SAT score distributions in Michigan • Hacker News Board

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#371

Post by yamtaddle » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 6:23 PM UTC

kfajdsl wrote: post #316

mberning wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Schools and even individual classes in a school can skew "smart", probably for some combination of chance and socio-economic circumstances.

My (public) high school class was commented on from grade school as being remarkably bright. But about 3/4 the bright kids were lazy as fuck and got terrible grades (myself included—and I don't mean the try-hard version of terrible grades like "oh no I got one b-", I mean Cs and Ds not being uncommon)—but then killed on standardized tests, 95+ percentile, very certainly not due to application of remarkable effort or even trying all that hard.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#372

Post by sokoloff » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 6:27 PM UTC

MichaelCollins wrote: post #357

jjj123 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

Early childhood (0-3) nutrition could probably productively use more expenditures. Setting that aside, I think your last point is a very large part of the problem (which also includes the nutrition point).

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#373

Post by glerk » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 6:29 PM UTC

hotpotamus wrote: post #361

glerk wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The correct number of X group who should be admitted is the number of individuals in X group who meet the academic standard to be admitted. How about we stop giving those arbitrary buckets so much importance and treat everyone like individuals?

Yes, and I wonder what the racial composition of such a standard would be.

Take a look at the table in the linked post and you might get an idea. The real question is why are you so interested in these buckets? Why are you trying to impose them on the rest of us?

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#374

Post by googlryas » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 6:30 PM UTC

hker999 wrote: post #3

fullshark wrote: post #2

This anecdote is really something https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2022/10/sat-score-distribution...

The Harvard university president has stated many times that admissions are weighted and if you are Asian, will have a much harder time getting accepted. It seems racism is accepted in academia, when it affects a demographic you deem 'problematic'

Why don't Asians just decline to self identify? Are admissions looking at names or something and saying "yup, this is an Asian"?

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#375

Post by AlanYx » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 6:34 PM UTC

thwayunion wrote: post #311

commandlinefan wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think most people don't appreciate the extent to which extracurriculars, athletics and personal factors affect elite college admissions. Especially for things like computer science programs. I was in that bucket too, believing that it was mostly SAT scores that mattered in making admissions decisions, and the other factors being largely supplemental. Reading the expert witness report in the Harvard case ( https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/diverse-education/file... ) opened my eyes in that respect.

Maybe it should be different--for example, I'm at a loss to understand how athletics might predict success in computer science programs (grit, maybe?)--and there's probably a reasonable argument that the four-factor (academic, extracurricular, athletic, personal) model creates more systematic biases than it avoids. But what you're saying is pretty accurate.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#376

Post by freyr » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 6:38 PM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #331

lupire wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Now that Jewish immigration has mostly ended, their great-grandchildren (and the descendants of previous generations of Asian immigrants) are, as a cohort, not performing academically as well as today's Asian immigrant children and children of immigrants. Source? Judging by elite college representation [1], they're doing at least as well if not better than Asian Americans (which granted, is not limited to just Asia…

Judging by elite college representation

Elite college representation is a poor metric because of legacy admissions, influence of donors, and the reported efforts to limit Asian admissions.

Look at schools with more merit-based admissions (MIT, Caltech, etc.). Asians are overrepresented to a much higher degree.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#377

Post by thwayunion » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 6:45 PM UTC

AlanYx wrote: post #375

thwayunion wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think most people don't appreciate the extent to which extracurriculars, athletics and personal factors affect elite college admissions. Especially for things like computer science programs. I was in that bucket too, believing that it was mostly SAT scores that mattered in making admissions decisions, and the other factors being largely supplemental. Reading the expert witness report in the Harvard case ( https://p…

> for example, I'm at a loss to understand how athletics might predict success in computer science programs (grit, maybe?)

Grit, leadership, team work, the crucible of (a different type of) competition, tactics and strategy, etc. Again, not sports in general, but specifically being good enough at a sport to get a D1 or D2 scholarship, requires significant discipline and inter-personal skills.

(I also think tech folks under-appreciate that physical movement is a type of intelligence that might just correlate well with certain types of high-stress/low-information decision making... at least as well as IQ correlates with similar types of things... but that's an evidence-free conjecture on my part.)

> there's probably a reasonable argument that the four-factor (academic, extracurricular, athletic, personal) model creates more systematic biases than it avoids. But what you're saying is pretty accurate.

That's definitely true -- eg a student from outside the college-going class or without enough economic capital wouldn't be able to participate in niche sports and become elite by virtue of big fish/small point dynamics. And their parent wouldn't have friends who could give advice or open doors. But, do note that the student in the referenced paragraph is not a victim of that type of systematic bias. His father, a partner at IBM, is exactly the type of person who is positioned to provide those unfair advantages.

(edit: my posts above should be referring to TOC not NDT.)

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#378

Post by when_creaks » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 6:50 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #188

fleetwoodsnack wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but more germane here: it’s also being used by you to discredit real accomplishments with hypothetical ones. I’m not discounting that you could be right, just that you could be right in a totally contrived scenario.

You're assuming your point by calling them "real accomplishments". But that's the whole debate. Is being an Eagle Scout a "real accomplishment" or is it a participation award? And if it's a participation award did the kid get it through his own initiative or because he was forced by his parents? The answer to that question is the whole debate. And this is not a "totally contrived" scenario. The guy is posting his kid…

Not the OP. Just want to add that it takes years of work to become an Eagle Scout. Usually at least two, but often three to five. Don't want to assume too much without clarification but feels a little uncharitable to imply that that level of effort is without value and/or not worthy of recognition.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#379

Post by PubliusMI » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 6:58 PM UTC

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…

This post isn't about UMich. This is about ALL public high school seniors, who were compelled to take the SAT by the state of Michigan in May 2022.

Re: SAT score distributions in Michigan

#380

Post by atlgator » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 7:10 PM UTC

Asian parents send their kids to extracurricular learning centers like Kumon while everyone else lets their kids obsess over Tik Tok dance videos. Not surprised by the result.

SAT Math is just like Leetcode. It's recognizing problem patterns and strategies for solving them in a timely fashion. To be successful you have to practice, practice, practice.