[lateforwork]

See: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co...

Excerpts:

UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many.

A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower class rank at a more high-achieving school.

[nine_k]

That is, they are biased towards top performers, not just high performers, even if one student's "merely high" is formally higher than the ceiling the other student hit.

(The "winning" strategy then is to move to an underserved high school after an elite middle school, and hit the ceiling.)

[xnyan]

You may be joking, but I have several high achieving peers whose families did this with good results. The choice was: did they want to be in the best high school with the highest level of competition, or did they want to go to an OK school that had good magnet programs and less competition. my sample size is only about three, but it worked out well for them.

[fn-mote]

I don’t think the GP is joking, but they may not have realized that this strategy is already well known. A lot of families won’t uproot themselves for it, though.

[osnium123]

They have local magnet/specialized programs in CA public schools that they use to attract good students to poorly performing schools for help goose up test schools.

[strbean]

This may be sampling bias as well. Having parents with the means, willingness, and involvement to do this is probably a strong predictor of success already.

[lubujackson]

This is the new meta, in SF at least.

Despite the "what are secondary effects?" school admins trying to "fix inequality" by creating school lotteries, ending gifted programs and focusing on "equality of outcomes not equality of opportunity", the only thing that has actually improved troubled schools is that smart kids with involved parents now actively seek out lower rated schools like Mission High so they can more easily rise to the top of the class and get a free ride to Berkeley or another UC.

There was an article about this exact phenomenon in SFGate a year or two ago so it is definitely a real trend.

[nine_k]

While I'm usually not a fan of ending gifted programs and such, I do believe that the kids in the lower-rated schools must feel a positive effect, mingling with highly-motivated, better-educated kids. It may do away with the whole "study is uncool, real kids hate school" vibe that holds many "bad neighborhood" schools back.

[wahern]

> I do believe that the kids in the lower-rated schools must feel a positive effect, mingling with highly-motivated, better-educated kids. It may do away with the whole "study is uncool, real kids hate school" vibe that holds many "bad neighborhood" schools back.

That's the logic, but it doesn't pan out. IMO it's because 1) by high school it's too late--kids already segregate themselves and the ones with strong study habits will tend to hide them. In America generally the culture is for upper classes to pretend they're anything but, coopting the styles and mannerisms of the lower classes, especially Black culture (which in American culture is almost by definition low status yet valorized).

I grew up poor, with zero structure at home. It wasn't until I was mid-way through college when I realized the people around me actually studied and did their homework. I just didn't see it because they all pretended otherwise, then snuck off with their higher class peers, almost like secret rituals.

Contrast that with, e.g. East Asian culture. I remember the first time I visited Singapore and saw a group of elementary school kids, without supervision, congregating at a McDonalds do to their homework together.

My daughter goes to a Chinese immersion public school in SF. It's mostly Asian, but there's actually a sizable minority of black students there. Like their slightly more numerous white peers, they tend have a parent (or relative--grandmother, aunt, etc) who made a very deliberate decision and who provides the necessary structure and support at home. Home support is key because, talking with those parents, not even by 8th grade does the feeling of being different disappear; it's very taxing, and without constant encouragement kids will slip back into their comfort zone. It's entirely unreasonable to drop a poor white, black, or 4th generation Asian kid off at that school and expect them to adopt and internalize the culture without significant support at home. By contrast, the recently immigrated Asians fit right in regardless of class or wealth.

Now imagine dropping a few smart students with strong study habits and support networks off at a school where most kids don't have those benefits. It's never going to move the needle.

I just got back from Malaysia, where the majority Muslim Malay population benefits from government programs in ways that would be unfathomable to all but the most leftist Americans. 50 years from independence, excepting for the most wealthy, cosmopolitan strata, the country is as racially and economically stratified and segregated as it ever was. AFAIU, the situation is similar in South Africa.

I'm onboard with the idea that diversity and breaking the structures of inequality are laudable goals, but so far nobody has figured out to socially engineer that outcome. Culture is like a newtonian fluid; you apply pressure and things tend to become even more rigid and less fluid. It's not just the privileged who push back, it's the social underclasses that also push back; they're no less invested in their identity. Change, when it comes about, tends to only happen organically in ways we haven't figured out how to induce.

