Harvard Reinstates Standardized Testing Requirement (axios.com) 84
Harvard College is reinstating the requirement for standardized testing, reversing course on a pandemic-era policy that made them optional. It follows similar moves from elite universities like Yale, Dartmouth, and MIT. Axios reports: At Harvard, the mandate will be in place for students applying to begin school in fall 2025. Harvard had previously committed to a test-optional policy for applicants through the class of 2030, which would have started in fall 2026. Most students who applied since the pandemic began have submitted test scores despite the test-optional policy, the university said.
Reviewing SAT/ACT scores as part of a student's application packet helps an admissions decision be holistic, the university said in a statement. "Standardized tests are a means for all students, regardless of their background and life experience, to provide information that is predictive of success in college and beyond," Hopi Hoekstra, a Harvard dean, said in the statement. "Indeed, when students have the option of not submitting their test scores, they may choose to withhold information that, when interpreted by the admissions committee in the context of the local norms of their school, could have potentially helped their application."
Reviewing SAT/ACT scores as part of a student's application packet helps an admissions decision be holistic, the university said in a statement. "Standardized tests are a means for all students, regardless of their background and life experience, to provide information that is predictive of success in college and beyond," Hopi Hoekstra, a Harvard dean, said in the statement. "Indeed, when students have the option of not submitting their test scores, they may choose to withhold information that, when interpreted by the admissions committee in the context of the local norms of their school, could have potentially helped their application."
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I think you missed the part of "regardless". I imagine the thinking is standardized tests will be used as a metric for accepting a smart poor kid versus rich alumni kids who get to ski in switzerland with the donors... Will it actually make a real difference on admissions? We'll see...
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I think you missed the part of "regardless". I imagine the thinking is standardized tests will be used as a metric for accepting a smart poor kid versus rich alumni kids who get to ski in switzerland with the donors... Will it actually make a real difference on admissions? We'll see...
One possibility is to compare scores of similarly located students and focus on those doing better than the average, even if their score is lower than others admitted. The assumption Is such. student overcame challenges and thus should succeed at Harvard. One challenge with taht approach is you are likely to have small populations to compare results, so average scores may be misleading since many students simply will not take teh SAT/ACT and thus you have a self selected set of data points that do not ref
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This is sort of how University of California does it. You get a spot at a UC campus (not necessarily first choice) if you're top 9% statewide, or top 9% at your local school, grade-wise. For residents anyway, out-of-state students probably have different rules. Then some other things like no grade below a C, etc. This is today, but when I was applying it was a either SAT combined scores above X, or school GPA above Y. And I definitely had at least one straight-C student in the dorms who happened to have
Re:"...regardless of background and life experienc (Score:4, Interesting)
Will the standardised test help to prevent Harvard discriminating against Asian students?
The lawsuit alleges that Harvard effectively employs quotas on the number of Asians admitted and holds them to a higher standard than whites. At selective colleges, Asians are demographically overrepresented minorities, but they are underrepresented relative to the applicant pool. Since the nineteen-nineties, the share of Asians in Harvard’s freshman class has remained stable, at between sixteen and nineteen per cent, while the percentage of Asians in the U.S. population more than doubled. A 2009 Princeton study showed that Asians had to score a hundred and forty points higher on the S.A.T. than whites to have the same chance of admission to top universities. The discrimination suit survived Harvard’s motion to dismiss last month and is currently pending.
https://www.newyorker.com/news... [newyorker.com]
Re:"...regardless of background and life experienc (Score:5, Informative)
Judge Burroughs’s opinion also addressed the striking fact that, when sending recruitment letters to potential applicants in “Sparse Country” (underrepresented states in the Harvard applicant pool), Harvard used an SAT score cutoff of 1310 for white students, 1350 for Asian American females, and 1380 for Asian American males. There were gasps in the courtroom when this evidence was revealed at trial.
https://www.newyorker.com/news... [newyorker.com]
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How do they know the race of the students? Personally, I've refused to answer that question on pretty much everything ever, because it's BS. So either the students are volunteering it without thinking about why it is problematic to do so, volunteering it because of some other advantage it provides them, or the colleges have access to the information from some other source. All three are problems, but all three have pretty obvious ways to correct them, too.
