Reply to MIT's findings on standardized tests is worth noting

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]When MIT reinstated standardized testing again last week, they released the following statement. There is a small footnote here on the efficacy of these tests that if worth reading

https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our-sat-act-requirement-for-future-admissions-cycles/
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Our research shows this predictive validity holds even when you control for socioeconomic factors that correlate with testing. It also shows that good grades in high school do not themselves necessarily translate to academic success at MIT if you cannot account for testing. Of course, we can never be fully certain how any given applicant will do: we're predicting the development of people, not the movement of planets, and people always surprise you. However, our research does help us establish bands of confidence that hold true in the aggregate, while allowing us, as admissions officers, to exercise individual contextual discretion in each case. The word 'significantly' in this bullet point is accurate both statistically and idiomatically] is signifhcantly improved by considering standardized testing especially in mathematics alongside other factors
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This is the truth that elite colleges are deliberately choosing to ignore or obfuscate in their quest for racial diversity. How can these colleges teach our kids to think straight and speak the truth, when they are unwilling or unable to acknowledge it themselves?
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This is a silly post.

I personally am a white person who got waitlisted at MIT and who have a white son who might have liked to go there but didn’t bother to apply.

First, MIT looks at test scores on a pass-meh-fail basis; it doesn’t directly prefer kids with math scores of 800 over kids with scores of 780, because it knows that, statistically, those scores are roughly the same scores.

Second, MIT gets many applications from Black kinds with great SATs, and it rejects most of those applicants. Black kids with math SATs over 750, nearly straight A’s, plenty of AP tests and relevant but meh  extracurriculars do not normally get into MIT. They need great ECs to get in. And the big difference between Black kids and other kids who get into MIT is the nature of their activities and awards, not their stats. Other kids who get in tend to have newsworthy activities and awards.

And, third, it’s simply terrible for kids in a world where racism is one of the top social problems to go to schools with nearly all-white classes. I remember being the pro-integration child of pro-integration parents, in schools that, legally, were integrated, but, in practice, were deeply segregated. Sometimes there would be one Black student in a class, and all of those Black students were terrific students. When I went to college, there were some Black students who were living on my dorm floor, and those were the first Black people my age that I’d ever talked to  outside of the classroom. Who knows whether the college was good for them, but their presence was really important for me, because it gave me some chance to learn about a world where some other people weren’t from the same mold.

Because I grew up in such a segregated environment, my brain is neurologically racist. No matter what political views I hold, how enthusiastically I support reparations and affirmative action, and how nice I try to be, my brain simply reacts differently to Black people than it does to white people.

Still another issue here is that race and class matter in high-level STEM.

The math might be race-neutral. But race can affect issues such as which equally high-stats grad school applicants get into which grad schools, how we choose research funding priorities, which research proposals actually get funded, who ends up on which fancy academic committees, and how the risks involved with, for example, academic nuclear reactors are handled.

So, it’s fine to say that stats matter. Different people might see the data in different ways, but it seems as if people with 750 on the math SATs might have a different level of math ability than people with math scores of 550.

But it’s unreasonable to see that as a reason to harass the Black kids at MIT. They are there because they are high-stats students, they’re generally brilliant, they deserve to be there, and MIT, the research community and society as a whole need for them to be there. 
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PP sounds really bitter about her MIT reject. [/quote]

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