391–400 of 451 posts
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You are right it’s not trivial, but on the other hand if you simply try to make such a test you’d do better than completely uncorrelated pretty easily I’d suppose.
SAT has has been around almost 100 years and ACT around 2/3 of that, so they've had pretty long to hone the tests as well. This is far from their first stab at it.
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I'm confused. The authors cite several instances of research done at other institutions as the main evidence that SAT/ACT scores are predictive of overall success. At that point, the a priori assumption is that Dartmouth would behave the same way, which they then go on to show. I agree that they could have fully analyzed graduation rates and full-term GPA, but other studies have already done that. I do believe their…
When I talk about statistics on HN it feels like I'm taking crazy pills. The HN community pretends to be intellectual, but the level of mathematical education here is terrible. > Moreover, you're hyperbolizing yourself. Namely, you criticize the title, which is not the author's title at all. Their letter is titled "Report From Working Group on the Role of Standardized Test Scores in Undergraduate Admissions" The auth…
Ironically, I bet most of the US users on this site probably did well on the ACT/SAT too.
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People gaming the system? Are affluent kids moving into housing projects in order to get admitted into Dartmouth? The fact is if they're in a public school in an underserved area, they are most likely going to a disadvantaged public school, and face strong headwinds trying to achieve the kinds of scores kids in affluent neighborhoods get. Note also that multiple factors are being looked at.
> Are affluent kids moving into housing projects in order to get admitted into Dartmouth? This came up in Boston Public Schools. Admission to Boston Latin took into account the portion of a student body eligible for free lunch. It became mathematically impossible to be admitted to Latin if you weren't coming from a low income school.
I don't believe this is true, but if you have citations I'd be happy to hear them.
For instance, their accountability data [1] shows that, in 2023, out of 409 kids taking their ELA MCAS test, 92 were categorized as "low income."
I find this hard to square with your statement (all students came from low-income schools but 88% are not low income?).
1. https://profiles.doe.mass.edu/accountability/report/district...
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All it takes one data brokerage company...
But how do they keep track of all that even so? e.g. school district lines get redrawn all the time. And each school of sufficient size has AP or IB tracks anyway, which basically kills any comparison. And within those, there may even be a further tiering between magnets that select on aptitude etc etc... and what reporting requirements do schools even have? is this mandated by law? the more data you introduce the mo…
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Affirmative action on the basis of socio-economic status is a good thing, and will replace affirmative action based on race. What surprises me is that you're surprised by this. Wasn't this called out by the Supreme Court in their judgement as a better alternative to the race based admissions they struck down? > whatever objectives They're very clear about their objectives too - they want more of their student body to…
You're absolutely right but that's not what's being done when the community income is being used rather than family income. This leads to many complexities, injustices, and people gaming the system.
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> SATs are the chemotherapy of inclusion This is very apt. And then all the anti science people come and argue we need to take every patient off chemotherapy because it hurts them, and thus making things worse for these poor patients. I think it is ok to think that those kind of people are insane and need to be stopped, and that chemotherapy is overall a good things for patients even if it hurts a bit.
Being pro-every single medical treatment is epitome of anti-science. Science is following evidence-based medicine and the evidence shows that there are cases where chemotherapy is ineffective, like https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15330... and https://www.healio.com/news/hematology-oncology/20191213/adj... . Putting everybody with cancer on chemotherapy is anti-science.
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Indeed. If the level of instruction between neighboring school districts is the same but one is super competitive and the other is not, I really don't see why you'd decide to buy a house in the the more competitive one. What good does it do? And that's not even taking into account the fact that kids from a weaker school might actually have better chances during admission.
I think the general sense is that being around other high-performing students would be motivating and enjoyable. But if there is a significant tradeoff in terms of admissions, I think some parents will lean in the other direction.
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Is this a US thing because there has been so much debate on race, equity and etc? I thought this was obvious. Academic excellence arguably requires the least resources, which means the difference in social-economic status matters the least. All one needs is access to excellent books and internet resources, a competent teacher, and optionally a supporting community. And one driven kid can get all of them from librarie…
"All one needs is access to excellent books and internet resources, a competent teacher, and optionally a supporting community" That "all" is doing a heck of a lot of work, to the point of being indistinguishable from satire! A lot of SAT success happens because of families who can afford to train and hire tutors specifically for preparation.
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…
What a silly idea. Universities are not just in charge with academic education but rather with the formation of a person’s character. To succeed with the latter, academic capability must be held alongside the estimation of one’s character, for it is not only about one’s intellectual capacity but rather how one uses it.
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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…