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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

#511

Post by Rebelgecko »

pannSun wrote: post #347
rayiner wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you would. WASPs don’t like Jews and never have. Only the justifications have changed.

It's the opposite. In a poll, WASPs gave Jews the 2nd highest rating (69, higher than Catholics, rating only themselves higher at 82), while Jews rated themselves at 89, and gave Evangelical Christians the lowest rating, 34. In other words, WASPs have a positive view of Jews, while Jews have a very negative view of WASPs. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2014/07/16/how-american... 2nd table In fact, no co…

I wonder if the college administrators who enforced quotas on Jewish students would answer similarly (not being sarcastic, I generally wouldn't be surprised if they said in a survey that they had warm feelings towards the Jews)

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

#512

Post by FactoryReboot »

psalminen wrote: post #443
lupire wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SAT stopped calling itself an Aptitude test 29 years ago. If you go to school and you don't presume that your can improve your score on a test by studying, it seems unlikely that you would score high on the SAT anyways.

As a stubborn, idealistic teenager I refused to do any preparation for the SAT/ACT. I believed that I _should_ be an aptitude test so I treated it as one. Would preparation have been helpful? Most likely. But I was happy with my >2000 score, and felt.lkke.i earned it more by not preparing.

You earned something more by not working for it? That’s a hot take

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

#513

Post by AkshatJ27 »

SamBam wrote: post #499
hintymad wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem of SAT is that it's too easy, or at least too easy to be gamed by tutoring. That is, family with means can really improve their kids' scores by throwing money. Make SAT as challenging as India's JEE or those national entrance exams in East Asian countries, and we will see that tutoring hardly will matter in large scale but teacher's quality will do.

Are you saying that students with money to spend on tutors don't do better at the JEE or Chinese entrance exams? I don't know otherwise, but that seems unlikely to me, so I'm interested if you have any evidence that poor kids pass these exams at the same rate.

In india due to less resources for the poor compared to the rich, the government has 'reservations' for the economically weaker section, i.e. at least X percent of the students who will be given admission will be from economically weaker sections.

On the negative side, we also have reservations depending on your caste, so whether or not you get admission into a prestigious institute depends on your family history.

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

#514

Post by pannSun »

samatman wrote: post #421
pannSun wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If culturally-discriminating WASP admissions officers were the main barrier, one would not expect non-Jewish whites to be the most underrepresented group in the Ivy League. Circa 2019, looking at non-international students only: Ivy League US Ratio Mean SAT score [1] Jewish 17.2% 2.4% 7.16 n/a Asian 19.6% 5.3% 3.71 1216 White (incl. Jewish) 50.3% 61.5% 0.82 1148 Hispanic 11.4% 17.6% 0.65 1043 Black 7.8% 12.7% 0.61 96…

Well, and there's the rub, right? Jews and Asians are overrepresented because they give the hard signal. Some absurd double-digit number of Asian students at Harvard have a perfect SAT score. What's taking assessment tests out of that picture likely to do to the percentage? It's not more WASPs, there are exactly twenty of those matriculating per year and they all drink blood out of a skull†. It's less Asians and more…

> Jews and Asians are overrepresented because they give the hard signal. Some absurd double-digit number of Asian students at Harvard have a perfect SAT score.

That is why I included the SAT score in the table. Non-Jewish whites don't benefit from a higher score - they get admitted at approximately the same rates as Hispanic and Black students, despite 100-180 points higher mean SAT scores.

On the other hand, the smaller, 70 point lead of Asians gives a 6.6x higher admission rate, and the unknown lead of Jewish students a 12.8x higher admission rate. Strange, isn't it?

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

#515

Post by EvgeniyZh »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #504
SamBam wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that students with money to spend on tutors don't do better at the JEE or Chinese entrance exams? I don't know otherwise, but that seems unlikely to me, so I'm interested if you have any evidence that poor kids pass these exams at the same rate.

On an orthogonal note, harder tests are more sensitive. In a test as easy as the SAT you would expect most of the bright kids to have the same score regardless of whether they are top 10% or top 1%. With a harder test like the JEE, we can separate these two outcomes

It's not that harder tests in general are more sensitive, it's just if your test score saturate at either endpoint, they are not sensitive at that endpoint

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

#516

Post by psalminen »

FactoryReboot wrote: post #512
psalminen wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a stubborn, idealistic teenager I refused to do any preparation for the SAT/ACT. I believed that I _should_ be an aptitude test so I treated it as one. Would preparation have been helpful? Most likely. But I was happy with my >2000 score, and felt.lkke.i earned it more by not preparing.

You earned something more by not working for it? That’s a hot take

That's a snarky reading of my experience. As an aptitude test, my "working for it" was my seventeen years of learning and developing cognitive skills leading up to the test.

Can you, or anyone else, say you learned something beneficial by studying for a standardized test? Was there anything worthwhile about it sans the score?

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

#517

Post by pannSun »

lupire wrote: post #450
pannSun wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the opposite. In a poll, WASPs gave Jews the 2nd highest rating (69, higher than Catholics, rating only themselves higher at 82), while Jews rated themselves at 89, and gave Evangelical Christians the lowest rating, 34. In other words, WASPs have a positive view of Jews, while Jews have a very negative view of WASPs. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2014/07/16/how-american... 2nd table In fact, no co…

Random Americans feelings of "warmness" isn't the same as admissions officers decisions.

There's no evidence of anti-Jewish bias in Ivy League admissions (the opposite, in fact), and polls also show friendly attitudes towards Jews among the general population, so I don't know what it would take to convince you.

On the other hand, Ivy League students are only 33% non-Jewish white, and 4-5 of the 8 presidents are Jewish, per their wikipedia pages (Martha Pollack is listed as Jewish, but the citations in support of that claim are ambiguous, hence the uncertainty), so what makes you think that admissions are the exception where WASPs reign?

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

#518

Post by pannSun »

polynox wrote: post #432
pannSun wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If culturally-discriminating WASP admissions officers were the main barrier, one would not expect non-Jewish whites to be the most underrepresented group in the Ivy League. Circa 2019, looking at non-international students only: Ivy League US Ratio Mean SAT score [1] Jewish 17.2% 2.4% 7.16 n/a Asian 19.6% 5.3% 3.71 1216 White (incl. Jewish) 50.3% 61.5% 0.82 1148 Hispanic 11.4% 17.6% 0.65 1043 Black 7.8% 12.7% 0.61 96…

Why would you take U.S. population rather than world population?

A very good point! We can also ask why whites are underrepresented at Addis Ababa University, and why there are so few Latinos attending Osaka University.

Because each university belongs to the whole world, and none were founded to serve their country.

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

#519

Post by selimthegrim »

wincy wrote: post #132
nerdponx wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t know, universities in Israel seem to keep magically pumping out geniuses that invent all sorts of incredible technologies despite not being particularly diverse.

Israel does not exactly set the PISA on fire, what they do do is delay college until after military service

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

#520

Post by splistud »

ratsmack wrote: post #346
humanizersequel wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"that System is designed to keep minorities out" That is an extraordinary claim to make with such poorly defined terms and lack of evidence.

This argument is parroted constantly regarding many things and not a shred of evidence is ever required.

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