Comment by impossiblefork
5 days ago
Standardized test reliably predict academic success. IQ tests similarly.
Here in Sweden, if you do well enough on the entrance exam, we simply let you in, even to the best universities. This means that people other than hoop-jumpers have a chance.
Academic success isn’t what Harvard cares about. They want leaders, not kids who are great at “school”.
Put it this way they’d much rather have Roberts or Obama as alumni than your typical 1600 SAT quant.
Whats the best metric to find the people they are looking to educate?
If that is their goal, should they even be classified as a university? Formal education that the government regulate has different goals from non-formal and informal education. If the goal is to be a primer for leaders, then they can be that without mixing it with formal education.
If we want the selection process of future leaders to be government regulated under formal education, then we should have a discussion on how such system should look like. The current system is a bit like the old fraternal groups, with the admission system being relocated to the university admission board. There should be better way to select future leaders.
> If that is their goal, should they even be classified as a university?
There is no universal definition of what the goal of a university should be.
At the very top of Harvard's mission page it says, "Our mission to educate future leaders is woven throughout the Harvard College experience, inspiring every member of our community to strive toward a more just, fair, and promising world."
There is NOWHERE where they say anything even remotely like, "Our goal is to reward students who do well in high school coursework and testing." Nor do they say anything like, "The mission of Harvard is to teach as much academic material to students as possible."
In contrast Caltech says, "The mission of the California Institute of Technology is to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research integrated with education. We investigate the most challenging, fundamental problems in science and technology in a singularly collegial, interdisciplinary atmosphere, while educating outstanding students to become creative members of society."
It's much more focused on solving science and tech problems and a focus on educating outstanding students. There is very little here about leadership.
And so you tend to see that CalTech has some of the top scientists and professors in the world. At the same time, even in tech/science companies, they occupy a small percentage of CEOs. Those aren't the people they are intending to nurture.
There's room for different types of education with different goals and metrics, including admissions metrics.
And anyone can create a university and say,"We look at grades and test score. We don't ask for recs or essays. Don't care about what your goals are. We stack rank based on GPASATAPs and then select the top N." That's a perfectly valid approach. I wouldn't want to go to that school, but it sounds like there are some students who would, and I wouldn't object to it.
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In reality though, Harvard actually educates perfectly ordinary physicians, engineers, etc., and I assume that the vast majority of their output consists of relatively ordinary people.
What people need isn't leaders, but the capacity for decentralised self-organisation.
Their decision to make education into finding or creating leaders is, I think, a terrible mistake and socially dangerous, and in a way exclusionary. If they are truly successful and are able to notice natural leaders and bring them into their institutions that might well channel the capacity of ordinary people away from decentralised self-organisation and into a pure elite society.
You can try, but I think it'll be hellish.
Then they'll fail. They have that right.
As so many people who hate the Ivies tell me, you can get just a good of an education at your local CC and state college. That option is available and they don't have the emphasis on leaders and they also tend to accept most people who are qualified.
The reasons people want to go to Harvard aren't simply because of the academics to be ordinary engineers.
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Do you think there's a specific (whether public or hidden) criterion being used to deny Asian students based on "leadership abilities"? Or do you think they're simply being held to higher standards or subject to an informal quota?
I don’t think most people are denied based on any specific thing. Asians attend these elite schools at much higher rates than their population. If there was a school that admitted based on grades and test scores only they’d probably be even more highly represented.
College is no more a reward for school academic achievement as a basketball scholarship is for HS basketball achievement. They’re correlated but a lot more go into both.
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> Standardized test reliably predict academic success. IQ tests similarly.
So do home addresses. And skin colour. And parent's money. There are issues with all of those for different reasons. People saying IQ is problematic don't mean there's no correlation at all. Just that they can be culture / approach / etc. specific and we shouldn't treat them as an objective measure.
Are you saying these aren’t objective measures or that they’re “problematic”? The distinction is important.
They're objective measures (don't depend on the person applying them), created subjectively (people choosing criteria based on their preferences/ideas), and chosen subjectively (people deciding which ones they want to rely on more). I meant objective originally, as in many people claim the whole process is objective.
They're obviously objective. That doesn't make them good. Think of Harvard's goals, maybe some more complicated version of a combination of:
1. Meritocracy: Give a chance to the students with the best innate chance at real-world success
2. Self-preservation: Give a chance to the students with the best chance at real-world success
3. (implicitly) Don't let too many people in who don't further (1) or (2).
Those measures (SAT, high-school GPA, gender, color, income, ...) are weak predictors of (2). How couldn't they be? We live in a world that encourages feedback loops, making it difficult for the most intelligent and ambitious people to break through class barriers with any reasonable degree of success.
They're not good measures because (a) they're not even particularly strong predictors of goal (2), and (b) they're piss-poor predictors of goal (1).
By way of contrast, a compelling essay is much harder to assign an "objective" score to, but it's a stronger predictor of both (1) and (2) than the rest put together, especially at the top end.
The important thing to keep in mind with all of those though is that they're proxy measurements. We can't directly measure the future, so we come up with tests to try to guess less incorrectly. It doesn't matter which measure you pick; they'll all be "problematic." If you recognize that though, it's easier to move past a shallow thought like whether the measure is objective or not and toward a system that better align's with the university's goals.
If you think that Ivy League cares about academic success, you're out of touch of how US universities work.
Y'all have a lot of inner city neighborhoods that have been systematically destroyed over decades due to redlining, Jim Crow laws, lynching their inhabitants or just outright burning them to the ground, or is “but we do it in Europe” maybe frequently as stupid a comment as “but we do it in America” and is best kept to one’s self, if one doesn’t actually understand how it might be applicable?
Also, bullshit on IQ tests. They do reliably predict a number of socioeconomic factors, so I suppose they’re a great way to keep the poors out. How very “enlightened” of you.
If someone has a low IQ and can’t do well on a standardized test, how in the world will they succeed at Harvard?
Even if you believe that such tests simply reflect privilege and reveal absolutely nothing regarding innate talent, what difference does it make? It can be a point-of-time snapshot but it still doesn’t mean letting in low-IQ poorly-equipped students to Harvard will help them or anyone else.
Your question is, “even if IQ tests don’t show intelligence, how will someone who did poorly on one cope at Harvard”?
Seriously? That’s your question? And you think these low income students are why you didn’t get into your school of choice?
Just go sports.