I no longer advocate for affirmative action programs, though I don't like dropping what programs we have. Constantly changing the rules creates its own burdens and unfairness that probably exceed the costs of keeping them. Better to just let them quietly recede into the background where they can continue helping a small minority of people capable of leveraging them.

[paulryanrogers]

> ...so far nobody has figured out to socially engineer that outcome

Isn't forced busing a counter example? When I was younger it increased my exposure to different races and expanded my friend groups. By the 90s my family had moved a few times and the bussing had ended nearly everywhere. Things were far more 'naturally' segregated without some forcing function.

Coworkers with similar bussing experiences said their friend groups were also more diverse than peers or younger generations who didn't have it.

Civil rights legislation (and enforcement) also ended phenomenon like whites-only businesses and bathrooms. Changing some centuries old racism may just take longer than we expect.

[lateforwork]

> I'm onboard with the idea that diversity and breaking the structures of inequality are laudable goals

It is not OK to manipulate college admissions to achieve those goals. A student who worked hard in high school should get into the college he deserves based on merit alone.

[terminalshort]

Yes, but it should have nothing to do with how hard you worked, only what your performance is.

[sublinear]

Has this not always been "the meta" everywhere for all of human history (and nature)? It's the fundamental driving force in favor of "diversity" always winning out over time. It's diffusion.

It's definitely there in sports teams, jobs, politics, etc.

There's a natural limit to this effect. The downside is that being a big fish in a small pond means you may not leave the pond without a longer term goal beyond it, and there's a saturation point of talent beyond which any competitive advantage is minimal.

This ultimately does not really impact the lesser schools much unless they were starved for talent for too long and needed to raise the bar. Migration patterns have an ebb and flow.

[apparent]

One of the charts in TFA shows a discontinuity in admissions rate around 75% UPP. This means that if you send your kid to a HS that is underserved when you enroll, but drops below the critical 75% threshold because too many other families are doing the same, then the school could fall out of the strong-benefit category.

The kid would still have a better chance than if he applied from a high-performing school, but it wouldn't be as much of an advantage.

Socially, I'm guessing the kid could face some challenges because (1) other high performing students might not like him because he's a curve-breaker, (2) teachers would know what the family was up to and could view it as distasteful, and (3) if the student went to UCSD or another school where this is a well-known hack, there could be stigma for having gamed the system/being less-smart.

[kelipso]

No one cares what high school you went to in college, unless maybe you went to the same high school yourself.

[apparent]

Most of the time, no one knows. But if you're from a nice part of LA or SD but you went to a HS in a bad part of town, people might wonder why you went there, or figure it out for themselves.

I think in most cases fellow undergrads would see it as just playing the game, but some might see it as "cheating" or like you didn't earn your spot as much as they did (if they were from a HS that was from a good part of town).

[aprilthird2021]

> other high performing students might not like him because he's a curve-breaker

Not that common in high school to have classes and exams curved. Also kids don't care.

> teachers would know what the family was up to and could view it as distasteful

They also don't care

> if the student went to UCSD or another school where this is a well-known hack, there could be stigma for having gamed the system/being less-smart.

College kids also don't care and there are lots of other ways to game the system. Ocne you're at school, no one cares who gamed the system to get there and how they did it

[SR2Z]

Once upon a time, the SAT an IQ test, and it was a real achievement to score a 1600. That achievement has been hollowed out in tandem with the value of most college degrees.

We know how to test for merit. The greatest tragedy in this college admissions racket isn't the shadowy affirmative action policies, the mountains of student loan debt, or the entire college admission-industrial complex that's sprung up.

It's that even the tools we've used to use to measure if someone was _ready_ for college have been annihilated.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the SAT an IQ test

You’re thinking of a 2004 study that found “the SAT (and later, with Koenig, the ACT) was substantially correlated with measures of general cognitive ability and could be used as a proxy measure for intelligence” [1]. To my knowledge, this remains the case.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6963451/

[losvedir]

Time pressure is a crucial aspect of it, though. I think GP may be alluding to the alleged abuse of disability exceptions, allowing kids (who don't need it) to take longer.

[hackyhacky]

The SAT was never an IQ test, and it certainly doesn't measure "merit", whatever that is. It's a Scholastic Aptitude Test, and it isn't particularly good at that either.

If we had a good "test for merit" then we could directly assign people to their roles and ignore their actual performance.

[JumpCrisscross]

> It's a Scholastic Aptitude Test, and it isn't particularly good at that either

It’s a pretty good measure for how a student will do in their first year in college.

