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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

#891

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #467
zasz wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> What's crazy about this whole controversy is that HN is usually skeptical towards college anyway.

I've always thought of them as a loud minority and, to be fair, they're not wrong: a lot of web jobs, even well paid ones, really don't require that much education or even much in the way of cognitive acuity.

The people who actually need to use their college education, the FAANG folks and people in other cutting edge tech jobs, don't bother to be vocal about it.

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

#892

Post by commandlinefan »

snaggletooth wrote: post #721
jachee wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Punishing those in privilege is how you achieve equality. They can't give up that inequality voluntarily, and wouldn't if they could.

So if you make $125k/yr and I make $75k/yr, equality can only exist if you give me 25k? Should America all just average our salaries and call it a day?

I think you'd be shocked how many people in America actually do think that's a good idea.

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

#893

Post by Glyptodon »

robotresearcher wrote: post #711
remote_phone wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already talked to my wife about this. I would retire, we would divorce, and I would rent a shitty apartment in East Palo Alto all the while living in our house. If they think they can boil my kids into a single number without bothering to find the context of who my kids are then I will game it to as much as possible. I don’t know why my family should be punished because my wife and I worked our asses off to get ahe…

I understand the feeling, but how about if we rephrase it from another viewpoint: I don’t know why I should be punished because my parents didn’t succeed financially. I work hard in highschool but don’t have extra private tutoring or parents who can help me with calculus homework. I’m hard working and bright but how can I compete with kids from Saratoga High School where everyone’s parents went to MIT/Penn and work a…

Keep in mind that given 1000 admission slots and 1000 very smart poor/disadvantaged kids and 1000 average rich kids most institutions will never admit all the 1000 poor/disadvantaged kids (though the absolute smartest and absolute richest will probably have a leg up).

Colleges are gatekeeper institutions that want to identify the worst off person that's still likely to have high success so that they can talk about how great their programs and commitment to diversity are while still mostly admitting wealthy folks and raking in money for their foundations and endowments. And so that they can point to those successes as proof that they're serving a social interest by anecdote, regardless of what the actual numbers on social mobility say.

It's really at level very removed from what you bring up. It's not that you're being punished because your parents are not part of the oligarch class. Rather, the oligarch class wants higher education to be a system that primarily benefits themselves while making it palatable by marketing the whole thing as a societal benefit.

Some colleges have become attuned to the fact that people caught on to this, which is why some elite institutions advertise that they're "need blind," a phrase which is more marketing than reality. They know that they can admit many middle class people and have them turn down "affordable" packages that are actually very draining for financially responsible families. And they know that they can calibrate their admissions to get exactly the amount and quality of disadvantaged students they want to mix with their legacy and elite admits, which will leave the majority of admits upper class and elite ("need blind" might as well be a synonym for "oligarchs are meritorious").

This is the game because elites have succeeded in twisting the system to benefit them. And the game now is to convince the public at large is that they should keep a system created for the oligarchy in place while putting lipstick on it.

If you want to shatter this state of affairs, the #1 thing you can do is start treating elite institutions and their graduates with the social stigma they deserve.

It's also worth keeping in mind that a significant reason this happens is because of admissions decisions revolving around institutional interests rather than societal interests, which means putting admit decisions in the hands of a body that does not represent the institution(s) in question could also be another route towards addressing what you bring up.

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

#894

Post by mizzack »

kaitai wrote: post #870
WillPostForFood wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Felicity Huffman is going to go to jail for much longer than Kelley Williams-Bolar (9 days), even though she is rich, white, and has great lawyers.

And there's been media discussion of why her husband hasn't been charged, despite being on the phone calls & verbally approving the crime!

Talk about moving the goalposts...

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

#895

Post by parsamzand »

This is a terrible idea. Why further punish kids for the success and efforts of their parents? Even if this isn't outright lowering the score of high-achieving kids, this is lowering the worth of their accomplishments in the greater college-admissions market.

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

#896

Post by Glyptodon »

torgian wrote: post #744
jachee wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The system is pre-rigged against: • People of color • LGBTQ • Lower-than-upper-middle-class • Divorced and/or single-parent homes • Rural families You talk about the decisions you made. The fact that you even had a choice is a privilege denied to many. For each of the above that you didn't have to overcome, that's a way the system is rigged in your favor. Your children won't be disadvantaged in any way, and you're fr…

I can’t agree with this sentiment of yours. While I agree that people that had less than ideal childhoods should be given more opportunities to succeed, it shouldn’t be at the expense of those who worked their ass off for their kids, only to see their hard work taken away by government laws. My own parents and grandparents came from shitty roots. Russia, concentration camp, Brazil, then to the US. My parents worked h…

You working for your kids doesn't mean your kids worked.

