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SAT score distributions in Michigan

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Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#171

Post by beebmam »

basic_test_prep wrote: post #110
aabajian wrote: post #11

The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. The stratification is more granular than Asian versus Black or White versus Native America. For example, Jewish students excel beyond the Caucasian average while Cambodian and other Southeast Asian Immigrants perform significantly below the national average for Asian Americans. The challenge…

> score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. Test prep has diminishing marginal returns. On the flip side that means just 1 hour of prep makes a big impact. This is what research has found and why a lot of focus is on getting kids to do any studying for anything at all. Many kids do zero homework and zero studying. Getting them to 1 is the hardest part. This is the biggest…

Just want to make sure, and correct me if I'm wrong, but is this your argument? "some students did X and their outcomes were good, therefore doing X is all anyone needs to have a good outcome"

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#172

Post by eternalban »

aabajian wrote: post #11

The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. The stratification is more granular than Asian versus Black or White versus Native America. For example, Jewish students excel beyond the Caucasian average while Cambodian and other Southeast Asian Immigrants perform significantly below the national average for Asian Americans. The challenge…

> The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically.

I scored very high in both. Believe me, as new immigrants we were completely clueless about the heated race to top spots. In my case, credits goes to my makers (mom and dad :) and the fact that Iran had fairly good public schools.

Culture is important. Two relevant shockers for me (as a very young new arrival to US):

- disrespect for teachers.

- practically institutionalized disdain for the smart kids. I am talking cultural products here.

So I honestly think cultural backgrounds that feature things like special social and personal regard for those who teach, and special regard for individuals in STEM professions (for example "mr. engineer"), are more at play here than merely ambitious parents. And guess what is driving those ambitious parents? Culture has a lot to do with it.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#173

Post by strikelaserclaw »

someguydave wrote: post #116
faeriechangling wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. Is there any way to prove/disprove this? Also doesn’t this also beg the question as to why non-Asian parents apparently won’t teach their kids to be good academics?

Yes there is a way, you put kids in test prep and see if they do better. They generally do not improve much. The SAT is an IQ test, and IQ is mostly inherited from your parents.

There is no way the SAT is a purely IQ test, when i didn't get a hot score on my first SAT, i practiced for 1 week straight and substantially improved my scores (like 300 points range). The way i liken this to is if a MLB pitcher throws the same pitch at the same velocity and i know this ahead of time, i could practice for a year and when the time comes i could hit that ball. Does that mean i'm a major league level batter? Heck no, it is the same way with the SAT's, Leetcode and other tests, they measure how much you want it more than raw IQ.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#174

Post by treis »

z7 wrote: post #145
treis wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that "quality of parents" shouldn't be the way we pick the elite

Why not extend this to attractiveness, general health, enviromental factors like air pollution, gender, quality of local libraries, height etc., all likely influencing an individual's success in life?

Of course I don't think we should pick out elite based on these things either

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#175

Post by netheril96 »

UncleMeat wrote: post #161
FredPret wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. You can’t hide a high IQ, even though parental and societal involvement will always act as a multiplier on what a kid can naturally do.

IQ is highly correlated with nutrition. Very likely, being food-insecure has a direct causal effect of lowering IQ. It isn't a thing fixed from birth.

Do Asian Americans have better nutrition than other categories?

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#176

Post by hirvi74 »

billsmithaustin wrote: post #59
aabajian wrote: post #11

The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. The stratification is more granular than Asian versus Black or White versus Native America. For example, Jewish students excel beyond the Caucasian average while Cambodian and other Southeast Asian Immigrants perform significantly below the national average for Asian Americans. The challenge…

My daughter credits the test-taking techniques they taught in her SAT prep course for a big boost in her SAT score. She says the test-taking techniques were orthogonal to how well she knew the material. I'm happy for her but at the same time it seems unfair that my ability to afford the SAT prep course gave her an advantage not available to families with lower incomes.

MY SO is a professional tutor, and she often has clients for standardized testing prep.

From what I have gathered it seems a lot of students really need a confidence boost. Once they realize they are capable to doing well, they tend to improve their performance.

There is also like tricks and gimmicks, but that is a different discussion.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#177

Post by PKop »

Why is this extreme "nurture over nature", "blank-slate" mentality not applied to any other disparities in biological expression save for the brain/intellect?

Do we all think that, say, the massive racial disparities in 100m Olympic sprinters, or NBA basketball, is due to "practice" "culture" and "work ethic" primarily rather than genetic/biological factors of physical ability?

Are say a group of 5'8" Asians going to have the same potential ability to play top level basketball compared to a group of 6'8" Blacks? Does practicing change this dominant variable? Is the differentials in height due to "culture" or "biology"?

