<p>The Super-Stat proposal deserves credit for being thought-provoking and yet I doubt that this model will ever be seriously considered in US college admissions because it will meet tremendous resistance from all directions and all parties including college admissions professionals, students, parents, college alums and AA advocates, etc. </p>
<p>Does the US college admission system need reform? I believe it certainly does. The issues are complex and the difficulty is how to implement reforms in college admissions and where to start; there may be millions of ideas and drastically different view points. Every year, college admission officials and high school guidance counselors go to conferences and institutes to talk about college admissions. However, the general public such as students, parents and educators not in the profession of college admissions rarely have any opportunity to voice their concerns and opinions that are vital to college admissions reform in our country. This forum is a good place to offer new ideas, debate different approaches and propose constructive solutions to address problems, flaws and aspects of unfairness in the current admissions system.</p>
<p>This is probably one of the stupider ideas I have ever heard. There is far too strong an aversion to subjectivity on of these boards. Evaluating subjectivity is what makes us human. Otherwise we would just be super crappy computers.
Basic plan:
Suck all real learning out of the educational experience by forcing students to base their learning on rigid standardized tests. I can self study 5 APs and get all fives but it doesn’t really mean a thing. It’s a test of patience and memorization, not brains.
Reward people who take tests well (a skill not necessary in any place other than school), while ignoring GPA, the academic statistic that correlates most closely with college performance, and all factors that evaluate a candidate’s capacity to function in the real world. </p>
<p>Result: Maybe it is just me, but I would never go. It just sounds boring and oppressive. Once you leave school, nobody cares about your AP scores or your SATs. What matters is your ability to function and contribute to a real world community. Ignoring supposedly “subjective” factors ignores the reality that it is these things that will make or break a person in their life. At what point do you begin rewarding people for the abilities that actually matter?</p>
Please, just stop now. If you think every student in the US can get a 5 on an AP test you are kidding yourself. The smartest students will always have a competitive advantage in tests which require thinking, whether it be pure memorization or not. </p>
<p>
Umm, the academic statistic which correlates most closely with college performance is not high school GPA. It’s proficiency in taking AP tests…</p>
<p>And who said college was about the real world? I’ve learned far more in the “real world” than I did in college. In fact, college might be as far from the real world as possible. No responsibilities really, get drunk every weekend. Do whatever you want. Just need to maintain cash flow (in many cases this means calling up the parents).</p>
<p>
Please, what makes you think that simply going by scores means they won’t be able to interact? Maybe at the absolute upper tier, but it levels off quite quickly. In fact, many schools already use a pure numbers based system and the people are able to interact quite well. Amazing.</p>
<p>With the average class SAT at 2397, and calculations of Pi being done to the 10 millionth digit, and the school’s well-known PUFFM (Pi University’s Future Fields Medalists) program, this might well be the type of school you’d end up with…or not</p>
<p>My favorite line is the one about their four Fields medalists coming out of the freshman class of 17 last year.</p>
<p>P.S. This was a class assignment my son had for his junior year graphic arts class in high school in 2004. He has kept the whole sit and its links active, though, because he likes the joke aspect. However, he had to take down the picture link to the bookstore, which used an unauthorized picture of Stanford’s bookstore, after he was asked to do so very politely by administrators from that school.</p>
<p>“If you had 100 open seats and applicants consisting of 20 with 6300, 35 with 6000, 55 with 5000, how would you choose between identical scorers?”</p>
<p>I would use a series of tie-breakers:
Students receiving the SAT in a single sitting would be first.
