If you're going to discuss standardized testing, you should at least mention that it's totally a racket: Educational Testing Service.

As a Canadian I never took anything like the SAT. I don’t quite get why it exists. Or why people are convinced it needs to exist. Most of the world does fine without it.

That being said, I support whatever helps empower the diminished classes and helps quash the undeserved power of those born into money. …And in that case, the SAT might make a lot of sense now that I think of it.

Even if your teenage years were a quagmire and you have no grades to show for it, a single test can still open you up to academic opportunities.

Now that chatGPT breaks the college essay, proctored standardized tests seem like one of the only ways to assess kids.

Too many comments to reply to but the Scientific Racism in the comments here are astounding.

Rich people feel less guilty ("black people do bad on tests", they say) and also don't have to pay for years of SAT tutoring so their average IQ kids overperform and qualify for prestigious colleges. Gifted underprivileged kids pay the price. Sounds about right.

> Our ruling class is doing all they can to prevent this possibility.

HN gets bizarrely left-wing when wokeness comes up.

Ruling classes keeping the poor down? You simply don't see that kind of talk here unless affirmative action or similar is discussed.

It'll be a double win if these attempts to undermine wokeness lead to a society that truly provides equality of opportunity for all.

The SATs only apply to applicants seeking to gain admission by merit

If you want to help poor kids let them take the SAT exams for free.

Tragedy of the well-heeled commons.

Reading this is really weird for me. Worthwhile and eye-opening, but also baffling: I am literally the chair of the faculty committee at my small college that voted a couple of years ago to go test-optional (provisionally but with an eye toward making it permanent). I won't claim to be an great expert on the issues involved, beyond generally trying to keep up with the broad conversation about research outcomes: we're too small for any of us to specialize enough to get into the weeds of specific studies and methodologies outside of our fields (I'm in physics).

From all I've read in the past, though, standardized test outcomes are very strongly correlated with family wealth. The kids who have great SAT vocabularies are overwhelmingly the kids who grew up with parents with plenty of free time to read to them every day. High scoring kids are overwhelmingly the ones whose families could provide lots of educational support (either through direct help from available parents or through private tutoring). They're so very often the ones who spent weeks of their lives getting dedicated training in the otherwise-useless skill of "how to take a standardized test". And the correlation between SAT score and college success (by whatever metric) is IIRC quite low once you control for family background. So by and large, the faculty members that I know have come to see standardized testing as precisely a tool to give preference to kids from wealthy, privileged backgrounds.

Obviously the author of this article had a very different experience! And clearly there are kids out there who can use standardized tests to demonstrate amazing competence beyond what their grades show. (That's why we went "test optional" rather than "no tests allowed", for what it's worth.) And I'm not at all surprised that admissions essays correlate even more strongly with wealth than do SAT scores. (We don't rely entirely on essays, either.) Maybe we really did get it wrong, and the research we considered really was misleading, and universal testing would raise up more underprivileged students than it threw down. But I promise you, I absolutely 100% promise you, that no person in that room where we made the test-optional decision believed that the outcome of our decision would be fewer students with challenging backgrounds being admitted.

So is the claim here that the college decision makers adopting these policies are also dupes of "the chattering class"? (Aren't we supposedly a part of that class?) Or maybe it's just that I, personally, was the dupe of my faculty colleagues, who were conniving behind my back to get less competent students in their classes? I don't get it.

The only conclusion I can draw, in general, is that it is really hard to disentangle an individual student's intrinsic potential and preparedness from the influence of family wealth and resources. I agree with this author that there really are enormous systemic biases that encourage class segregation, and those biases are viciously wide-ranging and flexible and are embedded across all axes of achievement and opportunity. So I'm not particularly happy about the way that this essay very explicitly assumes bad faith on the part of those of us struggling to find a way to make things better.

[I'm posting this late enough that it'll probably never be seen, but given my connection to the subject I still feel compelled to chime in.]

I think people are missing the bigger picture, that's related directly to the SAT.

In the USA, public education funds are directly derived from the local tax base as a percentage of that revenue. If you live in a rich area, it means your family is also rich. The tax base, although it may be the rough same percentage, is much higher actual dollars than a small non-rich community.

I even see that locally in my nearby college town. There's definitely a "rich district". Homes go from $750k up to $5m. Their elementary has teachers and aides to cover students at 7:1, and flush with a wealthy technology budget. The other schools, or in particular, the "subsidized housing and trailer parks area's schools" have student coverage around 25:1, no teacher aides, and very limited tech budget.

This should be of little surprise given how our education system by default teaches the wealthy to be wealthy. And that starts as early as preschool and easily onwards through public school. And naturally, I didn't even touch upon private schools. And in my state, vouchers can be used from public schools on private and even religious schools. That too is an even higher rung on elitism.

Unless you're a genius from a poor family, you're likely going to stay in the "dumb and low paying" jobs for most of your lives.

We have to remember that Rob Henderson is a performer running his shtick. At first I really liked him, and in general agree with his assessments of things.

But he's just another guy that has to turn tricks with some new variant of "durr hurr liberal plan for X is elitist and a luxury belief."

It's a little personal with him, because right before the 2020 election he posted something pretentious like "In 2016 I bet and won a lot of money on the outcome of the election, and I bet even more this time" (Implying his non-elitist background gave him the clairvoyance that Trump would win. I asked him who he bet on this time. Then the results came in and Trump was clearly losing in 2020, and then he blocked me.

In the end, even if we agree with him, he's just another culture warrior that whose livelihood depends on feeding the angry masses outrage at whatever Team Blue/Team Red is doing.

'Disguising self-interest as virtue'

Indeed, and this seems like a prime example.

I'm a fan of a level playing-field, and measuring, rather than judging, ability.

But lets face it the putative victim described by the author is actually up against the kids of quite privileged, or dedicated families, who will be hiring private tutors, sending their kids to evening cram schools, or doing the 'tiger-mom' thing.

Some flexibility might give a leg-up to talented kids who haven't had one before (although there is that danger that it could go woke).

There is this belief among some, that the wealthy have an advantage when it comes to standardized tests such as SAT. This isn't true. Correlation isn't causation. You can't use your wealth to buy SAT scores. The best SAT tutoring available is Khan Academy, and it is free.

"Elite colleges are eliminating standardized tests before they eliminate legacy admissions. Tells you all you need to know."

In my view it might be possible to distribute resources to a greater extent by making it explicitly a lottery. For instance, a college could assign a "score" to each applicant, using their existing process, but then deliberately add a certain amount of random noise to the score. Socially, everybody would know that acceptance was decided by a combination of "merit" (by whatever measure) and luck.

The degree of randomness could depend on the school. For instance, community colleges accept virtually 100% of applicants anyway, and a random factor would not change anything.

I realize that the argument here is isolated to testing, so perhaps instruction is out of scope, but it reeks of a sickness I see all over education: so often we don't bother teach, we merely filter.

> Elite colleges are eliminating standardized tests before they eliminate legacy admissions. Tells you all you need to know.

Ah, well, case closed! Saved me from reading the entire article :)

Is this coming from a different place by the sort of person who has good-but-but-top grades and top standardized test scores, but thinks they deserve a look by elite universities? However, they can't say that so they point to a theoretical disadvantaged student who is somehow elevated by taking the test?

Fundamentally, the question is whether the SAT does what ETS wants you to believe it does, that it provides an objective assessment of a high schooler for college admissions. The claim is a correlation to the first year grades. Beyond that, it's mainly correlated to IQ and social class (professional class scores best IIRC).

Contrast this with the situation in other countries that rely heavily on testing, such as Ireland. As I understand it, the subjects are tested and the test grade is used instead of subjective markers of academic performance. Students are allowed to choose their university course based on priority derived from these test scores. This seems like a much more likely way for a poor Irish kid to arrive at Trinity college than for Harvard to notice and pluck out a poor American kid, if they even bothered applying.

In principle, SAT scores enable people like me, who were very very good at such tests, to break into elite schools.

In fact, test prep works well enough to enable a shockingly high percentage of legacies and donor brats in elite schools.

Ending SAT use in admissions might enable a more balanced approach to admissions, but it does not broaden access to elite schools. They could increase class sizes, or they could get rid of legacies and donor admissions.

I've said this before: read the small print. The SAT (or similar) is no longer required to become admitted to Good School(tm). The donor class that subsidizes those without other means to attend the Good School(tm) have been explicit in their contracts: They award on test scores. Has the SAT (or similar) really become not necessary?

Not sure I agree with Peter Hitchens, but he wrote a book (A Revolution Betrayed) about Modern, Grammar and Comprehensive secondary schools in Britain which digs into a lot of this as it feeds into the colleges systems in both countries. It’s a good book for getting your head around the problem.

I'd be curious to see a good school most the opposite direction. Admit ONLY based on SAT or SAT+ACT or something. Effectively allow students an "instant acceptance" option. I highly suspect that this "SAT-Only" group would be competitive across most or all metrics.

Interesting how many people try using inequality of outcomes as evidence for inequality of opportunities

Columbia University. Figures.

Yeonmi Park's "While Time Remains" has a biting critique of Columbia University's "wokeness".[1] Park escaped from North Korea to China as a child. In China, she was an illegal alien, and if caught would be deported back to North Korea and executed, so she and her mother were kept as slaves. She managed to escape China and get to the US. So she knows about oppression.

She ended up as a student at Columbia University. "What a load of crap" she writes. "The difference between a passing grade and a failing one lay in a refusal to criticize the usual targets (capitalism, Western civilization, white supremacy, systemic racism, oppression of minorities, colonialism, etc.) Worse than a bad grade was to be labelled by one's classmates as a 'SIX HIRB', a sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamaphobic, racist bigot."

