MIT suspending SAT/ACT requirement for next application cycle(mitadmissions.org) |
MIT suspending SAT/ACT requirement for next application cycle(mitadmissions.org) |
Fine with this being temporary. Much less fine with the schools who have completely abandoned the SAT/ACT in the name of equality while still considering things like personal essays and extracurriculars, which are way more liable to be gamed by the wealthy than the SAT.
The Harvard undergraduate admissions lawsuit a year ago or two provides an example. Asian applicants were consistently ranked to have inferior personalities to white people, even with otherwise identical applications. There's no particular reason to think Asians are inferior to white people, and Harvard is really just promoting racist ideologies that say that Asians are mindless automatons who might be technically proficient but lack the creative, human impulses that would make them suitable for social roles higher than servitude.
I can understand that the motivation of such reform is to improve equity, as numerous studies have shown positive correlation between family income and testing scores. Therefore, lowering the difficulty of challenging courses and removing requirements of standard tests appear to be a natural choice towards better equity. Besides, many of us do not need advanced math or STEM in our profession anyway, why spend so much time on STEM, right?
That said, I don't see how such reform will lead to more equity. Studying and taking tests are probably the most inexpensive activities out there. All that a driven student needs to learn well is a library, a good teacher, and a few like-minded classmates. And tutoring school does not necessarily make a difference, either. But with all the reforms, what would happen? Here is what I can imagine:
- Tutoring schools will make more difference. Family with means will send their kids to
tutoring schools so their kids can learn geometry or algebra in grade 5 and have all
the time to study AP courses in high school. Who suffers? Smart kids from poor families.
Same goes for history, writing, English, and etc.
- Money will matter more. Families with means will send their kids to robotics camps,
science research labs, coding schools, professional sports coaches, and etc.
You know, things that poor families have a hard time to afford. With non-differentiating
test scores, guess what school admission officers will look at?
And I'll be happy if someone could show me how wrong I am.
This is a heartbreaking example of how some people today take equality to mean taking everyone down rather than trying to bring everyone up. Or in other words, "they don't love the poor, they just hate the rich"
This part shocks me a little bit. All kids in Vietnam start geometry at grade 6. I have a hard time comprehend what is the difference that makes kids in a developing countries can learn things 3 years ahead of a developed countries.
Correlation != causation.
One of the best SAT prep available today is https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/sat and that is free for everyone.
Standardized tests are important, otherwise students are not evaluated using a uniform criteria. GPAs can be compared only within the same school district.
Even the curriculum is not standardized across states. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core_implementation_by_...
The hard part will be that the poorer folks won't have the same luxury of free time to study like this.
So in the end I'm not sure that we'll really escape from Matthew's Law ("the rich get richer and the poor get poorer").
That's when I took it as a youth and nobody in either of the school districts I went to around those years took it any earlier.
(For non-North Americans, 9th grade is 14-15yo).
(And did you mean 'board' instead of 'union'?)
EDIT: Some basic googling isn't coming up with anything about this, the closest I've found is SF high schools delaying algebra 1 until 9th grade, but with an option for kids to take both algebra 1 and geometry at the same time (or algebra 2 and geometry at the same time). Details at https://www.sfusdmath.org/high-school-pathways.html
> I'll simply send them to private schools, all kinds of camps, or tutoring schools. They will learn calculus in grade 7 or early if they are talented. They will have a bucket list of volunteering experience and so-called leadership proof in their resume. They will build their ML-powered robots or conduct their favorite chemistry/physics experiments in their private lab that I can help build, if they are interested. And in the worse case, my wife and I have no problem and plenty of time to home school my kids.
Sounds like a great way to give them one hell of a complex.
I've had co-workers who were parents of kids in the Princeton NJ school district (and adjacent districts) and from what they say it is an incredibly stressful and competitive experience. On the opposite coast, there's a reason kids in Palo Alto are killing themselves so much more than elsewhere.
In the usual secondary sequence, Geometry is between Algebra I and Algebra II; doing it in 9th grade, even with a full year precalc after Algebra II, gets you to Calculus I in 12th. with a combined Algebra II/Trig and no separate precalc, which has long been thr common accelerated course, it gets you to Calculus II.
Physics in high school is typically non-calculus based and works well alongside precalc or calc I or even Algebra II; there’s no difficulty having it in 11th/12th with geometry in 9th.
It may create problems keeping mathematically advanced students engaged, it doesn’t create problems teaching algebra or physics.
This was years ago but there's no particular reason I'd expect things to have changed. But basically if you looked at outcomes--I think this included post-uni outcomes like salary--the quantitative measures like SAT score had a lot more predictive value than interview/letters of recommendation/essays/etc.
(The way the one school I'm familiar with used to do things was that basically everyone went on an X-Y graph with X being a normalized quant score and the Y being a normalized everything else score. Everyone up and to the right. No one down and to the left did. Those in the middle band were looked at a bit more carefully.
