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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

#581

Post by 0000011111 »

My dyslexia is so bad that these types of tests were/are a total barrier to entry for me and folks like myself.

Fortunately, tech is one high-paying industry where an IT degree from a great university and certifications are not required to get a job making good money. I was able to learn system administration - network engineering at the community college and use online resources.

If there is one positive is that MIT has a very small undergraduate class so the impact will be minimal across the global cohorts of future college students. Perhaps perspective students will stop applying to that school and focus their application strategy on schools that do not have this requirement.

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

#582

Post by com2kid »

lliamander wrote: post #386
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…

> Removing admission tests was a huge slap in the face to social mobility out of the middle class. I agree, but arguably the benefits of the SAT with regard to class mobility is less than it was when it was introduced. The heritability of IQ, combined with assortative mating, means that increasingly class divides are forming around differences in IQ. I think many people are rightly concerned that this will eventually…

> The heritability of IQ,

For better or for worse, regression to the mean is a thing.

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

#583

Post by MichaelApproved »

tomatowurst wrote: post #577
outlace wrote: post #470

I used to be against standardized tests, but I grew up as a low-income minority in a single-parent household and I ended up getting into good schools pretty much only due to my high test scores, which has been a life changer. Other than test scores, I couldn't afford to do any fancy extra-curriculars. It felt a lot more achievable to know I can change my life if I just focus and do well on a test than it would if I h…

what do you think about people who claim standardized test is systematic racism? standardized test is the only way to measure somebody on their aptitude for doing well like the LSAT. yet somehow asian americans being discriminated at ivy leagues even with good standardized test score is not seen as systematic racism.

I’d say you’ve got more straw men in that loaded question than farmers have in their field.

You’re taking poorly summarized opinions and pretending that combination of opinions are held by a group of significant size.

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

#584

Post by doetoe »

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…

If I understand you correctly you are assuming that being valedictorian, scoring 1510+ and scoring 1600 are all independent events.

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

#585

Post by mypalmike »

jimbob45 wrote: post #546
mypalmike wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Tax exemptions.

Assuming you claim tax exemptions annually, are you partially funded by the government? :-P

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

#586

Post by lightup »

lightup wrote: post #553

My son found out 2 days ago he didn't get accepted to his in-state land grant public university. The University of Minnesota. This was his fall back plan. Now he's screwed and may not be able to start college in fall. His sins: - a 35 ACT score (legit with no studying or ACT prep classes) - a 3.8 weighted GPA (because he took multiple AP classes and actually was in college for his junior and senior years through Minn…

And young people on here imagine having 2 children 2 years apart. One of them doesn't get to go to college because of covid and the other doesn't get to go because ability didn't matter for a year.

EDIT:

I hope this never happens to your kids. Beware of being penalized for trying. Is that a lesson you will teach your kids?

I'm not "bummed". Read my post with anger.

U of MN was not his first choice. It was _fallback_.

Try on some shoes.... Imagine putting 30 years of high taxes into a state as a high earner and business owner (that's me). Then imagine that your almamater doesn't accept your kid when your kid is, in fact, a lot smarter than you and has accomplished a lot more than you did by his age.

Then imagine being that kid and being taught by the State that, while you are in the top 95th (99th) percentile nationally on test scores there's just something not right about you. Is it your GPA? It can't be. You're on the A honor roll every time.

In the end you'll never know and that is fine because the school you might have attended has changed into something it was never intended to be.

Land grant university or something else? The Great Emancipator rolls in his grave.

On the plus side the U of MN gets billions of dollars in state funding and keeps the washout money too. Win-win.

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

#587

Post by peter303 »

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…

Curiously, MIT does not have an university-wide computer requirement, though some departments do. They have been debating this requirement for decades.

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

#588

Post by tomatowurst »

rafale wrote: post #393

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

Having a high IQ means you can probably retain information better with less effort but for the vast majority of students, its a question of consistent work ethic.

Important to differentiate places like South Korea has a massive privatized cram schools where it does a fantastic job of creating high scorers but because it is scaled, it means if you are not paying extra and spending ridiculous time in privatized cram schools, you are almost certainly going to fail unless you can rely on some innate genius. Here in this case, it is truly discriminating students based on the economic capacity of their parents and it has the highest houshold debt not only from real estate but from debt to finance the young into educational hell.

Another unpopular opinion: Unhappiness correlates with high IQ if a proper outlet is not met due to a variety of factors.

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

#589

Post by fn-mote »

whynotminot wrote: post #412
londons_explore wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you just want to be a great web developer, MIT may not be the best place for you. MIT best prepares people for those less well defined roles, such as designing the next era of web browsers . For that, you can never know exactly which skills will be needed, so it's probably best to have as many neighbouring skills as possible so you don't hit problems you can't solve merely because the knowledge required to see the…

Hmm I’m not sure I really agree with this. Does MIT (or any university) teach the creativity needed to envision the kind of thing you’re talking about? Or like most universities, is it just teaching some foundational skills coupled with whatever has condensed into “required reading” from industry over the last couple decades? Just with a higher pedigree and ostensibly better prepared student body.

> Does MIT [...] teach the creativity needed to envision the kind of thing you’re talking about?

Absolutely.

Explicitly.

I have just been a bystander, but it's clear.

I don't think that MIT grads are in this thread wasting their breath, though. Which I think is a good decision.

[1] https://lemelson.mit.edu/ [2] https://innovation.mit.edu/resources/

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

#590

Post by freedomben »

tomatowurst wrote: post #577
outlace wrote: post #470

I used to be against standardized tests, but I grew up as a low-income minority in a single-parent household and I ended up getting into good schools pretty much only due to my high test scores, which has been a life changer. Other than test scores, I couldn't afford to do any fancy extra-curriculars. It felt a lot more achievable to know I can change my life if I just focus and do well on a test than it would if I h…

what do you think about people who claim standardized test is systematic racism? standardized test is the only way to measure somebody on their aptitude for doing well like the LSAT. yet somehow asian americans being discriminated at ivy leagues even with good standardized test score is not seen as systematic racism.

I think your question would have been a lot better if it was just:

> What do you think about the argument that standardized tests are systemically racist?

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