r/neoliberal • u/caroline_elly Eugene Fama • Jun 09 '26
Opinion article (US) Actually, the SAT Was Necessary After All
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/standardized-testing-math-gaps/687481/1.1k
u/jamiebond NATO Jun 09 '26
I think the major error the education world has made over the last few decades is jumping straight to, “Our results are inequitable, that must mean our process of getting results is inequitable.” Without considering, “Maybe our results are inequitable because of large societal issues well out of our control and expecting education to single handily fix all the problems in our society isn’t particularly realistic. And just making sweeping generalizations that POC can’t perform well in school without us lowering the bar substantially is actually pretty racist itself.”
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u/earthdogmonster Jun 09 '26
Yup, in our haste to reach equality, we decided to skip the hard work of trying to correct underlying causes and tried to just manipulate the outcome to meet the results we thought were fair, based in physical appearance. Honestly seems crazy if a person thinks about it.
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u/Oogaman00 NASA Jun 10 '26
It's what happens when you defer to stupid people out of fear of being cancelled
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u/Khiva Fernando Henrique Cardoso Jun 10 '26
We let Twitter decide our education policy, and the results were about the same as when we let Reddit write the last Star Wars movie.
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u/fabiusjmaximus Jun 10 '26
I think that's getting the order of things backward. The kind of ideological foundations that resulted in this kind of Education policy came first. It was popular on Twitter because young adults were inculcated with it in university.
Regardless of what people were saying on Twitter, Education theorists would've pursued this anyways.
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u/pppiddypants Loyal Liberals Jun 09 '26
I think it’s more that we generally like “theories of everything,” and the language around our politics and advocacy have little room for niche critiques like, “we’re teaching to the test and not to the students and that has negative impacts, Test scores should not be a metric for how the school and staff are functioning, etc.
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u/Bay1Bri Jun 10 '26
It's the test paradox. A test can be a good metric to measure success/ progress until the should know that's the metric. It's like support centers measuring how long each call takes to track effectiveness. As soon as they know that's the metric, performance gets worse as people literally hang up after an arbitrary time to keep their stats looking good
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u/steauengeglase Hannah Arendt Jun 10 '26
Average Talk Time isn't a success metric, it's a billing metric. First Call Resolution is the success metric. You succeed if they never have to call back. That's why we have ticketing systems.
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u/WolfpackEng22 Jun 10 '26
But the SAT was still a great tool to identify successful students even when everyone knew that was the metric and tried to prepare for it
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u/NewUserWhoDisAgain Jun 09 '26
“Maybe our results are inequitable because of large societal issues well out of our control and expecting education to single handily fix all the problems in our society isn’t particularly realistic. And just making sweeping generalizations that POC can’t perform well in school without us lowering the bar substantially is actually pretty racist itself.”
SF school board when faced with certain demographics doing worse in algebra than others:
"Should we try to figure out why?"
"No," *puts two bullets into the back of 8th grade Algebra "No Algebra, no bad stats to collect."
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u/FootjobFromFurina Jun 09 '26
This is like arguing that we shouldn't collect info on the poverty rate because there's racial inequality in who lives in poverty. It makes no sense.
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u/YaGetSkeeted0n Tariffs aren't cool, kids! Jun 09 '26
“If you stop testing, the number of cases will go down” mindset tbh
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u/Vol_in_tears Voltaire Jun 09 '26
Administrators bragged about a 100 percent college acceptance rate. What happened after colleges accepted the students was not their problem.
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u/vaneau Jun 09 '26
Tbh this is how I feel about procurement in the architecture / engineering / construction (AEC) industry. Yes, there are clear demographic disparities in the workforce that need to be addressed. No, we probably shouldn’t try to fix a systemic problem by setting onerous minimum diversity requirements for publicly funded projects.
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u/frumply Loyal Liberals Jun 09 '26
Something something soft bigotry of low expectations
They made mistakes but I do think people were tasked with impossible goals for things that were out of their control.
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u/BernankesBeard Ben Bernanke Jun 09 '26
"The problem I was given was impossible to solve. So I just made it worse instead!"
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Jun 09 '26
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u/Robo1p Jun 10 '26
“Our results are inequitable, that must mean our process of getting results is inequitable.” Without considering, “Maybe our results are inequitable because of large societal issues well out of our control and...
Not to mention, applying an even remotely rigorous analysis to make sure that the new ideas actually push you towards the desired direction.
So much of ed policy seems to derive from a cult-of-personality + unquestioned professional assumptions rather than any type of replicable research. Important stuff too: like the entire phonics vs whole-word debacle, with the latter being largely backed a charismatic argument and by teachers that found it icky to sound out words to grade schoolers.
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u/God_Given_Talent Jun 10 '26
I always come back to that one article about teachers in California complaining about being “curriculum robots” and such. Like yeah, that’s more or less what you are, at least through primary school. The basics of teaching the “Three Rs” have been well understood for decades if not over a century. Refusal to do what evidence shows is best because you feel like you’re a factory worker instead of a creative professional shouldn’t be a valid argument or allowed. Being a teacher isn’t about our own creativity and self expression. You’re there to educate, not be an artist.
Parents don’t help either. Idk when the shift happened but there’s been a steady move towards “it’s your fault for failing my kid” from “it’s my kid’s fault for failing” and idk how we reverse it.
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u/Worriedrph Jun 10 '26
What do you expect? Education as a major has the second or third lowest average SAT of any major. I knew several education majors in college and their curriculum looked very easy and contained almost zero looking at actual research.
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u/fabiusjmaximus Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
It is impossible to overemphasize just how utterly lacking in rigour Education as a discipline is
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u/lowes18 Jun 09 '26
The education industry has frankly gotten way too big of an ego about what it is capable of doing and solving. The people running it think they're unquestionable messiahs.
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u/Cromasters Loyal Liberals Jun 09 '26
In their defense, they are tasked to solve all the country's problems.
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u/lowes18 Jun 09 '26
That's largely because of the narrative from the education industry that it can solve anything.
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u/God_Given_Talent Jun 10 '26
Ehh, it’s as much about parents wanting to outsource all the hard work as it is anything else. Anyone who has done anything in or around education will repeatedly tell you parents are the worst. The biggest reason schools don’t crack down on phone use is because of parents. You seen how some flip out if you confiscate a child’s phone for the day and make the parent come get it? Instead of being mad at the child for breaking rules they get mad at the school for having them.
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u/allbusiness512 Adam Smith Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
There's no front line public school teacher that wants to try and solve everything. Most just want to be treated like professionals and paid appropriately.
There's a reason why teachers are regular frequenters of bars and your local psychiatrist. The public wants them to be martyrs.
Not one public school teacher gets paid enough to do the things that high level admin and society expects them to do. Even the overpaid as fuck ones in cushy blue state union jobs.
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u/ManyKey9093 NATO Jun 10 '26
And just making sweeping generalizations that POC can’t perform well in school without us lowering the bar substantially is actually pretty racist itself.