I've also read SAT scores are highly correlated to family income. Family income probably has a huge impact on post university outcomes.
Everyone can, online. All of MIT's course content is available for free online:
Why not take 1 or 2 university classes your junior and senior year of HS?
Test prep companies have an incentive to overhype their services but research suggests the improvement isn't that much.
There's a Jacobin article making the case for the SAT that people following this debate might enjoy reading: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/03/sat-class-race-inequality...
Spending 10k on a prep class isn't going to cause your dimwitted child to outperform a bright kid from a disadvantaged background, but it can probably buy a better essay
Richer families were more likely to have connections with a doctor to give the diagnosis, afford the insurance deductible, or even be in the right circles or to know through word of mouth or paid admissions advisers that it was a thing to try and acquire for the kid.
The SAT is the one mechanism that poor asian and jewish and nigerian kids could prepare for and do well on. But obviously the objective is to get rid of them as "theres too many"
Its also the only measure thats the same for everyone. There also isnt any indication that as a whole the test prep classes actually "work" to a serious degree. Maybe theyll take your score up 20 points but wont raise it 300.
A lottery system of admissions, with a guarantee of admission to at least some universities. It's described here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/admit-everybody/
I suppose that is true for MIT, for mainstream media, and for US corporations.
60% of 750 - 800 math SAT scorers are Asian
https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
I looked through the list of USAMO finalists in recent years and > 80% have Asian surnames.
I think the SAT is likely more egalitarian than extracurriculars, although I cannot comment on its effectiveness as an indicator for college performance.
Someone who has to work after high school to support their family would not have the time or energy to play sports, do choir, run clubs, etc. But they could go to the library, pirate some books, print out the pages and practice 20 minutes a day starting 10-12 months ahead of time. It would be more difficult, of course, but I still think studying for a test is easier and cheaper than having extensive extracurriculars.
Anecdotally, I've also always heard SAT test prep is a waste of money.
--
Is anyone using lotteries as part of admissions?
My interest in lotteries comes thru 1) warming up to the notion of sortition, 2) tired of the food fight over affirmative action, and 3) rejection of ever increasing bureaucracy and credentialing.
As a mental model, I'm starting to think of lotteries as an optimization technique.
--
I briefly worked on some student facing stuff in higher ed. The course registration stuff is insane. There's got to be more fair, easier to administrate systems. Something like an auction. Release some fraction of courses every time interval. Figure out some rational way to prioritize bids. Like add weight for seniority, students in program, declared major. Or whatever. Then administrators can add or remove courses, sections, labs, whatever as needed.
--
Now that our university monopolies have been privatized, why hasn't Freedom Markets™ logic prevailed? Raise supply to meet demand.
Higher ed loves government pork. But are completely unaccountable.
If we are states are no longer willing to adjudicate bottom up, they must now impose some kind of top down pressure.
The most simple idea I can think of is raid (radical cashectomies) the endowments. Use it or lose. Compel places like MIT and Harvard to spend down their hoard. Increase slots. Add campuses. Adopt other universities and invest in them, like scholastic version of sport farm teams.
Let Freedom Markets™ sing!
Like let's say you grow up ok but you can't really afford to join the ski club or for a tutor and maybe you work in the evenings but you crush the SAT/ACT because you're incredibly intelligent. How will universities like MIT take that into account? If we're talking about merit - boy that sure speaks of merit to me compared to a laundry list of clubs, activities, and organizations that the kids with hyper-dedicated parents or lots of money have on their applications.
I'll also say, I didn't take either of these tests and came from a family where to this day I'm still the only one to attend college, but if I had taken the SAT or ACT and scored remarkably well - I think that would have opened doors I didn't even know exist. High school counselor ideally would have noticed a high score and helped with applications.
I don't like these tests but I have to imagine a subset of the population uses them to great effect. Like many things, it seems, I bet that removal of these tests will result in bifurcation in the education system, or will wind up hurting poorer students (while making the middle extremely competitive).
Anyway. There are so many problems with the university system, starting with using universities to train workers, that it's difficult to feel emotion anymore around the issue because it's so overwhelming.
-edit-
For what it's worth I don't know if the SAT/ACT are a good show of intellect. And these tests can be effectively gamed - not just illegally as we saw with the recent scandal but with tutors and test prep.
-edit 2-
Many students who are intelligent but grow up poor have a difficult time in universities, especially when they don't get to take the same classes as their peers did in high school. I know I'm probably an average student, but when I went to my calculus classes after being out of high school for around 5 years I could grasp how to do derivatives and their meaning, but couldn't understand the log functions or trigonometry. So I'd do most of the homework and take the quizzes, then bomb the exams when these concepts came into play. I felt miserable and I didn't know how to study or how to even really get help - I didn't even have a concept of what I didn't know. I just thought I was dumb. It took 3 tries but I eventually got enough help and practice (thanks Khan Academy and others) to make it through, graduate, and go on to do other things.
