of course, and many argue that conventional college isn't worth the money. Schooling has always been about jumping through hoops, weeding people out, conforming to the system. Those who play ball inside academia excel at it.
I did not study for my SAT. I did not do great. A long time friend who I consider to be one of my intellectual peers, did study, got a great SAT score, went to college, worked the system and now we both work the same job. None of this is scientific, this is just my experience, however I have always had the feeling that people who excel at following the rules of schools obviously do better in that type of system.
> This move feels almost as though it was intended to stir up unnecessary controversy.
I mean probably not, otherwise they would let the students see the scores.
I think it was put there to help the elite colleges defeat the lawsuits against them by being able to say, "see, we used an objective measure of hardship from a third party!".
The value of the diploma is directly linked to the value of the college. When you break it down a college diploma is only worth as much as the reputation of the college.
What about the education itself? Do the awesome professors actually teach? Are the social circles at the college going to lead the student where they want to go in life? What about potentially-burdensome loans at the end of it?
I think we need to get away from the idea of college admissions as a tournament with Harvard at the top. "Good" depends on many things and different students may best be served by different universities.
I wonder how much of the correlation between income and SAT scores is due to wealthier people's children just being more intelligent, rather than due to having access to better education.
The FBI only busted them because a person they were investigating for a completely separate issue told them about this in hopes to get a more lenient sentence. So yes, it is the system working, but we got very lucky the FBI stumbled upon this information.
As you say, the FBI busted the scam which went on for years (decades?) and the colleges all say they had no idea about it, right? So his claim that the colleges weren't able to suss this out is absolutely correct in 100% of all known cases, right?
its not so much 'sussing out tricks' as a blanket ban on anything that can be abused. My parents made roughly 100k when I was going to school but they were terrible with money and have a lot of children. The 'expected contribution' was actually quite high but I never received anything from my parents at all. Thus, I have much in the way of student loans.
Not to take away from your point but the colleges having to work against these sort of tricks has a lot of unintended consequences.
This is already happening. The difference is that it's only happening at elite schools that take a "holistic" approach to admissions already. Now, less elite schools will join in the fun.
None of that’s going to make any difference. Let’s be real here, it’s going to be based on race alone (and perhaps being gay or trans). White or Asian? You don’t suffer any adversity. Black or Hispanic? Congratulations, your score just improved by 200 points.
This just sounds like the SAT board doing what school admissions boards already do: decreasing or increasing scores based on race.
How do they determine one’s race in the US? Is there a central database where everyone gets a record at birth? Otherwise what stops me from reporting myself as black?
Nothing, although if colleges accepted you under the assumption that you reported who you were honestly, and then later found out that you weren’t who you claimed to be, you might find your acceptances revoked.
How would they find out my race? Based on the looks? So they would count Michael Jackson as “white”? What if a person looks white but has black ancestors?
Probably not. I remember a story of someone who did this [0] and nothing happened.
I can only imagine the terrifyingly embarrassing situations where people of a race are challenged to prove their race and flip out because they are their race.
The Census collects racial information that most people answer with responses they believe to be truthful. IIRC in WW2 it was used to identify Japanese-Americans for internment.
How would you reliably capture race, or sexual orientation, or gender identification — or even income — on a self-reported metric with no third-party validation? They aren't talking about sending the College Board your tax returns.
Realistically, this will be based on ZIP code and registered high school. Information that's already publicly-available. This changes nothing except potentially making neighborhood-level affirmative action more politically palatable.
I do believe with just a few pieces of the information they're taking into consideration (namely, neighborhood, if you have a single parent, and if you're ESL [not sure if they're talking about the child being ESL or the parents]) you could reliably determine if the child is black or Hispanic and therefore worthy of an adversity score boost. Everyone else, get stuffed. They may also be making a big show of using these factors that "technically" don't identify the test taker's race and instead are just disregarding them and relying solely on the self-reported racial information provided when taking the test. Who knows? But I highly doubt you'll find a lot of poor white kids in West Virginia getting boosted scores via this scheme.
Thanks for the link. I would honestly be quite astounded if they were using individual-level reporting instead of using public data captured at the census tract level. Do you have any information about where the "family-level" data are coming from?
> But I highly doubt you'll find a lot of poor white kids in West Virginia getting boosted scores via this scheme.
That is exactly what I expect to happen - as well as poor kids who happen to belong to racial minorities. The College Board published the criteria they will use to calculate the score. Race is not one of the criteria. But you're saying that race will not only be used, but be the primary criteria. So, let's be clear: you're saying the College Board is lying. Which, I can't prove they are not, but I'm inclined to trust them over your claims.
Thanks. CBS seems much better than the NYT on this.
Quote:
These factors are first divided into three categories: neighborhood environment, family environment and high school environment.
Each of the three categories has five sub-indicators that are indexed in calculating each student's adversity score. Neighborhood environment will take into account crime rate, poverty rate, housing values and vacancy rate. Family environment will assess what the median income is of where the student's family is from; whether the student is from a single parent household; the educational level of the parents; and whether English is a second language. High school environment will look at factors such as curriculum rigor, free-lunch rate and AP class opportunities. Together these factors will calculate an individual's adversity score on a scale of one to 100.
Just to nitpick a bit, race is one of the optional criteria. The school decides whether they want the College Board to include it.
"The program aimed to measure the challenges students faced. It created an expected SAT score based on socioeconomic factors including, if schools chose to add it, race." [1]
> It would be calculated using 15 factors, like the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood. The score would not be reported to the student, only to college officials.
None of those suggest they're linked to individual actions like your examples are -- and that makes sense since the SAT can know the student's schools and addresses but little else.
And I don't think sending your kid to a worse school is gaming the system... because they'll probably do worse.
This adversity score is advertized so that it will help out poorer and more abused students, in an emperical way.
But what this is actually telling schools is if the person is rich-ish or not. Basically, can this family pay the bills and are they likely to attend football games and be donating alumni?
Call me cynical, but if anything, this is going to further segregate the schools towards the rich-ish.
This will give schools a guise under which they can say: 'Look, we're diverse!' But it will allow the space (and the ML inputs) for the schools to maximize profits.
I know that you are very unlikely to be able to maximize all diversity at once. Like, admitting more black women may come at the cost of matriculation rates for transgender people, or more Hispanic people in STEM classes may come at the cost of Asian people in humanties courses, etc. Nothing is perfect.
"Neighborhood environment will take into account crime rate, poverty rate, housing values and vacancy rate. Family environment will assess what the median income is of where the student's family is from; whether the student is from a single parent household; the educational level of the parents; and whether English is a second language. High school environment will look at factors such as curriculum rigor, free-lunch rate and AP class opportunities."
These are hard to game, and in many cases if you do game them it's a "Mission Fucking Accomplished" situation. Most billionaires are not willing to move into a high-crime, high-poverty neighborhood with shitty housing, nor are they willing to put their kids in bad schools with poor people. If they are, great, that neighborhood probably won't stay poor with shitty schools for long.
> Most billionaires are not willing to move into a high-crime, high-poverty neighborhood with shitty housing
sure, but I don't think any existing laws would prevent them from just buying a second house in a bad part of their home town and using that address for applications and I can't see how the College Board could reliably detect this.
Your primary residence is listed on your tax returns and determines which school district you're entitled to attend. Misrepresenting it can result in criminal charges, and schools do check:
They'd have a tough time explaining to colleges why their transcript is from Good School District Across Town when they listed their address as Dumpy Neighborhood With Bad Schools.
Residency scams are a long-standing issue around Boston and in Boston itself (parents of suburban kids attempting to get their kids into exam schools like Boston Latin). This article explains the difficulties and expenses associated with catching families trying to get around the residency requirements: https://www.patriotledger.com/x792538354/Quincy-schools-crac...
Rich people go to private schools so they don’t care what address have. Buying a $5k shithole house in your same city and county won’t affect your taxes and won’t affect school distribution so no one is investigating that except the SAT police.
So the San Francisco school district gives priority to certain neighborhoods roughly based these criteria and gentrification has been a problem. Wealthy folks move into historically poor neighborhoods and benefit from lagging statistics in school choice.
>> Anne Zimmerman, a stay-at-home parent and writer, had what others call, sometimes derisively, the “golden ticket.” She and her husband, who works in advertising, moved into their two-bedroom rental in the Potrero Hill neighborhood a decade ago, without realizing their address granted them priority in the school lottery.
>> This year, their daughter, Vera, was offered admission to their first-choice kindergarten, one of the most requested in the city. The school is 37 percent white and 21 percent low-income. Districtwide, 15 percent of students are white and 55 percent are low-income.
I don't get the point of this. The SAT is never used by colleges outside of the context of the applicant's background. I have full faith that there's nothing College Board can add to knowledge of an applicant that admissions committees don't already factor in.
So I think that it is OK to be taking these factors into account at the college admissions level, but I am not sure if the "neutral test administration organization" is the correct place for this to be at.
This is a very thorny issue, and I am uncomfortable with a centralized organization influencing it to such a large degree.
Whether, and how much, to take into account these factors should be a local decision made by the college itself.
I would imagine that elite schools won't rely on this very heavily, but not every school has the resources to do a "holistic" admissions process, and not every student has the desire to go through such a process.
The problem with doing it at the admission level is you have to adjust ALL admissions processes. Doing it at the SAT level avoids the problem where disadvantaged kids are cut off by hard score limits right at the start of the process.
It could also be used to signal to schools which kids are likely to need some remedial classes in the first year despite what they scored on the SAT. Of course one can imagine a scenario where the admissions looks at the adversity score to weed out kids who they don't think are going to be prepared regardless of how smart they are.
This whole process assumes that the universities are interested in reforming the kids that the school system failed in the first place.
This seems fine if you wanted to use the SAT to measure an outcome for a given level of inputs. If all you actually care about is the actual outcome though, then this doesn't actually help.
I guess there could be both use cases for test scores, given that higher education might actually find itself more concerned with showing improvement as an important metric. They might prefer students that show more aptitude for a given level of input, moreso than the total aptitude achieved.
I constantly hear employers mentioning that same desire - to have "lifelong learners" are employees. I have to believe at some level that there is some desire for a measure of absolute capability, too.
Past adversity is in the past. So if someone grew up in a poor environment but you're thinking of admitting them to a good college on full scholarship, they'll soon be progressing at the rate they're capable of without the adversity.
So the best predictor of future success in a good environment probably does include a correction for past adversity.
Correlation between two factors doesn't tell you how to compare two sets of values. Kids who have to work after school until bedtime won't get as good grades in HS, but if no longer made to do so, may perform substantially better in college.
And that's the key. You're positing that the disadvantage magically stops in university.
I work in law school admissions prep, and you see these disadvantages all the way down the line: SAT, college grades, LSAT, law school grades, Bar exam passage rate
There are some cases where it stops. Maybe the college board can identify which variables may indicate a poor correlation. There might be some factors that indicate transient issues and some that indicate worse lifelong expectations.
But I'd be cautious about too readily assuming that a cause of a lower SAT will vanish in later life.
Actually, I should have been specific: you see disadvantages related to ethnic group down the line. If a group has a lower SAT score, they generally have the same gap on the LSAT, GRE, GMAT etc.
This is heavily related to socioeconomic status in the US. IIRC, in the UK for example you don't see these same gaps between ethnic groups. So it's something specific to US social circumstances, and not racial.
