Applications Surged After Colleges Started Ignoring Standardized Test Scores (nbcnews.com) 187
What happened when college admissions offices started ignoring the standardized test scores? NBC News asked college administrators like Jon Burdick, Cornell's vice provost for enrollment:
When the health crisis closed testing sites in 2020, four of Cornell's undergraduate colleges decided to go test optional, meaning students could submit a test score if they thought it would help them, but didn't have to. Three of Cornell's colleges adopted test-blind policies, meaning admissions officers wouldn't look at any student's scores. The effects were immediate, Burdick said. Like many other colleges and universities, Cornell was inundated with applications — roughly 71,000 compared to 50,000 in a typical year. And the new applications — particularly those that arrived without test scores attached — were far more likely to come from "students that have felt historically excluded," Burdick said.
The university had always looked at many factors in making admissions decisions, and low test scores were never singularly disqualifying, Burdick said. But it became clear that students had been self-rejecting, deciding not to apply to places like Cornell because they thought their lower SAT scores meant they couldn't get in, he said. Other colleges also saw a similar surge in applications.... At Cornell, managing the surge in applications wasn't easy, Burdick said. The university hired several admissions officers and about a dozen part-time application readers — paid for in part by the additional application fees....
In the end, Cornell enrolled a more diverse class, including a nearly 50 percent increase in the share of first-generation college students. "It showed me that these students, given the opportunity, can show really impressive competitive credentials and get admitted with the test barrier reduced or eliminated," Burdick said.
Research on colleges that went test optional years ago shows that students admitted without test scores come from more diverse backgrounds and do about as well in their classes once they arrive as peers who did submit test scores.
The university had always looked at many factors in making admissions decisions, and low test scores were never singularly disqualifying, Burdick said. But it became clear that students had been self-rejecting, deciding not to apply to places like Cornell because they thought their lower SAT scores meant they couldn't get in, he said. Other colleges also saw a similar surge in applications.... At Cornell, managing the surge in applications wasn't easy, Burdick said. The university hired several admissions officers and about a dozen part-time application readers — paid for in part by the additional application fees....
In the end, Cornell enrolled a more diverse class, including a nearly 50 percent increase in the share of first-generation college students. "It showed me that these students, given the opportunity, can show really impressive competitive credentials and get admitted with the test barrier reduced or eliminated," Burdick said.
Research on colleges that went test optional years ago shows that students admitted without test scores come from more diverse backgrounds and do about as well in their classes once they arrive as peers who did submit test scores.
Low Bar (Score:3, Insightful)
They can "get admitted with the test barrier reduced or eliminated". Similarly, I can compete at the olympics if there are no barriers to my doing so.
Re:Low Bar (Score:5, Informative)
The bit which really matters is this (from the last link in the summary)
If it's true that higher SAT scores sometimes predict less able (more stupid?) people then using a high SAT score to let people in is actually lowering the bar.
Now, I'd say that I'm surprised by the result, to the extent that I'd normally suspect that there's something wrong with it. This wouldn't be the first time I've seen some garbage science in social sciences, if my gut instinct is right, however I've got no right to criticise it until I find a clear piece of scientific evidence that shows this is wrong. They've put their science out there and I haven't. Before we have any right to criticise this, we need hard evidence that SAT scores are in some way linked to future academic achievement.
Re:Low Bar (Score:5, Insightful)
Children from families with enough income or time to spend on SAT tutors, SAT prep classes or SAT exercises will have better chances at high scores.
Re:Low Bar (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the "wealth" effect of SAT tutors / prep classes is highly overstated. You can buy an SAT prep book for $20-$30. These contain the same "tips and tricks" that any fancy course will teach you. Even poor people can afford that. Kids get out of it what they put into it, so at the end of the day, it's still mostly based on motivation and intelligence. And learning/prepping directly from a book is very analogous to what one does in college so ones success in doing so is probably a good predictor.
When I was in high school I spent a ton of time and effort prepping for the SAT and got a fairly good score. My siblings, despite having access to the same books/courses, put zero effort into preparation and as a result received mediocre to poor scores. You can't teach motivation or intelligence.
Re:Low Bar (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the "wealth" effect of SAT tutors / prep classes is highly overstated. You can buy an SAT prep book for $20-$30. These contain the same "tips and tricks" that any fancy course will teach you. Even poor people can afford that. Kids get out of it what they put into it, so at the end of the day, it's still mostly based on motivation and intelligence.
