Subject:
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Re: Legos get you into college
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Wed, 2 Feb 2000 21:32:10 GMT
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Original-From:
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alex wetmore <alex@phred.orgSPAMLESS>
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Viewed:
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1754 times
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From: "David Chen" <nospam-dcchen@pacbell.net-nospam>
> The alternative tests may get you in the door, but unless you have
> adequate
> math skills (for example), you just won't get the engineering degree.
> If you
> can't write at a college level, you won't pass your liberal arts
> classes. Saw
> too many friends at Berkeley who got in on Equal opportunity fail in
> this manner.
> Those who succeeded, felt diminished by everyone assuming that they were
> there
> ONLY because they were EOP, NOT because they actually had the grades.
On the other hand there are those (such as myself) who get fairly low scores
on standardized tests, but who can do well in a competitive university
atmosphere. I'm not sure why I do badly on standardized tests, but I do.
My SAT scores were pretty much bottom of the pile at my university (Carnegie
Mellon), and in most cases I was 100-200 points lower then my friends. I
did excellently in my college humanities courses even though I did poorly on
the verbal SAT. The standardized tests that I took had very little to do
with proving writing skills or advanced math skills, and had a lot more to
do with advanced guessing and multiple choice test taking skills.
I was able to get into Carnegie Mellon and graduate because they do accept
more applicants then other big CS schools and pay less attention to
standardized scores then most places. They then proceed to fail them out at
quite high numbers (the retention rate at CMU was much lower then any of the
other top 25 universities according to the statistics in US News and World
Reports). This system worked well for me, and it was very nice to get
accepted to a top-notch CS department when other schools were getting hung
up on my low standardized test scores (and the fact that my high school used
a non-standard grading system and refused to rank students).
Anything that gets universities to look for alternative methods of filtering
out applicants is good in my view. I don't think that CMU's system (accept
lots of people, then flunk a third of them out) is necessarily the best
system for keeping high student moral, but at least a lot of very bright
students who may not do well on current standardized tests were able to
attend. Perhaps new testing standards will be more representative and give
those who do poorly on multiple choice tests a chance to prove themselves.
alex
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Legos get you into college
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| This thread is getting really off topic but...gotta put in my 2 cents. It is nice that universities are attempting to create opportunities by testing for non-traditional problem solving skills but...Fact is, in the real world and to excell in higher (...) (25 years ago, 2-Feb-00, to lugnet.robotics)
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