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MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

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Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#331

Post by charlesju »

saithound wrote: post #55
yardie wrote: post #8

I used to think the SATs were fair. Until I found out how much money was being spent on SAT prep. And those expensive prep courses had the potential to increase scores over 100 points. I took the recommended SAT prep course through my high school. It was 2 weekends of going over material that might be on the exam and a workbook recommended by The College Board. Imagine my surprise going to university and meeting stud…

The SAT is not fair. By taking an expensive prep course, you can potentially increase your SAT score by 100 (although that's quite extreme, the average improvement attributed to SAT prep is closer to 20 points). That's a significant, but not earth-shattering improvement: it moves you from the 75th percentile to the 84th, or from the 97th percentile to the 99th. Now let's compare that to other criteria used in the col…

I took tests in the 1600 era. I came from one of the best public high schools in California. I would say 80%+ of the high school had SAT prep, every single one of the people I talked to at school had SAT prep.

If you're not including self study, then maybe? But with prep and self study, everyone I knew was able to get at least a 100 point increase, I think I got a 300 point increase. Basically aced the math section through practice and study (missed 1 question).

Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#332

Post by underpand »

hintymad wrote: post #194
knzhou wrote: post #57

Anybody cheering the exclusion of some test or other, because it was a pain to study for in high school, is simply not noticing the frog-boiling secondary effects going on. Every bit of emphasis taken out of objective results mean more advantage for smooth talking, photogenic, well-connected people. Yes, some misguided parents waste thousands of dollars on SAT courses. But students can also prep using the $20 officia…

The problem of SAT is not that it can be prep'd, but it is too easy to be differentiating, and too simple so people can game it. By the way, isn't depending on SAT for years and everyone bitching about SAT is a gross failure of our education system? Take any serious test, be it STEM competitions, JEE, or NCEE, multiple-choice questions are the easiest part. The differentiating questions are all kinds of word problems…

It's hard enough such that schools have to lower their SAT standards to accept underrepresented minorities.

Otherwise, for non-URMs, the top schools do agree with you. SAT (and school GPA) are usually used in threshold-y way with other factors mattering more.

Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#333

Post by kccqzy »

The SAT subject tests just felt like a joke to me anyways. My high school was a public high school in Singapore, a country generally considered to have great education. With a generally good mastery of the normal high school curriculum, these tests were considered very easy. Pretty much all my friends and I got 800 out of 800 for all the subject tests. And these perfect scores ended up not mattering that much in college admissions anyways.

The normal SAT I tests, on the other hand, seemed to require more critical thinking, higher reading comprehension and reasoning skills, skills that are sorely needed in an age of blatant misinformation. These are much harder to score well, which is why so many people spend a lot studying for them. Not so much for the SAT subject tests.

Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#334

Post by barry-cotter »

chongli wrote: post #320
ebrenes wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SATs have a top score, if it were easy to game you'd find many people would clump at the top. That would make it impossible to normalize that distribution into a bell-shape because they're all clustered into the same bucket with no way of spreading them. OP's point was that the perfect scores remain consistently outside of people's grasp despite the variety of resources available to prep for the exam. I only once…

A lot of the reason the SATs are able to maintain a spread that lets them normalize the distribution is that they fill the tests with stupid tricks that fool people into wasting time. If you do a ton of prep then you learn to spot these tricks and then a lot of the questions become really easy and you can knock them off quickly. A poor smart student may have mastery of the material but their score will suffer if they…

And you can find out about all these tricks for free on Khan Academy or for $20 in a SAT prep book.

Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#335

Post by underpand »

yardie wrote: post #8

I used to think the SATs were fair. Until I found out how much money was being spent on SAT prep. And those expensive prep courses had the potential to increase scores over 100 points. I took the recommended SAT prep course through my high school. It was 2 weekends of going over material that might be on the exam and a workbook recommended by The College Board. Imagine my surprise going to university and meeting stud…

> And those expensive prep courses had the potential to increase scores over 100 points.

As compared with self-studying with free online practice tests and resources having the potential to increase scores over 100 points.

Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#336

Post by devmunchies »

underpand wrote: post #328
dawg- wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you call a "smooth-talker" is what someone else would call an articulate, socially well-adjusted person who can communicate their values and opinions in an intelligent way and who is comfortable making connections with others. Perhaps if this was the standard college admissions used, public schools would have more incentive to educate students as functional humans rather than test-taking drones.

