Most readers are probably aware that meritocratic testing for the selection of the ruling administrative class was a feature of the Chinese system for over 2,000 years. This created in China a civilian ruling coterie unified by cultured cultivation of mental rather than physical feats, similar to the Roman nobility which flourished during the first two centuries of the Empire (and persisted as a social and economic force for centuries after 200 AD, though they became progressively marginalized by the professional military class). The true crystallization of the system, which maintained itself down to 1900, occurred during the Song dynasty, around 1000 AD. The full story is told in The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China.
The cultural legacy of this history persists down to the modern day. Standardized testing in modern East Asia is very different in terms of the subject than in the past, but the aim is the same. To select for the best, by merit alone, in societies where inter-personal relationships still loom very large.*
This historical context is why I am somewhat dispirited by the discussion about standardized tests which is dominant among cultural elites in the United States currently. When I pointed out to someone that standardized tests were used in Britain to target lower socioeconomic students who lacked “polish” and “class”, there was a genuine surprise. But even a trivial familiarity with Chinese history and the powerful leveling influence of the examination system would have habituated people to this reality.
In the past, there were methods to select the “best” candidates without examinations in most societies. During much of the Latter Han and Tang dynasty various blood lineages, what in the west would be called nobility, dominated the ruling class. They recommended their own kith and kin. During the Yuan (Mongol) period policies of ethnic divide & rule were utilized. The British Empire was administered by broadly educated gentlemen.
The utilization of more “holistic” criteria will certainly allow for particular sorts of representative apportionment to occur which are seen as a social good, but if humans are the way they have been in the past, those with polish and pedigree will also shine more brightly in a system where human judgement and human endorsement are given more prominence.
To be frank I think this too shall pass. So when the time comes for the dimming light to burn bright once more, here is a paper which I found very interesting from last year, ACT for All: The Effect of Mandatory College Entrance Exams on Postsecondary Attainment and Choice. The abstract:
This paper examines the effects of requiring and paying for all public high school students to take a college entrance exam, a policy adopted by eleven states since 2001. I show that prior to the policy, for every ten poor students who score college-ready on the ACT or SAT, there are an additional five poor students who would score college-ready but who take neither exam. I use a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate the effects of the policy on postsecondary attainment and find small increases in enrollment at four-year institutions. The effects are concentrated among students less likely to take a college entrance exam in the absence of the policy and students in the poorest high schools. The students induced by the policy to enroll persist through college at approximately the same rate as their inframarginal peers. I calculate that the policy is more cost-effective than traditional student aid at boosting postsecondary attainment.
Emperor Taizu would not be surprised at this result, and he died over 1,000 years ago.
The paper is open access, so read it yourself. The “natural experiment” is rather simple, though the author did have to dome some weighting of the before and after samples. The dataset looks pretty big.
* This causes major issues relating to a fixation on the test as the ultimate goal, as opposed to learning. But excessive focus on education is a “good” problem for a society to have.
Seems like introduction of examinations in China were quite important to the social mobility of political office, but probably on either the margins of or not important to overall social mobility? Based on Greg Clark’s estimates of the underlying constant of social mobility.
To be frank, the move away from standardized testing, particularly in grad schools, is to increase the number of traditionally underrepresented groups. Claims of it (GRE) being too expensive are ridiculous compared to the alternative (~$330 including sending it to 5 schools and a $30 study book). This is a lot cheaper than months of unpaid research. If colleges were really worried about the price, they could use their huge endowments to pay for testing and score sending, like those 11 states mentioned in the paper.
What’s even more grating is that I’m constantly told people have implicit biases, and they affect one’s decisions. By making admission selection more dependent on people’s judgments, won’t it become more biased?
But you see, admissions people are part of the good people, so they won’t be biased–at least in a bad way.
I think the shift away to more “holistic” criteria is just a way for them to engage in quotas without saying that they’re doing so (and in New York City’s case, to encourage more people to attend public schools since the top students will get an automatic in to the top high schools). I too hope it will pass quickly.
think the shift away to more “holistic” criteria is just a way for them to engage in quotas without saying that they’re doing so
the term now is ‘representation.’ and yes, i think it will solve that issue. but unintended consequences are probably easy to guess (some faculty who oppose GRExit are frank with me in private because they know i won’t denounce them in public as ‘capitalist roaders’ or whatever). #pedigreeWillMatterWayMore for good labs, which is why even progressive faculty from international backgrounds are overrepresented among those who speak about the topic in public as dissenters: no matter their race to some extent they enter into the american ecosystem as outsiders without those networks.
Yeah, the reason we moved away from standardized testing is because the results made affirmative action impossible. UC went from ranking grades and SAT about 50-50 to 75-25, making it nearly impossible for bright kids who didn’t care about grades to get in.
