University Of California Reaches Final Decision: No More Standardized Admission Testing

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You can prep the heck out of these test and score well. Any parent with multiple kids knows which ones are academically inclined and which are more challenged. Yet my own were all able to score well on these standardized tests. One without much prep at all and others after prep and multiple tries.

On paper from the scores...they look identical but I know quite well that they are not. This test can be gamed so what good is it?

Why not ask MIT? You can't really game your way into a truly superior SAT score.

"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, and the commercial test prep industry capitalizes on, at best, modest changes [13,17]. Short of outright cheating on the test, an expensive and complex undertaking that may carry unpleasant legal consequences, high SAT scores are generally difficult to acquire by any means other than high ability."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/

Whatever this study concluded, and to add to what other parents have already mentioned on this thread about their kids increasing their scores, my DC raised their ACT score NINE points after expensive tutoring in math. DC scored very high on the other sections on the first try, but bombed the math. DC always hated math and had a lot of math anxiety. We hired an ACT tutor focusing only on math for the test and it worked. DC also attended a private school that did not have standardized testing at all and the ACT was one of the first multiple choice tests DC had ever taken! So DC had to get used to that type of test, which the tutoring helped a lot with as well.

Because “tutoring doesn’t help” is stated as “fact” all the time, and yet it is contrary to your experience, as well as mine, and many others, I decided to look at the study cited by pp. The “study” linked to merely cites two other studies for the premise that testing doesn’t help. The first one cited doesn’t seem to really address that issue as a primary issue, but the second one does. It’s too much to go into here, but suffice it to say that the study goes to great lengths to manipulate the data to “levelize” for other factors (race, socioeconomic status, etc) and does not account for the type of “prep” provided in the final results (tutors vs. self-directed, etc). In other words, by manipulating the data to discount the effect of extensive tutoring for kids who are most likely to get that tutoring (rich Asian/white kids), they “prove” that tutoring doesn’t work as well as advertised. The premise seems to be that these kids have other advantages and would have done well anyway, so that doesn’t count. At one point, they pick out 10 specific examples of kids that mostly weren’t helped by tutoring, but then go on to admit that the ten examples weren’t statistically representative of their data set. It very much looks like these people went in with a predetermined conclusion, and manipulated the data until it fit.

Are there kids who aren’t particularly helped by tutoring? Sure. Will tutoring take a 20 ACT to a 36? Nope. However, take two equally bright kids with a 28-30 ACT and give one ten (or even better, 20) sessions with a good tutor, there’s an excellent chance that the tutored kid will absolutely score much higher the second time around. Getting into the 34-36 range is key for acceptance to elite colleges, and there are a lot of kids that wouldn’t be there without tutoring.

+1 Thank you! I didn't have the patience to explain the issues with the study. I tell my students all the time to read and evaluate the cited literature before drawing any conclusions about the validity of a study.

[Anonymous]

Eh, I question the motivation because this looks just like the elimination of gifted student programs. If the politicians don't like the racial breakdown of the population then get rid of the program or metric altogether. I'm reminded of the San Diego school district which eliminated student discipline altogether because there were a disproportionate number of black and brown students being disciplined.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Eh, I question the motivation because this looks just like the elimination of gifted student programs. If the politicians don't like the racial breakdown of the population then get rid of the program or metric altogether. I'm reminded of the San Diego school district which eliminated student discipline altogether because there were a disproportionate number of black and brown students being disciplined.

Sums it up. Everything else is just spin and excuses.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Someone does not yet understand that public institutions are indeed accountable to the public. Let me guess, you are one of the people who can’t accept that school closures led to the democrat losing the governor’s race?

More like someone can't read.

I didn't say public institutions are not accountable to the public. I said you don't get to decide how they hire, and you know that is true an that you don't, right?

They can hire who they want as long as they don't break the laws. Colleges can admit who they want as long as they don't break laws. Some guy on DCUM notwithstanding.

It doesn’t seem like you know what accountable means.

Accountable means some dude on DCUM gets to tell them what to do?