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Because most applicants do check a box on the form.
You clearly have not been burdened (Score:2)
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Racist tests and admissions / graduation rates (Score:4, Insightful)
For decades we had standardized tests as a huge component of college entry.
Then someone noticed that blacks on average score lower proving the tests are racist. So they start adding points for all sorts of non-standard test things to bring in more blacks.
Then someone notices they still don't have enough blacks so they drop test scores entirely to bring in even more blacks.
Then what? Oh yeah, they see the graduation rate for blacks drops like a rock because they're admitting people who can't handle the work (and had shitty test scores, if any, that got ignored during admissions).
Soooooo... now we go back to tests, although racist, are important, so fewer blacks will get in but graduation rates will go up.
What can we conclude:
Are tests racist? No.
Do tests help determine academic ability sufficient to correlate with successful graduation? Yes.
Is Harvard racist? Absolutely. Given limited number of spots, they give spots to less capable blacks which would have otherwise gone to Asian or Jewish students.
And if you believe tests are racist then Harvard is also racist for bringing tests back.
So here's the real problem:
Waiting until college admissions to try to fix low academic achievement among blacks is too late. Those Asian and Jewish kids were trained from early childhood to respect and desire academic achievement while black children receive the opposite message. Until that flaw in black culture is corrected, the number of blacks successfully entering and graduating from top schools will remain limited to well below population percentage no matter what else anyone tries to do about it.
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Advocating anything other than "treat everyone equally" is discrimination. If you think certain races should get special perks, then guess what, you're a racist. You treat people differently based on the color of their skin.
All the downmods and mental gymnastics in the world won't change that fact.
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Agreed.
Not all people are equal.
Some spend effort on improving themselves and can then pass tests.
I choose to respect those people more.
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Did you read the summary? After decades of complaints about racist test, Harvard has demonstrated that the tests actually do have predictive value for college success.
If the tests are racist then why is Harvard bringing them back? Because Harvard is racist? Is that really your argument?
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The snag with that ideal, is that historically everyone was not treated equally. We have unequal schools, TODAY. Schools with predominantly black or hispanic schools are underfunded compared to schools with predominantly white or asian students - even within the same city.
The ideal breaks when people whose great great grandaddy pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and went on to be a wealthy robber baron then go and tell other people "you're free now, so pull your self up by your own bootstraps and don
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Surely you have some citations to back up your rambling thoughts?
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Uh yes, did you read the summary?
Hello?
Or maybe live in the US at all?
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Uh yes, did you read the summary?
Reading is racist
Hello?
Hi
Or maybe live in the US at all?
Americans are racist and Living in America is racist.
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Mod parent up.
So here's the real problem:
Waiting until college admissions to try to fix low academic achievement among blacks is too late.
The hypothesis posited by the equity crowd is that it was the racist tests, and only the tests, that kept black Americans from succeeding in academia. Well, now we have incontrovertible proof that this was never the case. I wonder if being presented with these facts will cause social justice advocates to reevaluate their positions? (My guess would be: No.)
Those Asian and Jewish kids were trained from early childhood to respect and desire academic achievement while black children receive the opposite message. Until that flaw in black culture is corrected, the number of blacks successfully entering and graduating from top schools will remain limited to well below population percentage no matter what else anyone tries to do about it.
You're identifying culture as the main driver of unequal outcomes among racial groups in the U.S., and I think the evidence more than sugges
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"Black" culture in the U.S. is unlike anything I've seen anywhere else in the world (although it is slowly taking hold in the UK as well) and it promotes values that are antithetical to academic success and conscientiousness in general.
You don't know what "Black" culture is. You also don't know what "White" culture is, because "White" culture includes songs that promote wasting money, shooting people, and getting drunk to avoid problems.
