91–100 of 307 posts
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> Anyway the alternative proposed here is replacing lucky question guesses with luck via a lottery. Yes, this proposal is more transparent and honest about the factor luck plays in the outcomes. It doesn't try to launder luck through some test numbers and essays to pretend it's purely meritocratic.
Downvoted over "luck laundering"... Definitely time to quit get back to work.
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Sure, but this is like insisting that every guy with Olympic gold holds a "false" medal, every time. While the stated rule is that it goes by who crosses the line first on the day, this obviously isn't a perfect measure of who's ultimately really in some other abstract sense the fastest man alive. I guess the common way of deliberately adding noise is by rounding off scores, such as giving A/B/C instead of rank order…
> this is like insisting that every guy with Olympic gold holds a "false" medal, every time Bad comparison. We have loads of statistics from sports showing there are highly-precise rankings. Run certain races repeatedly and you’ll find persistent rankings. Particularly at the most-competitive levels, where innate biology dominates in most sports. Have a cohort of students re-take a standardised test a few times, on t…
But I have not checked the numbers. Obviously if you restrict attention to those with exam scores near the boundary, you can get different results. And there are indeed other sports scores more precise than the one I mentioned.
education is not a scarce goods - why not accept _all_ candidates that are good enough? The cost of educating one more student is marginal, and if there's a large enough number, economies of scale can kick in as well.
> education is not a scarce goods Education itself is not, but going to a top college is not the same as getting an education. If Bryan Caplan's idea of college being mostly about signaling[0] is true, then top colleges can't scale. They are an exclusive club and a lot of the benefits of top colleges come from being exclusive. Opening it up to more people reduces these benefits for the students. [0] https://www.latim…
which is something i feel is a bad outcome for society in general, even if this is good for those individuals.
College should be a meritocracy, it's just that we want people to be able to be able to afford it and not be shit out of luck if they can't go to it. This would also reduce stress as you don't have to worry about not getting into a college if you know your life is going to turn out fine either way. Why has this goal been malformed and twisted around to the point where people are coming up with any solution that doesn…
I know the person's intentions are good in putting forth such an idea, but the problem with intentions is that they're always good. But they often ignore the bad side effects of the idea when it comes to putting it into practice . First, let's not mince words here -- this suggested policy is about lowering the bar for admission to top universities so that some previously unqualified tier of applicants has a better sh…
The problem is that those factors confound measurement so much that we don't actually know if the highest-scoring students are really the best. Lowering the bar in the face of absolute certainty and precision might be bad (that itself is a debatable point) but that's not what the authors are proposing.
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Sure; but we don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of the good. “Fair capitalism” also doesn’t exist in society. But in both cases it’s worth asking - do we want more capitalism / meritocracy or do we want less? Is the problem that our assessment tools are too easy for rich people to game, or is the problem meritocracy itself? Random selection would get obviously terrible outcomes too, but for different reasons. I’v…
Random selection is important to know if your system actually improves anything, or if the results are only good because the input was good to begin with. For all we know, those universities that only pick the best and brightest may actually produce inferior results that are nevertheless still very good. Thomas Sowell, when challenged on the success of charter schools in New York as being biased due to a "better sele…
However, my hazy understanding from psych lectures years past is that similar experiments have already happened and the results are in. University achievement was found to be correlated with big 5 consciousness and IQ. (I can’t remember the effect sizes.) I have no idea how well the US collage admissions process selects for those traits. I’d love to be proven wrong, but I would bet money a lottery would lower the average academic achievement of collage graduates.
(Edit: first result on google scholar talks about the positive correlation between GPA and consciousness: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/per.732 )
Commenters bringing up "meritocracy" don't seem to realize that fair meritocracies rarely exist in society. Often, your merit allows your to accumulate more merit, making the merit function geometric rather than linear. When the merit function is geometric, all it takes is a small change of fortune to start a rapid rise or a rapid decline. "Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is…
We really need to interrogate the concept of meritocracy a lot more: "Many deride our meritocracy for not really working for the poor, for people of colour, for women; they see structural impediments to these groups as preventing a real meritocracy from flourishing. But I would put it to you a different way: What could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled?" Because once we acknowledge that n…
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/08/wh...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyway the alternative proposed here is replacing lucky question guesses with luck via a lottery. Yes, this proposal is more transparent and honest about the factor luck plays in the outcomes. It doesn't try to launder luck through some test numbers and essays to pretend it's purely meritocratic.
Downvoted over "luck laundering"... Definitely time to quit get back to work.
lol, why would they do that? Then they will be found out since the differentiator between the top pool of 'good enough' undergraduate programs is merely being able to play king maker to students who were going to go far in life anyway. And in return, the top students help brand the university as being top.
> lol, why would they do that? Basically, using academic aptitude as an entrance qualification includes/excludes different races unevenly, (Asians and Whites do better) so this is a way to get round that. Lowering the standards and using randomness is a roundabout way to discriminate against Asians and Whites, but not explicitly. Of course, another way of looking at it is that tests are racist because of the variatio…
My point is that Universities have a brand for taking top tier raw undergrad students and moulding them into elite graduates who lead the world. In reality, many of those top tier students would succeed no matter what (raw talent, sheer will, family connections, etc).
If you dilute the pool in a meaningful way then 5% of the top 10k students go to Top Tier Uni 1; 5% to Top Tier Uni 2, ... Top Tier Uni 20. In ten years the outcomes of the students will no longer be biased towards Top Tier Uni 1 since students were dispersed across the top 20. Instead they are spread uniformly across the top 20. Why would TTU1 agree to lose their #1 place?
This is predicated on the reasonable belief that the Top 20 Undergraduate programmes are all 'good enough'.
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Random selection is important to know if your system actually improves anything, or if the results are only good because the input was good to begin with. For all we know, those universities that only pick the best and brightest may actually produce inferior results that are nevertheless still very good. Thomas Sowell, when challenged on the success of charter schools in New York as being biased due to a "better sele…
Great! This is getting closer to a testable hypothesis. I’m imagining “students chosen randomly from the applicant pool, and students chosen based on merit will have indistinguishable academic results”. This isn’t perfect yet but it’s closer to being testable. However, my hazy understanding from psych lectures years past is that similar experiments have already happened and the results are in. University achievement…
That's not the point though.
Remember, the article proposes to draw a random sample from all applicants who are "good enough", so you would have some sort of aptitude test. However, instead of selecting the best N results from that test, you select a random N.
I wouldn't hypothesize that the results are going to indistinguishable or even that they will be better. I would argue that total welfare may improve as a result and that is worth testing.
The reason is as follows: If you only take the "best and brightest", there's little room for improvement.