@fsudad First Generation means “first in (immediate) family to go to college”. Generally that means the child of parents who didn’t go, or graduate.
Nothing to do with arriving on the Mayflower vs arriving last year.
Any test where an outcome seen as important to the test takers is the result will be practiced, gamed, and prepped for. It is unlikely that a test that purports to be based only on innate ability can eliminate all other factors, including practicing, gaming, and prepping for the test.
Brains and their development can be optimally or adversely affected by unequal family and educational (and other) conditions.
And I disagree with both of them.
I was that kid who attended a poorly performing high school where most didn’t go to college, and attending being accepted to an elite college was really rare. It was purely my performance on the ACT and the full ride scholarship at the state flagship that launched me.
I agree with @SatchelSF. Standardized tests don’t have much meaning today because they are too easy. They have a low ceiling which makes it difficult to distinguish between good and really great, which makes them more coachable.
Of course, this low ceiling is by design, as the tests have intentionally been weakened over the past three decades. The non-elite colleges (i.e. those below top 50) still find the range with the lower ceiling useful because they can help determine who is too weak. And the elite colleges like the lower range because it lets them be as holistic as they like among the kids that score well.
I also agree with much of what you said, @SatchelSF. As I said on another thread, I believe if you connect the dots in the Harvard expert reports (@Data10 has done this), you’ll find that ~1% of applicants get a “1” in any of the three non-athletic categories, ~6% get three “2”s, and this ~7% accounts for ~58% of Harvard admits. My personal belief is that legacy status (particularly of the connected / involved / generous kind) is effectively the equivalent of a third “2”, moving a candidate from having well under a 50% shot to being more likely than not to be admitted.
I think it’s @northwesty who likes to say that legacy is a tiebreaker in a game with a lot of ties. That’s what I think is going on here. There aren’t enough kids with “1” status in any category to fill the class, but there are loads of kids with two “2”s, all of whom are admissible and would do fine, How do they fill out the class / break the tie? Legacy status helps a lot.
Tests are imperfect, but combined with other academic measures, are certainly better than any of the other alternatives, to identify candidates of merit. Why do tech firms like Google test their applicants? To find the best candidates regardless of their resumes (including where they went to college). This is in stark contrast with IBs (another high paying profession), where Ivy Leaguers are everywhere. IBs are too lazy (“you must be smart if you get into this college”) and their recruiters are too prejudiced (they’re graduates of these same colleges) to properly test their applicants. Now, would you tell me which method you’d prefer?
I read on CC all the time that the child is looking for a small school, with only academically oriented kids. They want small classes with only other top students. They’d also like a lot of diversity among those other students who are ‘just like them.’
Sometimes those things don’t come in the same student. A student who is from a low income background may not have had the opportunity to attend a good high school, may not have the writing skills or vocabulary to keep up in college (and make those small class discussions so fascinating). He might be just as smart as the kid from the prep school, but he has a lot of distance to cover in freshman year.
Re: #64
However, note that interview testing by computer companies is definitely not standardized, since different questions may be asked that are specific to the job in question (though there are “ace that coding interview” web pages and books that attempt to help prep for what they believe are common questions). Less standardization and greater specialization and variation of interview testing means that they are less preppable and game-able than the more standardized tests like the SAT and ACT (however, the less standardization can also mean less consistent results in the unprepped ungamed cases).
Also, standardized testing grading for something that is normally graded subjectively can be difficult to implement. The essay on the 2004 SAT was an attempt at that with respect to writing, but eventually test prep companies managed to reverse engineer the scoring scheme. Earlier SATs were vocabulary-heavy as presumably a proxy for reading (in English), but then high school English teachers added vocabulary words to their classes, and there were SAT prep books of purported SAT words to learn.
(But yes, the point of bankers being lazier in hiring is well taken.)
The deficiency of standardized tests you mentioned can be remedied to a large extent. First, add more difficult questions to the tests (increase the “ceiling”, in @hebegebe’s terminology). Second, make the tests more of a test of innate abilities, rather than acquired knowledge. Third, have applicants submit all scores and average-score, rather than super-score, all tests (i.e. no Score Choice or Super Scoring), so repeated preps and testing doesn’t necessarily help (and likely hurts). Most colleges (and the College Board) are currently heading in the opposite direction, unfortunately.