Fortunately I had training in resilience from the military. What about that kid who grows up crushes a standardized test and fails a class and then thinks that they're stupid and they don't know how to ask for help or can't afford tutoring? Those kids maybe they fail out, or maybe they have mediocre grades so when they go to try and get a job they're competing against 3.8s with tons of on-campus activities. Yet again perpetuating the cycle of getting dumped on. Needs lots of luck or persistence to break the cycle.
There's no upside, but if you don't prepare, or happen to have a bad day, it can ruin your chances. For students applying to MIT-caliber schools it's a hoop to jump through, not an opportunity to distinguish themselves.
I am honestly curious how the MIT admissions office is able to use the SAT to predict anything about student success, given a huge majority of the students got a nearly perfect score. It seems like there should be almost no signal.
A huge majority of the students who got accepted (since those are the only ones you're looking at) got a nearly perfect score. But only about 7% of students who apply to MIT get accepted. SAT scores, back when they were required to be provided, were one of the primary filters on applicants. (Not to mention the "filter" of many kids not even applying because they knew their scores were too low for them to be considered.)
If you have, let’s say, 3000 open positions and 15,000 applications of which all are academically qualified does it really matter who they pick for admission? It’s not like there is going to be any real world performance difference between candidate 1200 and 12000 if they are valedictorians with 4.0 GPAs.
1. Asking for voter id is racist because it disproportionately effects black voters.
2. Making this move that disproportionately effects Asian students is not racist?
I know America has a serious NIH syndrome, but the situation could be improved overnight if every single public school adopted the GCSE/A levels or IB curriculum and exams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCE_Advanced_Level_(United_Kin...
If a student is a top-tier applicant that has good grades, plays a sport, participates in a club or two, volunteers, & has a part-time job, they are easily working a minimum of 60+ hours per week. There is absolutely no way this can continue. I was pissed about this when I was in high school ~8 years ago, and it's only gotten worse since.
EDIT: Downvoted because I'm advocating for teens to not have to spend all of their waking hours preparing for college & instead get enough sleep or do something enjoyable?
This is discrimination against people who need employment. It's a luxury to get transportation to a volunteer location, and then spend hours there, without any income earned.
This is getting ridiculous.
Imagine if your kid puts in the hours and hours of studying and pulls off a 35 on their ACT -- at a school like MIT, that's not enough (considered alone) to get in.
How are you and your kid going to feel when they give her spot to someone who didn't even submit a standardized test score?
When the SAT went mainstream in the 1960s it opened up a world of opportunity to the previously overlooked gifted kids from middle-class families and excluded ethnic groups. It was now possible for a bright kid whose parents were garment workers in the Lower East Side to objectively compete with the Kennedys or the Astors in Exeter or Dalton. And the raw numbers meant that college admissions officers could no longer pretend this wasn't true.
It's almost certain that the 21st century's version of "holistic admissions" winds up operating much the same way as the early 20th century. There will certainly be more diversity window dressing. But at the end of the day it will still primarily benefit the powerful, rich, and well-connected. They'll be a few less Rockefellers and Bushes and a few more descendants of Eric Holder and Carlos Slim. But at the end of the day, the result will be the same. Keeping out kids from the wrong side of town.
> But at the end of the day the result will be the same. Keeping out kids from the wrong side of town.
For any sufficiently in-demand institution, a healthier approach would be to define a minimum bar ahead of time, accept applications only from students who meet the bar, then select applicants by lottery from the pool according to available openings. Ultimately, selecting for perfect and near-perfect scores is actually counterproductive - Goodhart's Law is as applicable as ever.
If the kid's that smart then presumably they'll have a top GPA as well. Absolute GPA of course is gameable, but class ranking really isn't. Texas at least has a "top 10%" law (https://news.utexas.edu/key-issues/top-10-percent-law/) which would get them in to a state school, and if that kid was really hankering for MIT then maybe they can transfer.
If they're lucky enough not to be in Texas, well, there's nothing wrong with state schools in any of the other several states, and furthermore there's no shame in going to a community college first if you have to.
I definitely wouldn’t make that assumption.
> If they're lucky enough not to be in Texas, well, there's nothing wrong with state schools in any of the other several states, and furthermore there's no shame in going to a community college first if you have to.
Oh no doubt. I went to two public state universities and I believe my education was just as good as I’d find anywhere. Though there are differences (opportunities), the education is pretty good overall. But! That doesn’t tell the whole story. Many of the kids I went to school with in undergrad had taken classes like AP Physics, or AP Chemistry, or math beyond geometry. I didn’t. So I had to work much harder in some classes. I failed Calculus I twice before getting an A (maybe a B+? Don’t remember) and moving on with my life. For other students this could send them out of engineering, or maybe out of school altogether, and I’d argue it’s not really an intellect thing more so than it is not being on a level playing field to start with. This is an issue even at state schools. Maybe more so if they lack enough resources to cover tuition and room and board. People growing up in poverty (not that I did myself but much of my family did) think debt == bad or maybe they’re afraid to ask for help.
