For the meritocracy crowd, how do you envision a transition purely to stats. From my understanding, this would reasonably involve the elimination of legacy admissions, complete elimination of applicant background and school disadvantage information from applications, rigorous reforms to the SAT or at least required AP/IB courses with test scores for consideration of admission, etc. |
> applicant background and school disadvantage information from applications
Removing this isn't strictly necessary - I have less of an issue holding disadvantaged students to a lower academic standard than I do with holding athletically advantaged (sports recruiting), familialy advantaged (legacy), financially advantaged (quirky ECs) students to lower academic standards. Another issue is the need for a higher, statistically valid ceiling in the SAT/ACT and a lack of recognition of the level of depth and rigor of olympiads (AMC, USAMO, f=ma, USAMO, USACO, USNCO, etc). An admissions officer not being familiar with these is like a football coach not being familiar with The Opening or The Elite 11. |
I think there would actually need to be more tests, to better differentiate students currently getting top scores. There are more students getting u/w 4.0 and 1600/36 than there are spaces for them in the Ivies, for example. Those schools simply can’t admit on stats alone because there are too many students with the same top stats. |
It really wouldn’t work in the US because there are so many different grading systems, curricula etc. It’s all fine and good when you have a national curriculum and a national set of tests that everyone takes once and are graded numerically, but the US doesn’t have anything standardized that way and even SAT/ACT Are highly impacted by access to practice courses, number of times taken et cetera. |
Also regarding sports recruiting and academic standards, I'm specifically referring to elite schools where the recruiting sports lose the school money and don't really contribute to its prestige. If you think sports teams are a necessary part of these institutions, fine, but so are the orchestras, moot courts, model un, and many other groups within these universities, none of whose potential participants get an extra special route to admissions. |
A meritocratic process would place greater weight on my DC's strengths, less weight on other students' strengths (unless they are also my DC's strengths), and would consider any social or academic obstacles faced by my DC in comparison with students who are more privileged while ignoring the social and academic obstacles of other students who are less privileged than my DC. |
Not a meritocrat, but have thoughts. We'd have more high-end technically-focused STEM schools like MIT. The demo skews would be wild in a variety of directions. There are a lot of weird high stats kids of all demographic varieties so I'd expect the high score cutoff schools to be more tech bro Silicon Valley 24/7 on computers and no social skills type people. At the highest end, I think there might be a male skew. This would likely cause the popular, well-rounded kids to move a tier down and make some schools cooler than they are today. I'm coming to learn that the SATs have been managed in a way that disadvantages women (removal of verbal analogies, the way math problems are created for the math section). It seems they have always had to double the PSAT verbal score for NMFs so that women get a fair share. This kind of calls into question the whole design. Why haven't they designed a test where women's strengths outperform? Seems totally possible and you could still produce the all-important correlations with undergrad GPA and parental HHI. I think what it comes down to is that people only want high stats admission if it benefits them. Standardized tests are just one way of assessing what people know (subject knowledge level) and (crudely) how intelligent they are in an academic arena (test-taking skills, speed at process of elimination, close reading, ability to manage nerves while displaying subject matter knowledge). I think if we shifted to a meritocracy, we'd need more complex entrance examinations than the SATs/ACTs or we'd definitely have some unintended consequences for selective schools. |
those tests exist. See the first comment.
A test doesn't need to be normed on an entire population to distinguish between top performers. The Olympiad selection exams do a fine job of distinguishing between rarefied level of academic skill in a meaningful manner. |
The only workable meritocratic admissions is based on standardized testing. The SATs worked very well for this for a long time before it was notably dumbed down and rescored. It wasn't perfect but it played a key role in spotting the diamond in the rough and weeding out the high GPA due to lower standards. The SATs + APs were about as reliable as you could get for a merit-based application package. |
I think it's funny how art and music, two subjects where creativity is paramount and where you think there would therefore be the greatest emphasis on holistic admissions, are actually the most strictly meritocratic. Imagine if students intending to major in math were expected to work through a rigorous math book like Rudin and then submit their best proofs the way music applicants practice concertos and then submit their best performance. |
I agree with more focus on standardized tests, but combined with adjustment for background. We're not rich or especially connected, but still among my kids parents and grandparents, we have 7 grad degrees and 3 Ivy degrees. If they had an 1500+ SAT score, that is way less impressive than a 1300 from a child of high school dropouts. And grades matter, but that 1300 kid might be at a school where straight As just mean you can read and write and show up to class, so admissions officers can't get much information from grades alone. |
You need more required subject tests. Like British A levels etc. |
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Colleges look for future leaders, that concept is vastly different from Olympiad winners. Olympia competition is limited to math, physics, chemistry, biology, information science. Limiting seats to Olympia winners is an extremely weird idea. The majority of math Olympia winners end up at Jane Street and Citadel. Do we want that for our society as a whole? Naw.
I think, if anything, we should exclude these Olympia people from the top colleges. They are free to attend state universities and such. |
Well it depends if you let foreign students compete. If you look at the Harvard 70% of the foreign students are Asian.
Makes sense. Lot more Asians in the world vs rest of the world or US population. Just the top percent of foreign Asian students could take all the spots. American students(including American Asian students) would have a very hard time getting in to the top universities. |