Going to College

Cathy O’Neil Says in her book Weapons of Math Destruction, she says that the Algorithms had a negative impact on admissions for the students. This is because the schools made it harder to get in to make their ranking go up. Again these rankings were not based off of the best data that you could choose to rank schools. They used SAT scores and that’s not very beneficial for what you could be studying at these colleges. Because how you accept students is part of the algorithm that they used, This made schools raise the minimum SAT score needed to get into these colleges. Just making it a more selective process than it already has been. These schools are all making these changes to get higher on the list of “top schools”. However one that I thought could have been a good one is student/ teacher ratios. This one will at least benefit the student by getting smaller class rooms, They have a better chance of receiving the help that the student needs to actually succeed. I am not aware of how much this impacted the algorithm. Like how much weight each part holds. So the only beneficial one to the student probably doesn’t hold the same weight as others that could have a negative impact. They also use jobs after school. But there are a few problems with this. You need to classify what “jobs” are considered good jobs after college, some students get jobs that have nothing to do with their majors. On top of not getting jobs related to the degree they received, They also count some part time jobs like working in a coffee shop. This is ridiculous because what does that have to do with college success? The answer is nothing.