My understanding is that Beijing University gets the test results for every high school graduate in the country and automatically admits the top scorers. It's a method of elite production that allows for social mobility and limits the ability of parents to pass their status on to their children. I've wondered if much of reason why Harvard-associated people have been negative about standardized tests
It is not how it works. Depending on the province, student submits a list of preferred universities with majors before taking the test, after taking the test, or after knowing the score. The list is divided in groups, and also depending on the province, the universities in each group may or may not be ordered.
In a province where the universities are ordered, students with the same first choice are grouped together and the said university gets the result and admits top scores within quota. If there are more quota than students, university looks at students putting it as second choice AND not admitted by another university yet. Never figured out how unordered group works so I won't explain that.
There are also nuances if students could submit list after knowing their scores, because universities can approach top students in private and negotiate terms with them to lure them into putting the universities as first choice.
Hence Beijing University only gets results if it is on the list of a student. And it is not always a good idea to put Beijing U as the first choice since in a province with ordered group, not getting admitted by first choice hugely decreases the chance of getting into second choice university.
Same thing here in Vietnam. But I don’t think it detracts from the point (standardized testing is good for social mobility).
Normally almost everyone know roughly how competitive your own self is, so only people at the margin of admission has to care. There are some majors where everyone is at the margin (sometimes it get to 29.75 out of 30 as the cutoff), but at that point, it really doesn’t matter who you would get among all those people, and the effect is roughly the school pick a subset of very talented and hardworking student at random. Again, doesn’t affect the mobility issue
With the Indian JEE you just rank all your choices (major, university). The system then allocates the highest available choice for the student sorted by the student rank. This avoids all the guesswork and game theory that you describe. There are also well defined quotas for lower caste/disabled/state locals etc
> There are also nuances if students could submit list after knowing their scores, because universities can approach top students in private and negotiate terms with them to lure them into putting the universities as first choice.
That seems unnecessary? I asked several students at 复旦大学 and 上海财经大学 how they got into those schools, and about half of them told me they'd gone through the normal process of "take the gaokao, apply to the school, and be admitted based on exceeding the 分数线".
Other responses:
- "I took 财大's own entrance exam, so I didn't need to take the gaokao."
- "I went to the high school affiliated with 复旦, and they recommended me to 复旦. I had a meeting with an admissions officer and he liked me, which meant that I could be admitted with a lower gaokao score [than would otherwise have been required]."
If admissions has this much leeway, I don't really see why they'd need to lure students into listing their school first. Surely the student who didn't bother taking the gaokao at all also didn't need to submit a ranked list of school preferences with the gaokao she didn't take?
> In a province where the universities are ordered, students with the same first choice are grouped together and the said university gets the result and admits top scores within quota. If there are more quota than students, university looks at students putting it as second choice AND not admitted by another university yet. Never figured out how unordered group works so I won't explain that.
I've heard about the rank ordering, but I wasn't able to understand how the system works. As I understand things, the first thing that happens in an admissions year is that the school publishes their 招生计划, the schedule of how many students they plan to admit from each province. Then, aspiring students take the gaokao for that year and submit their ranked school preferences. Then, each school looks at the students that picked them first, and admits them in top down order of score. Then, if they haven't filled out the 招生计划, they look at the students that picked them second, and so on...
Finally, the school publishes their 分数线 for each province (and major) that year, the lowest score that resulted in being admitted from that province in that major.
The thing I don't understand is that the 分数线 appears to be fully discretionary. I am not aware of a rule that tells the school when to stop looking at students that ranked it first and start looking at students that ranked it second. How is that decision made? It will always be possible to scrape the bottom of the first-choice barrel a little harder, so that you have more first-choice students and a lower 分数线, or to maintain a higher standard, reject the first-choice student with a terrible score, and move on to the second-choice group, where you can start over from the top scorer in that group. That will be good for your 分数线. Why not do it?
(The other problem is that the first set of students you're looking at is well-defined, but the second set is not - they might be admitted by their first-choice school. Do you know how the system handles this? When can a school learn what their second-choice students look like?)
> My understanding is that Beijing University gets the test results for every high school graduate in the country and automatically admits the top scorers.
