Grade families like classes. The "class average" should always be a C (assume for sake of explanation that a C is 2000).

C, the student's initial score (call it the "crude score", C) is computed the same way it's always been

P is the student's penalty, computed from a weighted average of all of their ancestors' crude scores (w_k...w_1) as well as theirs (w_0).

For the next generation,

set w_k := w_(k-1)

if C > C_av: w_0 = w_1 * w_2 else: w_0 = w_1

normalize w_0...w_k

P = (sum(w_0...w_k) - C_av) * urgency

Where urgency is a measure of how in need the disadvantaged groups are as well as their numbers. This can be adjusted manually based on the political climate, maybe by a DAO that governs the College Board on the Ethereum blockchain.

Hopefully micro-credentialling/MOOCs/the fact that a lot of good careers are slowly turning into software (which is one of the easiest things to objectively test) eventually kill this fake-meritocracy bullshit.

From the perspective above, this is lipstick on a pig.

We say "celibrate diversity", but then try to quash it by making everyone appear equal and the same.

We are born in different circumstances. Sometimes being rich is a hindrance, making people lazy and unmotivated. Sometimes being poor is a hindrance. But sometimes it is motivation to work hard to escape poverty.

I think it's a little crazy that a committee of people get together and think they can "fix" someone's life circumstances, while in the process they are also hurting others'. We are not wise enough to make these decisions for others.

I did good but not great on the SAT and only got into CMU because I was a student athlete. But once I had my foot in the door I did very well (high gpa, TA'ed, graduated w/ honors and awards) and then continued to do very well in industry (arguably).

If an adversity score can help out other kids like me who don't happen to be "impressive-for-a-D3-school" level athletes, then I think it's a great thing.

All this will likely serve to do is show that given two equally scored students, the one with less adversity tends to get in because they help the college pay its bills or provide connections to their family's firms.

Schools already have financial aid data for poor students for grants, so this just makes this data more transparent to the rest of us.

I'll be interested to see if future data shows I'm correct on this.

I don't think it's ever going to work trying to rally against the math the universe is built out of.

Assuming that means AP classes that have been properly registered to use the trademark on transcripts, we will likely see pseudo-AP substitutes. The material will be taught, and students will take the tests, but officially there will not be AP at the school. Students will have to go elsewhere on test day.

Another possibility is that a completely different alternative will become far more popular. This could be dual-enrollment or International Baccalaureate.

If we want to have a real impact we need to be examining the factors contributing to the disadvantage leading up to this point and find a way to address those.

> A true critic might call for an end to funding schools by local property taxes and the creation, as in many advanced countries, of a common national pool that funds schools more or less equally. What a thought leader might offer MarketWorld and its winners is a kind of intellectual counteroffer—the idea, say, of using Big Data to better compensate star teachers and weed out bad ones.

Hardship score is a symptom. A large part of the problem lies in aristocratic-like school funding system.

"Adversity" levels are already assessed by all big name universities in the United States. This score will likely change very little, especially if the 15 factors are broken out and included in the report. What's more likely is that the score will oversimplify "adversity" to a level that can be exploited (even more so).

This could be seen as a good thing, even if you don’t like affirmative action. Instead of relying on crude metrics like zip code, race and income, this will allow for a more granular approach. If we are going to give a leg up to the disadvantaged (and therefore a push down for the advantages) we might as well do as good of a job as possible.

I think this is just meant to add some standardized and measured context for admissions officers, like an objective version of other "adversity factors" already present in the admissions packet.

However, I think College Board have no business doing this themselves. Seems out of line and very different from standardized testing.

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/01/21/chinese-...

That just seems so limited considering the variability of life.

It seems there are so many well intentioned efforts out there that seem focused on sort of economic or just easily measured statistics .... and people just try to unweave the weave by putting pressure on those easy to measure numbers.

I'm not sure that solves anything.

Colleges already weigh a GPA as better if the school district is more wealthy (competitive). So the adversity score counter-balances that existing bias.

