ajwinn

I like to think I wasn't "judging" anyone, but I know what you mean. Because we used both GPA and test scores, yes, you almost certainly would have been a "deny" with a 36 ACT and a 1.97 GPA.

If I had seen your file, it would have been the talk of the day. "Can you believe this file!" I probably would have talked to the Dean, maybe called you and given you some advice. That advice would have been something like:

"Listen. Don't tell anyone I said this, but, this school is more expensive than it needs to be. Heck, who says you need college at all? But if you really want to go here, you've got two options. 1. See if you can get into the local community college for a semester or two and then transfer your credits - we won't care about your HS grades anymore. 2. AND REALLY DON'T TELL YOUR PARENTS/TEACHERS I SAID THIS You could, in theory... just get your GED. That's a loop hole around us caring about your GPA."

You might be an outlier!

But it sounds like you did not graduate high school or apply to college. If that’s correct, I would not have the context to know since the baseline of inclusion into my experience is people who graduate high school in some form - GED included, AND who provide test scores.

I’m really sorry to hear about your stepdad, wincy. I hope things are ok for you now.

I worked in the underrepresented student office, so I was keenly aware/curious about that possibility when I began. However, after reviewing thousands of applications, my experience, to my surprise, was that GPA to SAT/ACT scores remained highly correlated regardless of race. If memory serves (and it’s been awhile) the outliers who were more likely to have higher SAT/ACT than their GPA normally suggested, tended to come from predominantly non-white schools. I’ve seen so many reports to the contrary that this surprised me to no end, but that’s what I observed.

Excellent question. I’m of two minds here. As a high school student, I too struggled to get great test scores. I took the SAT four times, which finally resulted in a score that could get me scholarships.

Did I become smarter? - I sincerely doubt it.

Did I become less likely to fail out of college? …Seems unlikely, but I don’t know.

As an admissions rep, I understood that high scores, whether SAT or GPA, are certainly both proxies for a prediction: If I admit this student, are they going to fail out?

Unknown: It actually might be the case that students who get private tutoring are less likely to fail out because their parents can financially endure them struggling to repeat failed courses. I’d be interested to see a study on that.

From a state school’s Admissions perspective, where the unit test resolves to admit/deny, there is nothing particularly outlying about your scores from what I recall.

I see 31 and think, “admit”. I see 3.18, I think “probably admit”. I check your math scores (which is where a lot of people trip up), and see you got mostly Bs- heck, you’re on Hacker Mews, probably As, and I think, “admit”. Now I do the normalizing math and yeah, Admit. Congratulations!

Great question - the short answer is that our Admissions office did not attempt to normalize non-mathematical factors. At first, this surprised me. How often do we as students somehow get the impression that extracurriculars, magnet, Montessori, AP, IB, student council, <more trophies/achievements of your choice/> are somehow positively associated with college admissions?

From a non-Admissions perspective, accounting for these non-empirical differences seems wise and fair. However, they introduce subjectivity into the equation, which increases the likelihood of a human decision maker being unfair.

So what normalization did we do? What would you do? Knowing that no equation is perfect, you must start with a goal and find the least-bad equation.

The goal: Only admit students with a high likelihood of not failing out.

Why: Failing out has consequences for most US students who take out large loans and must repay immediately if they fail out.

The realization: High schools already provide a proxy for degrees of past failure - letter grades.

Assumption: Assume that high schools use their letter grading system as a method of normalizing and displaying how hard their courses are. A B+ should represent a certain level of achievement regardless of school. The school has the autonomy to use any letter system they choose.

Solution: Assign a point system to letter grades and calculate an average. Use only classes correlated to success at your university. This is the normalized GPA.

Surprise #1 - If your high school thinks a tougher-than-average letter grading system (eg a 93% is a B+) somehow makes students more attractive to the majority of the 7000 US colleges, they are wrong. And probably causing students to lose out on scholarships.

Surprise #2 - If you believe this system is unfair, you can aim the blame at technology. Applications to most universities (until recently I’m told) increase every year as digital applications make it easy to apply to 10 schools instead of 3. To handle the increase, colleges can hire 3x more admissions people, or find ways to speed up the process.

Surprise #3 - Colleges always want more applications than ever before. By dropping SAT/ACT as criteria, it removes a point of friction in the customer experience, and removes a step in the calculation effort. (If they could drop GPA and keep SAT/ACT, this would the ideal situation from a metric and efficiency perspective, but Marketing and the public would throw a fit.)

I worked in Admissions at a large state school from 2005-2007. Our method for determining admissibility reminded me of the heat map chart in this article - ie GPA on one axis, SAT/ACT score on the another axis, trace your finger along both paths to see if the applicant was in or out.

