This makes sense: Harvard has a huge issue with discrimination against Asian Americans, who are not represented according to their ACT/SAT score distribution. If Harvard could waive away these scores, they can continue their admissions policy that favor students from wealthy families who pay full price, and are likely to be institutional givers after graduation by focusing on admission factors that are much less accountable, like "personality".
Student's for Fair Admissions is in the process of suing Harvard over discrimination, and their website (with legal filings) is probably the single best source of information on Ivy League admissions: https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/updates/
This is real institutional racism in my opinion. There are enough reason why Asians tend to do better than other groups without using explanations provided by neo-nazis that grade humans by intelligence or whatnot.
But it just plainly is racist against Asians. There is no greater good to be defended here that isn't a lie. And they even have a history of discrimination with quotas, although I tend to classify AA as not being racial quotas. But if people are measured unequal due to their race, they only affirm that race exists and that they don't treat everyone on their merits. I don't see advantages here.
As I said, logistics of knowledge are so cheap, that good education can reach anyone. Maybe a teacher is missing here, but it is a solid start.
>This makes sense: Harvard has a huge issue with discrimination against Asian Americans, who are not represented according to their ACT/SAT score distribution. If Harvard could waive away these scores, they can continue their admissions policy that favor students from wealthy families who pay full price, and are likely to be institutional givers after graduation by focusing on admission factors that are much less accountable, like "personality".
Please. This is about affirmative action for people who aren't Asian or White. Not wealthy donors. The argument is that lack of privilege causes poor SAT scores which is preventing certain minorities from realizing their potential, and that this justifies selectively lowering the bar and allocating additional resources.
But this is all based on a conflation between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity.
Harvard's admission rate is <6% for general population - that includes affirmative action ethnicities. Harvards admission rate is >30% for "legacies" which make up one in six of their students, and even higher for donors. These are the kids who get in while being thick as a brick. The injustice is not primarily the black kid with 1400 SAT getting in over the east Asian kid with 1580 -- the injustice is the hundreds of CEOs/senators' kids being assured admission even being dumber than a sack of hammers.
I would expect legacies to have a higher admission rate. They are a subpopulation coming from homes with intelligent parents, likely grew up in intellectually stimulating environments, and were probably focused on the Ivy League before many of their peers had even heard that term.
There is definitely some application boost legacies get simply by virtue of being a legacy, but their applications are probably quite strong in general. So it's unlikely that dropping the SAT was meant to cater to them.
This should be easy to test, right? Look at the percentage of students admitted to Harvard whose parents went to Harvard vs. the percentage admitted whose parents went to some other similarly-selective school.
I'm not sure about this. I'm not a fan of the ACT/SAT (I've never taken them and somehow wound up with a master's degree) - but what I worry about them is that it removes one somewhat objective measure that you could point to in scoring. When you remove that, well, what do you look at? I think that's where we see students who come from well-off families have an even larger advantage because they can be captain of the sports team, the debate team, volunteer at the hospital, etc. Whereas if you are poor and smart - you work a second job to support your family, or you spend as much time not at home as possible.
Good luck convincing an admissions officer that working a second job is more "valuable" in the process than doing all these other things when they want to maintain the "image" of the university.
Without an ACT/SAT you'll also probably get more applicants hoping to hit the lottery from an admissions officer too.
I will say that obviously wealthy parents can pay for a tutor for the ACT/SAT, but a poor kid can get a practice book for $20 and at least have a shot.
First of all a distinction must be made between legacies and big donors. Legacies are often dismissed as getting in only because of their legacy status, but I'd wager that their grades, test scores and other accomplishments put them on the admissions bubble already. Dropping the SAT isn't going to help Harvard let more of them in because they're probably doing quite well to begin with.
Donors' children may have more wiggle room with their grades and scores, but they're a much smaller population than legacies and the idea that Harvard is going to drop standardized testing just to marginally increase the numbers of donors' children they can let in, like some nefarious plot to marginally increase donations, is laughable and culturally tone deaf.
Harvard administrators have no interest in drastically increasing the number of legacy or donor students. The admissions rates for those groups have likely been static for decades.
Harvard administrators do, however, have a huge interest in increasing black (and to a lesser extent Hispanic) admissions rates. This is made much more difficult by standardized testing scores.
In fact much of the stated justification by the schools and other intellectuals for dropping the tests is that it discriminates against the poor and minorities, which is ironic because it is one of the factors of admission least correlated with wealth and also because many minority groups do better on the test than the overall test taking population.
