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"We don't want to game the system. We want to change it. One year after our decision to stop accepting SAT/ACT scores in admissions, we are seeing remarkable results." - Hampshire College Liberal retards have come to the conclusion that standardized testing is patriarchy, and that we should judge students only on the arbitrary letter grades prescribed by >10 different teachers of varying skill, expertise and intelligence. https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=ht...h=FAQExDhQa&s=1 Their marketing tagline is "Disrupt Higher Ed"
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Sep 27, 2015 15:23
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They should reenact "Battle Royale" and let the survivor get into the school.
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Sep 27, 2015 15:26
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Am I the only one who thinks that democratic elections became obsolete with the invention of the Stanford-Binet IQ test?
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Sep 27, 2015 15:31
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Outside of some kind of standardized college admissions exam system that tests people's knowledge in several subject matters (like the SAT IIs) I don't think the SAT/ACT means much anyway. At the very least the college board developed the SAT because they thought jews were just gaming the admissions system with too much studying so they needed a test to measure "intrinsic" intelligence that will foil their grind heavy strategy.
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Sep 27, 2015 15:31
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Peven Stan posted:Outside of some kind of standardized college admissions exam system that tests people's knowledge in several subject matters (like the SAT IIs) I don't think the SAT/ACT means much anyway. At the very least the college board developed the SAT because they thought jews were just gaming the admissions system with too much studying so they needed a test to measure "intrinsic" intelligence that will foil their grind heavy strategy. The bigger issue is dissociating SAT scores to the US News Rankings which are somehow held as gospel to how good a school is.
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Sep 27, 2015 15:32
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Peven Stan posted:Outside of some kind of standardized college admissions exam system that tests people's knowledge in several subject matters (like the SAT IIs) I don't think the SAT/ACT means much anyway. At the very least the college board developed the SAT because they thought jews were just gaming the admissions system with too much studying so they needed a test to measure "intrinsic" intelligence that will foil their grind heavy strategy. When the SAT was introduced and used as the sole admissions test, too many Jews scored highly on it and ended up in Ivy League schools. The college admissions process adapted to this infestation by changing the admissions process to take a "holistic approach" by considering "extracurricular activies" and "interviews" instead of just basing admissions off of test scores. This was an obvious smokescreen for trying to divine the Jewishness of the applicant and refusing them - the whole college application process was born out of trying to reduce the number of Jews in Ivy League schools. Misguided idiots follow the process to this day.
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Sep 28, 2015 03:39
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I did really well on the SATs and therefore propose that everything in life be based principally on SAT scores, including assigning of life partners, job placement, electoral results, and salary. This will totally not result in an awful society, really!
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Sep 28, 2015 03:48
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Not enough minorities were getting into that college and it was making them look bad, so academic testing was thrown out the window. Yeah, that makes total sense. I mean, you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings.
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Sep 28, 2015 05:42
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:When the SAT was introduced and used as the sole admissions test, too many Jews scored highly on it and ended up in Ivy League schools. The college admissions process adapted to this infestation by changing the admissions process to take a "holistic approach" by considering "extracurricular activies" and "interviews" instead of just basing admissions off of test scores. This was an obvious smokescreen for trying to divine the Jewishness of the applicant and refusing them - the whole college application process was born out of trying to reduce the number of Jews in Ivy League schools. Misguided idiots follow the process to this day. To be fair the other side of that was the fact that the SAT turned out to not be culture-neutral. It also had (well, still has) issues that arise from the quality of education one received. When I took it there were mathematical symbols on it I just plain didn't recognize at the time because I was never taught them. It limited what I could get on the test. I scored very well anyway but it could have been better. Even so the test was not exactly fair to minorities and poor people.
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Sep 28, 2015 05:45
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:When the SAT was introduced and used as the sole admissions test, too many Jews scored highly on it and ended up in Ivy League schools. The college admissions process adapted to this infestation by changing the admissions process to take a "holistic approach" by considering "extracurricular activies" and "interviews" instead of just basing admissions off of test scores. This was an obvious smokescreen for trying to divine the Jewishness of the applicant and refusing them - the whole college application process was born out of trying to reduce the number of Jews in Ivy League schools. Misguided idiots follow the process to this day. You could make an argument that this is the Ivy League schools protecting their real purpose, which is to serve as a cultural incubator for American elites, which permits and benefits perhaps from a certain number of Jews, of Asians, of poors coming into the mix - fresh ideas here and there, getting people used to those others existing, letting some of them bootstrap their way up. Some. Not too many.