I don't know so much about particular circumstances, I just know what the high level stats say, and am inferring from that. I'm not American, so I don't have lived experience of the class structure there.
There are probably studies about income, but the test makers tend to only collect official data about ethnicity. It's commonly used as a proxy for social class, but I wish the test makers had better data about the elements the College Board is trying to capture with this new policy.
It's about one standard deviation between high scoring groups and low scoring groups across the tests.
LSAC no longer has theirs posted publicly, but it was much the same.
So, to the extent ethnicity is a proxy for social class in the US, we can say that the disadvantage these groups have at SAT time doesn't vanish by the time they take graduate level exams.
I wish I had some data for you that was based on social circumstances other than race, but I don't have deep knowledge in the domain, only what I've seen looking at the reports produced by the test companies recently.
I'm not trying to say there's no correlation from some subgroups. Obviously there is.
I'm trying to say that if you're trying to predict performance in a new environment (college) you can improve the prediction by correcting for factors (bad home environment during high school) that affect current test scores but won't be active in the future.
How large the correction should be can only be answered by large population studies.
Good point. It would be extremely useful to be able to pinpoint factors that are transient vs. those that stay with someone and continue to affect future performance..
1) Why do you think their circumstances will change once they're in University?
2) There is the assumption that the environment in which you grew up in does not permanently affect the way you learn, while many studies have proven this to be untrue. The most critical years shaping the way you learn is in the younger years. Once you're past that, there is no way you can "make up" for it just by going to a better college.
A radical solution I believe is to completely subsidize all education and child rearing costs, such that every child will at least have the necessary basic conditions needed for them to excel. Of course, parents are always going to try and give their kids an edge, but at some point there'll be diminishing marginal returns. To relieve pressure on governmental funding, another radical idea is to couple this with an upper limit on the number of children you can have, so people will not "overburden" the system by having too many children.
1) For most selective colleges, they'll be living in a different neighborhood or different city, in a college dorm instead of their house, with classmates instead of parents & siblings. So almost everything is different.
2) Sure. Environment has both short-term and long-term effects. So a fraction of the environmental effects wear off. I dunno what the fraction is, but when you do the regression to find the weighting of SAT test score and adversity score that best predicts college achievement, it should find the right balance.
How does one determine how large the correction should be? Since the system is all opaque and political, what prevents one from setting a correction factor of 10x, making sure no child of --bourgeois-- middle-class parents will ever set foot in an university? Such a policy was implemented in Eastern Europe under occupation by Stalin's armies in the aftermath of WWII. The economic and social results became quite apparent a few decades later, when the whole system collapsed.
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 want to distance themselves from and wrap it up in an opaque package so that they're not actually considering anything legally risky in their admissions decisions. This is potentially valuable to institutions that want to have affirmative action style admissions without risking the ire of state legislators.
I think you're overestimating the taxes paid by a shell office (it's not uncommon for dozens/hundreds of organizations to use the same small office suite, staffed by a single receptionist).
Fancy private school in expensive neighborhood registers their official address in a poor neighborhood, and calls the school in the 'nice' neighborhood a "satellite campus".
I was talking to someone who's been involved in elite university admissions, and gaming for the city/neighborhood/HS has been a known tactic for a while.
There's a related tactic for people in affluent suburbs, for getting their child into urban school districts with an especially well-regarded primary public school: buy a house or condo in the city, and try to make it look on your application like that's your primary residence.
Depending on where you live, the break-even point of doing this versus a private school can be under 2 kids (and is usually under 3 kids), so you save quite a bit of money.
Money. Private schools can be $40K or more (after taxes) per child per year. You can get a lot of real estate for that money instead in a lot of markets.
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 ahead. It’s an insult to hard working people across the spectrum.
Sure, and every non-privileged person who gets in also hurts others who are in the same situation, since they have taken up a spot. The difference is in this case there is an actual policy which is actively punishing people for being in a perceived state of privilege.
You can also give resources to those who aren't in privilege so they are able to succeed academically, and don't need to have their admission average artificially lowered.
Giving resources is also a zero-sum game. When you're giving more resources to those that aren't privileged, you are in effect denying those same resources for those that are.
For example, school admissions. We can provide more funding for underperforming schools, but that is also less funding going towards better performing schools. At a certain point you will have to accept that to help the poor it will mean cutting off certain benefits for more well-off. Then the discussion becomes around how much resources should be shifted around.
No. If I can afford to provide my own resources, I’m okay with this. Just like I’m okay paying for social security but not receiving any when I retire. Those that have more resources can afford to take less than those that don’t have enough resources themselves.
What I’m not okay with is adjusting scores and denying opportunity because of economic class warfare.
Those that have more resources have historically spent significant amounts of those resources to ensure that they pay in as little of them to anyone else as possible.
Wow punishing those in privilege creates equality. The logic “progressive” american politics is pursuing is truly scary and broken.
Hating the rich is hate.
If you really loved the poor you would think how to help them lift themselves up. Holding down the top both doesn’t work and is deeply unethical.
College board should provide free tutoring and review classes based of their adversity score instead.
I can’t image this scheme
won’t be challenged in courts. Especially the keeping secret the score, imagine if your credit score was kept secret and this will effect their lives more than credit score.
As I have said in other comments, next we need an Unattractiveness Score as we know physical traits have high correlation and causation to success and wealth, clearly a privilege and creating inequality.
Tax credits for the ugly. Mandatory minor face disfigurement for the overly beautiful or handsome.
Very scary developments. America is under true threat to its future with this politics.
Does anyone honestly believe the only way to provide that advantage is to fake their score? That kind of lazy thinking is what needs an adversity score to be considered good.
HARRISON BERGERON by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213 th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
I can kinda see why you say that, my best guess is if I delete references to politics and progressive, american etc, then you might see it as less an issue.
The comment I was replying to was pretty absurd wording of punishments.
Anyway it’s always a little hard to know exactly how to interpret the guidelines as there is quite a bit of subjectivity.
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?
Do you donate your extra money to charity or do you save some for your future? If you have the privilege of being able to save some money for your future, shame on you! There are people starving and you’re amassing your wealth?
>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.
I’ve worked my ass off for nearly 30 years, as has my wife. We are both smart and very hard working and it paid off. My roots are middle class at best. My parents are immigrants and were extremely poor as children but they also worked hard and went from poverty to middle class.
I’m teaching my children to work hard and be good people and contribute to this world.
How pray tell am I benefiting from “pre-rigging”? I’ve made solid decisions throughout my life and sacrificed to be where I am today.
Now I’m being told that my children will be at a disadvantage for college because my wife and I worked hard our entire careers and succeeded. That’s hogwash. Absolute hogwash and I’m furious.
So, some kids from crappy schools and neighborhoods will get into college, when they might not otherwise, presumably taking the place of you/your children, who have “made solid decisions” and “worked my ass off for 30 years” who deserve it more? Because you/they worked harder?
People who work hard deserve the fruits of their labor, regardless of their economic status. I have no problems with economically disadvantaged hard working people getting into great colleges, I have problems with equally hardworking people being disadvantaged because their parents are successful.
Wouldn’t you agree that two people who achieve the same score on the test may not have worked equally hard? If someone scored the same as your child, except they didn’t have good security, good quality schools, parents that could help them, etc, I would say that they in fact worked much harder than your children.
And by the logic of “those who worked harder deserve it more”, well I think you see where this is going.
If anything this adversity score IS making things more fair because it’s providing light to the extra challenges someone might have had and thus who indeed worked harder at it.
We don’t know if they worked harder or not. It’s almost impossible to determine if the reason for any particular success is good teachers, hard work, or genetics.
If this score was unrealistically perfect and able to accurately account for every possible detail, maybe. If instead it just does a cheap job of assuming anyone with a certain set of data points is at a major disadvantage, nope.
The test claims to be measuring a students ability to learn in the first place, not just their current knowledge, so why not aim to make that more accurate instead of bypassing it?
The subject area is the SAT, a test, which is imperfect like all tests, with research which indicates that it's actually problematic for such a diverse country like the USA. So a test like the SAT, which boils down to a single number. Yes that's the subject.
And now they're making the results 2 numbers. The test and some, well known summary of information about the student.
And THIS, THIS is the bridge too far?
Honestly, do you even hear yourself? What should a third party think about your words? Perhaps you could help me and provide a back story of how you've been in opposition to the SAT for a long time, and how this just reinforces a flawed test.
But nope, it sure does seem like you're focusing in on how this test might provide opportunities to black and brown people.
But I'm sure that's not that, because it's hackernews, and we are so polite to each other and reasonable.
So, tell me again why the SAT is good, but SAT + adversity score is bad?
But the richer children are inherently privileged, yet you think providing privilege to poorer children is immoral. Why is one acceptable but the other is not?
• 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 free to spend your resources to ensure their maximum opportunity.
Take a break from your "I gotta get mine before anyone else gets any!" attitude, and walk a mile in my shoes.
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 hard and I had better opportunities because of that.
What if government took that reward away from them? Well, surprise surprise, it did (just in another country in another era).
_you_ have a choice too: either to take the hand that’s dealt you and move forward, or complain about how others had it better because of their parents, or their own actions.
I’ve had a lot of ups and downs in my life due to circumstances as well as choices I made. I don’t blame other people for what happened to me (but I will blame government services being complete shit, especially towards veterans).
This isn’t a perfect world, so don’t complain what others get that you don’t have. Work towards making the world better instead, without destroying what others have worked hard for in the meantime.
They will NOT be at a disadvantage for college; they will still be at an advantage, because of all the opportunities you have given them. They may be at a slightly smaller advantage than now; is that terrible?
Again, i think this is more like the inner city kid who gets a 700 on the SAT math section vs a privileged kid who gets an 800. They aren't letting in talent less hacks just cause they are poor.
If the status quo systematically oppresses one group and benefits another, the beneficiaries of said system will perceive any change to the status quo that would reduce the oppression of the former group as an unfair attack.
Nope, not going to play this ridiculous game. And this is a game. I don’t know how or why the modern left started employing the rhetorical tactics mastered by Lenin but here we are.
But it's not systemic oppression. The system doesn't try to keep poor people poor or uneducated. Do poor people have it harder? Yes, but they have many of the same opportunities available to them. The modern world is rich in information that is freely taught. College is signaling in large part, but there are plenty of opprobrious right now where skill beats signaling.
I'm not sure about ascribing desires to 'the system', but let me do so. The system does try to keep some/many people poor and uneducated in many different ways.
If you want the most egregious examples, look at how we treat(ed?) blacks and Native Americans ... the system decreed blacks could be slaves up until one generation ago; the system decreed they would get way less legal rights up until 2 generations ago; the system decreed they would not get loans for housing up until at most one generation ago; the system currently harrasses them and puts them in prison ... many features of our school system seems designed to keep poor people uneducated.
Many times it is harder to see what is currently going on; so, if you want a more blatant current example, right now, the system is keeping undocumented immigrants poor and uneducated on purpose.
>The system doesn't try to keep poor people poor or uneducated.
The system doesn't have motives. Individual behavior can give rise to systemic oppression with no top level design goals needed.
If we take a look at Black people specifically:
Black sounding last names are half as likely to receive callbacks for job interviews. Black people are more likely to be arrested, convicted, and receive longer sentences for committing the same crimes as White people. It's harder for Black people to find housing. Its even harder for them to rent vacation properties.
