Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 647 posts

Re: Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

#631

Post by daddylongstroke »

lordlimecat wrote: post #622
BitwiseFool wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My high-school's college admissions advisors told us, in no uncertain terms, if you are non-white or mixed race, make sure you declare that because it will help your chances.

I have worked at companies where their referral bonus schedule rewards white males at one-quarter the rate of female Asians. But the application of course states that race and gender are not considered....hmmm.

Haha. Yep, same here. Just saw an email from our corporate HR head saying that we're paying an extra $1500 per referral for people considered a "minority" by the federal government definitions. I work at a tech co. where white people are a minority (less than 39%), so not sure what type of gobment subsidy they're after now?

Re: Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

#632

Post by daddylongstroke »

blackgirldev wrote: post #587
dcow wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it telling that stronger resistance is met in the younger years where the costs are paid by society and not the individuals? I deeply disagree that it’s the same set of individuals. Maybe I’m N=1 but I want to take focus off solving things at the college level and shift to solving things at the community level, explicitly not wholesale rejection of any program that benefits the disparaged. Rather a call to use…

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1998-06-07-980607... Speaking of primary, elementary level perspective… The school in question is where I went prior to its closing. After I graduated, white families decided to close a very new, nice school because they just didn’t want their kids among black students. Even where there is money and great support, whites just don’t want to have any funding to go to black kid…

I went to an all-black public school after my family moved to the US in a Chicago "suburb" overrun by gang activity and crack houses (yep, my sister and I were the only white kids in the whole school). Most of the teachers were black, and upper-middle class, none that I knew of living anywhere near the neighborhood where the school was (down the block from me). I once asked a younger teacher who would frequently mention her kids during classroom "lectures" why they never visit her during the school day. She sheepishly replied that they go to private school. This was around '92-'93. A few years later the school district put out a poll of the teachers where a couple of the questions were focused on if the teachers' kids (if any) went to school in the same building where the teachers taught, and if not, did they go to public or private school. Something like 58% of the teachers sent their kids to private schools outside of their own area. :-/

Re: Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

#633

Post by dcow »

curryst wrote: post #629
gjhh244 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. From an European perspective America's obsession with race seems absolutely idiotic. Progressive taxation and major help for poor communities and families regardless of skin colour is obviously the only sensible solution.

As an American, I think it's because the treatments for racism are far cheaper and more tolerable than the treatments for poverty. Minorities were kept out of any opportunity to create generational wealth for a long time, due to racism. The problem we need to solve to reverse that is deprivation of generational wealth for decades, not racism from 60 years ago. We don't want to talk about that, though, because most of…

You could start by closing tax loopholes or introducing a corporate community/education support tax. We leak a lot of wealth IMO that could be captured and distributed to those in need but we don’t because we live in a corrupt society that’s lost it’s backbone.

The supposition we’re exploring in this sub-thread is that AA is not actually a treatment for racism and more of a signal of virtue collectively by society. Real treatment would be to do the expensive and disruptive thing, yes.

Re: Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

#634

Post by dcow »

curryst wrote: post #630
908B64B197 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> given two equally qualified applicants I wonder if that push toward diminishing the impact of measurable, standardized testing isn't an attempts at generating more "equally qualified applicants"

There are complaints that standardize testing isn't equal. Basically that some portions of the testing reflect white culture, which puts minorities at a disadvantage. I read the article a while back, but one of the examples they gave was the choice of words to test on the SAT. One of the questions was asking for a synonym for "armoire". The article posited that that term was far more likely to be recognized by white…

If you frame it as a fight against poverty we’re making incredible progress. Now we can ask the question in a way that might lead to a real solution. The solution could either be fix the biased vocabulary in the test or give everyone armoires. Or overhaul the economic system so that more families can afford armoires.

Re: Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

#635

Post by walkedaway »

pmoriarty wrote: post #124
walkedaway wrote: post #11

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...

