And why would the parents give a donation if they can just buy their kid a great SAT score and everything else needed to get in? Why were some wealthy parents even buying their kids fake sports scholarships to make up for their low scores?
Then why did you say nonsense that’s contradicted by your own cite?
Here you are again: “since SAT scores don’t measure anything valuable” - your own cite contradicts this. Why keep repeating a lie? Now I agree tutoring aimed at improving scores is unlikely to improve anything other than ability to take tests, but if students are lacking in that area then in makes sense, and according to the article, the program is helping the students get in to better universities, and to believe they can go at all.
That’s not what it shows. By learning some useful techniques a kid who didn’t already know them can raise their score. But that doesn’t mean their own knowledge and ability has no effect, or that you can keep on tutoring them and raise it arbitrarily high.
And I’m guessing you got a good score. Did you do expensive SAT prep courses?
But they let in the kids of alumni whose SAT scores would not normally be good enough, right?
Where did you get the idea that good SAT scores = get in anywhere? This is highly incorrect. I crushed the SAT and did even better on the ACT. The year I went to college, I had a higher SAT score than the average at Harvard. But that doesn’t mean I’d have gotten in if I’d applied… I didn’t have the necessary GPA or extracurricular lineup.
My own cite claims by practicing a bunch you can get substantially higher SAT scores. Unless you think taking SAT practice tests makes you inherently smarter, that’s pretty dang conclusive evidence that the SAT measures how good you are at taking SAT-like tests, not your inherent intelligence or how good of a student you are.
I did not, but my mom did buy me a practice test booklet with 5 or so practice SAT tests which I ran through before taking the test. Of course, my mom was a stay-at-home mom who was able to monitor me closely to ensure I was actually practicing (which I very much did NOT want to do, haha) - poorer parents, single parents, less educated parents, etc may not have that same mean or opportunity.
Additionally, where I went to school we had, through the school, taken very similar tests every year. Again, that won’t be true of every school.
(You might ask again “but then why do rich people toss thousands of dollars at these prep courses?”, and honestly they’re probably wasting their money - at the end of the day the main thing an SAT tutor does is give you practice tests to take. But if you are a shitty parent or you have a shitty kid, maybe you need to pay for a one on one tutor to sit with them the whole time to make sure they’re actually taking their practice tests seriously).
I literally have a near-500 post thread about how cheating on the SAT’s is a massive industry here in the US, one which has caught even Hollywood D-listers in legal trouble.
If one of your parents went to Harvard, chances are you’re pretty advantaged already. How on earth is it right to give a preference to someone like that over a kid who’s the first in their family to go to college, or anyone else who doesn’t have that background?
No it isn’t. It’s good evidence that practicing can improve your score, but it doesn’t show that intelligence or long term academic learning have no effect on it.
In fact the SAT and ACT have already been demonstrated to correlate substantially with IQ:
Lol, I knew it. And you even agree the expensive prep courses are probably a waste of money. Why? Because there is only so much that practice can do. You can take two siblings, and send them to the same school and have the same parents making them do the same amount of work, and still they’ll frequently get very different results.
You realise that if they could improve their kids scores enough with tutoring, they wouldn’t need to cheat, right?
Yeah. My experience likewise doesn’t bear out DemonTree’s assertion that improving scores on standardized tests like the SAT is “much harder”, or even anywhere near as hard as, improving overall academic performance and extracurricular achievement.
Academic coursework and extracurricular accomplishments literally take years to acquire. The SAT is a three-hour test for which even a couple weeks’ practice and tutoring can substantially improve performance.
That said, it should be noted that the test score boost from practice and coaching is fundamentally limited: a 500-scoring math SAT is highly unlikely to be changed into a 750-scoring one from a few weeks’ practice and coaching. But you’re not going to get a comparable boost from a few weeks’ practice and coaching on your school grades or your athletic or artistic achievements either.
In short, it’s a given that educational advantages and their strongly correlated levels of achievement are distributed very unfairly in the first place. Standardized test scores do little or nothing to balance out that slant.
