Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles

mitadmissions.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 1001 posts

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

#491

Post by notservile »

selimthegrim wrote: post #468
notservile wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

CRT is an outgrowth of critical _legal_ theory, which upon examination of the career of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Bean has ample justification for existing.

Cool story bruh. I escaped communism under threat of death. CRT is carefully repackaged Marxist garbage.

And I’ll take a stand with other Americans to make sure our children don’t die slaves in America when the time comes.

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

#492

Post by lliamander »

notservile wrote: post #428
lliamander wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Class divides have always been around IQ in every society.

Given by the positive effects of SAT testing on social mobility in the mid 20th century, I rather doubt that.

And to be honest, if we are going to have a class system one way or the other, IQ might be the better approach. But IQ is not wisdom, and I worry that the elites of such a society would be disposed to unprecedented levels of ego and hubris.

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

#493

Post by kragen »

rayiner wrote: post #447

I don't think people appreciate the radical nature of the attacks on standardized testing. Standardized tests have been critical to higher education and the professions for almost a century. Virtually everyone in an elite academic, government, scientific, legal, medical, or financial role attained that role based, in part, on the SAT and similar exams like the LSAT or MCAT. Not only them, but everyone who taught and…

I would say standardized testing has been critical to higher education and the professions since it was established 1416 years ago and is a major reason that China and Japan (which began standardized testing more recently, some 1100 years ago) never went through the catastrophic colonial subjugation that did so much damage to India and the Middle East and obliterated most of the cultural heritage of Africa and America.

Moreover, the British adoption of the system some 200 years ago was crucial to their imperialist success, and Western academia began adopting it slightly earlier. Without this Sinicization of Europe the Enlightenment might have fizzled out; perhaps we would never have had an Industrial Revolution.

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

#494

Post by nicknow »

deanCommie wrote: post #123
rossdavidh wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Latin in the 19th century was always still useful to one's education, Was it? Or was it perpetuated by a community that happened to already know it and so they leveraged it?

Yes, because learning Latin - as a written language - will put your vocabulary far ahead of those who don't. My high school had a general elective focused just on learning to use Greek and Latin to enhance your vocabulary, it was essentially a free SAT prep course for the language section.

So many terms can be quickly understood if you understand Latin prefixes and suffixes, and the better you understand Latin the better you'll understand its use in any of the modern Western languages.

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

#495

Post by jobs_throwaway »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #339
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. To reiterate other commenters, admission tests are the hardest part of the process to game and the least biased towards things like having a tiger parent, while being the most predictive indicator of success in college. Wealthy and well connected people can easily game extracurriculars and essays, and HS grades are vastl…

you're refuting a strawman. The claim wasn't that tests are impossible to game, only that they're harder to game than the other components used in the admissions process

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

#496

Post by jostmey »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #479
rayiner wrote: post #447

I don't think people appreciate the radical nature of the attacks on standardized testing. Standardized tests have been critical to higher education and the professions for almost a century. Virtually everyone in an elite academic, government, scientific, legal, medical, or financial role attained that role based, in part, on the SAT and similar exams like the LSAT or MCAT. Not only them, but everyone who taught and…

> If the SAT is not predictive, as some claim, we've been selecting our elites and professionals the wrong way for three generations. Yes, and? The easiest way to understand the shortcomings of these tests (at least their older versions) is to realize that students who use paid SAT/ACT-prep materials and services get higher scores than students who don't. Yes, there are confounding factors, but this fact alone is fai…

All tests have flaws, but a flawed test is better than no test. Design a better test if you can! Any test can be "defeated" to some extent

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

#497

Post by kbelder »

beamatronic wrote: post #457
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.

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.

That was my situation, also. It sucked because in general, all the other kids in school who were academically gifted were from well-to-do families, and I think I was the only one taking AP calc or physics whose family couldn't afford the test.

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

#498

Post by jobs_throwaway »

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…

>Standardized tests themselves have mostly tested not IQ or domain knowledge, but how anxious you are taking tests. This does predict later academic performance, sure, but to say that this anxiety is disconnected from demographics sounds like a rather strong claim. Instead you have that it is more disconnected than GPA and essays and extracurriculars which is not saying much.

saying 'tests are better than the other primary indicators we use to admit students to colleges' isn't saying much? this is nonsense

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

#500

Post by colinmhayes »

orangepurple wrote: post #438
verve_rat wrote: post #433

Earlier 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.

How can you seriously believe the Fed isn't a government entity? I'm legitimately struggling to understand how you came to such a misguided conclusion.
Post reply on HN