Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

robkhenderson.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

661–670 of 684 posts

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#661

Post by tqi »

csa wrote: post #658
tqi wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> these elite schools would change that criteria, because the criteria are a means to an end. That’s a nice opinion you have. Do you have any evidence to support this? The case against Harvard showed us pretty much everything behind the curtain. If there is any systemic bias against any group, that must be the best kept secret in the world. Check out this article: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/10/27/opinion/harvar…

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...

"Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university."

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#662

Post by mseidl »

cyanydeez wrote: post #572
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.” >…

Meh, meaningless. Those kids get in regardless. The SAT has flaws, like AIs trained on criminal records has flaws. Getting rid of a flawed test won't suddenly make rich privilege suddenly increase

The SAT was designed as a general intelligence test. But the fact you can study for it and improve your score made that false.

Zoe Bee did a good video on grades... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe-SZ_FPZew

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#663

Post by harvey9 »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #398
harvey9 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like it was designed to be easy to game; income in last two years as a metric rather than total assets, or zip code, or high school attended etc Does India have something like SAT as well?

Yes, it's actually much harder. But the final results are group by category order by rank. There is negative marking to discourage guessing, so the cutoff for certain categories can even be 0 or even negative

So you could make the cut (be considered a successful exam taker) with a zero score just because a large proportion of your peers got negative scores?

This seems just as unhelpful for deciding who to hire or who to allow onto a higher course of study as the campaigns we have seen on some USA university campuses to give all students an automatic A grade.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#664

Post by nobodyandproud »

WalterBright wrote: post #544
nobodyandproud wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If college is the only way to make a good living, then rational actors will game and lobby their way to getting in. Even in the 1990s, a CS program was easy to get into and a local 4 year degree was sufficient for most lines of work.

At least in the 70s, if you gamed your way into admission at Caltech by doing test prep, coaching, having someone else do your application essays, etc., you were going to be sorry. Because you would find it impossible to do the work required. Caltech did a good job of screening because the ones they admitted could do the work (though a lot dropped out simply because they didn't want to work). But there were a few tha…

> At least in the 70s, if you gamed your way into admission at Caltech by doing test prep, coaching, having someone else do your application essays, etc., you were going to be sorry.

I’m sure it’s still true today. Still, the incentive to game and coach through admissions is intense because of the potential rewards.

I went to my local 4 year which was nearly free, and I coasted through the CS program making it possible to do other things.

Still, my earnings were halved because of the lower quality of the CS program and I do wonder about the road not taken.

I think it’s even more intense for students today; but it’s also true that the quality of student hasn’t gone up.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#665

Post by AtlasBarfed »

JackAndJack wrote: post #601
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing Rich kids in. THISSSSSSS!!!! is what it was always about. It amazes me how corrupt higher education is now. It is AMAZINGLY corrupt. There is this thing with getting old (I'm in late 40s now) where you think the world is going to hell, but really what is happening is that you are figuring out EXACTLY how fucked up everything is. However, sometimes things really are going to hell (increasing rich/poor divide,…

It is not about rich kids. It is about diversity, they want different skin color in addition to Whites' and Asians'. Asians mostly come from poor families compared to west. Here is distribution of test scores and Asians have top scores. https://twitter.com/monitoringbias/status/163214392094241587...

Let me tell you a tale from when I was going to college.

The school I was attending decided in my last year that it was no longer doing "need-blind" admissions. There was a minor uproar, but of course it went through.

So... you're saying the school will preferentially let in richer students to the organization if they can? You know, two applications being allegedly equal?

I leave it as an exercise to the reader how much objectivity on "equal applications" when one of the students basically is 10x richer (and parents that might donate), when you have to see how well affirmative action with "equal applications" has worked to get minorities into white collar jobs.

Of course what the college was doing was probably formalizing what it was doing anyway. Why would it do that?

Ohhhh,,, right, lets do way more egregious pay-for-admission that "pick the richer between equals". Right.

Then a decade later, I noticed all these chinese nationals on universitites, and the students said they were a bit of a headache because they were so obnoxiously rich.

