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Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

#91

Post by mhuffman »

mantap wrote: post #39
mhuffman wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... well, this is the real reason, but I don't think any professional would word it that way! Here[0] is a story about a group arguing (a bit successfully, I might add!) that "forcing" students to have the ability to at least pass algebra to get a college degree is a civil rights issue! [0] https://www.npr.org/2017/07/19/538092649/say-goodbye-to-x-y-...

Right because putting people in crippling debt when they fail out of college is going to improve civil rights.

I mean offering a worthless* degree to people is also not helping, right?

* I am using worthless here, to denote that someone that does not even have the capacity deal with a single term of high-school level algebra, can otherwise do very well in it.

Re: Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

#93

Post by timmytokyo »

xyzzyz wrote: post #65
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> See eg. https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/educators/higher-e... . Quoting the company that sells you those tests to tell you those tests are predictive is quite fun.

Their result match everyone else’s, so I see no reason to not cite them.

And apparently you see no reason to cite "everyone else's", even when that would have strengthened the persuasiveness of your argument. Hm.

Re: Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

#94

Post by jdashg »

vntx wrote: post #46
spicyusername wrote: post #21

No disagreement that there are fundamental elements of our socio-economic system that suppress certain groups of people, but this approach seems to be tackling this problem from an extremely misguided direction. The end goal is certainly to increase college enrollment among groups who have historically been underrepresented, and removing all academic and skill prerequisites from academic and skilled trades programs w…

Agreed, this approach is misguided. Removing standardized tests removes a useful metric admissions can use to analyze applicants as part of a holistic process. Is it a perfect metric? No, but the scores are good predictors for diligence which is crucial for college success. If you need to go to college to develop fundamental critical thinking skills, then something is very, very wrong with your basic education system…

The problem is that SAT isn't actually a good predictor, even though it seems like it should be.

Re: Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

#95

Post by leetcrew »

freetime2 wrote: post #75

As someone who dealt with severe depression during high school, I feel like the SATs really helped me out during college admissions time. Just getting out of bed every day was a real struggle for me and as a result my attendance was poor, my grades were spotty, and I didn’t have any formal extra curriculars I could show off. But I did get the highest SAT scores in my class, and I feel like that helped demonstrate tha…

I do think this is an important take. colleges should avoid relying excessively on a single measure of aptitude to evaluate applicants for this reason. there are lots of bright kids who struggle in high school but really blossom in college if they're given a chance.

that said, I was in a similar position to you in high school. I would always get one of the highest scores in the class on tests/exams but usually get a poor overall grade due to missed homework assignments. the teachers did recognize that I was smart, but they concluded that the only possible explanation for my poor performance was that I was just lazy and pretty much wrote me off. in my my life at least, educators have been very willing to make exception after exception for less bright students who seem to try hard but will happily let smart underperformers fail without inquiring why.

Re: Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

#96

Post by ccffpphh »

jeromebaek wrote: post #28

I got a 1000/1600 on my first try of the SAT. Then I went through a $6,000 SAT summer camp, and got a 1600/1600. I used this score to tutor privileged children charging upwards to $100/hr. The conclusion, for me? The SAT has become just another way for the privileged to incestuously perpetuate privilege among themselves. I believe it's a great move to stop considering these test scores.

I got 31 on ACT first try then spent all summer playing dota 2 with my friends and got a 35 the second try. We were also poor as hell. I don't think it has anything to do with privilege

Re: Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

#97

Post by so_tobeclear »

xyzzyz wrote: post #76
docbrown wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on your job, i think people confuse the true idea of what a college education is meant to be. It is not a trade, nor is it career-prepping with the exception of a handful of programs (engineering, nursing, accounting). So in your case, depending on your field, your education was designed to give you a basic understanding of the fundamentals that you will need and the critical thinking skills that will allow…

That’s the theory that people keep repeating, but research keeps failing to substantiate that. University syllabuses keep teaching people things that is not going to be useful to anyone, or will only be useful to tiny fraction of people, who’d likely just learn it as needed anyway. Experiments show that transfer learning basically doesn’t exist, average people simply cannot apply principles they’ve learned in one con…

Though in large part what you are saying is accurate and studies likely confirm it, the comment above makes the distinction of select courses of study. Engineers, lawyers and doctors aren't average, even within the university context.

>...many people have very successful careers in one field despite having a degree in a completely different field...

This sounds a great deal like transfer learning. Applying format, structures, and approaches to unrelated fields. Much of an engineering degree is designed around learning to learn well. That's the only degree I can speak of, but it has been my understanding that other programs have similar intent.

Re: Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

#98

Post by joshmn »

I wasn't the best student in high school (2.65GPA) but I did have excellent standardized test scores. I feel like they really helped me in my college hunt and were a significant factor into getting accepted into some of the schools I did.

There are other people like myself who are just bad students for one reason or another. A student's future prospects of education shouldn't be dependent on just test scores or a GPA (what this is playing into) because those scores aren't reflective of a student. It's reflective of them playing into the system. The system rewards the typical student — or what we think of as a typical student — and completely neglects the overall picture of the student.

Does my GPA reflect being sexually assaulted by a teacher? Having my best friend die? Having an increasingly troubled home setting? Running out of my medication routinely? Being bullied? No. My GPA simply indicates how I did in the classroom.

A student has an array of attributes. Only one of those attributes is score. Other attributes factor contribute and influence score. I realize it's hard to quantify or quality non-tangibles into these attributes. But it needs to be done for the betterment of future students.

Re: Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

#99

Post by Izkata »

thawaway1837 wrote: post #78
xyzzyz wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve also learned a lot in my degrees, and greatly enjoyed my time in the university. However, I’ve only ever needed a tiny fraction of what I learned there in my jobs at Google and Facebook.

I use literally nothing I learnt in college in my day to day work. At the same time, I’m almost 100% sure I wouldn’t be half as good at my job if it wasn’t for the stuff I learned in college. Right from technical courses which taught me to analyze, and convert words and images (documentation) into actual working products, to the writing courses which mean I communicate much better than I would have otherwise to the e…

For me it's very close to that. Nothing is directly used, but for those of us who really payed attention and didn't just do assignments to get them out of the way, the underlying principles of the stuff from college has help significantly.

With a BS in CS, I have two explicit examples:

* Understanding time complexity has helped with a couple performance issues, but one big one was recognizing a Schlemiel the Painter algorithm [0] that multiple other devs (including a senior) hadn't noticed - fixing it brought one process's the nightly runtime from something like 2 hours to 5 minutes.

* In an information retrieval course, we built a basic inverted index as a semester-long project. That experience has helped with understanding how Lucene and Solr do things under the hood, which helped with various things relating to it - understanding why it's fast, understanding why doing certain queries things didn't improve performance, and understanding what people are even talking about online when trying to diagnose memory issues.

If some of this (particularly the time complexity one) sounds basic, it kinda is. But that's the problem - my experience is that people who get into software development through bootcamps or are self-taught end up missing this foundational knowledge, because they don't even know it's something that's out there.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/

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