I personally strongly disagree. I think it's much better to be given the opportunity to do the actual work, rather than to be required to do the pre-assessment song and dance. And if there are actual prerequisites that a person hasn't previously passed, they should be allowed to be tested on these specifically.
It depends on a lot of things. If they've also applied to another college that's better suited to their ability, admitting then to a school where they'll likely fail is not really doing them a favor.
Agreed. I've seen some interesting data that kids who could've been successful premeds or engineers at their state flagship but instead eke their way into Harvard or Princeton (sports scholarship, legacy etc) will instead graduate with a flaky studies major because they couldn't cut it in their intended major and the switching costs of transferring were too high.
There are downsides if you end up a small fish in a big pond.
Is the actual premed or engineering coursework at Harvard or Princeton really that much more rigorous than that at a flagship state school? I'm doubtful.
I'm no expert on that particular situation, but I compared my syllabi and projects from a state flagship (not Georgia Tech, Berkeley, or UIUC) with my brother's from Carnegie Mellon, and the expectations of first/second year CS majors were extremely different. Sometimes we used the same textbook but CMU covered more chapters and their projects were more involved. Some courses that typically waited until senior year at the state flagship were common to take spring sophomore year at CMU. There were a lot of courses that were numbered as undergraduate at CMU but covered content that was only covered in graduate courses at the state flagship.
Longer answer - in the other reply to your doubtfulness.
This is true across the entire US system, some state flagship universities curricula are so deficient that graduate level at better schools wont even consider the bachelor level diplomas from those schools as eligible unless the applicant is top n% of the graduating class, where n is a low single digit.
The admissions committee may never publish or say it directly, but for MANY state flagship universities the B.S. level maths and science courses are simply insufficient fo higher level studies at leading schools.
Thus, companies with hiring and leadership that is aware of these conditions will also simply pass over applicants with degrees from flagship state universities, much the same as they do with online diploma mill "Graduates."
My take on this situation is that as primary education outcomes worsened in the US, state universities modulated the coursework to match the readiness of incoming students in order to keep enrollment 'available' to everyone and extract revenue from the student loans system.
The "Princeton and Harvard(s)" were differently motivated, in that they never had a goal of admitting the majority of High School graduates, and thus were not required to lower levels of educational rigour to meet eroding conditions in primary education.
> The "Princeton and Harvard(s)" were differently motivated, in that they never had a goal of admitting the majority of High School graduates, and thus were not required to lower levels of educational rigour to meet eroding conditions in primary education.
It's easy to find recent reporting on claimed grade inflation, reductions in rigor, and students who seem unprepared or unwilling to do the work at Harvard and Princeton too.
They "were" differently motivated and the slide that began much longer ago in the other schools (and was always present for the 'legacy' students at Ivy-Leagues) has now reached the general student body.
Hopefully this trend will become more visible in hiring practices, will lead to an erosion of the preference for named schools, and employers will adopt a more disciplined path from internship-to-mentorship-to-full_team_membership to compensate for the general loss of capability and readiness from graduates everywhere.
I say, hopefully. I don't see any inclination toward that path from any of the major employment sectors.
Maybe the Ivy-Leagues and top ranked schools will collectively reinforce student performance requirements, encourage educational rigour, accept lower admission numbers for only high performing applicants, use their endowment funds to establish bridge institutions which remediate the shortfalls of public school education and offer trade-school training programs for the masses of students not capable of the high standards.
But, as Mal says, "I'd like to be the king of all Londinium and wear a shiny hat."
So, we're both right. The Ivy League did mean better education, AND it may not be better for much longer due to the incoming student body.
Speaking as a professor: the filter is really helpful. Having students struggle for two years in a program they're going to fail out of is terrible. I've seen it happen - and I saw more of it happen for the years CMU also stopped requiring the SAT.
The SAT is a very imperfect measure but it turns out a lot of the others are even worse.
>Having students struggle for two years in a program they're going to fail out of is terrible.
Putting a body every a seat for those profitable 500-person lectures taught by an adjunct and graded by TAs who are all paid peanuts and then having them wash out before those expensive 50-person high level classes and esoteric electives taught by tenured profs and accompanied by lots of expensive lab time is great for the university's bottom line though.
