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

hechingerreport.org

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

#51
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely agree. In the US, "holistic" admissions were introduced to deny admission to students suspected of being Jewish [1]. [1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...

Shaping the ethnic demographic of the school is a big component of the modern intent as well. Particularly, these "holistic" admission standards are designed to facilitate discrimination against Asian Americans. This is justified with transparently racist bullshit claims about Asian American students being too focused on academic performance, not "well rounded" whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. They reduce…

At UW they call it "race equity" [1]. Meaning that you can't have more than x% of Asian Americans in the UW if the percentage of Asian Americans in the community is x%. The Supreme Court will soon decide if this practice is legal [2], and it is going to be interesting either way!

[1] https://www.washington.edu/raceequity/

[2] https://edsource.org/2022/as-supreme-court-considers-affirma...

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

#52
In time, maybe universities will collapse under the weight of their own idiocy. I went back to school to finish my degree for fun at 25 t a top school. To my dismay, many online courses were better taught.

In retrospect, the only courses in I enjoyed were small seminar passion projects.

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

#55
post #30

Alternate headline: "Colleges that ditched admissions tests have to actually holistically evaluate applicants rather than reduce them to two numbers" No doubt that it's more subjective and more difficult; human beings are complex, multi-dimensional entities and I find it sad that in many of these selection processes, they are reduced to a few numbers for the sake of low effort filtering.

With the 10s of thousands of applications top universities get, there isn't enough time to evaluate the "complex, multi-dimensional entities" behind each application. At University of Washington, applications are not reviewed by "admissions people". They hire temporary workers (grad students, retirees etc.) to review applications, and give them 8 minutes per application [1]. And this is typical of most universities.…

But at highly competitive schools you still have several times more students with 1500 SATs than you have available spots. So you eventually need to use holistic judgement anyways.

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

#56

Alternate headline: "Colleges that ditched admissions tests have to actually holistically evaluate applicants rather than reduce them to two numbers" No doubt that it's more subjective and more difficult; human beings are complex, multi-dimensional entities and I find it sad that in many of these selection processes, they are reduced to a few numbers for the sake of low effort filtering.

Exactly. Of course having numerical values you can directly compare is going to be the easiest way to select students, but it's only "fair" to the degree those numbers accurately reflect the relative academic performance and potential of the students. I think the reason people so vigorously defend the use of standardized test scores in admissions is that we all have a built in bias towards viewing quantifiable compar…

> But how the test is constructed to arrive at that number is much more complicated.

Is that done per student behind closed doors though, with the people calculating the score knowing who the student is and the ability to alter the scoring based on that knowledge?

Standardized tests are bad, but they're a giant step up from the corruption that is other forms of selection.

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

#57

Alternate headline: "Colleges that ditched admissions tests have to actually holistically evaluate applicants rather than reduce them to two numbers" No doubt that it's more subjective and more difficult; human beings are complex, multi-dimensional entities and I find it sad that in many of these selection processes, they are reduced to a few numbers for the sake of low effort filtering.

"holistically evaluate applicants"

How likely is it that this holistic evaluation will end up preferring individuals conforming to the current Zeitgeist (e.g. using all the momentarily popular buzzwords in their applications) rather than truly talented candidates? Thus contributing to further ossification of current elites?

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

#58
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the 10s of thousands of applications top universities get, there isn't enough time to evaluate the "complex, multi-dimensional entities" behind each application. At University of Washington, applications are not reviewed by "admissions people". They hire temporary workers (grad students, retirees etc.) to review applications, and give them 8 minutes per application [1]. And this is typical of most universities.…

But at highly competitive schools you still have several times more students with 1500 SATs than you have available spots. So you eventually need to use holistic judgement anyways.

They could just admit at random from among that group. What would be the downside?

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

#59

Alternate headline: "Colleges that ditched admissions tests have to actually holistically evaluate applicants rather than reduce them to two numbers" No doubt that it's more subjective and more difficult; human beings are complex, multi-dimensional entities and I find it sad that in many of these selection processes, they are reduced to a few numbers for the sake of low effort filtering.

Exactly. Of course having numerical values you can directly compare is going to be the easiest way to select students, but it's only "fair" to the degree those numbers accurately reflect the relative academic performance and potential of the students. I think the reason people so vigorously defend the use of standardized test scores in admissions is that we all have a built in bias towards viewing quantifiable compar…

On the contrary, test scoring is the most objective thing we had to evaluate students based on the diligent work of a company whose entire business is maintaining that perception of objectivity. Sure, it's "the perception of", but if you think there aren't smart people analyzing college board exam scores across the country for signs of skewed testing so they can write an expose on it, you're far from reality.

In fact - the line that you're walking is the reason there was briefly a suggestion of an "adversity score": https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/college...

Which is the first time that's been considered, because in the current climate - working extremely diligently to try to ensure that no particular student or group of students has an advantage, some students do have an advantage. They are smarter, or have better parenting, or better education, or their parents simply have more money to throw at tutoring

You can say "that's unfair! This is about selecting the best students and locks smart people from worse off backgrounds out of university!"

It does the second thing, sometimes, as a side effect - but it is also true that those students are still better students, regardless the path dependence.

Meanwhile, universities are enacting racial and gender preference schemes, Cites: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

Additionally, the primary winner of the policies this line of argument promotes are white women - with the primary loser being Asian men. Asian students in particular are bringing the suit against Harvard for these practices.

So while your epistemic humility ("is this REALLY objective? How do we measure that?") is well intentioned, it's the exact sort of reasoning used to cover up a strict ideology of "more black good, more women good, less white good, less men good" in universities, and the actual behavior of universities shoe that.

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

#60

Alternate headline: "Colleges that ditched admissions tests have to actually holistically evaluate applicants rather than reduce them to two numbers" No doubt that it's more subjective and more difficult; human beings are complex, multi-dimensional entities and I find it sad that in many of these selection processes, they are reduced to a few numbers for the sake of low effort filtering.

There is plenty of evidence to doubt the whole "holistic evaluation" line of thought, which is often a tool for subtle discrimination. And pretty much all of these schools already did "holistically evaluate" students; test scores were just one part of that evaluation. Besides, at the end of the day everything boils down to a single number - applicants are ranked and those that make the cutoff get in, those that are b…

Holistic evaluation in practice really means “present your best self in your application whatever that might be.” It allows for a range of impressive feats outside “was good at the arbitrary selection of school subjects and extracurriculars.”
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