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Nothing is fair except double-blind lottery by SAT cutoff. It would be interesting to see the student mix that creates, but it won't happen.
So do you believe the rest of the application like the motivation texts and maybe some smaller questions (depends on the university, it's been a little while since I used Common App) should not matter at all? Even though there can be tremendous differences personality-wise in students with equal SAT scores, and assuming we are aiming to train America's future elite in the top universities, those can have a significant effect?
For example leadership, agreeableness, emotional intelligence, and discipline come to mind. I would strongly prefer a disagreeable charismatic student getting the spot over someone who is essentially a drone and exclusively studying all day. Of course, those skills are barely quantifiable in general and probably hard to determine based on a thousand words, but it should be a good estimate already.
In other words, is "fair" referring to the fact that SAT correlates strongly with IQ and we just want the highest IQ individuals, which is a point I can see, or a moral judgment differentiating by what we could call "aptitude", in which case my text applies?
The problem with a lot of that stuff lends itself well to selecting for things that signify race, or wealth, or being a progressive. An essay about an experience that changed your life is going to naturally give off all kinds of demographic data. You going to a public school for the first time at age ten and meeting your first poor kid signals wealth. You volunteering overseas signals wealth. You doing church work signals conservative values and working for a nonprofit signals liberal values. It’s almost impossible that you can look very deep at stuff like that and not be able to know who the person is.
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I agree with you that many of those characteristics could potentially be important. The disagreement is that obviously college admissions professors are unqualified, or even anti-qualified, to make such evaluations.
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Modern SAT is too easy that a single silly oversight like filling in the wrong bubble for a question on the MATH section leads to you not getting 800, and then you're screwed. We need something like STEP Mathematics to truly distinguish the great from the merely very good.
I'd expect the winning distribution would be something like 70% Asian (of all types), 25% white and 5% other. Most importantly it would create volcanic eruption levels of seethe both on the left and the right.
Or Gaokao. The problem with making these tests harder is that you now need more tests than just reading, writing and mathematics. Do all college applicants have to be great at mathematics, no matter their major?
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Wouldn't that depend on where you set the cut-off?
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I can confirm that STEP is hard (I had to take it, had a bad time and barely squeezed in), but in general I'm not convinced that the Anglo-style maths exams are quite testing for the right of thing. Compared to what you get in other countries, in all of them the test-taker is bottlenecked on speed - if you are faced with a question where you do not immediately recognise the structure and have memorized a solution algorithm, it is always advantageous to skip it and jump to another one where you have rather than spend any time on problem-solving to create a strategy rather than recall it. Of course performance on such a test is correlated with intelligence to a fair extent (after all, you need to build a good mental data structure to pattern-match the problems and remember all the different solution algorithms, and to execute a possibly quite complex algorithm which might involve symbol-pushing or spatial imagination quickly), but it is correlated with discipline and commitment even more (since the person who sat down and drilled example questions will have a tremendous advantage), and in my view there is in fact a principal component contributing to "speed" that is independent of "intelligence", which naturally matters as well.
Now you could argue that testing for discipline and commitment over intelligence is actually the test working as intended and part of the required notion of "merit", and perhaps all of the above is me coping and seething because I'm a lazy and undisciplined bum and almost got humbled by this type of exam (I can't fully deny), but the question is if you really want to have something as life-changing as university admissions hinge on a metric that is so trainable and even attainable by coercion. Sure, you could say that it is good that the gifted-but-lazy kid is sidelined by the kid who, due to natural discipline, sat down for three hours every day of his last two years of school and practiced past SAT/STEP questions. What if the latter kid then is sidelined by the kid whose parents locked him up and made him practice the questions for every waking hour since he turned 12, not allowing him to socialise and withholding food if he slacks off? As college becomes more of a prerequisite for success and discipline-based exams become more of a prerequisite for college, the dominant strategy becomes something like the South Korean childhood on steroids. Sure, in the limit of everyone having to play along with this equilibrium strategy the test once again becomes the reflection of 60% discipline plus 30% intelligence plus X or whatever it was in a state of nature, but what is the cost to society?
(Then of course there are the more common objections that some last-minute transfers from other life paths, gifted-but-lazy types and "slow but deep thinkers" are in fact also beneficial for the intellectual ecosystem and need a path to admission, which is of course also more cope.)
I agree with all of this except the jab at “slow but deep thinkers”. I think that with regard to mathematical talent specifically, there really is a pool of talented/high-IQ individuals who punch below their weight in math competitions where speed is important, like the AMC and AIME. This is a shame, because the USAMO and IMO are much more “slow but deep”-loaded, but you can’t qualify for them unless you get past the AIME. The USAMTS (a proof-based exam taken over the course of multiple weeks) helps alleviate this disadvantage somewhat, but it still only helps you skip the AMC level; I wish there were a second round of USAMTS for skipping the AIME and advancing to USAMO.
To be completely fair, I think the absolute cream of the crop in mathematical talent are both fast and deep, and hence the current system of contests will correctly identify them. We are certainly not at risk of being unable to field a competitive IMO team, or of failing to identify those who are most likely to become HYPSM math faculty in a decade or so.
But the “second string” of talent tends to be underserved until their strengths shine through in late undergrad/early grad school—assuming they stick with math that long, which sadly many don’t because they incorrectly think (on the basis of math contests) that they’re not good enough for graduate-level math research.
The specific mechanism by which being “deep” helps with research is having a holistic understanding of how different concepts in math relate to one another, and having a greater ability to perceive similarities/analogies between disparate things, which is important when bringing techniques from vastly different subfields of mathematics to bear on unsolved problems; this happens all the time in number theory, for instance, and it’s also what Grothendieck did when he revolutionized algebraic geometry. See also: the Langlands program.
“Fast but shallow” thinkers, on the other hand, are good at quickly pattern-matching problems to known solution techniques, which is also important: you won’t get anywhere in math without a well-developed, organized, and quickly-accessible stock of knowledge in your noodle. But they tend to be unable to generalize/extend/apply those techniques to very different domains.
Full disclosure: I was a “slow but deep” thinker with regard to math when I was in school and I may be just a little bit salty about my lackluster performance in time-constrained math contests.
This brings back bad memories.
Full disclosure: I've always been a "fast but relatively superficial" thinker with regards to basically everything. As you can expect I did very well at Olympiads until the questions got to about IMO level, and yes my performance was better in earlier years of undergrad vs later (though still extremely good even in the later years).
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