Good point, and that was for me the promise of the original MOOCs 15 years ago - for students to be able to take on these MIT/Stanford courses, with the exact same workload and see if they could handle them, without any additional cost to the school and without the student having to upend their life yet. And if they proved to themselves that they could and are willing to, then enroll, and use that as proof.
There are still some online courses that try to do this sort of thing, with a particular example being the University of Helsinky's Full Stack Open [0] which offers post-hoc university credits for those who complete the course, but it seems that the dream didn't quite materialize.
Honest question: why is it terrible? I would assume that if someone is capable enough to struggle for 2 years, they stand a real chance to struggle for 4 years and graduate. And seeing how the job market rewards a mediocre diploma from a good college significantly more than a good diploma from a mediocre college, it seems like a very rational decision from the student's side. And if they do fail out, they should still be able to enroll in another program, and presumably get a decent grade there, no?
Not in the universe where I live. Having worked in a variety of web tech, and then working at a fintech with a partner bank, traditional banks move incredibly slow compared to nearly every other tech company out there, and for good reason.
> medicine will always be the most secure and stable career, still has a shit life-work balance too.
It only is because it effectively has a guild\cartel system preventing an oversupply of doctors and that we have an aging population that increasingly demands medical care.
(1) The test has to be signed by an online doctor. The firm arranges this implicitly, but it's not free. I can't go directly to Quest for any random test I want. The tests offered directly by Quest without an intermediary are too expensive and too few.
(2) States like New York throw a wrench in it by disallowing anyone with an in-state billing address from ordering such tests.
Ideally I should be able to pay the same low rate that the insurance firm would minimally pay, but in practice I can't. I have to pay a lot more if I can get it at all. The cartel is strong.
Having multiple parallel tracks for different types of students is controversial. Schooling tends to be cyclical with periods with more tracking is popular shifting to periods of less tracking and more classroom mixing. It really depends on what you want to optimize for. More tracking benefits the highest achievers. Less tracking raises the bottom and the average but at the cost of not maximizing the outcome of the top.
I find these arguments ignore one of the most obvious and important parts of school: discipline/behavior.
A really small number of disruptive kids will destroy the learning of the entire middle. The top kids will figure it out at home and survive, or their parents will separate them through brute-force - a few borderline high achievers will probably be brought down too.
In the poorer neighborhoods around me the school performance is actually shameful and the kids are being subjected to the worst of their peers constantly, destroying their ability to succeed. Many will (hopefully) drop out/get arrested by late middle/early high school but the damage they do to their entire neighborhood along the way is massive.
Cohorting the highs and the well-behaved middle would probably work out just fine but unless you can eliminate the disruptive and the very-behind it's just the worst of all worlds.
Do you find it controversial to have different tracks for Geometry, Swim, and Orchestra students? These are different types of students.
Arithmetic, Algebra, and Statistics are different classes should be taught separately.
"Please wake up and take your headphones off and answer my question even though you don't plan on passing any of your classes" and History are different classes with different types of students. Trying to conduct both classes at the same time using the same teacher is folly. You will be forced to abandon one or both of the students. You might argue that you should abandon them it turns every other day so they both get something out of the class. But that means they will each get half or less out of the class than they would have if you separated the classes. It is highly likely that you will frustrate both students to the point of impediment.
"Having multiple parallel tracks for different types of students is controversial."
It shouldn't be. The research overwhelming says its a good practice. The type of people who say this type of thing are the exact type of ideologically motivated people who are destroying school systems in blue districts. Ironically this group both hates private schools and creates the environment that pushes parents to pay for private schools. I've personally seen the bad consequences of schools that do this and I know people who aren't here anymore because of it. So please, for the love of god, stop talking about topics you know nothing about.
It's not that easy. The status quo is that having multiple tracks creates terrible incentives among teachers: no teacher wants to teach the "bad" track, so they get stuck with the worst teachers and the worst educational outcomes over time. (This occurs not just because many remedial students have very real behavioral issues that deter the best teachers from engaging with them, but also notably because the progressive education establishment is dismissive of teaching methods that actually help those students learn effectively, and doesn't train general-ed educators in the use of such methods.)
