Does it not occur to these brilliant students who are treated so unfairly to apply to unis outside the US? Oxbridge, ETH, Ecole Polytechnique don't care about essays.
I've known multiple mathematically gifted people with limited English despite strong incentives to improve for many years and living in the USA. Language is just one of those things.
It's hard for some people, and no matter how smart you are, you need to practice, and successful practice depends more on your social disposition than intellectual ability.
French/German would be even harder. Unlike English, people aren't used to hearing flawed/accented speech, and they all speak English so will constantly try to prevent you from practicing.
Even granting this (which I'm not so prepared to do - yes, some people find it easier to learn languages, but it's certainly not impossible), there are plenty world class unis outside the US that teach in English. Besides Oxbridge, you have Imperial, Trinity in Dublin, LSE, UCL...
I am just struck by how parochial this discussion is. And frankly, if it doesn't even occur to someone to consider these options, maybe they are not as intelligent, contrarian, and out-of-the-box thinkers as they think. Maybe they're just very good at solving narrow problems.
People indeed should be applying to those as well as Canada, although I think a lot of "slightly more achievable" American schools are probably better at the undergrad level. You'd get a good education though.
However, attending one of these won't help the real problem, which is the emotions of parents. You'd have to convince parents this is a great outcome.
I think if you go to a global top 50, even top 100, you'll be fine! And I think a parent whose child goes to Cambridge will feel fine - and even if they end up somewhere like LSE or Trinity (i.e. great but not with the same star power), surely the international experience itself is worth it.
The main point still stands: there are many excellent unis outside the US, many of which teach in English.
But it is curious that many good students struggle with foreign languages. Wonder why. What makes learning a language that much harder than learning anything else?
I'm hard of hearing, as an example of an especially legible obstacle.
Learning a language takes a lot of time because there are a whole lot of bits to master -- some people really prefer mathy subjects. Unless you get interested in it for its own sake, that giant mass of memorization is going to be a slog. (True that it is more efficient now with spaced repetition, internet, and chatbots.)
In my case I was an avid reader, but had challenges with completing homework assignments (probably an executive function issue). For any course where I could learn by being smart, actively participating in class, and having read a lot of books in English, I would do very well on the tests, at least. That covered math, science, English, and often history. French was not a class where those factors were enough - it demanded study and memorization outside of class, and that was very hard for me.
There's a positive correlation between dyslexia and visual math performance, so if you impose a language requirement you're biasing against visual maths.
Like most responses, this misses the main point, which is there are great colleges outside the US, many of which teach in English.
But even besides that, how strong is this correlation? And how much does dyslexia affect learning a foreign language (noting that it doesn't impact learning a native language to the extent that studying maths in english is also impossible)?
You made a specific claim -- "If you can win in maths Olympiads, you can learn French and German" -- that triggered an unusual number of specific rebuttals. You should take this as evidence of an objectionable property in your specific claim, and not "everyone else missing the point". People didn't like that statement!
Since this is an anecdote festival, I went to an Ivy, wrote my thesis on applied graph theory, but I frequently mangle spoken English, and I have never done better than a C grade in any foreign language course.
I do respond to that specific objection, I'm just also reminding people to focus on the main claim.
Remember also that a lot of the discussion is not on maths prodigies but all-round top students. Even if there are some exceptions, I struggle to believe the majority of those top-ranking students can't learn a foreign language - after all, how many students at Ivies are foreign? They manage!
No not really. The ability to be great at math and quickly pick up a foreign language do not overlap that much. Most STEM majors think everything else is easy but it is not.
"Learn a different language" as the solution to college admissions is yet another example as to how broken college admissions is. That's an insane ask for any language other than English.
I'm not arguing admissions aren't broken, I haven't studied in the US so I don't know (though I do know plenty of white non-legacy men who've been to Ivies! So the claim it's literally impossible is obviously not true).
I am just saying these students do have other options and it's mildly baffling they don't even consider them. Isn't agency the mot du jour at the moment? This attitude doesn't suggest high agency.
