Steve McGuire on X - "Berkeley math professor: “Today, the more successful a public high school is at preparing its students, the lower its graduates' chances of getting into top UC campuses like Berkeley and San Diego.” Berkeley admitted 45% of applicants from a high school where nearly 94% of “students failed to meet the state standards in mathematics.” It admitted less than 14% of applicants from a school where “nearly 100 percent of its students in AP Calculus BC pass the national exam with a perfect score of 5.”"
Steve McGuire on X - "Another Berkeley professor told the author: “In my second-year engineering class, a student asked me to explain why 1/2 + 1/3 = 5/6…. The lecture had to stop while I explained fractions.”"
Timothy Bates on X - "Same in Scotland since ~2003. In one recent year, 100% (!!) of law school entrants at Edinburgh were selected from the bottom quintile of parental/postcode socioeconomic status. Zero chance for 80% of families and highly capable young people. Private education, home ownership, parental education sum to dwarf any remaining variance in leaving exams which have near 100% pass rates. Probably fine…"
Weird. We're told that high school grades predict college success better than SAT score
Jeffrey P. Clemens on X - "Thinking about this issue as an economist, I think an underappreciated dimension is that the absence of the SAT/ACT in the college application process is itself a cause of K-12 grade inflation. The absence of the SAT made grade inflation a more powerful lever through which high schools could increase the rates at which their students were admitted to highly ranked UCs. This made grade inflation more attractive both as a matter of strategy and out of genuine sympathy from high school teachers and administrators for their students. Of course, admissions in the face of fixed college class sizes is a zero sum game. So in the end, grade inflation becomes less a way to "give your students a leg up" and more a way to "avoid holding them back" once "everyone else is doing it.""
Jelani Nelson on X - "One motivation to ban SAT/ACT in UC admissions was to eliminate perceived bias against black and latino students. But the biggest shift by banning the SAT was a transfer of admit seats from Asian students to white: https://t.co/MUDsL2CSk1 E->F, rows 12-19."
i/o on X - "No, the main motivation was to eliminate evidence that could be used in lawsuits against UC when it engaged in anti-Asian and anti-white admissions discrimination. Since high school GPA is becoming increasingly uninformative as an indicator of intelligence, removing the most reliable indicator (standardized tests) was essential. Because the more colleges rely on measures that strongly correlate to general intelligence, the smaller the representation of blacks and Hispanics in their student bodies — that is, the farther the modern elite university gets from its main mission (to increase "diversity")."
Weird. The "experts" told us that high school GPA predicted college success better than the SAT
New York Post on X - "UC professors forced to teach 'middle school math' after SAT ban"
Liz4SF on X - "Zero common sense, let’s do away with SATs bc it’s racist. UC regents should all be fired, along with/ racist admissions committees, where Asian kid w/ 4.42 Weighted GPA & 1590 on SAT cant get u admissions to UC SD, UC SB, Davis nor Irvine “More than 500 professors signed an open letter saying they’ve been forced to teach “middle school” math in Calculus and other courses as incoming students are alarmingly unprepared for college-level coursework.”"
Weird. The "experts" told us that the SAT was useless for predicting college performance
Neetu Arnold on X - "University of California STEM professors want standardized tests back due to severe math deficiencies among students: “We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle school mathematics” “The current admissions metric, based primarily on GPA & essays, can no longer reliably distinguish readiness for university-level STEM majors in an era of severe grade inflation & AI assisted application essays”"
John Loeber on X - "There are several interesting things going on here.
(1) The UCs were long known for their high standards, in particular UC Berkeley and UCLA as their flagships: in general, if you hired one of their graduates (especially an in-state student), you were getting a smart and ambitious employee. This contract is now broken. The signal doesn't work anymore. When the world updates for this fact, things get worse for them: out-of-state students will be less likely to want to pay the tuition, employers will be more skeptical, and they will have a harder time getting the best talent. This is a negative feedback loop. It's weird that this happened because organizations are usually much more self-preserving. Universities live and die by their reputations. Perhaps they thought that dropping the SAT and (this is the subtext) admitting students quasi-randomly would gain them political brownie points, but to what end? Looking back: what was the point of all this?