> The argument is that lack of privilege causes poor SAT scores which is preventing certain minorities from realizing their potential, and that this justifies selectively lowering the bar and allocating additional resources.
The UC system also removed SAT recently arguing it discriminates.
I haven't seen clear evidence though that the SAT discriminates more against poorer students than any other admissions factor. In fact given that richer kids go to elite colleges at higher rates than middle income, conditioned on same test score, I'm inclined to think it's being underweighted.
>The Regents argued that the tests discriminated w/o evidence
That's the entire diversity/inclusion in a nutshell. None of this has been scientifically verified and the basic premise is in contradiction with what we know about humans. But bringing this up anywhere where your name is visible is liable to get you cancelled.
Lets ignore your claim at possible discrimination, and ask what the ability to game a high score on an ACT/SAT has anything to do with how successful or contributing to society someone will become?
In the internet age that we live in today, with access to all sorts of methods of memorization, I would argue scores on a standardized test are largely irrelevant, beyond testing for if someone can pass a test or not. The highest score goes not to the person who thinks critically but to the one who gamed the system the most. If you can teach someone to win at candy-crush, you can get them to ace the SAT's.
Some of the most important people in society have not typically done well in structured schooling, and this is in part because a lot of education is bs in the first place.
I would argue that "structured schooling" refers more to a university than to the SAT.
Personally I see more merit in performing well on an exam with a clear statistical context, than in filling out some bullshit lab notebook or whatever it is that people at Harvard do to earn their A- (mean grade) or A (mode).
One problem with your argument is that, without the SAT, admissions counselors will have to depend MORE on structured schooling, because they have to lean more heavily on grades, school activities, and teacher recommendations.
Your initial question, by the way, is flawed. School is not success, and education by itself is not a contribution to society. So why you use those things to judge a college entrance exam is unclear to me.
An entrance exam is a measure of intellectual horsepower. Tons of rich people throw money at SAT courses and still fare poorly, while tons of smart kids whose families wouldn't be able to afford college without financial aid fare well.
> An entrance exam is a measure of intellectual horsepower.
No its not. What are neurons? What are networks of neurons? How do the wiring of neurons affect the way an intelligence output answers? Can neurons be cultivated in certain ways? If so, can you cultivate a network of neurons to output answers with the most efficiency and correctness?
If so, what is the difference between one network optimized for standardized testing and another optimized for political upheaval? Do the neurons fire less quickly in the latter because they can't pass the answers to a test as quickly?
the best performers at school often become career academics -- a few research discoveries aside, you could say this is a pretty low-leverage position.
In other words, as you said, doing well in school means little outside of school.
So if you really wanted to come full circle on it, you could say it's actually good that people who aren't able to game a system, end up staying outside of that system.
As an Asian American myself, I don't understand this notion of discrimination against Asian Americans by Ivy League schools. Per Harvards Class of 2023 Admissions data [1], Asian Americans makeup 25.3% of the admitted class. They're the largest minority group admitted.
You dont understand until your kids get rejected despite having straight A, high SAT scores and strong background, just because many other people whose ancestors come from a similar region on earth were as highly qualified too. So your kid is out not because of her fault but because of her race. I suppose many people are OK because deep down they think they will be in the accepted portion but still.
Just say that your child identifies as [insert popular identitarian group of the day] and put them between a rock and a hard place. They'll either have to accept your kid anyway, or admit that their agenda is BS and watch the facade crumble.
Not necessarily. I have a niece who is a textbook A-plus Asian student, she didn't get into any top school nor did any UC-school accept her. She is in a CA community college now hoping to transfer later. (She did get into an expensive 2nd tier private college, but since Covid shut everything down she withdrew and transferred to a CC near home.)
Years ago I tried to counsel her parents into letting her do extra-curricular activities that did not fit the stereotypical Asian student profile, but they would not hear it. Piano it was, rather than sports or other non-academic work/volunteering. They did not understand that an Asian girl with a 4+ GPA and years of piano training was not going to get a fair shake when it came to college admissions.
Yeah, you might not get Berkeley, but an A+ student is guaranteed admission to a UC. The profile you describe is far better than the average student at UCR and would be quite competitive at Davis or Irvine.
Did something fall through here? Did she not even apply to a mid-tier "safety school"?
When have these schools ever said they care only about academic merit? They explicitly don’t and never have; every high school has a counselor that will tell you that you need to have more on your application than grades and a test score.
