I have taught graduate school for a long time which has traditionally required the GRE (Graduate Record Exam). It's similar to the SAT. The students with higher GRE scores are better students. Another school at which I taught made the GRE optional. The quality of student performance declined. I mean across the board--late assignments, poorer writing, weaker analytical skills. The students I taught were of all backgrounds. This wasn't racial.
I notice this at work too. For some people, I can give simple directions and they come back with a lot of interesting work. Others need to be walked through something or else they produce meaningless crap. Not to mention that I produce much crappier work than other people I've worked with!
Of course, I can't determine if this came from genetics, upbringing, previous experience, etc. Point is: ability exists.
I try not to fall into, "o, I'll just do it"--but often it is the case it is easier to do a thing than delegate. For example, I like to edit on Wikipedia. It is sort of fun to add facts about libraries. All the tutorials are on the platform and it is 100% self taught. Also, many people complain about the gender/race composition of who edits Wikipedia so I try to encourage more diversity in editing. I've had people that say, "thanks for telling me" and people who say "o, that's impossible to learn all that."
Interesting observation, but I think the dynamics are different with the SAT vs. GRE/MCAT/LSAT/GMAT. What I mean is that it makes perfect sense to me that students with lower GRE (etc.) scores would perform worse in graduate school because taking the time to prepare for the test is something a dedicated student with good study habits would do. Those who don't take it seriously at that level of education are probably not going to be very good students.
In many cases high school students taking the SAT DGAF and don't bother or can't afford to prepare adequately. I should know. The first time I took the SAT hungover as hell I scored about 300 points lower than when I took it after a good night's sleep. Notably, I didn't do any significant prep for it either time; I'm just pretty good at standardized tests.
I think the group of people who blag their way through the GRE are going to be bimodally distributed - those who are weak students and those who find it easy.
Sure. I can see the ones who find it easy not trying very hard or prepping (source: #metoo) could possibly score low, but in both of our cases that wouldn't really be true if we're both self-reporting accurately. It looks like this sample size of 2 who blagged our way through got pretty good scores (I never actually enrolled in grad school though so maybe I'm not a valid sample point lol).
Well it's in the news, send it's an important issue to me. But the bigger thing is that I can't think of an issue where the dominant liberal position is this wrong, this incoherent, and I'll keep pointing that out as long as they keep spreading it.
The reasons for the current state of affairs are obvious: most progressive intellectuals with influence went to elite schools. So they have a vested interest in keeping elite schools elite but more racially diverse.
It would be a more just world if there were no elite schools and if people only had to get as much education as they needed for their jobs and no more. (Thus ending many occupational licensure boards, and the "universal college" push endorsed by both conservatives and progressives in the US.) But there are too many vested interests for that actually to happen.
An anti-racism which doesn't address class will always be more appealing to the American elite than one which does - even if a class-conscious anti-racism wouldn't have to frame itself in opposition to the white working class.
"The SAT is officially gone from the University of California because they’re desperate to reduce the Asian student population they want greater racial diversity."
I thought the point was to move towards "holistic" criteria so they could arbitrarily accept more high-tuition-paying students.
Regardless of the real reason, holistic criteria are a problem because they are a black box and when Harvard originally created them, they were created explicitly to keep out Jews.
Unless the correlation between SES and test scores is a perfect 1, removing the need to select by one indicator lets you better select along another. There will be low-income, high-testing students you can replace with high-income, meh-testing students.
I see this kind of mistake a lot in rat-adjacent discussions of intelligence. Intelligence is highly heritable (yes), so let's reason as though highly intelligent children are never born to people of average intellect (no). Intelligence and SES are correlated (yes), so let's reason as though all intelligent people are well-off (no).
I think there's a space in the higher education industry press for an alternative to the Chronicle and similar publications which would question orthodoxies about meritocracy, universal college, the sorting function, elite schools, the superiority of in-person to online in all circumstances, the need for a faculty-centered as opposed to student-centered university, etc.
Then you could write for it and puncture the myths about the admissions process at the elite universities, including the one you mentioned here.
I think the Wall St. Journal already did some detailed reporting on this. And for those here who only know the WSJ from their editorial page, their reporting section is independent of it. It still leans right but is very rigorous and has broken major stories, like the recent one on FB and the one on Elizabeth Holmes' company a few years back for which is now facing charges.
WSJ has been absolutely skewering elite and wannabe elite private universities that use high-pressure sales tactics to get students to enroll in incredibly expensive, nearly worthless Masters programs in journalism, film, social work, etc. It's borderline fraud. There is a lot of rot in the neoliberal university. COVID19 revealed more clearly than anything how financially dependent many schools are in having paying students in dormitories and dining halls.
I was always impressed the WSJ ran the story tearing the lid off Theranos even though Murdoch was a big investor in Theranos. The writer even checked with Murdoch in advance of publication, who told him simply to run it if it was true.
I work in the administration of a fully-online nonprofit open-admissions college where over 70% of students receive Pell. To me, at least, that type of model seems much more likely to further racial and socioeconomic equity than the one the elites are pushing.
Freddie is right that talent is unfairly dispersed. AND as noted above... there is NOTHING we should try to do to advantage the untalented in EDU.
However, we should do serious cash transfers ONLY IN THE FORM OF Weekly Wage Subsidies (no UBI, everyone works)
This is for the bottom 47%, as long as they keep their grades up and finish school, starting at age 14 boys and girls should be able to earn $300/wk Full-Time (Summer) $150/wk Part-Time (during the school year), where Small Businesses and Families can offer jobs starting at $100/wk, with the Govt in for $200/wk.
Since now, there is no labor slack in America, many SMBs will need to offer more than $100/wk, and everyone will have 50+ jobs to pick from starting at $100/wk, so no excuses that you can't find work.
For every $20/wk more the SMB pays the Govt pays $10 less. So even at $480/wk, govt is still in for $10.
Using this system, the bottom 47% will obtain master-craftsmen skills by age 20. We will have all the plumbers, electricians, mechanics, 3D printing. specialists, we need.
Fortune 1000 eat shit.
Woke EUD eats shit
College Admins eat shit.
The talented soar.
EVERYONE works. Zero labor slack forever.
EVERYONE has their nut covered.
And we are pandemic (Economic shock) proof. Bc the weekly wage subsidies increase as SMBs / families must pay less, and the innovation Economic engine gets fed jet fuel, bc "wages paid" falls FAST in crisis without anyone ever not working, or earning enough to feed their belly.
Above plan endorsed by Scott Sumner, Miles Kimball, Nick Roe, Roger Farmer, Larry Kudlow, Carlos Mucha, Adam Ozimek, Steve Waldman (he likes UBI, but knows he cant have it)
If it helps though, you can think of it as minor form of Communism and mini-MMT.
The govt is taking everyone no currently employed and "hiring them" for $300 per week.
Since Govt is shit at directing labor and we want to fuck Fortune 1000, they offer this labor to SMB and families at LABOR.GOV website starting at $100/wk.
Since $100/wk is a super cheap deal, EVERYONE has 50+ job offers to choose from. Nobody has to take the job that offers the most. You choose your boss.
If I hire you to tend my vast garden for $100/wk, and you chose that job bc you love gardening. By week 3, the machine sees that I have rehired you, and everyone else looking for a Gardner bids you up. Maybe you stay bc you love my garden, maybe you go work a micro-farm making $200+$150 from Govt.
Hiring circles are illegal. I hire you, you hire me. Apart from that, no reason to worry about cheating.
You GET zero labor slack forever. Take the half loaf.
As long as they get whatever we can expect from 80 IQs. Im OK with dropouts, but you need to understand folks are gonna scream from left, that we're paying kids to drop out.
Sure as long as the person being cared for is paying $100/wk - they have this money from Medicaid / Medicare and they aren't hiring family.
Hiring circles must be blocked to stop fraud.
BUT, what you will see happen instead is this: Mom stops caring for grandma, and goes and earns $40K doing something else in real world, and pays someone $200($10k yr) +150 from govt to do the care work.
I believe that what we really need to do is utterly abandon the "universal college" aspiration. If everyone had a Bachelor's, it would make Bachelor's degrees largely worthless. Half of US high school students will not go on to a University, which is good, rather than bad, because most of them don't have the intellectual aptitude or intellectual curiosity to benefit from it. "Universal college" would just make universities big high schools, and many of them are halfway there as it is.
There should be *real* vocational education in US high schools, ideally partnering with employers and / or unions. Many of the EU countries have dedicated vocational high schools whose graduates can immediately earn enough to support themselves. Instead, half of our secondary school students are subjected to a college-prep curriculum which offers them nothing but boredom and/or frustration, and in the process are given the message that they are failures and rejects from the educational system.
Free online video coursework is a no-brainer, bc 75%+ of the kids who get into an IVY will take a bunch of free courses, transfer them in and be able to say they graduated from Harvard after spending only 1 year there. This will destroy the Admin system and high cost of college.
And weekly wage subsidies will replace vocational learning. What we need for the bottom 47% is a system that allow them to "dabble" and "move"
If a guy wants to be a cowboy or a glass blower or work on a new robot fishing boat, it's not enough that he be able to try it, he should be able to MOVE there, take on some kind of other job from LABOR.GOV while he goes about convincing the guy he really wants to work for to give him a shot. MOIBILITY is key to American happiness.
Everyone has different abilities. I do not understand why sports allows the best to become elite and we can't admit that math is any different. I'm not upset that I didn't make any U.S. Olympic team because those are not my abilities. And I'm not upset that Carlsen v Nepomniachtchi are better at chess than me.
Right! Now if there’s ever an Olympic event for reading books while caring for children, I’d be a strong contender. (I had a lot of fun watching the online chess tournaments during lockdown. And the Magnus documentary was great.)
They seem very evenly matched--at a draw after 4 games. And there is nothing more challenging than taking care of small children--an undervalued contribution to life.
Ill explain it.... trust me it works, ill prove it.
Heres what is coming from WebEx and Texas: Two teachers for Texas.
The top teacher in the state for the Holt 9th grade geometry textbook records the Master Track.
You the student are watching the stream with your Live Teacher in the corner of screen. She is watching all kids faces and seeing where they are in lesson.
All students are in different spots on timeline.
Either can "Go Live" with each other.
NOW THEN, every time a student clicks Pause Rewind Play, the server makes note where info transfer mY have been bad.
NO VIDEOS ARE EDITED.
Instead new video clips that explain each idea a new way are added, ao rhat whenever a kid is not getting something he can tap a button and see new explaination, tap, tap tap each time a new fresh way of learning an idea.
This is called Telescopic Video. Like a TV ad thats 10 seconds long, but you could watch for an hour.
Of course, when teachers GO LIVE to help a stuck studwnt, they are recorded and those clips are evaulated to be added to timeline.
HERE IS WHY IT I CAN GUARANTEE IT WORKS.
What I just described is basically how iterative website design works. You dont realize it but 10's of thousands of amall chnages are made to Facebook or Amazon each year, each new addition making something a little easier for dumber people to use.
Mathematically, there are not that many Questions. There are more answers for each question, true. But the biggest thing to contend with is all the many ways students ask those questions.
Suffice to say, very quickly the top half of students will not need to tap Go Live very often. Its mostly about keeping them on track and not daydreaming.
The bottom half of kids DESERVE and need more human instruction (if not human contact) but there is no rwason to slow the top half down for them anymore.
"You the student are watching the stream with your Live Teacher in the corner of screen. She is watching all kids faces and seeing where they are in lesson."
Which means THERE IS A LIVE TEACHER! The live teacher has NOT been replaced.
No. Overtime the course becomes perfect. Stupider and stupider kids can take Holt 9th Geometry without a teacher or the book.
The live teacher has hundreds students they are "staring" at (really is is an AI) watching eyeballs to make sure they are payimg attention to the video.
Human-level AI could of course function as a human (by definition), but nothing short of that will be able to cope with the astonishing range of misunderstandings that students come up with. If you've never taught, you simply cannot comprehend this.
I've been teaching STEM for 38 years, and students STILL find novel things to misunderstand, things I would never think of as something that even COULD be misunderstood. Yet it happens over and over again.
No offense, but iterative design simply works, it's called A/B testing, and it has consumed EVERY PART of the World Economy, it's relentless. And I'm sorry that this basic reality is rolling towards your life's work.
I hate to break this to you, but human beings are not snowflakes. When I say "A!" there will be misconceptions, but the actual misconceptions will fall on an 80/20 curve.
I'm not suggesting there is not a "long tail" of individual crazy ideas and misreadings, Im suggesting that the only thing a live teacher is necessary for is when they happen (it's a very small percentage of the questions you get asked).
let me say it another way it may be less objectionable to you...
Nothing needs ever be said twice the same way live.
So the lecture the live teacher gives? that's replaced with video.
Answers that other live teachers give to reduce questions during the video? Thats also replaced with video.
Repeat forever.
Finally, let me make note here... SO MANY of the gifted kids LOVED COVID LOCKED DOWNS bc they were able to do the work on their own, crush their competitors (other students) and go do other stuff.
Meanwhile, the bottom half of kids often didn't even log on.
The same thing is happening with Work From Home. The TALENT is all secretly working two jobs and refuses to come back to the office, and the middle managers and office politics guys are shitting bc they are being measured digitally from home and it turns out they don't do any real work.
1. Don't be mad the gifted kids are being freed.
2. Don't pretend 6-12th grade is some magical thing where TALENT isn't able to cruise or that much of what you did for 38 years was repetitive.
What it is is a false statement. There is no "top teacher" for a textbook, and if there was, it wouldn't matter, because we teachers can use whatever book we want or indeed, no book at all. What, you think we all say "open the book to Chapter 1" and then go through the book in a way that means you could just show a lecture and whammo, it's all done? Moronic.
And if you don't know that, then you really shouldn't opine on this topic.
To play critical theorist for a moment: What exactly do we mean by ability here? Ability to complete what tasks, in what circumstances, according to what rubric? Who decided?
I think you will find that white people decided. The charge of racism isn’t that GPA and SAT mask Black students’ secret mastery of the material. It’s that the material and the whole apparatus for teaching and testing on it are themselves encodings of white culture.
It’s the question of the hour. At its gauche to suggest culture has anything to do with it—and I’m talking right down to family culture; every single household feels different from the next because we make our own cultures.
The correct answer is in the US differences against whites are heightened. The very best people of countries/race FLEE and come to US.
Indians / Chinese etc the smartest ones figure out how to GTFO and come here.
That said 100% culture matters - meaning Tiger Momming works. When you force a developing brain to struggle to learn during the day, that night when it sleeps during first 3 REM cycles, whatever parts of brain were being taxed light up under fMRI and dedrites and synapses rewire and to keep the metaphor simple,. the pipes get bigger (like in broadband)
You can really tax kids into being "smarter" than they would be without the struggle, but it's super expensive and doesn't scale - parents have to do it.
IIRC from stats in my ed program, it's immigration, not race. Most Asian Americans are 1st & 2nd gen immigrants. People who up stakes and swap hemispheres for economic and social advancement work hard and push their kids hard. Same reason why West African immigrants outperform African American students.
It's a chicken and egg situation. Asians make up the largest category of legal immigration to the US and a large part of that is employers recruiting workers in fields like tech from abroad. Half the work force in Silicon Valley, for example, is Asian. If the only metric that matters is ability to do the job why recruit so heavily from Asia versus South America? I don't think it's any coincidence that the countries that tend to score highest on the PISA every year are Asian.
The Asian/white gap is much smaller than it looks, although it does exist. Asian gap is predominantly grades, and I really can't stress enough how useless grades are, and how much I disagree with Freddie when he says you'd expect grades and ability to align. And to the extent it's test scores, Asian immigrant test prep is months and months and months on tests that have gotten progressively easier to game since 2005.
If you want to see a more authentic Asian/white gap, check out LSAT scores. The LSAT is extremely difficult to prep for, is relentlessly focused on authentic vocabulary knowledge acquired over decades, and is one of the few tests where the average Asian score is very slightly lower than average white (last I checked) and is definitely not attributable to immigrant language issues.
And I'm sympathetic to that argument in many ways, though it's a big conversation. The issue is that the SAT etc are genuinely good at predicting the kinds of skills and abilities that are valued in neoliberal capitalism. As far a alternatives to that goes - that's why I wrote my book!
They are essentially IQ tests, and you can pretty reliably switch in IQ for SAT or GRE. At one point your argument likely had some truth to it. White people used to decide. But we figured that out a long time ago and have improved the process. Here's how you make a modern test: Randomly select a large amount of questions formulated in language, or some other symbolic manner that require abstraction to solve. Give those questions to a large amount of people. Score and rank them, and you have IQ. That's it. Fundamental to the process is that it does not actually matter what the questions are.
It's going to be hard to fault Asian Americans for turning into Republicans when our left-wing institutions are so explicitly working against their interests. The first signs of this shift already appeared in the NYC mayoral election.
Don't forget crime. Jay Caspian Kang had an article a few months back where he wrote about the immigrants posting on WeChat who referenced "the Biden crime wave".
Seriously? They're being ridiculous. Crime "waves" and the rates in general are lagging indicators at best. I'd find it equally ridiculous to assign the (documented) increase in violent crime when Trump was the President. Actually, however, I think overall the incidence of non-violent crime is still shrinking but the murder rate is going up. It all happens on a much longer timescale than one presidential term. Nobody can really seem to figure it all out.
1) I would argue that the current increase in crime rates, especially homicide rates, is real and significant. The last time homicide rates were this bad in the US was 1996. That gives some context to the cliché about crime rates being low compared to 30 years ago.
2) Homicide rates started going up in 2014, with two years left to go in the Obama administration. When Trump referenced "American carnage" at his inaugural that is what he was referencing. Of course, crime rates remained elevated throughout his presidency.
3) It started in 2014 but crime sky rocketed in 2020. The increase in the homicide rate from 2019 to 2020 was literally the largest in the history of the modern United States.
4) Preliminary indications are that violent crime is still increasing in the current year.
5) Property crimes showed a temporary decline in 2020 due to lockdowns. That decrease didn't survive the end of lockdowns.
If radlibs aren't concerned over working class black and latino Democrat voters going for an explicitly tough on crime candidate, they're not going to be concerned about working class asians.
"...this entire school of race politics, where you try to diversify the elite first and then somehow get to broad justice later...."
I don't know who pointed this out first, but this whole thing is basically Reaganomics but with race and gender. It's all built on the idea that if you diversify the elites, it'll naturally "trickle down" to other areas of life. Clearly I don't think it works.
Exactly. And once you see it you can't unsee it. Trying to be charitable, I see this as somewhere between the "talented tenth" and "a rising tide lifts all boats." That is, like you say, if the top of the meritocracy is diverse, then eventually the benefits will seep down elsewhere. (And like you say, I don't think it works.)
