Seems like the fairest option. GPA, essays, and extracurriculars are BS and even worse.
Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
501–510 of 602 posts
Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's your source for this? What makes you think this is the reason, as opposed to the nature and nurture rationales?
Just ask anyone in academia? It barely counts as an open secret. Most admission forms (for the Cali and other state schools/private schools) would ask you explicitly if you have any relatives working for the school and their specific title and role.
Definitely not true for UC. Had a friend whose mom is a professor there. There wasn't anywhere to indicate this.
Privates ask about alumni connection, and possibly about teaching connection. But not the public schools.
Regardless what you've mentioned isn't proof that this is why so many get in. The fact is that kids of PhDs are likely to have genetic and educational advantages. That is likely much of the reason that they get in at a higher rate.
Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
#503No post body was provided.
Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem of SAT is that it's too easy, or at least too easy to be gamed by tutoring. That is, family with means can really improve their kids' scores by throwing money. Make SAT as challenging as India's JEE or those national entrance exams in East Asian countries, and we will see that tutoring hardly will matter in large scale but teacher's quality will do.
Are you saying that students with money to spend on tutors don't do better at the JEE or Chinese entrance exams? I don't know otherwise, but that seems unlikely to me, so I'm interested if you have any evidence that poor kids pass these exams at the same rate.
On an orthogonal note, harder tests are more sensitive. In a test as easy as the SAT you would expect most of the bright kids to have the same score regardless of whether they are top 10% or top 1%.
With a harder test like the JEE, we can separate these two outcomes
Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
The math part is not so bad, but I definitely would agree that the verbal/written strongly favors students educated in affluent private schools. You just not going to get that vocab prep down in a poor public school with a lot of minorities. The SAT tests in the language of the US white elite.
> The SAT tests in the language of the US white elite. How do Asians manage to do well on it? And let me guess, you’re specifically talking about the analogy question that refers to a regatta? That question is repeatedly trotted out as evidence of the SAT’s bias but it, or anything similar, hasn’t been found in the test in decades…
The conclusion of course, in their minds at least, would be that Asians are white. Translate it to academic-speak and you would get something like "Asian benefit from white supremacy"
Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
#506The greatest source of admissions inequity is childhood socioeconomic status. Dropping the SAT is so obviously not a fix for that I question the competency of the administrators who thought doing so was a good idea. The SAT is probably the most attainable piece of the application process for a poor kid to succeed at. You literally just need a guide book or two and enough time to study. One good smart friend helps if…
I grew up pretty poor, and through a longer story than I want to type here and a confluence of negative voices mostly from my school, was dissuaded from taking the SATs and even considering college.
Years after high school I eventually found my way to community college, then to a 4-year, a grad program and so on. It worked out to be a blessing as I graduated without debt from a major university and entered into a realm of well paying jobs that have put me firmly into a life the rest of my family can barely even comprehend.
To me the proof I should continue to a 4-year degree was doing well in my community college courses. I am fortunate to have been given the gift of automatic entry by policy makers who decided long ago that if you graduate from a Community College you can go to a State School no questions asked...and you can go to a Community College by basically walking off the street no questions asked.
I graduated my undergrad with a 4.0 and my grad with a 4.0, but to be honest I don't think my SATs would have been worth entry into any college and my high school GPA was around a 2.5.
My point is, there are other ways of assessing a child's entire future for entry than a single test, and many alternate paths to attainment. But we act as if there is only one kind of path and one kind of package, a 1600 SAT score, lots of extracurriculars, "differentiator" activities, and an original heart strings pulling letter.
Top schools need to get smarter, more creative, and maybe take a page from those "lesser" schools they turn their noses up at.
Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
#507The "avalanche" of applications isn't just from the lack of standardized test scores, but the rise of the Common application platform. It's incredibly easy to fill it out once and then fire off a dozen applications in an afternoon.
This is why, in the UK system, you're only allowed to apply to five or fewer universities in the same academic cycle. (It's possible to enforce this because all applications go through the same centralised system.) You're also not allowed to apply to both Oxford and Cambridge in the same year - otherwise both universities would get twice as many applicants.
It's suboptimal. It involves a lot of guessing on the applicant's part as to which university is suitable for them. There is a huge possibility for mismatch
Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I mean by "test prep" is learning how to game the test, not actually learning the material the test covers.
> What I mean by "test prep" is learning how to game the test You'd also be wrong here. Let me give you a simple example, that might not be immediately apparent to someone who doesn't know the rules of these tests. At one point in time, on some tests, there was a "guessing penalty" for getting a wrong answer. Having a basic understanding of how that works, and different guessing strategies, can increase your score. E…
That's the only thing I remember from the test-prep book I bought: a brief paragraph about the "guessing penalty."
As the book said, it wasn't a guessing penalty, it was a guessing-wrong penalty. They told you it was a guessing penalty to scare you into not guessing.
The penalty was a quarter point. Most questions had four options. So it was already an expected zero points on average, not a penalty, and if you could eliminate a single answer it was a net positive to guess.
Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
#509A selection process based on academic achievement alone yields a graduate more highly valued by corporate America [1]. Private universities should be able to use whatever criteria they want (as long as there is no illegal discrimination) including "building communities" and "shaping the student body". (It's a free country after all!) But public universities must use objective criteria. Students need to be able to con…
I very much agree on the shaping your own destiny part. How can anyone subject themselves to a committee of random bureaucrats deciding their future? Even if they were 100% fair and impartial, does it not take away your agency in choosing your own fate?
And let's not pretend that they are 100% fair and impartial. We know for a fact that they are racially biased against different races depending on the time period. And maybe the one who rejected you didn't like how you name sounded. It's not as though the process is transparent, and they're only making it a 100 times more opaque as people catch on to them.
This Holistic Admissions nonsense has always been a scam just like Holistic Medicine
Re: Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
#510MIT admissions concluded that SAT scores were the least inequitable method for selecting students that would be successful at MIT.
Citation needed. MIT Dean of Admissions said the opposite: "He says the standardized exams are most helpful for assisting the admissions office in identifying socioeconomically disadvantaged students who are well-prepared for MIT’s challenging education, but who don’t have the opportunity to take advanced coursework, participate in expensive enrichment programs, or otherwise enhance their college applications." https…
Most helpful for socially disadvantaged students vs least inequitable don't seem contradictory to me