There's two problems, one is "how do you do fair and good college admissions", the other is "how do we reduce stress and misery of high schoolers".
It feels like you can fix the latter by fixing the former. I am skeptical. Fundamentally the pressure comes from the parents, and college admissions are just an acceptable outlet for people to express their own anxieties and resentments toward their children. It would just come out somewhere else. Although more free time would probably help a lot of kids, it's not nothing.
That said, I feel like I want to hear from a Canadian. They seemingly have a very sane college admissions system up there, and I wonder what the emotional experience is like among peers and in the family.
Make a base threshold to reach, and once you reach it, you get put into a lottery. You've hit it, there's nothing to be done, if you don't make it into your dream school, hey, people will understand, it's a lottery.
This is my preferred approach. Stop encouraging bright kids to burn their teen years competing in a tournament market. I'm aware of the argument against it, but I think the amount of human potential we're burning with the current system dramatically outweighs the things we lose by switching to a lottery system.
"President: If a few get scared off or decide to transfer to feel smarter because they care mainly about signaling and positional goods rather than learning, that seems fine, make sure our office helps them get good placements elsewhere. And yeah, okay, or sports teams suck, but remind me why I should care about that"
Overlooked: Employers and graduate schools looking at transcripts care about grades and GPA, not about relative increases in learning.
It would be vitally important for this school to garner lots of media attention so that potential employers and graduate schools would be aware of how this school was handling things differently.
So I've thought about this a great deal and wanted to design a system that was meritocratic, and doesn't waste kids childhood on signaling games. I like test based systems, but it seems like the experience in Asia is everyone instead of pretending to do whatever colleges want just spends nights and weekends preparing for the test. Not good either.
So my solution is to lower the stakes of the test by creating admission bands that equalize the top schools, and mid schools admissions. Admission is done by test group band, and a matching application system once band is established. We divide colleges up by 4 grades. A, B, C, & D. A could be the top 10 or 20 schools. Your grade on the test gets you a garenteed spot at at least one school at the band level you scored. Tests are graded on a curve based on how many people take it. So not much point in trying to get a higher A score or a higher B score, an A is an A, and a B is a B. It is worth studying if you are at the top of Bs or the bottom of A, which honestly is a good signal if you can go from high B to A with effort.
Applications come after that, but you are garenteed a spot in an A school if you get an A score. Since we know how many A spots there are and how many students pass the test. A could require a score of say 1500 one year, or 1520. the next, depending how big the class is that year. We want to set the A threshold at the top 5% of scores, maybe B at top 25%, C is the the next 25%, and D is everything below that. If you want a scholorship you can go to a school below your level for free.
The advantage of this system is it's meritocratic, gets the right people to work harder. Gives most kids their childhoods back. The disadvantage is that now there is much less difference between brands like, Havard, Yale, and MIT. But they can choose their student matches, and reputation will still help students rank their choices.
I would make all federal and state funding dependant on using the standardized admission system. No you can't opt out and steel childhoods.
Schoolhouse's Dialogues is still a very new feature, it'll start pilot testing their system in this application system, and schools merely say they will accept it for the first time. Colleges are not mandating it, requiring it, or expecting it. They don't say how much it'll matter in the process, but likely not a lot.
It's probably not a good idea but it's not going to have a huge impact on the admissions process, so I'd be surprised if people started extensively gaming the system and if doing so would work as opposed to schools just mostly ignoring these scores or discontinuing the pilot.
Something that has always confused me about the discussion of admissions is that many people seem to assume that the qualifications are supposed to be entirely academic, despite colleges constantly saying that they’re not and are more holistic. Like, sure, group test scores averages can differ, that doesn’t mean the groups with lower test scores are “less qualified” according to what the people doing admissions are calling qualifications.