I don’t think anyone in US higher education believes that elite-institution legacy admission preferences are ethically “right” in any abstract sense. They’re an artifact of the situation in which American colleges (unlike a lot of European and Asian universities, AFAICT) are not just a batch of slots to be handed out to the highest scorers on some set of “objective” admission criteria. They’re communities of institutional culture that often have some strongly regional and even familial ties, as well as having community ideals about diversity and representation along with the given expectations of academic achievement.
All of which makes the admission officer’s job a hell of a task! Like I said, I don’t defend the abstract fairness of legacy admissions, but I do recognize that the contribution they make to institutions is not 100% sordidly financial. I remember my own undergraduate experience from decades ago, and the fascination of talking to classmates whose parents and grandparents etc. had gone to the same college, and hearing the stories of the “old days”.
Though I can see how at a super-wealthy and elite institution in the Ivy League, the unfair competitive advantage of legacy status might come to outweigh its positive contributions. But even in the Ivy League, the concept of rigidly objective meritocracy is not particularly embraced. (At the tech flagships like MIT and Caltech though, maybe? Hmm, perhaps not even there.)
“Long term academic learning” definitely has an impact, in that even as a teenager I was pretty well-read so for example on the reading section I’d often skim the article, notice it was a topic I was familiar with, and be able to answer most of the reading comprehension questions by memory.
This is by no means a positive thing, though. We already have a metric for my academic learning: my grades. But I had a huge advantage on the SAT because I came from a family that was well off enough to enable me to sit around and read a bunch, that enabled my mom to stay at home and make sure I was enriching myself rather than wasting time, etc. I already had an advantage in my GPA over lower-income kids; I certainly didn’t need another one.
Aside from that, though, the SAT had VERY LITTLE to do with academic skills. For example, the math section certainly wasn’t asking me about the sorts of things I was learning in math class. It simply measured how good I am at taking a standardized math test.
For example: am I a poor kid, who didn’t take a bunch of practice test, and has made the fatal mistake of thinking that to do well on the math section I need to work through every math problem carefully until I find the right answer? Or is my family well off enough that I DID take practice tests, realized that doing the math on the math questions as intended takes forever and is a huge waste of time, and instead learned to take each of the 4 provided answers, plug it in, and see if I get the original question?
Wow! You are saying that two standardized tests that don’t measure your inherent intelligence or academic skills so much as your test taking skills are correlated with a third test that doesn’t measure inherent intelligence?
It’s almost like all 3 tests are measuring the same thing (how good you are at standardized test taking).
Did you read my post? The problem with expensive prep courses isn’t that “there is only so much that practice can do”, the problem with them is that an expensive test course is NOT NEEDED for practice - a $50 practice test booklet gets the job done just as well as a $2000 private tutor who simply shows you the practice test.
FWIW, as I said the area I went to school in was rather well off, and we had lots of standardized tests like the PSAT at the school itself, before any of us signed up for the ACT or SAT. And there I DID get some helpful tips, like the aforementioned “don’t do the math questions, just plug the answers they give you in and see if it makes sense”. So I guess if I wasn’t privileged enough to get that for free through my public school, a tutor WOULD have been helpful - though I still think a quick prep course + practice tests would be far cheaper and just as effective as private tutoring the whole way through.
Cheating is easier than practice; that doesn’t mean practice doesn’t work.
And cheating can pay off bigger than practice in terms of immediate results, too. As I noted, that 500 SAT math score isn’t going to become a 750 with practice and coaching, though it might bump up to 550 or 575. But it could definitely become a 750 with the assistance of cheating.
The funny thing about the SAT is that you can literally pay to improve your score by taking it multiple times. They let you take the highest score from each section - a lot of my friends took it a 2 or 3 times and wound up with a higher combined score than they would have got individually.
If your goal is to maximize the social benefits to the world of college admissions, maybe that’s a problem. But that’s not Harvard’s goal, nor the goal of any university I’m aware of. Harvard is trying to build a strong class, full of diverse students who will enrich each other’s time there. It is trying to strengthen the institution itself, and build and maintain a community. And yes, it’s hoping that alumni (current and future) will donate money, and it wants to encourage a sense of belonging – both for the benefit of the university and of the people who are a part of it.
