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SAT score distributions in Michigan

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Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#311

Post by thwayunion »

commandlinefan wrote: post #295
thwayunion wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a real shame that this guy posted his son's resume non-anonymously, but I have to agree. Aside from grades and AP scores, it's a lot of "showing up" dressed up as accomplishment. JV track explains itself, the debate stuff is the equivalent of getting third place in one track event at one regional meet, and Eagle Scout is impressive but IMO doesn't show anything that doing well in school doesn't already show. Eve…

> Everyone applying to CMU CS or Harvey Mudd has high GPAs I think his point was that any kid of any race other than Asian with identical stats would have been accepted.

> I think his point was that any kid of any race other than Asian with identical stats would have been accepted.

And my point is that this is not true.

His scores are near the median for those cohorts, and only a tiny fraction of students with those scores are admitted. Test scores are literally the only non-average thing on his resume for college applicants in general, and among CMU CS/HM CS they don't set him apart from anyone admitted or even tons of other people rejected.

Now, if he received an NDT bid and/or made it deep into nationals? Placed in State and had D1 track scholarship potential? Special distinctions from the Scouts? Sure. Those might raise my eyebrow. But he has average scores _for the cohort_ and nothing else of note on his resume other than participation in a few after-school activities.

Schools like CMU CS and HM can demand both his scores and also excellence in other dimensions. They have tons of applicants with NDT bids in policy/PF/LD and similar or better scores. They have tons of applicants who are on Varsity track teams, even do well at state, and have similar or better scores.

Even more importantly, they have tons of applicants who do really interesting and unique things outside of the official college prep extra-curricular stuff -- run apps/websites with tons of users, OSS packages with lots of stars, various types of civil society involvement, and so on. Those students also have similar or better scores.

And they turn down a lot of those applicants who have the same scores as this student but are also top percentile at their extra-curricular activities.

Good test scores aren't enough to get into CMU CS/HM, and that's all this student has. It's not racism. It's merit.

Again, this discussion is about a real person and it's a shame his dad entered his resume into this discourse non-anonymously.

But the narrative is just wrong. The bar is absurdly higher than this dad thinks it is. Period.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#312

Post by Aunche »

snarf21 wrote: post #229
Aunche wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I volunteer tutor teens in the SAT and the problem is a bit deeper than just parents. A few of my students have a similar amount of base intelligence as me, and if they studied as much as I did, they would have no problem with finding a path of least resistance to the upper-middle/lower-upper class. The problem is that even if I'm 100% sure this path exists, they are skeptical because it seems like I'm in a entirely…

This is why (imo), test prep should be a class you take at school. Why should it be a separate thing and a multi billion dollar industry? A lot of the SAT/ACT prep for HS students is about understanding how the tests work and how to approach questions. We already have a bunch of federally mandated AYP testing (no) thanks to No (ALL?) Child Left Behind, why can't this just be old copies of the ACT or SAT. By the time…

You can already get 8 free SAT practice tests and Khan Academy offers a free online class. If you go through all of them and learn from your mistakes, that should be more than enough to get a decent score. With tutoring and classes, you're mainly paying for someone to pressure you to put the effort in, similar to with fitness classes.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#313

Post by mariojv »

clusterhacks wrote: post #187
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…

I don't have a good answer to your question here are some results from a quick google search: https://blog.prepscholar.com/average-sat-scores-over-time I think a sometimes-easy-to-overlook factor is that many state flagship institutions like UT-Austin have a strong bias or preference for in-state applicants. Famously, I remember being told that out-of-state applicants to my state's big, somewhat well-known, public un…

This is a good answer.

UT Austin in particular used to automatically accept anyone whose GPA was in the top 10% of their school for in state applicants, regardless of that school's performance. It was meant to give people from different calibers of schools from across the state a fair chance, since school quality would inevitably affect test scores.

Now, it looks like the top 6%: https://admissions.utexas.edu/apply/decisions

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#314

Post by MichaelCollins »

PaulHoule wrote: post #119
dilap wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of the opposite. I was a highschool dropout, highest level of math was basic algebra. I was able to change my mind about the whole education thing by buying a "prepare yourself for the SAT" book, studying it for a couple of months, doing well, and getting admitted to college. Ended up doing a math + physics dual major. (I'm really grateful that that avenue to college existed -- I could not have written an a…

Jim Webb who was a Marine officer in Vietnam, a journalist, a novelist, and then a Democratic senator from Virginia saw standardized tests as his route to social mobility from a poor background in the rural south.

