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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

#231

Post by thegrim22 »

lordnacho wrote: post #219
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.” >…

I used to think standardized tests were the way to go, but... My kid recently went through another testing gauntlet, which is the 11+ test. For those who aren't in the Southeast corner of the UK, this is a multiple choice type test that looks a lot like an IQ test in some ways. It's a single sitting and determines whether you are allowed into something called a Grammar School, which is just a selective school, and th…

How is hiring a tutor "gaming" it? They spend extra time learning, and as a result they do better. It's not like the tutors secretly give them a cheat sheet list of all the test answers; they still have to answer the questions the same as everyone else. If somebody puts more time into studying, whether on their own or with a tutor or with their parents, they'll do better than somebody who didn't.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#232

Post by paulpauper »

How is it a luxury belief? A luxury would imply that it's hard to obtain and rare/uncommon, yet this is a view that is widely held by a lot of people, and it's not like there is any barrier to believing in something, unlike having enough money to buy a luxury car. It's more like a trendy belief than a luxury one.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#233

Post by CrazyStat »

chaostheory wrote: post #191
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.” >…

If you ban legacy, then you lose needed donations. If you lose donations, then costs go up for everyone else. There is a net benefit for everyone when there are academically challenged wealthy children. Just keep standardized testing to prevent mass arbitrary admissions that will inevitably become racist. https://priceonomics.com/do-elite-colleges-discriminate-agai... It’s happened in the past to Jewish people and it…

> If you ban legacy, then you lose needed donations. If you lose donations, then costs go up for everyone else.

Or the universities could spend a bit less money. Most donations go to things that aren't exactly central to the supposed mission of a university, like football fields or $90 million dining halls [1]. The explosion of administrative staff over the last couple decades also doesn't help.

[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/blog/real-estate/2016/0...

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#234

Post by notlukesky »

_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…

40% for meritocratic entrance is more than twice what is at elite schools in the US. Maybe ambitious Americans should move to India for a fairer chance.

At most US elite schools, less than 20 percent is for “non-reserved” seats. Elite schools reserve seats for sports teams (affirmative action for rich white elites with “sports” like fencing and rowing), legacies (affirmative action for rich white elites), related to professors and school administrators (affirmative action for rich white elites), those who write essays on poverty tourism and their work experience in the NGO/white savior/charity scams (rich white elites), and then regular affirmative action (capped at 20%].

So it is a brilliant way to use regular affirmative action for Blacks as a weapon to ensure that rich white elites always win and do not compete with the “deplorable” poorer whites, the Asians and immigrants.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#235

Post by faeriechangling »

Jensson wrote: post #140
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standardized tests are much easier to prep for than GPA and extracurriculars. I don’t get where the statement “rich kids don’t test well” actually comes from, and it wasn’t just made up to argue a point. Perhaps if you had state sponsored test prep like in China (you spend the last two years of high school just prepping for the test), but high school isn’t compulsory and many poor kids don’t even attend.

> Standardized tests are much easier to prep for than GPA and extracurriculars And that makes them perfect for poor kids who don't have much time or money, they can easily get similar levels of test prep as rich kid with little effort. GPA or extracurriculars however, no chance, those are much more dependent on home environment and wealth.

Yeah exactly. Being able to score well on some standardized test is way easier than being able to keep up performance year round when you have problems at home if you have the aptitude to succeed at either.

GPA is also much more subject to getting penalized because a teacher straight up hates you for being poor, disabled, male (this one is measurable by having teachers grade tests with different names), ugly, smelly, other thing K-12 teachers tend to dock you for even though on paper they shouldn’t.

Many extracurriculars are also expensive and poor kids don’t get to do a lot of them or excel at them to the same degree.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#236

Post by PaulHoule »

bradleyjg wrote: post #195
mrangle wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What makes a psychologist an “independent psychologist“? Are they selected and paid for by someone other than the parents? We see in medical malpractice cases that there’s always two expert witnesses and their respective testimonies always line up with the interests of the side that’s paying them. Why aren’t those clinicians worried about losing their licenses? Edit: I upvoted your post, it was gray, I appreciate eng…

There was a psychiatrist in my town who specialized in prescribing stimulants and benzodiazepines to hippies. One of his patients would get a scaled-up pill bottle the size of a small trash can full of Dexedrine every month, another got 3x a dose of Klonopin that would turn me into zombie. Frequently his "patients" would use only a portion of their medication and sell the rest for (often badly needed) income.

I almost dropped the dime on him because one of his patients was a severely disturbed friend of mine who did not have a proper diagnosis (I'd conjecture today she had schizoaffective disorder) and I think would have benefited from a change in medication -- but we never found out because she took her own life. I'm pretty sure somebody else dropped the dime on him.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#237

Post by nick__m »

chaostheory wrote: post #191
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.” >…

If you ban legacy, then you lose needed donations. If you lose donations, then costs go up for everyone else. There is a net benefit for everyone when there are academically challenged wealthy children. Just keep standardized testing to prevent mass arbitrary admissions that will inevitably become racist. https://priceonomics.com/do-elite-colleges-discriminate-agai... It’s happened in the past to Jewish people and it…

Elite institutions like MIT, Yale, Stanford, Princeton and Harvard do not need more donations.

Look at the worth of theirs endowment funds at the end of 2021 :

  Harvard   53G$
  Yale      42G$
  Stanford  37.8G$
  Princeton 37G$
  MIT       27.4G$
Can you honestly tell me that they need more donations ?

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#238

Post by dr_dshiv »

lordnacho wrote: post #219
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.” >…

I used to think standardized tests were the way to go, but... My kid recently went through another testing gauntlet, which is the 11+ test. For those who aren't in the Southeast corner of the UK, this is a multiple choice type test that looks a lot like an IQ test in some ways. It's a single sitting and determines whether you are allowed into something called a Grammar School, which is just a selective school, and th…

In the Netherlands, teacher advice (based on standardized tests)is the way. They really restrict practice for the test in multiple ways, some legal and some cultural.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#239

Post by bnralt »

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.” >…

> This is a simple and effective way of achieving the goals they claim to be championing.

And what are the real goals of these institutions? The whole approach of having artificially limited education where people are sifted into higher and lower status classes based upon judgements made when they're teenagers is premised on elitism, not equity. That's the purpose of these institutions - not to education as many people as possible, but to restrict education to a privileged few in order to increase their own worth. Saying they're concerned about equity is like the casinos that put up signs saying they're concerned about gambling addiction.

There's a reason why Harvard is happy to take people's money and give them an education in the Harvard Extension School, but why they firmly tell those people they can't call themselves Harvard graduates. Contrast this with OMSCS, where they firmly say an in-person degree and an online degree will be the same thing.

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