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UC slams the door on standardized admissions tests, nixing any SAT alternative

latimes.com

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Re: UC slams the door on standardized admissions tests, nixing any SAT alternative

#121

Post by xyzzyz »

temp8964 wrote: post #29

I found what is funny / pathetic about this is that there are tons of psychology / education / especially educational measurement top experts in the UC system, and they know how wrong it is, while they just keep mouth shut. The whole anti-standard-testing movement is pushed by ideology leftists and corrupted bureaucrats, but the supposed experts just quietly watch the world burn. Lol. Update: I found experts in the U…

Arthur Jensen was himself from UC Berkeley. That alone should have made the place a psychometry powerhouse.

Re: UC slams the door on standardized admissions tests, nixing any SAT alternative

#122

Post by abhiyerra »

keeganpoppen wrote: post #114
abhiyerra wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strength leads to strength. If you can get to a place of prestige and that place continues to have high standards, then the people who are bound for the streets or no purpose have a means to a higher goal. Maybe I believe that if you give people a little bit of chance, they end up better?

ah, so you just find a way to continue to have high standards while continuously lowering the standard for admission but that's not even the point... the post was about how students who don't care about school will somehow be better served by getting into a good school anyway. sure, some people will have an "oh shit i cant screw this up" moment, but... many will just fail. right? and in the meantime, the student who…

I don't think you have to worry here. The people who take the SAT are a minority. We need to stop thinking everyone takes the SAT. It is not valid. This policy benefits the people who take the SAT, which is likely a minority of students.

Re: UC slams the door on standardized admissions tests, nixing any SAT alternative

#123

Post by rahimnathwani »

ngc248 wrote: post #105
lokar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying the racial demographics of students who score above 1010 are very different from that of all graduating students who intend to go on to post secondary education, and that fact would be politically unacceptable?

No, what he is saying is that preparing for the SAT (or any competitive exam) is like an arms race. Immigrants from asia (where it is already hyper-competitive and the population is more) will be determined and over-prepare and clear the SAT with high scores. It is like "knowing is half the battle". This will fill all the classes with asians, that is why you read about all of the ivy league's etc having a different c…

This is closer to what I meant, but a few things I feel I should clarify:

- I am an immigrant, ethnically Asian (Indian), and moved to the US from Asia (China)

- The 'Asians are overrepresented' meme isn't targeted at _immigrants_, but at Asians, regardless of birthplace. When I meet Asians who went to UC, they were usually born in California.

- When people decide to implement racial quotas (or policies that allow them to effect racial quotas without calling them racial quotas), they necessarily decide not to treat each person as an individual. Each person becomes just a 'representative' of some racial group.

Re: UC slams the door on standardized admissions tests, nixing any SAT alternative

#124

Post by abhiyerra »

b9a2cab5 wrote: post #116
abhiyerra wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a History degree, and I'm doing fine. I'm sure most of the PMs who design the tech engineers build will also agree.

You may be doing fine, but objective measures of the average salary of humanities majors at schools like UCB say otherwise. Most of the PMs I know have either business or STEM degrees.

I guess we aren't talking about the same humanities majors. Most of my friends from Berkeley who are history or humanities majors are lawyers, academics, or doctors (yes, many of the humanities became doctors). They don't really seem to care about the money even though we as engineers seem they should care. Or they had to go through additional layer of study which depresses their true value.

Re: UC slams the door on standardized admissions tests, nixing any SAT alternative

#125

Post by alphabettsy »

b9a2cab5 wrote: post #104
nitrogen wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many have been given the opportunity to do so? Could a pure apprenticeship model without universities (but still with lots of theory) work for engineering professions?

Lambda School shows it doesn't work for software engineering. A so-called "apprenticeship" model for something like mechanical engineering would basically be the exact same set of (difficult) math and physics courses but without the garbage breadth requirements, which doesn't exactly sound attractive to dropouts.

Or maybe Lambda school doesn’t work?

Re: UC slams the door on standardized admissions tests, nixing any SAT alternative

#126

Post by guard0g »

Too much effort on racial equality in the admissions process, too little on ensuring success in college, graduation and beyond. My top 10 college was hyper focused on diversity admissions, but the graduation rate of the under represented population was under 50%. Students shifted down due one tier due have a much higher rate of success than students shifted up one tier.

If we want to be serious about equity and equal opportunity, we should focus on eliminating legacy.

Re: UC slams the door on standardized admissions tests, nixing any SAT alternative

#127

Post by zenta »

The comments on these articles seem to generally come out in favor of standardized testing (specifically the SAT). I find that interesting because college admissions seemingly generalizes to candidate evaluation. And if you were to suggest a standard leetcode test for software engineering job candidates? Man, this place would go up in flames.

Re: UC slams the door on standardized admissions tests, nixing any SAT alternative

#128

Post by eesmith »

jchonphoenix wrote: post #78

Sounds like a UC degree is getting less and less valuable from a signaling perspective. They ignored the research results of their own team and professors which conclusively showed standardized testing was the highest signal for academic success across all races. Talk about political bureaucracy

Please clarify. My understanding is that it's the opposite.

Eg, quoting https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0013189X2090211...

> Yet, the emphasis on test scores over grades in policy and practice recommendations stands in contrast to research showing high school grade point averages (HSGPAs) are stronger predictors than test scores of college outcomes (Bowen et al., 2009; Geiser & Santelices, 2007; Hiss & Franks, 2014; Kobrin et al., 2008).

Re: UC slams the door on standardized admissions tests, nixing any SAT alternative

#129

Post by nickkell »

zenta wrote: post #127

The comments on these articles seem to generally come out in favor of standardized testing (specifically the SAT). I find that interesting because college admissions seemingly generalizes to candidate evaluation. And if you were to suggest a standard leetcode test for software engineering job candidates? Man, this place would go up in flames.

I’m not for or against these leetcode style tests, but I think the difference is that they see a correlation between admission test score and how well they’d actually do on the course. Can the companies using “leetcode” tests prove the same?

Re: UC slams the door on standardized admissions tests, nixing any SAT alternative

#130

Post by throwaway34241 »

rsj_hn wrote: post #67
mrjangles wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and not even remotely jokingly. Higher education outside of STEM has been nonsense for quite some time. Inside of STEM, it has been an outdated form of education for just as long. The encroachment of socialism into the educational sphere needs to accelerate . The sooner it destroys itself the better.

That's great if your only requirement is to train software developers to write CRUD apps - you can learn to do that by watching youtube videos, reading self-study materials, and taking MOOC classes - but if you want mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, electrical engineers, and be a leader in materials science or chip manufacturing, then you still need universities. So the price of this "equity" movement is goin…

> So the price of this "equity" movement is going to be (and always was) mass de-industrialization and transforming the economy to third world status

I also disagree with these sort of decisions but this seems a bit hyperbolic. Certain institutions will probably admit fewer students who are able to excel in those fields, and if the change is large enough it will affect the quality of those degree programs (although in probably any admissions process talented students will be better able to game it).

But the likely eventual outcome to that seems like it would be other institutions attracting the most talented students and professors. It's hard for me to imagine every single university getting on board with this, although I could imagine STEM being increasingly concentrated at universities with that focus like Caltech instead of general liberal-arts schools.

It also might be kind of interesting if the brightest students tried to excel more in things that aren't directly competitive (kind of like Thiel fellows), although I don't think that's the purpose behind these sorts of changes.

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