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SAT score distributions in Michigan

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Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#231

Post by sampo »

wjnc wrote: post #49
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…

Just a quick note on the word 'push'. We all now the 'tiger parenting' trope. Those parents exists and it makes a difference (with clear 'pushing', which I see as a negative). But with maths I think it's a bit more subtle. Just the tiny things (even just 'talk' math) you do in early education can make a massive return later. There is no 'mean' in maths education even in ages 4-10 (my kids). We live in the Netherlands…

> We all now

As a non-native English reader, it took me a while to understand that this means: We all know.

I think native speakers hash the words in their brain based on how they sound. And people who learned English at school primarily by reading and writing, hash the words by how they are written. The latter data structure makes it difficult to find that "know" and "now" are almost the same word.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#232

Post by sweezyjeezy »

thwayunion wrote: post #226
sweezyjeezy wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question was specific to African Americans, and not specific to CS.

CS isn't the only field where Michigan is an excellent and highly selective school. Some state flagships serve as "come all" institutions -- any decent student gets admitted. States like Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota, and I think still Wisconsin come to mind. Michigan doesn't work like that. Lots of their undergraduate programs are extremely competitive, and therefore admissions overall is competitive. Saying "better s…

I never said it is, but I do think there are MORE competitive places out there. People seem to be commenting on assumption that this is representative of races at large, I don't think you can draw that conclusion. You could infer that African American's are basically never in the top band, but you could also think that the ones that are get accepted at the most competitive places. Likewise you could say Asians are MUCH more likely to be in the top band, but you could also say that the most competitive colleges are less likely to accept them, so more likely they go to Michigan.

I'm not saying either is true, just commenting that this data on its own is too incomplete to draw the kinds of conclusions people are assuming here.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#234

Post by RetpolineDrama »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #134
dwater wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, assuming you are correct, what's the root cause of difference in time spent studying? If the primary cause is less study time spent by black and brown students, how do you address that?

Cultural values. Cultural values are more complex than genetic make up. Part of it comes from generations of values that lead to success of previous generations. An overlooked reason I believe there is such a statistical discrepancy of African Americans is that slavery effectively cut the cultural heritage of values from earlier generations of Africans. Slavery broke up families and with that erased generations of su…

>Cultural values are more complex than genetic make up.

In the same way that a hologram has greater volume than the 2D film that produced it.

"Culture" is the collective expression of shared preferences.

Country A has a culture of coffee consumption, because the people there like coffee, because the population possesses an above average expression of gene CR22423 subtly changes how caffeine and dopamine interact leading to increased pleasure seeking.

Then some undergrad comes along and makes the point that Country A has a "coffee culture" because it's "more widely available" and "climate factors", when in reality it's the gene driving the behavior that lead to the increased demand which lead to increased cultivation which self-reenforced because Tribe A was hyped up on coffee so they conquered Tribe B and bred their women further spreading the _coffee preference gene_ so that the modern population is now largely descended from the coffee addicts.

It's just a simplified example, but the point is that culture is just an abstraction layer running on top of a collective set of shared preferences

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#235

Post by Gareth321 »

d_burfoot wrote: post #216

A related issue, that people are slowly starting to realize, is that there are big variations in life expectancy between races. Asians live 10 years longer than blacks on average (and about 7 years longer than whites) [0]. Also, women live about 4 years longer than men. These differences may not seem big relative to total lifespan, but they are enormous relative to retirement span, and that has huge implications for…

The other side of this is that the average Asian also has longer to accrue wealth. So when we're looking at racial equity data, and Asians end up wealthier, at least part of the reason is that they just live longer. It's not all structural racism, as some propose.

The fact of the matter is that different groups are different. For example, Asian parents are notorious for making their kids study six hours a night. African American parents are notorious for not making their kids study six hours a night. These two groups are never going to end up in the same place. And you have to let that happen because we all have the freedom to choose how we live our lives. We cannot, and should not, force values onto any people.

> Asian high-school students spend significantly more time studying and doing homework, Ramey found, than any other ethnic or racial group. Averaged over the entire year (including summer vacations), the average, non-Hispanic white student spends 5.5 hours per week studying and doing homework, while Hispanic and non-Hispanic black students spend even less. In contrast, the average Asian student spends a whopping 13 hours per week. Parents' educational levels do not explain the differences, Ramey said, as these become even greater if the sample is limited to children who have at least one parent with a college degree. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110505103345.h...)

Stats taken from: https://www.bls.gov/tus/

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#236

Post by time_to_smile »

beebmam wrote: post #171
basic_test_prep wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

How can you in read that comment in good faith and come to that conclusion?

