Tuesday, March 19, 2019



Why Elites Dislike Standardized Testing

On Tuesday, March 12 2019, federal prosecutors exposed a crooked college admissions consulting operation that bribed SAT administrators and college athletic coaches in order to get wealthy, underqualified applicants into elite universities. Also charged were 33 wealthy parents who had paid for admissions bribes, including actors Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, Gordon Caplan, a co-chair of the international law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, and Douglas Hodge, the former chief executive of Pimco.

As this story unfolds, there will be numerous takes and analyses about what the exposure of such widespread corruption in college admissions could mean. People are going to say that this scandal is proof that the meritocracy is broken and corrupt. And it’s likely that many commentators will use this event as an opportunity to attack the SAT and the ACT. Progressives view test-based admissions as inequitable because some marginalized groups are significantly underrepresented among the pool of top-scoring college applicants. But millionaires and elites also hate standardized admissions tests, because their children’s admission to top colleges is contingent upon test scores.

Under pressure from both the academic left and wealthy parents, hundreds of colleges have become “test optional,” allowing students to submit applications without test scores. Some elite schools, including Bowdoin, Bryn Mawr and the University of Chicago have adopted these policies.

It is absolutely true that the SAT is the reason this scandal occurred. But for standardized testing requirements, the millionaires and celebrities charged in this scheme would not have needed to search for “side doors” to get their children into elite colleges; they could have walked right in through the front.

Here’s what arguments against testing look like

A short viral Twitter thread from actress, playwright and screenwriter Zoe Kazan, which amassed over 20,000 likes, indicates one way this scandal will be used to attack meritocracy:

without that systemic leg up, i doubt i would have gotten into yale, from which i graduated with honors etc. i was exactly the same applicant pre & post tutoring. i just looked different on paper. well aware most of my peers’ families could not afford to give them that advantage.

— zoe kazan (@zoeinthecities) March 12, 2019

not saying it’s the same AT ALL as breaking the law/bribing/etc. but let’s not pretend money isn’t helping kids get into college all the time, in ways big & small. even if one’s parents didn’t, say, give 2.5 million to one’s college of choice: https://t.co/mibkC3OTlQ

— zoe kazan (@zoeinthecities) March 12, 2019

Zoe Kazan is a talented writer, and in three short tweets here, she manages to:

* Remind everyone that she went to Yale and graduated with honors from its theatre program,

* Check her privilege by acknowledging that she would not have been admitted to Yale if she hadn’t had the resources to pay for an expensive SAT tutor who helped raise her math score 200 points,

* Suggest that her Yale classmates who got in on the basis of stellar SAT scores also owe their admission to privilege, rather than extraordinary aptitude or effort, and

* Dunk on Jared Kushner, who was famous for buying admission to Harvard long before his father-in-law was elected president.

Zoe’s arguments don’t hold up, however, and her experience is actually a perfect encapsulation of why standardized tests are so important, and why it is necessary to defend the meritocracy against assaults from elites who would prefer not to have to participate in a competitive admissions process.

This argument falls apart on examination

Opponents of tests like to argue that tests primarily measure socioeconomic status and parental resources, but it’s not true that rich parents unfairly distort the college admissions process by outspending other people on test prep. There’s not a clear causal relationship between income and test scores, and there’s no evidence that expensive test prep gets better results than cheap or free alternatives.

According to data released by The College Board, the median SAT test taker in 2013 scored a 496 on the SAT’s critical reading section and a 514 on the math. The median student whose family earns less than $20,000 will score a 435 on the critical reading section and a 462 on math, considerably below average. Students from families earing $60,000-80,000 perform similarly to the overall distribution, and median scores continue to rise about 10 points for every marginal $20,000 of family income. The median student from a family earning more than $200,000 per year scores a 565 on critical reading and a 586 on math. The richest students perform a little more than half a standard deviation above average, while the poorest perform a bit more than half a standard deviation below.

But while it’s true that higher-income students get better scores on average and lower-income students do worse, it doesn’t necessarily follow that money raises test scores. This is a mere correlation, and, as anyone who did well on the SAT knows, correlation doesn’t imply causation.