Arguably the largest effect wealth has on SAT scores is how easily it can compensate for a lack of motivation. Just look at the difference between taking a class in programming and taking a Coursera course. Most students could perform just as well on an aptitude test after taking both courses, but they don't. Students in a physical class with a teacher, who grades them and reports those grades to a school (and the kid's parents), do far better on average. Just paying for courses has a huge effect, even if from the same institution. A free Coursera class will have a 2-6% completion rate, while paid classes have a 45-55% completion rate (articles found in a quick google search varied widely).
So a student who has access to actual tutors is going to do far better than most students given access to the same educational material for free, regardless of their level of motivation.
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When I was in high school, spending a lot of time and effort preparing for the ACT/SAT wasn't even on my radar. Things have changed over the years.
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I think the "wealth" effect of SAT tutors / prep classes is highly overstated. You can buy an SAT prep book for $20-$30. These contain the same "tips and tricks" that any fancy course will teach you. Even poor people can afford that. Kids get out of it what they put into it, so at the end of the day, it's still mostly based on motivation and intelligence. And learning/prepping directly from a book is very analogous to what one does in college so ones success in doing so is probably a good predictor.
When I was in high school I spent a ton of time and effort prepping for the SAT and got a fairly good score. My siblings, despite having access to the same books/courses, put zero effort into preparation and as a result received mediocre to poor scores. You can't teach motivation or intelligence.
Some of that is wealth, as the other comment mentioned a tutor or class is much more effective than a book, but another factor is the cultural networks that often go along with wealth (even middle class wealth).
Parents talk, they talk about how their kids are doing, what colleges they apply to, how they apply, and how to prep their kids for the SAT.
For instance, consider kids who do come from serious wealth when it comes to their professional lives. A lot of them make a lot of money with various investments
Re: Low Bar (Score:3)
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Re: Low Bar (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes that is true. But I guarantee every other method you come up with can also be games by the wealthy. The wealthy can afford to fund the loophole methods. The wealthy can afford all the extracurricular things. They can, and do, hire a consultant to advise them.
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UK's A Level exams remain a serious test (Score:2)
Taken by almost all university candidates at the end of your school career, these are a proper examination of your knowledge of the material you've studied for the past 2 years. Your success in that studying is used to determine which universities you will get a place in.
Whilst rich parents may be able to game the exams a little bit, on the whole they are a good measure of how much academic ability you have. In practice university admissions personnel may adjust your target (you get a conditional offer at
Re:Low Bar (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, I'd say that I'm surprised by the result, to the extent that I'd normally suspect that there's something wrong with it.
MIT for example claims that "[their] ability to accurately predict student academic success at MIT is significantly improved by considering standardized testing -- especially in mathematics" [mitadmissions.org]. Maybe Cornell isn't teaching in a way for which high ability demonstrated by testing is relevant but MIT is? Or maybe Cornell's results are garbage as you say, that's also possible.
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Or maybe MIT makes no effort to assist students who didn't get the best mathematics education before arriving and Cornell does.
From MIT's own page:
In other words, there is no path through MIT that does not rest on a rigorous foundation in mathematics, and we need to be sure our students are ready for that as soon as they arrive
It's a blatant fuck-you to anyone who went to a high school with a poor mathematics curriculum and couldn't afford tutors to ;provide them with a better education.
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I started off high school in a typically low-resource rural public high school, then got to go to a better school with college level courses, and I am thankful that on various fronts they caught what was missing and I benefited from a few 'catch up' classes, as the school decided it was their job to make up for lacking curriculum rather than the student's fault. So after losing roughly a semester to 'remedial' (comparitively speaking) courses, I got to the more rigorous and useful coursework.
Re:Low Bar (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a blatant fuck-you to anyone who went to a high school with a poor mathematics curriculum and couldn't afford tutors to ;provide them with a better education.
It's not that simple. The solution has to come from improving the education in high schools, not from having MIT accept students with insufficient math background.
If accepted, a student who comes with insufficient math preparation may fail in their classes that require math knowledge. This certainly does not help the student in the long run.
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Re:Low Bar (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a blatant fuck-you to anyone who went to a high school with a poor mathematics curriculum and couldn't afford tutors to provide them with a better education.
