Public community colleges exist to do exactly that – give everyone a chance (open admission, no lottery), regardless of prior preparation or whatever, even if considerable remediation is required. Of course, a chance does automatically mean success, since the student still needs to do the work to pass each class and do so with enough courses to earn an associates degree or transfer to a university for a bachelor’s degree.
Are you opposed to having a state’s college and university system offering such a pathway to those whose prior preparation happens to be severely lacking?
Minimum frosh admission requirements for CSU or UC are only geometry and algebra 2, although UC applicants and those applying to some CSU campuses or majors really should go further to be more competitive for admission, and/or be better prepared for their majors.
I didn’t note it clearly but I meant for an engineering path. Please correct me if I’m wrong but for that, I think the course sequence is very regimented and it would be more problematic to try to finish in 4 years if one is starting with Trig or PreCalc. Most examples I saw start with Calc1. I’m thinking you might need a 5th year at a UC (and I’m clueless re: CSU) but again, you might know this better than me.
If anyone in this thread has advocated for what you describe, I didn’t see it. Test optional is not a lottery system. Instead other parts of the application are used to make the admission decision in place of the test.
That said, as I noted earlier in the thread the average admit rate at 4-year public colleges is ~80%. Most public colleges in the US are not highly selective. Students attending such colleges do come from a variety of HS backgrounds, and many do need to start at different levels. A similar statement could also made about highly selective colleges, such as Harvard and Stanford, which both have a wide variety of possible starting points for freshmen math/science courses and opportunities for students from weaker HS backgrounds to catch up. Different students starting college at different levels is often expected and is not considered a failure. More important is what happens to students at the college, rather than at what level they begin. Are they academically successful at the college?
The UC and CSU engineering majors do assume starting in calculus 1 (or higher). Finishing in 8 semesters is unlikely for those who start in a math course lower than calculus 1. At UCs and some CSUs like CPSLO, stopping math at algebra 2 makes it less likely to be admitted to an engineering major. However, at the non-impacted CSUs where engineering majors are not impacted (e.g. Chico, Sacramento, San Francisco), it is possible to be admitted to an engineering major with only the base CSU course requirements (including math up to geometry and algebra 2) with a 2.5 HS GPA as recalculated for CSU purposes. But obviously, that is along the lines of “give everyone a chance” model.
Obviously, there is also the community college path that exists, and is well used. Indeed, the California public universities’ business models assume that about a third of graduates originally started at community colleges.
A basic early lesson of data analysis is that if you are looking for a particular answer, you can usually find it if you try hard enough.
If your goal is to find a model that diminishes the power of the SAT, it’s possible to do so, because as you add additional factors that are correlated with the SAT, the explanatory power of the SAT will diminish.
Likewise, if your goal is to find a model that diminishes the power of HS GPA, it’s possible to do so for exactly the same reason. For example, if you looked at family income percentiles within a school, I expect that would correlate quite well with HS GPA. If we can find enough factors that explain away the HS GPA, should we ignore HS GPA? That’s silly to suggest of course, but it shows that because a model is mathematically correct does not mean it is either appropriate or sound.
For example, if we are talking about models that can be used to influence admissions, why is URM a control in Vigdor’s model, given that URM status cannot be considered? Why is gender a control? Why in the world is ED a control?
Also let’s remember, that even after all these controls, the predictive power of the SAT is still still on par with HS GPA (Model 4).
He didn’t explain Model 5, but in Model 6 he mentions the elephant in the room that people like to pretend doesn’t exist, which is that the high school a student attends has more impact on college success than anything else. And because high school quality is correlated with SAT test results, the predictive power of the SAT decreases once again. To compensate, he could have looked at SAT score within school, which likely would have significant explanatory power, and might have increased R^2 further, but he didn’t do so.
But a person who’s done a lot of data analysis, and is looking for the truth wherever it leads them, wouldn’t tack this on this major factor after all the others have determined. They would start with this one, and then see which ones should be added to increase explanatory power. I bet a very good model can be made using simply quality of school, income within school, and SAT within school, and HS GPA. And given these four factors, I expect the explanatory power of most of his controls would disappear. But using such a model to select students is immoral, because a student has no control over the high school they attend. And for that same reason, it’s invalid to tack it on at the end if the purpose is to have a model that influences admission decisions.
I know you are really attached to his model, but I hope I explained to you why you shouldn’t treat it as THE ONE TRUE MODEL. Like all models that deal with messy data, it offers insight more than prescriptions.
Understood. That’s what you do in your opening post where you compared using test scores to using GPA alone, rather than looking at how admissions decisions are actually made. That’s not how admissions works, and doing so would be “nonsensical:”
Vigdor said it’s nonsensical to compare test scores and GPAs one on one when in reality they are pieces of an increasingly varied puzzle of admission considerations.
“If the question at hand is ‘If colleges can only base their admissions decisions on one thing, what should that thing be?’ then sure, the data shows test scores are a little better than high school grades,” he said. “But that’s not the question relevant to this policy debate. It does happen to be the question that delivers a good answer for the testing companies.”
As for the rest, I have no attachment to any particular model. There are obviously a number of different ways to choose a class, depending on the mission of a particular school.
