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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

#181

Post by econonut »

tokey wrote: post #116
kenjackson wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could whites be discriminated against if Asians would rise to 90% of the accepted population? There aren’t enough underrepresented minorities at selective all combined to get Asians to 90%. That is most of the pool that Asians would take is from White students. From a pure counting perspective, more whites get in over “more deserving” Asians than any other group (assuming your numbers are accurate). Based on this…

I was incorrect about the 65% of Berkeley as Asian. It's 30.6%. Note this is double the percentage as the Ivy League schools - and it's based on a framework that was specifically developed as a way to get around the 1996 ban on affirmative action. I still believe the only explanation for eliminating clear, measurable and quantifiable metrics for university admissions is because universities are looking for discrete w…

Your statistics there are wrong. I think you got that from a site other than Berkeley. Those percentages don't even come close to 100%.

Berkeley reports here: https://opa.berkeley.edu/uc-berkeley-fall-enrollment-data-ne...

Asians are 43%-53% depending on how many who identify as 'International' are Asian. Whites are 19.7% and Blacks are 3.4%

You are right, however, about why schools want to eliminate the SAT. SAT optional admissions is a way for schools to admit students whom would have previously been considered unqualified. By increasing the pool of eligible applicants, the school is discriminating against the previous population of qualified, top tier students, which has been historically an Asian majority. Additionally, Asian students with low or no SAT scores will not benefit from these changes because the best Asian students will continue to submit high SAT scores. How many Asian students are going to be accepted without an SAT score when they're being compared to other Asian students with 1500+ SAT scores?

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#182

Post by tekla »

Spooky23 wrote: post #117
bradleyjg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly. “Holistic” evaluation is entirely game-able. The claim is that they are trying to give the kid from East New York a shot but the reality is that this is all about the Dalton parents not wanting their little precious to have to go head to head on a fair playing field against a Stuyvesant kid. Their goal is to make all desirable institutions look like Dalton—-very wealthy students with an appropriate spri…

The issue is that the standardized tests correlate with IQ, and IQ has been determined to be have racial and other biases. I went to a shitty rural high school - high scores on my ACT made a huge difference as anyone who could read got out of that school with a 3.7.

> standardized tests correlate with IQ

> IQ has been determined to be have racial and other biases.

Citation needed

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#183

Post by PaulHoule »

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?

All the people I know who have been able to claim disability for psychiatric reasons as adults have come from upper middle class families (e.g. my bipolar aunt whose brother was the superintendent of buildings for a small cities, a friend who dropped out of grad school after not seeing his advisor for nine months whose father was a specialist manager for failing Montgomery wards stores, an ex-friend who suffered from panic disorder and agoraphobia whose father was an doctor in the army who later rose high in the ranks of the medical establishment.)

Conversely I've seen people from hardscrabble backgrounds who are obviously disabled (a friend with no diagnosis but who so thought disordered that even though she are addicted to cigarettes it would take hours for her to get it together enough to smoke her first cigarette even with help) who would struggle to deal with the paperwork to get food stamps and TAANF, never mind the much more difficult and adversarial process to get SSI or SSDI.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#184

Post by tqi »

mrangle wrote: post #143
ww520 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are so qualified, why not let them compete on the even ground with the rest of the applicants? Why is there a need to special track them via legacy? Legacy should have been abolished long time ago. It’s the epitome of systematic racism.

You seem to have missed the point of my prior post, and you misunderstand how legacy admissions work. Dropping the rhetorical nuke of "systemic racism" doesn't cover for that. Read my prior post again. Legacy gets one looked at. Its not an automatic admission. Unlesss you are simply stating that legacy admissions should be disqualified (this would be ridiculous), then also consider that: you may be making the "resear…

Two questions:

1. does having a parent who is an alum make a student more qualified?

2. does having a parent who is an alum increase the likelihood of an applicant being accepted?

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#185

Post by cma »

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.” >…

> Standardized test scores are the hardest metric to game

Learning disabilities give unlimited time on the tests. That means you can slowly use brute force on the math section to check each alternative one by one instead of needing to be good at other techniques.

Harvard had something like 25% of admitted students do this. Does it sound plausible that 25% of Harvard students need unlimited time on the test due to a learning disability and that lower tier schools have lower rates of learning disabilities, or more plausible that Harvard students have more access to sympathic doctors (through family relations, upper/upper midle class organization connections) and savvy admissions advisers?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/colleges-bend-the-rules-for-mor...

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/h...

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#186

Post by lordnacho »

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…

I would do a very very selective 1st round, eg a college with an intake of 1000 would admit 10 people who are special in some way, so you can get that kid that is head and shoulders above everyone else.

For the other 990 spots, you make a minimum bar of achievement (lots of As, high score, whatever) and put everyone who meets it in a lottery.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#187

Post by csa »

pmoriarty wrote: post #180
_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…

> 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.

Trusts are the most common way to do this.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#188

Post by ab0aa907 »

jakeinspace wrote: post #145
_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…

This is off topic, but do you find it difficult seeing this friend the same way while knowing that they and their father gamed the system like that? If I learned this about somebody I knew it would seriously hurt their image in my eyes.

Coming from other side of border but with similar culture and attitudes, corruption is so common in that part of the world that most of the people don’t even see it.

They would consider it smart to game the system.

Only way I can explain this attitude is to compare it tax loopholes in the west. It is very hard for many Americans to see loopholes in tax codes as unethical. Like using mega-backdoor-ira loophole to bypass income limits for contributing to IRA. (Personally, I am not saying that tax loopholes are ethical or unethical, just something that can be seen both ways.)

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#189

Post by adrr »

mrangle wrote: post #110
CJefferson wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Legacy” applicants is the opposite of woke, it’s been how the “old boys network” has run for hundreds of years, getting under qualified students into top Universities.

That's an urban myth perpetuated by people interested in generalized grievance. At least from the period I attended prep school, and beyond. From the mid-1990's. Almost in-total, the "old boys" applicants are not under-qualified. When compared to almost any kid that attended lesser secondary schools than the privileged kid attended, on average. These kids have almost always proven themselves in elite educational envi…

Is it an urban myth? We can look at former presidents like George who attended Yale with a 1200 SAT and a 2.5 HS GPA.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#190

Post by ryzvonusef »

tekla wrote: post #129
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…

I come from a poor Asian immigrant family, and this SAT shit seems wild. My parents always told me that America is an easy country to succeed in. Just do decently in school, ace the SAT, and boom full ride to a upper middle class life, no matter the background. Its proven pretty true so far.

Not sure if America an easier country to succeed in, but I do believe it's a RICH country (with a high GDP per capita), i.e. it can afford to fund more colleges, imho, which means the competition is less.

Not just colleges, but colleges with prestige, there are a LOT of American college at every prestige level. The supply is rather high.

I am really impressed at the Land grant college schemes, for example. Really funneled a lot of money into the creation of colleges all over the country, not just in the populous cities.

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