SAT scores correlate strongly enough with IQ that the SAT is interchangeable with IQ as a test of general cognitive ability. Cognitive ability is highly heritable; the single strongest predictor of a child’s IQ is the IQ of the child’s parents. There is also a correlation between income and IQ. That means smarter than average parents are likely to have smarter than average kids and higher than average incomes.

The educational attainment of an SAT taker’s parents is about as strongly correlated with higher scores as high income is; the median student whose parents hold graduate degrees scores a 560 on critical reading and a 576 on math, only slightly lower than the richest students in the dataset by income, and a full standard deviation higher than students whose parents hold only high school diplomas.

There’s also little support for the contention that inequalities in access to test prep is the mechanism by which richer students secure their advantage.

It is true that prep can help; working practice tests can help students get comfortable with the tested concepts and get familiar with the test format and the way the test writers reason. Practicing can also improve the speed at which testers can work the problems, and help them become more confident and comfortable taking the test.

However, it has never been true that poorer students lack access to test prep; most students prepare for the SAT, and high quality materials and practice questions drawn from old tests have been available in inexpensive test-prep books for decades. In 2015 the College Board partnered with Kahn Academy to provide free online test prep resources, and about 60% of test takers now utilize the free official test-prep resources.

Despite what commercial test prep companies might claim in their marketing materials, there is no evidence that expensive commercial prep materials or private tutoring yield better results than test prep with inexpensive practice materials or the free official online resources.

It’s worth noting that the scores most rich kids and most children of highly educated parents earn are still far too low to get into elite colleges. The median child from a family earning $200,000 scores an 1151, which puts you in the bottom half of the admitted class at a school like Ole Miss or University of Alabama, and is far short of the 1500 earned by the median student who enrols at Yale.

If rich people could just spend their way to high test scores, then they wouldn’t be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to bribe their way into elite schools.

Zoe Kazan checks her privilege, but not all of it

While her assertions about money and access to expensive test prep don’t stand up to scrutiny, it’s particularly ridiculous for Zoe Kazan to claim that the primary privilege factor — the “systemic leg up” — that secured her Yale admission was her ability to pay for SAT tutoring.

Zoe Kazan’s parents are Hollywood writer/director Nicholas Kazan and screenwriter Robin Swicord. Nicholas’s father — Zoe’s grandfather — was legendary director Elia Kazan, who made On the Waterfront, East of Eden and A Streetcar Named Desire. Elia Kazan’s wife was the playwright Molly Day Thacher. Elia and Molly met while they were students at Yale, and Molly was, as it happens, the granddaughter of the revered Yale professor and administrator Thomas Anthony Thacher, who was a descendant of the Rev. Thomas Buckingham of Saybrook, one of Yale’s founders.

Legacy applicants — the children or grandchildren of alumni — get an admissions advantage worth about 160 SAT points. By contrast, the median student with a family income over $200,000 scores about 140 points higher than the median student in the overall dataset. Another way to describe the legacy advantage is that legacies get in if they can score at the 95th percentile, while unhooked applicants must score above the 99th percentile.  But “legacy” is insufficient to describe Zoe Kazan’s pedigree. She’s something closer to royalty at Yale. When an applicant like this comes before an admissions committee, they will be very motivated to admit her.

What is extraordinary is that she almost didn’t get in. The test score bar is much lower for special cases like hers, but there’s still a bar, and she had to struggle and cram and hire an expensive tutor to get over it, and she had to sweat out her college admission just like the rest of us. And there are other applicants who are the children and grandchildren of exalted and famous families who can’t get their scores high enough, and they don’t get in, and that means there are more seats at schools like Yale that are available to the rest of us.

You can tell an objective, meritocratic system is working when it pushes out people that the establishment would prefer to admit (people like Zoe Kazan), and it admits the people that the establishment would prefer to reject (Jews and Asians). It is phenomenal that CEOs and power brokers and celebrities are getting indicted for desperately trying to bribe someone to get their mediocre kids into good schools, because that means meritocratic systems are throwing barriers in front of the children of elites when they can’t compete on an objective test.

