[cmh89]

Deciding whether or not the SAT is equitable, fair, or valuable shouldn't have any anecdotal component. For every one person with a story like yours, there is someone who had a bad experience with it for reasons outside of their control. I did exceptionally well in take home or book assignments because I understand the subject matter, but never was a good test taker. I took the ACT and did 'fine' but I could have done much better in an untimed, open book environment. What are we trying to measure with these tests? Your memory? Your ability to devote time to studying?

At the end of the day, tests like the ACT/SAT will always privilege people who can afford to spend more time on it. Lots of kids do better because their parents spend thousands on tutoring. Other kids of the same skill level do worse because they work 25 hours a week to help their family make rent. No amount of change in 'access' can overcome that.

Knowledge and skill is complicated and trying to boil it down to a timed test isn't a particularly useful measure.

[rayiner]

That kid working 25 hours a week to help their family make rent is going to have an easier time buckling down for one test than keeping up their GPA over four years. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2021/03/23/sta...

[SamoyedFurFluff]

How does that work? You’re saying a child being literally homeless can focus on keeping GPA up?

[BeFlatXIII]

You got the point of the parent comment backward. It’s specifically easier for a bright child in poverty to ace one test than to maintain a GPA for four years.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

But how can it be better for child study to ace the test when they’re homeless rather than they work to help avoid homelessness and maybe not study so much?

[nonethewiser]

You're 100% correct but people will argue SAT performance is more a function of privelege than being bright.

[cmh89]

I agree that there are issues with GPA too, but despite saying that it's easier to take one test than it is to maintain a high GPA throughout high school, that's opinion. Teachers can work with over extended students to help them while they are in school

I can't really speak to your opinion piece because its behind a paywall

[rayiner]

Privileged kids have an even bigger advantage in GPA. They can afford to harangue teachers for retakes, accommodations, etc. The kid working in his parents restaurant can afford prep, but his parents can’t afford time to game GPA.

[blackgirldev]

Not just that his parents don’t have time; in many places, parent’s social standing has an impact on the teacher’s willingness to be flexible.

[spaced-out]

>Teachers can work with over extended students to help them while they are in school

They can, but will they? Plus, it seems like GPA would be even easier for the wealthy to game, many fancy prep schools sell themselves on their ability to place kids in good colleges. If those kids no longer need to perform well on a standardized tests they just need a high GPA, that seems even easier from the school to guarantee.

[ZeroGravitas]

It's written by a contributer to the National Review, if that helps you decide whether you're missing out on anything important:

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/05/national-review-william-...

[cmh89]

Ah, so it's the digital equivalent of trying to read soiled toilet paper. Got it

[JPKab]

The SAT is an extremely high predictor for IQ. It correlates incredibly well.

I grew up in a trailer park, and didn't have access to the test prep industry, so I understand that wealthier kids had a big edge. That being said, nobody is talking about the SAT being biased against poor kids. They are pretending that it's purely a racist, culturally-biased test due to its outcome of having average scores that are hundreds of points lower for certain ethnic groups. And like all hamfisted efforts at "equity", it will benefit the most privileged members of the favored class at the expense of the least privileged members of the disfavored class.

Rich Black kids will gain the most, and poor Asian and White kids will lose the most. Poor Asian kids are already getting screwed. My best friend is the child of dirt poor Cambodian refugees, but the college admissions people treated him as if he was the son of college educated Korean immigrants.

Obama's daughters will never be held back in life, and this ideology makes no room for that fact, or the fact that a pale kid born to a single mom in a trailer park is, statistically, screwed.

[unishark]

> I grew up in a trailer park, and didn't have access to the test prep industry, so I understand that wealthier kids had a big edge.

Test prep does not give much of a an edge. It certainly isn't comparable to those point-differences between groups (and therefore the effective "bonus points" often given for being a member of certain groups).

Everything they teach in those prep courses is available in books you can get for a few bucks (like 12-16). If you're really strapped, you can probably get prior years' books for next-to-nothing (this is what I did in the days before the internet, finding them at thrift stores for pennies). I suspect if you compared test prep takers to people who actually worked through the books (or comparable info from the internet) and practice tests the advantage would disappear (if not reverse).

[cmh89]

Plenty of people recognize that the SAT is bias against poor kids

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/07/why-po...