If you go to a big state school you meet a lot of mediocre people who went to rich public schools and got mediocre scores and high (memorization-oriented) GPAs. They had access to lots of AP credits and get admissions advantages not just for the results but for taking the AP classes in the first place (weighted GPAs, etc.).

The adversity score, if it works correctly, will help colleges find students who attended high schools that were little more than daycare, offered no weighted GPA, few AP classes, lousy teachers, etc. A high potential student from one of those districts will fly under the radar compared to the kid who had a memorization 3.8 GPA and 8 AP classes from a big suburban high school.

Pretty concerning and really doesn’t capture various types of adversity faced in childhood. Feels like another box kids would need to fit in to...

Identity politics is becoming a parody of itself.

The only solution is UBI.

For example, if Harvard admitted purely by academics (assuming that a suitably hard version of SAT exists), they'd certainly have a student body that overcame more adversity they currently do. But they'd miss out on the likes of Jared Kushner who, despite low test scores, certainly had better career prospects than the average Harvard student. In reality top schools are generally looking for well-bred, well-rounded rich kids that are going to be successful no matter what. Everything about their process optimizes for this - relatively easy tests and low cutoffs, focus on extra-curricular and well-roundedness in general, ridiculous emphasis on sports no one without money would play, legacy preference, the list goes on. Admissions officers are even known to prefer more expensive extra-curricular activities - it's not about ability, it's not about effort, it's about interestingness and rarity, which are essentially synonymous with expensive.

Then to mask the fact that this is what their admissions process optimizes for, they just put the lipstick on the pig to make the result superficially palatable. This is where race-based affirmative action comes in - the whole holistic admissions process is fairly blatantly regressive, but somehow it's sold as a package deal with race-based affirmative action (it doesn't have to be) to put the critics on the defensive, as though they are the ones defending privilege. It's a fairly brilliant rhetorical technique, I must say. The holistic admissions process is primarily used to admit rich kids who aren't quite good enough academically over middle-class/poor kids who are great academically, but just have a hard time distinguishing themselves due to their chea, extra-curriculars that are available to far too many people to be interesting. But the fact that this process, combined with race-based affirmative action, yields a few more upper-middle class African immigrants and far fewer poor white and Asian kids, is apparently enough to give them the moral high ground.

They've done such an amazing job pushing this narrative that most people seem to think rich kids getting SAT tutoring is a big problem from a privilege perspective and de-emphasizing objective metrics is about leveling the playing field. It's the exact opposite - they want every excuse to admit the people that they think are going to be successful (and what better predicts success than growing up already successful?) and de-emphasizing objective metrics allows them to fill the entire class with mostly privileged people, without the riff-raffs that are academically good, but don't have the connections or the upbringing or the money to be successful.

Adversity score: tries to make the student a statistic

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.

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.

Judaism is well accepted as being both a race and a religion. Of course it has fuzzy borders with people who don't believe the religion but are genetically Jewish and vise versa, but so does every race and every religion.

It's not helpful for thought to demonize an idea by calling it "filth". How can you consider possibilities if you've decided in advance what's clean and what's too dirty to even say?

Jewish secularism comprises the non-religious ethnic Jewish people and the body of work produced by them. Among secular Jews, traditional Jewish holidays may be celebrated as historical and nature festivals, while life-cycle events, such as births, marriages, and deaths, may be marked in a secular manner.

This is actually a serious question. I want to get an understanding of the mind-set that creates this class wedge.

And this is a problem why?

You can't compare one zip code versus another to say which is geographically more "adverse". Poor white, trailer trash neighborhood vs drug-infested, gang-ridden city streets. Schools with 75% of students on free-lunch vs schools that have suffered mass shootings. Single black mother working as a nurse making $80k a year raising two kids versus Indian single mom who was abused by her husband and filed for divorce and custody.

