Who else has a feeling this change is due to internal pressure that there aren't enough domestic applicants that can make the grades?
Gotta have some way to fight back against "Chi-com" influence
Dropping the SAT/ACT is white liberal reaction. There are four reasons behind this:
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It makes it easier to apply to Harvard, which gives them more money in application fees ($75 per application).
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Low admission rate is calculated in US News and World Report rankings. A school will be rated higher simply by denying more applicants. These rankings are incredibly important. University presidents jobs in part depend on them. Abolishing the SAT means more applications and more denials.
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The "abolish the SAT" movement took off as soon as Asian students started greatly outperforming white students on the tests. This timing is not a coincidence. This is absolutely white liberal backlash.
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It scores a PR win among white liberals who want to look like they're fighting for marginalized students without actually surrendering any privilege.
None of this is a defense of the SAT or ACT, they're dogshit tests that just exists to impose hierarchies on students. But abolishing them doesn't remove the hierarchies, it just shuffles the criteria around to determine your place in the hierarchy. It puts more emphasis on legacy admits, extracurriculars, and personal essays, all of which are even more classist and racist than standardized tests.
"Holistic admissions" are a scam. They were literally invented in the early-mid 1900s because working-class Jews did too well on the tests at the time.
I mean, I know you give that caveat that the tests are indeed dogshit, and your 4 points I don't disagree with.....but you do still kinda make it seem like this isn't good. Fuck the SATs. I don't really care what the reason is, we just need universities to get rid of them. That shit is a terrible factor in judging quality.
I think there are good and bad parts to it. It's good that kids won't have to prepare for the SATs as much. But it's not going to improve the quality of students that get into Harvard, it's not going to meaninfully improve working class or underrepresented minority representation (could even backfire), and honestly I don't even think it's going to make students less stressed about applications. If anything it could make them more stressed because it will make Harvard even harder to get into (more applications for same number of spots).
And I agree the SAT is a bad way to judge quality. Extracurriculars, essays, and legacy admissions - which will all become a bigger piece of the pie - are even worse.
I dunno - I hope this helps students. I sincerely do not think it will.
Yup - a rich kid can get a small to moderate advantage by paying for SAT tutoring. They can automatically win by literally hiring a former admissions officer to write an essay for them!
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We've known for some time that SAT or ACT scores have very weak correlation to college success.
Yeah I was always dogshit at school but I test really well because my brain is kinda fucky, so I basically neurodiverged my way into perfect scores in a couple sections and went on to fail several classes in college lol
This is true though I also don't think optimizing for college success re: attributes of applicants is good to emphasize. We should be, collectively, making students who are "unlikely" to succeed and explicitly admit + support them because clearly society has failed them.
Being "likely" to succeed is generally a proxy for political economic advantage and social marginalization.
Success in college is also weakly correlated with success in the labor market too. Since upward class mobility is fiction in this country, and the school system doesn't help us succeed, then wtf are we doing? Hell, even subsidized preschool that focus on school readiness instead of childhood wellbeing has been found to decrease cognitive ability in children.
alternatives
The alternatives is yipee now we can accept more sons of billionaires and politicians without giving a fuck (relatively) more objective metrics.
All of the University of California schools have already gotten rid of using standardized testing for admission.
University of California has a hard cut-off grades for if I'm not mistaken. You have a certain gpa, no matter which school, you get in. I doubt this will happen with the rich private schools.
I don't think that's true. If you have a GPA above a certain value and you're a California high school student, you get guaranteed admission to a UC, but they don't throw your application out just because your GPA is below X.
This is especially true for the less-prestigious schools like Merced.
I guess I meant it would work more favorably for students in the other direction. If you have certain grades you're guaranteed to get in to Berkeley or w/e no matter how rich or poor or prestigious your high school is. Not sure if I'm right though.
Like I said, you get guaranteed admission to a UC, but not necessarily Berkeley.
