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Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles

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

#611

Post by charlieyu1 »

jerojero wrote: post #575
lliamander wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds nice. Those other things are great, but have little value in terms of academic success. I think that for people who do poorly in academics but well in those other areas should have other avenues of advancing themselves rather than being forced through the college funnel.

It could be nice if access to education is equitable. In chile we also have grades + standardized test + ranking (your position versus your cohort). But the top universities are filled with the top alumni from expensive private schools because they are usually 1. given inflated grades 2. trained to perform well on standardized tests (in their own schools, theyre rich so they can afford this). If you look at OECD stat…

School grades and ranking should never be used for admission. Just standardised testing is good enough. It brings everyone to the level field.

I don’t know the situation in Chile but surely even the poor can buy books that tells you how to do standardised tests right?

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

#612

Post by TimPC »

The SAT being a help to low-income students shows how messed up the US high school system is. Normally standardized tests hurt low-income students because they require extra-curricular resources to do well on. In the US they hurt poor students less because the GPA system is so badly broken. AP courses are not offered in the poorest schools but offer such large bonuses to GPA that a 4.0 GPA is considered very poor for applying to university. A student can literally have a perfect GPA in the best courses offered by their school and be considered a very poor applicant academically.

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

#613

Post by aj7 »

davesque wrote: post #478
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #191

Definitely for the best. Standardized testing was pretty much the only reason I and many other working class folks I know could get into good schools -- I was never going to do a million side activities, and my summers were spent working, not building my academic resume. Of course the real tragedy is that we fixate so much on college, even prestigious ones, at all given how unnecessary they are for making people into…

> Of course the real tragedy is that we fixate so much on college This is what gets me. The whole concept of college, and especially selective, high profile colleges such as Harvard, MIT, etc., seems antiquated and almost entirely manufactured at this point. It's artificially crafted scarcity designed to create a market and brand. I feel the true, primary function of these institutions is to give the rich and powerfu…

No no no. The thesis topics are in graduate schools are more cutting edge, and the opportunity to interact with real science as an undergraduate are invaluable. I would tend to agree that excelling at a second tier university with a comprehensive program is an acceptable start. It generally gets you to a higher level.

Competitiveness is about speed. Anyone can look something up. It’s about knowing things right off the bat, knowing what’s an unreasonable answer, estimating things, knowing what’s important. That takes years of education and practice.

In the US, we have probably had 750,000 excess deaths in the last two years because politicians do not have an intuition about probability and statistics. This was generally true in the West, but NOT in China and Asia in general, where the leaders were more numerate.

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

#614

Post by whynotminot »

fn-mote wrote: post #589
whynotminot wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Alright. You seem to feel pretty confident about this.

Having worked with quite a few MIT grads over the years, at least in my anecdotal experience, they were smart people who were no more or less likely than any of the other smart people working around them to stumble upon the next evolution of the web browser.

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

#615

Post by blip54321 »

ralmidani wrote: post #596

I would like to know how much of an “improvement” in outcomes these tests bring. From another article linked in the one from this discussion: “In short: Our research has shown that, in most cases, we cannot reliably predict students will do well at MIT unless we consider standardized test results alongside grades, coursework, and other factors. These findings are statistically robust and stable over time, and hold wh…

I think the bigger question is whether we should have exclusive schools like MIT.

Screening for college admissions made sense a century ago, when 5% of people went to college. Today, not so much. From an undergrad class perspective, the difference between MIT and a better state school is mostly the brand stamp and the admissions department.

Why do we want to stamp people with a stamp like "MIT"?

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

#616

Post by 30829984 »

jacobr1 wrote: post #573
dangle1 wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can relate, and I appreciated the doors the PSAT and SAT opened for me. OTOH, I test higher than my actual abilities in my opinion, and that was a relatively unfair advantage the test gave me.

What does testing higher than one's ability actually mean? I'm guessing either you think the test is an imperfect proxy for a different (more important) skill, or otherwise you have imposter syndrome.

Not OP but I am an abnormally good "tester." It was always easy for me to see what the questions were asking for and could make a go of anything multiple choice. I'm also good at writing essays. It does not make me smart, it makes my abilities especially suited to standardized tests.

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

#618

Post by muh_gradle »

tomkat0789 wrote: post #293

I hated taking the SAT/ACT, but holy cow are we in the US in a better situation than Chinese students dealing with the Gaokao. A Chinese pen-pal once showed me some calculus problems from the Gaokao and the example I saw (a bunch of integrals) looked like a math test a sadist would create: long, complicated expressions just for the sake of complexity, "ugly" numbers that turned into messy fractions you have to carry…

I have a hard time seeing US standardized testing as "better." All of my Korean peers who have studied for the CSAT or Suneung laugh at how easy the SAT/ACT math section is in comparison. K-12 education in the US is years behind at this point from many Asian countries. The fact that we are debating whether standardized testing for colleges and prestigious high schools (Lowell in SF, Stuyvesant in NYC, etc) should be banned is just laughable and only sets us further back.

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

#619

Post by selimthegrim »

notservile wrote: post #491
selimthegrim wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CRT is an outgrowth of critical _legal_ theory, which upon examination of the career of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Bean has ample justification for existing.

Cool story bruh. I escaped communism under threat of death. CRT is carefully repackaged Marxist garbage. And I’ll take a stand with other Americans to make sure our children don’t die slaves in America when the time comes.

Can you explain how anybody is talking about enslaving white people?

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

#620

Post by Aromasin »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #533
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #191

Definitely for the best. Standardized testing was pretty much the only reason I and many other working class folks I know could get into good schools -- I was never going to do a million side activities, and my summers were spent working, not building my academic resume. Of course the real tragedy is that we fixate so much on college, even prestigious ones, at all given how unnecessary they are for making people into…

>Of course the real tragedy is that we fixate so much on college, even prestigious ones, at all given how unnecessary they are for making people into productive and happy human beings. This change is significant but affects less than one percent of the population each year.. I'm ambivalent because I sympathize with both sides of the equation. One one hand, I have the hindsight now that I didn't at 18 to realize that…

I likewise had a similar experience on the other side of the Atlantic with British universities. The goal for top achievers was always Oxford, Cambridge, or Imperial. I ended up significantly under-achieving on the grades my mock exams and teachers predicted, and went to a less prestigious institution, which used to be a Polytechnic. However, this gave me such an appreciation for the North of England that I would have never experienced otherwise, and a group of friends a league different from the ones I grew up with in the South, that I wouldn't trade for the world. It probably worked out well too because I got a relatively pain-free 1st grade (4.0 GPA) when I know full well that with my ability and work ethic I would have got a low 2.1 or 2.2 at where I planned to go.

All the same, finding a decent job after was a slog, and required me to go back to do a postgraduate degree at a Russel group (Ivy League equivalent) university to get a seat at the table with any major tech company. I'd like to earn more, but finance firms and most unicorn start-ups demand Oxbridge so I'll probably consider an MSc or MPhil at one of the two some time in the future, but that'll be 7 years of schooling for £80k, when I could have done it in 4 years for half that cost. All in all, it's what would have been a retirement at 40 to one at 50, which while not the end of the world is a little frustrating.

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