But the more cynical side of me sees in every prominent "antiracist" a temporarily embarrassed elite, waiting to be airlifted into their Harvard chair or F500 boardroom sinecure.
By the time a kid's taking the SAT his die is already cast. You want to improve SAT's and college performance, then educate kids long before they take the test. What needs to be done is a real "affirmative action program" for K-12 instead. The question is how do you affect that while public education is in the grip of the professional administrator class, teachers unions, schools of (mis)education, etc. and students' true education is of secondary concern.
Here's a tip. Take the GRE at the same time you take the SAT. You'll get about the same score. I've suggested this to many and then they don't have to take the test again. College adds nothing to the GRE. I asked a family member to do this who at the time thought I was "crazy," but she thanked me when she had the GRE for grad school all ready. This esp. good tip for people who get a BA in humanities as their math sills will never be as sharp as they were at 18.
I suspect that this was really just a way to admit more students and make more money. As I understand it college admissions are down, and due to declining birth rates (less babies always means less students the long run) it's the long term trend. This means a reduction in revenue and I expect we'll see standards being reduced of waived altogether to plug the gap. If students aren't prepared and too many flunk out, they'll start finding ways to either grade easier or allow students to pass some other way. They'll do anything and everything to keep those tuition dollars flowing.
"I suspect that this was really just a way to admit more students and make more money." Not at the level of top state schools and above. These schools have competitive admissions, but they want maximum flexibility to mold the student body in order to respond to political pressures.
Intervention strategies to address the inequalities may be of marginal effectiveness as well. Saw an interview with Kathryn Paige Harden (psychologist doing educational research and genetics) about this.
Among the more amusing facets of this argument, one which I have never seen anyone else point out, is that Education graduate schools have higher proportions of black and female students than almost any other graduate degree major. Presumably, The College Board is interested in hiring people with Ed degrees, so I would expect that The College Board is hiring higher proportions of black and female Ph.Ds than almost any other industry. I wrote a little bit about that on my blog at one point: https://itsnotmyfault01.medium.com/san-franciscos-pac-lowell-high-school-and-kendi-s-arguments-7955df437850
>The second thing here is that I find it even more sad/amusing that we’re bringing up “bad man thought of it first” as if there aren’t hundreds of scientists and scholars working diligently at the College Board or in academic research to try and remove racial bias from their tests and measures in the present. To assume that standardized intelligence tests (no described relation to current admissions tests) carry their racist biases and mission after 100 years, with no changes in tools, viewpoints, or objectives requires just a stunning amount of faith in one man’s antiquated vision. It’s ever more shocking because women and black people take up larger shares of psych and education PHDs than other fields. Maybe they don’t tend to specialize in psychometric measures or making tests… but they’re in the same field to be doing that work, and Ed schools are famous for their highly progressive slant. https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf21308/report/fields-of-study Table 16: Women are 69.3% of Education PHD in general, and 69.6% in “Educational assessment, testing, measurement”. Table 24: Black is 14.1% of “Education research” subfield, which is quite high compared to their fraction of other sciences. Knowing the high relative proportions of women and black people receiving education and psychology PhDs, both groups historically believed to be less intelligent, is the takeaway that women are the most racist testmakers? Should the takeaway be that that the College Board (or whatever test maker for these more local admissions tests) is systematically hiring unqualified people and racists or maybe not even trying? Does the high fraction of black PHDs in this field have 0 effect on the tests, even after 100 years?
The general counter-argument is that X-ness can cause something even if none of the people are X. So a guy from Nepal beating up a guy from Ghana can still be white supremacy.
As far as I can tell, these sorts of arguments are unfalsifiable. Personally, I'd rather believe in aliens or magic
That's interesting news to me. I posted separately that my wife is the director of a large local tutoring business and they have a LOT of trouble with diversity (specifically Black) hiring. The education school there in Austin (UT) seems to have a smaller number of Black students than otherwise represented in the overall population (~13%). But I haven't actually looked so could be way off. :-|
it seems like moving away from objective criteria like the SAT and moving towards the whims of admissions workers would allow for a quiet Affirmative Action program without having to come out and be explicit about it.
Affirmative Action is *incredibly* unpopular with most people, so finding a way to do it without having to admit you're doing it seems to be the main objective here.
like, if schools were like Stuyvesant and admissions were only a funciton of test scores, then it's really hard to practice AA (that's why Stuyvesant has like seven Black kids).
But if admissions were all about soft, holistic, culture fit-style criteria, then you can more easily build a student body that has the diversity that you want.
This surely is a significant factor. As Freddie notes, selective schools make complicated "black box" adjustments to GPA so as to be able to meaningfully compare, say, a 3.5 at Stuyvesant to a 3.9 at a poor-performing school. Easy to invisibly change your standards to produce a different mix of successful applicants - the average nominal GPA may even go up! Impossible with SATs.
I believe the writer intends the college's slack, not the "student's slack" ... remember, the target is a B-.
This gig pays $150 ?
How many words?
... should have gone into Earth Sciences, I get paid to ride around the back country on an ATV.
I have taught graduate school for a long time which has traditionally required the GRE (Graduate Record Exam). It's similar to the SAT. The students with higher GRE scores are better students. Another school at which I taught made the GRE optional. The quality of student performance declined. I mean across the board--late assignments, poorer writing, weaker analytical skills. The students I taught were of all backgrounds. This wasn't racial.
I notice this at work too. For some people, I can give simple directions and they come back with a lot of interesting work. Others need to be walked through something or else they produce meaningless crap. Not to mention that I produce much crappier work than other people I've worked with!
Of course, I can't determine if this came from genetics, upbringing, previous experience, etc. Point is: ability exists.
I try not to fall into, "o, I'll just do it"--but often it is the case it is easier to do a thing than delegate. For example, I like to edit on Wikipedia. It is sort of fun to add facts about libraries. All the tutorials are on the platform and it is 100% self taught. Also, many people complain about the gender/race composition of who edits Wikipedia so I try to encourage more diversity in editing. I've had people that say, "thanks for telling me" and people who say "o, that's impossible to learn all that."
It's "racial" in precisely the sense that punctuality, conscientiousness, and analysis skills are "white", dontcha know? https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333
Well, these skills seemed to correlate more with higher scores than anything else as far as I can remember regardless of student background.