There’s a reason Zoe is attacking the SAT rather other controversial aspects of the college admissions process like the preferential treatment of legacies: Testing impedes the success of people like her.  If Yale goes test-optional, what else is there in the admissions portfolio that could possibly scuttle the application of somebody like Zoe Kazan? When millionaires and celebrities attack the testing establishment, they pretend to do so on behalf of the marginalized and disadvantaged, but they really want to destroy the SAT because it is the only mechanism by which your kid can get into an elite college ahead of their kid.  Even if you assume, for the purpose of argument, that Zoe Kazan is right in her claim that standardized tests give “a systemic leg up” to “upper middle class” applicants who can afford commercial prep services, what is the alternative?

Without some semblance of competitive admissions based on objective criteria like standardized test scores, a college like Yale becomes an exclusive nightclub and the admissions committee is just a bouncer. People like Zoe Kazan — the children of senators and governors and CEOs and celebrities — get to walk right in. They’re on the VIP list. And the rest of us have to wait our turn for the bouncer to look us over and subjectively decide if we’re cool enough or hot enough.

SOURCE 

UPDATE:  A reader writes that affirmative action is also a big fraud that gets unqualified people into college:

"As always, those condemning “the rich” for buying admission to elite colleges for their low-performing children don’t ‘get it”.

As always, “legal crime” (tax evasion by a few of “the rich”) pales in comparison to “legal” crime (after all, mass executions by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and others) were “legal”.

How can the loss of a few million (perhaps billions) in tax revenue from “the rich” compare to the “lost revenue” from the trillions wasted on “college admissions” of “the disadvantaged” low performers?

Yet many of these “special admissions” are at the expense of taxes (Pell grants, for example) and “free tuition” for “the poor”, despite low performance?

And what about all the taxes spent in tracking down “fraud”?"






Is it fair that wealthy people can pay their kids’ way into college? No. But that’s often how it works

For prices up to $1.5 million, parents can buy a five-year, full-service package of college admissions consulting from a company in New York City called Ivy Coach.

The service — all of it legal — begins as early as eighth grade, as students are steered toward picking the right classes and extracurriculars to help them stand out from the crowd. Then comes intensive preparation for the SAT or ACT, both “coachable exams,” explained Brian Taylor, the company’s managing director, followed by close editing of college essays.

“Is that unfair? That the privileged can pay?” Mr. Taylor asked.

“Yes. But that’s how the world works.”

The fallout from the college admissions scandal announced by federal prosecutors this week was just beginning for the accused on Wednesday. Wealthy parents charged in the case began surrendering to the authorities. And consequences also loomed for the students, as the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Southern California, both of which had athletic coaches named in the indictment, vowed to punish anyone connected to the scheme.

The government’s indictments of dozens of parents, college administrators and coaches exposed an ugly array of corrupt and illegal admissions practices.

But there is also a perfectly legal world of gaming the college admissions process by doing everything from picking advanced classes, choosing the right sport, giving donations and turning to the multibillion-dollar industry of test prep, college essay editing and advice on how to produce the perfect application.

Every aspect of a teenager’s life can be managed and shaped into a persona catered to please the exacting eye of a college admissions officer. Parents might pay $300 for a standard, hourlong consultation with an admissions expert or donate tens of millions to schools, with the hope of winning special consideration for their child’s bid for a spot at a top school.

Revelations about these practices, sometimes only whispered about, risks breeding more cynicism toward American higher education at a time when elite college admissions are already under the microscope, with multiple schools facing inquiries into their affirmative action and legacy admission policies.

And they reveal the degree to which parents up and down the income ladder have become fixated on college acceptance as a ticket to their child’s financial security.

“Private college consulting is almost like the wild West,” said Alexis Redding, a visiting scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who has written about the “extreme pressure” the college admissions race can put on students and families.

Many colleges in recent years have made standardized test scores optional for students applying for admission, an acknowledgment that test scores can simply be a reflection of how much families are willing to spend on tutoring.

Removing the emphasis on the tests is one limited way schools are trying to expand access to students who can’t afford pricey help.

While many consultants adhere to optional ethical guidelines set out by national professional associations, some consultants do not, Professor Redding said.

The federal indictment “isn’t surprising to anyone who has either studied the high stakes world of private admissions or private consulting,” she said. “The scale and details and celebrity are surprising.”

