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Also I don't even know that those outcomes (increasing diversity, more first generation students) can even be linked to dropping SAT/ACT scores given that the same people who dropped the scores were also trying to create those outcomes.
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Sep 29, 2015 04:58
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Xandu posted:Also I don't even know that those outcomes (increasing diversity, more first generation students) can even be linked to dropping SAT/ACT scores given that the same people who dropped the scores were also trying to create those outcomes. I think the real issue is that the system is trying to apply a bandaid to a bullet wound. Standardized testing has its problems, to be sure, but most disadvantaged students are being hosed over long before college admission is even an issue. Maybe we ought to take the standardized test results at their word, and consider that maybe the disparity they show has its birth much earlier. It is necessary to address that, I should think, long before we discuss affirmative action at the university level.
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Sep 29, 2015 06:25
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ToxicSlurpee posted:To be fair the other side of that was the fact that the SAT turned out to not be culture-neutral. You mean not socio-economic class neutral? Oh wait this is the US you can't talk about economical status because that's communism. It's all about race and identity.
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Sep 29, 2015 07:35
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wiregrind posted:You mean not socio-economic class neutral? Oh wait this is the US you can't talk about economical status because that's communism. It's all about race and identity. Yes, someone think about the poor white men that we're ignoring because of  IDENTITY POLITICS .
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Sep 29, 2015 12:05
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Isn't this the plot of Ding Dong Ronpaul or whatever that stupid anime LP game was? This should be the new name of the series FilthIncarnate posted:anyway I hope you don't mind me weighing in. Thank you for your time. That was fantastic and written perfectly for SA standards.  thanks for sharing.
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Sep 29, 2015 12:16
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computer parts posted:Yes, someone think about the poor white men that we're ignoring because of You could see it that way. I didn't say that, just that there is a deliberate intent to avoid talking about poverty, instead painting it as cultural issues almost as if saying "Hispanic culture leads to this" when it's just that when people face poverty they suddenly are at disadvantage at studying, regardless of their accent or their religious books. Sure the idea is that non-whites are deliberately driven into poverty by hand but if that's a cultural issue it's of white culture. Black/Asian/Hispanic cultures are perfectly able to study like everyone else if they aren't facing poverty. I guess helping lower classes is harder than including token people at an university to appear multicultural while leaving the real economical issues of said multicultural people behind a smokescreen. wiregrind fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Sep 29, 2015 |
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Sep 29, 2015 14:58
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PT6A posted:This is the real issue: fixing the class and racial disparities at the college admissions level is just putting lipstick on a pig. The problem is that we're failing students at a much earlier, much more basic level in most cases. I don't think it's a problem the education system can fix on its own, either: we're talking about a need for serious investment to prevent childhood poverty, and the need to show students, early on, that they can succeed in life through education. It's way harder for lower-class students at any level to actually excel in school. Hunger can gently caress up your ability to study. Where I went to school a poo poo load of students started working the day they were able because they more or less had to. Kind of hard to do the academic, higher-level classes that expect more homework when you have a full time job. It's also hard to do after school extra-curricular activities or any sort of volunteer work when your parents don't have a car or can't afford the gas to get you anywhere. All of that can be damaging in college admissions way beyond damaging SAT scores. Schools want to see activities and volunteer work which just makes it harder for people who can't afford such things. Then you get into college and...then what? It can be massively difficult to make ends meet if your parents can't afford to help. I've actually read stories coming out that there are is a statistically significant number of college students right now that are literally homeless. Plus you get into internships. Good luck taking two months off of work to go do an internship. Can't afford to work for free? Lol gently caress you, shouldn't have chosen to be a poor. Poverty in life follows you forever and can severely restrict your options in life. wiregrind posted:You mean not socio-economic class neutral? Oh wait this is the US you can't talk about economical status because that's communism. It's all about race and identity. It isn't class neutral and it isn't race neutral. The SAT basically assumes that you're an upper middle class white person and talk like one. If you speak a dialect that's different enough or went to an underfunded school and didn't get a good enough English education it can ratchet your score down.
