New Admission Standard
Want to get into college? Great, forget about grades, they don’t matter anymore as once highly selective schools are now a free for all.
Ivy League schools and a host of other highly selective institutions waived SAT and ACT requirements for the class of 2025, resulting in an unprecedented flood of applications and what may prove the most chaotic selection experiment in American higher education since the end of World War II.
With less focus on standardized tests scores, which numerous studies have shown are correlated with family wealth, that could mean accepting more low-income students from under-resourced high schools. Colleges say that without SAT or ACT results they’ll give greater weight to teacher recommendations and signs of intellectual curiosity, and judge candidates in the context of their environments.
The pandemic “is calling on us to walk the talk,” when it comes to thinking more broadly about assessing applicants, said Lee Coffin, vice provost for enrollment and dean of admissions and financial aid at Dartmouth College.
Mr. Coffin says he is conflicted about going test-optional. Seeing strong scores helps his team feel more confident that admitted students could cut it at the Ivy League institution. “It becomes a moral question,” he said. “I don’t want to admit someone who is going to struggle.”
Grade-point averages—normally a key data point—were complicated by last year’s spring semester, when many high schools offered pass-fail options to students who were suddenly finishing junior year online.
Pass Fail?
What’s up with that? It should be Pass-Pass. Nobody should fail anymore.
Any teacher who gives a minority student a failing grade should be fired on the spot.
Better yet, just let kids should get to grade themselves. If that sounds crazy, it’s done at some schools.
Mish
On the off chance that the president had the option to drop understudy obligation without passing enactment, in principle borrowers could see their equilibriums diminished or disposed of for the time being. Then again, the odds of Congress consenting to pardon the advances is, best case scenario, questionable. For the most part, Republicans are not for obligation absolution.
Well, it seems like children will have to study harder to get a place in a college. I am a student and I should say it’s a big deal to apply to university without perfect language skills. I had to learn a language for more than three years before I applied. Thanks to my personal tutor from Preply for preparing me.
The problem with teacher recommends is that they are subjective. Many years ago, Hans Eysenck reported that evaluations by college admissions officers were also less effective than objective intelligence testing. IQ tests began in France to identify talented youth from poor families whose abilities might otherwise not be recognized by their teachers.
We know the SAT is a good predictor. “Coaching” does not improve performance very much. The problem with grades is that some schools have smarter student bodies than other schools, so an A is one school is not always comparable to an A in another school. The SAT is effective primarily because it is a pretty good measure of general cognitive ability (basically, a de facto IQ test). I think test makers have reduced its g loading nowadays, but it is probably not possible to totally “de-g” a test of academic achievement. Research shows that general cognitive ability is far and away the most explanatory factor in academic achievement, but that fact also means that it will always “disparately impact” groups with varying average levels of general intelligence, and that is why it is hated by the “woke” left.
There is also a move afoot among “woke” elements in the armed forces to eliminated or devalue the AFQT (the armed forces’ IQ test, consisting of 4 sub-tests embedded in the ASVAB), but its predictive ability, even for “grunts,” makes it difficult to dispense with, and the tragedy of “McNamara’s morons” in Vietnam has not been totally forgotten.
In the long run, what determines the success or failure of a University is how their graduates do post graduation. If they do well, they make a good living, and send money back to the college, and it thrives. If they do poorly, the college suffers in the long run. Colleges should be able to tinker with their admission formulas any way they like. What I oppose would be a government mandate requiring them to do things a certain way.
If a University like Harvard, uses an admission scoring system that attracts students who don’t succeed, then they will lose their elite status. If, say, Case Western, uses a scoring system that attracts students who do well, they will return to their former elite status.
Note that in my logic I specifically presume that there is nothing magical about the teaching at Harvard, or anywhere else. If a student is good, and the teaching is adequate, the student can thrive. In my opinion, the quality of Harvard’s graduates is more a function of the quality of the students they admit than a function of their teaching process.
think that SAT is still a decent way to assess students’ academic performance. You may argue that one of the problems is that passing SAT with a good score requires most students to spend a lot of money. However, you are planning to take the exam in order to get into a University where you will pay 100 times more EVERY year. It is wrong to think that sat is costly when you are going to college.
Let’s see what are other methods of assessing an application there are. Grades? The average grade in US is 3.38 on a 4-scale.According to this, everyone is well above average, so there is a grade inflation.
Recommendations. Let’s us imagine a not so outgoing student. He/she is smart, but doesn’t interact much with their teachers, so where can they get a moving recommendation? But with SAT and other exams they can compensate the disadvantage (by preparing for the exam instead of making connections with teachers).
SAT shows what work students made(their diligence, patience, and intelligence).
