Uchicago drops SAT/ACT requirement | Hacker News Reader

Uchicago drops SAT/ACT requirement

washingtonpost.com

15 pointsharshgupta11 comments

This is great. I wish it was around when I was applying to colleges, low these many years ago. This could also be a significant aid to minority and economically disadvantaged youth, because they have not been as able to take advantage of the test prep industrial complex.

What replaces it that is better? Inflated grades for the privledged? AP classes? Extracurriculars? Very easily biased and noisy interviews or essays?

Test prep accounts for a small portion of test score differences and minorities are more likely to use test prep.

Depends on what you mean by minorities but prepared minorities do use test prep. Poor black kids at disadvantaged high schools in my experience never did.

> ... because they have not been as able to take advantage of the test prep industrial complex.

I must disagree. In my brief experience with the "test prep industrial complex", I saw that most of the families putting their kids through it are immigrants - especially South Asian and East Asian immigrants. Minorities who arrived in the US with little money and no local support network.

I really meant the economically depressed people I knew when I was a kid in my urban high school in the south. My parents went to college and knew about preparing for those tests (like taking the psat and prep books, that's as far as I went). But plenty of my fellow students at my high school never really escaped the urban environment and didn't get a chance to go to college and beyond. If their parents were more prepared for this world, or they were lucky and able to navigate it on their own they might have had very different lives. I was not particularly savvy about the college world but my parents knew what to do. There are no doubt plenty of asian immigrants who also didn't have those parents who helped them get started in colleges, just like non-immigrant americans had parents who didn't help them get out to college.

If all your fellow high school students who didn't prepare for tests were magically granted admission and loans to go to a top 10 university, what percentage of them would you expect to have done well there and been able to repay their loan?

I assume the answer is greater than 0% and less than 100%. In which case, the second question is, what signal other than test scores could the top 10 universities use to accurately distinguish between those in your particular cohort who would most likely succeed and those who wouldn't?

I don't think they'd all succeed, but all well prepared college students don't succeed. I think they'd have a harder time than an "average" student because at least they can't fall back on their parents for as much experience based advice or money.

I don't know what universities should use other than test scores. But I do want them to do more.

Charging $9/mo for basic GDPR compliance? This can't be legal...

TLDR - scheme to game college rankings while still meeting diversity quotas.

Could you please work on posting more substantively?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You'll have to explain that. I didn't get that feeling.

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