I understand the sentiment. It feels like a waste of effort to study for exams you do not enjoy, do not make you more capable, and do not improve your self-image. I did not experience much of this, as the American standardized exams are significantly easier than the Chinese ones and cannot measure what the elite institutions are looking for, which forces a more holistic approach. It also causes other awful downstream effects, so I do not recommend imitating America here.
I also agree that a lottery system is better than assigning ranks and filtering for the top. There are many goals the university could have in mind when selecting candidates, which they abstract into some process that ranks candidates. If this process is well-known, such as with entrance exams, candidates can spend an inordinate amount of time optimizing for this proxy instead of aligning closer to the university’s ideal student. An opaque process is worse, as part of the optimization process becomes uncovering the black box, which in America comes in the form of $20k “college admissions consultants”. The solution is to make a transparent process for scoring or ranking candidates, but then to randomize the selection.
The author’s proposal for the lottery is wrong. Most admissions, especially at elite institutions, follow a Pareto distribution. Most admissions, especially at elite institutions, are somewhat random, due to application reviewers being human and needing to eat lunch. Thus, almost everyone admitted to elite institutions won a thresholded lottery. These universities like to humble their students during orientation week by saying, “we could have chosen the next 1,000 students instead of you,” which is somewhat false, but true for the bottom 900 of them. It may be different in China (or Taiwan), and this could be a quirk of the American system. However, the American system has a similar educational arms race, so a thresholded lottery is not the solution.
The solution is an exponential lottery. There are diminishing returns to optimizing a score function. To give an example with language learning, it takes about as long to understand 50% of the words on the screen as the next 25%. Scores are logarithmic with effort. If
Pr[selection]∝exp(score/temperature)
candidates would be indifferent between the cost of studying and its expected reward. Only those that have a different, better reward in mind will continue studying, naturally killing the arms race. I believe the right temperature choice should keep the free energy constant across admissions cycles, but I am not sure.
I understand the sentiment. It feels like a waste of effort to study for exams you do not enjoy, do not make you more capable, and do not improve your self-image. I did not experience much of this, as the American standardized exams are significantly easier than the Chinese ones and cannot measure what the elite institutions are looking for, which forces a more holistic approach. It also causes other awful downstream effects, so I do not recommend imitating America here.
I also agree that a lottery system is better than assigning ranks and filtering for the top. There are many goals the university could have in mind when selecting candidates, which they abstract into some process that ranks candidates. If this process is well-known, such as with entrance exams, candidates can spend an inordinate amount of time optimizing for this proxy instead of aligning closer to the university’s ideal student. An opaque process is worse, as part of the optimization process becomes uncovering the black box, which in America comes in the form of $20k “college admissions consultants”. The solution is to make a transparent process for scoring or ranking candidates, but then to randomize the selection.
The author’s proposal for the lottery is wrong. Most admissions, especially at elite institutions, follow a Pareto distribution. Most admissions, especially at elite institutions, are somewhat random, due to application reviewers being human and needing to eat lunch. Thus, almost everyone admitted to elite institutions won a thresholded lottery. These universities like to humble their students during orientation week by saying, “we could have chosen the next 1,000 students instead of you,” which is somewhat false, but true for the bottom 900 of them. It may be different in China (or Taiwan), and this could be a quirk of the American system. However, the American system has a similar educational arms race, so a thresholded lottery is not the solution.
The solution is an exponential lottery. There are diminishing returns to optimizing a score function. To give an example with language learning, it takes about as long to understand 50% of the words on the screen as the next 25%. Scores are logarithmic with effort. If
Pr[selection]∝exp(score/temperature)candidates would be indifferent between the cost of studying and its expected reward. Only those that have a different, better reward in mind will continue studying, naturally killing the arms race. I believe the right temperature choice should keep the free energy constant across admissions cycles, but I am not sure.