Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief • Hacker News Board

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#411

Post by WalterBright » Sun, Mar 05, 2023, 7:58 PM UTC

throw0101a wrote: post #288

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point is you can't just give preference based on income as its incredibly easy to fudge. Okay, well this is the US. Your tax returns are a very good indication of how much money you make. If you lie on your tax returns then you have much bigger issues than college admissions counselors.

> If you lie on your tax returns then you have much bigger issues than college admissions counselors. If you own a large amount of equities you can get a secured loan on those holdings and use it to pay your bills while taking zero salary. This allows folks to live fancy lifestyles without selling holdings and triggering capital gains: * https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/13/portfolio-loans-can-be-one-w... The loan is not…

At some point the loan gets paid, and then the income taxes apply.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#412

Post by cuteboy19 » Sun, Mar 05, 2023, 7:58 PM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #347

tomp wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a general question for the whole "social justice" movement. If you're concerned about the wellbeing of black people, and you justify your concern with statistics pointing out that they're disproportionately poor, why not, instead of instituting preferential treatment for black people (which, btw, is racist), you support preferential treatment for poor people instead? That way, you are more efficient (e.g. you…

The basic hypotheses for the pro-affirmative action crowd are: 1) Black people are not actually less “good at stuff”, we just have a habit of defining “stuff” in a way that excludes the things that black people are more likely to excel at. And, 2) Where black people do statistically worse, it’s not due to any innate difference, it’s because socially accepted “normal” support systems are more useful for people with ch…

But then Asians come along and outperform whites at the supposedly racist metrics. So much so that whites require affirmative action policies like Legacy Athletics and Dean's List. Simultaneously defeating both white supremacist arguments as well as anti-merit ones

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#413

Post by thephyber » Sun, Mar 05, 2023, 7:59 PM UTC

cleandreams wrote: post #319

I totally agree. I was an SAT high tester in an unsupportive home. I was not a good student. I had actually flunked a grade in elementary school though they let me pass. BTW, I ended up as a principal level at Microsoft. When I tested 99.9 percentile in Verbal and 97 percentile in Math my father's only comment was, "Who ever thought you could test like that?" Snicker, snicker. I'm disgusted by this decision. You HAVE…

Your anecdote is that you weren’t a good student, but you tested well and you credit that as having unlocked success in your career.

I have 2 anecdotes of high school students who earned near perfect SAT scores, were terrible students in high school, barely passed their undergraduate courses and are struggling to maintain careers in tech.

My point is that standardized testing is a measure of potential. But a college must gamble on a bad-grades, high-scores student. The payoff for a college might be better if they target higher grades with slightly lower scores. Not every student lives up to their capacity and the transition away from home to college isn’t an easy one.

My preference is to build more colleges and let them choose their own entrance criteria. Also, adults should do far more to help high school students understand how much social status, marketing, and press relations do to make some colleges appear far more prestigious than they are.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#414

Post by ryzvonusef » Sun, Mar 05, 2023, 8:00 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #294

ryzvonusef wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I replied to another comment, lottery doesn't achieve what (Asian) people really want; an attempt to control destiny, some sort of idealized version of fairness and justice. A test allows them to (seemingly) achieve that.

It's one of those things where people kid themselves that it was all them. To some degree it's a useful fiction, we can't be going about being all gloomy about our prospects. But it also creates a heck of a lot of stress. What your parents think of you, how they talk about you to their friends, is going to depend on this test. On top of it all, you're not even really learning anything, you need to spend the time lear…

isn't a (limited) exam stress a worthy tradeoff compared to life-time stress from uncertainty of sustenance?

Because that's what Asian parents would say, stress a bit now, be sure of an income for a lifetime.

obviously, I am not going to discount that stress does not scale well and that for children, who do not have the maturity to deal with it all, exam stress and peer pressure could lead to devasting outcomes...

but asian parents, who have long since forgotten their one-time exam stresses, but face daily stresses from inflation etc, would argue that it's worth it in the end, since they would be comparing themselves to their old classmates who didn't make the cut and are worse-off than them.

----

The exam themselves to tend to be absurdist, but when the seats are limited, and "fairness" is still required... asking candidates to do a special dance might be the only alternative left.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#415

Post by QuarterReptile » Sun, Mar 05, 2023, 8:00 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #271

notlukesky wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

40% for meritocratic entrance is more than twice what is at elite schools in the US. Maybe ambitious Americans should move to India for a fairer chance. At most US elite schools, less than 20 percent is for “non-reserved” seats. Elite schools reserve seats for sports teams (affirmative action for rich white elites with “sports” like fencing and rowing), legacies (affirmative action for rich white elites), related to…

> So it is a brilliant way to use regular affirmative action for Blacks as a weapon to ensure that rich white elites always win and do not compete with the “deplorable” poorer whites, the Asians and immigrants. I just realized that there are more Appalachians in America than Asian Americans. But how many people have you run into in an elite school with an Appalachian accent? (Or a southern or mid-atlantic, or other l…

I can think of exactly one guy: a classmate in electrical engineering courses who was from Kentucky. While you can obviously still find accents in the US, there are lots of reasons why you won't run into that family of accents much. Just about everyone in the US can avoid accents they don’t want by engaging in all forms of audible media, and social climbers and people who move around will avoid strong accents. Those are the same people who will filter to the top of any affirmative action cohort and end up at elite schools.

Maybe the redneck culture of poor Appalachian people is less sticky than the redneck culture of many poor Blacks in the US. My personal anecdotes support that, but then selection bias means they necessarily must.

