American system feels more unfair when you're given points for extracurriculars like playing instruments or sports, like that's not going to hold poorer children even more (also how's that related to academic performance at all? Unis should not care about unrelated things)
US universities do care about extracurriculars and GPA and other things because they aren’t optimizing for raw academic performance, they’re optimizing for various other things like an interesting student body (that attracts donors, professors, and future students), real-world networks, and so on.
I probably agree with that, but also acknowledge there's no good way to make that completely objective.
Even worse, rich kids have far more means to engage in extracurriculars than poor kids.
I would expect wealthy to always be well represented in test results because they are better at the skills being tested.
The US also has the best universities in the world, by and large, (even if the regular education system is lacking), so I am pretty skeptical of the idea that raw test scores as the sole criterion would lead to better outcomes.
Why glaze China so much when you can be impressed by the west instead.
All these zoomers grow up on a China propaganda app.
The SAT or ACT are technically the only ones "required" for college, but most of the elite schools expect AP or IB (which tends to give the students a year or two of calculus, a fourth year of foreign language, and some deeper dives into other sciences or social studies).
But, because it's split across so many tests, there's no single "score poorly and your life is ruined" exam.
Back home in Spain we follow the same style of a single national-level exam that you mentioned though.
That's not true.
That’s what happens in the US with the SAT/ACT.
I think you’d need free, universal SAT tutoring available to everyone in order to be more meritocratic.
Someone rich spending a lot of money to obtain tutoring doesn't necessarily make their score higher, and there's also diminishing returns. Someone poor who do not afford private tutoring can also receive good score due to their natural talent and/or hard work in self-teaching/practicing.
> universal SAT tutoring available to everyone in order to be more meritocratic.
and that is now called school isnt it? Everybody gets at least some minimal standard of schooling.
The fact is, meritocratic is meant to describe the opposite of nepotistic (or sometimes hereditary/aristocratic). Under a nepotistic system, no matter what you do, you cannot succeed without becoming the in-group somehow.
If these are outliers it isn't really meritocratic. If there 100 desired spots that are allocated by the exam, and 1000 students, and wealth (tutors/extra time etc) moves the needle enough to make a meaningful difference, it's basically nepotistic just the in-group is who's parents can afford it. Depending on where you are this can compound each generation.
Merit is about demonstrated ability, not how much effort, time, or money was put into getting the ability.
As long as you convert money into ability and ability into results, that's merit. Nepotism is when you convert money directly into results, buying a score.
Poor people typically have none of those extra resources. Some poor people with extreme talent will be able to overcome the challenges of relative poverty, but others with equal talent won't.
It's extremely hard to create a true meritocratic system, and Gaokao certainly isn't it.
Starting in 2020 when I was a new professor, I was contacted by a company that works with Chinese families to tutor their students directly. I would be paid $400 an hour to teach them online remotely.
Originally I thought it was because of COVID lockdowns and that may be part of it.
But the opportunities have continued since then. I stopped doing it as my career has become more involved but I still get solicitations from time to time, so it must be because of what you say.
Colleges in the US that removed standardized testing from their applications, in the pursuit of trying to be more meritocratic, found that fewer students from underrepresented backgrounds got in, not more. In hindsight (and to some in foresight) this makes sense because now schools leaned more heavily on grades and extracurriculars, both of which can be gamed by wealthy families far more easily than a standardized test.
That’s just like with sports: anyone can learn how to train himself, and anyone can improve with training, but in the end, some people will end up faster, and some people will end up slower.
But of course, in addition to that, there is always also a genetic component, as in sports.
The road to hell is built on good intentions.
This site is turning into Reddit
Your country has very black-and-white politics. Anything <entity I don't like> does / says is bad.
There may be some good things about the Gaokao but having spoken to some (Chinese) teachers in China, it's also a limiting factor for education prior to university in a lot of ways, limiting the freedom of teachers and driving up risk aversion in parents.
(It's also effectively graded on a regional curve, which might be a good thing but isn't meritocratic in the straightforward way you suggest.)
However I've never met anyone from these countries who have a high opinion of their systems. I'm from Taiwan and I do think standardized exams cause massive 'overfitting' issue (borrowed from machine learning). The exam is not as brutal as Korean one though.
YMMV.
Ultimately, the only "fair" outcome is an abundance of opportunity. The vast majority of people are worth something to their community and society. And even then, as long as there's enough food and shelter to go around, no one should have to justify their mere existence.
I wonder how much of this is less about attraction and more about social skills. Granted, higher attraction affords more opportunity to develop those skills, but I have met plenty of charming people who were not conventionally attractive.
Attractive people have advantage even without the social skills. We have all observed it. Don't cope.
I think this is largely a distraction from the direct effect. For any level of social skill, good-looking people at that level are perceived much more positively than others at the same level.
The question of the causal effect between physical attractiveness and social skill is interesting, though. There are plausible stories both ways, imo: your version, and the contrary one saying that pretty people coast on their looks and the rest of us have to try harder to be interesting or appealing in other ways.
