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

171–180 of 602 posts

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

#171

Post by CharlieDigital »

petilon wrote: post #30
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.

With the 10s of thousands of applications top universities get, there isn't enough time to evaluate the "complex, multi-dimensional entities" behind each application. At University of Washington, applications are not reviewed by "admissions people". They hire temporary workers (grad students, retirees etc.) to review applications, and give them 8 minutes per application [1]. And this is typical of most universities.…

It's not that it's not possible but rather we've simply been so lazy that we don't have the right heuristics.

No; I don't have the answer. I'm not an economist nor an admissions expert. But I've qualified and hired software engineers over the years and my process never focuses on a score or outcome of an assessment.

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

#172

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

FredPret wrote: post #92
nerdponx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately I feel convinced that it's a passing fad. I just hope that the pendulum does not swing too far the other way.

Maybe I'm in a bubble, but every anecdote I read online in the past year or two is someone royally fed up with liberal politics. On Twitter, Reddit, and real life, the majority of people keep complaining about crime, drugs, homelessness. Sounds like a perfect environment for a generation of conservatives to get elected. Hopefully they stay close to the center for a long time.

> Hopefully they stay close to the center for a long time.

I feel like the "the left" is undergoing a purity spiral whereas other parties are scooping up everyone pushed out.

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

#173

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

Spivak wrote: post #110
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice it also often means, "This Asian isn't 'well rounded' enough and they're only into math and chess club." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...

I don’t really know what you do to combat this kind of thing because what would you do as an admissions officer trying to create a student body with a wide range of skills and experiences but you have thousands of applicants who are “focused on having perfect grades to the detriment of everything else and participated in the ‘look how smart I am clubs’.” And I say this with full self-awareness that this was me. It’s…

Easy:

1. Have some minimum objective criteria (test scores, grades, class rank, etc.)

2. Accept students who meet that minimum with a lottery.

Of course, that would never happen at highly selective colleges, because it would shatter the notion that "only the best and brightest" got in and would ruin colleges' role as a maintainer of social hierarchy in the US.

I say this as a person who went to one of the most selective colleges in the world: the idea that colleges set up their application systems to build a "diverse" student body is complete and total bullshit. The reason being that some of the most important diversity comes from interacting with people of widely varying economic levels and intelligence levels. The idea that you can have a socially diverse student body, but only made up of people who got 4.0 GPAs and above, is bullshit on its face.

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

#174

Post by derbOac »

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.

Yeah, I almost felt like flagging this submission. It's taking something that on its own could be interpreted in many ways and giving it a strong political spin.

For the sake of argument, let's imagine a college doing the opposite: admitting students solely on the basis of a standardized test score. You submit your SAT score, and everyone above a certain percentile is admitted. People below the threshold are not. Many of the comments here seem to think this is optimal.

In that scenario, there wouldn't be any complaints from admissions committees at all about them having to put effort into the situation, because they wouldn't be involved at all. So is it being difficult a sign that reality is more complex than suggested by a test score, or that they've lost an objective indicator?

Most of the statistics thrown around in the article could also be turned on their head. For instance, just hypothetically, if getting rid of the test isn't changing the student body, what's the point of the test?

Having an objective number is useless on its own. Even if it's roughly correlated with the outcomes you desire, if it's that roughly correlated with outcomes, and subject to biases, there's no point in having it.

I feel like these tests are kind of like buying a house based on nominal square footage alone. Sure, it's probably correlated with satisfaction and resell value, it's an objective indicator that involves some measurement, and so forth, but no one would buy a house that way. It's subject to all sorts of manipulation and fuzziness, and doesn't tell you anything about the architecture, lot, or anything else. And yet that's kind of how standardized tests are used.

I'm fine with using standardized tests in theory, but they're far too abused and misused. It's not so much the tests I have problems with, as it is how it seems once you introduce them, it seems they can't be interpreted rationally in making any sorts of decisions about human beings. It's like people take something that has a sliver of information value with all sorts of limitations, and then treat it like an infallible signal just because it's easy to use.