(2) The SAT was the final load-bearing beam in this entire system. High school grades used to mean something, but grade inflation has wiped this out. Application essays? A whole industry of ghostwriters and now AI has winnowed the signal to zero. Teacher recommendations? When they matter so disproportionately much, they'll be bought and paid for. (The failure pattern is the same: much like how the universities have sacrificed their long-term credibility for short-term gain, I'd wager that many schools and teachers have done the same.) Parents used to defer to teachers and schools as experts, but the competitive environment has made parents become forcefully involved -- threatening, cajoling, bribing to get their students ahead. Schools never had the resources to defend themselves against this. Many people -- especially those below the SAT median -- probably thought that they would be better-off in a world of no tests, that they'd be able to get some relative advantage. Nobody would know they're in the 30th percentile, and maybe they could sneak by and pass for 80th. That may have been so in the short term, but the price is becoming clear now: the whole system is broken. (This is frequently the case when people try to turn fair games into rigged or opaque ones: the people who think they're going to win because of their new advantage tend not to see the whole picture, and will overestimate their expected position in the new world.)
Maybe you were an activist parent and managed to help force the UCs to get rid of standardized testing. And maybe your low-test kid got admitted to Berkeley. And maybe they even graduated with a 4.0. But you can't keep stacking the Ponzi scheme forever, eventually you get the reality test: they can't get a job and now you're stuck holding the bag on the student debt. A pointless waste."
Meme - el gato malo @boriquagato: "the university of california dropped the SAT and the preparedness of STEM freshmen plummeted so precipitously that they were having to reteach middle school math. and from this you learn "we should drop the MCAT from med school?" this certainly seems likely to improve the diversity of poor medical outcomes..."
"Removing the MCAT Could Improve Diversity in Medicine I Opinion. TYLER HARVEY, PUBLIC HEALTH RESEARCHER AND HEALTH EQUITY SCHOLAR"
Neetu Arnold on X - " Humanities professors unite w/ STEM faculty, demanding the University of California reinstate the SAT “We call for the UC Academic Senate and the UC Regents to give up the failed experiment of the last 6 years & return to including both the math & the verbal reasoning components of SAT/ACT as part of undergraduate admissions”"
Los Angeles Times on X - "UC Davis favored less qualified Black, Latino med school applicants, Justice Department claims"
i/o on X - ""claims" There has not been, to my knowledge, a single reasonably selective major university in the US in over a half-century that has admitted black applicants who were, on average, as academically qualified (measured by SAT/GPA) as white applicants. Not one."
Steve McGuire on X - "Columbia University has reinstated standardized testing for admissions — the last Ivy League school to do it. “Through a multi-year faculty review, it was determined that test scores, among other factors, were a useful indicator of potential student success.”"
Werner Zagrebbi on X - "Columbia had justified keeping test-optional with an unpublished study concluding that the policy "did not lead to a diminishment of the academic performance of admitted classes or the academic success of enrolled students"—sureeee! GPA-wise, non-submitters as a group correspond to the bottom 3% of the submitter distribution. About time."