Black children even receive harsher punishments for the same infractions in elementary school.
All of these things put together mean that yes, they are systemically oppressed, and the system is currently keeping them poorer and less educated. Exceptional individuals will overcome this oppression, but reinforcing feedback loops ensure that if something isn't done to break the cycle, it will continue, and as a class Black people will always be at a disadvantage.
I mean if we reversed this plan and said students from rich areas get bonus points on their SATs, wouldn't poor areas call it an unfair attack? Does that somehow prove that rich kids are systemtically oppressed? This vague statement is not some kind of proof of oppression, it's just wordplay.
"If you have a problem with changing the status quo, in a situation where the change would make you lose something, take extra time to examine whether it was justified for the status quo to give you that thing in the first place."
>>I don’t know why my family should be punished because my wife and I worked our asses off to get ahead.
Just to offer some general commentary, I think this mentality is probably the root of most of our social ills: people see everything as a "race" and they work hard to "get ahead", and they therefore get angry at policies that attempt to even the playing field because it might help others "catch up".
It's not an anger at helping others catch up, but an anger at pulling people back. We can help people who are behind without sacrificing the people who are already ahead.
Isn't it both? There are only X spots per school. Every person being helped up and admitted is someone being pulled back and denied. I have no opinion on this debate, but school admissions are a zero-sum-game, afaik.
Oh in terms of something like money, taking X dollars from the richest and using it to help the poorest is extremely positive sum.
This might be true for college admissions too, if you're flush with opportunities you're still ahead if you lose one.
But there's still an aspect of "pulling people back". It's a hard tradeoff to design. But if you do it right you really can make something with better outcomes and more fairness, even if some will call it an abomination.
Colleges aren't a zero sum game. The more qualified college goers there are over time, the more total college spots will be available. It's not like the number of universities (and the size of each) is some fixed constant. The entire pie can be, and is, grown.
I'm sure it is the root of many social ills, but the alternative is the root of many more social ills. The competitive struggle is what drives people to be productive. Without that, people don't attempt very much. Attempts to level the playing field cause widespread corruption as people evade the restrictions on competition. The lack of productivity is then fixed by the use of force.
To be fair, this is kind of impressed on people when so many are judged by the name of the school on their diploma or a score they received in the first quarter of their life. There's no guarantee a Harvard accepted child will have a happier life than someone "destined" to be a fast food cashier, but when we pressure young kids with so much judgment before they even experience life, it feels like a race from the start.
Couple this with the lack of class mobility and sometimes people feel participating in that race was the only way to control your future.
Choosing to get a fake divorce so that you can game the system as much as possible isn't punishment; it's probably fraud. You could also choose to relax and let your children enjoy all the other benefits of a great upbringing, and accept that "the children of hardworking parents should be more likely to be admitted" isn't a design goal of the admissions system.
The federally & state funded public Universities that will fall over each other to employ adversity scores as a pillar of their academic life, on the other hand... One can attempt to outsource responsibility from a legalistic perspective, but from a moral perspective one can't escape it.
That seems like quite a stretch to rationalize why a private entity making decisions about its internal processes is actually government mandated overreach.
I recently heard of a high earning family that bought a rental/investment property in EPA, then when their kid got into the Tinsley program (school busing from EPA to Palo Alto/Menlo/Portola/Woodside) they decided to move there full time. Their kid now goes to a fancy school and they live in a development in EPA near Facebook HQ. So to all the naysayers, people are already doing crazy stuff like this to help their kids.
School zoning is a pretty insanely high-stakes thing, and other parents will absolutely rat them out and provide evidence. Parents have been jailed for using an address they don't live at - https://abcnews.go.com/US/ohio-mom-jailed-sending-kids-schoo...
Sure, that's when you're publicly defrauding a school, and other parents know that you don't really live there. It would be much easier to game this system since you are only reporting your address to the College Board, and no other students/parents would have reason to know that you're not reporting valid information.
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 at Apple/Google[1]? I read library books and watch Khan Academy, but no one in my family ever went to college. Why does my parents’ achievement have a fundamental impact on my opportunities?
Somehow we have to aim for equality of opportunity. It’s difficult to achieve but can’t we agree on this as a goal? Opportunity should not be inherited. My kids are as good as yours, as the next person’s, independent of how hard we worked.
[1] hyperbole. Saratoga parents from UCLA/CMU who work at Netflix/NVIDIA I’m talking about you too.
I disagree on this as a goal.
Some things take generations: my great-grandparents had a good standing back in pre-war Europe. Then the war came and my grandparents escaped to South America - not great. My parents got up to high school level education. I got a B.Sc. Maybe my kid will go farther.
The underlying problem is that we're trying to ration something that shouldn't be this scarce.
If everybody wants to go to Harvard then why can't they expand the school and accept more students?
Because the same brand of metrics trolls who are screwing this up have also screwed up in the school rankings by making schools rank better if they reject more applicants, so now the schools optimize for that.
This is a good point. I think the their intent here is fine, but it seems like the wrong way to go about opening up more opportunities to people who start with somewhat of a disadvantage.
In any case, I don't think you should have to graduate from a prestigious college to find work that helps you live a good life. Maybe this involves making a place like Harvard accept more students, or maybe it involves improving the quality and our perceptions of middle and lower-tier universities. I don't know.
> If everybody wants to go to Harvard then why can't they expand the school
Well, you can only physically expand a single school so far, but I get what you mean. I think the bigger problem is this concept of “elite universities” and this sort of credential signaling that seems to matter so much. Honestly, I can’t tell how much it really does matter. I went to Valdosta State University (never heard of it? Nope, neither has anybody else), but have worked with Harvard and MIT grads who respected my opinion and treated me as an equal. My 15 year old son, who I’ve never really pushed too hard to worry about getting into a “good” college worries about it anyway, because everybody he knows is worrying about it. He says things like, “If I don’t do well on this test, I’m going to end up going to Texas Tech” and I think, “Hell, Texas Tech is better than where I went to college, and I’m doing fine… should I tell him not to worry so much or encourage him to shoot for the top-ranked colleges?”
By the time you hit the SAT it's too late. If you aren't qualified enough to do well on the SAT then, you are going to struggle and hold classmates back more-so than the peer you displaced would have.
Offer free additional after-school programs, etc in high school to solve the problem. You don't make a slow runner faster by moving the finish line closer for him/her.
We should maintain some real alternate paths for kids for whom this timing is bad.
I grew up on on welfare and left school at 15. Was smart but troubled. Worked dumb jobs for a while. Benefitted from enlightened admissions policy and eventually graduated from $VERYGOODSCHOOL. I worked hard and did just fine. My kids are privileged and my late career is fun and rewarding. I want to do all I can to pass on these opportunities to the next generation of kids like me.
Life is not fair, by the time you are six the number of distinct words you have heard varies drastically depending on your parents socio-economic status and education. The answer should be to extend the SAT with an IQ test, those are robust to environmental factors as twin studies have shown. Maybe you can couple that with a subject specific aptitude test. But also there is largely no equality of opportunity, because you never had a chance to change your genetics in the first place.
> But also there is largely no equality of opportunity, because you never had a chance to change your genetics in the first place.
We are probably hundreds of years away from solving all other factors besides genetics, which have an influence on SAT (or whatever equivalent other countries have), so this doesn't seem like a huge problem right now.
We can talk about genetics again when we've fixed everything else.
> Why does my parents’ achievement have a fundamental impact on my opportunities?
Because they are your parents and they will have an impact on your life whether you like it or not, right down from the genes you inherit to the kind of people you hang out with. So yes there achievement will have an impact on your opportunities.
What you want can only happen when parents are no longer associated with their children in any way and all children are raised by the State so that everyone can be provided "equal opportunities" and even then the type of genes you inherit will impact your opportunities because although social inequality has been removed, biological inequalities can never be removed.
So no your children or not equal to anybody else's children and yes what you do in life will have an impact on your children's life that's how life works.
> You want the kids of rich people to win the next generation unquestioned?
I am not the person you were replying to, but no.
However, the person who wins should be the more qualified person based on merit not based on some standard of suffering. Just because you had a harder environment does not mean you are more qualified than someone with an easier environment.
I agree completely. But there should be some heterogeneity available in the routes to success. Not all bright kids are ready and trained for the SATs. I was not and luckily I found another route in 1990s England. I’m trying to keep some alternate routes open.
> However, the person who wins should be the more qualified person based on merit
This has never been the case and will never be the case as long as some people are rich and other are poor. A "standard of suffering" tries to show that. Maybe it's a bad idea, but the current system is extremely bad, so people who dismiss this better come up with a better alternative.
Probably the best/ most ubiquitous method we have right now.
It would be trivial to improve our tests of merit compared to the almost impossible task of testing how well a student would do free from environmental factors.
>What you want can only happen when parents are no longer associated with their children in any way and all children are raised by the State so that everyone can be provided "equal opportunities" and even then the type of genes you inherit will impact your opportunities because although social inequality has been removed, biological inequalities can never be removed.
This is one of the weariest types of hyperbolic strawmanning typically employed in discussions of unequal backgrounds, opportunities, etc.
Literally nobody wishes for this imaginary future you're presenting. Not the comment you're responding to, likely not even the staunchest of activists against social injustice.
The question is, do we see children with potential not being able to utilize it because of happenstance, as a problem? Is it fair that a child from a better-off family is more likely to enter better academic institutions regardless of their merit? Should we not help disadvantaged kids?
Of course you can throw your arms up into the air and say "life isn't fair", and hold people responsible for the situation they were born into - but right now we're having this discussion, and we can make decisions and change these things. What if there's a better way?
(PS: Standardized Adveristy Scores don't exactly sound like the better way though.)
> Is it fair that a child from a better-off family is more likely to enter better academic institutions regardless of their merit?
At the point of admission, the merits of our two imaginary college kids are not same, even if they started out "the same". The current system, that only looks at objective test scores, is actually blind to anything but merit.
You seem to be making the same strawman mistake you described: No one claims that rich kids can buy their way into elite schools, but rather that they can buy better education along the way.
This concept equal opportunities by separating children from their parents is something that Plato explored quite a lot with the concept of the guardians, with some rather absurd suggestions which was likely given as both a commentary on the problem and criticism of the aristocratic society. If I remember right this is a central theme in Utopia.
Philip K dick also had a short story called Progeny with a similar theme, but here exploring it from the perspective of psychology.
Truth is, college admissions from Saratoga is a blood bath with so many over qualified, over worked, over stressed kids. If you are the oddball kid in a worse school and worse neighborhood and you're motivated enough to watch Khan Academy you are going stand out and do great, whether you end up at SJSU or Stanford.
There are so many online resources and free tutors out their nowadays for high school students, and it is only getting better.
We can't control your upbringing or the opportunities your parents give you completely though. People think the material opportunities given by parents is not fair, but think that the emotional or social opportunities of parents is. If my parents were emotionally abusive, but I grew up rich, should they rig the SAT to show that? How would they even measure that?
In a perfect world outcomes would only be determined by genetics, and the environmental factors would not play into life at all. We don't live in that world, and it would be impossible to replicate it. There are too many variables to be able to measure who deserves what beyond a merit based system.