[1] https://www.amazon.com/While-Time-Remains-Defectors-Freedom/...

I've been thinking about this for long time

On one hand I'm fan of standardized exams because they feel very very fair, are transparent and allow you to bootstrap yourself.

On the other hand I see the pros of taking people's traits into consideration because you know, it's not always that the top scorers are actually top people.

Unfortunately how to decide which traits are desirable? who decides that? etc etc.

And just because of that I'd default to first option - pure exams, because they're fair and transparent, rules are clear - just be the best.

But I do agree that in some cases there may be better ways to pick top people - just like during job interview.

When I studied physics it was almost “free admittance” (essentially a high school diploma with at least P-Level courses is what I think would be an equivalent in California).

Within the first semester everyone was weeded out who wouldn’t make it to the degree with theoretical physics and math courses.

It was pretty fair in retrospect. Everyone had their chance and a bad grade in English didn’t prevent anyone from pursuing physics. Since there was only an administrative fee of ~500€ for the semester it also didn’t ruin people’s finances

Whenever I see articles like this one, I imagine this is the kind of PR that US colleges would use to deflect conversational topics they don’t want happening. Get people talking about “how do we get into college?” (with the assumption that college is where we want to be) instead of “why is the US college system broken?”

Not saying this is that, but just a thought and I’d be curious to see if this is a trend that continues.

Nassim Taleb's idea (not sure if he came up with it first) is instructive here:

"Education doesn't create wealth. Wealth creates education."

They dropped the passing grade in South African high schools a decade or so back (maybe a bit more or less, longer after I exited the system in 2001).

Wouldn't you know it, graduating more students with terrible grades didn't magically lead to more capable working or studying adults.

It almost like pushing people through who are struggling to cope doesn't help them...

How is it a luxury belief? A luxury would imply that it's hard to obtain and rare/uncommon, yet this is a view that is widely held by a lot of people, and it's not like there is any barrier to believing in something, unlike having enough money to buy a luxury car. It's more like a trendy belief than a luxury one.

I worked during high school at a restaurant and later as a pizza delivery person.

In college I went to school at night and worked during the day.

I basically didn't get an education but paid for two pieces of paper that for me a great career... Not as good as a CMU grad, but pretty good.

The person OP is describing is me.

I don't think standardized testing is the answer. Nothing good happens by accident and using the SAT to fight a proxy war for accessibility of high quality higher education is not a good strategy.

I don't even know why people bother posting this stuff anymore.

We are living with mass encampments of the unhoused in our major cities full of the mentally handicap and physically addicted and our government and private sector has decided to let them rot.

45% of bankruptcies are caused by medical debt.

The rich have consolidated their power. The purse strings are closed. Nobody who matters gives a shit about the poor.

To quote George Carlin:

"But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, EVER be fixed.

It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got.

Because the owners, the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.

Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want:

They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking..."

Doesn't this go against what we know about SATs — which is that rich people do better simply because they have the time and money to do practice tests?

SATs don't measure much, they mostly measure how familiar you are with the structure of the test.

It seems to me that what's being debated here is a point of fact. Shouldn't the article be presenting directly applicable evidence rather than telling anecdotes about the Vietnam War?

In contrast, the bare minimum standardized testing in Poland ("matura") leaves you no chance whatsoever unless you've been keeping up in literature class for the past 3 years.

Ivys further cementing their role as champions of inequality.

> The luxury belief class [...] wants to keep you mired in [poverty and chaos]

And why would they want that? Author doesn't provide any reasoning about it.

> 14% of Harvard undergrads are legacies. It is exceedingly unlikely that SATs help a higher percentage of deserving but otherwise overlooked applicants.

I don't follow. Are you implying that the first sentence is evidence for the second? Do you think legacies are getting in via high standardized test scores? I don't think that's true. If standardized test scores were a major determinant of admission, these schools would be 2-3x more East Asian than they currently are. And virtually none of those students would be legacies. The Harvard admissions case showed all this with evidence from Harvard's own admissions data.

Additionally, the article cites a study saying that SATs do in fact help "deserving but otherwise overlooked" applicants.

> My point is, there is a way to have a far higher impact on opening seats for kids who should be getting an elite education than the question of whether SATs help or harm attaining that goal. They're not really serious until they don't preference legacies.

I agree with you that elite schools do not explicitly prioritize the talented poor. My impression is they prioritize (1) the powerful, (2) those who possess or can afford expensive class signals, (3) those who will donate money, (4) racial balance, (5) high achievers. Standardized tests allow students who can't get in via Categories 1-4 to sneak in via Category 5. Even these students tend to be of higher socioeconomic class, but to a lesser extent than Categories 1-4.

In my opinion, the only way to do better than standardized tests would be (standardized tests) - (all the non-academic mechanisms that privilege the rich) + (explicit priority for the talented poor). But these second and third terms will never happen, so standardized tests are better than nothing.

It is hard for me to understand those who support standardized tests being discarded along the way to a more fair admissions process. As you point out, there are much more obvious ways to achieve that first.

To get into Jesuit High in New Orleans, you need to have parents with money, no criminal record, and a pulse. The average student ACT score there is 31. That's the 95th percentile nationally. Those kids get great educations and have involved parents, but they aren't averaging 31s due to merit unless you're counting their parents' wallets too.

Are you saying there is some particular training program that increases scores much more than the 30-90 points claimed by various studies?

Can you link published research indicating that you can increase SAT scores through training? The research I have read says the opposite.

It’s not about being obligated or private parties. It’s just simply pointing out that not everyone has equal opportunity. You can start with access to prenatal health care, which literally starts before birth. And then you can find inequality of opportunity all the way up through life — from differences in water quality, school quality, access to money through inequality in banking access, access to high quality foods, etc….

This isn’t about the causes of these issues. But it’s obvious that not everyone has the same opportunities in childhood. It seems odd that you’d even question this.

Probably referring to things like this: https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistan...

Sure, in the case I believe any inequality in sentencing and arrests should be eliminated. As should subsidies and non-consumption taxes, making tax breaks irrelevant/impossible. Seems like you have no such consistency.

They are being so vague that’s it’s impossible for us to know, but they didn’t say “at scale”. You’re certainly correct that there isn’t some secret sauce that we could just apply to everyone. But it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a service that costs (high) 5 or 6 figures per year that could substantially increase test scores.

Though I would imagine such a service would have to take place over months/years and not days/weeks, and that kind of blurs the lines of whether it even counts as test prep at that point.

I’d be just as skeptical. It’s something that would require strong evidence and I’m providing you none.

I’ll be around on HN in five years. Ask me then.

> If equity is so important, why not grant preferential treatment to all children coming from families that aren't upper-middle-class?

College education has always been sold as a way to keep your children elite, and to the less well-to-do, as a golden ticket to being elite. The issue with education is that it has been marketed as the ultimate wealth signal: "My daughter is attending ______." (too bad for your daughter who is at ______ State)

> Standardized test scores are the hardest metric to game, and hence, are most under attack.

While this is true, standardized tests tend to favor children from more stable family situations and higher levels of wealth. The attack on the SAT is usually from the side favoring evening the odds for less financially advantaged groups.

Then what do you do for children coming from wealthy families who don't support them? Just because the parents have money doesn't mean they spend any of it or time on their kid, and with your system, those kids get screwed.

It's difficult.

I bet "why not ban legacy" is answered with "legacy donations mean two things: No chance".

https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-why-elite-colleges-...

"To find out why elite colleges love legacies, two business school professors were granted access to 16 years of admissions data at one elite Northeastern college. The upshot: it’s in this school’s clear self-interest to take them. Alumni children who received offers matriculated at much higher rates, giving the school more certainty in their future enrollment numbers. And these loyal families with multi-generational ties to the college were far more likely to donate funds, money that the school needs, in part, to offer scholarships to others."

Colleges want to look good... but no chance in hell they'll give up consistent students of families who donate.

Cost effective? not when it'll cost them millions or billions in kick backs.

Banning legacy admissions is a coordination problem. Try to eliminate it at one school and parents (re: donors) will raise an uproar. It would need to be eliminated at the whole cohort of peer schools to eliminate parents’ exit option.

Semi-related anecdote: my alma mater got huge pushback from donors when it tried to eliminate its football team [0], which was legendarily bad and a recruiting nightmare to boot (apparently football rosters can be 100+, though Swarthmore’s was ~53). So there was about as clear a case for elimination as you could hope for, and still it was a big controversy that impacted the school where administrators tend to notice — its endowment.

So when we talk about eliminating legacy admissions, I picture that, but just a thousand times worse.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/05/sports/football-no-more-f...

I have a really hard time believing this is being actively driven by collusion among rich families who know they could game non-SAT metrics. It would require a huge organizational effort, and for what? It's still not going to be a sure thing to get their kids in, there's gonna be even more randomness in the process after this change than there is now. And sending your kids to elite an school doesn't even buy them that much anyway if you're already rich & influential, you can pull strings to get them a job after they graduate from a mediocre school.

It's much easier to believe that this is being driven by college administrators who know that the way to advance their careers in the current climate is by passing radical social justice changes, and this particular idea is simply an organically popular fad among social justice influencers so it's the one they've latched onto.

Equity is not actually important, and the author said it saliently in this paragraph

> Elite colleges are eliminating standardized tests before they eliminate legacy admissions. Tells you all you need to know.

Wouldn’t rank within their school be the hardest metric to game, since schools tend to be fairly segregated with respect to income levels?

The only way to game that metric would be for the wealthy to send their kids to schools that perform worse, which would wind up driving more resources to those schools.

> If equity is so important

Because equity is about keeping people down, not lifting people up.