[fn-mote]

So is high school GPA.

[kelipso]

Not if you went to an easy school vs a difficult school vs a school that gives mostly As. Never heard of grade inflation or what?

[everybodyknows]

"Aptitude" was dropped from the name back in 1990.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#Name_changes

It may have become something of a dirty word ...

[galkk]

> A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many.

Damn, this is as stupid as it gets.

[parpfish]

There nothing stupid about controlling for circumstances.

As an analogy, let’s say you want to build a fun race car that you can take to the track. You go out and look at a bunch of used cars and you want to be qualitative so you measure out their 0-60 times.

You could just say “the car with the best time wins” and take the fastest one you tested. Or you could consider context like “this one had bald tires tha could easily be upgraded” or “we tested this one going uphill”.

The goal is to find the car that can be turned into the fastest and not which has the best numbers right now.

[daedrdev]

Better circumstance do create better students though. And all this will do is cause the best students to hide in shit schools to game the system

[fn-mote]

> And all this will do is cause the best students to hide in shit schools to game the system

No it won’t, because they would get a horrible base for their education and be 1-2 years behind their “super strong school” peers. (I did not make up these numbers; it’s easy to have more than 1 year of college credit from Advanced Placement classes in the US system.)

Acting like college is the beginning of education is foolish. Imagine struggling with learning how to learn challenging material while taking classes with students who already did that three years ago.

[labcomputer]

So they’ll take dual-enrollment classes at the local community college instead.

[gopher_space]

The students operating at this level are identical. There’s no practical difference between a 4.0 and a 4.5 GPA when comparing students from different schools.

[jayd16]

Ok well look at it the other way. Should a student be punished if they took every AP offered but less than another student?

[derektank]

They should just make this explicit, like the UT system does. The top X% of students are admitted automatically from each school.

[tzs]

California has that. The top 9% from each high school and the top 9% statewide are guaranteed UC admission. This does not guarantee admission to any specific campus, so if you are only interested in say Berkeley or UCLA you might get admitted but UC will find you a place at some campus.

[everybodyknows]

Recall that there are UC campuses in Riverside, Merced, Davis.

[throwaway2037]

Yes, I agree. The UC system is large and has many different campuses, but for undergraduate degrees it is by far Berkeley then LA. For grad schools, it is a toss up because different UCs specialise in different areas. Example: LA grad for film will be way better than Berkeley. And Berkeley physics or compsci will be much better than LA (but LA is still OK those). And don't forget there are some UCs that are grad schools only, like SF. They have excellent life sciences and medical school

[huhkerrf]

It's all publicly funded universities in Texas, not just the UT system.

In other words: you've just pissed off a lot of Aggies grouping them in with, ahem, tu.

[next_xibalba]

No one in Texas calls it “TU”. Rather, UT.

[huhkerrf]

Context clues matter--note that we're both talking about Aggies and that tu is lower-cased.

They do that to imply that "varsity" is not the University _of_ Texas.

As with lots of things coming from College Station, you just sort of have to accept it.

[next_xibalba]

I live 45 minutes from A&M. I’ll repeat myself. No one in Texas calls it tu. ;)

There may be some disenfranchised barbarians out in the wilderness that do. But likely only due to their extremely tenuous grasp of the fundamentals of English. Primarily they communicate through grunts and hand signs.

[huhkerrf]

I'm not sure why you insist on doubling down. It's not hard to find info about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/aggies/comments/v54bu/why_do_you_sa...

Hell, it's on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_University

[throw2312321]

"tu" is a term of disrespect used by the students at Texas A&M University (Aggies).

A&M is the other very large public university system in Texas. So there is a small intra-state rivalry there.

[blindriver]

UCs already guarantee this to the top % of students in every school.

[jgalt212]

I think U of Florida used to give full rides to the top n of each high school's graduating class. I think n was something around 5.

[john-h-k]

This seems terrible incentives. You are now in a purely adversarial relationship with your peers and hurting them helps you

[LarsDu88]

Not only that, but high performers are incentivised to move to worse schools.

It may actually improve mean outcomes, but harm societal outcomes, as the scientific impact of educated individuals may tend to be power law distributed (e.g. the most important breakthroughs come from a small sector of the population with wildly disproportionate impact)

[SoylentGreenGPT]

What breakthroughs are coming from high school students?

