I appreciate your willingness to engage and your detailed responses. I understand where you're coming from, and that you've seen how the sausage is made.
> In person tutoring worked better and by a lot, but it all helped.
Are money and other resources only helpful for getting a good test score? They don't matter at all for the factors that improve one's chances of admission? For example, going to a good high school district, participation in certain sports, hobbies, or access to internship, volunteer, or research opportunities?
My argument is simply: by making it about the test, you remove all the other factors where money could potentially have an influence. The rich students will get tutoring no matter what. But they can't gain any other advantages over the poor students.
> In that way, one could just set minimum criteria to be accepted, which includes GPA, tests scores, research, jobs, whatever, and then randomly select from that group.
That wouldn't be a terrible approach either. You are correct it would be unsatisfying.
> GPA and where they went to undergrad...were [both] hard metrics and full of bias.
I would argue they weren't "hard" at all. Undergrad is already gated by "squishy" criteria. Normalizing GPAs across universities (and countries, in the case of international applicants) is tricky and imprecise.
> In person tutoring worked better and by a lot, but it all helped.
Are money and other resources only helpful for getting a good test score? They don't matter at all for the factors that improve one's chances of admission? For example, going to a good high school district, participation in certain sports, hobbies, or access to internship, volunteer, or research opportunities?
My argument is simply: by making it about the test, you remove all the other factors where money could potentially have an influence. The rich students will get tutoring no matter what. But they can't gain any other advantages over the poor students.
> In that way, one could just set minimum criteria to be accepted, which includes GPA, tests scores, research, jobs, whatever, and then randomly select from that group.
That wouldn't be a terrible approach either. You are correct it would be unsatisfying.
> GPA and where they went to undergrad...were [both] hard metrics and full of bias.
I would argue they weren't "hard" at all. Undergrad is already gated by "squishy" criteria. Normalizing GPAs across universities (and countries, in the case of international applicants) is tricky and imprecise.