Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is hard to hurt someone when their score is a standardized test.
UCs don't consider standardized tests.
IMO they'll roll back. It was a bad decision, and a few unis already rolled back.
How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
81–90 of 199 posts
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
No they don’t “have” to do any of this as evidenced by the fact that the US is the only country where it happens. In most countries it would (rightly) be considered strange to care how good someone is at sports or marching band when evaluating their ability to study academic subjects (the actual purpose of a university).
That feels like a fairly narrow view of what the purpose of a university is. Look at the charter of any university and they do not just say: "create students who excel in their academic subject of choice". The vast, vast majority of higher education mission statements/charters include goals like: "helping students develop their identity", "pursuing meaning", "strengthening community", "sharing perspectives", "helping…
> Look at the charter of any university
Any university in the world? Or any university in the very idiosyncratic US system?
Again, nobody else does stuff like this, and their universities seem to be working fine.
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
UCs don't consider standardized tests.
IMO they'll roll back. It was a bad decision, and a few unis already rolled back.
Many other schools have rolled back their temporary suspensions of SAT-optional/blindness, but UC made a decision that was permanent. And when they made the decision, it was over the objection of the UC faculty recommendation. They might roll it back, but I'm not holding my breath.
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems backwards to me. Colleges should be prioritizing strong students for admission and nothing else. Our country needs the best engineers and doctors. Colleges are a scarce, valuable resource and should be reserved for the best students, regardless of why they are the best students.
> Colleges should be prioritizing strong students I agree with this, but I think you didn’t get the point. The point is, the way we measure strength has to be considered in light of the environment. If a student is in a high school where the average strength is 100, and the student has achieved a strength of 200, it shows that the student has tenacity and grit and drive. Whereas another student might be in a high sch…
I understand that point and I still disagree with it. There are objective, direct measurements of strength (standardized tests, performance at state/nation-wide academic competitions, admissions essays), and we don't need to resort to this more flimsy chain of subjective comparisons that use "relative strength of student within school" and "relative strength of school across all schools".
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems terrible incentives. You are now in a purely adversarial relationship with your peers and hurting them helps you
Not only that, but high performers are incentivised to move to worse schools. It may actually improve mean outcomes, but harm societal outcomes, as the scientific impact of educated individuals may tend to be power law distributed (e.g. the most important breakthroughs come from a small sector of the population with wildly disproportionate impact)
What breakthroughs are coming from high school students?
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems terrible incentives. You are now in a purely adversarial relationship with your peers and hurting them helps you
Texan here. There’s still ways to get in if you don’t make the top X% of your class (the percentage is shrinking every year as the school climbs up the rankings and more people want to go… I think it’s near top-4% now? It used to be top 15% I recall), and many of those high achievers go onto other out of state schools, so it’s in the interest of UT system to offer automatic admission to the top achievers from across…
I believe it's only UT Austin that's shrunk the percentage. All of the other public universities are still at the original top 10%.
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#87See: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co... Excerpts: UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offere…
They should just make this explicit, like the UT system does. The top X% of students are admitted automatically from each school.
It's all publicly funded universities in Texas, not just the UT system.
In other words: you've just pissed off a lot of Aggies grouping them in with, ahem, tu.
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I don't know how do you even compare students with different backgrounds against each other. That's why standardized testing is good - it gives everyone the same chance to excel.
> it gives everyone the same chance to excel. How does the existence of standardized testing give everyone the same chance? As an extremely over-exaggerated example example, someone whose home study time is disrupted frequently by gunfire outside is probably not getting the same chance as someone who lives on a 20 acre estate with private tutors for every subject.
“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it” -Bernard Shaw
I'm pretty tired of progressives insisting that people who grew up in poverty but were able to improve our lot in life through study, doing well on grades, and, yes, on standardized tests, like me, do not exist.
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems backwards to me. Colleges should be prioritizing strong students for admission and nothing else. Our country needs the best engineers and doctors. Colleges are a scarce, valuable resource and should be reserved for the best students, regardless of why they are the best students.
> Colleges should be prioritizing strong students I agree with this, but I think you didn’t get the point. The point is, the way we measure strength has to be considered in light of the environment. If a student is in a high school where the average strength is 100, and the student has achieved a strength of 200, it shows that the student has tenacity and grit and drive. Whereas another student might be in a high sch…
This doesn't describe what UC is doing, however. LCFF is for (1) kids in foster care, (2) English learners, and (3) low income. If you go to a school that has lots of these kids, but you yourself do not have one of these disadvantages, then it doesn't mean that you've risen up out of poverty to achieve relative greatness. It means that you're not an immigrant/poor, but you go to school with a lot of such students. And in the age of grade inflation, getting good grades at a school with lots of low-performing kids is especially easy.
Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once upon a time, the SAT an IQ test, and it was a real achievement to score a 1600. That achievement has been hollowed out in tandem with the value of most college degrees. We know how to test for merit. The greatest tragedy in this college admissions racket isn't the shadowy affirmative action policies, the mountains of student loan debt, or the entire college admission-industrial complex that's sprung up. It's tha…
The SAT was never an IQ test, and it certainly doesn't measure "merit", whatever that is. It's a Scholastic Aptitude Test, and it isn't particularly good at that either. If we had a good "test for merit" then we could directly assign people to their roles and ignore their actual performance.
> It's a Scholastic Aptitude Test, and it isn't particularly good at that either
It’s a pretty good measure for how a student will do in their first year in college.