I like the idea of averaging all the tests. But it does not stop people from preparing and test prep. They will just do practice tests until their fingers bleed and then go sit for the actual test.
That’s why there’re two other parts: 1) By adding progressively more difficult questions to the tests (to extend the “ceiling”), tests will be much harder to prepare for (An extreme example for the purpose of illustration: no one can win, or even qualify for, USAMO on prep alone). 2) If a test is on innate abilities (rather than knowledge), it will be harder to prepare for, be definition.
Of course, that is unlikely to happen.
Extending the ceiling only matters for super selective colleges that are most focused on the academic super elite. But super selective colleges and their applicants are only a tiny part of the SAT/ACT market, and most of them have other priorities for filling their classes along with a few academic super elite students. The CB and ACT presumably will target the broad market, rather than a tiny slice of it.
In terms of making tests purely based on innate ability, how can that be done for reading and writing (as opposed to the game-able proxy measures used in past and current SATs)? Even math, where harder problems can be given, some base level must be assumed.
“We see this convincingly in the URM applicant pool: knowledge of the bump leads to a dramatically weaker applicant pool…”
Where’s this knowledge of how weak URMs are come from? Ever read any of those apps? Or more than apps from your own family?
“That is tough for the other kids that have worked extremely hard”
But have they worked “smart?” The average top performer is not necessarily putting forth a strong application. (Then, people swing back to, “Well, it should be just stats-based decisions.” One big curcular logic after another.) Most kids who attain hs superiority still stumble on their college apps. They are highly qualified to, what?, transfer to a better high school? If a college asks for stretch, do you know what that means? It’s not national awards or unilateral, as if claiminig a passion is enough, or 3000 hours at the animal shelter or playing music at the old folks home or “founding” some club.
“IMHO, there is nothing valiant about accepting lesser qualified students because they are needy and then turning down excellent middle class candidates who may have earned the right academically to be there.” Again, you don’t know what apps look like, other than a few. You do not know they are accepting lesser qualified students whether due to legacy or a URM or low SES hook. You assume.
And all the numbers/links about this or that are not proof of the qualitative deficieincies you purport exist. Someone links something about the quantity of legacies and people respond, in effect, “See, they’re lesser.”
Little about this makes sense.
Poor or URM does not mean unworthy. Nor that their only value is in diversity. It’s too typical to assume a lesser high school means totally unsatisfactory education and other stereotypes and that those admits must be gimmies, rigged to make a top college look better. Again, assumptions. And you’re vehement about it, too. SMH.
The national spelling bee used to be on some hard but recognizable words. Now they’ve made it so the average student cannot win. Now everyone who wins is home schooled so that they have hours every day to learn foreign language roots and alternative spellings and a million other things that are good to know but not practical for students in traditional classrooms to spend time on when they also have to take art and do fire drills and go to assemblies during the day. It’s fine if that’s what the family thinks is important, but not a real test of ability to learn or contribute to the learning of others when they get to college.
The SAT and ACT have become like the Bee. Students can be taught how to answer the questions but do they have the ability to use those correctly spelled words in an essay or to explain a scientific discovery? There is more to words than just spelling them correctly, and there is more to college than high SAT scores.
Re #69. Basically you are describing something like the Oxford entrance process: it essentially boils down to a long tail one-off test, where getting an interview requires something like a minimum score of 65%-70%, and getting 80%-85%+ (top 5%-10% of that select group of test takers) means you are very likely to be admitted unless your interview is a complete disaster. That is then combined with an interview designed to identify innate ability amongst those getting 65%-80% in the test.
Yes you can prep for the test and interview, but allowances are made for how much prep you have had (test results are adjusted depending on your school’s overall teaching outcomes) and prep for the interview is not that useful. Instead Oxford’s primary constraint to finding the smartest candidates is persuading low income students to take part in the process at all.
And funny you mention the USAMO. At which top US schools would qualifying for USAMO make you an auto-admit, regardless of other grades and ECs?
I’m not for having college admission determined by a single test, as practiced by some countries. It’s certainly too extreme and no single test can capture everything. However, we’re currently heading into the other extreme, and we’re almost all alone. Fewer academic superstars are produced under this holistic system. Some would argue that we’re still the leaders of this and that. But take a closer look, in areas we’re still leading, we’re leading in spite of this system, not because of it. We’re losing our edges, and even surpassed in some crucial areas. Why are we all of sudden worried about 5G technologies, hypersonics, or quantum technologies?
