According to the recent "Task Force on Standardized Testing" from the UCs (https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/committees/... page 23) SATs are better predictors than GPAs for most demographics, although both together is unsurprisingly better than either alone.
This seems natural to me, as GPA seems inherently less objective (different schools, different teachers).
I think it's fairly strange that universities are getting rid of using them. One explanation is that it helps protect them from lawsuits like those against Harvard, as there is less incriminating evidence. I fail to see how it actually helps students.
Isn't it Berkeley where 80% of applications for faculty positions are filtered on their diversity statement (even for things like particle physics)? Or consider Stuart Reges being disciplined by UW for not putting the boilerplate land acknowledgement on his course's syllabus.
You are woefully uninformed, or willfully misrepresenting things if you don't think using such lists to punish people aren't already being used today. It's not harmless, and it seems dishonest to me to paint it as such.
I'm not the one misrepresenting things. The entire nature of Stanford's word list has been misrepresented up and down this thread by those freaking out that it's some sort of blacklist of "forbidden words" (as one poster put it).
Also I'm in academia so I'm not woefully uninformed about what goes on in academia and how it works. I think the SV tech workers here on HN are the ones who are uninformed about how academia works.
> Isn't it Berkeley where 80% of applications for faculty positions are filtered on their diversity statement
Have you ever read such a statement? They are very important for academia, because classrooms are very diverse. It's important for applicants to state their philosophy on teaching people with different (dis)abilities, because that's the nature of the job. As an instructor, you will face the range of disabilities in students from mild dyslexia all the way to students who are bound to a wheelchair and communicate through a computer voice system. How does the instructor handle those situations? What techniques or practices do they employ?
Also, classroom conflicts do exist. For CS there aren't so many, but in other classes that touch on contentious issues, the question for the instructor is: how do they balance the views of all students in a constructive way that is conducive to learning? It's not easy, and so requires some explanation on the part of the applicant.
Filtering on diversity statements means advancing candidates who have put genuine thought into these issues, because again, they are important for the job.
The other part of the diversity statement plays is that is forces the candidate to reflect on their community service work. Did you know that service is part of the job description of a professor? The job is research, teaching, and service. We ask them for a research and a teaching statement, so what's wrong with asking for a diversity statement? Would you rather it be called a "service" statement?
The filtering process selects for candidates who are serious about service and who have thought deeply about how to teach a diverse classroom (because that's the job). I don't see a problem with that; even if you disagree with DEI initiatives, you still have to teach a diverse classroom. This whole idea that we can't ask job candidates how they handle situations which will arise on the job to which they're applying is strange to me.
> Or consider Stuart Reges being disciplined by UW for not putting the boilerplate land acknowledgement on his course's syllabus.
This is a misrepresentation. The land acknowledgement for UW is in fact optional on the course syllabus. What Stuart Reges did was put his own land acknowledgement statement on the syllabus which veered from factual statements and was a political statement.
So he was using his platform in an engineering course to push his own personal political agenda. A syllabus in particular is regarded as a contract, sometimes binding, between student and professor. It's not the place for off-the-cuff political statements. If Stuart Reges is allowed to put his political statements on his syllabus, that opens up the door for all professors, which makes the syllabus a political platform. Apparently he was very vocal about the land statements outside of the syllabus and that is fine for UW, but it just didn't belong in the syllabus.
I don't see a problem with that, do you? If you want to include the UW land statement, that's fine. If you don't want to include the statement, that's fine. But what's not fine including your own statement because you're personally politically against land statements or what the UW statement has to say. I mean, if you take a course, do you care to see it colored with political statements from your instructor that are wholly unrelated to the course content?
As for how he was disciplined... what happened to him exactly? They asked him to take down the statement, he refused. Yet his salary was uninterrupted and he still works at UW to this day: https://www.cs.washington.edu/people/faculty/reges. So the sum total of his discipline was what, exactly?
According to the lawsuit Reges filed, he didn't even claim material damages. His lawsuit was about being butthurt because he felt like a pariah, which reading the situation, is as much his fault as anyone else's. In fact, the party that was materially impacted was the department; they had to open another section of the course because he was so acerbic to the students. That costs serious money and time from all of his colleagues. Honestly for that alone I would have fired him, but I guess UW is more forgiving than me.
I would say that McCarthy and his acolytes, was also motivated to do good (protect America).
The villagers burning 'witches' were motivated to do good (protect the village, and incidentally get their neighbours lands / jobs ... hmmm)
The students in the Cultural Revolution in China were motivated to do good (bring us forward into the utopia ... hmmm).
There is a nice saying, present in many languages: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".
And while I think intention does actually matter (vs. the a frequent claim by the woke), results matter more. (Intention matters because, e.g., it influences how you treat the action.)
And isn't there in implicit insult in that? That an entire group is so fragile, that seeing a mere word on paper, in a completely different context, will somehow reduce them to emotional rubble?
Aren't many of these making things worse, e.g. "calling a spade a spade" or "blackbox" by implying that any distant possible connection to 'black' makes something so horrible that its use must be suppressed? What does that imply about that color?
These lists are actively harmful, not to mention wasteful, but I guess they are good at creating demand for DEI officers and giving them work to do.
Yes, but then isn't it clear that he isn't to be trusted (or how much he is to be trusted), and that's really what most people care about, they don't care why.
I think that's part of why the mental health acceptance movement is quite tricky, and not super-successful.
Trusted to have a job? Get invited to dinner parties? Live without surveillance? Be in a position of responsibility over others, or to influence others?
It seems like we profoundly don't have answers to this from diverse groups like former felons, those with some record of prior bigotry/misogyny, mentally ill, those with divergent ideologies and more.
Maybe you don't understand how scales work. His description allows _everything between the endpoints_ he stated. How do you arrive at only a binary choice?
We (humans, AlphaZero) are both distilling the rules down. Some rules are easily distilled (a queen is worth more than pawn) some are more difficult (mobility, knight vs bishop). I would expect the easily distilled rules to be discovered by both of us.
What I think would be cool is trying to distill or revise better guidelines from what AlphaZero does.
This seems natural to me, as GPA seems inherently less objective (different schools, different teachers).
I think it's fairly strange that universities are getting rid of using them. One explanation is that it helps protect them from lawsuits like those against Harvard, as there is less incriminating evidence. I fail to see how it actually helps students.