No, it does not.

They are accountable to CA residents. I thought we all understood that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Someone does not yet understand that public institutions are indeed accountable to the public. Let me guess, you are one of the people who can’t accept that school closures led to the democrat losing the governor’s race?

More like someone can't read.

I didn't say public institutions are not accountable to the public. I said you don't get to decide how they hire, and you know that is true an that you don't, right?

They can hire who they want as long as they don't break the laws. Colleges can admit who they want as long as they don't break laws. Some guy on DCUM notwithstanding.

It doesn’t seem like you know what accountable means.

Accountable means some dude on DCUM gets to tell them what to do?

No, it does not.

They are accountable to CA residents. I thought we all understood that.

Great, so you are an CA resident and you get to tell them how to admit students?

Call them up and do so, and come back and let us know how that went.

[Anonymous]

Not sure why black children are being scapegoated. California has a very small black population to begin with.

Some of the comments about black students are bizarre.


This will moreso help white children than any other group of people.

[Anonymous]

The top 20 private schools will dictate how this turns out. They have more to lose admitting low quality students. Large public schools have a mission to serve their constituents that is influenced by politics and tax payer dollars.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the point is, are they actually voluntarily deciding not to use SAT scores, and, for a public intsitution, who does that hurt? Public colleges are not private employers who can hire and fire at whim. As for private selective institutions - the truly selective ones like MIT affirm that SAT scores are still important.

No you still miss my point entirely.

The colleges can accept whoever they want for whatever reason they want as long as they don't break the law. Employers - both private AND public - can hire whoever they want for whatever reason they want as long as they don't break the law.

What is important is up the THEM, not you. Any criteria, test scores being one.

And I disagree with you. Public institutions serve the public, so this is all a valid question. Plus UCs don't seem to be doing this voluntarily anyway.

You disagree with me? How? It's not up to me, or to you. How can you disagree with that?

You can have the opinion they should have different criteria, but you don't get to dictate it.

You agree with this for employment, but disagree on college admissions, and that is the hypocrisy.

Yes, I disagree that a public institution is unaccountable to the public. Not sure why that's hard to understand.

Oh, your point is understood perfectly. It's just also 100% untrue.

You don't get to tell the firemen who to hire and why
Nor your mailman
Nor the guy at the DMV
Nor the people who run NPR or your local arts council
etc etc etc

You don't get to tell any of those institutions what criteria they should use. Nor the public colleges. Not how it works, nor should it be, as you don't know better than they do. They know better than you do.

I think you understand now.

Someone does not yet understand that public institutions are indeed accountable to the public. Let me guess, you are one of the people who can’t accept that school closures led to the democrat losing the governor’s race?

NP here. They are accountable on some level but not in the way you think. You, as a taxpayer, do not have the level of control you think you have. The PP is in fact correct that these public institutions may hire/fire as they see fit so long as they are not in violation of the laws. You're "Accountability" is more of a transparency argument. But even that is limited. FOIA laws don't permit unfettered access (there are exemptions and exceptions). OIG is available (or some version of that depending on the jurisdiction) but, there too, that oversight is usually limited to specific allegations. You could sue, too, I supposed (good luck with that).

In short, you argue you have transparency and you do have SOME of that in these decisions. Accountability? Debateable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You can prep the heck out of these test and score well. Any parent with multiple kids knows which ones are academically inclined and which are more challenged. Yet my own were all able to score well on these standardized tests. One without much prep at all and others after prep and multiple tries.

On paper from the scores...they look identical but I know quite well that they are not. This test can be gamed so what good is it?

Why not ask MIT? You can't really game your way into a truly superior SAT score.