On the flip side, what message do you tell to a white male from an upper middle class background who is raised in a good school district? He wants to go to an Ivy League. What should he do, how can he prepare?

Also it seems Chinese and Indian kids with immigrant parents will be affected the hardest in general

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.

Contaminated Childhood: The Chronic Lead Poisoning of Low-Income Children and Communities of Color in the United States: https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20170808.06139...

https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/pr...

Looks like they try to account for neighborhood environment, family environment, and high school environment. Seems a bit fairer than I expected, assuming family environment is given the weight it deserves. Otherwise it may penalize people who try to go to a better school or a better neighborhood.

Also looks like a play to sell a dashboard. Maybe related to the regulatory environment of colleges - they can prove they're selecting across a broad enough socioeconomic stratus, similar to how banks like to prove they're meeting HUD requirements for lending.

Let's take an example of Elon Musk. His childhood was full of abuse but they weren't poor. How would you compare objectively his score from someone who wasn't abused but was poor? And let's say you give lesser points to Elon, do you think you did the right thing considering he has achieved a ton to push mankind forward?

Brilliant. Another aspect of the already sketchy admittance process that will be overanalyzed and ultimately gamed to death -- assuming that this score truly has value to begin with.

I don't trust any of these people to do it correctly. I wouldn't even trust them to make random truly random.

I used to believe in the value of collecting these stats to problem solve what we can do to help everyone achieve. But increasingly these stats are just being used for a different kind of discrimination.

We've all got problems, and they're immeasurable. In high school I had severe anxiety that led to a lot of procrastination and avoiding school clubs. And as a 1st-generation immigrant, there were subtle cultural differences, even though I fit in with my appearance.

The truth is, except for a small handful of schools (whose seats are mostly already spoken for, either through donors, athletes, or the elite prodigies who are going to get in regardless of their socioeconomic background) it is almost irrelevant whether or not you go to school A or school B in the long run.

Your grit, your personal talents, your luck/karma/destiny etc are basically what carry you through anyway.

Anyone who blames their failure in life on “some kid took my seat at Harvard because adversity score” probably doesn’t have what it takes to make it anyway.

I am now both a US Army officer and a self-taught senior software developer working for a company that until recently generated more revenue than Google. As a hobby I write open source software that is arguably superior and outperforms similar projects coming out of Facebook. My adversity and persistence allowed me to learn a skill that formal education did not and I have been rewarded accordingly.

I've always felt that it was completely ridiculous that a Laotian student from a low-income family would be penalized under modern American systems when competing against an African-American student whose parents are both doctors/lawyers/engineers, and surpass the aforementioned family's income by 10x or more.

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.

Also, is it just me, or are SAT scores wildly overvalued? Maybe it's just my high school, but SAT scores were never emphasized, versus the ridiculous race for grades, extracurriculars and good essays. The days of a "good" SAT score getting you into a college are over. I can generally tell how old someone is just from how much they emphasize SAT scores.

But, I don't understand why College Board is computing this score, and not colleges themselves.

At what point, if any, does the responsibility of getting out of adversity lie on the individual?

If education and opportunity were abundant, maybe we wouldn't be at each other's throats and/or concocting elaborate ways to game the system.

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.

The point there is the power of wealth and social connections. Thats what is unjust. Dragging race into it sort of undermines the point, and it certainly hurts the universality of the point, as other countries have different dominant class identifiers.

> why should I or my children who did the right things (study, sacrifice, etc) suffer

Because plenty of other families and children do the same right things (study, sacrifice, etc), AND suffer other adversity. You're not special.

I gotta say, people in this discussion are acting as if suddenly colleges will totally forget that they need to admit for the lacrosse team and the rowing team and make sure they get the legacy admits in etc. That will not happen. Those people make money for the college. People who pay full tuition will always statistically have an advantage. You know how I know? I have done admissions scoring for higher ed! I don't decide who gets in, I just read all the letters of rec and the personal statements and look at the transcripts and send in an Excel spreadsheet.

