Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

hechingerreport.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 602 posts

Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

#11

Post by onos »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #6
onos wrote: post #2

USA is rich in universities. I wish people would focus less on the rankings and looking good credential aspect of college, and more on using it as an opportunity to learn / actually getting good at something. If we did the latter, we’d realize that people could go to pretty much any university (or coursera!) and get a high quality education here.

You are absolutely missing one of the primary points of US universities, which is to maintain a social hierarchy. I mean, if you just want to learn stuff and get a good education, there are loads of resources where you can do that, often for free or near free. College is about much more than just learning new things, and if that's the only framework through which you value a college education, you'll be doomed to mis…

Yeah you’re right, that is the aspect of uni that this article is about. Who gets to get the premo credential.

Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

#12

Post by HarryHirsch »

RobotToaster wrote: post #3

I find it hard to believe there's a shortage of people capable of teaching 1st year students, so this seems like a problem of artificial scarcity.

The local community college will have openings for adjuncts. You go first and teach a semester, then you'll have a better understanding of the problem field.

Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

#14

Post by mjhay »

onos wrote: post #2

USA is rich in universities. I wish people would focus less on the rankings and looking good credential aspect of college, and more on using it as an opportunity to learn / actually getting good at something. If we did the latter, we’d realize that people could go to pretty much any university (or coursera!) and get a high quality education here.

The highest quality education I received was at a community college. The undergraduate education I got after transferring to a well-regarded research shool was lower quality, with larger classes and professors who weren't incentivized to put effort into teaching.

Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

#15

Post by Onanymous »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #6
onos wrote: post #2

USA is rich in universities. I wish people would focus less on the rankings and looking good credential aspect of college, and more on using it as an opportunity to learn / actually getting good at something. If we did the latter, we’d realize that people could go to pretty much any university (or coursera!) and get a high quality education here.

You are absolutely missing one of the primary points of US universities, which is to maintain a social hierarchy. I mean, if you just want to learn stuff and get a good education, there are loads of resources where you can do that, often for free or near free. College is about much more than just learning new things, and if that's the only framework through which you value a college education, you'll be doomed to mis…

Nonsense. Education is not about taking a course or reading bunch of books. The big part of education is being able to directly ask a knowledgeable person once you're stuck. You can ask the community of course but the quality of community answers is more than often just trash.

Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

#17

Post by factsarelolz »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #13

I’m looking at this and thinking: Did the colleges have no forsight, at all? Why did they think admission tests existed? Did they honestly think, “wow, the tests are flawed, so get rid of them, problem solved?”

No it made it easier to discriminate and make more money money. Simple as.

Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

#18

Post by dgacmu »

hattmall wrote: post #10
efficax wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

far from a shortage, there’s a surplus of phds in almost every discipline. despite charging the highest tuition ever and sitting on massive endowments, the mbas in university administration don’t want to have to pay for them

Why would they even need phds at all. Teaching first year student should be more of a side job thing.

I think you're misunderstanding the challenge. Teaching first year students doesn't require Ph.D.-level knowledge, but it requires more teaching experience and skills than teaching later levels: The classes are larger; the students are less experienced at learning on their own; the students are new to the environment and less familiar with how to navigate it.

Large classes of novices are particularly sensitive to logistical and teaching errors. You make a question on a homework or exam a bit confusing, you have 400 students utterly perplexed who may not have the domain expertise to know it's the question that's broken.

At Carnegie Mellon, our teaching-track faculty generally own the large intro classes for this reason. They're the best we have at the process of teaching & education. It's the exact opposite of a side job. You want people who are deeply expert and passionate about teaching so that you don't completely botch the job, because the opportunities to botch it are huge.

Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

#20

Post by rainsford »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #5

Alternate headline: "Colleges that ditched admissions tests have to actually holistically evaluate applicants rather than reduce them to two numbers" No doubt that it's more subjective and more difficult; human beings are complex, multi-dimensional entities and I find it sad that in many of these selection processes, they are reduced to a few numbers for the sake of low effort filtering.

Exactly. Of course having numerical values you can directly compare is going to be the easiest way to select students, but it's only "fair" to the degree those numbers accurately reflect the relative academic performance and potential of the students.

I think the reason people so vigorously defend the use of standardized test scores in admissions is that we all have a built in bias towards viewing quantifiable comparisons as inherently more objective because it's easy to justify how you arrived at a decision. After all, who can argue with a decision based on one number being larger than the other?

The problem though is that this approach doesn't really remove the subjective, complex elements at all, it just moves them from the decision step to the measurement step. Sure, an SAT score is just a simple number. But how the test is constructed to arrive at that number is much more complicated. And the value of a simple score comparison is only as good as the process of constructing the test, leaving you with the illusion of having made the decision simpler and more objective when you really just move the complexity behind a curtain.

In tech terms, I think the analogy is project managers trying endless different ways to measure software development performance. Number of tickets closed, "velocity", commits, releases, etc, (lines of code if you're very unlucky), all give you nice simple numbers to look at. And while they're not entirely useless, it's easy to become overly reliant on them and assume they are more objective measures than they actually are.

Post reply on HN