u/AlphaMaleKratos

I made a thread yesterday about the DOJ finding evidence of discrimination at Duke.

The evidence is pretty solid, but instead of having more interesting discussions, people here were having discussions about whether discrimination is actually happening or not. Is this really all that Duke students can think about?

There are so many more interesting things that we can discuss. DEI and affirmative action are directly linked to geopolitics and the US tech war against China. There’s even an interesting connection between anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and affirmative action against Asians in higher ed. Or Liberal elites being closet white nationalists and that DEI is a tool to maintain white supremacy.

There’s just so much to talk about, yet Duke students want to get bogged down by shallow discourse over LSAT scores.

I saw the viral news about Amherst's reading crisis, and it gives me great concern as a parent with a son who is looking to apply to Amherst.

I understand the need for test optional/blind admissions when the lockdowns started, but I see no reason to continue TO/TB today. It seems that colleges are willingly admitting academically weaker students to play the rankings game. This sounds very anti-intellectual and corrupt.

I have no doubt that Amherst and peer LACs are sitting on data showing that tests strongly predict academic performance at their institutions as all recent studies have all shown. So why the hesitation? It just gives me a very "ick" feeling seeing elite colleges prioritize rankings and whatever other non-academic goal over admitting genuinely bright and intellectually curious students.

Is Amherst and other "elite" LACs not a place anymore for smart kids? Is it a school meant for 1200-1300 SAT score grifters who want to pretend they're smart?

My son is about to enter high school in the fall, but I’m concerned about his lack of score improvement.

The first time he took a practice test early this year, he scored 1450. I made him take another one in may and he scored 1530.

He recently took a 3rd practice test and he got a 1520, so no improvement in the past 2 months.

He’s still young and has time, but I’m wondering when should we be more proactive and take khan academy and actually grind through problems? Right now, I’m just banking on his natural intelligence growing and scoring 1550+ by sophomore year without formal instruction.

Getting inundated with anti-Argentina posts all over social media. I see far more racism in other LATAM countries (Paraguay politicians comparing Mbappe to chimpanzees and burning his mannequin), yet I see no scrutiny towards those countries.

I hope you guys win the entire tournament and make everyone else seethe.

The AI Cheating Scandal at Brown shows the need to reform the way we pick our 'elites'.

There are 2 datapoints we need to focus on:

1. The top student that was below-average in the mid-term
2. Student 22 (The other student who didn't cheat) that was at the bottom of the class despite being above-average.

These 2 datapoints reveal something very concerning about the state of elite education as well as our society overall. First, the level of cheating was unprecedented. The Ivy Leagues promised us that they look at integrity and honesty as major components of an applicant's personality, yet it seems whatever they're doing isn't selecting for these students. What they're actually selecting are strivers who are not very bright but will lie and cheat their way to the top. This will, of course, have negative consequences for society in general as these dishonest students end up in influential roles in major institutions.

This AI cheating scandal is very personal to me, because I see a lot of Student 1 in myself. I never cared much about schoolwork and barely graduated high school, but I scored in the 99+ percentile on the SAT without effort and landed at a Top 10 university. I knew I was smarter than almost all my peers, but it was difficult to show my intellectual superiority through grades since everyone else was cheating.

Inevitably, I had difficulties breaking into many prestigious careers and had to start from the bottom at an obscure company at a low pay. In the end, my competence won out and I'm now high-up the corporate ladder making far more than many of these cheaters, but there is still some bitterness due to how much I struggled just for being honest and having integrity. There is something broken with how our society rewards the cheaters, grifters and strivers over the honest geniuses.

The Ivy Leagues are supposed to be the institutions curating the next generation of elites, but it seems like they're failing in their role. There are plenty of honest geniuses out there, kids who don't play the striver wars and don't cheat, but Brown is willingly overlooking them to placate the donor class who cheat and grift their way to the top.

We deserve a better class of elites.

From Steve McGuire:

No replication crisis here. In the last two years, each Ivy League school has independently discovered that standardized tests predict success in college:

1. Dartmouth (Feb 5, 2024):

“Several key findings guided our decision: First, standardized test scores are an important predictor of a student's success in Dartmouth's curriculum, and this is true regardless of a student's background or family income.”

“Research shows that standardized test scores can be an important predictor of academic success at a place like Dartmouth and beyond—more so even than just grades or recommendations, for example.”

2. Yale (Feb 22, 2024):

“Yale’s research from before and after the pandemic has consistently demonstrated that, among all application components, test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s future Yale grades. This is true even after controlling for family income and other demographic variables, and it is true for subject-based exams such as AP and IB, in addition to the ACT and SAT.”

3. Brown (March 5, 2024):

“Our analysis made clear that SAT and ACT scores are among the key indicators that help predict a student’s ability to succeed and thrive in Brown’s demanding academic environment.”

4. Harvard (April 11, 2024):

“Research by Opportunity Insights has shown that SAT and ACT scores are the single strongest predictors of academic success at selective colleges like Harvard... Standardized tests provide a common benchmark that can help us evaluate applicants’ readiness for the academic challenges at Harvard in a way that is more fair and equitable than high school grades alone.”

