UC slams the door on standardized admissions tests, nixing any SAT alternative • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by Auracle » Sat, Nov 20, 2021, 11:17 PM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #149

Auracle wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 1/8th. Is that enough? 1/4th? Where's the line? My state gave out grants to small businesses during the pandemic and directly said on the application that preference would be given to minorities. I didn't check both white and native only because a local organization would be dispersing the funds and I live in a rural area. Quite frankly, I'm sick of "reverse" racism. That was my state government all but telling m…

Well, the US government has 1/4 but some tribes go down to 1/8. If the position / scholarship says decent the tribes have that documentation too. You can get a document that says you are not enrolled but are a descendent of the tribe. If you are talking about the COVID funding, I think some documentation from the tribe that you are 1/8 in would suffice. Also check the tribal constitution and minority business rules o…

In our family it was a secret - my grandma died thinking she was 100% German and my great aunt still thinks that. They just think that’s what people from southern Germany look like.

However, my great grandpa didn’t inherit the farm he was supposed to because he married the “wrong” woman. That combined with how they look gave a hypothesis and DNA testing on me proved it.

So there’s no real documentation, and I don’t know for sure what tribe I descended from.

The point wasn’t that there was money set aside for Native Americans, but that it was set aside for anyone other than white people. That’s straight up wrong, and if black person could have checked a “white” checkbox to circumvent discrimination in the 50s I would have been all for it too.

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

#202

Post by systemvoltage » Sat, Nov 20, 2021, 11:45 PM UTC

mateo1 wrote: post #156

anonuser123456 wrote: post #38

I for one welcome the UC systems choice to erode the signaling value of their degree. Hopefully more universities adopt this approach. Employers may in turn value said degrees less and eventually maybe we can burn down all of higher ed.

I wonder what kind of bizarre, dysfunctional thought process would lead one to desire the complete destruction of all higher education.

I am down for higher education that includes technical schools and apprenticeships as well. Colleges are great! What I am not OK with is creating illiberal propaganda machines using public funds where no dissent is allowed and adolescents at a tender age get to them hypersensitized to identity and identity-politics. Fuck everything about that.

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

#203

Post by throwaway34241 » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 12:39 AM UTC

angelzen wrote: post #198

throwaway34241 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The corporate world isn't a bad analogy. But corporates are still by and large very profitable, some companies operate as they always have (although that isn't newsworthy, and it isn't a marketing point), and on this specific topic (testing) leetcode type questions are still ubiquitous. If social trends seriously impaired companies' competitiveness I might expect to see the companies that are more on board underperfo…

Post-stalinist Soviet Union, while not manically murderous, eventually imploded under the weight of a myriad suboptimal policy choices. Alas, it took 40 years to do so. There is a lot of inertia, I don't think anyone is arguing that UC (or Google) will collapse next year, but that the weight of poor policy choices compounds over time. Re "mass de-industrialization", there is a historical reference, specifically the c…

I think it's useful to explore historical perspectives, but there are many others. If I look at my parents' generation in the US, people were being forced against their will to fight overseas in a war that didn't achieve anything (and involved mass poisoning the crops of substance farmers). You had double-digit inflation, rationing gas by license plate, and, at points, literal price controls.

Before the baby boomers we had global war, before that the great depression and growing literal communism, before that prohibition and the mob. And of course prohibition was prompted by social problems around alcohol.

So I don't think "problems compound" is always true. For a long time, teen pregnancy and alcohol use were on the rise, but that trend didn't continue indefinitely, and both have relatively recently had dramatic declines.

If you look closely enough at any time period there are often multiple serious political, economic, and/or social problems, so much so that it seems to be the norm rather than the exception.

> Post-stalinist Soviet Union, while not manically murderous, eventually imploded under the weight of a myriad suboptimal policy choices

Even this I'm not so sure. Here is a graph of their GDP [1]. My understanding is it was a political collapse first (a failed coup), and the economic collapse followed. An example that I've read China has been very mindful of (apparently Xi talks about Russia much more in his books than he does the US).

> I do wonder how US/China rivalry will play out in the 2040s and beyond.

Me too, at that point they'll probably be a much larger economy than the US. Will that have a destabilizing effect (especially with a potential military conflict over Taiwan)? Or will (the US) having a shared rival be somewhat unifying? The UK did OK despite declining in (relative) importance, but I could imagine the US struggling with its domestic problems even without any great power rivalry...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet_Union_GDP_per_capi...

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

#204

Post by angelzen » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 1:17 AM UTC

throwaway34241 wrote: post #203

angelzen wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post-stalinist Soviet Union, while not manically murderous, eventually imploded under the weight of a myriad suboptimal policy choices. Alas, it took 40 years to do so. There is a lot of inertia, I don't think anyone is arguing that UC (or Google) will collapse next year, but that the weight of poor policy choices compounds over time. Re "mass de-industrialization", there is a historical reference, specifically the c…

I think it's useful to explore historical perspectives, but there are many others. If I look at my parents' generation in the US, people were being forced against their will to fight overseas in a war that didn't achieve anything (and involved mass poisoning the crops of substance farmers). You had double-digit inflation, rationing gas by license plate, and, at points, literal price controls. Before the baby boomers…

Life in the '80s in the Soviet Union space was marred by widespread food shortages. Here is a fairly accurate video of how the usual grocery shop looked like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8LtQhIQ2AE When the sporadic food supply truck would show up, people would line up for hours, many only to leave empty handed when the load would inevitably run out.

In 1989 Boris Yeltsin visited Texan grocery store and was positively shocked by the choice and availability. https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...