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Sep 28, 2015 06:24
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Truly leveling the playing field would require changing the entire way we fund schools, adding a greater variety of tests (Outside of math no one really cares about the SAT IIs), and eliminating stupid poo poo like children of alumni +10 bonus points or whatever. In the mean time, I guess we can continue to put tremendous pressure on our kids to jump through hoops fulfilling a set of ambiguous requirements so they have a 15% chance instead of a 10% chance to get into their school of choice. I hope you've traveled to Africa and won multiple sporting and science fair competitions by seventeen, little Timmy. It doesn't help that the class sizes of elite universities are pathetically and unnecessarily small, when most of them could double their undergraduate enrollment without any meaningful decline in quality of the student body. KaptainKrunk fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Sep 28, 2015 |
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Sep 28, 2015 07:50
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Peven Stan posted:Outside of some kind of standardized college admissions exam system that tests people's knowledge in several subject matters (like the SAT IIs) I don't think the SAT/ACT means much anyway. At the very least the college board developed the SAT because they thought jews were just gaming the admissions system with too much studying so they needed a test to measure "intrinsic" intelligence that will foil their grind heavy strategy. As the other poster said, I'm pretty sure it was the opposite. Jews were doing too well on SAT tests so universities reduced the importance of the SATs in admissions in favor of interviews, so they could weed out Jews in their student bodies and get more handsome Anglo sports players and sons of business execs instead. Good thing nobody would ever manipulate the demographics of a college student body for the optics now.
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Sep 28, 2015 07:54
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Big freakin' deal; community colleges don't use SAT scores either. Way to be on par with Bumpass Technical Institute of Cosmetology and Diesel Engine Repair, Hampshire College.
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Sep 28, 2015 08:02
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quote:Without the scores, every other detail of the student’s application became more vivid. I don't know that this reasoning makes much sense. It seems that focusing lest on test scores may be helpful but I fail to see how ignoring them completely is better than having the additional information. e: Oh, I didn't see that Hampshire was focused on liberal arts. I suppose it makes more sense that way. I had thought things like the math/science portions of the act/sat were better than nothing predictors of success in more sciency degrees. I can see it how a school not focused on that would ignore them entirely. Rahu fucked around with this message at 08:25 on Sep 28, 2015 |
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Sep 28, 2015 08:12
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ToxicSlurpee posted:To be fair the other side of that was the fact that the SAT turned out to not be culture-neutral. It also had (well, still has) issues that arise from the quality of education one received. When I took it there were mathematical symbols on it I just plain didn't recognize at the time because I was never taught them. Yeah, that's not exactly cultural bias.
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Sep 28, 2015 08:48
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blah_blah posted:Yeah, that's not exactly cultural bias. Haha, I'm imagining the poster going to some school where he was never taught the greater than or less than operators because the faculty were afraid of the political ideas they might foment.
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Sep 28, 2015 14:02
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ThirdPartyView posted:They should reenact "Battle Royale" and let the survivor get into the school. Isn't this the plot of Ding Dong Ronpaul or whatever that stupid anime LP game was?
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Sep 28, 2015 14:10
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ToxicSlurpee posted:To be fair the other side of that was the fact that the SAT turned out to not be culture-neutral. It also had (well, still has) issues that arise from the quality of education one received. When I took it there were mathematical symbols on it I just plain didn't recognize at the time because I was never taught them. It limited what I could get on the test. I scored very well anyway but it could have been better. Sure, but neither are other admissions criteria like extracurriculars. The problem is that there is simply no objective way to isolate and determine a student's intelligence or learning ability in a way that is not influenced by any other factor. Hell, the very idea of a simple one-dimensional spectrum of intelligence with "smart" on one end and "dumb" on the other is starting to fall out of fashion among education advocates and researchers (although it's still firmly embedded in popular culture). The human brain is simply more complicated and complex than that.