I guess that’s to say, I think it’s a problem in the entire system, all the way down to elementary school (Lebron James Family Foundation is doing a good job in my view of trying to address this).
My main issue with Ivy League schools is the perception and recruiting exclusivity. Wanna work at Goldman? Yale. Google? Harvard. Netflix? CMU. Etc.
Not a whole lot of tech recruiting going on at, say, Ohio University where I did my undergrad. Fuck those kids. Not in our recruiting footprint. Not one of our “target schools”. As if you need to go recruit at Duke to hire a BA?
In my personal life I do a lot of work to try and get more employers and recruiters down there and find ways to help. It’s tough sledding. Sometimes I wonder why I bother when it seems like so few others care.
I fantasize like damn if I had a ton of money or a huge grant there are so many things I’d love to try and do. It’s just too hard to quit my full time work. I’ll have to wait until I’m older and financially secure.
(a) Straight As
(b) (if applicable) Take all AP courses available at your high school
(c) (if applicable) Take additional college courses through community college dual enrollment or online school
(d) (if applicable) Join the math club, honors society, run for some kind of student council position, or other academics-oriented or leadership-oriented club role that doesn't require a hefty buy-in
b-d may or may not apply, depending on your school, school district, and state.
I don't think the difference between dedicated tutors and individual studying with Khan Academy is a large difference. The majority of low scorers score low because they're either lower on the intelligence scale or didn't spend time individually studying.
If your suggested measures were considered, they would quickly become targets & add to the already insane workload that high school students must put up with in order to be considered competitive applicants. It's unfortunately not a scenario where you can say 'Pick one of (a) through (d)', because it will quickly become all of (a) through (d).
And by the time there are actually viable free options the kids are already far behind.
Preparing for tests are much cheaper than joining good clubs and/or preparing to write a food essays
ACT/SAT scores are more representative of your socioeconomic level rather than just straight up smarts.
it definitely does make a difference for bright students who do unexpectedly well -- but it gets them into "merely" good schools not ultra-selective institutions like MIT.
Being smart does help you on these tests but not as much as you would hope. The things that meaningfully affect your score are studying for them and learning the specific material on the test. So there are two ways to do well: you study your ass off with test-prep materials or you go to one of the "good" high schools that tailor their entire curriculum to the ACT/SAT, AP and IB tests.
tl;dr these exasm only test how good you are at school and leave very little room to prove your aptitude in areas that aren't the primary subjects in school. CS being one area that until very recently was completely absent from all but the very best schools.
I did too (well, the SAT; given that and that evrywhere I wanted to apply took the SAT, the ACT would have been superfluous), but...
> Being smart does help you on these tests but not as much as you would hope.
Its pretty much all being smart. Focussed study has some effect (and because small score differences at the high end make big competitive differences, can be worthwhile), bit don’t really do much.
Scores are quite tightly correlatee with IQ, which is why, e.g., MENSA accepts them in place of IQ tests.
> The things that meaningfully affect your score are studying for them and learning the specific material on the test.
Sure, those are the things in your control near the time of taking the test that affect your score, aside from “not getting wasted the morning of the test”. There’s not much you (or anyone else) can do after early childhood to significantly improve your probable IQ at the time you take the test, but that’s still the main outcome driver.
Of course my aptitude at picking out synonyms didn't really indicate a damn thing about how well I could write an exam essay about the Reconstruction Era, so the fact that I got a good score without studying doesn't say that much for the test.
I “weaseled” my way into CMU via athletic admissions (I was an actual athlete, not a Lori Laughlin style one), but did very well at CMU once I got there. People who aced the SATs did not do as well. Fwiw I still did okay, 32 ACT score, but there were 35/36’s around.
IOW, prediction of academic success is hard; career success harder. These standardized tests don’t add much.
"These standardized tests don’t add much."
You can't throw away information and expect a better outcome.
It's fun to say things!
On the other hand, it's not like people haven't thought of this before. https://sci-hub.se/10.1037/0021-9010.86.4.718
Most biased comments about college admission always get hung up on one of two irrelevant qualities:
* illusory perceptions that childhood genius far outside even their selective populations somehow equate to real world adult performance
* a selection bias that schools must supremely optimize some precise quality during admissions that they don't nurture or measure
Instead of you just look at the data, remove all the emotional nonsense, and assign everybody a number with a set of performance metrics most of what people care about are things the schools care nothing about and ultimately don't matter.
Not trying to say you are wrong and not trying to claim any kind of authority as I have zero insider knowledge of college admissions process but just thinking out loud as a student, there can be a world of difference between an A from one teacher to an A from another teacher from the same school. Now if we extrapolate it across schools throughout the nation (we have not even gotten into international students), there is a wide gulf.