This is the very tangible result of suboptimal choices.

But I agree, life in the '90s, post collapse, was even worse. I read it as a warning that embarking on a suboptimal choice course may be hard to steer back until reality forces a very harsh collapse.

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

#205

Post by SkittyDog » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 1:29 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #57

SkittyDog wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no problem with CalTech. I have several friends who work there. But... your comment does not reflect well on CalTech. I don't think you're doing a good job of defending your alma mater, here. You may want to reconsider your comment, if that's your intent. OTOH if you are being sarcastic and trying to insult CalTech, then by all means... Mission accomplished.

It's Caltech, not CalTech. https://www.caltech.edu/ Caltech doesn't need defending. I'm just amused at xyzzy21's comment.

Whether or not it needs defending, your comments just keep dragging it down.

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

#206

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 2:10 AM UTC

antognini wrote: post #92

WalterBright wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are actually trained as engineers Caltech's engineering program doesn't actually train you to design machines, or how to operate a milling machine, or how to assemble an internal combustion engine. You can certainly get an engineering degree without ever getting grease under your fingernails. What it does do is teach you math. Every class is a math class. Statics, dynamics, newtonian mechanics, thermodynamics,…

I remember signing up for a political science class at Caltech that was called something like "American politics in the 20th century." The professor began the course by saying, "Let us consider an N-dimensional policy space, S, with a set of M candidate feature vectors, {C}, ...."

Sounds useful for applying that to (realtime) Delphi-Method, prediction markets, and so on.

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

#207

Post by throwaway34241 » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 2:39 AM UTC

angelzen wrote: post #204

throwaway34241 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's useful to explore historical perspectives, but there are many others. If I look at my parents' generation in the US, people were being forced against their will to fight overseas in a war that didn't achieve anything (and involved mass poisoning the crops of substance farmers). You had double-digit inflation, rationing gas by license plate, and, at points, literal price controls. Before the baby boomers…

Life in the '80s in the Soviet Union space was marred by widespread food shortages. Here is a fairly accurate video of how the usual grocery shop looked like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8LtQhIQ2AE When the sporadic food supply truck would show up, people would line up for hours, many only to leave empty handed when the load would inevitably run out. In 1989 Boris Yeltsin visited Texan grocery store and was posi…

> This is the very tangible result of suboptimal choices.

I agree - I've always liked that story about the grocery store.

I don't think bad policies are something that can be straightforwardly extrapolated into a course to the Soviet Union though. The US has had price controls in the past but backed off. Even large welfare states like Sweden eventually hit a point where they stopped or turned back the expansion of the public sector (reducing marginal rates, eliminating wealth taxes, spending as % of GDP leveling off, etc).

The Soviet Union even collapsed while it was heading in a more positive direction from where they were at (reducing state political and economic control).

So there doesn't seem to me to be a straightforward connection between incremental policy changes and collapse.

I don't see a clear connection between collapse and subsequent "steering back" either. Support for the market economy and multiparty democracy in Russia are both at record lows [1]. Venezuela has undergone an economic collapse but is still very dysfunctional. Neither seems on track to catch up with western countries any time soon.

It's interesting to contrast this with China, which had similar issues to the Soviet Union (of having an inefficient state-run economy) and had heavy debate about how to go about reforming it [2]. At least for their economic prospects the incremental path they chose seems to be working out better.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Escaped-Therapy-Routledge-Studies-Chi...

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

#208

Post by spoonjim » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 3:11 AM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #182

spoonjim wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the blood thing is just a complete nonsense way of assessing oppression/opportunities. Someone who is the child of a full blood Native American who was working as a bartender when she met a white corporate lawyer that she later married and moved to Bethesda lives a completely different life to a child growing up on the reservation. That’s why you’ll find that income-based affirmative action has vastly more suppo…

Well, tribes have their own type of sovereignty in this country and, for the most part, Native Americans moving off reservation has been a disaster, particularly when forced (the suicide rate is extreme). We live in a country that has special programs for certain races. If those programs continue to exist, then the money / opportunity set aside for Native Americans should actually be used by people provably Native Am…

> We live in a country that has special programs for certain races.

Yes, and those programs are immoral if they give a boost to the child of a Nigerian immigrant cardiothoracic surgeon for reasons ostensibly rooted in the oppression of American slavery.

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

#209

Post by systemvoltage » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 3:20 AM UTC

systemvoltage wrote: post #202

mateo1 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what kind of bizarre, dysfunctional thought process would lead one to desire the complete destruction of all higher education.

I am down for higher education that includes technical schools and apprenticeships as well. Colleges are great! What I am not OK with is creating illiberal propaganda machines using public funds where no dissent is allowed and adolescents at a tender age get to them hypersensitized to identity and identity-politics. Fuck everything about that.

Edit: adolescents at a tender age get hypersensitized to identity and identity-politics.

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

#210

Post by YeBanKo » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 3:28 AM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #150

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he has a mortgage to pay and dealing with protesting students doesn’t really interest him The great irony being it's decisions like this that are undermining support for the University of California. We're not there yet. But a few more of these, and I could see an off-year proposition that dramatically cuts the UC budget.

And such proposition will be slammed as anti-intellectualism driven by stupid, jealous, greedy deplorables. Without asking whether there might be deeper reasons for such development.

If it is done through a ballot measure, I think it might succeed or at least gain enough traction, that it will shed some lights on what UC spends money on.

Every parent is thinking about education. Kids and universities come up all the time. If it’s on the ballot, it will be scrutinized, regardless how it is going to slammed.