Look at it another way, would it be fair for a high school/ college sport to artificially raise and lower rankings based on upbringing or environment? Should players with significant coaching be lowered in the rankings, and poor players be raised? I don't think so.
I went to Stanford with full financial aid (apparently says something about my financials). I didn’t have to work to support the family, but I didn’t have private tutoring either, and my parents didn’t help me with my homework. I didn’t feel punished at all compared to kids who have everything in the world at their disposal; in fact, knowledge in my brain is about the last thing in the world that’s affected by my family’s socioeconomic status, and standardized testing, with all its problems, is about the fairest thing in this unfair society. Now tell me why you want to ruin the fairest thing by giving kids who have equal access to resources as I did an edge just because their parents earn a few grands less. Oh, while we’re at it, apparently I have above-average intelligence, which largely came from my parents’ DNA; should I be punished for that too?
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.
> 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.
And that's why thet won't reveal the detailed factors, the time windows over which they are evaluated, and their weighting.
> 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.
They don't. In fact, that seems to be exactly the problem this addresses, since with this the SAT would no longer be boiling kids into a single number, and it would be incorporating more context than the status quo.
"The rating will not affect students’ test scores, and will be reported only to college admissions officials as part of a larger package of data on each test taker."
Do what you want, but it doesn't seem like this will be any different from writing about adversity in an application essay. Schools can choose how much they want to weigh the score.
It always gets ugly. I had a (well-off, white) friend use another friend's address to get into the high school I went to. He ended up at Princeton so I guess it worked well for him. No one did anything about it. The case in 2011 where an Ohio woman (Kelley Williams-Bolar) was sentenced to a short jail sentence and 3 years probation and asked to pay $30000 to the school because she did the same thing has come up in the news again. She's black of course. There's that guy who paid $400,000 to get his kid into Georgetown as a tennis player who is now suing Georgetown 'cause they had the gall to expel his kid. It's all a matter of how much you can pay for a lawyer after your crime/gaming of the system.
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.
Presumably the SAT is meant to indicate a student's likelihood for success in a university setting; surely bumping up the scores of students based on how likely they are to be unprepared is counterproductive? This seems like it's going to set underprivileged students up for failure and deprive well-prepared students of an opportunity, no?
If a poor kid goes to a shitty school and has life impediments that limit the amount of studying and preparation they do and still scores a 1300, is that kid any less capable than a rich kid who goes to a private school and has all the opportunity in the world and gets 1500?
the original word choice was "prepared", which has a different meaning from "capable". if the poor kid never took calculus in high school and the rich kid already understands integration, that's probably two whole college semesters behind on a STEM track. there's no way you could say they're at the same level of preparedness for college. as for "capable", who knows?
Well, someone has to prop up the humanities. Universities are supposed to be communities of scholars. They aren't job training centers. Unless some students are persuaded to pursue less-career-oriented majors, all our universities would soon into polytechnics.
I chose the Calc I/II sequence as a concrete example that would be familiar to the large number of STEM majors on this forum. my point works just as well if you substitute "reading skills" for "calculus" and "humanities" for "STEM".
I don't think the factor is for kids who did poorly. This is a bonus (AFAICT) added on top of a reasonable test result. One that indicates that the student had some hardship that they overcame to get the result. Which should make the result count more as the kid had to go through more to get it done.
Who's more impressive on average? Students with a 1200 SAT in an area with low crime and upper middle class income, or students with a 1200 SAT in an area with high crime and low income? There's a presumption that the latter probably had external challenges to overcome.
Does this mean an additional number is going to be supplied alongside the individual test scores and overall score, or that the overall score will be a sum that includes an adversity score? In other words, is the article using "adding" in the sense of numbers or the sense of sets?
EDIT:
The Journal reported that this new score will appear alongside a student's SAT score and will be featured in a section labeled the "Environmental Context Dashboard."
What if the former scores 1220 and the latter 1200? That's the concerning case, IMO. If both kids scored 1200, I'm indifferent as to whether a desirable school offers admission to 0, 1, or both of them.
I think broadly, the SATs aim to provide some independent consistent data points a school can use to determine the desirability to admit certain students vs. others.
You're thinking academic aptitude is the only thing the SATs should measure and report, but if schools want more, it's just good business to provide it.
"...surely bumping up the scores..."
You might have misunderstood. It doesn't look like they will be changing SAT scores here but rather providing a separate "adversity score".
Perhaps the most cynical view of College Board and the SATs is that it is a bloated and useless bureaucracy leeching money and time off of students, their parents, high schools, and universities, and that this new 'Adversity Score' is merely a new way to introduce an entire new army of useless people with new material and classes to be sold to innocent people just trying to get into a decent school and pursue a path to a better life.
Colleges can already access this information in other ways. This is just a proprietary weighing of these things into one number. Given the information the SAT has access to, the number seems likely to be based around the student's address and school, rather than unique challenges to that student, like how present parents are in the student's life and if they have to care for younger siblings or need a part time job to help out. I don't remember having to give the SAT any sort of income or family data, but that sort of thing would be equally, if not more, relevant to the discussion of experienced adversity.
Just because a school has access to the information doesn't mean they have the expertise, time, or money, to turn that information into a number that can then be used in admissions. Admissions tests have existed for centuries the idea of the SAT is by having a single standard you can have one group of people make a better test for less money (and student time). This is very much the same thing, figuring out how to rank high schools and estimate adversity by street address for the whole nation is a HARD problem.
When I was immersed in the leftist outrage bubble, I used to think this video was ridiculous and insulting, but after breaking out of that bubble, this video has become startlingly accurate.
This “Adversity” score has me thinking of an analogy to physical beauty/attractiveness. I believe there is an incredibly high correlation,
especially residual to other factors, between physical traits and success and wealth. Something very unfair for those who are uglier.
Obviously the logical solution to that inequality isn’t to kick in the faces of the beautiful and handsome but instead focus on opportunities for those uglier to try and make themselves more attractive. In extremes plastic surgery for those with say cleft lip or other deformations.
Those who can’t understand the analogy says much about the source of their rage.
Hating the rich is still hate.
If the college board really wants to love the poor why don’t they come up with a plan to provide FREE tutoring to all the zipcodes in their model. I bet if they asked a few billionaires like Gates and Buffet they would even fund it.
Lifting the bottom up is not done by holding the top down. It just doesn’t work in reality.
> It would be calculated using 15 factors, like the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood. The score would not be reported to the student, only to college officials.
This sounds like affirmative action only at a much more granular and non-racial level.
Even better if it can take into account a student's whole academic history (e.g. if a student used to go to a fancy prep school and then moved to a local public school the year they took the SAT, or vice-versa).
Given the incredible disparities between schools/neighborhoods, they feels like it can only give a more accurate picture of a student's abilities relative to their situation.
This new metric seems to be mostly based on ZIP and school-level data, not individual circumstances, so it may not be trivially gameable (short of moving your family to an impoverished neighborhood, which seems... unlikely).
That said, colleges already have access to this information through publicly-available high school rankings and ZIP-level demographic data. All this new metric does is add opacity and plausible deniability, shifting responsibility from college admissions departments to a centralized (and, most importantly, private) authority.
> mostly based on ZIP and school-level data, not individual circumstances, so it may not be trivially gameable
Once the ZIP code to score mapping is known, it's trivially gameble to get a mailing address in the best scoring ZIP code that won't get you kicked out of your school, if the ZIP code comes from school records. People do this all the time in reverse to get kids into desirable schools.
Actually getting your kid into an undesirable school to get the full score might be less likely, although that may depend on the specific time requirements to get the score and the magnitude of the score related to other factors.
I can't say for sure, but I'd bet a decent amount of money that the variation in scores for zips in the same school district will be quite small compared to the variation in zips for different school districts. I doubt the kind of gaming you describe would have much of an impact.
All this new metric does is add opacity and plausible deniability
I would say that in addition to this just one organization has to do the research & math instead of the [large number] of colleges admitting students. It also provides for a degree f standardization.
>Higher scores have been found to correlate with students coming from a higher-income families and having better-educated parents.
Which makes a lot of sense since income correlates with intelligence and intelligence is partially heritable.
A century ago the SAT was used to fine diamonds in the rough for first-generation college students. After multiple generations of college students mating with college students, you're not going to find that many first-generation college students anymore.
Inserting dumber students into college because of their upbringing is hostile towards the success of a nation.
EDIT: Please point out something that's incorrect instead of downvoting because it makes you uncomfortable.
IQ predicts future income even if the subjects environement is controlled for. It's a very good meassure, probably the best we have in the social sciences. What it tells us is not nice, sure, but denying reality is not going to help anyone.
This, like every other similar attempt made to "equalize" the SAT, is misguided and will accomplish little.
If the SAT correlates too strongly with wealth, then Collegeboard should make a better test. Make one that changes significantly every year so direct test-prep is hard. Choose different types of critical reading passages and questions each year, vary the style of the math questions - make the test different enough each time so studying past tests isn't valuable. Then, if you eliminate the advantage direct prep gives, the correlation to wealth should weaken, and the test should get closer to measuring aptitude.
But instead, Collegeboard continues to shoehorn political objectives into an already broken exam. This is a mistake.
it's hard to change a test enough that it's hard to prepare for but not so much that scores can still be meaningfully compared year to year. even if kids go straight to college, there's a two year window where they could reasonably take the test and the test is offered several times per year. I don't see how they could accomplish this without severely increasing the cost of the test.
> it's hard to change a test enough that it's hard to prepare for but not so much that scores can still be meaningfully compared year to year. even if kids go straight to college, there's a two year window where they could reasonably take the test and the test is offered several times per year. I don't see how they could accomplish this without severely increasing the cost of the test.
As an entrenched player, I'd love to know more about their operating costs. They have no need for marketing, have a constant demand and are essentially a monopoly (possibly part of duopoly) on the college standardized test market. If they had optimized supply chains and distribution (which I would expect to improve year over year) I would be curious as to where all the money is going.
Hypothetically, what if it was true that wealthy people's exposure to better education over a lifetime, reduced stress distracting them from learning, better and more abundant roll models, etc, meant they would do better on pretty much literally any test you could put in front of them?
Then wealthy people show more "merit" and the test is working as designed. If the test is an accurate predictor of success in college and success thereafter (which is a big if), then that people who do well on it are more deserving of college admissions. The ancillary qualities of that group of people (wealth, race, etc.) are irrelevant.
This is the reality of the situation that people don't want to admit. This is a social engineering problem related to the outcomes of college entrance processes. It's not really about the test or how we are measuring aptitude.
This problem would be far better solved elsewhere in the chain instead of blurring the meaning of data and pretending that things are different.
Yes but fucking with the metrics costs almost nothing. Does almost nothing too.
It can even backfire by sending a bunch of disadvantaged kids to programs they're not prepared to succeed at to "help them" get saddled with college debt they can't discharge.
The SAT is (well, was) supposed to predict academic success at a college/university. The idea being that an institution could admit students who would likely graduate, as opposed to students who did not.
Your suggestion relies on the assumption that there is some way to change standardized tests such that they do not correlate with wealth. Perhaps the problem is that academic ability is directly correlated to the kind of test prep you receive, so unless you set a test paper full of trivia questions the student that has gone through test prep will perform better every time.
I do not agree with this idea either, but only in that the adversity score will be opaque to students, so there is no recourse if it does a poor job of addressing the current issues with college admissions.