I have talent for math, so my case isn't typical, as I never needed tutors, or even much studying, to get consistent A scores in high school math and physics classes. Math for me always simply fun. But one thing I noticed over the decades since is how poor what we were taught was, with teachers themselves barely grasping what they were talking about.
On the flip side, once YouTube became a thing it was as if finding an entire new world. Suddenly there were EXTRAORDINARILY GOOD teachers for a change, teaching it all properly, didactically, and with full knowledge of what they're talking about. With these tutors aren't necessary, except the problem now becomes students having enough interest to watch such videos.
Re:Low Bar (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a fuck-you, it's MIT stating that they expect a certain level of preparedness for their courses. If someone wasn't prepared by their high school but for whatever reason feel compelled to get into MIT then they need to find another way to learn these skills.
This is one of the primary functions of junior/community college.
Setting Up for Failure (Score:3)
It's a blatant fuck-you to anyone who went to a high school with a poor mathematics curriculum and couldn't afford tutors to ;provide them with a better education.
So you would be happier if they admitted you anyway, have you fail because you can't handle the level of maths required and then end up with a large tuition bill and still no degree? Setting someone up for an expensive failure is not better than saying no in the first place.
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[MIT requiring a strong foundation in mathematics] a blatant fuck-you to anyone who went to a high school with a poor mathematics curriculum and couldn't afford tutors to ;provide them with a better education.
albert einstein surely had more tutors than any of us then.
Re: Low Bar (Score:3)
MIT admitting people lacking a core skill will on aggregate produce poor results. Students who could achieve good results elsewhere in perfectly respectable colleges will fail at MIT.
You can't do remedial work at the top end of education anymore than a top football team could take in 40 year-old obese guys. Where ability is there, it's something to be addressed in high school and earlier.
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From the link you provided:
despite what some people infer from our statistics, we [MIT] do not consider an applicant’s scores at all beyond the point where preparedness has been established as part of a multifactor analysis.
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Re:Low Bar (Score:4, Interesting)
This seems to be bogus. If students without tests "did about as well" then you don't know their test scores to determine correlation.
As for those with test scores, (a) podunk colleges will let a potted plant graduate, (b) any college that uses test scores in admissions is not going to have a huge range of scores in its students, so variations in scores are not likely to mean much, and (c) any college that lowers its admission standards inevitably lowers its instruction and graduation standards in order to avoid charges of systemic racism.
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> This seems to be bogus ...
"Test scores, on the other hand, routinely fail to pass standard tests of statistical significance when included with high school GPA in regressions predicting graduation rates, especially when we leave the realm of the most highly selective public universities ... the remaining incremental predictive power of the SAT/ACT scores disappears entirely when we add controls for the high school attended, whereas the predictive value of the high school GPA increases. (Bowen, Chingos,
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In the 90's and 2000's, colleges were adamant that test scores were the best predictors of college success. Given that 20 years later, the social sciences are finding just the opposite, it seems that we ought to remove the word "science" from the social sciences. To be that wrong for so long about something so easily tested and verified calls into question the validity of the entire discipline.
Over the past decade, I have been slowly coming to the conclusion that the real purpose of a college education
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It's clear you haven't had kids experience the dystopia that is the modern college financing system. Kids that you'd want going to school - generally those from well-educated/well-off families and smart enough to do well in college - get _jack shit_ in scholarship-type financial aid except for maybe from their home state school, whereas schools throw money at those students with family incomes are under $120k/year.
Seriously. If you're a re
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I had found in College, the toughest classes I had to take were at the 100 level. (Even in my junior and senior years). Colleges seem to delight in having a high fail out rate. At the 200's and up. (including the 500's and 600's master classes) the Classes were more intended in actually teaching information, vs finding way to trick students into failing out our, figuring that college wasn't for them.
The real issue is the college/university system is in a lot of conflict with itself.
Their Marketing Depart
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Amazing! (Score:4, Insightful)
Think what would happen if they made it free!
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From the summary, which you clearly didn't read before jumping at the chance to dump on US students.
Research on colleges that went test optional years ago shows that students admitted without test scores come from more diverse backgrounds and do about as well in their classes once they arrive as peers who did submit test scores.
and they have an TRADES Track for people as well (Score:2)
and they have an TRADES Track for people as well.
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Yep. The Mumbai diploma mills.