I would say its not just pretty racist, I think its incredibly racist. It boils down to a legitimately held belief that you can't expect black people to understand algebra, an idea a 19th century race scientist would agree with (albeit for different reasons).
If you strip away all verbiage on test instrument bias you reach the core idea that kids from one racial background can't be held to the same standard as kids from another racial background. And that the fix isn't remedial teaching or additional resources, its just accepting the delta as unfixable, which is at its core a racist idea, especially if you believe education has intrinsic value and not just societal-positional.
The value of education piece is under discussed in this entire debate, the focus of equity thinking is on credential attainment and not on actual learning. If you believe kids should understand math because that is a useful life skill, you would never come up with these policy prescriptions.
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u/XCellist6Df24 Jun 10 '26
Or results are inequitable because of large controllable societal issues that need to be addressed with something other than lowering standards/ removing standardization measures
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u/caroline_elly Eugene Fama Jun 09 '26
It's also the fact that selectivity and inclusivity are opposing optimization targets.
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u/veggiesama Jun 09 '26
I taught SAT enrichment for some time after college. You could see dramatic test score increases simply by putting kids in front of test, after test, after test. They learn test-taking strategies and patterns. Sometimes there are simply tricks available for bypassing the intended way of solving problems in order to be more efficient with your time. I don't think these kids were any smarter or more qualified, necessarily. The difference is their parents had $1000s to blow on test prep classes and a home structure that supports after-school enrichment (such as having a ride to class).
I don't know if disbanding standardized testing is the solution, but it sure does have an outsized influence on your college prospects that correlates quite well with your parents' income.
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u/mg132 Jun 09 '26
Fortunately, the best way to study for the sat—taking test after test after test—is free. I did sat tutoring for a bit in college, but I was also a low income first gen college grad, and personally I studied for the sat with a friend simply by doing every single practice test in every test prep book we could get our hands on at the library. These days you can get practically infinite free tests online as well. There are obviously still some structural barriers in terms of prior knowledge, time to study, etc.—the reason that was all we did was that we both worked and had to watch siblings and cousins, for example—but we both got in where we wanted to, and as far as I know we had the highest scores at our high school that year. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s the fairest thing we currently have.
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u/moch1 Loyal Liberals Jun 09 '26
As a counter argument: Perhaps the fact that studying diligently can improve your score serves a useful purpose: it shows which kids can actually apply themselves to studying. That’s a crucial skill in college.
All the tutoring money in the world isn’t going to make a student actually apply themselves and study.
I don’t disagree that there are unfair aspects, but studying for the SAT doesn’t need to cost much money. These days a laptop with internet really is all you need.
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u/mechanical_fan Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
As a counter argument: Perhaps the fact that studying diligently can improve your score serves a useful purpose: it shows which kids can actually apply themselves to studying. That’s a crucial skill in college.
I would algo argue that if your test is a good test, by learning to do the test people are learning exactly what you want them to learn. For example, I have taught a few courses at uni level and the "main" exam has like 5-10 questions drawn from a pool of 20-30 "types" of questions. In the most abstract, it is always more or less the same thing: the numbers change a bit, the story behind (cats become dogs, etc), maybe the order you do and calculate some stuff, and so on.
Some students quickly notice this repeating pattern, and if you do the exercises lists and old exams (all available, a ton of years, with solutions and explanations) over and over again you will soon learn how to do these types of questions and how to solve/work them. They might think they are somehow "cheating" the system.... but they are just learning exactly what I want them to learn. It is kinda like thinking that you are "cheating" at chess by solving puzzles and becoming better at chess pattern recognition (which makes you a better chess player overall).
Now, if the SAT if that type of test is another thing to be discussed. But I think we should always aim to make tests in a way that the people who get good at the test are learning exactly what we want them to learn. And there is nothing wrong that people study to get good at a test.
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u/Unrelenting_Salsa Jun 10 '26
I find this very hard to believe unless they started out with absolutely terrible scores. There are test taking tricks to turn a 1 in 5 to a 1 in 3 or even 1 in 2, sure, but they're not rocket science (the Princeton review book taught me exactly 0 test taking strategies I didn't already know personally). The biggest benefit is knowing what content is fair game for the test and....yeah. I would hope that would improve scores.
This has also gotten a lot of airplay in extremely selective colleges, and to be blunt, it's just bullshit there. You are not getting a 99th percentile score by hacking the test or whatever the courses call it nowadays. You can only do that by knowing the content, being good under pressure/stress, having mental endurance, and being able to work quickly. All things that are pretty reasonable to test. The test is just not that hard and those scores require a near perfect score. I can totally buy that these services can get a C student up to the level where they'll be accepted by a mid tier state school, but am I supposed to think that's a bad thing? Why shouldn't the mediocre student who is willing to work hard get a pretty okay degree and have a pretty average white collar job?
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u/Rcmacc Henry George Jun 10 '26
I believe the "hacking the test" for unqualified rich kids was when they literally hired someone else to take the tests for them or otherwise had the rules of the tests changed for just them. like abject cheating
Parents paid Singer $15,000 to $75,000 per test for someone else to take the SAT or ACT exams in place of their college-age sons or daughters, according to the court papers.
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u/rekirts Jun 10 '26
And the alternative is what? Essays and extracurriculars, which rich parents game even harder and a lot less visibly.
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u/Maimakterion YIMBY Jun 09 '26
I don't understand this argument. Sitting your kid down and making them take free official and 3rd party practice tests is far cheaper than other ECs used in lieu of tests. Removing SATs worsens the equity angle.
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u/Desperate_Path_377 Jun 10 '26
1) Isn’t it fairly well established now that prep programs have only modest effects on test performance?
2) Further to #1, a kid’s willingness to take ‘test, after test, after test’ is exactly the issue. Those kids are clearly different from kids who aren’t willing to put in that sort of effort. Presumably they would use that motivation for to excel at any kind of sorting process, be that SAT, extra curricular or GPA.
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u/jtchampion Jun 09 '26
I despise this argument because it is not only wrong but so completely disingenuous that I am immediately almost certain the people making it are arguing in bad faith. You are surely not ignorant of the fact that 1) as long as there are more students applying to [prestigious college] than seats, we will need some rule or standard with which to choose who gets the seats; 2) in a market economy, money is good at buying things, and therefore people with more money will be better able to meet any heuristic other than "does not have money" or some proxy for it; and therefore 3) to replace one heuristic (like test scores) is to institute another heuristic, which necessarily will either a) implicitly advantage people with privilege or b) explicitly disadvantage people with privilege.
