I think instead of trying to lower the bar for low income students, we should work on solving the actual problems causing them to perform more poorly on the SAT (or adjust the SAT so it is more representative of their actual skills). If students are accepted with a lower SAT score because of their background, they are likely going to struggle in University, since they have lower scores than the rest of their class, seems like this would be just pushing the problem further down the road, rather than actually addressing it. From what I have seen, the problems for low income students start in grade school, if you are behind academically before you even enter high school, it's going to be hard to catch up.
On the other hand though it might be essentially impossible to close the gap between low income and high income students. Your parents have a huge impact on your learning, and if your parents are poor and have to work all of the time, they aren't going to be as available to help you learn.
Regardless, I think it is pretty impossible to calculate an adversity score that is actually accurate (how do you compare the challenges faced by a child in a single parent family with one who grew up in a poor neighbourhood?), and it seems pretty wrong to me to have a hidden score based on things you likely can't control influece admissions, but it would lead to some interesting research if it was actually used.
I believe all the problems you have mentioned can be easily solved. Permit adversity scores to weigh in favour of course grades and graduate honors. Legislation can be passed to ensure adversity scores count towards corporate and government employment to prevent any bumps further down the road.
Furthermore, adversity scores should also be counted towards recruitment in elite military units, selection for senior military leadership and all significant promotions. The adversity you faced in childhood should give one guaranteed opportunity throughout life. This progressive path ensures harmonious diversity and a perfect union of our states. Adversity is Excellence! Merit is Privilege!
Perfect solution! Based on what you said you should run for president to solve all the social issues for us, so far we only have 23 progressive candidates.
I worry SAT-adversity-score is not enough and we should go all the way, starting from free lunch at Kindergarten all the way to guaranteed college, job and income. To get there more efficiently we could just redistribute all the fortune right away. I actually see Communism ahead of us now, gosh Marx has been so right!
My mockery reflects the progression of reality in other nations where such policies have been implemented. Your anger and threat of "worse insults" matter little to history.
At each stage, the devout proponents of equality will only choose to draw the line further. When students of the 'adversity' quota are unable to get good grades, their grades will be inflated. When they are unable to get jobs, a push will be made for implementing adversity/equality quota in jobs.
Case study: India. In India, every community fights to be included in the backward communities category because the benefits are so frighteningly high. Politicians are elected on the basis that they promise to categorise their communities as backward to improve the opportunities for their children. Other politicians threaten to remove some communities from backward status. Being backward gains you a fantastic advantage towards college admissions, reservation in jobs, and several other free benefits. (including lowered prices, etc). Who will not want to leverage this ?
The US may very well develop the same problem as a natural evolution of this policy with corresponding natural devolution of merit. Where do you draw the final line on adversity ?
If you think this is unrealistic, you are severely mistaken my friend. This simply happens over time. It always starts with "Good Intentions".
It's much easier to say that the only thing about it that's clear is that the poster is sarcastically enthusiastic about the hypothetical end of some slippery slope. How that conjecture relates to the actual matter at hand, or what the poster really believes about it is left untold.
The post a level above it in the thread on the other hand makes a reasoned case for why this might not be a good idea, rooted in the actual matter and addressing it directly. With that in mind, it's even harder to imagine what lenkite thought would add to the discussion.
Actually saying that disingenuous mockery doesn't help apparently added to the discussion, though, in that lenkite then responded with a clearly reasoned argument.
Reductio ad absurdum is useful. Sounds like you agree. Idk why label it a slippery slope, it's pretty cut and dry. SAT scores def do determine who gets to work on your heart.
Maybe, but in this case I don't think that it was for the reasons that I've previously stated.
> Sounds like you agree.
What makes it sound like I agree? The only opinions I've divulged are on the quality of the post as an entry to the debate.
> Idk why label it a slippery slope, it's pretty cut and dry.
Please offer an opinion on whether its use was legitimate and based on a reasonably likely chain of events, but don't tell me that this wasn't using a slippery slope as a rhetorical device. It's not cut and dry, it's hyperbolic and vague, as bitter sarcasm tends to be.
> SAT scores def do determine who gets to work on your heart.
... and if that argument had been voiced I might have agreed or disagreed, but it wasn't.
> It's useful independent of whether the comment is sarcastically enthusiastic, hyperbolic, vague or bitter.
You can say that, but until you've actually offered an argument that supports your conclusion I have no reason to reconsider my view. There's no question IMO that a sentiment can be useful while being sarcastic, hyperbolic, vague or bitter. I just don't believe that this one was, for the reasons I've previously stated.
> Your actual objection seems to be that it's hypothetical when in fact that's the point of the technique.
No, my objection is that it is hypothetical without reasoning for how the actual matter at hand could form a basis for the hypothesis. To say that because SAT scores are adjusted for adversity, "adversity scores should also be counted towards recruitment in elite military units, selection for senior military leadership and all significant promotions" begs the question: why? The post doesn't answer that question.
> Why claim a simpler non-sarcastic example on how honest test scores matter was somehow not made?
I haven't. Plenty of users have written simpler, non-sarcastic examples on how honest test scores matter. I acknowledged this already, and I'm not sure why you'd think otherwise.
It's a slippery slope because the logic used to rationalize special treatment is that the outcome isn't the same for different people. Whatever measure or system they come up with, it won't change that, and they'll demand yet another concession.
In the progressive orthodoxy, merely observing that some distribution isn't independent of gender or ethnicity is necessary and sufficient proof of discrimination, and sufficient justification for a power grab too.
It's pretty simple. "we should work on solving the actual problems causing them to perform more poorly on the SAT" doesn't even resemble "guaranteed opportunity throughout life"
Wouldn't you want to address actual problems causing them to perform more poorly on the SAT instead of pretending they don't exist? The alternative, of lying to someone, is obviously worse. Do you somehow think this hypothetical person wants to be lied to? Or maybe they want to pretend they did something they did not do?
I don't assume that, nor would I want to be treated like that.
100%. To truly level the playing field requires far earlier intervention (of the sort we see through LeBron James' I Promise initiative), and is entirely beyond the ability of the College Board or even the university system as a whole. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
> (or adjust the SAT so it is more representative of their actual skills).
The problem, as you point out just one sentence later, is that adversity materially diminishes students' abilities. Either we can test them on their actual skills, which correlate strongly with socioeconomic status, or we can give disadvantaged kids preferential treatment at the last minute. You can't have both.
I don't know how to reconcile the belief that everyone deserves a fair shot with the reality that there are only so many open seats at America's premier universities (or anywhere else advancement and prosperity reside, for that matter). If you truly believe in equal opportunity, you must concede that the rich and poor are equally deserving of the chance to go to Harvard, and artificially closing the gates on some of the rich in favor of some of the poor is a crude facsimile of justice.
Why fixate on Harvard? It can only ever serve a few thousand kids. There are hundreds of universities and colleges that can provide a good education and more than a fair shot. The problem isn't a poor kid who graduates from University of Wisconsin or University of Colorado instead of Harvard or Stanford, it is the kid who didn't even graduate high school, can't really read, and isn't prepared to show up at work in the morning, let alone do the job.
I meant “Harvard” as a metonym for desirable/high-status universities. Like it or not, when an employer has to sift through 100 applications for a single vacancy, a Harvard graduate is far more likely to still be in the running by the time they’ve narrowed it down to five.
This matters less the longer you’ve been out of college, but by then, the effect will have made its mark on your resume already anyway.
What do you consider high status? Top 10? Top 20? A poor kid coming out of University fo Wisconsin (ranked ~50) is not going to look as good as a Harvard grad, but so what? That's my point, only a few thousand kids are ever going to get to be from Harvard. That kid from Wisconsin is going to do great, and have plenty of opportunity. It does a huge disservice to imply that he is lesser or lost out because he didn't make it to Harvard. Same for the kid who goes to the local community college. He will obviously have less opportunity than if he went to opportunity, but that doesn't mean he won't have a lot of opportunity, and enough to live a good life.
Okay, sure. Let's include University of Wisconsin and not include the local community college. University of Wisconsin received north of 42,000 applications for the freshman class of 2019,[0] almost exactly the same number that Harvard did.[1] Even a prestigious-but-small liberal arts college like Reed will have an order of magnitude fewer applications; the local community college, another order of magnitude fewer still.
What I am saying is that we try to protect children from the profound unfairness of the real world, but by the time they're getting ready to go to college, they are competing with each other on a national scale for scarce resources (i.e., a 5% shot at a seat at Harvard, or a 15% shot at a seat at UW if you prefer). I'm not fixating on Harvard specifically, but it is symbolic of this competition for scarce resources and the compounding effects of early advantages and opportunity.
The reason why the elites fixate on Harvard is because they’re completely out of touch with the 99% of folks that don’t apply to or don’t get into elite institutions. It’s pure condescension on their part.
I agree. Also, there is no policy ever that will make admission to Harvard completely equitable, so as long as you hold up Harvard as the example, it justifies any intervention you want to try. Because Harvard.
> To truly level the playing field requires far earlier intervention
And what happens when intervention in preschool also doesn't produce equal outcomes? Is there a point at which we accept that certain groups are just going to do better in a way that we can't eliminate?
Actively pushing and monitoring children's education has probably a lot more to do with academic success than free time. I am not aware that the asian minority has much more money and free time than anyone else.
At the end of the day some children will belong to Culture X which is more compatible with academic achievement that Culture Y. My best friend growing up was a Korean kid whose parents almost tortured him and his siblings to excel in school. His pain and sacrifice deserve to count for something.
Or perhaps we can look into alternate systems that don't reward excruciating studying and working systems. Perhaps standardized testing like the SAT is fundamentally flawed and we need to figure out better assessment systems.
> South Korea has the 10th highest suicide rate in the world.
Note that this is also inflated due to an abnormally high elderly suicide rate due to some systemic factors.
> Although lower than the rate for the elderly, grade school and college students in Korea have a higher than average suicide rate.
One example alternative would be de-emphasizing the utmost need for a degree, and emphasizing trades as an alternative. Not everyone should need a degree, and from an academia standpoint it makes having a college degree relatively worthless and slowly turns universities into degree mills.
What sort of fair system would not reward very hard work and study with very high rewards? If Koreans culturally want a life more tipped towards academic achievement, who are we non-Koreans to tell them they're wrong or that their achievements should be invalidated in the name of equal outcomes.
Nobody intrinsically wants it. Nobody wants to go to school and then study until 7,9,11pm. Nobody wants to go to 3-6 private academies after school, every day, in order to study very hard to pass the 수능 college entrance exam. Nobody wants to study to an excruciating degree in order to have a chance to get into one of the top 3 universities, in order to have a good chance of being hired by the top 재벌[0] corporations like Samsung or as a civil servant, in order to work 11, 12 hour days for the rest of their adult lives. This is what over-competition (and over-emphasis of a college degree) does.
Think about being a parent and having children; do you honestly, sincerely think your kids would be better off literally studying the entire day, and during most of their childhood? The answer is no. Studying is important to an extent, but so is enjoying childhood and doing other things than studying all the time.
Korea only recently reduced the maximum legal working hours per week from 68 to 52. Korea also has an above average suicide rates in the 10s, 20s, and 30s (and much higher elderly suicide rate, since there are few programs for them). The outcome of the 수능 exam is so important for determining one's future that planes don't fly at that time, and workers head to work at a later hour than usual.
What's happening in Korea currently is a hyper rat race that looms over one's life from a young age. Nobody wants that, but it's inevitable due to the difficulties of finding a job in this economy.
I am not discussing whether or not work should equal reward. I'm saying there should be no need at all for this ridiculous amount of studying. The current system is fundamentally broken.
I think we are maybe discussing slightly different things: you're talking about Koreans in Korea, whereas I had in mind Asians and more specifically Koreans in the western world where they and their children frequently excel relative to native people who work less hard. This is a discussion about the SAT and not the 수능 exam after all.
User intertextuality proposed that maybe the SAT should be adjusted so it "doesn't reward excruciating studying and working systems". My point is that firstly, many people find studying to a deadline to be excruciating so let's dispense with the dramatic adjectives, and secondly, what kind of replacement for the SAT scheme would not reward hard work and study? Would it even be an exam at all? In any conceivable testing regime people who study and work harder to succeed will, on average, do better. That seems fundamental. Without changing it so much it's not an exam anymore, Koreans will seem to have a cultural advantage over other less hard-working cultures and why should they not? In America they are not forced to work crazy hours, by law or the economy or culture or anything else.
It's entirely possible for the SAT to remain exactly as it is, in a way that rewards study, without implying a Korea-style deathmarch cultural ethic.
There's a difference in normal studying for a deadline (which just sucks) versus studying all day, every day, to the extent that Korean-Koreans do. I have no idea about American-Koreans. Both countries have big standardized tests (SAT, 수능) but the SAT is nowhere near as important as the 수능.
I do think standardized testing is fundamentally broken, but for mass-grading of people there's no other real alternative I suppose. However, I don't think the SAT's job should also be trying to account for systemic issues in America and life.
Instead, college admission boards should look at background as well as SAT scores. I believe they do this already, but SAT scores should be even less emphasized. Beyond a very minimum level I don't think it's a really good indicator of a person at all.
After school programs, ensuring all schools have equal funding, getting better at determining which kids aren't succeeding, and spending more time with them to give them the one on one support they need. I mean it's a very hard problem, and maybe it's unsolvable, but I think we have a lot more things we can try before giving up and trying to put Band-Aids on the problem.
I think if class sizes are sufficiently small though, at least in grade school, a teacher should know every student, and be able to identify those who aren't getting the support they need at home. If they are a good teacher, they can act accordingly, and maybe work with the parents to help the child succeed.
"Bad school" is not the one without a freshly refurbished swimming pool. It's the one with poor discipline, parents who don't care and a principal who has no idea how to work with kids.
Those are all great ideas, but the disadvantaged children in the schools this mechanism is trying to help probably don't go to schools that offer those benefits.
Well yes...the person you're replying to is saying that those schools should get enough funding (and whatever else) so that they can offer those benefits.
Or perhaps we should just even out the funding. Crudely redistributing wealth is a historically very poor way to solve inequality (assuming it is a problem), since it doesn't address the root cause. Investing in education, in particular trades, is an arguably better way. They are practical, have the most bang-for-buck value, and are not time-consuming or demanding.
>Not everyone can afford high quality tutoring, and high quality tutoring clearly has an impact on test scores.
There are a number of organizations offering free online tutoring, such as https://learntobe.org. https://weteachscience.org used to provide free STEM tutoring to students in disadvantaged schools, but they recently shut down...I think it was difficult getting stable funding.
There is no technical reason why high quality tutoring couldn't be offered to all these students. It's simply a matter of arranging the funding. I think a workable non-profit business model would be to arrange long-term funding from some government organization. If anyone is interested in setting up a business like this, feel free to email me and I can provide contacts and technology (I work with online tutoring companies, including the two listed above).
> "The rating will not affect students’ test scores, and will be reported only to college admissions officials as part of a larger package of data on each test taker."
I could be wrong, but my interpretation here is that there's a lot more data on students the CollegeBoard is reporting to colleges that students taking the test don't see or know about.
This also seems unfair to assess students on hidden metrics. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if the CollegeBoard were to (or currently does) partner with Equifax to see parents' credit histories. There's an entire analytics farm on students.
You’re so, so close but maybe having not lived it you can’t quite get there. The difference is not a difference of ability. It’s situation. Did you have to work full time all the way through school? I did. Did you have no support whatsoever from your parents and have to manage to pay rent, hold down a job, and take classes full time? My wife did it. She was on her own at the age of 17, no support. Put herself through school. It has nothing to do with tilting test scores. What people need is material support and frankly, for most working class kids, the only thing that will reliably solve their problems is free education and free room and board while they’re in school. That’s what leveling the field would look like. And that’s not even starting to consider students with small children.
I may not have been clear. It does not apply only to poor people. All children, from rich and poor parents would have to be raised in the same institutions.
This seems likely to end up being ugly. For example wealthy people could buy or rent addresses in "adverse" neighborhoods, or charter schools might locate offices there, in order to attempt to improve scores on this metric. At the same time this won't be able to identify many adverse life circumstances like abusive parents, cancer, etc.
What it does do is outsource components of admissions decisions the colleges may want to distance themselves from and wrap it up in an opaque package so that they're not actually considering anything legally risky in their admissions decisions. This is potentially valuable to institutions that want to have affirmative action style admissions without risking the ire of state legislators.
I already talked to my wife about this. I would retire, we would divorce, and I would rent a shitty apartment in East Palo Alto all the while
living in our house.
If they think they can boil my kids into a single number without bothering to find the context of who my kids are then I will game it to as much as possible.
I don’t know why my family should be punished because my wife and I worked our asses off to get ahead. It’s an insult to hard working people across the spectrum.
I understand the feeling, but how about if we rephrase it from another viewpoint:
I don’t know why I should be punished because my parents didn’t succeed financially. I work hard in highschool but don’t have extra private tutoring or parents who can help me with calculus homework. I’m hard working and bright but how can I compete with kids from Saratoga High School where everyone’s parents went to MIT/Penn and work at Apple/Google[1]? I read library books and watch Khan Academy, but no one in my family ever went to college. Why does my parents’ achievement have a fundamental impact on my opportunities?
Somehow we have to aim for equality of opportunity. It’s difficult to achieve but can’t we agree on this as a goal? Opportunity should not be inherited. My kids are as good as yours, as the next person’s, independent of how hard we worked.
[1] hyperbole. Saratoga parents from UCLA/CMU who work at Netflix/NVIDIA I’m talking about you too.
I went to Stanford with full financial aid (apparently says something about my financials). I didn’t have to work to support the family, but I didn’t have private tutoring either, and my parents didn’t help me with my homework. I didn’t feel punished at all compared to kids who have everything in the world at their disposal; in fact, knowledge in my brain is about the last thing in the world that’s affected by my family’s socioeconomic status, and standardized testing, with all its problems, is about the fairest thing in this unfair society. Now tell me why you want to ruin the fairest thing by giving kids who have equal access to resources as I did an edge just because their parents earn a few grands less. Oh, while we’re at it, apparently I have above-average intelligence, which largely came from my parents’ DNA; should I be punished for that too?
There are so many online resources and free tutors out their nowadays for high school students, and it is only getting better.
We can't control your upbringing or the opportunities your parents give you completely though. People think the material opportunities given by parents is not fair, but think that the emotional or social opportunities of parents is. If my parents were emotionally abusive, but I grew up rich, should they rig the SAT to show that? How would they even measure that?
In a perfect world outcomes would only be determined by genetics, and the environmental factors would not play into life at all. We don't live in that world, and it would be impossible to replicate it. There are too many variables to be able to measure who deserves what beyond a merit based system.
Look at it another way, would it be fair for a high school/ college sport to artificially raise and lower rankings based on upbringing or environment? Should players with significant coaching be lowered in the rankings, and poor players be raised? I don't think so.
> Why does my parents’ achievement have a fundamental impact on my opportunities?
Because they are your parents and they will have an impact on your life whether you like it or not, right down from the genes you inherit to the kind of people you hang out with. So yes there achievement will have an impact on your opportunities.
What you want can only happen when parents are no longer associated with their children in any way and all children are raised by the State so that everyone can be provided "equal opportunities" and even then the type of genes you inherit will impact your opportunities because although social inequality has been removed, biological inequalities can never be removed.
So no your children or not equal to anybody else's children and yes what you do in life will have an impact on your children's life that's how life works.
> You want the kids of rich people to win the next generation unquestioned?
I am not the person you were replying to, but no.
However, the person who wins should be the more qualified person based on merit not based on some standard of suffering. Just because you had a harder environment does not mean you are more qualified than someone with an easier environment.
I agree completely. But there should be some heterogeneity available in the routes to success. Not all bright kids are ready and trained for the SATs. I was not and luckily I found another route in 1990s England. I’m trying to keep some alternate routes open.
Probably the best/ most ubiquitous method we have right now.
It would be trivial to improve our tests of merit compared to the almost impossible task of testing how well a student would do free from environmental factors.
> However, the person who wins should be the more qualified person based on merit
This has never been the case and will never be the case as long as some people are rich and other are poor. A "standard of suffering" tries to show that. Maybe it's a bad idea, but the current system is extremely bad, so people who dismiss this better come up with a better alternative.
This concept equal opportunities by separating children from their parents is something that Plato explored quite a lot with the concept of the guardians, with some rather absurd suggestions which was likely given as both a commentary on the problem and criticism of the aristocratic society. If I remember right this is a central theme in Utopia.
Philip K dick also had a short story called Progeny with a similar theme, but here exploring it from the perspective of psychology.
>What you want can only happen when parents are no longer associated with their children in any way and all children are raised by the State so that everyone can be provided "equal opportunities" and even then the type of genes you inherit will impact your opportunities because although social inequality has been removed, biological inequalities can never be removed.
This is one of the weariest types of hyperbolic strawmanning typically employed in discussions of unequal backgrounds, opportunities, etc.
Literally nobody wishes for this imaginary future you're presenting. Not the comment you're responding to, likely not even the staunchest of activists against social injustice.
The question is, do we see children with potential not being able to utilize it because of happenstance, as a problem? Is it fair that a child from a better-off family is more likely to enter better academic institutions regardless of their merit? Should we not help disadvantaged kids?
Of course you can throw your arms up into the air and say "life isn't fair", and hold people responsible for the situation they were born into - but right now we're having this discussion, and we can make decisions and change these things. What if there's a better way?
(PS: Standardized Adveristy Scores don't exactly sound like the better way though.)
> Is it fair that a child from a better-off family is more likely to enter better academic institutions regardless of their merit?
At the point of admission, the merits of our two imaginary college kids are not same, even if they started out "the same". The current system, that only looks at objective test scores, is actually blind to anything but merit.
You seem to be making the same strawman mistake you described: No one claims that rich kids can buy their way into elite schools, but rather that they can buy better education along the way.
By the time you hit the SAT it's too late. If you aren't qualified enough to do well on the SAT then, you are going to struggle and hold classmates back more-so than the peer you displaced would have.
Offer free additional after-school programs, etc in high school to solve the problem. You don't make a slow runner faster by moving the finish line closer for him/her.
We should maintain some real alternate paths for kids for whom this timing is bad.
I grew up on on welfare and left school at 15. Was smart but troubled. Worked dumb jobs for a while. Benefitted from enlightened admissions policy and eventually graduated from $VERYGOODSCHOOL. I worked hard and did just fine. My kids are privileged and my late career is fun and rewarding. I want to do all I can to pass on these opportunities to the next generation of kids like me.
I disagree on this as a goal.
Some things take generations: my great-grandparents had a good standing back in pre-war Europe. Then the war came and my grandparents escaped to South America - not great. My parents got up to high school level education. I got a B.Sc. Maybe my kid will go farther.
The underlying problem is that we're trying to ration something that shouldn't be this scarce.
If everybody wants to go to Harvard then why can't they expand the school and accept more students?
Because the same brand of metrics trolls who are screwing this up have also screwed up in the school rankings by making schools rank better if they reject more applicants, so now the schools optimize for that.
> If everybody wants to go to Harvard then why can't they expand the school
Well, you can only physically expand a single school so far, but I get what you mean. I think the bigger problem is this concept of “elite universities” and this sort of credential signaling that seems to matter so much. Honestly, I can’t tell how much it really does matter. I went to Valdosta State University (never heard of it? Nope, neither has anybody else), but have worked with Harvard and MIT grads who respected my opinion and treated me as an equal. My 15 year old son, who I’ve never really pushed too hard to worry about getting into a “good” college worries about it anyway, because everybody he knows is worrying about it. He says things like, “If I don’t do well on this test, I’m going to end up going to Texas Tech” and I think, “Hell, Texas Tech is better than where I went to college, and I’m doing fine… should I tell him not to worry so much or encourage him to shoot for the top-ranked colleges?”
This is a good point. I think the their intent here is fine, but it seems like the wrong way to go about opening up more opportunities to people who start with somewhat of a disadvantage.
In any case, I don't think you should have to graduate from a prestigious college to find work that helps you live a good life. Maybe this involves making a place like Harvard accept more students, or maybe it involves improving the quality and our perceptions of middle and lower-tier universities. I don't know.
Keep in mind that given 1000 admission slots and 1000 very smart poor/disadvantaged kids and 1000 average rich kids most institutions will never admit all the 1000 poor/disadvantaged kids (though the absolute smartest and absolute richest will probably have a leg up).
Colleges are gatekeeper institutions that want to identify the worst off person that's still likely to have high success so that they can talk about how great their programs and commitment to diversity are while still mostly admitting wealthy folks and raking in money for their foundations and endowments. And so that they can point to those successes as proof that they're serving a social interest by anecdote, regardless of what the actual numbers on social mobility say.
It's really at level very removed from what you bring up. It's not that you're being punished because your parents are not part of the oligarch class. Rather, the oligarch class wants higher education to be a system that primarily benefits themselves while making it palatable by marketing the whole thing as a societal benefit.
Some colleges have become attuned to the fact that people caught on to this, which is why some elite institutions advertise that they're "need blind," a phrase which is more marketing than reality. They know that they can admit many middle class people and have them turn down "affordable" packages that are actually very draining for financially responsible families. And they know that they can calibrate their admissions to get exactly the amount and quality of disadvantaged students they want to mix with their legacy and elite admits, which will leave the majority of admits upper class and elite ("need blind" might as well be a synonym for "oligarchs are meritorious").
This is the game because elites have succeeded in twisting the system to benefit them. And the game now is to convince the public at large is that they should keep a system created for the oligarchy in place while putting lipstick on it.
If you want to shatter this state of affairs, the #1 thing you can do is start treating elite institutions and their graduates with the social stigma they deserve.
It's also worth keeping in mind that a significant reason this happens is because of admissions decisions revolving around institutional interests rather than societal interests, which means putting admit decisions in the hands of a body that does not represent the institution(s) in question could also be another route towards addressing what you bring up.
Life is not fair, by the time you are six the number of distinct words you have heard varies drastically depending on your parents socio-economic status and education. The answer should be to extend the SAT with an IQ test, those are robust to environmental factors as twin studies have shown. Maybe you can couple that with a subject specific aptitude test. But also there is largely no equality of opportunity, because you never had a chance to change your genetics in the first place.
> But also there is largely no equality of opportunity, because you never had a chance to change your genetics in the first place.
We are probably hundreds of years away from solving all other factors besides genetics, which have an influence on SAT (or whatever equivalent other countries have), so this doesn't seem like a huge problem right now.
We can talk about genetics again when we've fixed everything else.
Truth is, college admissions from Saratoga is a blood bath with so many over qualified, over worked, over stressed kids. If you are the oddball kid in a worse school and worse neighborhood and you're motivated enough to watch Khan Academy you are going stand out and do great, whether you end up at SJSU or Stanford.
Choosing to get a fake divorce so that you can game the system as much as possible isn't punishment; it's probably fraud. You could also choose to relax and let your children enjoy all the other benefits of a great upbringing, and accept that "the children of hardworking parents should be more likely to be admitted" isn't a design goal of the admissions system.
The federally & state funded public Universities that will fall over each other to employ adversity scores as a pillar of their academic life, on the other hand... One can attempt to outsource responsibility from a legalistic perspective, but from a moral perspective one can't escape it.
That seems like quite a stretch to rationalize why a private entity making decisions about its internal processes is actually government mandated overreach.
I recently heard of a high earning family that bought a rental/investment property in EPA, then when their kid got into the Tinsley program (school busing from EPA to Palo Alto/Menlo/Portola/Woodside) they decided to move there full time. Their kid now goes to a fancy school and they live in a development in EPA near Facebook HQ. So to all the naysayers, people are already doing crazy stuff like this to help their kids.
School zoning is a pretty insanely high-stakes thing, and other parents will absolutely rat them out and provide evidence. Parents have been jailed for using an address they don't live at - https://abcnews.go.com/US/ohio-mom-jailed-sending-kids-schoo...
Sure, that's when you're publicly defrauding a school, and other parents know that you don't really live there. It would be much easier to game this system since you are only reporting your address to the College Board, and no other students/parents would have reason to know that you're not reporting valid information.