When you ask what other things universities consider/want to see in admissions you’ll usually get some phrases like “future leaders” and “people who will positively impact their communities” and I think a lot of people (especially STEM people) are quick to write these off as trite meaningless sound bites, but it’s worth considering whether there’s actually any meaning there. In my mind the quality they are describing is something akin to agency, and personally I do feel that a lot of people I know who got into elite colleges (*especially* the ones who were less incredible academically) were very high agency. During the big lawsuit, Harvard released another portion of their admissions process called the personality score or something akin to that, and it had an inverse relationship with test scores across groups. People found a way to complain about that but to be clear, that is exactly what you’d expect if you have two uncorrelated variables X and Y and you select for a population above a high enough threshold for X+Y: a negative correlation between the two.
In any case, whenever I hear of high school students who have “extremely qualified” resumes that get rejected from “safety schools” e.g. Stanley Zhong from Cal Poly, the first question I ask is “how bad must this kids essays have been?” That appears to be one of the parts of the application that is suspiciously absent in their demonstration of how qualified he is. Additionally, nothing screams low agency like getting your dad to file a lawsuit against a school you didn’t get in to or bragging about a job offer you got at a company he works for.
I was part of the mythical “not well-off Asian American” demographic that Affirmative Action haters love to masturbate about and I indeed did not get into any “super elite” universities and instead “only” went to a good public university (when I think about my applications, there’s 0 chance my results were unfair), and my life is great because I decided to stop complaining about some pseudo injustice and just do things. These kids should probably do the same.
I also wonder about the teacher recommendation letters. I think elite college admissions are terrible, but when I see these “Everything about my micromanaged child is perfect, it’s a TOTAL MYSTERY why he wasn’t accepted” posts, I think, you might be right! But all it takes is one teacher *hinting* that you or your kid might be an interpersonal nightmare to explain why you got the results you did…no conspiracy theory required.
That was my conclusion from the business bro twitter kerfluffle. I read it and thought "I feel bad for this kid but yes I can immediately tell why those schools rejected him."
I think a lot of people who believe the admissions process should prioritize certain candidates (e.g. strong STEM candidates) use direct criticism of the process as a way to indirectly advocate for their priorities.
If you want to increase the focus of colleges on STEM candidates, one way to do that is to attack the process as unfair to those candidates. This obfuscates the difference between flaws in the process, and flaws in the target outcome.
Plausibly at least the admission officers are genuinely looking for personality attributes. Why on earth they would EXPECT to find a meaningful signal in the extremely gamed essay is however a mystery to me. I believe existing psychology research is already pretty skeptical about people being able to judge other folks' character from initial impressions in normal circumstances. Now add on top that students are of course very much not trying to be forthright in their essay, but use plenty of time and external advice to come off exactly how they want to. Continuing to ignore these well known facts seems at this point like willful ignorance.
I strongly dislike using GPA as an important admissions signal for high-end applicants.
I spent several years reviewing applications for a scholarship that switched to a test-blind process: even if the application included test scores, they were not included in the packet to review.
Even with the full transcript, I was unable to differentiate the academic achievement or ability of most applicants. At the high end, all students converge to almost all As, possibly with an occasional B. The signal is fully saturated.
Using GPA implicitly highly penalizes having one or more Bs, which I'm highly opposed to. I don't think it's meaningful predictive signal, and I don't think "Students who have never made a significant mistake at school" is really the selection criteria we should be going for.
This isn't a problem we can fix with controls or within-school ranks:
- Some schools do have clusters of truly outstanding students - it wouldn't be uncommon for the 20th best student at such a school to have higher academic achievement and ability than the valedictorian at a median school.
- The competitive dynamics would be even more terrible than they currently are. Turning academic indicators into a zero-sum game with ones immediate peers would be bad.
- More fine-grained grade measurement (e.g. schools that use A+, A, A-, B+, etc.) often end up measuring willingness to burn time doing busywork to please the teacher rather than meaningful achievement or learning.
- High schools won't play along. Elite schools already mostly refuse to provide any meaningful class ranks.
My preferred use of GPA is as an initial filter for ability and willingness to do the work expected of a college student. If the transcript isn't "mostly As, maybe with a couple Bs", then elite colleges should probably pass on that applicant unless there are really unusual extenuating circumstances. But I probably wouldn't consider it at all beyond that point.
