Well, this didn't take long.
Since we all know that standardized tests are racist, this means that Harvard is once more a pawn on the white supremacist patriarchy. Like that's a surprise.
In all seriousness, I would pay good money to hear recordings of the deliberations and read the email traffic that led up to this decision. It must have been en fuego.
1 comment:
Yeah, I can understand why they went back to the standardized tests. The problem was that they forgot why these tests were created in the first place - if you have many more applicants than you can take, you need some kind of uniform standard to compare them against so you can quickly pick out the legitimately good students. High school GPA is no good, because you have no idea whether an "A" from one school is equivalent to a "B" or "C" at some other school. And it gets really awkward when you take applications from other countries, which often use wildly different grading scales than US schools. Essays are not much help, because when you get hundreds or thousands of applications, reading them with any sort of attention becomes impossibly labor-intensive. Ditto with reading resumes or transcripts or letters of reference. And all of these have the added bonus that you have no idea whether they were actually written by the student, or whether they had hired it done (or had the increasingly capable chatbots do it). And in-person interviews take forever.
People can go on all they like about the "evils" of standardized tests, but the blunt fact of the matter is that admission departments need them, or something very like them, or they will never be able to keep up with the flood of applications. The only viable alternative would be some kind of lottery, and I bet people would really hate that!
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