[jackallis]

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

[Aurornis]

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

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

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

[screye]

It goes deeper. The problem lies at the source.

> people pushing ideology

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

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

The war on phonics is the canonical example.

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

[vacuity]

The sad thing is that I saw that standardized tests were being blamed based on a certain ideology, when the proponents of the ideology should've realized that their own goals are better served by using standardized tests.

It shouldn't be controversial, and in some sense it isn't (in another sense it is, because people confuse themselves), that everyone should be given the opportunity to develop and perform at their full potential. I could name multiple different ideologies that oppose this in some way, though.

[lotsofpulp]

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

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

[everybodyknows]

> increase number of students, which then increases their pay and job security ...

Someone who knows how the world works! Qui bene --

https://ucsdguardian.org/2025/09/29/uc-regents-greenlight-uc...

> The expansion anticipates 13,600 new students in the next 15 years

[le-mark]

Kurt Vonnegut saw this trend emerging back in 1961:

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

[firmretention]

There's a charming TV movie adaptation of this story.

[TechRemarker]

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

[mlboss]

I don’t think it is about resources. Growing up in 3rd world country I have zero resources. It is the drive of student and higher standards from parents and teachers that matters. Everybody is just getting soft.

[Aurornis]

> I don’t think it is about resources. Growing up in 3rd world country I have zero resources.

In America many parents do have resources, though, and they will spend those on private schools, tutoring, or home schooling.

> It is the drive of student and higher standards from parents and teachers that matters.

These proposals restrict the teachers and disallow teaching advanced subjects to students with drive to learn them.

You can’t say it’s up to the students and teachers while also holding back the students and restricting the teachers.

[corpMaverick]

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

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

[Aurornis]

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

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

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

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

[insane_dreamer]

I sort of agree, but in my experience, wealthy parents have the money for extra classes, tutoring, SAT/ACT prep, etc., which enable their kid to get a high SAT score. These are resources which the disadvantaged don't have. So while an "average" wealthy kid might score 780 with all the help afforded to them, it would take a truly exceptional poor kid to score 780 since they're essentially bootstrapping from natural talent alone.

So whether you include SAT scores in admissions or not, it's still heavily skewed.

Also, the problem with SAT scores is that you end up studying to the test. (This is why Chinese applicants do so well on college entrance exams - they spent most of their high school studying for the specific range/type of questions they will be asked on the test.)

[xphos]

I never thought about the ease at which you can game non-academic aspects. I agree that testing is probabamtic because a good tutor can boost peoples performance signficantly but there feels like a limit to actually just learning the material. Useful evalation metrics of people are notoriously difficult

[Jweb_Guru]

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

[sxzygz]

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

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

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

[Jweb_Guru]

Nobody is saying "don't teach math to high schoolers." My point is that this whole admissions rant appears to be entirely about admission to "elite" schools no longer being fully determined by SAT scores (or whatever--I've never been completely clear on what people are actually arguing for), when anyone good enough at math to get a really high SAT score can easily gain admission to a ton of universities with great math departments. As for the real "gifted" kids, there will always be some middle schoolers taking calculus etc. with or without a structured gifted & talented program. The majority of people in these programs are not so far beyond their peers as you seem to think, and my experience in math departments has been that there's a pretty even mix of kids with precocious math backgrounds and people who developed their skills at a later point.

[sxzygz]

The issue, as I see it, the erosion of the level of mathematical competence seen at university entrance. This inhibits the rate of progress one can make with a student over the period of an undergraduate education, and this reduces the exposure to mathematics of the next generation of educators.

Mathematics education is really, really broken unless your measure is Terry Tao’s are still produced. That’s not the issue. The issue is the breadth of people who can recognize what mathematical proficiency can enable within society, not because some wonk says data shows this, but because they personally have experience as to it has empowered them to perform more capably in their chosen field of endeavour.

[Jweb_Guru]

Okay. A lot of the blame for this has been previously placed directly at the feet of stuff like AP programs that claim to teach, e.g., calculus to a bunch of people who aren't ready for it; it becomes a prestige thing or expected for admittance to college, which results in a bunch of people being taught to the test and not actually gaining the foundational mathematics education they actually need to understand the subject. I don't see how encouraging this sort of thing actually helps with the problem of universities needing to do remedial math education to people who supposedly know the material already, but it appears to be what you're arguing for. If you're arguing for lower education reform in general, great, but that has little to nothing to do with how highly elite colleges weigh the math portion of SAT scores.

I feel compelled to point out that for people who want to learn mathematics, there are more and higher quality resources than there ever have been before. For the most part they are absolutely free, and unlike virtually every other subject on the planet they are generally not the sort of thing where you can be led astray by misleading material. I simply don't see how such people are being suppressed in any way, or why (from the perspective of advancing the state of the art of mathematics) I should care about the "non Terry Taos" in your words, who are merely above average at math but don't actually intend to pursue it as a career. There are plenty of other skills that are actually eroding at a high rate, or have huge startup and lab costs, or are otherwise underappreciated and underpaid relative to their importance to society; I don't think mathematics is one of them.

