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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

#291

Post by guiambros »

ww520 wrote: post #248
chaostheory wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We don't need rich people to all piling in to donate to the top schools. Have them donated to the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th tier schools. Encouraging donation to top schools via legacy admission creates a perverse incentive to concentrate resources at a few top schools, creating the cycle of everyone fighting to get into them. Money and resources should be spread out.

I like a alternate version of this: tax 25% of all donations to schools (all of them, top or not), and redirect the money to fund and improve quality of public universities.

You still have a strong incentive for folks who want to show gratitude to their alma mater, and at the same time help improve access and equity to everyone else.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#292

Post by throwaway894345 »

rayiner wrote: post #208
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'm experiencing this first hand. My family immigrated here from Bangladesh. Unlike much of my family, my dad had a college-degree required job lined up, and we ended up pretty comfortable with him on a GS-scale job and my mom selling furniture. Thanks to the SATs, my brother and I both ended up breaking into industries (banking, law) that until relatively recently were good old boy's clubs. Now that I have kids at i…

> But if I was ... a lower middle class kid in Iowa, I'd be pretty outraged about this.

Of course, no one cares about these kids (least of all the elites and their cadre), and any outrage from lower middle class Iowans is already explained away as racism (never mind that Iowa, like much of the rest of middle America, went to Obama in 2008 and 2012).

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#293

Post by guiambros »

nick__m wrote: post #237
chaostheory wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

What is G$?

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#294

Post by lordnacho »

ryzvonusef wrote: post #197
lordnacho wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As I replied to another comment, lottery doesn't achieve what (Asian) people really want; an attempt to control destiny, some sort of idealized version of fairness and justice. A test allows them to (seemingly) achieve that.

It's one of those things where people kid themselves that it was all them. To some degree it's a useful fiction, we can't be going about being all gloomy about our prospects.

But it also creates a heck of a lot of stress. What your parents think of you, how they talk about you to their friends, is going to depend on this test. On top of it all, you're not even really learning anything, you need to spend the time learning the test.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#295

Post by sgustard »

sandworm101 wrote: post #5

Standardized tests remain the only criteria totally in the control of the student. You can study for them and objectively do better, become a better applicant. Everthing else is either circumstantial or based in the opinion of others, mostly highschool teachers. If i had to rely on my highschool teachers' opinion of me i would not have ever gone to university let alone have won scholarships. Standardized testing allo…

Were you objectively more deserving to go to college than a kid with stellar teacher recommendations but lower scores? You might think so, but others would disagree. When I hire, I choose a trusted colleague's referral over the candidate who happened to cram best to do binary trees on a whiteboard.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#296

Post by selectodude »

lordnacho wrote: post #228
flangola7 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US parents' income is already considered when applying for financial aid. Just add that info to admissions

Does this mean you can not work for a couple of years to make it easy to get in, plus get a discount on the fee?

No, assets are taken into consideration for that exact reason.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#297

Post by throwaway894345 »

nick__m wrote: post #237
chaostheory wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

G$ == Giga dollars?

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#298

Post by wefarrell »

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.” >…

Wouldn’t rank within their school be the hardest metric to game, since schools tend to be fairly segregated with respect to income levels?

The only way to game that metric would be for the wealthy to send their kids to schools that perform worse, which would wind up driving more resources to those schools.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#299

Post by acmj »

cma wrote: post #185
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 l…

Also want to add that getting a formal certificate for learning disabilities is expensive. From what I heard, an ADHD test costs a couple of thousand USD, which could mean a lot to low income families.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#300

Post by bluescrn »

guiambros wrote: post #293
nick__m wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

What is G$?

1000 megabucks
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