[throwaway23236]

While you might be right on some of this. I think the colleges are looking for people not based on standardized tests alone. Most standardized tests are just rote learning and memorization.

I would challenge that these schools are looking for people who think better than most people. Yes they need to be smart when it comes to doing school work, but they need to be more than that to attend an elite university.

The people that go to these schools go on to be the upper-crust of society. They can think outside of the box and push the envelope of human knowledge.

Can other people do that without going to these schools? Sure. But these schools are looking for those people.

[chinchilla2020]

The issue with the essay system is coming up with an evaluation criteria that isn't completely biased and prone to manipulation.

The essay system favors people who hire admissions consultants to write them, or who study the online guides about what types of essays get into Harvard. They also tend to chase sensational sob stories - the claims within those stories are never verified by admissions officers.

I can't find the study at the moment on google, but I recall some work asking to end essays in admissions packages since it discriminates against Black and Hispanic applicants who do not have the background resources to write appropriate admissions essays.

[throwaway23236]

You are right, it is not. I totally get that and I think we should work to remove bias out of the process.

Maybe removing names and genders from the essays or similar entry requirements. There are ways to reduce bias without resorting to some kind of standardized test which only shows that they can pass a test.

Elite Universities are looking for people of character, that could be anyone from any walk of life. But it is self-serving, they are looking for people who will end up bringing money, recognition, and fame back to the school. They are looking for people who want to go there, who will go far in life and talk about how X university is where it all started.

I get that this is a difficult topic, and I want everyone in the world to be a lifelong learner, reader, and more.

But not everyone is built the same, that doesn't mean they won't go far in life. And I don't think recognizing that difference is racist or discriminatory. Not everyone will become a Harvard grad, the president, CEO of a company, etc. Some people are dealt a shittier hands in life and get less draws from the deck, we should work to fix that, but we shouldn't lump everyone into one basket.

[RestlessMind]

> we should work to remove bias out of the process.

How would you remove the biggest bias of money? People with money will throw it at gaming anything used by college admission process.

[throwaway23236]

Remove names, gender, race from admissions. Have a selection board base their decisions solely on a combination of transcripts and essays.

I think standardized testing is gaming the system, what you cannot game are transcripts of life long learners who value their education. If you remove all gendered language, names, mentions of race from essays you will hopefully be able to make your group decisions with less bias. The group should be diverse enough on multiple metrics.

Will it be perfect, no. But I think it's a better start than what we currently have.

[tester756]

>what you cannot game are transcripts of life long learners who value their education.

What does it even mean?

[throwaway23236]

I mean that seeing someone's grades over the course of several years is more useful then test scores.

[criddell]

A lot of your criticisms of the essay apply to standardized tests as well.

[chinchilla2020]

Sure, they do.

But a math test is a pretty accurate test of someone's mathematical skill.

An essay about life is a much more dubious and lacks a quantitative rubric for comparing candidates.

[elgar1212]

> The people that go to these schools go on to be the upper-crust of society. They can think outside of the box and push the envelope of human knowledge.

Yeah, kind of like SBF

> I would challenge that these schools are looking for people who think better than most people. Yes they need to be smart when it comes to doing school work, but they need to be more than that to attend an elite university.

I'd counter this and say the insistence on qualitative standards just opens the door for classist decision making. The second you allow people to introduce qualitative standards, it opens the door for discrimination

[throwaway23236]

Training someone to pass a test to get in is not the same as finding the right person to go there. Does this open up the possibility of discrimination? Yes.

Tell me about how many people I know who went to a CISSP bootcamp, passed the test, and walk around not knowing shit? It's the same in a lot of universities too. Elite universities are looking for people who fit their image and who they believe are going somewhere in life. Universities, especially universities are looking for people that are going places. They are looking for people who will bring recognition, money, and fame back to the university.

[elgar1212]

> Tell me about how many people I know who went to a CISSP bootcamp, passed the test, and walk around not knowing shit? It's the same in a lot of universities too.

So because bootcamps are an insufficient means of testing, standardized testing in general is inadequate? And not just this specific test in particular?

> Training someone to pass a test to get in is not the same as finding the right person to go there.