Of course a single numerical score never captures the complexity of students. I really don't understand why HNers think this will make or break admissions. Any college has to meet their budget first. People who pay full price fill those spots. Everyone else is fighting for the remaining spots. Ok, maybe I answered my own question: HNers realize that despite being moderately successful in our current regime, they can't afford to pay full price and so their kids will be scrapping it out with every poor kid who busted their ass too, and it's just less compelling to hear "son/daughter of software engineer from well-off neighborhood, with robotics team experience and high SAT score and hours of tutoring and an internship at a local biotech firm" than "son/daughter of welfare mom, with robotics team experience and high SAT score and an internship at a local bank"....

Rich people can have crappy lives. No doubt about it. But they sure do help a small liberal arts college meet their budget goals more easily anyway.

She's probably gonna mention the MS in her essay, though.

There are always edge cases. That we can't perfectly capture each and every one of them doesn't mean some data on common advantages/disadvantages can't be useful.

(Plus, there's going to be a number of more conventionally disadvantaged kids with MS, too, who don't have the billions of dollars to lean on.)

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

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

If you had been in the Netherlands, you'd get a stipend of ~$10k per year when enrolling in school, and other countries have similar systems. UBC in Vancouver, Canada generally pays masters students $30k a year, having had a few friends depart to Canada due to said offer.

If you want to incentivize character built through life experiences? OK, I guess. But it should have to be the life and character of the actual student that counts. Not his mom.

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.

It seems logical and reasonable to give more help to those who need it more. And realistically, you're always going to be way better off by maximizing your own success (even if it means you might get less help) than by minimizing your own success and maximally relying on help. A life lived solely on assistance isn't really a pleasant one.

I promise you that I know people who, in a short few months, who burn the light out of the brightest soul.

Make them that test subject’s parent and I’ll give you a sure shot to medicority and a life of emotional issues.

Anecdote is never data. On a large enough scale of human data we see that programs that improve basic things like food, interaction with parents and teachers - all improve student outcomes.

Unsurprisingly - these are also things that better off families tend to take care off and spend their resources on.

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.

You don't get your "adversity score" which is not based on how well you did, but only on where you live and what high school you attend.

The siren call of hackernews.

Who the hell is even here anymore?

Homogeneity can traditionally be attacked by exploiting a vector that the entire crowd is weak towards. Randomness helps to solve this problem on a macro level by varying the crowds weaknesses and strengths from individual to individual.

everyone seems to be conflating academics with person-building in this thread.

Why don't these same people seem to have any problem with non-academic scholarships?

Here's the grand reason why it's a good idea to make schools mixing-pots : You can expose the really effective students to ideas and concepts that they may have never experienced, which they may use more constructively than other individuals.

In other words : Colleges need people that create the idea of Napster , but they also need the folks that can implement it. Both groups are only marginally effective without the other.

Similar line of philosophical questioning : 'Why do managers exist?'

No disagreement from me there. However, I would prefer if a child's outcome were not so dependent on how willing their parents are to make sacrifices.

> Simply put, parents are now forced to weigh the comparative benefit of a high-end university education over the child's development. I'm betting that diminishing returns on development investment will at some point encourage investment in gaming the adversity score instead.

I'd argue the current system already does this. Placing such a high emphasis on scores just makes it so that parents are strongly encouraged to put their children in SAT/AP prep scores while ignoring other things that would likely be much more important.

I went to a school full of wealthy students. Almost all of them took prep classes to get really high scores.

As far as I could tell, there was absolutely no instance of people learning for the sake of learning and little no to interest in doing something for the sake of a child's development.

For instance, take the mean SAT of admitted students, lower it by X% and pick candidates to random pool with scores above that level.

I imagine that to many people it wouldn't be "fair" because it wouldn't bring the outcome they want. But it'd be fun to watch them argue that random system privileges XYZ group!

