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Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

robkhenderson.substack.com

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Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#421

Post by derbOac »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #329
zenta wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not though. Give ten kids from the same class a self study online course and give another ten a private tutor, and they won't see the same score distribution. Where's the signal there? SAT results don't have a line item that notes the amount of wealth or privilege that went into preparing. > Immigrant families eligible for reduced price lunch are able to scrounge up the money for these tests. Some families can't…

I'm a former educator and tutor. The effects of studying "for the test" as you put have been measured, improved test taking skills tends to be worth ~30 points which is not that significant. This matches my anecdotal experience and that of people I know who run SAT prep courses. It's far more effective to actually teach students the material, either by teaching them new concepts or by firming up their understanding t…

I'm familiar with that 30 point differential because it shows up in research.

You're right that 30 points isn't that much if you're thinking about the whole distribution, but I guarantee it can be significant around the selection threshold. That threshold might be implicit or explicit, but it's there, and if it's enough to nudge applicants past it, it's significant.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#422

Post by dgs_sgd »

whack wrote: post #120

The following paragraphs were especially powerful: > The chattering class is using poor kids as pawns to eliminate standardized testing. Which helps their own kids. Rich kids who “don’t test well.” But they know how to strategically boost their GPAs, get recommendation letters from important people, stack their resumes with extracurriculars, and use the right slogans in their admissions essays. They have “polish.” >…

Equity is not actually important, and the author said it saliently in this paragraph

> Elite colleges are eliminating standardized tests before they eliminate legacy admissions. Tells you all you need to know.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#423

Post by WalterBright »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #402
WalterBright wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I attended Caltech, there was no evidence that it was a rich kids school. For example, very few students had a car. The ones that did had a Bug or an old Ford pickup. I don't recall anyone wearing tailored clothes, the students mostly wore completely unremarkable stuff. When I'd meet their parents, they were perfectly ordinary people.

What house were you in? When I was there, there were huge income disparities between the houses. You may have had that experience in one of the less-well-off houses if you didn't socialize outside of that environment much. There are a lot of rich kids at the school, but it's less pretentious than Harvard or others.

Page, in the 1970s. I did not notice any disparity among the houses. Freshmen were initially assigned to houses at random, and then they'd go through "rotation" where they'd have dinner at each house in turn. After that, the houses would each make a rank of who they wanted, and the freshmen would say yes or no to the selection. I don't recall anyone, ever, talking about their social/wealth background in this process.

> There are a lot of rich kids at the school

They must have hid it well, because I didn't notice any. I never heard anyone mention skiing in Aspen. Nobody had even an upper class car. Nobody had an expensively outfitted dorm room.

As for me, I come from a lower middle class family, and managed to get a modest loan in aid, which I paid off after graduation.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#424

Post by Jensson »

Ekaros wrote: post #388
Jensson wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't see why studying 20 hours for 1 test that you can easily repeat is easier to scrape together than 2000 hours to score well on all tests throughout high school?

Maybe a test is bad if you can study all of the material or enough of it in 20 hours. Realistically good test would require that multi-hundred hour build up.

SAT stands for aptitude test, why would an aptitude test require multi-hundred hours of studying? All you need is to know a bit of math and how to read and you can score really well, you'd think that would be a shit test but apparently 90% of people can neither read well nor do a bit of math, so it is actually a good test.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#425

Post by kenjackson »

econonut wrote: post #181
tokey wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was incorrect about the 65% of Berkeley as Asian. It's 30.6%. Note this is double the percentage as the Ivy League schools - and it's based on a framework that was specifically developed as a way to get around the 1996 ban on affirmative action. I still believe the only explanation for eliminating clear, measurable and quantifiable metrics for university admissions is because universities are looking for discrete w…

Your statistics there are wrong. I think you got that from a site other than Berkeley. Those percentages don't even come close to 100%. Berkeley reports here: https://opa.berkeley.edu/uc-berkeley-fall-enrollment-data-ne... Asians are 43%-53% depending on how many who identify as 'International' are Asian. Whites are 19.7% and Blacks are 3.4% You are right, however, about why schools want to eliminate the SAT. SAT opt…

Note, colleges should not discriminate based on race. But they are under no obligation about their acceptance criteria. They could just use SAT tests if they wanted. Or just grades, or it could be a lottery. Or it could be the best dressed, or who could pay the most. Just because you don't use a mechanism that favors a specific group, doesn't mean that you are discriminating against them (necessarily). For example, most don't use height in admissions, but it doesn't mean we're discriminating against people from the Balkans.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#426

Post by cuteboy19 »

zenta wrote: post #309
rayiner wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prepping for the test is a valuable signal when you're talking about the entire pool of high school students. And it does not gate opportunities by economics as much as you'd think: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/magazine/asian-test-prep-... . Immigrant families eligible for reduced price lunch are able to scrounge up the money for these tests.

