Harvard will require Test Scores starting next year

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:With no dog in this fight (I have regular kids who aren’t high achieving) I applaud this.

Same, also as a parent with a child not applying to Harvard or Yale.

[Anonymous]

Finally things are returning to normal. It was such chaos. I was horrified we were living the American version of the Great Cultural Revolution and now I am a little optimistic about the next decade.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:this is for current Juniors? my kid has no interest in Harvard, but this seems really really late to make this call for this class

Tend to agree. I think it’s a reflection of how ill prepared TO kids were.

There is zero evidence of this or else schools would be releasing the hard data

Huh? Just the opposite. Schools are embarrassed by this failed TO experiment, which they were so proud of instituting for equity purposes. Only UT released the hard data - TO kids were on average a full GPA point lower once enrolled.

Oh my god, you are going to be so sad when you find out that kids with underperforming GPAs are now going to get in because their test scores are so high, instead of high GPAs and no or lower test scores. And ermagherd, A LOT of those kids are going to be minorities. Gasp!
A lot of you live in this bizarro world, looking for justifications and excuses and rationalizations for why your poor kid wasn't admitted.

Talk about victim mentality.

While I would maybe believe that you can be smart and not "test well," it doesn't work the other way -- you cannot be dumb and get a high score. It's not possible. Kids with low GPAs and high scores are usually very smart rebels who refuse to do busywork in subjects that they hate. These people then go to college and do very well, because they can choose their classes.

Pp above is 10000% correct.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:95% will STILL get rejected.

Yawn.

Maybe more like 90% now

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Finally things are returning to normal. It was such chaos. I was horrified we were living the American version of the Great Cultural Revolution and now I am a little optimistic about the next decade.

What is it about Harvard's return to required testing that makes you optimistic? Without some reason, your post is pointless.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My own kids are not applying to Harvard, but as a professor of mostly undergraduate students I applaud this. It's one data point that is, like ACTs and APs, scaled nationally. Grades are hyper inflated at many high schools and rigor varies too much across schools to be helpful to an admissions committee who is comparing students across the country, indeed even internationally.
Also, my unpopular opinion is that SATs are not racially biased. The scores are a reflection of reality -Black and Hispanic kids don't do well because they are relatively impoverished compared to other populations. Also, straight math problems (not word problems) logically cannot indicate bias.

Community college professor? Yes, straight math problems logically can be biased, especially in the way they are taught in schools. Think critically just a little. Hope you're not one of my children's professors. But they're both students with LDs at top 20 universities, so I'm guessing not.

DP, why the snark of throwing around community college as an insult and looking down at them? Give an example of a straight math problem that can be biased. Not sure what you were trying to demonstrate bringing up your LD kids at “top 20” colleges.

Again, think a little, and maybe you can make some conclusions on your own. Standardized tests, straight math, most of US style of teaching, are biased. This is not even arguable. It's not accessible to all.

In addition to all of the problems with our K-12 educational system, not everyone is intelligent enough to do well on standardized tests. It's not meant to be "accessible for all."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
If you genuinely believe Bias Victim deserves a spot at Selective U., what is Victim's game plan once admitted? To major in dance? How will Selective U. be any different that Biased Public Schools with respect to offering teaching "styles" AND evaluation of material that is not "biased"?

The game plan is to receive affirmative action in perpertuity for life. This actually happens. The underqualified URM who gets into a selective college, gets another bump in medical school affirmative action for bombing the MCAT and having a low science GPA, and then another bump for residency and another bump during hiring. It never ends.

Exactly right... there is never a "real world" moment. But everyone else now has to carefully choose their doctor because credentials don't indicate quality.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
If you genuinely believe Bias Victim deserves a spot at Selective U., what is Victim's game plan once admitted? To major in dance? How will Selective U. be any different that Biased Public Schools with respect to offering teaching "styles" AND evaluation of material that is not "biased"?

The game plan is to receive affirmative action in perpertuity for life. This actually happens. The underqualified URM who gets into a selective college, gets another bump in medical school affirmative action for bombing the MCAT and having a low science GPA, and then another bump for residency and another bump during hiring. It never ends.

Exactly right... there is never a "real world" moment. But everyone else now has to carefully choose their doctor because credentials don't indicate quality.

