Admissions tests are the best tool to fight racism, specifically institutionalized racism, that we have in our tool kit. When racism increases in the future the tests will be ushered back in with great urgency, but because institutionalized racism takes decades to slowly grind away at, I think we’ll be doomed to such cycles. On some level it’s hard not to see that process play out, notice that it benefits the elites by acting as a sort of moat around their comfy middle class lifestyle while hurting racially marginalized groups, and also hurting groups which are rapidly closing the gap like Asians, and not see it as at least potentially misguided.
Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
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Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
#62Who could have seen that coming? The whole point of ditching quantitative tests is to empower the bureaucrats who want to make qualitative judgements based on their personal whims and biases. "Holistic" my ass.
The problem with "quantitative" tests is that they are not without their own bias - they select for students that had the luck (or the right parentage) to go to either a private school or to a public school in a well-funded school district. The result is that the student base will be overwhelmingly white rich kids, which is pretty problematic (see e.g. [1], fresh out of the press).
Additionally, at least when one goes by the original purpose of academia - that is, to provide education and research opportunities to the actually gifted instead of yet another way for employers to bypass ADA and other anti discrimination regulations - it should be the way that qualitative judgements by humans prefer the academically gifted and interested!
Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
#63Who could have seen that coming? The whole point of ditching quantitative tests is to empower the bureaucrats who want to make qualitative judgements based on their personal whims and biases. "Holistic" my ass.
It’s really disappointing that many recent attempts of progressivism have just turned into new sexism and racism but defended as “the correct” versions of those. It erodes the intellectual validity of these institutions.
It is not just neo-racism and neo-sexism.
It is also a weird kind of neo-feudalism, excluding outsiders that cannot or won't fit the expected mold. In the court of Versailles, you had to behave according to a certain stiff etiquette. If the same is required in institutions of higher learning, how many really creative people will be willing to put up with it?
Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shaping the ethnic demographic of the school is a big component of the modern intent as well. Particularly, these "holistic" admission standards are designed to facilitate discrimination against Asian Americans. This is justified with transparently racist bullshit claims about Asian American students being too focused on academic performance, not "well rounded" whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. They reduce…
A more charitable interpretation is that a student body made up of too much of any one thing is not good. Part of the value proposition for going away to university for four years is to spend that time surrounded by diverse and interesting people. That doesn't excuse the actual racism that we've seen in admissions, of course.
In that case, maybe some universities could specialize on having racially diverse student bodies, and others on other attributes (say, political diversity, or something completely different). This way, everyone could choose their preferred institution according to their wishes and values.
Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
#65> One college purchased a data service that ranked high schools and factored those high school rankings into each application. Students from underserved high schools received a lower ranking, an admissions officer explained. It wasn’t a fair process.
This is the crux of the affirmative action fascists. They picked what they thought was a “fair” set of criteria and it didn’t produce the outcome they wanted. They concluded it wasn’t “fair” because it didn’t produce they wanted. That’s garbage.
Backing into an outcome simply based on skin color that they want is racist and truly unfair.
If you want certain communities to do better in education, you don’t manipulate the outcome by changing the selection criteria, you produce better candidates. Invest in education and safety in lower income areas. No one does this. South side Chicago and St. Louis Missouri and Baltimore aren’t filled with stupid people. They are filled with people who have suffered generational poverty, living in some of the most violent areas of the world. If you dump money into schools, jobs, and police in those areas, you will produce a thriving middle class in a single generation and from there you can create hundreds of thousands and millions of educated “underrepresented” people that are COMPETITIVE.
Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
#66They are very upfront in terms of rhetoric about wanting more black and Hispanic students, but their policies are a lot of shuck-n-jive, trying to get that result while pretending to be fair. Nothing has worked so far. The pretending-to-be-fair sure hasn't either. So, one thing that will work and keep it all simple: Just establish quotas. "We will admit the highest scoring black students until we hit x%." But I suppo…
A better alternative is to fix the problem upstream. Push much more test taking prep for poor students. And reevaluate the SAT. It’s well known the stories of the SAT not including questions blacks score higher on and using questions that whites score higher on. Try to remove the bias from the test even if that gives surprising results.
I’m not a fan of quotas, but I do think taking race into account up until a point is reasonable. It’s just a really tricky line.
Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
#67Alternate 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.
Unfortunately, in practice they now rely on one number: GPA, quietly weighted based on the high school's reputation.
Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
#68It seems like modern wokeism was designed to make it easier for rich elites to exploit their privilege. Stuff like this makes it easier for lazy kids with rich and connected parents to get into best colleges/universities. All the talk about race and gender also conveniently turns attention away form real solutions that could help the underprivileged, like progressive taxation, which the rich elites oppose.
At least Marx was smart enough to understand that ultimately who has the money/assets is the key, unlike modern progressives and their obsession with other less relevant qualities. We should tax the rich and fund the poor regardless of their ethnicity or identity.
Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
#69Alternate 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 compar…
Removing SAT scores doesn't remove the subjective and complex elements, but it does give a measure that took more than 8 minutes to arrive at.
As a previous commenter mentioned, UW spends about 8 minutes looking at applications at first. This isn't nearly enough time to make a "holistic" decision, especially when the application is largely subjective.
SAT scores, on the other hand, take longer than 8 minutes to arrive at. The subjective evaluations that go into designing the test can be determined over the course of months, leading to a measure that is imperfect but likely better than 8 minutes of a grad student's time.
The larger point is that in order for "holistic" admissions to work, you need to design an admissions process that actually evaluates candidates holistically. Removing SAT scores doesn't automatically fix those issues, it just removes one more piece of data to aid the process.
Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
#70Who could have seen that coming? The whole point of ditching quantitative tests is to empower the bureaucrats who want to make qualitative judgements based on their personal whims and biases. "Holistic" my ass.
It’s really disappointing that many recent attempts of progressivism have just turned into new sexism and racism but defended as “the correct” versions of those. It erodes the intellectual validity of these institutions.
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