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Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles

mitadmissions.org

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Re: Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles

#401

Post by Bahamut »

ceeplusplus wrote: post #363
opportune wrote: post #211

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…

> huge slap in the face to social mobility out of the middle class 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 re…

As an American born Asian myself, the "unofficial" quota system process colleges use is painful to me - I was an extremely academic high performing student before college, netting national level recognition in some areas with a lot of extracurriculars & came from a very poor background, yet my ethnicity worked against me.

At the same time, I recognize that this is also some of the challenge that underrepresented minorities face in general in American society where there are others who have more closed doors than I (I went to a high school with over 70% minorities, mostly African-Americans + hispanics). I don't pretend to know what the solution to the problem is, but given that high prestige colleges have created a high risk high reward situation with how they handle admissions, I feel like a lot of the problem is how academia has created this artificial situation - maybe this is by design, I don't know, but if we truly value diversity & equity in higher educational opportunities, there needs to be a significant change.

Re: Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles

#402

Post by time_to_smile »

david38 wrote: post #364
time_to_smile wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is hubris. I can think of many adults that know nothing of Calc and do very in life and work. Knowing basic accounting, being able to fix things around the house, being pleasant to work with, etc are far more important.

It maybe "idealistic" but I would hardly call it "hubris".

My undergrad was in a non-technical area and so I never had to take calc in undergrad. Having later learned it to solve problems, it has become clear to me that it would be preferable if everyone with a college degree knew calc. I was, in retrospect, wrong to have tried to avoid it.

I'm well aware we don't live in that world, unfortunately many people with a college degree also don't know write effectively, or perform critical analysis on texts, things I also thing should be part of being college educated.

> Knowing basic accounting, being able to fix things around the house, being pleasant to work with, etc are far more important.

I'm not sure how knowing calculus reduces these things.

Re: Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles

#403

Post by pishpash »

Animats wrote: post #20

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…

90% of software engineers don't do algorithms, even in ML -- nor are they capable of, besides rote memorization of interview algorithms. Software engineering these days is mostly a job of complexity management and automation, requiring little math and more secretarial skills. That's just the ugly truth that nobody wants to hear.

Re: Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles

#404

Post by 0x20cowboy »

namdnay wrote: post #344
0x20cowboy wrote: post #336

I grew up poor, and from my anecdotal experience people do better on the SAT if they "are rich". You can also pay people to take the test for you. Maybe it's because they don't have to spend their days worry about getting shot, stabbed or beaten to the ground by gangs. Maybe it's because they get to eat every day. I guess, perhaps, they get more quality study time. Or, heck maybe you're all right, random questions -…

I think you’re focusing your anger on the wrong target. Is it Google’s fault for performing blind objective skill tests? Or is it your society’s fault for not giving you the chance to grow up fed and safe enough to study?

Absolutely not! Sorry if you thought I was angry. I sometimes have a funny way of expressing myself, but there is no anger here at all. Just acceptance of the way the world works - kind of my point actually :)

Re: Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles

#406

Post by dan-robertson »

Animats wrote: post #20

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…

I’m not sure that elementary calculus is particularly related to machine learning (I have a similar opinion of linear algebra which is fundamentally geometric in a way that machine learning isn’t). That doesn’t mean that you don’t need to know anything about calculus or matrix multiplication to understand machine learning but knowing eg Green’s theorem won’t help and neither will understanding a tensor as a multi linear map or in the way a general relativity physicist might.

I also don’t particularly know what goes into calculus (in the U.K. we studied something called ‘calculus’ in high school which included integrating/differentiating polynomials, some trig functions, easy integration by parts and, in the ‘further maths’ course, some second order linear ODEs with forcing, first order ODEs via integrating factors, first order linear systems of ODEs via the eigenvectors method, and I think some integration by parts based recurrence relations. At university things were divided into ‘calculus’, which contained practical tools for applied maths like Green’s theorem or partial derivatives or contour integration or Sturm–Liouville theory, and ‘analysis’ which had foundational things like epsilon–delta stuff or Dedekind cuts or the definition of a limit or Riemann integration or the conformal mapping theorem and so on.

I think a first course in the thing I called analysis above is very useful for building mathematical maturity (ie the ability to not deduce false things but also playing with definitions and thinking about counter-examples) but the calculus knowledge can be useful for understanding the physical world. But I don’t know if that understanding should be required for e.g. computer scientists.

