191–200 of 451 posts
You know what’s an even better policy? Making standardised tests the sole admission criterion. No high school grades (which are often inflated, unless your teachers hate you), no extracurricular activities, no essays. Just one set of objective numbers from the national maturity exam; which tests and with what weights depending on the field of study. This is what universities do in Poland (for most fields of study; so…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What, you mean kids from a disadvantaged background can't build a 10 page CV filled with outreach, volunteering, expensive sports and musical practice by the time they're 18? They don't have an instinctive feel for the current pieties, bred into them since they're 3, to put in their admission essays?
This is a super goofy thing to say about Dartmouth admissions, because as of 2019 they expected admits to have all of that and have a 1550+/35+ test score. I'm beginning to think a lot of the people commenting on these things have this weird concept of these schools admitting poor kids from the sticks and asian kids from Chinatowns with no resume items except good grades and test scores....it's true they have much lo…
FYI the middle 50 is 1480 to 1560 for the class of 2028: https://www.crimsoneducation.org/us/blog/dartmouth-acceptanc...
The SAT was based on IQ tests used during WWI to try and find draftees with the most potential who shouldn't be wasted in the trenches. Standardized tests have always been about making things as fair as possible, and the fact that paying huge money for tutoring only results in minor score improvements should be a sign they are effective the war against them was because people didn't like the implications that poor As…
If you're going to talk about the origins of the SAT, don't forget that it was designed by a eugenicist to try to exclude black candidates. Ironically, the problem with them now is that they're now used to exclude white people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_SAT
back then being against eugenics meant you were a crazy religious nutcase who couldn't accept scientific fact about evolution and genetics
You know what’s an even better policy? Making standardised tests the sole admission criterion. No high school grades (which are often inflated, unless your teachers hate you), no extracurricular activities, no essays. Just one set of objective numbers from the national maturity exam; which tests and with what weights depending on the field of study. This is what universities do in Poland (for most fields of study; so…
By sheer dumb luck, I am exactly the kind of intelligent schools and standardized tests measure for. I went to my first choice schools on a full academic scholarship for both undergrad and grad school.
And it's meaningless in the real world.
The most important connections I've made certainly weren't at school. The academics themselves weren't terribly useful in terms of preparing me for life outside the ivory tower.
Why are we trying to sell people on this dream?
To measure academic achievement they use First Year GPA. It makes sense they're correlated, both require studying known material for a test. But is GPA the best measure, especially first year? I would be interested in other metrics like 3rd-4th year GPA or placements into jobs and such.
When I went back and was paying for tuition out of my own pocket as opposed to magic sky money falling into my lap from the US Dept of Education, things were a LOT different.
My ideal admissions system would consist of highly weighting standardized test scores and grades along with community impact and other extracurriculars as well as letters of recommendation from teachers and other community members. ...oh, wait, we have that admissions system. That's the admissions system of every flagship state school and the US Service Academies. Why does Dartmouth (and before it, MIT's) flip-flop o…
That’s not what the UC system does — they refuse to consider SATs.
Here's the money quote: >> Importantly, these test scores better position Admissions to identify high-achieving less-advantaged applicants and high-achieving applicants who attend high schools for which Dartmouth has less information to interpret the transcripts. Precisely. SATs aren't about hurting the poor or disadvantaged. It's about giving them a chance.
What, you mean kids from a disadvantaged background can't build a 10 page CV filled with outreach, volunteering, expensive sports and musical practice by the time they're 18? They don't have an instinctive feel for the current pieties, bred into them since they're 3, to put in their admission essays?
The SAT was based on IQ tests used during WWI to try and find draftees with the most potential who shouldn't be wasted in the trenches. Standardized tests have always been about making things as fair as possible, and the fact that paying huge money for tutoring only results in minor score improvements should be a sign they are effective the war against them was because people didn't like the implications that poor As…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a school asks for SAT or ACT scores but, hypothetically, wants to discriminate based on race or some other characteristic, doesn't requiring the ACT/SAT make them more likely to be liable for discrimination because there is an objective standard to show that they are treating some groups differently than others? I thought that some of the recent rulings against selecting students based on their race hinged on the…
That’s why they choose something not directly associated with race like socioeconomic environment. If the result is correlated with race, that’s not necessarily an issue with admission processes. There are other non-academic tests like CogAT, Wechsler, etc. that may be even better since they evaluate abstract reasoning and scale from young to old without significant modification. Those are used by gifted programs and…
True, though if socioeconomic status were not correlated with race, then there would be much less of a reason to want to select based on race in the first place.
> There are other non-academic tests like CogAT, Wechsler, etc. that may be even better
They probably would, for a while. Anything different from the SAT/ACT but correlated with some sort of capability is going to do better when the problem is specialized preparation for existing tests. And that was precisely the problem that caused colleges to stop looking at SAT/ACT. It wasn't because the tests are bad. It was the usual "you make what you measure".
Switching tests isn't free, though. You lose all the historical data that show the association between a test and the specific outcome you care about (eg graduation rates at this institution). You have to go through a bootstrapping period, and by the time you're done, it's possible that people are now targeting the new test and it starts losing its utility too.