It's a damn shame Jim Webb stepped away from politics.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#315

Post by throwaway6734 »

vxNsr wrote: post #20
user2352 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with East Asian ancestry in North America, you quickly learn that hard work will only rarely help you find opportunities with institutions that have a huge demand of qualified applicants but not enough seats. This includes universities, high-prestige schools like medical schools, and a lot of creative industries (mentorship opportunities and scholarships just aren't there for you). This is unfair, but it's…

I’ve got a friend applying to med schools, he’s a little older (late 20s vs early 20s) so he took the spray and pray approach and applied to 60 MD and DO schools. He said by and large he’s the only or one of ~3 non-minorities in any of the MD group interviews, additionally Asians aren’t well represented there either. DO group interviews on the other hand are mostly white/asain.

Do?

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#316

Post by kfajdsl »

mberning wrote: post #52
fny wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure... but I went to a public high school, got a 1590, and did not spend day and night studying nor did my parents have any expectation of me to perform well in school. I was just really lucky to go public schools with teachers who cared and peers that cared. It makes a huge difference.

You’re an outlier. That’s great. Most people are not scoring that high without a lot of effort, and a basic public school education, regardless of the quality, is not going to get them there. They will need additional resources within the home and outside of normal schooling.

I don't know... I went to a very competitive public high school in an affluent suburb. In most of my friend groups (self-segregated based on taking honors and APs), most people got at least above a 1450 on the SAT or maybe 32 on the ACT. At the end of the day we were taking Calc II (AP Calculus BC) when the highest math on either exam is the very beginnings of trigonometry.

EDIT: Many did take the exam 2 or 3 times, until they got a score they were satisfied with.

We still partied, drank, played a fuck ton of video games, generally did stupid shit, normal teenager things. This was largely the case in neighboring schools as well (the Atlanta northern sprawl is very large).

I'm not saying we didn't have parental involvement; we absolutely did. They had the resources and investment in our education to push us along that path. Our school also had a lot of resources. But it wasn't prison.

I'm not sure if it was the parental involvement and their expectations or the resources and quality of education at our affluent school. Most likely both. Whatever it is, I think it's a travesty that it isn't the norm everywhere to have an opportunity for that kind of education. There is so much wasted potential in this country.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#317

Post by yamtaddle »

warner25 wrote: post #111

I think I'm mostly surprised to see how many of the "White" scores are so low, and so far behind "Asians," after years of hearing that the test is biased towards white / Anglo / native-English speakers raised in Western culture. I'm also reminded that I (like probably most people commenting on Hacker News) exist in a really small bubble in which everyone I closely associate with was in the top two bands (after going…

Shitloads of whites come from disadvantaged backgrounds and have terrible lives. This is part of why one party is able to capitalize so well on lazy and loose rhetoric from the other about race and inequality. "The fuck I had unfair advantages! They want special treatment because their skin's a different color, they can go to hell! I'm voting for the other guy!" (this is not an endorsement of that attitude, but an explanation—and, confounding matters, you get similar reactions from people who did have advantages but are either deceiving themselves or are idiots)

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#318

Post by meragrin_ »

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…

I think you misunderstand the article. "The state of Michigan required all public HS seniors to take the SAT last year". That's not related to universities or applying to them. It is the data for all high school seniors in the state of Michigan.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#319

Post by throwaway8582 »

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.

So is height, and historically there have been large differences in height between the rich and poor. In modern developed countries, however, there doesn't seem to be any significant difference based on socioeconomic level. That leads me to believe that these "nutritional deficiencies" don't exist and are not what is causing any observed gap in IQ or academic achievement.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#320

Post by dan-robertson »

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…

I think it’s currently pretty hard for these people to stay in the US after getting their phds. I think immigration rates still haven’t recovered to pre-pandemic levels. I think immigration is just not popular with the American voters at the moment.

But it seems obviously bad if someone goes from China to the US for a phd in some critical field and wants to stay in the US (either for better opportunities or for the relationships they have developed or because they like living in a free country) but is forced to return to China by the US immigration system. Maybe phd students in stem in the US also bias foreign because there are just more non-Americans than Americans in the world or because American citizenship allows natives access to better opportunities (eg getting paid a lot more money in tech or just having a job where you get some level of support from your superiors).

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