I'm not sure I understand what you mean. GP writes:
> There is a small, but well-organized and vocal subset of the population that hates the idea of excellence and differentiation.
I don't see how that applies to my comment above, and I don't see how saying:
> They are trying to compress aptitude into a single Boolean variable, you are either admitted or not. That’s it.
is doing anything other than backing up what I said. At the point where you are dividing a subset of the population into binary "in or out" groups, you are in fact advocating for homogenization, for less differentiation between students, and for fewer levels/categories of excellence or exceptionalism.
I'm not here to tell you that's wrong, you do whatever you want. MIT is trying to decide who gets into their specific college, fine. But if you're arguing that the point of SATs is to make a binary determination about students, then it's just strictly inaccurate to say that it's the SAT critics who are all trying to cut down tall poppies.
You conflate vertical differentiation with horizontal differentiation. Horizontal differentiation is what is usually understood as “diversity” and considered good among certain groups of people. Vertical differentiation is what is usually understood as “hierarchy” and considered bad among those groups of people.
MIT like many American universities does only general admission and that’s indeed would be considered weird in other countries, but it seems like a whole nother issue.
> You conflate vertical differentiation with horizontal differentiation.
A binary admissions model reduces both. That's not to say a binary admissions model is wrong, but it does reduce vertical differentiation. Of course compressing an integer value into a binary result reduces differentiation, a boolean represents fewer states than a number.
To go a step further, even if that wasn't the case, vertical and horizontal differentiation still can't ever be completely decoupled from each other. Horizontal differentiation allows for greater vertical differentiation by allowing people to vertically differentiate based on their strengths rather than on a questionably representative average of all of their qualities. And I don't think that's a solely Progressive or Left-wing idea, it's a big part of the reasoning behind why economic specialization leads to more advanced societies.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30834517, but I'm here clarifying what my criticisms of the SAT are and what I think its weaknesses are -- and pointing out that my criticism of the SAT is the exact opposite of what tharne says it is. I'm not here to rework the entire admissions process.
I don't have a single-comment answer to replacing the entire SAT and reworking the entire college admissions process, and it's feasible that the SAT might still be preferable to pure GPAs in the meantime. But I don't think saying that requires us to pretend that compressing skillsets into an objectively less granular/descriptive metric is a good thing or that it's somehow increasing our understanding of student skillsets. Saying that MIT might be right to accept SAT scores doesn't mean we need to pretend that the SAT doesn't have very serious flaws. Certainly it doesn't require me to pretend that every argument against SATs are arguments against meritocracy, I think that's just objectively wrong.
Ideally we would have standardized metrics that were more granular, and ideally we would at least have an SAT that was administered differently and more regularly so that they were optimized less for formal test taking skills. But there are a lot of barriers in front of that.
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I also don't have a single-comment answer for what to replace Github repos with during hiring interviews, or how to make whiteboard coding tests more accurate, and I have criticisms about them too. The answer might be that there isn't an easy single number that represents meritocracy, and we might be fooling ourselves pretending that there is, and it might just be wishful thinking in the first place to pretend that there is a version of admissions processes for colleges that isn't fiendishly difficult and complicated and multifaceted.
When people criticize whiteboard interviews on here, it's reasonable to ask if there's a better system, but I rarely see people saying, "you're only criticizing whiteboard interviews because you hate meritocratic job placements." No, I have criticisms of these systems because they're not good representations of talent.
> There is a small, but well-organized and vocal subset of the population that hates the idea of excellence and differentiation.
I don't see how that applies to my comment above, and I don't see how saying:
> They are trying to compress aptitude into a single Boolean variable, you are either admitted or not. That’s it.
is doing anything other than backing up what I said. At the point where you are dividing a subset of the population into binary "in or out" groups, you are in fact advocating for homogenization, for less differentiation between students, and for fewer levels/categories of excellence or exceptionalism.
I'm not here to tell you that's wrong, you do whatever you want. MIT is trying to decide who gets into their specific college, fine. But if you're arguing that the point of SATs is to make a binary determination about students, then it's just strictly inaccurate to say that it's the SAT critics who are all trying to cut down tall poppies.