Interesting observation, but I think the dynamics are different with the SAT vs. GRE/MCAT/LSAT/GMAT. What I mean is that it makes perfect sense to me that students with lower GRE (etc.) scores would perform worse in graduate school because taking the time to prepare for the test is something a dedicated student with good study habits would do. Those who don't take it seriously at that level of education are probably not going to be very good students.
In many cases high school students taking the SAT DGAF and don't bother or can't afford to prepare adequately. I should know. The first time I took the SAT hungover as hell I scored about 300 points lower than when I took it after a good night's sleep. Notably, I didn't do any significant prep for it either time; I'm just pretty good at standardized tests.
You bring up good points. I was very GRE focused but those others may be different. The people I recommended do this were all high performers on SATs.
I think the group of people who blag their way through the GRE are going to be bimodally distributed - those who are weak students and those who find it easy.
Source: took the GRE with zero prep, did fine
Sure. I can see the ones who find it easy not trying very hard or prepping (source: #metoo) could possibly score low, but in both of our cases that wouldn't really be true if we're both self-reporting accurately. It looks like this sample size of 2 who blagged our way through got pretty good scores (I never actually enrolled in grad school though so maybe I'm not a valid sample point lol).
This was your best opening paragraph ever.
BTW, it seems to me in this essay you are mostly repeating points you have made many times before. But I, for one, never tire of reading them.
Well it's in the news, send it's an important issue to me. But the bigger thing is that I can't think of an issue where the dominant liberal position is this wrong, this incoherent, and I'll keep pointing that out as long as they keep spreading it.
The reasons for the current state of affairs are obvious: most progressive intellectuals with influence went to elite schools. So they have a vested interest in keeping elite schools elite but more racially diverse.
It would be a more just world if there were no elite schools and if people only had to get as much education as they needed for their jobs and no more. (Thus ending many occupational licensure boards, and the "universal college" push endorsed by both conservatives and progressives in the US.) But there are too many vested interests for that actually to happen.
An anti-racism which doesn't address class will always be more appealing to the American elite than one which does - even if a class-conscious anti-racism wouldn't have to frame itself in opposition to the white working class.
"The SAT is officially gone from the University of California because they’re desperate to reduce the Asian student population they want greater racial diversity."
I thought the point was to move towards "holistic" criteria so they could arbitrarily accept more high-tuition-paying students.
Regardless of the real reason, holistic criteria are a problem because they are a black box and when Harvard originally created them, they were created explicitly to keep out Jews.
No. The high-tuition-paying students do well on the tests.
Unless the correlation between SES and test scores is a perfect 1, removing the need to select by one indicator lets you better select along another. There will be low-income, high-testing students you can replace with high-income, meh-testing students.
I see this kind of mistake a lot in rat-adjacent discussions of intelligence. Intelligence is highly heritable (yes), so let's reason as though highly intelligent children are never born to people of average intellect (no). Intelligence and SES are correlated (yes), so let's reason as though all intelligent people are well-off (no).
I think there's a space in the higher education industry press for an alternative to the Chronicle and similar publications which would question orthodoxies about meritocracy, universal college, the sorting function, elite schools, the superiority of in-person to online in all circumstances, the need for a faculty-centered as opposed to student-centered university, etc.
Then you could write for it and puncture the myths about the admissions process at the elite universities, including the one you mentioned here.
I think the Wall St. Journal already did some detailed reporting on this. And for those here who only know the WSJ from their editorial page, their reporting section is independent of it. It still leans right but is very rigorous and has broken major stories, like the recent one on FB and the one on Elizabeth Holmes' company a few years back for which is now facing charges.
WSJ has been absolutely skewering elite and wannabe elite private universities that use high-pressure sales tactics to get students to enroll in incredibly expensive, nearly worthless Masters programs in journalism, film, social work, etc. It's borderline fraud. There is a lot of rot in the neoliberal university. COVID19 revealed more clearly than anything how financially dependent many schools are in having paying students in dormitories and dining halls.
I was always impressed the WSJ ran the story tearing the lid off Theranos even though Murdoch was a big investor in Theranos. The writer even checked with Murdoch in advance of publication, who told him simply to run it if it was true.
As a college professor, I can say that you are certainly right!
I work in the administration of a fully-online nonprofit open-admissions college where over 70% of students receive Pell. To me, at least, that type of model seems much more likely to further racial and socioeconomic equity than the one the elites are pushing.
Things everyone should be told:
1. The top 20% REALLY DO deliver 80% of the GDP each year.
2. 53% of Americans spend 5+ years in top 20%.
3. WE TEACH STEM for the top 53%, stop worrying about the bottom 47%.
4. Gifted need EXTRA resources (per student), should be removed from rest, and be self-directed (hybrid learning, online video EDU does this best).
5. Online video-based learning will eventually replace live teachers, but we still NEED SCHOOLS TO BABYSIT and teach vocational skills etc.
6. The Dept of Education should offer free online video coursework that all Middle School, Jr High, High School, and Colleges accredited in US must accept credit for https://medium.com/@morganwarstler/free-online-college-d0319ad4f0a1
Now with that said...
Freddie is right that talent is unfairly dispersed. AND as noted above... there is NOTHING we should try to do to advantage the untalented in EDU.
However, we should do serious cash transfers ONLY IN THE FORM OF Weekly Wage Subsidies (no UBI, everyone works)
This is for the bottom 47%, as long as they keep their grades up and finish school, starting at age 14 boys and girls should be able to earn $300/wk Full-Time (Summer) $150/wk Part-Time (during the school year), where Small Businesses and Families can offer jobs starting at $100/wk, with the Govt in for $200/wk.
Since now, there is no labor slack in America, many SMBs will need to offer more than $100/wk, and everyone will have 50+ jobs to pick from starting at $100/wk, so no excuses that you can't find work.
For every $20/wk more the SMB pays the Govt pays $10 less. So even at $480/wk, govt is still in for $10.
Using this system, the bottom 47% will obtain master-craftsmen skills by age 20. We will have all the plumbers, electricians, mechanics, 3D printing. specialists, we need.
Fortune 1000 eat shit.
Woke EUD eats shit
College Admins eat shit.
The talented soar.
EVERYONE works. Zero labor slack forever.
EVERYONE has their nut covered.