Is it not common sense that people have a natural range of potential ability for certain things that are biologically constrained, and practice and effort can shift ones ability within this range but not change the biological constraint to where this range lies?

Why does evolution and natural selection stop at the neck? Is the brain not also a part of the body, made up of the same organic material?

And finally, is "work ethic", "culture", "attitude", "affinity for intellectual focus/interests" 0% biological/heritable? Is that not also partially genetic along with the natural potential? Not that this is definitive for one individual to another, but in aggregate group averages bear this out statistically over long periods of time in different locations.

Let's take a step back and just think about the obvious here: how many "hackers" here on hacker news can say they did fairly well on the SAT and standardized tests, above average or well above average, and didn't prepare much at all? Whose parents didn't put much effort at all into pushing them to study for it? I'm sure quite a bit. Is that not an example of natural ability, nature, dominating over nurture? Not that they couldn't have done a bit better if they had, but that their cognitive potential to do well on these tests, to a significant degree was biologically determined? To deny this is similar to the myth that everyone can pull themselves up by the bootstraps. No, often one's inheritance, monetary or biological, have some say in this.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#178

Post by barry-cotter »

lupire wrote: post #76
aabajian wrote: post #11

The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. The stratification is more granular than Asian versus Black or White versus Native America. For example, Jewish students excel beyond the Caucasian average while Cambodian and other Southeast Asian Immigrants perform significantly below the national average for Asian Americans. The challenge…

SAT math is geometry,a 10th grade class for average students. Scoring below 700 isn't due to lack of "push" it's lack of some combination of intelligence, nurture, health, teaching. Due to the cost and complexity of transcontinental migration, most Asians in US now, and Jews last generation, come from elites from their previous family homeland who successfully migrated to escape bad government or seeking greater oppo…

> Jews last generation, come from elites from their previous family homeland who successfully migrated to escape bad government or seeking greater opportunity, when it was tactically hard to do so for the average person. It's a natural filter for smart, capable, effective people who can raise children to be same.

The large majority of the US Jewish population came after the 1850s. They were not selected for wealth. Like the Irish immigrants were negatively selected. They were less educated than those who stayed at home, on average. Similarly Italians in the relevant period of mass migration. The middle class were doing well so they were more likely to stay home.

> The effect tends to fade over time (shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, or docks to docks, in three generations).

This has no basis in evidence. Every psychological trait I’m aware of is strongly heritable, including ones with obvious impacts on earnings like intelligence, conscientiousness and extraversion[1]. Social class is so heritable the only society to make a dent were the Chinese during the cultural revolution[2]. If you want to know more about the extraordinary persistence of social class see Gregory Clark’s work[3].

[1] Genetic Influence on Human Psychological Traits

https://utahpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bouchard.0...

[2] Persistence Despite Revolutions

http://davidyyang.com/pdfs/revolutions_draft.pdf

[3] https://faithandheritage.com/2017/06/the-heritability-of-soc...

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#179

Post by yamtaddle »

uup wrote: post #39
mrep wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except local property taxes only pay for about half of k-12 education. The other half comes from federal and state governments and the way they give out funding is to selectively counteract that misallocation such that 47 states actually allocate more per-student funding to poor areas than to wealthier ones on average according to this article [0] and it has been this way since at least 1995. [0]: https://apps.urban.…

> only pay for about half That's a lot. From your own link, a vast majority of schools are regressive, i.e poor people get less.

Some of the worst districts in my state have the most funding and highest teacher pay.

The best teachers still don't want to work there because being called the c-word by 1st graders or having a 3rd grader threaten to stab you (and seem like they really mean it) and not being able to do anything about it because the two fights and one baggie of drugs admin's had referred to them by noon today has them too busy to spend any time on "minor" stuff like that, plus having lockdowns with police patrolling the halls and yelling at anyone who so much as pokes a head out a door without clearing it with them first, due to credible threats of violence, several times per year, makes you want to do literally anything else as a career in a hurry. 15-20% higher pay than the next-best-paying district doesn't make it worth it.

Schools can't fix poverty and ghettos no matter how much money you give them, but trying that is simpler than fixing the real problems that cause very, very "bad" schools, so that's what we do, even though it will never work.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#180

Post by vjshah »

uglycoyote wrote: post #166

has the SAT gotten way easier on recent decades or have students just gotten that much smarter or better at taking it, and universities gotten a lot stricter about accepting students with lower scores? one of the commenters in the linked article mentions that their son, with an SAT score of over 1500, was rejected by a number of normal state universities such as the University of Texas at Austin (a great school but n…

Sat scoring was “recentered” in 1996, causing a significant jump in average score.
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