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Sep 28, 2015 15:34
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This was my job for a number of years? Private college admissions tutoring and counseling; my family still runs a successful boutique operation in it; I have "retired" (moved on to other things) but I still handle problem cases that the family sends my way, though I now enforce strict ethical boundaries on what I will and will not do. This isn't A/T so I won't get super much deeper into my ~life story-; let me just say that I scored highly on standardized tests in high school, went to an ~elite college~ and had a great deal of success helping literal dozens of high school students into similar types of school. ("Dozens" because I only ever worked with students one-on-one; boutique, as I said) The point is that I know way more than is probably healthy about many parts of standardized testing (especially the basic SAT and the ACT), including how to teach a test and how to break a test. So um I normally don't post here, not sure how to do this, but, um the people trying to move away from standardized testing as it is currently practiced and understood in the name of trying to improve the egalitarianism of college admissions are absolutely right in every way; part of the difficulty is that look, this is difficult to explain to someone who has not spent a long period of time teaching people to break the test, but, like these tests are not good at measuring anything. Anything. This has a lot to do with how they are written. It's if this is tl:dr feel free to ignore me and move on but okay. So. Part of the appeal of standardized testing as it is currently practiced is that it seems to break the field down into "smart kids" and "dumb kids"; (for example, one's "SAT score" is not directly tied to one's "raw score", ie one's number of questions right and wrong. Instead, one's "raw score" is put into a database with all the other raw scores from the "sitting" (other kids who took SAT at the same time; this is why SAT testing is only available on certain dates) and then they are ranked in each session on a bell curve, 800s at the high end of the statistical distribution and 200s at the bottom; then scores are distributed). Sorry I'm trying to explain now this makes the test bad and it's the failing of the test is subtle. The scoring system is important because it's specifically created so that there are "winners" and "losers"; high scores are only high by virtue of beating other kids. So the real goal behind standardized testing as it exists today is not to evaluate kids' academic abilities but to screen out "low performers", giving admissions workers a smaller volume of tests to deal with. So even if every kid taking a sitting of the SAT is completely college-ready, and possess all the academic skills to succeed in a collegiate classroom, the test is designed so that half of them still have to score at the bottom of the bell curve. This is where the cultural bias comes in. The SAT (the ACT is a slightly different beast; we could talk about it later if people want) must have people fail in order for it to succeed. It cannot, however, accomplish this by being a harder test, because it must always exist at the same level (it tests sophomore/junior in high school level math, English, and critical thinking). So look the whole point of these tests is they ask children to do really, actually, honest-to-god easy things in way which intimidates and confuses them. All of the questions are trying to get kids to do things that they can actually do quite easily, but that fact is obscured by the oblique ways in which questions are presented. Basically, all tests are written in upper-class New England dialect; the closer you are to speaking upper-class New England as your native brand of English, the easier the test is to understand and the less intimidated one is by it. To anyone who knows anything about how these tests are actually written and how the grading mechanics actually work, it's been obvious for a really long time that standardized testing as we currently understand it is complete and total garbage vis a vis actually helping schools understand their applicants. So, why does it still exist? One reason is that the volume of students applying to schools every year is loving gigantic, and admissions people are desperate to stem the flow of applications they have to deal with; standardized testing is a handy way. The second is that actually evaluating the abilities of a student is kind of impossible at scale; the mind of a high-school teenager is like it's complex, even though they're just kids, and understanding each individual kid takes a lot of time and energy. So basically tests still exist for energy economy reasons; admissions staff are human, they possess finite emotional energy, they need to stem the flow; the stem has a pretense of "objectivity" when really it's a racist Rube Goldberg machine benefiting rich white people; and, like, laypeople like the OP (I'm sorry I feel bad calling you out but you're super wrong, bro) continue to believe it has value. Honestly it's all sort of like climate change science? Anyone who knows anything about it understands the professional consensus and why the consensus is the way it is, but opinionated laypeople who have no firsthand knowledge of how the process works project their ideology onto things and end up messing them up for everyone. I ended up leaving my (very cushy and high-paying) job because of my concerns about this poo poo, so, like, my money is where my mouth is and everything; anyway I hope you don't mind me weighing in. Thank you for your time.
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Sep 28, 2015 16:34
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I'm super glad I had a great ACT score that got me into college despite my inbred teachers docking me for not doing my final bio report on irreducible complexity. Discard test scores, fine, but don't delude yourself that these tests are less racist or classist than the human people that teach classes.