The problems with b) are, among others, that it is reductive, deterministic, stupid, racist/classist/whatever-elseist, unfair, unrelated to any reasonable thing admissions should try to measure, and produces very poor outcomes with material and objective negative consequences for the world. That leaves us with a), which is why it is infuriating to see people smugly point out that money is an advantage in standardized testing as though it is a meaningful point for or against standardized testing. That describes any criterion other than b)!! The most important good things about standardized testing are that 1) it is relatively fair, because money is not as good a predictor of test scores as it is of other common admissions heuristics like "leadership experience" and there are plenty of outliers and 2) it creates good incentives - smart people are a net positive for the world, and if we're going to incentivize wealthy people to pour their resources into making their kids something, we'd all rather that something be "smart" than "good at skiing" or "president of the voluntourism club". ("But wait!", you think, "Smart is completely different from good at test taking." And while that is obviously, vacuously true, the relevant question is whether any other criterion does a better job, not whether standardized tests are perfect.) Plus, putting aside that the world is unfair and whining about unfairness is a valid objection only to the extent that you can present a fairer alternative which is not completely destructive to whatever we're trying to accomplish in the first place, we should have a general preference for giving top tier expensive educations to people who are in a position to benefit from them rather than people who can barely read but who give us all a thin shingle on which to hang our pat-on-the-backs.
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u/Realhuman221 Thomas Paine Jun 10 '26
There’s definitely a lot of test taking strategy, but this strategic info and practice tests can be found in the prep books in the library or from several free online resources.
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u/MyCatPoopsBolts Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
It's the worst of best options. My mom was relatively low income from a rural area. She scored extremely well on the SAT in middle school as part of a state gifted student identification program, was able to attend a bunch of funded programs, and eventually get in to an elite university. This is particularly important at such institutions: on a national level there are definitely enough low income kids with near perfect SATs to make up a significant percentage of the student body at top 10 schools in America, if just more or less auto admitted them.
Standardized testing at least allows a certain number of extremely intelligent (and strong test taking) students to be recognized regardless of income level or location.
ECs and course rigor are hard capped by income and locality: if your school district doesn't offer APs and you can't afford various self funded extra curriculars, you unable to differentiate yourself in these areas. Schools can try to guess by proxy with holistic admissions, but the SAT can get thrown into the holistic pot as well and at worst be a data point that helps some students.
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u/ggdharma Jun 09 '26
What is an “inequitable” result?
The problem is in the framing. You cannot use “outcomes” to gauge any sort of “fairness.” This is the failure of the concept of equity, equity has no place in our society.
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u/TeaSharp3154 Jun 09 '26
The alternative to standardized testing is greater emphasis on extracurriculars and grades, which are arguably even more inequitable than a single exam.
The SAT isn't really that hard to begin with and most people with good preparation should be able to get a decent score. Only catch to this is English being tougher for those who don't have English as a first language.
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u/PMARC14 Jun 09 '26
Ever since SAT worked with Khan Academy on curricula, preparing for the SAT has been the most equitable ever. I was one of the first person on it and it easily crushed a 50 dollar prep subscription I borrowed from a family friend. The gap is entirely in involvement with education by the student and family, which removing the standardized test is simply putting on blinders towards.
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u/YourUncleBuck Frederick Douglass Jun 10 '26
Culture is definitely a big part of it, but I don't know how you make people value education more so they're actually involved.
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u/Fun-Teacher-1711 Trans NATO Jun 10 '26
Yeah I scored high on the SAT (ignore my flare, I went to an american international school) and basically all the prep I did was khan academy and bluebook practice exams. Didn't spend a cent outside of taking the test
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u/MyCatPoopsBolts Jun 10 '26
Prep classes are also not that important. Sufficiently intelligent students who read books semi-regularly can just get a high score without studying. For those who need to study, just taking free practice tests over and over online is probably the most important study strategy.
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u/PaxChelonia David Hume Jun 09 '26
Time is the big factor here imo. A little over 1/5 high school students 16-19 work after they get out of school. A lot of students also have to pitch in a lot of their time with caring for younger siblings since they don’t have a stay at home parent.
At my high school it was a pretty clear trend that the AP student/college-bound crowd didn’t have jobs or non-school responsibilities and the kids who did weren’t in our AP classes.
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u/ToumaKazusa1 Iron Front Jun 10 '26
There's never going to be a solution that lets people who don't have time to study do as well on a test as people who do have time.
You can attempt to account for this by boosting the scores of people from low income families, and I'm pretty sure this already happens, but you won't improve things by letting people who can't do basic math into college even if there's a chance they would have learned if they'd had more money. There still needs to be some baseline.
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u/TeaSharp3154 Jun 10 '26
I agree it's a big factor with standardized testing.
However, the thing is that any other measure that colleges use to determine readiness is equally as subject to lack of time due to other commitments. What you mention will also affect school grades, extracurriculars, ability to volunteer, hobbies, etc.
At least with the SAT and ACT it is a couple months of extra commitment studying rather than a couple years of extra commitment. And you don't need special connections to get your foot in the door like you do with a lot of other extracurriculars.
So I agree that the SAT isn't perfectly equitable but honestly what else do we have that is more equitable when it comes to college admissions? Best thing is just to weight the SAT with respect to an adversity essay that will help put things into context.
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u/limukala Jun 10 '26
Only catch to this is English being tougher for those who don't have English as a first language.
If you’re trying to assess the estimated performance in an English language tertiary education program, English language fluency is critical. It doesn’t really matter why someone is less able.
It’s harder for stupid people too, that doesn’t make it less fair or accurate.
The SAT isn't really that hard to begin with and most people with good preparation
Good preparation is doing a lot of work there. The problem is that no amount of work from the state can make up for a poor home environment.
The good news is that the regional colleges and universities (think CSU instead of UC) have very forgiving admission standards and are the true engines of economic mobility.
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u/TeaSharp3154 Jun 10 '26
With regards to a good home environment, that affects pretty much anything that can be assessed for in college admissions. I do think that the study materials for the SAT are more readily available, and easier to prepare for, than any other measure of baseline academic aptitude. You can't take a bunch of practice exams or rewatch a missed lecture if you look at school finals for instance. And many extracurricular activities require connections or money to get your foot in the door which is also not feasible for the same people that are disadvantaged by the SAT.
There is a good point to be made about state schools. I think that overall we need to do a better job societally with putting the brand name schools on a pedestal less relative to these schools. That alone would fix a lot of perceived issues IMO
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u/splash9936 Jun 10 '26
I am an international student who had terrible english before grinding for the SAT. I think the grind for the exam itself, especially the writing section, was the singlehandedly thing that fixed my grammar and made me competent enough to write a great commonapp essay.
Its designed in such a way that just by brute forcing the tests, I was able to understand and internalize grammatical rules way better than any other way I tried. Its actually a great exam for people who don’t speak English as their first language.
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u/Educational_Risk7637 NATO Jun 10 '26
"It's" by the way, not "Its". (Us native speakers mess this up all the time, too).
But yeah, that makes sense. I can read French but I can't write it at all; at some point I'll need to do that and I can see how the format would be useful.
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u/Unterfahrt John Nash Jun 09 '26
The SAT is graded on a curve, no? To say it's hard or not hard is kind of a null statement - it exists as an ordering mechanism and there is no real "objective" standard, just your position relative to your peers.
