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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

#521

Post by fuzzyset »

armchairhacker wrote: post #512

I’m genuinely curious about the advantages of going to MIT or any other super competitive CS college for undergrad instead of say, UMass or another less-competitive CS university. From limited knowledge and experience at other colleges (all pretty well-ranked but not as well as MIT), it’s the prestige and graduate research which makes colleges like MIT superior. Otherwise, for most undergrads it’s like a typical coll…

Compare a list of companies that attend MIT's career fair vs those that attend UMass. There will be some overlap, and it's not a closed door if you don't go to MIT/Stanford/etc. But, if you want to land an internship at "the best" companies (which can often lead to jobs), being recruited at a college career fair is the best option.

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

#522

Post by vidarh »

zozbot234 wrote: post #330
paxys wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why so many people (myself included) advocate for a pure "software engineering" degree at more universities. Let people who are interested study graph theory, combinatorics, linear algebra, advanced probability and statistics and whatever else. For the rest, provide a path to be ready for an industry job building websites and applications, which is what 90% of graduates will end up doing. Every other…

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…

The thing is people with a maths heavy background tend to think you need a much deeper understanding of math for this than you actually do.

You need very little beyond high school level math for most CS. Some areas, sure.

I've done things in my career that touches on a lot of different areas of math. But the number of times I've regretted not having taken more math have been pretty much non-existent. I wish I remembered a bit more of my trig, mostly.

Most software engineers come into contact with far less CS subjects where math matters than I do.

I don't have an issue with a place like MIT insisting on lots of math, but this notion that you need to understand so much math for software engineering is deeply flawed - you don't need much even for a lot of theoretical computer science.

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

#523

Post by MiroF »

xanaxagoras wrote: post #516
MiroF wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But shouldn't starting points be taken into consideration when you are judging someone's merit?

No, not here. 100% of MIT admissions should go to pupils who are the most capable of succeeding and who are already the best prepared to succeed before they arrive. Utopia aside, as a society we require elite science and engineering ability. If we don't have it we lose out to another society that doesn't do this incessant navel gazing, simple as that. To whatever extent "starting point" is a problem it should be reme…

If someone has "elite science and engineering" ability and came from a background where they were raised by a family with a household wealth of $5, and someone has a slightly more "elite science and engineering" ability and was raised by a family with a household wealth of $1,000,000, I am not confident that long term the second person will be the greater innovator.

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

#524

Post by lordnacho »

david38 wrote: post #364
time_to_smile wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly every educated adult should understand calculus, and certainly anyone with a technical degree should. Sure many people will be unlikely to need to do the raw computation of calculating derivatives and integrals (even people doing machine learning are typically letting computers do that work), but to understand the way these two concepts work together and describe the world is really essential to understandin…

This is hubris. I can think of many adults that know nothing of Calc and do very in life and work. Knowing basic accounting, being able to fix things around the house, being pleasant to work with, etc are far more important.

The GP talked about being educated, not being pleasant or productive.

Everyone needs to learn calculus because it opens up a gate into a form of beauty that no amount of work can ever satisfy.

The idea that people only need to learn what they need to live their external lives, those of work and interpersonal relations, is just wrong.

You need to learn calculus as part of your own internal life.

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

#525

Post by duckhelmet »

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.

Have you ever tried using a bicycle?

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

#526

Post by wiredfool »

verve_rat wrote: post #433
avs733 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is a perfect example of why governmental services are so important - even if they are often run poorly. Without them, dis-equities inherently perpetuate due to external incentives. The SAT is treated as a standardized test but it, as you note, is inaccessible to many. It is not government run or organized. I've found, from teaching undergraduates, that most of the students who go to college presume that everyone…

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?…

Uk qualification exams (GCSE and ALevels) are run by private boards. (Cambridge and Edexcel are the two big ones). These are effectively entrance exams, in that university offers are strongly dependent on them.

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

#527

Post by [deleted] »

whoisburbansky wrote: post #483
beamatronic wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How were you able to afford taking the classes for credit instead, at a cost of over two orders of magnitude more per class?

[deleted]

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

#528

Post by frankchn »

armchairhacker wrote: post #512

I’m genuinely curious about the advantages of going to MIT or any other super competitive CS college for undergrad instead of say, UMass or another less-competitive CS university. From limited knowledge and experience at other colleges (all pretty well-ranked but not as well as MIT), it’s the prestige and graduate research which makes colleges like MIT superior. Otherwise, for most undergrads it’s like a typical coll…

Speaking from personal experience, it does help in at least two ways:

(1) Being surrounded by other hard-working students pushes you to do better and exposes you to more advanced classes and research early on (a majority of my friends in CS started taking graduate courses by their sophomore year and did undergraduate research at least for a summer in one of research labs on campus).

(2) Recruiting/Ability to get interviews. It isn't a problem in getting interviews for software engineering internships/full-time positions if you have MIT, Stanford or Berkeley on your resume.

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

#529

Post by munk-a »

duckhelmet wrote: post #525
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.

Have you ever tried using a bicycle?

I heard bicycles works great with bootstraps. Maybe you should suggest bootstraps as well - they'd probably do the trick!
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