I, personally, grew up in a small, (lower-ish) middle-class mid-western town with below-average (I think!) schools. I did not get good grades (I just didn't care that much). But I got really good test scores. So I got into a pretty decent (state) school with a legit engineering program.
One could argue that my lack of grades is a good reason for me to not get into a good school. But without the tests, I definitely wouldn't have. I shutter to think how my career/life would be different had I not gotten into a decent school.
So, at least for me, I have a real affection for these kinds of tests. And, as far as I know, I think the US is like the only place that doesn't use tests as the primary decider for higher education.
It seems like the move away from testing was "not based on science". Though it was sometimes couched that way. I'm glad to see sanity (and science) prevail. But it all seems very fragile to me right now.
I think standardized tests correlate very highly (perhaps highest of any measure) to performance. I regularly see schools in the US with a 10% math proficiency and 40% literacy proficiency with a 99% graduation rate. What's up with that?
Standardized tests are the most fair and simplest way to evaluate students. Plus gaming the test is what exactly? Hiring a tutor and spending hours studying, much of it alone? And it's not a shock that success on studying and doing well on exams correlates to college where you're evaluated on how well you study and do on exams
It reminds me of that Key and Peele sketch where they're planning a long con bank heist but by the end it's obvious they're just working a job and saving for retirement
You probably want to do some test prep but you can do that with a test prep book at your local library.
Years ago, in a grad course of some sort, we looked at some papers of predicting performance in school. Basically, even at the grad level, GMATs were far and away the best predictor of academic performance, followed by undergrad grades. Things like letters of recommendation were pretty worthless.
The argument is that some people have access to private tutors who "teach the test" and others don't, not "some people study harder than others". And there is absolutely truth to that. I had to work after school, to make ends meet. Ain't got no time for extra studying.
That doesn't mean we should do away with test scores altogether, but we do need to realize the limitations. These scores come with error bars and uncertainty, and it matters how you use them. "Everyone with a score higher than the requirement ends up in a lottery" tends to be reasonably fair, but "we take the top-200 scores" tends to be biased to the well-off (sometimes very biased).
Harvard isn't some lottery that just pays out. It's a school. If you have to work after school and didn't have time to study for an exam, maybe you should go to a less competitive school. If you're not prepared enough, getting into a very challenging school isn't good. Its like I don't know how to read because I was taking care of my dying mother but now I want to get into a PhD program for literature. The PhD program wouldnt be doing me any favors by letting me in. Instead i would be frustrated, waste a lot of time and money and drop out eventually
I agree that there is likely no difference in performance between a 1500 and 1600 SAT so a lottery is reasonable. Although I will say it's pretty strongly correlated even at the extremes. But why should a school solely focus on maximizing gpa? It should minimize failure but choosing between a student who will get a 3.5 or a 3.75 is pointless
> If you have to work after school and didn't have time to study for an exam, maybe you should go to a less competitive school. If you're not prepared enough, getting into a very challenging school isn't good.
Getting extra tutoring, focused on improving your test results, does not make you more prepared for college.
> some people have access to private tutors who "teach the test" and others don't, not "some people study harder than others". And there is absolutely truth to that.
There is truth to the fact that some students have better access to study the test than others, but in my recollection, it really doesn't help those kids very much. I'm sorry I don't have any sources off hand, but I remember it being something like that all the extra prep will add maybe 10-30 points to the SAT.
To put another way: a dumb rich kid with private tutors will still score lower than a bright poor kid who takes the test with no prep.
I agree with your concern, but the problem is that Harvard will have to choose somehow, and most other ways of choosing are even more biased toward rich parents: some high school kids are writing conference papers and starting a venture, just imagine what kind of social background would make these kids even consider such an opportunity.
> I think standardized tests correlate very highly (perhaps highest of any measure) to performance
This depends on what kind of performance you're trying to measure. There will be some people who test very highly but are much less inclined to persevere and follow-through. Grades can be a better measure of this (though with rampant grade inflation, their utility is undercut).
> Plus gaming the test is what exactly? Hiring a tutor and spending hours studying, much of it alone?
Only if you aren't in Asia. Cram schools are a thing in India, China, Japan, Korea...
Of course, willingness and perseverance to go an extreme in work ethic has to be related indicator of future success. But that's your competition if you are just hiring a tutor and spending some hours studying alone.
This is a tautological argument. Test scores correlate with performance as measured via tests. Many of the best computer programmers I know have zero formal eduction in the field. They would fail the tests beloved to Silicon Valley and yet have proven their worth time after time.
Not requiring testing seems late stage ideological-cultural destruction plan to displace America, the values and guide rails that allowed the West to prosper, attempting to displace merit.
I did as little work as possible in high school. I was depressed due to unknown reasons at the time, diet playing a large role in that - as well as being high functioning autistic, Asperger's, and so in classes I cared about then I was passionate in - getting the only or one of the only 101% in a computer class that that high school had given anyone due to my quickly doing my assignments and then helping anyone else who needed help.
The teachers who saw me excel in their classes fought at the end of high school, my final year, when deciding what final grades to give - pitted against the teachers who saw the absolute least motivated and incompetent versions of me; they settled on giving me 80% honours - which allowed me better placement at top tier universities, technically 2 points above where my grades would have averaged otherwise - but where they had discretion.
It's time the pendulum begins to swing the other way again - and then for proper education to begin so that it limits or prevents it from swinging again as far as it has recently.
I have a related story. I was admitted to the CS department in the late 90s before it got super popular and they had to enact stricter admissions requirements. In hindsight I likely wouldn't have made the cut if those standards were applied to me. Fast forward and I've been a successful software engineer for the past 20 years.