If you do set a test paper full of trivia questions, that just changes the sort of things in the test-prep program. Anything studiable is going to correlate with the amount of time spent studying, therefore with wealth. People do study for Jeopardy.
> Your suggestion relies on the assumption that there is some way to change standardized tests such that they do not correlate with wealth.
Good IQ tests exists that are hard to game. They are easy to learn easy to vary and easy to measure.
(I think I have heard someone here talking about IQ tests that include language and geography questions. This is not the kind of IQ tests I'm talking about. Perfect IQ tests should measure your processing speed, not your "software" - i.e. education.)
The SAT is supposed to be a test measuring scholastic aptitude not a pure IQ test.
IQ tests always have a knowledge component anyway. Unless you specifically design a test to only measure something like working memory. And who cares about that. Colleges would only care to the extent that it correlated with performance.
But you can have 2 people who have equal performance in a given field even though one has a higher working memory because the other has better context from more time spent reading.
> Unless you specifically design a test to only measure something like working memory.
The ones I refer to typically test what I'd call pattern matching / pattern synthesis by presenting multiple choice questions showing a number of patterns and asking which out of several patterns comes next.
You can teach how to solve it to a schoolkid and it is still really hard to practice for.
You're talking about Raven's Progressive Matrices and variations thereof.
RPM only measures a very small subset of what we normally thing of as general intelligence, and they correlate with general intelligence less strongly than vocabulary. They definitely aren't nearly as good at predicting future college performance as the current SAT is.
>You can teach how to solve it to a schoolkid and it is still really hard to practice for.
It's actually not, you can definitely practice for them. And they are very sensitive to repeated testing.
RPM was developed to be free from cultural bias, but we now know that this isn't the case, they can actually be more biased than verbal tests depending on the culture.
Imagine a perfect SAT that preparation can't affect; for the purposes of the hypothetical, the test just stares into your soul and measures pure scholastic aptitude.
If (a) scholastic aptitude has a significant effect on your lifetime income, (b) people tend to marry people of similar social and economic class, and (c) scholastic aptitude is fairly heritable (through genes, environment, whatever)...
... then you would expect the Perfect SAT scores to correlate pretty noticeably with family wealth. This wouldn't be a sign that anybody is doing anything wrong; it's just as natural as water flowing downhill. And these are reasonable premises, with strong empirical evidence for each of them.
So, question: just by looking at the correlation of SAT scores with family wealth, how can we possibly tell how broken the test is? How can we know how far the real SAT is from the absolutely un-gameable Perfect SAT?
I mentioned this below, but if the test is a perfect predictor of future success, then the people that perform well on it are absolutely worthy of college admissions, and there should be no further analysis required. If the test is perfect, then the characteristics of the people that do well on that test don't matter. The reason we need to do implement equalizers like this is because such a test is impossible.
Because we've done studies to address exactly that question. What we've found: The least-gifted children of high-income parents graduate from college at higher rates than the most-gifted children of low-income parents, hence the adversity score to rectify the inequity in life circumstances.
This study has nothing to do with the SAT. Clearly, money is required in order to study full-time in the US, both for tuition and living expenses, so people with more money graduate more often because it's easier to not work during school, and to pay for tuition. But none of that is relevant to the point you replied to, which was that even a perfect test would have results that correlate with wealth
> The least-gifted children of high-income parents graduate from college at higher rates than the most-gifted children of low-income parents, hence the adversity score to rectify the inequity in life circumstances.
Looking at graduation rates instead of admission rates is problematic. Less gifted and underprivileged people also graduate at lower rates despite being admitted using affirmative action procedures as the College Board is now implementing. This means they do not have a degree that would advantage them, but are saddled with undischargable education debt that puts them at a severe disadvantage for the rest of their life. The system not only continues the inequality but makes it much worse. If college was free or education debt was dischargable in bankruptcy then it would not be the oppressive system it is currently where people unable to succeed are admitted, then forced to pay back debt they can not afford after they fail to graduate. Only a sadist and a racist would support such an inequitable abusive system.
So we need to correct the SAT so that the students most likely to be doomed to fail will be admitted to higher education?
To me it doesn't sound like you're trying to make the SAT reflect say academic potential. It seems like you're just trying to inflate the appearantly already inflated scores of the disadvantaged. Who will proceed to not get scholarships, fail out, and be saddled with debt they can't pay off or be discharged. This of course is the road to an egalitarian society!
Who needs to bother with difficult things like making the disadvantaged do a little better in school? Just add 100 points to their SAT. Problem solved.
Once you combine all those premises, the "pretty noticeable" correlation might be something like ten percent. So the problem of it correlating too strongly with wealth would be solved.
The student who spends time preparing for a test, reviewing the material, studying previous tests, drilling with practice tests, actually has more scholastic aptitude than the students who do not do this because these are actual research and preparation skills that are valuable to success in mastering college material.
The only skill you gain while cramming for the SAT is how to cram for tests like the SAT. The gameability of the SAT is not an indication of general scholastic aptitude
If general scholastic aptitude measured something other than how to study for tests and write essays, then you might be onto something, except that college is simply more of the same.
I always wonder where people get this view of college (the GP's view that is). I went to a non-name state school for undergrad and it was nothing like the above.
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?
Sorry, you don’t see the distinction between the type of academic study you described and the kind of rote learning and cramming required for tests like the SAT? They are quite dissimilar.
Sorry to hear that your classes at CMU involved just rote memorization and cramming, the two skills that standardized tests like the SAT seem to emphasize most. You apparently must not have availed yourself of course projects, discussion sections, or research experiences. I’m sorry to hear that the vaunted CMU educational experience has apparently gone so far downhill.
My experience was the same as all of my other classmates experience, and it is in the top 3 tech schools in the world.
I am describing what the best schools in the entire world do, and I have lots of knowledge from my classwork, and other classmates experience.
These are the best schools in the world.
And apparently someone else who responded had a similar experience at Stanford, another college that is among the best in the world.
You seem to have zero knowledge about how colleges work at even the literal best schools in the world.
Basically every top college in the world still has tests and final exams and studying and cramming. This is called the "normal college experience" at basically every college and top college in the world (and backed up by someone else in this thread from Stanford!).
Private higher education will always increase inequality in the long run as the wealthy can find ways to optimize/game filters. For the wealthy the more complex the filter the better as they can pay to navigate the complexity.
I think the goal of quantifying the amount of adversity a person experiences in their life is a fools errand. This is like asking "On a scale of 1-100 how beautiful is The Mona Lisa." Somethings can only be poorly approximated in numbers.
Once we have a number it tends to become An Important Thing, regardless of how much the number reflects reality. It is ironic that SAT is making a new number that has little reflection of reality to provide more context with their SAT test scores, which is another number that has only a poor approximate measurement of reality.
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 the graph is impeccable it also is built on layer after layer of imperfect abstractions until the graph has very little to do with reality.
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 slightest difficulty.
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.
This is off topic, but .. My cousin graduated from Harvard and he's like the least well paid and least connected person I know. Just a nerdy introvert kind of person.
At what point in life can one's hardships be discounted? First job application after college? Should every job application have an adversity score? Should every promotion consider this? Should you be entitled to more government benefits, because of adversity?
At what point, if any, does the responsibility of getting out of adversity lie on the individual?
The only way to be truly fair with admissions is to admit blind of any defacto discriminatory identity/categorization method and based entirely on competency and scores. I realize that is unpopular for a variety of reasons, but are elite academic institutions meant to be elite academic institutions, or are they social engineering laboratories?
They are meant to educate students for success in the world, and success for the world. Of course they are social engineering laboratories; that's in their charters.
I work in LSAT prep, and have taught the SAT as well. Whether this makes a different will depend on whether it's added as a ranking factor for schools.
If it's just a thing schools can see, that adds to their additional soft tools they can use to evaluate an application, then it probably won't do much. If it actually becomes something that determines rankings, it will have a big impact. The latter seems unlikely, as schools would have to publicly report the score to US News and World report for it to affect rankings. But the score is private.
A few key points:
* First, this isn't the cheating scandal. If the rich parents could have gotten their kids good SAT scores, they wouldn't have needed to cheat and bribe. The SAT was keeping the wealthy people out in those case, not letting them in
* Test prep helps. But it's not a magic wand. The only real solution to getting better at the SAT is....having grown up reading and being good at arithmetic and algebra. Failing that, you can spend 12-16 months memorizing thousands of vocabulary words, reading novels, and memorizing every math concept tested, using Khan Academy. But....at a certain point that actually approximates being good at the material.
* What's the advantage of being better off? It's that your kids generally spend a lifetime more likely to read, have good teachers, have leisure time, parental involvement, parents that are married, good nutrition.
* But if a wealthy kid has made it to 12th grade and isn't that bright, wealth is no magic bullet. Like I said, the only way to do it is to take 16+ months to cram foundations into you. And the vast majority of parents lack such foresight.
* Actually, there is one magic bullet: it's making sure your kid has some kind of easily diagnosable mental health condition that gives them extra time. By "easily diagnosable", I mean in the sense that there's no real way to exclude it and you can find a doctor to say "oh sure, this kid seems to have ADHD". Extra time is a massive leg up. This rule came about due to Justice Department rules about not discriminating against those with disabilities. It did help the disabled, but it also gave the wealthy a loophole big enough to drive a truck through
* Will this be a similar loophole? Maybe. I am sure parents will try to exploit it. But....it's a rule actually made by the testing company, and not one imposed by the government. So, they have more control to avoid having it exploited. Also, some of the factors are more difficult to exploit. For example "kid with single parents". I mean, maybe the parents could temporarily divorce, though it's not clear if that counts. If it actually requires one parent to truly be out of the kid's life (or dead)....well, there's no easy way to fake that
* These are just temporary hardships due to upbringing, and they'll go away in the health college environment, right? Nope. You see the exact same gaps in higher level standardized tests. And in later measures such as bar passage rate. Whatever causes the issue, causes it the whole way through.
* Will this solve inequality? Maybe, maybe not. Too soon to tell. One underappreciated risk to programs like affirmative action is that they don't actually help those they're aimed at. Here's an article citing Henry Louis Gates Jr. showing that Ivy League schools generally don't accept the sons and daughters of slaves. Instead, they accept foreign black students: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more...
This list seems aimed at addressing the last issue. Maybe not so much a ranking factor, but instead aimed at letting admissions officers see who, within a subgroup, actually had a disadvantaged upbringing, vs. having a more narrow checkbox a...
958 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 378 ms ] threadThis is actually a serious question. I want to get an understanding of the mind-set that creates this class wedge.
I did not study for my SAT. I did not do great. A long time friend who I consider to be one of my intellectual peers, did study, got a great SAT score, went to college, worked the system and now we both work the same job. None of this is scientific, this is just my experience, however I have always had the feeling that people who excel at following the rules of schools obviously do better in that type of system.
It seems like yet another opaque metric to be gamed by the people with the resources to spend optimizing for those sort of things.
This move feels almost as though it was intended to stir up unnecessary controversy.
"Adversity score" is precariously close to "diversity score" which would certainly store up controversy.
I mean probably not, otherwise they would let the students see the scores.
I think it was put there to help the elite colleges defeat the lawsuits against them by being able to say, "see, we used an objective measure of hardship from a third party!".