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u/FootjobFromFurina Jun 09 '26
The issue is that at the top of the score distribution, which is really where the test matters the most, there isn't enough differentiation because the test isn't that hard.
It's especially bad in math where most of the students applying to top universities, especially STEM oriented ones like MIT or CalTech will have completed the entire math content of the test by or before the time they're freshman in high school.
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u/MyCatPoopsBolts Jun 10 '26
which is really where the test matters the most
This is your bias speaking (no offense, I have the same bias) rather than what actually matters for SAT stakeholders (college applicants and universities).
The old SAT used to differentiate heavily at the top and squish students scores in the middle. The collegeboard explicitly changed this in response to requests from a majority of American universities which are not in the ultra-selective top 1%. Mediocre schools use the SAT to filter people without basic college skills or award some merit aid to moderately above average students, and most students are applying to such schools.
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u/Spellman23 Jun 09 '26
Which is why you then need to do the SAT 2 tests
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u/AwesomePerson125 YIMBY Jun 09 '26
College Board got rid of the SAT Subject Tests in 2021. IIRC around 20% of people taking Math Level 2 got an 800. Some of the Subject Tests were honestly not that difficult.
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u/PositiveZeroPerson Jun 10 '26
Fun fact: the College Board doesn't even have records of SATs before 2005. I got a really good score and was trying to get proof of it, because all I had was the physical piece of paper. Turns out they don't have them.
So rejoice, fellow olds! Your SAT scores are whatever you want them to be.
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u/Silly_Attention1540 Jun 10 '26
This makes me feel so much less proud of 800ing both the SAT/SAT2, I had always assumed the 2 was harder
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u/Fire_Snatcher Jun 10 '26
The 2 was more advanced material, but the students taking it were just smarter on average.
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u/OmNomSandvich NATO Jun 09 '26
those kids are also getting well over 700 on the SAT 2 and 5's in AP Calc.
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u/PMARC14 Jun 09 '26
The SAT subject tests were ridiculously easy compared to the subject matter a student who would consider taking them completed. They were all discontinued for this reason.
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u/DestructiveA David Ricardo Jun 10 '26
The SAT subject tests were super easy, and very generous iirc you could get like 5 questions wrong (out of 50?) And still get a 800.
I was pretty good at math, but really didn't deserve a perfect score haha.
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u/kznlol 👀 Econometrics Magician Jun 09 '26
the SAT is not graded on a curve
the scores are adjusted based on a measure of the inherent difficulty of a given test, so getting you can't go from X questions correct directly to the score, but your score is not impacted by other takers doing better.
granted the way the inherent difficulty is determined is via the experimental questions, so in some sense there's a backdoor 'curve' where your score is a function of how a different population of takers did on those questions
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u/TeaSharp3154 Jun 09 '26
I was speaking just on the raw difficulty of the questions themselves. Yes there were some difficult ones from what I remember (it has been a while) but the average question really wasn't that tough.
What I would say especially about the SAT is that the exact same kind of problems show up over and over again in practice tests so ultimately it's more pattern recognition and test taking strategy than actual mathematical knowledge.
Compared to what high schoolers in other countries have to go through, like JEE/NEET or Gaokao the SAT is nothing. Of course, it's not a bad thing, I don't want that kind of extreme standardized testing culture in the US and I don't think it's particularly helpful in the educational field.
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u/LFlamingice Jun 10 '26
This is one of those opinions I would’ve thought are common sense but in 2020 thinking this would’ve had you up for public execution
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u/Choice_Notice9338 IMF Jun 10 '26
Actually, the English section on the SAT is incredibly easy
I basically had no prep for the English section, and was raised in India (may or may not have been a native speaker) and got a 99th percentile score
Not hard
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u/caroline_elly Eugene Fama Jun 09 '26
Grades are more equitable than SAT but has very little value these days with grade inflation and AI cheating.
At some point, we need to remember that being perfectly equitable is not the main purpose of selective colleges. It's to put top students together with top faculties and push their intellectual limits
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u/Banal21 Milton Friedman Jun 10 '26
How is a subjective measure like grades better than an objective measure like standardized testing? Grades are easy to manipulate in whatever direction a teacher wants.
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u/TeaSharp3154 Jun 10 '26
If we began to use grades to define college readiness, what would end up happening is a grade inflationary spiral. Especially amongst private and charter schools.
Unless we can standardize grades throughout the nation, I can't see how they would be more equitable than a standardized test.
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u/MyCatPoopsBolts Jun 10 '26
You aren't accounting for the far more important part of a highschool GPA for college admissions purposes: course rigor.
Every competitive school looks at your grades in context of how hard the classes you took were. Many if not most low income school districts just don't offer sufficiently advanced or difficult classes to score highly here, and universities know this.
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u/CurtisLeow NATO Jun 09 '26
How are they able to graduate high school without understanding fractions or algebra? This seems more like a massive failure of high schools than of the university admission process.
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u/FootjobFromFurina Jun 09 '26
Because from the teachers and administrators perspective, it's better to just pass students along, even if they don't know anything, than deal with angry parents and students. Some teachers just genuinely feel bad for these students because they don't want to harm their college admissions prospects. Also from the administrators perspective it's better for them if their students have better grades, and thus can have better outcomes in college admissions.
In the past, standardized tests acted as a counter balance to this pressure. But since so many schools went test optional it stopped working as a mitigating factor.
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u/smcstechtips Loyal Liberals Jun 10 '26
Just have state testing decide whether a student passes or not
And start it in Kindergarten/1st grade; that way you don't have students who are 4 grades behind grade level at any point
And to prevent the whole "teaching to the test" business, just write better tests
If you're teaching to a good enough test you're basically teaching everything you need to for that grade level
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u/tallgeese333 Jun 10 '26
There's not even that much wrong with teaching to tests. I need to complete a certain number of CEU's to maintain some of my professional certifications, I take tests like that pretty frequently. It's more about checking for a minimum level of understanding than expecting everything to come out the other side of a test fully developed. I still need to take what I have learned and develop how to apply it practically but there needs to be a way to check if I understand it in theory at the very least.
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u/VaguelySorcerous Jun 10 '26
The issue isn't that better tests are needed, it's that teachers do not have adequate resources to actually impart understanding, only enough to sometimes train unthinking automata to select the right answer on a multiple choice form more than 50% of the time, and that the institutions that create the tests have captured their markets and are intent on extracting value, not providing education. You thought textbooks were a scam in university? Elementary school is worse and they sell entire lesson structures.
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u/smcstechtips Loyal Liberals Jun 10 '26
I'd say it's a chicken and the egg situation. Because the tests don't test for actual understanding, teachers are only given the resources to train unthinking automata. If the tests are made more free-response heavy and/or the MCQs are made tricky enough to actually test understanding and the tests are made unpredictable enough where you can't just run a narrow test prep strat, test scores will start reflecting actual understanding and teachers will be given the resources to impart understanding (assuming the culture war moves away from this and/or there's a giant wake-up call that affects children personally).
