Earlier quoted context omitted.
In between. They're run by not-for-profits.
Multi billion dollar not-for-profits? :)
As long as you spend all the profit... it’s non-profit
University of California Will Stop Using SAT, ACT
341–350 of 393 posts
Re: University of California Will Stop Using SAT, ACT
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Holistic" often ends up meaning "I'll make up the rules, and you dont get to know what the rules are" I'd rather take my chances on an unfair system with open rules than on an unfair system with opaque rules. Edit: spelling
> I'd rather take my changes on an unfair system with open rules than on an unfair system with opaque rules. I think this is a perfect summary. No system is perfect but at least the flaws are consistent and well-known, not subject to the whims of a particular group on a particular day.
While I would personally take the unfair system with open rules, the system with opaque rules has an advantage in that it's more difficult to game the system. With open rules, you work off a formula for maximising your chances, which may defeat the purpose of the system.
Re: University of California Will Stop Using SAT, ACT
#343Ibram X Kendi has an excellent book, "Stamped from the Beginning" that does a great job of explaining how SAT and ACT tests were really only ever meaningful as a barrier to class mobility for blacks in the United states. in the 21st century it does the same thing. By keeping test prep out of public school and forcing takers to invest up to a thousand dollars on a classroom instruction for the test (which often promis…
SAT test prep has a very small impact on scores. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-service/201903...
It’s likely more a marker about having caretakers who understand how to navigate the process than any actual explicit improvement.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/10/04/new-papers-fi...
FAFSA which isn’t even meant to be a filter is a barrier to entry for students without resources who understand the process and can guide them through it.
Re: University of California Will Stop Using SAT, ACT
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me learning doesn't hurt you.
But lowering the standards does. And that’s the only way you’re going from a pass rate of a third to 100%. You might be able to double pass rates to two thirds by putting many more resources into teaching but that costs money or comes out of research time/teacher satisfaction. You learning does hurt the top of the class if you’re a marginal student. Students on the verge of failure take up a lot more instructional an…
Ha, my school straight up bell curved the grades for most classes at the TA level so that a certain number of kids were always going to get a D/F both of which are not passing grades and thus requiring the student to either retake it or switch majors. I myself had to retake 3 classes to get through it and I have had to explain it to one of my parents clients whose son is in the program and has now retaken his 4th class as a junior.
It was pretty brutal but also highly effective at getting me to really study the material to stay above the curve and pass.
Re: University of California Will Stop Using SAT, ACT
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
Harvard, The most elite school in USA, has a church in the center of campus, an official preacher, and a whole Divinity School.
https://harvardmagazine.com/2007/07/faculty-faith.html 37% of professors at elite universities are atheist or agnostic. Saying Harvard is friendly to the religious because it has a divinity school is like saying Stanford is a hotbed of the rightwing because of the Hoover Institution, except that you would expect a lot of atheists and agnostics at Harvard’s divinity school and no Marxists at Hoover.
Could both the Hoover institution and the divinity school be a signal that there are no communists on campus?
I sometimes wonder if the US is less secular than Europe because atheists were for a long time associated with communists. Church going people obviously couldn't be communists.
Re: University of California Will Stop Using SAT, ACT
#346When this subject comes up I always tell the same story. When I entered university, the head of admissions had been forced to accept the job. He didn't want to be head of admissions (for physics, our subject). He used the opportunity to do an experiment. Normally you need advanced Maths with a decent grade to get onto a physics degree. He abandoned that and admitted about 20 people without that. He also admitted peop…
The logistics aren't impossible. As far as I'm aware, this is how e.g. the Belgian system works. In the US, however, I think attrition is a metric that contributes to University rankings. So if you accept people into a course you want people to graduate. In such a scheme, the attrition rates are high.
Depends on the school. I don't think the elite schools like the ivy leagues do this but they are very selective so it's kind of assumed everyone that gets in is smart enough that they should graduate. A lot of the competitive public state schools though absolutely do this.
I went to a public state school and they straight up bell curved the grades for most classes at the TA level so that a certain number of kids were always going to get a D/F both of which are not passing grades and thus requiring the student to either retake it or switch majors.
It was pretty brutal but also highly effective at getting me to really study the material to stay above the curve and pass.
Re: University of California Will Stop Using SAT, ACT
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here the common strategy for STEM degree programmes is to admit most people and then make first year hard enough that e.g. 2/3 of students are eliminated. In some sense it is more fair than strict admission criteria.
I can see a future cynical me talking about how brutal it is to lure poor students and have them take loans to pay first year tuition only to kick them out a year later with nothing to show for it, if they're not the top 1/3 for some reason.
That's essentially the same argument Supreme Court justice Rehnquist made during a case regarding the use of affirmative action in university admissions.
Re: University of California Will Stop Using SAT, ACT
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
In some sense more fair, but also in some senses less kind and less efficient. Let me give an anecdotal view as someone who had a brush with it at another big state school. University of Washington (Seattle) has a similar system in which some majors are 'capacity constrained' meaning some students would be directly admitted to the program, but the vast majority of them would only enter the major program after being a…
Or they could hire more teachers. Why is education competitive and exclusive? It makes no sense. The whole thing pays for itself in value creation.
They essentially do, but on other campuses throughout the state. The prestige of a University of Washington degree is much higher than one from Eastern Washington University and the quality at UW is probably also higher than that of EWU and similar schools but a student is going to be better off getting out into the world getting hands on experience with a bit lesser quality education.
Re: University of California Will Stop Using SAT, ACT
#349It'll probably come back in some form. Totally agree that too much emphasis was on the test score and that it didn't actually represent the student and their likelihood for success at the university. This is just Goodhart's law in effect, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
However, the reason it'll be back in some form later is because you need quantitative measures to help sort the stack of applications otherwise the overhead becomes too much to deal with.
Re: University of California Will Stop Using SAT, ACT
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
I second this. I grew up in a poor SE Asian country. There, we don't have prep school and such for SAT. But I went to US embassy library; borrow SAT prep books whenever they are available; make lots of photo-copies of some books (like Barron 3500 words) or just do practice tests at the library; and took these tests. I scored pretty well in SAT and SAT 2 subject tests that I won full scholarship at one of the good sch…
Until you mentioned it, I had no idea that so many embassies ran libraries. Thank you for teaching me something new.
Thank you. :) The US embassy library in Rangoon (Yangon) is a good resource (at least when I was there back in 2000-2005). There is favoritism (library staff giving favors to people they know by keeping some books off the shelf and letting their favorite/connected people borrow first), a lot of boot-licking (library and embassy staff, who are mostly local people, licking the boots of foreigners while looking down on native/local people), and class hierarchy (mostly the rich kids have access to the library; sure there are some people like me from less well-off families, but that's not common).
If one can ignore these ugly aspects and one can be patient to wait for the books needed to show up on the shelf (I took a bus for 45 minutes one way to go to the embassy almost everyday and stay there from 9am-2pm every day to catch the book I want being returned), the embassy is still the best resource we had.