Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

Cancelling SAT (especially subject exams) is the stupidest decision I&#x27;ve seen anywhere. Make access more fair? Sure. Cancel it? Plain wrong!<p>How do I know? I&#x27;m one of those students who didn&#x27;t have stellar high school grades, but I excelled in subject exams --- those subjects were genuinely interesting to me (math, science). I didn&#x27;t find the rest of high school interesting, and I wasn&#x27;t a nerd nerd studying anything my parents told me to study. I turned out &quot;ok&quot; (graduated as the top my class in college, then had a successful career in top tech companies). Without that final exam that gave me the opportunity, I probably wouldn&#x27;t be typing this message today.<p>I&#x27;m not even counted as &quot;diverse&quot; (because I&#x27;m not black or hispanic) despite coming from a muslim family and middle eastern background. I can only select &quot;white&quot;, though I&#x27;m not really white (european).<p>Today&#x27;s admission debates and anti-racist treatments are wrong at so many levels, I don&#x27;t know where to start.

I think the University of Texas has one of simplest and most egalitarian admissions policies that I have seen. If you graduate in the top 10 percent of your class, then you are guaranteed admission to all state funded universities.<p>As a Californian I find it quite ironic that many policies in “conservative” Texas (ex. university admissions, property tax, income tax) are more much more progressive than what we have in “liberal” California.<p>If anybody from Texas has a different perspective on UT admission policy (I am sure it has its pathological edge cases) then I would be curious to hear.

What I find very odd about this is the assumption that kids in challenging circumstances would have more problem with test prep than with keeping up their GPA. Poor people can afford test prep. Stuyvesant, NYC’s selective admission high school, has 50% of students living in poverty, and a 1300+ average SAT score. A couple of thousand dollars one time is something most Americans can scrape together.<p>Gaming GPA is much easier for privileged kids. My wife and I carefully manage her younger step siblings’ course schedules to maximize GPA. We schedule meetings with professors, counselors, schedule retakes and extra credit, etc. I can’t imagine how it would be easier for a kid with an unstable home life, who is moving around, maybe has parents getting divorced, etc., to keep up their GPA over several years than to do well on one test.

Don&#x27;t understand the hate for the SAT. Where I went to school, students would just beg their teachers for better grades and it literally worked.<p>I did average on my SAT compared to my ex-gf in college (top 30 US school) but I ran a 3.8 in college compared to her being a C student.<p>Doesn&#x27;t matter anyway because none of the stuff I learned in college is used in my daily job as a java developer.

Isn&#x27;t GPA even easier to game than SATs?<p>-- Private schools can curve more leniently so its pay to play<p>-- Rich schools tend to have more AP&#x2F;Honor courses which inflate weighted GPAs<p>I went to one of the best public schools in America and it was not uncommon for someone to take 100% AP&#x2F;Honors and get a 4.5+ GPA.

For one , you don&#x27;t need to go straight to college , or attend college at all. Even before I got my BA I was making more than the Ivy League Alum in my family.<p>That&#x27;s the first myth.<p>California has what&#x27;s probably the best community college system in America. It was very easy for me, as a poor kid to meet ( and at times date) people from all over the world. Maybe you dropped out of high school due to just not liking it. You can still attend a community college, transfer to a UC and have a great career.<p>I did very poorly in highschool since I was constantly ether getting kicked out or evicted. Still I had morons in my family pressuring me to shrug it off.<p>If anything I&#x27;m angrier now than I was back then<p>I was exceptionally lucky to be able to find an affordable place to live at 19. My family is pretty horrible, all I really needed was a stable place. But that&#x27;s impossible now, the same apartment that used to be $600 is now $1,300 or 1400.<p>For the record I&#x27;ve had several Asian friends who come from similar backgrounds, where there&#x27;s extreme domestic violence at home and they just need a stable place to live. This is very much not a race issue, it&#x27;s a &#x27;people who don&#x27;t have stable households aren&#x27;t going to be able to get into top schools&#x27; issue.<p>If you want to fix test scores or whatever, you need to look at actually fixing the economic situation many of these kids are in.<p>Make it possible to afford your own place with a full time minimum wage job. At least then when a kid from a messed up family turns 18 they can move out.

