The author makes a good point but focuses on schools where affirmative action is legal. In contrast, schools where it's illegal (like for example, public schools in California and Washington) are dropping the SAT because it allows them to admit "holistically" and thereby admit more "desired" ("underrepresented") minorities because a larger percentage of the application is subjective.
I find this particularly egregious because voters in both states rejected affirmative action very recently and yet the state funded administrations of these schools are going ahead with these policies.
The California situation is interesting because the universities initially fought back against the lawsuit for dropping test scores but then settled. It makes me think the administration feigned caring about the law or fairness but was actually very willing to change their admissions process. What’s more stunning is that the lawsuit that led to them dropping standardized testing requirements is based on one African American student who took the PSAT, got worse scores than he wanted, and decided that standardized testing was racist because he wouldn’t be able to get into the UC system with his scores. You can read the lawsuit (http://www.publiccounsel.org/tools/assets/files/1250.pdf) and settlement (http://www.publiccounsel.org/tools/assets/files/1588.pdf) for more details. But effectively the CA method of avoiding violating the law against affirmative action is to simply not measure merit anymore.
Another interesting development: WA rejected affirmative action once again in 2019, but recently the state passed a law requiring medical schools at state universities to set goals around increasing representation of underrepresented minorities (https://www.google.com/amp/s/mynorthwest.com/2911254/rantz-w...), which is effectively a race based cap on Asian enrollment. It seems the legislators are playing word games and trying to claim this doesn’t violate the law since it doesn’t set a “quota” but instead asks for correction of under representation.
It's interesting to compare schools where affirmative action wasn't legal and where test scores were used extensively VS schools of the same caliber in states where affirmative action is legal.
Caltech [0] and MIT [1] are a good example (both small and extremely prestigious, catering to a mostly engineering/scientific crows and recruiting from the same pool of academics outliers both nationally and internationally)
As someone who is currently thinking quite a bit about university admissions (I accepted an offer today, and made a post about it)[1], I think this is sidestepping the main concern: school overcrowding.
Being of a certain minority group, even if I had a perfect prodigal SAT + GPA combo, I would have a 15% chance of getting in. At that point there is no point to taking the SAT, if it's all random chance. [2] Note: I definitely did not have a perfect GPA, or any SAT. Getting rid of the SAT has zero effect on whether I get in.
I still agree with him overall, but until we can get to a point where if you get good grades, you get a spot at a proportionally good university, worrying about the SAT will not matter.
The article makes some good points, but I thought this was incorrect:
> The only reason to tweet a graph or chart at someone rather than to report a coefficient of determination is to obfuscate.
That isn't true. They use graphs and charts because most people don't understand what a coefficient of determination is. If you tweeted out that number, your tweet would not convince anyone because they wouldn't know what it means.
Granted, I'm not a statistician, so maybe I don't trust myself to use statistics blindly, but the first thing I do when I calculate a statistic is to look at a graph to see if the statistic is believable.
Bias: I almost aced the SAT-I (/1600) without studying but I made a dumb error on one question on the math section. GATE had zero effect (I always wondered if their primary purpose was to inventory smart kids for potentially-surreptitious scenarios and needs). I didn't even bother applying to Ivys or Pac12s where "everyone else" was going because those places didn't interest me. Other people got full/partial rides to Harvard, Yale, MIT, Berkeley, etc. but I kept looking.
---
Oh good, so merit is out the window. So what was the net good of shipping me 3 hours by bus roundtrip per day to a crappier school across town? (Waking-up before 5 am.) Oh that's right, because there were too many other white and/or Asian kids in the school a block from my house. I guess I just didn't have the right skin color. Leave it to 80's Californian affirmative action to "fix" schools with culture-shock, not fitting-in, racism, violence, and gang warfare. "We'll get you, whitey/Asian, by giving you our pain. That'll teach you not to be white/Asian." is the message it sends.
So this grand social experiment is so the kids who didn't earn admissions can get a degree they won't earn to get a job they won't earn so they won't know anything but entitlement because social justice through identity promotion fixes everything. That'll teach all those hard-working overachievers' parents to move to a different country like Finland, send China's sea turtles to go elsewhere, and destroy what was once America's greatest advantage.
Oh yeah and you know, the scientific method is "racist" (I, no shit, had a roommate applicant tell me this with a straight face recently). I became so flabbergasted I couldn't talk to them anymore.