What is the purpose of college admissions -- to award a select few or to match students with colleges where they are most likely to succeed?
I think we need to get away from the idea of college admissions as a tournament with Harvard at the top. "Good" depends on many things and different students may best be served by different universities.
- Get a summer job "because your family needed money"
- Move out of your parents house for a summer "bad living conditions"
- Adopt some non-binary gender temporarily "bullied for identifying as x"
- CEO dad drops salary to $20k for a year and instead gets stock vesting equivalent "poor family"
etc. etc.
https://youtu.be/_ogxZxu6cjM?t=62
Colleges are pretty wise to this trick. You aren't the first to think of it.
Relatedly is legally emancipating a child so they have "no parental support" and get a bunch of grants. That doesn't work either.
I suspect the colleges would get good as sussing out all those other tricks too.
Not to take away from your point but the colleges having to work against these sort of tricks has a lot of unintended consequences.
There'll be a boom market for Adversity Coaches.
This just sounds like the SAT board doing what school admissions boards already do: decreasing or increasing scores based on race.
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-rac...
I can only imagine the terrifyingly embarrassing situations where people of a race are challenged to prove their race and flip out because they are their race.
[0] https://nypost.com/2015/04/12/mindy-kalings-brother-explains...
Realistically, this will be based on ZIP code and registered high school. Information that's already publicly-available. This changes nothing except potentially making neighborhood-level affirmative action more politically palatable.
I do believe with just a few pieces of the information they're taking into consideration (namely, neighborhood, if you have a single parent, and if you're ESL [not sure if they're talking about the child being ESL or the parents]) you could reliably determine if the child is black or Hispanic and therefore worthy of an adversity score boost. Everyone else, get stuffed. They may also be making a big show of using these factors that "technically" don't identify the test taker's race and instead are just disregarding them and relying solely on the self-reported racial information provided when taking the test. Who knows? But I highly doubt you'll find a lot of poor white kids in West Virginia getting boosted scores via this scheme.
That is exactly what I expect to happen - as well as poor kids who happen to belong to racial minorities. The College Board published the criteria they will use to calculate the score. Race is not one of the criteria. But you're saying that race will not only be used, but be the primary criteria. So, let's be clear: you're saying the College Board is lying. Which, I can't prove they are not, but I'm inclined to trust them over your claims.
https://twitter.com/i/moments/1129009648214921216
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sat-adversity-score-college-boa...
Quote:
These factors are first divided into three categories: neighborhood environment, family environment and high school environment.
Each of the three categories has five sub-indicators that are indexed in calculating each student's adversity score. Neighborhood environment will take into account crime rate, poverty rate, housing values and vacancy rate. Family environment will assess what the median income is of where the student's family is from; whether the student is from a single parent household; the educational level of the parents; and whether English is a second language. High school environment will look at factors such as curriculum rigor, free-lunch rate and AP class opportunities. Together these factors will calculate an individual's adversity score on a scale of one to 100.
"The program aimed to measure the challenges students faced. It created an expected SAT score based on socioeconomic factors including, if schools chose to add it, race." [1]
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/sat-to-give-students-adversity-...
> It would be calculated using 15 factors, like the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood. The score would not be reported to the student, only to college officials.
None of those suggest they're linked to individual actions like your examples are -- and that makes sense since the SAT can know the student's schools and addresses but little else.
And I don't think sending your kid to a worse school is gaming the system... because they'll probably do worse.
This adversity score is advertized so that it will help out poorer and more abused students, in an emperical way.
But what this is actually telling schools is if the person is rich-ish or not. Basically, can this family pay the bills and are they likely to attend football games and be donating alumni?
Call me cynical, but if anything, this is going to further segregate the schools towards the rich-ish.
This will give schools a guise under which they can say: 'Look, we're diverse!' But it will allow the space (and the ML inputs) for the schools to maximize profits.
I know that you are very unlikely to be able to maximize all diversity at once. Like, admitting more black women may come at the cost of matriculation rates for transgender people, or more Hispanic people in STEM classes may come at the cost of Asian people in humanties courses, etc. Nothing is perfect.
But this really feels like a Trojan Horse.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/adversity-score-sat-exam-colleg...
"Neighborhood environment will take into account crime rate, poverty rate, housing values and vacancy rate. Family environment will assess what the median income is of where the student's family is from; whether the student is from a single parent household; the educational level of the parents; and whether English is a second language. High school environment will look at factors such as curriculum rigor, free-lunch rate and AP class opportunities."
These are hard to game, and in many cases if you do game them it's a "Mission Fucking Accomplished" situation. Most billionaires are not willing to move into a high-crime, high-poverty neighborhood with shitty housing, nor are they willing to put their kids in bad schools with poor people. If they are, great, that neighborhood probably won't stay poor with shitty schools for long.
sure, but I don't think any existing laws would prevent them from just buying a second house in a bad part of their home town and using that address for applications and I can't see how the College Board could reliably detect this.
https://whyy.org/segments/the-money-shot-how-school-district...
They'd have a tough time explaining to colleges why their transcript is from Good School District Across Town when they listed their address as Dumpy Neighborhood With Bad Schools.
So the San Francisco school district gives priority to certain neighborhoods roughly based these criteria and gentrification has been a problem. Wealthy folks move into historically poor neighborhoods and benefit from lagging statistics in school choice.
>> Anne Zimmerman, a stay-at-home parent and writer, had what others call, sometimes derisively, the “golden ticket.” She and her husband, who works in advertising, moved into their two-bedroom rental in the Potrero Hill neighborhood a decade ago, without realizing their address granted them priority in the school lottery.
>> This year, their daughter, Vera, was offered admission to their first-choice kindergarten, one of the most requested in the city. The school is 37 percent white and 21 percent low-income. Districtwide, 15 percent of students are white and 55 percent are low-income.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/san-francisco-school-s...
This is a very thorny issue, and I am uncomfortable with a centralized organization influencing it to such a large degree.
Whether, and how much, to take into account these factors should be a local decision made by the college itself.
It could also be used to signal to schools which kids are likely to need some remedial classes in the first year despite what they scored on the SAT. Of course one can imagine a scenario where the admissions looks at the adversity score to weed out kids who they don't think are going to be prepared regardless of how smart they are.
This whole process assumes that the universities are interested in reforming the kids that the school system failed in the first place.
If a college wants to not do that, fine, I just don't want a centralized organization short circuiting the issue and making decisions for the college.
I guess there could be both use cases for test scores, given that higher education might actually find itself more concerned with showing improvement as an important metric. They might prefer students that show more aptitude for a given level of input, moreso than the total aptitude achieved.
I constantly hear employers mentioning that same desire - to have "lifelong learners" are employees. I have to believe at some level that there is some desire for a measure of absolute capability, too.
So the best predictor of future success in a good environment probably does include a correction for past adversity.
The same gaps that appear on these undergrad tests show up on the grad school tests such as the LSAT, GMAT, GRE etc.
And that's the key. You're positing that the disadvantage magically stops in university.
I work in law school admissions prep, and you see these disadvantages all the way down the line: SAT, college grades, LSAT, law school grades, Bar exam passage rate
There are some cases where it stops. Maybe the college board can identify which variables may indicate a poor correlation. There might be some factors that indicate transient issues and some that indicate worse lifelong expectations.
But I'd be cautious about too readily assuming that a cause of a lower SAT will vanish in later life.
Can you say more about this? Do students who (presumably) leave home to go to college still have as-significant challenges after? How so?
This is heavily related to socioeconomic status in the US. IIRC, in the UK for example you don't see these same gaps between ethnic groups. So it's something specific to US social circumstances, and not racial.
I don't know so much about particular circumstances, I just know what the high level stats say, and am inferring from that. I'm not American, so I don't have lived experience of the class structure there.
There are probably studies about income, but the test makers tend to only collect official data about ethnicity. It's commonly used as a proxy for social class, but I wish the test makers had better data about the elements the College Board is trying to capture with this new policy.
It's about one standard deviation between high scoring groups and low scoring groups across the tests.
* SAT: https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/pdf/sat-percentile...
* MCAT: https://www.aamc.org/download/321498/data/factstablea18.pdf
* GMAT: https://www.gmac.com/-/media/files/gmac/research/gmat-test-t...
* GRE https://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/snapshot_test_taker_data_2017....
LSAC no longer has theirs posted publicly, but it was much the same.
So, to the extent ethnicity is a proxy for social class in the US, we can say that the disadvantage these groups have at SAT time doesn't vanish by the time they take graduate level exams.
I wish I had some data for you that was based on social circumstances other than race, but I don't have deep knowledge in the domain, only what I've seen looking at the reports produced by the test companies recently.
I'm trying to say that if you're trying to predict performance in a new environment (college) you can improve the prediction by correcting for factors (bad home environment during high school) that affect current test scores but won't be active in the future.
How large the correction should be can only be answered by large population studies.
2) There is the assumption that the environment in which you grew up in does not permanently affect the way you learn, while many studies have proven this to be untrue. The most critical years shaping the way you learn is in the younger years. Once you're past that, there is no way you can "make up" for it just by going to a better college.
A radical solution I believe is to completely subsidize all education and child rearing costs, such that every child will at least have the necessary basic conditions needed for them to excel. Of course, parents are always going to try and give their kids an edge, but at some point there'll be diminishing marginal returns. To relieve pressure on governmental funding, another radical idea is to couple this with an upper limit on the number of children you can have, so people will not "overburden" the system by having too many children.
2) Sure. Environment has both short-term and long-term effects. So a fraction of the environmental effects wear off. I dunno what the fraction is, but when you do the regression to find the weighting of SAT test score and adversity score that best predicts college achievement, it should find the right balance.
What it does do is outsource components of admissions decisions the colleges may want to distance themselves from and wrap it up in an opaque package so that they're not actually considering anything legally risky in their admissions decisions. This is potentially valuable to institutions that want to have affirmative action style admissions without risking the ire of state legislators.
Fancy private school in expensive neighborhood registers their official address in a poor neighborhood, and calls the school in the 'nice' neighborhood a "satellite campus".
There's a related tactic for people in affluent suburbs, for getting their child into urban school districts with an especially well-regarded primary public school: buy a house or condo in the city, and try to make it look on your application like that's your primary residence.
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 ahead. It’s an insult to hard working people across the spectrum.
Privileged people need to start recognizing their inherent pre-rigging of the system.
For those in power, equality feels like oppression.
They can use that privilege to spread their applications around to increase their opportunities.
For example, school admissions. We can provide more funding for underperforming schools, but that is also less funding going towards better performing schools. At a certain point you will have to accept that to help the poor it will mean cutting off certain benefits for more well-off. Then the discussion becomes around how much resources should be shifted around.
What I’m not okay with is adjusting scores and denying opportunity because of economic class warfare.
Those that have more resources have historically spent significant amounts of those resources to ensure that they pay in as little of them to anyone else as possible.
Hating the rich is hate.
If you really loved the poor you would think how to help them lift themselves up. Holding down the top both doesn’t work and is deeply unethical.
College board should provide free tutoring and review classes based of their adversity score instead.
I can’t image this scheme won’t be challenged in courts. Especially the keeping secret the score, imagine if your credit score was kept secret and this will effect their lives more than credit score.
As I have said in other comments, next we need an Unattractiveness Score as we know physical traits have high correlation and causation to success and wealth, clearly a privilege and creating inequality.
