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University of Chicago To Stop Requiring ACT and SAT Scores For Prospective Undergraduates (chicagotribune.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: For years, a debate has simmered at the nation's universities and colleges over how much weight should be given to standardized tests as officials consider students for admission -- and whether they should be required at all. A growing number, including DePaul University, have opted to stop requiring the SAT and ACT in their admissions process, saying the tests place an unfair cost and burden on low-income and minority students, and ultimately hinder efforts to broaden diversity on campus. But the trend has escaped the nation's most selective universities. Until now. The University of Chicago announced Thursday that it would no longer require applicants for the undergraduate college to submit standardized test scores. While it will still allow applicants to submit their SAT or ACT scores, university officials said they would let prospective undergraduates send transcripts on their own and submit video introductions and nontraditional materials to supplement their applications.
Taking and passing a ln SAT test sure does cost a lotbof money /s
....we cater to the lowest common denominator......
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
This is long overdue. To much weight is placed on these tests that wealthy students are able to pay for expensive test prep courses so they can pass the tests.
As long as those student loan bills get paid
When we eliminate objective means of measuring performance, we increase our control of the process. We increase our power.
In the pursuit of skin color (but not ideological) diversity, they've throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Don't let on that you're a white male, get Q'uantravious to do your video interview for you
Since most kids/parents have gamed the standardized tests so well, this will probably relieve some pressure on admissions folk to focus on the truly curious and motivated applicants regardless of score. Akin to showing your Gitlab projects to a prospective employer instead of a resume bragging about your umpteen MCSE certs but not knowing how to actually do anything.
Yes, a video from the applicant will be helpful ... we wouldn't want to accidentally accept a white guy who goes by "D'Andre".
If anything, that's yet another damning indictment of the US education system.
Here in Denmark, your standardized scores coming out of secondary education (high school, et al) mean everything, and can be relied upon to do so. There are no entrance tests for universities, no essays to write, no customized applications. Your test scores represent you - and it works, because the whole (free!) public education system is good enough, from the ground up.
(Universities here do have non-standard application options for people who want to go that route, or don't qualify for first priority for any reason.)
An educational institution's goal is — or ought to be — education.
Whether SAT and other scores help that or not, "diversity" certainly does not. It is a completely bogus goal to pursue.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
My daddy would cut a check to bypass the nonsensical application process.
I don't see the problem with this. I got a 23 on my ACT (an acceptable but not great score). I graduated from university Magna Cum Laude. I've always done terrible on standardized tests but I do very well on regular tests. That's been true all the way back to the fun Iowa Basics tests.
While it will still allow applicants to submit their SAT or ACT scores, university officials said they would let prospective undergraduates send transcripts on their own and submit video introductions and nontraditional materials to supplement their applications.
It may not be required, but I suspect that most students will provide them anyway. Students apply to multiple universities so they will have the test scores. The students who don't provide them may be at a disadvantage compared to the students that do. These tests exist because it is hard to screen every possible application by watching their personalized video. Objective measures are useful and they won't go away.
I don't understand how they're going to evaluate students.
In the US, we have no national education standards. In many states, we have no state standards. The quality of schools and what is taught in schools varies wildly from district to district, and even school to school, due to wildly unequal funding. With no standards, how are they going to compare students?
I don't respond to AC's.
In his book "Friday", Robert Heinlein predicted (in 1982) The California Confederacy voting to grant a Bachelor degree to every citizen graduating high school.
Because someone observed "that Californians with college degrees earned more than those with high school diplomas alone".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I've been a high school teacher (math, physics), and I've been a research assistant, teaching assistant, and teacher at the college level while completing my grad work. I've seen students with an 19 ACT score do as well as a student with a 32. I've watched 36 ACT students flunk the first semester. I've seen valedictorian students drop out. It's been my experience that students with > 30 ACT score generally do better than those with scores 30 have often had at least one semester, or even two of "ACT prep" in high school, compared to those with lower scores. It's not as if those student's aren't capable, it's just that they've been thrown into the game much earlier than those who haven't prepped.
will do more to weed people out than anything else. I'm paying $11k/yr for the 1st 2 and $16/k for the last two for my kid. If her grade were poor I could risk that. She'd be off to a life in Walmart.
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From the High School I graduated from, most students came out with at least two or three AP classes under their belt. I completely passed out of my college's chemistry and English requirements. Most of us got decent SAT/ACT grades and were accepted into decent universities.