Well, just make sure to avoid all women and minorities since they are all unqualified hacks who got by on their "victim status." Problem solved.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Indeed.

Some posters on here were very confident that Yale and Brown and Dartmouth resuming testing requirements were the exceptions.

Pretty clear by now that test optional admits had not very good outcomes.

😅😅😅😆 painfully clear

Yeahm but again, not for the reasons you want to believe. Take Dartmouth for example: "Yes. For the Classes of 2025, ’26 and ’27, we were optional, and the language for everybody was “Access to testing remains uneven, so include testing or not as your situation allows.” And what started to happen in the third year is we started hearing from [high] school counselors that most of the students in their class had access to testing again, but now the question had shifted to, “Should I or should I not include my scores?” Which for us was never really the point of the pause. That was a public health stance, not a critique of testing."

Oh and newsflash...a huge reason is that they weren't getting a diverse application pool and class:

" The finding [in the Dartmouth study] that I found most provocative when I first read it was the point that testing expands access.[...]
But as an admission officer for the last 30 years, it’s been striking to see the differences between different high schools and the way education in the United States is not equal as you move from town to town, never mind state to state. So we’re looking at testing as a reflection of that K-12 disequilibrium. We’re not saying it’s not capturing it, but contextually we’re able to say, “What does this score tell us about the place where it was generated, the neighborhood where the student is?” How do we use them to meet you where you are? As you move across this country, this heterogeneous landscape, it starts to mitigate some of the critique that testing favors the wealthy. It does, but only if you define high and low scores in a strict spectrum. In some places, a 1700 is not high; in some places, it’s lower than the norm. And in other places, it’s remarkably high. And that’s also true for 1200: there are places where that 1200 is unheard-of and others where that 1200 would be at the end of the data distribution."

So sorry...your 1600 DC kid may likely still get beat out by a 1300 kid in bumplepoop nowhere.
Them's the breaks, my friend.

+1 I hope this is true. Opportunity hoarding has to get equalized.

[Anonymous]

Legacy is the biggest opportunity hoarding, and they aren't getting rid of that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
If you genuinely believe Bias Victim deserves a spot at Selective U., what is Victim's game plan once admitted? To major in dance? How will Selective U. be any different that Biased Public Schools with respect to offering teaching "styles" AND evaluation of material that is not "biased"?

The game plan is to receive affirmative action in perpertuity for life. This actually happens. The underqualified URM who gets into a selective college, gets another bump in medical school affirmative action for bombing the MCAT and having a low science GPA, and then another bump for residency and another bump during hiring. It never ends.

Dude. You people really live in fantasy land. And are so hateful I can't understand. And uninformed. I won't say unintelligent because even smart people can be raging bigots.

Not the PP, but my company leadership explicitly told us to lower the bar for black candidates when hiring. Explicitly.

They did not. What bar?

Are the people denying the open secret in academics and the professional world really that clueless? Do you work outside your home? Of COURSE, standards are routinely lowered, and it starts with our friend upthread whose daughter scored 1290 and got into Georgetown. There are only a few thousand black students graduating each year who have even met the baseline of "college prepared." Those who meet those benchmarks are admitted by the elite institutions, but as you go down the rankings, those schools still need to show a diverse class, and kids who truly do not belong in college are admitted.

Because of lack of preparation and "mismatch" between preparation and IQ with the rest of the student body, the graduation rates for blacks are much lower, making the pool of students available to create diverse classes in grad schools and corporate hiring classes even lower, and these institutions reach further down the rankings to fill classes. There are innumerable internship programs for minority students at all of our elite corporations trying to compete for these kids as early as possible.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Legacy is the biggest opportunity hoarding, and they aren't getting rid of that.

Harvard has been admitting large percentages of minorities since the early 80s. There are plenty of minority legacies.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Indeed.

Some posters on here were very confident that Yale and Brown and Dartmouth resuming testing requirements were the exceptions.

Pretty clear by now that test optional admits had not very good outcomes.

😅😅😅😆 painfully clear

Yeahm but again, not for the reasons you want to believe. Take Dartmouth for example: "Yes. For the Classes of 2025, ’26 and ’27, we were optional, and the language for everybody was “Access to testing remains uneven, so include testing or not as your situation allows.” And what started to happen in the third year is we started hearing from [high] school counselors that most of the students in their class had access to testing again, but now the question had shifted to, “Should I or should I not include my scores?” Which for us was never really the point of the pause. That was a public health stance, not a critique of testing."

