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Tuesday, March 19, 2024

LA Times Calls on UC to Bring Back Testing

With the Regents meeting at UCLA tomorrow, the LA Times runs an editorial clearly aimed at them:

The SAT and ACT are making a small but important comeback after the tests were widely dropped as a requirement for college applications during the pandemic. Most schools went test-optional, meaning students could submit scores if they wanted but not doing so wouldn’t count against them. The University of California won’t consider test scores at all.

...The tests were criticized long before the pandemic as giving an unfair boost to more affluent students who could afford tutoring. And it’s true that scores are closely correlated with family income. But the pause in testing gave colleges a chance to study the issue more closely. They found that SAT scores were extremely effective at predicting whether students would succeed in college.

No one should be surprised. The University of California convened a panel several years ago to study the issue at length and it reached the same conclusion. The standardized tests were more equitable than grades, the panel said, because grade inflation is more pervasive at affluent schools. Yet UC refuses to consider test scores, after bowing to pressure from critics. We hope that the trend toward reinstating the tests in admissions makes UC leaders rethink this position...

The whole debate has sadly ignored the bigger factors perpetuating the uneven playing field of college admissions. Yes, rich students can receive SAT tutoring, and it helps, though only a little. The most rigorous study of the topic found that tutoring could raise scores by about 20 points.

Meanwhile, some aspects of college admission tilt the field in favor of wealthier students more than test scores do. For example, teachers at more affluent schools have more time for writing letters of recommendation for college applications than teachers at low-income schools...

Essays can be coached, heavily edited or even written by college consultants for a fee. A 2021 study at Stanford University found that the quality of essay content was closely correlated with family income among University of California applicants. Yet UC kept the essays and got rid of the tests.

There is nothing inherently evil about the SAT or ACT. It all depends on how they’re used. They can act as a reality check — a student who didn’t get great grades might show a lot of potential in the test scores, and vice versa. And, as UC did before it scrapped the tests, colleges should consider the scores in context, such as, is this the best score in a generally low-scoring high school? A score might reflect the education at that school, not the student’s aptitude for college work...

Full editorial at https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-03-17/mit-brown-georgetown-universities-bring-back-sat-requirement.

False Accusations

The Daily Cal carries a story about apparently false reports of harassment filed using UC-Berkeley and other email addresses against ASUC officials. Exactly, what the motive is and who is doing it is unclear:

Hundreds of nonconsensually submitted misconduct and harassment reports have been filed against some ASUC officials using random students’ UC Berkeley emails. The reports — which are being submitted to campus offices, UCPD and other universities — accuse current ASUC officials of abusive conduct and harassment in the workplace, according to Ariana Quintana. Her email address has been used by unknown individual(s) to file two to three reports a day for the past week.

“ASUC is supposed to be student government. It's not supposed to ruin your life, and the emails I'm getting are people trying to ruin people's lives,” Quintana, who is also a finance associate in the ASUC Office of the Executive Vice President, said...

Full story at https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/asuc/this-is-going-too-far-hundreds-of-nonconsensually-filed-misconduct-reports-made-against-asuc-officials/article_7ecdc492-df9b-11ee-898a-7f94b7b9e05e.html.

Monday, March 18, 2024

I agree

 As blog readers will know, yours truly sometimes agrees or disagrees or partially agrees with positions taken by the Council of UC Faculty Associations (which can be seen if you read the blog with a PC) towards upper right. In any case, I agree with the Council's position on supporting the BOARS recommendations regarding high school math. Specifically, current algebra requirements should not be replaced by "data science" courses that do not provide equivalent material. 

While yours truly would have written a different position statement, the bottom line would have been the same. Of course, not all college students desire to go into STEM fields, but an inadequate high school background could deprive them of that choice.

Toxic Econ - Part 2

We have in the past posted stories about the website EJMR https://www.econjobrumors.com/ (now XJMR) which caters to academic economists, originally to help job candidates, but has limited moderation. Bloomberg is the latest source of information about the website in a very lengthy article. Some excerpts: 

...Started in 2008 as a website to help Ph.D. students and professors navigate academia’s opaque job market, it soon became a forum for everything from ivory tower gossip to chatter about food or personal technology. (Recent, less inflammatory topics: “Canadian school flyouts,” “Headline CPI increases to 3.2%” and “Pokemon is morally evil.”)