I could consistently help even the poorest students move from below 50th percentile to 75th percentile. Moving from < 600 to mid 700s is totally doable with sufficient tutoring [1]. Even for pretty dumb students.

I think SAT/ACT are pretty good tests [1], but they're horrendously over-gamed at this point. I have very little faith in either as anything other than a demonstration of how badly the student wants to be admitted to a good school and has money for tutoring.

[1] edit: i.e., SAT/ACT are not easy to game wit short-term coaching, but sustained tutoring can substantially increase students' performance... see thread below for further elaboration and discussion of "coaching doesn't help" studies.

The fact is that different ethnic groups don't seem to mix organically unless they are all quite wealthy, at which point they have more in common with their socioeconomic class than with their ethnicity.

They'll also be punished for having established a low-crime neighborhood and learning english, since crime level and english as second language are also factors in the adversity score.

Of course, no single one of them is entirely responsible for their parents and community teaching them english, or for the low amount of crime. Because those are results of collective instead of individual effort, they're not labeled as laudable accomplishments, but as shameful privileges.

Maybe you grew up in a poor neighborhood but have incredibly supportive parents/family?

Maybe you grew up in a billionaire family but with parents who are never around because they have business to run and places to go (as they can afford to)?

And the 'secret' part of the story really really bugs me. Why don't we turn US tax code into a state secret so that rich people/business cannot try to game the system to pay less tax?

EDIT: I got downvotes. But really, I'd like to know who gets to decide how oppressed you are?

Q: What do you call the person who graduated last in their class in medical school? A: Doctor.

Sure, I'd probably prefer the higher performing doctor in this hypothetical scenario, but at the same time, it feels very much artificial (maybe a false dichotomy?). Sure, you always want the best for everything -- that's what "the best" means! Reality is that there are always going to be B students operating on people. If I were to propose my own false dichotomy, I might ask whether you prefer the B student who got tutored to pass the SAT, or one who self studied?

Ben Carson is an apparent moron, who thinks the pyramids were for grain storage. He'd fail a history course. He's also apparently a phenomenal brain surgeon.

Clinical skills and raw academic scores can be wildly disparate in a single person. Frankly, if I were picking a surgeon, I'd look for the one who enjoys tinkering with electronics and engines in their spare time.

I say this of course from the Computer Science perspective. Students scoring A are not necessarily the best Hackers.

The policy is dumb and dangerous, agreed.

But advantage is real. You can't list all the sacrifices your parents made while in the same breathe implying "no advantage here, this isn't fair".

The devil is in devising a fair system to determine advantage in an objective way that won't be rife with corruption and gaming the system. I highly doubt this will be possible and attempts likely will result in less fair and worse outcomes.

So policy wise, agree with OP. But from the story he tells, I think it obvious he does indeed have "advantages" many people don't and this is worth recognizing.

Compared to the poor students whose parents didn't make those sacrifices, they are privileged.

Scares the hell out of me.

What would "well prepared" mean here anyway?

Please don't lie. There is no mainstream Congress person or presidential candidate protecting FGM, advocating for full socialism or complete open borders. Just because you disagree with them doesn't make your projections true.

No, it does not say that it deserves a bonus _over_ family A. It deserves that that circumstance (a circumstance of the parents, not the kid!) is taken into account to close the gap somewhat.

Family B gets a triple mushroom, basically, and family A a green shell.

This... is a feature, not a bug. The SAT is a tool to measure educational attainment, and you boosted scores by legitimately educating students. The SAT is not a test to measure natural ability (I can't believe this needs to be said, but so many people claim that no intervention should be able to boost SAT scores, and the only logical conclusion is that they want the SAT to measure some sort of unchangeable inborn ability? Of course, I think the actual problem is that they haven't realized that if you eliminate all environmental differences, all you're left with is the genetic lottery.)

But anyway, I think this is absolutely fine. Would you expect someone who hasn't gone to high school to do well on the SATs? Then why in the world would you think legitimate education shouldn't boost SAT scores?

And that sacrifice will be for nought, due to adversity scoring.

This is a very bad idea.

And so the answer is that colleges already can and should take into account % learning through GPA.

Plenty of people stand up for their rights because they legitimately care about freedom. It’s not all some conspiracy by hate groups to defend themselves.

Your "intelligence" is definitely one of those things completely outside your control. What you've done with it is at least partially under your control, but you probably weren't born with any sort of brain disorder, for example.

EDIT: adding on things like your visual appearance - race, hair color, pigmentation, height, etc - all of those are outside your control, and you generally can't control how other people initially react to those things outside your control.

You didn't control where you were born, or - at least early on - what resources you had access to. You were a victim of (or success due to) your geography, at least early on in your life.

But hey, you 'worked hard' and didn't watch as much tv as some lazy bastards who might get a $1000 scholarship because they grew up in a high-crime area, and fuck that, right?

As was mentioned in the article - it doesn't alter your test score.

I did good enough and then went on to do a Masters degree. There I'd get my direct scores. I really feel much better about it. I knew what I did right and what I did wrong.

I think the adjusted score in my undergrad benefited me (some exams were too damn hard!) but I still hated the system.

Sorry, but there are people who work just as hard as you and don't get as far because the deck is even more stacked against them, and this is an attempt at getting them some relief.

If a poor kid in a high crime inner city school who has very limited access to tutors or mentors scores a 1600, that's a much more impressive achievement than an affluent kid in the suburbs who took the test 3 times, had access to experts in the various fields, got 3 good meals every day, etc. getting that same score.

Just imagine what that poor kid could do if given the same resources as the rich kid...

There's still a shitload of applicants between a 34 and 36. Easily more than one for every five spots. When you're talking about these universities with single digit admittance rates its not enough to just get good grades and good standardized test scores. Nine AP classes, fives on all the tests, and 4.0 GPA, and a perfect SAT score will guarantee you enough to get in the pile but you've still gotta make yourself shine like the diamond in the bush that all these schools are looking for. Having this 'Adversity Score' that's supposed to measure how much challenge you faced in life make it seem like you're an underdog that toughed it out against all the odds has the potential of being a big advantage.

> Sure, the Angleton guy's parents may be strung out on opioids or whatever, but I gotta be honest, I'm just not seeing why Stanford takes a chance on you as opposed to just giving it to one of the two kids who've proven they can perform at a high level academically test prep or no test prep?

Because not everyone believes in meritocracy. Some believe that Stanford should take bet on the guy's parents that are strung out on opioids even if he has lower test scores to advance their perception of social justice. That's just one possibility. There's also plenty of evidence to suggest that this may be a mechanism to enforce certain informal caps (like the one proven to be enforced on Asians) through geographic discrimination. Basically, a deliberately opaque (remember, this score is private and not given to the student) set of knobs and dials that can be used to achieve what normally can't be achieved legally.

Why should we be shoving people who aren't capable of being the very best students into this environment? Why give them the expectation that this is what they must do to be successful? What must everyone learn from a university (including those in the Ivy League and their peers) that we expect them to all need to go, as a fundamental right, regardless of the fact that they will be displacing students who are quantifiably better-fit for this place?

Who will be the first responders if we make everyone get a four-year degree before they can start their lives?

You go to a better school, you get a better education, you are more educated and you get a 34 on the ACT.

If you go to a crappy school and you get the same score than there's no qualitative difference between the schools and your parents skipped vacations for nothing.

But obviously the OP must believe there was value in the better school otherwise they wouldn't mention it. So they would believe they would have got a lower score in a different school, and if that's a proxy for education, then the OP must have ended up with a better education, and is also much more likely to succeed at _any_ college they go to, even if it's not Harvard.

I'm all about parents sacrificing for their kids, but when the system is set up to push people that far something about the system is broken.

Numerous private universities (Christian schools in particular) enforce strict student code of conduct rules that severely limit the student body's freedom of expression as to way to enforce religious or secular compliance. And it doesn't hurt their reputation but instead is an integral component of the school's identity.