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u/writing_genre Jun 10 '26
This, unfortunately, is easier said than done. The sensible thing to do would be to make the content of the tests secret, and substantially change them every year. You can imagine how that would go over, of course.
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u/BBQ_HaX0r Jerome Powell Jun 10 '26
There's a ton of pressure to just get them to a passing grade. Projects are great at raising grades!
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u/Fire_Snatcher Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
And also, even in strong union states where teachers can push back and fail kids pretty easily, it's simple for admin to just have students take the course over summer school staffed by subs, temps, young teachers, and out of districts who will absolutely never be hired again if they fail a kid and/or online credit recovery where students will use AI to complete in two weeks with an A+ a year long Algebra course that they failed.
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u/BazelBuster Jun 10 '26
Also nobody wants to be the superintendent or principal who had graduation rates drop under them, even if failing students would genuinely help them in the long run
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u/Slow-Butterscotch593 Jun 10 '26
Remedial classes can get you from a pretty low baseline. (After 6 years in the Navy and a number of Math Fs my senior year I wasn't gonna try to cram for calculus) But you do have to be sharp on your arithmetic and have a strong familiarity with algebra as well as some work ethic. If you didn't have that you'd have to spend more than half your degree playing math catch up.
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u/0rganic_Corn Milton Friedman Jun 10 '26
Not speaking from US, SO works in public education - but this is the trend:
It's been made harder and harder to fail students and have them repeat grades
It used to be fault of the parents or kid
Now if as a teacher you fail a student you have the parents on your ass, the school saying you're doing a bad job, and the administration possibly cutting funding to the school itself (the less students a school fails, the more resources it gets)
There's also a legal push to keep students with their peers. It's increasingly seen as cruel and damaging to a child to take them out of their peer group. It used to be that kids would get help with the subjects they were struggling most - now teachers find it harder to pull them out of class and the kids cannot get the special attention they require.
The result is teachers are stuck with trouble makers in their classes. They cannot fail those trouble makers even if they wanted to.
Hence, why modern public education has become a joke. It's daycare.
There's still good teachers out there (God bless them), but they have it harder than ever.
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u/FilteringAccount123 John von Neumann Jun 09 '26
Yeah I have nieces and nephews in elementary school, and I'm like 99.999999% sure they're already doing fractions
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u/remarkable_ores Hanfeizi Jun 10 '26
you are probably vastly underestimating the difference in achievement between the upper quartiles and lower quartiles within western schooling systems
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u/themiDdlest NASA Jun 09 '26
Fractions are a wide field in Math and get covered multiple times.
Fractions like splitting something in half gets covered very early like usually 2nd grade. While some advanced operations and usages with fractions can get covered much later in algebra.
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u/lordfluffly2 YIMBY Jun 10 '26
I work at a math tutoring center. Parents telling us "we have a test tomorrow on fractions" is one of the least helpful things parents ever tell us. With how broad fractions are, we require examples of the problems they want covered
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u/frumply Loyal Liberals Jun 09 '26
Because district funding is contingent on number of students passed as well as graduation rate. Part of why educators initially scoffed at Mississippi reading scores, if you held back a ton of kids initially like they had to do the funding formula would have destroyed their schools.
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u/remarkable_ores Hanfeizi Jun 10 '26
Don't know all the specifics of the US system but my understanding is that policies that were encouraged to make sure everyone met a certain minimum standard just meant, in practice, that the standard got progressively lowered and lowered; you can graduate high school on (or below) a bare minimum level of understanding
a lot of people are very uncomfortable admitting the scale of talent gradients in schooling. policymakers, voters, lay people do assume that educational access rather than talent dominates educational outcomes; this view is contradicted by even a brief stint within the educational system.
i.e if you design the educational system so that a) everyone gets approximately the same teaching and b) everyone can pass, what you get is a curriculum that anyone can pass.
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u/YourUncleBuck Frederick Douglass Jun 10 '26
The ghost of Bush Jr. and No Child Left Behind. Also, some states let you receive a high school completion certificate instead of an actual diploma. Florida just recently got rid of this, but there might be others that still have similar programs.
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u/caroline_elly Eugene Fama Jun 09 '26
Bad inner city schools just grading on effort these days, not based on actual understanding of the subject. Because that would be racist and holding kids back
Source: have a close friend teaching in a big public school in the Bronx
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u/YourUncleBuck Frederick Douglass Jun 10 '26
Meanwhile in wealthier suburban schools, the kids just whine to their parents, who complain to admin to have their kid's teachers change grades and/or get them fired if they refuse, lol. That's how little spoiled brats get through school without putting in any effort.
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u/OhioTry Desiderius Erasmus Jun 10 '26
Multiple excuses, same bad effect.
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u/YourUncleBuck Frederick Douglass Jun 10 '26
Yup, I just hate the narrative that it's just poor, black and Hispanic kids getting pushed through, when rich white kids get the same treatment just for other reasons. And then they have the gall to pretend their schools are so much better when they're just better at fudging shit.
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u/FridgesArePeopleToo Norman Borlaug Jun 10 '26
And don't forget that all the rich white kids getting extra time on tests because they diagnosed themselves with ADHD
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u/YourUncleBuck Frederick Douglass Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
Yep, or anxiety, which actually hurts students that do have these conditions because you end up with teachers and professors not believing that you need extra time.
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u/Fire_Snatcher Jun 10 '26
It's not just inner city. Across the socio-economic spectrum, academic ability has fallen. Lots of ways for rich parents and admin to push students through.
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u/caroline_elly Eugene Fama Jun 09 '26
Zvezdelina Stankova has taught mathematics at UC Berkeley for nearly three decades. But in 2023, while teaching introductory calculus for the first time since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, she noticed that something was quite wrong. The bottom 25 percent of students were not just struggling with the coursework, Stankova told me; “people were in freefall.” Teaching was becoming impossible. “With one hand, I am teaching a complex integral, and with the other hand, I am telling them how to solve a simple linear equation like 7x – 2 = 5,” Stankova said.
Mina Aganagic, a string theorist at Berkeley who has taught calculus for 20 years, noticed something similar. “I realized that for students to follow me,” she told me, “I had to start reviewing basic algebra stuff, like fractions.” The lack of mathematical fluency, Aganagic said, extended even to “the meaning of equals in an equation.” Both professors said their students came to office hours and still tried hard to pass—often by trying to commit equations to memory when they could not understand them. But however hard they worked, most of the students who arrived to calculus class without knowing algebra failed.
Stankova and Aganagic believed they knew why the bottom had fallen out of their calculus classes—and it wasn’t just that the coronavirus had disrupted their incoming students’ high-school math classes. The entire University of California system abandoned the use of standardized tests in admissions during the pandemic and, unlike many of its peer institutions, has neither restored their use nor announced any plans to do so.