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Sep 28, 2015 16:43
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Addendum: another indication that these tests don't work great (Sorry about my typos this post and last post; I'm phoneposting) anyway if standardized tests are to be believed I am some sort of supergenius. Clearly, however, I am not. I'm actually a pretty ordinary person who happens to be good at intuiting game structure. It's kind of like um this is not a great analogy and I don't know a lot about it but you know those dudes who spend all that time and energy "speed-running" video games? Doing all sorts of weird and crazy poo poo because they understand how the mechanics of the game actually work as opposed to the way that they appear to work? It's like that; I'm good at that. Does that make me brilliant? Definitely not. But if you give me a test, even one for a subject I genuinely don't understand, I can figure out how to make the test THINK I understand. Testing itself is flawed, is something else I'm trying to say. Testing as we understand it is flawed, and our reliance on standardized tests is an extension of that.
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Sep 28, 2015 16:47
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Radbot posted:don't delude yourself that these tests are less racist or classist than the human people that teach classes. You could discard all my wordy stuff and just read this, actually; the truth is that tests necessarily always contain the flaws and blinds of their creators, and, like that's a flaw that is always going to be with us, and it's why testing will never actually ever be good.
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Sep 28, 2015 16:50
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FilthIncarnate posted:*tons of poo poo* Interesting points. Without standardized test scores we have less criteria to judge applicants, namely transcripts and extracurricular activities. My high school's extracurriculars were less-than-rigorously documented, so us IB/AP kids really got creative with how they 'spent' their free time according to our college applications. Also, my Theory Of Knowledge teacher gave us a brutally honest talk about the extent to which our grades are cushioned; this can exist to any degree at any school. I'm not saying SAT score is the composite of your value as a human being, but I think eliminating 1 of the 3 judgement criteria when the other 2 are miserably dishonest is a lovely shortsighted way to provide upwards mobility to lower/middle America.
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Sep 28, 2015 16:51
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FilthIncarnate posted:that's a flaw that is always going to be with us, and it's why testing will never actually ever be good. Which is not an argument for keeping our lovely current stuff around; it's just a structural thing that hovers over all attempts of one group of people to evaluate another group of people.
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Sep 28, 2015 16:52
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FilthIncarnate posted:Addendum: another indication that these tests don't work great Is that not one measure of your intelligence? Your ability to intuit and manipulate systems for your own benefit? SAT isn't meant to categorize kids into smart/unsmart, but to quantify someones relative test-taking ability. This entire "Standardized-test scores not accepted" movement is a big distraction so textbook publishers can continue their racket undisturbed by gov't regulation.
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Sep 28, 2015 16:54
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fakiebeanplant posted:I think eliminating 1 of the 3 judgement criteria when the other 2 are miserably dishonest is a lovely shortsighted way to provide upwards mobility to lower/middle America. I hear you. The problem, though, is that 3 out of 3 criteria are miserable and lovely; it's just that it's harder for a layperson to see how lovely the standardized test is from within its fortress of mathematics and perceived respectability. I don't have a solution, by the way, to any of these problems; I just understand them.
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Sep 28, 2015 16:55
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fakiebeanplant posted:Without standardized test scores we have less criteria to judge applicants, That's a good thing.
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Sep 28, 2015 17:30
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I remember a large number of people dropped out of the SAT because they couldn't write cursive, which was required for the contract signing. I just scribbled a bunch of cursive gibberish and went on. It didn't seem to affect my overall score either way.
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Sep 28, 2015 18:01
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Maybe you all can clear this up for me, but I was under the impression that SAT in particular was pretty good at measuring things. Like in particular, how much you might get sunburnt on the campus quad and whether or not you came from a good family that could offer you support if you needed it.
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Sep 28, 2015 19:03
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PERPETUAL IDIOT posted:Maybe you all can clear this up for me, but I was under the impression that SAT in particular was pretty good at measuring things. Like in particular, how much you might get sunburnt on the campus quad and whether or not you came from a good family that could offer you support if you needed it. Yeah it turns out that standardized testing, as well as any sort of grading system at all, reflects the problems with the society that produce them. I do know that I'd rather try my chances with a set of five bubbles and a question versus trying to convince my teacher not to fail me for believing in evolution.