There are quotas for each province, city/rural area (I think the quotas are by major, which have to be declared ahead of time before you take the test). It can be really hard to get in from rural Henan, for example, but much easier to get in from urban Beijing. Someone who gets into Beida from a rural village in the middle of nowhere is going to have a much higher gaokao score than someone who gets in from Shanghai (there is a large quota for Shanghai kids even in Beijing University, but a very low quota for rural Henan). So it actually acts as a way of limiting social mobility for those without urban rich city hukous.
It is sort of analogous to America's public university system, where you get differences between in state and out of state tuition (except here, it isn't tuition, but quotas for regions).
At the end of the day, the purpose of the standardized tests is to provide a reasonable guide to admitting students who are (subject to various caveats) capable of doing the academic work. It's mostly true to say that elite universities are not looking to admit students solely (or maybe even primarily) on the basis of their scores on standardized test(s). And, yes, other factors are perhaps more influenced by family background but can be influenced by many other non-academic qualities as well.
I don't agree but I think it's fair to say standardized tests are a very mediocre solution for measuring students' capacity for academic work at any institution that requires them, and few universities have the resources to develop and implement better admissions procedures and entrance exams that are more reflective of their institutional values on their own. It's much easier just to get on board the College Board gravy train.
My two cents are standardized tests greatly reduce the function of MS/HS education. They are tied to school funding, teacher effectiveness, local/regional reputation and create a trickle down effect from SAT/ACT > PSAT > state-level tests so that the worst-served students are practicing multiple choice and boilerplate prompts from February to May every year. And these students hardly even go to college if they graduate, so that's time that could have been spent exploring trades, developing life skills (civics, taxes), understanding how to cope with any learning differences, etc.
Then there's the fact that a student can be taught to bump their score past a nominal requirement, gain admission, take out loans and never graduate. Not necessarily the fault of the test but part of the overall complex.
> My two cents are standardized tests greatly reduce the function of MS/HS education.
Eh, depends on how your country's standardized tests are set up. You don't have to ask multiple-choice questions.
There's no reason you shouldn't use standardized tests in trade education - if you're teaching plumbing with copper pipe, have them solder some joints and quiz them about air locks and suchlike.
You can cover things that are truly impossible to examine by just requiring a certain number of hours. If you want people in the first year of high school to receive sex ed but don't want to do exams on it, you can just require that schools deliver a certain number of hours of it.
Then they should just test for that and make it a lottery for everyone over the bar. Anyone who's been to an elite university will tell you that a lot more people could handle it than are admitted.
Why? Because there's no signal other than standardized test scores? If you believe that then you probably should just admit the highest scores.
When I last looked at the research many years ago, other signals certainly tended to be noisier but there's no particular reason to think that admissions would be better if universities simply set a test floor then rolled a dice.
We can't really resolve this with the current data, because the current system encourages people to get as high a score as possible at the cost of maximum stress. How do we know whether changing the system would lead to a less stressed system where people just do enough to leap the bar, perhaps like the diving test?
It's pretty clear however that the selection process at elite universities, however imperfect and to whatever degree it factors in things (like legacy admissions) that you may think shouldn't be factored in, still produces better results than just randomly admitting some percentage of whoever applies. (Especially if applicants knew it would be a completely random process.)
It's not clear that the existing selection processes at most universities actually adds value in proportion to its cost. What value, and to who? What are the shortcomings you think they're trying to fix?
Even if everyone agreed on a standard and its impact on admissions (+3 for participation in the Model UN, for example) it's not clear how we'd judge "better results" as we evaluate our admissions criteria. Are we optimizing for an even racial/religious mix of students? Higher output grades? Higher wages? More children raised successfully by the age of 40?
Then even with an agreed upon goal and some objective measures to used to approach it - is it worth doing? If we could get 1% better results by doubling the difficulty of the application process for the students then it probably wouldn't be worth doing it when the plan was considered holistically. What's an acceptable trade-off? What's the cost on transparency and perception of bias when we start considering subjective criteria?
For the SAT/ACT specifically, it's optional at a fair number of schools--elimination mostly started during COVID has been extended. (And not used at all at a few.) Of course, they still look at high school grades and class rank. I guess they'll have a better understanding in a few years how things turn out.
Of course, the process is still a far way from random.
A lot more people could handle it than are admitted because you can pick the classes you want to take.
If you are saying a lot more people could handle taking the top level classes than are admitted, I would also agree - but most of those people go to similarly elite unis.