All this gnashing over test scores and booster programs is just showboating. If states really want to fix poor schools they should make school funding occur at the state level, rather than whichever random zip code you’re born into.<p>Seriously, you can’t justify a wealthier neighborhood being entitled to better schools when they’re public institutions receiving state and federal funds. Evening out this funding is the only real step to giving students a more equitable future, but nobody would dare try it and put their own school district’s budget in jeopardy!<p>They want to fix the problem? Create an executive order requiring that all public schools who receive federal funding must have a percentage of their local funds be distributed at a state level, inversely to the funds generated locally.

<i>Aligning enrollment with state demographics would require cutting the share of those students by almost two-thirds.</i><p>My best friend growing up was Korean. I saw firsthand the amount of effort he put into his studies. Why should we allow any institution to invalidate his work because our culture produces lazier, dumber students? Why should we artificially prop up patterns of thought and behavior that have negative effects on the people subjected to it?

&gt; There is only one group of students who are “overrepresented,” to use the chilling language of social engineering, at the university: Asian Americans.<p>This is partly because of the yield rate of Asian students. This refers to the rate that admitted students choose to attend UC.<p>White, Black, and Hispanic students all choose to attend UCs at less than 40%. The yield rate for Asian students is 48%.<p>If Asians had the same yield rate as the other racial groups, their share of UC enrollment would drop from 37% to 31%. This is pretty close to their share of the UC applicant pool, 28%.<p>This comes from the most recent data available, from 2020. [1]<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.universityofcalifornia.edu&#x2F;infocenter&#x2F;admissions-residency-and-ethnicity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.universityofcalifornia.edu&#x2F;infocenter&#x2F;admissions...</a>

It may sound noble to increase admissions for &quot;marginalized&quot; demographics into the most prestigious universities that California has to offer. But this has the real implication of setting these students up for failure. California&#x27;s UCs demand the utmost of studious conduct. The SAT is one of the best ways of determining whether a student will succeed in such environments. But with the removal of it, we will see an influx of students who will become overwhelmed by the expectations placed upon them. Math will be too complex. Literature will be difficult to comprehend. Writing and spelling will be subpar. Fellow students will resent them in group projects for dragging down their grades. These initially excited diverse students will find themselves struggling. They will lose motivation. They will likely drop out when feeling such despair. They will find themselves with no degree and settled with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. In effect, they will be in a worse situation than if they were properly selected for a school that they will thrive in.

Some parents move to areas with better schools in order to give their kids an advantage (such as Cupertino or Los Altos school districts if you are in silicon valley). This may seem like a sensible thing to do, but because of the weird admissions process in US colleges, this may actually work against the kid. It may make more sense to move to an area where the kid can stand out, where schools offer fewer AP courses, and where the same accomplishment is considered to be a bigger deal. See link below for details.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;california&#x2F;story&#x2F;2021-04-12&#x2F;covid-college-admissions-season-brings-rejection-heartbreak" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;california&#x2F;story&#x2F;2021-04-12&#x2F;covid-co...</a><p>Excerpts:<p>UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many.<p>A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower class rank at a more high-achieving school.

My two cents. Be color blind for access to things like this. Then, when you see cultural groups that don&#x27;t seem to getting through in the numbers you&#x27;d like, study the success factors from other groups and help promote those from the bottom up, within the culture. Sounds cliche, but it&#x27;s better to build naturally occurring desirable attributes in communities than providing the benefits despite the absence of the attributes.