My wife is getting interns from another local "magnet" high school for kids who show aptitude in science and math (my wife's an engineer.) These are seniors in a magnet school, and they can barely use a desktop computer, nor form cogent sentences describing what they have done in a day's work via email. She gave one kid a day to put a couple pages of data into an Excel spreadsheet (should have taken an hour) and he did roughly 5% of the task.
Educational standards are pretty friggin' varied.
This is just an excuse to, when presented with two candidates -- one who is White or East Asian, Male, with great SAT/ACT scores, and a someone who is not and just writes "black lives matter" over and over again on their entrance essay, they can pick the latter and say "well, we don't really look at your test results".
Undergraduates sometimes surprise you - some of the brightest may have no creative imagination, some of the dullest may have great entreprenurial instincts. An interview can sus that in minutes, but if it's not PC to 'select', then hey, up the intake and note the 'survival of the fittest' in the first year. Waste of time for those unsuited, who could have been told ab initio, were it not for PC
Using test scores meant they had to admit too many Asians and whites. Getting rid of test scores makes it easier to discriminate against Asians and whites.
What a racist rant that understanding English and math is impossible for blacks.
Go back to your Klan meeting and leave the rest of us alone.
But because it's done to hurt whites, that makes racial discrimination OK!
I like what some CUNY schools do. You can take up to a certain number of credits as a high school grad who either:
(1) passed the CUNY entrance exam
(2) passed the Regents (an exam that everyone in NY state has to take to graduate high school)
The bar for this kind of non-degreee/probationary admission is fairly low, and but you "prove yourself", you can apply for regular admission.
...on the Colt45 , MD20/20 and Menthol120 test.
... such as parents bank statements
The UofC initiates yet another race to the bottom.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
A school like the University of Chicago hangs its hat on graduate education and research attached to grad students. Undergrad is a total afterthought, as it is for any of the Ivies or top tier research schools. Something for the grad students to TA.
The non-foreign grad student body (which is the minority of grad students) will continue to be populated by suburban and even rural kids, often of relatively low income families (but neither low income or diverse enough to be charity cases) who blew their ACT/SAT out of the water. They were quite often totally un-prepped, didn't get a sniff from a 'good school' despite a 34-36 ACT, and paid their own freight (i.e., loans out the ass) through state schools like Indiana or Nebraska.
that SAT scores have no bearing on graduation rates.
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"Once we looked at a student's grades and transcripts, the SAT and ACT added very little to explain how well they were going to do in college,"
Until some high schools engage in grade inflation to increase the college admission stats, a stat school are "graded" upon, and to some degree administrators and teachers rewarded upon.
The value of the SAT/ACT is that it is a common test all students would take and be evaluated upon. This tamped down on the impulse to inflate grades. With no such deterrent, and the reward of improved school evaluations, that microeconomics class I had in college suggests grade inflation will increase. Of course that microeconomics class also suggests a solution, grade high schools not by college admissions but by college graduations.
For those who SAT/ACT scores prevent(ed) them from attending the college microeconomics class, read the Dilbert comic strip. Its equivalent to the class. In this case Wally coding himself a minivan is particularly relevant.
Reading the comments, I can assume many of my fellow engineering-types are dismayed and think this is some kind of lowering-of-the-bar.
I applaud this shift away from standardized tests, for completely personal reasons. I got a middling SAT score and a bad ACT score (the same score, twice!), didn't get into any of my top choice schools, ended up at a ginormous state school ... where I proceeded to double major in literature, a foreign language, plus a minor in poetry, got 4.0's in all of them, I published a paper around age 20 in an academic journal, and ran my own student newspaper. (I know none of that liberal arts trash impresses most /. readers, but I later got into CS, and I've been a back-end engineer for years.)
The SAT and ACT were terrible gauges of my ability to succeed in an academic setting. Full stop.
This is long overdue. To much weight is placed on these tests that wealthy students are able to pay for expensive test prep courses so they can pass the tests.
Those inexpensive SAT self-study books do an incredibly good job at increasing SAT test scores too. The expensive prep classes are not necessary. Unless you lack the discipline to self-study and need your parents forcing you to go to the prep class and the prep class instructor forcing you to do some studying.
;-) In any case the self-study books are much less expensive than the prep classes and far more accessible.