I think a key will be merit-based resource distribution - which means not having a centralized pool funded by tax payers that then is a single point of failure, nor a single point of capture for wannabe tyrants, whereby still collect taxes for the purpose of education - however distributing it based on the parents' selecting what lineage of knowledge-skillsets they want their children exposed to or indoctrinated in.
Perhaps the greatest difficulty with this, for policy makers, is it's hard to quantify or account for externalized benefits. However the other end of the spectrum with the student loan scandal, giving loans to people for "education" that - has already occurred and so it's time to go back towards merit-based acceptance and distribution of resources - tied to an actual path with an ROI, and then where "liberal arts" can thrive once enough parents have enough to pay for their children to go into those programs - rather than society funding them, like we poorly-irrationally do in Canada.
The policy politicians will push for will depend on if their goal is to maximize centralized control and dependance on government or not, where if more and more "students" require state-funds for "acceptable" state accreddited education - where they must comply and be "good citizens" and follow your orders, mandates, if they want to continue to be able to suck on the teet of the centralized state control - while that same state may be (and is what's happening in Canada) has policy in place to dramatically increase and continue to increase the cost of living, reducing the quality of life - so where more and more people are going to become forced to depend on the government aka a communist state; or if the state as part of their strategy is also to accept foreign students, flooding the institutions with foreign students for their revenues, also as a way to bring in revenues from external sources, for better or worse.
“Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world.”
― Vladimir Lenin
"nor a single point of capture for wannabe tyrants"
This is a very good point. Americans rarely realize that single points of capture are magnets for wannabe tyrants. If you can't be a full dictator of the entire country for life, you may settle for being a full dictator of some massive institution that meddles in everyone's life.
To be clear, I don't think that Americans are stupid for not realizing this. They just don't have enough experience with tyranny.
I've never even been asked in 10+ jobs over a 20+ year career where I went to school, and mine had a great engineering program (which I had terrible grades in). They might have noticed it at the bottom of my resume but never asked.
Some of the best programmers I've had the chance to work with had no degree, though I know that's an HR bar in itself to leap over.
This has to vary. It was the last thing I read for anyone not just starting in the field. I wanted to know what they'd done, both in and out of work. I wanted to know if they were a driven, problem-solving go-getter. Degree and alma mater is a low-value data point in that regard.
Your school and GPA are relevant for a vanishingly short time on a resume. Maybe 2 years post graduation at best. After that, it's all about the work experience. If you have work experience before graduation, then school and GPA are almost completely immaterial.
HS GPA factors into getting into college, and is irrelevant afterwards. College GPA factors into getting internships and the first job placement and is irrelevant afterwards. If an employer actually cared in any meaningful way about my uni or grades after 5 years of work experience, I would take it as a red flag during hiring.
It makes a big difference in your first job, but then only if it is a name brand school. My company regularly solicits internships from certain top schools. Its hard to imagine CS at my school had something similar (I was not a CS major).
It's pretty normal not to be asked but many people do look--not so much for negative signal but they may notice. I'm pretty sure it didn't make the difference with my last job but probably sealed the deal as my manager went to the same school.
I might be wrong, but: What has science got to say about who should be admitted to schools, or more broadly what the priority of civilization should be? I think you're trying to universalize some of y(our) internalized beliefs into axioms.
I agree, my test score enabled me to get into a much better school than expected. All I did was borrow a test practice book from the library, take a few practice exams improving my score each time, and getting an even better score on the real one.
Test scores are an excellent way to distinguish moderate students from strong ones. In my experience, when you're distinguishing top applicants from each other, much of the difference will come down to the intensity of test preparation. Of course, for these Ivy League schools, the overwhelming majority of applicants fall into this category. The desire to outperform drives a huge investment in test prep, and selects for students who have put all their time into that activity -- rather than actually being curious about the world.
Per a link re:MIT in these comments, at that point, the best "solution" (such as it is) is to say they have a good enough SAT and move on to other metrics that may not be as accurate but are perhaps more illuminating. Does it really matter if someone has a Math SAT of 750 vs. 800 or whatever the numbers are these days?
Indeed, at some point the metric becomes very subject to stochastic uncertainty.
IQ tests administered by psychologists admit that there is a cutoff beyond which they fail, and so presumably the same situation exists with standardized tests.
We can't just make the tests hard enough so preparations will have diminishing returns? When I look at the exams in elite universities like Tokyo University, JEEs, and etc, I'm not sure how preparation can help the students in different talent pools. An extreme example would be those selective STEM summer camps. For instance, students in SUMaC will pick a subject in number theory, abstract algebra, or algebraic topology to study for three weeks. I don't think everyone can even understand the topics no matter how hard they try.
The simpler a rule is, the less likely it gets gamed. Simple as that. As for the standard tests, it baffles me why the US won't take a more rigorous approach like other countries do. At least add word problems, proofs, or in general problems that require some writing.
> And, as far as I know, I think the US is like the only place that doesn't use tests as the primary decider for higher education.
Yeah, it baffles me too. It's also hard for someone outside of the US to understand how even raising such question will be political and worse, racial. For god's sake, we don't need national or even state exams. Universities can simply design their own tests. Britain does that. Japan does that. Germany does that. East European countries do that. India does that. China does that (in addition to their national entrance exams).
How is a simple measure so divisive in the US? Oh well, what is not divisive in the US?
> The simpler a rule is, the less likely it gets gamed.
Why?
As a counterexample, measuring a programmer's productivity by lines of code written is almost as simple as a rule possibly can be, and is extraordinarily easy to game.
By and large, elite US universities are not interested in using testing to pick and choose among the most academically qualified applicants. Instead, they use testing primarily as a cutoff mechanism to distinguish applicants who can probably do the work and applicants that probably can't.
You may not agree, but the system seems to work pretty well.