When I run into guys at work with heavy Appalachian accents, they tend to be heavy machinery mechanics. That's also where I find Black guys who cling to a large amount of Black redneck culture. And those two groups together comprise the supermajority of heavy machinery mechanics at work, come to think of it.

Source: I spent my entire childhood on counties adjacent to what is considered 'Appalachia', and I went to a higher-end college with a significant affirmative action focus on geographic distribution around the US.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#416

Post by counters » Sun, Mar 05, 2023, 8:01 PM UTC

moomoo11 wrote: post #335

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…

In re to LSAT at least a decade ago your LSAT score meant shit. I’m S Asian, scored 99th percentile 17x, but my GPA was around 3.3 because I think college is a joke when it involves homework. I had never gotten less than a A on midterms and finals, but what I’m trying to say is that GPA and race matters much more. There was a law school acceptance calculator. With my scores and my Asian background, the T14 were eithe…

> Yes I don’t give a shit about homework, I understand the material which is why I’m slaying each test. I hated that about college. We are adults. I’m paying to get an education, why the fuck is homework 20% of the grade? It’s practice, for people who don’t get the material.

What discipline did you study in undergrad?

In many majors - or even just in well-taught classes - work outside of lecture or recitation is designed to complement what you are learning. It _is_ the education you're paying for. It isn't high school where it's a bunch of repetition of the same concept (although I'd vigorously defend that, too) intended as practice. Problem sets ought to be the application of the material you're introduced to in lecture, done so in a way that forces you to grapple with and connect core concepts to other material in your major.

For example, in grad school I TA'ed an upper-level undergraduate course that would typically have 15-20 students. The problem sets I created with the professor I worked for had problems split across two themes. The first was discover; we'd take something that seemed ho-hum or rote from class, and apply it to an oddball setting which yielded surprising results. Sure, that straightforward equation works - but why does it go so weird in this curated example we're providing? There's extraordinary opportunity for learning there.

The second theme was connection across disciplines. Introduce a mathematics, computer science, or other concept and use it to extend something from lecture in an interesting way. These problems were intended t be challenging. We referred students to other textbooks and invited them to work together or come to office hours to fill in gaps in their background, because (a) this is a _vital_ skill to learn, and (b) it led to really cool and interesting problems and solutions.

There simply is not time in lecture or recitation to cover the stuff we introduced in these homework assignments. That's why the course credit hours tallied up to 3x the amount of time spent in lecture. I'll also note that while challenging, we did not allow poor marks on or incomplete problem sets derail a student's grade. If in lecture/recitation participation and on exams they clearly knew the core content, we'd work with the students to ensure they got a high grade. But if someone shirked off the homework entirely but aced the exams? Well, the exams aren't testing everything we're teaching you in this course, so you better believe they'd get poor grades at the end of the term.

So your perspective seems warped. If you weren't doing the homework, then you didn't get the education you paid for, and that's on you - not the university.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#417

Post by pjscott » Sun, Mar 05, 2023, 8:01 PM UTC

kwhitefoot wrote: post #390

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.” >…

> legacy preferences Why does this even exist?

There's a market for getting underqualified students into fancy universities via legalized semi-bribery, but it would be bad for their image if they openly admitted to it. Hence the obfuscation.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#418

Post by kenjackson » Sun, Mar 05, 2023, 8:01 PM UTC

jiscariot wrote: post #194

kenjackson wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This case says something different though. It says you can’t use a test that doesn’t relate to the job, regardless of if there’s intent to discriminate or not. A standardized test that tests your ability to do the job is still allowable — presumably even if minorities fare worse on it.

This case is the whole reason the "disparate impact" phrase exists and its had a chilling effect on employment testing. If you're a large FANG company hiring programmers, you risk testing (validating someone can write code), but if you don't have the pocketbook and legal team, there is not much incentive to put your company at legal risk of being sued. This is especially true when you can just use "college degree in…

But even small tech companies do coding tests. I don't think its a function of large pocketbooks. Rather I think that they found tests that correlate more to the work done on the actual job.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#419

Post by ljhlkjlkj » Sun, Mar 05, 2023, 8:01 PM UTC

baremetal wrote: post #54

lumb63 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a mistake, that’s for sure. I’ll be more blunt since a lot of other comments in this thread beat around the bush: higher education institutes are removing objective admissions criteria so that they can admit less qualified minorities on subjective grounds.

the question is, why? why are they doing it? the real reason not the ostensible one.

Probably three reasons:

1) They're trying to get ahead of a Supreme Court ruling, which will likely rule Ivies are discriminating against Asian candidates.

2) Elite cultural zeitgeist is in favor of discriminating against Asian and non-elite white candidates.

3) More subtly, the top Ivy admins are overwhelmingly Jewish, and they've likely received push back from Jewish alumni/donors, as Asians have displaced smart-but-unremarkable Jewish candidates. A recent Tablet article alluded to Asians displacing Jewish candidates, which has been an unreported theme in the Ivies over the last 20 years.

Those three things are driving much of it.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#420

Post by indymike » Sun, Mar 05, 2023, 8:03 PM UTC

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.” >…

> If equity is so important, why not grant preferential treatment to all children coming from families that aren't upper-middle-class?

College education has always been sold as a way to keep your children elite, and to the less well-to-do, as a golden ticket to being elite. The issue with education is that it has been marketed as the ultimate wealth signal: "My daughter is attending ______." (too bad for your daughter who is at ______ State)

> Standardized test scores are the hardest metric to game, and hence, are most under attack.

While this is true, standardized tests tend to favor children from more stable family situations and higher levels of wealth. The attack on the SAT is usually from the side favoring evening the odds for less financially advantaged groups.