Anecdote: I had straight As in high school, took every AP class they offered, 98th percentile SAT and got rejected from every single college I applied to except for one state school which I’m pretty sure they were obligated to accept me to for being a resident
They make up 25.3% of the admitted class but would probably make up 75-80% of the admitted class in a system truly based on merit. 4 out of 5 strong applicants are rejected simply because they're Asian American.
Let's not exaggerate things. Comparing UC or Caltech is probably best (granted they use less controversial socioeconomic factors). Caltech is 43% Asian American vs 27% at MIT. Note that the race-neutral number is somewhere in between (Asians disproportionately yield to schools that don't use racial preferences because they are discriminated against elsewhere)
The competitive admissions high school I went to (which has an SAT average similar to Ivy League universities) has a completely race/SES-blind admissions system and is now 70% Asian.
That's a function of local demographics as well though. Lowell high school in San Francisco has those numbers but that's in part due to (more affluent than average) whites long fleeing the SF public schools.
? Have you ever been to SF? That's not true for the general population and even less true for youth. And the white youth that are there tend to go to private schools
No Asians go big or go home. They yield to all schools that are prestigious regardless of race-neutrality because all of these school (on the surface) appear to be race neutral.
Maybe, but students also want a diverse student body if they're going to an institution like Harvard. I doubt that the top X% of students who get into Harvard want to be surrounded by people just like them. They want diversity and different perspectives from people who are creative intelligent. That's the appeal of institutions like Harvard.
This. This is the one. If you view everything Harvard does as supporting this goal, it all makes perfect sense.
You don't necessarily want the smartest kids. You want the kids that are most likely to go on to make the most money AND the kids who are most likely to have a strong emotional connection to the university so they write big checks.
Not sure that's the right approach. Admitting people who are most likely to succeed is credit-taking in the guise of teaching. To maximize college's benefit to society, I think you should admit people whose success would be most improved by college. It would be a bit counterintuitive though, you would mostly admit average applicants (because top ones will succeed anyway).
> To maximize college's benefit to society, I think you should admit people whose success would be most improved by college.
1. I'm have yet to be convinced that Harvard is trying to maximize its benefit to society.
2. Even if we stipulate that Harvard's sole goal is to maximize its benefit to society, it may be that increasing the number of Jeff Deans or Jim Kellers, even by a small amount, is more beneficial to society than better educating a lot of average people.
... or it may not be. My point is that the approach you suggest is not obviously correct.
I’d add “most likely to become famous for a good reason.”
Most likely to graduate is interesting. Almost everyone I know who didn’t graduate, it was due to finances. Purely academic reasons, at least anecdotally, seem relatively uncommon now.
Two of Harvard's most famous students: Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't graduate, but the Harvard name still got boosted by the fact that they attended.
It doesn't make sense to assume that the HS student population is uniformly qualified to meet Harvard's admissions bar (absent explicit racial discrimination). There's a reason nobody really accuses the NBA of racial discrimination in drafting players.
It's not really fair to compare the NBA to Harvard. The NBA is a for-profit institution in the entertainment business that is interested in drafting the most talented players to get the most views and therefore, the most most money.
Harvard is a non-profit institute that seeks to create a diverse & successful that leave a mark on the world, which therefore upholds the eliteness of Harvard.
> The NBA is a for-profit institution in the entertainment business that is interested in drafting the most talented players to get the most views and therefore, the most most money.
So exactly like Hollywood who has rightly or wrongly be heavily campaigned against because of discrimination, btw it is ironic but if you check the numbers white women are over represented same as black people, the 2 leading-voices among the minorities, its is Asian- Americans, Hispanic-Americans and Native Americans who are completely sidelined in that industry.
Statistically, Asians have higher than average SAT, ACT scores, this is not contested.
In 1996 California passed prop 209 which banned affirmative action on the state level. All top UC schools have become majority asian despite California being less than 20% asian.
Now considering Harvard, there was a federal case brought against it since asians scoring higher marks than peers were being rejected.
Harvard's defense was that they were scoring lower, on average on "personality" scores -- a qualitative measure on admissions.
By contrast, african americans were scoring highest on these personality scores.
Ultimately, the case was won by Harvard since the intent was not determined to be pernicious.
It's no question Harvard artificially diversifies its student body, but affirmative action does come at a cost.
Student's for Fair Admissions is in the process of suing Harvard over discrimination, and their website (with legal filings) is probably the single best source of information on Ivy League admissions: https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/updates/