SAT score distributions in Michigan • Hacker News Board

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#351

Post by rayiner » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:21 PM UTC

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.

If SAT prep was effective, then it would be an educational miracle, because a good SAT prep course is under $1,000. American schools spend 10 times that much money per student every year and barely move the needle.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#352

Post by rizzaxc » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:30 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #326

rizzaxc wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if anybody doubts that the future isn't in the US (or rather, the west), this is the evidence. China has both the brains and brawn to bully every other nation (provided it doesn't collapse under its own weight)

If so... what do you do about it, then? If Chinese people are just smarter than everybody else and smarter wins (both just theories, but if they're true)... we can't just will ourselves into getting smarter.

Individually we can't get smarter all of a sudden, but as a society we can provide better platform for the smartest of us to contribute: bring (quasi)meritocracy back; do away with all these AA nonsense. Not very feasible with the political climate right now (or just American culture in general - `nerd` is such a weird insult). We can't win them on quantity, but at least we don't lose outright. And no I don't think Chinese are just smarter, they just try gigahard because you gotta compete with the other babillion Chinese peers somehow, and there's no AA to save you

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#353

Post by raydev » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:32 PM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #192

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?

> Also doesn’t this also beg the question as to why non-Asian parents apparently won’t teach their kids to be good academics? Because they don't value their kids being good at academics. I've lived in multiple countries. In the non-US ones, people don't brag about being bad at math (even when they are bad at it). As an adult, if you couldn't add/subtract/multiply two large numbers on paper without a calculator, that…

I have a (completely unresearched, unfounded, probably not accurate) theory that the exceptional prosperity in US that the boomer/early-gen-x generations saw, which had ultra-cheap housing relative to income across the US, ultra-cheap everything in the US, industries expanding so fast that schooling became less important in the US, all of that was a fluke.

For a couple decades a majority of people in the US had effectively gotten coupons for half-off everything they desired.

It wasn't normal, but it made those generations in the US so mentally lazy that it effectively poisoned huge swaths of the following generations, fooling them into thinking it was always going to be that easy. So now we're trying to sort out exactly why those born and raised in the US are doing so poorly now.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#354

Post by colinmhayes » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:33 PM UTC

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…

The test is biased toward people who study for it. Asian culture tends to demand more test prep so they do better.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#355

Post by BeetleB » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:35 PM UTC

jl6 wrote: post #66

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…

> an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement. I do wonder if this is possible. If you up the baseline of school provision, won’t involved parents provide a further advantage over and above that?

Involved parents will likely always improve the scores of students, but the disparity between those who do and don't need not be so dramatic.

It's fun to read biographies of 20th century scientists. Quite a few of them came from humble backgrounds and credited their success to education (and perhaps libraries). They often did not have well educated or motivated parents. Nick Holonyak is one such example. Carl Sagan is another.

And this is even more apparent when I look at the British ones. It's a bit funny given how rigid and uninspiring the British education system was.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#356

Post by Der_Einzige » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:37 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #227

eternalban wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> disrespect for teachers ... disdain for the smart kids I've gotten the impression from every high-achieving-country immigrant that I've ever talked to that schools in those countries just kick out the troublemaking kids before they have a chance to disrupt the environment for everybody else. Nobody gets kicked out of US public schools, for any reason - so the kids who don't want to be there and spend all of their t…

This is how it should be here too.

Inequality is accepted in so many other places in the USA, in ways that are far worse than this.

The anti-intellectualism is a very, very real thing in the USA. In not good schools, you WILL be bullied for being cerebral.

At this point, no amount of understanding of "oh the bad kids grew up in poverty and had social/economic reasons for being bad" is going to fix these kids up.

You want to disrupt education for the rest? Teachers will disrupt the rest of your earning potential. Seems like a fair trade too, since the criminals are all getting laid and the MIT kids are all staying virgins. It takes 15 years to mint another "elite" educated individual. Just a few bad apples can destroy all of this work of trying to get someone to the MIT level. Get the bad apples out.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#357

Post by MichaelCollins » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:39 PM UTC

jjj123 wrote: post #152

sokoloff wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would the end state of the latter part of look like? Taking kids away from their families at birth and raising them in state not-quite-orphanages? Even the concept that academics should be valued over other topics should be a matter of family choice. If you want to prioritize music, art, sports, food, entertainment, fitness, religion, or something else over academics, should society over-ride that?

Free after school programs, free lunches, Medicare for All, public housing. These are all things that would level the playing field for poor kids and allow them to make the same decisions that wealthy kids get to make. It’s not about choosing for them, it’s about lifting the boot on these kids necks enough so they can choose for themselves.

> Free after school programs, free lunches, Medicare for All, public housing.

Poor kids in America already get all of these, even free healthcare. The families of middle class kids have to pay for all of that, but not the families of poor kids.

Quadruple all these programs and you'll still have a situation where some kids want to do well but simply don't have the brains for it, and some kids who could do well but have shitty parents.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#358

Post by Der_Einzige » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:41 PM UTC

ffwszgf wrote: post #289

ryan93 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-a…

Ah, so you mean discriminating against Asians for their success?

May I remind you that Asians in the USA did not participate in mass enslavement of black and brown bodies.

Why should they have to give up spots for less qualified individuals? Have they not struggled enough? Most of their great grand parents were building our train tracks!

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#359

Post by Der_Einzige » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:43 PM UTC

dpatterbee wrote: post #80

commandlinefan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how do you propose that All the proposals I've ever seen have been to handicap the students whose parents try to give them an advantage. It's a popular sentiment, growing in popularity every day.

This response smells strongly of FUD. Could you possibly elaborate?

California trying to remove math tracks and to make it harder/impossible to take advanced math in the final two years of high school.

Look this up, it's been discussed here extensively.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#360

Post by MichaelCollins » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:45 PM UTC

socialismisok wrote: post #46

timmg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The challenge for large and heterogeneously diverse nations like the U.S. is to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement. But don’t your stats show that we already do? We “provide access” to everyone. Otherwise it wouldn’t matter how much the parents pushed the children. If your argument is that the system should push the children harder, how do you pr…

We don't provide access to everyone. If you are a kid who doesn't get fed at home, and you don't get a school meal until lunch, do you have the same access? If your school can't afford state of the art computers or technology, do you have the same access? If your school has class sizes of 35 and mine has class sizes of 18, do we both have the same access?

Public schools have been giving free breakfast to poor kids for as long as most people in this thread can remember; it's been a federally funded program since the early 70s.