[porb121]

> we do expect to return to requiring the SAT/ACT once it is possible for everyone to take them safely

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.

[scarmig]

One of the more obnoxious things is how biases are buried into things like personal essays and extracurriculars. They're so subjective that it lets evaluators sneak bias into their decisions.

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.

[flowerlad]

The so called "holistic reviews" were introduced to limit the number of Jewish people admitted to top colleges. See story here: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...

[hintymad]

It can be permanent. In addition to the effort of removing standard tests, education reforms are happening left and right. San Francisco school union recently decided to remove fast tracks. The union will also delay the teaching of geometry to grade 9, which IMHO will make teaching physics and algebra really hard.

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? 

I really don't see how good intention in this case will help less privileged kids. Such reform is advantageous to my ids, as 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. Yet it still pains me to see potentially hundreds of thousands of kids who would get better chance but can't because of watered-down education.

And I'll be happy if someone could show me how wrong I am.

[silicon2401]

As someone who grow up with very few opportunities, accelerated programs and standardized tests were far and away the single biggest reason I was able to go from growing up poor and without any connections to a top 10 school and then a great career in software. In turn, that's allowed me to support my family in everything from mentoring to financial support.

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"

[thanhhaimai]

> "delay the teaching of geometry to grade 9"

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.

[panda88888]

I agree. Compared to extracurriculars, SAT/ACT test prep is (was?) probably the most cost effective way of improving the chance of admissions for low-income students. It is possible to significantly improve the score simply by being familiar with the test format and a few test-taking strategies, and this is all doable even with just a SAT prep book and a timer.

[flowerlad]

> positive correlation between family income and testing scores

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_...

[Natsu]

I think we'll actually see more of a divide as those who are motivated to study on their own go through online programs like OCW and use that knowledge to do impressive things in lieu of credentialing themselves (though they may also leverage the impressive things to get credentials).

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").

[bigbillheck]

> The union will also delay the teaching of geometry to grade 9

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.

[hintymad]

Yeah, pushing kids may not always work out for kids. I used those examples to show it's possible for some kids to get advantages. That's also the reason I kept quantifying the examples with "if they are interested/talented" and etc. Maybe a reversed example is better: some kids could've stood out but didn't because they didn't have the edge of being in those camps/tutoring schools. I'm already seeing such trend: kids are in arm race of taking as many APs as possible. Kids rush to STEM contests, and etc. Schools can take out challenges, but the competitions won't stop simply because top-quality education is a scarce resource.

[ryandrake]

I get this but can’t bear to not participate!

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.

[dragonwriter]

> The union will also delay the teaching of geometry to grade 9, which IMHO will make teaching physics and algebra really hard.

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.

[scarmig]

AP Physics is calculus based.

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.

[souprock]

There are 4 different physics tests currently offered for AP.

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.

[hintymad]

When I was taking high-school physics, we started without calculus, but we definitely needed geometry. Otherwise, one wouldn't be able to work on free body diagram, circular motion, optics, and etc, as all of them involves trigonometry and some basic geometry.

[ghaff]

Furthermore...

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.

[chris11]

> the quantitative measures like SAT score had a lot more predictive value than interview/letters of recommendation/essays/etc.

I've also read SAT scores are highly correlated to family income. Family income probably has a huge impact on post university outcomes.

[Robotbeat]

I would imagine the socialization benefits of family income probably massively enhance interview skill and (even more) letters of recommendation as well, no? And for the essay, this seems easiest to fix with wealth as you can hire someone to either write it for you or massively edit it and assist you with it.

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.

[yellowyacht]

I have never considered this issue before, so what are the good alternatives to this? For MIT admissions to call their teachers and ask questions?

[rudderz]

I don't get why students need to be apply to be accepted. Why can't everyone go to MIT? Is there a scarcity on chalk boards, shitty chairs and cinder blocks?

[plank_time]

Because you want to have a minimum level of ability so that you can maintain a certain pace of instruction. If you have students of various levels of ability and you teach high tier material, most of those kids will fail and drop out. Why set them up for failure?

[tarboreus]

That's a nice thought, but it's about status. If they let everyone in, they'd lose status, and having an MIT degree wouldn't have signaling value. If what you said was accurate, they'd just set minimum qualifications and accept way more people.

[pdonis]

> Why can't everyone go to MIT?

Everyone can, online. All of MIT's course content is available for free online:

https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

[threatofrain]

It's not really, it's a dumping ground of university assets.

[pdonis]

Um, video lectures, lecture notes, problem sets, solutions, and references to textbooks is more than just "a dumping ground". When I look at what's available on OCW for the classes I took when I was at MIT, everything that I got any learning value from is there.

[scarmig]

The biggest part of any "elite" university is being surrounded by similarly high achieving people, to learn from and be motivated by. Attending any random state college gives you theoretical access to all the non-human resources (except labs) that the typical MIT undergraduate will access.

[pdonis]

> The biggest part of any "elite" university is being surrounded by similarly high achieving people, to learn from and be motivated by.

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.

[erosenbe0]

It's not theoretical, you simply need to search a bit more for same resources at a random state 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.

[threatofrain]

Here's a tell of critical incompleteness — find Analysis 1, which is a must-have course for math and adjacent technical majors.

[pdonis]

> find Analysis 1

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-100b-analysis-i-f...

[908B64B197]

There's more to a degree than just the coursework.

[pdonis]

If you mean there is more to the credential than the coursework, of course that's true. But the only possible value in the credential is scarcity; if everyone gets it, it ceases to have any value as a credential.

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."

[908B64B197]

> There is one other thing you could be referring to that the online materials can't give you, namely in person instruction and feedback

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.

[pdonis]

> It's the labs and the projects

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.

