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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31875 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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The top 1% of high school graduates nationally, sure, are basically all smart enough for Harvard.

But there is no actual way to identify them, unless you switch to SAT only admissions. Lots of individual high schools have valedictorians who are not college material.

But there is no actual way to identify them, unless you switch to SAT only admissions.

This statement sounds weird to me? "There is no way to identify them, unless you use the extremely obvious and easy method to identify them."

The USA culturally puts more emphasis on grades as opposed to strictly standardized test scores(yes, these are different things in the US). Changing that would require getting rid of everyone overseeing college admissions and then putting new people in.

If you meet these kids, it is immediately obvious, in the first minute or so, whether the child has it or not. The difference between the top kids (say, the top 20% of the class at a top university) and the rest is palpable. The top 5% are different yet again, and the smartest ten kids in the grade are obvious to all the faculty who mee them, as well as all their peers.

The SAT does not work, especially know that all the heavily g loaded parts have been removed.

Perhaps not Harvard material, but are you really feeling that there are 'lots' ( 5? 50? a double-digit percentage?) of highschools where the year's most academically successful graduate is not among the approximately 50% of Americans able to eventually navigate some form of post-secondary education? I know some districts are pretty rough but 'their top 1% is worse than our median' is a heck of a claim.

I’m quite confident that the typical public high school in Baltimore Maryland, Jackson Mississippi, Washington DC, and certain parts of Central Valley fits the bill. I would be shocked if chicago and LA and New York didn’t have at least a few apiece.

I in general expect low performing high schools to be much, much worse than it says on the tin because of fraud on the part of teachers and administrators.

There are 60 schools in Chicago where no student is proficient in math or reading.

These are not underfunded schools. The Douglass Academy High School gets $56k a student and has none that are proficient in reading.

And to note- the usual response to a high failure rate in schools is to lower standards, and admins and teachers are strongly incentivized to make rounding errors in a students favor. These are not unrealistically high standards; these are extremely doable standards even for a student body with an average IQ in the 80’s.

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