I like your solution though and this is probably very easily feasible without much protest assuming we reserve a small portion of the seats for donors and/or "legacy". Although, probably would be better just auctioning off those seats to the highest bidder now that I think about it. We will still treat everyone equally after students are admitted (and all auctions are nonrefundable) but we don't have to leave money on the table with an auction system for a small portion of the available seats.
Making admissions non-competitive will ruin top schools.
I never suggested that.
You don't like the use of an IQ test in school admissions, and you want to establish an IQ test instead?
SATs are a good measure of General Intelligence (and IQ).
“ This research established the relationship between SAT and g, as well as the appropriateness of the SAT as a measure of g, and examined the SAT as a premorbid measure of intelligence. In Study 1, we used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Measures of g were extracted from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery and correlated with SAT scores of 917 participants. The resulting correlation was .82 (.86 corrected for nonlinearity). Study 2 investigated the correlation between revised and recentered SAT scores and scores on the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices among 104 undergraduates. The resulting correlation was .483 (.72 corrected for restricted range). These studies indicate that the SAT is mainly a test of g. "
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0956-7976.200...
Things like age and prep time matter a lot.
I skipped two grades so I took the SAT at age 15 without studying, did well enough, and went to one of the top state schools for CS at the age of 16.
I took the intro to CS weed out class first year and got the highest score by a mile.
We, for decades until this year, had a single commonly used set, of which different institutions mandated (or accepted as one of several alternatives) different subsets, the SAT Subject Tests (formerly SAT II, formerly Acheivement Tests.) Like the SAT itself, they've bee questioned for a while, and the COVID-19 pandemic on top of that led to their widespread abandonment and, as of this year, discontinuation.
A-Levels are subject exams. They more closely align to AP exams in the US.
The SAT is administered by a private "not-for-profit" corporation (College Board) and doesn't test anything like history or science that most schools try to teach kids (well, probably all schools have a requirement). And every time someone wants to put together a national test as a replacement, it gets shot down (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for not good reasons).
I did AP all four years of high school because I found the normal classes too boring, and my GPA probably would've been higher if I hadn't, but I got into college.
It's a convenient way to compare students from different schools. The per school graduation exams have the benefit of allowing customization on a per school (per class, even) basis. This customization is one of the good things about the US education system, IMO. We are not like Germany, with the track set for the student (Gymnasium vs trade school) at middle school age, nor are we like India, China, and Japan (single extremely high stakes test).
US schooling is uneven. Some of the schools are very good (well funded private, religious schools with a focus on schooling instead of dogma, public schools in wealthy areas). Some are terrible (public schools in poor areas, public schools in cities).
Standardized testing, when viewed from one angle, makes the world more even: the test "doesn't care" (debated) what race you are, the wealth of your parents, etc. It "objectively" (debated) measures aptitude, giving equal opportunity to all.
I'm fairly sympathetic to that view, and I'm also skeptical that removing the standardized testing requirements will lead to more equality. Standardized testing seems like the method least susceptible to rigging by rich parents, what will they replace it with that is fairer?
So how do people fail to graduate high-school?
The standards for graduation across schools are massively different and the SAT/ACT is a private “solution” to the problem of measuring students across regions, for college admissions.
Nor do other schools...?
The SAT is also a thinly disguised IQ test, so it serves a different purpose anyway compared to high school grade records.
A lot of people have strong feelings against the SAT, but I actually think it's somewhat egalitarian. Before the SAT, prestigious colleges would only recruit from well-known feeder high schools whose curriculum was known to be rigorous. Since there is no unifying national curriculum, something like it is necessary so students from worse high-schools have a shot at getting into the nicer universities.
Of course, the effect of eliminating SAT/ACT could mean that other factors (like social connections, reported grades like your high school graduation test, etc) will end up being more heavily relied upon, and these could possibly be easier to rig or be more dependent on a wealthy family. Hard to tell, but the play dough squishes out somewhere, right?
The final exams High School seniors take are dependent on the curriculum they have chosen and are written/defined by their teachers. The outcome of these tests is reflected in the student's course grades and is reflected in their GPA (Grade Point Average) for their entire High School career.
The SAT or ACT are only used for College/University applications.
we didn't have any "graduation exams" as many other countries do - just needed to pass the required courses to gain the high school diploma. Our state testing exams were mainly to address progress, as the Exit Exam was suspended in 2015.
Even if we had these graduation exams, they also may vary depending on school, district, and state.
The world is very quickly bifurcating into 1. a small professional elite and 2. poverty for the rest. The middle class is going away, and with it, jobs and dignity for B, C, and D students.
As a parent I feel if I don’t go into six figure debt paying for camps, tutors, sports, accelerated this, and advanced that, then there is some other parent doing this whose kid will take her spot on the train. Id be dooming her to a future of poverty.
College placement is a highly competitive, zero sum slugfest and for her sake I need to at least try.
Parents should teach their kids about the importance of networking and signaling while growing up. Obviously, it's secondary to actually being proficient and productive, but still just as necessary.
citations needed
Any time someone proposes to get rid of this or that requirement for being correlated to wealth, I'd like to see what the alternative is and see if it's any better.