@lookingforward - Re your post #71 above, you can see the weakness of the URM applicant pool to Harvard from the litigation documents.
Although URM only constitute less than 24% of the applicant pool, they comprise fully 65% of the candidates in the bottom 10% of the entire pool by academic credentials, which is what I was discussing in my post which you quoted. Conversely, whites make up about 40% of the applicant pool yet comprise only 20% of the bottom 10%, and Asians are lower still, making up 28% of the applicant pool but only 10% of the bottom 10%. (Numbers do not add to 100% due to rounding and applicants who do not identify race.)
There is no question of the weakness overall of the URM applicant pool on academic measures. We can argue about how weak they are relative to other groups in the admit pool, but that is really more appropriate for the race thread. Note that almost everyone in the bottom 20% of the applicant pool is basically an instant reject. For the most part, these are just throwaway applications encouraged by Harvard outreach in order to artificially drive down URM admit rates to make them look more comparable to those of other groups.
Note that these are descriptive statistics provided by Harvard; they are not outputs of some statistical model. You can see the data on Table 5.1R (p.108) here: http://samv91khoyt2i553a2t1s05i-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Doc-415-2-Arcidiacono-Rebuttal-Report.pdf
On the following page, Table 5.2R, you can see that the entire bottom 10% of non-legacy or development applicants are basically throwaways. 0.01% admit rate. In other words, over 8 years, two African American kids were admitted out of the 5,921 applications from African Americans, and zero of any other race or ethnicity.
Huh? The way admissions are done at most of the elite college means that they may forego some academic superstars, but those academic superstars will likely to go other perfectly good colleges. That is, unless you are saying that an academic superstar needs to attend an elite college for some reason to fully develop his/her talents (as opposed to taking a fast track to Wall Street or whatever). But plenty of academic superstars develop their talents at not-so-elite colleges.
But also, regardless of what any of us thinks, the motivations of the elite colleges as they affect their admissions policies are mostly not focused on collecting the top academic students except for a small portion of their classes. Marketing to donors and elitist employers in powerful positions (e.g. Wall Street) as well as future students, producing future influential people, etc. are likely to be bigger factors in terms of allocation of admission places. Unearned (by the applicant) aristocratic preferences like development and legacy are presumably helpful for these goals. Having ceilings of academic credentials that stop at excellent (as opposed to superstar) means that they can maintain the image of academic excellence, but without questions that would arise if the distinction between excellent and superstar were more obvious.
But then how did this thread become focused on elite colleges? The study in question focused on several public universities.
Environment matters in most situations. College does matter. Great students are more likely to flourish under the guidance of great professors.
Yes, environment matters (contrary to what some seem to think in claiming that ability is unaffected by environment and can be measured without environmental influence), but great professors can be found in many colleges, not just elite ones. In most fields (except a few where PhDs are hired by industry), the job market for tenure track faculty is extremely competitive, so that any college basically has a buyer’s market, sometimes with hundreds of applicants for one job.
@OHMomof2 hits the nail on the head. You are talking about such a small number of young people that get that free ride.
My district is one of the poorer in the state, our schools are underfunded approximately $19 million dollars. This was due to a statewide change that decided to count only children that qualify for free lunch benefits as low-income. We are a majority minority district with a large percentage of recent immigrants who do not and cannot qualify for any federal aid and are therefore not accounted for. Instead these parents work 2 and 3 jobs, as do their older children.
I know some brilliant young people maintaining Honors/AP course loads, working 20 hours a week, taking care of younger siblings and all in the hopes of having a shot. Most don’t.
We have incredible, dedicated teachers and little in way of resources. I call these kids scrappy because it’s exactly what they are. They find a way and often it’s on 4 hours of sleep.
What I do know is that the tenacity of these young people and their families WILL pay off, one CC class at a time (our state university is also out of reach for most).
What I also know is that it matters what zip code your school is in when it comes to resources. We have a senior class of over 500. Traditionally, we have relied on sports and the military to get our youth opportunities in higher learning. Very few of those with high test scores, GPA and class rank, are able to get that dream full ride. Many don’t apply at all because they know the burden it would put on their family (loss of income, loss of childcare, etc.).
Final thought. It benefits all of us when one of these young people are pulled out of that cycle of poverty.