The core problem is that merit-based entrance is inherently at odds with equality of outcome. Families that are better off rais more capable children on average

Legacy admission should have been abolished long time ago. It’s systematic racism. Legacy admission has been part of the official admission system for the longest time. It's a system to favor the incumbents, the riches, the powerful, and the non-minority. It's used to ensure to give the elites are systematic unfair advantage.

Once a school is all lower class people it will stop being a high class product. Part of the value of these institutions is in reinforcing and renewing class solidarity.

I've made this proposal several times: judge an applicant by his/her delta relative to their cohort. For example (highly simplified) a kid from a wealthy family in a nice neighbourhood statistically scores 70% on average, if he scores 80 that's a +10. A kid from a poor single-parent household going to a dilapidated school where scores are 40% on average, if he scores 70 that's a +30.

Very rough example but the idea is this. Philosophically/ethically, it seems better. But practically as well: you want to admit the students most likely to excel if given the high quality resources at your university. Among a kid with all the comforts and private tutoring and all that, and a kid who rose way above his shitty lot in life, wouldn't the latter fit that description better?

I wonder if it would be better to just have a system where there are some number of elite university places set aside at some very high price for the rich. Perhaps the problem is the price would be too high / number of places too small that there would still be an incentive to try to get in through the ‘normal’ route. Plenty of top schools already set tuition prices based on family income.

It should satisfy people who want elite universities to be places to rub shoulders with other elites. My hope is that such a policy would reduce the incentive to game the ordinary system by throwing money at it.

But I guess the whole thing feels terribly unegalitarian and so couldn’t happen.

Perhaps an easier improvement would be if enrolment could be massively (say >2x) increased at elite schools.

I've seen this play out in a non-US country. My friend with wealthier parents got his loans paid because his parents didn't earn an 'income' and thus the state interpreted them as being poor. In reality they were fairly well off business owners who had a good accountant who channeled the cash flows through the lowest taxed entities.

> get recommendation letters from important people, stack their resumes with extracurriculars, and use the right slogans in their admissions essays. They have “polish.”

Or they just completely fake it, like a few cases that were discovered a few years ago. [1]

Let's be honest though. Those with less "polish" that would be admitted on purely objective/anonymous merit might even excel academically at the university, but they would be excluded by the very same social games being played here.

Sometimes they might even be told that explicitly but usually an excuse will be concocted.

The real question should be:

> What is more cruel, excluding them early on or allowing them to "win" but then ignore them completely when the benefits of that are to be distributed?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal

All of these takes ignore the fact that college shouldn't be a privilege. As long as we keep to the point that only a select few can go to college then we'll keep fighting over scraps. Nobody in this debate wants a meritocracy because implementing one would harm their interests.

Interestingly I feel the same way about coding interviews, which HN seems to hate. I feel like studying and doing well on my coding interviews helped me get into top companies that otherwise would probably pass over my decidedly non-elite resume.

> If equity is so important, why not grant preferential treatment to all children coming from families that aren't upper-middle-class? Or ban legacy preferences at the very least?

Because the equity that the school cares about above all else is its endowment, and rich family legacies give more than anyone else by far.

This is an interesting idea. You could stratify the admissions process by family income level, and set bars for admission at each level that ensure an equal distribution of admissions relative to the population distribution of income.

Meh, meaningless. Those kids get in regardless.

The SAT has flaws, like AIs trained on criminal records has flaws.

Getting rid of a flawed test won't suddenly make rich privilege suddenly increase

"Or ban legacy preferences at the very least"

It would be interesting if there was a rule that forbid you from attending the same school as your parents.

The admissions essays show polish because they are written (or at least heavily edited) by parents and paid consultants.

A big part of the problem is that means testing is largely a waste of time. If you boost people based on income you end up wasting a huge amount of time trying to figure out where the income line should be. Even if you can find a good point to put that line, the "rich kids who just didn't test well enough" will sue because they think college admissions should be a meritocracy, and bossing anyone for any reasons is somehow descrimination. They recently won a significant court case with that exact logic.

My next statement will be controversial, and is largely anecdotal, but there is very little to no research that contradicts my opinion, so I'm going to say it anyway. Smart, capable people who simply "don't test well" are almost non-existent. Even if they did, you can't accurately identify who doesn't test well except by giving them a job and letting them prove they were capable when they aren't under testing pressure. I have met hundreds of people who claimed they simply didn't test well, and only one of them later proved it by being genuinely capable and competent.

The thing that pisses me off the most about this whole debate, is that it only really matters if you think it matters whether you went to one of the top 10 universities available to you. Frankly, most employers will throw out your application if it says Harvard School of Business. The number of management jobs that want Harvard graduates is less than half the graduating class, and Business majors have it easier than most of the engineering degrees in that respect. If you're an electrical engineer, there are fewer than 100 jobs Nation wide, and they are already occupied. If you want to be a civil engineer, straight up forget about it. The medical and legal schools are the only exception, and those are graduate schools only.

There is far too much focus on whether the top 10 university admissions are fair and equitable, and far too little focus on whether we have affordable universities that meet decent educational standards for everyone who could reasonably earn a useful degree.

We definitely shouldn't be trying to get rid of standardized tests. There are arguments that can be made about their content, especially historically, but they have merit in showing whether a student is ready for certain classes. At a normal university, they use SAT and ACT scores to decide if you can skip algebra and go straight to calculus, or if you need to take even more basic classes before algebra, and they do this for science and English courses as well. Having such a laser focus on how the top 10 or top 50 schools that actually turn away applicants because they're at capacity is a massive failure to see the actual big picture when it comes to education.

If legacy wealthy kids can’t go to elite schools then the schools will not be elite. The schools the elite’s children go to are, by definition, the elite schools.

> legacy preferences

Why does this even exist?

That sounds like conspiracy theory. I think it is more likely the combination of ordinary racism with woke militantism. They think certain minorities aren't smart enough to pass SAT standards so the solution to get more of them in, is to not test for SAT.

It's the same stupidity that leads well-thinking liberals to bring their kids to drag strip shows because in their little mind "trans = gogo dancers in gay clubs".

Standardized tests are much easier to prep for than GPA and extracurriculars. I don’t get where the statement “rich kids don’t test well” actually comes from, and it wasn’t just made up to argue a point. Perhaps if you had state sponsored test prep like in China (you spend the last two years of high school just prepping for the test), but high school isn’t compulsory and many poor kids don’t even attend.

I have been watching this discussion but wasn’t aware there were recent votes about it. There is a diff between HES and Harvard College, as there should be since they are diff schools at Harvard University. Interestingly enough, something like 1/3 iirc of the classes are exactly the same invluding professor between the two. Pretty sure HES people would be satisfied if they were allowed to just put Harvard University by itself on their diploma or resume.

Pennsylvania? First day of buck season was always a holiday for us.

There's tons of people from fairly modest backgrounds in the legal profession, including ones who went to elite law schools. (E.g. Lawrence, Kansas, of all places, is the hometown of not one but two prominent south asian lawyers, Kannon Shanmugam and Judge Sri Srinivasan.) That's the direct result of the LSAT democratizing the legal profession over the last couple of generations.

I suspect you're correct, though, that if Harvard closes those doors, talented people will go to the University of Iowa (my wife's alma mater) and do fine.

It isn't that anyone things that folks from Iowa, going to the nearest in-state State college, can't make it. It happens. It just probably won't, but you might be more comfortable than someone that didn't go. Just don't, say, be a public defense lawyer or be a teacher.

It is that we know that going to places like Harvard, you are much, much more likely to have a well-paying job, comparatively. Bonus points if you are rich and can do things more often with your peers. I'm not under the impression that the education is that much better (it might be, I can't assess that). The networking you definitely seems better. You are getting a foot in the door, a thing that poor families can't always get without a good dose of luck.

There is really nothing inherently bad about sitting at the back of the bus. It is more so about the discrimination. It's a matter of principle.

I like a alternate version of this: tax 25% of all donations to schools (all of them, top or not), and redirect the money to fund and improve quality of public universities.

You still have a strong incentive for folks who want to show gratitude to their alma mater, and at the same time help improve access and equity to everyone else.

I agree, and for the record I wasn’t referring to just elite schools.

Well if you look at the scores, about 25% of a year group passes the test. It's something like 16% of state school kids and 36% of independent schools. Unfortunately the guy who compiled these stats closed down his website, so it's not so easy for me to look up.

The variation is enormous though. My kid's school is boasting about 95% of their kids passing the test. I know they've been prepping the test because well, that's what the kid has been doing for past couple of years.

> if a child passes the 11+, the private lose all the potential senior school fees.

It's true that some schools try to discourage the kids from taking it for that reason, but of course that's only true if there's a senior school section.

that goes for any career. I'm talking about young people who have plenty of time to invest into their future.

Doctor? Gatekeepers. Actor? Gatekeepers. Lawyer? Gatekeepers. Programmer? Just show up and be good! (The closest thing to a meritocracy there is.)

Interestingly, the Netherlands tried it a few years without the results of the standardised tests being known to the teacher (the results came in after they'd given their advice). It turned out that children from a poor background started getting worse recommendations...

As a result that practice has been reversed and teachers now use the result from the standardised test again when making their recommendation.

Yeah this is something I thought about quite hard before I moved countries. I didn't want my kid to be at the mercy of some teacher who might not like him.

So then I ended up where we have this one time test, which stresses the hell out of everyone. Luckily he did well on it, school decisions came out last week and he got what he wanted.

I'm not actually sure which is better, part of why I thought maybe teacher recommendations would have been better was that my kid would undoubtedly get recommended if that were the system, he just happens to have that thing that teachers recognise. But even so he could have had a bad day and not made it in the system we actually live in.

