As many a good soldier, from Napoleon to Gen Lee have learned the hard way - you can’t fight on too many fronts at once or you end up losing the whole darn war!
One day I’ll be arguing you don’t even need to be human to go to college!!
@OHMomof2 would you say that colleges could handle such evaluations in large volume? There is a local school that is also using such methods (and they usually have top kids), but their class is really small so I’m sure it’s no big deal. If UCLA had to review such evals, I’m curious if that workload would be reasonably handled. It is somewhat the logical conclusion to a distrust of gpa and tests.
@CaliDad2020 I agree that we are just going round and round with little incrementals at this point. Seems to me you incorrectly accused people in this thread of saying testing optional schools are wrong while at the same time saying that testing required schools are wrong. And you are doing that based picking and choosing a handful of data points (with next to no context behind the numbers) from three reports from three schools. Certainly your prerogative. Best of luck.
In terms of transcript optional, seems to me its expensive, elite private schools wanting to differentiate themselves. Something they have to do to survive (and have always done). But ultimately I think that (at least in the short run) will have a detrimental effect on lower SES kids. No doubt expensive private high schools with 15 kids in a class and high paid teachers with plenty of time to write detailed evaluations of every student in every class (rather than giving them letter grades). Wealthy public schools likely can get there as well. Now lets see how underfunded and overcrowded rural and inner city schools do with that. Good luck.
I think they can @chippedtoof , if you mean the example @LadyMeowMeow gave rather than my own HS example.
If the schools agree on the skills to master and present each student’s ability relative to that standard, I don’t see why not. As it is now they handle multiple grading scales, weighting, etc.
If you posted engineering GPAs, it wasn’t in a post I read. You linked to a paper that talked about undergrad degree completion rates at Caltech in the 80s and 90s, across all majors (not just engineering). As previously stated, in more modern times, women have higher graduation rates than men at Caltech. And you linked to a paper that discussed GPAs among economic majors (not engineering) at Harvard.
Several studies have previously been posted in this thread showing women have a higher average GPA among engineering majors at various colleges. I linked to a report showing first year GPA prior to taking major specific classes this time instead. Both cases show women have a higher average GPA than men, in the vast majority of studies/reports.
Yes, I miswrote, it was grad rates. From the paper: Figure 3: Percentage of Bachelors degrees awarded annually in engineering – total and by gender
self-reporting test scores is simply a “no cost” way to lower applicant costs (and barriers to entry, like trying to get a rush score out.)
I mentioned it only because I believe much of the SAT “standardized-test-industrial-complex” is “SAT/ACT income driven” and if it weren’t, SAT would lower the cost for scores, or encourage schools to allow students to self-report - even simply take a pic of their report. Final verification could go to accepted school only.
It is obviously not the same as “test optional” or moving away from SAT, but it does speak to one thing that could marginally lower a barrier to entry.
@saillakeerie “Seems to me you incorrectly accused people in this thread of saying testing optional schools are wrong while at the same time saying that testing required schools are wrong. And you are doing that based picking and choosing a handful of data points (with next to no context behind the numbers) from three reports from three schools. Certainly your prerogative.”
If that’s what you’ve gotten from the discussion, I dunno what to tell you. But I’ll give you the bullet points.
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Testing takes lots of time and money. 1.6 million x time spent x money spent x number of times a kid takes a standardized test per year = lots
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It is very likely, in many, if not most, situations SAT/ACT do not add any useful new information to the student’s application (SAT itself claims only ~15% of test takers have anomolously “low GPA/high SAT” results.
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SAT/ACT is required for many schools, so almost all aspiring college students, if they plan/wish to go beyond the schools that do not have competitive admission, feel they must take them.
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At least 80+% of those taking the tests add nothing to their application that GPA doesn’t reveal (according to the SAT folks themselves. I’m not claiming that, they are.)
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In the vast majority of cases SAT add no new, useful information to the application.
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SAT themselves state in most cases GPA are a very good indicator of FYGPA. They claim that SAT and even more usefully SAT II are better predictors, but I don’t think they have studied, for the anomolously out sync low GPA/high SAT which is the better predictor.
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We see from a number of school’s published graduation GPAs that admitted student GPA are good indicators of GPA and graduation rates.
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There are presistent gender discrepencies in SAT (~+10 to F on the verbal side, ~+30 to M on the Math side) that risk entrenching admission trends that might be based on poorly designed tests or overweighting of tests visavis GPA.
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If 80+% of the time an SAT test is simply confirming what a GPA already tells an adcom, we are blithley wasting a lot of “kid hours” and “parent/kid money” requiring/encouraging that all kids take them.
I’m an old-school swamp Yankee who keeps his 2002 Civic running with duct tape and bailing wire, so that just rubs me the wrong way. Thassall!
RE #6 in my above post. That should read that SAT themselves state in most cases GPA are a very good indicator of FYGPA. The claim the GPA + SAT, and even more usefully GPA + SAT + SAT II are better predictors… (SAT do not claim, as my above post suggests, that SAT without GPA are better predictors…)
Perhaps this is the point of divergence: my disappointment in the MIT report is due to it not showing its data (not due to any disagreement with its conclusions). Your take is that the lack of data could be forgiven since they claimed to have done it properly and the same conclusion was reached in various papers. I did try to show that other papers indicated differently, but the point there was not to prove the conclusions of your papers were wrong, but rather to demonstrate it was not conclusive… at least not to the point where I’d give the MIT report a pass.
The Caltech paper was referenced to show two things: that once, in the Cretaceous period, man stood on his hind legs and declared that he too could graduate engineering programs as well as women (no matter what some report from a fancy east coast school said), and that the said difference in test scores could possibly manifest itself more clearly - or at least differently - if you do filter for (a restricted range of) majors. (not because I wanted correlation between the score and gpa, but rather so I’d feel more confident about the results).