And we are pandemic (Economic shock) proof. Bc the weekly wage subsidies increase as SMBs / families must pay less, and the innovation Economic engine gets fed jet fuel, bc "wages paid" falls FAST in crisis without anyone ever not working, or earning enough to feed their belly.
Above plan endorsed by Scott Sumner, Miles Kimball, Nick Roe, Roger Farmer, Larry Kudlow, Carlos Mucha, Adam Ozimek, Steve Waldman (he likes UBI, but knows he cant have it)
Freddie you should get on board.
Couldn't we just do socialism instead.
nope. this is carefully calibrated to PASS.
If it helps though, you can think of it as minor form of Communism and mini-MMT.
The govt is taking everyone no currently employed and "hiring them" for $300 per week.
Since Govt is shit at directing labor and we want to fuck Fortune 1000, they offer this labor to SMB and families at LABOR.GOV website starting at $100/wk.
Since $100/wk is a super cheap deal, EVERYONE has 50+ job offers to choose from. Nobody has to take the job that offers the most. You choose your boss.
If I hire you to tend my vast garden for $100/wk, and you chose that job bc you love gardening. By week 3, the machine sees that I have rehired you, and everyone else looking for a Gardner bids you up. Maybe you stay bc you love my garden, maybe you go work a micro-farm making $200+$150 from Govt.
Hiring circles are illegal. I hire you, you hire me. Apart from that, no reason to worry about cheating.
You GET zero labor slack forever. Take the half loaf.
" as long as they keep their grades up" How realistic is that goal for the 10s of millions of Americans with an IQ below 80?
As long as they get whatever we can expect from 80 IQs. Im OK with dropouts, but you need to understand folks are gonna scream from left, that we're paying kids to drop out.
Extremely realistic. Grades are a farce. Teachers can't fail everyone.
Does unpaid caregiving count as work?
Sure as long as the person being cared for is paying $100/wk - they have this money from Medicaid / Medicare and they aren't hiring family.
Hiring circles must be blocked to stop fraud.
BUT, what you will see happen instead is this: Mom stops caring for grandma, and goes and earns $40K doing something else in real world, and pays someone $200($10k yr) +150 from govt to do the care work.
I believe that what we really need to do is utterly abandon the "universal college" aspiration. If everyone had a Bachelor's, it would make Bachelor's degrees largely worthless. Half of US high school students will not go on to a University, which is good, rather than bad, because most of them don't have the intellectual aptitude or intellectual curiosity to benefit from it. "Universal college" would just make universities big high schools, and many of them are halfway there as it is.
There should be *real* vocational education in US high schools, ideally partnering with employers and / or unions. Many of the EU countries have dedicated vocational high schools whose graduates can immediately earn enough to support themselves. Instead, half of our secondary school students are subjected to a college-prep curriculum which offers them nothing but boredom and/or frustration, and in the process are given the message that they are failures and rejects from the educational system.
You are right.
Free online video coursework is a no-brainer, bc 75%+ of the kids who get into an IVY will take a bunch of free courses, transfer them in and be able to say they graduated from Harvard after spending only 1 year there. This will destroy the Admin system and high cost of college.
And weekly wage subsidies will replace vocational learning. What we need for the bottom 47% is a system that allow them to "dabble" and "move"
If a guy wants to be a cowboy or a glass blower or work on a new robot fishing boat, it's not enough that he be able to try it, he should be able to MOVE there, take on some kind of other job from LABOR.GOV while he goes about convincing the guy he really wants to work for to give him a shot. MOIBILITY is key to American happiness.
Everyone has different abilities. I do not understand why sports allows the best to become elite and we can't admit that math is any different. I'm not upset that I didn't make any U.S. Olympic team because those are not my abilities. And I'm not upset that Carlsen v Nepomniachtchi are better at chess than me.
Right! Now if there’s ever an Olympic event for reading books while caring for children, I’d be a strong contender. (I had a lot of fun watching the online chess tournaments during lockdown. And the Magnus documentary was great.)
They seem very evenly matched--at a draw after 4 games. And there is nothing more challenging than taking care of small children--an undervalued contribution to life.
"5. Online video-based learning will eventually replace live teachers"
This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how people learn.
I think it will replace the 200-person lecture halls that were useless in the first place.
I agree that it won't replace a traditional classroom.
Ill explain it.... trust me it works, ill prove it.
Heres what is coming from WebEx and Texas: Two teachers for Texas.
The top teacher in the state for the Holt 9th grade geometry textbook records the Master Track.
You the student are watching the stream with your Live Teacher in the corner of screen. She is watching all kids faces and seeing where they are in lesson.
All students are in different spots on timeline.
Either can "Go Live" with each other.
NOW THEN, every time a student clicks Pause Rewind Play, the server makes note where info transfer mY have been bad.
NO VIDEOS ARE EDITED.
Instead new video clips that explain each idea a new way are added, ao rhat whenever a kid is not getting something he can tap a button and see new explaination, tap, tap tap each time a new fresh way of learning an idea.
This is called Telescopic Video. Like a TV ad thats 10 seconds long, but you could watch for an hour.
Of course, when teachers GO LIVE to help a stuck studwnt, they are recorded and those clips are evaulated to be added to timeline.
HERE IS WHY IT I CAN GUARANTEE IT WORKS.
What I just described is basically how iterative website design works. You dont realize it but 10's of thousands of amall chnages are made to Facebook or Amazon each year, each new addition making something a little easier for dumber people to use.
Mathematically, there are not that many Questions. There are more answers for each question, true. But the biggest thing to contend with is all the many ways students ask those questions.
Suffice to say, very quickly the top half of students will not need to tap Go Live very often. Its mostly about keeping them on track and not daydreaming.
The bottom half of kids DESERVE and need more human instruction (if not human contact) but there is no rwason to slow the top half down for them anymore.
"You the student are watching the stream with your Live Teacher in the corner of screen. She is watching all kids faces and seeing where they are in lesson."
Which means THERE IS A LIVE TEACHER! The live teacher has NOT been replaced.
No. Overtime the course becomes perfect. Stupider and stupider kids can take Holt 9th Geometry without a teacher or the book.
The live teacher has hundreds students they are "staring" at (really is is an AI) watching eyeballs to make sure they are payimg attention to the video.
Human-level AI could of course function as a human (by definition), but nothing short of that will be able to cope with the astonishing range of misunderstandings that students come up with. If you've never taught, you simply cannot comprehend this.