I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I'd argue that colleges and universities should have the right to police speech and expression: they should just be upfront about it. "Our house: our rules" as they say.

Are need based scholarships denigrating the hard work of wealthy parents?

And what happens when students cease to challenge their own views? They become accustomed to a monoculture and become adverse to views other than their own. In time, the refusal to challenge their own views morphs into hostility towards those that dare challenge those views.

> For example, at one time Gen-Xers and Millennials were significantly more tolerant of homosexuality than society overall (they still are, but society has largely come around). Did universities do them a disservice by either nurturing or ignoring these views, rather than intellectually challenging their pro-gay marriage views?

It did them a service. By being force to challenge these views, these students were prompted to developed effective arguments to refute those challenges. This better equipped them to turn around and challenge the rest of society's views on these topics.

vs the article:

> “growing up in a neighborhood with less violence gives you advantages in your academic work.”

The score proposed is to adjust for societal issues, and technological solutions aren’t usually a good fit for those.

I see the issue with info circulating outside of your oversight that has impact on your life, I am just thinking they are basically keeping the status quo on this.

When a university makes that decision, that is the student pool they are going to bring in and they take the risk with their graduation stats, employment stats and failure rates.

When college board does it, they have literally zero skin in the game. They bill both the prospective student and the institution, produce this arbitrary number and there is no penalty for getting it wrong since they can just move the goalposts and declare success.

My point was only that it's an understandable implemention.

Seems like this adversity score is a way to quantify some of the factors that might have previously been found by other, more subjective means.

it might be, but it will probably be significantly higher.

USC (South Carolina) is #1 for international business, for example. As I recall we also had good engineering programs. I can't speak for the CS department, but I do know some very smart professors are there, since some of my friends did research there.

USC was the only college I applied to, and I had zero doubts that I'd ever get in (since I didn't go in for IB/business).

Now, networking is a totally different animal. Of course a lot of universities can't match the kind of networking that happens at Ivy leagues. For most people I don't think this is really an issue though as long as you go to a "good"ish university.

Also, schools with higher acceptance rates do not necessarily offer lower-quality educations, or have lower standards for graduation. One metric to consider is the four- or five-year graduation rate. For financial reasons, second-tier schools may initially admit more freshmen but ultimately wash more of them out. While this can turn out poorly for the student who takes out student loans only to wash out sophomore year, it can be a boon to strong students who, for one reason or another, didn’t have a standout high school experience.

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.

https://youtu.be/_ogxZxu6cjM?t=62

Adding more rules will just create perverse incentives (e.g. parents incentivized to increase crime rate in their neighborhoods to boost their children's scores.)

Not "outstanding ability, after considering factors X, Y, and Z", but simply "outstanding ability".

Plus, to what extent is the capacity for hard work based on luck? If long hours give you clinical depression because you got 50 bad genes and experienced neglect as a child and lived in a house with lead paint, do you get sent to live in a slum with the rest of the "lazy" people?

I don't necessarily agree with tossing such resumes in the garbage, but it is evidence that universities that enforce religious dogma on their students do suffer a hit to their reputation because of that.

> how do you explain the strong performance (and reputation) of private institutions vs. "state schools"?

Not every private school is Stanford, MIT, etc. Plenty of private schools are shitty for-profit enterprises (especially online universities) that essentially scam customers out of their money. Purely on the basis of return on investment many studies also conclude that public university is better than private universities.

Also most reputable private university do respect freedom of speech and expression to a similar degree as public universities. If you factor in the reactions of students, perhaps even better. When Berkeley hosted Milo Y students rioted, smashed up cars, etc. When Stanford hosted Dinesh D'Souza it was very tame with protesters being non-disruptive. Public universities aren't immune from going off the deep end regardless of constitutional protection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cMYfxOFBBM

Again, the private schools with good reputations do behave almost as if the First Amendment applied to them. The ones that don't generally aren't reputable. So your question is based on false premise.

