"I’m guessing it’s because, as suspected for decades, elite schools use diversity slots as just another opportunity to farm rich applicants is true."
I'm not sure you meant this the way I am reading it, but I do not agree that, as a general matter, elite schools use diversity slots as an opportunity to admit rich applicants. No such opportunity is needed. Every elite school could fill their entire incoming class with well qualified kids that would not qualify for tuition assistance. For a different definition of "rich" - i.e., true donor-class kids - diversity slots are almost certainly counter-productive. If all you meant by this is that elite schools try to both (i) meet diversity goals while (ii) minimizing the negative impact of those diversity admits on the real goal of admitting "rich" kids...I mean o.k., I certainly assume so. But the way you phrased it is very confusing.
No I mean that there's a very large pool of historical evidence suggesting that elite schools is affirmative action to pursue minority applicants with affluent parents. The archetypal Ivy diversity candidate is the son of a Nigerian immigrant cardiologist who makes $300,000 a year, not a poor Black descendant of slaves. If you click that link you'll find a pretty good articulation of this; it's a longstanding critique.
Yes, I have previously read that article and understand that critique. I am objecting to the way you summarized it. Again, every elite school could easily fill their incoming class with well qualified students (that don't count as diverse) with even higher family incomes. They have to work to find that son of a Nigerian immigrant cardiologist. I think my formulation is a better way of expressing it. Universities seek to meet diversity goals while striving to minimize the negative impact of those diversity admits. The way you phrased it makes it sound like they embrace diversity goals as a way to admit rich applicants. As if they needed a diversity goal to admit more rich students.
“ every elite school could easily fill their incoming class with well qualified students”
No. If that were true the accomplishments of Harvard, MIT, Stanford would be equal to that of Brown and Dartmouth. They aren’t because the students aren’t as good.
Or the Harvard, MIT, and Stanford networks are better than the Brown and Dartmouth networks at getting their grads into the right graduate and professional schools, good starting positions at the right firms, etc.
I don't understand. Is the premise that Harvard and MIT admit a student body with social/class qualities that students at Dartmouth and Brown don't have? I'm doubtful.
All I meant when I wrote that was that every elite school could fill their incoming class with students with extremely high SATs/GPAs that are sufficiently well off to not require tuition assistance. But now I'm curious what you mean by suggesting that the accomplishments of Harvard, MIT, Stanford grads are greater than Dartmouth grads. I suspect you simply mean there are more famous tech titans/CEOs from Harvard, Stanford and MIT, which is true, but those are also much bigger schools! Dartmouth grads rather famously make more money than Harvard and Yale grads. I don't actually think this data point means much. It's probably more influenced by the number of students at each schools seeking employment in finance or business versus lower paid career options. But I definitely did not mean that every elite college could fill their incoming class with Jensen Huangs.
The point is that the ideals of affirmative action would make pursuing the poor Black kid the point - and you can read a lot of arguments to that effect from Black academics - but those ideals are set aside in the pursuit of richer parents, which makes the whole exercise a bait and switch.
Reading the Univ. of California report, and then looking at the decisions made about SAT scores, is astounding, and only makes sense if the goal was to remove objective measures in order to prevent lawsuits alleging discrimination.
The report did not conclude that the University system should scrap the SAT (the UC Board of Regents made that decision despite the task force's recommendations). In fact, the report found that 47 percent of the students who were admitted because of their SAT scores “were low-income or first generation students. These students would not have been guaranteed admission on the basis of their grades alone."
In addition, the report states: "the SAT allows many disadvantaged students to gain guarantees of admission to UC. As a share of all students in disadvantaged groups who are guaranteed admission to UC, the percentages who earn this guarantee due to their SAT scores range from a low of 24% for Latino students to highs of 40% and 47% for African-Americans and Native Americans."
"Critics of the SAT are fond of pointing out that the correlation between the SATs and family income is stronger than that between GPA and family income."
This is true, but I would love to see intra-school-only data on this, as I suspect that this is entirely a function of the fact more high-family-income students attend rigorous high schools and more low-income students attend public schools with large numbers of below average peers.
I didn't read the underlying study itself, but I don't believe this study is limiting the comparison of student GPAs and income/SATs and income to students within the same school. Nothing in the article implies that and the methodology described in the linked article implies it does not. This sentence, in particular, is suggestive:
These findings do not replicate Baydar (1990) who found that the SAT was more highly corre- lated with FGPA for the HSD group at two of the three schools in his study.
I worked at a charter chain that abolished the grade of D in high schools. This had the effect of “creaming out the top,” obviously, and the chain notoriously “encouraged” retention at a much higher rate for 9th graders than the nearby high school. But it also meant that the C became the new D, and halfway decent students, many of whom did not do well on tests, became all A students. Then the school found internships for every kid, made every senior write a thesis, every junior create a research project, created opportunities for clubs in the middle of the day…it was all optimized to get into college, and the school was mostly low-income kids. The only problem was that there were no real extracurriculars, because there was such a focus on academics and getting into college. Kids saw their friends at the local public school in band and sports and wondered why me? The answer was that their parents really wanted them to go to college, and the local public school wasn’t optimized for kids to do that.