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Sep 29, 2015 16:36
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blah_blah posted:Yeah, that's not exactly cultural bias. You know there are different symbols for the same things, right?
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Sep 29, 2015 16:42
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VideoTapir posted:You know there are different symbols for the same things, right? Lol I think blah_blah is pretty familiar with mathematical symbols. IIRC from his other posts, he did a Ph.D. in math. The post he commented on was some guy complaining about how bigoted and Anglo-centric the SAT was, who totally undermined his point by complaining about the math test he took where he didn't understand the Anglo-centric math symbols used. Math departments across the US are loaded with international students, many of whom do not know English that well, and students of recent immigrants, who are pretty separated from Anglo-culture, who absolutely crush these types of standardized math tests. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Sep 29, 2015 |
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Sep 29, 2015 17:56
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Standardised testing sucks and everything just goes to the lowest common denominator. In addition, test committees somehow fail to write down five long answer questions correctly over a year. Extracurriculars for otherwise pointless On the other hand, colleges shouldn't be forced to meet a politically correct quota of minority students but choose the people most likely to succeed at being an ivory tower academic (the whole point of college, as opposed to vocational tertiary schools, but lol the US doesn't have tertiary vocational education), and providing poors the conditions to become ivory tower academics/well educated workers should be something society pays for during primary/secondary education none of this will happen
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Sep 29, 2015 18:01
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Standardised testing is bad because you go to school to learn how to do standardised tests and get good marks. The school looks good, gets a pat on the back, and you end up with a bunch of useless crap you never use afterwards.
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Sep 29, 2015 18:30
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OwlFancier posted:Standardised testing is bad because you go to school to learn how to do standardised tests and get good marks. The school looks good, gets a pat on the back, and you end up with a bunch of useless crap you never use afterwards. Correct. However, it is cheaper and can easily be plotted on a babby's first graph, so it is politically preferable.
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Sep 29, 2015 18:58
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silence_kit posted:I don't know, I think you all are being a little hyperbolic regarding the utility of standardized testing. I know someone who teaches nursing at a pretty low-tier private college which accepts people with really low test scores, and she complains a lot that her students barely know how to read and write and can't do basic arithmetic to figure out drug doses. They love using 'I'm not a good test taker' as an excuse, but the reality is that they can barely read and do arithmetic. You're making the classic error here of assuming a correlation that you want to exist, without anything to actually prove it. The state of math education in the US is dismal at best (I dropped a bunch of statistics in the other education thread) and there are an estimated one million medication errors in the US every year. Do we know that every one of those errors that is the result of a simple mathematical mistake was done by someone with a lot SAT score? Something like a quarter of high school grads are barely able to read and do simple arithmetic, and the fact that colleges and universities are having to rely more and more on remedial classes for poorly-educated incoming freshmen suggests that test scores alone aren't doing a very good job of screening for that. Cicero posted:As someone who has always been good at tests, I've long harbored a suspicion that "I'm not a good test taker" really meant "I'm not particularly smart/I don't actually study that hard", like, a good 60-70% of the time. It's much easier to admit being bad at tests than having a bad brain or being lazy. Are there any studies on this? Of course it's actually a real thing. Tests tend to be built around one specific way of thinking, interpreting information, and approaching problems, and it's likely that students have different ways of thinking, interpreting information, and approaching problems. Some people are well-adapted to isolating factoids and trivia in their mind for blowing through the multiple-choice or true-false sections on a test but would do extremely poorly on giving a detailed answer showing deep understanding of the subject, while others might have a wider appreciation of the subject that would help them write a wonderful essay answer covering the question subject beautifully despite the fact that they might have trouble fishing out specific details needed to choose A, B, C, or D when asked about a highly-specific numeric factoid. That comparison also points to another issue - the depth of understanding that might be required for a question. Standardized tests tend to reward rote memorization and mindlessly executing formulas, rather than a deeper understanding that's