[jackallis]

".....In 2020, system leaders voted to phase standardized-test scores out of admissions decisions. They argued that the tests worsened racial divides and unfairly privileged wealthy students. But SAT and ACT scores are the most reliable predictors of a student’s math ability, the report found...."

[Aurornis]

The war on admissions testing is one of the worst education trends. I couldn’t believe it when it was first proposed, but I was even more shocked when the trend started to spread.

It does appear to be reversing a little bit in some places as schools realize they were fooled by people pushing ideology over data and results, but it’s going to take a while.

For those who aren’t in the loop: There’s an ideological push to eliminate testing, aptitude tests, and even to eliminate different educational tracks (accelerated learning programs, AP classes, advanced math tracts) in the name of pursuing equality for everyone. The idea of testing people for aptitude or allowing some students to go into more advanced classes than others is not allowed by some ideologically-driven people who think all students must be given strictly equal education at every grade level.

[screye]

It goes deeper. The problem lies at the source.

> people pushing ideology

University Education programs and as a result teaching bodies have been taken over by ideology.

I believe it is in part because all the teaching low hanging fruit has been established for centuries. So the only 'novel' things the programs can do is talk about discrimination, disparate outcomes and hand-wavey ideas about improving education. The departments have some of the lowest bars for academic professorship and as a result, the quality of research is similarly bad -> terrible.

The war on phonics is the canonical example.

The fault doesn't lie with 'people'. The above mentioned institutions are squarely at fault for making education ideological, and they should explicitly be blamed for the deterioration in student performance.

[lotsofpulp]

I wonder if college administrators are using discrimination as an excuse to decrease standards to increase number of students, which then increases their pay and job security. It is well known that not only did number of young people peak, but also that outside of the top 20 or so, college is nowhere near worth the tuition prices.

The only other option is for college administrators to be disturbingly stupid.

[le-mark]

Kurt Vonnegut saw this trend emerging back in 1961:

https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...

[TechRemarker]

Imagine still will be all the advanced tracks but will be only reserved for those with the resources to afford it and seemingly further the divide.

[corpMaverick]

IMHO. It is futile to level the field with the wealthy. They will always have the better opportunities, education, connections, etc. They will find a way.

But we should keep trying to give more opportunities to the less fortunate. Better education, remedial classes, free school lunches, child credits, etc. We do that by asking the wealthy to contribute more. Not by taking away their advantages.(e.g. Admission tests)

[Aurornis]

> Not by taking away their advantages.(e.g. Admission tests)

Admissions tests are actually not as big of a driver for the academic advantage of the wealthy. Especially at flagship institutions a lot of it is simply traced back to legacy admissions, athletics, and extra-curricular activities. Those latter two are more gamed by the wealthy than anything.

Removing admission tests and focusing only on the application is actually a huge boon to wealthy families who want to get their children into the best universities because it removes the hard part (having to learn enough to do well in exams) and replaces it with things that are easy to game, like writing essays and getting a track record of doing extra-curriculars.

Standardized tests actually make it easier for lower income families to compete for spots for academically advanced children because they’re measuring academic advancement. Even if it’s not a perfect measure, it’s way better than substituting non-academic things that are so easily gamed by the wealthy.

[Jweb_Guru]

I have never met a single person who wanted to learn advanced mathematics who was prevented from doing this by not getting into the college of their choice, and I know a lot of mathematicians. Do you genuinely believe that people who get an 800 on the math portion of the SATs (which is actually a pretty large number of people) are struggling to get admission to university at all?

[sxzygz]

The mathematicians I know wish the were introduced to more material when they were younger so they could spend more time internalizing different concepts before being forced to specialize by the demands of a PhD.

The more scientifically minded people I know wish they were introduced to more mathematical concepts when they were younger so they could feel more able applying more sophisticated models to their problem domain.

Having a pipeline of somewhat mathematically able citizens is crucial to having an advanced economy. I don’t think the preceding statement is remotely controversial.

[skeezyjefferson]

"But SAT and ACT scores are the most reliable predictors of a student’s math ability, the report found...."

how else do they gauge someone's math ability then?

[Aurornis]

They don’t. The movements pushing these ideas are against the idea of aptitude testing. Many of them are even against the idea of having advanced classes for those who are ahead.

It’s not a niche ideology, sadly. It’s going mainstream. A core part of Zohran Mamdani’s platform was his goal to phase out gifted education programs, for example.

[bena]

One could use course grades. The problem with that is the variance in instructor quality between institutions.

[naIak]

Gauging someone’s abilities is meany mean.

[massysett]

Thank you, this answers the question I was going to pose in a comment: why did this supposedly selective university admit students who can’t do basic math? Maybe their grade wouldn’t reflect it, but surely a standardized test like SAT or ACT would have flagged this? Maybe instead of remedial courses, they should stop admitting unqualified students?

[FatherOfCurses]

Standardized tests are reliable predictors of students' abilities to solve standardized tests, which is not necessarily a 1-1 correlation with aptitude in that field. It is much like how your ability to sort a binary tree in a development interview isn't a 1-1 correlation with your ability to effectively upgrade your production website's Angular to the latest version.

My wife works in private college admissions counseling, so I've been privy to a lot of conversations around these issues over the years.

The article is paywalled, but I feel that in this sentence the author is using all reasons used against standardized testing to criticize the elimination of standardized math testing.

The concerns around racial divides have been mainly in the non-math portion of the SAT's, where it's been found that students with a non-white background don't choose the "right" answer on ambiguous questions because they don't have the same shared experience that would make the "right" answer obvious to someone with a white background. Its inclusion here sounds like the author is trying to inject a little anti-woke hysteria into her argument.

Wealth leading to increased standardized test scores is a very real thing. Many of us have taken multiple choice tests where we've known that the best answer isn't necessarily the "right" answer, and that in order to pass the test we have to select the answer the test is looking for. The SAT and ACT are littered with these questions and there are test prep companies who have decades of industry knowledge that they provide their clients with to get a boost on their scores. No amount of non-profit or public school provided test prep can compete with that.

As someone else commented, someone with an 800 on their SAT math will get admitted 99 percent of the time. Colleges are always very open about their admissions criteria and students are always free to choose to apply or not based on those.

[vacuity]

Standardized testing isn't remotely perfect, but I think I have grounds to say that it is far better than many alternatives. In this case, standardized testing would've caught the problem before admissions.