With the many legal means to seek preferential treatment for one’s offspring, the Hollywood stars and business moguls named in Tuesday’s indictment seemingly had other ways to exert influence over the process.

But in recent years the costs of pursuing special treatment for an application have moved beyond comfortable reach even for the rich. A donation to an Ivy-caliber school would have to be valued at $10 million or more to earn an applicant truly special consideration beyond their merits, according to several experienced college admissions consultants.

Steven Mercer, a private college consultant based in Santa Monica, Calif., called $10 million “an entry-level gift that might not even get the attention of the admission office.” He added, “You have to sometimes go quite a bit higher.”

Mr. Taylor of Ivy Coach agreed that even after a $10 million gift, a student’s application would not be greeted with “no questions asked.” “It’s not guaranteed,” he said.

Certainty appears to be what parents were seeking when they hired William Singer, the consultant who pleaded guilty on Tuesday to charges of racketeering, money laundering and obstruction of justice. “I created a guarantee,” Mr. Singer said in a Boston courtroom.

In conversations with parents recorded by federal authorities, Mr. Singer styled his services as a first-class cabin for tech titans, rich investors and other luminaries trying to lock down a scarce spot at a prized school, such as Yale, Georgetown and the University of Southern California.

Court papers said he promised to slot them in as athletes — with fabricated or embellished records — and on schools’ “V.I.P. lists.”

Shaping a persona to please an admissions officer is big business.

According to court papers, Mr. Singer also promised parents that their children would get an ACT score in the 30s, or a 1400 or better SAT score.

Consultants who abide by the law can never offer a promise of admission to a specific school, said Mr. Taylor of Ivy Coach, no matter how much they charge or how much a parent is willing to donate.

“If they tip you off that they have connections with admissions officers, that’s a red flag,” he said.

Ivy Coach students sign and submit their own applications, according to Mr. Taylor. He said the fact that Mr. Singer was submitting applications on behalf of his clients was “a mark of unscrupulousness in and of itself.”

In some cases, according to federal prosecutors, Mr. Singer and parents conspired to reduce the role of school guidance counselors in the process, since those counselors knew the students’ true academic and athletic records.

Mr. Singer even falsified some students’ ethnicities, according to the authorities. Some families and students perceive their racial backgrounds can hurt or aid their chances of getting in to schools that consider race in their admissions decisions.

Accusations of untoward behavior, short of lawbreaking, are not uncommon in the world of high-priced admissions consulting.

The large size of Ivy Coach’s fees caused them to be kicked out of one industry association.

Mr. Taylor called the association’s decision “un-American.” “Who can say what is too much in America?” he said. “If someone wants to pay a fee that you command, they have that right.”

Some students said they had mixed feelings about their experiences with consultants.

Alex Cui, 20, said his parents, Chinese immigrants living in Toronto, spent $15,000 on a college consulting firm that advertised in Chinese-language magazines and newspapers, offering an Ivy League entry to immigrant parents anxious to get their children into good colleges. Mr. Cui said their investment bought him a three-day college admissions workshop at a hotel conference room, plus regular meetings with a private admissions consultant who recommended which extracurriculars to pursue and which to discard to build a personal narrative for his applications.

But Mr. Cui said the consultant was relentlessly critical about topics like Mr. Cui’s college entrance essay — about his experiences at the International Chemistry Olympiad — and caused Mr. Cui so much stress that he stopped meeting with him halfway through his 12th-grade year. He was accepted to the California Institute of Technology, where he is now a sophomore majoring in computer science.

He said his college counseling was probably not worth the $15,000. “It was just a lot of criticism that was not helpful,” he said.

Professor Redding of Harvard said she worried that the attention on the case this week would cast a negative light on the entire college consulting industry, which, she added, had taken strides in recent years to police itself. “There are lots of good actors here who get overshadowed in a case like this,” she said.

The education consultants industry has tens of thousands of practitioners, serving both students and schools, according to the research group IBISWorld, which estimated the sector’s annual revenue in 2018 at $1.9 billion.

Stefanie Niles, president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, said the allegations were an “extreme response to the commodification of the college admission process.”