I would not be surprised to see a new, entirely evidence-free hypothesis emerging:
Unsurprisingly, you can't recognize that your own hypotheses are evidence-free. Likely because you look for evidence to support your ideas, rather than to test your ideas (which is what a scientist would do).
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You don't know what "Black" culture is. You also don't know what "White" culture is, because "White" culture includes songs that promote wasting money, shooting people, and getting drunk to avoid problems.
Which is why "white people" in general keep shooting one another, get constantly drunk, and thus fail to achieve success and occupy hardly any of the prestigous positions in society, right?
Unsurprisingly, you can't recognize that your own hypotheses are evidence-free.
Sure, if we ignore crime statistics, are willfully blind to the fact that most gun violence is committed by urban blacks against other urban blacks using handguns, and pretend that contemporary, black rap music doesn't consistently glorify criminal behaviour and promiscuity, then my hypothesis does indeed lack any support
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"Black" culture in the U.S. is unlike anything I've seen anywhere else in the world (although it is slowly taking hold in the UK as well) and it promotes values that are antithetical to academic success and conscientiousness in general.
You don't know what "Black" culture is. You also don't know what "White" culture is, because "White" culture includes songs that promote wasting money, shooting people, and getting drunk to avoid problems.
Culture is a pain in the ass. We can all find things to describe as culture. Even racists love to invoke culture.
But since we're here, can you tell me the culture of the dark skinned men and women of African descent that I work with is?
They are in general, quite adroit. We speak the same language, we work the same problems, and while I have the final say, they are correct most of the time. Oh, just like the "white" people I work with. You can plug them into a work situation by skin color, and the result
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Black ghetto culture and the slightly higher class black victim culture are pretty damn easy to pick out in practice.
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Recent Black immigrants from Africa do much better than native Blacks.
That could still be cultural. None of the Africans I know (immigrants to Europe) have a culture that even vaguely resembles that of African-Americans.
The natives are descended from generations of slavery in which the smartest ones were killed by the masters as the smartest ones would rebel.
I just have to comment on this, because you're saying:
- rebellious slaves would disproportionally be the "smart " ones
- slavers would kill rebellious slaves
- as a result, only less "smart" slaves would procreate
- current-day African-Americans are the descendants of these less "smart" slaves
- therefore, we should expect modern blacks in the U.S. to be of lower
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Recent Black immigrants from Africa do much better than native Blacks.
That is a highly selected group. They get in because they are high achievers, and not at all representative of the average African.
In a similar way, I would expect that black American immigrants in Europe and Australia (small in number) do better than the average local. They had to be high achievers to gain residency visas.
Average IQ of African Americans is around 85, while sub-Saharan Africa countries are in the 60 to 75 range.
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Now what's the lead and other heavy metal toxicity like in most of Africa? Or the publicly available learning resources(Not schools, because American schools have steadily declined in quality since the 1970s and in the past decade have gone into a complete nosedive)?
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Now what's the lead and other heavy metal toxicity like in most of Africa?
That may be a factor in some localities, but the difference between Africa, and Africans in developed countries is mostly down to nutrition and hygiene in early childhood development. Huge improvements have been made over the last 70 years, with infant mortality plummeting, but there is a long way to go.
You can see it in stature too. Black Americans are around 10cm (4") taller than black Africans.
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Right, it's not like right up until the 60's that black marriage rates were on par with whites or that the black poverty rate was declining at a steady rate. It's not like the subsidization of failure and single parenthood, combined with the murder of the two black luminaries to be replaced by the worst kinds of con artists, the disparate effect that the drug war had on inner cities(Not because of the racisicisms but because drug deals are a lot easier to pick up on when the area they happen in is significa
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Oh absolutely! Obviously Harvard brought back test scores because Harvard is racist.
Pushing kids through is not success.
Please explain why Harvard brought back racist tests.
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Social justice should be beginning early. In preschools and kindergartens. Or earlier. Agreed that waiting until college is too late, when many students go to schools with textbooks that are decades old.
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Justice is paramount.
Once you feel the need to add an adjective, it's no longer justice. Otherwise, the adjective would be superfluous.