I used inexpensive self-study books for SAT, GRE (general and CS subject) and GMAT. The books dramatically increased my scores on the sample tests and the actual scores were comparable to the final sample tests.
Upon reflection, college may have warped my perspective on what an "inexpensive" book is.
... enrollment is declining, revenue is down, so lower the barriers.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
all you assholes supporting this...please look at the reputation of these institutions in 10years. we'll see who's right then.
"When it comes to people, past performance is the best predictor of future behavior. Standardized test scores just do not add any useful information for the admissions process." Isn't that generally a contradiction? One of the best to compare is to use the same critera which is what standardized test do. It is not the ONLY thing a school should use, but it does help. It is also usefull for people applying to a school to know if the average and range of standardized scores matches what they want --- I did not apply to many schools whose scores were too low and or too narrowly high.
Not everyone who's made for college is made for a standardized test.
True but for some of us (like me) the standardized test gave us a way to prove we were smarter than our grades would otherwise indicate. I wasn't a great student. Partly because I'm easily bored especially by subjects I don't care about. But mostly because primary school tends to heavily reward the ability to memorize and regurgitate random facts and my brain isn't optimally wired for doing that. But I could do rather well (generally 90-95th percentile) on standardized tests so even though my grades were mediocre I was still able to get into a very good college.
So some people who are college material don't have good test scores but conversely some people without exceptional grades actually are rather bright and do fine in college. I was the later.
Some people can afford to give their kids extra resources. Technology, books, tutors, free time. That all helps pass the SAT test.
You need to look at this from a university's perspective though. When I am teaching a first year physics course if the students in the lecture do not have a sufficient background in maths and physics to understand the material then they are wasting their time and money being there. That is the point of having standardized tests: they ensure all students have a sufficient background to be able to cope with the program they want to enrol in.
If society fails to support those from disadvantaged backgrounds enough so that they too can also reach the standards required for university then there is not a lot the university can do without lowering its academic standards and then you end up with a second rate institute whose qualifications are far less useful and whose value to society is far less than it was. If the university intake is not diverse enough for society then, provided the university is applying its intake requirements in an unbiased fashion, that same society needs to fix the problem at the school level.
What's with this US obsession of distinguishing people into black, white, and asian?
In its efforts to create a color blind society the government makes us pay close attention to color, keep stats on color and "grades" us on those stats. Loosely "discrimination" is defined by a particular color falling below some percentage, as opposed to defined by a better qualified person of color being denied a seat in college, a job or other opportunity. So we have these various efforts designed to increase the percentages irrespective of qualifications.
Want to see a more blatant example, lets look at the US Federal Aviation Administration:
"the FAA threw out the AT-SAT scores and CTI qualifications [aviation related college training] of an estimated 3,000 CTI graduates and military veterans [with aviation related training and experience] who were all previously designated ‘well qualified’ to become air traffic controllers. The FAA told them all to start over. But this time, when they applied for a job, their college degrees and previous military experience would mean nothing. They would now compete with thousands of people the agency calls ‘off the street hires;’ anyone who wants to, can walk in off the street without any previous training and apply for an air traffic control job. The FAA’s only requirements, to apply, are be a U.S. citizen, have a high school diploma, speak English and pass the FAA’s new BQ, Biographical Questionnaire."
The biographical questions are being used to cherry pick individuals to improve FAA stats, at the expense of far more qualified candidates that would not improve the stats. Its an emerging scandal. https://www.aim.org/aim-column...
Looks like part of the explanation could be artificial score inflation.
1. Allow applicants to omit SAT/ACT scores
2. Applicants with lower scores omit
3. Your average applicant score goes up
4. ???
5. Profit!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/s...
When will they stop grading athletic performance as a measure for being awarded a scholarship or even accepted on the sports teams? My time in the 40yd dash should have no bearing on whether I can be the wide receiver!
Once again, an objective metric shows us diversity is not our strength. And, of course, again it is the objective metric that gets deep sixed.
A highly competitive university that gets applicants almost exclusively from the top 1% of ACT/SAT scoring students says that ACT/SAT scores don't predict success in their institution.
Would the correlation perhaps be higher if they accepted students randomly from every quartile of ACT/SAT scoring students?
https://abcnews.go.com/Technol...
I have to wonder if the Universities considering this path actually CARE about how capable / incapable their prospective student body is.