Pro tip: don’t hire recent Harvard grads. Between the legacy admissions and affirmative action the S/N is too low to justify the salary demands. I’ve always had a better return on my dollar with a good candidate from a state school. Better work ethic too.
State school here: the Harvard grad is lower variance. If you need to reliably fill roles with people who won’t embarrass you, they’re polished and predictable. If you’re looking for diamonds, they certainly are more frequent among the Ivy League graduates, but you’ll pay up for them unlike sifting for them in the rough.
As someone who’s familiar with both state and Ivy, as both a student and an employer, the variance is most pronounced in the lower quarter than it is in the top quarter. Even the bottom 25% at Harvard are (mostly) competent. With the bottom quarter at a state school, you’ll find some who would have been better off if they had chosen a different path in life. Your job as the employer is to be able to reliably identify that bottom quarter, which isn’t difficult with experience.
I found little practical difference in the top ten percent between an Ivy and a decent state school. In fact, once someone is in the top half, other factors such as organization, drive, and the ability to get along others will dominate. As such, I save money and no longer hire from Ivy’s.
The absolute best software engineers that I've ever worked with most typically have music degrees, by a wide margin. Next most typically they went to Waterloo and then MIT, RIT or CMU. Next group are the self taught ones and then everywhere else.
It's the key to their success and other schools are crazy not to do it. But also I think their program is just straight up better.
OTOH, after successfully recruiting from Waterloo for over a decade, my company's recruiters suddenly decided to stop because it was more work for them even though it has consistently given great results.
It's a decision we've been fighting but our recruiting org won't budge.
* Unless they happen to be scholarship students. Scholarship students traditionally have to work harder than everyone else because they can't afford to buy homework or tests, or to pay people to take tests for them. One potential mark against them is the possibility of grade inflation endemic to the institution, but this maybe more or less variable in a particular STEM discipline.
Also, state research universities didn't/don't have as much grade inflation because they're intent on "competing" in the ranks without having the legacy, endowment, or name branding that Ivy's and Pac-NN's, so typically all they have (outside of NCAA sports $$$). University academic department staff are worried about bolstering their public image and of winning the approval of accreditation organizations.
Frame of reference: Most all of my college-prep public high school friends went to Harvard, MIT, Stanford, or CalTech while fewer, like me, went to University of California universities (UCs) like Berkeley or UC{LA,SD,SB,D}. I'm only certain of a few certain universities of that era were more or less more rigorous by comparing notes on specific courses and how team participation was regulated fairly or not. In 2001, we had a intro networking course requiring creating a forked caching HTTP/0.9-1.0 network web proxy server as one project of many.
That’s beside the point. Look up ‘regression to the mean’. If two highly gifted parents each with an IQ of 150 have children, their children will very likely be in the upper half or even perhaps upper quarter of the IQ distribution, but very unlikely to be the top 0.025% ~ IQ of 150. That is, their kids will be above average, but likely not Ivy quality.
There’s a reason legacy admissions need a thumb on the scale.
- If you don't hit some level of Math score, that's sort of a red flag that you'll struggle with at least calculus and physics right off the bat.
- If you have strong SATs, that's also a flag that you may be worth a deeper look even if you don't have other things on your resume that jump out, possibly for socioeconomic reasons.
For someone not from the US: From the second point I understand that the SAT is not the only thing used to decide who gets in? So, it's not "we have 100 slots this year, the 100 best get in"? What else is used?
I think each school has their own culture/brand they're going for and they want to find the best fit for that brand. Just having the best test takers doesn't match.
Harvard probably wants a mix of people who have a history of going to Harvard, elites, with high performers and others. If it's only elites, then the academic quality goes down. Only best academic performers, elites will go to another school to call home, etc.
elites == upper class, for those not from the US... Of course that being the reason test scores are considered primary in other countries and not the US. American universities have a need to recruit upper class students for various purposes including keeping the influence of the upper class on government, media, etc going.
To add to the other answers: at top universities, you can also have very unusual applicants. At Caltech we'd sometimes have (standard age) freshman come in with research publications, for example.
If you have the resources to review applicants individually, sometimes there are people who clearly stand out for reasons unrelated to test scores. I expect that in most cases, if they've taken tests, they have good scores, and it can make sense to generally have a threshold, but if you simply rank by top scores they are likely not the absolute best, as they would have been spending more time and attention on things other than studying for them.
It's actually super common to have research publications on undergrad applications now, so much so that I've heard that having such a publication is "table stakes" to be competitive at top schools.
Simultaneously, I've also heard that it's easier to get your name on a paper as a high schooler than as an undergrad working in the same lab. Some of this is because professors are incentivized to put random high schoolers on their papers -- when applying for grants, they're often asked what K-12 outreach they've done (https://new.nsf.gov/funding/learn/broader-impacts). "Look at this paper where there's a random high schooler on it" checks the box if a bit inappropriately. Incentives at work!
That funny, at the time I left academia, I found almost the entire opposite attitude. The faculty openly lobbied against having high school and sometimes even undergrads in the lab. This was in fairly heavy duty experimental life sciences, where we did small animal research, so I guess it depends on field/university/department.
But in my lab at least, we did have the odd high schooler/undergrad, whom I had a part in mentoring. For the high schoolers, my PI at least privately admitted it was because their parents had "means" and it was about at least the potential for grant money.
High school grades/class rank. And then (at least this is how MIT used to do it although I'm sure most schools have some variant of the process) you have all the qualitative stuff on the other axis: letters of recommendation, interview, high school activities, sports, other types of projects, etc.
I expect very few schools just mechanically admit based on SATs.