I had a similar experience in sixth grade. Completely insane.

On the other hand, it taught me early how life actually works.

They were not just researching "how to rain nuclear fire on the US" but also how to send the first satellite into space, send a probe on Venus, put the first man in orbit, etc.

SAT prep tests do have some impact, but much more significantly, re-takes and disability accommodations are highly impactful and heavily SES-correlated.

I guess 25 points does make a difference but I do think it’s a pretty small difference, especially at the top of the range. I remember the MIT admissions blogs years ago claimed that they do not distinguish at all between a 750 and an 800.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cram schools exist for a reason. You can get lots of help on the ACT/SATs, heck, they even offer it in China.

Grades and extra circular can be gamed as well, but you have to do a lot more planning ahead of time...like you can't just start 6 months before a test date and maybe try again 6 months after that. You have to start form late elementary school and be consistent up until 12th grade.

What you say is true, but I've seen this happening even with good teachers. I think there's a few reasons for this - first, if you have a large class and a student is already meeting all the standards, you're going to spend the time you have on the students falling behind. Teachers are going to want all the students to know what they're supposed to for that grade, rather than to have some advanced far off the grade while others fail.

Even if they had the time, there seems to be very little interest in advanced students across the board, and few if any programs put in place to meet their needs.

Secondly, there aren't many opportunities for students to demonstrate that they exceed the standards. Getting a class test entirely correct demonstrates that they know what is being taught, but nothing more. One thing I like about the standardized tests they're given now is that the computer will adjust and ask more advanced problems if the students get answers correct.

When I applied to secondary school, I barely made the cut and was one of the lowest-scoring students to be accepted that year, only ranking around the 4th percentile of those accepted. Once I started attending, I performed exceptionally well, ranking around the 95th percentile, give or take 5. It was mainly due to the fact that a large minority of my primary school teachers had biased opinions about me and our personal differences affected my grades.

Where I come from some are named for illustrious alumni, some of whom financed the building. But as far as I know it didn't give their offspring an easier way to get accepted as students.

Can you elaborate on the “different brain and habits”?

Sports programs, just like legacy entries, earn a lot of money for universities.

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

Prepping for a test doesn't give you any practical knowledge or expand how you think about things; it's just about getting familiar with the test’s format and the way the question authors think. It'd be a bit like getting “better” at poker by always playing with the same people and learning their tells. It's “gaming” it because you're not better at what the test is supposed to measure, you're just better at what it actually does measure.

Okay. Why?

Some of the public funds come by way of Pell Grants. What's so terrible about poor kids getting a top-tier education?

Other mechanisms are research grants. You don't think it's in the public's interest to incentivize graduate students at top institutions to do socially beneficial research?

Help me understand what your objection is to federal policy, and what you wish federal policy were instead.

A lot of federal regulation of schools is only present thanks to funding. That means that by giving the school federal funding, the federal government receives some level of control.

It's an important point to keep in mind I think.

The thing is, education doesn't scale infinitely like that. The bigger the class size the less attention you get from the professor, the less individualized the education is, the more generic it has to be, the lower the common denominator, etc.

And lots of colleges are known for their teachers. You can't always just hire another identical teacher: good ones are rare. At elite schools, they are often even famous and individually important in their field. You cannot scale that.

Hello I come from a country where a university education is free and the government will support your living costs while you are a student. In that setting, we have too many people in high school and not enough in vocational school (and the local high school is way more academically ambitious than American high school seems to be).

The way our societies & industries still function, too many highly educated people is not the end goal. There's still a long road to grow the percentage of "information workers", especially roles needing higher education, and frankly all that seems to mean is that you outsource all manufacturing to other countries -- I think we've seen lately that wasn't the greatest idea.

No. They mentioned what happens upon dropping affirmative action. Standardized tests still exist.

Grades in the UK are based 10 percentage point increments if that helps.

Perhaps we can ask the Soviets what they called it.

It's only silly to the extent that you collapse the argument down to the design of the test itself, and not all the circumstances that go into the administration of the test across the country.

I think we can all agree there is no such thing as a perfect test, but at the end of the day we need some sort of objective metrics if we want a merit-based educational system.

"doing so would be a complete waste of everyone’s time"

I simply don't believe this. Playing violin is virtuous even if you aren't a virtuoso and knowing about calculus is virtuous even if you're a Michelin starred chef. Its certainly true that the situation you describes may not be an _efficient_ distribution of resources if all you care about is productivity, but there are other ways to think.

You don't even need Trusts for this. EWS is decided by an issued certificate. The issuer can be bribed.

I knew a kid in high school whose parents divorced for college financial aid reasons. As long you have a trusting relationship, seems easy enough to divorce, give one spouse the wealth, and then remarry when you don't care about FAFSAs any more.

As a practical matter how would college admissions departments even try to account for "total wealth"? That number doesn't appear on income tax returns. Applicants could write down any number and there wouldn't be any way to verify it short of a court ordered forensic audit.

Trusts are the most common way to do this.

Coming from other side of border but with similar culture and attitudes, corruption is so common in that part of the world that most of the people don’t even see it.

They would consider it smart to game the system.

Only way I can explain this attitude is to compare it tax loopholes in the west. It is very hard for many Americans to see loopholes in tax codes as unethical. Like using mega-backdoor-ira loophole to bypass income limits for contributing to IRA. (Personally, I am not saying that tax loopholes are ethical or unethical, just something that can be seen both ways.)

People will do what they can to make their children's lives better. It just means the system was poorly designed

A suggestion: Judge the parent who did the action, not the child who was along for the ride.

Unless you have some specific knowledge that the child insisted on their parents taking the action, it’s not really fair to blame the child. A lot of children don’t have much choice in the matter at that age.

Well he is still his “friend”. Perhaps he has repented and paid for the education of a number of people who would otherwise not be able to afford it.

Atleast in India, everyone "games" systems as much as they can. Those who can't dream about gaming it. The Kafkaesque system makes sure that the few who actually tread the right path are never rewarded [1].

And unlike EU, this benefits corporates/capitalism as they can cut through the red tape easily by "gaming" things.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33368104

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

What's happening to lower middle class kids in Iowa? I'm honestly just confused here. To my knowledge, they're getting decent lower middle class jobs and doing fine. Maybe going off to college and moving to the coast, probably not unless they want to leave. I don't think of that particular group of individuals as disadvantaged, at least not in the context of getting into a good college.

...and anyone mentioning this is voted down by the chattering class of HN.

Predictable yet still disappointing.

That would help public universities, but many universities are private

Most criticism I've heard of them is that they suck up a disproportionate amount of funding.

I'm not sure I follow everything you wrote. Are you saying that poverty produces children and individuals more capable of driving and succeeding in society?

Nobody needs to go in cold when you can do a practice test at home or at the library.

If someone's high school math skills aren't ready at all then that's a much bigger issue than any kind of bonus prep.

What happens when the student takes a test in class if the tutor has been doing all the work?

> As an analogy, my physical fitness is totally in my control: if I work out more, I'll build more muscle. But you'd never say "Why are you even going to the gym if your fitness is within your control?"

This isn't a good analogy. A gym is a mere building. I wasn't referring to schools as mere buildings, the walls, the halls, the roofs. I was referring to schools as the places where the students meet the teachers.

> Students can learn in other ways, too, and any kind of learning will be measured on these tests.

How successful do you expect most children would be with entirely self-directed learning? No teachers, no tutors, not even parents. That's what I meant. I wouldn't expect that to work well, with only rare exceptions. Students — who by definition and nature lack experience, lack knowledge, are ignorant — need guidance, and thus the quality of the schools, the quality of the teaching is crucial. Nothing is totally in the control of the student, nor should it be, for the student's own good.

None of these (and other) schools view endowments as something to spend. It must always be growing to show how amazing and great the school is.

I remember how during the pandemic there was a number of articles about how these schools might have to take out some small pittance of the endowment to fund certain things and the schools were all doom and gloom about it.

University of Texas system was around $42B in 2022 : https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-harvard-university-o...

Not all universities are elite

G$ == Giga dollars?

What is G$?

> a way to circulate the elites

Thr proper terminology is Sovial Mobility

> arbitrary things like sex or race can’t work

They work as a litmus test-> if you are massively excluding someome, probably something in the process is fucked.

Did you not read the part where the ‘aristocracy’ pays way more tuition money for their one child? If you weren’t so focused on class warfare, you’d realize all of that extra money can be used for other things such as scholarships for families who wouldn’t be able to afford a university education for their children. The people you’re referring to wouldn’t be able to afford tuition before the rate hikes, and they sure would be in a worse position post tuition hike

Learning disabilities are a type of neurodevelopmental disorder in which a student that is of otherwise average of above average intelligence struggle with a specific type of material, commonly reading (dyslexia) or basic math (dyscalculia). The most effective treatment is early remediation, in which students in primary education are identified and given extra lessons and exercises on their weakness to help make them more well rounded so they do not struggle later in their education. This is super effective.

I can tell your frustrated with accommodations. I think your arguments against accommodations would be a lot stronger if you knew more about them. I think you might have some good points inside, but your frustration and ignorance prevent them from being compelling. I encourage you to do more reading, but let me point out a few mistakes in your post.

* You seem to mistakenly associate a learning disability with low intelligence. A person cannot have a learning disability and be below average in intelligence by definition. Struggling to learn how to read while being average or above average in every other subject is different than strugglingly to learn everything. The more a student struggles to learn to read while excelling at everything else, the more likely they are to be diagnosed. This means very intelligent students with a learning disability are more likely to be diagnosed than average students with the same disability.

* Extra time on test is an accommodation.

