131–140 of 199 posts
>> Incidentally, San Francisco public schools had a combined admission rate of just under 20%, well below the state average. Mission had the highest rate (26.5%) and Balboa the lowest (15.4%). It may or may not be a coincidence that 90% (the most of any SF school) of the applicants from Balboa were Asian whereas only 25% (the fewest of any SF school) of the applicants from Mission were Asian. In order to promote dive…
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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.
Or well, accept that same test is fair enough solution and it is impossible and probably not even sensible to apply some gameable metrics.
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> 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.
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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)
The bottleneck on research is funding. We have a glut of students wanting to go into research who don't because of how competitive the field is. We then have researchers constantly leaving the field for the same reason.
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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 .
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It’s an arms race. Now that students are encourage to apply to huge numbers of universities for safety, the universities are forced to accept a smaller percentage of applicants to avoid overcommitting. So student, parents, and counselors see this and tell everyone to apply to even more colleges and the cycle continues.
UK caps applications to 5 to combat this exact problem.
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Some other countries just use test scores and exam results.
That’s not unbiased though. You still have the question of what’s tested and how it’s graded.
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It’s always been this way; previously we just had to play to the old white men’s biases.
Yeah, there’s really no way around it when you have more qualified students than slots, unless you just mark each applicant as qualified or not and run a lottery. But they do have to “craft a class” to some extent. An obvious example is athletic recruiting, but some schools are consciously thinking about populating other extracurriculars, like marching bands or orchestras. And you also don’t want a class that’s all c…
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Right, up until middle school send kids to the best school, then for high school move to an area with poor schools.
Maybe they can bring their resources with them too, and the poor schools can have things like lead paint remediation, honors classes, and extra curricular activities. I like this idea!
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I was a transfer to UCSD - the transfer community itself is pretty large and one college (Sixth) houses a significant percentage, with dorms specifically for transfers. IMO there was far higher interesting diversity of folks there compared to rest of campus: veterans, addicts who got their shit together, tons of immigrants who couldn't afford going straight to UC (as well as your standard mostly 20-22 year old SoCal…
Sure, there's a community either way. But how does the CC -> UCSD transfer community stack up against either (1) four years at UCSD (which OP would say not to go to without a full ride) or (2) two years at UCI and two years at UCSC or UCLA? My guess is that there are hardworking people in both groups, but the ones who start out at a four year institution are more likely to be tip-top, and to have family/friends who w…
1) 4 year students had my best average, but also my widest standard deviation. My best and my worst students were in this group.
2) Community college transfers had a slightly lower average than my 4 years, but the standard deviation was a lot tighter. They were optimizing time and schedule.
3) Returning professionals had an even slightly lower average than CC transfers, but the standard deviation was super tight. They mostly targeted the low end of the B grade range. They were very strongly optimizing every ounce of their time schedule.