Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

#311

Post by gnicholas » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:16 PM UTC

legolas2412 wrote: post #289

nick7376182 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with 90% of this but I would say it's not entirely "retarded". It USED to be a very valid disadvantage across the board to have a minority race or skin color, but now as racism becomes less pervasive and "affirmative action" has had time to take effect it is becoming less of an effect. To dismiss it entirely ignores how much it seems to have accomplished. I do hate to see poor and working class white male chi…

> It USED to be a very valid disadvantage across the board to have a minority race or skin color I completely agree that this used to be the case. I might even argue that it is still true to an extent. I will also agree that we should still address it. My problem is when addressing it involves discriminating against asian Americans like me. The people who want to discriminate against asian Americans are just using "h…

The thing that made the least sense about Harvard's case was that Asians had a harder time getting in than white students. I could see the argument for other minorities being given a leg up over Asian students, but white students? That made no sense.

Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

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Post by ZoomerCretin » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:21 PM UTC

elteto wrote: post #137

msravi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this: >> Third, under test-optional policies, some less-advantaged students withhold test scores even in cases where providing the test score would be a significant positive signal to Admissions. Importantly, Dartmouth Admissions uses SAT scores within context; a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a lower-income community with lower school-wide test scores is a more significant achievement than…

> Dartmouth Admissions uses SAT scores within context; a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a lower-income community with lower school-wide test scores is a more significant achievement than a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a higher-income community And this is how you again discriminate based on race in a post-Affirmative Action world. The weight they assign to each context is…

>And this is how you again discriminate based on race in a post-Affirmative Action world. The weight they assign to each context is completely arbitrary and tuned to achieve whatever objectives they have.

This would be far more disastrous if spots at colleges were scarce, but they overwhelmingly are not. There are over 15 million undergraduate students in the United States, and we are undergoing a demographic collapse (https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...). In 2 years, the children of the baby bust (2008-2009) will start applying and enrolling in college, and because there are fewer of them, they will have an easier time getting into the college of their choice.

>95% of us do not attend Ivy League schools. Removing any and all affirmative action would help, at best, five thousand students? This is a manufactured issue. No one is denied a college education because of affirmative action. Any time spent arguing against it is wasted.

Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

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Post by cm2012 » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:22 PM UTC

11101010001100 wrote: post #310

cm2012 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IQ is one of the most reliable and proven metrics in social science.

Sure, but that says more about social science than IQ.

You can replace social science with "science about predicting people's behavior" if you want. The important thing is that IQ is one of the most powerful predictors of human behavior in science. So few things get proven to have a major effect on outcomes over and over again. You shouldn't just throw that out.

Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

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Post by marcinzm » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:23 PM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #212

msravi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this: >> Third, under test-optional policies, some less-advantaged students withhold test scores even in cases where providing the test score would be a significant positive signal to Admissions. Importantly, Dartmouth Admissions uses SAT scores within context; a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a lower-income community with lower school-wide test scores is a more significant achievement than…

Will processes like this result in families avoiding (or at least not seeking out as much) rigorous high schools? It seems like some families might choose to send their kid to a not-super-rigorous high school — where they can coast in class and learn via outside enrichment — instead of a school with more rigorous academics where they'll be held to a higher bar by colleges. This would allow students to have a lower-st…

This is nothing new. I went to a very rigorous high school in the late 90s. It was in no way a secret that every top university and even scholarship competition had caps for how many could make it in from our school. The joke amongst students was that the easiest way to get into a top college was for to move to Wyoming and just become valedictorian.

Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

#315

Post by gnicholas » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:28 PM UTC

verst wrote: post #87

I was born and raised in Germany where I attended an ordinary high school. Eventually I decided I wanted to attend university in the US but had no help navigating the process and requirements. Needless to say, I realized I had to take the SAT last minute and had never seen a practice test, or taken this kind of test in English before. All my instructions had been in German, and the German school system does not usual…

> For me this test truly only tests how good you are at that test.

International students are a completely different story. As you say, your entire educational experience had been in another language. This is not the case for students in the US. All students here have taken many multiple choice tests in English by the time they get to the SAT. For example, there are state- and federal-mandated tests that students must take.

> Perhaps the SAT can be predictive of performance for those who grew up in the system that prepares you for the SAT (or ACT). For anyone else, this is however meaningless.

It is perhaps close to meaningless for an international student, but for a student who went to school in the US, it is not meaningless at all.

Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

#316

Post by sudosysgen » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:28 PM UTC

coolbreezetft24 wrote: post #256

In Canada there are no high school SATs and university admission is mostly based on high school performance. Universities there don't seem to have the issues that American ones do. Living in America now I see a lot of parents spending thousands of dollars on SAT tutoring & preparation. It seems a lot of things could be fixed just by being able to support and admit more students at the "good" schools? (also not sure w…

Universities in Canada definitely do have issues due to the high school GPA system.

