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

Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

robkhenderson.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 684 posts

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#261

Post by s1artibartfast »

whack wrote: post #120

The following paragraphs were especially powerful: > The chattering class is using poor kids as pawns to eliminate standardized testing. Which helps their own kids. Rich kids who “don’t test well.” But they know how to strategically boost their GPAs, get recommendation letters from important people, stack their resumes with extracurriculars, and use the right slogans in their admissions essays. They have “polish.” >…

The core problem is that merit-based entrance is inherently at odds with equality of outcome. Families that are better off rais more capable children on average

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#262

Post by rayiner »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #245
thegrim22 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is hiring a tutor "gaming" it? They spend extra time learning, and as a result they do better. It's not like the tutors secretly give them a cheat sheet list of all the test answers; they still have to answer the questions the same as everyone else. If somebody puts more time into studying, whether on their own or with a tutor or with their parents, they'll do better than somebody who didn't.

Prepping for a test doesn't give you any practical knowledge or expand how you think about things; it's just about getting familiar with the test’s format and the way the question authors think. It'd be a bit like getting “better” at poker by always playing with the same people and learning their tells. It's “gaming” it because you're not better at what the test is supposed to measure, you're just better at what it a…

Prepping for the test is a valuable signal when you're talking about the entire pool of high school students. And it does not gate opportunities by economics as much as you'd think: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/magazine/asian-test-prep-.... Immigrant families eligible for reduced price lunch are able to scrounge up the money for these tests.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#263

Post by DubiousPusher »

mrangle wrote: post #114
tarotuser wrote: post #103

I think people are missing the bigger picture, that's related directly to the SAT. In the USA, public education funds are directly derived from the local tax base as a percentage of that revenue. If you live in a rich area, it means your family is also rich. The tax base, although it may be the rough same percentage, is much higher actual dollars than a small non-rich community. I even see that locally in my nearby c…

Even the most expensive prep schools tend to do limited SAT test prep, if any. Poor kids can technically access the same private test prep as rich kids, and whether they actually can or not, financially speaking, has nothing to do with the tax base and the school itself. That being said, better schools do provide for better child development. This can be compensated for, to a degree, by enhanced parental interaction…

> This can be compensated for, to a degree, by enhanced parental interaction with the child from an early age.

Which, as this article points out, is exactly the kind of thing that wealthier parents are able to provide their kids and which less wealthy parents often cannot, even when they would like to.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#264

Post by lvl102 »

tokey wrote: post #71

Isn't this patently obvious that dropping the SAT is entirely about creating pretext for continued discrimination against Asian applicants? In 1996, California repealed affirmative action via Prop 209. At the UC Berkeley and UCLA, considered the 'best' of the UC system, Asians represented 25-30% of the student base. Studies and fear-mongering at the time showed that a repeal of affirmative action would imply that Asi…

Do you know how many people cheated on the SAT in test centers across Asia? If you knew, you’d not say this.

It’s only discriminatory against Asian AMERICANS.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#265

Post by ryandrake »

nervousvarun wrote: post #122
ryzvonusef wrote: post #45

As an Asian person, I think it's a cultural thing. There is this old joke about how even if you are a one-in-a-million person, there are still 8000 of "you"s to choose from; how does one chose who to pick, if there aren't positions for all of them? So how do you make it "fair"? Since of the number of seats are limited, so imagine if the cut-off for the last seat is for someone who is in the 90.3765335th percentile, l…

You've articulated this very well. It's something I also have for years believed as a non-Asian person that has become a "conceptual framework" (my words...probably inadequate) to better understand Asian co-workers now and co-students back in my school days (to unfortunately generalize here). For me at least it really does explain a lot of the cultural differences that lead to lazy western stereotypes. So many exampl…

My roommate in undergrad (State university) many decades ago was an Indian guy. The whole "asian work ethic" stereotype: Driven, hard working and brilliant. It dawned on me really early on that there were probably 20 million people his age in India and out of them all, he was one of the (relative) handful to pass all the gatekeepers and come study in the USA. Whereas I had a mediocre GPA and SAT score and basically out of laziness applied to my home State's university only and got in because of my address. Super early and instructive lesson on white (and American) privilege.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#266

Post by _mh56 »

jakeinspace wrote: post #145
_mh56 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in India, we have quotas for different kinds of people. There's caste based, Gender based and finally EWS (Economically Weaker Section) Quota. Overall 60% of total seats are reserved for these people. My friend who's ultra rich was selected in EWS Quota. His father who runs his own company took Zero pay for the last two years so he qualified for the benefits. Meanwhile people who actually deserved this had to co…

This is off topic, but do you find it difficult seeing this friend the same way while knowing that they and their father gamed the system like that? If I learned this about somebody I knew it would seriously hurt their image in my eyes.

Atleast in India, everyone "games" systems as much as they can. Those who can't dream about gaming it. The Kafkaesque system makes sure that the few who actually tread the right path are never rewarded [1].

And unlike EU, this benefits corporates/capitalism as they can cut through the red tape easily by "gaming" things.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33368104

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#267

Post by civilized »

Spooky23 wrote: post #207
civilized wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by bias?

Different populations perform differently on average. There’s also a historical association with IQ assessment and eugenics.

> Different populations perform differently on average

Does this mean that today's IQ tests have racial bias?

> There’s also a historical association with IQ assessment and eugenics.

Does this mean that today's IQ tests have racial bias?

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#268

Post by itronitron »

sandworm101 wrote: post #5

Standardized tests remain the only criteria totally in the control of the student. You can study for them and objectively do better, become a better applicant. Everthing else is either circumstantial or based in the opinion of others, mostly highschool teachers. If i had to rely on my highschool teachers' opinion of me i would not have ever gone to university let alone have won scholarships. Standardized testing allo…

>> Standardized testing allowed me to overcome their base opinions.

The only K-12 school in which my children have been enrolled that has never reported standardized test scores to student's parents also happened to be a private school. I suspect the school's motive is a combination of not wanting to give leverage to parents whose children do well, and not wanting to piss off the wealthy parents. We are in the first group and thankfully my children weren't at that school for very long due to COVID lockdowns.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#270

Post by rflrob »

lapcat wrote: post #65

I think the author is missing an important point: like many young people, he was smart but undisciplined. If he had gone directly to college from high school, instead of into the military, he probably would have performed as badly in college as he did in high school. He needed more time to grow up and mature. The SAT is irrelevant to that natural fact. If you're not self-disciplined, then college can be even worse th…

> if you skip classes in college, they just shrug, cash your tuition check, and give you an F.

Depends on the college. A friend of mine who went to an “elite institution“ struggled to supervise themselves and got set up with a counselor to keep them on track. I’m not certain this was actually in their best interests, since they’ve spent most of their late 20s and early 30s struggling to apply to med school but missing deadlines.

Post reply on HN