I strongly agree that we need more rigorous tests. Ideally we would be testing for both "raw cognitive ability" as well as accumulated knowledge and skill. We approximate this right now with the SAT and AP tests, but the SAT is saturated at the high end and many AP tests are taken too late in high school to be considered in college admissions.
Technically, the UC system (Berkeley, LA, Davis et al) also has a 9% rule for in-state applicants. In-state applicants who are in the top 9% of their high school class are guaranteed a spot...in *a* UC school. So if you apply to every school in the system (including schools like UC Merced), you will get into at least one of them, but you are not guaranteed into the one you want.
If you have not previously looked into it: you may find the Irish Leaving Certificate CAO system, specifically as it functions when applying to Irish universities, of interest. It has many of the features you would like, few of the features you do not want, and was/is a functional system in place for decades (with variation). It also is a good illustration of what 'gaming' such a system looks like in the real world.
> The ‘top X% of your class’ system is excellent, such as Texas’s top 10% rule.
On current margins yes, but I don't think I need to explain the dystopian (literally YA dystopian, in fact) incentives that would result from this being widely adopted as a primary criterion.
I'm sorry but after reading Michael Druggan's twitter, I would have rejected him as well. People who are brilliant, arrogant and toxic are some of the worst people I've ever had to work or study with. I'd much rather work with people who lift others up even if they aren't as smart. I have little doubt that some of that personality came through in his essays, recommendations or interview (if he had one).
> Harvard admissions are way up
I think you mean applications.
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/childhood-and-education-college-admissions
Does it not occur to these brilliant students who are treated so unfairly to apply to unis outside the US? Oxbridge, ETH, Ecole Polytechnique don't care about essays.
Oxbridge would be wise although I think they limit American slots somewhat. The other schools conduct undergraduate education in French or German.
If you can win in maths Olympiads, you can learn French and German!
Also I think EP offers a BSc in English.
I've known multiple mathematically gifted people with limited English despite strong incentives to improve for many years and living in the USA. Language is just one of those things.
It's hard for some people, and no matter how smart you are, you need to practice, and successful practice depends more on your social disposition than intellectual ability.
French/German would be even harder. Unlike English, people aren't used to hearing flawed/accented speech, and they all speak English so will constantly try to prevent you from practicing.
Even granting this (which I'm not so prepared to do - yes, some people find it easier to learn languages, but it's certainly not impossible), there are plenty world class unis outside the US that teach in English. Besides Oxbridge, you have Imperial, Trinity in Dublin, LSE, UCL...
I am just struck by how parochial this discussion is. And frankly, if it doesn't even occur to someone to consider these options, maybe they are not as intelligent, contrarian, and out-of-the-box thinkers as they think. Maybe they're just very good at solving narrow problems.
People indeed should be applying to those as well as Canada, although I think a lot of "slightly more achievable" American schools are probably better at the undergrad level. You'd get a good education though.
However, attending one of these won't help the real problem, which is the emotions of parents. You'd have to convince parents this is a great outcome.
I think if you go to a global top 50, even top 100, you'll be fine! And I think a parent whose child goes to Cambridge will feel fine - and even if they end up somewhere like LSE or Trinity (i.e. great but not with the same star power), surely the international experience itself is worth it.
I did pretty well on the USAMO (I did not win), and French was the consistent bane of my GPA in both high school and college.
The main point still stands: there are many excellent unis outside the US, many of which teach in English.
But it is curious that many good students struggle with foreign languages. Wonder why. What makes learning a language that much harder than learning anything else?
I'm hard of hearing, as an example of an especially legible obstacle.
Learning a language takes a lot of time because there are a whole lot of bits to master -- some people really prefer mathy subjects. Unless you get interested in it for its own sake, that giant mass of memorization is going to be a slog. (True that it is more efficient now with spaced repetition, internet, and chatbots.)