> The research overwhelming says its a good practice.
I disagree. From what I've read, the data is more mixed. More tracking optimizes for the top achievers. Less tracking optimizes for the lower and middle. Less tracking probably maximizes average metrics.
> The type of people who say this type of thing are the exact type of ideologically motivated people who are destroying school systems in blue districts. Ironically this group both hates private schools and creates the environment that pushes parents to pay for private schools. I've personally seen the bad consequences of schools that do this and I know people who aren't here anymore because of it.
> So please, for the love of god, stop talking about topics you know nothing about.
Let's be civil. There is no need to attack me personally. You're welcome to disagree with my ideas, share your opinion, and present support. I think a reasonable person can find support for both opinions.
Dario is constantly fearmongering to generate press, gaslighting, and contradicting himself. Mythos is the most recent example of that. It was never too powerful to release, that was a lie to generate publicity and fear, and an excuse because they didn't have the compute to serve it. People were finding the same bugs and exploits using GPT5.4, GPT5.5, and lesser models. Now all of a sudden, they do have the compute, and now they're saying that Mythos is releasing in the coming weeks.
Anthropic is constantly caught up in ethical scandals too. They pump the web full of advertising bots. They steal peoples tokens, punish you for disabling telemetry, blacklist people they don't like. They had remote code execution vulns in their product for nearly a year and secretly buried that fact, no disclosures at all. Here are some of them https://clawd.rip
They're the least generous with open-source. The most closed off. The most likely to punish you for doing something they disagree with. Whenever OpenAI has issues they reset Codex's rate limits, they've done this every month that I can remember, and sometimes several weeks in a month. When's the last time Anthropic has done that for the many service issues they have had? Never. Not once.
Anthropic also never reply to peoples complaints or issues on GH issues, meanwhile the Codex team is very responsive and they actually care about customers user experience.
There's more, but you get the point. And yes, obviously not all of this is about Dario himself, but he drives the culture at the company.
Yes I'm surprised most of the "anthropic stans" don't realize this.
It's not like OpenAI is a particular fan of open-source models either, but the way I see it to OpenAI it's a purely calculated pragmatic business decision. They won't release weights for any good models since it'd impact revenue, and they view other open models as competition. But otherwise they're not ideological about it. If there was some really good reason to, they would (and they have, gpt-oss probably as a fig leaf). Sure some of the characterizations of "sama" aren't particularly flattering, but at the same time I think the common thread that he views everything as "just ruthless business" is ultimately beneficial, since rational and pragmatic can be modeled and understood.
Anthropic's founding philosophy is built on the premise that only they should control AI because of its danger, only they can be the right stewards, and that open-source models are an existential risk. Oh and the fact that it's Chinese open-source models rather than western models that are "winning" must be keeping them up at night.
While prescription drug marketing to consumers is an issue in the US, I think the actual problem in this situation is people Googling their issue then coming to the doctor with the conclusion of their investigation instead of letting the doctor do the investigation themselves.
i think this is large part due to the horrific healthcare system we have here in the US. I have personally witnessed family struggle to get help from doctors because they don't interact with a patient's health outside of immediate action items like filling a prescription, writing a summary, charting, writing a referral, etc. They spend 0 time looking into what could actually be wrong with them outside of their immediate knowledge/guess. I would like to think this is due to the shortage of doctors we have here (self inflicted) and the high demands we place on them. It really just sucks to be told to take some med, wait 3 months, and then have to communicate for them between doctors while filling out the same form 3 times.
Sometimes patients will also have an expired prescription from a different doctor, and they want a top-up. Good doctors check. Just because some other doctor prescribed some drug 3 months ago doesn't mean its actually the right choice, or the right choice now.
Its not just a US thing. I have a few GP friends here in Australia. They complain about it too.
> Near zero interest rates + COVID remote work + PPP loans = Booming economy
One more factor to add to the equation...when everyone went remote during COVID, all brick-and-mortar businesses had to quickly move to conducting their businesses online driving demand for SWEs.
reply