more likely to survive the summer break. There are also a lot of cognitive shortcuts a person can take in tests that not everyone might be aware of. Unfortunately, the state of academic research on this is extremely chaotic, too much for me to be able to cite a paper. For the last fifty years or so, theories about differing learning styles or intelligence styles have been clashing in the academic community against traditional turn-of-the-last-century theories of a single "g-factor" that reliably predicts a person's intelligence in all subjects, which some researchers extend to their performance in life after school as well. This, combined with the fact that theories of intelligence are difficult to empirically and reproducibly prove, the fact that research into education and intelligence can be heavily politicized, and that scientists from a number of disciplines are out to be the one that proves how intelligence works, means that it's easy to find a paper supposedly proving or disproving any theory you care to name. As you can probably tell, I personally think the theories leaning toward differences in learning styles and intelligence theories are a lot more solid than the older models that rely on a single factor or measure of intelligence, but the science is far from settled. Xandu posted:The problem for me with getting rid of test scores is that grades are so inflated in the vast majority of high schools that they're not very useful for most selective colleges once you filter out the obviously unqualified applicants. I think more essays are good, especially when you're able to interview all your applicants, but I don't think it's feasible everywhere. The article in the OP talks about looking at "community engagement and entrepreneurship," but that strikes me as even more class driven than test scores. The problem, ultimately, is that the American educational system at high school level and below is incredibly broken, and no matter how hard they try, higher education can't simply insulate themselves from that and pretend it's someone else's problem that doesn't affect them. Not that the university system doesn't have its own problems. Colleges love to complain about the fact that two high school graduates from different schools may have a completely different level of education, but on the other hand, colleges actively promote the idea that two college graduates with the same degree fron different schools may have a completely different level of education. The very existence of selective schools that only take really smart kids and really rich kids does plenty to produce the very inequities that we claim aren't acceptable in college admissions. Grad school admissions must be way easier, since they can just look at the relative prestige of the school you got your undergrad from (unless it's a historically black college, in which case they no doubt use other factors to cover their rear end).
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Sep 29, 2015 19:26
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Main Paineframe posted:Grad school admissions must be way easier, since they can just look at the relative prestige of the school you got your undergrad from (unless it's a historically black college, in which case they no doubt use other factors to cover their rear end). It doesn't really work this way, but there are definitely some sketchy practices that affect people based on their privilege in much the same way. The main "prestige effects" don't come from the undergrad school per se, but rather the professors who wrote you letters of recommendation. There is bias here, because more prestigious schools have higher proportions of top professors, but every school has a handful of well recognized professors. So rather than "x went to school y, interesting", it'll be "top professor z wrote a letter for x". So you actually end up with a ton of top performers from less-well known undergrads at top grad schools. A big change from undergrad is that individual grad school departments (who do the admissions into their programs, rather than a large overall admissions organization) don't give a flying gently caress about diversity.
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Sep 29, 2015 19:57
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Xandu posted:And to be honest, it goes far beyond schools. Lots of evidence that teacher/school quality is fairly marginal in outcomes outside of the extremes and thedifferences go back really to economic disparity. There are obviously a bunch of other problems that come from growing up poor too. The problem is that it's not really possible to accept the idea that selective admissions are a good idea in the first place (i.e. to avoid enrolling students in colleges that they'll do poorly in) without putting the problem in one or both of two other places: The students are poorly-prepared for college, or the admissions standards don't accurately reflect preparedness. You'll get no argument from me that the SAT is obnoxiously bad in a lot of ways (particularly the over-emphasis on test-taking strategy), but it's accurate enough to be useful and it'd be a better solution to make it more accurate than to ignore it. Neither of those solutions though will fix the first problem. This country sucks horribly at preparing low-income and minority students for college, and any admissions standard that actually works is going to have class/racial disparities until that problem is fixed. And of course, even if those are both fixed, low-income students will still get hosed over by the financial burden of attending.
