Reply to Some facts about Holistic Admissions Criteria from Stanford Daily

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[quote=Anonymous]The obsession with test scores and grades as a measure of meritocracy is laughable. What kind of merit do they measure?  They don't aren't even very good predictors of college grades.  (The College Board says all 3 SAT scores plus high school GPA have a correlation coefficient of just 0.48) There are a lot of factors that go into predicting whether a child will thrive at any given institution. There is no reason to privilege SAT and GPA over every other potential measure.

The silliest part of this never ending debate is to compare the US higher education system to India, China, S. Korea, and Japan.  In all those countries, there is an very strong correlation between income and admission to the top schools, even though admission is strictly test-based. Wealthy students are more likely to get in to BeiDa and IIT and Tokyo than into HYP.  And in every one of those countries, the education ministries are deeply concerned that their schools fail to produce innovative thinkers and want to overhaul their systems to reduce academic burdens and reliance on test scores.  Since the vast majority of students are destined to fail in those systems (as defined as admission to a top school), the pressure is enormous and everything besides test taking is tossed aside.

Why in the world should the US imitate higher education system that other countries are trying to make more like ours?

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