The reason that the racial component comes out is that Black children are over-represented in poor communities due to systemic racism

[atweiden]

What JPKab said is entirely true. The SAT is known to correlate strongly with general intelligence, which is determined almost exclusively by hereditary factors outside a person’s control [1]. The data clearly suggests lower class persons of east asian descent will disproportionately suffer the consequences of this policy.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/16/books/what-is-intelligenc...

[1]: https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/1994/10/16/books/what-is-...

[livinginfear]

SAT results correlate highly with IQ, and IQ correlates highly with success in life. Still, people engage in all kinds of postmodern mental gymnastics to explain why an intuitively obvious fact is somehow false.

[mrh0057]

Your statement immediately has a problem. How do you define success? Then you have a second problem when you state a person taking one test is also good on a different test.

Going much over 100 has little correlation with wealth which is what most studies use. Then you run into correlation doesn’t equal causation problem too.

[inglor_cz]

"How do you define success?"

Let us look at the USA of today and its social ills. Quality of a random person's life is undeniably better if they manage:

* to avoid going into jail/prison, * to always have a home, * to be drug-free, or at least drug addiction-free, * to be fit (= not obese), * to be employed or self-employed, * to finish their high school education at least.

Those points might sound modest, but if someone can tick off all of them, they are already sorta successful, especially compared to someone who can only tick off one or two.

A nation of people who could tick off 5 of 6 would probably be much happier than contemporary America.

Do all those points correlate with IQ? I would guess yes, but IANA Social Scientist.

[JPKab]

Great points, and one item that should be added is "not having children in your teens and with an absent partner."

The activists who talk about inequities at the population group level, and ignore the statistics on teen birth rates and single parent family rates above 70% isn't being honest.

Across all ethnic groups, isolating for income level, males raised without fathers commit crimes at dramatically higher rates, drop-out of school at dramatically higher rates, and are more likely to engage in violence. I grew up in a poor county that happened to be mostly Black, but with a significant population of poor whites as well. The common denominator of kids dropping out of school, or getting arrested for hitting their mom when they were 14, 15 years old wasn't race, it was absentee fathers. Incarceration rates aren't remotely high enough to explain the absent fathers in the United States. The vast, vast majority of absentee fathers are not in prison, they are just not around.

[JPKab]

IQ is the single most studied, and statistically proven, quantitative measure in all of social science and psychology.

The US military developed it not as a tool to exclude, but to INCLUDE as many males in the draft as possible during World War I and after.

The determination was that anyone below 85 IQ is literally a net drag on performance in the battlefield, and is unable to add value without a quantity of supervision that is detrimental to a fighting unit.

The harsh realities of IQ go against the grain of both of the major US political parties:

The GOP myth of everyone working hard to uplift themselves simply can't apply to about 10% of the population. There is simply nothing a person born with an 85 IQ can do to succeed in the modern world without a lot of help and assistance that almost certainly needs to come from some form of collective, probably the government.

The Democratic myth is that, given enough help, and with obstacles such as racism removed, everyone can succeed. Therefore, they believe that unequal outcomes are evidence of some form of systemic discrimination. There is no level of discrimination you can remove that is going to help the 10% of the population at or below 85% succeed in the modern world. Cash payments to this population are simply not going to ever yield any form of self-sufficiency in a post-industrial economy.

It's a miserable reality that I hate to think about, and simply makes me sad. Any one of us reading this comment could have been born with this affliction, and I think we should be extremely hones when assessing how to correct this injustice of birth and give these human beings a life that is as meaningful and happy as possible. The lies we tell ourselves do them no favors.

[livinginfear]

> " How do you define success?"

Surely you jest. It really doesn't matter how you define success, IQ is a valid predictor of pretty much any definition of success you can think of. Income, academic achievement, you name it.

[chillwaves]

Defining IQ is tricky to begin with. So is defining success.

Do you really not see the issue?

[JPKab]

The confidence with which you assert "systemic racism" as being the key factor causing Black kids to be overrepresented in poor communities is fascinating. Historical racism, which was woven into law, is the actual reason for this. Historical factors are also why White southerners are overrepresented in poverty statistics compared to Whites in the midwest and New England.

