Exams or applications? Elite Taiwanese students’ perceptions and navigation of college admissions systems
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studies often portray elite students as self-interested adolescents who justify educational selection systems that favor them. However, this perspective neglects critiques of the college admissions system on the part of the elite, who often have no other option than to support it as fulfilling the ideals of fairness. This study examines academic elite students’ perceptions of college admissions systems when they are given choices as to which system to use. Data for this study come from surveys, interviews, and participant observation in Taiwan, where students are selected through two systems: exam-based selections and application-based selections. The findings show that students in elite high schools perceive whichever system that benefits them to be the fairest. By narrowly defining fairness as family influence on admission outcomes, these students downplay the institutional advantages they enjoy and present themselves as deserving candidates. Using the example of elite Taiwanese students, this study highlights that elites justify privilege based on self-interest and strategically navigate admissions systems to accrue advantages.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it