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Ya, but "justice" by itself fails to trigger the people who need to be triggered.
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I have zero data on this one, maybe you have something but my entirely anecdotal experience from my school years was remedial classes did help the borderline students but the ones who weren't close weren't helped. Or not helped enough. In many cases it wasn't just not having the academic background but also the attitude. (Btw, I don't know but does Harvard already have remedial classes? I'd be surprised if not).
The most extreme example of this I encountered was my next door neighbor in the dorms who took
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I am not surprised you posted as AC.
"I'm not saying it's remedial but .... it's remedial" --Harvard
https://www.harvardmagazine.co... [harvardmagazine.com]
We will just call it "transitional assistance".
Lmao@you
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I have zero data on this one, maybe you have something but my entirely anecdotal experience from my school years was remedial classes did help the borderline students but the ones who weren't close weren't helped. Or not helped enough. In many cases it wasn't just not having the academic background but also the attitude.
There are some people who really are not college material. Happens to all skin colors. And the borderline students that can be helped are helped.
Those who can't be helped just don't find college success, no matter the skin color.
There was a young white lady who wasn't accepted to college some years back. She was co-opted by some racist politicians as an example of a victim of reverse racism. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/... [usatoday.com]
Turned out that she just really didn't have the chops. It was a competitive ye
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If what you're implying is true (that anyone who couldn't otherwise graduate from Harvard could graduate with remedial classes) then literally anyone could potentially graduate from Harvard with remedial classes and everyone has exactly the same potential.
Yeah. Harvard is hard to get in to, it's not hard to graduate from.
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Some universities notice that some students aren't up to the level they need to be, and require that they take remedial classes. That is an option for Harvard.
For most colleges that I know. Indeed, I bypassed the SAT's altogether, and took placement classes in early college. I had a few things to brush up on, but after that, there ya go.
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Some universities notice that some students aren't up to the level they need to be, and require that they take remedial classes. That is an option for Harvard.
Not really, because the whole shtick of Harvard is that it is an elite university.
Re:Racist tests and admissions / graduation rates (Score:4, Interesting)
Those Asian and Jewish kids were trained from early childhood to respect and desire academic achievement while black children receive the opposite message. Until that flaw in black culture is corrected, the number of blacks successfully entering and graduating from top schools will remain limited to well below population percentage no matter what else anyone tries to do about it.
So ... some cultures are better than others?
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Those Asian and Jewish kids were trained from early childhood to respect and desire academic achievement while black children receive the opposite message. Until that flaw in black culture is corrected, the number of blacks successfully entering and graduating from top schools will remain limited to well below population percentage no matter what else anyone tries to do about it.
So ... some cultures are better than others?
Sure. But so called "black culture" is not something that all dark skinned people of African descent ascribe to. It's a subset of pop culture, which is equally bad.
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Get this through your head: there are no "less capable" students at Harvard or any other elite institution. With a rounding error, you could say that everyone graduates. Do you know what the Yale admission rate is of people that actually attend Harvard? A third. There aren't enough minorities at either institution to explain it as some anti-white or anti-Asian racism. What explains it is that these, and every other elite university, rejects enough qualif
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For decades we had standardized tests as a huge component of college entry.
Then someone noticed that blacks on average score lower proving the tests are racist. So they start adding points for all sorts of non-standard test things to bring in more blacks.
Then someone notices they still don't have enough blacks so they drop test scores entirely to bring in even more blacks.
And put Descartes before the horse.
Then what? Oh yeah, they see the graduation rate for blacks drops like a rock because they're admitting people who can't handle the work (and had shitty test scores, if any, that got ignored during admissions).
Soooooo... now we go back to tests, although racist, are important, so fewer blacks will get in but graduation rates will go up.
What can we conclude:
Are tests racist? No.
Do tests help determine academic ability sufficient to correlate with successful graduation? Yes.
Oh hell yes. There are some majors that a person cannot bullshit their way through.
If Chocolate people are not scoring as high on the tests, the idea that the tests are racist is a goto excuse for people who see racism behind every tree. Ironically making that group highly racist. Differential analysis - the Chocolate kids are not being educated as well.