I've been teaching STEM for 38 years, and students STILL find novel things to misunderstand, things I would never think of as something that even COULD be misunderstood. Yet it happens over and over again.
Are you sure you teach STEM? :)
No offense, but iterative design simply works, it's called A/B testing, and it has consumed EVERY PART of the World Economy, it's relentless. And I'm sorry that this basic reality is rolling towards your life's work.
I hate to break this to you, but human beings are not snowflakes. When I say "A!" there will be misconceptions, but the actual misconceptions will fall on an 80/20 curve.
I'm not suggesting there is not a "long tail" of individual crazy ideas and misreadings, Im suggesting that the only thing a live teacher is necessary for is when they happen (it's a very small percentage of the questions you get asked).
let me say it another way it may be less objectionable to you...
Nothing needs ever be said twice the same way live.
So the lecture the live teacher gives? that's replaced with video.
Answers that other live teachers give to reduce questions during the video? Thats also replaced with video.
Repeat forever.
Finally, let me make note here... SO MANY of the gifted kids LOVED COVID LOCKED DOWNS bc they were able to do the work on their own, crush their competitors (other students) and go do other stuff.
Meanwhile, the bottom half of kids often didn't even log on.
The same thing is happening with Work From Home. The TALENT is all secretly working two jobs and refuses to come back to the office, and the middle managers and office politics guys are shitting bc they are being measured digitally from home and it turns out they don't do any real work.
1. Don't be mad the gifted kids are being freed.
2. Don't pretend 6-12th grade is some magical thing where TALENT isn't able to cruise or that much of what you did for 38 years was repetitive.
"The top teacher in the state for the Holt 9th grade geometry textbook "
hahahahahahahaah.
Gonna stop you right there.
It is what it is. Im in a postion to know.
What it is is a false statement. There is no "top teacher" for a textbook, and if there was, it wouldn't matter, because we teachers can use whatever book we want or indeed, no book at all. What, you think we all say "open the book to Chapter 1" and then go through the book in a way that means you could just show a lecture and whammo, it's all done? Moronic.
And if you don't know that, then you really shouldn't opine on this topic.
Weird that I've spent so much time with TX Dept EDU and Cisco WebEx on this stuff.
If it was found that inadequate nutrition had a role to play - would that be controversial?
To play critical theorist for a moment: What exactly do we mean by ability here? Ability to complete what tasks, in what circumstances, according to what rubric? Who decided?
I think you will find that white people decided. The charge of racism isn’t that GPA and SAT mask Black students’ secret mastery of the material. It’s that the material and the whole apparatus for teaching and testing on it are themselves encodings of white culture.
So why do Asian students perform better than white students?
It’s the question of the hour. At its gauche to suggest culture has anything to do with it—and I’m talking right down to family culture; every single household feels different from the next because we make our own cultures.
And it’s*
What if it just comes down to nutrition, namely vitamin D levels?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-d-make-a-difference/
Certainly possible. Isn’t nutrition part of culture? or is the hypothesis that government-subsidized food is deficient?
You know how your body makes vitamin D, right?
Yeah so that’s what I’m asking: how is this stratified racially? Black people don’t go outside?
The correct answer is in the US differences against whites are heightened. The very best people of countries/race FLEE and come to US.
Indians / Chinese etc the smartest ones figure out how to GTFO and come here.
That said 100% culture matters - meaning Tiger Momming works. When you force a developing brain to struggle to learn during the day, that night when it sleeps during first 3 REM cycles, whatever parts of brain were being taxed light up under fMRI and dedrites and synapses rewire and to keep the metaphor simple,. the pipes get bigger (like in broadband)
You can really tax kids into being "smarter" than they would be without the struggle, but it's super expensive and doesn't scale - parents have to do it.
IIRC from stats in my ed program, it's immigration, not race. Most Asian Americans are 1st & 2nd gen immigrants. People who up stakes and swap hemispheres for economic and social advancement work hard and push their kids hard. Same reason why West African immigrants outperform African American students.
It's a chicken and egg situation. Asians make up the largest category of legal immigration to the US and a large part of that is employers recruiting workers in fields like tech from abroad. Half the work force in Silicon Valley, for example, is Asian. If the only metric that matters is ability to do the job why recruit so heavily from Asia versus South America? I don't think it's any coincidence that the countries that tend to score highest on the PISA every year are Asian.
The Asian/white gap is much smaller than it looks, although it does exist. Asian gap is predominantly grades, and I really can't stress enough how useless grades are, and how much I disagree with Freddie when he says you'd expect grades and ability to align. And to the extent it's test scores, Asian immigrant test prep is months and months and months on tests that have gotten progressively easier to game since 2005.
If you want to see a more authentic Asian/white gap, check out LSAT scores. The LSAT is extremely difficult to prep for, is relentlessly focused on authentic vocabulary knowledge acquired over decades, and is one of the few tests where the average Asian score is very slightly lower than average white (last I checked) and is definitely not attributable to immigrant language issues.
And I'm sympathetic to that argument in many ways, though it's a big conversation. The issue is that the SAT etc are genuinely good at predicting the kinds of skills and abilities that are valued in neoliberal capitalism. As far a alternatives to that goes - that's why I wrote my book!
They are essentially IQ tests, and you can pretty reliably switch in IQ for SAT or GRE. At one point your argument likely had some truth to it. White people used to decide. But we figured that out a long time ago and have improved the process. Here's how you make a modern test: Randomly select a large amount of questions formulated in language, or some other symbolic manner that require abstraction to solve. Give those questions to a large amount of people. Score and rank them, and you have IQ. That's it. Fundamental to the process is that it does not actually matter what the questions are.
It's going to be hard to fault Asian Americans for turning into Republicans when our left-wing institutions are so explicitly working against their interests. The first signs of this shift already appeared in the NYC mayoral election.
Don't forget crime. Jay Caspian Kang had an article a few months back where he wrote about the immigrants posting on WeChat who referenced "the Biden crime wave".
Seriously? They're being ridiculous. Crime "waves" and the rates in general are lagging indicators at best. I'd find it equally ridiculous to assign the (documented) increase in violent crime when Trump was the President. Actually, however, I think overall the incidence of non-violent crime is still shrinking but the murder rate is going up. It all happens on a much longer timescale than one presidential term. Nobody can really seem to figure it all out.