The entire point of college admissions is to make sure that the Right People get in. Taking away standardized testing makes it harder to determine who those Right People are.
Taking away standardized testing makes it more subjective, which gives the college-admissions-industry more power to determine who are the Right People.
Right or wrong is a different question. I think it is hypocritical, considering how elite colleges market themselves, and it may be illegal if those discriminations are based on race, sex, etc.
The marketing that I see at "elite" colleges is that they admit a highly diverse class of top academic achievers. Based on all we've learned over the last few years, neither claim is accurate.
As a foreigner and a teacher, the GPA is the strangest element of American schooling to me. Coming from a system where it's pretty much all subject-based externally set exams, it's hard to imagine why anyone would trust this measure? Even if there wereno incentive issues, how do I know that my B+ is the same as the B+ down the road?
What's the reason there aren't just proper exams? Is there any push for them?
Childhood sports is another arena where parents are gaming the system in an attempt to bolster their children as compared to their peers. Private "travel" sports are a multi-billion dollar scam that parents voluntarily submit to year after year.
Oh we have that bit too (we call them 'rep teams'). They just play in front of empty stands, and universities don't give a shit. They just look at your exam scores.
To have national exams would require a national curriculum and people like every village and hamlet being able to do its own thing.
Also national exams sorts less for work ethic. A kid with a 160 IQ can ace the exams with minimal work. To get perfect GPA requires a great deal more effort and organization.
Ours are state-based rather than national, but yeah the states have a lot of control over schools. Even private schools ultimately do the same exams, because they want their kids to go to uni.
Two things on the 160 IQ thing:
1. it's not actually just exams - there's coursework too, but it gets scaled and statistically moderated against the exam. So if you get all Cs in school, but then the school cohort crushes the exam, then that "C" would count for an 88 or whatever.
2. I think you might have in mind something like an SAT. Most exams are about wide fields of content knowledge that are mastered over a year or two of upper high. You couldn't just rock up and "suss it out". But if you really were that knowledgeable with little work then... good luck to you? Enjoy university?
Sure you can - the amount of work required is a function of how smart you are. Below an IQ of 115 it would require infinite work and be impossible. With each standard deviation above that the amount of work required decreases dramatically.
I was not particularly organized or gritty in high school. Every essay was written the night before, every test was a last minute cram. Still managed to get straight As. I perform quite well on standardized tests.
All of this fell apart when I went to university because the amount of information and knowledge is just too much to cram in one evening before a final exam worth 70% of your grade.
A friend of mine went to a STEM magnet high school and then got an aerospace engineering degree at a good state university. Then he went to Johns Hopkins for his masters and found out there is another echelon indeed of high IQ peeps. He said he felt dumb for the first time in 20 years.
It is not possible to ace all exams, if the exam is hard enough, as it is in China or Taiwan. My parents took that test in China, I graduated MIT grad school, it is not enough to be smart. Ashley is correct, at some point, brains are not enough. Richard Feynman was the smartest one at MIT, but he's not acing those classes without working. And you are right, with a low IQ, it would be impossible to sscore highly enough to get into MIT, if MIT used a single difficult standardized test. But that is FdB's point, you shouldn't be able to tutor your way in or extra curricular your way in to MIT instead.
My point was that high school GPA isn't that much stronger of an indicator of grit, organization, and work ethic than a standardized test, because high school coursework isn't that hard to ace with minimal effort if you have a decently high IQ.
Some combination of "held a part-time job for a while with progressively increasing responsibility" and/or "did extracurriculars for several years" is a much better indicator of that kind of grit and commitment than a good high school GPA, imo.
I imagine that Ted Kascynski would’ve agreed with that, at least when he was in high school. Then he got into Harvard. He probably would’ve been better off at a JC.
I sm not sure this is true. I had a friend who slept through all of his classes. One day he was sick and had to take a make up test, which he aced.
The next day his high school teacher was giving him shit because he had accidentally handed out the wrong test--it was for a completely different course. My friend, having slept through every class, had no idea.
I had a similar experience. The teacher handed out the wrong test to the class and everyone failed except me. She refused to admit she gave out the wrong test and said, “Bronx got an A, you all just didn’t study.”
The trust isn't completely blind and there is some effort to norm GPAs between schools with some supposed magic slide rule that universities all claim to have, but I'm not alone in believing that this is a likely clumsy instrument.
In Canada, where no universities require the SAT, universities have internal high school ranking systems based on past performance from undergrads who hail from those schools to account for differences in grading.
And that's exactly what US universities are claiming to be doing. Comparing how previous students from different schools performed in the university to come up with something like a strength of schedule adjustment for different high school GPA scales.
This seems insane! There are 10s of thousands of high schools on America. And surely the teachers change from year to year, not all kids so the same classes, etc etc.
People give American universities a hard time about admissions, but it's an incredibly difficult job they're doing.
Because school boards and voters would have a fit, and the ramifications of subject-based externally set exams would upset many in the educational policy establishment.
EDIT: thinking about it for a bit, isn't "subject-based externally set exams" something like the much-reviled "No Child Left Behind"?
