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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

#921

Post by siruncledrew »

Glyptodon wrote: post #18

This seems likely to end up being ugly. For example wealthy people could buy or rent addresses in "adverse" neighborhoods, or charter schools might locate offices there, in order to attempt to improve scores on this metric. At the same time this won't be able to identify many adverse life circumstances like abusive parents, cancer, etc. What it does do is outsource components of admissions decisions the colleges may…

People using what they have to get their kids ahead is just called "Life".

Why are nice neighborhoods more expensive than bad ones? Why are good school districts more competitive than bad ones? Why do parents go to great lengths to get their kids better opportunity?

There will always be motivation to find the best ways to "play the system".

Also, what actually shows if someone is a good student or not?

A student with lower adversity could still have immense pressure if their family has sunk so much investment into their success.

For example, there are Asian parents I knew that had their kids regimentally studying for the SAT since age 12 like they were practicing to become professional athletes. Their parents left their entire lives behind to come to America and work their way up for the sake of their kids getting into a good college then getting a good job.

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

#922

Post by learc83 »

yibg wrote: post #770
djtriptych wrote: post #763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok but why not include achievement in the face of adversity. Why not consider this a perseverance/tenacity score? Since when does GPA/SAT completely describe fitness for the future?

The question then becomes do we go for an objective scoring system or are we ok with it being subjective? How do you quantify perseverance and tenacity? Is it higher perseverance to grow up in a poor neighborhood or with some chronic disease? Is overcoming ESL or abusive parents more tenacious? Even looking at my own situation I'm not sure which way things should go. I grew up poor to immigrant parents that didn't sp…

If you look at the metrics, you'd receive + marks for ESL and income, and negative marks for educated parents. Overall you'd probably receive a + adversity score.

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

#923

Post by learc83 »

adelie wrote: post #723
aabajian wrote: post #522

I'll play devil's advocate. I went to a public high school that served a large area (it's Rim of the World High in Southern California in case anyone is curious). It's the only high school in the mountains, and services "poorer" areas like Crestline and "wealthier" areas like Lake Arrowhead. To my knowledge, I was one of the only honors kids from Crestline. My morning consisted of getting up at 5:30 am and taking a 4…

i'd actually say that's an argument against having an 'adversity score' - a single value simply isn't enough to capture the nuances of your situation, and having a standardized score might pressure colleges to rely more heavily on those values. specifically for your example, there doesn't seem to be any factor in the score calculation that takes into account 'distance from school,' while 'quality of high school' does…

There's several neighborhood scores as well. Crime rate, poverty rate, home vacancy rate etc...

Presumably OPs neighborhood would score lower on those.

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

#925

Post by max76 »

harryh wrote: post #443
max76 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What statistics will the Adversity Score be based on? How close to reality are those numbers? What statistics will colleges create using the Adversity Score? Those will surely be even further away from reality. The primary use of a number like Adversity Score is to create a pretty spreed sheet that generates pretty graphs that look good in board meetings, grant applications and pamphlets. While the data backing up th…

There are great high schools, decent high schools, mediocre high schools and bad high schools and we can tell the difference. There are neighborhoods full of rich people, middle class professionals, working class people, and slums and we can tell the difference. I don't know why you think that's so hard. It seems quite easy to me. Certainly worth trying instead of (as you seem to advocate) just giving up at the sligh…

This isn't a slightly difficult problem, this is a fundamentally impossible problem. A qualitative thing cannot be quantified.

If we could quantify adversity we could calculate the percentage out of all human suffering that occurred during the Trail of Tears or determine the single most resilient living person.

I'm not saying we should consider adversity in college admissions. I'm saying we shouldn't quantify human emotions and experiences.

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

#926

Post by thereare5lights »

objektif wrote: post #764
thereare5lights wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to make any sort of conclusion based on your sampling of PhD students.

Same goes for every single place I worked at. Asians are by far the most prominent minority group. What should I base my argument on? Your experience? Why dont you counter argue with facts and hard statistics to disprove me?

> Why dont you counter argue with facts and hard statistics to disprove me?

I would, but you haven't yet so why should I?

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

#927

Post by stale2002 »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #924
stale2002 wrote: post #920

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is for a whole lot of students.

Sorry to hear about your poor educational experience.

I means, it's the educational experience of top colleges, such as Carnegie Mellon, that I attended.

This includes the engineering, math, CS, and social sciences class that I took.

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

#928

Post by jachee »

pathseeker wrote: post #734
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.

>Punishing those in privilege is how you achieve equality. Tall poppy syndrome. Destroying things does not create things. You can drop a nuclear bomb on silicon valley and punish lots of privilege. It's not going to achieve any notion of equality.

Not talking about destruction. Only redistribution.

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

#929

Post by droithomme »

stale2002 wrote: post #927
cycrutchfield wrote: post #924

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear about your poor educational experience.

I means, it's the educational experience of top colleges, such as Carnegie Mellon, that I attended. This includes the engineering, math, CS, and social sciences class that I took.

I went to Stanford and yeah much of the time was learning the material, then preparing for tests by reviewing material and studying. There was also doing projects, researching, and writing papers arguing various positions and analyzing things. As well as some novel research.

It's very strange to hear people here saying all these things are dumb or foolish or something, and good colleges are not like this at all and this is a "poor educational experience". OK, well, what was their school like then? They don't say. Details and names of schools are omitted from the posts of the critics. Are they talking about the drinking and sex at party schools? Or maybe the football games they attended? That is all fine but I don't usually include that when talking about the academic experience per se. Right, studying, learning and preparing for tests is not about those things, true. But so?

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

#930

Post by munmaek »

repolfx wrote: post #841
munmaek wrote: post #830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody intrinsically wants it. Nobody wants to go to school and then study until 7,9,11pm. Nobody wants to go to 3-6 private academies after school, every day, in order to study very hard to pass the 수능 college entrance exam. Nobody wants to study to an excruciating degree in order to have a chance to get into one of the top 3 universities, in order to have a good chance of being hired by the top 재벌[0] corporations l…

I think we are maybe discussing slightly different things: you're talking about Koreans in Korea, whereas I had in mind Asians and more specifically Koreans in the western world where they and their children frequently excel relative to native people who work less hard. This is a discussion about the SAT and not the 수능 exam after all. User intertextuality proposed that maybe the SAT should be adjusted so it "doesn't…

There's a difference in normal studying for a deadline (which just sucks) versus studying all day, every day, to the extent that Korean-Koreans do. I have no idea about American-Koreans. Both countries have big standardized tests (SAT, 수능) but the SAT is nowhere near as important as the 수능.

I do think standardized testing is fundamentally broken, but for mass-grading of people there's no other real alternative I suppose. However, I don't think the SAT's job should also be trying to account for systemic issues in America and life.

Instead, college admission boards should look at background as well as SAT scores. I believe they do this already, but SAT scores should be even less emphasized. Beyond a very minimum level I don't think it's a really good indicator of a person at all.

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