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

nytimes.com

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

#641

Post by ViViDboarder »

hetman wrote: post #633

While equalising opportunity is a noble endeavour, I fail to see how this particular initiative would achieve that. In short, it's too little too late. If someone struggled through high school because of environmental factors, they're not going to suddenly be on their A-game because they were admitted into university. At the end of the day, we should still expect the highest levels of excellence from our professional…

The article said that it won’t alter the score.

If someone went to a decent school, lived a care free life, and scored decently well, and then another student had the same score despite coming from a worse school district and having to work a part time job throughout high school, my bet would be on the later persons success.

Maybe they’d perform similarly in college, and the struggler would still struggle, but post graduation my bets would be on the person who had to struggle.

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

#642

Post by lopmotr »

kornsh3ll wrote: post #576
roenxi wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Jews actually have a pretty strong family component. In theory they aren't a race but for practical purposes it might as well be a racial stereotype (eg, the classic hook-nose propaganda - clearly a racial stereotype). Anyway, the point was that the culture is what is important. Jewish culture is clearly somewhat different from Christian culture. If you seep a person in a specific culture that will define how the…

> eg, the classic hook-nose propaganda - clearly a racial stereotype Please, do not repeat this filth. It is anti-Semitic nonsense that there is are “Jewish racial characteristics”. Jews come in every shape and skin tone. I know a very nice black man who is an African Immigrant and he is Jewish. There is no Jewish race - Judaism is only a religion.

Converts and outliers are of course are excluded, but for people with a long Jewish ancestry, there are clusterings of genetic markers that uniquely identify them as distinct from non-Jews. There are different groups of Jews too.

Judaism is well accepted as being both a race and a religion. Of course it has fuzzy borders with people who don't believe the religion but are genetically Jewish and vise versa, but so does every race and every religion.

It's not helpful for thought to demonize an idea by calling it "filth". How can you consider possibilities if you've decided in advance what's clean and what's too dirty to even say?

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

#643

Post by Retra »

andrepd wrote: post #577
darawk wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, you're saying that people who have the misfortune to have parents who can't do those things for them should suffer a handicap, right? Yes, for the reasons that I outlined. If you don't reward kids for their parents investment, their parents won't invest, and that will be worse for everyone. If you spending 1 hour or 10 hours teaching your kids at night makes no difference to their life outcomes, which will you…

A social class indicator on a test score is going to utterly nullify every single advantage a kid has earn from a dedicated parent and a high-quality education. Do you think this is a reasonable argument? Jesus.

Now suddenly having dedicated parents and high-quality education is not a reward in itself. Why be king of a minor gold hill, if it cannot entitle you to rule a mountain, am I right?

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

#644

Post by z3phyr »

zasz wrote: post #405
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.

As a fellow Asian whose parents also sacrificed a lot, I'm sympathetic, but I would urge you to consider a couple things: 1. Like it or not, plenty of families in America have had it worse than you had, and would not find it at all impressive that you have never gone on a vacation or eaten out. 2. You should save your anger for the huge number of spots saved for legacies and athletes. Being the child of alumni means…

> Worth aligning yourself with the guy pushing a trade war with China

Is it still worth to breath when we know Hitler breathed too? This was rhetorical and I apologize for starting a little blunt. There is no singular right wing like there is no singular left wing.

As I understand it, the parent is actually not talking about aligning with Trump, but rather their thought process is getting more individualistic i.e. more right wing in a broad sense.

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

#645

Post by throwawaymath »

StreamBright wrote: post #431

Nor Christians neither Jews are a race

That is incorrect. The Jewish people comprise an ethnoreligious group: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnoreligious_group

In fact, the term "Jewish people" refers principally to an ethnic group with a common cultural heritage and ancestral religion, not to adherents of Judaism. Judaism happens to be the common religion of the Jewish people.