It&#x27;s possible that dropping standardized tests will have the demographic effects that TFA fears, but it isn&#x27;t certain. Standardized tests aren&#x27;t the only reason that Asian-Americans are &quot;over&quot;-represented and other groups are &quot;under&quot;-represented. Another reason is that Asian-Americans are good students. Standardized test scores are not the only indicator of that.<p>Of course, the people who have decided to drop these tests claim to want some sort of demographic change. As long as California public universities have a limited number of open seats, that will hurt some groups if it helps others. Personally I hope that this doesn&#x27;t just turn into helping whites at the expense of Asians, but that isn&#x27;t impossible.

There is no real evidence for the idea that a difference in scores predicts a difference in performance, once you are above some threshold.<p>They should keep the test, but use a threshold (per major and school) with a lottery for everyone above the threshold. And admit a small number below at random to keep evaluating what the threshold should be.

This is one of the most outrageous things I&#x27;ve seen in a while. I really think the academic institutions are hammering the last nails into America&#x27;s coffin.<p>America is a failed state, the majority of Americans just don&#x27;t know it yet. The founding mythos, and ideological bedrock of America has been replaced by something toxic and subversive. The ideological upheaval of the last few years has left behind a broken and confused country. One that will inevitably fracture into smaller parts, or devolve unequivocally into a mess like South Africa. If you go to the former USSR (for one example), you can see monuments to the country&#x27;s tenacity in the face of absolute peril. Statues, monuments, and architecture which proudly memorialise their heroes, and their history. Meanwhile, delinquents in America have been tearing down any statue or monument with a European-sounding name. America will end up a country with no history, and no future.

This is not a particularly strong article. Here&#x27;s a much more data-backed one arguing similar points (though still with some bias): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freddiedeboer.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;you-arent-actually-mad-at-the-sats" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freddiedeboer.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;you-arent-actually-mad-...</a><p>Issues with this particular article (addressed by above):<p>* It&#x27;s ignoring the racial gap in SAT scores (and other standardized tests) that exists even after controlling for family income. A large part of the political narrative here (including the university backing Prop 16 which would allow it to consider race) is coming from this fact, not just the income gap in itself (Note that I don&#x27;t think the university ever took the position that the tests were per se discriminatory, which the author claims).<p>* It&#x27;s not really defining what &quot;worst&quot; school means; you need to be careful here as you might just be saying the tautological &quot;students at schools with low-performing students on average on low performing&quot;. It&#x27;s making the common claim these schools are underfunded, but on average, lower performing schools are receiving more money. (Example from LA - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.laalmanac.com&#x2F;education&#x2F;ed04m.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.laalmanac.com&#x2F;education&#x2F;ed04m.php</a> -- LAUSD, which some of the lowest ranking schools, is well over average funding - areas with top schools - e.g. Arcadia - get the least). Perhaps the author means &quot;underfunded schools relative to what I think they should get&quot;, but that&#x27;s a different statement.<p>* UC admission data for 2021 is out (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ucop.edu&#x2F;institutional-research-academic-planning&#x2F;content-analysis&#x2F;ug-admissions&#x2F;ug-pages&#x2F;admissions.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ucop.edu&#x2F;institutional-research-academic-planning&#x2F;co...</a>), so it&#x27;s possible to start objectively assessing the impact of the policy.

The article makes no mention of the lawsuit that was brought against the UC system. They ended up settling, with the UC system agreeing to stop using the SAT for the next 5 years. I think the lawsuit had a lot more influence on the decision than most people think.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfchronicle.com&#x2F;education&#x2F;article&#x2F;Judge-bars-University-of-California-from-all-use-15531662.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfchronicle.com&#x2F;education&#x2F;article&#x2F;Judge-bars-Uni...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfchronicle.com&#x2F;local&#x2F;article&#x2F;UC-settles-student-lawsuit-agrees-not-to-use-16178677.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfchronicle.com&#x2F;local&#x2F;article&#x2F;UC-settles-student...</a>

I went to a RURAL school. My graduating class was 20 people. We didn&#x27;t really do SAT prep, basically all time was eaten up triaging students who were struggling, and dealing with poorly behaved students. Or the teachers were sometimes completely lazy.<p>I didn&#x27;t even know AP classes EXISTED. I got to go home for a work study after my first class senior year because I had taken all of the classes available to me. A lot of my peers weren&#x27;t so lucky and had to sit in study hall for the entire day. The school was gaming attendance because kids in seats means more money, and with how small the school was every student mattered.<p>Either way: Not a great place to be as a reasonably intelligent young person with an aptitude for technology. I was so profoundly unprepared for college, I had to work twice as hard to do half the work as everyone else, but I managed to sneak by with never failing a class. ( OK, I failed one statistics class because I walked into the final without a calculator. )<p>I had to work during the day to support myself and do night classes my Jr and Sr year of school. I have this memory of all of my classmates going to an &quot;Of Montreal&quot; concert, and I really wanted to go, but I didn&#x27;t have the money to buy the ticket. Or the time, I never went out, I had to spend my free time on the weekends doing my homework.<p>So yeah, this is a nice gesture. The SAT is easier to study for when you are a product of an achievement driven environment and have mentors to coach you through the process. College is more valuable when you actually have the time and capacity to take advantage of your education and it&#x27;s opportunities. Same as everything else, there is a massive gulf of education and training between students of wealthy districts, and the rest of us. Personally, I think those of us from the sandlot deserve a swing as well.

The SAT is the single biggest determiner of intelligence I&#x27;ve come across (at least from people taking the test 10-20 years ago). It&#x27;s the only number I&#x27;ve come across that people commonly have, and is ballpark correct. Throwing it away is insanity.

In most countries students apply to just 1 or 2 colleges. Because college admissions are predictable in other countries. In the US students apply to a dozen or more colleges, and each college requires custom essays. Then these applications go through &quot;holistic reviews&quot;. In reality, because of the huge volume of applications, colleges spend 6 to 8 minutes reviewing each application, and the reviewer is often an inexperienced 22-year-old graduate student.<p>The system of &quot;holistic reviews&quot; and unpredictability was introduced to control the number of Jewish people being admitted to top universities. More here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;circles.page&#x2F;5680a56b5c28af0998656e09&#x2F;College-Admissions-in-the-US" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;circles.page&#x2F;5680a56b5c28af0998656e09&#x2F;College-Admiss...</a>

At this point I&#x27;m really wondering what the ostensible purpose of Universities is, as opposed to their true purpose of wealth signaling.<p>We live in an age where university level lectures and materials are available for free. Why are we paying a ton of money to obtain a limited slot that allows us to show up at a building for the same lectures and materials?<p>Is it personal attention? Almost certainly not, but even if it was that can be had on the open market for far less cost.<p>Access to specialized equipment? Well maybe, but surely there&#x27;s a more efficient solution there.<p>Is it certification? Because in my experience, as well as that of many others, the degrees don&#x27;t say much of anything about competence so what good are they? Besides, it&#x27;s again a really expensive way to certify people and surely there must be a better method.

&quot;People in power today would much rather do something that seems to promote “equity” than make an evidence-based choice that could lead to accusations of racism.&quot;<p>My experience was that the system worked just fine for all kinds of people that got to the point that they wanted to go to a UC.<p>Among my siblings and our offspring family of 12, we put 6 of family members through the UC system (Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD). 3 went through the community college system with no reliance on standardized test scores. 2 took SATs and GPAs. 1 got in this fall on GPA alone.