> I already talked to my wife about this. I would retire, we would divorce, and I would rent a shitty apartment in East Palo Alto all the while living in our house.
And that's why thet won't reveal the detailed factors, the time windows over which they are evaluated, and their weighting.
> If they think they can boil my kids into a single number without bothering to find the context of who my kids are then I will game it to as much as possible.
They don't. In fact, that seems to be exactly the problem this addresses, since with this the SAT would no longer be boiling kids into a single number, and it would be incorporating more context than the status quo.
"The rating will not affect students’ test scores, and will be reported only to college admissions officials as part of a larger package of data on each test taker."
Do what you want, but it doesn't seem like this will be any different from writing about adversity in an application essay. Schools can choose how much they want to weigh the score.
I’ve worked my ass off for nearly 30 years, as has my wife. We are both smart and very hard working and it paid off. My roots are middle class at best. My parents are immigrants and were extremely poor as children but they also worked hard and went from poverty to middle class.
I’m teaching my children to work hard and be good people and contribute to this world.
How pray tell am I benefiting from “pre-rigging”? I’ve made solid decisions throughout my life and sacrificed to be where I am today.
Now I’m being told that my children will be at a disadvantage for college because my wife and I worked hard our entire careers and succeeded. That’s hogwash. Absolute hogwash and I’m furious.
They will NOT be at a disadvantage for college; they will still be at an advantage, because of all the opportunities you have given them. They may be at a slightly smaller advantage than now; is that terrible?
Again, i think this is more like the inner city kid who gets a 700 on the SAT math section vs a privileged kid who gets an 800. They aren't letting in talent less hacks just cause they are poor.
While I agree that people that had less than ideal childhoods should be given more opportunities to succeed, it shouldn’t be at the expense of those who worked their ass off for their kids, only to see their hard work taken away by government laws.
My own parents and grandparents came from shitty roots. Russia, concentration camp, Brazil, then to the US. My parents worked hard and I had better opportunities because of that.
What if government took that reward away from them? Well, surprise surprise, it did (just in another country in another era).
_you_ have a choice too: either to take the hand that’s dealt you and move forward, or complain about how others had it better because of their parents, or their own actions.
I’ve had a lot of ups and downs in my life due to circumstances as well as choices I made. I don’t blame other people for what happened to me (but I will blame government services being complete shit, especially towards veterans).
This isn’t a perfect world, so don’t complain what others get that you don’t have. Work towards making the world better instead, without destroying what others have worked hard for in the meantime.
People who work hard deserve the fruits of their labor, regardless of their economic status. I have no problems with economically disadvantaged hard working people getting into great colleges, I have problems with equally hardworking people being disadvantaged because their parents are successful.
But the richer children are inherently privileged, yet you think providing privilege to poorer children is immoral. Why is one acceptable but the other is not?
Wouldn’t you agree that two people who achieve the same score on the test may not have worked equally hard? If someone scored the same as your child, except they didn’t have good security, good quality schools, parents that could help them, etc, I would say that they in fact worked much harder than your children.
And by the logic of “those who worked harder deserve it more”, well I think you see where this is going.
If anything this adversity score IS making things more fair because it’s providing light to the extra challenges someone might have had and thus who indeed worked harder at it.
We don’t know if they worked harder or not. It’s almost impossible to determine if the reason for any particular success is good teachers, hard work, or genetics.
If this score was unrealistically perfect and able to accurately account for every possible detail, maybe. If instead it just does a cheap job of assuming anyone with a certain set of data points is at a major disadvantage, nope.
The test claims to be measuring a students ability to learn in the first place, not just their current knowledge, so why not aim to make that more accurate instead of bypassing it?
The subject area is the SAT, a test, which is imperfect like all tests, with research which indicates that it's actually problematic for such a diverse country like the USA. So a test like the SAT, which boils down to a single number. Yes that's the subject.
And now they're making the results 2 numbers. The test and some, well known summary of information about the student.
And THIS, THIS is the bridge too far?
Honestly, do you even hear yourself? What should a third party think about your words? Perhaps you could help me and provide a back story of how you've been in opposition to the SAT for a long time, and how this just reinforces a flawed test.
But nope, it sure does seem like you're focusing in on how this test might provide opportunities to black and brown people.
But I'm sure that's not that, because it's hackernews, and we are so polite to each other and reasonable.
So, tell me again why the SAT is good, but SAT + adversity score is bad?
Sure, and every non-privileged person who gets in also hurts others who are in the same situation, since they have taken up a spot. The difference is in this case there is an actual policy which is actively punishing people for being in a perceived state of privilege.
You can also give resources to those who aren't in privilege so they are able to succeed academically, and don't need to have their admission average artificially lowered.
Giving resources is also a zero-sum game. When you're giving more resources to those that aren't privileged, you are in effect denying those same resources for those that are.
For example, school admissions. We can provide more funding for underperforming schools, but that is also less funding going towards better performing schools. At a certain point you will have to accept that to help the poor it will mean cutting off certain benefits for more well-off. Then the discussion becomes around how much resources should be shifted around.
No. If I can afford to provide my own resources, I’m okay with this. Just like I’m okay paying for social security but not receiving any when I retire. Those that have more resources can afford to take less than those that don’t have enough resources themselves.
What I’m not okay with is adjusting scores and denying opportunity because of economic class warfare.
Those that have more resources have historically spent significant amounts of those resources to ensure that they pay in as little of them to anyone else as possible.
>Punishing those in privilege is how you achieve equality.
Tall poppy syndrome. Destroying things does not create things. You can drop a nuclear bomb on silicon valley and punish lots of privilege. It's not going to achieve any notion of equality.
So if you make $125k/yr and I make $75k/yr, equality can only exist if you give me 25k? Should America all just average our salaries and call it a day?
Do you donate your extra money to charity or do you save some for your future? If you have the privilege of being able to save some money for your future, shame on you! There are people starving and you’re amassing your wealth?
Wow punishing those in privilege creates equality. The logic “progressive” american politics is pursuing is truly scary and broken.
Hating the rich is hate.
If you really loved the poor you would think how to help them lift themselves up. Holding down the top both doesn’t work and is deeply unethical.
College board should provide free tutoring and review classes based of their adversity score instead.
I can’t image this scheme
won’t be challenged in courts. Especially the keeping secret the score, imagine if your credit score was kept secret and this will effect their lives more than credit score.
As I have said in other comments, next we need an Unattractiveness Score as we know physical traits have high correlation and causation to success and wealth, clearly a privilege and creating inequality.
Tax credits for the ugly. Mandatory minor face disfigurement for the overly beautiful or handsome.
Very scary developments. America is under true threat to its future with this politics.
I can kinda see why you say that, my best guess is if I delete references to politics and progressive, american etc, then you might see it as less an issue.
The comment I was replying to was pretty absurd wording of punishments.
Anyway it’s always a little hard to know exactly how to interpret the guidelines as there is quite a bit of subjectivity.
Does anyone honestly believe the only way to provide that advantage is to fake their score? That kind of lazy thinking is what needs an adversity score to be considered good.
"If you have a problem with changing the status quo, in a situation where the change would make you lose something, take extra time to examine whether it was justified for the status quo to give you that thing in the first place."
If the status quo systematically oppresses one group and benefits another, the beneficiaries of said system will perceive any change to the status quo that would reduce the oppression of the former group as an unfair attack.
I mean if we reversed this plan and said students from rich areas get bonus points on their SATs, wouldn't poor areas call it an unfair attack? Does that somehow prove that rich kids are systemtically oppressed? This vague statement is not some kind of proof of oppression, it's just wordplay.
But it's not systemic oppression. The system doesn't try to keep poor people poor or uneducated. Do poor people have it harder? Yes, but they have many of the same opportunities available to them. The modern world is rich in information that is freely taught. College is signaling in large part, but there are plenty of opprobrious right now where skill beats signaling.
I'm not sure about ascribing desires to 'the system', but let me do so. The system does try to keep some/many people poor and uneducated in many different ways.
If you want the most egregious examples, look at how we treat(ed?) blacks and Native Americans ... the system decreed blacks could be slaves up until one generation ago; the system decreed they would get way less legal rights up until 2 generations ago; the system decreed they would not get loans for housing up until at most one generation ago; the system currently harrasses them and puts them in prison ... many features of our school system seems designed to keep poor people uneducated.
Many times it is harder to see what is currently going on; so, if you want a more blatant current example, right now, the system is keeping undocumented immigrants poor and uneducated on purpose.
>The system doesn't try to keep poor people poor or uneducated.
The system doesn't have motives. Individual behavior can give rise to systemic oppression with no top level design goals needed.
If we take a look at Black people specifically:
Black sounding last names are half as likely to receive callbacks for job interviews. Black people are more likely to be arrested, convicted, and receive longer sentences for committing the same crimes as White people. It's harder for Black people to find housing. Its even harder for them to rent vacation properties.
Black children even receive harsher punishments for the same infractions in elementary school.
All of these things put together mean that yes, they are systemically oppressed, and the system is currently keeping them poorer and less educated. Exceptional individuals will overcome this oppression, but reinforcing feedback loops ensure that if something isn't done to break the cycle, it will continue, and as a class Black people will always be at a disadvantage.
Nope, not going to play this ridiculous game. And this is a game. I don’t know how or why the modern left started employing the rhetorical tactics mastered by Lenin but here we are.
>>I don’t know why my family should be punished because my wife and I worked our asses off to get ahead.
Just to offer some general commentary, I think this mentality is probably the root of most of our social ills: people see everything as a "race" and they work hard to "get ahead", and they therefore get angry at policies that attempt to even the playing field because it might help others "catch up".
It's not an anger at helping others catch up, but an anger at pulling people back. We can help people who are behind without sacrificing the people who are already ahead.
Isn't it both? There are only X spots per school. Every person being helped up and admitted is someone being pulled back and denied. I have no opinion on this debate, but school admissions are a zero-sum-game, afaik.
Colleges aren't a zero sum game. The more qualified college goers there are over time, the more total college spots will be available. It's not like the number of universities (and the size of each) is some fixed constant. The entire pie can be, and is, grown.
Oh in terms of something like money, taking X dollars from the richest and using it to help the poorest is extremely positive sum.
This might be true for college admissions too, if you're flush with opportunities you're still ahead if you lose one.
But there's still an aspect of "pulling people back". It's a hard tradeoff to design. But if you do it right you really can make something with better outcomes and more fairness, even if some will call it an abomination.
To be fair, this is kind of impressed on people when so many are judged by the name of the school on their diploma or a score they received in the first quarter of their life. There's no guarantee a Harvard accepted child will have a happier life than someone "destined" to be a fast food cashier, but when we pressure young kids with so much judgment before they even experience life, it feels like a race from the start.
Couple this with the lack of class mobility and sometimes people feel participating in that race was the only way to control your future.
I'm sure it is the root of many social ills, but the alternative is the root of many more social ills. The competitive struggle is what drives people to be productive. Without that, people don't attempt very much. Attempts to level the playing field cause widespread corruption as people evade the restrictions on competition. The lack of productivity is then fixed by the use of force.
I was talking to someone who's been involved in elite university admissions, and gaming for the city/neighborhood/HS has been a known tactic for a while.
There's a related tactic for people in affluent suburbs, for getting their child into urban school districts with an especially well-regarded primary public school: buy a house or condo in the city, and try to make it look on your application like that's your primary residence.
Depending on where you live, the break-even point of doing this versus a private school can be under 2 kids (and is usually under 3 kids), so you save quite a bit of money.
Money. Private schools can be $40K or more (after taxes) per child per year. You can get a lot of real estate for that money instead in a lot of markets.
It always gets ugly. I had a (well-off, white) friend use another friend's address to get into the high school I went to. He ended up at Princeton so I guess it worked well for him. No one did anything about it. The case in 2011 where an Ohio woman (Kelley Williams-Bolar) was sentenced to a short jail sentence and 3 years probation and asked to pay $30000 to the school because she did the same thing has come up in the news again. She's black of course. There's that guy who paid $400,000 to get his kid into Georgetown as a tennis player who is now suing Georgetown 'cause they had the gall to expel his kid. It's all a matter of how much you can pay for a lawyer after your crime/gaming of the system.
People using what they have to get their kids ahead is just called "Life".
Why are nice neighborhoods more expensive than bad ones? Why are good school districts more competitive than bad ones? Why do parents go to great lengths to get their kids better opportunity?
There will always be motivation to find the best ways to "play the system".
Also, what actually shows if someone is a good student or not?
A student with lower adversity could still have immense pressure if their family has sunk so much investment into their success.
For example, there are Asian parents I knew that had their kids regimentally studying for the SAT since age 12 like they were practicing to become professional athletes. Their parents left their entire lives behind to come to America and work their way up for the sake of their kids getting into a good college then getting a good job.
I think you're overestimating the taxes paid by a shell office (it's not uncommon for dozens/hundreds of organizations to use the same small office suite, staffed by a single receptionist).
Fancy private school in expensive neighborhood registers their official address in a poor neighborhood, and calls the school in the 'nice' neighborhood a "satellite campus".
I work in LSAT prep, and have taught the SAT as well. Whether this makes a different will depend on whether it's added as a ranking factor for schools.
If it's just a thing schools can see, that adds to their additional soft tools they can use to evaluate an application, then it probably won't do much. If it actually becomes something that determines rankings, it will have a big impact. The latter seems unlikely, as schools would have to publicly report the score to US News and World report for it to affect rankings. But the score is private.
A few key points:
* First, this isn't the cheating scandal. If the rich parents could have gotten their kids good SAT scores, they wouldn't have needed to cheat and bribe. The SAT was keeping the wealthy people out in those case, not letting them in
* Test prep helps. But it's not a magic wand. The only real solution to getting better at the SAT is....having grown up reading and being good at arithmetic and algebra. Failing that, you can spend 12-16 months memorizing thousands of vocabulary words, reading novels, and memorizing every math concept tested, using Khan Academy. But....at a certain point that actually approximates being good at the material.
* What's the advantage of being better off? It's that your kids generally spend a lifetime more likely to read, have good teachers, have leisure time, parental involvement, parents that are married, good nutrition.
* But if a wealthy kid has made it to 12th grade and isn't that bright, wealth is no magic bullet. Like I said, the only way to do it is to take 16+ months to cram foundations into you. And the vast majority of parents lack such foresight.
* Actually, there is one magic bullet: it's making sure your kid has some kind of easily diagnosable mental health condition that gives them extra time. By "easily diagnosable", I mean in the sense that there's no real way to exclude it and you can find a doctor to say "oh sure, this kid seems to have ADHD". Extra time is a massive leg up. This rule came about due to Justice Department rules about not discriminating against those with disabilities. It did help the disabled, but it also gave the wealthy a loophole big enough to drive a truck through
* Will this be a similar loophole? Maybe. I am sure parents will try to exploit it. But....it's a rule actually made by the testing company, and not one imposed by the government. So, they have more control to avoid having it exploited. Also, some of the factors are more difficult to exploit. For example "kid with single parents". I mean, maybe the parents could temporarily divorce, though it's not clear if that counts. If it actually requires one parent to truly be out of the kid's life (or dead)....well, there's no easy way to fake that
* These are just temporary hardships due to upbringing, and they'll go away in the health college environment, right? Nope. You see the exact same gaps in higher level standardized tests. And in later measures such as bar passage rate. Whatever causes the issue, causes it the whole way through.
* Will this solve inequality? Maybe, maybe not. Too soon to tell. One underappreciated risk to programs like affirmative action is that they don't actually help those they're aimed at. Here's an article citing Henry Louis Gates Jr. showing that Ivy League schools generally don't accept the sons and daughters of slaves. Instead, they accept foreign black students: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more...
This list seems aimed at addressing the last issue. Maybe not so much a ranking factor, but instead aimed at letting admissions officers see who, within a subgroup, actually had a disadvantaged upbringing, vs. having a more narrow checkbox applied.
This might be good, this might be bad, it's really too soon to tell and depends entirely on the implementation and how it's used. But the issue of over restrictive categories could certainly use fixing.
This, like every other similar attempt made to "equalize" the SAT, is misguided and will accomplish little.
If the SAT correlates too strongly with wealth, then Collegeboard should make a better test. Make one that changes significantly every year so direct test-prep is hard. Choose different types of critical reading passages and questions each year, vary the style of the math questions - make the test different enough each time so studying past tests isn't valuable. Then, if you eliminate the advantage direct prep gives, the correlation to wealth should weaken, and the test should get closer to measuring aptitude.
But instead, Collegeboard continues to shoehorn political objectives into an already broken exam. This is a mistake.
Imagine a perfect SAT that preparation can't affect; for the purposes of the hypothetical, the test just stares into your soul and measures pure scholastic aptitude.
If (a) scholastic aptitude has a significant effect on your lifetime income, (b) people tend to marry people of similar social and economic class, and (c) scholastic aptitude is fairly heritable (through genes, environment, whatever)...
... then you would expect the Perfect SAT scores to correlate pretty noticeably with family wealth. This wouldn't be a sign that anybody is doing anything wrong; it's just as natural as water flowing downhill. And these are reasonable premises, with strong empirical evidence for each of them.
So, question: just by looking at the correlation of SAT scores with family wealth, how can we possibly tell how broken the test is? How can we know how far the real SAT is from the absolutely un-gameable Perfect SAT?
Because we've done studies to address exactly that question. What we've found: The least-gifted children of high-income parents graduate from college at higher rates than the most-gifted children of low-income parents, hence the adversity score to rectify the inequity in life circumstances.
This study has nothing to do with the SAT. Clearly, money is required in order to study full-time in the US, both for tuition and living expenses, so people with more money graduate more often because it's easier to not work during school, and to pay for tuition. But none of that is relevant to the point you replied to, which was that even a perfect test would have results that correlate with wealth
> The least-gifted children of high-income parents graduate from college at higher rates than the most-gifted children of low-income parents, hence the adversity score to rectify the inequity in life circumstances.
Looking at graduation rates instead of admission rates is problematic. Less gifted and underprivileged people also graduate at lower rates despite being admitted using affirmative action procedures as the College Board is now implementing. This means they do not have a degree that would advantage them, but are saddled with undischargable education debt that puts them at a severe disadvantage for the rest of their life. The system not only continues the inequality but makes it much worse. If college was free or education debt was dischargable in bankruptcy then it would not be the oppressive system it is currently where people unable to succeed are admitted, then forced to pay back debt they can not afford after they fail to graduate. Only a sadist and a racist would support such an inequitable abusive system.
So we need to correct the SAT so that the students most likely to be doomed to fail will be admitted to higher education?
To me it doesn't sound like you're trying to make the SAT reflect say academic potential. It seems like you're just trying to inflate the appearantly already inflated scores of the disadvantaged. Who will proceed to not get scholarships, fail out, and be saddled with debt they can't pay off or be discharged. This of course is the road to an egalitarian society!
Who needs to bother with difficult things like making the disadvantaged do a little better in school? Just add 100 points to their SAT. Problem solved.
Once you combine all those premises, the "pretty noticeable" correlation might be something like ten percent. So the problem of it correlating too strongly with wealth would be solved.
I mentioned this below, but if the test is a perfect predictor of future success, then the people that perform well on it are absolutely worthy of college admissions, and there should be no further analysis required. If the test is perfect, then the characteristics of the people that do well on that test don't matter. The reason we need to do implement equalizers like this is because such a test is impossible.
Your suggestion relies on the assumption that there is some way to change standardized tests such that they do not correlate with wealth. Perhaps the problem is that academic ability is directly correlated to the kind of test prep you receive, so unless you set a test paper full of trivia questions the student that has gone through test prep will perform better every time.
I do not agree with this idea either, but only in that the adversity score will be opaque to students, so there is no recourse if it does a poor job of addressing the current issues with college admissions.
> Your suggestion relies on the assumption that there is some way to change standardized tests such that they do not correlate with wealth.
Good IQ tests exists that are hard to game. They are easy to learn easy to vary and easy to measure.
(I think I have heard someone here talking about IQ tests that include language and geography questions. This is not the kind of IQ tests I'm talking about. Perfect IQ tests should measure your processing speed, not your "software" - i.e. education.)
The SAT is supposed to be a test measuring scholastic aptitude not a pure IQ test.
IQ tests always have a knowledge component anyway. Unless you specifically design a test to only measure something like working memory. And who cares about that. Colleges would only care to the extent that it correlated with performance.
But you can have 2 people who have equal performance in a given field even though one has a higher working memory because the other has better context from more time spent reading.
> Unless you specifically design a test to only measure something like working memory.
The ones I refer to typically test what I'd call pattern matching / pattern synthesis by presenting multiple choice questions showing a number of patterns and asking which out of several patterns comes next.
You can teach how to solve it to a schoolkid and it is still really hard to practice for.
You're talking about Raven's Progressive Matrices and variations thereof.
RPM only measures a very small subset of what we normally thing of as general intelligence, and they correlate with general intelligence less strongly than vocabulary. They definitely aren't nearly as good at predicting future college performance as the current SAT is.
>You can teach how to solve it to a schoolkid and it is still really hard to practice for.
It's actually not, you can definitely practice for them. And they are very sensitive to repeated testing.
RPM was developed to be free from cultural bias, but we now know that this isn't the case, they can actually be more biased than verbal tests depending on the culture.
If you do set a test paper full of trivia questions, that just changes the sort of things in the test-prep program. Anything studiable is going to correlate with the amount of time spent studying, therefore with wealth. People do study for Jeopardy.
Hypothetically, what if it was true that wealthy people's exposure to better education over a lifetime, reduced stress distracting them from learning, better and more abundant roll models, etc, meant they would do better on pretty much literally any test you could put in front of them?
Then wealthy people show more "merit" and the test is working as designed. If the test is an accurate predictor of success in college and success thereafter (which is a big if), then that people who do well on it are more deserving of college admissions. The ancillary qualities of that group of people (wealth, race, etc.) are irrelevant.
The SAT is (well, was) supposed to predict academic success at a college/university. The idea being that an institution could admit students who would likely graduate, as opposed to students who did not.
This is the reality of the situation that people don't want to admit. This is a social engineering problem related to the outcomes of college entrance processes. It's not really about the test or how we are measuring aptitude.
This problem would be far better solved elsewhere in the chain instead of blurring the meaning of data and pretending that things are different.
Yes but fucking with the metrics costs almost nothing. Does almost nothing too.
It can even backfire by sending a bunch of disadvantaged kids to programs they're not prepared to succeed at to "help them" get saddled with college debt they can't discharge.
The student who spends time preparing for a test, reviewing the material, studying previous tests, drilling with practice tests, actually has more scholastic aptitude than the students who do not do this because these are actual research and preparation skills that are valuable to success in mastering college material.
The only skill you gain while cramming for the SAT is how to cram for tests like the SAT. The gameability of the SAT is not an indication of general scholastic aptitude
If general scholastic aptitude measured something other than how to study for tests and write essays, then you might be onto something, except that college is simply more of the same.
I always wonder where people get this view of college (the GP's view that is). I went to a non-name state school for undergrad and it was nothing like the above.
I went to Stanford and yeah much of the time was learning the material, then preparing for tests by reviewing material and studying. There was also doing projects, researching, and writing papers arguing various positions and analyzing things. As well as some novel research.
It's very strange to hear people here saying all these things are dumb or foolish or something, and good colleges are not like this at all and this is a "poor educational experience". OK, well, what was their school like then? They don't say. Details and names of schools are omitted from the posts of the critics. Are they talking about the drinking and sex at party schools? Or maybe the football games they attended? That is all fine but I don't usually include that when talking about the academic experience per se. Right, studying, learning and preparing for tests is not about those things, true. But so?
Sorry, you don’t see the distinction between the type of academic study you described and the kind of rote learning and cramming required for tests like the SAT? They are quite dissimilar.
Sorry to hear that your classes at CMU involved just rote memorization and cramming, the two skills that standardized tests like the SAT seem to emphasize most. You apparently must not have availed yourself of course projects, discussion sections, or research experiences. I’m sorry to hear that the vaunted CMU educational experience has apparently gone so far downhill.
My experience was the same as all of my other classmates experience, and it is in the top 3 tech schools in the world.
I am describing what the best schools in the entire world do, and I have lots of knowledge from my classwork, and other classmates experience.
These are the best schools in the world.
And apparently someone else who responded had a similar experience at Stanford, another college that is among the best in the world.
You seem to have zero knowledge about how colleges work at even the literal best schools in the world.
Basically every top college in the world still has tests and final exams and studying and cramming. This is called the "normal college experience" at basically every college and top college in the world (and backed up by someone else in this thread from Stanford!).
it's hard to change a test enough that it's hard to prepare for but not so much that scores can still be meaningfully compared year to year. even if kids go straight to college, there's a two year window where they could reasonably take the test and the test is offered several times per year. I don't see how they could accomplish this without severely increasing the cost of the test.
> it's hard to change a test enough that it's hard to prepare for but not so much that scores can still be meaningfully compared year to year. even if kids go straight to college, there's a two year window where they could reasonably take the test and the test is offered several times per year. I don't see how they could accomplish this without severely increasing the cost of the test.
As an entrenched player, I'd love to know more about their operating costs. They have no need for marketing, have a constant demand and are essentially a monopoly (possibly part of duopoly) on the college standardized test market. If they had optimized supply chains and distribution (which I would expect to improve year over year) I would be curious as to where all the money is going.
> The score would not be reported to the student, only to college officials.
This seems really sketchy.
I mean, I can completely understand why the College Board would want to avoid blowback from students knowing their scores, but their convenience seems like insufficient cause to deny students access to their own information.
You seem to think that the system will be used to boost kids with high adversity scores. Many colleges desperately want kids who will pay full tuition. But they also want to claim they're "need blind." Voila. The "adversity" score tells them whether the kids came from a rich neighborhood.
Actually, there was an interesting link posted here a while back[1] that explored how non-profit colleges have a vested interest in making sure at least half of their students cannot afford full tuition.
To keep their tax exempt status, they must act as a “charity” by extending financial aid to at least half of their students.
The tax-exempt status enables them to invest their endowment without paying taxes on the gains.
You're aware of your SAT scores, you're aware of your transcripts; you're aware of your essays and extra-curriculars; you aren't aware (or aren't supposed to be) of the content of your recommendation letters, but you can choose who you have write them. So sure, give this the same visibility as all of the above and make it visible to the student.
The difference is these informations are produced or sourced by you, the extra 'adversity score', and what it replaces are external to you (and in this case it's not even personal)
I see the issue with info circulating outside of your oversight that has impact on your life, I am just thinking they are basically keeping the status quo on this.
I mean, the reason of the SAT's existence is the convenience of boiling down one's entire academic experience into one number. Perhaps the real problem is that university admissions allow the dualopoly of College Board and ACT control the academic fates of the nation's students with no public accountability.
When a university makes that decision, that is the student pool they are going to bring in and they take the risk with their graduation stats, employment stats and failure rates.
When college board does it, they have literally zero skin in the game. They bill both the prospective student and the institution, produce this arbitrary number and there is no penalty for getting it wrong since they can just move the goalposts and declare success.
Set a standard (SAT score, whatever) and say that students who meet that standard should be capable enough to admit. Then pick randomly from among the applicants who meet your standard. Sounds fair, right?
I think this is simply a service for universities to easily get info which they already estimate manually. Some colleges will like and use this service, others (schools who already have systems in place to measure these disadvantage points) won't.
With a number like this the typical outcome is that it becomes a factor in a school's US News ranking (average adversity score of incoming class for example). At that point a cottage industry is formed around this metric.
How about having lots of decent, desirable universities instead of a few elite ones and many weak ones? Furthermore, one could abolish tuition and provide students with living expenses, either all or those who need them. Furthermore, reverse grade inflation in school such that the final grade is a better predictor for learning aptitude. That would solve the stupid admissions problem once and for all. Btw we had all that here in Germany, but since about 20 years they are trying to shift finances to artificially create few "elite" unis and lots of crap unis in order to emulate the American system.
As someone who went to Harvard, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of extremely decent universities that all basically provide the same quality of instruction. People just get unreasonably hung up over the 'best' schools, but there are easily at least like 100+, if not several hundred, that provide easily roughly the same educational experience as far as I'm aware.