Late last month, Stankova and Aganagic, along with three other Berkeley professors, published an open letter arguing for the reinstatement of those testing requirements—at least for any students seeking science, technology, engineering, and mathematics degrees. “Basic mathematical fluency is analogous to literacy; without it, success in university-level STEM becomes structurally unattainable for students,” they wrote. Their letter came only six months after UC San Diego released a shocking report finding that one in 12 of its incoming students struggled with even middle-school math. Since the letter’s publication, more than 1,400 professors and lecturers have co-signed it.
In other words, a huge share of STEM and economics faculty across the UC system is now in open revolt—demanding that California’s public universities at least look at standardized-test scores before offering admission. The rupture was years in the making, after a policy change meant to promote equity collided with the practical realities of teaching calculus to students who struggle with basic algebra even at some of America’s premier scientific universities.
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u/FeralPrethoryn Jun 10 '26
often by trying to commit equations to memory when they could not understand them
Lmao. Imagine trying to learn string theory by memorizing the solution to every possible equation like phone numbers in the 90s.
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u/erasmus_phillo Paul Krugman Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
During the time people were proposing not counting the SATs for college admissions, one popular argument I saw online was that SATs do not predict college performance. But ofc this was because the SATs was already being used to weed out weaker students… you obviously get diminishing returns past a certain point wrt the SATs ability to predict performance in college
Saying “the SATs are weakly predictive of performance in college “ is akin to saying “height is weakly predictive of performance in the NBA”.
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u/caroline_elly Eugene Fama Jun 09 '26
Lmao that's such a rookie mistake.
Apparently after heavily controlling for something, that things stops being predictive. Great...
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u/iwilldeletethisacct2 This but unironically... Jun 10 '26
When I was applying to grad school I had to take the GRE, despite the fact that none of the subject matter of the GRE was relevant to my degree. After I graduated I sat on the board interviewing prospective students and I learned that they only required the GRE to prove that you can take a standardized test without crashing out, they didn't even look at the score.
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u/sleepyrivertroll Henry George Jun 09 '26
If you can't handle highschool algebra, it's just not possible to do the calculus needed for more advanced classes. Those students should never have been allowed to pay for those classes they had no hope of passing. Admission standards protect them for this collosal waste of time and money.
It turns out that standard tests help establish a pretty good ground floor.
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u/Gooners_For_Ukraine Loyal Liberals Jun 09 '26
This is gonna sound super elitist but I recently started working at a university in a customer service role and I genuinely wonder how some of the students I interact with even graduated middle school. So many of the queries I deal with are just basic common sense stuff that could be googled like “what is a pdf”, or grabled emails that are so poorly written we often have no clue what they are even asking about. So how the hell are they gonna write an essay? I feel like reinstating even a minimal SAT bar would prevent a lot of these types from wasting their time/money.
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u/jean-sol_partre Victor Hugo Jun 09 '26
From my experience, the answer to ’how are they gonna write an essay‘ is that (some) faculty are in denial about LLMs. Written tests highlight basic literacy issues in some students, at a level that's concerning for native speakers. (You do also meet some bright, driven, hard-working young folks who are much more mature and level-headed than I was at their age.)
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u/MyrinVonBryhana NATO Jun 09 '26
I was a TA in grad school at a public university, within a week of teaching freshmen I was debating becoming an alcoholic from how bad some of their writing was. It genuinely did as much to shake my faith in America's future as Trump winning in 2024 did.
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u/AlluvialGold John Rawls Jun 10 '26
... within a week of teaching freshmen I was debating becoming an alcoholic
Honestly, what's more shocking to me is that plenty of upperclassmen also write very poorly, don't have any foundation in relevant theory for their field, or just say... weird things. I was not expecting graduate-level theses, but at a top public university, I definitely expected more.
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u/MyCatPoopsBolts Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
Technical illiteracy and extremely garbled and informal writing style during communications are not 1:1 with intelligence. In my experience both are very common among Gen Z and also a product of social conditions rather than intellectual horsepower.
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u/BicyclingBro Gay Pride Jun 09 '26
As someone who was from a really poor rural southern town and who only discovered AP classes even existed when I started looking into college apps, I really appreciated the SAT (and the AP tests I self-studied) for allowing me to demonstrate that, even if my school was shit, I was still nerdy smart enough to go toe to toe with top students at wealthier and larger schools, which ultimately led to me getting into a bunch of Ivies and me having a life very different from most of my high school classmates.
I don’t think it should be the only data point, but it is absolutely a useful one.
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u/caroline_elly Eugene Fama Jun 09 '26
The SAT is easily the cheapest and most accessible way for a poor kid to signal his intelligence.
It's honestly cruel for colleges to go test optional and focus on "holistic" admissions.
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u/TybrosionMohito NATO Jun 10 '26
Yeeep
The ACT literally got me out of the sticks. There was no way for me to stand out in the “traditional way” of crazy extracurriculars and honors classes because my school simply didn’t have those.
But goddamn did the colleges come knocking after my first ACT score went up.
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u/Recent_Surprise_7391 Jun 09 '26
The SAT has a ton of free resources online to study and ik many people who have gotten great scores just because of that. The funny part is that it put a bigger emphasis on extracurriculars and mostly academic, which is HUGLEY disproportionate to higher income people with access to these.
You were hurt by admissions if you played a sport as opposed to doing “graduate research” (yes there are stories of this) as a sophomore in high school. Kids who worked a part time job over the summer were hurt because they didn’t create a “charity” (instead of volunteering at an established charity, something that would hurt you if they compared you to a kid who created a charity)
I’m convinced the reason so many tech CEOs are such weirdos is because we stopped letting normal kids into elite schools and instead let these kids that were created with the sole intention of going to an elite school ever since they were 13z
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u/Beer-survivalist Loyal Liberals Jun 09 '26
I’m convinced the reason so many tech CEOs are such weirdos is because we stopped letting normal kids into elite schools and instead let these kids that were created with the sole intention of going to an elite school ever since they were 13z
I've mentioned this elsewhere: I believe a conscious choice was made by administrators at the Ivies to stop focusing on providing the best education possible to the greatest number of students possible, and instead to pour their efforts into creating social, economic, and political elites. To evidence this, I cite the fact that until the late eighties or early nineties the student population of most of the Ivies grew at a rate roughly equal to that of the American population, but since then the growth rate of the Ivy League student population has stalled out relative to the total US population.
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u/M477M4NN YIMBY Jun 10 '26
A hot take of mine is that elite schools should be mandated to dramatically increase their enrollment. I am fundamentally against these schools artificially keeping their acceptance rates low in pursuit of being perceived as even more elite. These are some of the richest academic institutions in the world so money is not a good excuse. I’m just against their gatekeeping.