My own spin on it is anti-SAT folks are victims of the just world fallacy. They are deeply offended by the idea that some people are just smarter than others. With grades, at least in theory, one can work harder to make up for a lack of innate ability - especially these days. Do the extra credit, do the rewrite, be as ingratiating as possible, etc.
Good point, FdB. I remember a friend whose SAT scores were good enough for Hopkins and MIT, but was held back by his GPA at a very competitive high school.
The more complex the “acceptance” process, the easier it is to assure DEI outcomes.
As I recall, using tests as a prime determinant goes back to ancient China mandarins.
As I recall, the exams in ancient China were devised as a way to find the best, regardless of economic, or region. They were a process open to everyone. I don't think the current system in US education resembles that in any way.
It seems like a lot of the great empires/civilizations were, in their prime, proponents of meritocracy - the Romans, the Ottomans, the French, the British, and, of course, the Americans.
I agree with a lot of this, but IMHO the larger driver than tutoring is that schools that serve children of wealthy parents are more likely to push grades up to get kids into college.
A brief story: We had the resources to send our kids to a well-funded private school and instead chose a public magnet school. One of our kids took a calculus class senior year where the teacher was giving a lot of Bs and Cs for unclear reasons. That would not be happening at a private school: those schools understand that their record on college placement matters too much to let a cranky teacher hand out a bunch of Cs to high-performing seniors applying to college.
In this story, I'm not sure that the hypothetical alternative private school is the villain. The teacher was cranky! The kids were super-stressed about college! What was the point of handing out Cs to kids who were mastering the material? Were those grades more accurate than a bunch of B+s and A-s?
There are probably a number of versions of this story but all of them would weigh in favor of giving less weight to grades and more to standard assessments like the SAT.
"That would not be happening at a private school: those schools understand that their record on college placement matters too much to let a cranky teacher hand out a bunch of Cs to high-performing seniors applying to college."
I believe this is not, as a general matter, true. While there has been grade inflation at both public and private secondary schools, you can fool around with the Naviance data and see that most of the elite private school GPAs are actually lower than the GPAs from very well known quality public schools. This isn't a perfect comparison because it is based only on the GPAs for applicants to a particular college, but if you look at enough of them you can get a pretty good feel for what the GPAs are for the top performing kids in each school.
You might be right. I think a better formulation of what might be going on than what I initially expressed is that private schools carefully control their grading policy to make their students attractive to selective colleges and public schools do not. FWIW, I don't fault the private schools for doing this; that's not inconsistent with a sensible view of what grading should try to accomplish.
All of which is to say that while I still doubt a private school would let a cranky teacher give a bunch of kids Cs, it is certainly the case that a private school may be able to modulate its grading policy so that its average GPA is lower than the average GPA of comparable students at a nearby public school.
I think it's fair to say that reasonable people could have different opinions about how an elite private high school even should grade. A school that is only admitting applicants with ISEE stanines of 7s, 8s and 9s is, obviously, that rare Lake Wobegone school where everyone is well above average. Most of these students would be straight A students even at their quality public school. I think you could defensibly argue for scoring them based on how their performance on an exam or in a class would compare to local high schools so that it is more useful for their parents to understand their children's performance. Or you could argue that you enhance competition between those students by scoring them on a strict curve. I don't have strong opinions about it. But the fact that you could have schools following such different approaches is exactly why standardized tests are useful.
I think you are describing a force which certainly exists I just don't think there's necessarily a public v. private distinction to be had. I could even see an
Not all private schools grade inflate, but admissions officers at elite universities are familiar with the pipeline
private schools, down to the ability to interpret grades. This is probably true with honors type programs at some top public schools, which are like a private school within a school. It’s a double privilege. You get demanding teachers who ensure you’ve actually learned the material, and relationships (and history) with college admissions officer who know that your 3.7 at X school is equivalent to a 4.2 at Y.
My son attends the best general public academic school in our state, consistently outperforming other nearby schools. The school won't admit it but this is clearly the result of demographics not superior teaching.
This also means that my son is still around 170th in his grade with a 4.3 GPA. I tell him not to stress it... and that tests result matter more.
We keep getting contacted by Ivy League and similar schools around the country because his athletic talent with his academic ability is a good combination. They don't want the top 10%, they want good enough combined with athletic talent.
This debate is so tiring. Everything you’re saying is correct, but it always just runs into the buzzsaw of racial group disparities on IQ-linked tests like the SAT.
Everything other than intrinsic factors like IQ is gameable by the well-off, and in practice _is_ gamed, heavily, to the point where it’s super unfair by economic class. The “holistic” assessment that looks for volunteering abroad is my favourite. How could that not favour the top-10% professional class?! And yet we have this idea that kids of working-class parents have time to just quit their part-time jobs and disappear for 6 months, pay for all the travel supplies, etc.
But solving for intrinsic factors runs into the buzzsaw.
So the merry-go-round goes around and around and people try to get off by saying “revolution! Change the entire system!” because that’s vague enough that anything appears possible.
