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Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

robkhenderson.substack.com

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Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#501

Post by tptacek »

jlawson wrote: post #431
btilly wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but I take offense at this "it is all a matter of opinion and all opinions are equally valid" BS. 1) It is trivially true that if you define your measure right, you can make anyone succeed. For example black people are better at looking like black people. But we try to define "stuff" in a way that correlates with ability to do economically useful tasks. There are excellent reasons to do so. 2) You are ignoring…

>The scientific truth is that we have no data either way that can even begin to address whether one group is innately better than any other. The reason being that we have no way to separate out the impact of racism and history from innate ability. I'm sorry but this is blatantly false. "Innately better" is a vague and inflammatory term, but if you define the measure, we can use straightforward statistical techniques…

The logic of this comment is that there is somewhere a celestial point tally system that accumulates the genetic trauma of past generations, catapulting Jewish people to the top of the leaderboard for their racial experience of the Holocaust, and giving the lie to argument that generations of ongoing discrimination --- redlining ended within some of our lifetimes! --- and low SES conditions for disfavored minorities has any impact on their scholastic performance.

It is, to put it mildly, not at all well established how SES and assessed intelligence interact.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#502

Post by 999900000999 »

bushbaba wrote: post #480
DebtDeflation wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm white, my wife is Asian, our kids will be applying to university over the next couple of years. We've started to have the conversation about which race they will check off on the application. I'm coming to the conclusion that they have to just check white, as this means they will face less discrimination than if they check Asian. This makes me very uncomfortable, and also just seems absurd.

I believe you can check any race and they will never question it. You could state you identify as Black and so long as the name and application looks 'black', they'll never know. You'll start your first day at university and what will they do, ask you to take a genetic test?

As a thought experiment couldn't you just say your from South Africa. Thus being "African American".

For the record I hate affirmative action, but I also hate the notion of having some elite 10 schools everyone strives to get into. You can do just fine going to a state school, and you'll probably have a much more relaxed experienced.

You can also do what I did and hit 100k no degree at all. With all this talk of student loan forgiveness, maybe we need to rethink the role of college.

It doesn't need to be an automatic first step into adulthood, you can learn a great deal working for a few years beforehand.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#503

Post by pjscott »

Waterluvian wrote: post #397

As a Canadian I never took anything like the SAT. I don’t quite get why it exists. Or why people are convinced it needs to exist. Most of the world does fine without it. That being said, I support whatever helps empower the diminished classes and helps quash the undeserved power of those born into money. …And in that case, the SAT might make a lot of sense now that I think of it. Even if your teenage years were a qua…

Yes, that's exactly the historical rationale for the adoption of the SAT. It gained popularity in the first half of the 20th century as an attempt to identify poor kids with academic potential, so they could get educational opportunities that would otherwise have been out of their reach. Harvard, for example, used to be populated almost entirely by people who had gone to expensive private schools -- and then in 1934 they started giving admission and scholarships to students from lower classes who scored well on standardized tests, as part of an effort to improve socioeconomic mobility.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#504

Post by btilly »

mynameishere wrote: post #482
btilly wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but I take offense at this "it is all a matter of opinion and all opinions are equally valid" BS. 1) It is trivially true that if you define your measure right, you can make anyone succeed. For example black people are better at looking like black people. But we try to define "stuff" in a way that correlates with ability to do economically useful tasks. There are excellent reasons to do so. 2) You are ignoring…

we have no data either way that can even begin to address whether one group is innately better than any other Does all of world history count as data? What should we go by? Propose a test.

Given that I said we have no data that can begin to address this question, it is at best disingenuous. Because how can I offer a test without data?

It is true that all of world history is data, but it is not necessarily data that can answer any particular question. The problem is the age-old nature versus nurture debate. Both genetics and environment are important to IQ. Both generally affect IQ through long, convoluted, and poorly understood reasons of cause and effect. Therefore we can establish evidence of differences, but can't necessarily distinguish between theories about the causes of those differences.

What would make a difference is a theory of mechanism. For example it is uncontroversial that people with ancestry from Nigeria are better at sprinting, and people with ancestry from Kenya are better at long distance running. For this we can identify specific facts about body type that help with sprinting versus long distance running, and we can identify strong evidence that these body type differences are due to genetics.

But we have no such theory of mechanism that can be applied to IQ. And therefore the mass of data we have about the existence of differences does not distinguish between potential causes of said differences.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#505

Post by csa »

yibg wrote: post #479
csa wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me put your concerns to rest… There are no elite schools that systematically discriminate against Asians. Zero. None. Let me add a few points that counter some folks who think that schools do discriminate against Asians: - Some schools do give preferential treatment to Black and Latino/an applicants. This is not a particularly good look for the schools, imho, but it’s the reality. This is not the same as discrimi…

So schools have subjective criteria that disproportionately impacts one group of students, but it’s fine because that’s the rules and they are following it?

> So schools have subjective criteria that disproportionately impacts one group of students, but it’s fine because that’s the rules and they are following it?

