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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

#541

Post by johnnyanmac »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #109
Animats wrote: post #20

All MIT students, regardless of intended major, must pass two semesters of calculus, plus two semesters of calculus-based physics, as part of our General Institute Requirements. ... There is no path through MIT that does not rest on a rigorous foundation in mathematics, and we need to be sure our students are ready for that as soon as they arrive. For a period in the 1980s-1990s, you could argue that calculus was not…

If we need calculus for CS, I wish we'd teach it under the CS heading so that exposure to math didn't have to be so biased towards real analysis. Students spend years achieving this arbitrary (unless you're going to be an engineer) goal and end up with the erroneous (and often harmful) intuition that all spaces are continuous metric spaces.

I could agree with this. The one regret I had was burning through all my math classes within my first two years while my early CS classes barely seemed to use Algebra to begin with.

Then lo and behold, turns out I like computer graphics a few years later, and all that linear algebra and multivariable calculus I skimmed through slams me back in the face as I find out that GPUS chew through such math for breakfast. I could never find the application of such math to my career track until long after I took those classes.

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

#542

Post by rory »

danans wrote: post #450
rafale wrote: post #393

Unpopular opinion: SAT/ACT correlates with X where X = IQ × work ethic

That opinion is unpopular because it is incomplete. SAT/ACT scores correlate with lots of things, not just IQ and work ethic. Another huge correlation is with family income: https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2021/9/28/is-in... .

~.2 isn't really "huge".. Your source shows that the SAT is much more strongly correlated with other measures of aptitude.

The SAT does indeed correlate slightly more strongly with income than the AFQT does, which could show the "gaming" of the test. Only a ~.03 stronger correlation though. Not particularly dramatic.

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

#543

Post by zozbot234 »

vidarh wrote: post #522
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…

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 remembe…

The point is that even a "shallow" understanding of math is much deeper already than many, perhaps most realize. Many high-schools don't seriously try to teach math at all - there's no such thing as "high school math" in this day and age. You need college to even have a chance of being exposed to it properly.

(Then there's the whole "learning to code" part, of course. This is actually where middle and high school math provides useful application domains for learning to code, and people have tried to teach coding in schools since the 1980s.)

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

#544

Post by teirce »

thewebcount wrote: post #534
duckhelmet wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever tried using a bicycle?

Have you ever been to the rural US? Things are very far apart (often 10s of miles) and riding a bike may not be practical for things in the same way as in an urban or suburban area.

Yep - this. I wasn't even in /that/ rural of an area, but I was still ~20 miles (32 Kilometers) away from the nearest testing center. No vehicle to take myself.

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

#545

Post by rcpt »

uwuemu wrote: post #90
Animats wrote: post #20

All MIT students, regardless of intended major, must pass two semesters of calculus, plus two semesters of calculus-based physics, as part of our General Institute Requirements. ... There is no path through MIT that does not rest on a rigorous foundation in mathematics, and we need to be sure our students are ready for that as soon as they arrive. For a period in the 1980s-1990s, you could argue that calculus was not…

I would argue exactly otherwise... with the advent of the web platform and frameworks like .net, the vast majority (and I mean like 95%) of developers will never touch anything ML related in their careers. I mean, I get that this is MIT and many of their students will end up working with ML, but applying that globally to CS is nonsense. Back when I was studying CS (cze) more than a decade ago, we had to pass linear a…

Calculus was the first time in mathematics education where I actually had to understand systems and how to derive results from first principles. Prior to that everything was just memorizing: "this is what logarithm is", "socatoah", multiplication tables, etc etc. I straight up hated math until calculus (now I have a math PhD).

I'm sure the same could be accomplished with other fields of math but I don't feel it's necessary to switch. Would be extremely hard to find good teachers and course materials for combinatorics or graph theory to.

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

#546

Post by jimbob45 »

mypalmike wrote: post #535
jimbob45 wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

College Board is a nonprofit organization[0] and thus is partially funded by the government to say nothing of any other grants they may have received. ACT Inc is the same way. Instead of funding The One True Test, the US government partially funds every test competing to be the best college placement test. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Board

How does being a nonprofit imply "partially funded by the government"?

Tax exemptions.

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

#547

Post by colinmhayes »

kragen wrote: post #532
colinmhayes wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking the Calculus BC test already puts you in the upper echelon of high school math students though. According to a quick google only 15% of high schoolers will take the BC exam, so getting a 5 is something only 5% of students achieve.

That's the student providing 2.7 bits of information ("I want to take this exam") and getting an additional 1.4 bits from the result. By contrast, being valedictorian is about 10 bits of information, and being in the 99th percentile on a test (1510+ on the SAT) is 6.6 bits. Scoring 1600 on the SAT is 12 bits. So the SAT can easily give you 7 times as much info as the AP BC, and it's more about your aptitude than your…

You don't need information theory to tell me that 1% is less than 5%. Obviously scoring in the top 1% of a test everyone takes provides more information than getting a 5 on an AP test. But that 5 still provides, as you put it, 4ish bits of information, which is a lot more than the 0 you have without it or other standardized tests.

How many bits do you really need to know that you're a good candidate for continued education? Is being in the top 5% really not enough?

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

#548

Post by QuikAccount »

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?

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like you assuming they took the class for credit at university. Community college is also a possibility where it would be cheaper or around the same price. That also comes with the benefit of financial aid.

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

#549

Post by annexrichmond »

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?…

many schools are not public as with the SAT which is also "not-for-profit"

I wonder how one could codify a regulation for schools requiring entrance test to provide "reasonable" accommodations for prospective students to take it; like some parent comments mentioned not everyone can feasibly get to a testing center

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

#550

Post by rory »

peterhalburt33 wrote: post #509
rawgabbit wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oof. Tough look to name the model after yourself. Why is this cited so many times?
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