Who could have guessed? Harvard's test-optional admissions flopped

Harvard had to introduce remedial instruction in junior high school algebra and geometry last fall.

For generations, Harvard was the Goldman Sachs of higher education: the Smart Money.

From mandating the SAT test in the 1930s to dropping its Jewish ceiling in the 1950s to speedrunning through various types of affirmative action in the 1970s (initially, naively looking for Diamonds In the Rough from the ghetto, which led to some unfortunate incidents in the dorms) before settling on admitting well-socialized upper middle class blacks and selling it to the Supreme Court in the 1978 Bakke decision not as Reverse Discrimination Reparations to give blacks a leg up, which might violate the 14th Amendment, but to help everybody enjoy the more intellectually vibrant campus discussions that Diversity surely brings … well, Harvard was out front.

Harvard’s fame only grew. For example, I’ve mentioned “Harvard” at least 1,250 times over the years in my posts, only a few dozen times less than I’ve mentioned “Yale,” “Princeton,” “Stanford,” and “MIT” combined.

But then came the Great Awokening, and Harvard’s various self-inflicted humiliations, such as believing the Theory of Intersectionality and hence picking a black woman plagiarist to be its president, and suspending its legitimate superstar black professor during Me-Too for, basically, acting like a straight black guy.

As I’ve been mentioning, after some degree of sanity started to return to elite culture around 2022, MIT has taken the lead from Harvard by usually being first to roll back the worst craziness of the last decade, such as by dumping DEI Loyalty Oaths, cutting black admissions from a nutty 15% to 5% in an attempt to show it at least respects the Supreme Court (while still practicing some affirmative action), and being first to make admissions tests mandatory again.

Harvard has repeatedly lagged behind MIT and gotten burned.

In my day, we took algebra in 9th grade. These days, most kids who would traditionally be considered Harvard Material take algebra in 8th or 7th grade.

But, of course, Harvard, which had sponsored the rise of the SAT from the 1930s onward under president James Conant in order to find smart students from outside of its usual Saint Grottlesex feeder boarding schools, switched to test-optional admissions during covid.

And then, Harvard insisted on keeping test scores optional due to the Racial Reckoning through at least 2026.

What could possibly go wrong without test scores?

Besides admitting a bunch of students into Harvard who need remedial algebra?

That’s another Harvard Humiliation that flew under the radar for a few months. From the Harvard Crimson last September:

Harvard Launches New Intro Math Course to Address Pandemic Learning Loss

By S. Mac Healey and Angelina J. Parker, Crimson Staff Writers

September 3, 2024

The Harvard Math Department will pilot a new introductory course aimed at rectifying a lack of foundational algebra skills among students, according to Harvard’s Director of Introductory Math Brendan A. Kelly.

The course, titled Math MA5, will run alongside two established math courses — Math MA and MB — with an expanded five-day schedule.

Math MA is a year-long course that gets you into simpler differential calculus:

The study of functions and their rates of change. Fundamental ideas of calculus are introduced early and used to provide a framework for the study of mathematical modeling involving algebraic, exponential, and logarithmic functions. Thorough understanding of differential calculus promoted by year long reinforcement.

Math MA5 is a version of MA that meets 5 days a week to also go over “foundational skills in algebra, geometry, and quantitative reasoning.”

This is a version of Math MA that meets 5 days a week. The extra support will target foundational skills in algebra, geometry, and quantitative reasoning that will help you unlock success in Math MA. Students will be identified for enrollment in Math MA5 via a skill check before the start of the term.

So it’s not a course devoted entirely to teaching Harvard students junior high school skills. Instead it’s a year-long course that combines remediation of adolescent topics like algebra and geometry with differential calculus.

Back to the Crimson:

He said the Covid-19 pandemic led to gaps in students’ math skills and learning abilities, prompting the need for a new introductory course.

Harvard blames the “gaps in … learning abilities” of its recent freshmen that necessitated this embarrassing new course on covid rather than on test-optional admissions, much as the New York Times always blames the June 2020 surge in black homicides and black traffic fatalities on covid coming along back in March rather than on The Establishment going nuts over George Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020.

I’m sure Zoom classes during covid played a role, but according to NAEP scores, those hit the bottom half of American students — who greatly benefit from having an organized place to go to everyday and be talked at by middle-class grown-ups — much harder than the best students. If you are a Harvard grad, you would normally be expected to be able to work on your laptop out from under the boss’s eye, wouldn’t you?

But once Harvard stopped requiring test scores, it apparently lost the ability to identify applicants who don’t need handholding.

Who coulda guessed? I mean, besides James Conant 90 years ago. (Conant was considered a formidable figure in his day: he was, for instance, more or less the guy who picked Hiroshima to drop the Bomb on.)

Another thing to keep in mind is that high school GPAs are pretty worthless lately because grading became much easier in recent years, as the Education Reform delusion (exemplified by George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy crafting the No Child Left Behind act in 2002 that mandated that all students score, in effect, above average on school achievement tests by 2014) faded away and was replaced by the Blame Everything on Whitey craze of the last dozen years. And then came covid and George Floyd, which just exacerbated the trend.

So, who knows what Straight A’s mean anymore? The Harvard admissions department evidently doesn’t.

“The last two years, we saw students who were in Math MA and faced a challenge that was unreasonable given the supports we had in the course. So we wanted to think about, ‘How can we create a course that really helps students step up to their aspirations?’” he said.

“Students don’t have the skills that we had intended downstream in the curriculum, and so it creates different trajectories in students’ math abilities,” Kelly added.

A large fraction of the population does not use algebra in their careers, but, still, there’s a high correlation between algebra and logic. Harvard professors hate it when students can’t follow any simple algebra they might introduce.

More dubious was the tendency to make Algebra II be required to graduate from high school during the Education Reform Era before the Great Awokening. This fallacy was based on studies showing that students who had passed Algebra II tended to go on to do better things in life than students who hadn’t taken Algebra II. But of course that was mostly due to students who pass Algebra II having higher IQs than those who don’t.

Hence, from Harvard Magazine last April, two years after MIT re-mandated applicants submitting test scores:

Harvard College Reinstitutes Mandatory Testing

Applicants for the class of 2029 must submit scores.

by Jonathan Shaw

Harvard announced today that the College will reinstitute mandatory submission of standardized test scores for applicants.

Harvard announced today that the College will reinstitute mandatory submission of standardized test scores for applicants, beginning with students applying for fall 2025 admission (the class of 2029). Until today’s decision, the College had a test-optional policy in place for applicants through the class of 2030. The announcement follows similar decisions by Dartmouth, Yale, and Brown to require standardized testing beginning with the class of 2029.

It’s almost as if Harvard isn’t the pacesetter college anymore.

Test-optional policies were widely adopted during the pandemic, when it was difficult to sit for standardized tests, and many remained in place even as the threat of illness faded. The tests were thought to disadvantage lower-income students and those from under-resourced high schools. But a working paper coauthored in 2023 by Ackman professor of public economics Raj Chetty, Black professor of political economy and professor of education and economics David Deming, and John Friedman, a professor of economics at Brown, found standardized tests are a useful means of identifying promising students at less well-resourced high schools.

Thank goodness that Harvard employs Raj Chetty to crunch vast quantities of formerly privacy-protected data and discover … what my readers have already been reading for decades.