My guess is they've done the math on the amount of money they're missing out on due to setting the bar too high via SAT / ACT scores.
They will all happily take your money regardless if you can handle the curriculum or not.
You finishing your degree is relevant to them only as long as you continue to pay.
Of course, this is short sighted thinking on the Universities part.
In the short term, you have a larger influx of cash as the bar for entrance requirements is taken down a few notches and more students attend.
In the long term, bringing in students who may not be able to handle the curriculum ultimately tarnishes the reputation of the University.
( As the drop out rate increases, reputation plummets and fewer students will want to attend. )
Keep the entrance standards high and come to the realization that college is not in the cards for everyone.
Obama isn't president anymore. We aren't starting new wars every other month to distract from blatant government corruption. (IRS / DOJ / FBI / State Dept / etc)
We now have a president not creating corruption and ending things like the 60 year Korean war.
So what are the alternatives:
1. Recommendations: Well off students know a lot more lawyers, doctors, business leaders... than poor kids so will get a preference here.
2. Interviews: well off kids are much better dressed, much more polished, much more similar to the people doing the interviewing so will get a preference here.
What with the cost of taking the SAT multiple times and the classes and other prep materials it's just another way for corporate america to rip off the middle class. I'm glad to see it go and it's elitist attitude. Years ago I saw an episode of I think it was This Week with David Brinkley where they were discussing re-scoring the SAT because scores had gotten lower and the re-scoring was to get a better distribution. Of course all the talking heads were outraged by the lower of the standard. Of course they could all recite their own scores from many years ago as I'm sure it's a significant component of their colossal egos. Then with the change in scoring they could no longer compare their high scores.
SAT a combination of
a) College admissions laziness, incompetence, pettiness
b) Corporate american rip off
c) American elitism
Good reddens!
“You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq."
- John Kerry.
Thanks for giving us your elitist, people who disagree with you are shit and don't matter, opinion. Your kind of intolerance is not welcome in the US anymore.
As someone who is currently taking an intro to physics college course, and also got a 1390 on the SAT. I can tell you right now that more depends on the instructor then any test.
I mean would it kill anyone to post a single example problem before throwing formulas and word problems at people? Honestly at this point I am spending more time going out and learning how to do the problems from third party videos on youtube then I am reading the required readings, which also dont supply examples.
The textbook, supplemental workbooks for the textbook, the TA's discussion session and all the various online sources are the proper place for the example problem. These are things you should have used before the lecture. Lecture time is better spent on concepts and professor/student interaction.
I fully realize this is not how things have typically been done, but typically we are catering to lazy ill-prepared students who learn of something for the first time in lecture since they have not read the book or viewed other sources. I had one advanced math class where the professor broke from this. We had to read the book and associated materials on our own, do the homework and turn it in before the lecture, and then the professor lectured on the topic. We were now "qualified" for the lecture. Was this methodology more painful, yes. Was it more successful, yes, I learned far more than in the more typical classes.
Again, I confess that as a student I hated professors expecting me to be prepared for lectures. However it really is how the system should be working. With more lectures moving online and allowing class time to be used more for interactive Q&A and other more effective uses of time expect preparation expectations to be more common.
This is quite simply designed to make it easier to admit students based on race, gender identity, or whatever the characteristic du jour may be, as opposed to academic qualifications, which are merely a quaint notion of yesteryear, much like buggy whips and corsets.
Perhaps an atheist at a Christian school should have the good sense not to sneer hate at the teachers' beliefs.
Yeah, because teenagers the world over are so good at knowing when to shut up and not voice disdain. Do you even remember what it was like to be a teenager? Your solution is a recipe for disaster. Do we want colleges to identify the best/most intelligent/most talented kids, or just those who conform?
"Stop requiring" and "stop considering" are two different things. Will they do the latter? If not, then students still have to take the test, but they opt not to submit their scores if their not very impressive. It also means admissions officers will most likely assume students who don't submit scores had substandard scores and that will color their evaluation of those students. If they were serious they'd prevent students from even submitting scores.
Here's an idea: make the freshman class approximately twice the size of the other years, and set a fixed curriculum for all first-year students. Front-load all the non-major-specific "core" classes or something. Stipulate that first-year classes must be graded on a curve. Then, after the first year, decline to invite back approximately half the freshman class. Keep the highest-performing half.
Lololololol.
