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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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MIT's selection processes is hard enough that someone who would be inclined to cheat would not get in. Given that SBF got into Jane Street, likely he was smart enough to graduate without needing to cheat.

Can you demonstrate this? I admit, I'm not seeing how making selection criteria harder would decrease the likelihood of cheating. I mean, in the extreme case, if you make a test that only one billionth of humanity could pass fairly, then the odds that any given person passed the test fairly (when there are great reputational and financial rewards for passing the test, no deep culture of investigating and calling out cheaters, and strong incentives to have everyone passively trust the process and not assume cheating as a default possibility) are fairly low.

Again, I'm not an expert on MIT's admission methods, but if, e.g., they hold their own proctored and blind-graded exam for all students they are considering admitting, I'd definitely update in the direction of considering MIT more reliable. But given that my default assumption about colleges (which is that they will cheerfully drop admissions standards into the ground to accept those of their favored demographics, and raise the standards on the unfavored demographics to compensate), I simply do not believe that MIT is honestly selecting students according to fair criteria.

Demonstrate how? It's well known that MIT is both hard to get accepted ,as is the coursework

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