Historical racism isn't the same thing as the nebulous, impossible to define "systemic" racism, which basically means whatever the activist group pushing it wants it to mean. Typically, they look at any discrepancy in outcomes between two groups, ignore the complex multi-variate nature of said issue, and reduce it down to race, making the claim of "systemic" racism. The vast majority of CS grads from universities are males, but you never see this mentioned in claims of "systemic sexism" in the tech industry. Gender activism, like race activism, only goes in one direction, always.

The same activist groups tend to ignore factors such as 50% of all murders in the US being perpetrated by, and victimizing, Black Americans. This kind of statistic is inconvenient for their narrative of police deliberately arresting people based on race, vs. the fact that they commit crimes disproportionately. Also, constantly cited is the discrepancy in crack penalties vs. cocaine penalties. This ignores the fact that crack and meth (a drug used predominantly by Whites) have equivalently harsh penalties, and also ignores the fact that these harsh penalties were demanded and campaigned for by Black politicians in the 90's, reacting to the destruction of their communities by the crack epidemic. There is a clear record of this, as evidenced by Joe Biden being a huge proponent of the Crime Bill. He and other Democrats were being urged to push the Crime Bill by his own party's Black politicians.

Growing up in the rural south in a trailer park, the subculture of White people I belong to commit crimes at vastly higher rates than Whites in other parts of the country. They are arrested and shot by police at equally higher rates as well. Again, the low-resolution, activist driven narrative ignores all of this, treating White people in New York City and in Kentucky as being part of a homogenous group, instead of correctly identifying the vast cultural differences between the two going back to the completely different European cultures they are descended from (Dutch/wealthy English vs. dirt poor Ulster Scots emigrants).

[bookofsand]

For a less US-centric perspective, regional differentials in development persist even for countries with 'homogenous' populations. Italy is a canonical example, with significant differences between the rich North and the poor South. By US ethnic standards, Northern and Southern Italians are basically indistinguishable clones, though Italians themselves may beg to differ. See also Germany, Belgium, Poland or Romania.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Italian_regio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_GRP_p...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Belgian_provinces_by_G...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland_A_and_B

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Romania_-_Nominal_GD...

[JPKab]

Question:

Do you think that targeting people based on income level would be a superior way to address this issue? If it was based on income, rather than skin color, wouldn't it disproportionately help Black children while simultaneously not leaving other disadvantaged groups out in the cold?

[temp8964]

What? The article you linked does not address SAT at all!

[hedora]

The article presents a lot of relevant data. In particular, about half the people that got in with high test scores but low grades were from under privileged groups. I’d wager that such groups are less than half the population of admitted students.

[starchild_3001]

Not sure what data you're talking about. What I've seen so far: SAT <-> Income are correlated => let's not rely on SAT? That's such a BS argument.

Anything related to income will be (statistically speaking) associated with intelligence and other personal traits (perseverance etc). Any of this will be obviously correlated with your kid's SAT --- it's called genetics.

Any other, more sensible data to look at?

[dsr_]

It's never the kid's income, though. It's always the parents' income.

[tdeck]

> Anything related to income will be (statistically speaking) associated with intelligence and other personal traits (perseverance etc). Any of this will be obviously correlated with your kid's SAT --- it's called genetics.

No, it's called social darwinism.

[starchild_3001]

tdeck, genetics is a statistical phenomena. Your parents being smart/strong/fast runner/good in music etc doesn't turn you into one of these instantly, but they're statistically correlated with you having similar abilities and traits.

How can you argue against this? Isn't this obvious? Isn't this what genetics is all about --- parents' genes being passed to offspring?

You're either blinded by your ideology... or maybe don't understand biology.

[BurningFrog]

> At the end of the day, tests like the ACT/SAT will always privilege people who can afford to spend more time on it. Lots of kids do better because their parents spend thousands on tutoring.

This i true, but the effect is small. The studies I've seen mentioned say 50-100 points.

[ericd]

Seriously, most of the gains you get from test prep are from taking a few practice tests to get comfortable with the format and the question types. I found a $20 test prep book more useful than the course I took (which mostly consisted of giving us a practice tests anyway). If I’d needed help with fundamental Algebra and Geometry, to the point of needing tutoring, a selective college would not have been the right place for me, frankly.

The problem is much more fundamental, we need to try to solve the severe economic stresses for underprivileged kids’ families if we want them to have a fair shot at higher education and the success it supposedly grants, not these little tactical band-aids. They need economic opportunities and safety nets.

[nonethewiser]

Even if all of that is true it's not an SAT problem.