Great post; I’d note that while you focus on arguing that the correlation between Ivy admissions and intelligence is lower than one might naively expect, the statement “most Ivy-smart students aren’t at Ivy-tier schools” is also a trivial consequence of the fact that these schools collectively admit very few people and there are plausibly at least twice as many “Ivy-smart” applicants each year as there are spots at Ivies.
This assumes that the task of differentiating Ivy Smart+ applicants from mere Ivy Smart applicants is an efficiently solvable screening problem. I think it very likely isn’t and that the costs (to both universities and their applicants) of reworking the application process so that it could reliably distinguish the 99.5th percentile (by intellect) of high schoolers applying to college nationally from the 99th percentile of that group would be unacceptably high. (Notably, the SAT/ACT can’t solve this problem — they’re noisy on the order of several percentiles.)
I’m not sure, but I feel like the majority of other large countries managed to solve this problem without that much fuss (gaokao, IIT-JEEs, etc, all seem to have higher skill ceilings). That said, they tend to measure knowledge more than raw intellect, which is maybe bad from an EA perspective since it forces hyperoptimization on established paradigms.
I don’t have anything approaching a clear sense of how sensitive & specific the gaokao, IIT-JEEs, etc. are at detecting extraordinary intellect, but I will say that, yeah, I have not heard good things about the incentives that those exams create for students seeking admission to university. Even in places like France, where access to higher education is much less competitive (and much less high-stakes) than in China or India, the baccalauréat seems like it distorts students’ incentives in pretty unproductive directions. Whether or not that makes it worse than the current system in the U.S., I don’t know.
Great post; I’d note that while you focus on arguing that the correlation between Ivy admissions and intelligence is lower than one might naively expect, the statement “most Ivy-smart students aren’t at Ivy-tier schools” is also a trivial consequence of the fact that these schools collectively admit very few people and there are plausibly at least twice as many “Ivy-smart” applicants each year as there are spots at Ivies.
In a sane system, you might expect that this will mean that the “Ivy-smart” criterion gets redefined to be at a substantially higher bar.
This assumes that the task of differentiating Ivy Smart+ applicants from mere Ivy Smart applicants is an efficiently solvable screening problem. I think it very likely isn’t and that the costs (to both universities and their applicants) of reworking the application process so that it could reliably distinguish the 99.5th percentile (by intellect) of high schoolers applying to college nationally from the 99th percentile of that group would be unacceptably high. (Notably, the SAT/ACT can’t solve this problem — they’re noisy on the order of several percentiles.)
I’m not sure, but I feel like the majority of other large countries managed to solve this problem without that much fuss (gaokao, IIT-JEEs, etc, all seem to have higher skill ceilings). That said, they tend to measure knowledge more than raw intellect, which is maybe bad from an EA perspective since it forces hyperoptimization on established paradigms.
I don’t have anything approaching a clear sense of how sensitive & specific the gaokao, IIT-JEEs, etc. are at detecting extraordinary intellect, but I will say that, yeah, I have not heard good things about the incentives that those exams create for students seeking admission to university. Even in places like France, where access to higher education is much less competitive (and much less high-stakes) than in China or India, the baccalauréat seems like it distorts students’ incentives in pretty unproductive directions. Whether or not that makes it worse than the current system in the U.S., I don’t know.