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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

#311

Post by compiler-guy »

notart666 wrote: post #222
whoooooo123 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why, in the UK system, you're only allowed to apply to five or fewer universities in the same academic cycle. (It's possible to enforce this because all applications go through the same centralised system.) You're also not allowed to apply to both Oxford and Cambridge in the same year - otherwise both universities would get twice as many applicants.

Honestly it wouldn't be as big of a deal if colleges accepted more applicants than they have seats for. The UofMN does just that and has a 70% acceptance rate and is a top public school. They have yet to run into any problems by doing so. While this might not work for colleges in say California or Ivy Leagues, for competitive and selective schools it's definitely an option almost none of them do.

The term for the percentage of accepted students who enroll is “yield”.

Every college predicts its yield and admits enough extra to get a full class. It’s basic college admissions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_(college_admissions) https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-yield-788445

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

#312

Post by catiopatio »

bushbaba wrote: post #263
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You get 1000 resumes for a job. How do you drop 95% of the applicants. One easy way is to look at the University and GPA as a quick snuff test. After running that cheap low-pass filter you now only have 50 Resumes. You now spend ~3mins on each of those resumes to determine the 10 people you plan to interview. That's why university matters, it helps you get past the first level of screening. It's also fair of employer…

There are far more effective ways to stand out as an applicant than your GPA and university — in particular, by actually contributing notable work to the field, but also by making social connections and leveraging those into a job.

I didn’t even graduate from high school, but I’ve never struggled to find employment with the companies I wanted to work for.

The idea of a degree as a first-pass filter is oversold at best.

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

#313

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

filoleg wrote: post #302
BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>” compared to the cultural knowledge required to write an essay that moves a WASP admissions officer, or the social capital and connections required to get involved in charitable or social activities that stand out in an application.” When I was in high school we were advised, in no uncertain terms, that the mixed race students should not hesitate to identify with their Non-White ancestry on their application and th…

> When I was in high school we were advised, in no uncertain terms, that the mixed race students should not hesitate to identify with their non-white ancestry on their application and that doing so gives them an advantage. One important caveat to this - I am not quite sure this would accomplish the desired effect if the other parent of such a kid was asian. Listing themselves as an asian instead of white for pretty m…

That was actually a big concern. Especially for the Pacific Islander students who were worried about being lumped in with Asians. Nevertheless, they were still advised to identify as Asian/Pacific Islander rather than White.

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

#314

Post by tdba »

rayiner wrote: post #306
onetimeusename wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think WASPs are given an edge here. I feel like it is actually racist to make this assumption also. White people as a broad category are the only racial group that is underrepresented relative to their population percentage in Ivy League schools. Maybe you could make the argument that WASPs are a subset of white people who are overrepresented specifically because of that faculty benefit for admissions but the…

I didn’t say WASPs are given an edge. But the institutions are controlled by them. And minorities must appeal to their fancy to get in.

> institutions are controlled by them Citation very much needed. Have you actually looked at who occupies the high level executive positions at Ivy league tier universities? It's not predominantly WASPs.

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

#316

Post by flashgordon »

Well duh. SATs maybe useless and completely unrepresentative of real world application. But they are just that - standardized. You know 10 years in advance what you are prepping for as opposed to "oh well I am this background so doing this set of activities optimizes my college application because the application reviewer is so totally allowed to bring in their own biases".

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

#317

Post by Noumenon72 »

necrotic_comp wrote: post #230
preommr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The big part of education is being able to directly ask a knowledgeable person once you're stuck. Stuck on what? For an undergrad, those problems can easily be solved by going online or to a tutor for a fraction of the cost. And that's for STEM based problems, humanities is all about flattering whatever opinions the professor personally holds. The best piece of advice I got was from one of my english highschool tea…

"humanities is all about flattering whatever opinions the professor personally holds" - maybe at some universities, but not at a good liberal arts school.

It seems possible to me that people of a less analytic personality type can improve learning using the cue, "imagine you wanted to socially impress a particular person, an academic". The same way a weightlifter who doesn't study the anatomy of external hip rotation can get good results with "screw your feet into the floor", or GPT-3 from "Let's think step by step". It leverages instinct to do what isn't understood consciously. I agree you're going to need originality to really excel.

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

#318

Post by mackatap »

erdos4d wrote: post #299
geraldyo wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the sarcasm? You could argue the SAT is designed for testing skills that can only/primarily be learned within the current school system. And that System is designed to keep minorities out, so I could argue there's a correlation there

The math part is not so bad, but I definitely would agree that the verbal/written strongly favors students educated in affluent private schools. You just not going to get that vocab prep down in a poor public school with a lot of minorities. The SAT tests in the language of the US white elite.

It tests in grammatically correct English. Libraries are free. The internet exists. You can't expect a college to cover basic English writing that should have been learned over a lifetime.

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

#319

Post by actionablefiber »

WalterBright wrote: post #272
metalforever wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please explain how the child would get home from the after school activity, if it existed? I’m being clear when I am saying there really aren’t any EC options . In poor areas , there’s no money because school funding comes from property tax . Where I went, the funding was so tight they had to fire the foreign language , art teachers and music teachers . If they can’t afford regular instructors , where is the…

I walked home from school. I can't recall my parents ever picking me up. The Boy Scouts didn't run on money. A chess club, book club, drama club, dance club, photography club, math club, etc., don't require money. Besides, creating something from nothing is going to look a lot better on an application than following a course that is laid out by instructors and papered with cash.

> I walked home from school. I can't recall my parents ever picking me up.

In the United States in the 2020s being able to walk yourself to and from school without A) having your life in grave danger from motor vehicle traffic and B) having someone call CPS or the police on your parents is an incredible luxury.

The neighborhood where I grew up was built in the early 90s and its elementary school and middle school are on the opposite side of an eight lane highway that has no crosswalks or sidewalks (on the school side) for at least a quarter mile. The town believes so strongly that no one should walk or bike to school that they zoned the school and built out the roads such that attempting to do so would sooner or later result in certain death.

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

#320

Post by ajsnigrutin »

5mv2 wrote: post #28

It reminds me of European universities switching from selecting on humanities to selecting on maths a century ago. The idea was to remove the social upbringing's impact on test scores, as candidates from higher socioeconomic status are heavily advantaged from using a larger vocabulary from birth. A PhD friend who studied this told me it had no measurable impact. Put aside raising math tutors salaries of course.

I'm from a former socialist european country, and we use grades + standardized tests results to get into most colleges (art, music and acting colleges are an exception, due to obvious reasons). Everybody has to pass a standardized test at the end of highschool, 5 subjects, for most, the first three are slovene (our native language), english (second language) and math + two subjects chosen by the student (eg. physics and sociology, or chemisty and informatics, or whatever).

The colleges just give out rules how to calculate "points" (usually 40% are the grades, 60% is the test score, but some (eg medicine back in my time) require you to choose chemistry or biology as one of your subjects and that is worth 20%, next to 40% for the other ones and 40% for the grades).

Students know those rules, apply for a college they want, finish the year, do the standardized tests, get the results, colleges calculate them into points, and if there are 60 spots for that study course, top 60 students are accepted... you don't even have to wait to get your letter, colleges publish that the cuttoff was 82 points to get accepted, and if you're above that, you're in, if not, you compete in other colleges/programmes that still have open spots left over.

No races, no letters, no subjective stuff, no problems with -isms.

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