I have lived for more than a year in each of Colorado, California, Georgia (USA), Guatemala, Germany, Belgium and Luxemburg. This has to be one of the most laughable claims I have ever seen. It is harder to geht rich in Europe, but also harder to get poor and middle class life is mich more comfortable here.
You managed to find one single metric where the US is stronger than Europe, using a non-peer reviewed methodology to measure the value of social services. Bravo. Meanwhile every other measurement of well being puts most of Europe ahead of most of the US.
But I'll admit the conviction of your superiotity must feel nice.
yes lower the requirements to can you get a loan? the banks will love that.
These tests are just data points, and no single data point should be the determining factor in admission. For Univ of Chicago, there's no down side. Their grads won't see fewer job offers unless the school starts to pump out lower quality grads for a few years. And, they'll probably get a lot more applications from kids who just don't want all the stress of taking the exams.
Just another day in Paradise
teach the test is bad for the US education system!
The bottom line here is they can admit dumb legacy and rich kids without having to sacrifice their average SAT score.
Unless you have secure funding lined up, you're probably not getting in without SAT/ACT scores.
All that matters these days for college admission is your gender identity and skin color.
the whole "wealth inequality" thing. When it comes to quality of life America isn't even in the top 10.
Put another way, what the hell do I care if there's 100 billionaires in driving distance of me if I'm living in a slum?
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and as excuse to bring in H1-Bs instead of hiring perfectly qualified Americans for jobs that don't need a degree then I see no problem with that solution.
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Here in Canada we simply rely on your efforts in grade 12. So we dont have any SAT style approach and it works out very well. The same is true for many other first world countries. It's nice to see USA finally catching up with the rest of the world in common sense. Now if we can just get you guys to start using the elegant (and simple) Metric system and not that mess called Imperial.
It is easier to apply personal bias to a video submission than a standardized test.
The person may have a name that implies color or gender, but a video shows them.
A cell phone video is cheaper than a test, since everyone can afford a good phone.
.. and have a ton of grade inflation in high school.
Well anyway, they'll have their diversity good and hard, as no self-respecting academic would want to go to a school that lets in just anyone.
right wing think tanks use to keep their billionaire sponsor's taxes low. By every single metric European countries beat the United States with the exception of most Millionaires. Europe is doing a much, much better job of regulating income equality.
The US, thanks to our dumb as dirt "Protestant Work Ethic" and a healthy dose of classism and racism dividing the working class into easily manageable chunks (google "Southern Strategy", no it's not a myth, it's depressingly well documented) works harder for less. We call it "Trickle Down Economics" and it doesn't work and it never did, but we keep Chasing that Dragon.
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and the work and tests there in. Basically it appears that SAT scores have little impact on grades except at the very, very top end (e.g. you score a perfect, in which case you're probably not going to your local public Uni). Let the kids in and see how they do. A lot of the high SAT guys and gals drop out while a lot of the lower ones graduate. Humans are more complex than a test score.
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Have you ever checked out the test score differences between owls and larks when both are forced into the "discipline" of waking up early? It's about a full letter grade to the disadvantage of the owls, when the test is taken early in the day (the effect lessons as the day continues, because the owls do finally stop yawning in mid-afternoon).
Owl performance recovers in full when allowed to sleep until their natural wake time. Check out Why We Sleep (2017) by Matthew P. Walker. It's the most authoritative general account of sleep presently available.
In most high schools (those which have stuck with traditional start times), because of age-related changes in circadian rhythm, almost all the students are owls, but some are more owls than others, and their grades all suffer (but the owl owls suffer more than the lark owls).
But sure, make rise time your go-to proxy for having the right stuff.
Why did they use ceramic pillows in Ancient China and as recently as the Ming Dynasty? — August 2017
she took it twice. Once there was profit to be had you could take it as many times as you want as long as your money's good. It felt like a scam to me and I'm happy to see it go.
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they're a by product of massive federal funding cuts. Thanks to that schools have cut back and they're getting more qualified applicants than they have places. They predicted this when I was in college 20 years ago but everybody scoffed at it because they wanted those sweet, sweet tax cuts (jokes on them, those only went to the top 1%). You'd know this if you had a kid in college (I do).
And it's been shown that people with black sounding names are much less likely to have applications reviewed. Mr D'Andre's name is likely to hurt him. If anything the video will be to his advantage. You're parroting a false talking point that comes out of right wing think tanks whose primary goal is to distract you from real economic issues with a persecution complex. Time to get woke my friend.
