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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

#471

Post by brigandish »

hhmc wrote: post #114
tjs8rj wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then discriminate on the socioeconomic inequalities. A poor white person and a poor black person should get aid. Obama’s daughter (black, but rich and powerful) doesn’t need any aid or discrimination in her favor. Discriminating on the basis of race for these programs is so stupid. Ask why and people say “because socioeconomic status”, but then why don’t you discriminate on that? I think people know this but it’s a p…

Sure, just do _anything_ that's a directional improvement. I think a lot of bad faith prevarication prevents any improvement (such as the question I was replying to).

You are accusing me of a bad faith question?

Elaborate, and make it good.

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

#472

Post by robomartin »

davidgay wrote: post #397
robomartin wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The greatest source of admissions inequity is childhood socioeconomic status If we are talking about the US, no, I disagree. The greatest source of admissions inequity are shit K-12 education. I'll give you a direct example from when my kids were at the local middle school. Their science teacher --a Chiropractor-turned-teacher-- was, well, there's no other way to put it, a moron. The guy actually taught the kids th…

> > The greatest source of admissions inequity is childhood socioeconomic status > If we are talking about the US, no, I disagree. > The greatest source of admissions inequity are shit K-12 education. You've missed the step where the higher socioeconomic classes opt-out of the shit K-12 education by moving to better school districts, sending their kids to private schools, or homeschooling them.

> You've missed the step where the higher socioeconomic classes opt-out of the shit K-12 education by moving to better school districts, sending their kids to private schools, or homeschooling them.

No, I did not.

I stated that our schools are garbage.

If we fixed that, it really won't matter what anyone else does with their kids, public schools would be great.

Put a different way: There is no justification whatsoever for our public schools should be crap. The only reason this happens is because we do not exercise the kind of control and set the kinds of standards needed to provide every child in the country with the education they deserve. Teaching should be a profession where the standards and performance we demand from teachers are of the highest levels. That implies (and requires) that bad teachers are expunged from the system like a bad infection. Curriculum and teaching standards have to be optimized for top-of-the-world results.

This, BTW, also has to include kids who, for whatever reason, are not college-bound. Not everyone needs to or has to go to university. The problem is our schools are so bad that the average high school graduate is good for nothing other than maybe, again, maybe, going to college. The average high school graduate in the US is good for stacking boxes and, with training, making coffee. That is a tragedy and a massive failure of the system.

What people with money would not matter at all of our public schools were driven by a merit, performance and results-based system that floated the best teachers, teaching methods, technology and curriculum to the top.

This would require up-ending our entire system of education. Which means it is likely just-about impossible.

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

#473

Post by patrick451 »

dTal wrote: post #451
StanislavPetrov wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Let me reiterate: that requires for it occur to a student that you even can increase your SAT score. If you are a high school student and the possibility of increasing your score doesn't even occur to you, I would suggest that college isn't for you.

Would you study for an IQ test? Perhaps, but then is that fair? If you do, what is actually being measured? Certainly not IQ anymore. Maybe it doesn't occur to students that they should attempt to increase their score because they have a certain innocent model of the world, perhaps one in which they put trust in educational institutions to (as they claim to do) tell them how they should best achieve personal success.…

If an IQ test were required for admission to university or anything else I wanted to do, you're damn right I would study. Why would I care if that is fair or if I corrupt the measurement by studying if increasing my score benefits me? The validity of the measurement is the school's problem, not mine.

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

#474

Post by robomartin »

malborodog wrote: post #422
davidgay wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > The greatest source of admissions inequity is childhood socioeconomic status > If we are talking about the US, no, I disagree. > The greatest source of admissions inequity are shit K-12 education. You've missed the step where the higher socioeconomic classes opt-out of the shit K-12 education by moving to better school districts, sending their kids to private schools, or homeschooling them.

Well that's cause his _actual_ point is that they shouldn't have to, and that public schools should be run differently so as to eliminate the advantage of rich people just circumventing them, ya dig?

> Well that's cause his _actual_ point is that they shouldn't have to

Precisely correct. Our public schools should be the example the entire world tries to emulate rather than the substandard mess they use as something to avoid.

