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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

#991

Post by actually_a_dog »

rayiner wrote: post #642
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to high school in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and almost all of the top academic students in my class were first or second generation immigrants (mostly Indian) that had no interest in extra-curricular activities like sports, band, choir, or really anything. It's important that people, especially immigrants, can get into these schools based solely on their test scores and not have to do any of the other trivial…

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.

Specifically, the idea originated in the Ivy League (Princeton, IIRC) as a way to limit the number of Jews who got admitted.

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

#992

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

scarmig wrote: post #637
BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the SAT is not predictive, as some claim, we've been selecting our elites and professionals the wrong way for three generations. Yes, and? The easiest way to understand the shortcomings of these tests (at least their older versions) is to realize that students who use paid SAT/ACT-prep materials and services get higher scores than students who don't. Yes, there are confounding factors, but this fact alone is fai…

The issue with this comment and opponents of standardized testing more generally is that they compare standardized tests against some purely theoretical ideal metric that perfectly captures "merit," however it's defined. The reality is that standardized testing doesn't need to be absolutely perfectly fair to be something worth keeping; it just needs to be fairer than selecting students who had the opportunity to be c…

I'm not opposed to standardized testing nor am I among those saying to just eliminate the test; I'm just defending opinions critical of these tests from knee-jerk responses that I think are overly protective of them.

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

#993

Post by raphman »

apayan wrote: post #100

The implementation of footnotes on the right side of the screen is really cool, and not something I've seen before. Such a cool idea. I think it would be interesting for news publications to try that out in articles as well. It could allow for brevity in the main article text, but still allow those who want to know the source of a statement/fact or more detail the option to obtain it.

https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/

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

#994

Post by csa »

MagnumOpus wrote: post #989
csa wrote: post #883

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Thank you for the charts.

That said, I think two charts that try to summarize the data should probably combine the two if they actually want to measure SES rather than just SS or ES.

I like this study and summary:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280232788_Race_Pove...

Note that there definitely still is a statistically significant difference based on race, but I am fairly certain it’s not as large as the charts you linked to seem to suggest.

Specifically, I think it has to do with generational efficiencies in optimally using the opportunities that higher education presents.

Simple examples: knowing the hows and whys of relationship cultivation in college, knowing how to avoid or navigate potential educational pitfalls, knowing how to optimally use university resources, etc.

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

#995

Post by kragen »

mirker wrote: post #979
kragen wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can it approach an optimum in time linear in the number of dimensions like gradient descent does, rather than quadratic or exponential or something?

The greedy approach has an 1-1/e type of approximatation. You basically prove that the problem is in the class and then solve it greedily. It’s not much different than proving the problem is convex and then using gradient descent.

People mostly use gradient descent to "solve" nonconvex problems.

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

#996

Post by csa »

csa wrote: post #994
MagnumOpus wrote: post #989

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Thank you for the charts. That said, I think two charts that try to summarize the data should probably combine the two if they actually want to measure SES rather than just SS or ES. I like this study and summary: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280232788_Race_Pove... Note that there definitely still is a statistically significant difference based on race, but I am fairly certain it’s not as large as the cha…

Choice quote which does a good job of summarizing what I have seen:

“In addition, the differential direct and indirect effects of income on high school achievement and, in turn, high school achieve-ment on SAT scores may also be explained in terms of residential racial and economic segregation which are, through property values and taxpolicies, related to the quality of schooling. Moreover, the poverty effects reported here suggest the lack of social and educational resources in the larger community that are needed to supplement and complement the learning taking place in schools.”

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

#997

Post by mirker »

kragen wrote: post #995
mirker wrote: post #979

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The greedy approach has an 1-1/e type of approximatation. You basically prove that the problem is in the class and then solve it greedily. It’s not much different than proving the problem is convex and then using gradient descent.

People mostly use gradient descent to "solve" nonconvex problems.

There isn’t much theory on why it works in the nonconvex case. You can similarly make discrete heuristic algorithms for sorting, etc. with no guarantees.

Anyway, as nonconvex models are usually stacked convex models, you can find works that incorporate these submodular functions as neural network layers.

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

#998

Post by lliamander »

meepmorp wrote: post #962
lliamander wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they are: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/

They aren't. It says in the first line of the abstract that they correlate with general measures of intelligence, which is a different thing.

IQ means Intelligence Quotient, which is simply a way of representing a score on an intelligence test by dividing the individual's score by the population mean (and then doing transformation to make the numbers look nice).

An IQ test is simply short-hand for a test of general intelligence.

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

#999

Post by mike00632 »

barry-cotter wrote: post #930
mike00632 wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same observation. There is no data. It's nonsensical if you think about it: MIT stops using SAT/ACT in 2020 and now in March 2022 they have "robust" data that those students don't perform as well academically.

They’ve had a year with the students they admitted with no SAT. So they have one year of instructor experience with students selected without benefit of SATs. 700 or so students, two semesters of examinations. That’s plenty of data to see a dramatic fall in student preparedness.

It's most certainly not enough data. There is no way that academic OUTCOMES of a 4-year degree program can be measured by a couple exams from introductory courses during a time when classes were moved to being online.

Even if this "robust" data indeed showed that academic outcomes were worse over the course of one year, how can that possibly be attributed to not viewing students' SAT scores instead of, say, the entire classroom experience being upended and moved online?

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

#1000

Post by RC_ITR »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #903
RC_ITR wrote: post #716

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 Kind of wild to erase centuries of cultural heritage by implying that teaching academics with art is a uniquely Anglo-Saxan ideal.

Kind of wild for you to replace "WASP" with "Anglo-Saxon" and toss in the word "uniquely". WASP is a tiny subset, and that subset has a very specific history with that concept that's coming into play here.

Wait wait wait. What do you think the A and the S in WASP stand for?

Sorry it felt uncouth to add the race and religion letters...

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