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Comment by BoiledCabbage | Hacker News Reader

How is this comment upvoted? MIT has not removed the requirement to take SAT tests.

> We will continue to require the SAT or the ACT, because our research has shown these tests, in combination with a student’s high school grades and coursework, are predictive of success in our challenging curriculum.

This is typical of a knee-jerk reaction without even understanding their policy. Let alone reading the actual post. It's the answer to the very first question at the top of the post. I thought HN would do better than this.

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Probably because many (most?) people don't take or know about the subject tests.

I thought I had never heard of them, but after looking at wikipedia, it looks like they were called the SAT II when I was in high school. I remember that existing, but never knew why you would take them and never knew anybody that did.

It's not a stretch to imagine people being confused.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT_Subject_Tests

And way back, they were apparently called the Achievement Tests. I vaguely remember taking a few but don't otherwise remember much about them or what the requirements were.

It's explicitly explained in the very short article. Yet somehow people lacking basic reading comprehension are en masse bemoaning the dumbing down of kids these days.

SAT IIs are pretty obscure, and I don't think there's any benefit to taking them over AP tests, since APs can sometimes be translated into college credits and have much more support in public schools.

One of the points of metrics is to reduce the relevance of how savvy your parents are. But you have to have pretty savvy parents to take the SAT IIs.

Metrics get a lot of heat from people who don't realize what the alternative is, but I know a guy who got into Harvard because his grandparents go to the same synagogue as some admissions people and called in a favor. _That's_ the alternative to metrics.

It's been a few years since I applied to college, but subject tests were nice because they showed a baseline for certain subjects that didn't really have AP exams (e.g. Math II is everything through pre-calculus). You can also take them more than once, unlike AP exams. Also, you don't send "official" AP scores to college admissions; you only do that once you're admitted, since they actually go to the registrar, not admissions. You simply self-report AP scores otherwise.

I feel like there are other benefits that I'm forgetting, but those come to mind immediately.

GP comment seems completely relevant to SAT subject tests to me. The point is that removing a test from consideration, even if it's not the only test considered, makes it easier for rich people to game the application process.

Exactly. If you look at the comments on the linked article, or the ones that were on top here when I wrote mine, people are making comments that aren't specific to the SAT subject test at all -- "this is great, because I bombed that test", "this lowers stress", "that test was too easy anyway".

No. The point about replacing a test with more subjective criteria is completely invalidated when, instead, multiple tests are replaced with a single test.

EDIT: Instead of completely invalidated, I should say irrelevant to MIT's change. In another context it could be an important point.

I think the top level comment is based on the assumption that a greater quantity of objective data will lead to a greater weighting of objective data, and a lower quantity will lead to a lower weighting, leading to a greater weighting of subjective measures.

Likewise, there are many skills you can't demonstrate on the SAT such as Spanish language proficiency. For whatever reason I took the French subject test but no AP test, perhaps there are other schools that do this.

The math score might say a little about the other sciences, but the blmultilingual students are going to be disadvantaged by this it seems to me.

This is completely incorrect. The SAT is not changing to incorporate the skills that would have previously measured by the subject test. As a result we are simply going to have fewer objective metrics.

When I say "replacing" I mean in terms of the weight they carry in admissions.

If the subject test was a thing that everyone was informed about, did not cost extra, and was readily available, if not required alongside standard SAT administration, then I would be more inclined to agree. But here knowing that they even exist is half the battle.

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