Higher Ed Number cruncher here (who also read the report, which apparently was a big deal to the author since they cited the page count - and many of their arguments hinge on you taking their word for it and not reading at least the exec summary yourself - which is only 8 pages):<p>So, fun thing about the actual study that the author references... the committee actually __DIDN&#x27;T__ tell UC regents to not get rid of the test; they recommended against making it test optional due to variability in assessment requirements between institutions - and the exec summary doesn&#x27;t include any recommendation for or against fully excising standardized testing from their eval process.<p>Further, the committee found that while the tests over HSGPA (high test score, low GPA) weighting was used in a subset of cases it was more likely that a student was admitted with just the opposite (low test score, high GPA); and overall it looks like the strongest recommendation was to disincentivize the HSGPA due to it losing almost 25% predictive effectiveness over the tested time period.<p>This article reads fine until it gets to the last couple of paragraphs, covering &quot;affirmative action&quot; and over-representation of AAPI students; and this is where a glaring issue comes through with their analysis. Like any higher ed institution there is a monetary incentive to get international students; as there isn&#x27;t usually an out for lower tuition like WUE&#x2F;WGE (which coincidentally the UC system no longer participates in), interstate compact agreements, and the like for tuition reduction; and the home country in many cases subsidizes the student so the higher ed institution gets full out-of-state tuition rates on a nearly guaranteed basis. So, by using AAPI students as a proxy argument for their weird screed at the end while leaving off factors like what percentage of that UG population is in-state v. out-of-state v. international does a disservice to that over&#x2F;under-represented claim; while also leaving them off of the earlier analysis pieces moves the slant of the article in a weird way.<p>For further reference; AAPI students are __NOT__ included in Underrepresented Minority (URM) calculations - even though in many cases a layperson __WOULD__ include them; so by not mentioning them until you reach the point you&#x27;re calling out the discrepancy they end up begging the question around the &quot;model minority&quot; bs; when it really may be explained more concretely through international and out of state student draw.

Having spent a lot of time doing MS admissions at a top-tier CS program, I never really cared that much about specific scores unless they were absolutely terrible. Tests don’t tell you much about an applicant, essays are more helpful to know if somebody can be successful. We did away with tests and I didn’t miss them.

It&#x27;s all really stupid, actually.<p>The competition for the best schooling so that you can get the best job can indeed yield significant benefits for the winners. The private sector judges prestigious universities to be high-value; those universities use SATs to judge which students are high-value; and students judge universities as high-value based on their perception of what the private sector values.<p>All of this is apparently a filtration system designed to find the best and brightest candidates. Presumably, as many have mentioned, these are people with high IQ. And indeed, high IQ people are extremely noticeable when you are around them. They are frequently faster, more incisive, and have a knowledge base that is both deep and wide.<p>...And many of them are unproductive, valueless fuck-ups with poor temperaments for almost any work requiring a social component (i.e. almost all work). They have substance abuse problems. They have personality disorders. They lie. And many of them are also wonderful people.<p>I&#x27;ll take a medium-bright, tenacious, responsible worker with a degree from a state school or community college any day of the week over some moneyed primadonna who is too busy trying to display their own cleverness to focus on the task at hand.<p>All of this judgement is stupid because it discounts character. Medium aptitude coupled with hard work can and does produce excellence. Focus, care, and attention to detail are at least as important as intelligence. The filtration process closes doors for these people.<p>Lastly, though this only an anecdote, anyone who&#x27;s worked in the professional world has had the pleasure of running into idiot attorneys from prestigious schools. People who send e-mails full of misspellings, careless factual errors, and incorrect legal assertions beyond their specific scope of legal knowledge. Trust me, these people exist, and it&#x27;s extremely difficult to explain how they exist if the filtration system is really the meritocracy it claims to be. It is frequently hacked as a vehicle for privilege.

I will ask uncomfortable questions here. How will this change affect UC’s competitiveness (as measured by alumni quality) against Tshinghua University (China), or IIT (India), or MSU (Russia). Or we don’t care about that any more?

In this article about the impacts of dropping the SAT, I would hope to find a coherent analysis of the impacts of that policy vs. the status quo. Unfortunately, that analysis seems internally inconsistent:<p>&quot;In short, this decision will probably hurt thousands of Asian American teenagers, backfire for Black, Latino, and low-income students, and make little difference for affluent whites.&quot;<p>Wait a second. If this policy is going to reduce enrollment of non-white and low-income students, and make little difference for affluent whites, then which demographics will see increased enrollment?