They also give preference to people who are the first in their family to go to college. If they didn’t, such students would basically never be admitted, but they always admit some first-generation-college students. They also give preference to tuba players and artists and pole vaulters.
Fortunately, there are tons of good colleges out there, and students who are qualified for Harvard but aren’t accepted typically are accepted by other places that will serve them well.
Having some legacies is also a benefit to all the non-legacies who get to socialize with them and build relationships which are of value for after uni.
I am indifferent as to Harvard’s admissions policies and I question the good faith basis for conservatives like DemonTree to bring them up for discussion with random audiences such as one might find on the Dope. Conservatives like to criticize the Ivy League as bastions of liberal elitism on the one hand (and thus hypocrites for any deference given to legacies), but then they also sure love to bitch about how race-conscious admissions policies are ruining these institutions that… you’d think they’d want to see ruined anyway? I’d call that indicative of some pretty serious cognitive dissonance.
As someone who never went to an Ivy League school and never wanted to, and who also hates cognitive dissonance, I’ve decided to stop playing that game. If someone working admissions at Harvard wants to come in here and defend its policies, let 'em. Until then, I am pleased to let DemonTree go on screaming into the void. Because I sure as hell am not going to step in and defend Harvard’s admissions policies merely in the interest of creating a matter for controversy.
Are you going to pretend that you aren’t aware of the long history of ‘public’ schools in your own country?
Do Eton, Harrow, and Westminster ring any bells?
Earlier you claimed it’s a random test that doesn’t measure how good a student you are. Even though you know from your own experience that isn’t true. It’s fuckin’ hilarious that you’re claiming a few weeks of test prep was the only reason you got a 99th percentile SAT score.
The fact it measures academic learning is not a bug; that’s the test measuring what it’s supposed to measure. All that reading and learning makes you better prepared for college. Yeah, you probably had an advantage, but you can’t fix that by pretending it doesn’t exist.
Was it really your mother who forced you to sit around and read a bunch, or did you do it because you enjoy reading?
So give every kid the $50 practice test booklet, teach them good technique, and have them do practice tests in class. Now it’s fair, right? What would you predict to happen in that scenario? Everyone gets a near perfect score? Scores are randomly distributed? Or the test would measure what it’s supposed to measure?
Another implausible claim that goes against the existing evidence and everyday experience. What a coincidence that mere ‘test taking skills’ correlate with such seemingly unrelated things as likelihood of posting regularly on the SDMB.
Are you going to give any evidence for this?
What @Kimstu said. The 500 SAT math score isn’t going to become a 750 with practice and coaching. This is because although good test taking skills can help, other things are necessary too in order to get a top score.
Hmmm. Maybe I phrased that badly. I agree you’re not going to get a big boost in grades or sporting performance with a few weeks’ coaching. But if a kid gets tutoring all through school, won’t that make a significant difference to their grades? More so than to their SAT score. What I think is that an average kid can get A grades with long term tutoring, but they still won’t be able to get a 750 math SAT. Do you disagree with that?
As for extracurriculars, it seems obvious that parental income would be a significant factor.
Of course that should be the goal. Isn’t the point of universities meant to be to teach students and do research, not to enable the elite to network with each other and have their time ‘enriched’ by meeting diverse peers?
You make it sound exactly like the university version of Eton.
Why? It’s a private institution. It wants to survive. And more narrowly, its goal isn’t to “teach students to do research”, it is to educate students, and to enable its faculty to do research. Few of the undergraduates will ever do academic research beyond a possible honors thesis, and those who do will go to grad school. It does have a goal of undergraduate teaching students to understand how research works, and what it means, and more broadly, “where knowledge comes from”. But also to educate them about the world. And having a diverse group of peers helps it to do that.
The graduate school of arts and science does teach students to do research, of course. But not the undergraduate college, at least, not as a primary goal.
I suppose this is the difference between a private and public institution. We don’t really have private universities in the UK, but we do have expensive and prestigious private schools - 2 of the last 3 Prime Ministers went to Eton. That’s not a good thing. It’s very bad for society when leaders are so unrepresentative.
