Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by majormajor 1914 days ago
The trick would be coming up with an exam you can't study for. But even "IQ test" style stuff hasn't been immune to this, and many attempts to do so fall victim to "select for people with upbringing like the test authors, so actually they did study their whole life, they just didn't realize that's what they were doing."

Job interviews would benefit from the same thing, to go by the self-reported amount of time wasted on leetcode around here.
1 comments
ZephyrBlu 1914 days ago
How would that help?

Rewarding people for simply being born with high IQ is the opposite of meritocratic.

link
majormajor 1914 days ago
In theory, the purpose of the admissions test (or job interview) is to find people capable of doing the work, so they won't wash out from the hard, demanding programs. But none of these tests are rewarding people for doing useful or directly applicable work in the first place. So ideally you'd want a test that didn't require wasted zero-sum-game studying marathons, but would also correspond to the type of work involved... again, I don't think IQ tests are this. But such a thing would be useful, if it could be devised. If you still look at grades in addition to the standardized tests, like in the US, you'll wash out the not-willing-to-put-in-any-effort crowd like that.

To steal another idea from the job interview discussions: what you want might be entry-level intro survey type classes that are broadly open to lots of people (maybe online) but have a high bar for completion to gain full admission, and focus on some of the hands-on aspects of the field in question. "Lower bar + weed out courses" is used in a lot of places that couldn't get away with the high bar of MIT or such.

Alternately, I often suspect the best solution would be fully randomized admissions. Does it make sense to stratify by institution, so that you have one single gate into university, instead of looking at the output of four years of work across mostly-evenly-distributed places? Where you can more legitimately assume that what someone gets out of their time will be the result of what they personally put into it?

link
blasdel 1913 days ago
Randomized admissions were the implicit thesis of the satire we get the word from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
link
gumby 1914 days ago
Really depends on your definition of "merit" (which is frequently misunderstood the same way evolutionary "fitness" is often misunderstood).

Read Young's original book coining the term: it was both a satire and dystopian lament. Far from a term of approval!

Certainly many people -- perhaps most -- believe that "IQ" (loosely defined) is in fact the proper definition of meritocracy.

(In case it's not obviously I definitely disagree)

link
ZephyrBlu 1913 days ago
If many people loosely equate IQ to merit then that is worrying to me.

It's all well and good if you're smart because it increases your advantage two-fold. But it basically screws over everyone else.

link
thomasahle 1914 days ago
It might be meritocratic by some definitions, but it's hardly egalitarian or humanistic.
link