In addition to the fact that schools vary greatly in the number of APs offered and the number of APs a student is allowed to take. By way of example, my daughter’s (public) high school offers about 15 AP classes total. Students are not allowed to take any AP classes freshman and sophomore year, then are limited to a max of 3 classes junior year and senior year. A lot of private schools, from what I’ve heard, are moving away from AP classes entirely. So this too would make putting great weight on AP scores problematic, unless we want to encourage students self-studying and then panicking to find a place that will let them take the exam so that they have some scores to submit.
The elite private schools that are doing this (and not using other advanced testing frameworks like IB) are presumably those which are well known to and favored by elite colleges, so their rigor is not in question when their students apply to those colleges.
Showing AP 5 scores when applying to an elite college may matter more to a student from a more ordinary high school which the elite college may be more likely to question the rigor of.
But wasn’t the origin of AP a way for elite high schools to show how advanced (some of) their students were, so that they could have advanced placement in (elite) colleges? If so, then it looks like now, elite high schools see AP as too “ordinary”, so they need to drop it to differentiate themselves from the “ordinary” high schools.
As Selingo notes in his NYMag piece, as we’ve tightened on SAT math testing (but kept a similar bar in all other areas), our graduation rates have gone up across all demographic groups in recent years.
As Leonhardt mentioned in his piece, we ran our study on 15+ years of history, when we had more variance in test scores. I’m not sure what Caltech did (that’s a genuine “I’m not sure.”)
However, I will say that every time I see our 25th percentile is 790 it shocks me, because, as I wrote years ago, we really don’t look at the test scores and say “ah yes, I prefer an 800 to a 790, and a 790 to a 780,” and so on. We look at many different factors that create a composite of academic preparedness, but I genuinely never look and say “ohohoho, 800, hooray.” The only time I think it’s ever even salient to me is in true DITR cases, i.e. “holy crap, how did this child of migrant farmworkers in rural Texas get an 800?”
And, as we said in our blog post, there are other tests our research shows as predictive than the SAT (e.g. if a student gets, say, a 5 on BC calculus but has weaker SAT math testing for whatever reason, we “trust” the BC 5). The thing is, as we’ve said in our posts (and as discussed in this thread), AP testing is more restricted/regressive than the SAT/ACT. The most “predictive” thing would probably be if we made all applicants take the math diagnostic, but it would be so esoteric and regressive it wouldn’t be worth the marginal gain in predictivity.
Even though DL was very complimentary of us in this episode, I was disappointed by this aspect of it, i.e. the “shill for the tests” bit. There is a relentless elitism, masked as a focus on meritocracy, but really an obsession with name-brand institutions. But in the domains he mentions — like health — there are any number of counterexamples (e.g. Kizzy Corbett didn’t go to Harvard or Yale or MIT, she was a Meyerhoff Scholar at UMBC).
I know it’s inevitable but I really don’t like us being used as a spear to attack other schools by people who want to turn testing into a culture war about diversity being opposed to excellence (which is what I rather fear DL is doing here). It is missing the entire point of what testing means, or doesn’t mean, for your specific institution, and how a student does at a specific institution is (IMHO) all that matters, much more than how the student was selected or which institution it is. As many people in this thread have pointed out, we and CalTech are pursuing different policies that seem to work for our local institutions. I genuinely don’t think either policy is right or wrong; I presume each is institutionally appropriate.
Of course this whole forum exists to armchair quarterback admissions practices and policies . As I told Selingo, what I’ve learned from more than a decade on this website (and in public life, from neighbors to SCOTUS) is that what every really wants is to make the admissions decisions themselves! Or at least to think that it should be done their preferred way, whether or not they want to do the volume of work for the pay…
e2: to be blunt about my own priors here — as a UMass undergrad alum, who worked in admissions at MIT, then did grad school at MIT, then went back to admissions — it’s pretty clear to me that there are qualitative differences in the education (driven primarily by peer effects and access to resources as opposed to some fundamentally more transformative way of teaching calculus or whatever) but that the qualitative differences in outcomes are fundamentally determined by differences in corporate recruiting practices, social networks, and other opportunities offered equivalently qualified students. The thing is that you could “fix” the latter things without touching any admissions process anywhere. It is seared into my brain that when I graduated from the UMass honors college in spring 2009 summa cum laude, they had canceled the career fair and told me I was on my own; when I arrived at MIT that fall to work in admissions (after applying to 60+ jobs where this was the only one that called me back), the MIT career fair was continuing more or less untroubled by global financial crisis. These inequalities that shape long-term outcomes in lives trouble me more than what happens on the “front end,” which should, in principle, just be guiding students towards the specific education most beneficial to them at that moment in their life.
I am all for community colleges offering remedial instruction. In fact I support them being free and open entry to all; they are an ideal place for remediation. As a taxpayer, I don’t support significant remediation being offered at all other public colleges-it can likely be done both better and more cheaply at CC.
How many of your kids got caught up with changes to the SAT? Both of mine did. The first got caught up with the addition of the writing section…and the second got caught up with the elimination of it. It was crazy trying to figure out which colleges wanted…what.
I wish test optional had been a bigger choice when my kids were applying.
And don’t get me going about lost and delayed scores. Both of my kids had those issues too.
. As I told Selingo, what I’ve learned from more than a decade on this website (and in public life, from neighbors to SCOTUS) is that what every really wants is to make the admissions decisions themselves! Or at least to think that it should be done their preferred way, whether or not they want to do the volume of work for the pay…