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Sep 29, 2015 20:13
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I noticed that a few people suggested using intelligence tests as a replacement for the SAT/ACT. Tests of academic achievement and intelligence have some major differences by design. A modern intelligence assessment will provide a nice overall estimate of the student's intelligence, as well as estimates of their broad abilities- abilities used to process elements of all sorts of academic and practical problems. They accomplish this by using novel problems, problems that the student should never have seen before. This avoids any practice effect, though there are a few jackasses trying to sell practice tests to helicopter parents who can't accept that Dakota is just as much a genius as 68% of her classmates. Intelligence assessments are great for researching why a student is having problems in school, identifying gifted students, but it is way less informative outside these settings. Trauma, socioeconomic class, neurological issues, persistence, etc. can have some major effects on a kid's performance in the classroom. With an academic achievement test, you can find where the student's reading, writing, and math skills lie. Using normed achievement tests is kind of stupid for university admissions, considering how many students aren't college ready. It would be way better for everyone to use a criterion-referenced assessment for admissions and get students to a 8k per year remedial school rather than a 20k per year sink or swim major university. Sorry for going on so long, I give cognitive tests for a living and can give the KABC-II by heart.
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Sep 30, 2015 04:05
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And as most people can attest, just being smart and/or doing well on the SAT/ACT is a terrible metric for whether you'll succeed in college. I got a 28 on my ACT iirc (and according to google that's like an 1890 on the SAT? I dunno, I took my testing before the SAT added the writing part plus I seem to remember my SAT score being kinda bad) and massively hosed up in college due to general immaturity and never learning proper study habits in high school. Other than stopping aimless moronic 18 year olds like I was from going to college right away, I'm not sure what else there is to do though. I know college was pretty much the only option put on the table for me growing up.
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Sep 30, 2015 04:27
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FWIW I think the majority of the people in my medical school classes are not by and large smarter than any other average group of people I've met but they sure are good at taking tests. I rocked the MCAT for what it's worth - all I did was practice the drat thing over and over again until I couldn't get questions wrong, and did quite well. It was not because I was smarter, I had just trained for it like you train for any athletic event - brute force.
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Sep 30, 2015 04:34
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Stanos posted:And as most people can attest, just being smart and/or doing well on the SAT/ACT is a terrible metric for whether you'll succeed in college. I got a 28 on my ACT iirc (and according to google that's like an 1890 on the SAT? I dunno, I took my testing before the SAT added the writing part plus I seem to remember my SAT score being kinda bad) and massively hosed up in college due to general immaturity and never learning proper study habits in high school. Without really wanting to be a dick, that's hardly an exceptional score. It's well below the 25th percentile of admitted students to top universities, and approximately the average for most flagship state schools.
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Sep 30, 2015 07:22
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blah_blah posted:Without really wanting to be a dick, that's hardly an exceptional score. It's well below the 25th percentile of admitted students to top universities, and approximately the average for most flagship state schools. I mean really, is there any way you can actually test or check for maturity directly?
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Sep 30, 2015 07:28
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Kommienzuspadt posted:FWIW I think the majority of the people in my medical school classes are not by and large smarter than any other average group of people I've met but they sure are good at taking tests. "I've met" is the key factor there. There are wide swaths of America you've probably never even thought of. Also I guarantee most of those med students are going to be better in some specialized field than I am.
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Sep 30, 2015 12:11
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computer parts posted:"I've met" is the key factor there. There are wide swaths of America you've probably never even thought of. So is everyone who has studied fields other than your own.
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Sep 30, 2015 12:14
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blowfish posted:So is everyone who has studied fields other than your own. Yes, that's the point.