[sxzygz]

My initial reply to you was to only articulate some nebulous idea that there is desire for mathematical understanding that is being underserved by mathematics education.

If standardized tests statistically “reliably” predict mathematical “ability”, the act of removing their gatekeeper role to higher education in our society (that is structured around prestige colleges resulting in prestige future income) amounts to disincentivizing whatever performative mathematical education students endure.

Some people, as children, are drawn to mathematical concepts and, yes, now is a better time than in all history to be such a person. The ambient possibility of this for a given individual is I assume unchanged through history.

Some people, like me, are able to do performative mathematics in school well enough but didn’t particularly care for it. Then we encounter some remarkable teacher and we feel some fortunate and enriched.

The existence of the remarkable teacher is the product of the possibility of a society producing mathematically proficient educators. That means students must somehow encounter them in their education.

I believe increasing the production of such teachers is important, irrespective of the field. I believe mathematical thinking can address this problem. Above, I have sketched the most meagre possible outline of how such thinking prepares to address further modelling of the problem.

Yes, this is contingent on my assumption that mathematics is generally useful in problem solving.

If you don’t accept this, that’s fine. We simply don’t agree. That said, I want to add that I appreciate the time you took to engage with me. I’m someone who believes that a lot of structures in society are poorly conceived, but that is a much longer discussion. At the present moment in time, standardized tests are a minor stupid in comparison to removing them without a much broader vision of how to address certain shortcomings of society.

[skeezyjefferson]

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

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

[Aurornis]

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

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

[triceratops]

> his goal to phase out gifted education programs

Gifted education programs for kindergarten. I don't necessarily agree with that either but it's important to be accurate when talking about proposed policies. The man isn't talking about taking away AP algebra. Most kindergarteners still need to be told not to eat their boogers.

[Aurornis]

“Phase out” means gradually remove.

Kindergarten is where the phase out starts. That’s how you phase something out. You don’t take it away from everyone all at once because that triggers outrage. You disallow it for new kindergarten students one season, then next year remove it from 1st grade so they can’t go into accelerated programs and so on. He explicitly uses the phrase “phase out” for this reason.

Read more of his platform documents, including the ones before everything got watered down for his website.

The “it’s just for kindergarten” is just positive spin on the first step of the goal of phasing it out in general.

[triceratops]

> Read more of his platform documents, including the ones before everything got watered down for his website

Do you have links?

[Aurornis]

It’s been his statement all over: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/nyregion/mamdani-schools-...

The phase out starts with kindergarten and “early grades”. In some places he’s said up through second grade which some assume is an upper limit, but really it’s just the natural length of phasing out gifted programs one year at a time over the 4-year course of a mayoral term due to the necessary delays to eliminate the program after his election date (kindergarten next school year, then 1st grade the next, then 2nd grade)

[Izkata]

Also, they used to start that young. My gradeschool in the 90s would identify gifted students in kindergarten and give parents the option to move them to SWAS (school-within-a-school) starting in first grade.

[riskable]

There is a well-known effect where segregating kids into gifted VS non-gifted harms the education of the non-gifted while only having a marginal impact on the gifted:

https://ncrge.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/982/2019/04...

Basically, non-gifted kids learn from the gifted ones. It's that whole, "positive influence from peers" thing.

In the long term, having gifted programs results in a handful of accelerated students and a lot more struggling ones (at the end of mandatory education).

[Aurornis]

> Basically, non-gifted kids learn from the gifted ones. It's that whole, "positive influence from peers" thing.

In other words, let’s drag the smart students down, disallow them a better education, and instead force them to teach their peers because we don’t think their teachers are doing a good job?

This is a terrible way to solve a problem.

[jcranmer]

Honestly, nothing has done a better job of solidifying my understanding of a material than trying to explain it to other people. We should be giving students more opportunities to do this, not less.

[akramachamarei]

On the contrary, the study you cite found no significant effect either way for either group. From the last page: "we find that gifted grouping does not help or hurt the achievement growth of gifted students nor does it help or hurt the achievement growth of non-gifted students" (emphasis mine.) This certainly does not imply that separating gifted tracks results in a lot more struggling students.

[Aurornis]

Thank you! It’s perpetually frustrating that so many have come up with false ideas about gifted programs hurting other student.

Allowing advanced students to learn advanced topics should be an easy decision for everyone. It’s so strange that it’s become a contentious topic.

[triceratops]

I mean that's nice and all. But then you can also get behavioral issues from gifted students who feel stifled. Their needs aren't less important than the other students'.

Kids usually don't learn "school" things like math, reading, and science from each other. They learn behaviors. Kindness, cooperation, competition, integrity, working hard, not being disruptive etc. Having a gifted track for part of the day doesn't disrupt that learning.

[fortran77]

Even though he personally benefited from them. Pull up the ladder!

[vacuity]

Do you have reason to believe he benefitted from gifted programs around the level of kindergarten or maybe first or second grade?