"The Hoover Institution, officially the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, is a conservative American public policy institution and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government." Not surprisingly, Sowell's article is against affirmative action. While I was reading it, I was also looking out for anything that might distinguish Sowell as one of…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RN7X-De2RA

Re: Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

#636

Post by walkedaway »

seriousquestion wrote: post #30
walkedaway wrote: post #11

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RN7X-De2RA

Re: Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

#637

Post by JPKab »

cmh89 wrote: post #411
JPKab wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Plenty of people recognize that the SAT is bias against poor kids https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/07/why-po... The reason that the racial component comes out is that Black children are over-represented in poor communities due to systemic racism

Question:

Do you think that targeting people based on income level would be a superior way to address this issue? If it was based on income, rather than skin color, wouldn't it disproportionately help Black children while simultaneously not leaving other disadvantaged groups out in the cold?

Re: Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

#638

Post by JPKab »

mrh0057 wrote: post #484
livinginfear wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SAT results correlate highly with IQ, and IQ correlates highly with success in life. Still, people engage in all kinds of postmodern mental gymnastics to explain why an intuitively obvious fact is somehow false.

Your statement immediately has a problem. How do you define success? Then you have a second problem when you state a person taking one test is also good on a different test. Going much over 100 has little correlation with wealth which is what most studies use. Then you run into correlation doesn’t equal causation problem too.

IQ is the single most studied, and statistically proven, quantitative measure in all of social science and psychology.

The US military developed it not as a tool to exclude, but to INCLUDE as many males in the draft as possible during World War I and after.

The determination was that anyone below 85 IQ is literally a net drag on performance in the battlefield, and is unable to add value without a quantity of supervision that is detrimental to a fighting unit.

The harsh realities of IQ go against the grain of both of the major US political parties:

The GOP myth of everyone working hard to uplift themselves simply can't apply to about 10% of the population. There is simply nothing a person born with an 85 IQ can do to succeed in the modern world without a lot of help and assistance that almost certainly needs to come from some form of collective, probably the government.

The Democratic myth is that, given enough help, and with obstacles such as racism removed, everyone can succeed. Therefore, they believe that unequal outcomes are evidence of some form of systemic discrimination. There is no level of discrimination you can remove that is going to help the 10% of the population at or below 85% succeed in the modern world. Cash payments to this population are simply not going to ever yield any form of self-sufficiency in a post-industrial economy.

It's a miserable reality that I hate to think about, and simply makes me sad. Any one of us reading this comment could have been born with this affliction, and I think we should be extremely hones when assessing how to correct this injustice of birth and give these human beings a life that is as meaningful and happy as possible. The lies we tell ourselves do them no favors.

Re: Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

#639

Post by JPKab »

inglor_cz wrote: post #549
mrh0057 wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your statement immediately has a problem. How do you define success? Then you have a second problem when you state a person taking one test is also good on a different test. Going much over 100 has little correlation with wealth which is what most studies use. Then you run into correlation doesn’t equal causation problem too.

"How do you define success?" Let us look at the USA of today and its social ills. Quality of a random person's life is undeniably better if they manage: * to avoid going into jail/prison, * to always have a home, * to be drug-free, or at least drug addiction-free, * to be fit (= not obese), * to be employed or self-employed, * to finish their high school education at least. Those points might sound modest, but if som…

Great points, and one item that should be added is "not having children in your teens and with an absent partner."

The activists who talk about inequities at the population group level, and ignore the statistics on teen birth rates and single parent family rates above 70% isn't being honest.

Across all ethnic groups, isolating for income level, males raised without fathers commit crimes at dramatically higher rates, drop-out of school at dramatically higher rates, and are more likely to engage in violence. I grew up in a poor county that happened to be mostly Black, but with a significant population of poor whites as well. The common denominator of kids dropping out of school, or getting arrested for hitting their mom when they were 14, 15 years old wasn't race, it was absentee fathers. Incarceration rates aren't remotely high enough to explain the absent fathers in the United States. The vast, vast majority of absentee fathers are not in prison, they are just not around.

Re: Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

#640

Post by GaryTang »

starchild_3001 wrote: post #333

Cancelling SAT (especially subject exams) is the stupidest decision I've seen anywhere. Make access more fair? Sure. Cancel it? Plain wrong! How do I know? I'm one of those students who didn't have stellar high school grades, but I excelled in subject exams --- those subjects were genuinely interesting to me (math, science). I didn't find the rest of high school interesting, and I wasn't a nerd nerd studying anything…

This is precisely why alternatives to traditional education are accelerating now and will eventually replace all but the boys club institutions and capital intensive science programs.
Post reply on HN