Reply to What would a meritocracy in higher ed look like?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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