A few calculus examples I can think of in computer science:

- Some famous story of Feynman ‘interning’ at Thinking Machines and solving some capacity management problem using bizarre differential equations with terms representing e.g. ‘bits per second’. No sufficiently good solutions had been found using discrete methods.

- I was once asked an interview question which I suggested solving with differential equations but I was quickly directed towards not doing that.

- Honestly I can’t think of many more but maybe this is a lack of imagination. I think there are a few things that are really probability theory that you need some understanding of calculus for, e.g. emergent behaviour of distributed systems, reasons to prefer random cache eviction, some intuition to answer a question like ‘if the time X takes has some distribution, but sometimes we have a gc pause for y milliseconds, how would that affect the distribution?

Re: Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles

#407

Post by david38 »

hooande wrote: post #234
david38 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a very rich town, like super rich. I work in tech so am rich by the standards of general population, but by the standards of Silicon Valley. My child did very well on the ACT. All she did was buy a $35 practice book, which almost anyone can do. Literally this was it. Furthermore, she doesn’t know of a single friend or acquaintance that hired a private tutor. All the nay-sayers belly-ache about this but for…

Do you honestly believe that if you were from a very poor town, poor by the standards of african american neighborhoods in Detroit, that giving your child a $35 practice book would have a similar outcome?

My mother was an orphan at 15 in Honduras. When she had me, she shared a 400 square foot house with six of her sisters.

Look up the crime stats for Honduras and try again.

Also, looking at the very worst situations is not a valid argument. By that rational, what about the poor girl who is kept a sex slave in her basement by her father for twenty years?

Do you think sending your African American example to SAT prep will make a difference? Coming from the poorest and sketchiest towns in America? Such a child would likely be better served by starting at a community college. After that, SATs are not accepted.

Re: Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles

#408

Post by xxxtentachyon »

arcticfox wrote: post #390
paxys wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why so many people (myself included) advocate for a pure "software engineering" degree at more universities. Let people who are interested study graph theory, combinatorics, linear algebra, advanced probability and statistics and whatever else. For the rest, provide a path to be ready for an industry job building websites and applications, which is what 90% of graduates will end up doing. Every other…

While I spend 99% of my time doing pure "software engineering", I'm pretty grateful to have the advanced probability / graph theory / combinatorics etc. background because it helps me envision possibilities I wouldn't otherwise be able to. That being said, there are probably lighter ways of teaching that instinct than full-depth classes. I try to listen to podcasts these days as a way of expanding my horizons.

Any recommendations for good podcasts in that vein?

Re: Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles

#409

Post by jahewson »

zozbot234 wrote: post #330
paxys wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why so many people (myself included) advocate for a pure "software engineering" degree at more universities. Let people who are interested study graph theory, combinatorics, linear algebra, advanced probability and statistics and whatever else. For the rest, provide a path to be ready for an industry job building websites and applications, which is what 90% of graduates will end up doing. Every other…

Software engineering is based on applied mathematics too. You'll need at least some basic calculus to make sense of O(n) analysis, and Calc II as a prereq for probability. Then add plenty of logic, discrete mathematics (needed for algorithms and data structures), models of computation and concurrency, category theory (which is becoming a shared language of everything "compositional"), topology etc. etc. If you really…

Discrete probability is probably adequate for most software engineering. Almost everything we encounter in our jobs is discrete. One thing I do think we need more of is linear algebra.

Re: Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles

#410

Post by 0x20cowboy »

lucidbee wrote: post #359
0x20cowboy wrote: post #336

I grew up poor, and from my anecdotal experience people do better on the SAT if they "are rich". You can also pay people to take the test for you. Maybe it's because they don't have to spend their days worry about getting shot, stabbed or beaten to the ground by gangs. Maybe it's because they get to eat every day. I guess, perhaps, they get more quality study time. Or, heck maybe you're all right, random questions -…

If I were you I wouldn't apply right away to a 4 year college. Do community college in your chosen field and then transfer. In California if can do 2 years in a community college you are guaranteed a spot in a school in the UC system. Not UC Berkeley, but still some place great. I think to qualify for this transfer you need to have a 'C' or 'B' average. If you stay on the pity pot you won't get anywhere. Also, in Cal…

I don't live in the states any more, but thank you for the suggestion!

Also I am not on the pity pot, my life is awesome compared to where I came from. I'd like others not to have to go though it, but such is life.

Although, I am realising that the way I say things might give people the wrong impression...

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