<p>“This is probably one of the stupider ideas I have ever heard.”</p>
<p>We realize that SSU is not for everyone. There are many fine institutions that cater to persons who need consideration of subjective factors to balance deficiencies in performance on standardized tests.</p>
<p>Since SSU seems to be premised ENTIRELY on the notion that there exists a strong correlation between high SATs and “identifying students capable of handling a broad range of difficult college subjects at a high level” - could someone please refresh my memory as to how strong this correlation really is? Is the following true or not: </p>
<p>I wonder if SSU would be more successful if it were redesigned to instead be a one-year mandatory program at “Meritocracy University,” which must be passed by first year students in order to remain at the school, ie, students must meet the “expected” performance as predicted by their SAT scores before being allowed to continue their studies; “academic probation” may or may not be an option in this scenario. (Oh wait…this is similar to what many colleges do already, isn’t it by assigning grades?) </p>
<p>Of course, we should also do away with GPA completely at SSU/Meritocracy U and continue to ignore the “actual performance” of its students (which was a non-issue for admission), and should opt instead for a continued emphasis on theoretical learning abilities and merely administer more standardized tests each year to measure student’s “expected performance” - perhaps SAT III, SAT IV, SAT V and so on? And obviously the scores on these super super SATs would be the basis for continued enrollment each year </p>
<p>Although, hopefully these students whose actual performance abilities are never truly being tested will also never actually be required to “perform” outside of the “theoretical” learning bubble at SSU. [but I am not sure how best to market this aspect of SSU?]</p>
<p>Mr. Payne: “Umm, the academic statistic which correlates most closely with college performance is not high school GPA. It’s proficiency in taking AP tests…”</p>
<p>You sound pretty confident but I’m not so sure…
From Harvard: Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics Eric Mazur, who served on the development committee for AP Physics from 1995-2000, said that the correlation between AP science exam scores and performance in college is weak. He said, "In my class, I have had students with absolutely no physics background do better than people who make a 5 on the AP exam,” Mazur, who co-teaches the Physics Department’s introductory-level year-long sequence, said “They are geared as a model that rewards ‘plug and chuck’ and memorization,” Mazur said. “You look at a problem and say what equation should be used without understanding.” </p>
<p>Furthermore, as noted by scansmom:
The predictive ability (or r squared) of the SAT I is just .22, meaning the test explains only 22% of the variation in freshman grades. With a correlation of .54, high school grades alone do a better job, explaining almost 30% of the variance in first-year college performance.</p>
<p>In other words, you would be ignoring the most important factor while superscoring two essentially meaningless ones.</p>
<p>There are a set of schools that do not use subjective criteria at all, and are world-renowned in the high tech community - the Indian Institutes of Technology, aka IITs. They don’t use standardized tests, or school GPAs, or ECs, or recommendations. You take 4 hour comprehensive exams in Physics, Chemistry, and Math, and also a test in English that is only used to ensure you can attend an English-medium school. The exams are extremely complex, and change every year. The top 3000 or so students get in. The graders don’t even know your name or gender - only an ID number shows up on your exam papers - this is to avoid any bias at all in the grading.</p>
<p>I went through this process, attended an IIT, and my 2 daughters are now college age - one a soph at Harvard, one just decided on Stanford, so doing an apples-to-apples comparison of top schools under 2 systems, I think both approaches have their merits, and their flaws. There’s no perfect system, in short.</p>
<p>The US is pretty much the only major country in the world that makes heavy use of purely subjective/non-academic criteria (including race and gender) in university admissions. In most countries, admission decisions are based solely on secondary school grades/final exams and/or competitive entrance exams. Some universities like Cambridge and Oxford also use interviews, which could perhaps be considered at least a partially subjective criterion, but, even in those cases, interviews tend to be of a technical nature, i.e more like an oral exam actually.</p>
<p>Hmmm…an interesting idea, but I don’t think that it would be right for me. Wasn’t there someone who proposed a college in which admissions are completely holistic?</p>
<p>still the sarcasm seems to not be setting in with the users…that or the users have lost sight of the original intent or the OP didn’t realize Swift was being facetious.</p>
<p>Swift was not being facetious. He was employing satire to address real issues. What I’m trying to do here is a thought experiment.</p>
<p>“I went through this process, attended an IIT, and my 2 daughters are now college age - one a soph at Harvard, one just decided on Stanford, so doing an apples-to-apples comparison of top schools under 2 systems, I think both approaches have their merits, and their flaws. There’s no perfect system, in short.”</p>