It's interesting to read this article and discussion, although I am many years past those high school grades days. The only thing that might have gotten me directly into college from high school was my SAT score. My grades were hopeless. In the end, it took me 16 years to get a BA, after several starts and mis-starts at community colleges. When I finally decided I wanted it, I finished the last 3 years in 2 years, with a 3.9 GPA, then took the LSAT on a lark. The high score made me decide to go directly to law school.
So, in this round about way, I do support SATs, especially for those who, like me, had not found their way in the standard curriculum, or were not willing to follow the absurd rules that seemed to abound in the impoverished public schools I attended.
I worry most about the failure to actually teach anything demanding, challenging or meaningful. There is no attempt, at least in many educational systems, to teach for understand, for insight, for awareness of bias, and framing, or to encourage questioning, all of which are integral parts of critical thinking skills.
I'm really happy to hear that it worked out for you but from a college's perspective this would be a cautionary SAT story. Your SAT score covered up a pretty fundamental (at that time) lack of ability/desire. This is very similar to what happened to me and I'm split on what the right approach is here.
That being said, high schools do have a lot of rules that smart kids chafe under. I think this is going away with the trend away from AP toward dual enrollment, because high school would have been way better if most of it were on a college campus as opposed to being baby sat
It strikes me that the debate over "college admissions" really refers only to a small subset of colleges deemed elite or "prestigious" or the like. This country has thousands of colleges. If what is wanted is a college education, I don't think GPAs or SATs stand in the way for most students (I expect money is what stands in the way, but even there, I think motivated students can usually find funding). The subset of "prestigious" colleges cannot accommodate all students, of course, not even all the worthy students, so some are going to have to be left out, and those left out will have various characteristics that permit their exclusion to be presented as a political issue. MIT just released its admissions figures by race/ethnicity. MIT has a total undergraduate population of around 4,500, meaning its incoming class is around 1,125. A dozen or two more Black students, and a dozen or two fewer Asian students is what we are talking about, and it receives national attention. Those Black kids not admitted to MIT this year? Is there no other option for them? I think not.
The Economist ran some articles on wealth bias in elite institutions. MIT was an outlier in the wealth didn't make as much of a difference as in the other institutions.
I mentioned MIT only because I recently saw the report of its incoming class composition. MIT is not really a good representative of the genus "elite colleges." My point was only that the presence or absence of a few dozen more Black or Hispanic students at Harvard or Yale or Berkeley etc. isn't really a useful commentary on the higher-educational opportunities of an entire population in the country as a whole.
The group of "black, hispanic, native american, pacific islander" went from about 25% to 16%, so maybe fro 280 to 180 or about 100 kids.
MIT had no backup plan. Their admissions process was always separate for the populations they wanted to boost: instead of taking the top 30% of whatever, they chose "people we think can graduate." Which is necessarily a lower bar and they're not always right, with a 12 point difference in graduation rates. (This was the first citation I googled, and it's from 2012 so maybe out of date, but the black graduation was 82% versus white os 94%. Where's the Asian rate? Dunno. *EDIT* duh, the link: https://jbhe.com/2013/11/black-student-graduation-rates-at-high-ranking-colleges-and-universities/ ) Whoever's in that 12-point gap would've been better off at second-best-group-of-college which would've still been impressive. Maybe if they had been better at actually predicting graduation at admissions but they've been at it for decades.
If they had weird categories like "more points for being poor" they might have been able to keep the numbers up. Or not, if they were only trying to get rich NAMs.
A part of me says, who cares about a few elite colleges. There are a lot of other colleges that can give a good education. However, there is the argument that the movers and shakers of America disproportionately go to those elite colleges. But...will acceptance into an elite college actually get you into the American aristocracy? If you are on scholarship and working, chances are you won't be playing with the rich...you can't afford to.
However, I think the elite name behind you helps in employment and the way people view you.
I think drive to be in positions of power is the key. My husband went to an elite institution but likes a low-key life. He should have been a CEO but has chosen to work from home in a far lesser capacity that's stress free. My daughter went to an elite place. It helped her get her current position which is elite in her field, (performance is assessed literally behind a screen) but she didn't socialize a lot with people from school because she had to work and couldn't afford the extra-curricular activities. But probably more important, she didn't have the inclination.
"I’m guessing it’s because, as suspected for decades, elite schools use diversity slots as just another opportunity to farm rich applicants is true."
I'm not sure you meant this the way I am reading it, but I do not agree that, as a general matter, elite schools use diversity slots as an opportunity to admit rich applicants. No such opportunity is needed. Every elite school could fill their entire incoming class with well qualified kids that would not qualify for tuition assistance. For a different definition of "rich" - i.e., true donor-class kids - diversity slots are almost certainly counter-productive. If all you meant by this is that elite schools try to both (i) meet diversity goals while (ii) minimizing the negative impact of those diversity admits on the real goal of admitting "rich" kids...I mean o.k., I certainly assume so. But the way you phrased it is very confusing.
No I mean that there's a very large pool of historical evidence suggesting that elite schools is affirmative action to pursue minority applicants with affluent parents. The archetypal Ivy diversity candidate is the son of a Nigerian immigrant cardiologist who makes $300,000 a year, not a poor Black descendant of slaves. If you click that link you'll find a pretty good articulation of this; it's a longstanding critique.