The peer group may definitely dramatically different from what I can tell, but if you're a serious student and there for the learning above all, very straightforward to get into a school that will teach you just about anything you could learn at Harvard or any other Ivy League or similarly 'elite' school.
The thing is what makes a university good has more to do with the quality of the recruitment of its students than the teaching. In fact much of the teaching in ellite US colleges is done by researchers that are not particularly good at it.
While I agree with you, as someone that is inherently inferior to someone like you (on the basis of not getting into any elite school, much less Harvard) currently that inferiority has a cascading effect throughout life. I think the goal should be to equalize opportunities for everyone instead of just people who might be borderline elites at 18.
The dramatic difference between Harvard and an average university is that at Harvard you're probably going to bump into half a dozen people who will either inherit a business, or a fortune to start a business, or just start a business on their own. Guess what, knowing the CEO of companies is a bloody good way of getting a nice job in that company.
The connections you make are what the elite institutions really do to differentiate themselves.
+1.
A new member in our team has PHD from a top university and an MBA from Columbia business school.I don't how he got there but it was definitely not for the intelligence or smartness. First time I've understood that CBS graduates can be with zero knowledge or smartness.
The thing that still bothers me is the cognitive dissonance of being told by people orders of magnitude smarter than me that institution doesn’t matter. Yeah, if it didn’t you wouldn’t have gone to a HYPSM or out of state public ivy.
There's still a massive difference between schools that don't fall into the private/top-tier bin. Sorry.
I am from a family of 10 kids and we all went to and were accepted to different schools (all non-private/non-top tier)...there is a massive difference in education levels between schools (maybe it won't affect your career trajectory, but I didn't go to college for a career, I went to learn and be surrounded by others of my caliber).
>How about having lots of decent, desirable universities instead of a few elite ones and many weak ones?
In practice, this is pretty much the case. State schools (e.g. the University of Virginia, University of California-Berkeley, Georgia Tech, etc.) are often quite good in terms of the education provided, and offer lower tuition rates to in-state residents. Forbes and U.S. News & World Report maintain rankings of the top 100 or so colleges in the United States; my school was ranked in the 60-70 range for computer science. Having spent a number of years at big (and small) companies in the Bay Area, I feel it more than adequately prepared me for the workplace.
Maybe the sense of “a few elite schools, and lots of bad ones” is reinforced by the popular media? Hollywood tends to focus on just the Ivies and MIT.
They'll have to convince employers who are generally from the elite schools that the state schools are actually good and their graduates are worth hiring.
Yes, I agree that this is the tough part, especially in the Bay Area. Once you’ve been working a few years, though, your degree matters much less to potential employers.
One way “second-tier” universities can get around this problem is through mandatory co-op and internship programs. Push students to explore the job market early on, and they’ll start their post-grad job search with confidence, a stronger resume, and a network of contacts from previous co-ops and internships. This network may even include students from “elite” universities, who funnily enough often end up in the same internships and entry-level roles as their less-pedigreed counterparts.
> This network may even include students from “elite” universities, who funnily enough often end up in the same internships and entry-level roles as their less-pedigreed counterparts
I did more internships than average at my school (the norm is 1, I did 4) and while I did cultivate contacts with “elites” I’d disagree that they end up in the same entry level roles as people like me. If anything there’s a bigger difference!
The schools you listed-Berkeley, UVA, and GA Tech-are comparable in acceptance rates and in quality to Ivy League schools. Still doesn't solve the problem of having a few elite schools and many weak ones.
These schools are equally, if not harder, to get into as a first-year freshman.
The point is that many state colleges provide ample education. Some provide very good education depending on what areas they specialize in.
USC (South Carolina) is #1 for international business, for example. As I recall we also had good engineering programs. I can't speak for the CS department, but I do know some very smart professors are there, since some of my friends did research there.
USC was the only college I applied to, and I had zero doubts that I'd ever get in (since I didn't go in for IB/business).
Now, networking is a totally different animal. Of course a lot of universities can't match the kind of networking that happens at Ivy leagues. For most people I don't think this is really an issue though as long as you go to a "good"ish university.
I listed just a few strong non-Ivies off the top of my head. A list of other strong, non-“elite” CS schools might include the likes of GMU, WPI, RPI, RIT, or UMBC. I have friends and co-workers from each of these schools who are all fine engineers. Conversely, I’ve worked with Ivy Leaguers who couldn’t code their way out of a wet paper bag.
Also, schools with higher acceptance rates do not necessarily offer lower-quality educations, or have lower standards for graduation. One metric to consider is the four- or five-year graduation rate. For financial reasons, second-tier schools may initially admit more freshmen but ultimately wash more of them out. While this can turn out poorly for the student who takes out student loans only to wash out sophomore year, it can be a boon to strong students who, for one reason or another, didn’t have a standout high school experience.
> having lots of decent, desirable universities instead of a few elite ones and many weak ones?
it's not about the curriculum, it's about who you meet there and what can you make of those connections. you can't avoid the elite to bunch up in few places, because they intimately know that the game is about whom you know and how you can leverage family ties well before the smart kid from middle class background learn that the world outside academia isn't a meritocracy.
even if universities were all equally performant in teaching, people who managed to connect with the elite frequenting key places would still get a jump start in the life outside.
In part this initiative rewards bad parenting and lack of responsibility for raising your kids.
If you made imense effort to provide the best education possible to your child, to put him in a good school (even if that meant depriving yourself from a better material life and having 2 jobs), if you kept a non perfect marriage because that would be better for your child, if you only had one kid because you couldn't afford to provide a good education for more than one, what this law is telling you is: bad luck, you shouldn't have done it because now, we are going to adjust his score back for it so that none of that matters.
I don't really follow your logic. Bad parents are usually bad parents because they don't care about parenting or they care about other things far more than parenting - parenting just isn't their top priority. Their children's success in life is not top of mind, and some may not care how successful their kids are unless there is something in it for them. From my own personal experience, bad parents get annoyed when their kids are successful and they don't benefit directly in some way i.e. money. Or they are resentful and try to minimize your successes. Either way, bad parents think more about themselves than their kids - their kids being successful is not a reward.
If anything, perhaps it punishes good parenting. But I'm not sure it rewards bad parenting.
Isn't this a good thing to not encourage this so that your kid don't end up with mental issues because of your failed marriage and his childhood where you never saw them ?
The value of the diploma is directly linked to the value of the college. When you break it down a college diploma is only worth as much as the reputation of the college.
What about the education itself? Do the awesome professors actually teach? Are the social circles at the college going to lead the student where they want to go in life? What about potentially-burdensome loans at the end of it?
I think we need to get away from the idea of college admissions as a tournament with Harvard at the top. "Good" depends on many things and different students may best be served by different universities.
> This move feels almost as though it was intended to stir up unnecessary controversy.
I mean probably not, otherwise they would let the students see the scores.
I think it was put there to help the elite colleges defeat the lawsuits against them by being able to say, "see, we used an objective measure of hardship from a third party!".
Zero chance this non-disclosure policy lasts. Remember how much pressure Uber got to allow riders to see their rating? And that "score" has just about zero impact on anyone's life/future/potential scholarship opportunities.
I think the goal of quantifying the amount of adversity a person experiences in their life is a fools errand. This is like asking "On a scale of 1-100 how beautiful is The Mona Lisa." Somethings can only be poorly approximated in numbers.
Once we have a number it tends to become An Important Thing, regardless of how much the number reflects reality. It is ironic that SAT is making a new number that has little reflection of reality to provide more context with their SAT test scores, which is another number that has only a poor approximate measurement of reality.
What statistics will the Adversity Score be based on? How close to reality are those numbers? What statistics will colleges create using the Adversity Score? Those will surely be even further away from reality.
The primary use of a number like Adversity Score is to create a pretty spreed sheet that generates pretty graphs that look good in board meetings, grant applications and pamphlets. While the data backing up the graph is impeccable it also is built on layer after layer of imperfect abstractions until the graph has very little to do with reality.
There are great high schools, decent high schools, mediocre high schools and bad high schools and we can tell the difference.
There are neighborhoods full of rich people, middle class professionals, working class people, and slums and we can tell the difference.
I don't know why you think that's so hard. It seems quite easy to me. Certainly worth trying instead of (as you seem to advocate) just giving up at the slightest difficulty.
This isn't a slightly difficult problem, this is a fundamentally impossible problem. A qualitative thing cannot be quantified.
If we could quantify adversity we could calculate the percentage out of all human suffering that occurred during the Trail of Tears or determine the single most resilient living person.
I'm not saying we should consider adversity in college admissions. I'm saying we shouldn't quantify human emotions and experiences.
As a reference: The Chinese equivalent, Gaokao [0], is notorious for its brutal difficulty, but also widely regarded [citation needed] as a great equalizer. To that end, high school students spend obscene amount of their class time doing test prep (yes, in school instead of after). Although YMMV, and the total score usually spreads out quite nicely without need for curving (one such attempt was recently made [1]; it didn't turn out well). That is, despite all the extensive test prep, Gaokao simply refuses to be maxxed out (effectively, due to human scoring of essays). With all its problems and totally valid criticism, Gaokao remains (IMHO) the golden standard in equality of opportunity. Sadly China is moving to "diversify" college admission recently --- euphemism for bias towards wealthier families.
That, however, does NOT favor the rich, mod cheating/forgery, which surprisingly does get caught, due to the widespread expectation of the system to be fair.
And there used to be bonus points for STEM Olympiads, which had totally worked as intended by providing a sound alternative for the talented / hard-working specialists who have not so much family backing. There were varying degrees of cheating (mostly in the form of leaked problem banks), more rampant in some provinces than others, but AFAIK the asking price was not totally out of reach for the common working family, so it'd be unfair to say cheating the exam favors the rich either.
I don't think it's true that the Gaokao is regarded as a great equalizer. You might be misled by the fact that it is regarded as the only potential path out of rural poverty in China - but even in the wikipedia article you link it discusses many of the issues with it. And this (2014) NYT opinion piece covers some in more detail (including that yes, richer students also spend time after school preparing). https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/05/opinion/sunday/chinas-edu...
The SAT itself has been shown to be a poor measure of performance in college when compared to high school GPA or the challenge level of the coursework offered [1]. Instead of trying to turn students into numbers, we should demand college admissions employees do their jobs and actually look at the applications.
Though from experience talking with people who work in admissions at "selective" schools, SAT scores and grades are mainly used to filter out the bottom 90% of non-preferred (e.g. not athletes, legacies/donors, or geographic/demographically desirable) applicants and the rest is extremely subjective and/or random, and is influenced by many non-academic factors such as whether you are too similar to some already-accepted applicant, etc..
If you are rejected it often has nothing to do with your qualifications so it should not be taken as a negative judgment of same; similarly, if you are accepted often it's often due semi-random factors that placed you ahead of students with better qualifications.
I read the study you linked and it did not say that the SAT was a poor measure of performance? What it did say was that in isolation, the SAT score was worse than GPA, but the overall best predictor was a combination of SAT and GPA.
I think this agrees with other studies about hiring, FWIW, where, as I understand, the best way to measure somebody's ability is a work-sample plus an IQ test. As someone who has been involved in hiring, we crudely approximate this by looking at work experience and how selective somebody's college education was.
Presumably the SAT is meant to indicate a student's likelihood for success in a university setting; surely bumping up the scores of students based on how likely they are to be unprepared is counterproductive? This seems like it's going to set underprivileged students up for failure and deprive well-prepared students of an opportunity, no?
Perhaps the most cynical view of College Board and the SATs is that it is a bloated and useless bureaucracy leeching money and time off of students, their parents, high schools, and universities, and that this new 'Adversity Score' is merely a new way to introduce an entire new army of useless people with new material and classes to be sold to innocent people just trying to get into a decent school and pursue a path to a better life.
I think broadly, the SATs aim to provide some independent consistent data points a school can use to determine the desirability to admit certain students vs. others.
You're thinking academic aptitude is the only thing the SATs should measure and report, but if schools want more, it's just good business to provide it.
"...surely bumping up the scores..."
You might have misunderstood. It doesn't look like they will be changing SAT scores here but rather providing a separate "adversity score".
I don't think the factor is for kids who did poorly. This is a bonus (AFAICT) added on top of a reasonable test result. One that indicates that the student had some hardship that they overcame to get the result. Which should make the result count more as the kid had to go through more to get it done.
Who's more impressive on average? Students with a 1200 SAT in an area with low crime and upper middle class income, or students with a 1200 SAT in an area with high crime and low income? There's a presumption that the latter probably had external challenges to overcome.
Does this mean an additional number is going to be supplied alongside the individual test scores and overall score, or that the overall score will be a sum that includes an adversity score? In other words, is the article using "adding" in the sense of numbers or the sense of sets?
EDIT:
The Journal reported that this new score will appear alongside a student's SAT score and will be featured in a section labeled the "Environmental Context Dashboard."
What if the former scores 1220 and the latter 1200? That's the concerning case, IMO. If both kids scored 1200, I'm indifferent as to whether a desirable school offers admission to 0, 1, or both of them.
If a poor kid goes to a shitty school and has life impediments that limit the amount of studying and preparation they do and still scores a 1300, is that kid any less capable than a rich kid who goes to a private school and has all the opportunity in the world and gets 1500?
the original word choice was "prepared", which has a different meaning from "capable". if the poor kid never took calculus in high school and the rich kid already understands integration, that's probably two whole college semesters behind on a STEM track. there's no way you could say they're at the same level of preparedness for college. as for "capable", who knows?
Well, someone has to prop up the humanities. Universities are supposed to be communities of scholars. They aren't job training centers. Unless some students are persuaded to pursue less-career-oriented majors, all our universities would soon into polytechnics.
I chose the Calc I/II sequence as a concrete example that would be familiar to the large number of STEM majors on this forum. my point works just as well if you substitute "reading skills" for "calculus" and "humanities" for "STEM".
This new metric seems to be mostly based on ZIP and school-level data, not individual circumstances, so it may not be trivially gameable (short of moving your family to an impoverished neighborhood, which seems... unlikely).
That said, colleges already have access to this information through publicly-available high school rankings and ZIP-level demographic data. All this new metric does is add opacity and plausible deniability, shifting responsibility from college admissions departments to a centralized (and, most importantly, private) authority.
> mostly based on ZIP and school-level data, not individual circumstances, so it may not be trivially gameable
Once the ZIP code to score mapping is known, it's trivially gameble to get a mailing address in the best scoring ZIP code that won't get you kicked out of your school, if the ZIP code comes from school records. People do this all the time in reverse to get kids into desirable schools.
Actually getting your kid into an undesirable school to get the full score might be less likely, although that may depend on the specific time requirements to get the score and the magnitude of the score related to other factors.
I can't say for sure, but I'd bet a decent amount of money that the variation in scores for zips in the same school district will be quite small compared to the variation in zips for different school districts. I doubt the kind of gaming you describe would have much of an impact.
All this new metric does is add opacity and plausible deniability
I would say that in addition to this just one organization has to do the research & math instead of the [large number] of colleges admitting students. It also provides for a degree f standardization.
My (apparently unpopular?) opinion: this is an excellent move. Colleges already try to take adversity into account in admissions. Now they'll have a more uniform, clear, objective, and standardized way of doing so. I do wish it was more transparent--i.e. that students could see their own scores--but this is clearly a step in the right direction.
> Now they'll have a more uniform, clear, objective, and standardized way of doing so.
How do we know this? Why should the College board be reporting this? The lack of transparency is the real issue. What data are they collecting to generate this score and why? Is it just going to be an 0-100 index of the average score for that particular test location?
> It would be calculated using 15 factors, like the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood. The score would not be reported to the student, only to college officials.
This sounds like affirmative action only at a much more granular and non-racial level.
Even better if it can take into account a student's whole academic history (e.g. if a student used to go to a fancy prep school and then moved to a local public school the year they took the SAT, or vice-versa).
Given the incredible disparities between schools/neighborhoods, they feels like it can only give a more accurate picture of a student's abilities relative to their situation.
I would like to put forward best arguments for both systems, maybe it will direct our discussion somewhat.
--------
Method 1.
Give everyone equal chance at competing in the admission process itself, regardless of how they got prepared. Someone who prepared well, for any reason, might do well in the future too, for the same reason.
Result 1: Get the best prepared students to best colleges, maximize the number of top scientists / engineers / lawyers / etc graduating. Stronger academia and industry in the end.
Result 2: Meritocracy.
Result 3: On the feeling level: objective reward for hard work (no good example comes to mind, but maybe a Cinderella-type story).
--------
Method 2.
Give everyone equal chance both during the preparation and taking the test. Since that cannot actually be done by the time tests are taken, instead normalize the test result to adversity levels, on the assumption that someone held back by difficult circumstance is likely to perform ~25% better once released from the difficulty.
Result 1: Uncover potential geniuses in the rough, remove mediocre-or-lazy-but-pampered kids.
Result 2: Reduce stratification of society, even if at the expense of overall academic performance of the country.
Result 3: On the feeling level: a fighting chance for poor kids in bad situations (think "The Wire" type kids).
This “Adversity” score has me thinking of an analogy to physical beauty/attractiveness. I believe there is an incredibly high correlation,
especially residual to other factors, between physical traits and success and wealth. Something very unfair for those who are uglier.
Obviously the logical solution to that inequality isn’t to kick in the faces of the beautiful and handsome but instead focus on opportunities for those uglier to try and make themselves more attractive. In extremes plastic surgery for those with say cleft lip or other deformations.
Those who can’t understand the analogy says much about the source of their rage.
Hating the rich is still hate.
If the college board really wants to love the poor why don’t they come up with a plan to provide FREE tutoring to all the zipcodes in their model. I bet if they asked a few billionaires like Gates and Buffet they would even fund it.
Lifting the bottom up is not done by holding the top down. It just doesn’t work in reality.
When I was immersed in the leftist outrage bubble, I used to think this video was ridiculous and insulting, but after breaking out of that bubble, this video has become startlingly accurate.
> A growing number of colleges, in response to criticism of standardized tests, have made it optional for applicants to submit scores from the SAT or the ACT. Admissions officers have also tried for years to find ways to gauge the hardships that students have had to overcome, and to predict which students will do well in college despite lower test scores.
Taken to its logical conclusion, the SAT will cease to exist and the only thing the College Board will report to schools is a secret student dossier.
This dossier can contain anything. Think about the ways in which it might be possible to compute an "adversity" score.
What if we mix this "adversity" score with some factors indicating "deservingness?"
Today the dossier may be composed of mostly harmless stuff. In the very near future it may well become a terrifying concoction of privacy infringements.
There may be a silver lining in all of this, though. College today is increasingly a mere credential. The information conveyed through a degree can be obtained by those who want it from numerous sources.
If initiatives like the one in the article become widespread in admissions, then a degree will increasingly symbolize not accomplishment but rather something much less worth talking about. Colleges themselves would have precipitated their own well-earned demise.
It will become just like credit scores. A whole industry will sprout around gaming the score. There will be "adversity score repair" companies guaranteeing to increase your score in 30 days. There will be "Adversity Karma" where you can log in and see your score and its trend over time.
> It would be calculated using 15 factors, like the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood. The score would not be reported to the student, only to college officials.
None of those suggest they're linked to individual actions like your examples are -- and that makes sense since the SAT can know the student's schools and addresses but little else.
And I don't think sending your kid to a worse school is gaming the system... because they'll probably do worse.
This adversity score is advertized so that it will help out poorer and more abused students, in an emperical way.
But what this is actually telling schools is if the person is rich-ish or not. Basically, can this family pay the bills and are they likely to attend football games and be donating alumni?
Call me cynical, but if anything, this is going to further segregate the schools towards the rich-ish.
This will give schools a guise under which they can say: 'Look, we're diverse!' But it will allow the space (and the ML inputs) for the schools to maximize profits.
I know that you are very unlikely to be able to maximize all diversity at once. Like, admitting more black women may come at the cost of matriculation rates for transgender people, or more Hispanic people in STEM classes may come at the cost of Asian people in humanties courses, etc. Nothing is perfect.
"Neighborhood environment will take into account crime rate, poverty rate, housing values and vacancy rate. Family environment will assess what the median income is of where the student's family is from; whether the student is from a single parent household; the educational level of the parents; and whether English is a second language. High school environment will look at factors such as curriculum rigor, free-lunch rate and AP class opportunities."
These are hard to game, and in many cases if you do game them it's a "Mission Fucking Accomplished" situation. Most billionaires are not willing to move into a high-crime, high-poverty neighborhood with shitty housing, nor are they willing to put their kids in bad schools with poor people. If they are, great, that neighborhood probably won't stay poor with shitty schools for long.
So the San Francisco school district gives priority to certain neighborhoods roughly based these criteria and gentrification has been a problem. Wealthy folks move into historically poor neighborhoods and benefit from lagging statistics in school choice.
>> Anne Zimmerman, a stay-at-home parent and writer, had what others call, sometimes derisively, the “golden ticket.” She and her husband, who works in advertising, moved into their two-bedroom rental in the Potrero Hill neighborhood a decade ago, without realizing their address granted them priority in the school lottery.
>> This year, their daughter, Vera, was offered admission to their first-choice kindergarten, one of the most requested in the city. The school is 37 percent white and 21 percent low-income. Districtwide, 15 percent of students are white and 55 percent are low-income.
> Most billionaires are not willing to move into a high-crime, high-poverty neighborhood with shitty housing
sure, but I don't think any existing laws would prevent them from just buying a second house in a bad part of their home town and using that address for applications and I can't see how the College Board could reliably detect this.
Your primary residence is listed on your tax returns and determines which school district you're entitled to attend. Misrepresenting it can result in criminal charges, and schools do check:
They'd have a tough time explaining to colleges why their transcript is from Good School District Across Town when they listed their address as Dumpy Neighborhood With Bad Schools.
Residency scams are a long-standing issue around Boston and in Boston itself (parents of suburban kids attempting to get their kids into exam schools like Boston Latin). This article explains the difficulties and expenses associated with catching families trying to get around the residency requirements: https://www.patriotledger.com/x792538354/Quincy-schools-crac...
Rich people go to private schools so they don’t care what address have. Buying a $5k shithole house in your same city and county won’t affect your taxes and won’t affect school distribution so no one is investigating that except the SAT police.
As you say, the FBI busted the scam which went on for years (decades?) and the colleges all say they had no idea about it, right? So his claim that the colleges weren't able to suss this out is absolutely correct in 100% of all known cases, right?
The FBI only busted them because a person they were investigating for a completely separate issue told them about this in hopes to get a more lenient sentence. So yes, it is the system working, but we got very lucky the FBI stumbled upon this information.
its not so much 'sussing out tricks' as a blanket ban on anything that can be abused. My parents made roughly 100k when I was going to school but they were terrible with money and have a lot of children. The 'expected contribution' was actually quite high but I never received anything from my parents at all. Thus, I have much in the way of student loans.
Not to take away from your point but the colleges having to work against these sort of tricks has a lot of unintended consequences.
None of that’s going to make any difference. Let’s be real here, it’s going to be based on race alone (and perhaps being gay or trans). White or Asian? You don’t suffer any adversity. Black or Hispanic? Congratulations, your score just improved by 200 points.
This just sounds like the SAT board doing what school admissions boards already do: decreasing or increasing scores based on race.
How would you reliably capture race, or sexual orientation, or gender identification — or even income — on a self-reported metric with no third-party validation? They aren't talking about sending the College Board your tax returns.
Realistically, this will be based on ZIP code and registered high school. Information that's already publicly-available. This changes nothing except potentially making neighborhood-level affirmative action more politically palatable.
I do believe with just a few pieces of the information they're taking into consideration (namely, neighborhood, if you have a single parent, and if you're ESL [not sure if they're talking about the child being ESL or the parents]) you could reliably determine if the child is black or Hispanic and therefore worthy of an adversity score boost. Everyone else, get stuffed. They may also be making a big show of using these factors that "technically" don't identify the test taker's race and instead are just disregarding them and relying solely on the self-reported racial information provided when taking the test. Who knows? But I highly doubt you'll find a lot of poor white kids in West Virginia getting boosted scores via this scheme.
> But I highly doubt you'll find a lot of poor white kids in West Virginia getting boosted scores via this scheme.
That is exactly what I expect to happen - as well as poor kids who happen to belong to racial minorities. The College Board published the criteria they will use to calculate the score. Race is not one of the criteria. But you're saying that race will not only be used, but be the primary criteria. So, let's be clear: you're saying the College Board is lying. Which, I can't prove they are not, but I'm inclined to trust them over your claims.
Just to nitpick a bit, race is one of the optional criteria. The school decides whether they want the College Board to include it.
"The program aimed to measure the challenges students faced. It created an expected SAT score based on socioeconomic factors including, if schools chose to add it, race." [1]
Thanks. CBS seems much better than the NYT on this.
Quote:
These factors are first divided into three categories: neighborhood environment, family environment and high school environment.
Each of the three categories has five sub-indicators that are indexed in calculating each student's adversity score. Neighborhood environment will take into account crime rate, poverty rate, housing values and vacancy rate. Family environment will assess what the median income is of where the student's family is from; whether the student is from a single parent household; the educational level of the parents; and whether English is a second language. High school environment will look at factors such as curriculum rigor, free-lunch rate and AP class opportunities. Together these factors will calculate an individual's adversity score on a scale of one to 100.
Thanks for the link. I would honestly be quite astounded if they were using individual-level reporting instead of using public data captured at the census tract level. Do you have any information about where the "family-level" data are coming from?
How do they determine one’s race in the US? Is there a central database where everyone gets a record at birth? Otherwise what stops me from reporting myself as black?
Nothing, although if colleges accepted you under the assumption that you reported who you were honestly, and then later found out that you weren’t who you claimed to be, you might find your acceptances revoked.
Probably not. I remember a story of someone who did this [0] and nothing happened.
I can only imagine the terrifyingly embarrassing situations where people of a race are challenged to prove their race and flip out because they are their race.
How would they find out my race? Based on the looks? So they would count Michael Jackson as “white”? What if a person looks white but has black ancestors?
The Census collects racial information that most people answer with responses they believe to be truthful. IIRC in WW2 it was used to identify Japanese-Americans for internment.
This is already happening. The difference is that it's only happening at elite schools that take a "holistic" approach to admissions already. Now, less elite schools will join in the fun.
This is the real scandal. It is possible to convince a doctor to provide a disability. This gives advantages on the test, such as extra time. The abnormal testing is not reported to colleges.
Probably the only solution here is to offer those advantages to everybody. If you want double time, you should get it. If you want food during the test, you should get it. Whatever it is, let everybody have it. Anything less makes a mockery of "standardized" testing.
Fundamentally I think pretty much everyone agrees on the concept of equal opportunity. But what people don't seem to agree on is the definition of equal opportunity. Or even I guess what is opportunity?
If we have 2 people, A and B. A belongs to a wealthy family and lives in a nice neighborhood and goes to a nice high school. B has a poorer family, lives in a worse neighborhood and goes to a worse high school. What would providing equal opportunity look like? It seems like it should be something along the lines of B should also be able to attend the nice school, have access to tutors if desired etc. Not adjust B's scores up by some arbitrary amount because of circumstance.
Look, it's a question of implementation. There's a quantitative threshold at which students qualify for admission. Either we change that threshold, or we fudge the score.
Not sure I agree with that. The two choices are not just change the threshold or fudge the score. Ideally it would be to provide the right conditions so that neither is needed.
Of course real world is more complex than that, and that condition is not easy to provide. I'm just not sure having an subjective, arbitrary and opaque fudge factor is the right answer.
The question then becomes do we go for an objective scoring system or are we ok with it being subjective? How do you quantify perseverance and tenacity? Is it higher perseverance to grow up in a poor neighborhood or with some chronic disease? Is overcoming ESL or abusive parents more tenacious?
Even looking at my own situation I'm not sure which way things should go. I grew up poor to immigrant parents that didn't speak English (neither did I). However both parents are educated and valued education. Do I get + or - marks?
If you look at the metrics, you'd receive + marks for ESL and income, and negative marks for educated parents. Overall you'd probably receive a + adversity score.
