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SAT score distributions in Michigan

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Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#281

Post by yucky »

socialismisok wrote: post #17
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…

Not only that, where one lives can impact the funding available to even provide basic education. We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded schools.

This is not the case here, since in Michigan the Detroit Public Schools not only have the worst test scores in the nation, but the highest funding per pupil in the state.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#282

Post by RetpolineDrama »

commandlinefan wrote: post #243
RetpolineDrama wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We should not, because race is a useless concept. This may be true, but I find it interesting that white people are the only ones who think this way. Every other group has in-group racial bias, and actively organizes to that end.

> white people are the only ones who think this way Not really - Asians are pretty quick to point out that lumping Japanese immigrants in with Indian immigrants makes for a pretty meaningless classification.

Are you from the UK by chance? That's the only place I've been that considers Indians "Asian". I've also never heard any of my Indian-American friends call themselves Asian, they're very proudly (sometimes obnoxiously so) "Indian".

And of course the Philippines, Japan, China, Korea etc all have very different cultures/customs. However in my experience at a fortune 500 my Korean and Filipino coworkers still organize an "Asian Culture Club", in fact one of them is the president of an Asian advocacy group that interacts with the city for events around Asian American And Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

All that's fine, I'm not bashing anyone, just saying that from what I've seen it's seemingly only white people who are averse to any kind of ethnic organization.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#283

Post by someguydave »

f154hfds wrote: post #261
someguydave wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think the SAT is an IQ test. I'm sure IQ helps but parents clearly have a pivotal role - the single biggest external factor to explain variation in score perhaps. Surely the biggest factor in SAT scores is how much you the student _care_ about the SAT score. Why do you care? Maybe because your parents care, maybe because your parents don't care? At the end of the day parents are crucial to the success of thei…

This paper found a 0.82 correlation between general mental ability g and SAT scores

https://archive.org/details/ScholasticAssessmentOrG/page/n1/...

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#285

Post by sokoloff »

googlryas wrote: post #247
geraldwhen wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of my friends scored below 1400 and none had tutors. All public school.

1400 is 93rd percentile. The odds of, say, 7 random kids scoring above the 93rd percentile is pretty small. I bet you drew your friends from AP/honors classes, or from some nerdy/academic pursuit.

I don't know that my situation was exactly at that 1400 threshold, but I was all public schooled, basically all of my friends were from AP/honors classes, none of took SAT tutoring (that I ever heard about) and most of us scored in that range.

It seems (overwhelmingly?) common for ones high-school friends to be your classmates.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#286

Post by kirevmaco »

ryan93 wrote: post #266
kirevmaco wrote: post #241

It's just testing and rewarding people who studied for the stupid test, that's all. It also rewards conformist personalities. It reminds me of undergrad calculus, where you had to memorize how to do dozens of types of integrals. You're not supposed to ask "what does dx mean?" Asking those types of questions will give you a worse grade. I remember back when I was supposed to "study" for this thing. I asked "if it's an…

Schools do teach what "dx" is. But it is important for upper level engineering and physics to know "dozens" of integrals.

My point was that if you aren't willing to memorize stuff before you understand it, you often do worse in school.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#287

Post by yamtaddle »

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.

I legit think that my parents' successfully instilling a strong sense of fair play and honesty in my from a young age hindered me more than a little. The world's simply not like that. The ones who win take every advantage—if a test is trying to measure you, you'd damn well better study its "game", because you're competing against kids who did and they will receive zero negative consequences for doing so, only benefits, even if doing so seems against the spirit of the thing and feels dirty.

... which is part of why having parents who have themselves succeeded at these things is an advantage. Mine were from poor (quite poor, in one case) backgrounds but were worked-hard-and-eventually-did-OK sorts, not early-success sorts. So they taught me fairness and honesty in all things, and didn't know they should clue me in that some things are just bullshit games that you should do whatever you can to beat short of taking too-large risks. I mean, they hadn't even played most of those games, so how could they know?

I bet it would never occur to kids from an upper-middle-class background (doctor parents, lawyer parents, business exec parents, that kind of thing) that test prep is a bit dirty. Wouldn't even cross their minds. It's just what you do, obviously.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#288

Post by naet »

This chart focuses on race, but I'd be curious to see the breakdown based on school. In my previous experience as a substitute teacher, different schools are not anywhere near equal in their instruction or academic quality, and there is a high correlation between race and school in my area.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#289

Post by ffwszgf »

ryan93 wrote: post #147
lupire wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lower the ceiling and admit by lottery. End the artificial scarcity in education. Tax the rich to fund it.

How does that change anything? Kids who barely miss out on MIT arent sleeping on the streets. They are at good state schools or other top privates.

At the end of the day the only real solution to the problem of inequity/representation will end up being hard quotas that roughly maintain a demographic balance at top institutions.

At that point you can make most competition intra-racial with obvious carve outs for socioeconomic, sexual and gender minorities.

the devil is in the details as to how such a controversial system could be implemented but it’d be a trial-and-error process for sure.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#290

Post by yucky »

daemoens wrote: post #252
thwayunion wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The USA is home to the vast majority of leading universities, and no amount of PISA score dominance by Chinese children can change that. Those leadership placements are measured primarily by academic standards, and particularly research output. In CS, over 60% of PhD students -- the food soldiers of academia -- are here on student visas. Another huge fraction are first gen residents/citizens. I'd guess fewer than 2…

> If we get to the point where the USA depends on Chinese out migration in order to compete economically or militarily with China, China may well choose to turn off the spigot. America's biggest advantage over other nations is our immigration system, regardless of the myriad issues it has. The best and brightest are born all over the world, and they immigrate to America. Even if China stops immigration, we still have…

Our immigration system is our biggest advantage? Are you sure it's not the thing(s) that makes people want to immigrate here that is our biggest advantage?
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