This makes me sad. Instead of becoming more meritocratic and fairer, we're further
entrenching racism and discrimination without calling it that. Orwellian doublespeak and doublethink. What would MLK Jr think of all this?
Let's just have no standards of excellence at all and give everyone an Ivy or Pac12 degree for participation.
Double gold stars if people in any of your attribute groups ever had anything bad happen to them. First peoples? Slaves? Armenians? Jews? Italians? Irish? Spanish? Where does it stop?
At some point we just have to say "enough," or it devolves into absurdity and dishonesty when admissions are unmoored pure merit and reality.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
> Leave it to 80's Californian affirmative action to "fix" schools with culture-shock, not fitting-in, racism, violence, and gang warfare.
There's not a lot of easy solutions to undoing decades of segregation.
> didn't even bother applying to Ivys or Pac12s where "everyone else" was going because those places didn't interest me.
Based on your username and talking about the 80s I'm going to guess you were born in 1978, i.e. are roughly the same age as me. I find it interesting you talk about "Pac12" (and it's not just a typo, you do it a lot) considering that until 2011 it was the "Pac10".
For those not familiar with US college sports, the Pac10 at the time doggodaddo78 and I would have been applying to college was, in vague north-to-south order, University of Washington, Washington State University, University of Oregon, Oregon State University, UC Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, University of Southern California, University of Arizona, and Arizona State University. The Pac12 retains those same teams, but adds University of Colorado and University of Utah.
There's definitely some world-class schools in there, but with respect to all the Cougs I've ever known, I would not put, say, Washington State among the greats.
(Disclaimer: I was accepted to two of those Pac10 schools but could not afford to go to either, so went instead to a smaller state school).
what’s interesting is that there aren’t enough medical student seats in the usa to fill the residency spots in the usa. Why is it that other countries have more medical student seats than residency seats ? It’s because medical schools have quotas, whereas they don’t have quotas against over represented groups in residency.
Same reason we don’t have enough engineering seats in the usa and use H1B to fill in engineering positions in Silicon Valley. Colleges have quotas, Silicon Valley doesn’t.
Schools have quotas, reality / the market doesn’t.
If you look globally, you don't even need quotas. The world is approximately 65% Asian, so is the student body at magnet high schools with merit based entrance tests. the world is approximately 5% African.
> Same reason we don’t have enough engineering seats in the usa and use H1B to fill in engineering positions in Silicon Valley. Colleges have quotas, Silicon Valley doesn’t.
Lower tier engineering schools have room. And anyone can start a program. They're just filling seats with other things, like master's programs. But they'd rather have undergrads. And the ranking of these schools would increase as they got better students. The simple problem is not enough people want to major in engineering. The situation is the same everywhere (China/India are just bigger). But those places can't raise salaries to resolve it. US tech leaders clearly can.
The H1B helped keep this from resolving itself the normal way, i.e. where companies have to pay more to attract people to the field. I think it also relocated a big chunk of the developing world's tech growth to the US, so American executives could be the ones who benefited from it (yay for them). So it makes the domestic shortcoming worse in two ways.
For those interested in this topic also see this article previously discussed on HN, titled “America is flunking math”, by three university professors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27202337
The expected impact of these changes in testing is that admissions will be less about merit, and effectively punish Asian students who are on average more meritorious and therefore earn more college seats than you would expect based on their population numbers. Therefore these other discussions about “holistic” admissions processes are also worth visiting:
I think we should use SAT II or AP style subject tests for college admissions instead of SAT.
1) It's standardized so we can compare apples to apples.
2) Students spend time studying material that is a) taught in schools and b) they can pick their strongest subjects.
3) Subject exams are more reflective of what college is actually like: can you learn material on a particular subject and pass an exam on it?
4) I think the SAT test as a measure of "general intelligence" is too broad and vague, and that makes it both more controversial and less useful. If a student is terrible at math they should still be able to go to college and excel in language. If a student is terrible at language but they love math, they should be able to go to college for that.
Forcing people to take a "general intelligence" exam when college is about specializing in a particular major isn't a good metric in my opinion. Students could devote that time to other things: studying particular subjects that are relevant to what they may want to study.
I also find the tone of the article obnoxious. The author basically says that people who disagree with him aren't thinking critically. Sure, some of them. But there are plenty of people who have thought critically about this and disagree with the author. Also all the zingers about "liberals" are idiotic. Not everyone who disagrees with him is a liberal. It's unnecessarily divisive, and frankly makes it seem like the author is lazily throwing everyone into 2 buckets: conservative or liberal rather than thinking critically. Ironic.
