I’m not sure being delayed is really an issue as very few schools need official reports at the time of application. So students have many months to have the scores sent to the school they’re matriculating at.
By “lost” do you mean College Board never sent the scores you ordered?
They did when they lost my kid’s scores. Kid had applied to two EA schools. The scores were delayed being sent and there was actually a question whether they would get there in time for those EA admission decisions (which came out in December at the time). Lots of folks were on pins and needles waiting…not just us. They did get them sent just in the Nick of time.
ETA…this was a June SAT not a fall one. The sending of the scores was VERY delayed. They should have been released in July.
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I am. That’s the role of high school not college. Students should be able to get a publicly funded education to a college preparatory level. They should not be required to pay for remedial education to make up for deficiencies in K-12 education. Instead they should be able to avail themselves of free high school level adult education courses taught by trained teachers. In addition most college instructors do not have the requisite training to teach remedial courses.
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I would go even further, and note most college professors have no interest in, training for, nor ability to teach remedial courses to most students. It is an entirely different skill set.
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I would go even further and say that remedial courses aren’t the topic of this thread, so let’s get back in track please
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well, we can presume that a fair chunk of that TO cohort at Vandy would not have applied if they had had to submit their test scores. So getting rid of TO would have decreased the denominator, which would have increased the admission rate, making Vandy appear “less selective”.
Why would they get rid of TO? It brings more apps… and along with them, more kids to deny.
ETA:
This is how getting rid of TO might affect Vandy’s admit stats –
For 22-23, Vandy received 46377 applications and admitted 3093, for an admit rate of 6.7%
Upthread someone posted that 39% were TO. Let’s say that if applicants had to submit scores, that half of those TO admits never would have applied. So we are removing 19.5% of the applications from the denominator.
So now, non-TO Vandy had 37333 [(46377)(0.805)] applications, which would have increased their admit rate to 8.3%
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How does a potential employer know that a summa cum laude honors student from UMass is “equivalently qualified” (and more to the point capable of performing) as a graduate from MIT? And is that “equivalence” a priori to someone at the top, middle or bottom of the class at MIT? Seems like they would need to do some testing to figure that out (like for example Google’s tests for potential employees), because it’s hard to compare student achievement at different colleges, just like it’s hard to compare top students at different high schools.
Employers also use interviews to filter candidates for potential. I wonder why somewhere like MIT doesn’t use Oxbridge-like academic interviews, especially now there’s the technology available to do that remotely?
I think employers have a moral and ethical obligation to come up with ways to identify talent from unexpected places, which is exactly what we do with the SAT, and was part of the origin story of standardized testing (so you didn’t have to go to Andover to get into Harvard, or whatever). I’m agnostic to the method for both employers and universities, as long as it works for their institution. Testing works for us, and may work for others. Internships, apprenticeships, interviews, puzzles, whatever works.
I linked to this study on the subject by a friend / grad school classmate upthread: Engineering the American dream : a study of bias and perceptions of merit in the high-tech labor market
I don’t want to derail this thread from the core focus. I just want to emphasize that I don’t think testing is the telos. Finding talent (as defined pragmatically in a given context) from a broad base is the telos. Testing is one of many methods that can be deployed to this goal, if and as appropriate to the given institution.
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One of the reasons many tech companies employ code-tests in their interviewing process is that a degree from “University X” doesn’t really mean as much as it used to. The standard was once “I graduated from University X” and that was enough. Today, the standard is “I nailed the code-test at my interview”.
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As a former “employer” in sectors where there are many many more people who want these jobs than openings exist, one of the most efficient filters is the caliber of the college/grad/professional school program. Employers don’t have infinite resources of time and money to search for DITR, especially for entry level jobs. For a private business, the obligation of people who are responsible for hiring is to find employees who will help the business succeed in a cost and time efficient manner. Employers do hire DITR, but it is driven by the efforts of the DITR’s. I do think technology has helped create a wider net for employers as it is easier for potential employees to reach them and technology can help winnow the initial cuts. This happens because it is in the interest of the employer.
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This is why the UK system is better with A levels and all children having what seems to be a similar playing field. American system expects perfection in every course on top of meaningful ECs and unfair AP advantages at some schools. Kids killing themselves to make perfect math score when they will not be a STEM major or perfect English score when they will never write a DBQ again. My DS has 5s in junior APs and has been told colleges treat it higher than her not perfect math and science ACT (she has perfect English and Reading).Her History and English grades in honors and APs have been 95 or higher since 8th grade. I would hope AOs see that but I’m not holding my breath with the system. We just keep her expectations low.
I am aware that this is how it works, and I am saying it is normatively bad that it works this way, the same way that I would say it would be normatively bad — my prior statements about “to each institution its own” notwithstanding — if a college said “we will only admit students from these few dozen high schools because it is more cost and time efficient to do so and we can fill our class this way.” This is, in fact, how university admissions functionally worked before the development of the SAT/ACT, and is the origin story of the various “academies” or “preparatory schools” that we think of today as private/independent schools, which were founded primarily to educate (“prepare”) students towards entry in a given college or university with which it had a relationship.
The difference is that most colleges and universities think of themselves as having a broader social mission, and many businesses do not. As Uncle Karl called them, the “coercive laws of competition” are, as you note, a disciplining force on that social mission, unless you can make business-minded arguments for them that expand the conception of what the interests of the employer are (hence the business school research on how diverse teams are better at solving various kinds of problems than less diverse ones).
Now, I don’t know how you would actually implement this insight for all the various professions, careers, jobs, etc that need different skills and abilities. Testing might not be the answer here in most professions. But the “caliber of the program” in some abstract sense is, IMHO and with due respect, nonsense; the inputs and outputs vary so much across similarly prestigious programs that they function primarily as reproductions of affinity networks of social capital.
Again, I don’t want to derail this thread (and @skieurope, tell me if I am); I’m, trying to illustrate conceptually why a broad base of testing might be useful, and why other, more “efficient” methods are harmful, and also to tilt at my eternal windmill of American myopia for elite universities.
(I think of our admitted cohorts of ~1200 students we typically have >1000 high schools represented, which is not because we have any minimum or cap of admits on any high school, but simply because if you don’t index on program you can have a broader base from which to gather).
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I’m of two minds about this sort of thing. On the up side, it does allow for a “test” which would be a better glimpse at an applicant’s actual math understanding, rather than their ability to do well on standardized multiple-choice tests of a specific format. It would also be helpful for many of the students who suffer from test anxiety.
Of the down side, the testers would have to be trained very well not to fall into the patterns of the Oxbridge interviewers. Fact is that there an applicant who graduated from a private high school for the wealthy in the UK is more likely receive an offer after an interview than a kid from an underserved high school who grew up in a lower income family. Humans tend to have an innate preference for people who they see as similar to them. In the UK, class plays the main part in that, while in the USA, other factors come into play.
We have seen time and again, that academic suffer from the same biases and preconceived notions of what a “potentially successful applicant” should look like. So any dependence on interviews should take this into consideration.
The interview itself also can be problematic. While people who do not understand bias tend to make all sorts of snide remarks about how “math cannot be bigoted”, they ignore the fact that first of all, it can, and, more importantly, the material doesn’t need to be bigoted in order for a test to be bigoted.
All that being said, I lean towards supporting an interview, since it is easier to make interviews less biased than try and change an entire system that has bias built into it.
Subject change.
l also agree with the people who have said that the USA has a very biassed and inequitable school system, and we are putting the onus of solving that problem on the colleges. Many kids from low income backgrounds are underprepared for college, and dropping them in college as they are is not going to help them. At the same time, they have the exact same potential for academic success as their peers from wealthier families, and they shouldn’t be denied that opportunity just because the system has failed them until now.
So, if we are expecting colleges to help these kids who have the academic potential to succeed in college, but lack the academic background, colleges, particularly public ones, should create a system for helping these students.
Israel, for example, has such a system. It is a one to two year preparatory program, in which students who do not have the background in any particular topic are brought up to speed on that topic. Unsurprisingly, people over 18 are able to learn academic topics much more quickly than high school kids.
These can be even provided by Community Colleges, and students who attend will not be considered transfer students, but first year students. That way the won’t be at a disadvantage regarding financial aid.
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I am aware this is the most common justification these days (because firms cannot openly say they want to maintain the “old boys network”) but honestly I find this to be a lazy argument. Technology - and testing - can help narrow down a candidate pool efficiently and identify great candidates from a much larger group of schools. This is standard operating practice at most large tech firms, and can likely be replicated by other industries. Of course, if employers develop an aversion to testing then it becomes really, really hard to do this.
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When I posted this last night people jumped on the AP aspect of the AO liaisons comments but the most interesting part of the conversation to me was the “Honors classes are suspect from some areas of the country” remark. To me this was directed at taking GPA inflation to a new level giving an extra bump for material which should have been part of a regular class.
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I would just say that class plays a role in the U.S. too. As part of our new reader training, we often have to gently catch readers who are (unconsciously) drawn towards what I would describe as class affinity and reproduction, or the kinds of things associated with it that are read as normatively valorous (e.g. expensive “volunteering” opportunities). Essay content is more highly correlated with household income than SAT scores (Essay Content is Strongly Related to Household Income and SAT Scores: Evidence from 60,000 Undergraduate Applications | Center for Education Policy Analysis), which, as the authors write, efforts to “realize more equitable college admissions protocols can be informed by attending to how social class is encoded in non-numerical components of applications.”
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I will just add to this - once again - the example of the UCs. The UCs only acknowledge and “count” honors classes taken at California high schools which have, in some way (and I don’t know the process), been approved. Honors classes taken by out of state students do not count as honors classes for admissions purposes at UCs.
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Wondering how that would work?
Yes employers can and have developed tests to weed out applicants. Or they could just rely on standardized test scores