Rich, privileged kids who can buy good extra-curricular &quot;experiences&quot; and bribe their way to better grades at private schools will be the big winners here.

this is common with diversity efforts: over emphasis on admission. I feel this does students a disservice. I was one of these students.<p>Focusing on admission rates sounds nice to a bureaucrat – but to the individual who will drop out, they will be taking the hit on their career and savings– they won&#x27;t be getting hired, and they will have $100k in debt for nothing.<p>Who would you hire? A graduate from CSUn or a dropout from UCLA?<p>it&#x27;s telling that people rarely talk about SAT correlation with university graduation rates. I&#x27;m guessing they are tightly correlated (which is why they&#x27;ve been used for 60 years).

Because the SAT correlates with IQ and IQ tests are racist. Next leetcode style interviewing will be made illegal for the same reasons. Employers will then find something else to approximate IQ, and so on.

&gt; People in power today would much rather do something that seems to promote “equity” than make an evidence-based choice that could lead to accusations of racism.<p>&quot;Wokeness&quot; and CRT are steps back in logical and rational discussion. Sometimes the truth hurts, and instead of plugging our ears, shouting &quot;LALALALALA&quot;, and denigrating the purveyors of said truth, we should accept the truth for what it is and look to the underlying causes.<p>The modern western allopathic medicine treat-the-symptoms-with-drugs school of thought pervades more than just healthcare.

If you decide to argue that good test scores favor the rich because they can afford test prep, why are grades allowed at all? In reality the bar to afford 10 one hour sat prep classes is much cheaper than 4 years of tutors in different subjects.<p>And, since I have no doubt that&#x27;ll likely occur eventually, what would we use to decide who gets into colleges? Is it going to be a competition on who tells the best story in their essay? Can you even be held accountable for lying in the essay, could you even prove it? What else is there?

228-page official report from the University of California on their use of standardized testing [1]. Voluminous data they would’ve referred to while making this decision.<p>SAT and GPA provide significant and independent predictive value for outcomes of interest. See for example the graphs on page 22.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;senate.universityofcalifornia.edu&#x2F;_files&#x2F;underreview&#x2F;sttf-report.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;senate.universityofcalifornia.edu&#x2F;_files&#x2F;underreview...</a>

I personally feel that colleges are dropping the SAT and ACT because those scores show correlation between race and higher&#x2F;lower admission criteria in the admitted student body. See the Harvard lawsuit. Without the scores it is easier for colleges to shape the incoming student population to better approximate the desired demographic distribution.

I’m thankful for the diverse group of people that I studied with at the University of Missouri. Different backgrounds, point of views, and experiences added so much to the college experience. Diversity is such a great thing. We should do everything we can to promote it. My life is better, more enriched because of affirmative actions over the years.

Yes, it would be better if a school system produced racially unbiased test results, rather than abandoning the racially biased tests.<p>Unfortunately the former is vastly more difficult than the latter. So, while you wait for the school system to catch up, why not stop the system from inflicting some of its worst discriminative damage in the meantime?

I wonder what the second order effects of this change will have on the curriculum and scheduling in K-12 schools in CA.

You don&#x27;t change a test to serve the needs of student, you change students to serve the needs of the test.

Admissions are already way too complicated. Just have a GPA cutoff and randomly select people via a lottery.

&gt; If we were to think about this assertion rationally instead of emotionally, we would have to face what California has done: consigned its most vulnerable students to some of the worst K–12 schools in America<p>...assuming a given school is responsible for 100% of its students&#x27; SAT scores. In reality parents are responsible for <i>at least</i> 50% of a kid&#x27;s performance in school and so even if you put low income students into gold-plated schools they would still underperform because they lack a strong family life outside of school (i.e. educated, non single, motivational parents) that would have prepared them.<p>Take a truant kid from Baltimore and put them in the finest high school in America and they would still fail because the problem is the family life enabling truancy, not how much money the school has.

Standardized tests scores help students irrespective of the high schools they went or grades they got. Getting rid of them means eliminating common testing standards. How will that lead to equality ?

Good; the sooner we make university credentialing irrelevant the better.

