Just two hours ago, there was a very engaging talk from Daskalakis, a professor at CSAIL at MIT, that is very related to the topic:
The research he talks about includes college admissions.
Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles
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Re: Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles
#452I 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.”
This argument can be used to argue against public school, against any sort of consequences for anti-social behavior, etc. it’s a bad argument. Instead find ways to get the kids to the test instead of arguing against the test in general.
Re: Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
The MIT threshold is 800 minus noise. So MIT can't consider overperformance on the SAT (math section) because the test is designed to make students indistinguishable at the top. All it does is help them weed out the chaff who won't be able to handle the mandatory math and physics classes that all students have to pass.
I don't know what "800 minus noise" means. All 800s is something only about 500 people achieve a year, and not all of them are going to MIT.
800 on the math section is something a ton of people get. Way way more than 500. More like ten thousand per year, maybe more.
Re: Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles
#454To deal with socioeconomic issues in STEM, start early; very early like K-12. In a vague fantasy world in the USA, I would reduce the Department of Education to a fraction, shift education to the States, take the best parts of the winning systems fom all States, and make Federal recommendations accordingly. Rinse, repeat. I am saddened that most of the children I come across in first-world nations, lack the ability t…
It seems like a good approach but the funding of things like special needs education (FAPE) is federal in nature; cutting those would likely nuke special needs programs nationwide.
You would need to start with your 2nd or 3rd "approximation" of your iterative approach (ie, pre-calc which programs are already popular/effective and keep those) unless your goal is to cause maximum disruption and possibly jeopardize your ability to do the "make Federal recommendations" effectively.
Re: Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
this is a perfect example of why governmental services are so important - even if they are often run poorly. Without them, dis-equities inherently perpetuate due to external incentives. The SAT is treated as a standardized test but it, as you note, is inaccessible to many. It is not government run or organized. I've found, from teaching undergraduates, that most of the students who go to college presume that everyone…
Wow. As someone that isn't in the US, but grew up watching a lot of US TV, I had this same assumption. How the fuck is the primary method of judging student admission to University not a government run service? Wow. As you say, contrast that to my experience where everyone took University Entrance exams in their final year of school. Score over X and you have the right to go to a university. Don't score high enough?…
> How the fuck is the primary method of judging student admission to University not a government run service?
Well, I mean.. America is experimental capitalism. Why run anything government when it can be for profit and 'the market' will solve any and all issues with it?
It turns out 'the market' will skew in favor of making a small amount of people rich over actually improving the lives of anyone, but hey, that's freedom baby!
They're really precious about it though, so don't criticise this system out loud.
Re: Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never seen somebody who opposes meritocracy actual suggest taking starting points into consideration - instead, they demand that easily observable, intrinsic physical characteristics be used as a proxy for "starting point".
But there are a number of studies demonstrating how race & class impact things (when controlled for other factors) like teacher perception, grading, letters of recommendation, not to mention just the fact that if you are growing up in a black (or white) household that has $5 in wealth, you'll have less access to educational opportunity than the white (or black, albeit far more rarely) household with $200,000 in wealt…
No. That only tells you to fix those factors but the outcome is what they are. By the time of the ACT/SAT test it's too late to fix those things. Fix those upstream.
Re: Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles
#457My 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.
I took AP classes in high school, but couldn't afford to pay $65 per exam (at the time) to take the AP test for college credit.
Re: Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles
#458College Admissions in the US is broken. This is a great move at restoring normalcy though. The SAT or ACT are the best thing for leveling the playing field between the rich and the poor. If anything I would like to see more reliance on this. If I had my way the US would model the college admissions process on the Chinese Gao Kao. Have everyone take the the exam, have students list their preference for university, the…
This is kinda how medical residency is filled in the US, med students rank their top
choices, residency programs rank their’s. It’s called The Match, and generally results in a very fair equitable outcome.
Re: Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles
#459All 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 lin…
It's "fundamentally geometric" to understand that the Fourier transform diagonalizes a circulant matrix so you can estimate the clock skew between two radios?
I think you get into calculus very quickly once you start dealing with uncertainty. A bit is 0 or 1, a discrete value. A random or unknown bit has some probability of being 1, a continuous value. A process that produces a random bit does too. An unknown such process has a distribution over such probabilities. Things like that are fundamental for things like communication or image classification.
Also, though, a major application of computers is modeling and controlling the calculus-based physical world, just because they are so good at number crunching. Particularly popular examples are ray tracing, music synthesis, and motor control.
Re: Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. As someone that isn't in the US, but grew up watching a lot of US TV, I had this same assumption. How the fuck is the primary method of judging student admission to University not a government run service? Wow. As you say, contrast that to my experience where everyone took University Entrance exams in their final year of school. Score over X and you have the right to go to a university. Don't score high enough?…
> How the fuck is the primary method of judging student admission to University not a government run service? Wow. Probably the same reason that the Federal Reserve Bank is not a government entity (they only have a meaningless government "oversight board") even though it loans all money to the US Government with interest and has never been audited.
Now that we know that you have a dislike of the Federal Reserve system, you didn't actually answer the question by stating a reason. What would "the same reason" be?