Tax credits for the ugly. Mandatory minor face disfigurement for the overly beautiful or handsome.
Very scary developments. America is under true threat to its future with this politics.
I know! Let's give them a bit of advantage in getting an education.
Oh, wait.
HARRISON BERGERON by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213 th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The comment I was replying to was pretty absurd wording of punishments.
Anyway it’s always a little hard to know exactly how to interpret the guidelines as there is quite a bit of subjectivity.
I do apologize.
Could you do the same in the reverse situation?
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.
I’ve worked my ass off for nearly 30 years, as has my wife. We are both smart and very hard working and it paid off. My roots are middle class at best. My parents are immigrants and were extremely poor as children but they also worked hard and went from poverty to middle class.
I’m teaching my children to work hard and be good people and contribute to this world.
How pray tell am I benefiting from “pre-rigging”? I’ve made solid decisions throughout my life and sacrificed to be where I am today.
Now I’m being told that my children will be at a disadvantage for college because my wife and I worked hard our entire careers and succeeded. That’s hogwash. Absolute hogwash and I’m furious.
Ok. Cool. Just want to make sure I understand.
And by the logic of “those who worked harder deserve it more”, well I think you see where this is going.
If anything this adversity score IS making things more fair because it’s providing light to the extra challenges someone might have had and thus who indeed worked harder at it.
The test claims to be measuring a students ability to learn in the first place, not just their current knowledge, so why not aim to make that more accurate instead of bypassing it?
The subject area is the SAT, a test, which is imperfect like all tests, with research which indicates that it's actually problematic for such a diverse country like the USA. So a test like the SAT, which boils down to a single number. Yes that's the subject.
And now they're making the results 2 numbers. The test and some, well known summary of information about the student.
And THIS, THIS is the bridge too far?
Honestly, do you even hear yourself? What should a third party think about your words? Perhaps you could help me and provide a back story of how you've been in opposition to the SAT for a long time, and how this just reinforces a flawed test.
But nope, it sure does seem like you're focusing in on how this test might provide opportunities to black and brown people.
But I'm sure that's not that, because it's hackernews, and we are so polite to each other and reasonable.
So, tell me again why the SAT is good, but SAT + adversity score is bad?
Take a break from your "I gotta get mine before anyone else gets any!" attitude, and walk a mile in my shoes.
Parents who care is the single greatest privilege a child may get.
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 hard and I had better opportunities because of that.
What if government took that reward away from them? Well, surprise surprise, it did (just in another country in another era).
_you_ have a choice too: either to take the hand that’s dealt you and move forward, or complain about how others had it better because of their parents, or their own actions.
I’ve had a lot of ups and downs in my life due to circumstances as well as choices I made. I don’t blame other people for what happened to me (but I will blame government services being complete shit, especially towards veterans).
This isn’t a perfect world, so don’t complain what others get that you don’t have. Work towards making the world better instead, without destroying what others have worked hard for in the meantime.
Can you please edit personal slights like that out of your comments to HN? They break the site guidelines and undermine your case.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is a classic Kafka-trap, and I see this rhetorical payload delivered more and more these days.
"If you have a problem with changing the status quo, then you're in power and thus deserve to have the status quo changed on you."
Many times it is harder to see what is currently going on; so, if you want a more blatant current example, right now, the system is keeping undocumented immigrants poor and uneducated on purpose.
The system doesn't have motives. Individual behavior can give rise to systemic oppression with no top level design goals needed.
If we take a look at Black people specifically:
Black sounding last names are half as likely to receive callbacks for job interviews. Black people are more likely to be arrested, convicted, and receive longer sentences for committing the same crimes as White people. It's harder for Black people to find housing. Its even harder for them to rent vacation properties.
Black children even receive harsher punishments for the same infractions in elementary school.
All of these things put together mean that yes, they are systemically oppressed, and the system is currently keeping them poorer and less educated. Exceptional individuals will overcome this oppression, but reinforcing feedback loops ensure that if something isn't done to break the cycle, it will continue, and as a class Black people will always be at a disadvantage.
"If you have a problem with changing the status quo, in a situation where the change would make you lose something, take extra time to examine whether it was justified for the status quo to give you that thing in the first place."
Which is good advice.
Just to offer some general commentary, I think this mentality is probably the root of most of our social ills: people see everything as a "race" and they work hard to "get ahead", and they therefore get angry at policies that attempt to even the playing field because it might help others "catch up".
This might be true for college admissions too, if you're flush with opportunities you're still ahead if you lose one.
But there's still an aspect of "pulling people back". It's a hard tradeoff to design. But if you do it right you really can make something with better outcomes and more fairness, even if some will call it an abomination.
Again, the problem is you are viewing the world through a certain lens, where people are "ahead" or "behind".
Couple this with the lack of class mobility and sometimes people feel participating in that race was the only way to control your future.
Is an arranged marriage a fraud too? What if you get married for citizenship and then fall in love?
Why aren't gay partners subject to common law divorce precedents?
1. remote_phone cares deeply about his children
2. in life there are many unjust and immoral systems, and that it's okay to subvert them
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 at Apple/Google[1]? I read library books and watch Khan Academy, but no one in my family ever went to college. Why does my parents’ achievement have a fundamental impact on my opportunities?
Somehow we have to aim for equality of opportunity. It’s difficult to achieve but can’t we agree on this as a goal? Opportunity should not be inherited. My kids are as good as yours, as the next person’s, independent of how hard we worked.
[1] hyperbole. Saratoga parents from UCLA/CMU who work at Netflix/NVIDIA I’m talking about you too.
Play with the cards you were dealt.
In my stance, your kids can get ahead on their own merit.
I don’t know how to achieve this perfectly, but it’s an aspiration.
If everybody wants to go to Harvard then why can't they expand the school and accept more students?
Because the same brand of metrics trolls who are screwing this up have also screwed up in the school rankings by making schools rank better if they reject more applicants, so now the schools optimize for that.
In any case, I don't think you should have to graduate from a prestigious college to find work that helps you live a good life. Maybe this involves making a place like Harvard accept more students, or maybe it involves improving the quality and our perceptions of middle and lower-tier universities. I don't know.
Well, you can only physically expand a single school so far, but I get what you mean. I think the bigger problem is this concept of “elite universities” and this sort of credential signaling that seems to matter so much. Honestly, I can’t tell how much it really does matter. I went to Valdosta State University (never heard of it? Nope, neither has anybody else), but have worked with Harvard and MIT grads who respected my opinion and treated me as an equal. My 15 year old son, who I’ve never really pushed too hard to worry about getting into a “good” college worries about it anyway, because everybody he knows is worrying about it. He says things like, “If I don’t do well on this test, I’m going to end up going to Texas Tech” and I think, “Hell, Texas Tech is better than where I went to college, and I’m doing fine… should I tell him not to worry so much or encourage him to shoot for the top-ranked colleges?”
Offer free additional after-school programs, etc in high school to solve the problem. You don't make a slow runner faster by moving the finish line closer for him/her.
We should maintain some real alternate paths for kids for whom this timing is bad.
I grew up on on welfare and left school at 15. Was smart but troubled. Worked dumb jobs for a while. Benefitted from enlightened admissions policy and eventually graduated from $VERYGOODSCHOOL. I worked hard and did just fine. My kids are privileged and my late career is fun and rewarding. I want to do all I can to pass on these opportunities to the next generation of kids like me.
We are probably hundreds of years away from solving all other factors besides genetics, which have an influence on SAT (or whatever equivalent other countries have), so this doesn't seem like a huge problem right now.
We can talk about genetics again when we've fixed everything else.
Because they are your parents and they will have an impact on your life whether you like it or not, right down from the genes you inherit to the kind of people you hang out with. So yes there achievement will have an impact on your opportunities.
What you want can only happen when parents are no longer associated with their children in any way and all children are raised by the State so that everyone can be provided "equal opportunities" and even then the type of genes you inherit will impact your opportunities because although social inequality has been removed, biological inequalities can never be removed.
So no your children or not equal to anybody else's children and yes what you do in life will have an impact on your children's life that's how life works.
I am not the person you were replying to, but no. However, the person who wins should be the more qualified person based on merit not based on some standard of suffering. Just because you had a harder environment does not mean you are more qualified than someone with an easier environment.
This has never been the case and will never be the case as long as some people are rich and other are poor. A "standard of suffering" tries to show that. Maybe it's a bad idea, but the current system is extremely bad, so people who dismiss this better come up with a better alternative.
It would be trivial to improve our tests of merit compared to the almost impossible task of testing how well a student would do free from environmental factors.
This is one of the weariest types of hyperbolic strawmanning typically employed in discussions of unequal backgrounds, opportunities, etc.
Literally nobody wishes for this imaginary future you're presenting. Not the comment you're responding to, likely not even the staunchest of activists against social injustice.
The question is, do we see children with potential not being able to utilize it because of happenstance, as a problem? Is it fair that a child from a better-off family is more likely to enter better academic institutions regardless of their merit? Should we not help disadvantaged kids?
Of course you can throw your arms up into the air and say "life isn't fair", and hold people responsible for the situation they were born into - but right now we're having this discussion, and we can make decisions and change these things. What if there's a better way?
(PS: Standardized Adveristy Scores don't exactly sound like the better way though.)
At the point of admission, the merits of our two imaginary college kids are not same, even if they started out "the same". The current system, that only looks at objective test scores, is actually blind to anything but merit. You seem to be making the same strawman mistake you described: No one claims that rich kids can buy their way into elite schools, but rather that they can buy better education along the way.
Philip K dick also had a short story called Progeny with a similar theme, but here exploring it from the perspective of psychology.
We can't control your upbringing or the opportunities your parents give you completely though. People think the material opportunities given by parents is not fair, but think that the emotional or social opportunities of parents is. If my parents were emotionally abusive, but I grew up rich, should they rig the SAT to show that? How would they even measure that?
In a perfect world outcomes would only be determined by genetics, and the environmental factors would not play into life at all. We don't live in that world, and it would be impossible to replicate it. There are too many variables to be able to measure who deserves what beyond a merit based system.
Look at it another way, would it be fair for a high school/ college sport to artificially raise and lower rankings based on upbringing or environment? Should players with significant coaching be lowered in the rankings, and poor players be raised? I don't think so.
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.
And that's why thet won't reveal the detailed factors, the time windows over which they are evaluated, and their weighting.
> 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.
They don't. In fact, that seems to be exactly the problem this addresses, since with this the SAT would no longer be boiling kids into a single number, and it would be incorporating more context than the status quo.
"The rating will not affect students’ test scores, and will be reported only to college admissions officials as part of a larger package of data on each test taker."
Do what you want, but it doesn't seem like this will be any different from writing about adversity in an application essay. Schools can choose how much they want to weigh the score.
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.
Who's more impressive on average? Students with a 1200 SAT in an area with low crime and upper middle class income, or students with a 1200 SAT in an area with high crime and low income? There's a presumption that the latter probably had external challenges to overcome.
>adding an “adversity score” to the test results
Does this mean an additional number is going to be supplied alongside the individual test scores and overall score, or that the overall score will be a sum that includes an adversity score? In other words, is the article using "adding" in the sense of numbers or the sense of sets?