I went to a selective uni where I thought basically half my year at high school would have been just fine there. The other half were not particularly interested in studying anything and would have screwed up at any university.
It's not like the laws of physics depend on what college teaches them, right? The content of just about any course is going to be more or less the same. A lot of the books were the same as well, comparing notes with friends who didn't get in.
> It's not like the laws of physics depend on what college teaches them, right? The content of just about any course is going to be more or less the same. A lot of the books were the same as well, comparing notes with friends who didn't get in.
To restate your claim (correct me if I'm wrong): Because the laws of physics are constant, there is only small limited possible variability in the difficulty, knowledge transferred, and comprehension needed to take a physics class between that at an elite university vs. any other university.
The facts: Only 19% of American highschoolers take calculus. This already precludes 80% of students from taking the standard physics classes at my university.
Advanced classical mech. classes for first-years can go much beyond that, delving into lagrangian and hamiltonian formulations, fictitious forces, difficulty relativity problems, etc.
If you are claiming half of your year at high school would have been fine taking a course like this, you went to a very unusual high school in my opinion.
Well the ones in the higher math classes would have been, but that's perhaps a small class size effect. I mean half of them did do either a math or engineering degree, one did a math PhD. I'm not too knowledgeable about the ones doing other subjects like history or art.
But yeah it would seem of the people who were on the path to apply to Oxford (or any other mathy course at a university) would have been fine if they had gotten in.
I'm extrapolating that the other kids in other subjects were just as qualified.
I mean of course I'm not saying people who hadn't done the prerequites would be fine, just the ones who did and didn't get in would be.
My US experience, which is probably pretty typical, is some choice of core courses, choice of major, with some required and some options within that major. Undergrad I'm pretty sure I could have made choices that would have made it pretty much impossible for me to graduate and I could have made choices which--while they certainly wouldn't have made my undergraduate education trivial--would have made things easier.
I'm saying for almost every major there is a very easy path.
But I absolutely disagree if they're saying that there are tons of people who could grok the advanced first-year physics classes like Physics 16 @ Harvard who are just being turned away and also not getting into other similarly good schools.
I don't believe that for a second. Are you saying Xi's children and grandchildren would be denied admission at Beijing University if they wanted it? I'm betting the answer is no. Now extend that thinking to the Standing Committee? Would any of their kids/grandkids be rejected? Now extend that to the entire Politburo.
Now we can ask the question: Is it the grades that decide admission or the number if steps removed from the Premier? Merit, my ass.
>Is it the grades that decide admission or the number if steps removed from the Premier?
First off, the premier is not the leader of China. Second, while I can imagine that members of the Politburo could get their children in, and perhaps some others with power, this doesn't extend so far out. The CCP has tens of millions of members, more than 99% of them are irrelivant. If that kind of scandle would be revealed it would end their career. It is much safer to send their children abroad: something that Xi Jinping did for his daughter (and Kim Jong Il did for Kim Jong Un). That is what I imagine more likely. Additionally it would be easier to just get them a good job with a degree from a worse college (In their own or their freinds comapny). If you have any evidence otherwise I wouldn't be surprised per se but I think a source for your claim is needed.
Even if that's true, it's an entirely different scale from an entire class of people being able to pass their status onto their children through college admissions like the upper middle class and richer people can do in the US.
It is mostly the lower classes (or their advocates) complaining about standardized testing not being equitable. And they have a point about biases (not having access to tutoring, or questions that rely on a middle class or better background to answer correctly).
Many richer Chinese kids bypass the Gaokao completely and just take the much easier SAT/ACT to go to school in the states (or equivalent in other countries).
Not really their advocates, but upper middle class people giving themselves moral cover by saying they want to get rid of standardized test to help poor people. Really they want to make sure smart poor people cant out compete them.
I’m not sure where you are getting your info, but rich people do much better on standardized tests (ACT/SAT/GaoKao/etc…) then poor people given the resources they have available to prep for the tests. If you think these are equalizers for poor people (or that they think so), you are misidentifying the problem.
My understanding is that Beijing University gets the test results for every high school graduate in the country and automatically admits the top scorers. It's a method of elite production that allows for social mobility and limits the ability of parents to pass their status on to their children. I've wondered if much of reason why Harvard-associated people have been negative about standardized tests
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
is precisely because a test-based system wouldn't produce the same elite Harvard produces.