Well, what you have written just feels like a more favorable to your side explanation of the same thing.

Colleges are not trying to compress aptitude into a single number. It’s even worse. They are trying to compress aptitude into a single Boolean variable, you are either admitted or not. That’s it. And it seems that subject tests and general aptitude tests are very good indicators of college fit. I don’t know what system you envision, but alternatives I have seen always seem far worse.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. GP writes:

> There is a small, but well-organized and vocal subset of the population that hates the idea of excellence and differentiation.

I don't see how that applies to my comment above, and I don't see how saying:

> They are trying to compress aptitude into a single Boolean variable, you are either admitted or not. That’s it.

is doing anything other than backing up what I said. At the point where you are dividing a subset of the population into binary "in or out" groups, you are in fact advocating for homogenization, for less differentiation between students, and for fewer levels/categories of excellence or exceptionalism.

I'm not here to tell you that's wrong, you do whatever you want. MIT is trying to decide who gets into their specific college, fine. But if you're arguing that the point of SATs is to make a binary determination about students, then it's just strictly inaccurate to say that it's the SAT critics who are all trying to cut down tall poppies.

You conflate vertical differentiation with horizontal differentiation. Horizontal differentiation is what is usually understood as “diversity” and considered good among certain groups of people. Vertical differentiation is what is usually understood as “hierarchy” and considered bad among those groups of people.

MIT like many American universities does only general admission and that’s indeed would be considered weird in other countries, but it seems like a whole nother issue.

> You conflate vertical differentiation with horizontal differentiation.

A binary admissions model reduces both. That's not to say a binary admissions model is wrong, but it does reduce vertical differentiation. Of course compressing an integer value into a binary result reduces differentiation, a boolean represents fewer states than a number.

To go a step further, even if that wasn't the case, vertical and horizontal differentiation still can't ever be completely decoupled from each other. Horizontal differentiation allows for greater vertical differentiation by allowing people to vertically differentiate based on their strengths rather than on a questionably representative average of all of their qualities. And I don't think that's a solely Progressive or Left-wing idea, it's a big part of the reasoning behind why economic specialization leads to more advanced societies.

So what kind of system do you envision? I am a bit confused what you are arguing for.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30834517, but I'm here clarifying what my criticisms of the SAT are and what I think its weaknesses are -- and pointing out that my criticism of the SAT is the exact opposite of what tharne says it is. I'm not here to rework the entire admissions process.

I don't have a single-comment answer to replacing the entire SAT and reworking the entire college admissions process, and it's feasible that the SAT might still be preferable to pure GPAs in the meantime. But I don't think saying that requires us to pretend that compressing skillsets into an objectively less granular/descriptive metric is a good thing or that it's somehow increasing our understanding of student skillsets. Saying that MIT might be right to accept SAT scores doesn't mean we need to pretend that the SAT doesn't have very serious flaws. Certainly it doesn't require me to pretend that every argument against SATs are arguments against meritocracy, I think that's just objectively wrong.

Ideally we would have standardized metrics that were more granular, and ideally we would at least have an SAT that was administered differently and more regularly so that they were optimized less for formal test taking skills. But there are a lot of barriers in front of that.

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I also don't have a single-comment answer for what to replace Github repos with during hiring interviews, or how to make whiteboard coding tests more accurate, and I have criticisms about them too. The answer might be that there isn't an easy single number that represents meritocracy, and we might be fooling ourselves pretending that there is, and it might just be wishful thinking in the first place to pretend that there is a version of admissions processes for colleges that isn't fiendishly difficult and complicated and multifaceted.

When people criticize whiteboard interviews on here, it's reasonable to ask if there's a better system, but I rarely see people saying, "you're only criticizing whiteboard interviews because you hate meritocratic job placements." No, I have criticisms of these systems because they're not good representations of talent.

> If anything, I would say that my views are the opposite -- homogenization creates a lack of differentiation around skill and aptitude based on questionable science

If that were true, you'd expect countries like South Korea, Japan, and German to perform poorly in science and engineering, among other things.

Diversity may be a worthy goal for societal reasons, but it certainly is not a perquisite for excellence, seeing as there are many highly successful countries that are very homogeneous.

> If that were true, you'd expect countries like South Korea, Japan, and German to perform poorly in science and engineering, among other things.

It's wild to me that someone can have the view that the existence of other countries settles the debate over whether or not our school systems encourage well-rounded/successful students given that comparisons to more homogenized schooling environments like China is still one of the more contentious high-level debates about educational quality we have today. Again, I'm not here to convince you one way or another, but that is not a debate that I think most of society considers settled.

> Diversity may be a worthy goal for societal reasons, but it certainly is not a perquisite for excellence

If that's the argument you want to make, then fine, go for it. But then don't say that you're opposing a group that "hates the idea of excellence and differentiation." You are arguing for removing differentiation between different kinds of intelligence and skillsets and compressing that spectrum into an objectively less descriptive metric.

Make up your mind whether I'm arguing for more diversity and more differentiation between people or for less of it.

What's a better alternative in your view?

I'm not completely sure. I think MIT's conclusions might be correct, they might be preferable to GPAs. I also think there might be other alternatives that aren't easy to implement, that require either a restructuring of how we do school or a better distribution of resources than we currently have.

One conclusion that MIT hints at (although it doesn't say it outright) is that SATs might be a better indicator of success across economic levels in part because it's harder to buy a better SAT score with money. Looking at things like extracurricular activity runs into many of the same problems as looking at Github repos during hiring processes -- a lot of people don't have time to do a bunch of extracurricular activities, and access to those extracurricular activities is likely highly correlated with socioeconomic status. It might be difficult to move in that direction when access to school resources varies so much between areas.

I do think the SAT could be improved -- I think one really easy way would be to change how it's administered so that it optimizes less for formal test-taking skill. The really good thing about the SAT is that it's a less school-specific measure than GPA. So a better alternative might be a version of the SAT that kept a standardized metric but that either widened its scope significantly or was administered differently.

I also want to put forward the idea that admissions might just be really hard, period, and there might not be an easy way to assess potential, and trying to figure out the easiest way to do it might be like asking, "what's the best way to teach a child to play an instrument in a single day?"

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One really important point that I want to get across: there is a difference between a measure being good and a measure being "the least terrible option we have at the moment" -- and confusing the two can cause real harm.

At the top of this thread I see the quote, "so much for that common, popular notion that standardized tests do not predict anything of value." And if that's somebody's attitude, then they're never going to find a better option because the whole thing is being approached through the lens of "see, we were right, this is a good metric."

I think a lot of criticism of standardized testing, IQ, coding tests for hiring, etc... is not necessarily trying to destroy everything, it's just trying to point out that many of these measures are really bad and they shouldn't be treated with the respect they're often given. I think that someone can very easily both have the position, "yeah, MIT probably should use SAT scores alongside GPAs" and the position, "people place way too much confidence in these things as an indicator of success."