[LarsDu88]

Example: A high school student, Noam Shazeer placed Silver in the international math olympiad. Went on to build the foundations of LLMs in multiple papers including the transformer paper. Founded Character.AI...

Forget the fact that he's now a 50 year old dude, this kind of stuff started in high school

There are multiple examples of highly citied ML papers coming from essentially people in the middle of undergrad, meaning they essentially learned all their shit in high school. The first protein diffusion paper, the single cell autoencoder paper, diffusion autoencoder paper... these were all from essentially high school prodigies publishing in undergrad or first year of graduate school.

[gizmo686]

The bottleneck on research is funding. We have a glut of students wanting to go into research who don't because of how competitive the field is. We then have researchers constantly leaving the field for the same reason.

[kelipso]

The thing is the people who do get the funding should be the smartest of the smartest. That funnel needs to be there and this nonsense is destroying it.

[bradchris]

Texan here. There’s still ways to get in if you don’t make the top X% of your class (the percentage is shrinking every year as the school climbs up the rankings and more people want to go… I think it’s near top-4% now? It used to be top 15% I recall), and many of those high achievers go onto other out of state schools, so it’s in the interest of UT system to offer automatic admission to the top achievers from across the state.

Just because the top X% is guaranteed admission, that does not mean all (or even most) of the school is from the top X%.

[dustincoates]

I believe it's only UT Austin that's shrunk the percentage. All of the other public universities are still at the original top 10%.

[Mountain_Skies]

It's not unusual for families to change their school district so their kid can play for a better sports program and of course it's extremely common for families to want to live in the best district for education quality, but maybe some are now incentivized to move into a district with lesser competition for the top spots.

[terribleidea]

How much control can your classmates have over your own GPA? What percentage of 'control' over your GPA is up to you vs. your teachers, parents, classmates, and everyone else? I put those in order intentionally, as I think your classmates are below teachers and parents on the hierarchy.

[john-h-k]

Disincentives group learning, collaboration, teaching each other.

Many good cases to have a strict zero sum competition but you won’t see collaboration in these (eg olympiads, competitions). That’s fine for a short term event but for long term learning in a persistent social group it seems good to encourage collaboration

[wyldfire]

This kind of competition happens in other areas of academic pursuits too. Is that strictly a bad thing?

The bad thing about UT's policy is that it encourages well-off students to move to a less-competitive school district (usually rural) in order to improve their chances.

[derektank]

This seems like a good thing to me actually, lower performing students generally benefit from having high performers in their social circles

[john-h-k]

If we were really optimising for this, we’d ban colleges using anything other than geographic area. Keeping all the high performers at high performing unis will hurt the lower performers

[lostmsu]

It is hard to hurt someone when their score is a standardized test.

[apparent]

UCs don't consider standardized tests.

[lostmsu]

IMO they'll roll back. It was a bad decision, and a few unis already rolled back.

[apparent]

Many other schools have rolled back their temporary suspensions of SAT-optional/blindness, but UC made a decision that was permanent. And when they made the decision, it was over the objection of the UC faculty recommendation. They might roll it back, but I'm not holding my breath.

[SilverElfin]

This is a terrible system because it forces students and parents to start playing all kinds of games to navigate a non transparent process for admissions. What now? Are parents going to send their kids to good schools until it is time to apply to colleges? And then they are going to switch to the best school for applications?

[lateforwork]

Right, up until middle school send kids to the best school, then for high school move to an area with poor schools.

[crab_galaxy]

Maybe they can bring their resources with them too, and the poor schools can have things like lead paint remediation, honors classes, and extra curricular activities.

I like this idea!

[Mountain_Skies]

Resources are mainly property taxes. Unless they're building a new house whose value is significantly greater than the median for the area, families gaming the system aren't likely to have much of a lasting impact on the district.

[crab_galaxy]

Yeah you’re right. However, resource gaps can be filled by things like volunteer librarians, teacher wishlists/donations, field trips, strong PTAs, etc..

This is common in my city. It’s a big underfunded school district with a handful of coveted, well supported schools. I’m assuming it happens elsewhere in America with the success of platforms like donors choose.

[fn-mote]

Yes. Well off schools raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from parent donations.

[lmz]

Or it could end up like some Asian countries with a large afterschool tuition industry. I guess at a minimum you don't want the kid to get shot up at school though.