We don&#x27;t use the SAT in Canada. Instead it&#x27;s course grades plus provincial final exams which are subject specific. Generally works pretty well..

Man up. Admit everyone who applies. Let the ones that can&#x27;t meet the standard fail out and the ones that can stay. Everyone gets what they want.

I was born in yugoslavia (later slovenia), under the red star, communism, brotherhood, unity, equality, and all other communist bullshit back then.<p>...and even then we had standardized testing, and it worked.<p>You went to elementary school, usually the closest to your house (from about 6&#x2F;7yo to 14&#x2F;15, =8 years), and at the end of that, you&#x27;d apply to a highschool of your choice (either general &quot;gymnasium&quot;, or 3 or 4 year technical, trades, economic etc. school), and then you&#x27;d have standardized tests. Your grades in last three years and your test scores would be calculated into points (i think it was 120 points max), high schools would sort the applicants by points, and however many spots were available, that many top students would get accepted and a cuttoff point value was published (everybody above X points got accepted).<p>In high school it was a bit more complicated, because standardized testing had three core subjects (slovene, math and usually english (1st foreign language)) plus two subjects chosen by the students. Colleges would post requirements in advance - most had just 40% grades, 60% standardized testing, some (i think medicine) required one of the two chosen subjects to be either biology or chemistry (and it was 20% that subject, 40% grades, 40% other subjects), and only a few (art, acting, music) had entrance exams. And the process was the same as before... everybody did the tests, results got calculated into points (i think 0-100), top X got accepted.<p>The exams included knowledge from all the years of schooling, and tutors were a thing for &quot;bad&quot; students, who couldn&#x27;t learn enough from the teacher (or didn&#x27;t listen, did other stuff, failed, and had to get a higher grade, not to fail the whole year). With math, you had to know math... there was a lot of practice in school with every part of math, and tutoring was no better than just doing the work from regular workbooks. With history, well.. you had to memorize a lot of stuff, but you knew that when you chose the subject. There was no way to game the system, because everybody did the same programme.<p>I have no idea why only america has issues with standardized tests... IMHO, using grades is worse than testing, because an average students with shitty classmates will in general get better grades, than in a class with mostly &quot;geniouses&quot;.

This is just going to degrade the quality of the educational experience in California.

Khan Academy offers VERY nice, free resources for practicing.<p>Throwing out the SAT is the wrong move.

Im from the Netherlands and US education seems to be worst of both socialism and capitalism: lack of choice and sky high prices.<p>In the Netherlands we have:<p>Free choice of high school. I grew up in the poorest neighbourhood of the city and I still went to a very decent high school with classmates from all backgrounds.<p>More and smaller high schools. More choice and competition between schools. Schools are subsidised based on the amount of students they attract.<p>High school programs have different difficulty levels. Everyone follows a program that matches their academic ability. If you finish the highest level (VWO) you are generally granted access to all universities. American university application feels like a job interview. You have one chance to impress. Dutch (European) university application is like a 6 year internship where you can proof yourself.