I believe in Texas if you're in the top 5% of your class (in Texas) you get guaranteed admission to UT-Austin.
At least, that's how it was in 2008 when I was applying to college.
I think they might mean Lewis Terman who created the first US IQ test, the Stanford-Binet. He was a prominent eugenicist.
I agree that standardized testing is bad but I really can't imagine that the alternative way Harvard (and the like) will evaluate applicants isn't even worse. (Maybe I'm way off base here).
Right now, it's a combination of 40% grades 40% SAT and 20% extra curriculars. Grades? Harvard and the like weigh those based on the quality of school you go to, and naturally they prefer those who go to the most 'prestigious' schools that cater to the wealthiest in an area. Extra curriculars are mostly always based on opportunity and opportunity is simply not afforded to those with fewer resources. I dunno, as unfortunate as it is to say, aren't SAT scores the most objective way to measure applicants out of all of these? I dunno, not that I give a fuck, but I think that by eliminating this metric it allows these schools further leeway to just discriminate against poorer students.
This is correct. There's a reason Harvard is dropping the SAT and not, say, legacy admissions. This is a financial and PR calculation that they damn well know will not help marginalized students.
While this is true, you have to compare the SAT/ACT to the criteria that will replace it such as grades, extracurriculars, personal essays, and legacy. All of those metrics outside of class rank are even more classist and racist than the SAT.
It's not that the SAT is good (it isn't), but I do think there's a strong case for it being the lesser of two evils and that abolishing it is choosing the greater evil.
I think having something that you sit down and do once kind of helps to round out shit like grades, essays, extracurriculars, etc. like the SAT/ACT are dogshit but it def helped me out as a kid with undiagnosed ADHD and autism and an after school job to have a test I could sit down and do once vs various semesters of missed schoolwork, teachers that hate me, projects, presentations, tests I couldn't study for, etc.
Like it still sucks, and there's still a huge class and race gap for ACT/SAT scores, but IMO they're still at least marginally better at offering a level playing field than every other metric that American colleges use currently.
I know this, this is clear, but then what about the median family income of the high schools of admitted students vs the median family income of those who are not admitted.
I think grades are a better judgement than SAT scores, since they're ideally tailored to the school itself, and are determined by teachers who are a lot closer to their students. Of course that doesn't mean the decision is for a good reason.
I’ll tell youse something funny about the sat/act…
So during a dark period of my life when I graduated with my math degree but no job, I ended up doing some tutoring at tutor[dot]com. It was some gig bullshit, you know how it is.
So anyway, it turns out tutor[dot]com was owned by match[dot]com, which is already funny to have your tutoring for kids shit run by volcel outlaws.
But a few years later, they fucking go and buy Princeton Review, which is pretty name-brand as far as admission test prep is concerned—their bread and butter has been selling practice tests etc for the ACT and SAT.
A dating site doesn’t own Princeton Review anymore, sadly:
In April 2010, the company sold $48 million in stock for $3 per share, and a short time later was accused of fraud in a class action suit filed by a Michigan retirement fund, which claimed The Princeton Review leadership exaggerated earnings to boost its stock price.[4] In 2012, the company was acquired by Charlesbank Capital, a private equity fund, for $33 million.[5] On August 1, 2014, the Princeton Review brand name and operations were bought for an undisclosed sum by Tutor.com, an IAC company, and Mandy Ginsburg became CEO. The company is no longer affiliated with its former parent, Education Holdings 1, Inc.[6] On March 31, 2017, ST Unitas[7] acquired The Princeton Review for an undisclosed sum.[8]
I just think it’s extremely funny how something a lesser country might mistake for something important—education—is the kinda thing a bunch of bankers and other sordid coke heads pass around, knock a couple bucks out of for a year or two, then give it to the next guy.
And it actually is fine; the people who deserve employment are exempt from credentialism/have other processes to acquire the necessary bona fides, so this is just stuff the middle class and poors get to peck each others’ eyes out over