In Quebec, it's not present, instead you get in based on a Z-score renormalized based on how good your class was at standardized tests in CEGEP, which itself disproportionately looks at your standardized tests scores and those of your peers in high school

As far as the rest of Canada, highly competitive programs have to calculate the strength of a high school to normalize for grade inflation, especially in Ontario. It's a huge problem and makes it unfair for some students who don't go to the right high school.

Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

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Post by sudosysgen » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:34 PM UTC

zeroCalories wrote: post #85

abeppu wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... is it close to an IQ test? Like, people study very specifically for these standardized tests, and success is also related to how much prep work you put in. I think that may also align with how people study for exams once they're enrolled students, how much work they put into projects/papers/etc.

Then you just normalize the scores based on socioeconomic indicators like is done in the article. Of course, this highly advantages well groomed students from bad demographics, and horribly disadvantages neglected students from good demographics. That's why China worked hard to ban test prep. But either way, it's a pretty good proxy for IQ.

I think the real reason China banned many forms of test prep is because it's a zero sum game. Rich students are already advantaged by going to better schools, but too much test prep ends up forcing every student to study 14 hours a day to compete, with no actual advantage beyond that, so everyone poor and rich alike suffers from excessive test prep.

Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

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Post by balderdash » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:36 PM UTC

dpweb wrote: post #90

doctorpangloss wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the universities were sincere about that, they would figure out how to increase enrollment. Why is every parameter of admissions open to change despite tradition, except that one?

Increasing enrollment means increasing faculty. Maybe controversial but I really believe this lowers overall standards. You just can't find enough faculty to meet the high standards. Look what happened when tech blew up - they hired like crazy. I'd argue the overall level of programming skill went down.

I can’t find the study, but all the inflation in tuition can be basically be traced back to everything but increasing educational staffing (in other words all the incremental spending goes to new new sports complexes, administrators, etc.)…

Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

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Post by asdff » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:36 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #221

nostrademons wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SAT is well-correlated with 1st year GPA, but not well-correlated with eventual job placement (although it does correlate pretty well with eventual income). However, 1st year GPA is well-correlated with 2nd year GPA, which is well-correlated with 3rd-year GPA, which is well-correlated with 4th year GPA, which is well-correlated with eventual job placement, which is well-correlated with entry-level salary, which is we…

In my own experience, first-year GPA in college was a cakewalk. I had straight As until Junior year, then things got a bit more demanding and I was caught off-guard because college had been pretty easy up to that point. (Large state university).

My experience was the opposite. First two years were a blur, I was in the trenches juggling calculus and organic chemistry and physics along with my major work and the extra busywork courses they throw on top of all that too. By the time I got to my upper division work in the third year it was like grades didn't matter at all. There's be no more assignments or quizzes, maybe two exams to determine your entire grade for the course, that would be pretty easy to get an A on if you attended class and didn't sleep.

It could just be that professors don't want to invest a lot of time designing a bevy of coursework. In the weed out classes they are all lecturing off a textbook, which provides for them slides to use and a general schedule of topics, as well as banks of questions they could pull from and permutate and reuse. Its a lot of time saved for sure. In the upper division, there is no textbook or anyone designing any course, they might literally have a sentence description of what the course is pitched about in the catalog then they take it from there. The professor has to come up with what to talk about from their field for an hour twice a week, and sitting there drafting up those slides is enough work if they don't have any from last year to use, considering they are usually also a full time researcher on top of this.

Re: Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

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Post by cooper_ganglia » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:40 PM UTC

etrautmann wrote: post #141

brigadier132 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The goal of school IS NOT to make you a good office worker Who defines this "goal"? Each student has their own individual goals. I bet you if you surveyed students "The goal of school is to create the ability to think creatively, rationally and critically and make you a better citizen of society through those processes." Would rank all the way to the bottom and they all are terrible reasons to get into $200k of deb…

This is such a cynical and tired take. I would imagine that most people attending college at least intend to learn something and level up some ability. Many of them will also enjoy partying in their early 20s. Both can be true, and there’s not a singular purpose of attending school.

My girlfriend in high school had no idea what she wanted to major in, no idea what career she wanted, no idea what her future looked like at all. Anytime I'd ask her, she'd get upset, because she didn't want to stress about it before she had to.

We eventually broke up, and she went to college, changed her major 3 times, spent the whole time drunk at parties, and graduated with a degree with a relatively limited scope of jobs. She graduated 4 years ago, during which she's worked as a receptionist, a dog groomer, and a call center rep.

We shortly got back together as she was graduating college, and I encouraged her to apply for jobs for which her degree would come in handy. Every single time, she refused, because she "wasn't qualified enough" even though she had her Bachelors in what they were asking for.

I say all this to say that I think many kids are corralled into college without an actual end goal in mind. They go because it's what they're supposed to do. In my anecdotal experience, there isn't much thought about intending to learn or leveling up some ability.