The goal of elite university admissions is not to maximize academic success, it's to maximize career success and prestige. Organized athletics at the highest level require high levels of teamwork and grit which translate very well to the work force. Grit and teamwork might actually be the most important attributes for having a successful career so it really surprise me when people dont understand why athletes get some preference in admissions.
Aside from scholarships for sufficiently talented, it certain places it sometimes viewed as demonstrating leadership and/or social skills. Especially if you have some type of leadership role (captain, etc.). And especially military academies.
Good schools get enough applicants such that the top X are more or less indistinguishable from one another via quantifiable metrics. It's hard to define the 100 "best" when you're looking >100 kids with the same scores.
Harvard might not have this problem, but some, even some good, schools have to put some thought into if the student is actually going to accept the offer as well. Some states require a certain percent of students to be from the state in state funded schools.
> So, it's not "we have 100 slots this year, the 100 best get in"?
I think most schools would claim it is that, they just reject that testing is the end all be all of who is the best. These schools are looking for the next generation of leaders, theres a lot that goes into being a leader that isnt counted on standardized tests. Standardized tests really just tell you who has the highest IQ. Useful, but it misses lots of other attributes.
>So, it's not "we have 100 slots this year, the 100 best get in"?
If a university's mission goes beyond just collecting already-top-performing students from the best (usually wealthiest) school districts, you can't just do a straight rank on a single signal. There's a lot of variance in educational opportunity across the US, ranging from highly selective specialty public high schools [1], to places where they can only afford 4 days of schooling a week [2].
Multiple components are considered: SAT scores, high school grades, application essay questions, in-person interview (optional, but suggested), participation in extracurricular activities, recommendations from former teachers or influential people, and sometimes, a specific, highly-desired skill or talent (usually athletics, music, arts)
> When we initially suspended our testing requirement due to the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic
I was about to call them out on this, since most institutions were using loosely supported discrimination claims to justify eliminating test scores. But reading MIT's announcement at the time (https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-suspending-our-...), it really was explained solely in terms of COVID, and even at that time they reiterated that their own studies had shown how valuable test scores were. MIT switched back to using test scores just 2 years later.
On the other hand, Harvard announced up front that they'd stop using tests scores for 4 years, and included the standard baseless claims that it would aid diversity. Some at Harvard had been clamoring against test scores for many years, so COVID just offered the excuse they needed. I suppose it is to Harvard's credit that they at least saw how wrong they were after the fact. But it's a shame they had to hide behind chalking it up to "new research" when the data had been clear all along to those willing to address it honestly.
back in the late 80s MIT changed their admissions criteria to drastically increase the number of women in incoming classes. if they don't unwind back to there, they aren't really reviewing the experiments they've conducted. (perhaps in today's world, we'd see more women naturally; but the gender imbalance in the STEM workforce suggests that there is something to look at, at least if you believe in science. this stuff is important and there should be transparency.)
In part, MIT increasingly emphasized fields beyond straight engineering (and CS that didn't involve hardware was becoming more important as well). But, yes, MIT definitely tilted towards having more more women (which was about 1:7 in the late 70s) and changed significantly over the next couple of decades.
I am glad to see this experiment on our kids access to higher education to finally seeing its end.
When I saw state and other universities move away from standardized tests as acceptance criteria during the COVID era my only thoughts were - my kid was will not be college age for years and years and this should be over by the time it may impact him.
As someone who immigrated to the US during at a high school age with a non-negligible language barrier and culture shock, getting excellent grades across all subjects in school was impossible, but excelling at written tests especially in Math is what got me into a great state school and opened many doors for me later on.
This chance was being taken away from the kids of 2020s. I’m glad this is over.
My next hope is that any identity-based acceptance criteria are deemed illegal and acceptance is blindly merit and experience based to give a chance for my kid who may not fall into any protected categories to get into any school that his merit allows
And I'd guess it took a couple of years for them to realise that the candidates they took in in 2020 and onwards were underperforming compared to previous years, and that this was the cause, as opposed to any of the other things that have changed since 2020.
Lots of people have lots of reasons why they think universities overweight on one test relative to other measures that are more representative of the whole person or whatever. This clashes with the reality though that the SAT/ACT are actually pretty effective at predicting academic outcomes, probably especially with respect to math.
I agree with you about the reality! It's just that when Covid disrupted SAT/ACT testing, the folks who wanted to abolish them for admissions anyway for other reasons, saw a once-in-a-lifetime chance.
I can't speak for Harvard, but I can address my own university: The pressure to resume using test scores came from the faculty, because we observed that there were an unusually high number of students admitted who were failing the math (and math-y) courses. We want people to succeed in our classes, not enter and fail out. No donors involved.
It doesn't seem like a bad experiment to have tried, but the results were negative and bad for the students, so time to back it out.
Beyond some basic literacy, you really need some filter on math. I tutored in an MBA program which, I assure you, was not at all math-intensive. There was some subset of students who were just clueless about basic high school math. (Read any of the first year MBA memoirs and this is sort of a theme.)
Even many of those who were not clueless definitely leaned on those of us who had worked as engineers to take the lead on the math stuff in group projects.
Public institutions get paid the full amount by everyone who receives a degree. Failing out is a discount that the school administrators don't want to offer.
For instance we're instructed by admin to never encourage students to pursue mathematics. They "must" be funneled through an academic advisor, who can establish whether or not this is worth the financial risk of them potentially failing. This is regularly presented as "improving equity".
We are a little closer to Harvard in that regard: we are private, but one thing we do is that our admissions are direct into the department, though handled centrally. But regardless of the incentive, it does nobody any favors to put them in a situation where they're going to fail. The students we admitted who are not doing well in the math classes are exceptionally strong overall, but our CS program is, um, rigorous.
>regardless of the incentive, it does nobody any favors to put them in a situation where they're going to fail.
