Kevin Carey has a piece in the Washington Post on the imminent demise of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) as the main metric used in college acceptance. I know that in some parts of the country people use the American College Testing (ACT) test instead of the SAT. If Carey is right, both are doomed. The culprit is “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs. They are simply better than standardized tests in predicting how people will do in college courses.
MIT, long a leader in education technology, has been one of the first universities to take steps in this direction. In 2012, a young man named Battushig Myanganbayar was one of only 340 students out of 150,000 worldwide to earn a perfect score in a rigorous online Circuits and Electronics course. At the time, he was 15 and living in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.
All Battushig needed was an Internet connection and a teacher with an eye for engineering potential. After excelling in the MIT class, he took the SAT, and he’s now enrolled at MIT. Another Circuits and Electronics student, Amol Bhave from Jabalpur, India, enjoyed the class so much he created his own online follow-up course in signals and systems. He, too, was admitted into the 2013 MIT freshman class.
Here’s the key:
These are not watered-down classes. I took a genetics course through MITx, the university’s branch of edX. It was the same class taught to freshmen in Cambridge, Mass. — the same lectures, homework assignments, midterms and final exam. MOOC success is much more likely to predict success in college classes than SAT scores, because MOOC success is, in fact, success in college classes.
Now, MIT presents a pretty high barrier because the course matter is so challenging that most people need to be born with an above average aptitude to do well in their classes. But if you know what the course material is going to be and you have years to prepare, it should be possible to ace at least some of their online courses. Rather than teaching for the test, you can teach for the course, which should be both more predictable and more effective. I’d think it would be pretty easy to ace a class in Jazz Appreciation at the University of Texas, for example, which is actually one of the classes that are offered online.
This could change everything. It will change how people do college prep outside of school, and it will change how schools prepare kids for college admissions. I can imagine taking a class full of kids from a poor performing school in North Philadelphia and training them to pass classes at universities in subjects that they show aptitude for, until the whole class can do well in an online college course and give themselves a leg-up on other applicants from the suburbs who haven’t been as focused in their preparations.
But it’s bad news for the children of alumni and the rich if they aren’t willing to capitalize on their advantages. Their connections and SAT prep courses may not get them into Harvard anymore.
It’s also good news for kids like me who could never hope to have the highest scores in my school or finish near the top of my class simply because I went to a school with one of the highest-scoring student bodies in the country. But, as part of growing up in that culture, I was well-prepared to do well in rigorous college courses and proved it once I had the chance.
This will change how merit is measured, and it’s hard to argue with a metric that measures exactly what people want to know. Of course there will be losers. It won’t be possible to make up for a lack of innate aptitude with an impressive list of extracurriculars, and something will be lost in that. Doing great in class isn’t the only thing worth considering, and people who have a drive to help others can contribute a lot to a campus. But as everyone has learned to game this system, students aren’t helping out at the food bank out of some genuine desire to help the needy anymore. It’s probably best to deemphasize this kind of oneupmanship from the admissions process.
Mixed feelings. I’ve always struggled not because I lack intelligence but because I don’t have a particular specialization. I can do various disciplines but I’m not really really good (have aptitude) at any one thing.
In a world where aptitude gets more and more to the fore, what place is there for me?
I think this has potential. Learning early how to pass a college course would have helped me tremendously. I do have an aptitude for research, and my community college adviser misdiagnosed this as meaning I was suited for research in science. I could have saved myself a lot of literal headaches if I had known early on that I wasn’t suited for that by bombing in college-level Organic Chemistry at the high school level. I think this system could help students weed out the bad advice they get from advisers, too.
Unless school systems start using the college-level MOOCs as part of their enrichment curriculum, this system is going to select for the people who know at age five or six, not age thirty-six, what they want to be when they grow up. And that pool will become globally competitive moreso than it already is just by the example of the talent-spotting teacher in Mongolia.
That in fact puts an already anti-intellectual USA at a further disadvantage for its own citizens entering schools “in its own country”. An academic anti-immigration movement will be the result. No more student visas. Study at your own universities. Those will be the political mantras.
It is understandable that circuit analysis can function in a teach-to-the-top-university-course way. In fact any scientific technical subject that does not require too expensive laboratory equipment–if the student is highly enough motivated.
But what about contentious subjects of inquiry? Social sciences and humanities tend to be very personalized in the way courses are presented. Which MOOCs does one advise a protege to take in order to get into the classes of particular lecturers? What happens if the faculty changes and that teacher goes somewhere else in the time that it takes the student to prepare for a particular university?
The who gets cut out and why discussion in education is not nearly broad enough and fundamental enough given the opportunities of technology and the institutional collapse of a lot of institutions.
This Mongolian student is who is going to be designing the electronic devices or other electric-electronic-information science technologies with which the China’s Eurasia investments in infrastructure are going to be repaid with consumption and trade from Europe and possibly in time from Japan and the Koreas.
What is the United States going to get in return for routing so many of its best and brightest into military and “financial engineering” careers? And what will a university system of adjuncts and MOOCs become? Will it be worthy of seeking admission to to get branded as an educated product for marketing to employers? Is it Francis Bacon’s, Cardinal Newman’s or Clark Kerr’s vision of a university that is operative in this innovation? Which of those philosophical strands will be carried forward as the reason for a university’s existence?
“What is the United States going to get in return for routing so many of its best and brightest into military and “financial engineering” careers?”
Are you saying that the US doesn’t benefit from its best and brightest specializing in fields that have a military application?
I foresee a LOT of cheating if this ever becomes important in admissions.
We’ll just have to see what changes come our way and whether they are really for the best. If these classes do ultimately change the admissions process, I could see a future in which elite public and private high schools will maintain their traditional advantage as feeders to elite universities by incorporating the college coursework into their existing curriculum as much as possible. Resource-strapped schools, which may already devote substantial resources to simply getting the student body prepared to graduate high school, much less prepared for college, may have less integration of the MOOCs into their existing curricula and so gifted students in such schools would need to take the classes on their own, outside of normal school hours and in addition to their existing coursework and whatever else is going on in their lives.
It seems to me as though such a change is more likely to benefit wealthier children in wealthier schools (those with strong technological resources and faculty that can translate the college coursework for students who may need assistance with it) more than anything. Certainly it doesn’t do much for kids that lack a reliable internet connection, or whose schools can’t or won’t allocate resources to make use of such coursework.
And, for students at top high schools who are well-qualified for college but aren’t at the top of their class, I am also unsure whether such a change would really be of much benefit. If the overbearing parents of tomorrow all steer their kids into MOOCs, particularly those offered in “softer” humanities courses (in which grading is more subjective and it can be easier to get a good grade) and not engineering courses where it is nearly impossible to get a perfect score on the final test, then it seems to me that those kids’ resumes will all look more or less identical, as they do today, and so admissions officers would continue to give weight to class rank in deciding between different students. The problem for the students at such schools who are not at the top of the class is that they did not grow up in, say, Kansas or Montana, where their talents would have had a much better chance of standing out.
Anyway, this is all a long-winded way of stating that whether such a change is more meritocratic than the current system depends on how schools and students respond to such a change. And, for what it’s worth, I would argue that the current system isn’t all bad. I came from a very small town whose school had relatively few resources. I bought a few old ACT exams and spent about $5 on flash cards, and using those materials as preparation I managed to score high enough on the test to attend Harvard. Unquestionably, there were many students in my college class who were better prepared for the rigors of Harvard coursework than I was, simply because they came from better schools than I did and had much more experience with college-level coursework, but I adapted just fine after I got there. There needs to be a place in higher education for talented children whose circumstances have not yet given them the opportunity to develop that talent to its utmost.