A good friend of mine ran into this exact problem with the same requirement, couldn’t get the waiver, has no other remaining requirements, and will probably never graduate.
count as strong, direct counterevidence for this:
The final test is real, so if you built up real human capital, and learned how to learn things and remembered your lessons and persevere when the going gets tough, and all that, you win out. If you didn’t do that stuff, you fail at the end when you can’t hide it any longer. Or, for ability bias, only at the end do we learn who had the right stuff all along; same principle. If the final test is sufficiently ‘more real’ than the others, that bonus at the end makes perfect sense.
Unless you’re suggesting that part of the ability being measured, is entangled with the ability to get a waiver?
My own take was that there are a couple separate issues:
1) Is 7/8ths of schooling as proportionately strong signal as 8/8ths?
2) Is language requirements a signal anyone should care about?
My guess is Zvi thinks the answer to #2 is “no” (given that Zvi has a lot of bad things to say about school in the first place), but that the existence of the language requirement is a proof-of-concept that #1 is unlikely to be true. In the case of language, an employer shouldn’t care about that aspect of schooling one way or another, but in the case of biology class if you’re hiring a biologist, you should.
Shouldn’t this:
count as strong, direct counterevidence for this:
Unless you’re suggesting that part of the ability being measured, is entangled with the ability to get a waiver?
My own take was that there are a couple separate issues:
1) Is 7/8ths of schooling as proportionately strong signal as 8/8ths?
2) Is language requirements a signal anyone should care about?
My guess is Zvi thinks the answer to #2 is “no” (given that Zvi has a lot of bad things to say about school in the first place), but that the existence of the language requirement is a proof-of-concept that #1 is unlikely to be true. In the case of language, an employer shouldn’t care about that aspect of schooling one way or another, but in the case of biology class if you’re hiring a biologist, you should.