In my case I was an avid reader, but had challenges with completing homework assignments (probably an executive function issue). For any course where I could learn by being smart, actively participating in class, and having read a lot of books in English, I would do very well on the tests, at least. That covered math, science, English, and often history. French was not a class where those factors were enough - it demanded study and memorization outside of class, and that was very hard for me.
There's a positive correlation between dyslexia and visual math performance, so if you impose a language requirement you're biasing against visual maths.
Like most responses, this misses the main point, which is there are great colleges outside the US, many of which teach in English.
But even besides that, how strong is this correlation? And how much does dyslexia affect learning a foreign language (noting that it doesn't impact learning a native language to the extent that studying maths in english is also impossible)?
You made a specific claim -- "If you can win in maths Olympiads, you can learn French and German" -- that triggered an unusual number of specific rebuttals. You should take this as evidence of an objectionable property in your specific claim, and not "everyone else missing the point". People didn't like that statement!
Since this is an anecdote festival, I went to an Ivy, wrote my thesis on applied graph theory, but I frequently mangle spoken English, and I have never done better than a C grade in any foreign language course.
I do respond to that specific objection, I'm just also reminding people to focus on the main claim.
Remember also that a lot of the discussion is not on maths prodigies but all-round top students. Even if there are some exceptions, I struggle to believe the majority of those top-ranking students can't learn a foreign language - after all, how many students at Ivies are foreign? They manage!
No not really. The ability to be great at math and quickly pick up a foreign language do not overlap that much. Most STEM majors think everything else is easy but it is not.
How do all the Chinese students at Harvard manage?
"Learn a different language" as the solution to college admissions is yet another example as to how broken college admissions is. That's an insane ask for any language other than English.
I'm not arguing admissions aren't broken, I haven't studied in the US so I don't know (though I do know plenty of white non-legacy men who've been to Ivies! So the claim it's literally impossible is obviously not true).
I am just saying these students do have other options and it's mildly baffling they don't even consider them. Isn't agency the mot du jour at the moment? This attitude doesn't suggest high agency.
There's two problems, one is "how do you do fair and good college admissions", the other is "how do we reduce stress and misery of high schoolers".
It feels like you can fix the latter by fixing the former. I am skeptical. Fundamentally the pressure comes from the parents, and college admissions are just an acceptable outlet for people to express their own anxieties and resentments toward their children. It would just come out somewhere else. Although more free time would probably help a lot of kids, it's not nothing.
That said, I feel like I want to hear from a Canadian. They seemingly have a very sane college admissions system up there, and I wonder what the emotional experience is like among peers and in the family.
Make a base threshold to reach, and once you reach it, you get put into a lottery. You've hit it, there's nothing to be done, if you don't make it into your dream school, hey, people will understand, it's a lottery.
This is my preferred approach. Stop encouraging bright kids to burn their teen years competing in a tournament market. I'm aware of the argument against it, but I think the amount of human potential we're burning with the current system dramatically outweighs the things we lose by switching to a lottery system.
"President: If a few get scared off or decide to transfer to feel smarter because they care mainly about signaling and positional goods rather than learning, that seems fine, make sure our office helps them get good placements elsewhere. And yeah, okay, or sports teams suck, but remind me why I should care about that"
Overlooked: Employers and graduate schools looking at transcripts care about grades and GPA, not about relative increases in learning.
It would be vitally important for this school to garner lots of media attention so that potential employers and graduate schools would be aware of how this school was handling things differently.
Princeton tried exactly this. It didn't work and was abandoned as an unsuccessful experiment.
Well, that's a problem for someone who wants to overturn the traditional model by replacing one link in the middle of the chain.
Excellent and painful post
So I've thought about this a great deal and wanted to design a system that was meritocratic, and doesn't waste kids childhood on signaling games. I like test based systems, but it seems like the experience in Asia is everyone instead of pretending to do whatever colleges want just spends nights and weekends preparing for the test. Not good either.
