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by ordx 14 days ago
> I still contend strongly that it is wrong to distill a person into a collection of numbers.

Welcome to the adult world, where you are distilled into a collection of number each step of the way: look at credit scores, performance reviews, etc.

> I'll also mention that using tests scores is not entirely "fair" either.

Unfortunately we didn't come up with a better way to rank a group of people on scale in a reasonable amount of time. So tests are a necessary compromise. I also know plenty of examples where people aced their tests by just spending $30 on a prep book and studying hard.

1 comments

Thankfully, I also work in the adult world and this world requires judgement.

As an example, my wife is a physician. She and her colleagues use metrics to help assess a patient, but ultimately treatment is based on their judgement. Purely relying on hard numbers, such as what an EKG gives, would lead to dead patients. Many of them. I am a mathematician. My world revolves around hard computational numbers, yet my algorithms will often given misleading results. Determining when that is requires judgement. Despite a push too the contrary, good hiring managers assess applicants and take responsibility for both good and bad hires. This requires judgement.

And, yes, I can also find examples where someone either didn't study or used a book and did well on their SAT. That said, in person test prep with a tutor absolutely has a large, positive effect on test scores, much more than simply a book. Kaplan has the internal data. It's absolutely worth the money if one can afford it. Most can't.

Your personal stories are very cute, but they don't explain what you're proposing instead of tests. I'm not sure how you're going to use so-called "judgment" to decide which students get in out of hundreds of thousands of applications in a reasonable amount of time.