* Accommodations are not being handed out like candy for no reason. Anyone can buy candy. Accommodations require a documented disability.

* Many standardized test accommodations are very appropriate, such as blind people being offered a braille version of the test, or people with poor motor control having someone else physically fill in scantron bubbles.

* A student can be disabled based on low intelligence. It's not called a learning disability, because it's fundamentally a different thing.

To me education is about what you learn. And I’m happy that I aced every single exam and project.

Like I mentioned to the other poster, there are people who do all the homework and still fail the class.

I aced every single project, midterm, and final. I can understand most topics the first or second time I learn them, and when I don’t I will do some homework. But for the most part I personally didn’t need it and I got penalized. I also worked during college so I could afford to not commute, so i was glad I didn’t need to do the homework to do well in everything else.

So explain that to me. I recall students who did homework would still fail and then the professor would do some last saving grace move where you do some BS work to get an extra five percent.

Someone who understands the material would ace the exams. In my experience most people did not ace the exams and in fact would hate on me and some others who would “kill the curve”.

Finally fwiw I went to a lower ranked state college not some MIT tier place. They were the only college who offered the most financial aid so I was able to graduate with under 7k owed while affording to live on campus.

Paid off my debt in the first months paycheck lol.

Homework being worth 20% is dumb for school.

Besides I worked the entire time in college to pay for college. Being penalized because I don’t have time to do homework without which I can’t pay for school helps nobody. I don’t think I ever got anything lower than a B on an exam, and nothing lower than A on a final/midterm/project.

And yeah, homework is for people who need it. Work and school are totally different one you’re learning the other you’re utilizing what you learned. Having homework be worth anything more than maybe 5% is stupid. I’m not getting paid to do homework, in fact I am paying to even learn.

People do homework and still fail. So what’s the point of homework?

LSAT can be taken at 18. Discounting 2-3 years for a course and we have 15 year olds. Are we holding 15 year olds as liable as adults? That they must grind 3 years of course with full intensity while already dealing with teenage problems? Sounds like hell.

As a thought experiment couldn't you just say your from South Africa. Thus being "African American".

For the record I hate affirmative action, but I also hate the notion of having some elite 10 schools everyone strives to get into. You can do just fine going to a state school, and you'll probably have a much more relaxed experienced.

You can also do what I did and hit 100k no degree at all. With all this talk of student loan forgiveness, maybe we need to rethink the role of college.

It doesn't need to be an automatic first step into adulthood, you can learn a great deal working for a few years beforehand.

Thanks. That matches what I had expected.

We’re not talking about settling in NYC or Cali, we’re talking about the opportunity to compete with rich coastal kids for positions in top schools.

It's supposed to test a combination of intelligence and work ethic, and it does an OK job at that compared to everything else while being the hardest thing for established and/or wealthy students to game.

> I'm still struggling to see how that benefits the poor or the migrants in general

Maybe there can be a better way, but today the options are SAT or no SAT. How can a smart, poor student who goes to a bad high school (e.g. my dad fleeing Iran) stand out other than the SAT?

the point of standardized tests, is from what I understand, getting some sort of "objective" ranking, not for the purpose of intelligence per se, but to have a number so that when there is a cutoff, no one complains because everyone had (ceteris paribas) had an equal chance of getting in that cut-off, if they had worked hard enough.

In countries like India, the test like JEE are really absurd, because the competition is just that tough. Just any sort of question that fits in the syllabus is thrown in, because what else can you do?

In countries like the US, where things are a bit less stressed, they can try to attempt to perhaps gain some secondary data, by testing reasoning or what not.

but in the end, it's just a way to rank "fairly" to create cut-off, to look too deeply into it is not worth it, that's the job for your regular school education.

It’s not a mistake, that’s for sure. I’ll be more blunt since a lot of other comments in this thread beat around the bush: higher education institutes are removing objective admissions criteria so that they can admit less qualified minorities on subjective grounds.

Well, on the one hand, student applicants want to feel that "I am not a number, I am a human being."

And admission committees put a lot of time and effort into trying to discern qualities that go beyond some numbers of the page to admit a qualified but diverse student body (for reasons both good and arguably bad or ineffective).

When I attended Caltech, there was no evidence that it was a rich kids school. For example, very few students had a car. The ones that did had a Bug or an old Ford pickup. I don't recall anyone wearing tailored clothes, the students mostly wore completely unremarkable stuff. When I'd meet their parents, they were perfectly ordinary people.

> I wish the obsession with top-tier colleges would go away.

Until the ceiling of utility goes away the obsession wont go away.

If your goal is to climb the corporate ladder, all schools have nearly the same utility. Maybe industry specific, but I contend that its not different enough.

If your goal is to skip the corporate ladder, only top tier schools get you in the room. And only if the pedigree is used in very specific ways. Still not a silver bullet by any means.

But not being there is basically the same as having no ammunition.

I mostly agree, it's a fleetingly small amount of the population for which entering these elite colleges is even a possibility to begin with, what matters to the average Joe is their access to things like community college, tech schools, state schools, and so on.

Sure the elite schools matter because they control access to the levers of mass societal power but it seems to be a MAJORITY of what is talked about which seems disproportionate.

> There's virtually no such thing as ringers taking tests.

It happens more than you might think, but only because you don't have the money or desire to use such a service.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/artic...

There have been many scandals, relatively recently. This was just one of many many links that are very easy to find.

Don’t forget the off the chart rates of testing accommodations for rich kids vs everyone else.

There are more ringers taking tests than we probably know. I used to teach SAT prep and I was propositioned multiple times about this (usual subtle). Of course I never did it, but I’m sure they could find someone.

How does one study for the SAT, would you say, and what impact do you believe that studying has?

> For those pursuing expertise though, schools can provide a lot of value through offering access to others with talent and to some degree infrastructure.

I think you misunderstood what I meant. When I was referring to schools, I meant high school and earlier. In other words, the schools that should presumably give you an education relevant to the standardized tests.

It's one of those things where people kid themselves that it was all them. To some degree it's a useful fiction, we can't be going about being all gloomy about our prospects.

But it also creates a heck of a lot of stress. What your parents think of you, how they talk about you to their friends, is going to depend on this test. On top of it all, you're not even really learning anything, you need to spend the time learning the test.

It was a Supreme Court case, Griggs vs Duke Power, in 1970. Since then, employers cannot use IQ tests or standardized tests, since they were deemed discriminatory against minorities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

Yeah exactly. Being able to score well on some standardized test is way easier than being able to keep up performance year round when you have problems at home if you have the aptitude to succeed at either.

GPA is also much more subject to getting penalized because a teacher straight up hates you for being poor, disabled, male (this one is measurable by having teachers grade tests with different names), ugly, smelly, other thing K-12 teachers tend to dock you for even though on paper they shouldn’t.

Many extracurriculars are also expensive and poor kids don’t get to do a lot of them or excel at them to the same degree.

Agreed except the easily part. You need to even know that you can prep, and have some clue about prepping, along with quiet places at home or a library you can get to to do the work. Let's not make a lot of assumptions here.

The only exception I can think of are the temporarily poor; e.g. refugees from Southeast Asia or Africa whose families were well to do back home and still have that familial knowledge even if they are currently lacking in money.

Why would home environment be more influential for GPA, which is a bunch of tests, versus the SAT, which is also just a test?

Extracurriculars I agree with, rich people are more likely to have connections to get the nice internships.

I'll chime in with a suggestion. On average for every dollar of research money that goes to these institutions, another ~$0.70 is given to the bureaucracy to spend as it sees fit. The federal government could cap these rates at 40-50% down from 70% without a significant impact to research, since the research effort, including researcher salaries, are already paid from the direct funds. The bureaucracy will argue that it needs that extra money to keep the lights on, but in practice you see that the middle management tier of universities has expanded as a much higher rate than the research effort, suggesting it is relatively flush with cash compared to the boots on the ground types.

So far you’ve used straw man (you don’t support poor kids going to college?) and an ad-hominem (complaining that people who aren’t you are making money…) attack in your responses, which indicates a lack of argument in good faith.

I spelled out pretty clearly why somebody might have issues with taxpayers subsidizing the tuition of a Harvard graduate.

GPA is not a bunch of tests. Schools make it so box checkers who squeak get every opportunity to make up for their ability with cooperative socialization. While other students who don't do the right stuff and aren't involved in the right extracurriculars get everything rounded down, and rounded down harder if they speak up.

I'm a former educator and tutor.

The effects of studying "for the test" as you put have been measured, improved test taking skills tends to be worth ~30 points which is not that significant. This matches my anecdotal experience and that of people I know who run SAT prep courses.

It's far more effective to actually teach students the material, either by teaching them new concepts or by firming up their understanding to ones they've already been exposed to. Particularly in Math, many students in high school have shaky understandings of fractions or algebra. Firming up these foundations can often lead to >100 point increase (given sufficient lead time). Those foundations are something the test is actually looking for since numeracy and strong algebra skills are a strong predictor of success in Calculus.

It's true that tutoring grants unfair advantages but this is going to be true in any system that uses skills as part of a selection criteria.

The JEE solved this problem by changing the format of the test each year. It's not disclosed before the exam. So it is really hard to form meaningful strategy that consistently helps you

> That said... I don't know how the _new_ system will work at fighting that privilege -- there are still lots of ways for it to disguise itself. But we have to at least acknowledge the issues with the SAT.

I'm in favor of using tests like that SAT as cheaper diagnostic tests, to help with student placements and accommodations, not for admissions. It's too bad this is being lost with the removal of the testing requirements, but I guess it doesn't matter much as the tests were never used this way in the first place, despite providing this information. https://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/ACT%20Paper%20... (note that I don't agree with the conclusions of this paper, merely the identified diagnostic criteria)

> This is about diversity of skills and diversity of learner profiles

I might believe that if I didn't believe that the diversity would mostly be token, with the majority of students in selective schools fitting a handful of templates.

