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

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#641

Post by nathan_compton » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 3:08 PM UTC

hedora wrote: post #153

nathan_compton wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You simply CAN'T provide the same resource to all of them, some of them will have to vie for a lower-ranked resource." Why not just distribute those resources via lottery? Why not actually just split resources evenly across the population? There are good practical reasons not to do this, but they are, fundamentally, ideological (eg, we might feel it is inefficient to spend resources on someone which may not provide…

Different people have different skill sets. It makes sense to evenly distribute resources in elementary schools, but that’s not what is being’s discussed here. You could give me the same violin lessons as a virtuouso, and stick a functionally-illiterate Michelin-starred chef in my favorite calculus series, but doing so would be a complete waste of everyone’s time.

"doing so would be a complete waste of everyone’s time"

I simply don't believe this. Playing violin is virtuous even if you aren't a virtuoso and knowing about calculus is virtuous even if you're a Michelin starred chef. Its certainly true that the situation you describes may not be an _efficient_ distribution of resources if all you care about is productivity, but there are other ways to think.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#642

Post by throwaway894345 » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 3:14 PM UTC

msrenee wrote: post #622

throwaway894345 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if I was ... a lower middle class kid in Iowa, I'd be pretty outraged about this. Of course, no one cares about these kids (least of all the elites and their cadre), and any outrage from lower middle class Iowans is already explained away as racism (never mind that Iowa, like much of the rest of middle America, went to Obama in 2008 and 2012).

What's happening to lower middle class kids in Iowa? I'm honestly just confused here. To my knowledge, they're getting decent lower middle class jobs and doing fine. Maybe going off to college and moving to the coast, probably not unless they want to leave. I don't think of that particular group of individuals as disadvantaged, at least not in the context of getting into a good college.

My position is that it’s an injustice if an Ivy-caliber student from a lower-middle class background is denied top educational opportunities because they don’t have the family pedigree of wealthier, more middling students. We would expect upward mobility here, we shouldn’t content ourselves with “at least they’re not getting poorer than their parents”.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

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Post by throwaway894345 » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 3:17 PM UTC

msrenee wrote: post #638

tomcam wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah Iowa is getting totally jacked in this thread.

People on the coasts and even in the big cities in the Midwest just can't seem to wrap their heads around the fact that a lot of us wouldn't be willing to live in New York City or California for all the money in the world. It's not that one lifestyle is inherently better. People have different preferences and it's pretty condescending to think that folks who live in the great plains and don't go to the big name schoo…

We’re not talking about settling in NYC or Cali, we’re talking about the opportunity to compete with rich coastal kids for positions in top schools.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#644

Post by tikiman163 » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 3:22 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.” >…

A big part of the problem is that means testing is largely a waste of time. If you boost people based on income you end up wasting a huge amount of time trying to figure out where the income line should be. Even if you can find a good point to put that line, the "rich kids who just didn't test well enough" will sue because they think college admissions should be a meritocracy, and bossing anyone for any reasons is somehow descrimination. They recently won a significant court case with that exact logic.

My next statement will be controversial, and is largely anecdotal, but there is very little to no research that contradicts my opinion, so I'm going to say it anyway. Smart, capable people who simply "don't test well" are almost non-existent. Even if they did, you can't accurately identify who doesn't test well except by giving them a job and letting them prove they were capable when they aren't under testing pressure. I have met hundreds of people who claimed they simply didn't test well, and only one of them later proved it by being genuinely capable and competent.

The thing that pisses me off the most about this whole debate, is that it only really matters if you think it matters whether you went to one of the top 10 universities available to you. Frankly, most employers will throw out your application if it says Harvard School of Business. The number of management jobs that want Harvard graduates is less than half the graduating class, and Business majors have it easier than most of the engineering degrees in that respect. If you're an electrical engineer, there are fewer than 100 jobs Nation wide, and they are already occupied. If you want to be a civil engineer, straight up forget about it. The medical and legal schools are the only exception, and those are graduate schools only.

There is far too much focus on whether the top 10 university admissions are fair and equitable, and far too little focus on whether we have affordable universities that meet decent educational standards for everyone who could reasonably earn a useful degree.

We definitely shouldn't be trying to get rid of standardized tests. There are arguments that can be made about their content, especially historically, but they have merit in showing whether a student is ready for certain classes. At a normal university, they use SAT and ACT scores to decide if you can skip algebra and go straight to calculus, or if you need to take even more basic classes before algebra, and they do this for science and English courses as well. Having such a laser focus on how the top 10 or top 50 schools that actually turn away applicants because they're at capacity is a massive failure to see the actual big picture when it comes to education.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

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Post by yencabulator » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 3:30 PM UTC

somethoughts wrote: post #372

bnralt wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a simple and effective way of achieving the goals they claim to be championing. And what are the real goals of these institutions? The whole approach of having artificially limited education where people are sifted into higher and lower status classes based upon judgements made when they're teenagers is premised on elitism, not equity. That's the purpose of these institutions - not to education as many peop…

To your point, the biggest issue that I see is that elite schools are not growing physically to accept more students. When the eliteness is built on exclusivity versus the quality of the education/graduates that pits admissions of legacy versus new admits. Its kind of like when Nokia used to sell the mobile phones with gold plating and the only way to get one was via an invite from an influencer. Basically creating t…

Hello I come from a country where a university education is free and the government will support your living costs while you are a student. In that setting, we have too many people in high school and not enough in vocational school (and the local high school is way more academically ambitious than American high school seems to be).

