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Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

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Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

#451

Post by dTal »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #431
crazygringo wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me reiterate: that requires for it occur to a student that you even can increase your SAT score. That remains non-obvious. After all, IQ tests aren't supposed to be something you can prepare for. So why should the SAT be, if it's this kind of supposedly holistic aptitude test? Why isn't "school overall" all the possible preparation you could do? Again, the difficulty isn't primarily in getting the extra resources…

>Let me reiterate: that requires for it occur to a student that you even can increase your SAT score. If you are a high school student and the possibility of increasing your score doesn't even occur to you, I would suggest that college isn't for you.

Would you study for an IQ test? Perhaps, but then is that fair? If you do, what is actually being measured? Certainly not IQ anymore.

Maybe it doesn't occur to students that they should attempt to increase their score because they have a certain innocent model of the world, perhaps one in which they put trust in educational institutions to (as they claim to do) tell them how they should best achieve personal success. If it were a valuable use of their time, surely someone would tell them?

Reminder: you are responding to a commenter who is telling you that an offhand comment literally changed their life.

Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

#452

Post by andrepd »

WalterBright wrote: post #344
andrepd wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You care about fairness and justice? Well why don't you simply... not? Then your problem is gone. Well that's hardly an interesting solution is it? x) Yes things are not good, and they might never be perfect. But that can be better.

A point is reached in that any improvement in fairness to one group will decrease fairness to another. For example, I'm bald. That's unfair. At some point, one has to just accept it and move on.

I fail to see how the educational system has reached the end of any possible or conceivable improvement. I find it very very unlikely that 2022 USA is the end of history (but Mr Fukuyama might like a word with you :p)

Also, as a fellow man afflicted with male-pattern baldness, I wouldn't dream of comparing that with the injustices discussed in this thread.

Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

#453

Post by kelnos »

overrun11 wrote: post #175
tjs8rj wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is really simple: discrimination not on race, but on inequalities. Don’t discriminate because someone is black or white, but give due consideration to factors like family situation/income/legacy/etc This seems like the most reasonable solution. If you believe that systemic racism exists in the background, then this corrects for its real effects. If you don’t, I’m sure you at least accept that all else equa…

Or we could acknowledge that society functions best when the most qualified people are chosen and decide to only discriminate on merit. These selection criteria are meant to match students with schools filled with students of the same ability level. Of course there will always be factors in life that make it harder or easier for people to succeed. Having had exceptionally difficult life circumstances doesn't somehow…

> Or we could acknowledge that society functions best when the most qualified people are chosen and decide to only discriminate on merit.

The problem is that we have never actually done that. "Legacy admissions" is a fine example of that failure. Large donations influence admissions decisions. Biases (unconscious or conscious) can take two people of equal merit and cause an admissions officer to prefer one over the other.

There have already been studies showing that simply changing a person's name (either to present a different gender or race/national origin) on a resume can result in a different hiring decision.

A purpose of all of these equity initiatives is to compensate for the reasons why we already suck at giving people opportunities based on merit. Some of them are ill-advised and end up not working, but that doesn't mean we should just throw our hands up and accept the status quo.

And I certainly don't expect us to wave a magic wand and turn ourselves into perfectly rational, unbiased robots who actually do select purely on merit. Which wouldn't even fix the problem, anyway. But I feel like people like you who tout this "merit" thing are also pushing something impossible to accomplish.

Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

#454

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #393
onetimeusename wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say WASPs are given an edge You are making a nuanced argument for sure then. But the Students for Fair Admissions have explicitly made the case that whites are given an advantage that takes Asian seats at Harvard via the children of faculty admissions, donations, essays, athletics, etc. But this discounts donations from certain foreign governments and I think it creates a misconception about the average whit…

> You are making a nuanced argument for sure then. It’s not a nuanced argument at all. Harvard and similar universities are WASP institutions run by WASPs. When you have non-objective admissions standards, you have to appeal to their WASP sensibilities to get admitted. That doesn’t necessarily mean they prefer other WASPs. They also like minorities that affirm their worldview (but not so much minorities that don’t af…

[deleted]

Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

#455

Post by quantumwannabe »

rayiner wrote: post #306
onetimeusename wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think WASPs are given an edge here. I feel like it is actually racist to make this assumption also. White people as a broad category are the only racial group that is underrepresented relative to their population percentage in Ivy League schools. Maybe you could make the argument that WASPs are a subset of white people who are overrepresented specifically because of that faculty benefit for admissions but the…

I didn’t say WASPs are given an edge. But the institutions are controlled by them. And minorities must appeal to their fancy to get in.

