I’m actually curious about this. Maybe it’s just the circles I run in, but have come across very few people in the wild who think SAT optional is a good idea.
I had assumed that even the colleges themselves didn’t for the most part think it was a great idea, but it would be easier to get around all of these anti affirmative action rulings if scores were optional. Maybe, I’m wrong about that part though. In any case, I would say that people who think SAT optional is a good idea are a minority.
My wife and I went to a panel of four college admissions reps at my daughter’s high school the other night (she’s a junior, so it’s that time). Agnes Scott, Georgia Tech, Ohio State, UAB.
The UAB rep was interesting. First, she said their school only looks at data like grades, GPA, test scores, etc. No essay, none of that - if you hit the minimum metrics, you’re in.
But one thing she said that relates to your comments is that - at least with her school - applicants should submit test scores if they are at all decent. One admitted student missed out on $20,000 in scholarships because they were afraid to submit scores - the kid was comparing their scores to their classmates and didn’t think they did well enough (the implication was that the scores were totally fine, and don’t worry about what others did).
Georgia public colleges (UGA, GT, for example) require either the SAT or ACT, which surprised me, considering so many schools are still test optional. Ohio State said they are still test optional through the high school class of 2025 and they will reevaluate.
Last thing on the topic of tests: went to a college fair a couple months ago and spoke with someone from Washington University. I told him I noticed that the average test scores seemed so much higher than when I applied to schools and asked for his insights as to why. He had a reason or two that I had already figured but one I hadn’t thought of was that the test-optional era has skewed scores high because students self-select. The students who submit their scores generally did really well.
Yeah, we’ve been looking at colleges and they’ll report 25th-75th percentiles for SAT/ACT scores, and my wife and kid have gotten really intimidated by the reported numbers. And I’ve had to point out (repeatedly!) that they’re fairly meaningless because they are a self-selected group taken largely from the upper part of the distribution. But they kind of just nod their head at me and then go back to worrying about them.
If I can’t convey the idea of self-selection and bias to my wife and kid in an easyt-to-understand but high-stakes context, I can only assume that I do a crappy job of discussing self-selection and bias in PhD seminars.
I assume you’re a professor in the seminar but only dad at home…
Story of my life
30 years ago I applied to OSU. I had very good ACT scores and D average in High school lol. Not joking - they told me that I was accepted to their honors program but said that I couldn’t begin until the spring (unless I wanted to take classes at one of their affiliated regional campuses). Apparently this was all part of gaming which part of my application they could include in their summary statistics for US News and World Reports.
Maybe they are just evolving faster imo.
This may be due to Asian penises and vaginas optimizing the evolutionary process.
Early investor in and former board member of Berkshire Hathaway.
Dr. Gottesman’s husband died in 2022 at age 96. “He left me, unbeknownst to me, a whole portfolio of Berkshire Hathaway stock,” she recalled. The instructions were simple: “Do whatever you think is right with it,” she recalled.
Seems like he was a pretty good dude.
And knew his wife was a good woman.
“Unbeknownst” can also be read as the jerk waited until age 96 to tell her there a whole $1b portfolio of stock.
Very fair! If the guy was constantly like, “Oh no, we couldn’t possibly afford to go on vacation or eat at a restaurant”, he’d be an enormous asshole. But given he was a lifelong friend of Warren Buffett and a Berkshire Hathaway director, I feel pretty confident that she knew they were very wealthy.
i didn’t mean he did that, they were obviously top .1% or whatever anyway. but still seems like she could have, for example, made the med school tuition free 10 years ago, since the gift is large enough “in perpetuity”. maybe she didn’t have an interest in doing that until he died, but still. keeping $1b as a surprise until the time of his death could land him in either non-terrible or terrible thread.
Ahh, I think see what you’re getting at. I don’t know what Gottesman’s attitude was, but I am familiar with how Buffett views this issue, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Gottesman had the same attitude.
I think the general question is this: If you are a wealthy individual, is it better to donate $X when you’re relatively young or (larger) $Y when you’re older? Buffett has been very clear in his thinking: He always planned on donating the bulk of his wealth, and he believed that his wealth would have a bigger positive impact on society if he waited as long as possible; he believed (correctly) that his ability to compound that wealth into larger and larger amounts would mean that donating tens of billions of dollars in the 2000s and 2010s would be far more impactful than donating, say $35 million 40 years ago. (That’s a ballpark of the equivalent value of his donated stock.)
I think it’s clear that donating now is generally better than donating later. But I think it’s also clear that Buffett’s call was right, that he did far more good donating >$50 billion (and counting) in relatively recent years as opposed to donating ~$35 million 40 years ago. I know this was a question about Gottesman, but I think Buffett’s thoughts are likely to be similar (and I also tend to insert discussions about Buffett in places where they might not belong).
that’s fair, except for the fact the guy didn’t donate the billion, he left it to his wife, who didn’t know that portfolio even existed.
anyway im just harping on the single word in that article, unbeknownst. im glad it eventually did something good for a lot of people
I’m glad this person decided to donate the money instead of spending it all on diamond encrysted cat litter boxes or something, but this story just reads to me like a bizarro world version of those allegedly heartwarming stories of towns rallying together to donate money to a vulnerable person without health care or food. In a vacuum it’s good. In context it’s awful. We need a world with fewer billionaires and less poor people, not a world of effusive praise for one billionaire that does something to very slightly mitigate the harm caused by a system that creates billionaires.
re: SAT scores
Your kids will have to settle for trade school when Sklansky’s retakes nudge them off the cut line. Oh well. I hear electrician isn’t such a bad job.