[fortran77]

He never had to work a day in his life and now he's mayor elect of NYC!

[vacuity]

The "never had to work a day in his life" claim is wrong, though I agree his experience seems insufficient for the position of mayor.

[tehjoker]

There is a silver lining though, when everyone is in the same class, better off people don't think they can escape and push to make the program better for everyone.

[gizajob]

Nah, they get dragged down and ignored.

Teachers only really teach the middle third - the top third can be ignored because they can do it for themselves while being bored.

The bottom third can’t be helped because they won’t be helped without a huge amount of energy by the teacher (for little rewards), and so won’t do it for themselves while being bored.

The middle third is all that gets schooled because they can at least be bumped up a little higher towards where the under-achieving top third thus rests.

[Aurornis]

> better off people don't think they can escape and push to make the program better for everyone.

Your solution is to make the smart kids suffer so maybe they can force the educators to do better? That’s insane. It’s also not going to happen.

Do you know what will happen? Any parent with the means will scrape together cash to pull their students out and go to private schools. Or they’ll hire tutors after school and force their kids to sit down and learn what they should have been learning during the day.

This fantasy where the smart kids rally together to overhaul the system because we banned them from taking advanced classes is a delusion.

[FatherOfCurses]

This gives off "I Am Very Smart" vibes.

I was in a gifted program in grades 5-7, stopped going mainly because I had to travel to another school to attend and it was inconvenient.

I didn't "suffer" being in classes with folks who weren't at my level. The teaching staff did a great job and I never felt like I was being shortchanged. My undiagnosed ADHD means I goofed around a lot, but several of my friends told me after high school that they appreciated me because I helped them see learning from a different angle than their parents or the teachers.

[Aurornis]

Great that it worked for you. I believe everyone should have the choice.

However, please don’t force your experience to be the only allowable experience for others. If some students want to take advanced classes, we should let them.

Refusing to allow students to learn at a faster rate is insanity.

[triceratops]

But you can't tailor one program for kids with different abilities. You shouldn't even try. You should give each individual what they need to succeed to the best of their ability. That's the core of inclusion and equity. You know, the classic comic of the three kids trying to look over the fence?

[tr45872267]

They can and do. Private schools already exist.

[bryanlarsen]

AFAICT many private schools are worse than public schools. Parents put kids into private schools so that they get good grades and extra-curriculars to let them get into the good universities. So that's what private schools sell -- good grades. It's less important that they have the education that the good grades imply.

[Aurornis]

I have no doubt schools like that exist, but in every location I’ve lived and interacted with parents the private school educations they sent their kids to were no question a cut above.

I think this idea that private schools are no better are even worse is a wishful thinking narrative. Private schools, especially the more expensive ones, naturally select for parents who are more involved. More involved parents are highly correlated with better student outcomes. That alone means private schools are correlated with better outcomes. It honestly doesn’t really matter if it’s cause and effect or correlation, parents send their kids to private schools because they want them in the mix with other students selected into the higher performing environment.

[tr45872267]

They do perform better on average

>The average private school mean reading score was 14.7 points higher than the average public school mean reading score, corresponding to an effect size of .41 (the ratio of the absolute value of the estimated difference to the standard deviation of the NAEP fourth-grade reading score distribution). After adjusting for selected student characteristics, the difference in means was near zero and not significant.

For math:

>The average private school mean mathematics score was 7.8 points higher than the average public school mean mathematics score, corresponding to an effect size of .29. After adjusting for selected student characteristics, the difference in means was -4.5 and significantly different from zero. (Note that a negative difference implies that the average school mean was higher for public schools.)

In the context of the specific discussion here, it doesn't really matter that the effect goes away when controling for selected student characteristics. First off this was from 2006, we would have to see if any of that has changed. The 2024 numbers are here[1]. But in any case they are not worse than public schools, although they may be no better or slightly worse than a public school in a rich neighborhood or similar.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2006461.a...

[1] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/dashboards/schools_dashboa...

[naIak]

You can’t have a good teaching programme when there is a variance of 40 points of IQ among the pupils.

[bena]

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

[perrysmith]

That’s why it isn’t a reliable indicator of aptitude. A student who earns all A’s at a top level public school and a student who earns all A’s at a low level public school aren’t necessarily operating at the same academic level.

[bena]

They asked what else could be used. I told them, then I explained why it wouldn't work as well as a standardized test.

And the variance can happen even in "top level" public schools, for certain definitions of "top level". I went to one of the best high schools in the nation (as rated by college acceptance rates, SAT/ACT scores, etc). There were still teachers people wanted to avoid because they were seen as harsher graders. So you can have grade inflation even at "top level" schools as private schools aren't above selling grades.

[perrysmith]

Of course you can have grade inflation at top level schools, but there is a reason that they are considered "top level" in the first place.

[naIak]

Gauging someone’s abilities is meany mean.

[massysett]

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

[FatherOfCurses]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[vacuity]

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