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Sep 30, 2015 12:15
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OneEightHundred posted:Last time I saw the research on that, it was fairly significant (and if not, maybe we should cut public school funding after all!), and all of those factors together are aimed to do the same thing that segregation was for in the first place: Putting all of the poor minority students in a school district that the wealthy white suburbanites don't have to pay for. I think many suburban parents would be extremely happy with truly equal funding. It costs much less to educate suburban children with educated parents and fewer social problems.
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Sep 30, 2015 12:17
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computer parts posted:Yes, that's the point. No, it means that people generally have the capacity to become better than average at a particular thing through  and correct learning strategy. The fact that medical students are better at medicine or some other course they took than people who do different things says nothing about them being unusually smart.
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Sep 30, 2015 12:49
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blowfish posted:No, it means that people generally have the capacity to become better than average at a particular thing through They are unusually smart for the task they're excelling at. That example is also meant to show that even among (your phrasing) unusually smart people there's significant variation in what people are actually good at.
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Sep 30, 2015 12:52
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computer parts posted:They are unusually smart for the task they're excelling at. The point is that medical students are good at medicine because they ended up studying medicine. If you had made them study law instead, they would not have ended up being good at medicine.
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Sep 30, 2015 12:55
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blowfish posted:The point is that medical students are good at medicine because they ended up studying medicine. If you had made them study law instead, they would not have ended up being good at medicine. If you had made me study medicine, I would not be good at medicine.
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Sep 30, 2015 13:03
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Cicero posted:Also, obviously standardized tests can't test for something like 'maturity' except indirectly. I got a great SAT score, passed numerous AP exams (including a couple that I hadn't taken AP classes for), had a 3.9 unweighted GPA, and I still failed out of college my first year because I was immature and exploiting my newfound freedom by being lazy. I'm not sure "maturity" is the right word for it, nor is it something we could or should be testing for, because it's an obvious result of the vast difference between high school's level of rigor and college's level of rigor, the vast gulf in their approach toward students, and of course other major changes in the student's life that really have nothing to do with the actual education itself. computer parts posted:If you had made me study medicine, I would not be good at medicine. You'd certainly be better at it than a layman like me, though!
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Sep 30, 2015 15:17
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Out of curiosity, how many lazy/immature people that hosed up their first go at college were actually paying for it themselves? I'm guessing not that many, somehow...
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Sep 30, 2015 16:14
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PT6A posted:Out of curiosity, how many lazy/immature people that hosed up their first go at college were actually paying for it themselves? I'm guessing not that many, somehow... I hosed up college by going into a major that my college decided to pull during my senior year. 
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Sep 30, 2015 16:46
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blah_blah posted:Without really wanting to be a dick, that's hardly an exceptional score. It's well below the 25th percentile of admitted students to top universities, and approximately the average for most flagship state schools. It's pretty pathetic when people act proud about their 90th percentile ACT score, the SAT is a harder test anyway. When I did my undergrad (I don't like to brag, but I went to Harvard) we would celebrate real accomplishments, like my freshman year roommate who traveled to 80 different countries across the world before his 18th birthday. We're still friends to this day. To be honest, I've had it up to here with complaints about standardized testing. If you're not intelligent enough to pass an ACT test with flying colors, either you are naturally inferior, or you simply didn't work hard enough. Either way, perhaps you should consider that college is not the right choice for you! This whole thing reminds me of petty, high-school squabbling. For those naturally unskilled at sailing, there was always room on the equestrian team, if somewhat less glamorous. In fact, I remember a certain student who was not very athletic or, ah, "intellectually talented" (as the PC-crowd would have me say). Instead of joining an extracurricular he took a little bit of seed money and founded a (now very successful) business insurance service. There really is something out there for everyone.
