Colleges Want Students with Character, But Can’t Measure It

That makes about as much sense as suggesting bar owners should try doing a better job helping drinkers with infertility.

For elite schools atleast, I don't think it has anything to do with watering down their standards. These schools have the pick of the crop and if 3.3million high school students graduate in the US alone every year, the top 1% of students make up about 33,000 applicants, far more than the 2000 or so Harvard admitted in last year.

The issue really morphs from "How do I select the best students for my school?" to "What sort of arbitrary metrics can I use to filter down this list of already amazing students?" If I had to guess however, I'd say these schools, under the guise of character, are trying to select students that have the highest potential to give back to the university. "Oh this student does part-time acting? Well we will accept her on the chance she becomes the next Natalie Portman. This guy has a best selling app? Better put him on the list of potential Zuckerbergs."

I'm not an admissions officer (not even close), but that would be my best guess on what someone an admissions officer would do faced with the problem of having so many amazing students to fill their undergrad class 10 times over. At some point it no longer makes sense to filter on raw academic ability (see also, Google's "GPA does not matter"), and a purely random lottery would 1.) never actually be a random lottery (thank you alumni) and 2.) may massively favor one group of people (if I have to choose 2000 our of 33,000, and 60% of that 33,000 are asian from a 150,000k+ income family, you run the risk of homogenous class - if you have to ask whats wrong with this, consider this, would you like to work at a job that hired exclusively white men (or whatever race/gender you are)).

Another way to look at it would be this way: if you were given the task to hire a new team of software engineers, and once the resume's came in they all had, 3.9+ college GPAs, Ph.ds in CS, and multiple years of experience on your tech stack of choice, would you just "do a pure lottery" to see who works for your company? Chances are you might end up filtering them on the most circumstantial of metrics (i.e. "This guy was a Yankees fan, I don't think we would get along very well")

While I can understand that for basic stuff, there is no way I would ever attend an online course on some advanced undergraduate topics in physics or mathematics online.

There is a benefit of being in a classroom environment when learning an advanced subject. You have a direct connection to the professor and other students, which is essential for advanced material. Plus you can easily go and talk to them afterwards for more details. I learnt a lot by going to professors office hours which doesn't work online.

Also, what about labs? Every science program I am aware of has a laboratory component. That cannot be done at home. Plus good luck trying to get universities to agree on what labs to do. Each university has different types of researchers who focus on certain areas, which is reflected in the labs selected. My former university, for example, had no particle physics people so any lab related to particle physics would be misplaced. Instead they had a lot of quantum people so the labs were more geared towards that. I know of another university that had a lot of particle physics people and their labs reflected this.

Another thought is research. How would undergraduates get exposed to research in your system?

Thinking about it more, having TA'd first year calculus, you need to be able to interact in real time with students. I think online resources are great and I recommended them to my students, but they cannot replace face to face interaction. This is something online technologies cannot replicate, so I say it is a bad idea to even do it for basic things like calculus, which is very fundamental to the sciences.

Personally, I think it is a noble goal, but unlikely. Instead, I think the universities should integrate online stuff in addition to in classroom lectures.

EDIT: I forgot to mention the university environment. Being surrounded by my peers in the same field really helped. I learnt a lot just by hanging around the various clubs. That absolutely cannot be replicated online.

SAT / ACT both have best experts (psychometricians and statisticians). Those are very basic things for them. Can you tell me what is your reference? From what I read, I think SAT is addressing other issues.

One friend of mine left his sophomore year, as he was doing badly. About 10 years later, he asked if he could come back and try again, and Caltech said sure. He then proceeded to get straight A's and graduate. I asked him if he felt that he did better the second time because he'd gotten smarter. He laughed, and said no, it was just that in his late 20's he was then ready to work.