Pay their diploma fee, get a diploma.
It's worth less than the effort used to wipe your ass with it. But hey.
Simply handing out participation trophy diplomas doesn't mean you get a quality education or are a usable work prospect.
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> Some universities have no fees & no entry requirements. All you have to do is turn up & keep up.
Good point. What are their graduation rates like?
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The have entrance requirements, Abitur, Matura, the equivalent of a high level high school diploma.
Fools (Score:5, Insightful)
Standardized testing is the least racist way to admit students. If people of a certain race or background are not scoring high, it means they were not taught properly in K-12 education. Standardized testing reveals which regions of the country need resources K-12 (ohh, you don't wanna fix THAT, do you?). In fact, the less you rely on test scores .. the more elitist students you will get. You will get the rich kids who could afford extra-curricular activities and training. You will get the ones who can spin a good story about how they went to a protest or shit like that. Also, you will take away the incentive to study the hard subjects. Tell me something, if you needed brain surgery .. would hire your brain surgeon based on whether he faced hardships in life? or will you hire based on "this dude will not turn me into a vegetable"?
Imagine there is a kid who wants to be a brain surgeon, he knows his shit quite well. .. Without a standardized test, how does he prove that he knows anything? how does he prove that he is in the top 1% of kids that can learn/memorize the shit you need to know to do brain surgery. I mean, you do want brain surgeons to be the best we have, don't you?
Fix the schools, fix the parental attitudes .. don't bitch about standardardized tests. Bitch about the people who told you studies aren't important. Bitch about the parents who didn't make you learn shit.
Re:Fools (Score:5, Informative)
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Standardized testing is the least racist way to admit students. If people of a certain race or background are not scoring high, it means they were not taught properly in K-12 education. Standardized testing reveals which regions of the country need resources K-12 (ohh, you don't wanna fix THAT, do you?). In fact, the less you rely on test scores .. the more elitist students you will get.
However, arguments about the bias of such tests aside, if there are other ways to judge academic readiness that encourages more applicants, is it not worthwhile, if it does not negatively impact the academic quality of the student body? The TFA points out allowing non-submission increased diversity, so it would seem the elitist argument does not stand up. As for academic impact, the illustrative point from TFA:
The 2014 research revealed that—when given the option at one of those 33 TOP institutions
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Everyone knows the K-12 system is broken. What do you do in the meantime? Completely exclude an entire generation of people who were unfortunate enough to live in a bad school district?
Like, in Canada, maybe what you're saying would work. (Though we don't rely on standardized tests as much here; one's entrance is based on their high school grades, with the expectation that the schools are sufficiently standardized that they provide a good baseline to judge everyone.)
But in vast swathes of the USA, you see (
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"Standardized testing is the least racist way to admit students... Standardized testing reveals which regions of the country need resources"
Your second claim is orthogonal to your first. You then proceed to support the second claim but not the first.
If we stipulate your second claim and then act on it, that address future students but still does not tell us what to do about students now. Should we just write off good students who wound up in a bad school?
Colleges do not admit lower schools, they do not admi
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Everything you say is right: standardized test scores are the most objective standard we have. Race, eye color, height, and all the other irrelevant attributes have no influence.
Someone who does not have the necessary knowledge and/or intelligence to succeed, should not be let in anyway. All you are doing is setting them up to fail. Or, worse, you will "pass them through", handing them a paper qualification that they do not deserve. Which then casts doubt on all the other, qualified people who received a
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Well said, sir. Okay, maybe not so well said, but you make good points. I would suggest fewer uses of the word "shit" ... but there you are ...
Re: Fools (Score:2)
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Imagine you were a coach choosing people for the track team, and some kid moves in and without practice runs almost as fast as the kids you've been training every day for months. Wouldn't you be interested? Not because of pity, but because there's every chance tha
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If people of a certain race or background are not scoring high, it means they were not taught properly in K-12 education.
Not necessarily. It might mean that their parents do not care about education. Or, it might mean that as a class, they are less suited to the white man's education system. Or, it might mean that as a class, they have lower aptitude for what goes on in schools.
Then there is also a question of equity. If to be "taught properly" for student of group X costs 10 times what it does to be "taught properly" for student of group Y, is this fair either to group Y or to the taxpayer?
In fact, bad schools are bad be
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Standardized testing is the least racist way to admit students.