We want something somewhat meritocratic, where we can tell the difference between natural capability and hard work on the one hand and simply being lucky to be born into wealth on the other... but it's not clear to me that objective measures like the SAT are going to be worse than interviews/letters-of-rec/essays in discerning that.
It would result in massive inefficiencies and major risks.
With few exception (medical school, some very specialized research), you do not go to MIT if what you genuinely and strictly want is a good education. There is nothing that an undergrad is going to learn at MIT that can't be learned online. There's nothing secretive that MIT teaches that only MIT grads could possibly know about. There is no proprietary research or knowledge that MIT teaches to its students that isn't well established and that other colleges don't have access to. And finally, MIT and most other Ivy league schools and schools in general don't have any kind of specialty when it comes to lecturing or any kind of area of expertise on delivering educational material in any kind of special way; on the contrary most professors are pretty bad at teaching and teaching is not their area of expertise. The textbooks, the lectures, heck even the tests and assignments, are all available for anyone to learn from if they so choose.
You go to MIT because it puts you ahead of well over 95% of the population in virtually every future aspect of your career.
Again, you should expect every metric to be thoroughly gamed.
But I think this is not true at hyper-selective institutions, because as you say a perfect SAT score is necessary but not sufficient.
A student who has been on the normal, non-advanced educational track, not playing the resume game, and suddenly gets a 1600 SAT, still typically won't have a shot at MIT.
What they will get is a bunch of great full scholarships to good, but not hyper-selective elite, universities.
This statement requires some elaboration. Cramming for the SAT/ACT in the short time before the test has a small effect on your overall score. But if you go to a preparatory middle and high school where you will essentially spend 6-12th grade studying for the tests because the school designed the curriculum specifically to prepare you for them you will see a big difference.
Over the four years I spent in high school I was assigned as homework every. single. AP Calc I & II problem that had ever been published. Is it really that surprising that our class did well?
Another way of saying this.
* If you read voraciously as a child you will score extremely well on the reading section without really trying. You aren't smarter. You just spent a decade inadvertently studying.
* I was a math nerd as a child. I read math textbooks for fun. I was doing college-level math in 9th grade. And surprise to no one I scored almost perfect on the math section. But crucially, this didn't make me smarter than my peers. Literally anyone who had decided to spend their time at recess reading number theory textbooks would have done just as well.
AP tests are different than the SAT/ACT. AP tests measure knowledge of something (the degree to which one can study the test independently of the notional subject matter may be debatable, sure), but SAT/ACT are very much proxy IQ tests. They may frequently be used together (but MIT is dropping SAT/ACT, not AP), but are not equivalent to each other.
> If you read voraciously as a child you will score extremely well on the reading section without really trying. You aren't smarter.
There is considerable, though as in most things intelligence-related, not conclusive, evidence that reading, especially early reading, does improve general intelligence.
> I read math textbooks for fun. I was doing college-level math in 9th grade. And surprise to no one I scored almost perfect on the math section. But crucially, this didn't make me smarter than my peers.
How do you know that you didn’t both do this in part because you were already smarter than your peers, and that doing it didn’t make you even smarter than you would otherwise have been?
> Literally anyone who had decided to spend their time at recess reading number theory textbooks would have done just as well.
Even if that was provably true, that doesn’t mean doing it didn’t make you smarter, since if it did it would presumably also have that effect on others who did it.
Edit: my point is that finding the right math club at the right time is even more luck and effort than getting good on standard tests.
I mostly convinced classmates to go to local competitions because it was a day out of class and we could stop by the mall afterwards. We didn't win jack shit, my crowning "achievement" was beating half the schools at a regional competition, which is typically teams of 4, but as a team of 1 (and there's no award for 50th percentile).
Nonetheless, I had "President - Mu Alpha Theta" on my college application and I did end up making it to an elite university.
You are proving my point pretty much exactly. You didn't score well because you were smart in some vague objective sense -- you scored well because you had essentially spent 10 years inadvertently studying.
Not really. Of course studying for any test and preparing strategically/emotionally/psychologically makes one able to perform at their potential. If you didn't study, didn't prepare, don't know how to sit for a test or what the test will look like, no one expects good performance. Even though I run several miles every day, I'm never going to have the innate ability of an East African long distance runner.
Your extraordinarily excellent performance was not about your preparation but about your brilliance.
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Yet research has consistently demonstrated that it is remarkably difficult to increase an individual’s SAT score, and the commercial test prep industry capitalizes on, at best, modest changes [13,17].
Short of outright cheating on the test, an expensive and complex undertaking that may carry unpleasant legal consequences, high SAT scores are generally difficult to acquire by any means other than high ability.
”
Additionally, removing any of the objective requirements forces students to add even more activities to their existing laundry list of extracurriculars in order to stand out. I don't have any evidence, but I fear that students will have to work even harder & spend even more hours outside the classroom just to stand out without SAT/ACT scores. Students are massively overworked as it is.
