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How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

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Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

#111

Post by fn-mote »

xnyan wrote: post #41
nine_k wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is, they are biased towards top performers, not just high performers, even if one student's "merely high" is formally higher than the ceiling the other student hit. (The "winning" strategy then is to move to an underserved high school after an elite middle school, and hit the ceiling.)

You may be joking, but I have several high achieving peers whose families did this with good results. The choice was: did they want to be in the best high school with the highest level of competition, or did they want to go to an OK school that had good magnet programs and less competition. my sample size is only about three, but it worked out well for them.

I don’t think the GP is joking, but they may not have realized that this strategy is already well known. A lot of families won’t uproot themselves for it, though.

Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

#112

Post by fn-mote »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #90
hackyhacky wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So is high school GPA.

Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

#113

Post by fn-mote »

daedrdev wrote: post #109
parpfish wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There nothing stupid about controlling for circumstances. As an analogy, let’s say you want to build a fun race car that you can take to the track. You go out and look at a bunch of used cars and you want to be qualitative so you measure out their 0-60 times. You could just say “the car with the best time wins” and take the fastest one you tested. Or you could consider context like “this one had bald tires tha could…

Better circumstance do create better students though. And all this will do is cause the best students to hide in shit schools to game the system

> And all this will do is cause the best students to hide in shit schools to game the system

No it won’t, because they would get a horrible base for their education and be 1-2 years behind their “super strong school” peers. (I did not make up these numbers; it’s easy to have more than 1 year of college credit from Advanced Placement classes in the US system.)

Acting like college is the beginning of education is foolish. Imagine struggling with learning how to learn challenging material while taking classes with students who already did that three years ago.

Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

#114

Post by next_xibalba »

huhkerrf wrote: post #87
derektank wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No one in Texas calls it “TU”. Rather, UT.

Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

#115

Post by JumpCrisscross »

SR2Z wrote: post #52
nine_k wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is, they are biased towards top performers, not just high performers, even if one student's "merely high" is formally higher than the ceiling the other student hit. (The "winning" strategy then is to move to an underserved high school after an elite middle school, and hit the ceiling.)

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 an IQ test

You’re thinking of a 2004 study that found “the SAT (and later, with Koenig, the ACT) was substantially correlated with measures of general cognitive ability and could be used as a proxy measure for intelligence” [1]. To my knowledge, this remains the case.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6963451/

Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

#116

Post by [deleted] »

torginus wrote: post #30
lateforwork wrote: post #12

See: 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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

#117

Post by next_xibalba »

dmoy wrote: post #35
torginus wrote: post #30

Earlier 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.

This belief is how UC San Diego ends up with 900 freshman below high school math proficiency. And thus college becomes a remedial education institution.

https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...

Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

#118

Post by rsync »

lateforwork wrote: post #19
kccqzy wrote: post #11

> The opaqueness of the whole process is what I find most objectionable. I also find that objectionable. However, recalling my own college admission process, I think we have collectively determined that this opaqueness is basically working as intended. We are now treating it as a rite passage that qualified high school students can be mysteriously rejected. I applied to 6 colleges (not counting those outside the Unit…

The opaqueness is unique to USA and is thanks to "holistic reviews", which is a highly questionable practice. Elite-College Admissions Were Built to Protect Privilege https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor... The new holistic admissions policy worked as intended, successfully suppressing Jewish admissions. https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit... The 'holistic' admissions…

For you and your parent:

There is a special term to denote "amount which something is opaque" and that term is opacity.

Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

#119

Post by rgbrgb »

A lot of commenters seem to think this is purely a DEI thing, but doesn't it match how the best companies hire? Couldn't it be that the colleges are genuinely trying to select who they think will end up at the top of their fields? Common hiring advice for startups (my game) is to look for slope and drive, not deep expertise or experience. The top kid at a bad high school seems like a better bet to me than the median kid from a stellar high school, even if they've done 3x more AP classes. There have been "revelatory" articles like every year for decades about how google doesn't just hire ivy leaguers.

[0]: https://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-to...

Re: How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

#120

Post by nine_k »

lubujackson wrote: post #101
nine_k wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is, they are biased towards top performers, not just high performers, even if one student's "merely high" is formally higher than the ceiling the other student hit. (The "winning" strategy then is to move to an underserved high school after an elite middle school, and hit the ceiling.)

This is the new meta, in SF at least. Despite the "what are secondary effects?" school admins trying to "fix inequality" by creating school lotteries, ending gifted programs and focusing on "equality of outcomes not equality of opportunity", the only thing that has actually improved troubled schools is that smart kids with involved parents now actively seek out lower rated schools like Mission High so they can more e…

While I'm usually not a fan of ending gifted programs and such, I do believe that the kids in the lower-rated schools must feel a positive effect, mingling with highly-motivated, better-educated kids. It may do away with the whole "study is uncool, real kids hate school" vibe that holds many "bad neighborhood" schools back.
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