The way our societies & industries still function, too many highly educated people is not the end goal. There's still a long road to grow the percentage of "information workers", especially roles needing higher education, and frankly all that seems to mean is that you outsource all manufacturing to other countries -- I think we've seen lately that wasn't the greatest idea.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#646

Post by yencabulator » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 3:38 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #409

_mh56 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does it benefit capitalism? India has always had a less prosperous economy.

Bias toward corruption probably means any prosperous company will have its pockets emptied by those with power within the company.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

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Post by tqi » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

1letterunixname wrote: post #614

tqi wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two questions: 1. does having a parent who is an alum make a student more qualified? 2. does having a parent who is an alum increase the likelihood of an applicant being accepted?

Unfortunately, the current system is often yes to both.

I actually disagree that the first is true, in and of itself. If you have two otherwise identical candidates except one is a Legacy candidate, then the answer is (tautologically) no, having a parent does not make you more qualified. But it's also true that that being a legacy gives that student an advantage, even if its limited to just getting put at the top of the pile to be reviewed. And if a segment of the population has been historically barred from attending these institutions, then I think it qualifies as an "unfair" advantage.

Calling it "systematic racism" may bring with it a lot of other cultural baggage at the moment, but I think fundamentally we can at least agree that Legacy Admissions are a way of preserving the status quo, in opposition to social mobility.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

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Post by tqi » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 5:32 PM UTC

csa wrote: post #344

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.

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…

"they really don’t understand what makes for a strong elite school applicant"

I think it's pretty clear that even if they did understand what makes for a strong elite school applicant and refocused their energies on meeting those criteria en masse, these elite schools would change that criteria, because the criteria are a means to an end.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

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Post by btilly » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 5:33 PM UTC

JackAndJack wrote: post #599

btilly wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The logic of reparations does not require poverty on the part of the victim. It requires acknowledgement of an injustice, and a requirement that the perpetrator has to make good on it. In the case of blacks we have forcible capture, slavery, a variety of discriminatory laws and policies, lynchings, and so on. There is no shortage of historical wrongs done to blacks that were never meaningfully made up for. So far, so…

Things that your forefathers suffered, may be 6 to 10 generations before you. Can you name one thing which directly or indirectly affects you today because of their sufferings? Slavery was that long ago. White's were sold as slaves in North Africa before black slaves where brought to America. Even white women were sold as sex slaves and they used to call them "White Gold". ( You can search for term "White Gold Slaver…

I can trace behavioral patterns back 4 generations in my own family. And the only reason I can't go farther is that I have never talked to anyone who knew my great great grandparents. (Which would be difficult given that they were born in the 1800s and died before my birth.)

And even if you don't know what the connection is, that doesn't mean that there isn't one. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6127768/ and https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenet... are examples explaining some of the research on how epigenetics can pass trauma down the generations. We don't know how far it can transmit.

However, regardless of whether there is an impact, EVERY ethnic group has severe trauma in its past. And you generally don't have to go back more than a century or two to find it. The best thing to do is fix our present, and try to create a better future. Which, globally, we've generally been doing at a breathtaking pace.

Albeit with important exceptions. Such as problems that teenage girls began having with mental health starting about 10 years ago. Which may be tied to social media applications.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#650

Post by btilly » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 5:52 PM UTC

runsWphotons wrote: post #621

btilly wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In California they certainly do. Schools are mostly funded locally. As a result, there are very large funding gaps. And it isn't just liberal media saying it, https://reason.org/commentary/californias-schools-are-failin... says the same. I can't speak to other states. That said, there are a lot of ways to throw money at a problem and produce very little in the way of results. The education establishment is very, very…

Re throwing money at a problem and getting no results because of bad administration of funds---this is definitely what we have been doing in education and we should stop. Arguments to give more money to the same people to do the same things are going to go poorly with increasingly large amounts of the broader populace--this may not stop the government from doing it though. I am not going to pretend to know the detail…

We agree on problems in how education was done.

Sitting at my son's IEP meetings with a roomful of expensive professionals who documented all of the ineffective things that they were doing was eye-opening. I pulled him from public school and put him in a private school that specialized in children with lack of executive function (primarily ADHD and autistic). For a cost of about half the per student average in the school he was in (where he had cost far more than average) he got real help. He went from there to a college prep school that is far more academically rigorous than public schools, at similar per capita cost.

He is doing far better than public schools could have done, in a much more cost effective way.

On minority schools, a big part of the problem isn't funding. For many good reasons, schools in bad districts see very high turnover. As a result their teachers tend to be inexperienced. Plus there is the whole disrupted classroom issue, which is much worse in a tough neighborhood.

And about Obama, statistics do not support his having made lives better for blacks in general. But he's still cited as an inspiration a whole lot. And his success seems to have inspired other blacks to try to perform at the top level. Including our current vice president. So he seems to have become a useful symbol.