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

#897

Post by Veelox »

manfredo wrote: post #824
wolco wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly the people who mock students from private religious schools are also mocking students from historic black colleges or those who went to comminity college. Next time you hear about this speak up and change the conversation.

Not the case, at least in my experience. I work in the San Francisco Bay Area. We recruit exclusively at Ives, the likes of Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech, etc. and HBCUs and HWCUs. There's a big push to increase racial and gender diversity at least in this region. There's not much much diversity at religious colleges (>82% white, nowhere near the kind of representation we're looking for).

While I am sure you are well intentioned in your efforts to increase diversity in the Bay Area, your comment makes me think the end result of your hiring policy is going to be diversity in everything but thought. That makes me sad.

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

#898

Post by Veelox »

rayiner wrote: post #362
darawk wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and his point is why should his dad make that sacrifice for his kids if the SAT board is just going to subvert his efforts?

Why should the College Board not recognize that kids in fact have unequal opportunities for reasons totally outside their control?

Because the College Board isn't doing it in a way that truly reflects the adversity each kid faced.

For example, if Alice is raised by two loving parents in a so-so neighborhood she gets a score of 50. If Bob was abused as a child, put into foster care at 10, and adopted into a good neighborhood at 14 he gets a score of 25. Due to Bob's past he is way behind in school but works hard. Bob and Alice both end up getting 1400. At a selective school its possible that because Bob his a lower adversity score his application automatically gets rejected while Alice's application gets looked at and accepted.

This is the kind of case that is possible with an "Adversity Score" that bothers me.

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

#899

Post by darawk »

CydeWeys wrote: post #553
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…

This line of argumentation falls flat to me because the kids that are better educated by their parents will undoubtedly have better lifelong outcomes, regardless of what college it enables them to get into. There's a lot more to success in life than what college you go to. Going to Harvard is pretty worthless if you haven't even been set up with the skills to be able to graduate, for instance -- which the kid with hi…

> This line of argumentation falls flat to me because the kids that are better educated by their parents will undoubtedly have better lifelong outcomes, regardless of what college it enables them to get into.

Sure that may be true in relative terms. But at the margin, decreased reward -> decreased investment.

> There's a lot more to success in life than what college you go to. Going to Harvard is pretty worthless if you haven't even been set up with the skills to be able to graduate, for instance -- which the kid with highly invested parents is more likely to have.

That sounds like something that could be true, it just isn't. A Harvard degree is mostly about signaling. Once you are accepted to Harvard, you're nearly guaranteed to graduate (the graduation rate is 97.5%). Once you've gotten in, you're set. A huge number of jobs care more about marketing their ivy league staff than the actual skill output of that staff. You can do extremely well with zero talent and a Harvard degree. Obviously having both is better, but the Harvard degree itself confers tremendous value on anyone who has it, even if that person has no real skills or intelligence.

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

#900

Post by darawk »

kaitai wrote: post #538
darawk wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. The adversity score looks at things like the crime rate of the neighborhood you grew up in. That neighborhood is (primarily) a function of two things: Your parents income level, and their ability to prioritize what income they do have to make sure you're in a good neighborhood. The second thing is what's being de-valued. Some parents work really hard and pinch every penny to devote resources to their kid's educ…

To be clear then, you're not actually talking about quality of education (tutoring, robotics teams, mock trial, great teachers, enrichment activities, science museum trips, history competitions). As you say, it's "ability to prioritize what income they do have to make sure you're in a good neighborhood". Your primary problem with this, then,is that it devalues the ability to move into rich neighborhoods. How does the…

My point is this: parents have limited resources. They can devote those resources to things like: nice cars, fancy meals, vacations...or, they can devote them to educating their kids. Asian families notoriously prize devoting every last resource they can to educating their kids. That is a really great thing for society.

However, the adversity score policy being proposed here would blunt the impact of that resource allocation. When you blunt the return to an investment, you get less of that investment. If those same Asian families cannot improve their kids chances by making those sacrifices, then they have no reason to make those sacrifices.

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