It's not though. Give ten kids from the same class a self study online course and give another ten a private tutor, and they won't see the same score distribution. Where's the signal there? SAT results don't have a line item that notes the amount of wealth or privilege that went into preparing. > Immigrant families eligible for reduced price lunch are able to scrounge up the money for these tests. Some families can't…

The JEE solved this problem by changing the format of the test each year. It's not disclosed before the exam. So it is really hard to form meaningful strategy that consistently helps you

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#427

Post by QuarterReptile »

onetimeusename wrote: post #307
notlukesky wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

40% for meritocratic entrance is more than twice what is at elite schools in the US. Maybe ambitious Americans should move to India for a fairer chance. At most US elite schools, less than 20 percent is for “non-reserved” seats. Elite schools reserve seats for sports teams (affirmative action for rich white elites with “sports” like fencing and rowing), legacies (affirmative action for rich white elites), related to…

This is kind of a racist against whites who I think are used as a scapegoat no matter what. In my experience, those sports teams you are talking about are filled up with international and Asian students[1][2]. The dumb white elite student and the extremely talented, poor Asian student stereotypes are not true in my opinion. Maybe they were in the past. Even the SAT score can be gamed.[3] I think pretty much every adm…

>These schools are no longer about providing an elite education to talented students who want to get ahead.

This is the arbitrage opportunity for lower-ability legacy students. If the schools provided elite educations, they would chew up and spit out lazy rich kids (and probably generate parental acrimony toward the schools in the process, weakening the donor connections.) As affirmative action of all shapes and sizes creates an ever-expanding group of people most likely to fail who the school is particularly determined to not flunk, there is more safe space for deadweight rich kids (which, for the record, I suspect is an overplayed trope relative to actual prevalance, though probably not hard to find at top-ranked schools.)

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#428

Post by ryzvonusef »

pmoriarty wrote: post #201
ryzvonusef wrote: post #45

As an Asian person, I think it's a cultural thing. There is this old joke about how even if you are a one-in-a-million person, there are still 8000 of "you"s to choose from; how does one chose who to pick, if there aren't positions for all of them? So how do you make it "fair"? Since of the number of seats are limited, so imagine if the cut-off for the last seat is for someone who is in the 90.3765335th percentile, l…

"a standardized test is the only fair way" It depends on who writes the tests and who the tests are written for. There's a long and shameful history of standardized tests being written to benefit certain groups over others, or to stigmatize certain groups. Just because a test is standardized doesn't make it fair.

Most such standardized tests, atleast now-a-days, are objective-MCQ type questions that feature heavily on certain core stem subjects as Maths, Science etc.

This is partially to allow examiners to create a bank of questions that can be rotated around easily, and also to create easily markable exams that can be OCR-ed automatically and don't require manual markers.

(I think the SAT English essay is an outlier, in most countries these sorts of subjective questions are simply not a part of standardized test, at least for competitive tests like University Entry)

I think it's hard to argue an MCQ marginalizes anyone.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#429

Post by cm2187 »

whack wrote: post #120

The following paragraphs were especially powerful: > The chattering class is using poor kids as pawns to eliminate standardized testing. Which helps their own kids. Rich kids who “don’t test well.” But they know how to strategically boost their GPAs, get recommendation letters from important people, stack their resumes with extracurriculars, and use the right slogans in their admissions essays. They have “polish.” >…

That sounds like conspiracy theory. I think it is more likely the combination of ordinary racism with woke militantism. They think certain minorities aren't smart enough to pass SAT standards so the solution to get more of them in, is to not test for SAT.

It's the same stupidity that leads well-thinking liberals to bring their kids to drag strip shows because in their little mind "trans = gogo dancers in gay clubs".

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#430

Post by xvedejas »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #402
WalterBright wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I attended Caltech, there was no evidence that it was a rich kids school. For example, very few students had a car. The ones that did had a Bug or an old Ford pickup. I don't recall anyone wearing tailored clothes, the students mostly wore completely unremarkable stuff. When I'd meet their parents, they were perfectly ordinary people.

What house were you in? When I was there, there were huge income disparities between the houses. You may have had that experience in one of the less-well-off houses if you didn't socialize outside of that environment much. There are a lot of rich kids at the school, but it's less pretentious than Harvard or others.

At least for the two houses I was in, there were income disparities _within_ each house. It was never much talked about; I only realized it after a couple of years of getting to know individuals better. But I was in two (of the three?) houses with a very bohemian attitude I guess, and very little of our activities involved spending much.
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