alt Hacker NewsI appreciate your willingness to engage and your detailed responses. I understand where you're coming from, and that you've seen how the sausage is made.
> In person tutoring worked better and by a lot, but it all helped.
Are money and other resources only helpful for getting a good test score? They don't matter at all for the factors that improve one's chances of admission? For example, going to a good high school district, participation in certain sports, hobbies, or access to internship, volunteer, or research opportunities?
My argument is simply: by making it about the test, you remove all the other factors where money could potentially have an influence. The rich students will get tutoring no matter what. But they can't gain any other advantages over the poor students.
> In that way, one could just set minimum criteria to be accepted, which includes GPA, tests scores, research, jobs, whatever, and then randomly select from that group.
That wouldn't be a terrible approach either. You are correct it would be unsatisfying.
> GPA and where they went to undergrad...were [both] hard metrics and full of bias.
I would argue they weren't "hard" at all. Undergrad is already gated by "squishy" criteria. Normalizing GPAs across universities (and countries, in the case of international applicants) is tricky and imprecise.
Money absolutely has an impact across easily available metrics. For example, money lets one purchase better coaching for sports or join a travel team. As we see from the lawsuit, athletes were accepted at a much higher rate than the rest of the applicants. Money lets one attend better schools either from a transfer or private school. Money allows for better tutoring. I completely agree.
Where I think we differ is that my contention is that money also allows one to game a higher test score on something like the SAT and by a significant factor. Yes, it would focus attention on this one factor, but I believe it also misses the point. College admissions is not meant to be a singular contest or game, but part of a broader ecosystem and that system has choices.
A university has a number of competing criteria and wants for its applicants. Generally speaking, a university does not want someone to drop out. They want graduates and part of screening applications is meant to determine whether they believe someone can successfully complete their degree. Some universities essentially operate like hedge funds that have classes. These universities have an interest in high net worth and connected applicants because these people can trade favors or give donations as alumnae. This is reflected in legacy admissions and automatic admission for certain classes of donors. Some universities want to give preference to in-state or in-city students. The purpose here is to ensure the university is locally connected because the state and city have the most influence on what is really a city inside of a city for most universities. Some universities want to give children of those who never went to college preference because it ultimately broadens their base and likely ensures their children will want to attend there as well. Some universities want to maximize their rating on the US News and World Report ranking because it means they can charge higher tuition.
None of those metrics above, moral or amoral alike, need a total ordering of applicants based on a test score.
As one other comment, when I sat on the graduate board, our department was flooded with applications from one particular country, more than half. Don't know why, but it was. Certainly, we accepted some of those applicants. However, consider the implications of accepting students purely from that one place. Would the local government be happy if we did not accept any local or domestic students? Would the federal? Probably not. However, if we accepted applications purely based on a singular test score, there would be incentive for that place to game the system and help with the test, legal or otherwise. No idea if they did then, but it wouldn't have mattered since we still read the broader application.