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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

#981

Post by aj7 »

noduerme wrote: post #911
aj7 wrote: post #835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Preparing for internship culture. Your wife’s hamsters pay to run on the hamster wheel. And your family benefits!

Cultures that value education also value unpaid internships. It's an excellent trade. Free education in exchange for free labor. Yes, this has been extremely exploited in America, particularly in tech, where it has: - Created a sense that some work should be "free", hiding the true cost of labor from employers - Turned students into an endless pool to be exploited - Undercut the wages of professionals That being said…

I think you are right. The correct comparison is internship vs. no opportunity at all, not internship vs. job. The actual number of real jobs is driven by revenue.

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

#982

Post by jhanschoo »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #919
aj7 wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

What does this have to do with the parent comment?

This argument is trying to show that elite colleges are more than

> artificially crafted scarcity designed to create a market and brand.

In that they produce good research results.

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

#983

Post by thehappypm »

ryandrake wrote: post #505
thehappypm wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This wasn’t my path, but many of my peers where I went to college had a similar type of story. They came from very poor areas like rural Texas or rural Georgia, and they got into engineering after getting into things like Lego sets and video games. They got great at math because it intrigued them even in their subpar schools. Aced the math SAT and then doors opened for them. I’d hate to see that door close.

I grew up in a very rural, working class community. There was a mill in town, and a factory two towns over, and all the kids in my high school were pretty much expected to either work for those two businesses or go into the military after school. That's what probably 80 out of the 100 kids in my graduating class did. We didn't have AP classes and Rowing Club and Mock United Nations and all that upper-middle-class qua…

To be fair I think the whole Model UN, volunteer kind of thing is a way for mediocre students without athletic skills to juice their resumes. If you’ve got good SATs you’ll go to a good college. If you’re an athlete that opens tons of doors too.

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

#984

Post by BeFlatXIII »

quibono wrote: post #941
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #918

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: box-checkers are no fun to have as classmates.

Counterpoint: universities are supposed to provide education (which doesn't mean fun isn't allowed but surely that's not the priority here)

When I think of box-checkers, I think of the kind of classmates I had who could memorize things far better (or just put in more hours studying) than I ever could but would fall apart the moment you asked them to do something outside the happy path.

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

#986

Post by bzbarsky »

danans wrote: post #450
rafale wrote: post #393

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

That opinion is unpopular because it is incomplete. SAT/ACT scores correlate with lots of things, not just IQ and work ethic. Another huge correlation is with family income: https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2021/9/28/is-in... .

Yes, but is that correlation after controlling for IQ and work ethic? Because family income correlates with IQ and work ethic...

As far as I can tell, the thing the SAT really correlates with most is the thing it's actually designed to predict: ability to succeed in college, as measured by college GPA. (In particular, the correlation between college GPA and SAT score is higher than between college GPA and high school GPA.)

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

#987

Post by bzbarsky »

jounker wrote: post #940

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...

The "expensive preparatory courses" offer something like a 10-30 point benefit over checking out an SAT prep book from the library, if you control for the time spent on preparation, last I checked.

What the courses do offer, of course, is the structure to force indifferent students to sit through the preparation.

There's a lot of bad statistics, whether by accident or with an agenda, being done around the SAT....

But more important than all that, as the MIT post says, pretty much all the other measures elite colleges use for admitting students correlate even _more_ with income than the SAT does.

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

#988

Post by bzbarsky »

parkingrift wrote: post #139
LewisVerstappen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's far easier for rich students to game GPA, college essays and extracurriculars than it is for them to game the SAT. For GPA, they can hire a private tutor in the subject they're struggling with. There are services out there that will basically write your english essay for you / do your math/science homework. For college essays, they can hire college counselors to help them draft a compelling essay. For extra curr…

>It's far easier for rich students to game GPA, college essays and extracurriculars than it is for them to game the SAT. Disagree. I worked for the Princeton Review while in college back in the day. We would outright guarantee 99th percentile for one on one tutoring. If you didn't get 99th percentile the course was refunded or you could take it again. For classroom tutoring we would guarantee some improvement of I be…

> Candidly, no one would pay for a prep course for a 30 point gain.

My understanding of the research in this area is that the 30 point gain is if you compare people who take a prep course to people who put in an equivalent amount of time preparing on their own with the widely available (e.g. can check them out of the local public library in many cases) preparation materials.

The 200 point gain is if you compare people who did the prep to people who have not done any prep.

The set of people who can't make themselves put in the time without the structure of a course would benefit by a lot more than 30 points from the course, and would pay for it. And do.

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

#989

Post by MagnumOpus »

csa wrote: post #883
biohacker85 wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've asked similar questions to people who hold this view of "standardized testing is racist". While I never got a direct answer, I could infer or "read between the lines" that they are not oblivious to the seemingly glaring contradiction to some of their solutions to racism, its just that when it comes to equality--the ends justify the means. Groups whom have previously enjoyed privilege with college admissions (whi…

> I've asked similar questions to people who hold this view of "standardized testing is racist" The most defensible explanation that folks who claim standardized tests are racist is that the range of scores are not approximately equal across races. In theory, a “fair” non-racist test would have similar ranges of scores for all races. There are a lot of assumptions baked into the argument, many with which I disagree,…

> When SES is controlled for, everything else (like race) just has a minor impact on scores

This is sadly not at all the case. See the below famous charts about SAT results split by race and SES (proxied by either parental income or parental education). The lowest SES segments of the white/Asian population score as well as the highest SES segments of the black population.

This then makes it obvious that colleges need to choose between either (a) equality of opportunity where SAT matter and that gets you more Asian kids and fewer black students or (b) equality of outcomes where extracurriculars and 'personality' matter and get rigged until racial balance is the same as in the general population, disregarding the maximisation of talent or ability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#/media/File:1995-SAT-Educa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#/media/File:1995-SAT-Incom...

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

#990

Post by Psyladine »

mbesto wrote: post #281
Psyladine wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but the idea of standardised testing being equivalent across all factors just strikes me as being fundamentally untrue. What's your take on MIT's stance? our ability to accurately predict student academic success at MIT 02 Our research shows this predictive validity holds even when you control for socioeconomic factors that correlate with testing.

We have to read the sentence very carefully. It's saying that regardless of socioeconomic factors, the number correlates with graduate success rate. This seems like a very easy "duh". The way I read that is "if a student gets in the 99th percentile regardless of whether they grow up rich or poor, they are likely to do well at MIT". This doesn't talk about acceptance rates based on socioeconomic factors. The point in…

It's not saying regardless, it's says controlled for. A subtle distinction, but the former is a raw comparator and latter is an adjustment, which implies even with a bias that still doesn't account for substantive change.

I was hoping someone had more insight into process or metrics on it.

Your own post has an implicit accusation that lower socioeconomic situations preclude high testing, which has all kinds of implications about the quality of education and living standards as a prior for acumen. I suppose my own bias shows in drawing that conclusion though. As Henry said though,

"If I had seven peasants, I could make seven lords. But if I had seven lords, I could not make ONE Holbein."

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