If universities will take students solely based on essays, for most students (in science-related fields especially) life in college will be hell, since you cannot learn about students’ acedemic knowledge and skill only from essays. Something has to prove students’ knowledge (students can write whatever they want in their application).
Academic vigour is important but a person cannot study in college based only on their curiosity, their strenghts are important as well and you need something to measure that with.
You are f**king donkey. You don’t even live in the country you talking about. Sat MUST be removed because that test is racist af. Have you thought about the black peolpe who are humiliated by this exam? No, because YOU are racist.
Save your unnecessary opinion to your retardet schoolmates. BLM✊🏿✊🏿✊🏿
I completely agree with you! BLM✊🏿✊🏿✊🏿 BLM✊🏿✊🏿✊🏿 BLM✊🏿✊🏿✊🏿
Precisely because of people like you America became the center of racism of the world. You fu**ing little racist! I’m completely sure that u bully someone at school for their race!!! I think SAT MUST be removed because money which are used to run exams could be used in better ways. For example this money could be spent to treat people with cancer and etc!!! And there is nothing that you can say or do that is going to change my mind.. dumb racist kid.
Look at the BLM’er’s come out of the woodwork…..my, my.
U is not a word, btw.
Average SAT for Asians ….1217
Average SAT score for White….1104
Average SAT score for LatinX….969
Average SAT score for African-Amercian…….927
Harvard just wants to admit more blacks…because they want to be Woke. And those pesky SAT’s are a problem. The Asians kill it on the SAT’s and on grades. And when Harvard tried to cut Asians, they got sued by by the Asian students for discrimination. Look it up if you don’t believe me.
Hey, problem solved. Just get rid of the SAT’s.
Next at Harvard will be Evergreen College style grades….no grades at all.
“Your transcript is an in-depth narrative of your college experience, not a number.”
Relax. I think they are just trolls. Neither has ever posted before.
the ACT & SAT are a scam. if you have the money, you can hire a prep course to improve your scores. thus, they do not measure anything except your ability to scam the test.
“Consider that in 2019, only 37% of Illinois third graders could demonstrate grade-level proficiency in English-language arts and only 41% could
demonstrate grade-level proficiency in math.”
Parents are paying a lot of tax money for public schools to fail to teach their children.
In the past few years I’ve hired two new BS grads in electrical engineering to do radar simulation development. They’re both fairly smart and know stuff but are lacking in critical thinking skills. I believe this is due to schools becoming more group-project oriented and less comprehensive-exam oriented, allowing kids to get through that used to be weeded out. Soon, anyone who can pay tuition can be an engineer.
“… standardized tests scores, which numerous studies have shown are correlated with family wealth”
Any ‘test’ is questionable, and ‘standardized tests’ even more so, yet I suspect any test would fail the RIGOROUS evaluation of woke educators. That said, I went to Harvard Grad after I graduated top of a professional undergraduate program. At Harvard, world-famous faculty pushed me to achieve at levels I did not know I was capable of. Surrounded by the world’s best–those foreign students were incredible–we advanced as a group, and individually.
That said, what, exactly, is the correlation coefficient? Eg. -0.5, 0.20 or 0.90–all measure ‘correlation’? What were the sample sizes? How were they selected? What other factors were included in these uncited studies?
More importantly, are SAT/ACT test scores and family wealth collinear with ‘true’ predictor variables. For example, What is the correlation of test scores with a) 2 parent families,b) parents’ IQ, c) child’s IQ, d) critical thinking skill, e) reading ability, f) time spent doing homework, g) performance at high school/rank.
from
What We Know, Are Still Getting Wrong, and Have Yet to Learn about the Relationships among the SAT, Intelligence and Achievement
“correlations between intelligence and the SAT of roughly 0.5 to 0.9, depending upon sample and the way in which intelligence is defined [3,4,5]”
“SAT scores correlate moderately with socioeconomic status [15], as do other standardized measures of intelligence. “
(couldn’t access the ref to get the R value)
“Another popular misconception is that one can “buy” a better SAT score through costly test prep. Yet research has consistently demonstrated that it is remarkably difficult to increase an individual’s SAT score,”
“a) 2 parent families,b) parents’ IQ, c) child’s IQ, d) critical thinking skill, e) reading ability, f) time spent doing homework, g) performance at high school/rank.”
All these factors (plus family income) EXCEPT time spend doing homework are positively correlated with the child’s IQ. However, the more cognitively gifted kids do not necessarily spend more time on homework. They often spend less time. Yeah, I know, life is unfair, but that’s the way it is.
Coffin. What an inbred, old-rich yankee name. Talk about White Fragility.
This is a nail in the coffin of higher education, if you ask me. No pun intended.
Maybe we now are at point where autodidacts don’t need a Harvard diploma. Lord knows it will only mean you’re connected, from now on, if they have no admissions standards.