[chaostheory]

This exists. They’re called magnet schools. The IB program is decades old.

[torginus]

Honestly, I don't know how do you even compare students with different backgrounds against each other.

That's why standardized testing is good - it gives everyone the same chance to excel.

[dmoy]

> it gives everyone the same chance to excel.

How does the existence of standardized testing give everyone the same chance? As an extremely over-exaggerated example example, someone whose home study time is disrupted frequently by gunfire outside is probably not getting the same chance as someone who lives on a 20 acre estate with private tutors for every subject.

[alex43578]

How does the existence of a standard hoop height in the NBA give everyone the same chance to play? Shorter players should get lower hoops, and slower runners should get electric scooters. That way, everyone can appear to be equally capable.

[dmoy]

I would say that the NBA is explicitly not about giving everyone the same chance. Not everything has to be about giving everyone the same chance. A totally equitable NBA would probably be less entertaining to watch.

But that doesn't mean we can say that standardized testing gives everyone the same chance either...

[alex43578]

Standardized testing does give everyone the same chance: answer the question correctly or incorrectly.

[terminalshort]

Which is exactly the point of testing

[dmoy]

Which may be okay then? But let's not pretend it's about equal chances

[torginus]

This is like saying all furniture must be made waterproof because some people have leaky roofs. No, you fix the roof.

I know my proposition sounds absurd, but it kind of point out the issue with this kind of thinking is that applying some patchwork fixes to complex issues rather than treating the root cause is a bad idea. It's a bad idea in CS and a bad idea in planning social systems.

Neighborhoods should be made safe, or failing that, dorms should be made available for kids (in my country, there are tons of dorms for high schoolers already, who live in the countryside, and want to attend a somewhat better high school).

Alternatively I suggest making this a demand problem - good high schools should compete for talent (which is always in short supply) and should actively take measures to seek out and nurture gifted kids.

As for your rich kid example - what makes you think that in a more holistic system, he won't be able to optimize admissions by exploiting resources?

Just recently there was an article on HN about how the majority of those admitted to US elite college received some 'pity party' points - sounds to me the system is being actively exploited.

[dmoy]

Fixing the root problems sounds good to me.

But that doesn't mean that as it currently stands you can say that standardized tests gives everyone the same chance in the US. It would in some hypothetical future maybe yes, but not now.

[next_xibalba]

This belief is how UC San Diego ends up with 900 freshman below high school math proficiency. And thus college becomes a remedial education institution.

https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...

[Ekaros]

Hmm. I suppose with modern Flock technology and GPS tracking for whole childhood we could calculate some average of gunshots heard in vicinity to score and give school spots to those with highest total.

Or well, accept that same test is fair enough solution and it is impossible and probably not even sensible to apply some gameable metrics.

[blindriver]

The schools that went test-optional already have switched back because this actually gives lower income students the best chance to distinguish themselves. The narrative that lower income students with less opportunities would benefit from not submitting SATs turned out to be false.

[ThrowawayR2]

“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it” -Bernard Shaw

I'm pretty tired of progressives insisting that people who grew up in poverty but were able to improve our lot in life through study, doing well on grades, and, yes, on standardized tests, like me, do not exist.

[JumpCrisscross]

> someone whose home study time is disrupted frequently by gunfire outside is probably not getting the same chance as someone who lives on a 20 acre estate with private tutors for every subject

Is there any world in which the first student, struggling in that context, treads water at a UC?

I used to volunteer to tutor high-school aged students in New York. I gave up and moved to grade schoolers. A refugee who will take the SAT in six months and wants to go to college, but is struggling with basic reading comprehension and symbolic math is just not going to do well in college in a year.

Note: the student who excels in that first setting should absolutely be admitted. But they’re, by definition, already excelling.

[pepperball]

Most likely the people living somewhere continuously with gunfire wasn’t ever going to succeed academically either way. There are exceptions of course.

You’d have to basically rebirth and resocialize them in a different culture entirely.

Far too many people already have been educated past their natural state and it’s going to get ugly.

[lostmsu]

Ear plugs are under $5. If you could not think of that over years, you're not gonna be able to score well in SAT for different reasons.

[sokoloff]

How fortunate that the only downside of frequent gunfire on the streets outside your house is the noise.

[lostmsu]

What else has significant impact on ability to study?

General downsides are irrelevant, so I don't see a point in your comment.