There are a number of incorrect assumptions hidden in this statement. Foremost is the idea that academic failure is always regular failure. I know people who started in math amd pivoted after they didn't think they could handle being full fledged mathematicians, but who benefitted from the math they did learn enough that it was worth it to them.
Secondly, you can't know in advance who is going to fail, and people are not obviously better served by a strategy that plays it safe.
Colleges have limited capacity, and individual departments have even less. Given this information, what criteria would you suggest be used when determining admission into a department if not "likelihood of academic success?"
This is the core thing. Our acceptance rate is extremely low - under 10% for computer science. There are a lot of things we want to accomplish in admissions; _one_ of them is a statistical bias towards being able to succeed in the program. We obviously can't predict super accurately for a single student, but we try to create scoring criteria that result in success. Dropping the SAT caused a statistically significant reduction in success. We look at a lot of things, but, much as Harvard observed, a lot of those other things have even more bias. If you rocked the AIME, for example, we know a lot about your math skills, but there's a lot of bias ($$$) in which schools make it possible to participate in that, and there are a lot of students who will do well despite not having done AMC/AIME. Etc.
I'm pretty sure Harvard's endowment will thrive even if the donors go to zero. Harvard is more interested in prestige and public perception. That is their currency.
I see that Harvard's endowment is currently around 50 billion dollars. I suppose with good investments that could last for a long time, provided that Harvard doesn't need to dip into it to fund daily operations. Harvard's annual budget currently is around 5 billion per year.
Yes, and I would lump public (and even some private) companies into the pile. When all this went down it was certainly groundbreaking (at least to me) because in my previous 40 years on this earth I had never seen anything like it. There's a whole new dynamic now of seemingly wanting to "be on the right side of history" which has somehow translated to doing whatever is socially popular.
Probably the best to ensure high quality students are admitted. I think the idea of non-test admission is interesting and has merits, but looking at people I know and their kids performance and where they're going...not great for the schools.
I have always considered testing the least worst option. Rich kids might get some advantage, but they will get those advantage and more in any system. Pure lottery combined with auction might be the fairest solution. The rich paying for the rest...
I mean it works. Entrance exams for Indian IITs are brutal but the outcome is that something like 50% of all unicorns in India are started by IIT alumni. It’s probably similar in the US and Ivy League universities.
The problem is that tests do not ensure that high quality students are admitted.
Tests measure only that you are good at answering tests under heavy stress and at cramming for them. The whole teaching/learning to test thing - you don't learn to be able to understand and practically use the knowledge but cram to pass the tests and will usually promptly forget most you have "learned" in this way after the tests are over.
Not really a lot more. There are plenty of very good students that are just terrible at tests - either because they don't cope well with time pressure or because they learn in a different way and standardized testing is unable to capture that because of its "least common denominator" focus.
And don't get me started on people with very common disabilities like dyslexia or dyscalculia - neither of which has anything to do with intellect and sufferers of either can be excellent students. However, they will fail horribly at any kind of standardized testing.
So it is only a cheap to administer and easy to evaluate (just count the points) proxy for actual performance and knowledge that are much harder to objectively assess. But a very poor one.
And then there are the various sports stipendia and legacy admissions and ... that basically bypass the entire process as long as you are either good at football/whatever or been born to a well to do alumni family.
Let's call tests what they are - a cheap and somewhat objective filter to fit the large amount of applicants to the much smaller amount of available places. And don't delude ourselves it has anything to do with quality.
(I am a former university teacher and have done a specialized course in university pedagogy, including assessment)
> Tests measure only that you are good at answering tests under heavy stress and at cramming for them.
Sounds a lot like college, particularly for engineering degrees. Someone who does well on the math portion of the SAT likely has the baseline understanding of math to start on college math.
People with disabilities is a different conversation IMO, and should have some accommodation.
>The problem is that tests do not ensure that high quality students are admitted.
Ensure, no, of course not. But it's better than nothing.
>very common disabilities like dyslexia or dyscalculia
These are not "very common" by my defintion: 10% of population, of varying degrees.
>neither of which has anything to do with intellect and sufferers of either can be excellent students. However, they will fail horribly at any kind of standardized testing.
How do you know they'd be great students but fail at testing? How are you assessing it? Isn't this the answer to all these issues?
> And then there are the various sports stipendia and legacy admissions and ... that basically bypass the entire process as long as you are either good at football/whatever or been born to a well to do alumni family
I have never imagined it to be actually a thing. Wild.
I didn’t do well on my SATs back in the 90s. I’m not a good standardized test taker and I was working at a dialup internet provider while in high school, probably 30 hours a week. It left next to no time for studying for the SATs. As a result I got pretty bad scores because I was perpetually exhausted.
Still, I ended up getting a SWE job at Google in 2004 and working my way up to L8.
I think standardized tests are fundamentally bullish!t because they test more your ability to have time to prepare and study and think mechanically under artificial time constraints. None of which are associated with success in college. Some jobs, say a trauma surgeon, need to evaluate for the time constraint decision making, but a software engineer does not.
No I ended up going to a university where CS was probably the smallest major on campus. But I worked my ass off to learn CS on my own. The tests wouldn’t have predicted the outcome I’ve been able to enjoy based on scores I received.
I think you're touching on something else important, which is that, left to their own devices, virtually no one learns new things by cramming for a test.
I'd wager that when you were studying your ass off, you had books open and were hacking away trying stuff out, figuring what works and what doesn't, yeah?
You're the person I'd want to admit to university or hire for my work, and it has jack-all to do with your test-taking ability.
> None of which are associated with success in college
How much of college is associated with success at software development? Especially if you're essentially full-time employed in the industry (at an ISP) during high school?