I don’t think that the criteria are quite as subjective as you think. Anything on the margin, especially if it will make or break an application, will be discussed and evaluated at a reasonable level.

Most people are getting downgraded because of complete omission of one or more evaluated areas.

For the past few decades, elite schools have been very clear that they are looking for more than good grades (which themselves can be highly subjective) and good SATs in applicants. As mentioned in the article I linked in my first reply, Harvard actually lays out their exact rubric.

If someone, Asian or not, decides not to participate in sports and doesn’t really have a good reason why not (e.g., had to work after school), they shouldn’t be surprised by their low rating in this area, and they better be highly rated (as in, a 1) in one or more other areas to compensate.

The schools don’t maintain these criteria in order to exclude a certain race of people. They maintain these criteria because they think it’s good for the school long term.

As a simple example, so many of the people who disparage athletics as a component of admissions have no idea how important being a varsity athlete can be after graduating — I call it a totally-not-club club because it has such an invisible but significant influence.

Lastly, I will add that it is almost impossible to have an evaluation system that yields an equal outcome for all races that isn’t a pure lottery. I know the lottery idea is popular on HN, but I think that this is overly dismissive of what makes the strong elite school applicants strong both when they apply and after they graduate. Imho, other than 10% or so of each entering class, it’s not that they are brainiacs — it’s that they are smart enough and can get interesting shit done.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#506

Post by tptacek »

civilized wrote: post #267
Spooky23 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, structurally if not deliberately (it is unlikely that mainstream IQ tests are anything but diligently designed to avoid overt bias, unlike those of the middle 20th century). If you measure something that has a large SES causative component, and SES is for whatever reason itself highly correlated with race, then your measurements will encode a racial bias.

The big debate in academic psychology is the extent to which factors like SES (and factors downstream of SES, like general health) confound the measurement of some kind of general intelligence. The evidence we have right now pretty clearly points to an effect, so it's down to what the size of that effect is.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#507

Post by Jiro »

csa wrote: post #448
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're buying into Harvard's argument that "asian applicants are systematically less likeable / weaker in intangible attributes" which is racist nonsense in my opinion.

> It sounds like you're buying into Harvard's argument that "asian applicants are systematically less likeable / weaker in intangible attributes" which is racist nonsense in my opinion. Please don’t put words into my mouth that I did not say (and certainly don’t think). Note that I had a positive experience living in Asia for 9 years, and I am currently active in Asian communities in Asia as well as the Asian-America…

>First, using Harvard as an example, 25-28% or so of the entering class is Asian. Given that Asians-Americans are about 6% of the US, this hardly smacks of systemic racism. Something doesn’t add up with this argument.

There's a larger percentage than the whole population of the US, but a smaller percentage than the percentage who apply and have similar qualifications to accepted students who aren't Asian.

What you're seeing is that Asian-Americans are better qualified, but not enough of them are accepted as one would expect from being better qualified.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#508

Post by yterdy »

tekla wrote: post #129
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…

I come from a poor Asian immigrant family, and this SAT shit seems wild. My parents always told me that America is an easy country to succeed in. Just do decently in school, ace the SAT, and boom full ride to a upper middle class life, no matter the background. Its proven pretty true so far.

I don't know what your definition for "ace" is, but I did pretty well. That was my peak. Ever since has been dealing with barrier after barrier, which often seem actively hostile. I suppose that some would chalk my failure up to laziness, but everyone that I've seen overcome those barriers had access to mentors, contacts, connections, and opportunities - resources that don't come my way. Too black, too short, too gay, too quiet, too whiny, too weird. Maybe I just I trip people's gut alarms?

Granted, most of my peers who received a full ride seem to be doing fine. For millennials, I guess your parents gave decent advice. When I look around today, though, I feel less like a one-off loser than someone at the vanguard of a socioeconomic reality where even coming out of an education with no debt weight isn't a guarantee of a clean and unencumbered launch. Increasingly, superficialities - affinity, attractivenes, imminence - are the criteria. Which means that playing by the old rules, going forward, is foolish.

I sometimes wonder where I'd be, with my dark skin (et al.) and high scores, in a country that cared less about the former and more about the latter. But, here, socially, I don't know what I'd have to do to beat out an Asian or white candidate.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#510

Post by ghaff »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #172
ghaff wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is SAT test prep courses specifically though. Not going in completely cold versus having prepped for the test. I mean, if I took the SAT today many years on, I'm sure I wouldn't do very well--at least on the math section. There's too much that isn't muscle memory any longer because I haven't done a lot of the high school math stuff in years.

Nobody needs to go in cold when you can do a practice test at home or at the library. If someone's high school math skills aren't ready at all then that's a much bigger issue than any kind of bonus prep.

Certainly. My point was more though that, while I could hopefully reasonably puzzle my way through a SAT test without doing any prep, I doubt I'd do a very good job within a time limit because I'd be puzzling a lot of things out that I learned decades ago and haven't really used since without checking a book out of the library and spending at least a few days with it..
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