Yes, I have previously read that article and understand that critique. I am objecting to the way you summarized it. Again, every elite school could easily fill their incoming class with well qualified students (that don't count as diverse) with even higher family incomes. They have to work to find that son of a Nigerian immigrant cardiologist. I think my formulation is a better way of expressing it. Universities seek to meet diversity goals while striving to minimize the negative impact of those diversity admits. The way you phrased it makes it sound like they embrace diversity goals as a way to admit rich applicants. As if they needed a diversity goal to admit more rich students.
“ every elite school could easily fill their incoming class with well qualified students”
No. If that were true the accomplishments of Harvard, MIT, Stanford would be equal to that of Brown and Dartmouth. They aren’t because the students aren’t as good.
Or the Harvard, MIT, and Stanford networks are better than the Brown and Dartmouth networks at getting their grads into the right graduate and professional schools, good starting positions at the right firms, etc.
Exactly because they admit the right kinds of people who will easily fit in in those environments.
I don't understand. Is the premise that Harvard and MIT admit a student body with social/class qualities that students at Dartmouth and Brown don't have? I'm doubtful.
Or: what ih8edjfkfr said below.
All I meant when I wrote that was that every elite school could fill their incoming class with students with extremely high SATs/GPAs that are sufficiently well off to not require tuition assistance. But now I'm curious what you mean by suggesting that the accomplishments of Harvard, MIT, Stanford grads are greater than Dartmouth grads. I suspect you simply mean there are more famous tech titans/CEOs from Harvard, Stanford and MIT, which is true, but those are also much bigger schools! Dartmouth grads rather famously make more money than Harvard and Yale grads. I don't actually think this data point means much. It's probably more influenced by the number of students at each schools seeking employment in finance or business versus lower paid career options. But I definitely did not mean that every elite college could fill their incoming class with Jensen Huangs.
The point is that the ideals of affirmative action would make pursuing the poor Black kid the point - and you can read a lot of arguments to that effect from Black academics - but those ideals are set aside in the pursuit of richer parents, which makes the whole exercise a bait and switch.
Reading the Univ. of California report, and then looking at the decisions made about SAT scores, is astounding, and only makes sense if the goal was to remove objective measures in order to prevent lawsuits alleging discrimination.
The report did not conclude that the University system should scrap the SAT (the UC Board of Regents made that decision despite the task force's recommendations). In fact, the report found that 47 percent of the students who were admitted because of their SAT scores “were low-income or first generation students. These students would not have been guaranteed admission on the basis of their grades alone."
In addition, the report states: "the SAT allows many disadvantaged students to gain guarantees of admission to UC. As a share of all students in disadvantaged groups who are guaranteed admission to UC, the percentages who earn this guarantee due to their SAT scores range from a low of 24% for Latino students to highs of 40% and 47% for African-Americans and Native Americans."
https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/sttf-report.pdf
"Critics of the SAT are fond of pointing out that the correlation between the SATs and family income is stronger than that between GPA and family income."
This is true, but I would love to see intra-school-only data on this, as I suspect that this is entirely a function of the fact more high-family-income students attend rigorous high schools and more low-income students attend public schools with large numbers of below average peers.
Click the link! It's explicitly about that comparison!
There is no link in that paragraph. Are you referring to this link?
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED562878.pdf
I didn't read the underlying study itself, but I don't believe this study is limiting the comparison of student GPAs and income/SATs and income to students within the same school. Nothing in the article implies that and the methodology described in the linked article implies it does not. This sentence, in particular, is suggestive:
These findings do not replicate Baydar (1990) who found that the SAT was more highly corre- lated with FGPA for the HSD group at two of the three schools in his study.
I worked at a charter chain that abolished the grade of D in high schools. This had the effect of “creaming out the top,” obviously, and the chain notoriously “encouraged” retention at a much higher rate for 9th graders than the nearby high school. But it also meant that the C became the new D, and halfway decent students, many of whom did not do well on tests, became all A students. Then the school found internships for every kid, made every senior write a thesis, every junior create a research project, created opportunities for clubs in the middle of the day…it was all optimized to get into college, and the school was mostly low-income kids. The only problem was that there were no real extracurriculars, because there was such a focus on academics and getting into college. Kids saw their friends at the local public school in band and sports and wondered why me? The answer was that their parents really wanted them to go to college, and the local public school wasn’t optimized for kids to do that.
As a nerd that lacks the "it" factor boy am I glad I got through higher ed just in time.
The entire point of college admissions is to make sure that the Right People get in. Taking away standardized testing makes it harder to determine who those Right People are.
Taking away standardized testing makes it more subjective, which gives the college-admissions-industry more power to determine who are the Right People.
Precisely.
It is often hard to tell from an admissions application.
In a related context, this is one thing that complicates the job of H.R..
Why is that wrong? It’s not different than how a well run company hires staff.
Right or wrong is a different question. I think it is hypocritical, considering how elite colleges market themselves, and it may be illegal if those discriminations are based on race, sex, etc.
They pretty clearly market themselves as only admitting the right kind of people.
The marketing that I see at "elite" colleges is that they admit a highly diverse class of top academic achievers. Based on all we've learned over the last few years, neither claim is accurate.
