Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 959 posts

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

#191

Post by cljs-js-eval »

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?

The adversity score, as far as I can see, gives high scores to students who succeed in worse school districts. While none of the sites reporting on this bothered to link to any kind of official announcement, it looks like this may be a refinement of the tool announced here in 2016: https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/pr...

From the college board's description of the tool, it weights applicant scores by the quality of their neighborhood and high school. So a disadvantaged student whose family focused on moving to a neighborhood/school where lots of students succeed is not given a high score in this analysis.

The OP had the same opportunity, but because they did the traditional things for a poorer family to encourage their students to succeed (moving to a good school district and sacrificing on the commute) they will be considered a privileged student in this analysis.

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

#192

Post by learc83 »

eitland wrote: post #125
changchuming wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your suggestion relies on the assumption that there is some way to change standardized tests such that they do not correlate with wealth. Perhaps the problem is that academic ability is directly correlated to the kind of test prep you receive, so unless you set a test paper full of trivia questions the student that has gone through test prep will perform better every time. I do not agree with this idea either, but on…

> Your suggestion relies on the assumption that there is some way to change standardized tests such that they do not correlate with wealth. Good IQ tests exists that are hard to game. They are easy to learn easy to vary and easy to measure. (I think I have heard someone here talking about IQ tests that include language and geography questions. This is not the kind of IQ tests I'm talking about. Perfect IQ tests shoul…

The SAT is supposed to be a test measuring scholastic aptitude not a pure IQ test.

IQ tests always have a knowledge component anyway. Unless you specifically design a test to only measure something like working memory. And who cares about that. Colleges would only care to the extent that it correlated with performance.

But you can have 2 people who have equal performance in a given field even though one has a higher working memory because the other has better context from more time spent reading.

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

#193

Post by mbostleman »

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?

Because it's an attempt to change the outcomes of the test to make them more equal than they would be otherwise.

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

#194

Post by kevinh »

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.

Equality of opportunity seems like a pipe dream to me. Are you really going to equalize socioeconomic status? Parental skills? Pollution? Proximity to opportunities? Those all determine the opportunities one has access to.

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

#195

Post by [deleted] »

didgeoridoo wrote: post #57
xienze wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that’s going to make any difference. Let’s be real here, it’s going to be based on race alone (and perhaps being gay or trans). White or Asian? You don’t suffer any adversity. Black or Hispanic? Congratulations, your score just improved by 200 points. This just sounds like the SAT board doing what school admissions boards already do: decreasing or increasing scores based on race. https://www.latimes.com/local…

How would you reliably capture race, or sexual orientation, or gender identification — or even income — on a self-reported metric with no third-party validation? They aren't talking about sending the College Board your tax returns. Realistically, this will be based on ZIP code and registered high school. Information that's already publicly-available. This changes nothing except potentially making neighborhood-level a…

[deleted]

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

#196

Post by GhostVII »

jachee wrote: post #188
remote_phone wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Admissions is generally a zero sum game, so whenever you help one group, you hurt everyone else who doesn't have that benefit.

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

#198

Post by enraged_camel »

kevinh wrote: post #194
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.

Equality of opportunity seems like a pipe dream to me. Are you really going to equalize socioeconomic status? Parental skills? Pollution? Proximity to opportunities? Those all determine the opportunities one has access to.

That's not an argument against trying to equalize those things.

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

#199

Post by droithomme »

BonesJustice wrote: post #151
_Nat_ wrote: post #135

> The score would not be reported to the student, only to college officials. This seems really sketchy. I mean, I can completely understand why the College Board would want to avoid blowback from students knowing their scores, but their convenience seems like insufficient cause to deny students access to their own information.

Might have to do with wanting to avoid people trying to game the system? Not that I expect the shroud of secrecy to actually mitigate that problem.

The purpose of this sort of secrecy is to avoid people seeing how the system is gamed against them.

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

#200

Post by 781 »

UnpossibleJim wrote: post #152
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.

Is it even secretly anymore? It just seems outright discrimination, at this point, as far as admissions is concerned.

According to current thinking it's impossible to discriminate against white/east-asian people.
Post reply on HN