There is a commonly held belief that "Asian students do better because their parents push them really hard".

The parent comment is arguing that the "really hard" part is not necessary. They are stating that if you condition on "studied at all" (above some minimum threshold) you'll explain away most of the group variance.

They're also not even arguing against the claim that studying more is better, just that the biggest improvement is in studying at all.

The final conclusion is spelled out clearly: If you want to improve test scores across the board you don't have to "push kids really hard", rather you have to work to get all students to get over the initial hurdle of studying some minimum threshold.

Now the parent might not be correct, but it's hard to see how you're even coming across with the reading of that comment you are.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#237

Post by macNchz »

eternalban wrote: post #172
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 ver…

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

Escaping this is certainly a piece of why people pursue "good" schools in wealthy areas, gifted programs, and private schools. Obviously it's not a guarantee you can avoid this attitude, but there are obvious differences between educational environments.

I went to a good public school K-8, where I was part of the gifted program (what amounted to a handful of students in my year who had a few special class session per week), and then a top private high school.

One of the biggest differences from a typical American public school that I saw in the gifted program and private school was that being smart/curious/interested/engaged/academically ambitious was generally admired and encouraged. I was endlessly curious but never a particular diligent student, and had a tendency to "coast" in school, but I think being in this environment helped frame things for me in a really positive way.

It got a bit ridiculous at the end of high school as my classmates started aggressively competing for limited slots at top universities, but I feel the environment–being among people who valued ambition and using your brain–was super motivating and raised my internal bar for success in general. I'm reminded of something a tennis coach told me as I was first learning to play: the best way to improve your own game is to play with others more skilled than you.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#238

Post by cjbgkagh »

commandlinefan wrote: post #211
BeetleB wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear if you're trying to contest with the parent or agree with him, but you are doing the latter.

> you are doing the latter Not necessarily. If intelligence is genetic, then by OP's hypothesis, immigrants are more likely to be intelligent and pass that on to their children - whereas GP's hypothesis (seems to suggest) that intelligence is effectively random but determination is what's passed down from parent to child. Of course, it's probably a combination of both.

It depends on the degree of regression to the mean, and to which mean the children are regressing to. Due to selection criteria bias of immigrants they are more likely to be outliers than non immigrants. While it's very likely that the outliers have a genetic advantage it seems that important combinations of genes are often lost and on average subsequent generations do regress to the mean intelligence of the general population that they come from more. If intelligence was a single gene or the average of multiple genes what would normally be expected would be an average of the parents intelligence. It appears that the actual results are the mix of the two which could be readily explained by important combinations of genes not being lost some of the time.

In the future when the important combinations of genes yielding more intelligence are known it'll be possible to select for certain combinations and children selected this way would be expected to have a higher intelligence than either parent. i.e. making multiple draws from a distribution and picking the highest value.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#239

Post by yangikan »

thwayunion wrote: post #210
sweezyjeezy wrote: post #205

Is it reasonable to assume that an African American with SAT score in the top band(s) would probably get accepted to a better college than Michigan? There are loads of kids here with pretty low scores, so clearly this is not representative of the highest performing students in the US, nor that the race breakdowns are representative of the highest performing students in each race. This only seems to give us informatio…

For CS, getting into Michigan is incredibly competitive. They are tied (at #11) with places like CIT in CS and way above a lot of ivies and elite technical schools. Michigan CS is like Carnegie Mellon CS -- getting into the school for non-CS is waaay easier than getting into the school with the intention to major in CS, and the filter starts at admissions. Michigan is closer to an ivy than a "state school" for CS.

Do you have to declare a major when you apply? Can't you be ambivalent about it? Or apply for a different major and then switch to CS after you get in?

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#240

Post by thehappypm »

user2352 wrote: post #24
armchairhacker wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kid got accepted to UMass Amherst and Northeastern University. Those colleges are really highly-rated for CS, and Northeastern in particular has recently become really selective. The college rejections are weird, yes, but I don’t feel bad for him

With life experience and age, you really appreciate the opportunities like UMass Amherst and Northeastern for CS. But if you're a high school senior, it's really common that you don't really realize that in the moment, and feel hugely demotivated or even end up depressed at the start of university. A lot of these people spend hours a week studying for the SATs and courses with the dream and imagination of getting int…

UMass Amherst is where I hope my children want to go. It’s a prestigious school by all means, and it’s a beautiful campus-oriented life not too far from civilization. Plus in state tuition. I went to a prestigious private school and don’t think it’s really better than a flagship state school.
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