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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

#931

Post by saagarjha »

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…

I’m not too familiar with UMN admissions stats are, but a 3.8 weighted GPA might have hurt your son considering a lot of people applying for computer science will have an unweighted GPA that is around that or higher. You haven’t shared the unweighted GPA here but if it’s substantially lower colleges will not like that, especially state ones, since they think it shows you just take classes beyond your level.

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

#932

Post by not_a_pet_rock »

smokey_circles wrote: post #879

America deserves to go downhill if this seems like a good idea. Standardized testing is a joke. There are other, better forms of tests. See: Europe

All Nordic countries have (Standardized) national level testing and also have tests that have to do with the local school. All of them are top performers when it comes to education.

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

#933

Post by jp0d »

hn_99 wrote: post #852
jp0d wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Indian education system doesn't care about learning at all. It's all about scoring good grades and getting a job at the end. It's quite important as every individual needs to be able support themselves. However, it's really bad for learning. I'm a product of that. I've been struggling a lot with an online course from MIT but at least I'm enjoying learning a lot of stuff as I'm employed now. Physics and Mathematic…

>I've been struggling a lot with an online course from MIT but at least I'm enjoying learning a lot of stuff as I'm employed now. MIT OCW is absolutely amazing, I've learned a lot from there as well.

Absolutely. They were the pioneers in open sourcing so much knowledge. I'm doing a course on EDX from MIT and there are deadlines for homework assignments. It's quite hard. But one can learn the concepts from the OCW course if they're not interested in a certificate.

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

#934

Post by MichaelApproved »

tomatowurst wrote: post #889
MichaelApproved wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who claim “ standardized test is systematic racism ” are not necessarily the same people who think “ asian americans being discriminated at ivy leagues even with good standardized test score is not seen as systematic racism. ” You are taking two different points of views which are made by two different groups, reducing their arguments down to practically nothing, and pretending they’re being made by the same g…

You are trying to argue that the people who claim standardized test is systematic racism is meritocracy and against affirmative action. Then following your logic, the people who aren't claiming standardized test is systematic racism is anti-meritocracy and pro affirmative action. Yet the standard test does not differentiate the race of the test taker. If race was factored into the test scores somehow then what you ar…

No, that’s not what I’m trying to argue.

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

#935

Post by vidarh »

zozbot234 wrote: post #543
vidarh wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is people with a maths heavy background tend to think you need a much deeper understanding of math for this than you actually do. You need very little beyond high school level math for most CS. Some areas, sure. I've done things in my career that touches on a lot of different areas of math. But the number of times I've regretted not having taken more math have been pretty much non-existent. I wish I remembe…

The point is that even a "shallow" understanding of math is much deeper already than many, perhaps most realize. Many high-schools don't seriously try to teach math at all - there's no such thing as "high school math" in this day and age. You need college to even have a chance of being exposed to it properly. (Then there's the whole "learning to code" part, of course. This is actually where middle and high school mat…

I don't really think you need much math to learn to code at all. Again, some forms of code is helped by math, but I've also seen beginners struggle to reconcile differences between whatever programming language they were introduced to an mathematical notations. There's no doubt there are close relationships between math and CS, but you can a lot of CS just fine without ever being aware of those relationships.

I opted out of pretty much all the math I could at university, and at mine you could opt out of almost all of it (I had to take one introductory course which mostly served to bring those who hadn't taken much in high school up to scratch, and one introductory stats course).

Many of my other courses touches on subjects where a mathematician probably would say "but that's math". E.g. my compiler courses of course touched on a lot on parsers and grammars that are effectively just math restated. But those restatements matter. Maybe if more math was taught in ways that downplayed the dense notations more people would actually stick with it.

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

#936

Post by fatjokes »

nemo44x wrote: post #340
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, when you're doing something that is politically/ideologically unpopular or in the minority you tend to need to have bulletproof justification if you want to get away with it. Then again, with these sorts of things you can never be sure how much the tail wags the dog.

> Yeah, when you're doing something that is politically/ideologically unpopular or in the minority I don't think they are though. I think there would be massively popular and wide support for this. You're seeing it in SF right now as the school board is being overthrown for trying to ruin the school system in the name of "equity" or some other garbage reason. The people finally found out and organized. All this woke…

The problem is that the wokes tend to be loud. A small, vocal group can really ruin your day on Twitter (unavoidable for a leader these days). The only ones willing to speak against them are the hard-right Fox-News Q-anon types. The folks who may be against them but are otherwise reasonable tend to stay quiet until they reach the anonymous safety of the voting booth lest they be similarly targeted.

Then again the MIT Dean of Admissions hasn't been cancelled yet so maybe we're strawmanning.

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

#937

Post by jychang »

alskdjflaskjdhf wrote: post #778
frankchn wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the math part of the Gaokao tests memorization. Looking at a sample paper ( https://medium.com/@yujia_jo/2016-jiangsu-gaokao-national-hi... ), it seems like the examination really tests for the ability to do math and problem solve under fairly heavy time pressure (150 minutes total for all questions if you are in the science stream).

This honestly looks perfectly reasonable to me. It's obviously far harder than the SAT math section (which isn't saying much since SAT math is a bit of a joke), but the questions look completely fair and not at all like they're trying to trick or screw the student. Makes the comment upthread that started this come across as just more racist prejudices about China, unless the commenter has something to back up their c…

Looking at the first 10 problems, the only thing that really required memorization for me was trying to remember how to define the foci of a hyperbola and ellipse (questions 3 and 10), which I've long forgotten since high school. Everything else was pretty simple.

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

#938

Post by rayiner »

noduerme wrote: post #907
rayiner wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notion of a “well rounded student” who does music, art, and extra curricular activities, is a legacy of blue blood WASP culture. That is not to say that I think only test scores should matter. But the kinds of extracurriculars colleges value—in particular that they don’t value having a job or working in the farm—smacks of old money ideals.

When they talk about well rounded students: They do value working on a farm. Or going to Guatemala and building wells for people. Or construction work building houses. It's definitely not just about doing ballet and fine arts. I was the only kid in my class who didn't go to college, but I went to one of the top 3 prep schools in terms of Ivy League placement in the country, and the entire focus for extracurricular ac…

> TL;DR In my experience, a kid who had no creative talent but took a summer to build houses in Ecuador was much more likely, in the 90s, to get into the Ivy League than one who played violin, or football.

And how is a lower middle class kid in the Midwest supposed to be able to swing a summer off to build houses in Ecuador?

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

#939

Post by jounker »

gpt5 wrote: post #477
QuikAccount wrote: post #368

My problem with SAT/ACT actually has nothing to do with the test itself. I grew up very poor in suburban middle of nowhere and even with a waiver for the fee, I had no way of actually getting to a testing center. Parents worked 24/7 to make ends meet, no real public transport and this was before Uber and Lyft. The real culprit here is the lack of public infrastructure.

It's really weird to see this as the top comment. Is there evidence physical access to the test center still a problem today (small or large)? Is SAT worse than other criteria (such as extra-curriculum achievements) when looking at those poor suburbun middle of nowhere students? i.e. even in this example, did SAT actually made thing worse for those people when comparing against the alternative.

Is there evidence that physical access has improved? The idea that you’re espousing, that things must have gotten better, is a belief that needs to be backed up.

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

#940

Post by jounker »

One of the things the SAT appears to actually measure is income. More specifically it measures access to expensive preparatory courses, which is a good proxy for income.

This American Life has an excellent show discussion the SAT: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/734/the-campus-tour-has-bee...

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