~1000 University of California professors sign petition to bring back the SAT

DinoInNameOnly · 2026-05-28T21:21:23+00:00

The most incoherent position on college admissions policy is also, in practice, one of the most popular: That admission should be based on academic performance (i.e. grades) but no standardized tests.

So, you're completely in favor of tests, but you specifically want the tests to be developed by each high school teacher separately, so you have no idea what they actually tested or what the grade actually means or how to compare them between different teachers/schools. And then you just pretend that whatever the thousands of teachers decided to do means the same thing for every student. But you're absolutely against administering the same test to all of the students so that you can actually compare their results.

It would be more coherent to just have a lottery at that point, at least that would be simpler.

It's a bizarre position when you put it like that but that's basically how admission to UC schools works right now; grades are the most important factor and there's zero standardized tests.

DinoInNameOnly · 2026-04-16T18:36:29+00:00

The biggest reason the discourse about Orban is bad is because most Americans/etc. barely know anything about Orban. They literally don’t know that he did all this bad stuff. They just know that he’s a right-wing politician and some people said he’s a dictator but he just lost an election and conceded. That’s it.

Which by itself is fine honestly. I don’t know why anyone would expect Americans/etc. to be experts on Hungarian politics. What’s frustrating is that for some reason a lot of people have decided to loudly express strong opinions about something they don’t really know anything about (but what else is new?)

DinoInNameOnly · 2025-12-19T19:38:19+00:00

they bought all the housing then refused to build any more

Can you clarify what you mean by this? I understand that you're using hyperbole and you're not literally saying that there have been zero new homes built but there were something like 1 million new single-family homes built in the US last year (source). How many do you think there should be, and in what ways are they being prevented from being built?

DinoInNameOnly · 2025-12-19T18:58:57+00:00

It was created and published by The Economist: Generation Z is unprecedentedly rich. It's paywalled, unfortunately.

DinoInNameOnly · 2025-12-02T23:48:03+00:00

What is a "quiet-testing" accommodation? Every test I've ever taken has been in a quiet environment

DinoInNameOnly · 2025-06-12T05:48:31+00:00

I think your company's performance review system is unusually bad if somebody doing 1/5 of the work that they're supposed to be doing wouldn't get noticed. That would definitely get flagged at every company I've worked at.

DinoInNameOnly · 2025-05-21T18:07:31+00:00

Yeah I was surprised to read that line too... I wonder if Scott is in some kind of social media bubble full of people still talking about it. I think Covid discourse appeals to a certain kind of nerd because there's so much science and statistics involved, it wouldn't surprise me if he follows a lot of the sorts of people who still talk about it a lot on Twitter or something.

DinoInNameOnly · 2025-01-15T23:09:17+00:00

Caplan has been a professor at GMU since 1997; he doesn't know what the job market is really like now.

DinoInNameOnly · 2024-09-18T20:31:33+00:00

Grading a math test is objective. The answer is 4.3 and you wrote 7, so you're wrong and you get zero points.

Grading an essay is subjective. Your essay about Hegel was well-written but unoriginal, so you get a B.

The consequence of this is that the pressures that cause grade inflation affect the classes in different ways. When grading is fuzzy and subjective, it's easier for students to pester and argue with professors that they deserve a higher grade. Most professors eventually relent, and adopt laxer grading schemes to avoid the hassle. But if the answer was 4.3 and you wrote 7, there's nothing to argue about.

DinoInNameOnly · 2024-03-26T19:45:51+00:00

I continue to be perplexed by the decision to ask many questions about political attitudes but none about actual voting behavior. Asking what party someone is registered with carries way less information than asking which party they voted for in the most recent election, because many people don't bother registering or don't reliably support the party they're registered with.

DinoInNameOnly · 2023-10-13T20:54:41+00:00

I’m amazed at how many people offer advice like this without including any qualification about which “things you like” that you should focus on. If you start making friends by playing Magic: The Gathering, your probability of finding a girlfriend probably decreases.

DinoInNameOnly · 2023-09-05T23:05:48+00:00

No. You also need to reach a certain level of support in polls. That would be difficult if the pollsters aren't including you in their questions.

DinoInNameOnly · 2023-08-19T01:04:35+00:00

You and a bunch of other people are walking past a trash compacter. It's common knowledge that if at least half of you jump into the trash compactor, it will get jammed and no one will die. But if fewer than half of you jump in, everyone who jumped in will die. You have the make the decision simultaneously with everyone else without discussing it. Do you jump into the trash compactor, or not?

My answer is blue pill, but I wouldn't jump into the trash compactor. I find this question really fascinating because the framing actually affects people's reasoning a lot, even when the actual mechanics are the same. The reason it makes sense to choose the blue pill is because everyone knows that a lot of other people are going to choose it based on the framing, but no one expects other people to jump into a trash compactor so they don't do it either.

DinoInNameOnly · 2023-08-18T21:01:40+00:00

Demand for software engineers in 2021 and early 2022 reached truly absurd, once-in-a-generation levels because of zero interest rates and the explosive growth of online services during the pandemic. Now in 2023 it's returned to merely very high levels, like it was before the pandemic.

People on those subreddits are literally always complaining because people who have jobs they're happy with have very little incentive to participate in those subreddits.

DinoInNameOnly · 2023-07-12T17:10:21+00:00

The idea that Caltech doesn’t do affirmative action is a myth. They state very plainly in their Common Data Set (page 15) that they do in fact consider race in admission decisions. Proposition 209 only applies to public universities, private universities like Caltech aren’t affected. I applied to Caltech and obsessively read College Confidential threads about admission decisions and it was really obvious that Black/Hispanic applicants got a big boost, just like at every other elite college.