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

#646

Post by skissane »

GreaterFool wrote: post #392
grawprog wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did pretty well on the standardized tests in high school. If this had existed, i likely would have scored higher than average on adversity. I would be pissed to find out my score was altered in any way due to factors outside my control. If I do well on something, i want it to be from my own merits, whatever my current situation. I don't want to be pandered to because i grew up poor in a shitty neighbourhood. Everyt…

My university (one of the top-ranked in the world) did have some sort of adjusted scaling for the final exams. The raw results were never released. One would get a number somehow adjusted for how to the whole cohort did. So that if some exams turn out to be just too damn hart it won't wipe out everybody. But it was opaque and I really hated that! I did good enough and then went on to do a Masters degree. There I'd ge…

> My university (one of the top-ranked in the world) did have some sort of adjusted scaling for the final exams. The raw results were never released. One would get a number somehow adjusted for how to the whole cohort did

In first year university, I did a semester of Latin. For the first few weeks I was feeling very motivated; then depression hit me. I stopped going to class. What I should have done, is go see a doctor or psychologist, and got a letter saying I was depressed, and given it to the university administration, and I'm sure they would have given me some form of special consideration. But I didn't do that (it simply never occurred to me that I could do that, I wish it had.)

Anyway, since I'd missed more than half the semester of lectures and tutorials, I was thinking to myself - why bother turning up to the exam? I know I am going to fail anyway. But, I said to myself, I should go, you never know, I might somehow scrape through.

So, I sat down at the exam. I think I got the first page right. The subsequent pages, I had no idea. I sat there and waited until they let me leave early. (The university had some rule, you couldn't leave the exam early until after the first half-hour was up, or something like that.)

I waited for my results, I expected to fail. I was very surprised to find out I passed 50.0. I didn't understand how that could happen.

Next semester, I was enrolled in Latin again. I decided to drop it. But I thought, before dropping it, I should just go to the first lecture. As I was leaving at the end, the lecturer pulled me aside. He said to me, "You know you failed the exam, right?". "Yes", I replied. Then he said: "Too many students failed, and the administration told us we had to give some of them passes. We liked you, thought you were really enthusiastic at the beginning, didn't know what happened to you, and are hoping you might continue the subject, so we decided you'd be one of the lucky ones whose fail gets turned into a pass." I thanked him for his kindness, but I still dropped the subject anyway.

It was an interesting insight into just how "flexible" university marking can be.

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

#647

Post by wolco »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #634
aj7 wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. People with brains should be more united.

>Yeah. People with brains should be more united. While i don’t disagree on its face. That statement usually means “people should just be on my side”. As written above; the Overton window has been moving left, and things like not prosecuting female gential mutilation in the US, straight socialism, not settling for anything less than full gun bans, open borders - things that would have got you locked up 50 years ago ar…

You need a third party that takes up the middle. That allows the parties to move slowly towards the middle and shift left or right over certain issues only. Right now it is setup to move the parties apart as the choice is binary.

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

#648

Post by remarkEon »

mythrwy wrote: post #629
remarkEon wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is treading the line of being completely Kafkaesque. I'm having trouble following the discussion in this thread. On the one hand, lots of people are arguing that this test change is BS and will have lots of unintended consequences. Then there's others arguing, not always explicitly, that children should essentially be punished in terms of their "points", for lack of a better term, in college admissions because o…

Maybe I wasn't clear. The policy is dumb and dangerous, agreed. But advantage is real. You can't list all the sacrifices your parents made while in the same breathe implying "no advantage here, this isn't fair". The devil is in devising a fair system to determine advantage in an objective way that won't be rife with corruption and gaming the system. I highly doubt this will be possible and attempts likely will result…

Recognizing in what way? That’s what we’re all talking about here. How should we “recognize” that OP’s parents worked really hard?

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

#649

Post by [deleted] »

lenkite wrote: post #602
learc83 wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Harvard has need based scholarships. These need based scholarships directly reduce the amount of children of wealthy parents who get into Harvard. Are need based scholarships denigrating the hard work of wealthy parents?

Are you truly comparing the scholarship need-based policies of one wealthy, private college to a fundamental change in the Scholastic Assessment Test used nation wide ? You have a choice to apply to Harvard - there is very little choice apart from SAT/ACT for higher education in the states.

[deleted]

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

#650

Post by z3phyr »

dawkra wrote: post #339
781 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You forgot South Asian people.

I know it's an American website, but in almost all of the world, the word "Asian" includes the subcontinent and south east asia.
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