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How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

sfeducation.substack.com

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

#191

Post by Spivak »

cuttothechase wrote: post #107

>> 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…

The merit metric is just different than you expect it to be. The university wants students who rise to the top of their school.

The state champions all move on to the regional tournament even if 2nd and 3rd place in Illinois are better than 1st place in Ohio.

And I have to say, doing it this way is a fantastic way of breaking the "good school district" rat race when everyone piling on to a few really wealthy schools actually makes it more difficult to get in.

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

#192

Post by dmoy »

terminalshort wrote: post #187
dmoy wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Which is exactly the point of testing

Which may be okay then? But let's not pretend it's about equal chances

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

#193

Post by strbean »

fn-mote wrote: post #111
xnyan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be joking, but I have several high achieving peers whose families did this with good results. The choice was: did they want to be in the best high school with the highest level of competition, or did they want to go to an OK school that had good magnet programs and less competition. my sample size is only about three, but it worked out well for them.

I don’t think the GP is joking, but they may not have realized that this strategy is already well known. A lot of families won’t uproot themselves for it, though.

This may be sampling bias as well. Having parents with the means, willingness, and involvement to do this is probably a strong predictor of success already.

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

#194

Post by apparent »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #167
Izikiel43 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just discovered affirmative action?

That is illegal in California public schools like this article focused on. The truth is, UC San Diego admits students who didn't get into the more prestigious UCs like Berkeley, LA, etc. That's probably why you see data like this

Everyone knows that UC still practices AA, though not named as such. And UCSD doesn't just admit students who didn't get into UCLA and UCB. Students who get into the latter also get into UCSD. Some much lower-ranked UCs might not admit these students because they assume they'll not come (yield managing), but UCSD is close enough that some students might choose it, especially if they want to be near on the beach/in SD.

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

#195

Post by kelipso »

dmoy wrote: post #192
terminalshort wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is exactly the point of testing

Which may be okay then? But let's not pretend it's about equal chances

NBA gives everyone the same chance to get it, just you have to be good at basketball.

If the circumstances of your childhood made it so that you are shit at basketball but hey you were the top performer in your group of terrible players, the NBA is not going to pretend like you are good enough or grade you on a curve because of your circumstances.

Because if the NBA does that, well, you will get crappy players in the NBA. And can you then say that the NBA gives everyone the same chance to get in anymore. Just move to a neighborhood where everyone is shit at basketball and you suddenly have a much higher chance at getting into the NBA? That’s a much more unfair system than a standardized measure.

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

#196

Post by LarsDu88 »

SoylentGreenGPT wrote: post #85
LarsDu88 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

What breakthroughs are coming from high school students?

Example: A high school student, Noam Shazeer placed Silver in the international math olympiad. Went on to build the foundations of LLMs in multiple papers including the transformer paper. Founded Character.AI...

Forget the fact that he's now a 50 year old dude, this kind of stuff started in high school

There are multiple examples of highly citied ML papers coming from essentially people in the middle of undergrad, meaning they essentially learned all their shit in high school. The first protein diffusion paper, the single cell autoencoder paper, diffusion autoencoder paper... these were all from essentially high school prodigies publishing in undergrad or first year of graduate school.

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

#197

Post by sponaugle »

alephnerd wrote: post #110
sponaugle wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have met more other founders that came from large engineering state schools then the next tier-up of prestigious schools, with one exception being Stanford. Of course these larger schools produce far more students. Purdue (where I went) generates over 3000 new engineering graduates every year. From the hiring perspective - A degree from from ivy school means so little compared to the actual skill level of the appli…

That's my point. Alma mater prestige is increasingly divorced from employability and thus financial prestige. You don't need to go to an Ivy or Ivy adjacent to have a very successful career in Tech (software/hardware), Accounting, Actuary, Nurse Practitioners, and other high paying careers. And historically (past 40-45 years) "prestigious" careers like law, consulting, marketing, advertising, publishing, and media wi…

Oh yea, 100% agree.

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

#198

Post by alex43578 »

dmoy wrote: post #155
alex43578 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Standardized testing does give everyone the same chance: answer the question correctly or incorrectly.

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

#199

Post by aprilthird2021 »

apparent wrote: post #194
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is illegal in California public schools like this article focused on. The truth is, UC San Diego admits students who didn't get into the more prestigious UCs like Berkeley, LA, etc. That's probably why you see data like this

Everyone knows that UC still practices AA, though not named as such. And UCSD doesn't just admit students who didn't get into UCLA and UCB. Students who get into the latter also get into UCSD. Some much lower-ranked UCs might not admit these students because they assume they'll not come (yield managing), but UCSD is close enough that some students might choose it, especially if they want to be near on the beach/in SD…

No, everyone does not know that and it's not true. UC have a much different demographic skew than private California schools which do practice AA (e.g. compare Berkeley and Stanford)
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