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Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles

mitadmissions.org

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

#501

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

bena wrote: post #142
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to take the ACT for people, they'd pay me in beer (which I wasn't old enough to buy for myself). You'd get ID'd at the entrance, but nobody kept track of whether the name on your test was the name on your ID, so you'd just take each other's tests. It might be harder now, I don't know.

But they also wouldn't be old enough to buy you beer. Unless you are suggesting adults would buy you beer for you to take the ACT on behalf of a minor they knew. Which seems odd.

No this was my older co-workers. My academics were fresh because I was still in high school, theirs was rusty because they had graduated several years prior without bothering to take the ACT.

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

#502

Post by lliamander »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #474
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #191

Definitely for the best. Standardized testing was pretty much the only reason I and many other working class folks I know could get into good schools -- I was never going to do a million side activities, and my summers were spent working, not building my academic resume. Of course the real tragedy is that we fixate so much on college, even prestigious ones, at all given how unnecessary they are for making people into…

I live in slovenia, and the system is pretty much unchanged from the socialist times.... standardized testing + grades are used to get entry into colleges (and previously high schools). No resumes, no diversity/affirmative actions, clubs, volounteering etc... just grades+results.

That sounds nice.

Those other things are great, but have little value in terms of academic success. I think that for people who do poorly in academics but well in those other areas should have other avenues of advancing themselves rather than being forced through the college funnel.

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

#503

Post by naniwaduni »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #353
zozbot234 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineering is based on applied mathematics too. You'll need at least some basic calculus to make sense of O(n) analysis, and Calc II as a prereq for probability. Then add plenty of logic, discrete mathematics (needed for algorithms and data structures), models of computation and concurrency, category theory (which is becoming a shared language of everything "compositional"), topology etc. etc. If you really…

Not to mention relational calculus for a deeper understanding of databases.

The relational calculus has very little to do with the calculus of infinitesimals.

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

#504

Post by jobs_throwaway »

grego61 wrote: post #212

One way that rich parents can game SAT/ACT is through aggressive seeking of test accommodations for disabilities. There was common knowledge of up to 50% of test takers having extended time in some affluent private schools in the SF Bay Area prior to the Covid pause.

Very good point, and explains exactly why there should be no extra time on these tests. Give everyone the same time, same test, see how they do on the curve, and then you can make accommodations for disabilities ie 'how do you do among students with your disability or disabilities.

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

#505

Post by ryandrake »

thehappypm wrote: post #228
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…

This wasn’t my path, but many of my peers where I went to college had a similar type of story. They came from very poor areas like rural Texas or rural Georgia, and they got into engineering after getting into things like Lego sets and video games. They got great at math because it intrigued them even in their subpar schools. Aced the math SAT and then doors opened for them. I’d hate to see that door close.

I grew up in a very rural, working class community. There was a mill in town, and a factory two towns over, and all the kids in my high school were pretty much expected to either work for those two businesses or go into the military after school. That's what probably 80 out of the 100 kids in my graduating class did. We didn't have AP classes and Rowing Club and Mock United Nations and all that upper-middle-class qualitative stuff people jam into their college admissions. But we did have access to the SAT and I crammed for it and knocked it out of the park. If it wasn't for the SAT I probably would still be slummin it in that same town (minus the mill and factory which have long since closed) and would not be here on the west coast working in tech.

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

#506

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

tiahura wrote: post #161
bena wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they also wouldn't be old enough to buy you beer. Unless you are suggesting adults would buy you beer for you to take the ACT on behalf of a minor they knew. Which seems odd.

He’s old. You used to be able to buy beer at 18. This country used to be a lot less uptight.

This was in 2004. I was 17, they were in their mid 20's.

I know that one was training to be a dental hygienist, or at least wanted to be training for that. The other few didn't share as much, but they all knew each other so maybe it was the same thing?

I highly doubt I've harmed anyone by enabling their hygienist to get where she was without knowing the formula for the volume of a cone. As far as I'm concerned the gumption necessary to hack your way in is worth just as much as the gumption needed to pass authentically.

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

#507

Post by cma »

d110af5ccf wrote: post #443
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? Because it's only de facto the primary method, as evidenced by MIT dropping it for a while there. They didn't need government permission to do that. Even public universities here generally have a high degree of autonomy regarding such things.

MIT is private unlike most of the other land-grant schools.

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

#508

Post by tonguez »

colinmhayes wrote: post #500
orangepurple wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How can you believe it is? I'm legitimately struggling to understand how you came to such a misguided conclusion.

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

#509

Post by peterhalburt33 »

rawgabbit wrote: post #427
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…

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.

Teaching only statistics and no calculus is how you end up with people such as Tai reinventing high-school calculus and attempting to use statistical methods to validate their “method”.

https://math.berkeley.edu/~ehallman/math1B/TaisMethod.pdf

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

#510

Post by rory »

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…

This complaint is addressed in footnote 10 of the article.

It would be great to design a test that's less gameable than the current version, and we should certainly try to do that, but the current version is already less gameable than basically anything else colleges consider for admission.

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