that can afford it".

Plus I would be surprised if it there's a case the program led to a 'bad' school closing and a 'good' school opening on the same facility/location. What tends to happen (my state has this) is that rich/educated parents do everything they can to get their 3-5 year old into the best school and the poor/uneducated kids are still stuck at the 'bad' school. The 'good' school ends up with a large waitlist which wealthy parents work around by moving close enough (which costs more) such that the good school is the default school for them.

The only equitable method would to make every school use a 100% raffle system but that's not logistically possible.

Re: Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

#282

Post by shawndrost »

fridif wrote: post #192

Don't understand the hate for the SAT. Where I went to school, students would just beg their teachers for better grades and it literally worked. I did average on my SAT compared to my ex-gf in college (top 30 US school) but I ran a 3.8 in college compared to her being a C student. Doesn't matter anyway because none of the stuff I learned in college is used in my daily job as a java developer.

I can't point to something better than the SAT, but I can tell you what people don't like about it. SATs correlate with demographics in ways that conflict with the concept that merit is evenly distributed among student demographics.

Re: Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

#283

Post by visarga »

an_opabinia wrote: post #225
908B64B197 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replacing the SAT by a "Holistic" process is a convenient way to impose a quota on some groups judged problematic. To directly quote the article: "There is only one group of students who are “overrepresented,” to use the chilling language of social engineering, at the university: Asian Americans. Twelve percent of K–12 students are Asian or Pacific Islander, compared with 34 percent of UC undergraduates. Aligning enr…

No one ethnic group owns the schools.

Each individual is a minority of one. Forced equality is oppressive at individual level.

Re: Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

#284

Post by mcguire »

kcatskcolbdi wrote: post #243
briefcomment wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the best colleagues I've worked with aced the SAT and/or other standardized tests. I would hate to not be able to refer to them while interviewing job candidates. Honestly, standardized test scores and some case study type questions would be sufficient to make a decision (along with 1 on 1 convos). I hope a decision like this opens a channel for smart people to get to employment without having to go to school or…

You......ask what people got on the SATs in your job interview?

Well, it is basically an IQ test.

Re: Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

#285

Post by hackitup7 »

flowerlad wrote: post #40

Some parents move to areas with better schools in order to give their kids an advantage (such as Cupertino or Los Altos school districts if you are in silicon valley). This may seem like a sensible thing to do, but because of the weird admissions process in US colleges, this may actually work against the kid. It may make more sense to move to an area where the kid can stand out, where schools offer fewer AP courses,…

School size is a related factor. For example, Harvard is not going accept 50 applicants from the same school, even if it's a relatively large and exceptionally competitive one like Stuyvesant in NY or Thomas Jefferson in DC. But Harvard will totally accept 8-10 applicants from a small exclusive private or parochial school. The ratio plays in favor of smaller high schools if (say) the population of students going to any one college is capped at 5% for a large school and 10% for a small one.

This bears out in what I've observed (all anecdotes ofc). Many people who go from these sorts of large south bay high schools to top-5 UCs are head and shoulders smarter than the graduates of the small private school => Ivy League pathway, despite the Ivy schools ranking better.

When you see it in action (brilliant kid who went to a large, highly competitive public high school who was rejected from every Ivy, and is way smarter than many students who went to the schools that rejected them), it feels rotten. Happily most of the folks I've met in this category have great careers but their confidence often takes a hit at the age of 17-18.

Re: Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

#286

Post by ajsnigrutin »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #259
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #250

I was born in yugoslavia (later slovenia), under the red star, communism, brotherhood, unity, equality, and all other communist bullshit back then. ...and even then we had standardized testing, and it worked. You went to elementary school, usually the closest to your house (from about 6/7yo to 14/15, =8 years), and at the end of that, you'd apply to a highschool of your choice (either general "gymnasium", or 3 or 4 y…

> I have no idea why only america has issues with standardized tests... The United States has issues with standardized tests because (1) its black population performs very, very badly on them, while (2) official policy is that the black population should enjoy outcomes such as college admission or job offers that are in line with its share of the total population, not with performance against objective metrics. Note…

Shouldn't this be fixed earlier, and not after they get the lower scores?

Equal opportunity is ok, but equal outcome is really shitty for kids of other groups who work hard and lose their spots due to the color of their skin.

> Note that communist societies had the analogous problem; whenever they implemented standardized testing, class enemies filled the ranks of top scorers.

Meh, we were lucky, we were the "3rd world" (literal definition, before the current one), and our top students left the country and worked in other, western, capitalist countries (and sent money back to their families :)) I think for a huge range of years, our biggest export was the workforce :)

Re: Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

#287

Post by heavyset_go »

settrans wrote: post #106
323454 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This already exists and it doesn't quite work. School funding and outcomes are less well correlated than you might expect. Some of the worst performing schools and districts are also the best funded. The top causal factor appears to be parental involvement: highly involved parents in even poorly funded schools is better than uninvolved parents in well funded schools.

It exists in many, many states in some form or another: New Jersey (where every dollar collected from the progressive income tax is funneled redistributionarily to municipalities), Connecticut, and Vermont to name a couple. For one eye-popping counterexample to the notion that redistributionary school funding policies are effective, it might be worth understanding what happened in Newark[0], where 75% of the school i…

Property taxes pay for local schools in NJ.

Re: Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

#289

Post by KerrickStaley »

bachmeier wrote: post #214
pfisherman wrote: post #15

I think the University of Texas has one of simplest and most egalitarian admissions policies that I have seen. If you graduate in the top 10 percent of your class, then you are guaranteed admission to all state funded universities. As a Californian I find it quite ironic that many policies in “conservative” Texas (ex. university admissions, property tax, income tax) are more much more progressive than what we have in…

> many policies in “conservative” Texas Just want to point out that the policy you're referring to was put in place while Democrats ran Texas. Historically Texas was a Democratic state, with only eight years of Republican governors from 1874-1995. > more progressive than what we have in “liberal” California And also that California was historically a Republican state. For most of the years from 1943-1999, they had a…

Note that until recently, there was little correlation between the progressive/conservative axis and the Democratic/Republican axis. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 led to the downfall of the Dixiecrat faction of the Democratic party and the current ideological sort. Ezra Klein's book "Why We're Polarized" has a lot of good background on this.

Re: Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

#290

Post by dnautics »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #216
fortran77 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The linked article may give you another point of view.

It didn't. The author seems to have a gut-felt conviction that there is no bias or damage in standardized testing or its subsequent use for university admissions.

what? did you RTFA? The author gives an argument based on concrete evidence that the SAT helps underrepresented minorities, and states there ALREADY is a pathway (that also lots of underrepresented minorities use) that avoids the SAT, the biggest problem being that statewide guidance counselors are not instructed on the existence of that pathway.
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