Over the years, the site has also developed a reputation as a swamp of misogyny and racism, with a strict moderation policy but lax enforcement that’s earned it comparisons to 4Chan, the ugly online forum. (Recent, more inflammatory topics on EJMR: “Would you ever hire a hot grad student as a postdoc?,” “Why do feminists, critical theorists, postcolonial writers, etc know so little” and “Does tenure allow me to refuse teaching black people?” Those are just the printable ones.)

By the mid-2010s, the site had hundreds of thousands of visitors a month...

The culture war over EJMR has had implications for the profession, too. For decades, advocates for equality in economics have argued that the lack of women and minorities results in blinkered, narrow-minded policy (for example, not prioritizing research on child care or on the effects of incarceration). Economics as a field can’t address real-world problems, they say, unless it first looks like the real world. Over the years, EJMR had become a symbol of that imbalance as well as a bastion of resistance to change. Its targets have included Melissa Kearney, a University of Maryland economics professor who’s won recognition for her research on families and inequality, and Claudia Sahm, a former senior economist at the Federal Reserve who in a 2020 blogpost titled “Economics Is a Disgrace” denounced the profession as sexist, racist and elitist.

EJMR’s influence has grown despite attempts to shut it down or create sanitized alternatives. In some cases, anonymous attacks that started on the site eventually broke through into mainstream discourse. In December 2023, conservative activists published what they said was evidence that Harvard University’s president, Claudine Gay, had plagiarized her dissertation, which added to an already-raging firestorm over the school’s response to the war in Gaza and led to her resignation. An anonymous post on EJMR had made a similar claim months before. (Gay has said she’s never misrepresented her findings or took credit for others’ research.)...

[The article then goes on to describe how a subset of supposedly anonymous posts were traced to specific institutions.]
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Posts on Economics Job Market Rumors
Share of all posts from US universities or research institutions on the site

Sources: Ederer, Goldsmith-Pinkham, Jensen; U.S. News & World Report
Share is the percentage of posts accounted for by the school or institution among all posts originating from IP addresses associated with US universities or research institutions. U.S. News economics graduate school rankings are for 2023-24.
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Our earlier post on EJMR-XMJR:
https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/07/toxic-econ.html. It features a chart based on the percent of posts from various universities were classified as "toxic." The website has expanded to math, poli sci, and sociology, but seems less comprehensive and active in those fields. A still earlier post from 2017: https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2017/08/bias-in-econ.html.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Police Pancakes

Found on Facebook:

Pancakes with Police is back! We're inviting the UCLA community over for breakfast on Tuesday, April 16, from 8-11 a.m. Join us for free pancakes and coffee while you meet our officers and enjoy interactive displays, photo opportunities, and station tours. BruinCards are required for entry by participants and their guests.

601 Westwood Plaza.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/events/900154428463363/.

The Latest on the Harvard Data Manipulation Affair - Part 2

Blog readers may have a hard time recalling the data manipulation affair at Harvard, considering all the other things that have gone on their since it began.* But here is the latest from the Wall St. Journal:

A Harvard University probe into prominent researcher Francesca Gino found that her work contained manipulated data and recommended that she be fired, according to a voluminous court filing that offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at research misconduct investigations.

It is a key document at the center of a continuing legal fight involving Gino, a behavioral scientist who in August sued the university and a trio of data bloggers for $25 million.

The case has captivated researchers and the public alike as Gino, known for her research into the reasons people lie and cheat, has defended herself against allegations that her work contains falsified data. 

The investigative report had remained secret until this week, when the judge in the case granted Harvard’s request to file the document, with some personal details redacted, as an exhibit. The investigative committee that produced the nearly 1,300-page document included three Harvard Business School professors tapped by HBS dean Srikant Datar to examine accusations about Gino’s work.
 
They concluded after a monthslong probe conducted in 2022 and 2023 that Gino “engaged in multiple instances of research misconduct” in the four papers they examined. They recommended that the university audit Gino’s other experimental work, request retractions of three of the papers (the fourth had already been retracted at the time they reviewed it), and place Gino on unpaid leave while taking steps to terminate her employment. “The Investigation Committee believes that the severity of the research misconduct that Professor Gino has committed calls for appropriately severe institutional action,” the report states...

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Saturday, March 16, 2024

Not sure what Chrissy is Cooking up for me...

If you get an email from Chrissy, you might not want to find out what she is cooking up for you.