Why don’t you actually look up the religion and ethnicity of those people instead of blindly asserting that they are Protestants and Anglo-Saxons? You haven’t cited a single source showing that the leadership of the Ivy League are WASPs, but you’re claiming that all over this thread. If you’re going to make the bold assertion that the leaderships of those schools prefer applicants of their own ethnicity and religion, you better back it up with evidence, or else you just look like a bigoted racist.

Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

#456

Post by lupire »

rayiner wrote: post #393
onetimeusename wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say WASPs are given an edge You are making a nuanced argument for sure then. But the Students for Fair Admissions have explicitly made the case that whites are given an advantage that takes Asian seats at Harvard via the children of faculty admissions, donations, essays, athletics, etc. But this discounts donations from certain foreign governments and I think it creates a misconception about the average whit…

> You are making a nuanced argument for sure then. It’s not a nuanced argument at all. Harvard and similar universities are WASP institutions run by WASPs. When you have non-objective admissions standards, you have to appeal to their WASP sensibilities to get admitted. That doesn’t necessarily mean they prefer other WASPs. They also like minorities that affirm their worldview (but not so much minorities that don’t af…

Northern White Anglo-Saxon Protestants like David Evans, who spent 50 years in Harvard Admissions, and was born in Arkansas to the grandhild of Agrican-American slaves?

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/09/jhj-changemaker-in-a...

Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

#457

Post by kelnos »

kenjackson wrote: post #205
tjs8rj wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that poor whites are specifically against welfare because they think it helps black people more. That’s just another way of saying they are all racist. Ive grown up around poor whites and dislike for welfare among them was pretty much always a dislike of government generally, and the perception that welfare makes people lazy (often because they knew other poor people who would take advantage of welfare. On…

The discussion tends to devolve right around here. Let’s just say we have different data points and agree to disagree.

But isn't that really the issue at hand? You have different data points from the person you replied to. That means that you are both correct, for some subset of people. But do your data points generalize to the larger population, or does the other person's?

I don't think these conversations need to devolve. Where are the large-scale studies that show that your data point is the one that's the most common? I'm willing to believe that it is, but everyone seems to just prefer to assume their data point is the one we should be acting upon.

Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

#458

Post by uni_rule »

zdragnar wrote: post #408
davidgay wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > The greatest source of admissions inequity is childhood socioeconomic status > If we are talking about the US, no, I disagree. > The greatest source of admissions inequity are shit K-12 education. You've missed the step where the higher socioeconomic classes opt-out of the shit K-12 education by moving to better school districts, sending their kids to private schools, or homeschooling them.

That's why so many parents advocate for vouchers and school choice. Kids shouldn't be locked into shit schools just because their parents can't afford to move.

Vouchers that immediately squander the social mobility provided by public schools by placing them in an opportunity to go into a financial death spiral the moment those who can afford to leave and take the tax money with them while those who don't have the opportunity jump ship to a public school are left high and dry in a local education system bleeding viability. Public schools exist as an egalitarian institution, why deliberately fracture them into pieces for any reason other than to kill the whole idea off? Tangentally the idea is often pushed underhandedly by some evangelical types to shovel taxpayer money into religious schools in a way that isn't currently legal to do outright, but that's a problem adjacent to the idea rather than the main problem with it.

Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

#459

Post by indymike »

bombcar wrote: post #146
indymike wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it hard to believe there's a shortage of people capable of teaching 1st year students, so this seems like a problem of artificial scarcity. reply The supply is short because at least in the US, entry pay is low in higher ed. - $25/hour w/ benefits for semi-skilled labor - $42k/year no benefits for adjunct

Sounds more like the supply is overflowing that they can charge factory rated for it. Same reason flight instructors are so cheap.

Nope. They are having problems filling positions because the market has given people a better, higher paying option.

Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

#460

Post by nO0b »

kelnos wrote: post #398
nO0b wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Malcolm Gladwell explains why it's statistically FAR better to be among the smartest kids at a 2nd or 3rd tier school than struggling to get into some elite institution where you will be below average among your peers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UEwbRWFZVc&t=220s If you're borrowing money to pay for a degree, going to a school where you are not at the very top of the class is really taking a big risk.

Given all the trash Gladwell has spouted as truth over the years, it's hard to take him seriously. Even if sometimes what he says has merit, it's hard to know when to believe him and when not to. I especially cringe at the idea that Gladwell is saying it's statistically better to do something, when he has a known history of deliberately misinterpreting data and massaging numbers to get the result he wants. While I th…

Everything you said is valid assuming the student GRADUATES which is precisely the point Gladwell is trying to make.
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