5. Cornell (April 22, 2024):

“After a multi-year study conducted by the university’s Task Force on Standardized Testing in Admissions, data showed that when reviewed in context with other application materials—such as GPA, academic rigor, extracurricular engagement, essays, and letters of recommendation—test scores help to create a more complete picture of an individual applicant.”

6. Penn (Feb 14, 2025):

“Penn’s practice has been, and continues to be, considering a student’s school-based academic record on its own merit, with testing as part of Admission’s broad and comprehensive assessment. With this approach, testing complements a student’s existing accomplishments and can offer additional relevant information in our comprehensive and holistic admission process.”

7. Princeton (Oct 9, 2025):

“The decision to resume testing requirements follows a review of five years of data from the test-optional period, which found that academic performance at Princeton was stronger for students who chose to submit test scores than for students who did not.”

8. Columbia (June 11, 2026):

“Through a multi-year faculty review, it was determined that test scores, among other factors, were a useful indicator of potential student success.”

Documents provided by Davis Med show that its leadership openly boasted about ‘skirting’ the Supreme Court's ruling by using certain class-based ‘socioeconomic variables’ or ‘disadvantages’ as proxies for race.

“The lack of mathematical fluency, Aganagic said, extended even to “the meaning of equals in an equation.”

At Berkeley, math classes have turned into philosophy classes where students have riveting discussions about the meaning of mathematical equivalence.

The bad news just keeps on coming for the UCs.

CS 10 (The Beauty and Joy of Computing) is supposed to be an extremely light and easy class for people who have no background or aptitude in programming.

Berkeley is currently #15 in USNEWs ranking. At what point does UC Berkeley's ranking take a hit? I think if a third of your class has the math skills of a middle-schooler, your ranking should reflect that. Berkeley's true ranking, as well as all the other UCs, should be so low that it doesn't even get ranked in USNEWs.

Someone should email USNEWs and ask for Berkeley to be removed from their rankings.

>83% of 430 respondents across all departments support a return to the use of standardized test scores in admissions.

I've seen some anti-test people concede that tests are needed in STEM but continue to deny its predictive power in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

This poll shows that across all departments, not just STEM, professors overwhelmingly support using tests for admissions. It's hard to have intellectual discussions in philosophy when your students read at a 6th grade level and write like a 3rd grader.

https://ucstudentsuccess.org/

I think GPA was never reliable by itself. It works well when you compare 2 students with the same SAT score, which is why GPA seemed to predict student success in the past. It doesn’t work well when one student has a 1100 and the other a 1500.

The SAT is needed to select smart and capable students. Once you know 2 students have approximately the same intelligence, then you look at their GPA. Just using GPA as the first filter is a flawed method because smart students are a lot rarer than hard-working students. You condition on the rarer attribute first before filtering for the more common ones.

In an era of grade inflation, GPA has become totally meaningless. Harvard's own study by Raj Chetty and OI shows HSGPA has almost no correlation to college performance (See below), and when everyone has an A average in college, I doubt UGGPA has any correlation to post-college success. GPA also does not measure competence or deep understanding of the material. It's a metric that means nothing, and the unhealthy obsession students, institutions and employers have on this trivial metric is a cultural failure that we must rectify.

Harvard deserves credit for taking a bold and courageous step towards academic rigor and integrity. Many of the faculty are knowingly putting their own lives on the line in pursuit of what is right. I am not being hyperbolic. See the threats that UCSD math professors received after toughening up their curriculum.

Hopefully in time, other institutions will follow Harvard's lead. Eventually, GPA should be completely phased out and employment / grad school acceptance should be based entirely on aptitude testing.

SAT vs GPA:

Source: https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/SAT_ACT_on_Grades.pdf

UT Austin recently retweeted / posted this on X.

This sounds counter-intuitive, but I think it makes a lot of sense.

When you select students based on standardized tests like the SAT or ACT, you're controlling for high academic aptitude but with no controls for personality. You could end up with a genius kid who plays LOL all day in his mom's basement who retweets Truth Social slop on X, but you also could have a 150+ IQ, charming, 6'3" Clavicular-looking athlete who gets straight As without trying.

To put it succinctly, you're not controlling for personality at all, so you end up with a very interesting and diverse cohort.

Now if you compare that with what happens today when colleges try to control the personalities of their kids, you have grade-grubbers who pick classes based on how easy the instructors are; you have strivers who care more about landing a "prestige" occupation than on expanding their minds; you have a dull college culture where everything is about trumping your classmates down to the last hundredth of their GPA. More importantly, everyone just thinks the same and there's hardly anything interesting about the student body - they're soulless and vapid.

Ultimately, colleges should care less about "personality". Pretty much every personal statement and EC list are borderline fraudulent and meant to sell a facade to colleges. Colleges genuinely can't tell a student's personality no matter what they write in their essays or what their activities were or what their teachers say. The only way to get a cohort that is academically brilliant but also interesting and diverse is to use only test scores for admissions.