Many (most?) students change majors after entering college, so there would have to be some way of dealing with that. But in addition, colleges philosophically still push the idea that their purpose is to produce well-rounded human beings, and bristle at being reduced to hyper-specialized vocational training, even if in practice a lot of that actually happens.
I don't mean to attack the author rather than the article, but it's hard to take them seriously when they use terms like "liberals hate" and "lol" in an article that aims to be empirical. It's just so needlessly adversarial?
Unfortunately, having a thoughtful discussion on college admissions is seemingly impossible.
I'm a member of a number of alumni groups of academic institutions and have seen Facebook discussions devolve quite like the author describes. Presenting actual data refuting emotionally held positions gets you labeled and libeled.
Yeah. I find intentionally divisive articles like this hard to respect. The author is either trying to game engagement through division or insultingly bucket people into their camps because they really see the world this way. I wish people would stop legitimizing this.
I completely agree. Up until the final paragraph of the article, the point the author seemed to be making is "rich people will do better in college so only rich people should go to college."
Irritatingly, an article that bemoans a homogenous view based on race repeatedly views members of a particular political leaning as ideologically homogenous.
[+] [-] b9a2cab5|4 years ago|reply
I find this particularly egregious because voters in both states rejected affirmative action very recently and yet the state funded administrations of these schools are going ahead with these policies.
[+] [-] ixacto|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaysea|4 years ago|reply
Another interesting development: WA rejected affirmative action once again in 2019, but recently the state passed a law requiring medical schools at state universities to set goals around increasing representation of underrepresented minorities (https://www.google.com/amp/s/mynorthwest.com/2911254/rantz-w...), which is effectively a race based cap on Asian enrollment. It seems the legislators are playing word games and trying to claim this doesn’t violate the law since it doesn’t set a “quota” but instead asks for correction of under representation.
[+] [-] 908B64B197|4 years ago|reply
Caltech [0] and MIT [1] are a good example (both small and extremely prestigious, catering to a mostly engineering/scientific crows and recruiting from the same pool of academics outliers both nationally and internationally)
Now, can anyone spot the difference?
[0] https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/california-institute...
[1] https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/massachusetts-instit...
[+] [-] HDMI_Cable|4 years ago|reply
Being of a certain minority group, even if I had a perfect prodigal SAT + GPA combo, I would have a 15% chance of getting in. At that point there is no point to taking the SAT, if it's all random chance. [2] Note: I definitely did not have a perfect GPA, or any SAT. Getting rid of the SAT has zero effect on whether I get in.
I still agree with him overall, but until we can get to a point where if you get good grades, you get a spot at a proportionally good university, worrying about the SAT will not matter.
---
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27302928
[2]: https://wkoury.github.io/harvard-admissions/
[+] [-] cortesoft|4 years ago|reply
> The only reason to tweet a graph or chart at someone rather than to report a coefficient of determination is to obfuscate.
That isn't true. They use graphs and charts because most people don't understand what a coefficient of determination is. If you tweeted out that number, your tweet would not convince anyone because they wouldn't know what it means.
[+] [-] analog31|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] murgindrag|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doggodaddo78|4 years ago|reply
---
Oh good, so merit is out the window. So what was the net good of shipping me 3 hours by bus roundtrip per day to a crappier school across town? (Waking-up before 5 am.) Oh that's right, because there were too many other white and/or Asian kids in the school a block from my house. I guess I just didn't have the right skin color. Leave it to 80's Californian affirmative action to "fix" schools with culture-shock, not fitting-in, racism, violence, and gang warfare. "We'll get you, whitey/Asian, by giving you our pain. That'll teach you not to be white/Asian." is the message it sends.
So this grand social experiment is so the kids who didn't earn admissions can get a degree they won't earn to get a job they won't earn so they won't know anything but entitlement because social justice through identity promotion fixes everything. That'll teach all those hard-working overachievers' parents to move to a different country like Finland, send China's sea turtles to go elsewhere, and destroy what was once America's greatest advantage.
Oh yeah and you know, the scientific method is "racist" (I, no shit, had a roommate applicant tell me this with a straight face recently). I became so flabbergasted I couldn't talk to them anymore.
This makes me sad. Instead of becoming more meritocratic and fairer, we're further entrenching racism and discrimination without calling it that. Orwellian doublespeak and doublethink. What would MLK Jr think of all this?