Holistic Admissions Criteria Favor the Rich - "while it is true that children from the richest families have better academic qualifications than the population overall, it is not true that this fully explains their greater representation in the top universities. After controlling for test scores, the richest kids are admitted at more than twice the rate as the population overall. Notably, this admissions boost is found among the 12 Ivy-Plus schools analyzed in the study, but not at flagship public universities. Despite what some think, the overrepresentation of the rich at the top universities is not driven solely or even primarily by legacy preferences. According to the paper, after controlling for test scores, legacy preferences explain about 30 percent of the surplus rich attendees, while higher application rates, higher matriculation rates, better nonacademic credentials, and athlete preferences explain the remaining 70 percent. If you take application rates and matriculation rates out of the equation, leaving only the factors related to how universities make admissions decisions, legacy preferences account for 46 percent of the surplus rich attendees while better nonacademic credentials account for 30 percent, and athlete preferences account for the remaining 24 percent. A debate has raged for many years about how much weight to put on test scores versus grades and nonacademic factors. One popular view that has emerged on the left is that test scores should be augmented, if not entirely replaced, by more holistic considerations like personal statements, extracurricular activities, recommendations, and things of that nature. This view appears to be primarily motivated by the belief that such augmentation will benefit kids from poorer families. The alternative view is that these holistic considerations actually favor the rich more because the rich will tend to accumulate better recommendations, more extracurricular activities, and even better grades because they have more information and are more strategic about preparing a college resume. This study suggests that the alternative view is the correct one. When comparing students with similar test scores, every other consideration — including academic ratings (grades), non-academic ratings (extracurriculars), guidance counselor recommendations, and teacher recommendations — favors the rich, with extracurriculars and recommendations especially favoring the rich. If the goal is to eliminate the extent to which rich kids are overrepresented at top universities relative to their test scores, the study points to the existence of some fairly straightforward ways to do so. Legacy and athlete preferences can be zapped immediately. Non-academic factors like recommendations and extracurriculars could be hugely down-weighted or eliminated entirely. Other targeted encouragement could increase the application and matriculation rates of the non-rich. But this is really not the goal of top universities. These schools already have vastly more qualified applicants than they have seats. If they wanted to create classes that were more socioeconomically balanced, they could already do so from their current applicant pool. They choose not to because their goal is, in part, to run the nation's elite families through their institutions in order to increase their endowments and power in society... many people seem to be interested in these institutions because they think that they are important pieces of our higher education system when that just is not the case. According to the study, the 12 Ivy-Plus schools have an average admissions class of 1,650 and admit around 157 more rich kid than they ought to based on test scores alone. This means that, between these schools, there are around 1,884 seats being misallocated to the rich every year. By comparison, around 4 million kids are admitted at undergraduate institutions in a given year. The kids who are elbowed out by the 1,884 non-deserving rich kids still attend college, just at a 98th percentile institution, not a 99th percentile institution. The quality of the educational services they receive does not differ, though the prestige, status, and career opportunities made available by their institution does."
Clearly, since we know that standardised test scores just reflect socio-economic status, the solution is to let people in by a lottery
A Personal Case for College Admissions Exams - "Expensive test preparation basically consists of taking practice exams and then reviewing what you got wrong. This can be done inexpensively on your own and it's not clear that it actually increases scores all that much... Low-income kids are underrepresented at the top of the test-score distribution just as they are underrepresented at the top of pretty much any other indicator of educational attainment and academic ability. Being poor is disadvantageous in a lot of ways when it comes to excelling academically. But the top of the test-score distribution is not completely devoid of low-income kids. There are fewer of them than there would be in a random draw, but they do exist. For those kids in particular, the test is often the best and sometimes only way that they can prove their abilities and show that they actually are more capable than their richer peers... There is a reason why the scandals surrounding the SAT and ACT generally take the form of rich people paying a ringer to fraudulently take the test for their kid. It's because dim rich kids can't outcompete brighter poor kids in that specific arena."
Tyler Austin Harper on X - "I go back and forth re standardized tests, but like Matt I benefited greatly from the SAT/GRE as a working class kid. The rich are great at throwing money at every element of the admissions process, but it’s probably right that SATs are the most privilege-proof of the criteria."
Steve Sailer on X - "We need to invest in making the SAT/ACT more Tiger Mother-proof. There's evidence that the SAT before they started fiddling with it in 1995 was much better than it is now. Practically every change made since then to benefit the Diverse has instead rewarded Asian test preppers:"
Charles Murray on X - "More precisely, it rewarded systematic test prep, period, and it turns out that the people who work the hardest on test prep are Asian students and the white children of the affluent who want to get into elite schools. Want to know what the hardest-to-prep-for kind of question is? Analogies. Vocabulary is a close second. Yes, you can try to memorize vocabulary lists, but the real edge goes to young people who reflexively try to figure out what an unfamiliar word means when they encounter one. It's a strong signal of...you guessed it...cognitive ability. The College Board dropped both analogies and vocabulary."