I still don’t see how it’s discrimination against White students. This actually looks more like discrimination against Asians, with Whites being the biggest beneficiary of the discrimination based on the numbers. Blacks get the biggest bump, but it is Whites who “steal” the most spots.

It does make me wonder about the marketing of anti-affirmative action. For example you see on social media the kids who posts about their great grades and scores and not getting into the Ivies. The common refrain is that some black kid got their spot due to affirmative action. Although it’s actually more likely, if the applicant is Asian, that it is a white kind who got that spot due to affirmative action. I wonder how public perception changes if they knew that reality?

I think that’d be gibidollars (Gi$ or something like that?).

All these unusual units are kinda fun, could spice up a presentation or conversation to throw in without context.

It gives me that hacker having fun, tarsnap picodollar/byte-month pricing vibe.

Because there is no safety net otherwise.

also, wages (and respect) for employees are already limited, and the lower down the "totem" pole you are the worse it gets. parents don't want to imagine such a scenario, even if they have moved to the US where despite everything, things are still much better, minimum wage wise.

But even small tech companies do coding tests. I don't think its a function of large pocketbooks. Rather I think that they found tests that correlate more to the work done on the actual job.

That story doesn’t say that at all. You brought in your own baggage to make that claim.

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

Your statistics there are wrong. I think you got that from a site other than Berkeley. Those percentages don't even come close to 100%.

Berkeley reports here: https://opa.berkeley.edu/uc-berkeley-fall-enrollment-data-ne...

Asians are 43%-53% depending on how many who identify as 'International' are Asian. Whites are 19.7% and Blacks are 3.4%

You are right, however, about why schools want to eliminate the SAT. SAT optional admissions is a way for schools to admit students whom would have previously been considered unqualified. By increasing the pool of eligible applicants, the school is discriminating against the previous population of qualified, top tier students, which has been historically an Asian majority. Additionally, Asian students with low or no SAT scores will not benefit from these changes because the best Asian students will continue to submit high SAT scores. How many Asian students are going to be accepted without an SAT score when they're being compared to other Asian students with 1500+ SAT scores?

Why is that a bad thing?

Cal is in Bay Area. Bay Area is like 35% Asian.

I agree that certain people are racist / jealous towards Asians because we are smart and can get ahead in a generation even when we start far behind some other people, but UCB is a state school located in a area that has a lot of Asian population.

Not just gameable, but provably biased to start with against applicants from a lower-class background. And with K-12 public education declining even further in quality, the bias against students from less privileged backgrounds and having less outside support will only increase.

The issue is that the standardized tests correlate with IQ, and IQ has been determined to be have racial and other biases.

I went to a shitty rural high school - high scores on my ACT made a huge difference as anyone who could read got out of that school with a 3.7.

If they are so qualified, why not let them compete on the even ground with the rest of the applicants? Why is there a need to special track them via legacy?

Legacy should have been abolished long time ago. It’s the epitome of systematic racism.

Is it an urban myth? We can look at former presidents like George who attended Yale with a 1200 SAT and a 2.5 HS GPA.

This is kind of a racist against whites who I think are used as a scapegoat no matter what. In my experience, those sports teams you are talking about are filled up with international and Asian students[1][2]. The dumb white elite student and the extremely talented, poor Asian student stereotypes are not true in my opinion. Maybe they were in the past.

Even the SAT score can be gamed.[3] I think pretty much every admissions advantage that exists is found and exploited. These schools are no longer about providing an elite education to talented students who want to get ahead. They are credential factories and students who go these schools have parents that push them from young ages to get in because they want the status credential. I have all sorts of stories about how fake a lot of students CVs are. Fake non profits, doing math competitions despite not liking math, getting into obscure sports, etc. It's absolutely not just white people who do this.

I am not advocating for dropping test scores. I just want to point out how aggressively people pursue getting admitted to elite schools and the specter of cheating hangs over it all too. I have friends who did tutoring in other countries who talk about paid SAT test takers.

[1]: https://gocrimson.com/sports/mens-fencing/roster

[2]: https://goprincetontigers.com/sports/mens-squash/roster?path...

[3]: https://qz.com/980074/the-sat-can-be-hacked-and-gamed-with-t...

I also went to an elite prep school except it was the 2010s. You're right that the kids there prove themselves. The top ~15% of students there would have found the top universities under-challenging, except maybe MIT. The top 50% would've been on par.

But guess who got into the top private universities from that prep school, not the top students. Most were legacy, donor families, or really crafty liars. So overall I would consider the prep school kids going into top private schools under-qualified (public unis are different), though not exactly because they're from prep school.

Not entirely true. The marketplace for homework and Varsity Blues.

Really believe Trump could've made it through Wharton unassisted? Or W?

All the people I know who have been able to claim disability for psychiatric reasons as adults have come from upper middle class families (e.g. my bipolar aunt whose brother was the superintendent of buildings for a small cities, a friend who dropped out of grad school after not seeing his advisor for nine months whose father was a specialist manager for failing Montgomery wards stores, an ex-friend who suffered from panic disorder and agoraphobia whose father was an doctor in the army who later rose high in the ranks of the medical establishment.)

Conversely I've seen people from hardscrabble backgrounds who are obviously disabled (a friend with no diagnosis but who so thought disordered that even though she are addicted to cigarettes it would take hours for her to get it together enough to smoke her first cigarette even with help) who would struggle to deal with the paperwork to get food stamps and TAANF, never mind the much more difficult and adversarial process to get SSI or SSDI.

Why should you believe that it is "happening here"?

Let alone at a significant rate.

Why is this wild conjecture worth a discussion?

Give me a break.

As a clinician that evaluates disabilities, it is very difficult to fake one. They tend to be diagnosed at an early age, and not at "test time" in high school. In fact, as a person ages they are much less likely to receive a diagnosis. There has to be early-age evidence even if the diagnoses is later in life.

The disability rate in elite / prep schools exists but is low. These kids tend to be more on the spectrum than anything else.

Underperforming kids who don't have a disability, and might be prone to cheat by one means or another, and who aren't sports recruits tend to transfer to easier schools.

If a kid wants to go through the process of being fraudulently diagnosed by an independent psychologist with ADHD, for the purpose of accommodations, then the same process is discoverable by literally anyone with an internet connection. That is, by everyone.

And from what I know, this has much less to do with clinician corruption than it does with the individual faking symptoms. There's few to zero people risking their licenses to hand out fake diagnoses for scheduled medications that are under heavy scrutiny at all times by the States and the Feds. The liability alone is off of the charts.

Schools are only likely to accept the diagnoses if a thorough clinical evaluation is undertaken. The result of which is not able to be faked.

Would you have some papers I could google, or some keywords to get me started? I'm quite interested in reading those studies.

The SAT and ACT are pretty easy in this regard. You can do really good at it just by practicing for a few months. Nothing like the Chinese Gaokao, which you need to study for a couple of years at least.

SAT stands for aptitude test, why would an aptitude test require multi-hundred hours of studying? All you need is to know a bit of math and how to read and you can score really well, you'd think that would be a shit test but apparently 90% of people can neither read well nor do a bit of math, so it is actually a good test.

> I just think the AA narrative that it is Blacks that took that Asian kid/s seat is misplaced -- it was more likely the White kid who took their seat.

And at the schools that are very good the Asians that couldn't get into the best ones are taking those spots from others. But you've excluded those colleges from your calculus for some reason.

People generally apply to several schools and may not get accepted to all of them, majors have limited number of spots, scholarship are limited, and so on. If the College Board subtracts 100 from every White person's score they'll apply to or get accepted to lower choice colleges, and this is effectively what race-based affirmative action is doing.

When you have systemic discrimination like affirmative action the whole system is affected. It seems like you don't believe race-based affirmative action causing White kids to get accepted to their 3rd choice instead of their 2nd is fine since you're pretending it doesn't happen.

I'm not following your logic at all. If our logic is that merit evenly falls between every racial group and the enrolment of schools should match demographics, then Asians are still over-represented and both blacks and whites are under-represented. So Blacks and whites took both era spots.

If the idea is that current test scores without affirmative action represent true ability, then nobody took eachothers spot, what you describe is true fairness, only 22.2% of whites and 4.5% of blacks deserve to be in school.

Is the idea that blacks deserve affirmative action, and Asians do, and Hispanics do, but whites don't, so any instance of them benefiting from AA is whites stealing from blacks? I just don't quite follow.

> So it is a brilliant way to use regular affirmative action for Blacks as a weapon to ensure that rich white elites always win and do not compete with the “deplorable” poorer whites, the Asians and immigrants.

I just realized that there are more Appalachians in America than Asian Americans. But how many people have you run into in an elite school with an Appalachian accent? (Or a southern or mid-atlantic, or other lower-tier white accent?)

This is about right. They want every podunk town to remember that the smartest or most impressive kid in 10 years went (finishing is optional) and they don’t really want more “strivers” than that.

It sounds like you're buying into Harvard's argument that "asian applicants are systematically less likeable / weaker in intangible attributes" which is racist nonsense in my opinion.

I think you’re missing the point. The really wealthy can just stop receiving income and have enough to draw on from their accumulated wealth. You can start looking at net assets but it’s a cat and mouse game against lots of very well resourced opponents.

> If you lie on your tax returns then you have much bigger issues than college admissions counselors.

If you own a large amount of equities you can get a secured loan on those holdings and use it to pay your bills while taking zero salary. This allows folks to live fancy lifestyles without selling holdings and triggering capital gains:

* https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/13/portfolio-loans-can-be-one-w...