Education is not some kind of of enterprise free from regulations. The consequences of bad education is similar to bad health care. As I see it, let schools worry about education, political system deal with politics, legal system deal with enforcing the law, health system deal with health issues, and religious communities deal with religion. Trying to mix them together will only cause intolerance and tensions in society.

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.

It's heading away from that.

This problem would be far better solved elsewhere in the chain instead of blurring the meaning of data and pretending that things are different.

One way “second-tier” universities can get around this problem is through mandatory co-op and internship programs. Push students to explore the job market early on, and they’ll start their post-grad job search with confidence, a stronger resume, and a network of contacts from previous co-ops and internships. This network may even include students from “elite” universities, who funnily enough often end up in the same internships and entry-level roles as their less-pedigreed counterparts.

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.

I don't understand why one would want a talented student to get preferential admission to a school because, for example, he liked the design of the campus. I only get the argument that a talented student should get admitted to a school that'll best develop those talents. The link between "you're talented" and "...so you should get to go to any school you want!" is one I don't get.

Why doesn't that lead to absurdities like a school which specifically excels at teaching "low-talent" students, churning out competent (if unexceptional) composers, still admitting talented students preferentially?

No, you certainly are not. But this is completely different from adding a hidden adversity score to the SAT. Your proposal is equality of opportunity to earn merit. The other proposal is manipulation of outcome to negate merit.

"Bad school" is not the one without a freshly refurbished swimming pool. It's the one with poor discipline, parents who don't care and a principal who has no idea how to work with kids.

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.

personally, I'm no savant, but as a child I really didn't have to work hard at anything in school. I was pushed up a grade, and was still at the top of that class, and bored, for years. i put in basically no effort in to any schooling for years, and was still, generally, way ahead of many other students who, looking back now, were struggling (this was in the day when students could be 'held back' to repeat a grade - I don't think that's done much today?).

i have learned plenty of skills, and some took years, and it's never ending. but some came - essentially - effortlessly (or appeared effortless relative to peers' efforts).

This matters less the longer you’ve been out of college, but by then, the effect will have made its mark on your resume already anyway.

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

Even the definition of merit and earned achievement is largely arbitrary. I'm successful because of the way I was created and raised. It's not a personal accomplishment.

Hard work should be rewarded because it's a basically useful for society to do so, not because it's some kind of absolute moral imperative.

To the extent that this proposal ceases to award hard work, from a societal perspective, it's gone too far. However it doesn't come close to doing that.

Looking at the metrics they're using, the only likely widescale impact on behavior is that people are less likely to move to rich neighborhoods with high scoring schools. I don't see this as a problem.

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.

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.

Your family is not model to be aspirational of. Yours is a warning to others.

College is all about studying/cramming for tests.

And yes, this applies to "top" engineering colleges and otherwise.

Couple this with the lack of class mobility and sometimes people feel participating in that race was the only way to control your future.

Think about being a parent and having children; do you honestly, sincerely think your kids would be better off literally studying the entire day, and during most of their childhood? The answer is no. Studying is important to an extent, but so is enjoying childhood and doing other things than studying all the time.

Korea only recently reduced the maximum legal working hours per week from 68 to 52. Korea also has an above average suicide rates in the 10s, 20s, and 30s (and much higher elderly suicide rate, since there are few programs for them). The outcome of the 수능 exam is so important for determining one's future that planes don't fly at that time, and workers head to work at a later hour than usual.

What's happening in Korea currently is a hyper rat race that looms over one's life from a young age. Nobody wants that, but it's inevitable due to the difficulties of finding a job in this economy.

I am not discussing whether or not work should equal reward. I'm saying there should be no need at all for this ridiculous amount of studying. The current system is fundamentally broken.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol

https://twitter.com/i/moments/1129009648214921216

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sat-adversity-score-college-boa...

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.

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."

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.