As

maybe for low-level engineering drones who don't have any say in what gets built, which is typical for the first few years of an engineer's career. But senior engineers, and especially engineering management need to have good communications skills to work cross-functionally.

Surely MIT would rather graduate future engineering leaders and technical founders and not just engineers.

Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#337

Post by octorian »

_fq4v wrote: post #218
SkyBelow wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once they are in college, the impact of parents is quite minified. So if you have a stupid whose default academic potential is 10 but has a parental multiplier of 2 for having involved parents and another kid whose default academic potential is 15 but has a parental multiplier of 1 for parents who don't care, once they get into college and the parental multiplier goes away the one who has a 15 should do better than t…

> Once they are in college, the impact of parents is quite minified What an absolutely ridiculous thought. Literally our entire personality, our study habits, and our grit come from our parents.

Perhaps, but it doesn't necessarily translate so directly.

When a kid's academic achievement is significantly caused by their parents constantly putting daily active pressure on them, the removal of that pressure can cause them to completely fall apart.

Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#338

Post by barry-cotter »

bsanr2 wrote: post #329
Hydraulix989 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) An individual's performance on one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to that person's performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks.

It's not impossible that these tests measure something other than general intelligence, that just happens to correlate with social outcomes (like historical, relative familial wealth). IIRC general intelligence also doesn't simply measure speed of cognition, but also ability to choose what to focus on ("intuition"), which these tests do not measure.

Adoptees have IQs in line with their biological parents, not their adoptive ones. It’s heritable like every other psychological variable I’m aware of.

Speed of cognition is absolutely correlated with IQ but the difference in speed doesn’t cause the differences in results. Both are downstream of being more intelligent.

> Speed of information processing and general intelligence

> One hundred university students were given five tests of speed-of-processing, measuring their speed of encoding, short-term memory scanning, long-term memory retrieval, efficiency of short-term memory storage and processing, and simple and choice reaction time or decision-making speed. They were also given the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the Raven Advanced Progression Matrices. A number of multiple regression analyses show that the cognitive processing measures are significantly related to IQ scores. Other analyses indicate that this relationship cannot be attributed to the common content shared by the reaction time and the intelligence tests, nor to the fact that parts of the WAIS are timed. It is concluded that the reaction time tests measure basic cognitive operations which are involved in many forms of intellectual behavior, and that individual differences in intelligence can be attributed, to a moderate extent, to variance in the speed or efficiency with which individuals can execute these operations

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/016028...

Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#339

Post by cycrutchfield »

thebradbain wrote: post #254
quartzite wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly correct. Those who fight for fair admissions on the basis of intellectual ability and academic potential should hold up the SAT and standardized testing as a cornerstone of the admissions process. Standardized testing significantly levels the playing field for students across income brackets. Returns on study investment quickly diminish, and reaching a plateau on returns doesn't require much investmen…

The tests don't not work (I believe that within the middle of bell-curve they accomplish their goal well), but at the extremes they are prone to gamification, especially to those in the know. For example, the pre-2017 SAT had some well known (and some lesser known) tricks that you would only know by studying the test, rather than the material: - ALL sections (and sub-sections) have questions that strictly increase in…

I wish more people who fall into the kneejerk "we must emphasize only objective testing" group were aware of things like these. Standardized tests are incredibly game-able, particularly at the upper tail of the distribution. Because of the nature of that distribution, that means that if you selected students only by "objective" measures like standardized test scores, you will be disproportionately selecting for students who are experts at test-taking, not experts at being good students.

The more we can reduce the overdependence on standardized tests, the better we can be at selecting for well-rounded students and not just test-gamers.

Re: MIT to no longer consider SAT subject tests in admissions decisions

#340

Post by barry-cotter »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #197
ivalm wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people would argue that Mensa itself is a joke...

I always tell people this who want "only high IQ" people to run society. "Oh, you want the people at Mensa to run your society?"

The overwhelming majority of the high IQ are not Mensa members. They are academics, doctors, lawyers, successful businesspeople, the kinds of people for whom it is more common in their friends group to have a Master’s degree than to be a high school dropout.
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