There nothing stupid about controlling for circumstances.
As an analogy, let’s say you want to build a fun race car that you can take to the track. You go out and look at a bunch of used cars and you want to be qualitative so you measure out their 0-60 times.
You could just say “the car with the best time wins” and take the fastest one you tested. Or you could consider context like “this one had bald tires tha could easily be upgraded” or “we tested this one going uphill”.
The goal is to find the car that can be turned into the fastest and not which has the best numbers right now.
> And all this will do is cause the best students to hide in shit schools to game the system
No it won’t, because they would get a horrible base for their education and be 1-2 years behind their “super strong school” peers. (I did not make up these numbers; it’s easy to have more than 1 year of college credit from Advanced Placement classes in the US system.)
Acting like college is the beginning of education is foolish. Imagine struggling with learning how to learn challenging material while taking classes with students who already did that three years ago.
As an analogy, let’s say you want to build a fun race car that you can take to the track. You go out and look at a bunch of used cars and you want to be qualitative so you measure out their 0-60 times.
You could just say “the car with the best time wins” and take the fastest one you tested. Or you could consider context like “this one had bald tires tha could easily be upgraded” or “we tested this one going uphill”.
The goal is to find the car that can be turned into the fastest and not which has the best numbers right now.