Lot to discuss here, so:
1) I would argue that the current increase in crime rates, especially homicide rates, is real and significant. The last time homicide rates were this bad in the US was 1996. That gives some context to the cliché about crime rates being low compared to 30 years ago.
2) Homicide rates started going up in 2014, with two years left to go in the Obama administration. When Trump referenced "American carnage" at his inaugural that is what he was referencing. Of course, crime rates remained elevated throughout his presidency.
3) It started in 2014 but crime sky rocketed in 2020. The increase in the homicide rate from 2019 to 2020 was literally the largest in the history of the modern United States.
4) Preliminary indications are that violent crime is still increasing in the current year.
5) Property crimes showed a temporary decline in 2020 due to lockdowns. That decrease didn't survive the end of lockdowns.
Property crime is up massively in the SF Bay Area at present.
If radlibs aren't concerned over working class black and latino Democrat voters going for an explicitly tough on crime candidate, they're not going to be concerned about working class asians.
"...this entire school of race politics, where you try to diversify the elite first and then somehow get to broad justice later...."
I don't know who pointed this out first, but this whole thing is basically Reaganomics but with race and gender. It's all built on the idea that if you diversify the elites, it'll naturally "trickle down" to other areas of life. Clearly I don't think it works.
Exactly. And once you see it you can't unsee it. Trying to be charitable, I see this as somewhere between the "talented tenth" and "a rising tide lifts all boats." That is, like you say, if the top of the meritocracy is diverse, then eventually the benefits will seep down elsewhere. (And like you say, I don't think it works.)
But the more cynical side of me sees in every prominent "antiracist" a temporarily embarrassed elite, waiting to be airlifted into their Harvard chair or F500 boardroom sinecure.
The Reagan Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
By the time a kid's taking the SAT his die is already cast. You want to improve SAT's and college performance, then educate kids long before they take the test. What needs to be done is a real "affirmative action program" for K-12 instead. The question is how do you affect that while public education is in the grip of the professional administrator class, teachers unions, schools of (mis)education, etc. and students' true education is of secondary concern.
Here's a tip. Take the GRE at the same time you take the SAT. You'll get about the same score. I've suggested this to many and then they don't have to take the test again. College adds nothing to the GRE. I asked a family member to do this who at the time thought I was "crazy," but she thanked me when she had the GRE for grad school all ready. This esp. good tip for people who get a BA in humanities as their math sills will never be as sharp as they were at 18.
I suspect that this was really just a way to admit more students and make more money. As I understand it college admissions are down, and due to declining birth rates (less babies always means less students the long run) it's the long term trend. This means a reduction in revenue and I expect we'll see standards being reduced of waived altogether to plug the gap. If students aren't prepared and too many flunk out, they'll start finding ways to either grade easier or allow students to pass some other way. They'll do anything and everything to keep those tuition dollars flowing.
"I suspect that this was really just a way to admit more students and make more money." Not at the level of top state schools and above. These schools have competitive admissions, but they want maximum flexibility to mold the student body in order to respond to political pressures.
Intervention strategies to address the inequalities may be of marginal effectiveness as well. Saw an interview with Kathryn Paige Harden (psychologist doing educational research and genetics) about this.
https://youtu.be/yKPInvMDmFQ
Among the more amusing facets of this argument, one which I have never seen anyone else point out, is that Education graduate schools have higher proportions of black and female students than almost any other graduate degree major. Presumably, The College Board is interested in hiring people with Ed degrees, so I would expect that The College Board is hiring higher proportions of black and female Ph.Ds than almost any other industry. I wrote a little bit about that on my blog at one point: https://itsnotmyfault01.medium.com/san-franciscos-pac-lowell-high-school-and-kendi-s-arguments-7955df437850
>The second thing here is that I find it even more sad/amusing that we’re bringing up “bad man thought of it first” as if there aren’t hundreds of scientists and scholars working diligently at the College Board or in academic research to try and remove racial bias from their tests and measures in the present. To assume that standardized intelligence tests (no described relation to current admissions tests) carry their racist biases and mission after 100 years, with no changes in tools, viewpoints, or objectives requires just a stunning amount of faith in one man’s antiquated vision. It’s ever more shocking because women and black people take up larger shares of psych and education PHDs than other fields. Maybe they don’t tend to specialize in psychometric measures or making tests… but they’re in the same field to be doing that work, and Ed schools are famous for their highly progressive slant. https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf21308/report/fields-of-study Table 16: Women are 69.3% of Education PHD in general, and 69.6% in “Educational assessment, testing, measurement”. Table 24: Black is 14.1% of “Education research” subfield, which is quite high compared to their fraction of other sciences. Knowing the high relative proportions of women and black people receiving education and psychology PhDs, both groups historically believed to be less intelligent, is the takeaway that women are the most racist testmakers? Should the takeaway be that that the College Board (or whatever test maker for these more local admissions tests) is systematically hiring unqualified people and racists or maybe not even trying? Does the high fraction of black PHDs in this field have 0 effect on the tests, even after 100 years?
The general counter-argument is that X-ness can cause something even if none of the people are X. So a guy from Nepal beating up a guy from Ghana can still be white supremacy.
As far as I can tell, these sorts of arguments are unfalsifiable. Personally, I'd rather believe in aliens or magic
That's interesting news to me. I posted separately that my wife is the director of a large local tutoring business and they have a LOT of trouble with diversity (specifically Black) hiring. The education school there in Austin (UT) seems to have a smaller number of Black students than otherwise represented in the overall population (~13%). But I haven't actually looked so could be way off. :-|
it seems like moving away from objective criteria like the SAT and moving towards the whims of admissions workers would allow for a quiet Affirmative Action program without having to come out and be explicit about it.
Affirmative Action is *incredibly* unpopular with most people, so finding a way to do it without having to admit you're doing it seems to be the main objective here.
like, if schools were like Stuyvesant and admissions were only a funciton of test scores, then it's really hard to practice AA (that's why Stuyvesant has like seven Black kids).
But if admissions were all about soft, holistic, culture fit-style criteria, then you can more easily build a student body that has the diversity that you want.
This surely is a significant factor. As Freddie notes, selective schools make complicated "black box" adjustments to GPA so as to be able to meaningfully compare, say, a 3.5 at Stuyvesant to a 3.9 at a poor-performing school. Easy to invisibly change your standards to produce a different mix of successful applicants - the average nominal GPA may even go up! Impossible with SATs.