Didn’t the HMC issues also have something to do with the workload of the core requirements, which has been constantly critiqued and tweaked for years.
In that sense, it wasn’t an admissions issue - it was something that impacted all students regardless of demographic. Fwiw, HMC seems to have gotten the message - it isn’t dumbing anything down so much as reconfiguring workload, and they seem to get that many kids are burned out by the time they reach college. That reconfiguration and implementation of more support resources may make more of an impact for those who come from backgrounds that did not instill as much discipline or independence - or maybe overkilled on “elite or bust” mentality. It certainly is not something that would be picked up from test scores.
I imagine the same reconfiguration is happening elsewhere, too btw. HMC just had a harsh awakening to the need.
“Harvey Mudd College canceled classes for two days after sit-in and protests over issues of race, workload and a leaked report in which faculty appeared to be insulting students.”
I would agree with this, but when my son attended an info session at an HYP they advised applying to 10-12 schools. That just seems insane to me. He was planning to push it to eight apps and THAT seemed like too much. But he returned thinking that he hadn’t selected enough schools to apply to. IMO, advice like that is only contributing to the problem.
A matching system would not reduce the number of places that kids apply to. Within the medical resident match system, some students are applying to 50 or more residencies currently.
Sure, but it may eliminate some of the specific directed effort a student has to put forth. Obviously, colleges like that amount of effort because it gives them more info about the student. But if, say, all students place a personal statement on some matching website, along with pertinent information, and then their rankings . . . perhaps it’ll take some of the time and stress out of the application cycle. Let the algorithm figure it out! It’s just a (tempting) thought . . .
Not sure why you focus on minorities here, since @Hanna once mentioned that white students in her college admission consulting business generally avoided colleges that were not white majority, but minorities were more varied in such preferences.
The SATs changed between 2015 and 2020, the 1560 in 2015 would be a 1590 in 2020. It would be easy for a place like HMU to get whatever scores they wanted depending on their goals. It’s odd that HMU said students couldn’t pass the placement tests, rather than a certain percentage had to be placed in Calc 1 or the course before Calc 1.
“Not sure why you focus on minorities here, since @Hanna once mentioned that white students in her college admission consulting business generally avoided colleges that were not white majority, but minorities were more varied in such preferences.”
I brought up minorities because they look for other students, faculty that have similar backgrounds and experiences for support and fit, which went counter to the prevailing thought about going to a college to meet different kinds of people. Minorities don’t have much choice, there are only 100-110 HBCUs and 295 HSIs (Hispanic specific), which would leave the remaining to be white or Asian majority. So minorities have to be more varied.
According to concordance tables, the 1560/1400 on the old SAT corresponds to a 1570/1450 on the new SAT. So expressing in terms of the new SAT it would be as listed below – a negligible difference in both 25th percentile and 75th percentile.
I listed SAT instead of ACT earlier because HMC does not provide ACT scores for 2005 . I believe HMC did not permit submitting ACT until 2007. Looking at ACT for the years that are available also does not suggest a decrease in scores as the diversity increased. Instead there appears to be a small increase in scores. The jump to 34/36 in English in 2020 seems like an anomaly. However, it doesn’t appear to be a typo since 2019 was even higher, with a 35/36 English.
I don’t know what your expectation is based on. In the report you linked to, it states:
"…a significant number of faculty thought that Harvey Mudd students had, over time, become less capable of, and less interested in, meeting the challenge of Mudd’s difficult curriculum."
I recall there were additional leaked comments in that regard at the time of the protests that weren’t included in that report.
A. Harvey Mudd faculty deliberately arranged to overrepresent the voices of students who were struggling, and faculty who felt challenged.
I get the feeling that the faculty were not entirely on board with some aspects of President Klawe’s mission to diversify the student body. She does acknowledge that they were bringing in students who needed extra help so perhaps the college didn’t have the resources to assist them properly. Or maybe they were just choosing poorly.
Q: Explain to me how this drive toward diversity intersected with attempts to overhaul Harvey Mudd’s infamously tough Core Curriculum.
A: Some of these students are coming in with less preparation; they’re equally hardworking, equally bright, but less prepared. They find it hard to keep up, and faculty are unhappy.
We made changes to our Core eight years ago and invested a lot of resources to hire more faculty.
There was so much good work done with the best possible intentions.
We thought it was going to improve things, and it didn’t, it just made them worse.
We changed the requirements, changed from four to three semesters, added more electives. And instead of using it to take more relaxing courses, students used it to move ahead in their major, which made it even more stressful for students.