"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, and the commercial test prep industry capitalizes on, at best, modest changes [13,17]. Short of outright cheating on the test, an expensive and complex undertaking that may carry unpleasant legal consequences, high SAT scores are generally difficult to acquire by any means other than high ability."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/

Whatever this study concluded, and to add to what other parents have already mentioned on this thread about their kids increasing their scores, my DC raised their ACT score NINE points after expensive tutoring in math. DC scored very high on the other sections on the first try, but bombed the math. DC always hated math and had a lot of math anxiety. We hired an ACT tutor focusing only on math for the test and it worked. DC also attended a private school that did not have standardized testing at all and the ACT was one of the first multiple choice tests DC had ever taken! So DC had to get used to that type of test, which the tutoring helped a lot with as well.

Because “tutoring doesn’t help” is stated as “fact” all the time, and yet it is contrary to your experience, as well as mine, and many others, I decided to look at the study cited by pp. The “study” linked to merely cites two other studies for the premise that testing doesn’t help. The first one cited doesn’t seem to really address that issue as a primary issue, but the second one does. It’s too much to go into here, but suffice it to say that the study goes to great lengths to manipulate the data to “levelize” for other factors (race, socioeconomic status, etc) and does not account for the type of “prep” provided in the final results (tutors vs. self-directed, etc). In other words, by manipulating the data to discount the effect of extensive tutoring for kids who are most likely to get that tutoring (rich Asian/white kids), they “prove” that tutoring doesn’t work as well as advertised. The premise seems to be that these kids have other advantages and would have done well anyway, so that doesn’t count. At one point, they pick out 10 specific examples of kids that mostly weren’t helped by tutoring, but then go on to admit that the ten examples weren’t statistically representative of their data set. It very much looks like these people went in with a predetermined conclusion, and manipulated the data until it fit.

Are there kids who aren’t particularly helped by tutoring? Sure. Will tutoring take a 20 ACT to a 36? Nope. However, take two equally bright kids with a 28-30 ACT and give one ten (or even better, 20) sessions with a good tutor, there’s an excellent chance that the tutored kid will absolutely score much higher the second time around. Getting into the 34-36 range is key for acceptance to elite colleges, and there are a lot of kids that wouldn’t be there without tutoring.

+1 Thank you! I didn't have the patience to explain the issues with the study. I tell my students all the time to read and evaluate the cited literature before drawing any conclusions about the validity of a study.

and I teach people to look for motivated reasoning and bad logic
. you can pick apart any study if you try hard enough. even if tutoring provides some large benefit to a few that doesn’t disprove the tests’ correlation to intelligence. After all MIT still thinks SAT is important. you simply can’t prep your way to the scores needed for MIT.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the point is, are they actually voluntarily deciding not to use SAT scores, and, for a public intsitution, who does that hurt? Public colleges are not private employers who can hire and fire at whim. As for private selective institutions - the truly selective ones like MIT affirm that SAT scores are still important.

No you still miss my point entirely.

The colleges can accept whoever they want for whatever reason they want as long as they don't break the law. Employers - both private AND public - can hire whoever they want for whatever reason they want as long as they don't break the law.

What is important is up the THEM, not you. Any criteria, test scores being one.

And I disagree with you. Public institutions serve the public, so this is all a valid question. Plus UCs don't seem to be doing this voluntarily anyway.

You disagree with me? How? It's not up to me, or to you. How can you disagree with that?

You can have the opinion they should have different criteria, but you don't get to dictate it.

You agree with this for employment, but disagree on college admissions, and that is the hypocrisy.

Yes, I disagree that a public institution is unaccountable to the public. Not sure why that's hard to understand.

Oh, your point is understood perfectly. It's just also 100% untrue.

You don't get to tell the firemen who to hire and why
Nor your mailman
Nor the guy at the DMV
Nor the people who run NPR or your local arts council
etc etc etc

You don't get to tell any of those institutions what criteria they should use. Nor the public colleges. Not how it works, nor should it be, as you don't know better than they do. They know better than you do.

I think you understand now.

Someone does not yet understand that public institutions are indeed accountable to the public. Let me guess, you are one of the people who can’t accept that school closures led to the democrat losing the governor’s race?