EDIT:
The Journal reported that this new score will appear alongside a student's SAT score and will be featured in a section labeled the "Environmental Context Dashboard."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sat-adversity-score-college-boa...
You might done well to have stopped there.
I think broadly, the SATs aim to provide some independent consistent data points a school can use to determine the desirability to admit certain students vs. others.
You're thinking academic aptitude is the only thing the SATs should measure and report, but if schools want more, it's just good business to provide it.
"...surely bumping up the scores..."
You might have misunderstood. It doesn't look like they will be changing SAT scores here but rather providing a separate "adversity score".
It _is_ pretty hard to make that logical leap from something that is (ok, was once) called the "scholastic aptitude test"...
/s
Maybe if they had changed its name to the "admissions desirability test," people wouldn't be so aggravated by this.
Privilege Points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM
This “Adversity” score has me thinking of an analogy to physical beauty/attractiveness. I believe there is an incredibly high correlation, especially residual to other factors, between physical traits and success and wealth. Something very unfair for those who are uglier.
Obviously the logical solution to that inequality isn’t to kick in the faces of the beautiful and handsome but instead focus on opportunities for those uglier to try and make themselves more attractive. In extremes plastic surgery for those with say cleft lip or other deformations.
Those who can’t understand the analogy says much about the source of their rage.
Hating the rich is still hate.
If the college board really wants to love the poor why don’t they come up with a plan to provide FREE tutoring to all the zipcodes in their model. I bet if they asked a few billionaires like Gates and Buffet they would even fund it.
Lifting the bottom up is not done by holding the top down. It just doesn’t work in reality.
This sounds like affirmative action only at a much more granular and non-racial level.
Even better if it can take into account a student's whole academic history (e.g. if a student used to go to a fancy prep school and then moved to a local public school the year they took the SAT, or vice-versa).
Given the incredible disparities between schools/neighborhoods, they feels like it can only give a more accurate picture of a student's abilities relative to their situation.
I wonder how, 4+ years after it's implemented, the results of the test's predictive accuracy are shown.
That said, colleges already have access to this information through publicly-available high school rankings and ZIP-level demographic data. All this new metric does is add opacity and plausible deniability, shifting responsibility from college admissions departments to a centralized (and, most importantly, private) authority.
Once the ZIP code to score mapping is known, it's trivially gameble to get a mailing address in the best scoring ZIP code that won't get you kicked out of your school, if the ZIP code comes from school records. People do this all the time in reverse to get kids into desirable schools.
Actually getting your kid into an undesirable school to get the full score might be less likely, although that may depend on the specific time requirements to get the score and the magnitude of the score related to other factors.
I would say that in addition to this just one organization has to do the research & math instead of the [large number] of colleges admitting students. It also provides for a degree f standardization.
Which makes a lot of sense since income correlates with intelligence and intelligence is partially heritable.
A century ago the SAT was used to fine diamonds in the rough for first-generation college students. After multiple generations of college students mating with college students, you're not going to find that many first-generation college students anymore.
Inserting dumber students into college because of their upbringing is hostile towards the success of a nation.
EDIT: Please point out something that's incorrect instead of downvoting because it makes you uncomfortable.
If the SAT correlates too strongly with wealth, then Collegeboard should make a better test. Make one that changes significantly every year so direct test-prep is hard. Choose different types of critical reading passages and questions each year, vary the style of the math questions - make the test different enough each time so studying past tests isn't valuable. Then, if you eliminate the advantage direct prep gives, the correlation to wealth should weaken, and the test should get closer to measuring aptitude.
But instead, Collegeboard continues to shoehorn political objectives into an already broken exam. This is a mistake.
As an entrenched player, I'd love to know more about their operating costs. They have no need for marketing, have a constant demand and are essentially a monopoly (possibly part of duopoly) on the college standardized test market. If they had optimized supply chains and distribution (which I would expect to improve year over year) I would be curious as to where all the money is going.
Most research points to this being true.
This problem would be far better solved elsewhere in the chain instead of blurring the meaning of data and pretending that things are different.
It can even backfire by sending a bunch of disadvantaged kids to programs they're not prepared to succeed at to "help them" get saddled with college debt they can't discharge.
It's heading away from that.
I do not agree with this idea either, but only in that the adversity score will be opaque to students, so there is no recourse if it does a poor job of addressing the current issues with college admissions.
Good IQ tests exists that are hard to game. They are easy to learn easy to vary and easy to measure.
(I think I have heard someone here talking about IQ tests that include language and geography questions. This is not the kind of IQ tests I'm talking about. Perfect IQ tests should measure your processing speed, not your "software" - i.e. education.)
IQ tests always have a knowledge component anyway. Unless you specifically design a test to only measure something like working memory. And who cares about that. Colleges would only care to the extent that it correlated with performance.
But you can have 2 people who have equal performance in a given field even though one has a higher working memory because the other has better context from more time spent reading.
The ones I refer to typically test what I'd call pattern matching / pattern synthesis by presenting multiple choice questions showing a number of patterns and asking which out of several patterns comes next.
You can teach how to solve it to a schoolkid and it is still really hard to practice for.
RPM only measures a very small subset of what we normally thing of as general intelligence, and they correlate with general intelligence less strongly than vocabulary. They definitely aren't nearly as good at predicting future college performance as the current SAT is.
>You can teach how to solve it to a schoolkid and it is still really hard to practice for.
It's actually not, you can definitely practice for them. And they are very sensitive to repeated testing.
Here's a cited Psychology Stack Exchange answer with a good summary: https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/20177/does-pr...
RPM was developed to be free from cultural bias, but we now know that this isn't the case, they can actually be more biased than verbal tests depending on the culture.
If (a) scholastic aptitude has a significant effect on your lifetime income, (b) people tend to marry people of similar social and economic class, and (c) scholastic aptitude is fairly heritable (through genes, environment, whatever)...
... then you would expect the Perfect SAT scores to correlate pretty noticeably with family wealth. This wouldn't be a sign that anybody is doing anything wrong; it's just as natural as water flowing downhill. And these are reasonable premises, with strong empirical evidence for each of them.
So, question: just by looking at the correlation of SAT scores with family wealth, how can we possibly tell how broken the test is? How can we know how far the real SAT is from the absolutely un-gameable Perfect SAT?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/money-academic-su...
Looking at graduation rates instead of admission rates is problematic. Less gifted and underprivileged people also graduate at lower rates despite being admitted using affirmative action procedures as the College Board is now implementing. This means they do not have a degree that would advantage them, but are saddled with undischargable education debt that puts them at a severe disadvantage for the rest of their life. The system not only continues the inequality but makes it much worse. If college was free or education debt was dischargable in bankruptcy then it would not be the oppressive system it is currently where people unable to succeed are admitted, then forced to pay back debt they can not afford after they fail to graduate. Only a sadist and a racist would support such an inequitable abusive system.
To me it doesn't sound like you're trying to make the SAT reflect say academic potential. It seems like you're just trying to inflate the appearantly already inflated scores of the disadvantaged. Who will proceed to not get scholarships, fail out, and be saddled with debt they can't pay off or be discharged. This of course is the road to an egalitarian society!
Who needs to bother with difficult things like making the disadvantaged do a little better in school? Just add 100 points to their SAT. Problem solved.
it might be, but it will probably be significantly higher.
College is all about studying/cramming for tests.
And yes, this applies to "top" engineering colleges and otherwise.
This includes the engineering, math, CS, and social sciences class that I took.
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?
I am describing what the best schools in the entire world do, and I have lots of knowledge from my classwork, and other classmates experience.
These are the best schools in the world.
And apparently someone else who responded had a similar experience at Stanford, another college that is among the best in the world.
You seem to have zero knowledge about how colleges work at even the literal best schools in the world.
Basically every top college in the world still has tests and final exams and studying and cramming. This is called the "normal college experience" at basically every college and top college in the world (and backed up by someone else in this thread from Stanford!).
I truly loathe those who "help" the disadvantaged by lowering standards for them.
Once we have a number it tends to become An Important Thing, regardless of how much the number reflects reality. It is ironic that SAT is making a new number that has little reflection of reality to provide more context with their SAT test scores, which is another number that has only a poor approximate measurement of reality.
That doesn't mean they aren't useful.
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 the graph is impeccable it also is built on layer after layer of imperfect abstractions until the graph has very little to do with reality.
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 slightest difficulty.
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.
Otherwise, every college application would need an addendum of "List every hardship or limitation you have ever experienced". It's not practical.
The debate shouldn’t be to distribute the scarce resource more equitably, it should be to increase the availability of the resource!
At what point, if any, does the responsibility of getting out of adversity lie on the individual?
They are schools, not prize contests.
If it's just a thing schools can see, that adds to their additional soft tools they can use to evaluate an application, then it probably won't do much. If it actually becomes something that determines rankings, it will have a big impact. The latter seems unlikely, as schools would have to publicly report the score to US News and World report for it to affect rankings. But the score is private.
A few key points:
* First, this isn't the cheating scandal. If the rich parents could have gotten their kids good SAT scores, they wouldn't have needed to cheat and bribe. The SAT was keeping the wealthy people out in those case, not letting them in
* Test prep helps. But it's not a magic wand. The only real solution to getting better at the SAT is....having grown up reading and being good at arithmetic and algebra. Failing that, you can spend 12-16 months memorizing thousands of vocabulary words, reading novels, and memorizing every math concept tested, using Khan Academy. But....at a certain point that actually approximates being good at the material.
* What's the advantage of being better off? It's that your kids generally spend a lifetime more likely to read, have good teachers, have leisure time, parental involvement, parents that are married, good nutrition.
* But if a wealthy kid has made it to 12th grade and isn't that bright, wealth is no magic bullet. Like I said, the only way to do it is to take 16+ months to cram foundations into you. And the vast majority of parents lack such foresight.
* Actually, there is one magic bullet: it's making sure your kid has some kind of easily diagnosable mental health condition that gives them extra time. By "easily diagnosable", I mean in the sense that there's no real way to exclude it and you can find a doctor to say "oh sure, this kid seems to have ADHD". Extra time is a massive leg up. This rule came about due to Justice Department rules about not discriminating against those with disabilities. It did help the disabled, but it also gave the wealthy a loophole big enough to drive a truck through
* Will this be a similar loophole? Maybe. I am sure parents will try to exploit it. But....it's a rule actually made by the testing company, and not one imposed by the government. So, they have more control to avoid having it exploited. Also, some of the factors are more difficult to exploit. For example "kid with single parents". I mean, maybe the parents could temporarily divorce, though it's not clear if that counts. If it actually requires one parent to truly be out of the kid's life (or dead)....well, there's no easy way to fake that
* These are just temporary hardships due to upbringing, and they'll go away in the health college environment, right? Nope. You see the exact same gaps in higher level standardized tests. And in later measures such as bar passage rate. Whatever causes the issue, causes it the whole way through.
* Will this solve inequality? Maybe, maybe not. Too soon to tell. One underappreciated risk to programs like affirmative action is that they don't actually help those they're aimed at. Here's an article citing Henry Louis Gates Jr. showing that Ivy League schools generally don't accept the sons and daughters of slaves. Instead, they accept foreign black students: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more...
This list seems aimed at addressing the last issue. Maybe not so much a ranking factor, but instead aimed at letting admissions officers see who, within a subgroup, actually had a disadvantaged upbringing, vs. having a more narrow checkbox a...