> In making the decision, the college said it had been persuaded by research that found that standardized testing was a valuable tool to identify promising students in disadvantaged environments and struggling schools, especially when paired with other credentials.
Was this research not available when the universities decided to make the tests optional in the first place? The listed benefits of standardized testing should have been well-known. There seems to be a lack of reflection here about just what went wrong in the decision-making process.
I'm happy to see testing come back, might give school another look in a couple years when more follow suit.
I was looking at applying to grad schools last year. I've been out of school for, uh, a bit, and my undergrad was neither stellar nor relevant. I do great on standardized tests but basically none of the programs I wanted to apply to even accepted them and there's not a lot of room to communicate non-academic learning, so I just didn't bother.
I think this is the right step forward, again, but we should work very hard to make the tests as unbiased as they can be. They are not perfect but they are a reliable measurement, especially as the creators have gotten better at removing hidden biases.
Society is biased, and universities prepare students to be successfull in the real world. While yes we should all remove hidden biases where possible, but we also need to be cognizant of some of those biases to BE successful.
> Society is biased, and universities prepare students to be successfull in the real world.
So, if any bias, they should admit with counter-to-general-society biases, since those who satisfy the biases of the general society don’t need preparation.
(Unless the goal is to just appear to be preparing people for success while doing nothing, in which case having biases aligned with those of the general society is the ideal strategy: pick the people that were going to succeed no matter what, and claim credit for preparing them.)
> pick the people that were going to succeed no matter what, and claim credit for preparing them.
I do think this is what lots of schools do. I mean, "the best people available" will be roughly identical with "the pool of people that contains the highest fraction of those who would succeed no matter what". And if your alumni are successful, then you claim credit. Why not? (I've occasionally seen people attempt to calculate "value added", but completely accounting for selection effects is difficult.)
And, by the way, just because someone would have succeeded no matter what doesn't mean you can't increase their success. It's plausible that some highly-driven highly-competent genius would have ended up becoming a top engineer going to school X, but would have co-founded a billion-dollar company going to school Y, due to some combination of getting a somewhat better education and meeting the right people. So the value proposition may be real.
I think standardized tests are better than no tests, but how do you weight the test scores to avoid the situation where you have one person who devotes their life to only studying for the SAT and does well, versus a person who can barely study for the SAT because they're, I don't know, working a job or helping raise their siblings, and only does marginally worse than the person who devoted their life to it?
You’re describing an edge case which will arguably prevent the imaginary second person from succeeding in college even if they get accepted.
Instead we should leave criteria merit based and invest in social programs that give the high school student in question ability to be a student instead of a parent and caregiver
It's probably not an edge case, considering that East Asians are the most likely to attend SAT prep classes, and also the group that does the best on the SAT[0].
Yes, I guess we should completely reinvent American society to make it better, but in the meanwhile, tweaking college admissions standards seems like an okay stop gap measure. We should also work to systemically eliminate homelessness and hunger, but that doesn't mean we should be shutting down shelters and soup kitchens in the meanwhile.
the edge case i meant was the second person:
"person who can barely study for the SAT because they're, I don't know, working a job or helping raise their siblings, and only does marginally worse than the person who devoted their life to it"
The circumstances of this imaginary person would prevent that from succeeding in college if they are accepted and we should be able to attack the circumstances that prevent highschool students from being the best student they can with social programs, instead of moving away from merit-based college acceptance criteria.
Their circumstances are not conducive to any kind of learning whether before or during college and should be addressed instead of getting rid of merit-based college admissions
Assuming "marginally worse" with a good score, that probably doesn't affect their admissions chances a lot unless they're right on the cusp. In fact, all the other stuff they don't have time to do probably affects their chances more--which is actually an argument for the SAT.
wow require. they are not messing around. I am guessing test-optional has not worked, either because now admittees who fail to submit test scores are not up to par, or test-optional hurts low-SES students who may not be able to participate in expensive extracurriculars or 'character building'.
One of the pretext that ivies are using can be summed up by Brown's statement:
"Further, the data suggested unintended adverse outcomes of test-optional policies in the admissions process itself, potentially undermining the goal of increasing access. The committee was concerned that some students from less-advantaged backgrounds were choosing not to submit scores under the test-optional policy, when doing so could actually increase their chances of being admitted."
If you believe that, I have a bridge you might want to buy...
True, wasn't this move away from meritocracy dictated by the nonsensical critical race theory? Academia and its policies should be driven by science and not feelings. It's a good sign that they turned around on this.
> True, wasn’t this move away from meritocracy dictated by the nonsensical critical race theory?
No, this was dictated by exigencies of the COVID pandemic.
Critical race theory doesn’t dictate any policies.
> Academia and its policies should be driven by science and not feelings.
All policies are driven by feelings; science can tell you what is, and how to achieve a given goal, but it takes values/preferences – which, ultimately, are feelings – to have goals in the first place.
Just imagine, the leaders in charge of running one of the world's most prestigious academic institution are collectively less intelligent about this than a majority of HN opinion that knew dropping test scores was a stupid idea...
Harvard won't admit it, but I think it's likely that when schools like Dartmouth and Yale reinstated the SAT or ACT for admissions, Harvard did not want to look less academically selective than them.
There seems to be quite a bit of outrage against the idea that merit doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.
Let's consider the times when these institutions have had meritocratic admissions. What exactly have the meritorious students from these institutions contributed to society? The primary accomplishment is that they've engineered a corporate take over of society. The 2008 financial crisis, the tech driven surveillance society, all came from the talented minds of the merited elite.
So it is any surprise that there is support for the idea that merit is a meaningless idea? The gifted class hasn't made life any better for the rest of the society.
Then let's try something simpler. What were the test scores of Linus Torvalds? Which gatekeeper certified that he was qualified enough to do engineering at the level he has done?