The growth of private consulting has been driven, in part, by a shortage of guidance counselors in public schools. During the 2015 to 2016 school year, each public school counselor was responsible for an average of 470 students, according to the group.

There is a wide range of prices in the field. In Boca Raton, Fla., Naomi Steinberg runs a “super premium boutique” where the yearslong college planning process often starts in ninth grade and can end up costing families $10,000 to $15,000. “You’re trying to make sense of a system that can’t be made sense of,” she said.

Mr. Mercer, the Santa Monica consultant, works within the mainstream of the field: He charges between $300 and $7,000, depending on a student’s needs and how early in the process he is hired. He previously worked in the admissions office at the University of Southern California, and said he was shocked that the school was included in the federal indictment.

While the extreme behavior detailed by federal prosecutors this week could breed concern among families who intend to play by the rules, Mr. Mercer says his message to clients will remain the same: that the name brand of a college is far less important than finding a good fit for a student.

Still, he acknowledged, “Such outrageous amounts of money and the persons involved and the schemes? It isn’t just a little blip.  It’s embarrassing to those of us in the field.”

SOURCE 






UK: 'Maths anxiety' may be fuelling a national crisis, researchers say

“Maths anxiety” may be fuelling a national crisis, Cambridge University researchers have said, as they find that one in ten children suffer from “despair and rage” at the subject.

The number of children who experience maths anxiety is a “real concern”, according to academics from Cambridge’s Faculty of Education and its Centre for Neuroscience.

Researchers surveyed 1,700 British pupils aged eight to 13 about their feelings towards the subject.

They found that ten per cent of children suffered from maths anxiety, meaning they had “overwhelming negative emotions” towards the subject, ranging “from rage to despair”.

Other emotions triggered by maths included feelings of apprehension, tension and frustration, while physical symptoms included butterflies, a racing heart or struggling to catch breath.

The phenomenon of maths anxiety is characterised as a “general sense of feeling the subject is hard compared with other subjects”, leading to a subsequent lack or loss of confidence. 

“The project investigated individuals’ attitudes towards mathematics because of what could be referred to as a ‘mathematics crisis’ in the UK,” researchers said. 

“Many children and adults experience feelings of anxiety, apprehension, tension or discomfort when they are confronted by mathematics. This may be contributing to a relatively  low level of numeracy amongst UK adults.” 

 More than three-quarters of children with high levels of maths anxiety are normal to high achievers
More than three-quarters of children with high levels of maths anxiety are normal to high achievers
The proportion of adults with functional maths skills equivalent to a GCSE grade C has dropped from 26 per cent in 2003 to only 22 per cent in 2011, according to the charity National Numeracy. Meanwhile, 57 per cent achieved the equivalent in functional literacy skills.

Dr Denes Szucs, deputy director at Cambridge’s Centre for Neuroscience in Education and one of the report’s authors, said that there is a widespread misunderstanding that only low performing children suffer from maths anxiety.

“This is actually a very frequent misconception that we have seen in decision makers,” he said. “They automatically assume people are anxious about maths because they are poor achievers.”

In fact, more than three-quarters (77 per cent) of children with high levels of maths anxiety are normal to high achievers. 

Dr Szucs went on: “Probably their maths anxiety will go unnoticed because their performance is good. But they are very anxious and in the long term their performance is suppressed.

“This is a real danger here: these are children who are completely able to do maths at a normal level, but may keep away from it because they feel anxious.”

The research, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, also found that girls have higher levels of maths anxiety than boys. Students who have the condition face a vicious circle, with their anxiety leading to poorer performance and poorer performance increasing anxiety. Maths anxiety is present from a young age, researchers found, but can develop as the child grows.

Josh Hillman, director of education at the Nuffield Foundation which funded the research, said: “Mathematical achievement is valuable in its own right, as a foundation for many other subjects and as an important predictor of future academic outcomes, employment opportunities and even health.

“Maths anxiety can severely disrupt students’ performance in the subject in both primary and secondary school.

“But importantly - and surprisingly - this new research suggests that the majority of students experiencing maths anxiety have normal to high maths ability.”

SOURCE 


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