(It's also hard to fully separate the skills from the looks, because behaviours that work for a good-looking person might backfire terribly for someone at the other end of the scale. Do we say those two people are equally socially skilled, or the pretty person is more skilled because they chose a strategy that works in their context and the other person didn't?)
if that mismatch increased more for women than men, the estimated “beauty premium” for women could fall even without any change in teachers’ discriminatory behavior. The paper just assumes the attractiveness stayed constant during the period, but seems to have had no data to verify this.
In the past they would stare in pure awe at my guaranteed impeccable looks.
Now they ask me damned question to calculate the speed of fluids in different pipes through the Bernoulli's principle. And ChatGPT only helps so much here ...
Also, I think there must be a pretty big difference between female and male, because even if a male student is attract, if I am a male teacher and interested in females, would I wish to prioritize on looks, if the underlying grading is instead done on e. g. testing knowledge and skills? Why would looks even factor in here? Such a system would be flawed from the get go.
The company went on to grow quite successfully until it was acquired 6 years later. I feel that zoom and video conferencing allows some of that "appearance" factor back in. Based on my experience though, if I had my way, job interviews would be exclusively audio only.
For research studies, we slowly revert to on premise physical interviews at work. If we want the ChatGPT answers, we don’t need another human in the loop.
Some will of course argue that you losing weight will also make you more confident, and thus you become more approachable. I think there's a lot of bias against fat people, against "unattractive" people, etc.
This also shows in the classroom, work, etc.
Of course, actually being conventionally attractive will come with its own perks. People will go out of their way to help you, and to support you. Over time this could very well boost your ego to also become more confident and decisive.
The phd student who conducted it trawled through students' Facebook pages and took their profile photos (without consent). Then he had a jury of 74 teenagers rate the photos on a scale from 1 to 10. Then he tried to correlate beauty with grades for distance or in-class education. De-anonymizing the data was trivial so everyone could pretty much see how the jury had rated each profile photo. And research data is public.
It was a seriously weak study with questionable methodology and a too low effect-size to draw any conclusions anyway. So no reason to get alarmed if you are ugly. :)
Mistletoe•1h ago
jdthedisciple•1h ago
CodeyWhizzBang•1h ago
Why is beauty a productivity-enhancing attribute for males in non-quantitative subjects? Generally, it is difficult to disentangle the reasons behind why beauty improves productivity (Hamermesh and Parker, 2005). However, relative to other students, attractive men are more successful in peer influence, and are more persistent, a personality trait positively linked to academic outcomes (Dion and Stein, 1978, Alan et al., 2019). In addition, attractive individuals are more socially skilled, have more open social networks, and are more popular vis-à-vis physically unattractive peers (Feingold, 1992). Importantly, possession of these traits is significantly linked to creativity (Soda et al., 2021). In our setting, the tasks faced by students in non-quantitative subjects, for instance in marketing and supply chain management, are likely to be seen as more ”creative”, and significantly contrast the more traditional book-reading and problem-solving in mathematics and physics courses, the latter presumably perceived as more monotonous. Together with the large use of group assignments in non-quantitative courses, these theoretical results imply that socially skilled individuals are likely to have a comparative advantage in non-quantitative subjects.
cubefox•51m ago
atwrk•43m ago
fn-mote•40m ago
> attractive individuals are more socially skilled, have more open social networks
I'd say you need different evidence if you want to grind that axe.
nathan_compton•39m ago
Yes, crickets.
dude250711•36m ago
One gender still has to approach, the other gender still waits to be approached.
tokai•23m ago
threethirtytwo•23m ago
Women rely on beauty for success much more than men. It is not just in terms of "grades". Even in engineering jobs you can see it, a beautiful woman can get armies of male engineers to "help" her. I literally saw one female engineer get 2 male engineers to spend 3 weeks on a project for her just by virtue of the fact she's a woman.
And she's not even aware of this. Like she thinks people are just "nice". But men are not conditioned to ask other men for this kind of help and we can't expect 2 idiots to spend weeks on a "favor" for someone else.
We live in a world that tries to deny this reality with "gender equality" but these cultural ideas fly in the face of millions of years of biological evolution.
Now that being said. We very much expect that the grades of women should go down when not in person to a degree MUCH MUCH more than men. That is completely is expected. The question now is, why was there even a correlation of better grades and beauty among men in the first place? Why did that correlation exist when men do not rely on beauty? That is the anomaly here.
I think part of the answer is clear. Beautiful men do not rely on beauty for success. They never did hence why when you removed it as a factor the success rate did not change. What's going on I suspect is even more controversial: Beauty correlates with intelligence. This is not an insane notion. We already know that height correlates with intelligence, but it is likely beauty does too.
Edit: I looked it up, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
And it looks like my guess was true. This is indeed what's going on.
mschuster91•13m ago
Oh us men also have a beauty industry - or, I should rather say, an attractiveness industry. We just get sold different, and arguably far more pricier, things... luxury watches and cars, tailor-made suits and shoes, grooming, gym memberships.
And similar to how women got anorexia through unhealthy beauty standards for decades, that comes back to bite us men this time with "looksmaxxers" [1]...
> Clavicular attributes his looks to, among other things, taking testosterone from the age of 14 and smashing his jawbone with a hammer to supposedly reshape his lower face - neither of which is recommended by health professionals.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx28z4zypkno