They do - just not diverse in terms of SES.
That's right... isn't that what this blog post is about?
As a foreigner and a teacher, the GPA is the strangest element of American schooling to me. Coming from a system where it's pretty much all subject-based externally set exams, it's hard to imagine why anyone would trust this measure? Even if there wereno incentive issues, how do I know that my B+ is the same as the B+ down the road?
What's the reason there aren't just proper exams? Is there any push for them?
Actually the wild enthusiasm for teenage amateur sport is the strangest, but this is close.
Childhood sports is another arena where parents are gaming the system in an attempt to bolster their children as compared to their peers. Private "travel" sports are a multi-billion dollar scam that parents voluntarily submit to year after year.
Oh we have that bit too (we call them 'rep teams'). They just play in front of empty stands, and universities don't give a shit. They just look at your exam scores.
To have national exams would require a national curriculum and people like every village and hamlet being able to do its own thing.
Also national exams sorts less for work ethic. A kid with a 160 IQ can ace the exams with minimal work. To get perfect GPA requires a great deal more effort and organization.
Ours are state-based rather than national, but yeah the states have a lot of control over schools. Even private schools ultimately do the same exams, because they want their kids to go to uni.
Two things on the 160 IQ thing:
1. it's not actually just exams - there's coursework too, but it gets scaled and statistically moderated against the exam. So if you get all Cs in school, but then the school cohort crushes the exam, then that "C" would count for an 88 or whatever.
2. I think you might have in mind something like an SAT. Most exams are about wide fields of content knowledge that are mastered over a year or two of upper high. You couldn't just rock up and "suss it out". But if you really were that knowledgeable with little work then... good luck to you? Enjoy university?
This is not true for exams given in east Asia. There is no way you can ace the entrance exam in China or Taiwan just by being smart.
Sure you can - the amount of work required is a function of how smart you are. Below an IQ of 115 it would require infinite work and be impossible. With each standard deviation above that the amount of work required decreases dramatically.
I was not particularly organized or gritty in high school. Every essay was written the night before, every test was a last minute cram. Still managed to get straight As. I perform quite well on standardized tests.
All of this fell apart when I went to university because the amount of information and knowledge is just too much to cram in one evening before a final exam worth 70% of your grade.
Right but there are people who can.
A friend of mine went to a STEM magnet high school and then got an aerospace engineering degree at a good state university. Then he went to Johns Hopkins for his masters and found out there is another echelon indeed of high IQ peeps. He said he felt dumb for the first time in 20 years.
It is not possible to ace all exams, if the exam is hard enough, as it is in China or Taiwan. My parents took that test in China, I graduated MIT grad school, it is not enough to be smart. Ashley is correct, at some point, brains are not enough. Richard Feynman was the smartest one at MIT, but he's not acing those classes without working. And you are right, with a low IQ, it would be impossible to sscore highly enough to get into MIT, if MIT used a single difficult standardized test. But that is FdB's point, you shouldn't be able to tutor your way in or extra curricular your way in to MIT instead.
My point was that high school GPA isn't that much stronger of an indicator of grit, organization, and work ethic than a standardized test, because high school coursework isn't that hard to ace with minimal effort if you have a decently high IQ.
Some combination of "held a part-time job for a while with progressively increasing responsibility" and/or "did extracurriculars for several years" is a much better indicator of that kind of grit and commitment than a good high school GPA, imo.
If you have a 160 iq applicant you should just accept them no questions asked.
What if they are lazy and disagreeable?
NO I'M NOT
LOL!
I imagine that Ted Kascynski would’ve agreed with that, at least when he was in high school. Then he got into Harvard. He probably would’ve been better off at a JC.
He’s have been better off if he wasn’t tortured by MKUltra, too
I sm not sure this is true. I had a friend who slept through all of his classes. One day he was sick and had to take a make up test, which he aced.
The next day his high school teacher was giving him shit because he had accidentally handed out the wrong test--it was for a completely different course. My friend, having slept through every class, had no idea.
I had a similar experience. The teacher handed out the wrong test to the class and everyone failed except me. She refused to admit she gave out the wrong test and said, “Bronx got an A, you all just didn’t study.”
Was the teacher Donald Trump?
The trust isn't completely blind and there is some effort to norm GPAs between schools with some supposed magic slide rule that universities all claim to have, but I'm not alone in believing that this is a likely clumsy instrument.
In Canada, where no universities require the SAT, universities have internal high school ranking systems based on past performance from undergrads who hail from those schools to account for differences in grading.
And that's exactly what US universities are claiming to be doing. Comparing how previous students from different schools performed in the university to come up with something like a strength of schedule adjustment for different high school GPA scales.
This seems insane! There are 10s of thousands of high schools on America. And surely the teachers change from year to year, not all kids so the same classes, etc etc.
People give American universities a hard time about admissions, but it's an incredibly difficult job they're doing.
Because school boards and voters would have a fit, and the ramifications of subject-based externally set exams would upset many in the educational policy establishment.
EDIT: thinking about it for a bit, isn't "subject-based externally set exams" something like the much-reviled "No Child Left Behind"?