The loan is not counted as income.

Taking a $0 salary for a few years is feasible for most rich people. That's why the FAFSA (financial aid form) also asks about assets.

If your family has $10MM in the bank, you too can take (and report) to IRS zero income.

People can participate in the social life of campus at any college. The problem with using this supposed socializing metric at the expense of more academically qualified kids is that it just shuffles the more academically talented kids to a lesser University. Where they what? Supposedly socialize less. Why should the social kids go to the academically rigorous college and the academic talents go to a lesser University? In the end, this socializing metric is bs cover in order to juke admissions for the purposes of legacy and diversity criteria.

The notion also relies on an inaccurate stereotype of what smart looks like. In practice, you are as or more likely to see an Ivy-level academic talent that looks like a leader than not.

Its rare to find lesser academic talents who will have better extra-curriculars than the best academically inclined candidates. The latter's prep schools will generally offer far more opportunity in that regard, and moreover any excellence in EC's is in a competitive environment that is often more intense.

P.S. It's possible I was simply blind to the upper class signalling. Things like word choice, manner, etc.

Why would that be surprising? Gifted people tend to be that way in multiple areas. I wouldn't be surprised if the average IQ in Hollywood is quite above the overall average.

But systematic racism against Asians who actually are smart is okay right?

So schools have subjective criteria that disproportionately impacts one group of students, but it’s fine because that’s the rules and they are following it?

"they really don’t understand what makes for a strong elite school applicant"

I think it's pretty clear that even if they did understand what makes for a strong elite school applicant and refocused their energies on meeting those criteria en masse, these elite schools would change that criteria, because the criteria are a means to an end.

"tax returns" and the OPs example was someone who had millions in the bank and took no "income" for years to fudge the tax return.

Deferred compensation plans allow you to strategically create a low w2 income for awhile and are mostly available to high earners.

No one is disputing the fact that there are advantages to being legacy, at least in terms of giving the application a hard look so as not to unduly disappoint donors and other people in the "club" that is the entire reason that non-legacy candidates want in.

Versus say a public school (American) candidate who gets filtered out earlier because they graduated in the middle of their class.

I don't recall anyone promising anyone else a perfectly even playing field down to the most minuscule detail.

The people arguing that point seem to be demanding a social standard and then working from the assumption that it is a shared standard, value, and may even be the law. None of which is true.

But the more important points are at the end of my last post, which point to the fact that people arguing against the rate of legacy admissions haven't a leg to stand on without first controlling for obvious variables.

Unfortunately, the current system is often yes to both.

Possible! But my previous answer was based on the "If they are so qualified" scenario. The important takeaway is that the legacy special track has a reason to exist whether or not they let unqualified students in.

So does that mean that on average, “legacy” students at these schools are lower performers? Since their bar for admission would be that much lower?

This system doesn’t really exist in Canada so I’m finding it very interesting

"The average SAT score of students with family income under $40,000 was 1443, while those with a family income of more than $500,000 averaged 1520."

Would the legacies tend to have much higher income, or is any old person who's a child of an alumnus considered a legacy?

First, if that number could be read directly as a refutation of my hypothesis, it would be tied, rather than showing an advantage to the legacy students.

Now, a few guesses: first, to the extent that affirmative action is even partially successful in targeting disadvantaged groups, affirmative action students should be less likely to be legacy, meaning that applications of legacy students should at least reflect a numerical superiority consistent with the strength of the affirmative action bias. Second, I will say that from personal experience I valued, more highly than was deserved, the schools that my parents attended; in this way those schools were the beneficiaries of highly effective advertising, through my parents, that made me more focused on those particular schools than they deserved (so much so that two of the three were two of the four schools I intended to apply to.) The aggregate outcome of that effect across all legacy applicants should be a higher-than-usual applicant quality in the pool of legacy students.

Now remove the affirmative action portion of the non-legacy students and compare numbers again.

> If you can't find the time to do your normal tests for GPA, you won't find time to study for the SAT either.

That is just nonsense. Lets say that you have 20 hours to study per year, like a couple of weekends that are calmer etc, you can spend those on SAT and you got basically the full benefits of studying for that test since studying more isn't very beneficial. But 20 hours to study per year wont budge your GPA much at all. Close to every kid can find 20 hours to study per year, I'm pretty sure.

Or do you think that people can either study all the time, or study none of the time, no in-between at all?

Edit:

> it's only theoretical that someone who isn't used to a studying environment can somehow have the foresight to invest their few hours on this particular exam.

Not at all, I never studied for anything in high school and got shit grades. But I spent a weekend to study for a SAT once, got good on that, and got into college that way. This isn't theoretical at all, it happens all the time. It is very different to do something for a very short time, or keeping that up for 4 years straight.

Sorry, but I take offense at this "it is all a matter of opinion and all opinions are equally valid" BS.

1) It is trivially true that if you define your measure right, you can make anyone succeed. For example black people are better at looking like black people. But we try to define "stuff" in a way that correlates with ability to do economically useful tasks. There are excellent reasons to do so.

2) You are ignoring the obvious fact that blacks do NOT get anything like equal treatment. They start with terrible schools, in neighborhoods that are aggressively targeted by police, and grow up with realistic expectations of going to jail that are amply born out by lived experiences. It takes willful blindness and stupidity to ignore that there are excellent reasons why we should expect poor black performance.

Given that the inferences on which this affirmative action position are based require willful blindness and stupidity to believe, there really is a giant logical flaw. It is most emphatically NOT plausible to say that we should expect equal performance from children whose fathers are in jail, whose schools are atrocious, whose neighborhood is dangerous, and who rightly believe that they are being unfairly targeted by police. Both how common these factors are and how important they are to actual outcomes is borne out by extensive research.

The scientific truth is that we have no data either way that can even begin to address whether one group is innately better than any other. The reason being that we have no way to separate out the impact of racism and history from innate ability. Read https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190808/th... if you want a more complete accounting of that fact.

But you do not need to have an opinion on that question to identify many factors that are helping ensure that black kids don't get a fair shake at life. And it is obvious that affirmative action can be at best too little, too late, compared to the things most urgently in need of fixing.

No, assets are taken into consideration for that exact reason.

But then Asians come along and outperform whites at the supposedly racist metrics. So much so that whites require affirmative action policies like Legacy Athletics and Dean's List. Simultaneously defeating both white supremacist arguments as well as anti-merit ones

No. The truth is not unknowable. Some truth is unknowable, though.

Which of these basic hypotheses supports reparations?

I'm pretty sure there needs to be a 3) blacks are poorer as well.

> Different populations perform differently on average

Does this mean that today's IQ tests have racial bias?

> There’s also a historical association with IQ assessment and eugenics.

Does this mean that today's IQ tests have racial bias?

Caltech is very different today than it was 50 years ago. Modern Caltech recently cancelled Robert Millikan (the founder)

If college is the only way to make a good living, then rational actors will game and lobby their way to getting in.

Even in the 1990s, a CS program was easy to get into and a local 4 year degree was sufficient for most lines of work.

>Keep in mind that I attended in the 70s. Nothing stays the same. I have little idea if Caltech is the same today as then, and rather doubt it.

Late 60s, Page, for me. I was lower middle class, which seemed to be the great majority. I recall only one House contemporary who was from serious wealth. Would never have known but for developing a friendship. As you say, I doubt things are similar today.

How could they keep that in mind if you never said it ..

… yet somehow a district court found no reasonable claim of discrimination, and the appellate court upheld that finding.

Imho, this article is an example of how the NYT has gone off the rails with their agenda-based spin on reporting.

The article flat out says the following:

“Harvard said that the plaintiffs’ expert, Peter Arcidiacono, a Duke University economist, had mined the data to his advantage by taking out applicants who were favored because they were legacies, athletes, the children of staff and the like, including Asian-Americans.”

All of those can influence the personal rating positively.

This lawsuit is an attempt by anti-affirmative action people to end affirmative action. They are using Asians as a figurative cudgel to beat other minorities, and this saddens me.

Fwiw, I think affirmative action is not without flaws and could be improved (e.g., I struggle to see why Asians aren’t given affirmative action status at these universities similar to how Asians have this status with the federal government — there has been and still is oppression and discrimination against Asian Americans), but I think there are large swathes of the country that are still in favor of this policy.

A large percentage of the population seems to believe that IQ and similar cognitive ability tests are something like a credit score, having no purpose but to direct society to the high scorers so that they can be showered with opportunity, while denying the same to low scorers. And it's true that tests like the SAT can have a big impact on the opportunities we get in life. But they can also be used in a more win-win way, to match people to opportunities they're ready for. And for that, you need an honest assessment of where the person is actually at, separate from how they got there.

A poor kid may score worse than they would have scored if they weren't poor, but if we want to know whether they're ready for MIT or a course above their grade level, it might do them a disservice to confound our perceptions of their actual current level with our personal indignation over socioeconomic inequalities and our hopes in the potential they'd realize if those inequalities were eliminated.

I doubt it. I was just the annoying freshman next door. He was nice to me (and to everybody) but I wasn't in his circle of confidants.

I can trace behavioral patterns back 4 generations in my own family. And the only reason I can't go farther is that I have never talked to anyone who knew my great great grandparents. (Which would be difficult given that they were born in the 1800s and died before my birth.)

And even if you don't know what the connection is, that doesn't mean that there isn't one. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6127768/ and https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenet... are examples explaining some of the research on how epigenetics can pass trauma down the generations. We don't know how far it can transmit.

However, regardless of whether there is an impact, EVERY ethnic group has severe trauma in its past. And you generally don't have to go back more than a century or two to find it. The best thing to do is fix our present, and try to create a better future. Which, globally, we've generally been doing at a breathtaking pace.