Its ease of use could be seen as a problem, not something desirable.

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

#175

Post by overrun11 »

tjs8rj wrote: post #101
kenjackson wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a society we got ourselves into a situation where ignoring race now I promotes inequality as it helps those that have benefited from racism in the past. And doing ANYTHING proactive now is racism not. The question is just — what type of injustice do you prefer?

The answer is really simple: discrimination not on race, but on inequalities. Don’t discriminate because someone is black or white, but give due consideration to factors like family situation/income/legacy/etc This seems like the most reasonable solution. If you believe that systemic racism exists in the background, then this corrects for its real effects. If you don’t, I’m sure you at least accept that all else equa…

Or we could acknowledge that society functions best when the most qualified people are chosen and decide to only discriminate on merit.

These selection criteria are meant to match students with schools filled with students of the same ability level. Of course there will always be factors in life that make it harder or easier for people to succeed.

Having had exceptionally difficult life circumstances doesn't somehow change the fact that you need to have already mastered Algebra to succeed at MIT for example.

We should focus more on mitigating the extent that difficult circumstances hinders learning not just manipulating selection criteria after it already has.

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

#176

Post by bradleyjg »

kenjackson wrote: post #145
bradleyjg wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “advanced math, physics, research, etc” in high school is all just college admissions prep too. When you major in math you have to take an analysis sequence starting at the beginning because AP calculus isn’t actually math. It’s just memorizing and learning to execute some math related algorithms. It’s all just signaling. Let’s be open about that instead of hiding the ball.

Again there’s levels to this. Harvard Math 55 is filled with exceptionally strong math students. I’m a 1500 SAT student, but not a Math 55 student. Them not being able to differentiate these classes of students seems problematic.

Problematic is such a vague word. Connect the dots for me.

The top N schools in the nation, collectively representing enough seats to account for 5% of SAT takers, all change their admissions policies to select randomly among applicants in the top 5% of SAT scorers.

After ten years of these policies being in place we will likely see the following negative effects:

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

#177

Post by thegrimmest »

kewrkewm53 wrote: post #68

It 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 M…

I think this implies a personal philosophy along the lines of negative utilitarianism. I'm not sure everyone shares that.

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

#178

Post by ethbr0 »

thegrimmest wrote: post #159
ethbr0 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe parent's point was that "spend[ing] that time surrounded by diverse and interesting people" is an effective way of "preparing our best and brightest to make the world a better place".

But since when is superficial appearance the primary measure of "diversity"?

"Skin color, sex, sexual orientation" all drastically impact an individual's experience in our world. Therefore, having interactions with someone with different varieties thereof increases the diversity of ones experience.

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

#179

Post by subradios »

Spivak wrote: post #86
subradios wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, test scoring is the most objective thing we had to evaluate students based on the diligent work of a company whose entire business is maintaining that perception of objectivity. Sure, it's "the perception of", but if you think there aren't smart people analyzing college board exam scores across the country for signs of skewed testing so they can write an expose on it, you're far from reality. In fact…

You’re glossing over the core issue which is that universities (and employers when hiring juniors for that matter) need to measure potential and many of the objective measures do correlate but do so weakly. It’s why we don’t hire based on Leetcode, whiteboard algorithms problems or GPA. Doing better on those is a positive sign but I can get a much much stronger signal through a conversation, probing to find out their…

Who is we?

Literally every major tech company hires on effectively leetcode alone.

https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma...

Men perform (slightly) etter on technical interviews when modulated as women, and women perform the same.

The idea that women are "putting up with so much more bullshit" when we have every major university and large tech employer bending over backwards to find more women who are interested, sky high salaries, and that we can show notable although weak bias in favor of women in settings where gender is obscured is out of date at a minimum.

Post reply on HN