University of California Will Stop Using SAT, ACT

That depends on the student's choices. I dated a woman in college who was trying to get a degree in speech pathology. Because it was an "impacted" program, they use the process of having students take general core courses and then reevaluating them. She didn't get into the program after her first year. Given the choice of taking degree adjacent courses for a year or changing majors, she chose to go into special education instead. There were other schools in the state that offered speech pathology but they were branch campuses. Given the choice between speech pathology from a directional school or a special education degree from Big State University, she went with special education. That was her choice. From what I can tell from her Facebook posts, it seems to have worked out well for her.

No, I just went through applications, and that's not a thing, except with a few rich parents who are desperate to get their kid who has slacked off for years into a decent school.

Okay, I hated taking SATs as much as anyone, and have an AP exam in a few hours, so I'm no standardized test fan. But there are reasons for it that obviously don't apply in the same ways when evaluating job applicants. While some objective comparison might be helpful, this is a massive apples-and-oranges issue.

* College applicants have, by and large, no real-world experience that demonstrates their competency. There are obviously exceptions, but this remains true of the vast majority. Most job applicants have at least some experience, so it's easier to weed out the fruit loops by taking a look at their resumes. There's a lot more high-quality objective information by which one could compare job applicants than college applicants.

* Job applications typically narrow the pool to a few candidates to be seriously evaluated. College bureaucrats have thousands. It's more realistic for a potential employer to perform more "holistic" evaluations then for a college to do so simply because of problems of scale. The interviews used to fill most of this role, but bureacrats have gradually shouldered that role: my parents had interviews of two hours for most of their colleges, which seemed to be common for that day. I had interviews of forty-five minutes when they went well, and this was true for my peers as well. Now I guess some administrator sits in a dark room and by the light of a single candle looks up your extracurriculars to determine your zodiac sign and thus your fitness for the school, or whatever garbage they came up with.

Where do you usually see the subjective, interview-style evaluations break down in favor of whiteboarding? Big FAANGs that have a scale that makes that sort of individual evaluation difficult and may necessitate whiteboarding. Universities hit this same problem, only with the added concern that there's even less consistent basic competency: about one third [0] of students require remedial courses and therefore probably ought not to have been admitted to college. So there has to be at least some metric by which they can consistently compare.

On the other hand, I applied to a bunch of "elite" schools that all had black-box "holistic admissions" processes. What frustrated me wasn't that "Oh no, now I can't game the system; drat!" Rather, I didn't know what to emphasize for best effect because they didn't make what they valued clear. I had enough stuff about which I could write that I could pick and choose, and I wasn't sure which I ought to pick. This made things like ordering my resume and writing my essays more difficult. You know who probably could have told me what to write about and how to order my resume, though? A fancy, expensive college consultant. Making the process more opaque only helps those who literally pay people to sit around and figure out how to game the system.

[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5184995_Shape_Up_or...

> You know who probably could have told me what to write about, though?

A high school guidance counselor?

Black-box holistic admissions processes are nothing new, most selective institutions have overtly had them for decades even if they didn't tend to use the word “holistic” to describe them (they have weighted a wide range of factors beyond GPA and test scores, and have never announced how most of them were measured or how they, once individually measured, were aggregated, but advising on the that has been—since sometime I started preparing to apply to college in the late-1980s—a major function of high school counselors.

An expensive college consultant could tell you who and how to bribe to bypass the admissions process applicable to more plebian applicants, though.

Sadly this is a continuation of a long trend. In 2005 Inside Higher Ed mentioned:

> Fewer than a third of college degree recipients are “proficient” in everyday literacy, U.S. study finds, and rate is falling.

Do you think its gotten worse or better, 15 years on?

Back in 2017 I wrote about how Cal State replaced no-credit classes with credit bearing ones, and then nixed the requirements for placement exams and remedial classes: https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/higher-education-erodes-a7c...

> At Cal State, about 40% of freshmen each year are considered not ready for college-level work and required to take remedial classes that do not count toward their degrees.

> The hope is that these efforts will also help students obtain their degrees sooner — one of the public university system’s priorities. Cal State has committed to doubling its four-year graduation rate, from 19% to 40%, by 2025.