You can and should increase access; altering the culture and identity of an institution is a much more challenging endeavor. If you are going to “lighten the load” you need to choose students who wish to work less. Not an easy task at a place like HMC! The solution probably would be to increase the resources for struggling students and to do a better job finding great fits among the 98% of schools they have expanded to in their recruitment efforts.
The issue about scores isn’t that difficult - schools can manipulate those distributions. So it’s definitely possible to be told that there are more 36’s in math entering in the fall only to find that a greater number are also scoring quite low on the math placement test. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.
Such a choice or preference may be more obvious with minorities, but it may be less common.
White students’ preferences on this matter are more likely to be unstated for obvious reasons. But it sometimes comes out indirectly (not necessarily for an individual student) on these forums when posters are suggesting colleges to a student asking for suggestions. Black students often get HBCU recommendations, but other students rarely do, and some posters discourage HBCUs when one is mentioned in that case.
Also, regarding majority race / ethnicity at colleges, HSIs are not necessarily majority Hispanic, Asian majority colleges are not that numerous, and some colleges have no majority.
The paragraph immediately before the one you quoted begins “While most faculty…”, then the next paragraph that you quoted begins “However, a significant number of faculty…” When the report expresses an opinion of the majority of faculty, it says “most” or other wording implying a majority opinion, suggesting that instead saying “a significant number” is a minority opinion, or at least minority of comments.
Furthermore, if you re-read the post you quoted and related discussion with TheloniusMonk, you’ll see that the discussion was not about that particular faculty member feeling that students were less capable and/or interested in HCM’s curriculum. It was about other comments in his quote, which is repeated below.
"“We’ve had admissions changes and no one has helped faculty understand how to deal with a more diverse student population. We get students with perfect ACT math scores who can’t pass our math placement tests. Because of the increased student diversity, students need more help.”
Agree that colleges can and do manipulate scores for number of purposes. I actually thought HMU could go stay test optional or go test blind for similar reasons as Cal Tech or MIT, but maybe not.
As was noted, there were also not significant differences at the lower end math scores. The 25th percentile scores did not change significantly in math, nor did not the lower tail end scoring <30. The lower end ACT composite score increased over the period where some faculty expressed a negative sentiment.
I think the bigger issue is that the ACT math in no way resembles the placement test or math students would see in classes at HMC or similar. The ACT math is a quick race to finish 60 simple multiple choice algebra/geometry type questions in 60 minutes. You need to average 1 question per minute without making any careless errors to get a perfect score.
I haven’t seen the placement test at HMC, but at other highly selective tech colleges, like MIT and Caltech, the placement test emphasizes calculus, which isn’t covered by the ACT. The placement test also has far more challenging questions than occur on the ACT, does not emphasize speed, and usually is not multiple choice. It’s a completely different test that requires completely different knowledge and ability to be successful. It’s quite possible that a student who aces the math ACT may fail the math placement test and is in no way prepared from math at HMC, MIT, Caltech or the like.
As such, a single faculty member saying that some HMC students aced the ACT while failing the placement tests has little bearing on whether HMC, MIT, or Caltech could/should go test optional/blind. I expect such colleges gain very little from students listing the math SAT/ACT score since it has so little connection to the math used at the college. Along the same lines, I expect that they’d lose very little from the test being removed. Sure, it’s possible that the SAT/ACT could flag some kids who apply to HMC/MIT/Caltech in spite of not knowing basic algebra or geometry well . However, such kids would almost certainly be flagged in numerous other areas of the application, such that they would still be rejected, if test optional/blind.
Not a major point, but it’s still possible to move around a bit in that “less than 30” range.
There is also the fact that you only take the placement test one time and students generally are discouraged from “prepping” so that they don’t end up with an erroneous placement. It’s a truer indication of math-ability at that (or any other) institution.
Not sure much can be gleaned from that one comment other than that admin was probably touting the strong SAT/ACT scores as proof of the quality of the class while faculty might have been seeing something else. Cal Tech’s two year Test Blind experiment will probably yield more informative conclusions.
My kid just had her Duke interview with a lovely interviewer but interestingly, it was by far less in-depth (and the shortest at 30 min) than the other several “elite” college interviews that she had.
My D21 has focused on Southern LACs. She was not excited about her ACT scores, so applied TO everywhere. So far, she’s been accepted at all 4 she’s heard from, with between $22,000 and $31,000 in annual scholarships. TO has worked out great for her.