Only if the test is insufficient. "finding the right person" is just a racist, classist dog whistle from a group of people that feel entitled to the right to discriminate

You want to see a living example of this entitlement? Listen to the audio from the recent Supreme court verbal argument regarding the Harvard case. Specifically the "oboe players" comment. Juxtapose this with the historical racist and antisemitic discrimination and ask yourself whether Harvard should be trusted to "find the right person" in this sort of way

[kyrra]

Can the universities prove that whatever process they have now (or is trying to do) is better than a pure meritocracy? Obviously we would need to agree on what "better" means here (ie: what outcomes they are measuring).

The question to you is, how do you measure "needs to be more than that". If this isn't something that you can't quantify, it's just going to let administrators pick students to satisfy whatever the current cultural hot button issue is.

[throwaway23236]

That is a good question. I think the university should decide on the "why" and base candidates off of that. And you are are right, much like picking a hire, a best friend, your spouse, there is a lot that isn't quantifiable.

4.0 student who you interview and they come off as a Jerk, they are smart as hell or a 3.93 student who is passionate about learning, wants to be there, and is a humble person. Which do you want affecting your school's culture?

[gautamdivgi]

You can make the tests harder. There can be IQ testing to estimate ability to handle out of box thinking. Fwiw - anyone able to fork out $52k/year for their child is wealthy enough so that the child has had enough flexibility for out of box thinking growing up.

A lot of out of box thinking is conditioning to the environment. If you are taught not to have constraints your ability to think out of the box is much better.

[dbingham]

There is so much classism, elitism, and unsupported effect therefor cause reasoning in this comment I don't even know where to start with it.

Which is ironic, because I am also generally against the idea of colleges basing their admissions solely on standardized tests. Those tests have their roots in the eugenics movement, have been shown to be deeply problematic and biased, and have completely failed to predict future success when you remove confounding factors.

> I would challenge that these schools are looking for people who think better than most people. Yes they need to be smart when it comes to doing school work, but they need to be more than that to attend an elite university.

I would argue that far more people who "think better than most" people come out of public schools than the "elite" schools. What the elite schools do very well is laundering the mediocrity of the upper class. (See "legacy admissions")

> The people that go to these schools go on to be the upper-crust of society. They can think outside of the box and push the envelope of human knowledge.

...

https://hbr.org/2020/09/graduates-of-elite-universities-get-...

> Our results offer some solace to the traditional recruiters. After controlling for age, gender, and the year of study, we found that graduates from higher-ranked universities performed better, but only nominally and only on some dimensions of performance. Specifically, the overall performance improved by only 1.9% for every 1,000 positions in the Webometrics global university rankings. When comparing the performance of candidates whose universities rank further apart — a graduate from a top university versus a “global average” university — the performance differential jumps to 19%.

> The 19% difference in performance between the top and the average seems significant, but keep in mind that this is for graduates from universities that are 10,000 university ranking positions apart. At a given organization, candidates are likely to be selected from within a much narrower pool, perhaps from universities whose rankings differ by a couple of hundred positions. In this more realistic case, the predicted difference in performance would be closer to 1%.

Keep in mind, this[1] is the ranking they are using. The top 10 includes public universities and omits several Ivy league "elite" universities.

[1] https://www.webometrics.info/en/world

[sokoloff]

> have completely failed to predict future success when you remove confounding factors.

It seems to me that measuring/estimating the scholastic ability/preparedness of a prospective student has value independent of whether that preparedness is correlated with some other variables (wealth, neighborhood, childhood nutrition, other socioeconomic markers).

“Are they prepared/do they have the aptitude to succeed here?” matters much more than the underlying reasons why they might or might not be prepared.

[jimbokun]

>...and have completely failed to predict future success when you remove confounding factors.

The research I've seen claims the opposite.

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-arent-actually-mad-...

[unmole]

I was under the impression that elite universities first switched to holistic criteria for admissions because too many Jewish students made it through on academics.

[throwaway894345]

> Most standardized tests are just rote learning and memorization.

Most of the non-standardized test stuff is subjective and lends itself pretty directly to classist and racial prejudice. No one is arguing that standardized tests are the perfect way to test for aptitude, but the pro-standardized-test folks argue that the alternatives are significantly worse.

[HDThoreaun]

Harvard admissions are classist on purpose. They want to admit mostly upper class people because they want every single one of their graduates to become upper class, and the easiest way to do that is to start upper class.