I'll play devil's advocate. I went to a public high school that served a large area (it's Rim of the World High in Southern California in case anyone is curious). It's the only high school in the mountains, and services "poorer" areas like Crestline and "wealthier" areas like Lake Arrowhead. To my knowledge, I was one of the only honors kids from Crestline. My morning consisted of getting up at 5:30 am and taking a 45 minute yellow bus ride to get to school (and school started at 7 am!) and back. How do I explain to colleges that every day of my high school was 1.5 hours longer because of that bus ride?
i'd actually say that's an argument against having an 'adversity score' - a single value simply isn't enough to capture the nuances of your situation, and having a standardized score might pressure colleges to rely more heavily on those values.
specifically for your example, there doesn't seem to be any factor in the score calculation that takes into account 'distance from school,' while 'quality of high school' does play a role. so it's quite possible that since your high school did better overall (i.e. serviced 'wealthier' kids, skewing the score), your score would look better than things actually were.
This is a terrible policy. These factors aren't subject to being quantified, and thus can't be compared equally.
You can't compare one zip code versus another to say which is geographically more "adverse". Poor white, trailer trash neighborhood vs drug-infested, gang-ridden city streets. Schools with 75% of students on free-lunch vs schools that have suffered mass shootings. Single black mother working as a nurse making $80k a year raising two kids versus Indian single mom who was abused by her husband and filed for divorce and custody.
On the flip side, what message do you tell to a white male from an upper middle class background who is raised in a good school district? He wants to go to an Ivy League. What should he do, how can he prepare?
This seems fine if you wanted to use the SAT to measure an outcome for a given level of inputs. If all you actually care about is the actual outcome though, then this doesn't actually help.
I guess there could be both use cases for test scores, given that higher education might actually find itself more concerned with showing improvement as an important metric. They might prefer students that show more aptitude for a given level of input, moreso than the total aptitude achieved.
I constantly hear employers mentioning that same desire - to have "lifelong learners" are employees. I have to believe at some level that there is some desire for a measure of absolute capability, too.
Past adversity is in the past. So if someone grew up in a poor environment but you're thinking of admitting them to a good college on full scholarship, they'll soon be progressing at the rate they're capable of without the adversity.
So the best predictor of future success in a good environment probably does include a correction for past adversity.
1) Why do you think their circumstances will change once they're in University?
2) There is the assumption that the environment in which you grew up in does not permanently affect the way you learn, while many studies have proven this to be untrue. The most critical years shaping the way you learn is in the younger years. Once you're past that, there is no way you can "make up" for it just by going to a better college.
A radical solution I believe is to completely subsidize all education and child rearing costs, such that every child will at least have the necessary basic conditions needed for them to excel. Of course, parents are always going to try and give their kids an edge, but at some point there'll be diminishing marginal returns. To relieve pressure on governmental funding, another radical idea is to couple this with an upper limit on the number of children you can have, so people will not "overburden" the system by having too many children.
1) For most selective colleges, they'll be living in a different neighborhood or different city, in a college dorm instead of their house, with classmates instead of parents & siblings. So almost everything is different.
2) Sure. Environment has both short-term and long-term effects. So a fraction of the environmental effects wear off. I dunno what the fraction is, but when you do the regression to find the weighting of SAT test score and adversity score that best predicts college achievement, it should find the right balance.
I'm not trying to say there's no correlation from some subgroups. Obviously there is.
I'm trying to say that if you're trying to predict performance in a new environment (college) you can improve the prediction by correcting for factors (bad home environment during high school) that affect current test scores but won't be active in the future.
How large the correction should be can only be answered by large population studies.
Good point. It would be extremely useful to be able to pinpoint factors that are transient vs. those that stay with someone and continue to affect future performance..
Correlation between two factors doesn't tell you how to compare two sets of values. Kids who have to work after school until bedtime won't get as good grades in HS, but if no longer made to do so, may perform substantially better in college.
And that's the key. You're positing that the disadvantage magically stops in university.
I work in law school admissions prep, and you see these disadvantages all the way down the line: SAT, college grades, LSAT, law school grades, Bar exam passage rate
There are some cases where it stops. Maybe the college board can identify which variables may indicate a poor correlation. There might be some factors that indicate transient issues and some that indicate worse lifelong expectations.
But I'd be cautious about too readily assuming that a cause of a lower SAT will vanish in later life.
Actually, I should have been specific: you see disadvantages related to ethnic group down the line. If a group has a lower SAT score, they generally have the same gap on the LSAT, GRE, GMAT etc.
This is heavily related to socioeconomic status in the US. IIRC, in the UK for example you don't see these same gaps between ethnic groups. So it's something specific to US social circumstances, and not racial.
I don't know so much about particular circumstances, I just know what the high level stats say, and am inferring from that. I'm not American, so I don't have lived experience of the class structure there.
There are probably studies about income, but the test makers tend to only collect official data about ethnicity. It's commonly used as a proxy for social class, but I wish the test makers had better data about the elements the College Board is trying to capture with this new policy.
It's about one standard deviation between high scoring groups and low scoring groups across the tests.
LSAC no longer has theirs posted publicly, but it was much the same.
So, to the extent ethnicity is a proxy for social class in the US, we can say that the disadvantage these groups have at SAT time doesn't vanish by the time they take graduate level exams.
I wish I had some data for you that was based on social circumstances other than race, but I don't have deep knowledge in the domain, only what I've seen looking at the reports produced by the test companies recently.
How does one determine how large the correction should be? Since the system is all opaque and political, what prevents one from setting a correction factor of 10x, making sure no child of --bourgeois-- middle-class parents will ever set foot in an university? Such a policy was implemented in Eastern Europe under occupation by Stalin's armies in the aftermath of WWII. The economic and social results became quite apparent a few decades later, when the whole system collapsed.
Colleges can already access this information in other ways. This is just a proprietary weighing of these things into one number. Given the information the SAT has access to, the number seems likely to be based around the student's address and school, rather than unique challenges to that student, like how present parents are in the student's life and if they have to care for younger siblings or need a part time job to help out. I don't remember having to give the SAT any sort of income or family data, but that sort of thing would be equally, if not more, relevant to the discussion of experienced adversity.
Just because a school has access to the information doesn't mean they have the expertise, time, or money, to turn that information into a number that can then be used in admissions. Admissions tests have existed for centuries the idea of the SAT is by having a single standard you can have one group of people make a better test for less money (and student time). This is very much the same thing, figuring out how to rank high schools and estimate adversity by street address for the whole nation is a HARD problem.
There are so many solutions that are possible if we are honest about underlying problems. For example, minority children are more likely to live in places with high lead exposure - lead has devastating consequences on brain development - and presumably future SAT scores.
The only way to be truly fair with admissions is to admit blind of any defacto discriminatory identity/categorization method and based entirely on competency and scores. I realize that is unpopular for a variety of reasons, but are elite academic institutions meant to be elite academic institutions, or are they social engineering laboratories?
They are meant to educate students for success in the world, and success for the world. Of course they are social engineering laboratories; that's in their charters.
Looks like they try to account for neighborhood environment, family environment, and high school environment. Seems a bit fairer than I expected, assuming family environment is given the weight it deserves. Otherwise it may penalize people who try to go to a better school or a better neighborhood.
Also looks like a play to sell a dashboard. Maybe related to the regulatory environment of colleges - they can prove they're selecting across a broad enough socioeconomic stratus, similar to how banks like to prove they're meeting HUD requirements for lending.
Totally irrelevant; this isn't a matter of the author being one thing or another. The point Vonnegut makes in the story is a philosophical one, namely that a blind pursuit of equality is wicked and inhuman, which is transparently correct.
As a brown immigrant from a poor south asian family who recently moved to Canada, I still oppose this. I don't think measuring one student's hardship to another student's can be achieved objectively. What if someone comes from a rich family but was always beaten, ignored, molested, raped by their siblings/parents? Is this person's hardship not as measurable as someone from a poor family but never had to face those issues?
Let's take an example of Elon Musk. His childhood was full of abuse but they weren't poor. How would you compare objectively his score from someone who wasn't abused but was poor? And let's say you give lesser points to Elon, do you think you did the right thing considering he has achieved a ton to push mankind forward?
I don't get the point of this. The SAT is never used by colleges outside of the context of the applicant's background. I have full faith that there's nothing College Board can add to knowledge of an applicant that admissions committees don't already factor in.
FTA: "The score would not be reported to the student, only to college officials."
Brilliant. Another aspect of the already sketchy admittance process that will be overanalyzed and ultimately gamed to death -- assuming that this score truly has value to begin with.
When I have kids, I think I'm going to direct them to check the "Decline to respond" box for any race/income/parents-education-level questions.
I used to believe in the value of collecting these stats to problem solve what we can do to help everyone achieve. But increasingly these stats are just being used for a different kind of discrimination.
We've all got problems, and they're immeasurable. In high school I had severe anxiety that led to a lot of procrastination and avoiding school clubs. And as a 1st-generation immigrant, there were subtle cultural differences, even though I fit in with my appearance.
This whole thing is about who deserves the opportunity for higher education.
The truth is, except for a small handful of schools (whose seats are mostly already spoken for, either through donors, athletes, or the elite prodigies who are going to get in regardless of their socioeconomic background) it is almost irrelevant whether or not you go to school A or school B in the long run.
Your grit, your personal talents, your luck/karma/destiny etc are basically what carry you through anyway.
Anyone who blames their failure in life on “some kid took my seat at Harvard because adversity score” probably doesn’t have what it takes to make it anyway.
This whole conversation is stupid. I graduated from high school class rank 380 out of 386 and nearly failed the SAT. I still got into college without any challenge and graduated.
I am now both a US Army officer and a self-taught senior software developer working for a company that until recently generated more revenue than Google. As a hobby I write open source software that is arguably superior and outperforms similar projects coming out of Facebook. My adversity and persistence allowed me to learn a skill that formal education did not and I have been rewarded accordingly.
I'm late to the party, but I think this is a good first step towards actually prioritizing/penalizing around class, instead of using race as a proxy for it.
I've always felt that it was completely ridiculous that a Laotian student from a low-income family would be penalized under modern American systems when competing against an African-American student whose parents are both doctors/lawyers/engineers, and surpass the aforementioned family's income by 10x or more.
Wouldn't it be hilarious if universities found that higher adversity score predicted worse outcomes and used it to penalize applicants afflicted with adversity! Once it's well accepted that it's OK to discriminate based on the adversity score, they can discriminate in whichever direction they want and it will be hard for critics to complain without admitting that it's really racial discrimination in disguise.
So I think that it is OK to be taking these factors into account at the college admissions level, but I am not sure if the "neutral test administration organization" is the correct place for this to be at.
This is a very thorny issue, and I am uncomfortable with a centralized organization influencing it to such a large degree.
Whether, and how much, to take into account these factors should be a local decision made by the college itself.
The problem with doing it at the admission level is you have to adjust ALL admissions processes. Doing it at the SAT level avoids the problem where disadvantaged kids are cut off by hard score limits right at the start of the process.
It could also be used to signal to schools which kids are likely to need some remedial classes in the first year despite what they scored on the SAT. Of course one can imagine a scenario where the admissions looks at the adversity score to weed out kids who they don't think are going to be prepared regardless of how smart they are.
This whole process assumes that the universities are interested in reforming the kids that the school system failed in the first place.
I would imagine that elite schools won't rely on this very heavily, but not every school has the resources to do a "holistic" admissions process, and not every student has the desire to go through such a process.
Kinda feels like admissions departments are not doing their job/the College Board is attempting to do their job for them. Why should I trust a metric from the College Board? Anybody who has taken an AP test can tell you the courses are in no shape or form close to college level. And the SAT is an exercise in anal perfectionism, not intelligence. I don't trust them to accurately judge the socioeconomic background of a cow, let alone a student. And anyways, isn't it the job of the admissions department to judge a candidate by more than their scores? Isn't that the point of "holistic" admissions?
Also, is it just me, or are SAT scores wildly overvalued? Maybe it's just my high school, but SAT scores were never emphasized, versus the ridiculous race for grades, extracurriculars and good essays. The days of a "good" SAT score getting you into a college are over. I can generally tell how old someone is just from how much they emphasize SAT scores.
When you say AP tests are nowhere close to college level, do you mean they are easier or harder? Personally I think they are morw difficult, but your comment seems to be implying they are easier (and obviously so).
At least for Computer Science A, BC Calculus, Physics C and US History, the tests are nowhere near college level. Plenty of people get 5's on Calculus BC and can't tell you how to derive, say, integration by parts. Or how the Mean Value Theorem works. Or really anything beyond regurgitated power rules, etc. And Physics C? I got a 5 on both tests with some pretty terrible answers. The courses, sure, depending on your school they can be really great and beyond college level. But they'd still be great and beyond college level if they were just regular advanced classes.
Not to mention some AP tests are rather ridiculous. Like AP World, which is a test on all of history. Could you imagine a test on all of math? Plus it doesn't count for anything. AP US History doesn't get me out of any classes. It didn't add anything to my application other than another number. And I didn't really learn much either.
This seems like a better system than just blindly adjusting scores based on race. It never made sense to me how a white kid from a broken home in rural West Virginia could be considered by some colleges as privileged over a black kid with multimillionire lawyer parents living in NYC.
But, I don't understand why College Board is computing this score, and not colleges themselves.
At what point in life can one's hardships be discounted? First job application after college? Should every job application have an adversity score? Should every promotion consider this? Should you be entitled to more government benefits, because of adversity?
At what point, if any, does the responsibility of getting out of adversity lie on the individual?
The underlying assumption in all of this is that quality education should remain scarce, in which case it must be doled out based on broadly applicable metrics that end up being arbitrary in practice.
If education and opportunity were abundant, maybe we wouldn't be at each other's throats and/or concocting elaborate ways to game the system.
Equality of opportunity over outcome for me. Now Asians will be discriminated against secretly. My family sacrificing vacations and eating out for 12 years (literally ate out 5x max) to afford to live in a good school district shouldn’t penalize us. My dad commuted 4 hours daily instead of moving...I’m getting pushed further and further to the right.
>I’m getting pushed further and further to the right.
Maybe not, it feels like to me that the Overton window[0] has been sliding left. My views on freedom of speech made me a 'leftist commie' when I used them to defend South Park and Eminem now most often I'm accused being 'alt-right' by those who disagree with those same views.
A one dimensional left/right view doesn't really explain our current politics very well. Factions in both parties have strong reasons to be against freedom of speech.
While i don’t disagree on its face. That statement usually means “people should just be on my side”.
As written above; the Overton window has been moving left, and things like not prosecuting female gential mutilation in the US, straight socialism, not settling for anything less than full gun bans, open borders - things that would have got you locked up 50 years ago are being pushed by presidential candidates and congress members.
It’s moved left, and a little too far. So while I agree people with brains should be united, right now many of the balanced beliefs will get you called an alt-right Nazi.
You need a third party that takes up the middle. That allows the parties to move slowly towards the middle and shift left or right over certain issues only. Right now it is setup to move the parties apart as the choice is binary.
> not prosecuting female gential mutilation in the US, straight socialism, not settling for anything less than full gun bans, open borders
Please don't lie. There is no mainstream Congress person or presidential candidate protecting FGM, advocating for full socialism or complete open borders. Just because you disagree with them doesn't make your projections true.
Anecdotal, but I notice a lot more people clamoring about freedom of speech when it's white supremacists being affected and a lot less when it's ISIS or Al-Qaeda. I find it very hard to take them seriously because of this, despite agreeing with a lot of the sentiment.
Keep in mind that the definition of "white supremacy" has been expanded to include things like opposition to affirmative action, or support for enforcement of existing border control regulations (let along their expansion). Of course calls to censor those things are going to garner much more opposition than censoring explicit terrorist organizations.
Many people, including mainstream media outlets, friends of mine, and co-workers have labeled these positions as white supremacist. Not just identifying them as positions that white supremacists support. The set of views considered "white supremacist" is indeed expanding to include mainstream conservative views like the ones I mentioned.
I recently attended a diversity workshop at a large organization that you’d recognize where we were taught some key elements of white supremacy are things like: perfectionism, urgency, defensiveness, individualism, etc.
Being conscious of dog whistles isn't expanding the white supremacist classification. A single false positive by Twitter of all places isn't indicative of a trend.
> Being conscious of dog whistles isn't expanding the white supremacist classification.
It does when allegations of dog whistling are levied against mainstream viewpoints. Saying "build the wall" is a white supremacist dog whistle is absolutely a means of expanding white supremacy to encompass support border enforcement. Nothing about building a wall on a national border is white supremacist. White supremacists may be in favor of such a viewpoint, but that does not make the viewpoint itself white supremacist.
Accusations of dog whistling is a very cheap and effective way of stuffing words into one's opponents' mouths and many do use it to try and paint acceptable views as white supremacist.
It most certainly is. What's worse is when anonymous strangers on the internet accuse someone of being white supremacist just because they oppose reparations and affirmative action without even knowing anything else about the person. I am a brown immigrant myself (recently moved to Canada) who opposes affirmative action and reparations and just for that, I got called white supremacist, a nazi etc on reddit. Like how exactly can a dark brown person be white supremacist? Makes no sense. But the hidden identity on the internet lets people throw abhorrent insults like no tomorrow.
I’m pretty tired of people linking any sort of complaint, worry, and defense of their rights to white supremacy or whatever hate group.
Plenty of people stand up for their rights because they legitimately care about freedom. It’s not all some conspiracy by hate groups to defend themselves.
Welcome to the world created by faster communication.
At a point where each issue is extremely polarizing, where we connect people around the world - blurring the local and the global - and there’s a new crazy event happening every minute around the world minute - people lose nuance and the ability to stop and compartmentalism events.
Since everything is now part of a never ending stream of outrageous actions, content consumers have adapted by looking at meta identifiers to get a grip on the world around them.
Who is speaking? What are they saying ? Oh? It matches statements used by white supremacists ? Ok, good bye.
I don’t have the time or bandwidth to invest in you.
When everything is accessible and people have only limited processing space - decisions are made on lossy fast information.
Perhaps, but there is also a cultural trend of alt-right/far right groups clamoring about free speech in response to de-platforming and being uninvited to speak at college campuses. Most contemporary American free speech protests aren't apolitical affairs where nonsectarian activists are just "standing up for their rights because they legitimately care about freedom" for the sake of free speech as an ideal- they view freedom as a means to promote their ideology.
> Perhaps, but there is also a cultural trend of alt-right/far right groups clamoring about free speech in response to de-platforming and being disinvited to speak at college campuses.
For public universities, this is a breach of the first amendment no matter how heinous the speakers' viewpoints are. And for private universities it's a big blow to the institution's reputations for all but the most objectionable speakers.
> Most contemporary American free speech protests aren't apolitical affairs where nonsectarian activists are just "standing up for their rights because they legitimately care about freedom" for the sake of free speech as an ideal- they view freedom as a means to promote their ideology.
I don't disagree with you. But you're drawing the wrong conclusions from this observation. If the concerns over free speech is more prevalent on one end of the political spectrum, it could easily be due to the fact that said end of the political spectrum is being censored more frequently and more aggressively. And I can't argue with that, I've seen very stark disparities in enforcement over the past several years.
> And for private universities it's a big blow to the institution's reputations for all but the most objectionable speakers.
Numerous private universities (Christian schools in particular) enforce strict student code of conduct rules that severely limit the student body's freedom of expression as to way to enforce religious or secular compliance. And it doesn't hurt their reputation but instead is an integral component of the school's identity.
I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I'd argue that colleges and universities should have the right to police speech and expression: they should just be upfront about it. "Our house: our rules" as they say.
Let me preface by saying I disagree with everything you say, but I still think you have the right to say it.
Universities are meant to be institutions of learning. Learning isn’t always comfortable. Some long held truths turn out to be wrong at some point. What we all think is true or right right now could completely reverse in a decade. Letting people speak especially when it’s against your morals is important for learning and understanding. Even if it’s bizarre and incoherent, if somebody believes it, we should try to understand why so that we can better educate those who were persuaded.
As an example of the rapid change in public thought and what’s acceptable, almost nobody publicly supported gay marriage a little over a decade ago. Saying you did would result in mockery, people questioning your sexual identity, people bringing up the religious history of America, etc. Now publicly opposing it is career suicide.
The student body is going to have its own set of values, some of which may challenge the prevailing norms of society or the university itself. Should a university ignore, nurture, or challenge the views of its students? I feel like, as a student, you should be allowed to pick. Because depending on the issue, or the individual, the answer may change.
For example, at one time Gen-Xers and Millennials were significantly more tolerant of homosexuality than society overall (they still are, but society has largely come around). Did universities do them a disservice by either nurturing or ignoring these views, rather than intellectually challenging their pro-gay marriage views?
> The student body is going to have its own set of values, some of which may challenge the prevailing norms of society or the university itself. Should a university ignore, nurture, or challenge the views of its students? I feel like, as a student, you should be allowed to pick. Because depending on the issue, or the individual, the answer may change.
And what happens when students cease to challenge their own views? They become accustomed to a monoculture and become adverse to views other than their own. In time, the refusal to challenge their own views morphs into hostility towards those that dare challenge those views.
> For example, at one time Gen-Xers and Millennials were significantly more tolerant of homosexuality than society overall (they still are, but society has largely come around). Did universities do them a disservice by either nurturing or ignoring these views, rather than intellectually challenging their pro-gay marriage views?
It did them a service. By being force to challenge these views, these students were prompted to developed effective arguments to refute those challenges. This better equipped them to turn around and challenge the rest of society's views on these topics.
I think there’s a difference between challenging and shutting down. Challenging should be encouraged since it (at least theoretically) forces people to have a reasonable basis for their beliefs. Students who don’t want to be challenged and just want to be correct and shut down opposing thoughts shouldn’t really be called students. They’re not seeing to broaden their horizons. If they only want to learn about their speciality topic, that’s okay, but university isn’t really the place for that. Technical and speciality schools exist to focus on small fields of learning.
> Numerous private universities (Christian schools in particular) enforce strict student code of conduct rules that severely limit the student body's freedom of expression as to way to enforce religious or secular compliance. And it doesn't hurt their reputation but instead is an integral component of the school's identity.
Perhaps you're coming from a different cultural context than, but in my circles such universities absolutely are mocked and looked down upon. Some people don't even consider applicants from BYU, and other heavily religious universities because they don't want to reward such institutions.
> I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I'd argue that colleges and universities should have the right to police speech and expression: they should just be upfront about it. "Our house: our rules" as they say.
For public universities, the First Amendment legally obligates them otherwise. For private universities they already have the right to police speech and expression. It is, as you say, their house and their rules. They don't police (or rather they are very liberal in their policing) because freedom of speech and expression are central to an effective academy. Once universities start policing heavy-handedly, or on ideological grounds people start to doubt whether the ideas voiced are genuine or whether people are censoring themselves out of fear of retaliation from the institution. This cloud of doubt hangs overall the research published by that university, and the reputation of that university suffers considerably.
> Some people don't even consider applicants from BYU, and other heavily religious universities because they don't want to reward such institutions.
That's just religious discrimination cloaked in something less intolerable: academic elitism. HBCUs probably face a similar problem: should we abolish or enforce strict racial quotes on them because there are racists who will toss a resume with Howard University on it?
> For public universities, the First Amendment legally obligates them otherwise.
This is absolutely true. But to your broader point, that freedom of expression yields greater institutional cache: how do you explain the strong performance (and reputation) of private institutions vs. "state schools"?
> That's just religious discrimination cloaked in something less intolerable: academic elitism.
I don't necessarily agree with tossing such resumes in the garbage, but it is evidence that universities that enforce religious dogma on their students do suffer a hit to their reputation because of that.
> how do you explain the strong performance (and reputation) of private institutions vs. "state schools"?
Not every private school is Stanford, MIT, etc. Plenty of private schools are shitty for-profit enterprises (especially online universities) that essentially scam customers out of their money. Purely on the basis of return on investment many studies also conclude that public university is better than private universities.
Also most reputable private university do respect freedom of speech and expression to a similar degree as public universities. If you factor in the reactions of students, perhaps even better. When Berkeley hosted Milo Y students rioted, smashed up cars, etc. When Stanford hosted Dinesh D'Souza it was very tame with protesters being non-disruptive. Public universities aren't immune from going off the deep end regardless of constitutional protection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cMYfxOFBBM
Again, the private schools with good reputations do behave almost as if the First Amendment applied to them. The ones that don't generally aren't reputable. So your question is based on false premise.
I think the both of you are conflating a multitude of separate topics. Private schools tend to have strong reputations because of legacy reputations, and wealthy alumni funding. Freedom of speech is unlikely to be related. Berkeley and Stanford are both examples of very famous schools with distinct (and sometimes contrasting) cultures. They do not necessarily correlate to supporting/not supporting freedom of speech. (Berkeley was home to a Free Speech Movement in the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement) Aggressive protest is part of the Cal student body culture, and the behavior of students is not reflective of the actual college administration's actions restricting or upholding free speech.
> But to your broader point, that freedom of expression yields greater institutional cache: how do you explain the strong performance (and reputation) of private institutions vs. "state schools"?
as a way of insinuating that freedom expression is not important to institutional reputation because private schools (which aren't required to abide by the first amendment) are often very reputable, frequently moreso than public schools.
This is question loaded in false premises. Reputable private schools do support freedom of speech and expression to similar degrees as public schools. And not to mention, the claim that private schools are on aggregate better than public schools is likely untrue.
Banning religious schools is often discussed here in Sweden. It has nothing to do with discrimination. The question is if religion has any right to exist in education that society pay for, and if religious element during education is compatible with the many regulations that cover the education sector.
Education is not some kind of of enterprise free from regulations. The consequences of bad education is similar to bad health care. As I see it, let schools worry about education, political system deal with politics, legal system deal with enforcing the law, health system deal with health issues, and religious communities deal with religion. Trying to mix them together will only cause intolerance and tensions in society.
Sadly the people who mock students from private religious schools are also mocking students from historic black colleges or those who went to comminity college.
Next time you hear about this speak up and change the conversation.
Not the case, at least in my experience. I work in the San Francisco Bay Area. We recruit exclusively at Ives, the likes of Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech, etc. and HBCUs and HWCUs. There's a big push to increase racial and gender diversity at least in this region. There's not much much diversity at religious colleges (>82% white, nowhere near the kind of representation we're looking for).
Before you try to diversity based on race you need to diversity more based on other factors and stop hiring from the same schools as everyone.
Who cares if you have x number from certain race groups if everyone is from the same monoculture. Why not try to hire the best from African schools.. that will give you race diversity more important cultural diversity.
While I am sure you are well intentioned in your efforts to increase diversity in the Bay Area, your comment makes me think the end result of your hiring policy is going to be diversity in everything but thought. That makes me sad.
If people try to crush speech they don’t like, and fringe groups are the only ones saying they support freedom, otherwise neutral people who are concerned about their rights are going to side with one of those groups.
The number of people siding with those groups will be more than zero. Support will grow and they’ll push their message farther and farther into extremism.
It’s not the first time this has happened. But each generation thinks they’re enlightened and extremism won’t take over again. Political extremists work with a grain of truth (“Look! They really ARE oppressing us”). If they were absolutely false nobody would support them.
People also need to get over the fact that on a business platform like Facebook Google, Reddit -- you have no rights (except those spelled out in their editable tos/privacy policy/etc...), None of these entities has ANY legal requirement to give you a platform for hate speech, and has EVERY right to ban said speech. Unless we'd rather the government take over Facebook and have full on communism, and make all these businesses public entities, etc...
I'm not getting into the hate speech debate - most of this page of comments so far is depressingly tone-deaf and insensitive - but I have to say that your argument about having no rights on websites is pretty hollow. Nobody with even a modicum of sense ever claims that their actual legal rights are being violated when they complain about being censored on a private website. Any reference to "free speech" is an appeal to shared values, an argument that they think the moderators are acting improperly in light of those shared values. The public debate is over whether platforms like Facebook, Google, Reddit, etc should be neutral marketplaces of ideas, like Greek agora, and to what extent they should be able to privately police such a large part of our public discourse. This is a legitimate topic for debate and potential public policy, even if initially such policy would only serve to provide a voice for some pretty despicable people. You pointing out that Facebook is a private company which can do whatever it wants with its own data is wholly missing the point. Nobody is even having that conversation.
