481–490 of 1001 posts
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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.
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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 fre…
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.
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.
I hated taking the SAT/ACT, but holy cow are we in the US in a better situation than Chinese students dealing with the Gaokao. A Chinese pen-pal once showed me some calculus problems from the Gaokao and the example I saw (a bunch of integrals) looked like a math test a sadist would create: long, complicated expressions just for the sake of complexity, "ugly" numbers that turned into messy fractions you have to carry…
I am not sure how it compares but India suffers through the same problem. It is essentially a rat race. A lot of those problems could be trick questions, but to be able to identify it, especially on a regular basis takes longer(when the question has less than a minute dedicated to it).
A lot of folks focus on act/sat scores when talking about diversity when really these ivy league schools shouldn't have an express lane for legacy entrants. If you are trying to be different than how it was previously, how can you expect that to happen when you give preference to folks that benefited previously?
"What about university donors, though? Don’t they have an unfair advantage in this process? In truth, for every office of admissions there is a development office that builds a university’s endowment through donations from alumni and wealthy individuals. And every year, regardless of what a college or university says publicly, a number of children of wealthy donors and alumni get a nod in their direction while other applicants are rejected.
The reality is, the money generated by admitting wealthy students often serves to subsidize the financial aid of those less fortunate. If one squints, one might see here a karmic balance enabling many students to attend a college they otherwise could never afford."
Note he said "every office of admissions" and "regardless of what a college or university says publicly." If MIT were an exception, presumably he would have mentioned it. The "regardless of what a college or university says publicly" implies that MIT may be not stating the entire truth when they claim "we don't do legacy"[2] or that MIT's internal behavior may have changed since Crowley worked there. I'm not sure what MIT has to say about providing admissions preferences to children of wealthy donors the way many (most?)[3] universities including Stanford[4] do.
[1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2019/03/13/co...
[2] https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/just-to-be-clear-we-do...
[3] https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-college-admissi...
[4] https://provost.stanford.edu/2020/06/26/admissions-considera...
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Edit: I should add, thanks for pointing out a third group - people who think the tests don’t work! > To me, this showed that the tests are not an accurate measurement of how successful someone will be at college The test proves you are smart enough. Like, do you believe you were not intellectually capable of getting through college? That you flunked out for a pure lack of IQ and no other factors? From the writing in…
> I can’t pretend to know you enough to know why you dropped out. But if I had to bet it wasn’t raw IQ. No it almost certainly wasn't raw IQ (not that I take a lot of stock in IQ in itself anyway), it was a combination of depression and attention issues. > The test proves you are smart enough. I wouldn't exactly call the ACT (I never took the SAT so I cannot speak to it) an objective measure of intelligence. It's ext…
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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…
Practical, industry expert-led coursework has been by far the most outstanding education I have ever received. My DSP professor was (is still) an adjunct to the university I attended and works a normal job 9-5 during the day at some engineering firm. He was easily the best educator I have ever experienced because he brought reality into the classroom every day. I still vividly recall the 20–30-minute lecture/rant about making power point presentations that don't suck.
It's all the little things for me... The nuanced details like "why are you holding it that way?" are impossible to discover until you have a customer complaining at you for a while or have someone who experienced it themselves giving you a heads-up.
For me, the future of practical software engineering education looks a lot more like a machine shop than it does a university campus.
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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.
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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.
> Knowing basic accounting, being able to fix things around the house, being pleasant to work with, etc are far more important. Those are totally useless skills. If you live in America and your only contribution to society is being pleasant, knowing how to fix things around the house, and basic accounting, then expect your livelihood to be replaced by someone willing to do your unskilled work overseas for a fraction…
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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…
I was in college long ago and for my CS undergrad and masters took the usual CS and math courses. When I needed electives though I took courses like economics, finance and accounting. Many years later, those electives ended up being the most useful.
The CS and math courses I wouldn't consider useless though. I'm sure I lean on theory I learned without realizing. But, at the time I couldn't have predicted working in small companies or startups and how important basic finance and accounting would end up.