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You admit a student, get his loan money and then he fails in the first year.
A worse scenario: you let the student graduate with some bulshit degree which will never be accepted by the job market and let him hang with a huge debt.
A political scenario: indoctrinate the student with communism and add a new head to the coming revolution.
The casino never loses.
Sure, let all the dumbasses in, too. Diversity is the Devil!
In all of the lamentations about colleges and their high prices, political correctness and other woes, no one ever mentions there are alternatives to college that are often times much better. Not everyone is meant to go to college. There are trades that pay much, much higher and far more quickly than going to college, emerging 4-6 years later in massive debt. Anecdotes that show this is true, as I know these people:
1. Friend of mine learned welding at a trade school that costs a fraction of even an associate degree. He took to it like a natural. He secured a great job working 4-5 months in Alaska's warmer season pipe welding for the oil industry. He's back in town now and he has already cleared $90k. He's done this for the last few years. His wife works part time to simply keep busy. They have three kids. He spends all summer with his kids, hunts, fishes, and has 6-7 months doing nothing.
2. Friend of mine became a plumber's apprentice 5-6 years ago, and again was a very quick learner. He secured the right certs along the way and went off on his own with two other guys. They formed a small plumbing company which now has almost 10 people in employment. He clears $100k a year just for himself. He works no nights, no weekends, and he's not on call. His guys get 40% of whatever they can generate.
3. Friends of mine was an electrician in the military and loved it. He got out, took a couple of advanced courses at his local community college on the cheap. He passed his Master's Electrician state license and went off on his own. First year was a little slow, but he made do. Second and third years saw rapid growth and he hired two other guys. He clears $2000/week for himself after taxes. This man has zero education beyond HS and a few courses. He just secured a deal with a local construction company to wire a 2000+ apartment complex which in itself will net him several hundred thousand dollars.
Takeaway: College leaves you in massive debt immediately. The trades do not. The trades make great money, you get decent exercise and you are not at the whim of Wall Street, outsourcing to Turdistan, or other outsourcing. You can largely set your own hours, and most importantly, you are in charge of your own destiny. None of the men above are rocket scientists. All of them are simply driven to be their own men, to decide for themselves what is best. They all have great family lives with their wives and kids, and they are all financially secure. Dave, the welder, lives far below his means, and his wife and he save 50% of his take home. He's 35. Even if his pay were to never increase, he saves almost $50k a year. He wants to retire by 50 and he can likely do so. So can you or anyone else who is willing to be the master of his own destiny. College is simply training to be a corporate drone. Like Dave, I'm about to get out of IT and into the trades using my IT skills and experience to deliver unique solutions to the trades. Anyone can do this...
4. Move to a state that heavily subsidizes college. Work at a shit job for a year so you get permanent residency. Go to college on the public dime, graduate with a small amount of debt, profit!
I'm really smart, I just can't prove it in a monitored, controlled environment! Objective reality IS white cis hetero xian male privilege.
You missed the point. College is not always the answer. The guys above never wanted to go to college and they make more already than if they did, and *THEY* control their own destiny. There are tons of people that want nothing to do with sitting in an office, dealing with politics, end users, gossip, all the crap diversity BS meetings, forced to pretend like you "accept" the flaming homosexual that won't STFU about homosexual cruises. No thank you. Guys like my friends above want to do it their way and they do, all while not being in debt along the way. The welder guy above already owns his house, which is modest and sits on almost 15 acres. His taxes are almost nothing, since he lives outside city limits and had it zoned agriculture by simply putting a few goats and two donkeys on the property. The goats "mow" and the donkeys are fun for the kids and useful for working, hunting, and carrying loads.
the article is about a University ending the practice of using SAT & ACT scores in admission criteria. The fact that they noticed some racial bias in the scores is one factor in that decision. The fact that those scores don't appear to be an accurate predictor of academic success is another.
Again, right wing talking points and wedge issues. We're all completely missing the point, which is that the 1% have cut funding to education so they can pocket the money as tax cuts while using cheap foreign labor to avoid paying for an educated workforce.
Every, and I mean everything, is always about the economy. If you and I weren't getting so screwed by wealth inequality you wouldn't give 2 shits about this. Because you wouldn't be at every other working stiff's throat for the scraps left by the billionaires. Face it, you've been had, again.