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Sep 28, 2015 19:09
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FilthIncarnate posted:You could discard all my wordy stuff and just read this, actually; the truth is that tests necessarily always contain the flaws and blinds of their creators, and, like Thanks for all this info! It's rare to get a glimpse into how this stuff works behind the scenes like that. fakiebeanplant posted:Interesting points. Without standardized test scores we have less criteria to judge applicants, namely transcripts and extracurricular activities. My high school's extracurriculars were less-than-rigorously documented, so us IB/AP kids really got creative with how they 'spent' their free time according to our college applications. Also, my Theory Of Knowledge teacher gave us a brutally honest talk about the extent to which our grades are cushioned; this can exist to any degree at any school. There are two problems with college admissions criteria. The first is that all of the criteria used are "miserably dishonest" at best. The second is that the thing they're trying to measure probably doesn't even exist. The college admissions process is probably not much more reliable than flipping a bunch of coins and then throwing 90% of the pennies into the garbage regardless of which side was up.
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Sep 28, 2015 20:00
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fakiebeanplant posted:Is that not one measure of your intelligence? Your ability to intuit and manipulate systems for your own benefit?
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Sep 28, 2015 20:05
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I don't know, I think you all are being a little hyperbolic regarding the utility of standardized testing. I know someone who teaches nursing at a pretty low-tier private college which accepts people with really low test scores, and she complains a lot that her students barely know how to read and write and can't do basic arithmetic to figure out drug doses. They love using 'I'm not a good test taker' as an excuse, but the reality is that they can barely read and do arithmetic. I never took the SAT, but I took the ACT, and it wasn't some test of arcane Anglo culture like you all make it out to be. It had me read some articles and asked questions testing how well I understood the articles. It also had me do some basic math problems. Unless you want to make the claim that reading comprehension and mathematical ability are 'white' skills, which strikes me as being quite racist, I'm not getting why standardized tests are racist. Of course, if you don't receive the benefit of a good education, it's harder to do well on the test, and disadvantaged minority students tend not to receive as good educations as white students on average, but that's not really what you all in this thread are saying.
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Sep 28, 2015 20:25
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It's a lot easier to beat a racist test than it is to beat an entire school of racist teachers for 4+ years.
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Sep 28, 2015 20:32
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silence_kit posted:I don't know, I think you all are being a little hyperbolic regarding the utility of standardized testing. I know someone who teaches nursing at a pretty low-tier private college which accepts people with really low test scores, and she complains a lot that her students barely know how to read and write and can't do basic arithmetic to figure out drug doses. They love using 'I'm not a good test taker' as an excuse, but the reality is that they can barely read and do arithmetic.
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Sep 28, 2015 20:33
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silence_kit posted:I don't know, I think you all are being a little hyperbolic regarding the utility of standardized testing. I know someone who teaches nursing at a pretty low-tier private college which accepts people with really low test scores, and she complains a lot that her students barely know how to read and write and can't do basic arithmetic to figure out drug doses. They love using 'I'm not a good test taker' as an excuse, but the reality is that they can barely read and do arithmetic.
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Sep 28, 2015 20:35
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Cicero posted:As someone who has always been good at tests, I've long harbored a suspicion that "I'm not a good test taker" really meant "I'm not particularly smart/I don't actually study that hard", like, a good 60-70% of the time. It's much easier to admit being bad at tests than having a bad brain or being lazy. Are there any studies on this? I dunno, as someone who has always done extremely well on standardized tests the ability to see the question behind the question is definitely a huge part of it. Whether that's a reflection of better knowledge/ability with regards to actual content of the test, I personally don't really think so. I definitely know some very smart people who even at the graduate level just suck at certain types of questions and I have to think its because they read the question in a very different way, or fail to immediately see the examiners intent behind the question.
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Sep 28, 2015 20:42
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tehllama posted:I dunno, as someone who has always done extremely well on standardized tests the ability to see the question behind the question is definitely a huge part of it. quote:Whether that's a reflection of better knowledge/ability with regards to actual content of the test, I personally don't really think so. I definitely know some very smart people who even at the graduate level just suck at certain types of questions and I have to think its because they read the question in a very different way, or fail to immediately see the examiners intent behind the question.
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Sep 28, 2015 20:49
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The SAT and ACT are stupid garbage run by a monopolistic cabal.
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Sep 28, 2015 20:56
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I think standardized tests filtering out people who can't read and do basic math is a good thing. If you cannot do those two things you should be in remedial classes at the local community college, not trying to get into somewhere where you will not be able to do the work and are thus wasting both your time and the university's.
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Sep 28, 2015 21:09
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