Having your own tests of skills relevant to the job is different from relying on high school standardized tests.
That suggests that employers do not really believe what many say here about elite colleges, which is that even “hooked” admits are highly qualified at least to the “average excellent” level (including, but not limited to, test scores).
Also, do they note the difference between heavy core curriculum / general education colleges like MIT versus open curriculum colleges like Brown or Amherst, for this purpose when deciding whether a college degree indicates sufficient math or verbal ability?
That may also cause a selection effect in favor of those who had advantages while in high school (e.g. more access to test preparation), and against those who took non-traditional paths (transfer) who may have no or poor high school standardized test scores. But perhaps that is the intent.
Your questions are better directed to the IB, VC, and PE companies which use the test scores. In my experience, such companies do differentiate between levels of colleges (accepting a slightly lower GPA from targets) and majors (more weight given to a math major, for example). As I noted, more recent test scores are accepted as well, so if one prefers to show such ability through an alternate test, that is an option.
I don’t know if it’s “easier”.
I think college students are just more busy nowadays with school, work, internships, clubs etc. so they have to be efficient in their studying.
One thing I did see was not many students reading library books. I guess much of the research is just done online now.
Not a comment on easier (which I don’t think it is, just much better access to things like the rest of life) but a fun anecdote.
Vividly remember scurrying through the periodicals in the basement of an old library to do research for a paper. According to the card catalog there was an article in a fairly obscure magazine . Was ecstatic the library had the magazine as it was sort of like a treasure hunt. Had my bubble burst when I got my hands on the mag only to find the actual article was razor bladed out. Who would do such a thing? Apparently a kid who wanted to take the article with him and we weren’t allowed to remove periodicals from the library.
Fortunately kids don’t have to deal with that thanks to the internet but the actual work is just as hard (in my opinion).
Colleges are easier than they used to be, on average but not universally. Curricula are less demanding today almost across the board to accommodate students of more varied abilities at most colleges. Easier majors and fields of study have been created so nearly all students have reasonable chances to graduate. Graduation rates are critical benchmarks for these colleges after all.
But not at the colleges that most people on these forums write about, since most of those have gotten substantially more selective than they were when people of parent-of-high-school-or-college-student age were in college. These colleges’ admit classes have been compressed to the top-end of academic credentials. Even those in privileged admission lanes (e.g. legacy, development) now have to meet academic standards at least in spitting range of regular admits, unlike the “gentleman’s C” students of the past.
Even many moderately selective public colleges have gotten more selective, due to increasing population relative to their capacity and value-seeking by money-limited students and families.
On the other hand, undistinguished moderately or less selective, but expensive, private colleges may be becoming less selective due to falling demand. These are the colleges that are more likely to show up in college closure or being acquired lists.
^You are equating higher selectivity with uniformly greater abilities. That isn’t necessarily true, especially in the current pursuit of greater diversity.
Seems like you are equating diversity to lower abilities.
If Harvard had remained all-male until today, would it be able to admit a stronger incoming all-male class compared to its actual coed class? How would the weakest students in the theoretical all-male class compare to the weakest students in the actual coed class?
If Rice had remained all-white until today, would it be able to admit a stronger incoming all-white class compared to its actual (33% white) class? How would the weakest students in the theoretical all-white class compared to the weakest students in the actual class?
With the more selective colleges compressing at the top (of high school academic credentials in their admit classes), it is unlikely that they are getting more dispersion. Greater dispersion in this case requires that the bottom end of the admit class gets weaker – but it is likely that the opposite is true (e.g. the minimum academic standards for those with the biggest “hooks” are likely higher now than before).
How did you come to that conclusion? The standards are more lax today for applicants with hooks in a number of categories. The criteria that “they can do the work” (i.e. graduate) is much less meaningful today with the proliferation of easy majors and fields of studies.
I think some things are harder than the old days, as less time spent computing stuff thanks to software /programming has led to more advanced analytical capabilities being required earlier on. It’s my impression that for example, economics courses are tougher. Definitely at graduate level - the current version of the masters I got accepted to back in ‘92 (in the UK) has much tougher entry requirements now (including prerequisites that sometimes you were only expected to start at postgrad level back then). I’d be surprised if this isn’t also the case in some other disciplines too.
College is different, but different does not mean harder or easier. As human knowledge continues to expand, there’s more information to pack into a four year undergrad. Your laptop may have a 1000x the processing power, but Windows 10 and and any new engineering software requires 1000x the specs to run efficiently.
Back when I started college it was very unusual for kids to have completed a basic calculus course in high school – and although AP testing had been introduced, high schools didn’t offer much in the way of AP courses. I had math through trig in high school, and would have enrolled in a basic, introductory calc class in college if I had been required to, but I wasn’t. (I wasn’t required to take any math courses at all in college, even though I earned a B.S. degree – I think my math SAT score was high enough to exempt me from all college math scores, and that was probably for a score that was in the upper 500’s.). But my friends during freshman year who did take math were all taking that intro course – no one came in prepared for anything higher. I’m guessing that the AP Calc exam probably didn’t even exist back then- though I can’t seem to find information about its history.
My uncle attended Columbia in the 1940’s, and when he died a few years ago and we were going through his things, we found a transcript from Columbia – and on the math end of things, I was shocked to see a course list that looked like high school level offerings. This would be consistent with the information in this article – https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/download/fedora_content/download/ac:187819/content/Huntington_columbia_0054D_12606.pdf
Apparently high school math wasn’t much of a thing before the 1950’s.
How do you know that the standards are more lax in absolute terms for hooked applicants today than they were generations ago for hooked applicants then?
Indeed, the historical requirements for math majors at what are now seen as highly selective colleges linked in reply #34 suggests that incoming students generally were not very well prepared in math in previous generations, with trigonometry and precalculus being listed as requirements for math majors. That suggests that the general (non-math-major) population at such colleges may have been even less well prepared in math. Today, would even hooked admits be worse prepared in math than the general populations of previous generations?
There’re simply more places to “hide” (i.e. easier courses, majors, etc.), so a student who can’t keep up will still graduate… not to mention near universal grade inflation which you surely won’t deny.
Here’s a recent and concrete example of how the pursuit of diversity affects academic rigor. Harvey Mudd has recently revised its core math curriculum after protests that shut down the school two years ago. The protests were triggered by a sudden increase of mental incidents including suicides following Mudd’s decision to relax its admission standards in pursuit of more diversity. More diversity is a worthwhile goal but it certainly isn’t without cost.