They don't want a less racist way to admit students. They want a student body representative of the population. Even if that means creating different standards for different groups.
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> In reality, if there are gaps in a student's knowledge they can be filled.
Look up "McNamara's Morons", a Vietnam era project to fill the ranks of US military with men with IQ's lower than 83. It was a very dangerous disaster. The idea that less capable students can master higher skills is fantasy for people who've neve taught real lessons to a a class of mixed talent.
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The admissions process is often not permitted to select students with the highest capability or likelihood to succeed. I't sonsidered biased and even federally prohibited if those factors include race, gender, gender identity, religion, naitonality, marital status, without physical handicaps, although every one of those correlate strongly with likelihood of success in college. It's understandable to extend opportunities to those whose academic careers have been hindered by such factors, but there are cases
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These kinds of issues don't come up in other countries, because they try to fix the system as a whole. In the US you have too many people trying to stop things getting better, so everyone ends up doing what they can and it being resolved by these kinds of lawsuits.
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Whatever makes you think these issues don't occur in other nations? In the UK, the tests are called "O Levels" and "A Levels". Japan, and China, have very intensive training for students to get the scores they need for college admissions. It's balanced in modern societies with desires to "level the playing field".
teach the test / cram for the test does = good stu (Score:2)
teach the test / cram for the test does = good students per say.
Now it may trun out people who are good at test taking but not good at useing that knowledge.
Do we need more Paper MCSE people? or people can learn and use knowledge but may be bad at test cramming?
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The issue in Japan is that because some people started going to cram schools, now everyone has to in order to compete. In fact the exams are rubbish anyway. The English exam, for example, is focused on correctness rather than a person's general ability to communicate. Students are advised to write extremely simple, short sentences from a set they memorise, because even if they have lived abroad and are fluent things like spelling mistakes or common but technically incorrect grammar gets them marked down.
In
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Universities in the USA also have classes to "help you come up too speed." A standardized test, which is used by every country that produces top professionals, gives you pre-knowledge of exactly what work you need to do to get into a good college. Without standardization it is quite arbitrary. People will give up on even trying. Let's say the NBA chose players randomly, rather than by your metrics, would anyone practice their basketball skills? Would anyone try to improve their free throw skills? Also, espe
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False. The UK absolutely does have standardized testing. It is called the GCE A-level. I don't know the exact terminology, but no decent college is going to take you if you haven't done those and scored high. In addition many universities have their own entrance exam, which quite frankly is worse than a standardized test if you think about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://www.ox.ac.uk/admission... [ox.ac.uk]
https://www.undergraduate.stud... [cam.ac.uk]
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Correlation does not equal causation, so quit worrying about admissions not including improper correlations like race, sex, religion, etc.
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What I have seen, anecdotally, is that if a black kid studied 4 to 6 hours every day the same as asian kids they too will score in the top 99.9% percentile. If the "race was inferior" how do you explain that there are black doctors and mathematicians? It should be impossible for any black person to do multi-variable calculus. Everyone who puts in the necessary study time can do it. It is only a matter of being motivated, or sometimes forced, to do it.
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If the "race was inferior" how do you explain that there are black doctors and mathematicians? It should be impossible for any black person to do multi-variable calculus.
I'm not going to make any statement about race, but someone's gotta point out that your statement is analogous to "If height mattered in basketball, people under 6 ft would never dunk!"
Re: Fools (Score:2)
You do realize that the Eastern Hemisphere contains Europe, Africa and Asia along with 82% of the Workd population?
If we limit the discussion to China it has a tertiary education rate which is slightly above the OECD average (maybe less older students). Around 40%. So it is not like only the most gifted students get that opportunity. They are simply building a broad well educated population although their education system still has some shortcomings compared to western education systems (critical thought fo
Is that a good thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it a good thing to have many more applicants than your fixed capacity to take in? Since you always only end up with the same number of new students, so the answer is "yes only if you end up with overall better students", you could easily just as well end up with worse students.
But now that they have removed the only objective measure (regardless of how useful it was), there is no way to answer the question, until years later when those students graduated, and even then, any measure would be hard to separate from other factors. So, good job for these colleges to make a change that cannot be measured, they can pat themselves on a job well done because no one can challenge them.