Progressivism and the police - "In 2021, the Metropolitan Police recruited new officer, PC Cliff Mitchell, who they knew had previously been accused of raping a child. Part of the reason he was able to slip through vetting was because of the colour of his skin. Mitchell would later be convicted of 13 counts of rape, including six against a child... Mitchell was far from the only beneficiary. Of the recruits whose cases were reviewed and had their original vetting decision overturned, more than a fifth went on to commit misconduct or be accused of a criminal offence... there are only really two options at play: either the Met believes their vetting officers are racists, or the force is willing to lower its standards for ethnic minority recruits. Which is it? In a sign that this was not an aberration confined to the Met, a document issued jointly by the Home Office, the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council in September 2021 pronounced the Panel to be “good practice”... In the decade following the Macpherson report, progressivism within policing progressed relatively slowly... It was the arrival in 2010 of the Conservative-led coalition government which placed rocket boosters under the diversity, equality and inclusion agenda within policing. Keen to present themselves as no longer the “nasty party”, with David Cameron having advocated a more loving approach to youthful miscreants in 2006... It was David Lammy’s review which would later lead to two-tier sentencing proposals that would have made it less likely for certain “disadvantaged” groups to be given a prison sentence after being convicted of a crime. As prime minister, Theresa May launched a government audit to “tackle racial disparities in public service outcomes”. The announcement included reference to her project as Home Secretary to reduce the number of black people who were stopped and searched by the police. It was also during this period that the institutions that would become the cultural homes of the diversity, equality and inclusion industry within policing were created... Several police forces started to show themselves willing to break the law in the drive to advance the cause. In 2017 an applicant to join Cheshire Police, who was praised following his interview as being particularly “well prepared”, was rejected because he was a white, heterosexual man. The Force claimed the Equality Act 2010, the last hurrah of the Labour government, gave them the right to do so under the “equal merit provisions”. An employment tribunal disagreed, declaring the approach to be unlawful and stating that the force approached the recruitment process with a “radicalness” that was “stark”. Thames Valley Police lost an employment tribunal because in 2022 it had passed over three white officers for promotion in favour of a female ethnic minority officer. One senior officer told another to “make it happen” despite being warned about the risks of not holding a competitive process. It is difficult to believe that these cases are rare exceptions. Such legal rebukes appear to have done little to stymie the careers of those involved. The acting chief constable at the time of the Cheshire case later went on to become the national programme director for the recruitment of 20,000 police officers by Boris Johnson’s government. At least one of the senior officers directly involved in the Thames Valley case has since been promoted. Neither was this isolated to merely internal issues — the progressivist agenda expanded into operational policing, too. The growth in the recording of Non-Crime Hate Incidents, which led to the police vigorously investigating incidents which Parliament had not prohibited whilst apparently ignoring burglaries and shoplifting, is perverse but was just one of the consequences of the new doctrine. Similarly, embedding in policing practice the prioritisation of certain “communities” above a focus on serving the wider public — with the secretive consultation of “community leaders” considered sine qua non in the planning of any operational police activity — was no less malignant. The recent West Midlands Police–Maccabi Tel Aviv scandal, which led to the departure of the force’s chief constable, demonstrates the disastrous consequences of such an approach... Post-BLM policing represents the ultimate victory of progressivism over any vestige of British policing’s traditions of impartiality and acting “without fear or favour”. It applies in every domain of policing — including who gets recruited, promoted, searched, arrested, prosecuted or consulted. No longer is diversity merely one consideration amongst several. Any disproportionality is considered evidence of discrimination. In some cases, it appears the pre-eminence of those from “under-represented” groups, whatever the impact, is considered a moral imperative. Any failure to demonstrate sufficiently enthusiastic levels of “allyship” by those in policing is deemed proof of an individual’s personal, and potentially racist, deficiency. There is little room for dissent, with those in policing who are ambitious to progress knowing they must acquiesce to the new rituals. At the heart of determining what is legitimate in the post-BLM policing world, alongside many of the most corrosive developments of the last two decades, are policing’s human resources departments. Detached from the realities of the operational frontline yet steeped in the doctrines of diversity, equality and inclusion these bureaucrats have become the internal arbiters of the “right values”. The diversity, equality and inclusion industry promised a fairer form of policing. What it has delivered is a weaker one. It can be seen on our high streets and in our villages, towns and cities that we now have a police force that is less confident, less capable and less trusted by the public... Most police chiefs over the last three decades have been one of a combination of enthusiastic supporters, sycophantic careerists or so weak in their opposition to the progressivist cult as to be irrelevant. The police do not exist to manage “community cohesion” or to perfectly represent society. They exist to protect it by impartial service to, and enforcement of, the law."