Oh and newsflash...a huge reason is that they weren't getting a diverse application pool and class:

" The finding [in the Dartmouth study] that I found most provocative when I first read it was the point that testing expands access.[...]
But as an admission officer for the last 30 years, it’s been striking to see the differences between different high schools and the way education in the United States is not equal as you move from town to town, never mind state to state. So we’re looking at testing as a reflection of that K-12 disequilibrium. We’re not saying it’s not capturing it, but contextually we’re able to say, “What does this score tell us about the place where it was generated, the neighborhood where the student is?” How do we use them to meet you where you are? As you move across this country, this heterogeneous landscape, it starts to mitigate some of the critique that testing favors the wealthy. It does, but only if you define high and low scores in a strict spectrum. In some places, a 1700 is not high; in some places, it’s lower than the norm. And in other places, it’s remarkably high. And that’s also true for 1200: there are places where that 1200 is unheard-of and others where that 1200 would be at the end of the data distribution."

So sorry...your 1600 DC kid may likely still get beat out by a 1300 kid in bumplepoop nowhere.
Them's the breaks, my friend.

+1 I hope this is true. Opportunity hoarding has to get equalized.

You totally misunderstand (and frankly so do the Admissions directors) the function of elite educational institutions. They are there to match the highest caliber faculty in the world with the students who are most able and prepared to benefit from exposure to them. This was meant to be a societal bid to move forward the pursuit of knowledge, not to give a middling kid a line on their resume so that they can cosplay through life. There are plenty of schools that will give mediocre students opportunities.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Finally things are returning to normal. It was such chaos. I was horrified we were living the American version of the Great Cultural Revolution and now I am a little optimistic about the next decade.

What is it about Harvard's return to required testing that makes you optimistic? Without some reason, your post is pointless.

Thanks. I don’t care to explain my point to everyone, especially on a forum like this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Indeed.

Some posters on here were very confident that Yale and Brown and Dartmouth resuming testing requirements were the exceptions.

Pretty clear by now that test optional admits had not very good outcomes.

😅😅😅😆 painfully clear

Yeahm but again, not for the reasons you want to believe. Take Dartmouth for example: "Yes. For the Classes of 2025, ’26 and ’27, we were optional, and the language for everybody was “Access to testing remains uneven, so include testing or not as your situation allows.” And what started to happen in the third year is we started hearing from [high] school counselors that most of the students in their class had access to testing again, but now the question had shifted to, “Should I or should I not include my scores?” Which for us was never really the point of the pause. That was a public health stance, not a critique of testing."

Oh and newsflash...a huge reason is that they weren't getting a diverse application pool and class:

" The finding [in the Dartmouth study] that I found most provocative when I first read it was the point that testing expands access.[...]
But as an admission officer for the last 30 years, it’s been striking to see the differences between different high schools and the way education in the United States is not equal as you move from town to town, never mind state to state. So we’re looking at testing as a reflection of that K-12 disequilibrium. We’re not saying it’s not capturing it, but contextually we’re able to say, “What does this score tell us about the place where it was generated, the neighborhood where the student is?” How do we use them to meet you where you are? As you move across this country, this heterogeneous landscape, it starts to mitigate some of the critique that testing favors the wealthy. It does, but only if you define high and low scores in a strict spectrum. In some places, a 1700 is not high; in some places, it’s lower than the norm. And in other places, it’s remarkably high. And that’s also true for 1200: there are places where that 1200 is unheard-of and others where that 1200 would be at the end of the data distribution."

So sorry...your 1600 DC kid may likely still get beat out by a 1300 kid in bumplepoop nowhere.
Them's the breaks, my friend.

+1 I hope this is true. Opportunity hoarding has to get equalized.

You totally misunderstand (and frankly so do the Admissions directors) the function of elite educational institutions. They are there to match the highest caliber faculty in the world with the students who are most able and prepared to benefit from exposure to them. This was meant to be a societal bid to move forward the pursuit of knowledge, not to give a middling kid a line on their resume so that they can cosplay through life. There are plenty of schools that will give mediocre students opportunities.

Disagree. These are not mediocrity students.

And all the Bankman-Frieds and Caroline Ellison type of excellent students are plenty represented.