If I understand the sentence “The proportion of college-ready non-takers to takers is slightly lower among black students than among white students”, it’s comparing like to like. If that’s true, it supports something I wrote a long time ago–most high-skilled kids with poor grades and no college plans are whites, mostly white boys, I’d guess. Again, talking numbers, not percentages.
If that’s true, it supports something I wrote a long time ago–most high-skilled kids with poor grades and no college plans are whites
there is some evidence for this in the paper. though not totally significant strength statistically. also more boys than girls being left out.
and tbh the pragmatist in me thinks that the 1990s practice of ‘race-norming’ may have been a reasonable compromise to prevent the wholesale transition we are going through now….
“also more boys than girls being left out.”
Also not surprising.
Actually, the affirmative action in the 80s was far more severe than that of the 90s–in fact, the deep discounts given African American entrance scores was a lot of the reason why the anti-affirmative action initiatives began in the 90s. That’s why despite their best efforts, the UCs haven’t gotten anywhere near the same percentage of black admits since the law.
USA hot-button ethnic shtuff aside for a moment–here’s my completely uninformed recollection of somethin’ I heard oncet and operationally believed to be truism ever since:
That the millenially enshrined exam system in pre-modern china led to centuries of sclerotic mentality of ‘training to the [civil-service] test’, and said practice greatly weakened, indeed obliterated, real-world rough-n-tumble conceptualizing among the brights, hence the ruling class’s perceptions of The Real became so myopic, that in the end the whole civilization was pushed over with a feather by the Euro (let’s call it Scottish-Enlightenment brutal-realist) ascendance.
Not saying I’m right at-all, at-all, just an fyi re: how an edjumacted generalist who gets by on fumes of misbegotten recollection recalls the characterization that lodged in USA-milieu noggin.
I am now prepared to be corrected (enlightened, heh) by way of round disabusings.
the above may or may not be correct. but it’s a reasonable model.
basically one can think of the chinese-system as a local optimum when it comes to social economic productivity and stability.
Sending more students of “low SES” to universities is, in my view, the exactly the opposite of what should happen and will further indebt students, generate useless credentials, and lead to further mismatching, especially among favored ethno-racial groups. It will worsen the distortions in the labor market.
What the U.S. needs is a German-style three-tier cognitive separation at the secondary level (Hauptschule, Realschule, and Gymnasium) that provides appropriate speed and amount of education that will help them for the next step, be it vocational training, technical apprenticeship, or university.
The main problem with this highly rational approach is that, in a multiethnic society, the cognitive separation will also be almost explicitly ethno-racial as well and is likely to create a social backlash. But I would argue that we already have social discontent and backlash anyway, and also have an irrational and inefficient and inefficacious “everyone to colleges” ideology.
I live in one of these states that require every public high school student to take a college entrance exam. Seems like a no-brainier given that the No-Child-Left-Behind regime has involved constant testing since 3rd grade. I don’t think it is easy to motivate adolescent kids to care about tests that don’t mean anything to them, but perhaps introducing earlier versions of the ACT/SAT in middle school might show even better outcomes for lower SES, who I believe have been shown to be the main beneficiaries of test-prep.
lower SES, who I believe have been shown to be the main beneficiaries of test-prep.
Where did you see this?
But honestly, how many high school kids should even be going to college? The old fashioned answer was 1 SD above mean, which would mean the top 16 percent of the population. Even if you say the top 40 percent, there would be huge waste in test administration, flakier proctoring, and more cheating in universal testing. I think teachers know who the lazy, couldn’t care less smart kids are, and could tag them for mandatory testing. But don’t make the bottom 40 percent take it. They hate school and just want to get out.
@Twinkie: Alex Tabbarok is one place I can recall:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/the-sat-test-prep-income-and-race.html
His points are slightly different than mine though: (1) test prep has only modest effect on test scores; (2) test prep usage varies little or not at all by income; and (3) blacks are more likely to use test prep than whites. Ergo, prep tests are ameliorate racial disparities modestly.
To the extent that you are right, and I think you are, it undermines a lot of expectations of lassiez-faire economics. Higher ed has a lot of private institutions, and yet, there is no notable institution really trying to utilize the pool of undereducated, academically talented SES students to its full potential.
Also, other statistics (looking at the impact on inputs academic ability in quartile or quintile on one hand and SES by the same measure against college attendance and graduation rates) make the point even more starkly and also provide a decent way to measure the effect of educational institution quality on high ed outcomes (mostly minimal but strong that the extreme bottom and top of institution quality).
A third statistic I’ve seen in Colorado tracks the college outcomes of kids identified as gifted and talented (top 2% IQ) in elementary school.
PD–it annoyed me greatly that Tabarrok almost certainly lifted those links from my article, which came out a year or so earlier, and was pretty widely read at the time. He could have given me credit. One or two of the links was never widely used until I mentioned it.
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/06/19/why-chris-hayes-fails/