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Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

robkhenderson.substack.com

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Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#171

Post by wernercd »

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #146
_mh56 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in India, we have quotas for different kinds of people. There's caste based, Gender based and finally EWS (Economically Weaker Section) Quota. Overall 60% of total seats are reserved for these people. My friend who's ultra rich was selected in EWS Quota. His father who runs his own company took Zero pay for the last two years so he qualified for the benefits. Meanwhile people who actually deserved this had to co…

> The point is you can't just give preference based on income as its incredibly easy to fudge. Okay, well this is the US. Your tax returns are a very good indication of how much money you make. If you lie on your tax returns then you have much bigger issues than college admissions counselors.

"tax returns" and the OPs example was someone who had millions in the bank and took no "income" for years to fudge the tax return.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#172

Post by Dylan16807 »

ghaff wrote: post #29
medler wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can study for them and objectively do better, become a better applicant The thing is, attempts to measure the effect of test prep show they have little effect. According to these studies, SAT test prep courses might add ~30 points to your score: https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...

That is SAT test prep courses specifically though. Not going in completely cold versus having prepped for the test. I mean, if I took the SAT today many years on, I'm sure I wouldn't do very well--at least on the math section. There's too much that isn't muscle memory any longer because I haven't done a lot of the high school math stuff in years.

Nobody needs to go in cold when you can do a practice test at home or at the library.

If someone's high school math skills aren't ready at all then that's a much bigger issue than any kind of bonus prep.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#173

Post by josephcsible »

pmoriarty wrote: post #164
whack wrote: post #120

The following paragraphs were especially powerful: > The chattering class is using poor kids as pawns to eliminate standardized testing. Which helps their own kids. Rich kids who “don’t test well.” But they know how to strategically boost their GPAs, get recommendation letters from important people, stack their resumes with extracurriculars, and use the right slogans in their admissions essays. They have “polish.” >…

"Or ban legacy preferences at the very least" It would be interesting if there was a rule that forbid you from attending the same school as your parents.

This would be unfair for exactly the same reason that legacy preferences are, just in the opposite direction.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#175

Post by [deleted] »

djbusby wrote: post #156
LewisVerstappen wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point is you can't just give preference based on income as its incredibly easy to fudge. Okay, well this is the US. Your tax returns are a very good indication of how much money you make. If you lie on your tax returns then you have much bigger issues than college admissions counselors.

If your family has $10MM in the bank, you too can take (and report) to IRS zero income.

[deleted]

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#176

Post by harvey9 »

_mh56 wrote: post #133
whack wrote: post #120

The following paragraphs were especially powerful: > The chattering class is using poor kids as pawns to eliminate standardized testing. Which helps their own kids. Rich kids who “don’t test well.” But they know how to strategically boost their GPAs, get recommendation letters from important people, stack their resumes with extracurriculars, and use the right slogans in their admissions essays. They have “polish.” >…

Here in India, we have quotas for different kinds of people. There's caste based, Gender based and finally EWS (Economically Weaker Section) Quota. Overall 60% of total seats are reserved for these people. My friend who's ultra rich was selected in EWS Quota. His father who runs his own company took Zero pay for the last two years so he qualified for the benefits. Meanwhile people who actually deserved this had to co…

That sounds like it was designed to be easy to game; income in last two years as a metric rather than total assets, or zip code, or high school attended etc

Does India have something like SAT as well?

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#177

Post by mrangle »

bradleyjg wrote: post #131
mrangle wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, the issue of unprovided testing accommodations is only relevant for kids with a disability. This would not apply to everyone else. Only to kids with an unidentified disability. Which will be more in the underprivileged group, but it is still a minuscule group. Especially taken in the context of elite University admissions, for which we are actually speaking of the even rarer child that is "twice excepti…

This assumes that the rich kid rate is accurate and what’s missing is parallel accommodations for poorer kids. But what about if instead the elevated rate is a result of fraud? In other areas of life (e.g. service animals and medical pot) it’s pretty clear that there are medical professionals out there are selling their letterhead to the highest bidder. Why should we believe that’s not happening here?