As always great work.
My own spin on it is anti-SAT folks are victims of the just world fallacy. They are deeply offended by the idea that some people are just smarter than others. With grades, at least in theory, one can work harder to make up for a lack of innate ability - especially these days. Do the extra credit, do the rewrite, be as ingratiating as possible, etc.
Rather a lot of anti-SAT people are just people unhappy with what they think the SAT had to say about them, personally.
Good point, FdB. I remember a friend whose SAT scores were good enough for Hopkins and MIT, but was held back by his GPA at a very competitive high school.
The more complex the “acceptance” process, the easier it is to assure DEI outcomes.
As I recall, using tests as a prime determinant goes back to ancient China mandarins.
As I recall, the exams in ancient China were devised as a way to find the best, regardless of economic, or region. They were a process open to everyone. I don't think the current system in US education resembles that in any way.
It seems like a lot of the great empires/civilizations were, in their prime, proponents of meritocracy - the Romans, the Ottomans, the French, the British, and, of course, the Americans.
Is there still joy in HK? . . (fond memories)
On one hand, the governments want the government staffed by smart people who can get the job done.
On the other hand, the individual people involved want to be able to hand out jobs to their friends.
And the second group will always overpower the first group. Iron Law of Institutions.
The initial sorting process would often happen on the family level, with one son studying for the exam and the others going to work on the farm, etc.
Of course it got co-opted by the nobles, who had the time and money to train for the exams, but the principle was still solid
I agree with a lot of this, but IMHO the larger driver than tutoring is that schools that serve children of wealthy parents are more likely to push grades up to get kids into college.
A brief story: We had the resources to send our kids to a well-funded private school and instead chose a public magnet school. One of our kids took a calculus class senior year where the teacher was giving a lot of Bs and Cs for unclear reasons. That would not be happening at a private school: those schools understand that their record on college placement matters too much to let a cranky teacher hand out a bunch of Cs to high-performing seniors applying to college.
In this story, I'm not sure that the hypothetical alternative private school is the villain. The teacher was cranky! The kids were super-stressed about college! What was the point of handing out Cs to kids who were mastering the material? Were those grades more accurate than a bunch of B+s and A-s?
There are probably a number of versions of this story but all of them would weigh in favor of giving less weight to grades and more to standard assessments like the SAT.
"That would not be happening at a private school: those schools understand that their record on college placement matters too much to let a cranky teacher hand out a bunch of Cs to high-performing seniors applying to college."
I believe this is not, as a general matter, true. While there has been grade inflation at both public and private secondary schools, you can fool around with the Naviance data and see that most of the elite private school GPAs are actually lower than the GPAs from very well known quality public schools. This isn't a perfect comparison because it is based only on the GPAs for applicants to a particular college, but if you look at enough of them you can get a pretty good feel for what the GPAs are for the top performing kids in each school.
You might be right. I think a better formulation of what might be going on than what I initially expressed is that private schools carefully control their grading policy to make their students attractive to selective colleges and public schools do not. FWIW, I don't fault the private schools for doing this; that's not inconsistent with a sensible view of what grading should try to accomplish.
All of which is to say that while I still doubt a private school would let a cranky teacher give a bunch of kids Cs, it is certainly the case that a private school may be able to modulate its grading policy so that its average GPA is lower than the average GPA of comparable students at a nearby public school.
I think it's fair to say that reasonable people could have different opinions about how an elite private high school even should grade. A school that is only admitting applicants with ISEE stanines of 7s, 8s and 9s is, obviously, that rare Lake Wobegone school where everyone is well above average. Most of these students would be straight A students even at their quality public school. I think you could defensibly argue for scoring them based on how their performance on an exam or in a class would compare to local high schools so that it is more useful for their parents to understand their children's performance. Or you could argue that you enhance competition between those students by scoring them on a strict curve. I don't have strong opinions about it. But the fact that you could have schools following such different approaches is exactly why standardized tests are useful.
I think you are describing a force which certainly exists I just don't think there's necessarily a public v. private distinction to be had. I could even see an
argument that the public schools would care more.
Not all private schools grade inflate, but admissions officers at elite universities are familiar with the pipeline
private schools, down to the ability to interpret grades. This is probably true with honors type programs at some top public schools, which are like a private school within a school. It’s a double privilege. You get demanding teachers who ensure you’ve actually learned the material, and relationships (and history) with college admissions officer who know that your 3.7 at X school is equivalent to a 4.2 at Y.
My son attends the best general public academic school in our state, consistently outperforming other nearby schools. The school won't admit it but this is clearly the result of demographics not superior teaching.
This also means that my son is still around 170th in his grade with a 4.3 GPA. I tell him not to stress it... and that tests result matter more.
We keep getting contacted by Ivy League and similar schools around the country because his athletic talent with his academic ability is a good combination. They don't want the top 10%, they want good enough combined with athletic talent.
Which sport if you don't mind me asking?
Football.
Always here for an education article.
This debate is so tiring. Everything you’re saying is correct, but it always just runs into the buzzsaw of racial group disparities on IQ-linked tests like the SAT.
