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Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

robkhenderson.substack.com

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Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#51

Post by vgatherps »

wunderland wrote: post #27

All of this debate about what measures should be used to gatekeep higher education ignore that the US system is only loosely about teaching students; the goal of an American university degree is class differentiation. There is not a shortage of textbooks or qualified teachers who could explain calculus or history or economics. As a society, the could easily produce far more educated people (and for a lower cost), but…

In a loose sense this is the accepted purpose of a degree, not just as an education center (theoretically motivated peers in addition to the teachers), but as a stamp of "we have given you education in X and deemed that you learned/retained enough of it". I don't know that many school do it well, but some universities can claim that they have much more rigorous programs than others and so students going there will come out better educated (I studied abroad and the mathematics standards at my host school were just nonexistent).

Anyone can pick up a math book and start teaching themselves, there's no doubt about it - but any form of third-party verification of this is very high effort on a case-by-case basis.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#52

Post by sillypuddy »

1letterunixname wrote: post #9

Maybe I'm old or insufficiently woke, but I don't see legacy or identity as substitutes for demonstrated learning. I see the decay of rigor and achievement as signals of decline of excellence and the crumbling of knowledge. The mythology of "everyone needs degrees" created a wealth transfer scam and a lowering of standards to sell more student loan debt for sheepskins. Maybe we need to throw away arbitrary employment…

States and companies are starting to drop college arbitrary college degree requirements:

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/pennsylvania-governor-r...

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/25/companies-eliminate-college-...

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#53

Post by zozbot234 »

ryzvonusef wrote: post #45

As an Asian person, I think it's a cultural thing. There is this old joke about how even if you are a one-in-a-million person, there are still 8000 of "you"s to choose from; how does one chose who to pick, if there aren't positions for all of them? So how do you make it "fair"? Since of the number of seats are limited, so imagine if the cut-off for the last seat is for someone who is in the 90.3765335th percentile, l…

> You simply CAN'T provide the same resource to all of them, some of them will have to vie for a lower-ranked resource.

It depends what the "resource" is. If it's the mix of prestige and the individualized attention of highly impressive scholars that you get at elite colleges, then of course not. If it's simply high-quality educational content plus some average-quality tutoring, that's a scalable resource that could be provided to many more people at very low cost.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#54

Post by baremetal »

lumb63 wrote: post #30
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while a lot of the softer stuff like interviews and letters of recommendation were pretty close to worthless It’s telling we’re seeing testing attacked while these are preserved.

It’s not a mistake, that’s for sure. I’ll be more blunt since a lot of other comments in this thread beat around the bush: higher education institutes are removing objective admissions criteria so that they can admit less qualified minorities on subjective grounds.

the question is, why? why are they doing it? the real reason not the ostensible one.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#55

Post by civilized »

Zigurd wrote: post #48
civilized wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standardized tests are designed to be as non-gameable as possible. They're definitely less gameable than the other admissions criteria still used in elite colleges: admissions essays, playing obscure sports, fancy extracurricular experiences, etc. Most studies find SAT prep confers very limited benefits to the average person. Having an essay essentially written for you by an expensive consultant with contacts in admi…

14% of Harvard undergrads are legacies. It is exceedingly unlikely that SATs help a higher percentage of deserving but otherwise overlooked applicants. My point is, there is a way to have a far higher impact on opening seats for kids who should be getting an elite education than the question of whether SATs help or harm attaining that goal. They're not really serious until they don't preference legacies.

> 14% of Harvard undergrads are legacies. It is exceedingly unlikely that SATs help a higher percentage of deserving but otherwise overlooked applicants.

I don't follow. Are you implying that the first sentence is evidence for the second? Do you think legacies are getting in via high standardized test scores? I don't think that's true. If standardized test scores were a major determinant of admission, these schools would be 2-3x more East Asian than they currently are. And virtually none of those students would be legacies. The Harvard admissions case showed all this with evidence from Harvard's own admissions data.

Additionally, the article cites a study saying that SATs do in fact help "deserving but otherwise overlooked" applicants.

> My point is, there is a way to have a far higher impact on opening seats for kids who should be getting an elite education than the question of whether SATs help or harm attaining that goal. They're not really serious until they don't preference legacies.

I agree with you that elite schools do not explicitly prioritize the talented poor. My impression is they prioritize (1) the powerful, (2) those who possess or can afford expensive class signals, (3) those who will donate money, (4) racial balance, (5) high achievers. Standardized tests allow students who can't get in via Categories 1-4 to sneak in via Category 5. Even these students tend to be of higher socioeconomic class, but to a lesser extent than Categories 1-4.

In my opinion, the only way to do better than standardized tests would be (standardized tests) - (all the non-academic mechanisms that privilege the rich) + (explicit priority for the talented poor). But these second and third terms will never happen, so standardized tests are better than nothing.

It is hard for me to understand those who support standardized tests being discarded along the way to a more fair admissions process. As you point out, there are much more obvious ways to achieve that first.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#56

Post by Brian_K_White »

Zigurd wrote: post #3

In principle, SAT scores enable people like me, who were very very good at such tests, to break into elite schools. In fact, test prep works well enough to enable a shockingly high percentage of legacies and donor brats in elite schools. Ending SAT use in admissions might enable a more balanced approach to admissions, but it does not broaden access to elite schools. They could increase class sizes, or they could get…

All dropping standardized test does is grant them the ability to discriminate.

There are going to be special cases and examples of unfairness in any system, and so you can find cases where a standardized test resulted in an unfairness, but the alternative is only 100x worse.

The alternative is not "Without the burden of these inflexible uncaring mechanistic tests we can serve each precious flower better and leave no one out."

That is only the sales pitch.

The alternative is actually nothing but "Now we can discriminate."

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#58

Post by i_am_toaster »

Whenever I see articles like this one, I imagine this is the kind of PR that US colleges would use to deflect conversational topics they don’t want happening. Get people talking about “how do we get into college?” (with the assumption that college is where we want to be) instead of “why is the US college system broken?”

Not saying this is that, but just a thought and I’d be curious to see if this is a trend that continues.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#59

Post by MisterBastahrd »

sokoloff wrote: post #37
tomp wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes wonder if rich people pay tutors to test prep their stupid children simply because they don't want their kids knowing they only got into a good school because of corruption.

There’s no amount of test prep that will get a “stupid child” to a 1500+ on the SAT.

To get into Jesuit High in New Orleans, you need to have parents with money, no criminal record, and a pulse. The average student ACT score there is 31. That's the 95th percentile nationally. Those kids get great educations and have involved parents, but they aren't averaging 31s due to merit unless you're counting their parents' wallets too.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#60

Post by kenjackson »

tomohawk wrote: post #33
paulsutter wrote: post #10

Employers should embrace standardize testing: we're on the cusp of a revolution in education driven by the tireless personalized tutoring and feedback of LLMs Of course not all schools are ending testing, MIT for example: "We are reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles" https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...

Employers used to have standardized tests for all sorts of things. The tests enabled a lot of upward mobility for people to pursue occupations that did not require college degree. If you could show aptitude in a test and had at least a high school education, they'd take you on and train you and you'd have a nice career. However, certain groups sued saying that "equality of outcome" is more important than "equality of…

Can you provide references for this story?
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