NP here. They are accountable on some level but not in the way you think. You, as a taxpayer, do not have the level of control you think you have. The PP is in fact correct that these public institutions may hire/fire as they see fit so long as they are not in violation of the laws. You're "Accountability" is more of a transparency argument. But even that is limited. FOIA laws don't permit unfettered access (there are exemptions and exceptions). OIG is available (or some version of that depending on the jurisdiction) but, there too, that oversight is usually limited to specific allegations. You could sue, too, I supposed (good luck with that).

In short, you argue you have transparency and you do have SOME of that in these decisions. Accountability? Debateable.

boy you have an extremely limited and poorly informed view of what political accountability means. nobody claimed that they have an individual right to dictate that a student get admitted.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Someone does not yet understand that public institutions are indeed accountable to the public. Let me guess, you are one of the people who can’t accept that school closures led to the democrat losing the governor’s race?

More like someone can't read.

I didn't say public institutions are not accountable to the public. I said you don't get to decide how they hire, and you know that is true an that you don't, right?

They can hire who they want as long as they don't break the laws. Colleges can admit who they want as long as they don't break laws. Some guy on DCUM notwithstanding.

It doesn’t seem like you know what accountable means.

Accountable means some dude on DCUM gets to tell them what to do?

No, it does not.

They are accountable to CA residents. I thought we all understood that.

Great, so you are an CA resident and you get to tell them how to admit students?

Call them up and do so, and come back and let us know how that went.

do you know what a ballot initiative is?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Someone does not yet understand that public institutions are indeed accountable to the public. Let me guess, you are one of the people who can’t accept that school closures led to the democrat losing the governor’s race?

More like someone can't read.

I didn't say public institutions are not accountable to the public. I said you don't get to decide how they hire, and you know that is true an that you don't, right?

They can hire who they want as long as they don't break the laws. Colleges can admit who they want as long as they don't break laws. Some guy on DCUM notwithstanding.

It doesn’t seem like you know what accountable means.

Accountable means some dude on DCUM gets to tell them what to do?

No, it does not.

They are accountable to CA residents. I thought we all understood that.

Great, so you are an CA resident and you get to tell them how to admit students?

Call them up and do so, and come back and let us know how that went.

do you know what a ballot initiative is?

Lol keep digging dude.

The day there is a ballot initiative on forcing the UCs to use SAT for admission, you can come back here and start a thread.

Until then, you're just fartin' in the closet.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The top 20 private schools will dictate how this turns out. They have more to lose admitting low quality students. Large public schools have a mission to serve their constituents that is influenced by politics and tax payer dollars.

They have the resources to sniff out wealth without resorting to test scores as proxy. They’ll be fine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Someone does not yet understand that public institutions are indeed accountable to the public. Let me guess, you are one of the people who can’t accept that school closures led to the democrat losing the governor’s race?

More like someone can't read.

I didn't say public institutions are not accountable to the public. I said you don't get to decide how they hire, and you know that is true an that you don't, right?

They can hire who they want as long as they don't break the laws. Colleges can admit who they want as long as they don't break laws. Some guy on DCUM notwithstanding.

It doesn’t seem like you know what accountable means.

Accountable means some dude on DCUM gets to tell them what to do?

No, it does not.

They are accountable to CA residents. I thought we all understood that.

Great, so you are an CA resident and you get to tell them how to admit students?

Call them up and do so, and come back and let us know how that went.

do you know what a ballot initiative is?

In addition, I think more likely that democrats will continue to lose voters who don’t think improving diversity should be synonymous with lowering standards. We already saw a depressed democratic turnout in typically blue or purple states such as VA, WA, and NJ just a few weeks ago which voters attributed in part to issues with public education.

If admissions of Asian students are materially affected in a negative way, lawsuits are also a possibility.

[Anonymous]

Time will tell. CA has a lot of problems right now. I wouldn’t want to send DC to school there now for many reasons. My guess is they will still have enough draw for students for a long time to come, but if they can’t maintain the same reputation and draw they will have to deal with lower applicant pool.

They are a state institution and should be there to accommodate the in-state applicants first- maybe this will assist that applicant pool. Or maybe it will lower their prestige.