IMO a solution the higher-education issue both in terms of cost &amp; acceptance is to force any public or publicly funded school (i.e all of them just like Title IX did) to:<p>1. Offer all undergrad classes online, without capacity limits , and at a lower price. [1] 2. Degrees are awarded on some tiered scale (instead of the college&#x27;s name?). 3. All student outcomes are published including % that get a job within 6 months &amp; average starting salary. 4. Most classes can be passed&#x2F;skipped via an exam of some sort. 5. All amenity&#x2F;building costs are optional or part of the in-person price.<p>Certainly lots of students prefer or say they prefer small, physical classes but if the online cost is 1&#x2F;10 of the physical price then you can prioritize which classes you prefer in person vs online.<p>The cost breakdown would be like this:<p>* ~$200 to take the class online or ~$2000 to take it in-person. * ~$50 to just take the exam.<p>If you take 8&#x2F;10 classes online and take 1&#x2F;10 as an exam and 1&#x2F;10 in-person; then you save ~82% ($3,650 vs $20,000). This puts the cost easily within a summer job.<p>The tiered scale would probably just be putting the GPA on the degree. (It will never happen but I think it would be good if the degree lacked the school&#x27;s name and school&#x27;s would not disclose if the student attend that specific school.)<p>This would be a drastic change but the current system is extremely biased to the kind of student&#x2F;person that schools like for their &#x27;culture&#x27;. We essentially have an Instagram version of education that&#x27;s pay-to-play and pay-to-win.<p>The counter argument is always that college is about network effects that can only be accessed in person. I think this is absurd since a good portion of students don&#x27;t have the luxury&#x2F;desire to build those connections. In undergrad, I bet it&#x27;s less than 5% that benefit (but those 5% benefit <i>a lot</i>). In any case, schools shouldn&#x27;t be using admission requirements to boost their schools reputation. e.g taking Calc 1 at a Ivy school isn&#x27;t very impressive besides the fact you are at an Ivy league school.<p>There are certainly a lot of other issues to resolve. Schools would hate it because they couldn&#x27;t be prestigious simply because they are very selective and wouldn&#x27;t be able to spread costs around between colleges&#x2F;classes. Professors would hate it because they would have to have an online class (which they seem to hate). Etc.<p>[1] Obviously lab classes cannot be 100% online but in this the student should be mostly free to take the class at any physical school. A titration lab is still just a titration whether it is at MIT or the local community college. Even STEM programs are made up of mostly lecture classes. And obviously there is an upper limit per class&#x2F;semester but it&#x27;s probably like 10x the current class size.

Statistics:<p>The UC system has decreased the white student admissions down to 20%. It varies by school. Asian Americans make up 34% and Latinos are 37% of the UC campuses. It does change by campus, for example, white students are 15% at UC Irvine, and 11% at UC Merced.<p>Additionally, admittance ratio of universities across the nation is 60% women and 40% men, so that means of that 20% of white students admitted to the UC program, only 8% are white males.<p>Drop the SATs in order to concentrate on &quot;lived experience&quot;, and then squeeze out the remaining white males? Or get it down to 1 or 2%?<p>A friend of mine, took the most difficult advanced courses at the most challenging high school in all of California, did all kinds of extracurriculars, sports, music, volunteering and never got less than an A in a single class. The very hardest classes. Fluent in several languages. Could not get into a single UC school. Would he have been admitted if he was a POC? I don&#x27;t know, you tell me.

Thomas Sowell has broken this down very well over the last 50 years.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hoover.org&#x2F;research&#x2F;affirmative-action-around-world" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hoover.org&#x2F;research&#x2F;affirmative-action-around-wo...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.commentary.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;thomas-sowell-2&#x2F;affirmative-action-a-worldwide-disaster&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.commentary.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;thomas-sowell-2&#x2F;affirmat...</a><p>And of course the Bible on the subject: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sowell-ebook&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B07JLS7P8D" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sow...</a>

&gt; Here are some more of the fiercely held arguments for dumping the tests: Test scores don’t reflect the character-forging aspects of life as a poor teenager; the tests force students from underfunded schools to compete against “affluent whites” who can afford expensive test prep;<p>While the article does offer some rebuttal to that claim, I&#x27;d like to give a stronger one*: California is 31% white, University of California students are 25% white - they are underrepresented.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;University_of_California#Student_profile" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;University_of_California#Stude...</a><p>*Edit: On second thought, grardb is correct: Comparing with K-12 demographics, as the article does, is better.

Longform journalism can be reduced to the simple formula of ostensibly liberal journalists writing pieces that appeal to conservatives.

In the very first line:<p>&gt; but out here in the crumbling state of California<p>Yup, no need to read any more.

The author doesn&#x27;t spend much time arguing why the tests should be kept. This is one defense and it feels pretty weak to me:<p>&gt; standardized test scores say more about which applicants are likely to earn a degree and to do it in less than eight years; they also correlate strongly with students’ GPA at the university