Personally, I hate the whole test industry - it incentivizes poor behavior (ie the existence of the entire test prep industry). But, I don't have a better answer. I wish colleges could rely on GPA, course selection, and extracurriculars, but apparently that doesn't work either.
At a macro level, I'm not even sure it matters much. The students who are marginal for acceptance to MIT or other top-tier universities are already going to be successful wherever they land. The real stand-outs are going to get in regardless - they're just that good. And everybody else will do just fine at the best state u. (or whatever other selective but not "ivy tier" college) in their region.
Anecdotally, my friends kids are getting into top universities without the insanity. A bunch to UVA, W&M, and VT (we live in VA), a few Ivies, a few to Stanford and Berkeley. The few kids I know doing test prep and other stuff like that are mostly getting into 2nd tier privates, which they likely would have gone to without the insanity.
This is basically a tautology ;) it doesn't matter how the targets change, as selectivity increases students (and their parents, for the well-to-do) will work harder and harder to pass whatever filters exist.
This is already the case. My list is meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive nor aspirational
I misunderstood the intent of the list, I agree with you.
Some other points:
1) SFUSD actually delayed Algebra 1 until 9th grade, not just Geometry.
2) This choice was a bit silly, but beginning algebra concepts are still being taught in middle school. The title of the course is less relevant than the actual content, and this was less of a radical change than the course title makes it sound.
3) The actual issue is that SFUSD eliminated algebra tracking, and for ideological reasons thinks that students who are ready to study calculus in 8th grade must be put into the same classes as students who are struggling with basic arithmetic. Every student has special needs, and it's a disservice to all of them to pretend that a single unified curriculum and classroom is equally suitable to all students.
Calculus based: AP Physics C Mechanics, AP Physics C E&M
No calculus: AP Physics 1, AP Physics 2
Of course you would need the one with calculus to get credit that works for any STEM major. Without calculus, you aren't likely to get more than a generic science credit.
Even so:
> In any case, even small effects can be unfair. Let’s assume the effects of short-term coaching are really just a 20- or 30-point jump in students’ scores. That means they ought to be irrelevant to college admissions officers. Briggs found otherwise, however. Analyzing a 2008 survey conducted by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, he noted that one-third of respondents described a jump from 750 to 770 on the math portion of the SAT as having a significant effect on a student’s chances of admissions, and this was true among counselors at more and less selective schools alike. Even a minor score improvement for a high-achieving student, then—and one that falls within the standard measurement error for the test—can make a real difference.
https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...
Test prep, even if it's as rudimentary as taking the test multiple times (thus, being able to afford to take the test multiple times), is an advantage that matters.
In extremely competitive situations, the slightest edge matter. Arguably test prep is less of an edge than spending a summer on some community project would be but even a relatively small point jump is an edge for someone on the bubble. And, of course, elite schools have become hyper-competitive. I have very few illusions that I would have the school choice I had when I went to college--especially given that that about an eighth of my class went to the school in question.
Wasn't this the point of AP classes?
I think there are some Community Colleges/Universities that will allow it, or used to.
Well, no, since that would be 150% of the maximum score.
You can buy your way to the maximum score, and people have been doing it, but test prep won't get you there. (As you note, prep is worth nearly nothing in terms of score gains.) You need advance access to the answers, or a substitute to take the test for you, or something along those lines.
Sure, yes, maybe bribery or fraud could get you there. Have there been reported cases?
Yes, there have been various reported cases of fraud on the SAT. The most prominent two that come to mind are the recent college admissions scandal, in which strategies included both (1) having a substitute take the SAT in place of the student and (2) bribing the test proctor, and the year in which every test result from South Korea was canceled due to widespread cheating.
https://world.time.com/2013/05/10/for-the-first-time-sat-tes...
Most public High Schools in the US are honestly extremely hard to fail out of. As long as you get C's in all your classes you'll graduate.
If the bar sounds low and subjective, that’s because it often is, and as such I think it’s mostly useless for colleges looking to measure students against each other to choose who to admit.
* Graded homework
* Papers/Project/Labs
* Midterm/Final Exam
The teacher chooses the exact mix per class, so it's possible you fail even if you ace the exams, or pass even if you fail the exams. This variability is why the standardized tests exist.
The exact weightings are not known to the students applying, but it's safe to say you can't just minmax on the standardized test.
I don't know if you've picked up the tone of some of the other comments in this thread, but people feel very strongly about what factors should be considered in college admissions. Almost no people will defend legacy admissions, few will defend athletic admissions, some will defend musicians, many will defend GPA and standardized testing.
College admissions are zero sum, and different weightings benefit one group over another. For example, "Asians" (the US does not differentiate South Asian [India, etc] from East Asians [China, Korea, Japan]) have very high test scores in the US. If you base your college admissions just on taking the people with the highest test scores, you would get a massive over-representation of Asians. Schools have decided that isn't what they want, so they take people with worse test scores in order to "balance" the student population.