Are they platforms or publishers? Your ISP doesn't police content in a meaningful way and are immune to legal claims that their service is responsible for same, similarly a newspaper is legally responsible for what it prints due to the fact they have a editor who controls what is published.
There is a selection effect going on. The algorithmic censorship of those groups also did a lot of collateral damage to regular folks in the Middle East who didn't have much of an influence or voice (limited or no English-language skills, not much connections to large media outlets or influential tech people, and located in a different part of the world - which affects organic reach of their social media posts even if they did voice their dissatisfaction with what was going on).
Tipper Gore and other Democrats lead the charge with the PMRC which created parental advisory stickers and age restriction on music. I felt like both sides were down to restrict expression in the 80's and 90's
Specifically on freedom of speech, the left and right oscillate tons based on who is feeling more authoritarian (the other axis). A small, very vocal portion of the identity-politics left is currently very authoritarian and anti freedom of speech but I think that's a specific current internet-influenced trend and not to do with a wider shift of the overton window on issues in general.
I agree with you on the internet-influenced part, but not on the latter portion of your argument. Even if the anti-free speech movement is small, the majority of "left-aligned media" do echo their beliefs. This to me does swing the overton window to the left.
A particular subgroup with its Overton window in a certain range is using the power of cancel culture, naming-and-shaming, etc. to see their standards applied universally. Do not underestimate this. The next frontier is identifying and punishing those who are "at risk" of transgressing identity-politics norms. I saw a few of them on Twitter crafting plans to pressure open source conferences to ban people who gave talks of the form "Making X Great Again" where X = JavaScript, unit testing, etc. on the grounds that such a title constituted "normalizing hate speech" and such people were at particularly high risk of violating relevant Codes of Conduct.
The people creating them shouldn't be banned, but those titles should definitely be banned because that is a terrible and uncreative joke/reference that should have been retired by the end of the 2016 presidential elections.
The window is shifting to opinions held by those who call themselves the left, which isn't necessarily the same thing as what has been traditionally considered to be leftist.
I'd describe the situation as being that the core beliefs of the political left in the United States have diverged sufficiently far from the core beliefs of liberalism (including freedom of speech) to the point that being a liberal no longer automatically implies membership in or sympathy for the left.
Not just freedom of speech, supporting trumps new tariffs would have made you a pinko commie as little as 20 years ago, protests against global trade (like the battle of Seattle) had a sizable trade union contingent. So many that consider themselves left today seem to define it in opposition to what the right is doing, not from valuing egalitarianism.
> Maybe not, it feels like to me that the Overton window[0] has been sliding left.
The Left-Right Overton Window has definitely moved Right, in that reductive to the point of uselessness, single-axis characterization of American politics. Some of Reagan's and Nixon's policies would be dismissed as "libtarded" now, as would some of W.'s.
Another Overton Window (or, more accurately, related group of Windows), describing discourse about and among the races, sexualities, gender identities, &c, have at the same time moved in a direction that is less welcoming to speech that is premised in a notion of superiority or morality about those things, especially when uttered by a person who believes that premise, and which is about the speaker's (and by implication their tribe's) own superiority, or someone else's inferiority or immorality.
The vector product of those Windows' movements is a culturally dominant polity who feels marginalized.
> My views on freedom of speech made me a 'leftist commie' when I used them to defend South Park and Eminem now most often I'm accused being 'alt-right' by those who disagree with those same views.
I think there's a meaningful difference between speech that is offensive, whatever that means, to cultural norms — especially those that are othering, or regressive, or shame-based, or whatever — and speech that is offensive, whatever that means, to individuals and populations — particularly when those individuals or populations are minorities, and have been historically subject to oppression, and which speech attempts to normalize their oppression.
Don't mistake me: Freedom of speech is for the speech one likes least, or it's for no speech at all; I want the bigots every bit as free to make their noise as I do the artists or the critics (who are often the same people), but for entirely different reasons.
Perhaps the comedian's notion of "punching up" versus "punching down" is relevant here. Perhaps also that people — on both sides — are generally just bad at disagreeing.
Based on the views you have espoused here, I would not call you a leftist commie. It sounds like freedom of speech is your number 1 concern, which would be in character for someone with views that could be considered alt-right. Maybe you are a libertarian, which could otherwise be referred to as an anarch-capatalist, but libertarianism is in no way a leftist movement.
While South Park and Eminem both 'triggered' a lot of people because of their use of obscenity, neither is leftist in any way, shape or form. South Park regularly attacks anyone who tries to change society, which is in no way a leftist mindset. As for Eminem, I can't think of a single example of left-leaning thought in any of them outside of freedom of speech.
In general I think you'd have a very hard time making the claim that the overton window is sliding to the left. Maybe the overton window is moving to the left for gender identity and sexual expression, but that is about it. The right has succeeded in moving the overton window substantially in their favor in most social and economic programs.
Leftists aren't actually oppressing anybody. We're still under the rule of the far-right in the US (a country which does not actually have a left wing by Western standards). Voting with your dollar and pointing out bigotry and inequality is not oppression.
Well, that's certainly not true. They are absolutely oppressing people. They may be oppressing people that you or even I think ought be oppressed, but that doesn't mean they're not doing it.
> We're still under the rule of the far-right in the US (a country which does not actually have a left wing by Western standards).
That's true around economic issues. It's not so true around identity politics. The political climate around those issues in the US is very much left of center.
> Voting with your dollar and pointing out bigotry and inequality is not oppression.
That kind of depends on what exactly you mean by that. Naming and shaming individuals for social transgressions based on hearsay seems pretty oppressive to me.
As a fellow Asian whose parents also sacrificed a lot, I'm sympathetic, but I would urge you to consider a couple things:
1. Like it or not, plenty of families in America have had it worse than you had, and would not find it at all impressive that you have never gone on a vacation or eaten out.
2. You should save your anger for the huge number of spots saved for legacies and athletes. Being the child of alumni means you have a 45% greater chance of getting into a college. (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/07/harvards-freshman-class-is-m...) If you must get angry at someone, don't get angry at the people who are struggling as hard, or harder than you are--get mad at the rich assholes who quietly sail into these so-called elite institutions.
3. If you have good grades and good test scores, there are tons of good colleges you can go to. They just might not be Harvard. Is not going to Harvard worth pushing yourself to the right? Worth aligning yourself with the guy pushing a trade war with China, which is going to do wonders for the image of Asians in America? Personally, I don't think so.
4. The adversity score is designed to ensure equality of opportunity, dude. If they were capable of making a good adversity score, they would certainly take into account your family's struggles. They probably won't be able to, because these things are unquantifiable, but frankly the SAT and the whole college admissions process are bullshit anyway, and you'll be happier once you let go of your belief that because your family sacrificed a lot, the system ought to reward you. It should, but it won't, because it's a capricious and unfair monster.
Lots of great points to consider here and I'll boost number (2). I'm struggling not to say something unforgivably cynical here.... .... ...so let's say this: getting the 4.8% of Americans who are of Asian descent to spend their time crapping on the 12.7% of Americans who are black, or even better spend extra time crapping on the 6% of college students who are black and at 'good' universities, is just wonderful for letting the overrepresented white population run away with the education and the money. Divide and conquer for the win!
Your use of white is sort of shitty here- While it may reflect the truth of the demographics, whiteness is not the salient point when we're talking about legacies and 'athletes'.
The point there is the power of wealth and social connections. Thats what is unjust. Dragging race into it sort of undermines the point, and it certainly hurts the universality of the point, as other countries have different dominant class identifiers.
> frankly the SAT and the whole college admissions process are bullshit anyway
What's crazy about this whole controversy is that HN is usually skeptical towards college anyway. Even beyond the pro-Peter Thiel arguments back in the day about how college is a waste of time, nowadays there are plenty of allegations on HN about how higher ed is a bubble. About how CS, or at least programming, can be self-taught. So I don't understand why so many people here are giving College Board and the college industry any credence here.
HN is skeptical towards the substance of college. I think most would recognize that going to Harvard or Stanford opens a lot of doors, regardless of what you learn or don't.
> What's crazy about this whole controversy is that HN is usually skeptical towards college anyway.
I've always thought of them as a loud minority and, to be fair, they're not wrong: a lot of web jobs, even well paid ones, really don't require that much education or even much in the way of cognitive acuity.
The people who actually need to use their college education, the FAANG folks and people in other cutting edge tech jobs, don't bother to be vocal about it.
> Is not going to Harvard worth pushing yourself to the right? Worth aligning yourself with the guy pushing a trade war with China, which is going to do wonders for the image of Asians in America? Personally, I don't think so.
Point of fact: the Chinese had tariffs on American goods long before the “trade war.” That isn’t fair and it’s correct to call a government out on that policy. China has been called out by the WTO on numerous occasions and now, somehow Trump is wrong for agreeing with the WTO?[1] France has had high tariffs on American products for a long time, but now Trump is the bad guy? I don’t agree with any tariffs, but when other countries use tariffs, it’s only logical to retailiate.
Secondly, you seem to be suggesting that the OP should just accept not going to Harvard as fair when other people who didn’t work as hard get to go? That is just un-American and the complete opposite of a meritocracy. What do kids that have lower grades and don’t score as well get a preference to the most elite schools in the country? We are outraged when rich people bribe their way into a school, how is this any different? These lower performing students could also go to state schools just as you suggest the OP do. What gives them a right to a school for which they wouldn’t normally qualify? There is real anti-Asian discrimination at many of the Ivy League schools. This is documented and is not unlike the anti-Jew initiatives of years past. May the smartest student win — and if that results in an entirely Asian class at Harvard, so be it. It isn’t like Asians have any super-powers in academics. They’re human like the rest of us, but it might seem that their cultural emphasis on education is paying off. Instead of handicapping Asians, why not try to change the culture of non-Asians to better compete?
> Worth aligning yourself with the guy pushing a trade war with China
Is it still worth to breath when we know Hitler breathed too? This was rhetorical and I apologize for starting a little blunt. There is no singular right wing like there is no singular left wing.
As I understand it, the parent is actually not talking about aligning with Trump, but rather their thought process is getting more individualistic i.e. more right wing in a broad sense.
The ironic thing about your post is that the adversity score is just accounting for the ways in which children are denied "equality of opportunity." For example, it factors in: "the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s neighborhood." Your post confirms it--why would your dad commute four hours a day to live in a particular neighborhood unless he believed it would confer some unequal, advantageous opportunity for his kids? What about kids whose parents didn't make those sacrifices--did they have equal opportunities to you?
You go to a better school, you get a better education, you are more educated and you get a 34 on the ACT.
If you go to a crappy school and you get the same score than there's no qualitative difference between the schools and your parents skipped vacations for nothing.
But obviously the OP must believe there was value in the better school otherwise they wouldn't mention it. So they would believe they would have got a lower score in a different school, and if that's a proxy for education, then the OP must have ended up with a better education, and is also much more likely to succeed at _any_ college they go to, even if it's not Harvard.
I'm not sure what your point is. Nobody mentioned Harvard. This de-values the efforts of parents to improve their kids education. If you devalue something, you get less of it. Simple as that.
Sure. The adversity score looks at things like the crime rate of the neighborhood you grew up in. That neighborhood is (primarily) a function of two things: Your parents income level, and their ability to prioritize what income they do have to make sure you're in a good neighborhood. The second thing is what's being de-valued. Some parents work really hard and pinch every penny to devote resources to their kid's education. Scoring kids based on adversity partially mitigates those efforts for the purpose of getting into college.
> Your parents income level, and their ability to prioritize what income they do have to make sure you're in a good neighborhood. The second thing is what's being de-valued.
So, you're saying that people who have the misfortune to have parents who can't do those things for them should suffer a handicap, right? How well you are able to compete for a slot in college should depend on who your parents are?
> So, you're saying that people who have the misfortune to have parents who can't do those things for them should suffer a handicap, right?
Yes, for the reasons that I outlined. If you don't reward kids for their parents investment, their parents won't invest, and that will be worse for everyone.
If you spending 1 hour or 10 hours teaching your kids at night makes no difference to their life outcomes, which will you choose?
This line of argumentation falls flat to me because the kids that are better educated by their parents will undoubtedly have better lifelong outcomes, regardless of what college it enables them to get into.
There's a lot more to success in life than what college you go to. Going to Harvard is pretty worthless if you haven't even been set up with the skills to be able to graduate, for instance -- which the kid with highly invested parents is more likely to have.
> This line of argumentation falls flat to me because the kids that are better educated by their parents will undoubtedly have better lifelong outcomes, regardless of what college it enables them to get into.
Sure that may be true in relative terms. But at the margin, decreased reward -> decreased investment.
> There's a lot more to success in life than what college you go to. Going to Harvard is pretty worthless if you haven't even been set up with the skills to be able to graduate, for instance -- which the kid with highly invested parents is more likely to have.
That sounds like something that could be true, it just isn't. A Harvard degree is mostly about signaling. Once you are accepted to Harvard, you're nearly guaranteed to graduate (the graduation rate is 97.5%). Once you've gotten in, you're set. A huge number of jobs care more about marketing their ivy league staff than the actual skill output of that staff. You can do extremely well with zero talent and a Harvard degree. Obviously having both is better, but the Harvard degree itself confers tremendous value on anyone who has it, even if that person has no real skills or intelligence.
Now suddenly having dedicated parents and high-quality education is not a reward in itself. Why be king of a minor gold hill, if it cannot entitle you to rule a mountain, am I right?
The kid who gets a better education is still better off. High school isn't just a means to an end of going to college; you're learning lots of valuable things while you go there, that will help you for the rest of your life. And you're also being set up for better success in college because of that foundation.
To be clear then, you're not actually talking about quality of education (tutoring, robotics teams, mock trial, great teachers, enrichment activities, science museum trips, history competitions). As you say, it's "ability to prioritize what income they do have to make sure you're in a good neighborhood". Your primary problem with this, then,is that it devalues the ability to move into rich neighborhoods.
How does the ability to move into a rich neighborhood correlate with college success? I teach math, so that would be a great place to give an example.
My point is this: parents have limited resources. They can devote those resources to things like: nice cars, fancy meals, vacations...or, they can devote them to educating their kids. Asian families notoriously prize devoting every last resource they can to educating their kids. That is a really great thing for society.
However, the adversity score policy being proposed here would blunt the impact of that resource allocation. When you blunt the return to an investment, you get less of that investment. If those same Asian families cannot improve their kids chances by making those sacrifices, then they have no reason to make those sacrifices.
You live in a better neighborhood, you get a better education, you likely have healthier food available to you and grocery stores nearby, in addition to a school that probably cares a little bit about that sort of thing. There's still drugs in high school, but they are sold by the rich kids. There's tutors and test prep centers by your school. There's a lower probability of violent crimes and gangs. Sure, your family has to shop at the thrift store, you get hand-me-downs, and you don't get to go to Subway at lunch with your friends.
Somehow, all of that is rendered worthless when somebody going to a shitty school with shitty food wins the shitty school and home life lottery and edges them out of the more prestigious school with lower test scores thanks to the adversity bump.
Ultimately, good school kid must settle for highly regarded state school and post about how unfair the system is on a website for engineers and entrepreneurs. Shitty school kid becomes rich and famous because they went to an Ivy, everybody in the VC office loves them, buys a Tesla and their single mom a mansion.
Just kidding, shitty school kid had to drop out when their mom got sick junior year.
So is it okay then to have poorly educated people in college? This incentivizes everyone moving to a negatively rated district and getting a worse education, because it wouldn't matter, according to the logic.
That's assuming they calculated their adjustments precisely. And if they didn't, then welcome to all sorts of artificial biases in the system where a few more people appointed themselves to determine the fates of many. Congrats on solving nothing at all.
Asian dad should move the family to a shitty neighborhood and spend the saved money on private tutors. Get boosted scores from the “everyone equal” has hood adjustment on top of already good scores from all the tutoring.
It's fine to recognize it. But if you say, z-score applicants by their 'adversity score' peer group, then you negate the impact of their parents efforts. If you negate their parents efforts, you make it not worthwhile for their parents to make those efforts in the first place. If you make it not worthwhile to make those efforts, they won't be made. And society as a whole will be worse off for it.
The whole point is to devalue those efforts. I thought OP wanted “equality of opportunity.” You can’t have equality of opportunity if some kids get a head start because of their parents.
In a world where the efforts of parents don't help their kids, parents won't make efforts. This will degrade the educational attainment of all kids. Most people consider this to be a bad thing.
That really depends on how much diminishing you do. Either way, at the margin, you decrease the return to parental investment. At the margin, parents will invest less.
I don't think you can ever eliminate that, short of removing kids from their parents Plato's Republic style.
Adding more rules will just create perverse incentives (e.g. parents incentivized to increase crime rate in their neighborhoods to boost their children's scores.)
I agree that you can’t equality of opportunity without the government taking over the task of raising children. But that undermines OP’s premise. If “equality of opportunity” is not an option, then “equality of outcome” should be on the table.
Because the College Board isn't doing it in a way that truly reflects the adversity each kid faced.
For example, if Alice is raised by two loving parents in a so-so neighborhood she gets a score of 50. If Bob was abused as a child, put into foster care at 10, and adopted into a good neighborhood at 14 he gets a score of 25. Due to Bob's past he is way behind in school but works hard. Bob and Alice both end up getting 1400. At a selective school its possible that because Bob his a lower adversity score his application automatically gets rejected while Alice's application gets looked at and accepted.
This is the kind of case that is possible with an "Adversity Score" that bothers me.
Because we don't want to live in a society that so strongly encourages "sacrificing vacations and eating out for 12 years (literally ate out 5x max)" and "My dad commuted 4 hours daily instead of moving."
I'm all about parents sacrificing for their kids, but when the system is set up to push people that far something about the system is broken.
We should absolutely want to live in a society that rewards people for effort and sacrifice. If we do not reward people for doing those things, they won't do them, and you definitely don't want to live in that society.
I wonder if the opposite is true as well. That is, when theses sorts of discussions come up, I'm always asking: when is it over? When does the sacrifice stop? A person sacrifices for their kid for some nebulous better life, which their kid goes on to do for their kids...ad infinitum? However, through an evolutionary lens it make some sense: an individual doesn't have to have time to enjoy any advantage they've accrued through such previous sacrifice because evolution doesn't care if you're happy, just that you're reproducing successfully, and so far that's instilled (it's arguable) an instinctive sense to socially rise in order to obtain better access to such. So in such a sense there really would be no point of it being over (except for the extinction of the species). So why shouldn't someone in this great chain of sacrifice say no and kick their feet up and enjoy the fruits of all that sacrifice? This would explain why we (society at large and various specific social groups) treat the childless so negatively and use the term anti-natalist as a slur.
However, there is another component to it: one's advantage is always relative to others' lack of advantage. This is why equal access education will never be truly supported (no matter what people say); if all kids have the same advantage as their kids, then their kids don't actually have any advantage at all (in social terms).
I think it's just a personal choice everyone makes. How much should they sacrifice now to have more later (either personally, or inter-generationally). We all have different preferences around that, and that's ok. If someone is willing to work harder or sacrifice more, it's reasonable for them to get more reward later on for their efforts. If you prefer to enjoy the present, that's ok too.
Did you skip what I wrote? You say you're all about parents sacrificing for their kids. But why would they bother if their kids won't get any benefit from it?
Devil's advocate: do you think children who lack families that provide such advantages must necessarily "suffer" as a consequence of that lack? And conversely, why did you wait to object until this, in particular, became a consideration instead of before (when ethnicity and other factors were already considerations)?
I can’t speak for the original commenter, but lots of people did not wait to object to this.
What’s uniquely bad about this is that it doesn’t have even the facade of holistic analysis. The College Board is counting up how oppressed they think you are, and telling colleges to count your score less if you don’t have enough oppression points.
My comment was tailored specifically to be a response to the comment above it. Haven't read all of the other comments in this thread, or looked into the implementation details yet, but yes, a fundamental criticism of this action is that the SAT purports to measure "aptitude" rather than "oppression", and it's hard to immediately see how such a feature would improve the test score's accuracy with regard to the former characteristic. Another criticism is that this could increase the attack surface for "gaming the system" rather than reduce it.
Exactly. And who gets to decide how oppressed you are?
Maybe you grew up in a poor neighborhood but have incredibly supportive parents/family?
Maybe you grew up in a billionaire family but with parents who are never around because they have business to run and places to go (as they can afford to)?
And the 'secret' part of the story really really bugs me. Why don't we turn US tax code into a state secret so that rich people/business cannot try to game the system to pay less tax?
EDIT: I got downvotes. But really, I'd like to know who gets to decide how oppressed you are?
Language is probably a decent one. If there was a major language shift in your family tree within the last 500 years, you can probably count yourself as disadvantaged in a lot of ways. This includes Africans, indigenous people, but also people from countries where a central version of their language spread from the capital out, although not as bad of a case.
If your Asian parents immigrated and sacrificed hard for you, but still speak the language that their grandparents and their grandparents before them spoke, well, your parents sacrificed, but like, people go through shit. White people, black people, Asians, all types of people get exploited into nothingness. Into being not even human.
>Language is probably a decent one. If there was a major language shift in your family tree within the last 500 years, you can probably count yourself as disadvantaged in a lot of ways.
500yr is waaaaay too long. 100yr ago nobody in my family tree spoke English and they were all subsistence farming on a different continent. Every relative I know is decently prosperous. Some people make more of their lives than others but nobody is disadvantaged.
I have a friend who's grandparents had everything taken by the Japanese, then again by the communists, moved somewhere they couldn't even speak the language (they got called crazy but they got the last laugh when everyone else starved) and my friend owns a house in a gentrifying city and makes six figures sitting on his butt staring at a screen. Not bad for two generations.
I knew a woman who lost a good chunk of her immediate family to violence in a south American country her mom moved with her to the US (I'm pretty sure she came to the US as a refugee) they eventually wound up in one of the "worse" cities in NJ and her mom signed her up for some educational program that somehow led to her being sent to a prep school in New England and from there she wend to college and graduated from Colombia.
Compare all of those to my girlfriend's family tree which is chock full of deadbeats. I don't know a single one who is actively engaged in working hard to move up in the world. They've been on this continent longer than the existence of the nation they reside in. Maybe they made something of themselves once upon a time but this branch of the family tree has done nothing productive.
I think whether or not you grow up in a household with parents who are driven to raise their kids well is the primary determining factor. If colleges want to know how "disadvantaged" a kid is they should be looking at the parents. Immigrants for the most part tend to be very industrious and pass that on to their children and grandchildren but it seems to diminish over the generations and the variance among individuals takes over as the determining factor. Some individuals are highly driven. Some are deadbeats.
It's not a question of deserving their suffering: it's about interfering with a standardized preparation metric for college level work to the disservice of everyone. No one is saying to make college admissions purely SAT based; applications are already multifactor composites. This is about an effort to undermine the numerically objective part of it under political pressure.
For years, there has been strong criticism of reliance on standardized tests, as there are quite a few people who "just don't test well". This extends the flawed philosophy of attempting to condense a complicated question into a single statistic to an even more complicated question. My parents worked very hard to get me into a good school. I was one of the poorest in my neighborhood, and our house was one of the smallest. The college board did not have access to my parents' actual incomes.
To answer your question, I think many will suffer, though they must not necessarily. I would have objected long before; ethnicity should never be a consideration. Why? Because people are not statistics. When thinking on statistics, you can't use them to judge one individual case, only to make predictions about a population. That means while these predictions or introduced biases are generally true, some people get screwed. We, as a society, are set up to work differently. Look at our justice system: a very high burden of proof means that we believe it better for ten guilty men to walk free than for one to go to jail. I would argue the same premise applies here: it is better for ten people to judged without race (though availability of opportunity can be a consideration) and result in a somewhat unfair distribution than for one unprivileged person to be kept out of college because he's the wrong race. In other words, I would rather we don't tinker with the ratio based on race than for one poor white kid out of Appalachia to have his score "adjusted" down and his application turned down.
I guess both are unjust, but one has injustice as the result of intervention, and the other has injustice as the result of non-intervention.
There was a skit by a comedian years ago called "Modern Educayshun", which predicted this almost exactly. That was comedy then.
> Devil's advocate: do you think children who lack families that provide such advantages must necessarily "suffer" as a consequence of that lack?
As for me, of course not. I don't want other kids to suffer. And I'm sure it's the same for everyone else.
But why should I or my children who did the right things (study, sacrifice, etc) suffer because some faceless bureaucrats gets to decide who get an advantage via a 'secret' score?
This to me seems like it IS opportunity over outcome though. If you have two people who are equally hard working and one grows up in a disadvantaged environment, the latter going to score lower.
My parents sacrificed a lot so I could go to a good school. It was completely obvious to see that not that hard working people at my school would do much better than extremely hard working people from poorer districts.
The thing is, I imagine the people who worked harder but scored lower would probably fare better if given equal opportunity but they aren't.
> My family sacrificing vacations and eating out for 12 years (literally ate out 5x max) to afford to live in a good school district shouldn’t penalize us. My dad commuted 4 hours daily instead of moving...I’m getting pushed further and further to the right
If implemented correctly (and that's a big if) this should just make it so parents don't have to go through those sacrifices. Isn't that a good thing?
Strong disagreement from me here. I believe that encouraging parents to invest in their children's growth is a good thing. Removing/reducing the benefit of this investment in the child is the kind of perverse incentive that's probably bad for society as a whole.
Simply put, parents are now forced to weigh the comparative benefit of a high-end university education over the child's development. I'm betting that diminishing returns on development investment will at some point encourage investment in gaming the adversity score instead.
> I believe that encouraging parents to invest in their children's growth is a good thing.
No disagreement from me there. However, I would prefer if a child's outcome were not so dependent on how willing their parents are to make sacrifices.
> Simply put, parents are now forced to weigh the comparative benefit of a high-end university education over the child's development. I'm betting that diminishing returns on development investment will at some point encourage investment in gaming the adversity score instead.
I'd argue the current system already does this. Placing such a high emphasis on scores just makes it so that parents are strongly encouraged to put their children in SAT/AP prep scores while ignoring other things that would likely be much more important.
I went to a school full of wealthy students. Almost all of them took prep classes to get really high scores.
As far as I could tell, there was absolutely no instance of people learning for the sake of learning and little no to interest in doing something for the sake of a child's development.
The more I reflect on your comment the more obvious to me it is that the situation is ultra urgent.
Somebody needs to get a class action going asap, tomorrow.
Its so so true that so many Asian families have made massive financial and personal sacrifices in the hope to provide their children the best opportunities possible. This is clearly protected activity under the founding documents of our nation, pursuing life, liberty and happiness for themselves and their children through education.
I can’t imagine the sinking feeling running through so many of those incredibly honest and hardworking families tonight. Imagine you saved everything, lived in the smallest apartment possible barely in the good school zone, spent extra money on tutors and extra circulars and your high school senior or junior learns all his or her effort all the family’s effort they want to cancel out.
It’s a blatant attempt to punish Asian families for believing in America.
There's going to be a lot of Veterans that feel the same way. Imagine serving in the military for a while, saving up money to move somewhere where your kids will have good schools and good quality of life, getting a good job after working your ass off to jump careers, and then have the College Board tell you that this will disadvantage your child when applying to college. This is insane.
Also Asian myself. There has never really been a place for us on either side of the political spectrum. The left does not treat us as they do with other minorities, so they don't care about screwing us over while the right generally only uses us to pretend that they care about minorities to appeal to centrists/other.
While the right's policies may benefit us a bit, culturally the right will be just as happy to screw us to benefit themselves/their majority constituents when the time comes.
Most Asians I know are very well educated and doing well. I bet they are probably much better off compared to other minorities in the US. When I was doing PhD 90% of my classmates were Chinese. I think it is a bit of a stretch to to say Asians are completely getting screwed in the US.
That's exactly what I mean though, your conclusion that Asians are better off than other minorities just because you saw a bunch of Asians in your elite college (who were most likely foreigners coming to study abroad anyway and not American citizens) is justification the left uses to disregard us lesser Asians in lower economic classes.
Pertinent to TFA, if this adversity score weighs economic factors more heavily than racial ones, then it might actually be more beneficial to Asian Americans than previous affirmative action implementations.
Same goes for every single place I worked at. Asians are by far the most prominent minority group. What should I base my argument on? Your experience? Why dont you counter argue with facts and hard statistics to disprove me?
From the article:
"The score will be calculated using 15 factors, including the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s neighborhood."
So no, it doesn't account for you to secretly discriminate against you. What it does do, for the penalization part, is that the schools that are in affluent neighborhoods have access to much better resources than ones from Compton or Watts.
To me, a kid from Compton who scores 1500 on the SAT far outweighs someone from Palo Alto High who also scores 1500 because of all the resources the latter received to be able to reach it.
Moving is orthogonal to the problem, except that the district could be brutally hard for some kids.
Also, imagine the other folks in your neighborhood who got literally everything. Driving to school in a Maserati and spending for 4 different tutors over the course of 12 years.
Who is more deserving? You, who scored 1500, or him, who scored 1500? I sure hope you don't say, "it should equal!"
I dated a girl once whose family had a ton of money - think billions. She lived in the ritziest of neighborhoods, went to the best private schools, and had private tutors galore. I was a middle class income kid from a middle class neighborhood. She however, was also unfortunate enough to have early onset M.S. and could not sit comfortably for a very long, no matter how many tutors you gave her, and extra time couldn't overcome the fatigue. If she and I both got the same score, who is more deserving of admiration? I hope you don't say me, because you'd be wrong. The so-called "adversity score" would never capture her private medical struggle.
I gotta say, people in this discussion are acting as if suddenly colleges will totally forget that they need to admit for the lacrosse team and the rowing team and make sure they get the legacy admits in etc. That will not happen. Those people make money for the college. People who pay full tuition will always statistically have an advantage. You know how I know? I have done admissions scoring for higher ed! I don't decide who gets in, I just read all the letters of rec and the personal statements and look at the transcripts and send in an Excel spreadsheet.
Of course a single numerical score never captures the complexity of students. I really don't understand why HNers think this will make or break admissions. Any college has to meet their budget first. People who pay full price fill those spots. Everyone else is fighting for the remaining spots. Ok, maybe I answered my own question: HNers realize that despite being moderately successful in our current regime, they can't afford to pay full price and so their kids will be scrapping it out with every poor kid who busted their ass too, and it's just less compelling to hear "son/daughter of software engineer from well-off neighborhood, with robotics team experience and high SAT score and hours of tutoring and an internship at a local biotech firm" than "son/daughter of welfare mom, with robotics team experience and high SAT score and an internship at a local bank"....
Rich people can have crappy lives. No doubt about it. But they sure do help a small liberal arts college meet their budget goals more easily anyway.
> The so-called "adversity score" would never capture her private medical struggle.
She's probably gonna mention the MS in her essay, though.
There are always edge cases. That we can't perfectly capture each and every one of them doesn't mean some data on common advantages/disadvantages can't be useful.
(Plus, there's going to be a number of more conventionally disadvantaged kids with MS, too, who don't have the billions of dollars to lean on.)
Imagine you are about to undergo a major surgery. Would you rather get operated by a surgeon that graduated from the medical school with A+, or by someone with a B who got the job instead because they came from a poorer neighborhood?
Q: What do you call the person who graduated last in their class in medical school?
A: Doctor.
Sure, I'd probably prefer the higher performing doctor in this hypothetical scenario, but at the same time, it feels very much artificial (maybe a false dichotomy?). Sure, you always want the best for everything -- that's what "the best" means! Reality is that there are always going to be B students operating on people. If I were to propose my own false dichotomy, I might ask whether you prefer the B student who got tutored to pass the SAT, or one who self studied?
I am merely trying to simplify a complex matter to make it easier to understand/debate.
I would say, in reality indeed a certain % of surgeons would be the B students. The problem is that some social policies would increase this %, while others would decrease it. In my opinion, giving points for anything other than raw measurable performance would increase this %.
To answer your question, I would prefer a person who is passionate about what they are doing and capable of thinking outside the box. However, unfortunately, it's not something that could be easily formalized. Sure, self-taught students would likely be better motivated than tutored ones, however once you begin counting it as a part of the score, people would start gaming the system. Someone would lie about not being tutored. Someone else would actually skip taking private lessons and will miss out on learning something important, because doing so would give them a better score. A much better solution, IMO, would be to point out and quantify the traits and skills the self-taught people show, and include them in the test, giving everyone a chance to learn and practice them.
> Would you rather get operated by a surgeon that graduated from the medical school with A+, or by someone with a B who got the job instead because they came from a poorer neighborhood?
Ben Carson is an apparent moron, who thinks the pyramids were for grain storage. He'd fail a history course. He's also apparently a phenomenal brain surgeon.
Clinical skills and raw academic scores can be wildly disparate in a single person. Frankly, if I were picking a surgeon, I'd look for the one who enjoys tinkering with electronics and engines in their spare time.
Just to get this right - to get a better SAT adversity score for their children, parents should ideally quit their job, survive on tax-payer welfare and live in a high-crime area ? This is now fully incentivized right ?
I don’t see why children should have their opportunity limited by what their parents can or can’t do (or even refuse to do). How is that meritocracy or equality of opportunity? That’s just old fashion inheritance.
You are absolutely right. If playing some sports that only rich can afford makes you more likely to get into an ivy league school then may be hardships should too.
Your intact family sticking together for your childhood and making a sustained sacrifice for your benefit already represents several awesome advantages many, many, many kids will never enjoy.
You didn't eat out much so... home cooked meals most nights?
You lived in a good school district?
You had parents and/or other family as a support structure for 12 years?
You had a dad?
What is with this sentiment that we have to try to make people ashamed for doing things the right way and working hard?
Be proud of what you have accomplished. Fuck the people that want to tear you down because there's some poor wretch that "deserves" a shot more than you do.
OP is saying that their family sacrificed a lot to live and attend school in a geographic area that was probably catering towards wealthier people. The new system will be unfair for people like OP as their socioeconomic adjusted scores now get bunched together with the average wealthy student in the area despite not having actually been well off. Perhaps the student had to work after school at her mother's laundromat all day despite living in a good neighborhood and attending a decent school. Not only does this "adversity" not get reflected but basically the effort part of the student (and their family) is getting lost with this new system.
Honestly, given that the sole purpose of the SAT is to apply to college, which get tons more information about the test taker/applicant than College Board, hopefully this gets ignored and college admissions make their own judgements on "adversity" versus the SAT's simplistic, reductionist view of quantifying it... Admissions should and will have full ability and better info to do a much better job at this. Indeed, the Ivies do seem to take these things into serious account based on the stats they release every year on new admits.
Also, the cynic in me thinks this is more of a way to make up for the losing market share to the ACT and attract more test takers away from the ACT that would benefit from this adversity scoring system.
In the zero sum game of admissions, boosting someone else for their poor location/school impacts those who sacrificed to get score better without the boost.
A poor asian community that sends their kids to after school schools and does very well as a whole will suddenly fight themselves without the boost that others at that economic level might have.
All theoretical at this point I guess. I would prefer to let this play out a little bit more rather than race based quotas/scholarships which more often than not seem to go to kids with the same good backgrounds who just happen to be minorities.
> A poor asian community that sends their kids to after school schools and does very well as a whole will suddenly fight themselves without the boost that others at that economic level might have.
They'll also be punished for having established a low-crime neighborhood and learning english, since crime level and english as second language are also factors in the adversity score.
Of course, no single one of them is entirely responsible for their parents and community teaching them english, or for the low amount of crime. Because those are results of collective instead of individual effort, they're not labeled as laudable accomplishments, but as shameful privileges.
As I understand, there is no 'out-weighing' - holding other factors constant, their adversity score would be even higher if their neighborhood had more crime, or spoke worse english.
Exactly, Facebook and a few others got in trouble because advertisers could set geographic criteria which translated quite neatly to race demographics.
The fact is that different ethnic groups don't seem to mix organically unless they are all quite wealthy, at which point they have more in common with their socioeconomic class than with their ethnicity.
>The fact is that different ethnic groups don't seem to mix organically unless they are all quite wealthy, at which point they have more in common with their socioeconomic class than with their ethnicity.
That goes both ways. If you've got a group of mostly upper middle class whites, Asians and Indians (i.e. your average tech company) the poor whites are going to hand out with the blacks, Mexicans and eastern Europeans. Not having much in common with the majority group is the trait that ties the minority group together.
That’s an impressive claim. Source? I can think of a half dozen things that probably correlate as strongly with race. For example, what you ate for breakfast this morning.
One issue with discriminatory initiatives like this one is that they invite corruption. Given human nature, the invitation will be readily answered and then some. Triple so if the procedure is secret.
Well, no dog in this race obviously, but doesn't that mean that instead of penalizing you for your parents' good character, we penalize poor rural and urban kids for their parents' bad character?
Not exactly. This adversity score penalizes people who good character (insofar as making sacrifices to provide better education opportunity for ones' kids is good character).
Family A makes $X and goes through significant sacrifices (e.g. commuting 4 hours) to live in a wealthy neighborhood with good schools.
Family B makes the same $X and lives a leisurely live in a cheap neighborhood with bad schools.
Which should have a better chance of succeeding? This adversity score says family B deserves a bonus over family A.
It seems you haven't spent much time in a "cheap neighborhood with bad schools." I can assure you that no one there is making $X. In my city, the average household income is $38k; the state average is $74k. Almost all people, including poor people, make sacrifices and want what is best for their kids.
You're missing the point. The original comment in this chain comes from someone whose family made sacrifices in order to live in an area with good educational opportunities. This 'Adversity Score' would penalize them for making that sacrifice. Between two families with identical incomes, the one that chooses to curb luxuries to live in a place with a better school district would be penalized for that choice. The fact that good school districts tend to be populated by people with higher incomes is largely tangential to the point at hand.
> Almost all people, including poor people, make sacrifices and want what is best for their kids.
I don't doubt that people of all income levels want their kids to succeed. But there definitely are differences in behavior between demographics. The wealthier people are the more likely they are to use test prep across all demographics, but Asians are more likely to do so regardless of income. Asians also spend more than twice as much time studying outside of class than any other race [1]. There are differences in how much emphasis is put on education, this cannot be denied.
Yeah, but if you're doing all that, and you're landing between 34 and 36? I mean, let's be frank, Stanford is not looking at you if you're lower than 33. (Unless you have a wicked 3 point shot. Or you're a genius on the piano or something.) So, yeah, you did all that test prep, and end up scoring about the same as some local yokel from Angleton, TX who took the test cold? Or some broke kid from Chicago who took the test cold?
Sure, the Angleton guy's parents may be strung out on opioids or whatever, but I gotta be honest, I'm just not seeing why Stanford takes a chance on you as opposed to just giving it to one of the two kids who've proven they can perform at a high level academically test prep or no test prep?
> Yeah, but if you're doing all that, and you're landing between 34 and 36? I mean, let's be frank, Stanford is not looking at you if you're lower than 33. (Unless you have a wicked 3 point shot. Or you're a genius on the piano or something.) So, yeah, you did all that test prep, and end up scoring about the same as some local yokel from Angleton, TX who took the test cold? Or some broke kid from Chicago who took the test cold?
There's still a shitload of applicants between a 34 and 36. Easily more than one for every five spots. When you're talking about these universities with single digit admittance rates its not enough to just get good grades and good standardized test scores. Nine AP classes, fives on all the tests, and 4.0 GPA, and a perfect SAT score will guarantee you enough to get in the pile but you've still gotta make yourself shine like the diamond in the bush that all these schools are looking for. Having this 'Adversity Score' that's supposed to measure how much challenge you faced in life make it seem like you're an underdog that toughed it out against all the odds has the potential of being a big advantage.
> Sure, the Angleton guy's parents may be strung out on opioids or whatever, but I gotta be honest, I'm just not seeing why Stanford takes a chance on you as opposed to just giving it to one of the two kids who've proven they can perform at a high level academically test prep or no test prep?
Because not everyone believes in meritocracy. Some believe that Stanford should take bet on the guy's parents that are strung out on opioids even if he has lower test scores to advance their perception of social justice. That's just one possibility. There's also plenty of evidence to suggest that this may be a mechanism to enforce certain informal caps (like the one proven to be enforced on Asians) through geographic discrimination. Basically, a deliberately opaque (remember, this score is private and not given to the student) set of knobs and dials that can be used to achieve what normally can't be achieved legally.
As an analogy, that automatically popped to my mind when I initially heard the idea of "adversity scores", we can think about a common squad or platoon level personnel situation in the military.
Some guys win lots of trophies at shooting contests, and display impressive marksmanship down at the shooting range. But some guys can shoot at that same superhuman level in a fog, with contacts all around them, at night, and under a level of fire so high you'd probably label it "Hollywood". Well, if you get to pick and choose, the guy who can shoot at that level while under fire is obviously a superior pick for you than the show pony who shoots well at the equivalent of beauty pageants.
To me, this seems like the same kind of situation.
No one is taking a bet on anyone's parents, strung out or not. They're taking a bet on one of these kids. I posit that Stanford or SAT or whoever would be correct. The impoverished local yokel from Angleton, TX with strung out parents and a cold, unpracticed 35, is a better bet than the guy with 35 through the efforts of a ton of expensive test prep. And it's obvious that part of why he's a better bet is that he can score the 35 under much less optimal conditions than the guy with expensive test prep can.
Now you can call that difference the "adversity score". Or you can call it "performance consistency". Or you can even just call it "common sense". But it really does seem obvious to me that given two applicants, the one who performed at a high level consistently under sub-optimal conditions is a better choice.
> Some guys win lots of trophies at shooting contests, and display impressive marksmanship down at the shooting range. But some guys can shoot at that same superhuman level in a fog, with contacts all around them, at night, and under a level of fire so high you'd probably label it "Hollywood". Well, if you get to pick and choose, the guy who can shoot at that level while under fire is obviously a superior pick for you than the show pony who shoots well at the equivalent of beauty pageants. To me, this seems like the same kind of situation.
It's not. Some students apply with subpar scores, but often the majority of applicants to these universities apply with perfect or close to perfect grades and SAT scores (think 3.9+, as many AP classes as the school offers, good extracurricular, and probably a >2200 SAT or >33 ACT). It's not just about performance, there's a lot of additional character judgement and luck involved. I went to one an institution widely considered "elite" myself, and I can say firsthand that plenty of students from other universities are just as smart and can work just as effectively under pressure as my classmates. The universities themselves state that many more qualified students apply than are positions. For universities where this is legal, race absolutely comes into play as far as which applicants are selected. There are many universities that can't discriminate based on race due to legal restrictions, and it's widely suspected that this adversity score will be engineering to be strongly correlated with demographics these institutions discriminated in favor of when such discrimination was legal. A backdoor means to what is meant to be prohibited discrimination.
> No one is taking a bet on anyone's parents, strung out or not. They're taking a bet on one of these kids. I posit that Stanford or SAT or whoever would be correct. The impoverished local yokel from Angleton, TX with strung out parents and a cold, unpracticed 35, is a better bet than the guy with 35 through the efforts of a ton of expensive test prep. And it's obvious that part of why he's a better bet is that he can score the 35 under much less optimal conditions than the guy with expensive test prep can.
Yeah, but how we engineer the metric to measure how much of an "impoverished local yokel" is easily subject to abuse. The fact that these 'Adversity Socres' are kept private is highly suspicious. This comes on the heels of racial discrimination becoming more prohibited by the current government. There's strong reason to suspect that this is about circumventing the principles of equal protection of the law. And this is to mention the possibility of people gaming this system to portray themselves as enduring adversity. Wealthier people can probably better min-max this system to boost their diversity scores. Not to mention, in doing so we may be discouraging things that are demonstrated to be healthy. If this adversity score penalizes two parent households, then we're basically discouraging marriage. Even if its creation is earnest, it could easily have negative effects.
>Which should have a better chance of succeeding? This adversity score says family B deserves a bonus over family A.
No, it does not say that it deserves a bonus _over_ family A. It deserves that that circumstance (a circumstance of the parents, not the kid!) is taken into account to close the gap somewhat.
Family B gets a triple mushroom, basically, and family A a green shell.
> No, it does not say that it deserves a bonus _over_ family A. It deserves that that circumstance (a circumstance of the parents, not the kid!) is taken into account to close the gap somewhat. Family B gets a triple mushroom, basically, and family A a green shell.
Yeah, but whatever version of Mario Kart this is, it's pretty obvious how those two objects are going to stack up in terms of balance. Affirmative action has always been used for either of two purposes: to advance a left leaning view of social justice, and to enforce de-facto caps on disproportionately successful minorities. If you're an optimist you can portray this as giving groups labeled disadvantaged a better chance that they deserve (but invite criticism from those that may not believe in either how you define disadvantage, and from those that more broadly disagree with putting one's finger on the scale). If you're a pessimist you suspect that this is a way of enforcing informal caps on successful groups, namely Asians which have been demonstrated to have been subjected to such caps in the last several decades.
Obviously both are bad, but if you had to choose (and you kind of do, because admissions is zero-sum in the short term), you should incentivise good character.
I guess I was more getting at the question of how we got to the point where we're giving out college admission, based on who your parents are? And what your parents lived through?
If you want to incentivize character built through life experiences? OK, I guess. But it should have to be the life and character of the actual student that counts. Not his mom.
I grew up in a poor, dangerous neighborhood as a child. Later in my teens I lived in a wealthy suburb with collectible cars in the driveway after my father's startup succeeded.
My father was physically abusive, and child services got involved. My father's lawyers sorted things out to get the investigation to stop and drop charges if I lived somewhere else. I unfortunately went into the Troubled Teen industry (which I had definitively no reason to be in other than as part of his lawyers' story blaming me for what happened). That industry is filled with abuse.
The day I turned 18 I was pulled from there and struggled with homelessness for a year. It was extremely hard to succeed when you are homeless.
Financial aid for university is tied to your childhood guardian's social security number until you are 25, so I was a homeless person, and not eligible for any financial aid.
This is just a start. I've never broken any laws or done anything particularly wrong.
Did you ever think of my story? Apparently bureaucrats didn't.
Also, why should I need permission from some bureaucrats to study from the top degree programs? Shouldn't the goal be the opposite: to expand the best education opportunities to as many people as possible?
We have so much wealth and enormous social spending in America, and yet look at our outcomes with homelessness, poverty and suicide...
People shouldn't be viewed as financially coupled to their parents until 25. Our current system is set up to discourage people from furthering their educations, with exorbitant tuition and fees.
If you had been in the Netherlands, you'd get a stipend of ~$10k per year when enrolling in school, and other countries have similar systems. UBC in Vancouver, Canada generally pays masters students $30k a year, having had a few friends depart to Canada due to said offer.
The adversity score, as far as I can see, gives high scores to students who succeed in worse school districts. While none of the sites reporting on this bothered to link to any kind of official announcement, it looks like this may be a refinement of the tool announced here in 2016: https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/pr...
From the college board's description of the tool, it weights applicant scores by the quality of their neighborhood and high school. So a disadvantaged student whose family focused on moving to a neighborhood/school where lots of students succeed is not given a high score in this analysis.
The OP had the same opportunity, but because they did the traditional things for a poorer family to encourage their students to succeed (moving to a good school district and sacrificing on the commute) they will be considered a privileged student in this analysis.
>The OP had the same opportunity, but because they did the traditional things for a poorer family to encourage their students to succeed (moving to a good school district and sacrificing on the commute) they will be considered a privileged student in this analysis.
Compared to the poor students whose parents didn't make those sacrifices, they are privileged.
How would the sacrifice be for naught? The kid is presumably smarter and harder working and better prepared for success no matter what college they go to.
But for college admissions, I don't think it is unreasonable to judge a kid for how well they did relative to the advantages they were given.
Your parents making a sacrifice isn't the same thing as you making a sacrifice.
If my dad makes a sacrifice by working 100 hours a week to buy me a Maserati, the car is definitely a privilege not something I earned. And yeah, I may have lost out on spending time with my dad, but that wasn't a choice I made, so while it cost me something it wasn't a sacrifice on my part.
For many Asian-American's their children's education is a dream that they plan out and sacrifice for so that their kin can have better opportunity than what they managed for themselves. Many are tightly knit families where children look after parents or other close family members later in life. To penalise and denigrate the efforts of such families as "privilege" is awful.
Many White, Black, and Hispanic families do the same thing. It's not denigrating that sacrifice to acknowledge that being born into cohesive, supportive family that values hard work is a privilege that many poor children do not have.
Are you truly comparing the scholarship need-based policies of one wealthy, private college to a fundamental change in the Scholastic Assessment Test used nation wide ? You have a choice to apply to Harvard - there is very little choice apart from SAT/ACT for higher education in the states.
Are you avoiding the question? I'll rephrase it. If I give $5k dollars per year for college to every student in America whose parents make under $100k a year, am I denigrating the hard work of the parents who make more than that?
If I give $5k dollars per year, for college, to every student in America whose parents make under $100k a year, am I denigrating the hard work of the parents who make more than that?
No, you certainly are not. But this is completely different from adding a hidden adversity score to the SAT. Your proposal is equality of opportunity to earn merit. The other proposal is manipulation of outcome to negate merit.
Equal opportunity vs equal outcome is just a matter of perspective. If we take the desired outcome as can complete college then both proposals are attempting to provide equal opportunity.
Declaring that one denigrates people while the other doesn't based solely on outcome vs opportunity requires arbitrarily picking an observation point that supports your view.
From any remotely objective view-point, a policy that chooses to add a hidden adversity score based on poverty, single-parenting and perceived hardship to a test that is designed as a measure of your scholastic ability is most certainly denigrating to folks who have chosen to lift themselves out of that adversity through experience of great adversity!
A policy that gives 5K to low-income families to allow their children to compete effectively on the SAT is not denigrating.
I firmly believe that if you pose this question to the world, a near complete majority of people will rule the latter is fair, the former is not. There is no arbitrary pick of an observation point here. These are two completely different policies.
And the first sentence is strange. If equal opportunity versus equal outcome is a merely a matter of perspective, then you can draw your lines even further! After all, whatever effects poverty and weaker education had on students in their ability to perform on the SAT certainly won’t have disappeared once they stroll across the campus green!
You can contribute the hidden adversity scores to course grades, contribute it to graduate honors, contribute it further to employment opportunity and promotion. You can draw your line at retirement and benefits if equal opportunity vs equal outcome is merely a matter of perspective.
Yes, of course you can because the distinction is arbitrary. What people decide to think of as outcome vs opportunity tends to reflect the distinction that benefits them the most.
Even the definition of merit and earned achievement is largely arbitrary. I'm successful because of the way I was created and raised. It's not a personal accomplishment.
Hard work should be rewarded because it's a basically useful for society to do so, not because it's some kind of absolute moral imperative.
To the extent that this proposal ceases to award hard work, from a societal perspective, it's gone too far. However it doesn't come close to doing that.
Looking at the metrics they're using, the only likely widescale impact on behavior is that people are less likely to move to rich neighborhoods with high scoring schools. I don't see this as a problem.
I agree, but do we really want to disincentivise parents sacrificing for their children's education? I'm fine with taxing Maseratis at whatever rate, not so fine with this.
For society as a whole I don't think it is particularly beneficial to encourage people to move to rich neighborhoods/better school districts. The other factors are so far removed from most individual's control that I don't think we'll see much of an impact on behavior.
Sometimes it's hard to see the second order effects of our actions, but it seems pretty clear cut how society will be affected if you punish people willing to invest in their childrens' education.
They are imperfect phrases, but generally an equality of opportunity in this case refers to no matter what you look like, what your parents do, how much money you have, if you get a SAT score and GPA above a threshold, you get accepted into the school.
Whereas equality of outcome would focus more on who gets in even if it means treating people differently based on what they look look, how much money they have, where they live, etc.
That's part of it. But even when adjusting for IQ, parental income is highly correlated with success--SAT scores, college admission, lifetime income--however you want to measure it.
The adversity score is basically an acknowledgment of the fact that there is no equality of opportunity, and moreover that it’s just never going to happen on any reasonable timescale, in the US. This is an attempt to correct for the inequality of opportunity that continues to exist and, although almost certainly imperfect, I think it’s completely reasonable.
The hard work of your parents for you to attend a better school have nothing to do with your potential.
You were fortunate, not everybody was.
You might also consider that the great sacrifices your parents made to place you in a certain environment robbed you of an education others less academically focused learned well. And that some of those skills have value.
The issue with 'equality of opportunity' is it barely exists and only for the group of people in nearly exact economic statuses in the same area. So many things in the environment and schooling set poorer people back from day 1 be it environmental pollution, noise pollution, or older poorly funded schools (given how much extra funding schools can get from a combination of property tax revenue and just fundraising from parents), the list goes on.
Colleges have limited ability to help with those factors so they apply weights where they can. Hell even the SAT itself has a pretty regressive impact because most colleges will let you submit your highest score from multiple tests, I got 2 800s but it took 2 tests (not counting a couple PSATs I got various times) to get that a chance a poorer person is much less likely to have.
> The issue with 'equality of opportunity' is it barely exists ... Colleges have limited ability to help with those factors
I think you summed up the problem quite well and acknowledged that colleges aren't in much of a position to solve it, but seem happy with a solution that ignores the problem. A much more effective effort would be to solve the problem and ensure that there is equality of opportunity as much as possible, like eliminating your postcode determining your quality of schooling.
Don't forget that not everyone is college bound, those that don't get help from the college will still have a poor education, will still live a poor community and will still have another generation of kids facing the same issues.
Ok, here's a question for you. You like equality of opportunity. Presumably you agree that the SAT (as-is) does not provide that, in light of (eg) people that can't afford to retake the test and get a higher score. So, here's the question: would you support an "accurate" adversity score? One that, say, was assigned by an all-knowing oracle?
I could consistently help even the poorest students move from below 50th percentile to 75th percentile. Moving from < 600 to mid 700s is totally doable with sufficient tutoring [1]. Even for pretty dumb students.
I think SAT/ACT are pretty good tests [1], but they're horrendously over-gamed at this point. I have very little faith in either as anything other than a demonstration of how badly the student wants to be admitted to a good school and has money for tutoring.
[1] edit: i.e., SAT/ACT are not easy to game wit short-term coaching, but sustained tutoring can substantially increase students' performance... see thread below for further elaboration and discussion of "coaching doesn't help" studies.
Nearly all of those studies focus on short-term and test-specific interventions; i.e., "coaching", not "tutoring".
I worked with students throughout the school year with a focus on the underlying content, and only switched to "coaching" the last few weeks before the exam. For many students, I tutored them weekly or biweekly, for 1-3 hours per week, for multiple years!
NONE of the studies on the effect of coaching consider the effect of this sort of longer-term individualized instruction.
I'm willing to believe that short-term coaching only has small effects, but sustained individual instruction has a huge impact on mathematical ability. And as I explicitly said in my original post, SAT/ACT do a good job of measuring that ability.
But claiming that sustained access to individualized high-quality teaching doesn't effect performance on subject-specific tests that require nontrivial content knowledge and practice is, on face, absurd. At the very least, the studies you're citing say absolutely nothing about this sort of sustained intervention.
(Also, College Board loves amplifying those studies. I wonder why...)
> For many students, I tutored them weekly or biweekly, for 1-3 hours per week, for multiple years!
This... is a feature, not a bug. The SAT is a tool to measure educational attainment, and you boosted scores by legitimately educating students. The SAT is not a test to measure natural ability (I can't believe this needs to be said, but so many people claim that no intervention should be able to boost SAT scores, and the only logical conclusion is that they want the SAT to measure some sort of unchangeable inborn ability? Of course, I think the actual problem is that they haven't realized that if you eliminate all environmental differences, all you're left with is the genetic lottery.)
But anyway, I think this is absolutely fine. Would you expect someone who hasn't gone to high school to do well on the SATs? Then why in the world would you think legitimate education shouldn't boost SAT scores?
There's a huge spectrum between "raw ability" and SAT/ACT. A good test would measure somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. It's not impossible to do, but is really hard.
The SAT (and other standardized tests) make a lot of sense when you're comparing people who have spent more-or-less the same amount of time and money preparing. They also make sense as one component of a holistic picture, weighed appropriately.
The the true value of these tests for predicting potential is a lot less useful otherwise.
The huge problem, from a predict-success perspective, is that you can't tell the difference between:
1. a brilliant person;
2. a kind-of-smart person who's very driven; and
3. an average person with no work ethic who was forced to sit with a tutor for many hours each weekend.
> Then why in the world would you think legitimate education shouldn't boost SAT scores?
It should. That's what the SAT is for. As I've said twice now, the SAT is a well-designed test. I don't think the SAT should change. I'm just now sure how useful it is, especially as a holistic measure.
To be really concrete about this: colleges should shy away from the SAT because I won't be holding those students hands forcing them to study and custom-designing their course of study at their first job!
At some point soon after graduating college, the hand holding disappears and you sink or swim. Academic preparation helps, but work ethic and the ability to learn on your own is really important. Colleges are, or at least should be, attempting to select people who are more likely to "swim".
If I were a college admissions officer, I'd probably weigh "good enough scores to know you're not an idiot, plus a compelling demonstration of grit and work ethic" WAY over "great scores with no demonstration of independent drive".
(FWIW I think we're now completely disconnected from the actual topic of the article, since that's not what the hardship score is measuring)
Oh okay, I think we mostly agree. People ragging on the SATs and other standardized exams for being teachable is a pet peeve of mine and I overreacted.
Back to the hardship score, I just don't think that the College Board should be in this business at all. Individual colleges certainly know where an applicant is coming from, and what high school they went to, and they have a lot more additional information not available to the College Board. So they have a much better idea of what hardships the applicant went through. Furthermore, different colleges want different things from their students which would and should lead to them weighing different kinds of hardships differently. Reducing all of this to a single number based on very coarse data is exactly the opposite of what holistic admissions is supposed to achieve.
Do I necessarily agree with this score? No. But you should read Rothstein's book "The Color of Law" and the Supreme Court decision Milliken v. Bradley and think about how these "good school districts" came about
It’s basically like golf handicapping. Imagine if pro sports gave the Oakland A’s a few extra runs per games when they played the Yankees because they have a lower payroll. That’s what this is. Except you wouldn’t know how many runs would be added to the score until the end of the season. I went to high school with many lower-middle/poor people (I was one of them,) despite identical neighborhoods, crime, income, etc.,) most Asians I know aced the SAT — some were 1st generation and arrived in the US from places like Laos and Vietnam and spoke no English when they arrived. They (like me,) didn’t have expensive private tutoring; their families just put an insane focus on education. The tiger mom stereotype is there for a reason. Many of these families worked 16+ hour days in small shops, with the entire family working. Most of these kids went to Ivy schools or for full-rides at the state schools. Yet non-Asians living on the same block barely graduated, if that. Yet the only difference was parental motivation and cultural background. These kids respected the teachers, did their homework to a high standard and didn’t roam around the neighborhood looking for trouble. And discrimination? Asian kids with little English in a mostly black and white lower class neighborhood — they got picked on relentlessly.
If parents value education, they find a way. Perhaps having a two parent, tightly knit family helps. If we want to really help future generations, we have to find ways to support and encourage two-parent families. That’s one of the biggest predictors of academic and social success and there is plenty of data to back it up. Limited income, educational level of the parents, crime ridden neighborhoods — somehow, statistically, Asians don’t seem to care, they find a way. Until we reverse many of the social policies created in the early 1970s that destroyed the two-parent family in certain communities, you’ll get more of the same results. Interestingly, black kids from two parent families perform just as well academically as does a white student from a two-parent family. All of these other “factors” are just noise. The problem is in the home, not with the tests.
> I’m getting pushed further and further to the right.
No one's pushing you. If you really are a conservative, you should take responsibility for your own views and actions. Don't blame them on someone else.
I'll also note that all of the things you describe as your personal virtues that are supposedly under attack were actually things provided to you by your parents. Not accomplishments of your own. Why should someone who's parents are addicts, have mental health issues, or crippling medical issues feel like the testing is a level playing field when they didn't get those advantages?
> Which is absurd, considering it's involved in college admission process.
Your SAT score is just about the only bit of the admission process you have access to. You don't get the admissions officers' opinions on your essay, what they thought of your extracurriculars, how they perceive the reputation of your high school, what their alumni interviewers said, etc.
(Chances are you can make a pretty good guess at what the adversity score is going to be, too.)
And all that secrecy should go burn in a fire. Colleges have more impact than many government institutions, and they certainly take in a lot more government funding than many government institutions. They should be as transparent as government institutions if not more (What's the rationale against? National security?).
I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted. The United States has a system of de jure discrimination against white and asian men. Moreover, there is a great deal of de facto discretization against them as well. Many people seem to think that it is "fair" and appropriate for this to be the case, but I don't think its debatable that this is the fact of the matter. I think those who support this policy should defend it honestly instead of lying about it and claiming its not the policy, when it plainly is.
An example is the federal contracting rules that specifically require that some contracts be awarded to companies that are not run by white males.
This of course is gamed. The common case for a small contractor is that a woman is officially running the business but her husband is really doing it. Large contractors subcontract out to these small contractors for no reason other than to fill quotas. It is often make-work nonsense, paying them even though there is no reason other than the quota to have them working on the project. In other words, it is government waste.
There are people who make a career out of filling these quotas.
Consider how things work if nobody games the system. Each contractor is really being operated by the claimed owner/CEO/president. If the best contractors for a government agency's needs all happen to be run by white males but other less-good contractors exist, some of those better choices need to be rejected. The people running them are hurt by not getting the contracts. The government agency is also hurt by not getting to use the best contractors, and of course this hurts the general public due to government waste.
Ah yes, the system of discrimination that nevertheless has white and asian men disproportionately over-represented in silicon valley, tech companies, and government.
It's worth noting that all of hiring is some form of discrimination. An employer is activilly discriminating against anyone one they do not hire by any number of criteria.
This is fine. Generally accepted criteria such as fitness of duty, education, relevant experience, references and criminal background are all forms of discrimination that are generally accepted forms of discrimination.
But, unacceptable forms of discrimination include race, sex, religion and sexual orientation. If you, as an employer, engage in discrimination against better qualified employees to make a quota of an arbitrary percent of these protected classes against another based upon their class status, you are, in my opinion engaged in unlawful discrimination. It is still targetted discrimination even if it's against a majority class member such as race or gender, if that's the reason for the decision.
Promoting or accepting an underqualified minority over a more qualified minority under "affirmative action" or "diversity" is systematic, institutionalized racism/sexism.
Instead, how about we stop asking or considering "what" we are and consider what we can offer beyond our race/sex/sexual orientation?
> Ah yes, the system of discrimination that nevertheless has white and asian men disproportionately over-represented in silicon valley, tech companies, and government.
Asian immigrants, many of us who grew up in poverty and other difficult circumstances, are "privileged" now?
One of these days, progressives on HN are going to wake up to find the many, many Asians in technology on the opposite side of them. We ain't "woke" and we ain't your "allies", largely because of treatment like this.
It occurs in most non-merit based social settings. 95% of all churches are 95% homogeneous. Racial groups self segregate at lunch tables. 85% of millennials don't have a single friend outside their own racial group.
In merit based settings like employement, the employer is going to be selecting for IQ so the racial demographic of the employees is irrelevant, only their productivity.
I hate to be that person, but could you maybe cite those statistics? I was willing to give a pass on 95% of churches being 95% racially homogeneous, but I'm deeply skeptical the 85% figure is true for all millennials.
So, controversial question here. Is there a racial divide by IQ then?
I'm not talking about the cause of this, whether genetic, cultural or others. But right now in the United States, is there a sizable IQ distribution difference across the various racial groups?
> Now Asians will be discriminated against secretly.
So, a separate number being added to College Board's overall package is secret discrimination against Asian students? The "adversity score," according to the article, is calculated based on 15 different factors. The two listed (relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate/poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood) are not directly tied to any one race.
I know that promoting affirmative action is tantamount to blasphemy on this site, but let's be honest here.
Standardized tests alone are really not the great equalizer that many might think. I am a Nigerian-American immigrant, but my parents were able to afford expensive, one-on-one ACT tutoring/prep, and I scored a 34, and was awarded the National Merit scholarship after SAT prep. Not everyone can say that they had the same opportunities I did.
A so-called "adversity score" doesn't have to be the end-all, be-all. If it can provide additional context to the scores students receive, then it can really give first-generation, low-income, etc. students a fair shot at competitive universities.
Besides - nobody said schools have to consider the "adversity score," anyways.
> I’m getting pushed further and further to the right.
I also don't understand how a single organization making a change to its testing package, in the interest of leveling the playing field, is somehow "pushing" your political beliefs in any one direction... It's your choice whether you want to align your beliefs more closely with any side.
I did pretty well on the standardized tests in high school. If this had existed, i likely would have scored higher than average on adversity. I would be pissed to find out my score was altered in any way due to factors outside my control. If I do well on something, i want it to be from my own merits, whatever my current situation. I don't want to be pandered to because i grew up poor in a shitty neighbourhood.
Everything i learned and can do is because of my own intelligence and skill. Fuck anyone giving me points for things i didn't work for or that are outside my control. I want to be recognized for the things i can do, not because i grew up in a broken, poor family in a low income neighbourhood.
> because of my own intelligence and skill... Fuck anyone giving me points for things i didn't work for or that are outside my control...
Your "intelligence" is definitely one of those things completely outside your control. What you've done with it is at least partially under your control, but you probably weren't born with any sort of brain disorder, for example.
EDIT: adding on things like your visual appearance - race, hair color, pigmentation, height, etc - all of those are outside your control, and you generally can't control how other people initially react to those things outside your control.
You didn't control where you were born, or - at least early on - what resources you had access to. You were a victim of (or success due to) your geography, at least early on in your life.
But hey, you 'worked hard' and didn't watch as much tv as some lazy bastards who might get a $1000 scholarship because they grew up in a high-crime area, and fuck that, right?
How? I chose to learn the things i learned outside of school and to an extent the things i chose to learn in both high school and university. I didn't have to learn those things. I could have spent my time watching tv or doing other things. I know the things i know because i spent time and effort learning them.
Further, when it comes to intelligence and Nature vs Nurture it’s really both. People 15,000 years ago people had nearly identical genetics, but their society lacked the knowledge to pass a SAT level math test.
Now, making the best of your social and genetic background is up to everyone. But, assuming everything is balanced is at best willful ignorance.
you didn't choose your capacity for learning. there are people that try - much harder than you'll ever be capable of knowing - who can't do as much as you can. and it's not because of any factors they chose.
And how would such a test not work out well for you?
You would still score well, and the fact that you have extra work will still hold in good stead.
Let me turn this question that puts your self interest first.
You’ve got two people who you can hire for your team.
I turns out one guy got a lower sat score than the other.
The lower scorer is someone from the projects where people don’t go to college. He still managed it, and crunched his way through everything to get to community college.
The other chap has good parents who are highly educated and comes from a stable household.
Without a doubt, the first individual has proven a tenacity required to overcome a world of adversity.
Frankly - this is a handicap we already give people if we are made aware of their context.
The same reason people respect first responders, or people who’ve made it out of poverty are respected.
Because it IS harder, and far more fail to get out in the current environment, than those who do.
This will end up being more of a “how effective were you with the opportunities you had.” Measure than any other - and that’s provided it takes off in the first place.
Have we forgotten the purpose of universities? Groups of students once gathered in a place to attract groups of professors who can teach them thing, and those professors attracted more students, and eventually they got together and built buildings for teaching and housing for students, formed unions, and all the rest.
Why should we be shoving people who aren't capable of being the very best students into this environment? Why give them the expectation that this is what they must do to be successful? What must everyone learn from a university (including those in the Ivy League and their peers) that we expect them to all need to go, as a fundamental right, regardless of the fact that they will be displacing students who are quantifiably better-fit for this place?
Who will be the first responders if we make everyone get a four-year degree before they can start their lives?
a hypothetical person who was born an autistic savant who is a musical genius. They sold out concert halls at age 9-10, playing the hardest classical music ever written. To what degree did they “earn” their skills and their genius? At a certain point you must agree that people are born with brains that are wired better, and they had no control over that. Effort should be rewarded, but luck should not. Determining how much of someone’s success was luck vs hard work is not at all easy to determine.
Through hard work and discipline, you did the best with the hardware you were given. But don’t think for a second that you wired your own brain.
Edit: and just to clarify, I think some fuzzy new metric on a standardized test will probably never summarize whether someone “earned” their score or lucked into it. My comment here is mostly a reminder to be humble.
When it comes time to enroll in college, I want that savant to go to the best music secondary school that they want to attend. I don't care whether they were "born with it" or "earned it", but I do care that they demonstrate outstanding ability.
Not "outstanding ability, after considering factors X, Y, and Z", but simply "outstanding ability".
What is "the best school" here? It must be "the school that will best develop their particular talents", right?
Presumably you want them to go to that school so they can produce the best music possible with their abilities, for the benefit of society. The other option I see is that you might want them to go to that school because they have "earned it", but this is silly, especially considering a case where they haven't done anything, and are just naturally talented!
You now have two problems- first, one school might be excellent at training good musicians but not so great at training savants. Second...
Suppose you have one spot in a magical "savant school", which is able to develop somebody's skills better than anywhere else in the world. You'd want to assign the student who would benefit most to this spot- the one who has greatest potential.
This is NOT the student who currently writes the best music- this is the one who will write the best music after attending the school.
You don't care about ability now- you care about ability later. Predicting the latter from the former alone has an obvious flaw- training and practice improve ability.
Because of this, it's a good idea to consider measures of how much training somebody has had, in addition to their current ability, for admissions decisions.
Unfortunately, quantifying that is hard- so other metrics are used as proxies. In considering admission to an Olympic swimmer training program, for example, perhaps one might consider how early somebody learned to swim, or how often they visited a swimming pool.
The best music school here is the one that they wish to attend. They (and those who advise them) are in a far better position to evaluate the variety of factors that influence that decision than I am, as someone whose only musical instrument ability is a CD player or iPod.
Some music savants want to attend a music school that the composer or musician they most admire attended, others the one that is closest to home.
I don't understand why one would want a talented student to get preferential admission to a school because, for example, he liked the design of the campus. I only get the argument that a talented student should get admitted to a school that'll best develop those talents. The link between "you're talented" and "...so you should get to go to any school you want!" is one I don't get.
Why doesn't that lead to absurdities like a school which specifically excels at teaching "low-talent" students, churning out competent (if unexceptional) composers, still admitting talented students preferentially?
And if the savant kid happened to only see a musical instrument for the first time at 10 years old, so that when they took their music entrance exams at 11 years old their performance was very good but not quite at the same level as the other kids who had been learning for 10 years, you would just want to assess all of them on performance at that moment, and choose the kids that had been playing longer because your objective assessment is that they are better musicians.
In your autistic savant musician example, they are probably practicing obsessively every second they can manage, and may actually have earned their success. Does their hard work not count because their biology "made them do it?" I guess that's a question that cuts right to the heart of free will and applies to all of us in the end.
what if they aren't practicing every second? what if it simply comes out 100% effortlessly? how do you define "earn"? only X hours of obsessive practice? does their skill not count because they didn't put in years of 'hard work'?
Did you see the reference to 'autistic savant' up above? That was the example referenced. And even if someone does work/practice some, if the effort is minimal relative to other people ('normal' people, or what not), does it diminish the ability because they didn't "work hard" for it?
personally, I'm no savant, but as a child I really didn't have to work hard at anything in school. I was pushed up a grade, and was still at the top of that class, and bored, for years. i put in basically no effort in to any schooling for years, and was still, generally, way ahead of many other students who, looking back now, were struggling (this was in the day when students could be 'held back' to repeat a grade - I don't think that's done much today?).
i have learned plenty of skills, and some took years, and it's never ending. but some came - essentially - effortlessly (or appeared effortless relative to peers' efforts).
I do understand the initial example; and I have a story similar to yours. But you're comparing apples to oranges here: the experience of having a decent working memory and getting good grades due to schools being unable to test for real knowledge (but regurgitation of facts) and catering to the lowest common denominator, vs the ability to play a musical instrument skillfully are two very, very different problems.
My claim is that the latter is a skill that nobody is born with. Autistic savants aren't some type of magic creature that know things just by virtue of being savants. They still have to go through the process of skill acquisition. Now that process may be accelerated compared to me or you, but I disagree with your claim of proficiency with zero effort, especially with skills that have shown to require thousands of hours of deliberate practice to establish proficiency.
I think the key is in your last statement: "or appeared effortless relative to peers' efforts". It seems you found yourself in an environment which didn't sufficiently challenge you. This would only argue that you should've been pushed up to more challenging AP/honors classes. This would again have the effect of placing you in a higher standing compared to your peers. So if both you and your peers would be pushed to your true potential, it seems consistent with your statements to say your performance/output would've been superior.
So why should colleges deny you entry because of your ability to be proficient in the system they've set up?
If you stop rewarding "luck", where luck means inherent ability, then all the "lucky" people will voluntarily exile themselves into careers that are actually fun and which they can put maximum effort into, and stop working 8 to 6 designing hydroelectric power systems or writing biannual rice production forecasts or gently explaining how to write status update emails to software engineers.
Plus, to what extent is the capacity for hard work based on luck? If long hours give you clinical depression because you got 50 bad genes and experienced neglect as a child and lived in a house with lead paint, do you get sent to live in a slum with the rest of the "lazy" people?
Intelligence can be developed. I think it’s called “thinking”. Unless you disagree and have have a more thorough model of the mind as an uncontrollable and spontaneous assembly of synaptic connections in your skull?
So attractiveness adjustment score is also needed right?
Physical traits have huge correlations and almost certainly causation to wealth and success.
Tax credits for the ugly. Or maybe mandatory minor face disfigurement for the very beautiful.
Hating the rich is hate.
College board should use their zipcode model to provide free tutoring services instead of trying to punish Asian families who made sacrifices to live in better neighborhoods.
Holding down the top doesn't work, isn’t ethical and is not the same as lifting up the bottom.
You're splitting hairs. Their "score" just becomes whatever function the university uses to decide, and if they use it then their score would indeed be altered by the "adversity" score.
My university (one of the top-ranked in the world) did have some sort of adjusted scaling for the final exams. The raw results were never released. One would get a number somehow adjusted for how to the whole cohort did. So that if some exams turn out to be just too damn hart it won't wipe out everybody. But it was opaque and I really hated that!
I did good enough and then went on to do a Masters degree. There I'd get my direct scores. I really feel much better about it. I knew what I did right and what I did wrong.
I think the adjusted score in my undergrad benefited me (some exams were too damn hard!) but I still hated the system.
> My university (one of the top-ranked in the world) did have some sort of adjusted scaling for the final exams. The raw results were never released. One would get a number somehow adjusted for how to the whole cohort did
In first year university, I did a semester of Latin. For the first few weeks I was feeling very motivated; then depression hit me. I stopped going to class. What I should have done, is go see a doctor or psychologist, and got a letter saying I was depressed, and given it to the university administration, and I'm sure they would have given me some form of special consideration. But I didn't do that (it simply never occurred to me that I could do that, I wish it had.)
Anyway, since I'd missed more than half the semester of lectures and tutorials, I was thinking to myself - why bother turning up to the exam? I know I am going to fail anyway. But, I said to myself, I should go, you never know, I might somehow scrape through.
So, I sat down at the exam. I think I got the first page right. The subsequent pages, I had no idea. I sat there and waited until they let me leave early. (The university had some rule, you couldn't leave the exam early until after the first half-hour was up, or something like that.)
I waited for my results, I expected to fail. I was very surprised to find out I passed 50.0. I didn't understand how that could happen.
Next semester, I was enrolled in Latin again. I decided to drop it. But I thought, before dropping it, I should just go to the first lecture. As I was leaving at the end, the lecturer pulled me aside. He said to me, "You know you failed the exam, right?". "Yes", I replied. Then he said: "Too many students failed, and the administration told us we had to give some of them passes. We liked you, thought you were really enthusiastic at the beginning, didn't know what happened to you, and are hoping you might continue the subject, so we decided you'd be one of the lucky ones whose fail gets turned into a pass." I thanked him for his kindness, but I still dropped the subject anyway.
It was an interesting insight into just how "flexible" university marking can be.
Yeah but you had to work harder because of the traits being measured by this score and you should get credit for that, whether or not you think you should.
Sorry, but there are people who work just as hard as you and don't get as far because the deck is even more stacked against them, and this is an attempt at getting them some relief.
If a poor kid in a high crime inner city school who has very limited access to tutors or mentors scores a 1600, that's a much more impressive achievement than an affluent kid in the suburbs who took the test 3 times, had access to experts in the various fields, got 3 good meals every day, etc. getting that same score.
Just imagine what that poor kid could do if given the same resources as the rich kid...
> I know that promoting affirmative action is tantamount to blasphemy on this site, but let's be honest here.
Yes, let's be honest! I was from one of those locations where "adversity" would have benefited me. Worst school district in the state, low income, etc.
I am and I suspect will continue to be upset that the harder I work, the less benefit I receive. I pulled myself out of that situation. People in similar situations don't. I don't think everyone can, but they have an equal opportunity to. All they have to do is study or even just work hard or join the army / navy and do their 20 years.
I understand equal opportunity, but at this point we are forgoing equal opportunity and have been for a long time. By setting limits, calculating scores based on hardship, etc. We are doing the opposite of making it equal opportunity by definition.
> additional context to the scores students receive
Most people lack motivation to get out of their situation and improve, because either they are happy with it or they don't have drive. If they don't have drive, they likely wouldn't succeed anyway and they are taking the spot of someone with said drive. If they are happy - good for them. I’m sure they’d be happy to take a hand out, but they are taking someone else’s spot more deserving.
> I am and I suspect will continue to be upset that the harder I work, the less benefit I receive .
It seems logical and reasonable to give more help to those who need it more. And realistically, you're always going to be way better off by maximizing your own success (even if it means you might get less help) than by minimizing your own success and maximally relying on help. A life lived solely on assistance isn't really a pleasant one.
> It seems logical and reasonable to give more help to those who need it more.
It does, but that is because all the counter-arguments are complicated and sound mean-spirited. That approach, when tested, sometimes works out absolutely terribly.
Liberty and assuming everyone has an equal capacity to better themselves is the winning philosophy.
Helping people who need it is a lousy strategy. Giving them opportunities is a great strategy. However, the opportunity needs to be to show that they will work hard for a goal, not shoehorning them in to university. Nobody needs a degree to succeed. They need safe shelter, clear/consistent/unbiased rules, food and a system that allows accumulation of capital. A good universal level of high school education. The basic foundational things that underpin a civilised society.
> And realistically, you're always going to be way better off by maximizing your own success
Most people don't actually work that way, I don't have a statistic but based on anecdote I'd expect most people to minimise risk. People who optimise for success are quite rare.
So I'm curious, do you believe we should switch to a communist economic model as well? Allocate resources based off who "needs it more" seems to be flirting with that ideology. A life lived solely on assistance is better than a life toiled for no gain it would seem.
>If they don't have drive, they likely wouldn't succeed anyway and they are taking the spot of someone with said drive.
I promise you that I know people who, in a short few months, who burn the light out of the brightest soul.
Make them that test subject’s parent and I’ll give you a sure shot to medicority and a life of emotional issues.
Anecdote is never data. On a large enough scale of human data we see that programs that improve basic things like food, interaction with parents and teachers - all improve student outcomes.
Unsurprisingly - these are also things that better off families tend to take care off and spend their resources on.
>So, a separate number being added to College Board's overall package is secret discrimination against Asian students?
It sounds kind of like, "put a gold star on all of the Jewish applicants, and allow each reviewer to decide how to act on that information individually."
It really does not, at all. How can you equate a combination of 15 factors (at least two of which are not tied to any specific identity) to improve admissions results, with a Nazi policy that directly foreran the Holocaust, and singled out groups for mass extermination?
Regardless of the veracity of that article's data, which I do not care to check - you cannot post an article about Jewish overrepresentation in elite universities and disclaim the fact that the article was written by a Holocaust denier.
It's the gold star thing, folks. Gold star + Jewish evokes Judenstern, to use the historic name, not preschool accomplishments. It's definitely true that Harvard and other US colleges/universities discriminated against Jews under the influence of anti-Semitism, and it's also true that there were American Nazis, for instance the German-American Bund in the 1930s.
I don't think that this adversity score has anything to do with the Nazis, I have to say. It sounds like the data is publicly available financial information. So this whole little branch of HN commentary is an unnecessary diversion.
To return to the article, colleges have been giving extra points to legacy admits, children of donors, people from X region, tuba players, violists (but not violinists haha), rowers, lacrosse players, merit students, Lutherans, etc etc etc forever. I think schools should have to option to get the adversity score or not. I went to Caltech; they probably don't care and should stick to their quirky admissions as many of us 'minority' admissions found it comforting in the midst of failure to know that we were admitted on nothing but the material in the application. But other schools serve a different purpose and if they want to admit twelve poor kids by "adversity score" that's great. I have to say I read the coverage and it's just a bunch more rich parents freaking out that they don't have every single last advantage possible. Ask me in 15 years -- maybe I'll be doing the same.
There is some correlation between race, culture and outcome. In the bad old days it was thought that race was the causal variable of the 3. Now it is accepted that culture probably plays the causal role.
The classic example is Shylock in the Merchant of Venice. The Jews had a racial stereotype of being moneylenders; that stereotype didn't evolve because of a racial disparity, it evolved because Christians generally didn't charge interest. So the moneylenders were non-Christian and that correlated with being a different race.
There is evidence of a slight bias where Asian migrants sacrifice more to set up their children's educational future. Policies that cheapen the impact of sacrifice will disproportionately affect them. It may not be explicitly racist, but the outcomes will likely be delectably different in different racial groups, to the net loss of the Asians.
The stereotype evolved because Jews were forbidden by law from owning land in most of Europe and also forbidden from joining the guilds that ruled the professions. So if you can't own land and can't be a professional and also might be forced out of your home in a hurry, the game-theoretic solution is to be a moneylender. I don't think this is particularly cultural, as women in India for instance have long kept their wealth in gold for the same reason. That's why women like jewelry: if you're forbidden from having a bank account and credit and can't own your home, you need to have something you can carry away and pawn. (I mean, since the 1960s women have been allowed to open their own bank accounts in the US -- but that's within my mother's lifetime!)
> I also don't understand how a single organization making a change to its testing package, in the interest of leveling the playing field, is somehow "pushing" your political beliefs in any one direction... It's your choice whether you want to align your beliefs more closely with any side.
Leveling the outcome is NOT leveling the playing field. And by keeping the algorithm secret, it is tyranny not justice.
> So, a separate number being added to College Board's overall package is secret discrimination against Asian students? The "adversity score," according to the article, is calculated based on 15 different factors. The two listed (relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate/poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood) are not directly tied to any one race.
The powers that be do not get the benefit of the of doubt after all the shenanigans they've pulled over the past century.
No. I’m an MIT SB and Berkeley PhD and I will tell you engineers never made a living in the US until around 2000 (fiberoptics and Netscape boom). The “right” will snatch that right back.
Let the gamification begin where subpar students move into crime filled areas at least on paper and into rough schools. While paying for private SAT tutors.
There's no evidence for this -- from what the parent poster said, he probably lived in a well-off neighborhood and went to a well-off school. The article specifically says race is not a variable, so you seem to have a factual inaccuracy in your statement. Since poverty level within zip code is one of the few variables specified, and the parent poster would show less rather than more adversity in this respect, how do you justify your argument?
> Oh, do you think the right is going to improve upon the US's current system of incentivizing/forcing families to fight over/make big sacrifices for homes in the wealthiest school districts in order to give their children a half-decent shot at a good education?
Yes? Ever heard of school vouchers? The political right would love to reform the education system, from teachers unions to university professors, the entrenched interests are core Democrat voting blocs.
Interestingly, black and Hispanic people support vouchers at a slightly higher rate than white people. That is remarkable because whites overall skew heavily conservative. (Trump and Romney won white non-Hispanic voters approximately 60-40.) White liberals are the only demographic that strongly oppose school choice and vouchers.
We already have school choice for universities. You go where you want and you either pay for it or find funding from the government/charities. No one finds it weird that you're not tied to your local neighborhood for higher education.
We already have something that's not too far from school vouchers for universities, which is FAFSA. The government provides aid that you can use at any accredited institution, not just the institution into which you were geographically zoned.
Wikipedia sums it up: "the evidence to date is not sufficient to warrant recommending that vouchers be adopted on a widespread basis; however, multiple positive findings support continued exploration."
Seems pretty reasonable that we don't let people replace the entire country's educational system with this new one until the evidence in favor of it is extremely compelling.
Didn't your public school teach you not to consider Wikipedia a convincing reference for validating political opinions? Maybe you could have used some vouchers...
> Didn't your public school teach you not to consider Wikipedia a convincing reference for validating political opinions? Maybe you could have used some vouchers...
I think they were too busy teaching me that randos on the internet disputing Wikipedia's sources are definitely more reliable than Wikipedia.
Haha maybe you should wonder how many Wikipedia editor accounts I maintain. Or maybe reading, you could try that. ITT we're talking about political opinions: vouchers good, vouchers bad. No one with a multiple-digit IQ is going to find such an answer on wikipedia.
I lean to the right and I'm opposed to school vouchers. We all pay for public schools on the theory that it's a public good. Why should only people with children get to decide where resources go? All taxpayers should get equal say.
It's telling that state GOPs typically support vouchers in the name of choice, but not actual choice within the public option.
Allowing any student to enroll at any public school regardless of their home zip code would be a much more meaningful form of choice than vouchers.
Why not just let anyone in a metro area attend high school at the richest/best high school in the area?
If you can answer that question, you can pretty well predict what systemic issues would be caused by a voucher system.
I'm generally skeptical of mixed public/private education systems with partial choice and subsidies for private options. We have exactly such a system for higher education and it's a fucking disaster.
You have 80% of the story but the last 20% is important.
Why not let anyone attend any public school? Because public schools are largely funded by local taxes. So a school in an expensive neighborhood with high taxes will naturally be a magnet for everyone else who can be a free-rider (in the economic theory sense). School vouchers fix this problem by carrying revenue along with the student instead of tying it to geography.
School vouchers with dollars attached to kids is effectively "choice, as long as you can pay for it". It's the status quo of zip code based schooling access, on steroids. That's exactly the "systemic issue" I'm referring to in my original post.
The claim that school choice would improve access to quality education for students in poor-performing schools is a complete farce.
I'm not saying that our current system works well or that it's particularly just. I'm just pointing out that vouchers make the tie between wealth and educational access even more explicit and codified than it already is. A voucher system would deepen, not alleviate, the inequities in our educational system.
I suspect we're just going to disagree on "as long as you can pay for it". In a publicly voucher system a large part of your ability to pay is provided by the government. This is not the case today. Vouchers take the ~$5-10k allocated for you that is "locked up" in your zip code and allows you to spend it anywhere you want. This doesn't fully equalize ability to pay but it's a large step toward equalizing it.
Secondly it fixes incentive structures. Good schools in high-tax areas can now see inbound students from elsewhere as partially subsidizing the cost of the school, rather than being a pure cost center. Again this doesn't perfectly equalize anything but it's a step in the right direction.
Allowing low income students more freedom in how they spend their government-allocated funds mitigates the problems of wealth disparity. This is already how the university system works so assertions that it is a complete farce should also justify the abolition of the FAFSA system in exchange for federal funds that can only be used at the university nearest your home.
>Or do you just want to be entitled to the good college in exchange for the childhood your parents chose to give/were coerced into giving you?
It should generally be noted that such policies usually do not hurt the truly well-connected as much as the nouveau riche, who fought their way from poverty to a home in the suburbs only to find their investment pulled out from under them. For instance, black families were disproportionately affected by the subprime mortgage crisis. One way or another, society told these people "do this", they complied, and they face being punished for it. Not to perceive an injustice here is wilful blindness.
The policy is quite defensible, but grandparent's concerns are legitimate and do not warrant sarcasm.
Why not actually? Instead of politicized solutions one could require schools at every level to create some sort of random admission pool for some percentage of yearly admissions.
For instance, take the mean SAT of admitted students, lower it by X% and pick candidates to random pool with scores above that level.
I imagine that to many people it wouldn't be "fair" because it wouldn't bring the outcome they want. But it'd be fun to watch them argue that random system privileges XYZ group!
Equality of opportunity seems like a pipe dream to me. Are you really going to equalize socioeconomic status? Parental skills? Pollution? Proximity to opportunities? Those all determine the opportunities one has access to.
> I’m getting pushed further and further to the right.
Cycles of poverty will never end when people with the privilege of dedicated and capable parents facilitate their success feel like victims. How about some alternate suggestions for poor kids without parents like yours?
An SAT score is an assessment of how well you will do in college. It's not something you can earn or deserve. If someone does less well than you but came from a much worse school district, why shouldn't a predictor take that into account?
If this were almost any other example of adding a modifier to correct for a bias in an initial scoring system, nobody would bat an eye, and we'd be discussing specifics.
Probably something along the lines of: Without accommodation, being able to learn, participate, and demonstrate competency in a series of courses which presume a student's mastery of information presented through secondary education.
Ok. If we take that definition, is there any reason a test shouldn't consider whether a student had a very good school and learned half of what they were given, or a very poor school and learned everything they were exposed to? (a contrived case, of course)
I suspect your question has an unmarked asterisk, which is that the students end up with similar standardized test scores and GPA. For that to happen, it must be the case that a student at the good school can get good grades while learning only half the material, which seems not possible.
And so the answer is that colleges already can and should take into account % learning through GPA.
Yes similar test scores, for the GPA it might depend on how much we trust the scoring from the good school.
I was imagining that the good school presented more and better information, (perhaps more at the style and pacing of a good college classroom,) While the poor school may not have even presented all the information, or done so in a rushed way. (Focusing on that majority of students bound for community college.)
Free lunch, low-income pays no incoming tax(47% and more of them), food stamps, disabled benefits, medicare medicaid, CHIP for kids, etc etc, I'm fine so far. But AA for college admission(and jobs too these days)? followed by SAT score manipulation? this is literally pushing me to the far right side, it makes me feel hard working, sacrificing for next generation made no sense, this is getting close to robbery. what's next for me as a middle class guy?!
not really, color-based AA admission is the true racist, I'm just emphasizing merit-based results no matter what your skin color is, the equalize-every-result is going way too far.
Do you know each year how many of those AA students dropped out? I am sure we will have a solution soon, that is each college will give adversity-GPA-for-college-degrees-by-skin-color, all must be good.
But I don't want to be treated by an AA doctor myself! The richest and the poorest are rare, let the majority students shine by hard working, that's the best gift we can give them instead of cut-in-line because their skin color difference, which is truly racism.
Last, we probably should look into NBA, too few white and Asian there, how racist they are!
> The rating will not affect students’ test scores, and will be reported only to college admissions officials as part of a larger package of data on each test taker.
So there is no discrimination, unless this is used in a feedback loop, which maybe it is.
> "My family sacrificing vacations and eating out for 12 years"
So your family has hardship, but managed to skew things so you can have it better. If this analysis means more is done to help kids from poor backgrounds, you'd be doubly helped, one by your parents hard work, and again by the system.
Edit: This guy’s parents might have actually been through some shit. Asia was not a nice place over the last century. If he had said something like ‘my parents escaped pol pot’ or something ummmm, actually horrendous, then, I mean, that’s a hardship. And had this commenter framed it in that way, then it gives a whole other dimension to the discussion. But he didn’t.
I’m going to repeat this for anyone spoiled enough by western society to ever say this:
Hardship is relative. There's always someone who's had it harder than you. His parents sacrificed things to get him the resources he needed to succeed, is his point. They sacrificed things that the parents of other kids did not.
People are starting at different points. His parents were physically able to do what they did. If his dad had been disabled, or dead, he wouldn't have been able to commute for 4 hours. Would that make his dad less virtuous?
One thing I have to say about this SAT thing is that, there are lots lots of Asians working in SAT as statisticians, psychometricians, and analysts. There must be lots of Asians working on the project related to the 'Adversity Score', unless they intentionally exclude Asians from this project.
But we've never heard anything about internal disagreement or resistant against this stuff. This fact tells something.
I hear what you are saying, but that means you are advantaged. You had parents that cared and sacrificed and took and interest in your future. With that in mind they also probably made sure you studied and did your homework.
To be a bit blunt (and hopefully not offensive, just for example), if someone who didn't have those kind of parents and that type of situation makes the same scores as you, likely they either worked harder or have more ability.
Still I feel where you are coming from. Reverse discrimination for people who work hard is still B.S.
This is treading the line of being completely Kafkaesque. I'm having trouble following the discussion in this thread. On the one hand, lots of people are arguing that this test change is BS and will have lots of unintended consequences. Then there's others arguing, not always explicitly, that children should essentially be punished in terms of their "points", for lack of a better term, in college admissions because of their homelife. Have a mother and father that stayed together? You lose adversity points. A mom that stayed at home so dad could get promoted and afford to move the family to a better school district? You lose adversity points. A public high school with lots of AP classes? You lose adversity points. Family lives in an area with a tech boom, and thus has low vacancy rates in housing? You guessed it. No adversity points for you.
This is insane, and it's going to encourage absurd behavior meant to dupe this system - and don't kid yourself, there will be (see all the wealthy Hollywood types cheating on their kids SAT scores). There might be less nefarious antics if the College Board at least was transparent about how they calculate the score and released it after the test - but they're not. That's how you know this is a shell game, meant to give Universities an "out" for manipulating the demographics of their matriculating classes as they see fit. These incentives are wrong and unethical.
As a silver lining, maybe this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back and folks will start to realize what a fraud the modern "university" is. When the fiance and I start having kids, we've already discussed how college shouldn't be the default scenario. I hope others start considering this. It is mind-boggling to think that my kid could be disadvantaged specifically because I sacrificed to make a better life than I had growing up, so we won't be playing this game.
But advantage is real. You can't list all the sacrifices your parents made while in the same breathe implying "no advantage here, this isn't fair".
The devil is in devising a fair system to determine advantage in an objective way that won't be rife with corruption and gaming the system. I highly doubt this will be possible and attempts likely will result in less fair and worse outcomes.
So policy wise, agree with OP. But from the story he tells, I think it obvious he does indeed have "advantages" many people don't and this is worth recognizing.
I'd argue that you not eating out, getting socialized, and traveling actually made you less of a well-rounded individual and you probably should be penalized for those things. Colleges need diversity. They don't need the same kind of kid replicated 10,000 times. Racquetball, violin, AP calculus does not an interesting campus make.
I would need some very heavy proof that traveling (aka vacations where you instagram breakfast with a view) and eating at restaurants makes someone a well rounded individual, not to mention someone who “adds” to an educational institute.
I would put my chips on someone who has at least proven themselves academically.
>I would put my chips on someone who has at least proven themselves academically.
everyone seems to be conflating academics with person-building in this thread.
Why don't these same people seem to have any problem with non-academic scholarships?
Here's the grand reason why it's a good idea to make schools mixing-pots : You can expose the really effective students to ideas and concepts that they may have never experienced, which they may use more constructively than other individuals.
In other words : Colleges need people that create the idea of Napster , but they also need the folks that can implement it. Both groups are only marginally effective without the other.
Similar line of philosophical questioning : 'Why do managers exist?'
We got it all wrong folks. We should be giving priority to the children of millionaires who are diverse because they had the opportunity to go on vacation every summer/winter break.
presumably due to the same reason that it's found biologically -- if you only have a hammer you'll find yourself caught with your pants down when you need to tighten a bolt.
Homogeneity can traditionally be attacked by exploiting a vector that the entire crowd is weak towards. Randomness helps to solve this problem on a macro level by varying the crowds weaknesses and strengths from individual to individual.
Now THAT is racist attitude against asian-americans (well the stereo typical asian).
So how about kids from single parent family or poor neighborhoods who cannot eat out and/or cannot travel because of lack of money? Are they less rounded kids too?
Just because you are asian and do 'Racquetball, violin, AP calculus' doesn't make one asian same as the next asian. How damn racist of you.
I've actually thought quite a bit about this issue over the past few years. Essentially the problem is that students with parents who did not score well are fighting a constant uphill battle.
Grade families like classes. The "class average" should always be a C (assume for sake of explanation that a C is 2000).
C, the student's initial score (call it the "crude score", C) is computed the same way it's always been
P is the student's penalty, computed from a weighted average of all of their ancestors' crude scores (w_k...w_1) as well as theirs (w_0).
For the next generation,
set w_k := w_(k-1)
if C > C_av: w_0 = w_1 * w_2 else: w_0 = w_1
normalize w_0...w_k
P = (sum(w_0...w_k) - C_av) * urgency
Where urgency is a measure of how in need the disadvantaged groups are as well as their numbers. This can be adjusted manually based on the political climate, maybe by a DAO that governs the College Board on the Ethereum blockchain.
The real problem is way more fundamental than this, imo the real problem is the concept of school as a discriminator of aptitude rather than an educator (or indeed as both). When you're teaching someone, teach them. Test them as late as possible, in a way as close as possible to the task you're testing them for (programming assignment completed in-house instead of weird whiteboards, piece of writing completed in house instead of screening English degree).
Hopefully micro-credentialling/MOOCs/the fact that a lot of good careers are slowly turning into software (which is one of the easiest things to objectively test) eventually kill this fake-meritocracy bullshit.
From the perspective above, this is lipstick on a pig.
Nature and life is full of diversity, from where you are born to the structure of your brain to the occupation of your parents.
We say "celibrate diversity", but then try to quash it by making everyone appear equal and the same.
We are born in different circumstances. Sometimes being rich is a hindrance, making people lazy and unmotivated. Sometimes being poor is a hindrance. But sometimes it is motivation to work hard to escape poverty.
I think it's a little crazy that a committee of people get together and think they can "fix" someone's life circumstances, while in the process they are also hurting others'. We are not wise enough to make these decisions for others.
I don't think people realize that SAT scores are a lot more arbitrary than they look. If you're one of the lucky kids whose parents set them up with reasonable coaching (and academic expectations in general), you do much better.
I did good but not great on the SAT and only got into CMU because I was a student athlete. But once I had my foot in the door I did very well (high gpa, TA'ed, graduated w/ honors and awards) and then continued to do very well in industry (arguably).
If an adversity score can help out other kids like me who don't happen to be "impressive-for-a-D3-school" level athletes, then I think it's a great thing.
Private higher education will always increase inequality in the long run as the wealthy can find ways to optimize/game filters. For the wealthy the more complex the filter the better as they can pay to navigate the complexity.
The SAT selects for two things: Can you give this school prestige with your brain (high score, low income, no test prep)? Or, can you give this school money with your (parent's) wallet (high score, high income, test prep).
All this will likely serve to do is show that given two equally scored students, the one with less adversity tends to get in because they help the college pay its bills or provide connections to their family's firms.
Schools already have financial aid data for poor students for grants, so this just makes this data more transparent to the rest of us.
I'll be interested to see if future data shows I'm correct on this.
The availability of AP classes is part of the calculation. This will backfire for College Board. Now it becomes undesirable to offer any AP classes in the high school!
Assuming that means AP classes that have been properly registered to use the trademark on transcripts, we will likely see pseudo-AP substitutes. The material will be taught, and students will take the tests, but officially there will not be AP at the school. Students will have to go elsewhere on test day.
Another possibility is that a completely different alternative will become far more popular. This could be dual-enrollment or International Baccalaureate.
While equalising opportunity is a noble endeavour, I fail to see how this particular initiative would achieve that. In short, it's too little too late. If someone struggled through high school because of environmental factors, they're not going to suddenly be on their A-game because they were admitted into university. At the end of the day, we should still expect the highest levels of excellence from our professionals.
If we want to have a real impact we need to be examining the factors contributing to the disadvantage leading up to this point and find a way to address those.
If someone went to a decent school, lived a care free life, and scored decently well, and then another student had the same score despite coming from a worse school district and having to work a part time job throughout high school, my bet would be on the later persons success.
Maybe they’d perform similarly in college, and the struggler would still struggle, but post graduation my bets would be on the person who had to struggle.
This reminded me about the quote from "Winners take all"
> A true critic might call for an end to funding schools by local property taxes and the creation, as in many advanced countries, of a common national pool that funds schools more or less equally. What a thought leader might offer MarketWorld and its winners is a kind of intellectual counteroffer—the idea, say, of using Big Data to better compensate star teachers and weed out bad ones.
Hardship score is a symptom. A large part of the problem lies in aristocratic-like school funding system.
My sons best friend is Asian, 1600 SAT, 4.0 GPA, top-5 California high school, top-50 in country, almost 20 AP/honors courses, but I guess just too low an adversity score to get into UCLA ....
Part of me wonders if this is an effort by the universities, in cooperation with the College Board, to keep their hands clean and position themselves as objective, data-driven entities.
"Adversity" levels are already assessed by all big name universities in the United States. This score will likely change very little, especially if the 15 factors are broken out and included in the report. What's more likely is that the score will oversimplify "adversity" to a level that can be exploited (even more so).
I wonder how much of the correlation between income and SAT scores is due to wealthier people's children just being more intelligent, rather than due to having access to better education.
If colleges are doing this anyway, then this is just a standardized way to do the scoring. This is basically a service the college board is providing to colleges.
This could be seen as a good thing, even if you don’t like affirmative action. Instead of relying on crude metrics like zip code, race and income, this will allow for a more granular approach. If we are going to give a leg up to the disadvantaged (and therefore a push down for the advantages) we might as well do as good of a job as possible.
And in the end, they'll read the same books, study the same math, learn the same history. No SAT score or college admission can replace an inquisitive mind and a library.
It seems people are conflating "low adversity score" with "my perfect SAT score is ruined because my family lives in the nice suburbs".
I think this is just meant to add some standardized and measured context for admissions officers, like an objective version of other "adversity factors" already present in the admissions packet.
However, I think College Board have no business doing this themselves. Seems out of line and very different from standardized testing.
The supply of high quality education and credentialing services needs to increase to meet demand. Otherwise, college admissions will just be a zero sum game.
So a kid is lacking math/science/reading skills, how will boosting their scores help? They're still behind, you just rigged the game in their favor. They'll still show up at some prestigious college and do poorly for the same reasons they do poorly at the SAT. Testing will never erase the inequality between income, class and race.
I can see a new score based up height and good looks which are correlated with higher incomes and executive success. After all, these colleges care more about polishing their own scores (sat, rejection rates, library volumes, GPA scores, alumni starting salaries) even more than the poor kids trying to gain admission ...
That just seems so limited considering the variability of life.
It seems there are so many well intentioned efforts out there that seem focused on sort of economic or just easily measured statistics .... and people just try to unweave the weave by putting pressure on those easy to measure numbers.
Shouldn't college admissions officers already be able to take this into account based on data in the application? I am pretty neutral on it, but think the idea is pretty pointless and just leads to people trying to game the system, rather than having decision making criterion distributed.
A friend of my sons is brilliant with a 1600 SAT and top grades at a top-5 high school in California. Still, he is not admitted to UCLA. Probably his family needs to Move across town to East Palo Alto where there are gunshots every night to increase his adversity score ....
This seems extremely hypocritical if they do not also account for personal adversity (with evidence). Both of my parents died while I was young. It certainly interfered with schooling as I questioned the point of existence as well as not growing up with consistent role models.
This is a terrible idea. Why further punish kids for the success and efforts of their parents? Even if this isn't outright lowering the score of high-achieving kids, this is lowering the worth of their accomplishments in the greater college-admissions market.
On a related note I always thought that US college admissions are very sketchy. Why should children of alumni have have a higher chance of getting into an ivy school. Same goes for extra cirricular activities. Who gives a shit about your exceptional cello playing skills?
The SAT is designed and delivered by a private, for-profit company. They are providing additional information that they think will add product value for their customers (schools). Do we want our public schools to continue encouraging/requiring such products?
The problem isn't the adversity score, it's the admissions practices that reward mediocre performance in rich public school districts.
Colleges already weigh a GPA as better if the school district is more wealthy (competitive). So the adversity score counter-balances that existing bias.
If you go to a big state school you meet a lot of mediocre people who went to rich public schools and got mediocre scores and high (memorization-oriented) GPAs. They had access to lots of AP credits and get admissions advantages not just for the results but for taking the AP classes in the first place (weighted GPAs, etc.).
The adversity score, if it works correctly, will help colleges find students who attended high schools that were little more than daycare, offered no weighted GPA, few AP classes, lousy teachers, etc. A high potential student from one of those districts will fly under the radar compared to the kid who had a memorization 3.8 GPA and 8 AP classes from a big suburban high school.
I prefer this to school's independently coming up with their own non-transparent systems. That being said I hope this is like Affirmative Action, only meant to be instituted for a length of time ~10 years once the problem has been deemed solved.
This sounds like thing what we had during communistic times in Poland; universities were giving extra points for place of origin of student candidates during entrance exams, adding these to the sum of points obtained for results in individual exams and for grades on the secondary school exit exam aka matura exam. The general idea was to give better chances for young people coming from workers and countryside families
This sort of "positive" discrimination led to more discrimination where I grew up, in Romania.
Highschools and universities had "reserved spots" for Moldovans and ethnic gypsies who where placed in classes ahead of ethnic Romanians with higher grades. This led to them being hated and bullied more, many to the point where they dropped out.
The purpose of the SAT is supposed to be to predict if a person would succeed or not at college. I don't see how adding an adversity score will aid in making this prediction.
> The purpose of the SAT is supposed to be to predict if a person would succeed or not at college. I don't see how adding an adversity score will aid in making this prediction.
If adversity measures correlate with lower test scores more than they do with lower performance, then it would obviously help.
Of course, the adversity score—which is separate from the main test score—may serve a separate function for institutions using it, just because the existing score serves one purpose doesn't mean that everything the College Board packages with it must serve that purpose.
This is off topic, but .. My cousin graduated from Harvard and he's like the least well paid and least connected person I know. Just a nerdy introvert kind of person.
What we really need to do is remove all adversity and all other incentives for people to better themselves. I mean, what good ever came from people trying to overcome struggle and strife?
"Adversity Score" sounds a bit like something you'd find at the "Oppression Olympics", which is a term often used to criticize exactly this type of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppression_Olympics
A valedictorian from an impoverished community has the same merit as one from a wealthy school (on average). Think about that and the solution seems obvious.
As someone who's somewhat ambivalent about race-based affirmative action (in short, I feel it's oversold at elite institutions and underused elsewhere) - a widespread adoption of something like this seems like an improvement over the status quo from the perspective of fairness. With that said, I don't think it will end up being used in this manner because fundamentally institutions are indifferent to your hardship and generally want the least fair process possible. At least as far as you can infer from their actions, top schools don't want students that overcame hardships. They want students that are likely to be successful. And given equal test scores, those that overcame more hardships are probably less likely to be successful, since they are likely to face more difficulties and less support in the future.
For example, if Harvard admitted purely by academics (assuming that a suitably hard version of SAT exists), they'd certainly have a student body that overcame more adversity they currently do. But they'd miss out on the likes of Jared Kushner who, despite low test scores, certainly had better career prospects than the average Harvard student. In reality top schools are generally looking for well-bred, well-rounded rich kids that are going to be successful no matter what. Everything about their process optimizes for this - relatively easy tests and low cutoffs, focus on extra-curricular and well-roundedness in general, ridiculous emphasis on sports no one without money would play, legacy preference, the list goes on. Admissions officers are even known to prefer more expensive extra-curricular activities - it's not about ability, it's not about effort, it's about interestingness and rarity, which are essentially synonymous with expensive.
Then to mask the fact that this is what their admissions process optimizes for, they just put the lipstick on the pig to make the result superficially palatable. This is where race-based affirmative action comes in - the whole holistic admissions process is fairly blatantly regressive, but somehow it's sold as a package deal with race-based affirmative action (it doesn't have to be) to put the critics on the defensive, as though they are the ones defending privilege. It's a fairly brilliant rhetorical technique, I must say. The holistic admissions process is primarily used to admit rich kids who aren't quite good enough academically over middle-class/poor kids who are great academically, but just have a hard time distinguishing themselves due to their chea, extra-curriculars that are available to far too many people to be interesting. But the fact that this process, combined with race-based affirmative action, yields a few more upper-middle class African immigrants and far fewer poor white and Asian kids, is apparently enough to give them the moral high ground.
They've done such an amazing job pushing this narrative that most people seem to think rich kids getting SAT tutoring is a big problem from a privilege perspective and de-emphasizing objective metrics is about leveling the playing field. It's the exact opposite - they want every excuse to admit the people that they think are going to be successful (and what better predicts success than growing up already successful?) and de-emphasizing objective metrics allows them to fill the entire class with mostly privileged people, without the riff-raffs that are academically good, but don't have the connections or the upbringing or the money to be successful.
The Jews actually have a pretty strong family component. In theory they aren't a race but for practical purposes it might as well be a racial stereotype (eg, the classic hook-nose propaganda - clearly a racial stereotype).
Anyway, the point was that the culture is what is important. Jewish culture is clearly somewhat different from Christian culture. If you seep a person in a specific culture that will define how they think in a way that their race does not.
> eg, the classic hook-nose propaganda - clearly a racial stereotype
Please, do not repeat this filth. It is anti-Semitic nonsense that there is are “Jewish racial characteristics”. Jews come in every shape and skin tone. I know a very nice black man who is an African Immigrant and he is Jewish.
There is no Jewish race - Judaism is only a religion.
Converts and outliers are of course are excluded, but for people with a long Jewish ancestry, there are clusterings of genetic markers that uniquely identify them as distinct from non-Jews. There are different groups of Jews too.
Judaism is well accepted as being both a race and a religion. Of course it has fuzzy borders with people who don't believe the religion but are genetically Jewish and vise versa, but so does every race and every religion.
It's not helpful for thought to demonize an idea by calling it "filth". How can you consider possibilities if you've decided in advance what's clean and what's too dirty to even say?
Judaism is not 'well accepted' as being a race, and it is quite dismissive for you to assume that other commenters have taken up their positions 'in advance' rather than having spent time on the topic before this conversation that led them to their position.
Jewish secularism comprises the non-religious ethnic Jewish people and the body of work produced by them. Among secular Jews, traditional Jewish holidays may be celebrated as historical and nature festivals, while life-cycle events, such as births, marriages, and deaths, may be marked in a secular manner.
In fact, the term "Jewish people" refers principally to an ethnic group with a common cultural heritage and ancestral religion, not to adherents of Judaism. Judaism happens to be the common religion of the Jewish people.
of course, and many argue that conventional college isn't worth the money. Schooling has always been about jumping through hoops, weeding people out, conforming to the system. Those who play ball inside academia excel at it.
I did not study for my SAT. I did not do great. A long time friend who I consider to be one of my intellectual peers, did study, got a great SAT score, went to college, worked the system and now we both work the same job. None of this is scientific, this is just my experience, however I have always had the feeling that people who excel at following the rules of schools obviously do better in that type of system.
>Higher scores have been found to correlate with students coming from a higher-income families and having better-educated parents.
Which makes a lot of sense since income correlates with intelligence and intelligence is partially heritable.
A century ago the SAT was used to fine diamonds in the rough for first-generation college students. After multiple generations of college students mating with college students, you're not going to find that many first-generation college students anymore.
Inserting dumber students into college because of their upbringing is hostile towards the success of a nation.
EDIT: Please point out something that's incorrect instead of downvoting because it makes you uncomfortable.
IQ predicts future income even if the subjects environement is controlled for. It's a very good meassure, probably the best we have in the social sciences. What it tells us is not nice, sure, but denying reality is not going to help anyone.
On the other hand though it might be essentially impossible to close the gap between low income and high income students. Your parents have a huge impact on your learning, and if your parents are poor and have to work all of the time, they aren't going to be as available to help you learn.
Regardless, I think it is pretty impossible to calculate an adversity score that is actually accurate (how do you compare the challenges faced by a child in a single parent family with one who grew up in a poor neighbourhood?), and it seems pretty wrong to me to have a hidden score based on things you likely can't control influece admissions, but it would lead to some interesting research if it was actually used.