So my solution is to lower the stakes of the test by creating admission bands that equalize the top schools, and mid schools admissions. Admission is done by test group band, and a matching application system once band is established. We divide colleges up by 4 grades. A, B, C, & D. A could be the top 10 or 20 schools. Your grade on the test gets you a garenteed spot at at least one school at the band level you scored. Tests are graded on a curve based on how many people take it. So not much point in trying to get a higher A score or a higher B score, an A is an A, and a B is a B. It is worth studying if you are at the top of Bs or the bottom of A, which honestly is a good signal if you can go from high B to A with effort.
Applications come after that, but you are garenteed a spot in an A school if you get an A score. Since we know how many A spots there are and how many students pass the test. A could require a score of say 1500 one year, or 1520. the next, depending how big the class is that year. We want to set the A threshold at the top 5% of scores, maybe B at top 25%, C is the the next 25%, and D is everything below that. If you want a scholorship you can go to a school below your level for free.
The advantage of this system is it's meritocratic, gets the right people to work harder. Gives most kids their childhoods back. The disadvantage is that now there is much less difference between brands like, Havard, Yale, and MIT. But they can choose their student matches, and reputation will still help students rank their choices.
I would make all federal and state funding dependant on using the standardized admission system. No you can't opt out and steel childhoods.
Schoolhouse's Dialogues is still a very new feature, it'll start pilot testing their system in this application system, and schools merely say they will accept it for the first time. Colleges are not mandating it, requiring it, or expecting it. They don't say how much it'll matter in the process, but likely not a lot.
It's probably not a good idea but it's not going to have a huge impact on the admissions process, so I'd be surprised if people started extensively gaming the system and if doing so would work as opposed to schools just mostly ignoring these scores or discontinuing the pilot.
Something that has always confused me about the discussion of admissions is that many people seem to assume that the qualifications are supposed to be entirely academic, despite colleges constantly saying that they’re not and are more holistic. Like, sure, group test scores averages can differ, that doesn’t mean the groups with lower test scores are “less qualified” according to what the people doing admissions are calling qualifications.
When you ask what other things universities consider/want to see in admissions you’ll usually get some phrases like “future leaders” and “people who will positively impact their communities” and I think a lot of people (especially STEM people) are quick to write these off as trite meaningless sound bites, but it’s worth considering whether there’s actually any meaning there. In my mind the quality they are describing is something akin to agency, and personally I do feel that a lot of people I know who got into elite colleges (*especially* the ones who were less incredible academically) were very high agency. During the big lawsuit, Harvard released another portion of their admissions process called the personality score or something akin to that, and it had an inverse relationship with test scores across groups. People found a way to complain about that but to be clear, that is exactly what you’d expect if you have two uncorrelated variables X and Y and you select for a population above a high enough threshold for X+Y: a negative correlation between the two.
In any case, whenever I hear of high school students who have “extremely qualified” resumes that get rejected from “safety schools” e.g. Stanley Zhong from Cal Poly, the first question I ask is “how bad must this kids essays have been?” That appears to be one of the parts of the application that is suspiciously absent in their demonstration of how qualified he is. Additionally, nothing screams low agency like getting your dad to file a lawsuit against a school you didn’t get in to or bragging about a job offer you got at a company he works for.
I was part of the mythical “not well-off Asian American” demographic that Affirmative Action haters love to masturbate about and I indeed did not get into any “super elite” universities and instead “only” went to a good public university (when I think about my applications, there’s 0 chance my results were unfair), and my life is great because I decided to stop complaining about some pseudo injustice and just do things. These kids should probably do the same.
I also wonder about the teacher recommendation letters. I think elite college admissions are terrible, but when I see these “Everything about my micromanaged child is perfect, it’s a TOTAL MYSTERY why he wasn’t accepted” posts, I think, you might be right! But all it takes is one teacher *hinting* that you or your kid might be an interpersonal nightmare to explain why you got the results you did…no conspiracy theory required.
That was my conclusion from the business bro twitter kerfluffle. I read it and thought "I feel bad for this kid but yes I can immediately tell why those schools rejected him."
