661–670 of 959 posts
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Imagine you are about to undergo a major surgery. Would you rather get operated by a surgeon that graduated from the medical school with A+, or by someone with a B who got the job instead because they came from a poorer neighborhood?
The old joke is something along the lines of: Q: What do you call the person who graduated last in their class in medical school? A: Doctor. Sure, I'd probably prefer the higher performing doctor in this hypothetical scenario, but at the same time, it feels very much artificial (maybe a false dichotomy?). Sure, you always want the best for everything -- that's what "the best" means! Reality is that there are always g…
To answer your question, I would prefer a person who is passionate about what they are doing and capable of thinking outside the box. However, unfortunately, it's not something that could be easily formalized. Sure, self-taught students would likely be better motivated than tutored ones, however once you begin counting it as a part of the score, people would start gaming the system. Someone would lie about not being tutored. Someone else would actually skip taking private lessons and will miss out on learning something important, because doing so would give them a better score. A much better solution, IMO, would be to point out and quantify the traits and skills the self-taught people show, and include them in the test, giving everyone a chance to learn and practice them.
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Well, no dog in this race obviously, but doesn't that mean that instead of penalizing you for your parents' good character, we penalize poor rural and urban kids for their parents' bad character?
Obviously both are bad, but if you had to choose (and you kind of do, because admissions is zero-sum in the short term), you should incentivise good character.
If you want to incentivize character built through life experiences? OK, I guess. But it should have to be the life and character of the actual student that counts. Not his mom.
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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…
> frankly the SAT and the whole college admissions process are bullshit anyway What's crazy about this whole controversy is that HN is usually skeptical towards college anyway. Even beyond the pro-Peter Thiel arguments back in the day about how college is a waste of time, nowadays there are plenty of allegations on HN about how higher ed is a bubble. About how CS, or at least programming, can be self-taught. So I don…
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Are you avoiding the question? I'll rephrase it. If I give $5k dollars per year for college to every student in America whose parents make under $100k a year, am I denigrating the hard work of the parents who make more than that?
If I give $5k dollars per year, for college, to every student in America whose parents make under $100k a year, am I denigrating the hard work of the parents who make more than that? No, you certainly are not. But this is completely different from adding a hidden adversity score to the SAT. Your proposal is equality of opportunity to earn merit. The other proposal is manipulation of outcome to negate merit.
Declaring that one denigrates people while the other doesn't based solely on outcome vs opportunity requires arbitrarily picking an observation point that supports your view.
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.
If parents value education, they find a way. Perhaps having a two parent, tightly knit family helps. If we want to really help future generations, we have to find ways to support and encourage two-parent families. That’s one of the biggest predictors of academic and social success and there is plenty of data to back it up. Limited income, educational level of the parents, crime ridden neighborhoods — somehow, statistically, Asians don’t seem to care, they find a way. Until we reverse many of the social policies created in the early 1970s that destroyed the two-parent family in certain communities, you’ll get more of the same results. Interestingly, black kids from two parent families perform just as well academically as does a white student from a two-parent family. All of these other “factors” are just noise. The problem is in the home, not with the tests.
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Keep in mind that the definition of "white supremacy" has been expanded to include things like opposition to affirmative action, or support for enforcement of existing border control regulations (let along their expansion). Of course calls to censor those things are going to garner much more opposition than censoring explicit terrorist organizations.
The definition of white supremacy isn't expanding, but those are two topics white supremacists vocally support.
I recently attended a diversity workshop at a large organization that you’d recognize where we were taught some key elements of white supremacy are things like: perfectionism, urgency, defensiveness, individualism, etc.
https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/white-supremacy-cu...
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.
Welcome to the dark side.