A McKinsey consultant got there through meritocracy, but they will likely be working on something that makes life miserable for people, whereas someone working on an FOSS project will likely make life better for people. As a measure of usefulness to society, meritocracy, as determined by test scores, or career achievements is useless.
But how do you suppose that putting people with less academic merit in those positions will create better outcomes? On one hand there is the lived experience of being in the underclass, which might cause someone to be less supportive of tech authoritarianism from the consumer surveillance industry. On the other hand personal benefit fuck-you-got-mine is a strong attractor regardless of someone's past, and I'd think that more "privileged" people could be more independent and better at pulling in a different direction than the overall group behavior.
> But how do you suppose that putting people with less academic merit in those positions will create better outcomes?
It won't and that's the point. We should stop wasting our childhoods chasing meaningless standardized tests because the rationale for the tests is built on a lie. You can randomly pick people to run corporations and we won't be any worse off.
Meritocracy is a lot like how Winston Churchill described democracy: the worst of all systems, until you consider the alternatives. What’s your alternative? Hereditary aristocracy?
Considering the biggest predictor of academic success is wealth, it's difficult to square admissions to top schools as a "meritocracy". The root of the problem here is the vast wealth inequality, and the way schools are funded via property taxes — something with a lot of problems and bias on its own.
One way to address some of this is to properly fund all public schools so academic success isn't largely a tossup of where one's parents could afford to live. Trying to correct for this at the admissions level is a divisive and bandaid solution.
> the biggest predictor of academic success is wealth
Perhaps the better way to think of wealth is as a proxy for intelligent, conscientious parents who care about educating their children. That is, the same qualities that make someone more likely to become wealthy are also qualities that promote academic success, not that wealth causes academic success.
> properly fund all public schools
Some of the worst-performing public schools in the nation are funded quite well, and the US nears the top per-student spending around the world[0], well above the OECD average. There is no amount of funding that can supplant parents who value education and a culture that values education.
>Perhaps the better way to think of wealth is as a proxy for intelligent, conscientious parents who care about educating their children.
That just doesn't line up with reality. In the U.S. the vast majority of wealth accumulation is in the form of homeownership [1] — Which has a stark and undeniable racial divide of which we're still seeing consequences today. Specifically racist zoning laws and redlining by banks that refused to give loans to PoC.
A lot of these laws are still being enforced today (i.e. 5,000sqft minimum lot sizes and huge setbacks requiring the purchase of lots of unproductive land that less wealthy people can afford).
Now, during the course of these discussions someone usually brings up a 'model minority' that's succeeding academically, and I'll agree that there's a cultural aspect to this as well. However, if they also own their homes disproportionately to other minorities, they're benefiting from an inequitable system that's still in place.
I'm not trying to reduce anyone's academic success and hard work down to a matter of money, there are lots of successful people despite their obstacles. But we can't pretend the system is setup to reward everyone solely on merit.
The US has a notoriously terrible social safety net compared to peer countries. The "worst-performing public schools" are using their money to provide food, transportation, healthcare, and counseling services in addition to academics.
There's a lot more to this issue than school funding, but teaching as a profession should pay for a solid middle class life to attract the best talent. Could we at least agree on that?
Modern society has problems, and they should be addressed. Yet there will always be issues to address, problems to resolve.
Yet these schools exist in one of the freest societies that ever existed, with untold riches in terms of health care, prosperity, and quality of life.
Ask someone from 1800AD about antibiotics, vaccines , cars, computers, electronics and electricity. The advantages of a modern state are astonishing, and all come at the feet of modern universities.
Heck, metoo, the woke movement none of that could have ever existed without decades of courts ruling on the rights of the individual. Quite literally the woke movement's mocked boomer narrative was astonishing, as the woke movement would have never been given room to breath in 1930.
Boomers enabled the woke movement.
We have our society, those that came before us to thank, not belittle. And yes, we have our own things to fix.
Either people are stupid to know or too evil to pretend not to know that the more complex a rule is, the easier it is to game it. So it is much easier for the wealthy to game the essay writing or whatever that "holistic admission".
Besides, SAT is a filter. SAT is objectively easy compared to the college entrance exams in other countries. Those who do well in SAT may not do well in school, but those who do badly in SAT or CAT are certainly academically inept, at least probabilistically. Of course, there are some corner cases, such as for the unfortunately students in those miserable Baltimore schools, where the median GPA is 0.5 (or 1.5?).
It's so sad that the US got into this Animal Farm shit, and far too many people cheered for it.
They’re still only marginally useful because the SAT is too easy. Harvard has enough applicants with 99 percentile scores to fill their incoming class multiple times over.
But if they're not looking at test scores, then they start admitting 80th-percentile applicants without knowing it. Applicants that got help writing their personal statements, or padded their time in high school with the "right" extracurriculars. The ones who have a 4.5 GPA because grades don't mean shit anymore.
Plenty of high school graduates have the 4.5 GPA and a snazzy personal statement and all the right "add-ons", but aren't actually equipped to succeed at Harvard. The SAT is plenty useful to evaluate that.
maybe these gigantic institutions with billions and billions in endowment and reputation should use those resources to expand access to their school instead keeping access as low as possible
That's a feature, not a bug. If everyone has a Harvard degree, nobody has a Harvard degree. A lot of the worth of one derives from its exclusivity, and the cream of the crop you meet there because of that exclusivity. I'd posit that the difference in the quality of the education itself received between Harvard and a good state school isn't worth talking about.
Not really - ~8500 people got 1550(99th percentile) or better on the SAT last year.
