C- now a failing grade in engineering

sakky
Tue, 30 Dec 2008 02:47:21 +0000

That’s the only problem… you can’t predict everyone’s outcome by statistics. Recent history of similarly ranked students isn’t always accurate, and especially for state’s like mine. Under Texas state law, the top 10% of any public high school is accepted into any public U within the state. Now when you have schools like UT-Austin and TAMU-College Station within the state, many of the top 10% students who are satisfied going to those engineering programs (as they are both ranked in the top 20) don’t take any standardized tests seriously. Why should they? It’s simply required, not necessarily needed for acceptance. Just one example.



It is of course true that I won’t be able to predict everybody’s outcomes, and I’m not proposing that we can. All I am proposing is a system that is better than the current admissions system, and let’s face it, the current system is pretty mediocre. Right now, as you have seen yourself, under the current system, plenty of admitted people won’t make it to graduation, and plenty of other people who were rejected might have actually successfully graduated. The reason for this is simple: current admission criteria are not predicated on admitting those who are actually going to graduate, except in an indirect sense. High school GPA and SAT scores do have some correlation to graduation likelihood, but clearly not as much as would the variables that would be computed from a retrospective statistical analysis of past students.

The fact is, we have to use some sort of admissions system. Nobody is seriously proposing open admissions; some people must be rejected. Therefore we ought to be rejecting those people who are likely to fail anyway, as determined by statistical data mining analysis. Now, will it be able to predict everybody’s behavior perfectly? No, but neither does the current system. A new system would, by definition, be at least as good as the current system, for if absolutely no variables other than overall high school GPA and SAT score were found to be significant (a highly unlikely outcome), then we could just stick with the current setup.