Let's just have no standards of excellence at all and give everyone an Ivy or Pac12 degree for participation. Double gold stars if people in any of your attribute groups ever had anything bad happen to them. First peoples? Slaves? Armenians? Jews? Italians? Irish? Spanish? Where does it stop?
At some point we just have to say "enough," or it devolves into absurdity and dishonesty when admissions are unmoored pure merit and reality.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
[+] [-] bigbillheck|4 years ago|reply
There's not a lot of easy solutions to undoing decades of segregation.
> didn't even bother applying to Ivys or Pac12s where "everyone else" was going because those places didn't interest me.
Based on your username and talking about the 80s I'm going to guess you were born in 1978, i.e. are roughly the same age as me. I find it interesting you talk about "Pac12" (and it's not just a typo, you do it a lot) considering that until 2011 it was the "Pac10".
For those not familiar with US college sports, the Pac10 at the time doggodaddo78 and I would have been applying to college was, in vague north-to-south order, University of Washington, Washington State University, University of Oregon, Oregon State University, UC Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, University of Southern California, University of Arizona, and Arizona State University. The Pac12 retains those same teams, but adds University of Colorado and University of Utah.
There's definitely some world-class schools in there, but with respect to all the Cougs I've ever known, I would not put, say, Washington State among the greats.
(Disclaimer: I was accepted to two of those Pac10 schools but could not afford to go to either, so went instead to a smaller state school).
[+] [-] GoodJokes|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] naveen99|4 years ago|reply
Same reason we don’t have enough engineering seats in the usa and use H1B to fill in engineering positions in Silicon Valley. Colleges have quotas, Silicon Valley doesn’t.
Schools have quotas, reality / the market doesn’t.
If you look globally, you don't even need quotas. The world is approximately 65% Asian, so is the student body at magnet high schools with merit based entrance tests. the world is approximately 5% African.
[+] [-] unishark|4 years ago|reply
Lower tier engineering schools have room. And anyone can start a program. They're just filling seats with other things, like master's programs. But they'd rather have undergrads. And the ranking of these schools would increase as they got better students. The simple problem is not enough people want to major in engineering. The situation is the same everywhere (China/India are just bigger). But those places can't raise salaries to resolve it. US tech leaders clearly can.
The H1B helped keep this from resolving itself the normal way, i.e. where companies have to pay more to attract people to the field. I think it also relocated a big chunk of the developing world's tech growth to the US, so American executives could be the ones who benefited from it (yay for them). So it makes the domestic shortcoming worse in two ways.
[+] [-] murgindrag|4 years ago|reply
That only works out about right if you're still on the 3/5ths compromise, but accidentally apply it twice.
[+] [-] rashkov|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] autarch|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaysea|4 years ago|reply
Also see this past discussion on Harvard dropping test scores: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23535528
The expected impact of these changes in testing is that admissions will be less about merit, and effectively punish Asian students who are on average more meritorious and therefore earn more college seats than you would expect based on their population numbers. Therefore these other discussions about “holistic” admissions processes are also worth visiting:
Harvard rating Asian students lower on personality traits as part of their “holistic” admissions process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17320360
More on quirks of Harvard’s admissions, like their “z-list”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17641360
Yale’s discrimination against Asians: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149352
[+] [-] smbv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MyHypatia|4 years ago|reply
Forcing people to take a "general intelligence" exam when college is about specializing in a particular major isn't a good metric in my opinion. Students could devote that time to other things: studying particular subjects that are relevant to what they may want to study.
I also find the tone of the article obnoxious. The author basically says that people who disagree with him aren't thinking critically. Sure, some of them. But there are plenty of people who have thought critically about this and disagree with the author. Also all the zingers about "liberals" are idiotic. Not everyone who disagrees with him is a liberal. It's unnecessarily divisive, and frankly makes it seem like the author is lazily throwing everyone into 2 buckets: conservative or liberal rather than thinking critically. Ironic.
[+] [-] mbg721|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DistressedDrone|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] testfoobar|4 years ago|reply
I'm a member of a number of alumni groups of academic institutions and have seen Facebook discussions devolve quite like the author describes. Presenting actual data refuting emotionally held positions gets you labeled and libeled.
[+] [-] batch12|4 years ago|reply
Edited- fixed stuff, finished my thought
[+] [-] rayiner|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evilotto|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agar|4 years ago|reply