Why should you believe that it is "happening here"?

Let alone at a significant rate.

Why is this wild conjecture worth a discussion?

Give me a break.

As a clinician that evaluates disabilities, it is very difficult to fake one. They tend to be diagnosed at an early age, and not at "test time" in high school. In fact, as a person ages they are much less likely to receive a diagnosis. There has to be early-age evidence even if the diagnoses is later in life.

The disability rate in elite / prep schools exists but is low. These kids tend to be more on the spectrum than anything else.

Underperforming kids who don't have a disability, and might be prone to cheat by one means or another, and who aren't sports recruits tend to transfer to easier schools.

If a kid wants to go through the process of being fraudulently diagnosed by an independent psychologist with ADHD, for the purpose of accommodations, then the same process is discoverable by literally anyone with an internet connection. That is, by everyone.

And from what I know, this has much less to do with clinician corruption than it does with the individual faking symptoms. There's few to zero people risking their licenses to hand out fake diagnoses for scheduled medications that are under heavy scrutiny at all times by the States and the Feds. The liability alone is off of the charts.

Schools are only likely to accept the diagnoses if a thorough clinical evaluation is undertaken. The result of which is not able to be faked.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#178

Post by IshKebab »

baremetal wrote: post #54
lumb63 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a mistake, that’s for sure. I’ll be more blunt since a lot of other comments in this thread beat around the bush: higher education institutes are removing objective admissions criteria so that they can admit less qualified minorities on subjective grounds.

the question is, why? why are they doing it? the real reason not the ostensible one.

Money presumably. There's an extremely strong incentive for educational institutions to spend their long term reputation on short term financial gain by setting high fees and giving everyone a high grade. Basically everyone loves it except people who already graduated.

And maybe employers, but employers tend to do their own tests because of the difficulty of comparing external test results across time and institutions.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#179

Post by ryzvonusef »

nathan_compton wrote: post #132
ryzvonusef wrote: post #45

As an Asian person, I think it's a cultural thing. There is this old joke about how even if you are a one-in-a-million person, there are still 8000 of "you"s to choose from; how does one chose who to pick, if there aren't positions for all of them? So how do you make it "fair"? Since of the number of seats are limited, so imagine if the cut-off for the last seat is for someone who is in the 90.3765335th percentile, l…

"You simply CAN'T provide the same resource to all of them, some of them will have to vie for a lower-ranked resource." Why not just distribute those resources via lottery? Why not actually just split resources evenly across the population? There are good practical reasons not to do this, but they are, fundamentally, ideological (eg, we might feel it is inefficient to spend resources on someone which may not provide…

> Why not just distribute those resources via lottery

It comes back to the concept of "fairness"; or rather, something you can control for, something you can work hard and strive for.

Race/Gender/Ethnicity/Location/Wealth etc. are all lottery variables already, people was something that is not a lottery.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#180

Post by pmoriarty »

_mh56 wrote: post #133
whack wrote: post #120

The following paragraphs were especially powerful: > The chattering class is using poor kids as pawns to eliminate standardized testing. Which helps their own kids. Rich kids who “don’t test well.” But they know how to strategically boost their GPAs, get recommendation letters from important people, stack their resumes with extracurriculars, and use the right slogans in their admissions essays. They have “polish.” >…

Here in India, we have quotas for different kinds of people. There's caste based, Gender based and finally EWS (Economically Weaker Section) Quota. Overall 60% of total seats are reserved for these people. My friend who's ultra rich was selected in EWS Quota. His father who runs his own company took Zero pay for the last two years so he qualified for the benefits. Meanwhile people who actually deserved this had to co…

> you can't just give preference based on income as its incredibly easy to fudge

That's why you have to look at total wealth, not just income... though I'm sure the ultra wealthy will find some way to work around that as well.

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