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SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships

nytimes.com

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Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships

#181

Post by albertshin »

gugagore wrote: post #162
rhegart wrote: post #131

Equality of opportunity over outcome for me. Now Asians will be discriminated against secretly. My family sacrificing vacations and eating out for 12 years (literally ate out 5x max) to afford to live in a good school district shouldn’t penalize us. My dad commuted 4 hours daily instead of moving...I’m getting pushed further and further to the right.

I might be missing the point, but from a quick glance at the article, it's about geographic location, and not race. Is there some second-order effect?

OP is saying that their family sacrificed a lot to live and attend school in a geographic area that was probably catering towards wealthier people. The new system will be unfair for people like OP as their socioeconomic adjusted scores now get bunched together with the average wealthy student in the area despite not having actually been well off. Perhaps the student had to work after school at her mother's laundromat all day despite living in a good neighborhood and attending a decent school. Not only does this "adversity" not get reflected but basically the effort part of the student (and their family) is getting lost with this new system.

Honestly, given that the sole purpose of the SAT is to apply to college, which get tons more information about the test taker/applicant than College Board, hopefully this gets ignored and college admissions make their own judgements on "adversity" versus the SAT's simplistic, reductionist view of quantifying it... Admissions should and will have full ability and better info to do a much better job at this. Indeed, the Ivies do seem to take these things into serious account based on the stats they release every year on new admits.

Also, the cynic in me thinks this is more of a way to make up for the losing market share to the ACT and attract more test takers away from the ACT that would benefit from this adversity scoring system.

Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships

#183

Post by Erik816 »

rexpop wrote: post #175
crazy1van wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are imperfect phrases, but generally an equality of opportunity in this case refers to no matter what you look like, what your parents do, how much money you have, if you get a SAT score and GPA above a threshold, you get accepted into the school. Whereas equality of outcome would focus more on who gets in even if it means treating people differently based on what they look look, how much money they have, where…

SAT scores and GPA are strongly affected by how much money you have.

Yes, because intelligent parents tend to make more money. And their children tend to be more intelligent as well.

Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships

#184

Post by EventH- »

dunstad wrote: post #123
EventH- wrote: post #120

Have these people never read Harrison Bergeron? How do they think this is going to end?

Don't believe everything you read. Vonnegut is an author, not a prophet.

Totally irrelevant; this isn't a matter of the author being one thing or another. The point Vonnegut makes in the story is a philosophical one, namely that a blind pursuit of equality is wicked and inhuman, which is transparently correct.

Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships

#185

Post by dangerbird2 »

shriphani wrote: post #150

How are they going to boil all this down to a single number? So ridiculous. All these pseudoscientific people have taken the comfy position of unaccountable gatekeepers. Society's true vultures.

I mean, the reason of the SAT's existence is the convenience of boiling down one's entire academic experience into one number. Perhaps the real problem is that university admissions allow the dualopoly of College Board and ACT control the academic fates of the nation's students with no public accountability.

Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships

#186

Post by AcerbicZero »

jeffdavis wrote: post #140
threatofrain wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal of admissions is to accept students who enrich their college in one way or another.

What about the student?

The value of the diploma is directly linked to the value of the college. When you break it down a college diploma is only worth as much as the reputation of the college.

Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships

#187

Post by knolax »

khawkins wrote: post #142

The SAT itself has been shown to be a poor measure of performance in college when compared to high school GPA or the challenge level of the coursework offered [1]. Instead of trying to turn students into numbers, we should demand college admissions employees do their jobs and actually look at the applications. [1] http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/What-Matters-M...

>actually look at the applications.

So that they can infer the same "adverse conditions" and call it a holisitc process like they do now?

Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships

#188

Post by jachee »

remote_phone wrote: post #170
Glyptodon wrote: post #18

This seems likely to end up being ugly. For example wealthy people could buy or rent addresses in "adverse" neighborhoods, or charter schools might locate offices there, in order to attempt to improve scores on this metric. At the same time this won't be able to identify many adverse life circumstances like abusive parents, cancer, etc. What it does do is outsource components of admissions decisions the colleges may…

I already talked to my wife about this. I would retire, we would divorce, and I would rent a shitty apartment in East Palo Alto all the while living in our house. If they think they can boil my kids into a single number without bothering to find the context of who my kids are then I will game it to as much as possible. I don’t know why my family should be punished because my wife and I worked our asses off to get ahe…

How is giving underprivileged people a leg up "punishing" anyone?

Privileged people need to start recognizing their inherent pre-rigging of the system.

For those in power, equality feels like oppression.

Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships

#189

Post by wallace_f »

perfmode wrote: post #144
rhegart wrote: post #131

Equality of opportunity over outcome for me. Now Asians will be discriminated against secretly. My family sacrificing vacations and eating out for 12 years (literally ate out 5x max) to afford to live in a good school district shouldn’t penalize us. My dad commuted 4 hours daily instead of moving...I’m getting pushed further and further to the right.

Can you make an argument why this would be considered about “outcome” for the purpose of conversation?

I grew up in a poor, dangerous neighborhood as a child. Later in my teens I lived in a wealthy suburb with collectible cars in the driveway after my father's startup succeeded.

My father was physically abusive, and child services got involved. My father's lawyers sorted things out to get the investigation to stop and drop charges if I lived somewhere else. I unfortunately went into the Troubled Teen industry (which I had definitively no reason to be in other than as part of his lawyers' story blaming me for what happened). That industry is filled with abuse.

The day I turned 18 I was pulled from there and struggled with homelessness for a year. It was extremely hard to succeed when you are homeless.

Financial aid for university is tied to your childhood guardian's social security number until you are 25, so I was a homeless person, and not eligible for any financial aid.

This is just a start. I've never broken any laws or done anything particularly wrong.

Did you ever think of my story? Apparently bureaucrats didn't.

Also, why should I need permission from some bureaucrats to study from the top degree programs? Shouldn't the goal be the opposite: to expand the best education opportunities to as many people as possible?

We have so much wealth and enormous social spending in America, and yet look at our outcomes with homelessness, poverty and suicide...

Re: SAT to Add ‘Adversity Score’ That Rates Students’ Hardships

#190

Post by prvc »

rhegart wrote: post #131

Equality of opportunity over outcome for me. Now Asians will be discriminated against secretly. My family sacrificing vacations and eating out for 12 years (literally ate out 5x max) to afford to live in a good school district shouldn’t penalize us. My dad commuted 4 hours daily instead of moving...I’m getting pushed further and further to the right.

Devil's advocate: do you think children who lack families that provide such advantages must necessarily "suffer" as a consequence of that lack? And conversely, why did you wait to object until this, in particular, became a consideration instead of before (when ethnicity and other factors were already considerations)?
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