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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

#421

Post by justsocrateasin »

paxys wrote: post #273
uwuemu wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue exactly otherwise... with the advent of the web platform and frameworks like .net, the vast majority (and I mean like 95%) of developers will never touch anything ML related in their careers. I mean, I get that this is MIT and many of their students will end up working with ML, but applying that globally to CS is nonsense. Back when I was studying CS (cze) more than a decade ago, we had to pass linear a…

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…

I think this line of thinking fails to recognize what a general math background does for your critical thinking skills.

I'm sure you and I both took plenty of math classes, and therefore we won't ever really know what our computer science skills would be like without a rigorous math background. Even if I never touch anything more complex than algebra II again, taking ~30 credits of applied math allows me to think in a way that I wouldn't otherwise without that background.

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

#422

Post by [deleted] »

bmc7505 wrote: post #58
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…

Calculus is not just about gradients. Fundamentally, calculus is about calculation and symbolic logic, a much older concept that predates its usage in gradient-based machine learning. In this sense, calculus holds deep connections to logical reasoning, proof theory and the foundations of computer science. [1] [1]: https://compcalc.github.io/

[deleted]

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

#423

Post by whynotminot »

crdrost wrote: post #385
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…

They might be the least gameable, but this is kind of a “bare minimum” for diversity/equity practices. It is the cheapest way to get little bit of reliable signal. Because let's be clear about the standardized test situation. Test takers had time to take the test, they weren't doing work on the side for their parents instead to make ends meet. They had transportation to the test location, they were able to pay the fe…

> Because let's be clear about the standardized test situation. Test takers had time to take the test, they weren't doing work on the side for their parents instead to make ends meet. They had transportation to the test location, they were able to pay the fees, and they were not being discouraged from college as “we can never afford that, I’m sorry.”

How big a proportion of the population is this that we throw out our most objective standard? Kids that don’t have time to take a test? I would wager the vast majority of kids have time for an exam.

Seems like we figure out how to get kids to the bus stop before we just decide that objective measurement is irresponsible as long as there’s a kid who doesn’t have the time for it.

Just to build on this even further, a kid who doesn’t have time for an exam also probably hasn’t had the time to build the educational foundation necessary to succeed at a university.

I can’t imagine some kid who didn’t have time for high school math succeeding in my engineering program, for instance. It might seem charitable to throw out the SAT and admit that kid, but you’d just be setting them up for failure.

What you’re describing is a different problem that needs to be solved. Throwing out the SAT does not solve it.

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

#424

Post by david38 »

paulpauper wrote: post #19
LewisVerstappen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's far easier for rich students to game GPA, college essays and extracurriculars than it is for them to game the SAT. For GPA, they can hire a private tutor in the subject they're struggling with. There are services out there that will basically write your english essay for you / do your math/science homework. For college essays, they can hire college counselors to help them draft a compelling essay. For extra curr…

This times 10. GPAs have been rendered close to useless, especially at identifying above average ability, due to grade inflation, and also extreme variability between schools. Same for valedictorian and other appellations.

Exactly. What teacher is going to fight for the B when the parents are complaining to the administration she’s keeping their precious angel from Harvard?

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

#425

Post by satthesat »

QuikAccount wrote: post #368

My problem with SAT/ACT actually has nothing to do with the test itself. I grew up very poor in suburban middle of nowhere and even with a waiver for the fee, I had no way of actually getting to a testing center. Parents worked 24/7 to make ends meet, no real public transport and this was before Uber and Lyft. The real culprit here is the lack of public infrastructure.

> The real culprit here is the lack of public infrastructure.

What was your area like? I grew up similarly poor but in a wealthy area and would walk several miles to a public library for early computer access, biked to school, etc.

Even then, our school offered SAT, etc.

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

#426

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

hyperbovine wrote: post #141
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we need calculus for CS, I wish we'd teach it under the CS heading so that exposure to math didn't have to be so biased towards real analysis. Students spend years achieving this arbitrary (unless you're going to be an engineer) goal and end up with the erroneous (and often harmful) intuition that all spaces are continuous metric spaces.

I don't get this take at all--learn both real analysis and discrete math. At MIT especially. Knowing calculus (the precursor to RA) is essential for quantitatively understanding the world in which we live, including the 99.9% of it that is not computer science.

I think we're in a circle: I'm objecting that we teach people to map everything onto the real line and you're saying that it's essential to quantitatively understanding the world. But isn't that what "quantitatively" means?

My point is that in the zoo of mathematics, the reals are just one exhibit. Equally valid is to map phenomena onto topological spaces, inner product spaces, sets, groups, rings, fields, lattices, topoi, etc... People have been standing on Newton's shoulders for so long that all they can see from there is ground well worn by their colleagues who stood on the same shoulders.

I think we'd be much better off if you had to specialize in some part of math, but that different people specialized in different parts of it without necessarily taking a major in it. This would maximize the sort of happy accidents that lead to discovery because for any given phenomena you now have a wider variety of perspectives on it, rather than just a classroom full of analysts.

I'm against the reals in particular because I think they're especially suited to zero sum games, and I wish we played fewer of those.

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

#427

Post by rawgabbit »

rossdavidh wrote: post #48
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…

True, but the usefulness of calculus to a working developer in ML is pretty marginal. The difference between different ML algorithms for hill climbing or gradients, is orders of magnitude less than the effect of having the right training data, formatted the right way. Statistics or data science is far more applicable to nearly any field on real-world programming. But, you know, like Latin in the 19th century was alwa…

Agree. Statistics > calculus for the software engineers. Statistics > calculus for most people doing research as their papers would need to interpret t-scores, z-scores, confidence intervals etc. I don't understand this fetish about calculus.

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

#428

Post by notservile »

lliamander wrote: post #386
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…

> Removing admission tests was a huge slap in the face to social mobility out of the middle class. I agree, but arguably the benefits of the SAT with regard to class mobility is less than it was when it was introduced. The heritability of IQ, combined with assortative mating, means that increasingly class divides are forming around differences in IQ. I think many people are rightly concerned that this will eventually…

Class divides have always been around IQ in every society.

Which is why CRT being pushed on children is so sick. They’re literally teaching children race Marxism. They’ve replaced the idea of class with race and now demand equity not between classes, but between races.

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

#430

Post by gmadsen »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #332
uwuemu wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue exactly otherwise... with the advent of the web platform and frameworks like .net, the vast majority (and I mean like 95%) of developers will never touch anything ML related in their careers. I mean, I get that this is MIT and many of their students will end up working with ML, but applying that globally to CS is nonsense. Back when I was studying CS (cze) more than a decade ago, we had to pass linear a…

I remember finding myself in 3rd year Calculus in a Computer Science degree, and realizing: I don't have to be here! (only two years were mandatory) I've always enjoyed math and kept enrolling into it out of habit, until it became so esoteric, and my actual interests more solid and practical. I find a lot of my university career was fascinating and... useless. Not just from "I will never use this directly perspective…

interesting, I think almost the complete opposite. I am happy where I'm at, but I most certainly would have preferred doing a math/cs double major rather than all the BS busy work of an engineering degree I went through. I wouldn't call 60 hours a week of symbol manipulation practical...
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