<p>I’d be interested to know what sort of students ended up at IIT. Were they the “featureless drones” that we’ve heard would predominate at a stats-only college? Were they test-taking specialists who were unsuccessful in actual classes?</p>
<p>Anecdotal evidence, of course, but the super stat kids Ive met have been a bit more than the sum of their fantastic test scores. Inventors, lab rats, gifted musicians, artists, and writers, many of them award winners. In sum, a very eclectic and diverse bunch who appear to be keeping their heads above water at their respective colleges while doing a lot more than just studying and taking tests. </p>
<p>Just as there is no reason to assume that many lower stat kids wont be as or more successful than a lot of those super stat drones, Ive seen little evidence to suggest that the super stat kids wont do quite well for themselves. With one set (of my anecdotal evidence) graduating this year, Ive been fascinated by the academic and career paths that many of them are taking. A couple of future lawyers and doctors like Hunt assumed, some Wall Street-type consultants as suggested by Token, but most headed to grad school.</p>
<p>I have to admit that Im quite curious to see what the next few years reveal about these kids and my next sampling of anecdotal evidence. :)</p>
<p>My SAT is well above my college’s 75th percentile but I am currently in the bottom half of the class.</p>
<p>I go to a college where there are a lot of high achievers who went through high school with this ‘grade obsession’. I never felt this obsession in high school and chose to slack off freshman year. There have been AP classes where I would consistently get B/B- in high school but get a 5 on the AP itself. How a person will succeed in college won’t always matter by how well he or she did on a standardized test, it matters by the decisions the person makes throughout his or her time there. My failures have entirely been my fault and I accept that but am optimistic about the future, if this correlation proves to be true. I can say that I had a fun freshman year, even if I wasn’t successful academically.</p>
<p>I know personally that if SSU didn’t have a strong party scene or debate/drama/quiz bowl, even if I were to get in, I would probably pick elsewhere. I am personally for a greater focus on standardized testing and don’t believe that a university such as SSU would be a boring grind university. I know of many interesting people who are far from grinds who aced standardized tests. These are often people who won’t have the grades to get into many elite colleges though.</p>
<p>I have no doubt that if a university could attract a student body consisting exclusively of “super stat kids”, it would be a vibrant, interesting place, although it might lack visual artists, drama, athletes. However, most of the people who would make it a vibrant, interesting place have no need for SSU, because they are already engaged in making Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, Amherst, Swarthmore, etc., vibrant and interesting places, along with all of the other non-super stat kids there who are super in some other dimension.</p>
<p>The assumption (satirical or not) in this thread is that high-stat kids would flock to SSU. I don’t think that would be true at all. I suspect they would be very ambivalent about it, and that it would be a last-resort kind of place for those few rejected by all 15 of the other colleges to which they applied.</p>
<p>Of all the things that need fixing in the world, the plight of high-testing high school students who find themselves choosing between Duke and Cal Tech rather than among HYPS, etc., is far, far down the list.</p>
<p>EDIT: Cross-posted with above, which illustrates my point.</p>
<p>I have a question about SATs, and I ask because I really dont know. Two students. Student A is a girl who lives in a smallish town in North Dakota. She is intelligent, intellectual inquisitive, likes to learn, well-read, good writing skills, able to grasp abstract concepts, good analytical skills, and very capable of expressing her thoughts. But she attends a small high school that doesnt have the size or financial resources to offer a broad range of AP classes (or maybe even any), but provides a good, solid, and well-rounded education. Student B is a girl who lives in Connecticut, with all the same characteristics as student A, but who attends a competitive private school with a wide range of honors and AP classes. Question: is there something structural in the SAT (or ACT) that would mean a student like B would consistently score significantly higher than a student like A? Or do the exams measure a certain level of skills and knowledge that both our theoretical students might well have. In other words, is it possible for student A to score as high as student B. If so, the only other factor in the formula is AP classes. My concern would be that student A would not have the number of AP classes to raise her super-score, and could be locked out of the admission process simply by virtue of her zip code (one of the other circumstances mentioned in an earlier post). I guess Im also not certain that student A is ill-prepared to handle the challenging courses at SSU, and would need remedial education. In fact, she may have personal characteristics or skills that would enable her to actually do <em>better</em> than student B. Of course, since those arent measurable and cant be plugged into a formula, they do her absolutely no good.</p>
<p>well then why call it a modest proposal Hunt? s’s and giggles? or where you trying to emulate some of the amazing prose that Swift did write. And perhaps while Swift did use satire, satire is in its very nature facetious.</p>