Harvard freshman class size is 1700, but there are also a number of other schools at the same tier of Harvard (off the top of my head, Princeton, MIT, U Penn, Stanford, Yale)
I'm afraid the scientific evidence is so strong, that I personally lump the "SAT scores don't predict anything!" crowd in the same bucket as the "Covid isn't real!" and "AIDS is caused by gay!" crowds.
As Harvard said in the article: yes, the tests may have some bias, but every other measure suggested so far to replace them --- especially "personal statements" --- has an even higher bias.
It's not that SAT scores don't predict anything, it's perhaps the case that the very loud signal it provides will overwhelmingly favor those with more resources.
Using the SAT as the sole or primary factor for selection means that we are going to end up widening the wealth gap over the long run.
That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be used, but that if we want to converge towards a more egalitarian society, then these institutions also need to properly weigh other factors when selecting candidates and also provide more support to students from less advantageous backgrounds and with less resources.
> It’s not that SAT scores don’t predict anything, it’s perhaps the case that the very loud signal it provides will overwhelmingly favor those with more resources.
The problem is that most of the alternative measures, which not using test scores make more prominent, also do this, some much more than test scores. Personal statements were particularly mentioned upthread, but looking at grades does this, too (and doing it in combination with looking at what classes were taken does so even more), looking at extracurriculars favors resources probably more than any other factor typically examined in admissions (though personal statements are in the running here, too.) Standardized test scores may be the least problematic factor commonly used in admissions.
I'm not in the States and have zero knowledge of the SAT and whether it's useful, but targeting an intervention at this level is simply too little too late, no matter how you slice it. If the idea is to reduce the stratification of society, you'd have to start much, much earlier and pour far more resources. My guess is ultimately that this is why these types of interventions are popular, they don't cost much.
The problem with weighing other factors is that they are the ones that rich people can trivially fake. An SAT score at least requires the applicant to actually perform good on the test. You can buy tutoring but it won't fix your nepo baby failson's terrible grades in the same way that, say, having a really good essay and a bunch of impressive-looking extracurriculars can.
If your goal is egalitarianism, however, the best response would be to abolish Harvard, not have them implement the Progressive Stack.
The thing is, Harvard education is not measurably higher quality than other schools. You can get a very similar quality of education elsewhere. The real reason why you go to Harvard is specifically for access to the social structures of America's rich and powerful. Every rich family is sending their kids to Harvard specifically because every other rich family does the same, creating a nexus of social capital[0].
Now, if you're a poor or middle class kid that manages to get into Harvard, that's great, you have the ear of a bunch of rich kids all at once. The SATs were the vehicle by which that happened. Intelligence does not accumulate like social capital does, so even an imperfect measure of intelligence makes the pool of accepted applicants more egalitarian. If you want to replace the SATs, you need a selective measure that rich people can't readily optimize for, and by Goodhart's law, such measures are extremely hard to find.
So what would "abolishing" Harvard mean, exactly? I don't mean literally winding down the school's business entities or nationalizing it (mostly), but breaking the social norms that make rich people all cluster in one educational gated community away from everyone else. Harvard won't break them themselves, because it brings in tons of money from rich donors who want to don't-call-it-a-bribe the admissions department. But what if we forced Harvard - and every other university - to share one giant pool of applicants? You'd have a unified admissions system that took every applicant and randomly assigned them to 3 to 5 different schools' applicant pools. Students could then pick from the acceptances they got or try again if they didn't get any. This incredibly invasive change to how university admissions exist would have to be done for the sole purpose of keeping all the rich kids from just picking Harvard.
[0] In general, social capital precedes all other forms of control, including capitalism and politics. See also: The Tyranny of Structurelessness.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
MIT has a limited number of seats to receive possibly the best education in the world. The idea that anything but merit and quantitative assessment of such should be used to fill those seats is self destructive to a society. Next they should remove all collection of race information, just as it is illegal in France to ask your race or ethnicity for anything. If it means 75% of the seats are Asian-Americans so be it. The overall cost to society of not educating the most skilled for the future far outweighs any so called diversity virtues. Sorry to be blunt. I’m expecting the downvotes and perhaps even ban/block/retaliation for my “incorrect” views. I don’t care anymore if you are offended by opinions that don’t agree with your belief systems.
I guess I just don't agree that a university--and its students--is best-served by just lazily admitting the top scores on a single standardized test and ignoring everything else. But, yes, that's probably a different belief system than the one you have.
Obviously not only a single standardize test is needed, your projects, extracurriculars, all relevant to a cold quantitative analysis of a candidate’s ability to perform and receive the highly advanced education. Do you need someone’s racial and ethnic background as part of that process? why? for what purpose? diversity of backgrounds is supposedly the value it provides, I understand the argument but don’t agree with it.
A lot of the things you list are not "cold quantitative analysis." I don't have strong feelings about considering racial/ethnic data but I expect a lot of qualitative factors would end up being racial/ethnic proxies.
Let's say you have a Black student and a white student that have the exact same everything on their application. I feel like it makes sense to admit the Black student, because it is very likely that they have persevered more.
It’s an awfully slippery slope. I understand the idea and it’s good intentions, however it requires calculation of “perseverance” and comparison between humans in a very difficult way.
You better do some extra digging to figure out who is more qualified by some metric, otherwise you incentivize "oh well they look too similar, let's go with our preferred race" more often.
One could argue that my lack of grades is a good reason for me to not get into a good school. But without the tests, I definitely wouldn't have. I shutter to think how my career/life would be different had I not gotten into a decent school.
So, at least for me, I have a real affection for these kinds of tests. And, as far as I know, I think the US is like the only place that doesn't use tests as the primary decider for higher education.
It seems like the move away from testing was "not based on science". Though it was sometimes couched that way. I'm glad to see sanity (and science) prevail. But it all seems very fragile to me right now.