Oh! The colleges figured out how to kill two birds with one stone: a rich foreigner is a minority AND rich! So they would coddle these scions as much as possible.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#666

Post by telotortium »

tptacek wrote: post #554
rayiner wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SAT assumes a baseline vocabulary and familiarity with basic logic, which a lot of kids don't meet now that so many people take the test. My score went up by 120 points from my first practice test in 8th grade to the real thing in 11th grade, but some of that was just covering the ground on the expected high school math and vocabulary.

I tend to agree that studying and practicing for the SAT has a material impact, but most people on your side of the issue dispute that.

As someone who is (I think) on rayiner's side more or less, my impression of the evidence is that the SAT and similar tests (even IQ tests) can be practiced for to an extent, and scores can be improved, but only up to a "natural ceiling". So, while it should be possible for a while to improve everyone's scores on the SAT by providing test prep, you shouldn't expect everyone to be able to score near the upper limit on the SAT, just higher than they would be without test prep. Test prep has diminishing returns (unless that test prep is effectively cheating because the test questions and answers have been leaked) because the upper limit of a person's score is limited by their natural potential. The end state for the SAT, assuming the test isn't changed, is to produce a distribution more or less like a bell curve, but with a mean higher than before widespread test prep (and possibly some groups disproportionately improving compared to other groups, but not necessarily reaching the exact same mean as the other groups).

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#667

Post by QuarterReptile »

lordnacho wrote: post #483
onetimeusename wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> arbitrage opportunity for lower-ability legacy students Is that generally true or is that a stereotype? Legacy students also had a higher average SAT score than non-legacy students, at 1523 for legacy students and 1491 for non-legacy students. [1] [1]: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/9/8/2025-freshman-su...

"The average SAT score of students with family income under $40,000 was 1443, while those with a family income of more than $500,000 averaged 1520." Would the legacies tend to have much higher income, or is any old person who's a child of an alumnus considered a legacy?

Child of alumnus should be considered legacy, but that's not to say that thay factor doesn't also skew wealthy.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#668

Post by cuteboy19 »

harvey9 wrote: post #663
cuteboy19 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's actually much harder. But the final results are group by category order by rank. There is negative marking to discourage guessing, so the cutoff for certain categories can even be 0 or even negative

So you could make the cut (be considered a successful exam taker) with a zero score just because a large proportion of your peers got negative scores? This seems just as unhelpful for deciding who to hire or who to allow onto a higher course of study as the campaigns we have seen on some USA university campuses to give all students an automatic A grade.

That is the cost of equity.

Note that the system also has many holes, so the categorization isn't perfect. Its possible for a large number of students to belong to the categories only on paper. So you don't even get equity in the end.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#669

Post by tptacek »

telotortium wrote: post #666
tptacek wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree that studying and practicing for the SAT has a material impact, but most people on your side of the issue dispute that.

As someone who is (I think) on rayiner's side more or less, my impression of the evidence is that the SAT and similar tests (even IQ tests) can be practiced for to an extent, and scores can be improved, but only up to a "natural ceiling". So, while it should be possible for a while to improve everyone's scores on the SAT by providing test prep, you shouldn't expect everyone to be able to score near the upper limit on…

I'm not in favor of eliminating the SAT. I don't necessarily believe that SAT prep is materially impactful (I think it improves scores, but not, like, up a tier of selectivity). But all of the SAT improvement factors available to well-off families certainly do materially improve scores; those improvements include not just SAT prep, but also taking the test multiple times, having your results tracked by family and being forced to take the test multiple times, and disability accommodations, which are rampantly abused.

Low SES families are not taking the SAT on a level playing field with high SES families.

Re: Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

#670

Post by doetoe »

tomcam wrote: post #629
_mh56 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in India, we have quotas for different kinds of people. There's caste based, Gender based and finally EWS (Economically Weaker Section) Quota. Overall 60% of total seats are reserved for these people. My friend who's ultra rich was selected in EWS Quota. His father who runs his own company took Zero pay for the last two years so he qualified for the benefits. Meanwhile people who actually deserved this had to co…

What the hell. When you say caste based do you mean something unspoken or is it explicitly legislated? Mind-blowing.

Discrimination against lower castes is very real. There are quota to somewhat compensate for this. Maybe you interpreted it as there being quota for each caste?
Post reply on HN