What it really does….the REASON fo this…..is it allow the administrations to stop having to let so many Asians in…..and now they can let in the black kids who have no chance of killing it on the SAT….
The SAT’s were stumbling block on the road to Diversity and Inclusion. Now we can graduate a whole generation of Ibram Kendis and become a post-slavery utopia.
I was accepted to Harvard once (for a post-doc) , but I couldn’t afford to go. I went to UT in Houston instead, and came out fine.
F**k Harvard and the Ivy League.
F**k college.
Enroll on YouTube and learn anything you want. Read some books. Seek mentorship on the internet. Do great things.
The term propinquity means nearness. Thus, the theory of propinquity states that individuals affiliate with one another because of spatial or geographical proximity. … This theory appears to explain the group formation process based on nearness.
Colleges and work are where college graduates marry other college grads. Run this over and over again, and you can get really smart offspring.
Not all schools will drop the SAT and not all schools will go full “woke” unless it is imposed by the government. Some will not follow and they will get more good candidates whose diplomas will be better appreciated by companies. In principle it should work this way if there is a free market.
Tim: nickname scallywag https://prospect.org/power/ex%E2%80%93treasury-secretary-geithner-leads-massive-private-security-deal/
My son is studying for SAT right now. I am guessing most schools that dropped SAT requirement for 2021 will un-drop it for Fall 2022.
MIT experimented with admitting “the whole student” in 1989 and 1990. I was in that first class.
By 1991 they were back to admitting valedictorians with high SAT scores and a 4.0 GPA.
This experiment won’t last long, especially for tech/engineering schools. They don’t want 1/2 their admits failing out before they even make it through diff eqs or organic chem or circuits. The new generation of woke folks at colleges just needs to re-learn the lessons lost when the last generation retired.
That’s interesting. 4.0 is nothing now, of course, gotta be a 5.0. Son wants to apply to MIT, been talking about it for years, but the average SAT there is over 1500, which means you have to be really good at taking that test.
When I was there, roughly 40% of the students had been the valedictorians in their high school class.
Average SAT score was 1405/1600, but the SAT has been re-centered at least twice since then*, so I’m not sure what that equates to now. Most of us were coming in with about an 800 math / 600 verbal split.
The SAT / ACT test prep industry will take financial losses; as will the College Board which writes / administers the exams.
A shift to teacher recommendations is not only biased, but places and huge burden on teacher’s scarce instructional time to write recommendations. Recommendations with glaring grammatical or spelling errors could reflect poorly on the student whose subject matter knowledge may be accurately reflected in a high grade.
My STEM degree is getting more valuable with every graduation ceremony.
so you want to force colleges to use the SAT? That’s not very libertarian
“so you want to force colleges to use the SAT? That’s not very libertarian”
Don’t be an idiot. Who said force them to use anything?
It just happens that SAT scores generally give a good indication. What has a better track record?
I don’t acept your premise
You’re starting with an unproven claim that SAT’s scores are a good predictor. Lots of people now saying otherwise? This is the standard right wing garbage. Let the colleges decide. Seems the outrage is drven more by social media than academics
What’s proven is you put words in my mouth I did not say – Don’t!
z
The math is a lot of word problems and logic games. That is not what they teach in High School.
I think that it is a natural evolution, following the end of effective selection of good pupils in elementary schools.
I can speak of what happened in France, where I am. In the past (up to around 1970) there was selection in the elementary schools. I remember that in the end of every school year prizes where given to the best pupils (books). These best ones were possibly gathered in special classrooms in the next level. Teachers used to take care of them, help them, orient them in higher studies. This could replace in many cases the poor education that could not be given by the parents.
This is why children of poor people could reach a better position in society than there parents. And then in the 70’s and 80’s, all this disappeared, no selection in schools, and there was no other way to make progress than to come from a rich and well educated family.
The supporters of this kind of evolution (that they called “progressive”) were very surprised to note that the proportion of children of the working class in the high schools of the country was reduced to almost zero. But they found a solution to this problem : also end selection in the high schools !!!
SAT is a racket and has nothing to do with anything anybody is learning in High School. The stupid Dept.of Education is supposed to standardize the courses in K-12
Every high school has different standards for grading students, if they have any standards at all. How can universities decide between students with similar GPAs in different states? The Ivy League will continue to rely on AP test scores, but most students applying to lower tier universities don’t take those. It is getting harder and harder to justify private college tuitions, when schools like MIT have all of their lectures online for free.
The future of learning is online. The best lectures from the best professors in the country can be made available to any student—why would you tolerate a mediocre teacher? College students are consumers, and they should demand the best.
I don’t think anyone was taking SAT’s in Idiocracy.
College degrees made in China. Who would have thought? Pretty soon we won’t have anything here in the US that we can sell.