I think a lot of people who believe the admissions process should prioritize certain candidates (e.g. strong STEM candidates) use direct criticism of the process as a way to indirectly advocate for their priorities.
If you want to increase the focus of colleges on STEM candidates, one way to do that is to attack the process as unfair to those candidates. This obfuscates the difference between flaws in the process, and flaws in the target outcome.
Plausibly at least the admission officers are genuinely looking for personality attributes. Why on earth they would EXPECT to find a meaningful signal in the extremely gamed essay is however a mystery to me. I believe existing psychology research is already pretty skeptical about people being able to judge other folks' character from initial impressions in normal circumstances. Now add on top that students are of course very much not trying to be forthright in their essay, but use plenty of time and external advice to come off exactly how they want to. Continuing to ignore these well known facts seems at this point like willful ignorance.
What would you suggest as an alternative? Rely more on the interview? Feels like that could have a host of issues as well
I strongly dislike using GPA as an important admissions signal for high-end applicants.
I spent several years reviewing applications for a scholarship that switched to a test-blind process: even if the application included test scores, they were not included in the packet to review.
Even with the full transcript, I was unable to differentiate the academic achievement or ability of most applicants. At the high end, all students converge to almost all As, possibly with an occasional B. The signal is fully saturated.
Using GPA implicitly highly penalizes having one or more Bs, which I'm highly opposed to. I don't think it's meaningful predictive signal, and I don't think "Students who have never made a significant mistake at school" is really the selection criteria we should be going for.
This isn't a problem we can fix with controls or within-school ranks:
- Some schools do have clusters of truly outstanding students - it wouldn't be uncommon for the 20th best student at such a school to have higher academic achievement and ability than the valedictorian at a median school.
- The competitive dynamics would be even more terrible than they currently are. Turning academic indicators into a zero-sum game with ones immediate peers would be bad.
- More fine-grained grade measurement (e.g. schools that use A+, A, A-, B+, etc.) often end up measuring willingness to burn time doing busywork to please the teacher rather than meaningful achievement or learning.
- High schools won't play along. Elite schools already mostly refuse to provide any meaningful class ranks.
My preferred use of GPA is as an initial filter for ability and willingness to do the work expected of a college student. If the transcript isn't "mostly As, maybe with a couple Bs", then elite colleges should probably pass on that applicant unless there are really unusual extenuating circumstances. But I probably wouldn't consider it at all beyond that point.
I strongly agree that we need more rigorous tests. Ideally we would be testing for both "raw cognitive ability" as well as accumulated knowledge and skill. We approximate this right now with the SAT and AP tests, but the SAT is saturated at the high end and many AP tests are taken too late in high school to be considered in college admissions.
Strong agree on the SAT being much easier - particularly in the Math section where it feels like questions are shorter and require less attention.
My company is working on an SAT Math prep tool and would love feedback from anyone interested - https://aaris.ai
Technically, the UC system (Berkeley, LA, Davis et al) also has a 9% rule for in-state applicants. In-state applicants who are in the top 9% of their high school class are guaranteed a spot...in *a* UC school. So if you apply to every school in the system (including schools like UC Merced), you will get into at least one of them, but you are not guaranteed into the one you want.
If you have not previously looked into it: you may find the Irish Leaving Certificate CAO system, specifically as it functions when applying to Irish universities, of interest. It has many of the features you would like, few of the features you do not want, and was/is a functional system in place for decades (with variation). It also is a good illustration of what 'gaming' such a system looks like in the real world.
Depressing as usual. A+
> The ‘top X% of your class’ system is excellent, such as Texas’s top 10% rule.
On current margins yes, but I don't think I need to explain the dystopian (literally YA dystopian, in fact) incentives that would result from this being widely adopted as a primary criterion.
I'm sorry but after reading Michael Druggan's twitter, I would have rejected him as well. People who are brilliant, arrogant and toxic are some of the worst people I've ever had to work or study with. I'd much rather work with people who lift others up even if they aren't as smart. I have little doubt that some of that personality came through in his essays, recommendations or interview (if he had one).