We are still told that the Tories were right wing and that DEI is to ensure anyone who is not a straight white man can get a job
Lydia Moynihan on X - "SCOOP: Woman who emptied Knicks trashcan on street— then stole it — fired from JPMorgan Chase, was DEI exec"
Matt Walsh on X - "Well obviously. One look at this woman and you knew there were only three options: unemployed, DEI executive, or government employee. She was the second, now she’ll be the first, soon she’ll probably be the third."
Matthew Williams on X - "She's a DEI exec, this is literally her job on a civilizational level."
Scott Robertson on X - "Carney: Canada is a mosaic, not a melting pot. And this is the distinction that matters. Because a mosaic doesn't dissolve or blend its pieces. Each is stitched to each and all the pieces hold all. And the beauty is in the arrangement, not in the blending."
Simen on X - "I hope people realize that this particular conception of multiculturalism, which has become predominant in the West as of late, is completely utopian. In fact, it is the latest great Utopian project to come out of the West (joining a long line of past failed schemes). First off, the analogy is flawed. A mosaic is the product of top-down work, not bottom-up spontaneous order from cultural anarchy. (This is important). Secondly, it is in the nature of things for people to blend together, and so the only way to preserve some “mosaic” fantasy is by reifying and propping up tribal delineations. Of course ethnic identity politics does some of this (as we’ve seen in the last decades). But to sustain it longer you need to reproduce something à la the Ottoman millet system (only woke). There are of course signs of such things going on, not just with extra-official religious courts, but by officially sanctioned and enshrined discrimination. Remember that the heart of Kendian Anti-Racism, which we saw guided British police into the Nowak case, is that to be “blind” to ethnic identities and treat people the same is bad. Hence you need to treat groups differently to have “equity”. But how is this working out? Does Britain look very stable? Meanwhile, the populist right — the reaction to this project — is surging like a tide across Europe. John Gray is good on this. Now, the entire idea is clearly a misunderstanding of the American project. America assimilates better than any nation on earth. Any particularism is as shallow as a puddle. There’s a reason America is the only great multicultural democracy to succeed, and that is because it assimilates intensely. Its “cultures” (except African American culture) are merely accessories. Irish Americans or Italian Americans are just American, which is obvious when they visit Ireland or Italy. The idea of turning dusty old nation-states, that have undergone centuries of nationalistic development, into a fantasy picture of New York City is clearly extremely… ambitious. It is also probably a liberal fantasy picture of imperial cosmopolitanism, but as indicated with the Ottoman example, this doesn’t work with liberalism. It’s amazing that a mere 30 years after Yugoslavia imploded into sectarian violence, the idea has suddenly become to build Yugoslavia from scratch, on steroids, only somehow make it work this time. “If only they were liberal and progressive like us, everyone would surely live in harmony!”. And bear in mind Yugoslavia at least had the idea of a unifying pan-nationalism. Mosaic multiculturalism has nothing, except the empty phrase “our values”. So to conclude, this project is intensely utopian, and I suspect it will turn out like all utopian projects, very badly. Then the Western elite and intellectuals will learn nothing, and it’s on to a new utopian project. This is what happens when you don’t know your own history of ideas."
Simen on X - "Partially I also think it’s because these imbeciles confuse multi-racial with multi-cultural. You can easily have a multiracial country through liberal nationalism, without it being “multicultural” in this utopian sense. Also, I am convinced most of these people envision multiculturalism as “more food”. I remember a classic NYT report from a terror attack where it said “the street was famous for its rich restaurant diversity” or whatever."