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But, being surrounded by a narrow ethnic set in college is NOT going to help you relate to the real world. I'm not bashing Asians, just saying that the work world is largely a social endeavor (except for narrow specialties), and without exposure to more ethnic groups, you'd be at a disadvantage.
Table-ized A.I.
I am glad to see my former university starting to smarten up. There is more to add to this such as the students entering UC used to be and probably still are required on campus to take a series of exams theoretically to place them in appropriate courses based upon how they did on the placement exams but in reality they do the exact opposite. When I took them, I was put into a series of boring sociology and political science classes and placed out of the the fine arts and so forth courses. I did not know who I was to become for the four years at UC as I was shunted into the hard sciences graduating in BSC in physiology. Until four years later did I finally have the opportunity to confront fine arts and went back to start once again and become an artist and eventually a professor in that field. I was essentially denied the opportunity at UC to explore but was funnelled without choice into these other placement courses because crazily I was not interested in them! The auC College had a certain set of cours credits required and then one can choose a major but the major I would have chosen was never presented to me as it was to those with less talent in fine arts ...it is bizarre if it still works that way but every year when I am asked to give to UC I give to a university that gives its students freedom to choose their life that I was denied.
I've aced every test I've ever taken without studying. My SAT was 99th percentile in 1958. This taught me to be lazy as shit and just coast, which bodes ill for serious study and real life. Yeah, college was wasted on me, although I was a damn fine secretary. Tests, unfortunately, aren't everything.
Mass market schools are businesses pandering to the lowest common denominator that can get a loan or grant.
The unqualified people they encourage to attend for useless degrees are direct victims of exploitation by the school system, saddled with a lifetime of debt and regret.
Civilization as a whole suffers when resources that could be used to educate engineering students is squandered on PC nonsense.
Can anyone honestly believe that people in central Africa would choose somebody that claims they should be proud to have no clean water over an engineer that can teach them how to make clean water?
I eventually found a place in an OK state school, but I didn't lose the C+ habit. I graduated the the minimum acceptable grade to achieve a diploma :/
There is an old joke that applies. "What do they call the person who graduates last in their class from medical school? Doctor." Unless you plan to go into academia the only time your grades really matter is if you are trying to get a competitive job right out of college with limited work experience. After that nobody gives a shit if you had mediocre grades. I haven't had anyone ask in a job interview what my grades were for 20 years across numerous jobs.
That is entirely incorrect. I can memorize things all day long and regurgitate them back at you for weeks and sometimes months. I could ace every test in every subject and still almost failed out of high school because I refused to do homework.
I'm afraid it's quite correct. Schools test memorization ability far more than they test analytical ability in general. Yes if you never do homework you still can fail classes. Nobody claimed otherwise. I was lazy about the homework too which is why my grades generally were poor. But the fact remains that someone who can memorize well (and can be bothered to do so) will generally outperform someone who doesn't memorize well even if they are good at figuring out problems.
"Diversity" is an indicator, not a tool. If our assumptions about the distribution of talent are correct, the primary-secondary education system is working, and society is sexually and ethnically unbiased, the demographics of universities should mirror that of society. Trying to artificially increase "diversity" will distort everything and can only damage the education system as a whole.
And now I am a parent... and I wonder what I am going to say to my daughter when she gets a C in a class she doesn't like in school.
My take on it generally is that I don't care so much what the grade is but I care very much how much effort was put forth. Sometimes you work really hard for a C and other times you get an A with barely any effort. I also plan to point out that grades don't define her but they do matter for some things. They matter for college admissions. They sometimes matter to employers. I can be very pleased with a C in a hard class where she put in a lot of effort especially if she doesn't like the class.
I hope I can keep it cool and tell her with a straight face that school performance doesn't matter, and all the useful learning she is ever going to do is going to be self led.
School performance does matter, just not in the way they pretend it does. Good grades tend to mean you worked hard. I would argue despite my previous comments that grades in subjects like math and science and writing and a few others really do matter even in the real world. If my child gets a C in a music class I'm only upset if they obviously didn't really try. If they get a C in math though I'm not going to be as forgiving though again effort matters most. They don't have to like it but not liking something isn't an excuse for not doing your best. I know I didn't have that reinforced adequately by my parents and I don't plan to make that mistake. (I'm sure I'll make plenty of my own mistakes...)
Found a Californian...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.