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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

#561

Post by hijghula »

jeffrallen wrote: post #75

I live in a society with free education for all, up to and including university. To make that possible, there are a limited number of seats, and the number is based on the needs of society, and on our government's budget. The seats are allocated based on testing, but there are multiple ways to "test into" a seat, i.e. "you missed it this time, but go do another two years of pre-university and you might get in later".…

Sounds like the French system.

Largely free (taxpayer-funded) at all levels but if you want to go into the best schools you better bring in your A-game because entrance requirements it to sit series of 4 hour long tests graded anonymously. You don't have to pretend to be a native American competitive rower who plays the trombone, but you need to know how to calculate Fourier series by hand.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#562

Post by moomoo11 »

counters wrote: post #513
moomoo11 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me education is about what you learn. And I’m happy that I aced every single exam and project. Like I mentioned to the other poster, there are people who do all the homework and still fail the class. I aced every single project, midterm, and final. I can understand most topics the first or second time I learn them, and when I don’t I will do some homework. But for the most part I personally didn’t need it and I go…

> So explain that to me. You're special. Congratulations! You have a unique capability to absorb knowledge. In my experience, this means one of two things: either (1) you truly are brilliant and will exceed at anything you apply to, or (2) at some point you will run into something that you _don't_ understand after the first or second try, and you'll be entirely unequipped and unprepared to deal with that. Also in my…

You’re right. I’m just venting my own experience.

It’s just that I’m seeing all these so called solutions to problems in education like removing SAT while students who need to be well equipped to learn like a sponge and retain that knowledge are imo/ime just left to the side.

It’s cool that you seem really invested in helping people succeed. That wasn’t my experience, because I recall my professor calling me out all the time because I was late to his class. Like bro I’m sorry no disrespect meant but I’m doing my best and it’s not like I am failing your class. Unless you make it so I do because you grade stuff like showing up on time.

Again education is a paid for expense. It isn’t a charity, and I’m paying to learn. Not do charades.

And IRL you are either getting paid to do a job or busting to make a dollar. Totally different world imo.

If I could do it over again, I’d probably have taken that 200k risk and gone to the best school I got into but didn’t offer any fin aid. And I’d probably have studied CS and Math instead of business because I ended up teaching myself software engineering.. it just sucks that education isn’t tailored to the student, and people want to do all the things except grade people on what they can demonstrate (tests/material).

I firmly believe that the final exam is what shows whether a student understands the material. When graded on anything besides that, I personally don’t care anymore. That’s just my opinion. Otherwise just remove grading completely and do pass/fail. Or just pass everyone for giving them the check each semester.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#563

Post by dan-robertson »

lordnacho wrote: post #219
whack wrote: post #120

The following paragraphs were especially powerful: > The chattering class is using poor kids as pawns to eliminate standardized testing. Which helps their own kids. Rich kids who “don’t test well.” But they know how to strategically boost their GPAs, get recommendation letters from important people, stack their resumes with extracurriculars, and use the right slogans in their admissions essays. They have “polish.” >…

I used to think standardized tests were the way to go, but... My kid recently went through another testing gauntlet, which is the 11+ test. For those who aren't in the Southeast corner of the UK, this is a multiple choice type test that looks a lot like an IQ test in some ways. It's a single sitting and determines whether you are allowed into something called a Grammar School, which is just a selective school, and th…

Teacher recommendations is how the U.K. used to work. It might be interesting to see what the arguments were at the time, though grammar schools feel like they’ve been a hot topic for quite a long time now.

I don’t think teacher recommendations are great. Presumably parents who currently pay for test prep will instead throw money at getting good teacher recommendations through the right schools, teaching good manners, etc. If I look at my mother and her sister, one went to the grammar school and the other didn’t because they had gotten a new headmistress who didn’t really know the students. The grammar school stopped being selective after a few years anyway (did I mention that grammar schools have been a hot topic for a long time…) and I think the teachers struggled with the change. Perhaps another difference is that grammar schools are often single-sex which I think has a bunch of benefits and drawbacks.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#564

Post by btilly »

hijghula wrote: post #547
btilly wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that I said we have no data that can begin to address this question, it is at best disingenuous. Because how can I offer a test without data? It is true that all of world history is data, but it is not necessarily data that can answer any particular question. The problem is the age-old nature versus nurture debate. Both genetics and environment are important to IQ. Both generally affect IQ through long, convolu…

You accept that some people run faster ("uncontroversial") but somehow it is "unknowable" whether some people think faster?

No. That there are differences in thinking speed is verifiable.

We can also verify that differences in thinking speed between individuals has a large component due to genetics, and also another large component due to environment. Everything from diet to the quality of parental interactions in early childhood.