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Sep 30, 2015 17:07
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:I hosed up college by going into a major that my college decided to pull during my senior year. That's not your fault, though. For sure, there are people who don't graduate university due to circumstances beyond their control, but I'm going to guess that the people who screw up early on because they're being lazy generally aren't paying their own way. Getting dicked over by the university, or health problems, or whatever else is a separate matter.
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Sep 30, 2015 17:38
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Milk Malk posted:It's pretty pathetic when people act proud about their 90th percentile ACT score, the SAT is a harder test anyway. When I did my undergrad (I don't like to brag, but I went to Harvard) we would celebrate real accomplishments, like my freshman year roommate who traveled to 80 different countries across the world before his 18th birthday. We're still friends to this day. 8.7/10, an excellent showing.
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Sep 30, 2015 17:50
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Milk Malk posted:This whole thing reminds me of petty, high-school squabbling. For those naturally unskilled at sailing, there was always room on the equestrian team, if somewhat less glamorous. In fact, I remember a certain student who was not very athletic or, ah, "intellectually talented" (as the PC-crowd would have me say). Instead of joining an extracurricular he took a little bit of seed money and founded a (now very successful) business insurance service. There really is something out there for everyone. Are there no workhouses, no prisons?
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Sep 30, 2015 18:03
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Milk Malk posted:we would celebrate real accomplishments, like my freshman year roommate who traveled to 80 different countries across the world before his 18th birthday.
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Sep 30, 2015 18:09
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Cingulate posted:I agree being born to rich parents is a great accomplishment I wonder why he wasted his father's money when he knew he had a cushy job awaiting him at his dad's office anyway.
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Sep 30, 2015 18:25
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:I wonder why he wasted his father's money when he knew he had a cushy job awaiting him at his dad's office anyway.
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Sep 30, 2015 18:28
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PT6A posted:By the time students get to high school, can you really fix the fact that they've been systematically hosed over for the better portion of their lives, no matter what you do to the admissions process? i think this is the core issue. By the end of high school, more well-off kids will, on average, be genuinely more capable and knowledgeable than their disadvantaged peers. This is why I think the best option is to simply give kids extra "points" for things like race and low income (that is, affirmative action). Ideally we'd make society more equal so that this wouldn't be necessary, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
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Sep 30, 2015 18:29
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Stanos posted:And as most people can attest, just being smart and/or doing well on the SAT/ACT is a terrible metric for whether you'll succeed in college. I got a 28 on my ACT iirc (and according to google that's like an 1890 on the SAT? I dunno, I took my testing before the SAT added the writing part plus I seem to remember my SAT score being kinda bad) and massively hosed up in college due to general immaturity and never learning proper study habits in high school. To be honest I think another major bit of idiocy in our school system is the insistence that we must shove as many people as possible into college immediately after high school for their own good. First off not everybody is college material. Second off we don't need everybody to be college educated. Third off we also need people to perform jobs that require skills that vocational schools teach but colleges do not. Fourth off it's downright absurd to expect every teenager to plan out their whole lives as teenagers. Teenagers are loving stupid and probably lack world experience but are often expected to pick a career and use that to pick a major. Which may end up being something they aren't even good at. Sometimes school guidance counselors also push high school kids into more "practical" decisions based on their interests. I remember everybody that said "I like music, can I study music?" was told to go into music education. Which was problematic because you'd see things like going to a band festival and noticing that everybody there was planning on majoring in music education while none of them looked at how strong that job market was. Not only does music education pay like rear end but the supply of people with that education far outstrips the demand for it. So now you have hordes of students paying piles of money, going into debt, and then going "well gently caress, now what?" when they can't get jobs. The assumption that a student that doesn't start college at 18 will never go to college is also incredibly stupid. I started at 28 and now I'm graduating with two majors and a high GPA. I think back to how I was at 18 and am very glad I didn't start then. Not everybody that has college potential has it at 18. Or even 30 sometimes. It's almost as if America has an education system that is insane and broken from top to bottom. Welp.
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Sep 30, 2015 18:34
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