Not only that, but high performers are incentivised to move to worse schools.
It may actually improve mean outcomes, but harm societal outcomes, as the scientific impact of educated individuals may tend to be power law distributed (e.g. the most important breakthroughs come from a small sector of the population with wildly disproportionate impact)
Example: A high school student, Noam Shazeer placed Silver in the international math olympiad. Went on to build the foundations of LLMs in multiple papers including the transformer paper. Founded Character.AI...
Forget the fact that he's now a 50 year old dude, this kind of stuff started in high school
There are multiple examples of highly citied ML papers coming from essentially people in the middle of undergrad, meaning they essentially learned all their shit in high school. The first protein diffusion paper, the single cell autoencoder paper, diffusion autoencoder paper... these were all from essentially high school prodigies publishing in undergrad or first year of graduate school.
The bottleneck on research is funding. We have a glut of students wanting to go into research who don't because of how competitive the field is. We then have researchers constantly leaving the field for the same reason.
The thing is the people who do get the funding should be the smartest of the smartest. That funnel needs to be there and this nonsense is destroying it.
Texan here. There’s still ways to get in if you don’t make the top X% of your class (the percentage is shrinking every year as the school climbs up the rankings and more people want to go… I think it’s near top-4% now? It used to be top 15% I recall), and many of those high achievers go onto other out of state schools, so it’s in the interest of UT system to offer automatic admission to the top achievers from across the state.
Just because the top X% is guaranteed admission, that does not mean all (or even most) of the school is from the top X%.
It's not unusual for families to change their school district so their kid can play for a better sports program and of course it's extremely common for families to want to live in the best district for education quality, but maybe some are now incentivized to move into a district with lesser competition for the top spots.
How much control can your classmates have over your own GPA? What percentage of 'control' over your GPA is up to you vs. your teachers, parents, classmates, and everyone else? I put those in order intentionally, as I think your classmates are below teachers and parents on the hierarchy.
Disincentives group learning, collaboration, teaching each other.
Many good cases to have a strict zero sum competition but you won’t see collaboration in these (eg olympiads, competitions). That’s fine for a short term event but for long term learning in a persistent social group it seems good to encourage collaboration
This kind of competition happens in other areas of academic pursuits too. Is that strictly a bad thing?
The bad thing about UT's policy is that it encourages well-off students to move to a less-competitive school district (usually rural) in order to improve their chances.
If we were really optimising for this, we’d ban colleges using anything other than geographic area. Keeping all the high performers at high performing unis will hurt the lower performers
Many other schools have rolled back their temporary suspensions of SAT-optional/blindness, but UC made a decision that was permanent. And when they made the decision, it was over the objection of the UC faculty recommendation. They might roll it back, but I'm not holding my breath.
It may actually improve mean outcomes, but harm societal outcomes, as the scientific impact of educated individuals may tend to be power law distributed (e.g. the most important breakthroughs come from a small sector of the population with wildly disproportionate impact)