But, one obvious downside is now the colleges need to spend much more effort to decide which students to accept, and many students have to spend more effort to apply for more colleges. And why is that? When colleges used test scores as a criteria, most students could practically judge which colleges would likely accept them based on their own scores, and could thus quickly make a shortlist of colleges to apply.
Now, with no test scores to guide them, most students have to take a scattershot approach to apply to as many colleges as feasible so as to both maximize the number of offers they can get, so they can choose the best among them.
This is the same (broken) approach HR departments take to hiring, which resulted in job hunters spamming as many companies as possible, it did not result in better fit between jobs and applicants, it only resulted in resume spamming services. If colleges continues this practice, we can look forward to "college application services" soon to help students to apply to "hundreds of colleges by filling in just one form", and colleges getting flooded with applications they have no resource to handle. Then, of course, those college application services will turn around to "help" colleges filter applicants (using keywords just like broken the HR hiring process).
Also, look forward to see more corruption in college applications, since there is no way you can tell if any student was accepted based on merit, or was it based on their dad's "donations". Such corruption, of course, amplifies social inequality, in an already very unequal country. Good luck with that.
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"(regardless of how useful it was)"
If the measure was not useful, that means that prospective applicants were eliminating themselves before the college got to do their actual evaluation. This provides an advantage to aggressive applicants regardless of any other ability.
"This is the same (broken) approach HR departments take to hiring"
Competent hiring managers will tell you that resumes and interviews can only go so far, and at some point you just have to try people out in the actual work environment and se
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You obviously didn't read the paper. They have years of data for applicants who opted to include SAT scores and those who didn't in the same shools. They conclude that there was a small drop in mean GPAs for those who didn't submit SAT scores compared to
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fixed capacity to take in
You can hire more administrators and have a bigger endowment.
How on earth is an endowment tied to the size of the administration?
Admission is not being good at your job. (Score:5, Insightful)
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The answer is right there in the summary, if you'd bothered reading it
Research on colleges that went test optional years ago shows that students admitted without test scores come from more diverse backgrounds and do about as well in their classes once they arrive as peers who did submit test scores.
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The answer is right there in the summary, if you'd bothered reading it
No. It isn't. The OP is suggesting that metrics collected while in school do not correlate to performance in the field. Everything in the summary, including your quoted snippet, refers only to how the new free-range, grass-fed students do "about as well" in their classes and graduate about as often. If that's your only criteria, that the students stay in the field long enough to pay for a 4-6 year degree, then success! But you leave open the bigger, and perhaps more relevant question, of how long they
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But that's not the question at hand, as it's a more general issue about how well college prepares you for the corporate world.
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"about as well in their classes" doesn't mean equal outcomes If your more diverse background students on average take lower difficulty courses or less strenuous subjects.
Is the SAT biased? (Score:5, Insightful)
Alright, there are fools claiming the SAT is "biased." Rigged so that only white people can score high due to cultural bias in the questions ... Umm OK .. maybe .. but then how is in that people whose parents/background is from India and China score the highest .. by far on the SAT? They had zero exposure to white culture, yet they somehow manage to score high on these tests? I mean, seriously .. the cultural bias thing is BS. The cultural bias is that YOUR parents didn't show or tell you the importance of studying. They didn't instill a discipline of spending 4 to 6 hours every day on academics as many Asian parents do. Indian parents don't give a shit about sports (out of the entirety of India, 1.2 billion people, only one Gold medal was obtained in the 2020 Olympics), but they care about academics. So should the NBA draft Indian people because they culturally lack sports emphasis? Should a grammy be given based on the hardships someone faced rather than the music they created? THAT could be cultural, but the goal of the test is to see who can do English and Mathematics the best. If you didn't study or give enough of a shit about it to waste your time on it, then how the fuck are you supposed to do it? The reason you got a low score on the exam is you didn't give a shit about Math and studies. Or you started caring too late.
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"Rigged" is not the same as "biased".
MIT did the exact opposite thing (Score:5, Informative)
And the new applications — particularly those that arrived without test scores attached — were far more likely to come from "students that have felt historically excluded," Burdick said.
Research on colleges that went test optional years ago shows that students admitted without test scores come from more diverse backgrounds
Weirdly enough, MIT did the exact opposite thing recently [mitadmissions.org], using the same argument:
Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT.
