Yes, perfectly reasonable to pull state funding for private enrichment. Now, all we have to do is get rid of the racism in “holistic admission” and use a demonstrably fair system like performance on standardized tests.

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tzs 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

What about schools where standardized tests are insufficient?

At Caltech and MIT for example they have way more people with very high SAT score than they have openings for. Most admitted students at both have math scores of 790 or 800, and reading/writing averages around 750.

The SAT is not reproducible enough to say that someone who scored say a 790 is better than someone who scored a 780. If both retook the test they would likely get different scores and would have a good chance of finishing in a different order.

Same for other standardized test.

The result then is that after you filter by standardized tests you still end up with a more people than you can admit that have high tests scores that give you no information about who would do well and who would not.

There are plenty of people who can get those high scores but would not be able to handle the class work at Caltech, and from what I've heard the same applies to MIT. To figure out who can actually handle the work they have to look beyond standardized tests.

	▲	renewiltord 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The inability for a test to have sensitivity at the top end isn’t some fixed property of the universe. It’s just a property of the SAT. Harder tests are possible. The only thing that matters is that candidates know that it’s not at the whim of some human who has decided that 25% Jews is enough or 33% Asians is enough or whatever and that it’s by a fixed scoring rubric. And then some large number of high scoring candidates will miss out until we have a sufficient number of universities. Irrespective of the mechanism, it is incredibly racist to use one’s race as a scoring mechanism perhaps by definition.
	▲	impossiblefork 6 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'd argue for what the ETH and the Independent University of Moscow do. Make them sit some of the university's exams, and if they pass they get in.

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Spivak 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wish granted, you now 1000 spots in your freshman class and 5000 applicants with identical scores and 4.0 GPAs. And there's another 8000 applicants whose scores are within the individual variance of the test. You wouldn't drop their application just because they had a bad day would you? We're a meritocracy here so no cheating and choosing randomly—that's not how you get the very best. What's the next criteria?

	▲	renewiltord 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		So I made a bad test and now I have a problem? Because you can make tests quite difficult. e.g. the GRE mathematics section is trivial to score maximum on, but there's no reason for that to be the case. It could be made harder. Obviously if your test makers aren't very good you'll get full score being only 96th percentile. But you can make tests that don't have full score being that many people. We know because very few people medal on the IMO. Once you have a sufficiently hard test, rank everyone and choose top to bottom. As people get better and better, you have to expand your universities. Of course, in the US you run into the problem where the towns consider students a pollutant[0] but I'm sure we can start new universities out in the middle of nowhere. We've done it before, we can do it again. And until we do, yes, if you had a bad day, try again next year 0: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-03-02/california-...

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MPSFounder 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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