This infuriates the people passed over in the name of "balance", naturally.
Or if you mean there's more to the experience of going to college than just the coursework, of course that's true as well. But if everyone went to MIT (or any other selective school), that experience would change too; all those people would not be getting the same experience that people going to MIT now are getting.
In short, it is not really possible for everyone to "go to MIT" (or any other selective school) in either of the above senses. So I was focusing on what is possible, namely, for everyone to have access to the same actual learning materials that MIT students have access to.
There is one other thing you could be referring to that the online materials can't give you, namely in person instruction and feedback. Personally, if I think back to the classes I took at MIT, I didn't learn anything significant in those ways; everything significant I learned, as far as the actual academic material was concerned, I learned from reading the course notes and textbooks and working the problem sets and taking the exams (and seeing what I got right and what I got wrong). And all those things are available to anyone who goes to the OCW site. I can't say for sure what other people's experiences are, but I think this quote from Gibbon is relevant:
"The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous."
It's the labs and the projects. Especially for engineering degrees, a good part of learning comes from shipping projects. I think it's where "everyone doing MOOC" falls short.
And consciensciousness is actually negatively correlated with IQ.
> And consciensciousness is actually negatively correlated with IQ.
In the same way that SAT math scores are negatively correlated with SAT verbal scores, which is to say only in thresholded samples.
Personality traits are much more strongly correlated with academic aptitude than IQ is. If you disagree, you should provide a source.
True, this is one thing that online course materials can't give you. But I also don't think a school like MIT has any real advantage in this respect over other schools. At least, not if the labs I had there are any indication; the materials we were given to work with were just as half-baked as anywhere else.
In non-thresholded samples there is still a small negative correlation, or no correlation at all. If you could show me a study thay shows big, positive correlations between intelligence and consciensciousness without thresholding I'd be interested.
While this is a common belief (and many people, before I went to MIT, were very effusive in telling me how much it would benefit me), my experience is that it is a myth (or at least it was at MIT when I was there). Of course there were high achieving people at MIT when I was there, but there were also plenty who were not; overall I don't think the distribution of motivation was much different from high school. (Motivation is not the same thing as grades: most of my fellow students at MIT got straight A's in high school for the same reason I did, that for us, high school was simply not that challenging academically, so we could be lazy and still make the grades.) As for what I learned from my fellow students, I can't say I learned nothing (since, for example, learning what pot smells like counts as learning something), but I don't think I learned anything significant academically that I wouldn't have learned from my peers at a less selective school.
There are plenty of top quality professors at such schools.
Not every professor can make things work for their family at Stanford or MIT. Maybe their partner has a modest income so to afford a house so they go work at Penn State or whatever.
We are...
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-100b-analysis-i-f...
The data from which I learnt this isn't public AFAIK, but I'm sure similar studies exist for other countries.
> If you disagree, you should provide a source.
>One index of that result was an augmentation in the correlation between the NELS Test and high school grade average from .62 to a multiple correlation of .90 based on the test plus 31 additional variables and corrections for unreliability and grading variations (see p. 72) [p. 105]
Here you go : test scores have a correlation of .9 with grades once you account for the grading difficulty of individual teachers and their unreliability (which is done by multiple national exams in the final synthetic grade). This means that they are excellent as a proxy for academic achievement, which can be restated as the following hypothetical : "what would be the grade of the students if they were to all be graded by the same, reliable teacher?"
Generally I think that the burden of proof on the statement "are exams better at predicting grades than IQ tests" lies on the negative, for the obvious reason that grades are generally composed of exams.
Also, the really cool thing with this is that you can also the reverse - after the teacher has had all of his students graded on the exam, you have all of the variables and can predict exam scores with a correlation of .9 (and thus general academic achievement with a correlation of .81), which means that you can avoid dispensing national exams at every level of schooling and simply use grades. You can even use this data later in college to evaluate how harshly a college professor is grading, and use that to generate much better grades in college!
I think these things can be found at any decent school. Or, for that matter, in many kinds of activities outside of any school.
At the senior level, folks have typically carved a path out for themselves. College is typically the oldest thing on their resume anyways.
I think a lot of people here assume a fairly linear SWE progression beginning with a CS degree but that's not the norm for a lot of people who work in the computer industry in various roles even that didn't involve wholesale career shifts.
Yes, fair point.
> suggesting it can substitute actually studying at MIT is a bit too... optimistic
My personal experience at MIT was that I didn't learn much from lectures; too long, too boring, and too much tailored to the professor's style instead of the student's. In this respect lectures at other schools where teaching is valued more relative to research might actually be better. (One of the professors I had at MIT who was the exception--an excellent lecturer, who actually responded usefully to questions from students in a freshman-level class of 200 or more--was criticized by the MIT administration for not publishing enough research papers.)