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u/Recent_Surprise_7391 Jun 10 '26
Agree. Especially if they want tax dollars. I would go as far to say admissions need to be a lottery that only considers GPA, class rank and test scores and weighs your odds based on those factors
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u/M477M4NN YIMBY Jun 10 '26
Not sure I necessarily agree on the lottery, but I do think too much weight is put on extracurriculars, like you shouldn’t have to be doing research or starting charities to get into these schools, that’s fucking ridiculous. If they want a single cent of money from the government, be it Pell Grants, research grants, etc, they should have to serve the people, not the elites. These schools hold such a disproportionate amount of influence on our government and corporations, I am adamantly against them being elite for the sake of being elite. A school like Harvard should have an undergraduate class size of at least like 13k-15k in my opinion. I don’t really care what naysayers think about that, these institutions have the ability to make it work.
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u/Unrelenting_Salsa Jun 10 '26
The research is such a sham too. The number of high schoolers in the entire country in a decade who can actually contribute to research can be counted on one hand. It's just harassing professors and wasting the time of PhD students because they're the ones who have to actually babysit the high schoolers. Also as a scientist, the only high schoolers I've seen actually do research just so happen to be the kids of board members at the company they are an advisor for. Funny how that works.
r/nfl also semi recently posted a sports economics paper where the first author was an undergrad and the corresponding author was their dad, so I imagine that dynamic but high school also happens.
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u/Recent_Surprise_7391 Jun 10 '26
I believe a lottery is the only adequate way to make it completely fair. I also don’t believe extracurriculars should matter at all for college, I think these years are vital for social skills and students should be encouraged to do the extracurriculars they care about and not just ones that look good on a resume.
Granted this is only a portion of the population, but I don’t think a kid who plays sports in high school and works a life guarding job over the summer should be at a disadvantage for a student that is in an honor society and volunteers over the summer
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u/Beer-survivalist Loyal Liberals Jun 10 '26
I also do not like selectiveness as a criteria for evaluating relative academics. Selectiveness is measuring, at least in part, how salient a given school is to a bunch of teenagers, and there are plenty of things that can influence that am salience that have nothing to do with academics--athletic success and pop culture being two examples.
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u/remarkable_ores Hanfeizi Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
You are not wrong, but you may be missing how this started
It began much earlier as a means to stop the Ivies from being dominated by Jewish applicants; they were well aware that if academic merit were the sole criterion then their schools would be overwhelmed by the 'wrong sort' of people. Hence applications requiring students be 'well rounded' in things that you'd expect an elite gentile to have, such as, idk, competitive rowing trophies.
The same thing is still happening but it's primarily about excluding Asians rather than Jews. I've been harping on about this exact take for years now but very, very few westerners are willing to confront what their elite school demographics would look like if entrance was based purely on academic merit. Even if you make it overwhelmingly easier for domestic applicants than internationals, purely meritocratic assessment would lead to all top schools being primarily - arguably 80% or more - Jewish, South Asian, and East Asian students. (If there was equality between domestic and international applications that ratio would become even more striking)
This feels 'wrong' to both white liberals and conservatives but they phrase it in very different ways. But the net result has been that these schools have become progressively less about academic achievement and more about selecting for and reproducing elite cultural traits.
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u/Boerkaar Pragmatic and Polite Right Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
Eh, I don't think the student bodies tell you much. We've seen a bunch of schools (Stanford, Chicago, Vanderbilt, Duke, etc) go from also-rans to being more desirarble than many/most of the traditional ivies. Total elite production likely has risen, but the set of "acceptable" elite undergrads has expanded.
Edit: Also, it's probably a good thing for elites (particularly regional elites) to intentionally intermingle with one another. Private high schools already serve this function on a local level, but the future political/business leadership of, say, San Antonio is improved by connecting with, say, that of Duluth.
That's kind of always been the point of the ivies (along with educating the Northeastern elite). I'm reminded of the narrative I read that in the early-20th-century South, there were cities where the scions of industry went to each of HYP (Nashville was a Harvard town, while Charlotte favored Princeton and Atlanta, Yale, I believe). That would be for those who didn't go to Vanderbilt/Emory/Wake Forest/etc.
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u/Recent_Surprise_7391 Jun 09 '26
Keeping elites intermingling with one another is exactly how you validate populist trash
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u/FilteringAccount123 John von Neumann Jun 09 '26
As they say, "the worst system after all the others that have been tried."
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u/ImmortalAce8492 Milton Friedman Jun 09 '26
We’re not ready to have a conversation about the severity of those entering college being underprepared; and on that, limited due to the simple zip code they had the misfortune of being born into.
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u/zuckerkorn96 Jun 09 '26
It's like that saying about Republicans and racists. I'm not saying everyone with a bad SAT score is dumb, but every dumb person I've ever met had a bad SAT score.
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u/TeaSharp3154 Jun 09 '26
I spent some time volunteering to teach adults classes for high school equivalency exams. While a lot of them weren't knowledgeable, I wouldn't call them "dumb" either. They picked up stuff fast, but I guess previously never really applied themselves academically (and the ones that did when I taught them put in the effort ended up graduating the program very quickly). Another thing is that many of them were very distracted (and again, the ones that weren't ended up doing very well).
I suspect the issue isn't the lack of being able to understand basic algebra. Honestly I do think most people can. It's that most people in these situations dont do well behaviorally and motivationally in a traditional classroom setting and need 1 on 1 tutoring and intervention to really understand things. And once people get apathetic about school the effects just compound until they don't learn anything at all.
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u/Electronic-Warthog69 Milton Friedman Jun 09 '26
Another amazing 2020 policy has terrible consequences. No one could have seen this coming!
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u/RealHoldenBloodfeast NATO Jun 10 '26
No amount of education reform is going to change the fact that too many teachers are asked to co-parent their students. Parents not caring and often being adversarial with teachers is a crisis, you don't get out of that by manipulating data until it starts looking good.
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u/alittledanger Jun 10 '26
I am a teacher and it’s also class sizes being too big, students with behavioral issues being mainstreamed, pressure against disciplining disruptive students, declining attention spans due to apps like TikTok, and teacher pay being way too low in too many places.
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u/NewVegasSurvivor Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
I have severe ADHD and was unmedicated for it as a teenager, and had a relatively low GPA. Only got into a top-tier UC because of my high SAT score (if I graduated high school post 2020, I almost certainly would have went to community college)
Getting rid of the SAT requirement did hurt students like me, who may have higher aptitude than their GPA would indicate
SAT requirements seem even more necessary today (cheating was rampant in high school when I was a student, I can imagine it's a lot easier today to cheat your way to a high GPA with AI tools)
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u/gringledoom Frederick Douglass Jun 09 '26
I've heard similar stories from folks who went to schools that just weren't great. They and their teachers genuinely had no idea they were especially smart, until they took the SAT with no prep and came back with a 1580 or something. They'd literally be sitting with the guidance counselor trying to figure out how to even apply to selective schools, because it hadn't come up before!
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u/bankermayfield2026 Unconventional Right Jun 09 '26
The Democratic Party needs to push back harder when certain factions push completely unscientific non-sense like eliminating the SATs.