[ghaff]

And if I'm really honest, not to suggest the coursework (especially hands-on) didn't have value, but a huge part of what I learned was exposure to many things--including non-STEM--and various activities outside of classwork. I only use things I learned undergrad in the most general sense today.

[pdonis]

> a huge part of what I learned was exposure to many things--including non-STEM--and various activities outside of classwork

I think these things can be found at any decent school. Or, for that matter, in many kinds of activities outside of any school.

[trentnix]

Because the big money isn't in selling an education. The big money is in selling the credential.

[ALittleLight]

The admissions criteria is probably most of the value of MIT. If you have a degree from MIT you're probably smart, and we know that because you were able to get in to MIT (and graduate).

[Ekaros]

If we could find proper way to do testing and administer unlimited class sizes, one option could be just allow everyone in first year remote with some lower tuition rate. And then just drop all of the students who do not do good enough to get inside quota of spots for further years.

[philipkglass]

Lab based courses are crucial to the natural sciences. Even an institution as well off as MIT can't afford to buy enough NMR spectrometers for everyone to take their chemistry classes. Simulations and videos are not adequate substitutes for real lab work.

[rudderz]

> Simulations and videos are not adequate substitutes for real lab work.

citations needed

[fuzzer37]

With online schooling this is true now more than ever. Why _cant_ i just follow along online, have a bot grade the assignments, and get a degree? Makes you start to question what going to prestigious schools is really about.

[lotsofpulp]

>Makes you start to question what going to prestigious schools is really about.

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.

[sitkack]

How about kids test in? They can take classes online, if they perform well enough, they get to attend in person, everyone else can bang on the gates via a MOOC.

Why not take 1 or 2 university classes your junior and senior year of HS?

[908B64B197]

> Why not take 1 or 2 university classes your junior and senior year of HS?

Wasn't this the point of AP classes?

[sitkack]

I think so, but in the method I am outlining, the student would be doing an audition with a university they would like to attend, it isn't just for college credit.

[908B64B197]

That would be neat.

I think there are some Community Colleges/Universities that will allow it, or used to.

[bryanlarsen]

Given the massive endowments that MIT & the Ivy's are sitting on, it's borderline criminal that they're so selective IMO.

[Kranar]

Their massive endowment comes from being selective. Seeing where someone graduated from is an excellent tool that companies use to filter out candidates and that filter is of genuine value to the economy. Hiring people is very very risky, especially new grads. Imagine having to sift through 1000s of potential candidates and not having indicators such as whether they graduated, where they graduated from, how well they did compared to their peers, etc...

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.

[pmiller2]

You know test prep courses are a thing, and that the wealthy are the primary consumers of them, right? Pretty much everything in the USA is pay to win.

[fireflies_]

You're being downvoted, but I think this sentiment is right and if you take it seriously, it's an argument for the SAT. Pretty much _everything_ in the USA is pay to win, not just the SAT, and the more subjective factors like essays, extracurriculars, and even grades, are more biased.

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...

[kansface]

Test prep has a more or less negligible effect size. Extra curriculars and paying someone to write your essay for you on the other hand are all about privilege.

[ghaff]

I know the test prep industry is bigger today than it used to be- but I assume you can still just buy a test prep book(s) and study like I did.

[sokoloff]

Or even check out a test prep book from the library.

[paconbork]

Yes, and high-quality free prep solutions exist: https://www.khanacademy.org/SAT

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

[cma]

At least in the past, Harvard had a far higher rate of students with learning disabilities than lower tier schools, because having one meant you could get unlimited time on the SAT (giving the time to, on the math part, test every multiple choice solution manually rather than solve once and choose or use other higher level strategies).

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.

[908B64B197]

That's genius. I've seen it elsewhere too.

Again, you should expect every metric to be thoroughly gamed.

[ericd]

This is an oft-repeated meme, but I don't think it holds much water - the main value of SAT test prep is in taking a few practice tests, which you can do by yourself with a $20 book. You can't buy your way to a 2400, it takes being able to actually solve the problems. Otherwise, you'd see a lot more of them.

[thaumasiotes]

> You can't buy your way to a 2400

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.

[ericd]

Ha are they back to 1600? When did they get rid of writing?

Sure, yes, maybe bribery or fraud could get you there. Have there been reported cases?

[thaumasiotes]

1600 is the high score again as of 2016.

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...

[ericd]

Wow, TIL, thanks!

[porb121]

I'd rather have people paying for test prep services than essay ghostwriters or fraudulent extracurriculars.

[sparky_z]

Yes, everything. But testing is the least gameable (assuming you can prevent actual cheating). So getting rid of it makes admission more gameable overall.

[jostmey]

At least the wealthy still have to take the test. With essays, there is no guarantee that the person wrote it. There are numerous websites for purchasing essays

[underpand]

This was downvoted because it's a disingenuous reply. Obviously, OP was not arguing that SAT can't be gamed.

[pmiller2]

I think I know when I'm being disingenuous, thank you very much, and that was not it. Mistaken, perhaps, but not disingenuous.

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.

[ghaff]

That's fair.

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.

[pmiller2]

The real problem [edit: with scores] here is that scores are reported on a 200-800 scale. If they were reported in terms of standard deviation from the mean, then those 20-40 point differences wouldn't matter to admissions officers. As it is, a 30 point difference looks significant, even though it's only around 0.15 SD.

[ghaff]

I'd hope that admissions officers are sophisticated enough to know that. Having said, there's some band in which you're basically flipping coins given overall criteria so you flip coins based on statistically insignificant numbers rather than complete random number generators.

[ffggvv]

you know they also pay people to write their essays or give them tutoring to get a high GPA right? And that GPA's are inflated at private schools?

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.