And it's kinda cruel to put kids in situations they haven't been adequately prepared for. Or push them through to g
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> My best guess is that you are exactly correct, many have not been trained to go after academic success. But many have, and they seem to be successfully on their grind. Ask them what the issue is,
Black friend/project partner in my CS classes told me he checked "Caucasian" on all his college applications because he "wanted to know he earned his place at college based on who he is not his skin color". He laughed when telling me he didn't get into MIT and maybe he should have checked black on that one. W
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It's all about culture. It isn't about being black genetically. The recent African immigrants I know (mostly Ethiopian) loathe and despise black Americans and are embarrassed to be put in the same group as them. They rail hard against it and want nothing to do with them. They value hard work, education, traditional family structure, and respect for themselves and others.
Pop culture has morphed badly since I was a kid. At this point, it is bad for people regardless of skin color - although I'd surmise that it is harming people of color more.
My favorite culture shock moment was I was introduced to a scientist of African descent at a picnic. He was a French citizen.. We hit it off big time, he was brilliant as well as had a great sense of humor.
So dinner time came, and he and I were working on fried chicken and watermelon. We were demolishing that shit. Suddenly it occu
They never got to the root of the problem (Score:1)
They never got to the root of the problem, which was under-funded inner city school and inner-city culture that disproportionately affected the Black community.
The funding problem could be solved with regional taxation, but that's a hard sell to the suburban communities that were created by white-flight in the first place.
The culture problem is even harder to break. If I even mention it as a white person I'm immediately labeled racist; but I've actually had a Black person tell me it's a problem with thei
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Bullshit. It's not the funding. Above an extremely low bar that the vast, vast majority of schools which fail to meet are rural, and thus overwhelmingly white and latino in composition, funding for K-12 has ZERO correlation with performance.
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Until that flaw in black culture is corrected, the number of blacks successfully entering and graduating from top schools will remain
WTF? There is no flaw in 'black culture'. The outcomes can be described very easily with economic factors. Black people have been historically and currently disadvantaged economically. If you think people with white skin are inherently superior, all you have to do is look in backwoods Appalachia to see how extreme poverty affects people whose skin is on the lighter side.
There is no fixing this situation because to the wealthy, if you are poor, it doesn't matter what your race is, you are still just a n_i_gg
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If you think people with white skin are inherently superior ...
Me
I don't know how you could go from saying it is economics and not skin color to saying I'm a white racist supremacist because I wasn't talking about skin color at all.
You
If the shoe fits, wear it. I am guessing it does not fit, so why are you concerned about an if statement used to fully cover a point?
You'll see the same effect of ghetto culture on Asians and whites who have adopted the same shitty ghetto culture of anti-education, anti-hard work, and pro-crime.
The only real question here is how to deal with it. Many people use racism or other divisive ideas to "deal" with this and that results in lots of unnecessarily dead people along with infinite amounts of misery.
TL;DR, how do we bring them back into the fold? (hint: it begins with basic respect of an individual (without tolerance for nonsense))
Just in from Harvard scientists: (Score:4, Informative)
Water is wet and children like candy.
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College essays are written by ChatGPT. Standardized exams have a proctor. In the US, the proctors are unlikely to be bribable.
Maybe this will get rid of the idiots? (Score:2)
They've been taken over by antisemites. Perhaps with the SAT and ACT back, the idiots won't get in anymore.
Correlation, but Essays, Extracurriculars Worse (Score:2)
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The purpose of colleges is not to raise the poor. It is to educate. Elite colleges should educate the best. Some of the poor are the best. Some of the rich are the best. Those who make the most of their situations should be raised up no matter their level.
Totally anecdotal (Score:3)
Standardized tests can benefit minorities.
One of my online friends is non-white and immigrated to Australia as a child. She had a thick accent and racist teachers labeled her stupid.
Then one day she had the chance to take a standardized test. Her very high intelligence showed, and she got tracked into a selective school and moved into a high-paying career.
Study (Score:1)