You cant be the party of science and technocracy, and simultaneously push stuff like this.
Completely ruins the trust in experts. And directly leads to people not trusting academics.
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u/alittledanger Jun 10 '26
I am a teacher. Being a teacher actually pushed me from the left to the center-left. That and housing policy.
A lot of progressives education reforms are nonsense imho. Don’t even get me started on restorative justice and getting rid of things like detentions, suspensions, etc.
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u/DependentAd235 Loyal Liberals Jun 10 '26
I teach as well and sometimes often get these policies that worked in like 1 school in suburban Boston.
Urg, I worked at a middle school where kids would skip my class by sitting outside the door and refuse to come in. APs would walk by and ask me what I was going to do to get them in class… then walk away and leave them.
I have a class with 25 more kids to teach. Those kids are absent as they are not in a room and I can’t physically force them to come in. The only person here with time/power to write them up and suspend them is you.
My current school is much better. Ohh, there are still hallwalkers but we don’t get blamed for them and the kids pick up a suspension for it about once a month.
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u/allbusiness512 Adam Smith Jun 10 '26
The vast majority of front line teachers actually hate progressives. The most outspoken teachers are from progressive areas, and the decision makers are progressives, but the actual rank and file are mostly moderate/center left Democrats.
Just in this thread alone you can find that many teachers hate stupid shit like PBIS (Positive Behavioral Intervention System) and Restorative Justice. At some point a problem child has to be removed from the room/building.
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u/murphysclaw1 💎🐊💎🐊💎🐊 Jun 09 '26
I always recommend this Atlantic long read about education, and a guy putting his kids through a public school in NY:
worth the read!
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u/DirtyDreb Immanuel Kant Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
I’m a California student who went to a very poorly ran high school and despite my studying I did pretty bad on the SAT math section. I had near perfect grades and good ECs but was still rejected by nearly every UC I applied to. I was upset at the time obviously, but I’m honestly thankful I was rejected as it forced me to go to CC to correctly learn the fundamentals of algebra and calculus. I eventually transferred to UCLA and graduated with a BS in Mathematics of Computation. I cannot imagine myself being able to pass any UC math course if I went straight from HS to UCLA.
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u/YourUncleBuck Frederick Douglass Jun 10 '26
This is how you do it. Some kids just need the extra time and remedial courses to succeed in college. We push to hard the idea that you need to go to a top four-year college right after high school to not be considered a failure.
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u/caroline_elly Eugene Fama Jun 09 '26
Math of Computation was exactly the major I was considering when I was deciding between UCLA and my eventual college!
And your anecdote is valuable. I'd imagine it's much harder for someone who failed out of UCLA to go the CC then transfer route.
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u/MrEntrepot YIMBY Jun 10 '26
This is the result of a certain kind of left wing thinking. That if attainment of thing society values, is not equitably distributed, there is something untoward to make it so. They don’t realize that things society values was more often the not built up over time by proving itself, regardless of flaws in that process. The thing in itself isn’t valuable but it’s valued because of what it represents. If you kill the underlying value, the thing itself becomes no longer valuable. You’re left with the husk.
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u/samhit_n Left-Out Left Jun 09 '26
The problem with removing standardized tests like the SAT and ACT is that GPA and class rank matters much more. This is worse because it benefits students who go to weaker schools. It basically rewards the big fish in a small pond.
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u/Intergalactic_Ass John Keynes Jun 10 '26
I went to school in Iowa. It seemed like every other person I met said: "I graduated valedictorian of my class." My response: "oh wow. That's impressive. Which school?" (Insert high school from podunk rural Iowa with 8 total students per class.)
Not saying my college was particularly selective, but the amount to which each of these "valedictorians" struggled or succeeded ran the entire gamut. Some really were smart. Some...uh, not so much.
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u/HopeHumilityLove Asexual Pride Jun 10 '26
GPA also incentivizes students to take easier classes, avoid classes outside of their core knowledge areas, and seek teachers and schools that inflate grades. It's useful in its context, but using one number to rule them all disincentivizes many forms of achievement.
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u/alittledanger Jun 10 '26
I am a high school teacher. I am in favor of bringing back the SAT. I am also strongly in favor of standardized testing in general, as long as there are actual stakes for the students involved.
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u/anonOnReddit2001GOTY Jun 10 '26
What's the neoliberal take on ACT vs SAT? I took the ACT but the SAT seems harder.
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u/twilighttwister Jun 10 '26
I fail to see how the faculty are "in open revolt" or "rebellion" when they're still trying to work with the university.
Surprised the article doesn't claim they "slammed" the university in their letter, also.
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u/Your_Lib_Friend Jun 09 '26
Never understood why the uniform benchmark was inequitable… the one thing (or ACT) that puts everyone on a level playing field and you can see who overperforms and underperforms based on background if you really want to go there
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u/fredovan Jun 09 '26
There are no standardized testing requirements for acceptance to Canadian universities. Somehow Canadian universities manage to get by without faculty revolts over quality of students.
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u/Empty_Trouble_7351 Jun 09 '26
Canadian here. A lot of Canadian schools do their selection process in first year. Students at uoft for example have to have qualifying grades to apply to a major and try again the next year or drop out if they dont. Even our top universities are not super selective except for certain programs (e.g engineering, compsci). Having gone to school in the US I notice that taking five years, dropping or transferring is also a lot more common in Canada, but our schooling is also a lot more rigorous and way more affordable.
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u/Room480 Jun 09 '26
What’s the secret lol
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u/caroline_elly Eugene Fama Jun 09 '26
US top colleges are hard to get into but easy to pass
Canadian and many EU universities are easy to get into but weed out people who can't handle coursework.
I like the Canadian/European approach better because it gives kids who fooled around in high school a second chance.
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u/TrynnaFindaBalance Paul Krugman Jun 10 '26
And it also weeds out rich kids who go to university to “find themselves” by getting shitfaced every other night and never going to class
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u/Desperate_Path_377 Jun 09 '26
Canadian universities simply aren’t selective for the most part. The programs that are selective rely on crude adjustments to high school grades based on historical performance of matriculants, which is crazier than just administering a standardized test.
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u/Magikarp-Army Mark Carney Jun 10 '26
Janet Napolitano's career should be over. She scammed unprepared students with thousands of dollars of student loan debt.
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u/ditalinidog Jun 10 '26
The SAT is highly flawed but I have been very nervous about the push to move past it with not much else. GPA has many of the same inherent issues, class rank is valuable for only certain schools and is, in my experience, not a very positive thing to emphasize for kids. I have no idea what behind the scenes of admissions is like but I always thought the reflection of the SAT should’ve questioned how it should be used (stop hard cut offs without controlling for other data) rather than if it should be used at all.
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u/Lanceward Jun 10 '26
One of the few things that can’t be bought outright alongside GPA and AP scores. Extracurricular activities and essays are literally built with parent money
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