As a kid I had the experience of attending school in other countries due to my parents moving around for work. The best example I have of just how bad things are in K-12 education in the US is that coming back to US schools felt like a vacation, a joke. My level of preparation when compared to US students of the same age almost didn't compare. I could read, write and do math better than anyone in my class. And that's after attending school at a third world country. That says a lot.

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

#475

Post by robomartin »

davidgay wrote: post #446
malborodog wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's cause his _actual_ point is that they shouldn't have to, and that public schools should be run differently so as to eliminate the advantage of rich people just circumventing them, ya dig?

> Well that's cause his _actual_ point is that they shouldn't have to, and that public schools should be run differently so as to eliminate the advantage of rich people just circumventing them, ya dig? I'm all for that point, I grew up in Switzerland which on the whole exemplifies that attitude (make sure the schools are good). But "we should fix the schools" is not a counter-argument to the fact that current admissi…

> current admission inequity is primarily driven by socio-economic status

Maybe I didn't make my point clearly enough?

If admission is based on testing and our schools are top-of-the-line, kids would not any problem at all passing the test.

We need better education before university. Make that happen and admission isn't an issue.

Beyond that, the world is wide open now. There are tons of universities anyone can attend remotely and get a degree. Some have very permissive admission policies.

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

#476

Post by yCombLinks »

LatteLazy wrote: post #395

Colleges should admit everyone then let those who pass pass and those who fail drop out. That is the fair way to run your admissions policy. Everything else is BS.

Harvard admits 4% of it's applicants. How is it going to allow 25X as many students?

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

#477

Post by patrick451 »

BobbyJo wrote: post #399
matai_kolila wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool so when exactly is a student supposed to spend this time to study? I really think HN should stop for a moment and think about how insidious and pervasively poverty creeps into every aspect of a poor child’s life, because some of what’s being written here is embarrassingly naïve.

As someone who grew up super poor, time tends to be one of the only things poor kids have as much of as rich kids. Is that universal? Of course not, but name something better.

I agree. Sure, holding a part time job in high school cut into study time, but a lot of that was balanced out by not being to afford a bunch of time consuming extracurricular activities.

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

#478

Post by tsunamifury »

jeff-davis wrote: post #113
cdot2 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that wasn't the original intention for many if not most of the people advocating those positions.

Less-powerful people tend to appeal to principles more, because principles tend to align with their benefit. You don't know whether the principles really exist until you see currently-powerful people hold themselves to the principles. I suspect nearly all people would fail this test, execpt those who've been on both sides (at least in small ways) enough times.

Very insightful. This gets to the root of power and how different moral truths are advocated by different positions with both saying how they are universal. I wish we could admit that as progressives and have a better conversation around the motivations of certain policies.

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

#479

Post by tsunamifury »

themitigating wrote: post #265
pseudo0 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird how the "Christian nationalism" meme has been pushed by the usual suspects when US church attendance is at an all-time low, and religious influence on politics is a shadow of its former self. My guess is it's a mixture of obsession with The Handmaid's Tale, and the need for an alternative pejorative term that can be applied to black and Hispanic conservatives.

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/14/1073215412/christian-national... Evangelicals are key backers of the republican party.

Evangelicalism is now a meaningless term with the nyt even claiming it’s largely an identity that does not practice in any form. It’s just a default conservative term for whose who can’t admit they are atheists.

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

#480

Post by mmcconnell1618 »

ecshafer wrote: post #374
alistairSH wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the argument for dropping the SAT is that the SAT has been shown to be a proxy for family socio-economic status and is no better an indicator of success at college than GPA, honor/AP/IB course participation, and extracurriculars. (I’m not making that argument myself, I haven’t seen numbers explained well enough to form a solid opinion)

There are a lot of issues with this argument which any administrator should immediately see the issue with. GPA: Schools weigh GPA differently. One thing I saw was that some schools with honors / AP you can get above a 4.0 to the point of a 5/4. Also GPA can be messed up when someone has a bad home life, or works a job. honors/ap/ib: These are often related to which school you go to. Poor schools have few to no AP cl…

College admissions teams don't accept the GPA from each school as-is. Instead, they look at the difficulty of each course, the school and their knowledge of the students from that school in past years. They actually use their own formulas and recalculate an internal GPA that is specific to that college admissions team. For example, they may only consider core classes and ignore electives. They may or may not count AP courses as part of their formula. In the end, each college makes their own rules about what criteria they will use to compare students.
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