<p>“Speaking of gaming the system–THIS. As I have said before, every single thing that an upper-middle-class family (white, Asian, or other) can do to ensure their child’s success sets up a false comparison against a kid who can’t afford the money or time to take the SAT/ACT more than once. Superscore? Really? If we want a fair comparison, maybe we should only allow students to take each test one time. Then let’s see how wide the gap is. I am guessing it would be much smaller.”</p>
<p>Agree with you. The College Board has a very good reason to support Superscore–it boosts their revenue. I don’t know why the colleges accept it though.</p>
<p>I’m on board with the idea of only taking the test once, but why do you think the gap would be smaller? Poor students get fee waivers to take the test and students from better-off URM families would be just as inclined to retake the test as other students – unless the lower score threshold is “good enough” to get into the elite schools; if so, why bother?</p>
<p>That is why many people propose other approaches to help URM students. The Texas 10% approach is a good plan. No problem here, and it does benefit people from lower SES. The problem is that many schools want to use race/ethnicit only. As when Texas defends having a wealty URM in place of a poor non-URM student. Texas uses this approach after the 10%. Many schools use this approach from the get go. Which schools? For a starter, look a those that filled an Amicus Brief to the Texas case.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s just a matter of the cost to take the test. If a poor student doesn’t have an easy way to get to the testing site, or has to work on Saturday mornings, going even once might be a challenge.</p>
<p>Maybe I see the idea as “aptitude” as being more about capability than accomplishment (which would diminish the effects of good versus bad schools). I see taking the test once as a better measure of aptitude than taking and retaking it with a lot of coaching. If we truly want to measure academic POTENTIAL, maybe we should rely on IQ tests. I don’t know.</p>
<p>A- This is my paraphrasing of the point a lot of people on this board are making</p>
<p>B- The foreigners come to the U.S. to study because:</p>
<p>1) per capita, the U.S. has more college slots than just about any country in the world:</p>
<p>University students per million population:
3314 U.S.
1343 China
1205 India
249 Indonesia
199 Brazil
143 Russia
127 Japan</p>
<p>The top universities in India and China have a much, much lower admission rate than Harvard.</p>
<p>2) Intl students are generally full-pay, so for undergrad studies, its the rich ones who come to the U.S. because they cannot make the cut in their home county</p>
<p>3) The admissions requirements are easier in the U.S. The SAT or TOEFL exam only take a few hours, as compared to taking the A-Levels or earning the I.B.</p>
<p>4) English is the lingua franca </p>
<p>So I guess the bottom line is, YES. In essence, U.S. admission standards are comparatively lax.</p>
<p>@Philo, seems the Ivies are part of the problem then. How can a child in a bad school be judged on knowledge of a subject that may not have been taught well?</p>
<p>GMT I disagree with your paraphrase, I think you made a rather large leap from anything said in this thread.</p>
<p>I agree on the international thing. I know a number of intl students who are studying here because they didn’t make the cut for the best Us in their home country. </p>
<p>I also know some who are here because they want to experience an American college - AA and all.</p>
<p>If you read the case (or some good digests of the case) you will clearly see that the issue is not full pay. The issue is to create a “critical mass” of URMs that has not only low SES students (who are likely to come from the 10%) but also wealthy URM students so that others do not associate URM = poor. Another reason is to protect SAT scores, because plans lake the 10% cause the average SAT scores of admitted students to drop (this last issue, some of the Justices really disliked).</p>
Well I’m not convinced that my according-to=-IQ-tests gifted kid knows his multiplications tables, but his math teacher nevertheless wrote a recommendation saying that he understood math better than most of the kids who got better grades on the tests. He ended up with a 3 in BC Calc - (4 on the AB half) not perfect, but nothing to be ashamed of either, for a kid with LDs. He’s at Tufts, currently studying Arabic in Jordan. Doing fine thank you. I’m glad our education system recognizes kids like him.</p>
<p>And yes, he was in gifted class in elementary school.</p>
<p>If you were only allowed to take the test once, rich kids would just take more practice tests.</p>
<p>“So “under-represented” means they are in colleges in numbers less than their % of the population as a whole.”</p>
<p>Sorry, I wasn’t clear … “and they’re underrepresented because they’re not competitive with members of more-qualified groups.” An alternate bitterheart view is “any group offered a boost must, by definition, be unqualified compared to other groups.”</p>
<p>They are saying they want to build their own classes free of formulas - 10% of high schools, racial quota - whatever. I think it’s pretty clear they don’t want anyone telling them what to do in their own admissions process and they are afraid UT losing this case might lead to that.</p>
<p>It’s notable that while we talk about AA we are NOT talking about a system where the government is saying to colleges, you MUST enroll a certain % of URMs. We’re talking about colleges being able to do so. At least the private ones.</p>
<p>Colleges do like full-pay students - some colleges, in not being need-blind, come out and say so. Some are financially well off enough not to have to take that into account. When I say perhaps they like wealthy URMs because they are both URMs and full-pay, I am speculating, of course. Hence the “perhaps” at the beginning of the sentence.</p>
<p>But I don’t know why people complain about test prepping. There is no one stopping a kid from buying a $10 Barrons SAT test prep book and practicing. </p>
<p>People don’t seem to complain about atheletes practicing to get into the Olympics or musicians practicing to get into Julliard.</p>