The Harvard paper (which studies Adams College not Harvard, a LAC with which I am not familiar or perhaps it’s just an invention to protect the innocent) was referenced to demonstrate the complexity of the problem of utilizing gpa with such broad strokes.
Neither of these were referenced to show disagreement with female success re: gpas in general, but to judge the thoroughness of that MIT report and to indicate the difficulty of the task at hand. I am in agreement that women are doing better in overall gpas! However, I believe overall gpas are a cloudy metric, so I don’t believe the answers are all clear cut as is being presented (i.e. who is the more intellectually capable gender wrt college). I personally feel both genders can handle the necessary tasks of college equally well, including engineering.
The Harvard paper, was the most interesting in its presentation, and I wish the others were just as effective.
“There are presistent gender discrepencies in SAT (~+10 to F on the verbal side, ~+30 to M on the Math side) that risk entrenching…”
This is perfectly consistent with over 90 years of intelligence testing on literally millions of subjects. @CaliDad2020 your beef is with nature, not the SAT people.
What’s next? Should we ban tape measures because they risk entrenching the trend of people noticing that males are taller than females? Why not abandon grades and GPA since they risk entrenching the idea that girls are better students?
lol. You continue (willfully) to conflate “intelligence testing” with “college success.” And I’m sorry to tell you (again) that it ain’t neccessarily so…
And that is precisely my point: As long as folks aren’t clever enough/honest enough to accept that “top scores in intellegence testing” does not always add up to “most success in college” we will be stuck with a certain, persistent disconnect.
Once folks use more concrete metrics like graduation rate and graduation GPA we start to be able to fine tune which “intellegence testing” translates to a good prediction of success in college. I think I’ve perhaps written this once or twice before, but the SAT folks themselves claim the best cocktail is GPA + SAT + SATII… and they only looked at FYGPA.
I don’t think there a lot of studies that suggest “intellegence testing” alone is a better predictor of “college success” than GPA. (which is why, to answer you question, we don’t “ban” GPA - 'cause it’s the best predictor, even SAT folks admit that… Talk about your, uh, “rhetorically circumspect approach to the discourse…” You can do better than that - I know you can.)
And, again, the reason to avoid SAT is it is a “test to nowhere” whose only purpose is to see how you do on the SAT with the expectation that it will be a valuable added data point to your application. It has 0 other application in a student’s education. They will never use a “good at SAT taking” skill - unless they tutor the SAT… which happens a lot, of course.
“Highest scoring on intellegence tests” correlates best with “high scores on intellegence tests.” It does not neccessarily correlate best with “success in college.” There, my friend, is the rub-a-dub-dub…
Lol @CaliDad2020 - I am guilty as charged! I do think intelligence is a better predictor of what we care about than a few tenths of a GPA or the passing of a low threshold like graduation (>90% graduate so where’s the challenge?).
Not sure if anyone reads this stuff, but about admission based on intelligence, this is worth reading: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/iq.htm. The writer is pretty witty as well. Knowledge of basic integral calculus and elementary stats would help, but are absolutely not essential to an appreciation of the ideas presented. Happy reading!
@OHMomof2 - you might like that piece as well. I know you have some familiarity with CCNY/CUNY.
I don’t think GPA is a great equalizer because it is quite dependent on the quality and professionalism of the teacher- some give A’s out like candy others follow a strict bell curve - some give easy extra credit, some allow test corrections to improve grades-
I think the best indicator of success is actually the ability to study- how many times have we seen kids cruise through HS on jus their basic intelligence and never develop the ability to study so when they get to college they suffer with the more challenging course work and are at a disadvantage because they have new clue on how to crack open a book, while another student who really had to put some effort into HS to get the same A flourishes in college because they have learned the proper way to study- same A in HS, just 2 ways of getting there
It goes both ways though. There are many gifted kids in high school that are bored and therefore never achieved the best grades, but start to thrive in college because they find the work mentally stimulating. This is the reason I did better in undergrad than in high school, and better in grad school than undergrad.
And on the flip side, students who had to work really hard in high school find that the college work is simply beyond their capability. Very common in engineering.
Evidently a film is underway on this subject. See cover story at:
“many?” How many? Do you have any stats?
Again, SAT themselves claim only ~15% of SAT takers are low GPA/high SAT. That means approx. 250,000 students.
It would be very easy for colleges, even the SAT themselves, to offer an objective test to those students that felt their GPA didn’t reflect their “gifts.”
But for a kid who is pulling an UW3.7 - 3.8 and above with a reasonable smattering of Honors/AP/IB/Top track core courses, SAT most of the time provides no new info.
It’s a very cynical attitude, really, to somehow assume that at least 10, and likely more - as many as 20-25, different teachers in core curriculum subjects over the course of a student’s HS career would be “gut” teachers who hand out As like candy. And, of course, that kind of pattern would be instantly identifiable in a school profile. It would be very easy for schools to calculate a class’ core grade GPA distribution - even if it doesn’t rank. And for the schools that rank, even if you’re “handed” a 3.8, if that puts you at 500 out of 1000, adcoms can figure that out.
No stats. However, a couple of years ago I took my son to a Davidson annual summit (a program for kids in the top 0.1%), and it was heartbreaking to hear all the stories of kids that are so badly served by their school systems. The main reason for taking my son was to show him, that despite his complaints, he is in a highly supportive high school system. It opened his eyes.
And no, I do not have the position I have because my kids are low GPA/high test scores. They do fine on both.
lol, you got me there, I have lived long enough to definitely become a cynic