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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

#151

Post by losvedir »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #115
SR2Z wrote: post #52

Earlier 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 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/

Time pressure is a crucial aspect of it, though. I think GP may be alluding to the alleged abuse of disability exceptions, allowing kids (who don't need it) to take longer.

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

#152

Post by cyberax »

smelendez wrote: post #23
flufluflufluffy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> An obvious example is athletic recruiting

Itself a very US-specific thing. So much so that trans athletes in college sports were a focal point of a propaganda campaign that resulted in Trump winning.

I don't think any large European country even has athletic admissions, outside of maybe Olympic-level athletes.

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

#153

Post by everybodyknows »

hackyhacky wrote: post #79
SR2Z wrote: post #52

Earlier 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.

"Aptitude" was dropped from the name back in 1990.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#Name_changes

It may have become something of a dirty word ...

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

#154

Post by everybodyknows »

tzs wrote: post #47
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.

California has that. The top 9% from each high school and the top 9% statewide are guaranteed UC admission. This does not guarantee admission to any specific campus, so if you are only interested in say Berkeley or UCLA you might get admitted but UC will find you a place at some campus.

Recall that there are UC campuses in Riverside, Merced, Davis.

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

#155

Post by dmoy »

alex43578 wrote: post #92
dmoy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How does the existence of a standard hoop height in the NBA give everyone the same chance to play? Shorter players should get lower hoops, and slower runners should get electric scooters. That way, everyone can appear to be equally capable.

I would say that the NBA is explicitly not about giving everyone the same chance. Not everything has to be about giving everyone the same chance. A totally equitable NBA would probably be less entertaining to watch.

But that doesn't mean we can say that standardized testing gives everyone the same chance either...

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

#156

Post by labcomputer »

fn-mote wrote: post #113
daedrdev wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fooli…

So they’ll take dual-enrollment classes at the local community college instead.

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

#157

Post by chaostheory »

lateforwork wrote: post #22
SilverElfin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a terrible system because it forces students and parents to start playing all kinds of games to navigate a non transparent process for admissions. What now? Are parents going to send their kids to good schools until it is time to apply to colleges? And then they are going to switch to the best school for applications?

Right, up until middle school send kids to the best school, then for high school move to an area with poor schools.

This exists. They’re called magnet schools. The IB program is decades old.

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

#158

Post by labcomputer »

999900000999 wrote: post #56

Community colleges are the real heroes of California's higher education. Unless you get a full ride you probably should start at community college. You can then transfer later and generally you'll have a better variety to choose from. The UC system is sorta weird though. Maybe the top 2 , UCLA and Berkeley compete nationally. After that you're paying UC tuition for an average school. Out of state that's around 50k, 1…

> The UC system is sorta weird though. Maybe the top 2 , UCLA and Berkeley compete nationally. After that you're paying UC tuition for an average school.

Does UCSB no longer have an excellent physics department and is UCSD no longer considered a top CS department?

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

#159

Post by bobbiechen »

Back when I was applying to college, there was the idea of "yield protection": a college might decline overqualified students to optimize for their "yield" (the percentage of admitted students who accepted). The yield might affect college rankings.

I'm not sure whether yield protection is actually practiced vs. just a paranoid student meme, but it was the first thing I thought of here and I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned in the article.

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

#160

Post by glpgeFwac »

labcomputer wrote: post #158
999900000999 wrote: post #56

Community colleges are the real heroes of California's higher education. Unless you get a full ride you probably should start at community college. You can then transfer later and generally you'll have a better variety to choose from. The UC system is sorta weird though. Maybe the top 2 , UCLA and Berkeley compete nationally. After that you're paying UC tuition for an average school. Out of state that's around 50k, 1…

> The UC system is sorta weird though. Maybe the top 2 , UCLA and Berkeley compete nationally. After that you're paying UC tuition for an average school. Does UCSB no longer have an excellent physics department and is UCSD no longer considered a top CS department?

Assuming this isn't a rhetorical question: San Diego, Davis, Irvine, and Santa Barbara all rank in the top 15 US public, top 50 US / top 200 global universities (USN&WR, THE, QS rankings) and have specific programs that are world class ( including the ones you mention--two UCSB professors won last year's Nobel in physics.

Though Berkeley and UCLA have the advantage of most all departments being top 10, "average school" is not a fair assessment for the rest.

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