Report on the role of standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions [pdf]

Post by cubefox » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 7:40 PM UTC

codexb wrote: post #199

ren_engineer wrote: post #157

The SAT was based on IQ tests used during WWI to try and find draftees with the most potential who shouldn't be wasted in the trenches. Standardized tests have always been about making things as fair as possible, and the fact that paying huge money for tutoring only results in minor score improvements should be a sign they are effective the war against them was because people didn't like the implications that poor As…

The war against standardized tests has far more to do with black students performing disproportionately poorer on them. Many people are unwilling to acknowledge the multitude of cultural and socioeconomic factors responsible for that and instead want to simply chalk it up to racism. And so there's a war against any admissions policy that results in disproportionate racial outcomes, until we're left with admissions po…

Post by nindalf » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 7:45 PM UTC

elteto wrote: post #137

msravi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this: >> Third, under test-optional policies, some less-advantaged students withhold test scores even in cases where providing the test score would be a significant positive signal to Admissions. Importantly, Dartmouth Admissions uses SAT scores within context; a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a lower-income community with lower school-wide test scores is a more significant achievement than…

> Dartmouth Admissions uses SAT scores within context; a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a lower-income community with lower school-wide test scores is a more significant achievement than a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a higher-income community And this is how you again discriminate based on race in a post-Affirmative Action world. The weight they assign to each context is…

Post by carabiner » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 7:48 PM UTC

breadwinner wrote: post #163

carabiner wrote: post #133

Yep. And STEM students have higher SAT scores than lib arts. And Asians have higher SAT scores than everyone else.

> And Asians have higher SAT scores than everyone else. And that might be the biggest reason to prefer "holistic review" over SAT scores. Originally invented to limit the number of Jews [1], "holistic reviews" is now being used to limit the number of Asians in top universities. [1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...

Post by gnicholas » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 7:50 PM UTC

light_hue_1 wrote: post #33

If this was a paper submitted by one of my students, they would fail. Why would these faculty members sign their names to this drivel? If you read carefully, you see how useless SAT and ACT scores really are. Here are just a few insane things. > Figure 1 shows a linear relationship between SAT scores and cumulative first-year GPA for Dartmouth students. SAT scores are grouped into 16 equal-sized bins, and we plot mea…

Post by seanmcdirmid » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 8:04 PM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #269

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your popularity goes down if too many of your classes are taught by PhD students and post docs. Overhead is brutal, and research grants are limited, so hiring more faculty is tough. If they just hire enough professors to satisfy demand, they would be on the hook for paying most of their salaries since they are unlikely to get funding. Hiring a bunch of pure teaching faculty is a no go since that turns the flag ship i…

In the humanities at least, tenure-track hiring numbers are down about 50% from pre-2008 era, while the supply of humanity PhDs is broadly stable. The problem is that the university departments are less willing to hire the faculty that they once did, and that largely comes down to university administrations having decided that paying for anything non-STEM (and non-sports, I guess) isn't worth it anymore.