Everything other than intrinsic factors like IQ is gameable by the well-off, and in practice _is_ gamed, heavily, to the point where it’s super unfair by economic class. The “holistic” assessment that looks for volunteering abroad is my favourite. How could that not favour the top-10% professional class?! And yet we have this idea that kids of working-class parents have time to just quit their part-time jobs and disappear for 6 months, pay for all the travel supplies, etc.
But solving for intrinsic factors runs into the buzzsaw.
So the merry-go-round goes around and around and people try to get off by saying “revolution! Change the entire system!” because that’s vague enough that anything appears possible.
In reality, it’s just a really hard tradeoff, and on an incredibly taboo topic in the western world (multiple studies confirming this, good recent one here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916241252085 )
The more ambiguously a metric is earned, the more room there is for rich and well connected families to game it.
It's interesting to read this article and discussion, although I am many years past those high school grades days. The only thing that might have gotten me directly into college from high school was my SAT score. My grades were hopeless. In the end, it took me 16 years to get a BA, after several starts and mis-starts at community colleges. When I finally decided I wanted it, I finished the last 3 years in 2 years, with a 3.9 GPA, then took the LSAT on a lark. The high score made me decide to go directly to law school.
So, in this round about way, I do support SATs, especially for those who, like me, had not found their way in the standard curriculum, or were not willing to follow the absurd rules that seemed to abound in the impoverished public schools I attended.
I worry most about the failure to actually teach anything demanding, challenging or meaningful. There is no attempt, at least in many educational systems, to teach for understand, for insight, for awareness of bias, and framing, or to encourage questioning, all of which are integral parts of critical thinking skills.
I'm really happy to hear that it worked out for you but from a college's perspective this would be a cautionary SAT story. Your SAT score covered up a pretty fundamental (at that time) lack of ability/desire. This is very similar to what happened to me and I'm split on what the right approach is here.
That being said, high schools do have a lot of rules that smart kids chafe under. I think this is going away with the trend away from AP toward dual enrollment, because high school would have been way better if most of it were on a college campus as opposed to being baby sat
It strikes me that the debate over "college admissions" really refers only to a small subset of colleges deemed elite or "prestigious" or the like. This country has thousands of colleges. If what is wanted is a college education, I don't think GPAs or SATs stand in the way for most students (I expect money is what stands in the way, but even there, I think motivated students can usually find funding). The subset of "prestigious" colleges cannot accommodate all students, of course, not even all the worthy students, so some are going to have to be left out, and those left out will have various characteristics that permit their exclusion to be presented as a political issue. MIT just released its admissions figures by race/ethnicity. MIT has a total undergraduate population of around 4,500, meaning its incoming class is around 1,125. A dozen or two more Black students, and a dozen or two fewer Asian students is what we are talking about, and it receives national attention. Those Black kids not admitted to MIT this year? Is there no other option for them? I think not.
The Economist ran some articles on wealth bias in elite institutions. MIT was an outlier in the wealth didn't make as much of a difference as in the other institutions.
I mentioned MIT only because I recently saw the report of its incoming class composition. MIT is not really a good representative of the genus "elite colleges." My point was only that the presence or absence of a few dozen more Black or Hispanic students at Harvard or Yale or Berkeley etc. isn't really a useful commentary on the higher-educational opportunities of an entire population in the country as a whole.
The group of "black, hispanic, native american, pacific islander" went from about 25% to 16%, so maybe fro 280 to 180 or about 100 kids.
MIT had no backup plan. Their admissions process was always separate for the populations they wanted to boost: instead of taking the top 30% of whatever, they chose "people we think can graduate." Which is necessarily a lower bar and they're not always right, with a 12 point difference in graduation rates. (This was the first citation I googled, and it's from 2012 so maybe out of date, but the black graduation was 82% versus white os 94%. Where's the Asian rate? Dunno. *EDIT* duh, the link: https://jbhe.com/2013/11/black-student-graduation-rates-at-high-ranking-colleges-and-universities/ ) Whoever's in that 12-point gap would've been better off at second-best-group-of-college which would've still been impressive. Maybe if they had been better at actually predicting graduation at admissions but they've been at it for decades.
If they had weird categories like "more points for being poor" they might have been able to keep the numbers up. Or not, if they were only trying to get rich NAMs.
A part of me says, who cares about a few elite colleges. There are a lot of other colleges that can give a good education. However, there is the argument that the movers and shakers of America disproportionately go to those elite colleges. But...will acceptance into an elite college actually get you into the American aristocracy? If you are on scholarship and working, chances are you won't be playing with the rich...you can't afford to.
However, I think the elite name behind you helps in employment and the way people view you.
If you bust your butt enough you can get into some positions of power as a poor kid who gets to a good university.
More likely is that your kids end up being able to get into those positions of power, providing they have the same drive as you.
I think drive to be in positions of power is the key. My husband went to an elite institution but likes a low-key life. He should have been a CEO but has chosen to work from home in a far lesser capacity that's stress free. My daughter went to an elite place. It helped her get her current position which is elite in her field, (performance is assessed literally behind a screen) but she didn't socialize a lot with people from school because she had to work and couldn't afford the extra-curricular activities. But probably more important, she didn't have the inclination.