So Cornell believes that students with no test results "can show really impressive competitive credentials" whereas MIT believe that tests "help [...] identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities". So apparently poor students simultaneously can't do well on standardized tests, and therefore are supposed to impress in other ways, but also can't impress in other way so they better do well on standardized tests to impress? My head hurts...
Re:MIT did the exact opposite thing (Score:5, Interesting)
It is worth reading through the rationale behind MIT’s decision. In particular the announcement you linked to talks about how at MIT passing a rigorous calculus programme is critical to progressing. So the SAT, with its high mathematics content is useful to determine who is well prepared enough to be successful in the MIT programme.
To me this seems logical - the university is testing for preparedness for their own programme which includes a must pass to progress exam. As far as I can see from the argument they are not saying that their decision should be universally applied.
As one of those who excel with assignments and research type work, but struggle in an examination environment, it would be great if MIT had an alternate path to prove capability and subject mastery, but it is their prerogative to structure it this way.
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Aim is to get students that can pay (Score:3)
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Not when the school makes more from investing their endowment than they do on admissions. Then the more "prestigious" the school, the better students they attract, the better later life outcomes of those students, the more they contribute back to the school and pump the endowment.
Ah, other factors, too (Score:3)
Correlation is not causation: many students took a gap year from the pandemic and are applying now. The surge will likely subside in a couple of years.
I don't understand the political agenda of the current Slashdot editors that standardized tests are bad. It's almost as if they didn't do well in school and have a chip on their shoulder. If you didn't realize the importance of tests and learn how to take them well, especially standardized tests, then you weren't paying attention. That's on you, not the rest of society.
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A friend did not get accepted from several big state universities, although her grades and effort should have made her a shoe-in. Two things happened: the standardized test cut, and that these universities are accepting FEWER students this year due to their having overbooked students last year.
It was a big shock to this girls' ego and made her question why she worked so hard. She'll be fine, but it's one of those anecdotes...
Who would have thought it? (Score:2)
Take away an entrance restriction and more people try to enter. I can see why this is news.
Once they start graduating we'll know if this worked. And by "worked" I mean "showed that their old tests were flawed".
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Once they start graduating we'll know if this worked.
The problem would be things like bloated class sizes, having to cope with a larger number of students who can't cope with the course, and a higher dropout rate.
Um, ok (Score:2)
"Purchases surge after stores stop requiring money!"
May be some downstream negative side effects, but who cares about such details ... haters!
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Did they say they aren't looking at students' secondary school marks and other academic qualifications? I must have missed that.
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LOL. You're right. Perhaps my expectations were a bit high.
I feel bad for the kids. (Score:2)
Quality testing (Score:2)
I have taken a look out of curiosity at sample questions for the LSAT, the SAT and the GRE. The LSAT seemed reasonably well structured and an attempt to find out what students knew or could reason through.
The GRE had some odd questions about the structure of the GRE test itself (IIRC something to do with the grading policy) Quite what that relevance had to anything other than "test preparation" was obscure.
The SAT seems less of an attempt to find out what students knew or could infer than it is an attempt t
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Completely unexpected. (Score:2)
If a bar stops checking IDs, I would expect business to boom.
"Fairness" is missing the boat (Score:3)
Admissions criteria is a red herring. Dropping standardize testing simply changes the mix of accepted students. Either way, a bunch of students don't get admitted. To me, it's not at all clear that denying admission to high-SAT score students is better than denying admission to low-SAT score students. Either way, someone loses. "Fairness" is in the eye of the beholder.
The correct strategy should be to enlarge the capacity of universities to admit all students to competent programs. Fortunately, the US system (as opposed to many Asian and European systems) offers a huge number of universities, junior colleges, and community colleges that essentially cover all students that want a post-secondary education.
The real problem with the American university system is not admissions at all. The problem is affordability. Ironically, admitting more low-SAT score students to "top" universities exacerbates the affordability problem without helping with the quality education problem (i.e., where I distinguish between a college degree with reputation versus a degree with quality).
Useless data (Score:2)
Whether you have 71000 or 50000 applications is irrelevant when there's only around 3500 positions available. It's the difference between 5% acceptance rate vs 7% acceptance rate. Whether they require a test score or not, it's very unlikely you'll get admitted.
Altruistic? Follow the money (Score:2)
Unis these days are a business. More students=more money. Long term damage to uni reputation is offset by short term cashflow.
The dumbest thing I've ever read. (Score:3)
***(Credentials not proven or real)