321–330 of 959 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Arguing that point with a fictional novel seems incredibly opaque, inefficient, and sometimes disingenuous.
Taken to its logical conclusion, the SAT will cease to exist and the only thing the College Board will report to schools is a secret student dossier.
This dossier can contain anything. Think about the ways in which it might be possible to compute an "adversity" score.
What if we mix this "adversity" score with some factors indicating "deservingness?"
Today the dossier may be composed of mostly harmless stuff. In the very near future it may well become a terrifying concoction of privacy infringements.
There may be a silver lining in all of this, though. College today is increasingly a mere credential. The information conveyed through a degree can be obtained by those who want it from numerous sources.
If initiatives like the one in the article become widespread in admissions, then a degree will increasingly symbolize not accomplishment but rather something much less worth talking about. Colleges themselves would have precipitated their own well-earned demise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted. The United States has a system of de jure discrimination against white and asian men. Moreover, there is a great deal of de facto discretization against them as well. Many people seem to think that it is "fair" and appropriate for this to be the case, but I don't think its debatable that this is the fact of the matter. I think those who support this policy should defend it…
Ah yes, the system of discrimination that nevertheless has white and asian men disproportionately over-represented in silicon valley, tech companies, and government.
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: I'd argue that you not eating out, getting socialized, and traveling actually made you less of a well-rounded individual and you probably should be penalized for those things. Colleges need diversity. They don't need the same kind of kid replicated 10,000 times. Racquetball, violin, AP calculus does not an interesting campus make.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t speak for the original commenter, but lots of people did not wait to object to this. What’s uniquely bad about this is that it doesn’t have even the facade of holistic analysis. The College Board is counting up how oppressed they think you are, and telling colleges to count your score less if you don’t have enough oppression points.
Exactly. And who gets to decide how oppressed you are? Maybe you grew up in a poor neighborhood but have incredibly supportive parents/family? Maybe you grew up in a billionaire family but with parents who are never around because they have business to run and places to go (as they can afford to)? And the 'secret' part of the story really really bugs me. Why don't we turn US tax code into a state secret so that rich…
If your Asian parents immigrated and sacrificed hard for you, but still speak the language that their grandparents and their grandparents before them spoke, well, your parents sacrificed, but like, people go through shit. White people, black people, Asians, all types of people get exploited into nothingness. Into being not even human.
Not going on vacation is not a hardship.
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.
Edit: This guy’s parents might have actually been through some shit. Asia was not a nice place over the last century. If he had said something like ‘my parents escaped pol pot’ or something ummmm, actually horrendous, then, I mean, that’s a hardship. And had this commenter framed it in that way, then it gives a whole other dimension to the discussion. But he didn’t.
I’m going to repeat this for anyone spoiled enough by western society to ever say this:
The lack of vacations is not a fucking hardship.
You can't compare one zip code versus another to say which is geographically more "adverse". Poor white, trailer trash neighborhood vs drug-infested, gang-ridden city streets. Schools with 75% of students on free-lunch vs schools that have suffered mass shootings. Single black mother working as a nurse making $80k a year raising two kids versus Indian single mom who was abused by her husband and filed for divorce and custody.
On the flip side, what message do you tell to a white male from an upper middle class background who is raised in a good school district? He wants to go to an Ivy League. What should he do, how can he prepare?
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.
So, a separate number being added to College Board's overall package is secret discrimination against Asian students? The "adversity score," according to the article, is calculated based on 15 different factors. The two listed (relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate/poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood) are not directly tied to any one race.
I know that promoting affirmative action is tantamount to blasphemy on this site, but let's be honest here.
Standardized tests alone are really not the great equalizer that many might think. I am a Nigerian-American immigrant, but my parents were able to afford expensive, one-on-one ACT tutoring/prep, and I scored a 34, and was awarded the National Merit scholarship after SAT prep. Not everyone can say that they had the same opportunities I did.
A so-called "adversity score" doesn't have to be the end-all, be-all. If it can provide additional context to the scores students receive, then it can really give first-generation, low-income, etc. students a fair shot at competitive universities.
Besides - nobody said schools have to consider the "adversity score," anyways.
> I’m getting pushed further and further to the right.
I also don't understand how a single organization making a change to its testing package, in the interest of leveling the playing field, is somehow "pushing" your political beliefs in any one direction... It's your choice whether you want to align your beliefs more closely with any side.
If you made imense effort to provide the best education possible to your child, to put him in a good school (even if that meant depriving yourself from a better material life and having 2 jobs), if you kept a non perfect marriage because that would be better for your child, if you only had one kid because you couldn't afford to provide a good education for more than one, what this law is telling you is: bad luck, you shouldn't have done it because now, we are going to adjust his score back for it so that none of that matters.
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)?
To answer your question, I think many will suffer, though they must not necessarily. I would have objected long before; ethnicity should never be a consideration. Why? Because people are not statistics. When thinking on statistics, you can't use them to judge one individual case, only to make predictions about a population. That means while these predictions or introduced biases are generally true, some people get screwed. We, as a society, are set up to work differently. Look at our justice system: a very high burden of proof means that we believe it better for ten guilty men to walk free than for one to go to jail. I would argue the same premise applies here: it is better for ten people to judged without race (though availability of opportunity can be a consideration) and result in a somewhat unfair distribution than for one unprivileged person to be kept out of college because he's the wrong race. In other words, I would rather we don't tinker with the ratio based on race than for one poor white kid out of Appalachia to have his score "adjusted" down and his application turned down.
I guess both are unjust, but one has injustice as the result of intervention, and the other has injustice as the result of non-intervention.
There was a skit by a comedian years ago called "Modern Educayshun", which predicted this almost exactly. That was comedy then.