361–370 of 1001 posts
Buried in the details it says that MIT will be accepting anyone over a (presumably secret) threshold, not using it as a ranking tool as some people might indicate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The no-test policy is espoused by two groups who find themselves to be unlikely allies: naive progressives and actual racists. The naive progressives think what you’d expect: “Minorities and poor people can’t possibly be expected to do well on anything objective, so it’s unfair to test them”. It is bigotry, but at least it’s well-meaning. The actual racists are more cynical: “I don’t want Yale to be 67% Asian.” Obvio…
I think we can disagree with a policy without saying, "The people who agree with this policy are racist.". I mean weren't the elimination of standardized tests also justified on them supposedly being racist? At this point I couldn't care less what people assume the motivations of their opponents are.
One group wants to delete the tests because they think the test is racist.
The other group wants to delete it because they are actually racist.
I found the irony of it amusing.
I am so happy to see this. I went to high school in a bit of a backwater in the US. People don’t really go to selective colleges or care much about applying. It was only doing very well on standardized tests and spending time on the internet looking for info about colleges that led me to believe I could go to one of these places. I got into several and attended one, and I believe it greatly positively changed my life…
No, it was an intentional move to restrict the number of Asians admitted because despite their best efforts to hide it, prestigious universities' data showed systemic discrimination against Asians in the admissions process (see: SFFA vs Harvard). Removing the SAT removes some of the data that opponents can use to sue them. One of the reasons the UC removed the SAT was to "diversify" their admit pool because Asians disproportionately did really well on the SAT and they aren't allowed to discriminate based on race by state law.
My hope is that the Supreme Court, now that it's a 6/3 conservative majority, finally strikes down race based "affirmative action".
All MIT students, regardless of intended major, must pass two semesters of calculus, plus two semesters of calculus-based physics, as part of our General Institute Requirements. ... There is no path through MIT that does not rest on a rigorous foundation in mathematics, and we need to be sure our students are ready for that as soon as they arrive. For a period in the 1980s-1990s, you could argue that calculus was not…
Honestly every educated adult should understand calculus, and certainly anyone with a technical degree should. Sure many people will be unlikely to need to do the raw computation of calculating derivatives and integrals (even people doing machine learning are typically letting computers do that work), but to understand the way these two concepts work together and describe the world is really essential to understandin…
I am so happy to see this. I went to high school in a bit of a backwater in the US. People don’t really go to selective colleges or care much about applying. It was only doing very well on standardized tests and spending time on the internet looking for info about colleges that led me to believe I could go to one of these places. I got into several and attended one, and I believe it greatly positively changed my life…
>Removing admission tests was a huge slap in the face to social mobility out of the middle class. To reiterate other commenters, admission tests are the hardest part of the process to game and the least biased towards things like having a tiger parent, while being the most predictive indicator of success in college. Wealthy and well connected people can easily game extracurriculars and essays, and HS grades are vastl…
There was another near-top comment when I posted that pointed out that test prep classes only conferred a 30 point benefit. Likely because it’s just familiarizing students with the test and covering basic testing strategies (like skipping a hard section and coming back to it last). I agree the benefit should ideally be 0 but 30/2400 is not much. That’s what I meant in my post.
Also, I’ve heard that in the past the SAT in particular was much more gameable due to the vocabulary/analogy sections, which incentivized students to study specific known topics or cram vocab terms. I’m not sure if they added it back but they’d been removed by the time I took the exam.
One way that rich parents can game SAT/ACT is through aggressive seeking of test accommodations for disabilities. There was common knowledge of up to 50% of test takers having extended time in some affluent private schools in the SF Bay Area prior to the Covid pause.
In the case of students trying to get into MIT I wonder if there is actually much point in gaming the test? The article says they are using the tests as a threshold. It sounds like they don't care by how much you pass the threshold, just that you have passed it. I'd expect that most students who will be able to survive at MIT can make the SAT threshold with no gaming of the test and no test prep other than maybe doin…
Eh, not so sure. The "threshold", if we really trust that they do threshold and don't consider overperformance beyond that threshold (something I am skeptical of), is likely quite high.
> I understand that this announcement may dismay some readers for whom the tests can be a source of stress. Bluntly, if one can't handle the stress of the SAT, then the stress of exams at a university like MIT is going to be overwhelming. Exam week at Caltech was called "compression", and after the exams was "decompression". The moniker is not a joke.
> I understand that this announcement may dismay some readers for whom the tests can be a source of stress. Bluntly, if one can't handle the stress of the SAT, then the stress of exams at a university like MIT is going to be overwhelming. Exam week at Caltech was called "compression", and after the exams was "decompression". The moniker is not a joke.
Can't explain why an IQ test predicts success in cognitively demanding work?