I probably reviewed 20-30 applications a day. If high school transcripts were universally formatted, decisions could have been instantaneous but alas, we live in the real world and some human-in-the-loop normalizing had to be done over-and-over.

With all that reviewing, patterns emerged, namely that SAT and ACT scores strongly correlate to GPA. Now, I’m the kind of person that roots for the genius to overcome his grades and emerge a genius on the SAT/ACT. But in two years, it probably happened only twice. Before calculating a normalized GPA, I could look at the test scores and predict “admit” or “deny”.

While the author is correct to say “the irrelevance of test scores is greatly exaggerated”, in my experience, whether or not something is irrelevant has very little to do with what universities do.

I’d recommend only using test scores. Or, only go with GPAs. Only test scores is more efficient. Only GPAs looks better on press releases.

I'm still messing with it, so that link probably won't work anymore. :) But this one will (until I get the bug and mess with it even more, haha): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8948326/podcast/2016-08-...

This is probably a dumb question, but how do I get this to work in OS X? Bash says it cannot execute binary file despite chmod +x /path/to/mailer - thanks.

Just two serious reactions!? Come on people! We want to see a flame war apocalypse and we'll never get there at this rate! Surely there must be some deep seeded angst-ridden phrases you've been saving up for a rainy day! Now's the time to use them! :) I'm thinking of phrases like "the nerve!" and maybe "freedom isn't free. live free, die hard (TM)" and "this is no laughing matter", etc.

Also, NSA, if you're listening (and, let's face it, that's your thing) - I'm going to need a cell room with WiFi - is that ok?

The advantage and disadvantage of this approach: you have to already know Unix commands. Inevitably all programmers learn Unix commands - but probably a rough approach for beginners. Although, I'm guessing this advice isn't really aimed at beginners anyway.

What do you think the company in Atlanta will use it for? I mean, who are the users that need things printed in plastic? Architects maybe? People who want custom desktop toys? I have a 3d printer on the way and I'm trying to think of how I could make money off of it.

Just out of curiosity - enclosures for what? Hard drives or something? Did you also sell the shelving, chess sets, heart gears, spool rollers (for spools of filament?), and desktop ornaments? I've got a Printrbot on the way, and I'm interested how people are using these things to make money.

I've wondered the same thing. If you bought one - what sorts of things do you think people would be willing to pay you to print?

Ah, yes. That makes sense then. Because I don't have a formal background in computer science, I was just reading it as "puts". When you read it, do you think to yourself "put string"?

I like to think I'm commanding the computer to do something, so for me it would be preferable to see commands in the English command form - put, instead of puts. But, thanks for the "puts" background - that makes more sense now!

I think you're right that the feeling others in society are some sort of "monster" is really key. I heard a podcast of This American Life that interviewed Mr. Rogers, and I remember this moment where he's asking a man why they don't talk with their neighbors, and he has this way of making them open up like they're a kid. And the guy responded something like, "I'm afraid they won't BE like me. Like a monster or something."

And that's where our modern monsters come from (and maybe always have): these unspoken, emotional, real-life fears. Like the fear of 'Others', I would suggest that the fear of finding a job is probably weightier than the fear of Zombies, and if they DO start walking... it will be a relief to stop worrying about losing/finding a job. :)

Good thoughts. Something else I've been wondering about - why do you think the reset always brings us to Pre-Industrial Revolution (lack of infrastructure) - as opposed, to say, the Dark Ages (lack of scientific method)? Specifically, the apocalypse never seems to impact survivor knowledge, just the speed at which they can rebuild?

Had to happen eventually, right?

I love that they only raised $118k and sold for $35M. These guys are my heroes.

Raise $115K, sell for $35M? That's my favorite story of the day.

Congrats! Wufoo is awesome, and you deserve the acquisition.

With the new engineering resources, I'd love to see some awesome features like:

1. 1,000 field entries per form instead of 100 (http://wufoo.com/forums/discussion/3020/workaround-for-100-f...)

2. A "Form Building API" so we can programmaticaly create forms. (http://wufoo.com/docs/api/v2/#makeforms)

"Anyone can be a biz dev executive because it’s not a real job. It’s kind of like sales but you usually don’t have any kind of quota. You just work on 'deals.' "

Haha. Love this comment. Mostly true - I know, because I work in biz dev and have worked with a few of the biggest companies in the Valley. Looking forward to eventually having an actual job, but have to admit it's a good gig for now.

It's about time. Goodbye, Symbian.

Best video. Ever.

Of course, DropBox was originally www.getdropbox.com, so they could make the transition too if they can afford a matching domain.