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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=jsteele][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]WSJ Article "The Roots of STEM Excellence"

It should be one of the nation’s highest educational priorities to get its most brilliant STEM students into those elite universities. Until a few years ago, the California Institute of Technology was the model. 
...

The record of achievement among Caltech graduates and faculty speaks for itself—46 Nobel Laureates, 66 awarded National Medals of Science and 75 elected to the National Academy of Sciences, all generated by a school that enrolls only about 1,000 undergraduates and 1,400 graduate students at a time.
..

"Based on the known distribution of math talent at the highest level and sex differences in occupational preferences, the students in these elite STEM departments will be more than 90% Asian or white and more than 80% male. But some things are more important than having the correct demographic mix. Finding and developing one of our rarest and most precious human resources is one of them."[/quote]

People don't realize how important it is to human civilization to nurture the far right tail of the IQ distribution.
Having fusion energy 10 years sooner will make concerns about global warming almost evaporate.
AI and Robotics will make a lot of dangerous jobs (and traffic accidents) a thing of the past.
We aren't going to protest our way out of the really big problems, we are going to science our way out of it.  We are going to think our way out of it.

If we are concerned about the achievement gap then close the achievement gap.  
We know how to do it, we've known how to do it for years but we don't do it on the left because we don't want to tell URM to work harder and the right doesn't really care enough about closing the achievement gap to dedicate the effort and resources.
Don't undermine merit and PRETEND you've closed the achievement gap that's the worst of both worlds.[/quote]

Yet many people here still think cheating is merit. [/quote]

That's frequently driven by white supremacist impulses.

They have to justify why non-white people are doing better than them at something in spite of the incredibly racist society they pretend exists in america (sure there's some but not like they say).

The white supremacists on the left have always been there, but they only have permission to be racist against model minorities.  That's why you see gaza protests.[/quote]

Stop being a cheater apologist! This is clearly driven by the fact that many students were gaming the admissions by purchasing access to the test answers. I get it, but pretending that's merit is as ridiculous as it is misguided.[/quote]

The allegation that student were purchasing access to the test answers has been made several times. Could you please provide some evidence that this occurred? [/quote]

Hi Jeff. Thanks for jumping in here, as there's been a lot of maligning of this story since it was broken about four years ago.

It is a little bit misleading for anyone to suggest that "students were purchasing access to the test answers". That's a pretty large rhetorical jump from what has been confirmed by multiple TJ students posting publicly on Facebook both under their names and anonymously, which is best summarized as:

"TJ students in the Classes of 2023 and 2024 report that when they took the Quant-Q exam as part of the TJ admissions process, they had already seen [i]some[/i] of the longform multi-layered questions [b]verbatim[/b] during their prep work at Curie Learning Centers."

This is problematic only because the makers of the Quant-Q exam pose it as a secured exam, publish no publicly available prep materials about the exam, and require literally everyone who sees the exam (including students) to sign an NDA promising not to discuss or share its contents.

https://www.facebook.com/tjvents/posts/3294039000634689?ref=embed_post

The above is the post on TJ Vents that made the initial allegation that was confirmed in the comments and that spurred on a tremendous amount of conversation within the TJ community writ large. It is generally accepted within the TJ community, and those classes in particular, that this is a thing that happened - to the point where denial of it amounts to an admission that you don't really know what you're talking about.

The only purpose that I have in highlighting this issue is to discuss its contribution to the necessary removal of the exam (and, concurrently, the application fee) from the TJ admissions process. It is not to cast aspersions on Curie, or Indian students and families, or Asian-Americans more broadly, and it bothers me that some folks who generally I agree with have gone on those needless tangents. What happened wasn't really illegal (I don't think the NDA would have been enforceable or actionable) - it just highlighted the weakness of using a standardized exam to try to select students for educational opportunities when a $5,000 boutique course exists to try to create imbalances in that process.

"Buying answers" is a damaging heuristic that doesn't really help anyone.[/quote]

So, no news stories?  Just a social media posts by one kid on facebook?

Recycling the exact same test 2 years in a row seems like something that might be newsworthy.

Is it possible that this high school sophomore didn't get it exactly right on their facebook post?

It doesn't really seem like enough evidence to support the statement that wealthy kids were buying test answers before the test.

And it certainly isn't enough to invalidate almost all the research on the subject about the validity of testing.[/quote]

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