Albeit with important exceptions. Such as problems that teenage girls began having with mental health starting about 10 years ago. Which may be tied to social media applications.

Re throwing money at a problem and getting no results because of bad administration of funds---this is definitely what we have been doing in education and we should stop. Arguments to give more money to the same people to do the same things are going to go poorly with increasingly large amounts of the broader populace--this may not stop the government from doing it though.

I am not going to pretend to know the details of California school funding. But broadly speaking schools which get less local funding usually get more funding from state and federal sources. And the national average per pupil differences between the poorest and richest school districts are really not that large, but these numbers are very tricky (much more spent in nyc than idaho, etc.). Some anecdotes: recently there was a viral video of a school in Indiana, I think Carmel. Everyone was very impressed by the school facilities and it seemed to confirm the prior that rich kids get more funds. But then it turned out the average spending per pupil at that school is less than half the per pupil spending of DC public schools. Now there may be good reasons DC would spend more (COL etc.), but even adjusting for that the spending wouldn't be that different. Carmel just spends the money better. Anecdote 2: I have taught school in rural areas at schools which are absolutely poor in terms of facilities and everything else. I don't think tripling the spending per student would have done anything at all to change outcomes there...the students could usually not make it through a 40 min lesson without attacking each other or totally disrupting things. No reasonable amount of money would have changed this. It is not that expensive to educate a kid, you just need to feed them and teach them things that have been known for hundreds or thousands of years from old books. What is going wrong, I think, does not have to do with differences in school funding.

I think Obama's legacy is yet to be understood. Something like "the inspirational power of the symbol of a black president" is difficult to measure. The worsening race relations and their societal impacts (and their causes) since he took office is also hard to measure. Im curious what your evidence is to say "it seems very important for inspiring US blacks in general". Inspiring them to do what? And how is this quantified? (I guess by asking people "who is your hero" or something).

You won't find a single statistic whose difference can be clearly attributed to cultural rather than some genetic factor either.

This is an isolated demand for proof. At the level of proof you're demanding, basically nothing can be said about anything in terms of social science one way or the other. There are basically never 'single statistics' that are isolated from all alternative explanation.

Instead, one should apply the same standards and skepticism to all hypotheses. In this case, both for and against genetic/cultural explanations.

(Even so, "you won't find a single statistic whose difference can be clearly attributed to genetics rather than some cultural factor" is untrue; differences in athletic performance satisfy this demand.)

Culture largely flows from genetics, so I'm not quite sure what you are getting at.

> What I am saying is that its largely a fallacy that Universities are commonly put to the decision of a more social candidate versus a more academically talented candidate.

> The more common reality being that the leading academically talented candidates are as or more qualified in their extra-curricular participation.

I have no particular objection to this, but doesn't it imply that the SAT requirement is superfluous, with the combination of grades and extra-curriculars adequately measuring what the colleges want to measure?

> You may as well ask what the purpose of special education or gifted programs are... the answer is educational justice.

I don't feel that's an answer. It's just a couple of words that sound nice.

(I was in a gifted program in junior high school, by the way. In retrospect, it's not clear to me what purpose it served, other than to separate us socially from other students. Maybe it wasn't a very good gifted program, but I did live in a fairly well-off school district, so I don't think that was from lack of funding. In high school we had Advanced Placements courses, which are obviously more practically useful, though I wouldn't place them under the category of "educational justice".)

> in a manner that raises the living standards for have nots.

That's the issue. It sounds nice, reminiscent of the Rawlsian difference principle, but empirically I'm not seeing it in the world. What I see is largely self-enrichment of the minority, without much regard for everyone else.

Yes, but do you think that's what normally happens? I would suggest that what normally happens in your situation is that no studying gets done and you bomb the test.

I also know people who've been in your situation, and that's what I see more often than not.

I can understand if you think that's what the SATs are for though, a kind of lifeline for kids in bad situations. I just have reservations about it actually working enough of the time to not simply be another opportunity hoarding play by wealthier people.

> What you're seeing is that Asian-Americans are better qualified, but not enough of them are accepted as one would expect from being better qualified.

Please reread my entire comment.

I covered your thesis, and I am fairly certain that it is an inappropriate characterization of the reality.

Specifically, every study I have seen that makes this claim determines that Asians are “more qualified” based exclusively on a comparison of SAT scores and/or grades.

Grades and SAT scores are only one factor of many that are used in admissions decisions.

As I have said before, some folks may not like that more than grades and SATs are used in admissions decisions, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Let me give you an example of a profile I see a lot:

- 800 math 780 verbal on SAT.

- Top 5 in class taking a strong academic curriculum. Not valedictorian because of a few differences of a + or - here and there attached to their straight As.

- Played instrument in band and marching band for 4 years.

- Wrote articles and took photos for school newspaper and yearbook.

- Volunteer in school volunteer group that actually did some decent work.

Using the guidelines in the link below, how would you rate this applicant?

https://veritasessays.org/college-admissions-blog/posts/type...

1. Academics — solid 2. Definitely not 1, since there is no indication of “genuine scholar” like published research or a Westinghouse award or something similar.

2. ECs - Squarely 3. Did some stuff, but no leadership or substantial impact.

3. PQ — Let’s say 2, but this could be a 3 if their school does not know how to write good recommendations for elite schools and/or if the applicant did not impress the right people. Note that there is nothing about low SES or other challenging conditions that might make them a solid 2 or even a 1. Frankly, in our case, it doesn’t matter.

4. Athletics — Marching band is basically a sport. Let’s say 3. If they were just in band, that would probably fall under ECs, and this might be a 5. Note that there is no expressed desire to be in the Harvard band, and there is no quality measure (like winning a competition) that suggests that they could be good enough, so 1 and 2 are out of the question.

So… is this person an admit?

Probably not. This is almost a perfect “standard strong” — nothing wrong with them, but nothing stands out. Note that their grades and scores only got them a 2 in academics, and there are a lot of other 2s out there in the applicant pool.

They probably won’t get in unless they have some other highly desirable trait like geographic diversity, racial diversity, recruited athlete, director’s list, or child of faculty.

Anyway, I hope that people stop perpetuating the myth that “better qualified Asians” are not being accepted. A more accurate statement is “asians with higher grades and SAT scores are not being accepted because they are not excelling in other areas that are explicitly mentioned as part of the evaluation process”.

Note that those folks (Asians and otherwise) who have good grades and good SAT scores as well as excel in other areas are much more likely to be accepted.

> For example it is uncontroversial that people with ancestry from Nigeria are better at sprinting, and people with ancestry from Kenya are better at long distance running.

World class sprinters have an over-representation of individuals descended from a specific region of Nigeria - you can't generalize that to "Nigerians sprint faster than Europeans",or "Black people sprint faster than white people" the way people do with IQ. It is also prudent to note that Kenya has a whole ecosystem nurturing long distance runners; with a wealth of scouts, academies, and trainers available to the young who show some talent, so ascribing Kenyan's prowess to nature alone is incorrect.

Nutrition and IQ are correlated independent of race; especially early-childhood nutrition. Standardized testing is further compounded by test prep and tutors (proxy for wealth). Wealth in a family correlates to parents' education level. The lack of education in older African Americans has an obvious historical explanation. Most black Americans are descended from slaves from West Africa, but don't do as well as recent West African immigrants - 29% of Nigerian-Americans have advanced degrees; more than any other immigrant group. The vast chasm between the academic outcomes of two groups that are both largely of west African descent disproves "nature" is the sole determinant of poor outcomes for African Americans.

You accept that some people run faster ("uncontroversial") but somehow it is "unknowable" whether some people think faster?

One would hope so.

Ideally, the people of the future will have progressed beyond the relative savagery of me and my peers and look upon us with disdain. Perhaps for how much I enjoy a good steak, or for the genital mutilation of our boys.

I mean the obvious parallel to slavery, they are property owned by somebody who are not truly free to leave and have been bred to the point of dependence, are regularly neutered, are leashed regardless of need, they are commonly fed kibble produced from waste not fit for human consumption at rendering plants, and so on.

I'm not saying there couldn't be I don't know, a pet owner who took them in off the street or from a shelter, nursed them back to health, and are lifetime companions in a consensual idealised relationship, with the ownership mostly being a legal technicality. Yet there is an ethically dubious side to pet ownership which I could imagine getting the entire institution framed in a negative light in the distant future.

I imagine in the year 3000 there might be a future where schoolchildren will be shown holograms of rendering plants and told by the teacher "And this is what they fed the animals" and then a Labrador Retriever will have an AI write an essay which states that "the ownership or consumption of any animals, is fundamentally a crime against animal rights".

There is a great deal wrong with making moral judgments about people. People are complicated and you don’t have the full information to make an unbiased judgement.

The real issue here is it’s hard to revise such emotionally charged views in light of new information. Condemn people for murder and it will be harder for you to notice the innocent person on death row.

Worse, many people will try and influence your opinion via misinformation. Condemnation short circuits peoples ability for rational though and that’s exactly how normal people end up committing atrocities.

I guess you shouldn't go too far back in history then. If that's how you judge the average Nazi party member (as in the regular Nazi on the street at the time), I imagine you think every Swede during the time of the Vikings was correspondingly a terrible person. And every Frank, Mongol, Arab, Indian, Slav, and... yeah pretty much everyone back in the day. Cato included. With the whole world being so fundamentally morally terrible it's a wonder any good people managed to come into existence in the last 20 years to be the woke arbiters of morality for all past and future action.

The uncomfortable truth is that any of us, genetically unchanged but raised in post WWI Germany would most likely be Nazis during WWII.