I was talking about the unnecessary consumption of their energy and time before college, not about the roles colleges may or may not play.
von Neuman’s energy was also wasted when his dad “forced” him to study Chemical Engg at ETH, before he turned to more fruitful ventures.
I am aware. My point was that the notion of true genius being suppressed because of holistic admissions is ludicrous (and completely without data).
Are we worried that Yo-Yo Ma spent too much time cramming for the SAT’s or becoming president of his HS’s Yearbook club?
I think true genius should be exempted from holistic admissions. It is certainly a cost to society. Maybe even to them.
And with the current crop of 20 something hippy/dippy clueless AOs (I wanted to paint a vivid picture) evaluating applications, some of these applications may slip through the cracks.
I used von Neumann because he was mentioned upthread. With his intellect, he didn’t need college and some misdirection or wasteful activities wouldn’t have made much difference. But few, if any, other “geniuses” are anywhere close to the level of von Neumann.
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Ooops, I thought it had been understood that I used the term “genius” (with quotes intact) colloquially. Sorry for poking a wasp nest. 
(Clearly I have more in common with Alfred E. Neumann.)
Not in CA. The median SAT score in our high school has gone up over 100 points since 2020, because no one bothers taking it unless you are going to get a high score and want to apply to some of the more prestigious private/out of state colleges. The majority of students going to four year college attend UCs or CSUs where it’s not considered.
Tangentially - I had not appreciated the depth of the problem, especially considering public state universities that should be the most accessible to the broad population:
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We need harder standardized tests to find the truly passionate and talented. None of normal standardized tests does that nowadays.
Our AP tests have become an endurance contest for 2 weeks in high school, but they aren’t deep enough. To get an A at a rigorous college is a lot harder than an AP 5. Even passing in college might be more rigorous.
Way back when, I took only one AP test, Calc BC. I had to do many multi-step integrals, and a simple proof, to get a 5. Now they don’t even ask those things. It still was easier than university math, but at least I could integrate. I had math at the level needed for engineering, which I think was the push after WW2 – to create engineers. Now we don’t even do that, and for our best high school students, there’s a crazy panic and risk of getting shut out of suitable programs if they don’t do everything perfectly – because they cannot show that they do anything very well.
Any of these test results will be “necessary but not sufficient” for showing mastery. People note that people who succeed on these tests don’t really know what’s going on. But anyone who knows what is going on would succeed on the tests and find them trivial.
The SAT. It’s now just a test of high school material, and that intention from CB is explicit. But the kid who is passionate and talented will be much stronger than that. How can that kid make the distinction? SAT used to include harder sections like data sufficiency for math, and verbal analogies for verbal. Contrary to someone else in this thread, there wasn’t just vocabulary (antonyms) but those other sections. They were eliminated because at the time they were suspected to cause a racial gap in performance. But the gap didn’t change even after their elimination; the test overall became more of a test of speed rather than depth for everybody.
Analogy questions were basically another type of vocabulary questions. If you knew the words, they were easy. If you did not know the words, they were hard.
As I recall the vocabulary in analogies was easier than in antonyms, so if you were going for a high score and could do the antonyms, that wasn’t driving your performance in analogies. Anyway with the sample tests now online, there should be no surprises vocabulary wise. Some of us got it by reading, but maybe others can stare at word lists.
And we don’t have anything now like the old data-sufficiency.
I recall those in the SAT math section and did not think that they were difficult for someone who knew high school math up to algebra 2 well.
And you got into UCB. This is twice that you’ve said “but it was easy for me.” But these questions could separate people who were candidates for UCB from those who would have been crushed there or just bogged the place down.
You’re not the only one here who could do the SAT, even before they took out those sections hoping to close the racial score gap. They also took advantage of those opportunities to recalibrate scoring, to raise the overall declining score trend.
UCB was nowhere near as selective then as it is now.
I know someone else who sort of drifted into UCB too, not part of a focused intention. And he wasn’t the sort to try-hard on tests. But he happens to be very bright too. Those cognitively loaded tests were effective, sorted students into schools that were good matches academically, without the panic and tension that high school students go through today.
It seems like you’re arguing for something like the A-level system. There are pros and cons to that system, like any other, but it’s clearly better than ours at sorting high-end students and verifying who is ready for advanced university work in a given field.
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The US also manages to have very few (or none at all) false positives in getting high-end students into high-end colleges, not counting the hooked kids.