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U of Texas will stop using controversial algorithm to evaluate Ph.D. applicants

insidehighered.com · 1,492 words · saved by 1 readers

In 2013, the University of Texas at Austin’s computer science department began using a machine-learning system called GRADE to help make decisions about who gets into its Ph.D. program -- and who doesn’t. This year, the department abandoned it. Before the announcement, which the department released in the form of a tweet reply, few had even heard of the program. Now, its critics -- concerned about diversity, equity and fairness in admissions -- say it should never have been used in the first place. “Humans code these systems. Humans are encoding their own biases into these algorithms,” said Yasmeen Musthafa, a Ph.D. student in plasma physics at the University of California, Irvine, who rang alarm bells about the system on Twitter. “What would UT Austin CS department have looked like without GRADE? We’ll never know.” GRADE (which stands for GRaduate ADmissions Evaluator) was created by a UT faculty member and UT graduate student in computer science, originally to help the graduate admis

Wikimedia Commons/Daderot In 2013, the University of Texas at Austin ’s computer science department began using a machine-learning system called GRADE to help make decisions about who gets into its Ph.D. program -- and who doesn’t. This year, the department abandoned it. Before the announcement, which the department released in the form of a tweet reply , few had even heard of the program. Now, its critics -- concerned about diversity, equity and fairness in admissions -- say it should never have been used in the first place. “Humans code these systems. Humans are encoding their own biases int

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