I guess it’s up to them if they want to get rid of standardized testing. We recommend friends to high paying jobs and don’t think anything of it so teacher recommendations for new debt slaves seems par for the course. It will backfire probably but not anymore than the fact that students can take out near-infinite loans for worthless degrees.
The ivies will experiment and hopefully learn lessons before the public universities follow suit (they will). Higher education is a complete disaster for several reasons, standardized testing seems inconsequential.
None of the standardized tests do much good in my opinion; SAT, GMAT, LSAT; but I think we need something to help determine which students get in to which schools. No one gets a prize for just being there in life. lol Best thing would be to remove names and give them a “number” with only family income. I think its pretty apparent if the goal was to actually educate, the system wouldn’t be the way it is; ie see what the Alumni Association of Harvard thinks if they removed all barriers to entry and just had their teachers teach virtually. lol
What we don’t have, but the schools do have, is the ability to correlate those scores with how the students actually perform. Only they know whether the scores are valuable or not, and how valuable.
French system more of a meritocracy. We need to rethink admission standards. If two applicants are roughly equal, take the one from a less advantaged – parental wealth/background. Eliminates consideration of race which is becoming more difficult as our society evolves – mixed race – what percent Native American to qualify as Native American? Who is more disadvantaged, the mixed race son of African American cardiologist or white daughter of West Virginia coal miner?
My daughter was admitted to the University of Texas. Under the condition she takes the SAT. Doesn’t matter what her score is. She just has to take it.
She’s a good student and we get a lot of mail from colleges who admitted her without even applying. I think the only condition for acceptance is the parents willingness to pay for tuition.
Both my parents went to ivy league schools. My brother went to Harvard. I’m not impressed with their education. They would do well in jeopardy, but I wouldn’t call them any smarter than my other siblings who went to regular schools.
That was my first thought too. Colleges saw the dip in enrollment and wanted to expand their customer base this year to make up for it. What better way than to make it easier to apply.
Most of the top ivy league schools have 2 undergrad tracks.
The first track is what normal college tracks look like and where the kids of rich parents go (think George Bush). It’s nothing special other than you get to say you went there and potentially meet other rich kids.
The second track is for the very very bright. The .1% types. Those are the people who go on to get multiple PhD’s in their careers. That track is very much worth it.
The SAT’s are a questionable metric. If you have money your parents send you to Kaplan’s and spend a few hundred or more so you can memorize a bunch of vocabulay words you are unlikely to come across ever again. If someone has a better metric or predictor I’m all ears. I think of it like a FICO score , Nobody thinks it works but they keep using it. I can’t see how the math portion of the SAT is biased. It’s just math.
If they don’t use a standardized test to compare students from various school districts, what should they use? An essay that would be far easier to cheat on? A recommendation from school officials who are under pressure to send students to prestigious schools?
The questio is do we have data to support the contention that the SAT is a better predictor of academic success than high school grades. Does access to test preparation courses tilt the results and is that a way of punishing lower income students. Seems its up to the colleges to propose something better
Grades are far easier to achieve at some schools than others. Everyone takes the same SAT test, so it’s an even playing field. And why is it unfair that some kids study for the SAT and/or attend prep classes? Doesn’t it them make them more knowledgeable and better able to do well in college? Wouldn’t the same advantage apply towards their grades?
No matter how poor you are, you can access SAT prep books and study. They’re in every school library.
colleges know this. and they know which ones
The message of kidhorn….. nonsense, what facts can you back up your statements with. Reexamine your comment.
Sechel doesn’t know math is racist now.
that’s stupid
The latest trend in math education is to get away from the notion that there are right answers and wrong answers. Focusing on right answers is racist, and the preferred modern approach is to accept that there can be multiple answers, and that what matters is the process.
Is math racist?
It’s not stupid. We need to upend our white supremacist culture. Math should evolve towards affirming oppressed groups’ lived experiences. “The master’s tools will never be used to dismantle the master’s house.”
The problem is that historically SAT scores have been the best predictor of success in College. If they can develop another predictor that works as well, fine, but if not, this will end badly. FICO scores are used for the same reason; it is an easily available number that has proven to be an accurate predictor of whether a loan will be repaid.
FICO scores are based on real evidence of your past performance. If your High School Grades are good, and if the Dept Ed had standardized the curriculum well enough then that should be good enough…or does the Dept of Ed not trust their own schools in various states? Calculus is calculus. You take a final test based on standard problems that have been worked on all year. SAT has nothing to do with anything you learned in school
I believe the opposite is being argued
my understanding is that the best predictor of success in college is a combination of grades and SAT scores
They should always use whatever method is the best predictor of success. I would expect that to evolve over time, albeit slowly. Years ago it was the SAT. Today is may be a combination. Tomorrow it might be something else.