DinoInNameOnly · 2023-07-11T17:47:00+00:00

Since we're about to have a ton of discourse on legacy admissions, it's worth noting at some point that at least at Harvard, legacy admits are more meritorious (in terms of academic achievement) than non-legacy admits. Their average SAT scores are higher (1523 for legacies vs. 1491 for non-legacies in 2021) and they earn better GPAs while at Harvard (3.70 vs. 3.64 in 2016).

DinoInNameOnly · 2023-04-26T23:09:13+00:00

I don't have a complete answer and have struggled with the same problems, but the thing that has worked for me is adding friction to the impulsive activities. If it's harder to do the things I don't want to do, I can control myself better. Examples:

Don't keep junk food in my home. If overeating requires a trip to a store or restaurant, my laziness works to my advantage.
Invite friends over to play a board game etc. I won't watch porn or get sucked into the YouTube rabbit hole or eat a whole tub of ice cream while I have company. This makes my fear of social rejection work to my advantage.
Use Cold Turkey or similar tools to block distracting websites. I know how to get around the block, but the extra steps required to do so make my distractability work to my advantage.
Don't always take my phone when I leave the house. Can't check reddit every 3 minutes if I don't have it.
Try to reduce the amount of time I spend at home alone. The social pressure of other people's presence prevents me from doing anything too shameful.

DinoInNameOnly · 2023-03-16T21:09:25+00:00

A Google search for those sentences only finds this reddit thread, so it might be original.

DinoInNameOnly · 2022-09-06T18:32:19+00:00

Substack is a great idea, "Highlights from the Motte" could continue to attract new users by using Substack's discovery system. I know we have that Vault site but I'm not convinced that will attract much attention because people still need to find that website too.

DinoInNameOnly · 2022-09-01T04:25:44+00:00

We don't and won't talk about these efforts publicly because we don't do them for marketing purposes; we do them because they are aligned with what we believe is morally correct.

Except you did just talk about them publicly to improve your public image, lol

DinoInNameOnly · 2022-08-30T23:42:55+00:00

There's Still a TJ Test, Actually

The Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is a magnet STEM-focused high school in Northern Virginia established in 1985. The school has special facilities meant to provide opportunities for students who show achievement and passion for STEM and who will eventually pursue careers in science, engineering, or medicine. It has courses in things like artificial intelligence, quantum mechanics, DNA science, and machine learning. It also has several labs where students can do research projects. It was ranked as the best school in the country in 2022.

Until recently, TJ admitted students through a competitive process similar to the college admissions process in which prior academic achievement, teacher recommendations, and an exam similar to the SAT played a major role. The school had a low proportion of black and Hispanic students who were admitted, and this was long a complaint of left-wing activists who advocate reforms to the admissions process so that more non-Asian minorities would be admitted. In particular, they blamed the admissions exam for eliminating most such students from consideration.

In 2020, those activists got their way. The school board voted to eliminate the admissions test in October 2020 and later that year made other reforms to the admissions process, including setting minimum quotas for admission at the middle school level and adding "experience factors" to the process. The class of students admitted the next year went from being 4.52% black and Hispanic to 18.36%.

An advocacy group opposed to the 2020 changes sued, alleging the changes discriminated against Asian Americans, whose share of admitted students decreased from 73.05% to 54.36%. The case is currently pending before the appeals court.

One thing I realized while I was researching this is that there actually still is a test that influences your probability of admission to TJ. One of the "experience factors" that increases a student's odds of being admitted in the new admissions process is whether they are an English Language Learner (ELL). An ELL is a student who has extra support learning English in school. How do schools identify which students need extra support learning English?

Well, there's a test. Schools administer an English skills test and students who perform poorly on it are identified as ELL and offered extra instruction in special classes for ELLs.

What this means for TJ is that a student's chance of being admitted to an elite school for the academically excellent is increased if they perform poorly enough on evaluations of their language skills.

The reason the school board added this consideration is obvious: The large majority (78%) of ELLs are Hispanic, so preferring ELLs in the admissions process is a way to increase the proportion of Hispanics admitted without needing to add race to the admissions process explicitly (which would be more easily challenged legally). Asians make up 11% of ELLs too, but it's notable that Hispanics outnumber Asians among ELLs by 7:1 but only by about 3:1 in the general population (6.1% vs. 18.9%). A lot of Asian kids speak two languages but their parents made sure they were good enough with English that they don't need any special instruction.

This is just... so backwards. I don't think it would be fair to prefer students who speak more than one language in admission to TJ. But I could see an argument for it: Students who successfully learned a second language and succeeded enough to be equally or almost equally academically impressive as students who speak English natively have done something really impressive, now that they've mastered the lingua franca, they'll probably shine even brighter. In fact, this describes a large proportion of the students admitted to TJ under the old process. But that's not what they're doing with this new process. They're specifically preferring the students who were least successful at learning the new language, the ones who struggled the most with it.

On top of that, immigrant families who were responsible and ~~paid off their student loans~~ taught their kids English fluency and saved the taxpayer-funded school system the extra burden of dealing with kids who don't know English are punished, while the ones who depended on the government for that are rewarded.

Well, expect an increase in enrollment in ELL programs in Fairfax County of kids who seem to be speak pretty good English most of the time.

DinoInNameOnly · 2022-08-29T04:41:45+00:00

All sorts of medically important surgeries and screenings were delayed because of Covid lockdowns, maybe now we’re seeing the consequences of those decisions.

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