do stuff they think is bullshit but are told to do by their parents or others.) (Indeed, admissions officers are more interested in the students who find their own interesting things to do vs. There are thousands of worthwhile ways to spend time outside of school, and no particular “bullshit” choice is forced on anyone. Otherwise, the whole point of “extracurricular” activity is that it is outside of the curriculum, based on students’ personal choices about how to spend their time. “Extracurricular” activities are only bullshit if you make them so. It’s grotesque, especially considering students are already forced to spend thousands of hours in school. People encouraging all students to spend hours on this are effectively advocating an extra uncompensated time tax on high school students. Every hour that students collectively spend on SAT prep is an hour thrown away, not spent on some activity with more social/personal value. Spending a summer studying for the SAT is a 100% waste of time, with no redeeming value whatsoever beyond playing an admissions game. Sure some of the kids who succeed in that system are “working hard for it”, but at what cost?Īnd while one particular extraordinary disadvantaged kid might succeed in that system, it’s not any kind of general recipe for social mobility or fixing large-scale social justice problems. It’s nonstop test prep from morning to night starting from age 3 or 4 through the end of high school. South Korea or some Chinese social classes. Look at the childhoods of kids growing up in e.g. The purely test-based system is absolutely ruinous for some kinds of ambitious parents’ children. But IMO you still have to try to push back against those games. Whatever system you set up is going to get gamed, whether that means having someone ghostwrite/coach their admissions essays, exaggerate their recommendation letters, prep them (or even help them cheat) on admissions tests, train them in exclusive sports, help them obtain experiences inaccessible to other students such as working in a research laboratory or visiting exotic places, or just directly bribe the school with cash. In practice the wealthy and connected are likely to be somewhat advantaged either way. It was never their goal to get poor students in the first place, and income statistics of admits at Ivies show this clearly. We don't have to answer that because the schools have never asked. Would you rather prove your potential by simply taking a test, perhaps along with a brief note about your disadvantaged background, or would you rather have to submit materials reflecting ten different dimensions of yourself, all of which the wealthy have hired armies of consultants to optimize for them, and networks of insiders to feed them knowledge of what the schools want to see? You want to go to a life-changing school. Say you're a poor, smart kid who works to support a dysfunctional family. This criticism of standardized tests is ubiquitous, but what never, ever seems to be discussed is whether holistic review of many facets actually improves this problem or simply entrenches the well-off further. > well-off kids often get the helicopter-parent-study-to-the-test short-term-maximization childhood less well-off ones do not. we're saddled with a lot of legacy shit from existing wealth, past wrongs, etc, that make that real tough.Īnd then some people put crazy expectations on colleges to do things like fix those historical problems, too, when in reality so much damage to some kids prospects are done WAY earlier. If we were starting schools greenfield it might make sense to just let them all do whatever they want, and then see how their graduates do, but. And if it's secret, it's hard to tell if it's legitimately trying to value the right things. So you need a new metric, or some secret sauce, but the secret sauce is only useful if it's secret. Today we're somewhere in between - well-off kids often get the helicopter-parent-study-to-the-test short-term-maximization childhood less well-off ones do not. Have every kid get all that exact same level of tutoring and it's back to an even playing field, but you've managed to ruin everyone's childhood.Īnd you might've beaten a lot of creativity and other useful-for-real-life but less useful for mass-produced-college-education skills out of them. Have one of those kid's parents send the kid to a bunch of extra tutoring, and it ruins the ability to do the comparison. Of ten kids with no particular extra tutoring over what they got in their average public school, SAT and GPA are going to tell you a lot about underlying aptitude. The problem with SAT, GPA is that once everyone knows what you're measuring, they optimize for that measure, and it loses its meaning. It's a hard problem and anyone who says it's easy (including "just look at SAT/GPA!!") shouldn't be taken seriously.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |