531–540 of 647 posts
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How does that work? You’re saying a child being literally homeless can focus on keeping GPA up?
You got the point of the parent comment backward. It’s specifically easier for a bright child in poverty to ace one test than to maintain a GPA for four years.
Thomas Sowell has broken this down very well over the last 50 years. https://www.hoover.org/research/affirmative-action-around-wo... https://www.commentary.org/articles/thomas-sowell-2/affirmat... And of course the Bible on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sow...
Thomas Sowell is easily in the top 5 intellectuals alive, and yet most people are barely aware of him and his work. Why? I genuinely don't understand why he is so ignored.
Truly a shame...
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Sowell doesn't advocate for "right-wing" ideas. He's a moderate classical liberal, which is generally described as a centrist position.
He's extreme far right wing, especially compared to other parties in the USA, which tend to be right wing and moderate-right compared to those in Europe, where the terms originated.
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The top 10 percent policy is a merit based system and the most recent flavor of "progressivism" says that merit based systems are racist and should be abolished. Lottery and quota based admissions is what considered progressive today.
Lottery systems with an initial cutoff make sense if you have a large surplus of applicants who surpass your lower quality threshold. Rather than make asinine minuscule decisions over who exactly the top 1,526 out of 10,000 are, cull the 7,234 that don’t make the cut and randomly select from the survivors.
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Deciding whether or not the SAT is equitable, fair, or valuable shouldn't have any anecdotal component. For every one person with a story like yours, there is someone who had a bad experience with it for reasons outside of their control. I did exceptionally well in take home or book assignments because I understand the subject matter, but never was a good test taker. I took the ACT and did 'fine' but I could have don…
> At the end of the day, tests like the ACT/SAT will always privilege people who can afford to spend more time on it. Lots of kids do better because their parents spend thousands on tutoring. This i true, but the effect is small. The studies I've seen mentioned say 50-100 points.
The problem is much more fundamental, we need to try to solve the severe economic stresses for underprivileged kids’ families if we want them to have a fair shot at higher education and the success it supposedly grants, not these little tactical band-aids. They need economic opportunities and safety nets.
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All human “races” are social constructs with no basis in reality other than the social perceptions of the group delineating them. So, yeah, that's true of API, but its just as true of, say, White.
It’s a self label though, so social perceptions aren’t involved. I am whatever race I identify as, not whatever race other people think of me as. I can tell people that I’m Mexican and who are they to say otherwise?
SAT and GPA provide significant and independent predictive value for outcomes of interest. See for example the graphs on page 22.
[1] https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview...
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>> As a Californian I find it quite ironic that many policies in “conservative” Texas (ex. university admissions, property tax, income tax) are more much more progressive than what we have in “liberal” California. There isn't much that is progressive about property taxes. They affect the middle class much more than the poor (who often aren't homeowners) and the rich (who can afford high tax rates). Texas specifically…
> They affect the middle class much more than the poor (who often aren't homeowners) and the rich (who can afford high tax rates) Absolutely not. The burden of property taxes falls largely on the capitalized asset-value of real estate, so a typical middle-class household can offset much of that burden by paying for a smaller mortgage in the first place. And poor renters largely benefit by not having to pay local inco…
This is not how the rental business works. Property tax is simply a cost passed on to the renter.
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Deciding whether or not the SAT is equitable, fair, or valuable shouldn't have any anecdotal component. For every one person with a story like yours, there is someone who had a bad experience with it for reasons outside of their control. I did exceptionally well in take home or book assignments because I understand the subject matter, but never was a good test taker. I took the ACT and did 'fine' but I could have don…
The SAT is an extremely high predictor for IQ. It correlates incredibly well. I grew up in a trailer park, and didn't have access to the test prep industry, so I understand that wealthier kids had a big edge. That being said, nobody is talking about the SAT being biased against poor kids. They are pretending that it's purely a racist, culturally-biased test due to its outcome of having average scores that are hundred…
Test prep does not give much of a an edge. It certainly isn't comparable to those point-differences between groups (and therefore the effective "bonus points" often given for being a member of certain groups).
Everything they teach in those prep courses is available in books you can get for a few bucks (like 12-16). If you're really strapped, you can probably get prior years' books for next-to-nothing (this is what I did in the days before the internet, finding them at thrift stores for pennies). I suspect if you compared test prep takers to people who actually worked through the books (or comparable info from the internet) and practice tests the advantage would disappear (if not reverse).