What we can't determine is to whether genetics contributes to the differences in thinking speed between groups of people. We can identify important environmental factors like culture and racism. We can show that environmental facts matter. For example children of mixed race couples have a higher average IQ if they have white mothers. But nobody has found a way to measure what difference genetics might or might not make.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#565

Post by civilized »

hijghula wrote: post #556
tptacek wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, structurally if not deliberately (it is unlikely that mainstream IQ tests are anything but diligently designed to avoid overt bias, unlike those of the middle 20th century). If you measure something that has a large SES causative component, and SES is for whatever reason itself highly correlated with race, then your measurements will encode a racial bias. The big debate in academic psychology is the extent to wh…

Your second statement is incorrect. Having a racial bias would mean that IQ tests are incorrect (having significantly different errors) for certain samples/groups. But no one is saying that. Imagine a test to measure the resistance of various materials. Is the test biased because it shows that concrete is stronger than rotten wood? No, it just measures the resistance of different materials. If the measurement error (…

A large percentage of the population seems to believe that IQ and similar cognitive ability tests are something like a credit score, having no purpose but to direct society to the high scorers so that they can be showered with opportunity, while denying the same to low scorers. And it's true that tests like the SAT can have a big impact on the opportunities we get in life. But they can also be used in a more win-win way, to match people to opportunities they're ready for. And for that, you need an honest assessment of where the person is actually at, separate from how they got there.

A poor kid may score worse than they would have scored if they weren't poor, but if we want to know whether they're ready for MIT or a course above their grade level, it might do them a disservice to confound our perceptions of their actual current level with our personal indignation over socioeconomic inequalities and our hopes in the potential they'd realize if those inequalities were eliminated.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#566

Post by civilized »

tptacek wrote: post #506
civilized wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Different populations perform differently on average Does this mean that today's IQ tests have racial bias? > There’s also a historical association with IQ assessment and eugenics. Does this mean that today's IQ tests have racial bias?

Yes, structurally if not deliberately (it is unlikely that mainstream IQ tests are anything but diligently designed to avoid overt bias, unlike those of the middle 20th century). If you measure something that has a large SES causative component, and SES is for whatever reason itself highly correlated with race, then your measurements will encode a racial bias. The big debate in academic psychology is the extent to wh…

Bias has many different meanings. Now, correct me if I'm mistaken, but in this context, I believe we are talking about bias as a difference between a measured value and a true value.

What is the true value in this case? Is it the counterfactual performance a person would have if their SES were not low? Would that be the "right" true value in all applications? Might it not be the case that, in some contexts, the "right" true value is the person's actual current ability level and not some counterfactual of how they would do in other circumstances that were perhaps more just and fair? For example, what if you are trying to give them the learning opportunity best suited to their actual current ability level, not trying to rank people and only give the top-ranked some special status or credential?

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#568

Post by twiddling »

nick__m wrote: post #237
chaostheory wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ban legacy, then you lose needed donations. If you lose donations, then costs go up for everyone else. There is a net benefit for everyone when there are academically challenged wealthy children. Just keep standardized testing to prevent mass arbitrary admissions that will inevitably become racist. https://priceonomics.com/do-elite-colleges-discriminate-agai... It’s happened in the past to Jewish people and it…

Elite institutions like MIT, Yale, Stanford, Princeton and Harvard do not need more donations. Look at the worth of theirs endowment funds at the end of 2021 : Harvard 53G$ Yale 42G$ Stanford 37.8G$ Princeton 37G$ MIT 27.4G$ Can you honestly tell me that they need more donations ?

University of Texas system was around $42B in 2022 : https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-harvard-university-o...

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#569

Post by flappyeagle »

markdown wrote: post #540
ironcurtain wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t you worry, they’ll come for you eventually.

One would hope so. Ideally, the people of the future will have progressed beyond the relative savagery of me and my peers and look upon us with disdain. Perhaps for how much I enjoy a good steak, or for the genital mutilation of our boys.

Or you could like... understand that people behave in the context of their time in history, be glad we've moved past that, and celebrate the contributions of the people that got us to where we are.

I can celebrate George Washington as a founder of the country and also understand he was a slave owner.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#570

Post by twiddling »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #390
whack wrote: post #120

The following paragraphs were especially powerful: > The chattering class is using poor kids as pawns to eliminate standardized testing. Which helps their own kids. Rich kids who “don’t test well.” But they know how to strategically boost their GPAs, get recommendation letters from important people, stack their resumes with extracurriculars, and use the right slogans in their admissions essays. They have “polish.” >…

> legacy preferences Why does this even exist?

How do you think some of those fancy new wings/building get their names?
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