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Comment by edison85 | Hacker News Reader

I think making it about race just creates more division and is really really dumb. Scores should be normalized by income, stability of household, then holistic factors such as extraneous circumstances, health, etc. Race should have no impact except in extraneous circumstances in rare cases

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> Scores should be normalized by income, stability of household, then holistic factors such as extraneous circumstances, health, etc.

Why?

Opportunity is not even: a classmate prepared for classes by studying the material in the summer. Some classmates took SAT classes. On the flip side, a classmate had trouble studying because he had no quiet place to study at home.

In my college, at least differences in opportunity were somewhat recognized resulting in release of all old tests instead of it being hoarded by HKN, a quiet place to study for everyone, and financial aid so that a student wouldn’t have to take basically a full time job to pay for school.

We need to ensure opportunity all along the educational path. The current US system is blindingly obviously tilted.

I do agree that opportunity wasn’t specific to race but there was obviously correlation just as there is correlation between race and income.

And when I turn in a bad year of work because my two sisters-in-law and their eight children have moved into my home, should my performance review reflect that, or should it be normed for my circumstances?

I didn’t say anything about norming performance. I just said that there should be equality of opportunity.

Edit: I also said that there isn’t equality of opportunity for education in the US.

Normalizing test scores is norming performance. They're not different.

I didn’t say norming test scores either. I said norming opportunity. Quote where I said that.

I quoted it in my first comment:

> Scores should be normalized by income, stability of household, then holistic factors such as extraneous circumstances, health, etc.

Did you want to refer to hypothetical admission scores? There used to be US colleges that admitted on a points system (and some very low-prestige ones still do), but they've stopped doing that since giving objective points based on race was ruled illegal for public schools.

That wasn’t my post!!!!!! How many times do I have to repeat myself?

Fair enough.

You responded to the question "Why should scores be normed?"; I think it's fair to interpret that as providing a reason, in your own mind, that scores should be normed. If you don't want "because" read into your answer to "why?", you need to bring up the fact that your comment is not intended as a response to its parent.

> How many times do I have to repeat myself?

Not as many times as you seem to want to. Why post three separate replies, all saying the same thing, within five minutes of each other?

Stop your strawman arguments. I did not say the thing you quoted. Someone else may have but I didn’t. You can easily check that by looking at the commenters name beside a comment.

Here are my comments for your perusal. Go find where I said that. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=babesh

Here is exactly what I said: We need to ensure opportunity all along the educational path. The current US system is blindingly obviously tilted.

Furthermore examples of equality of opportunity were having equal access to previous tests, equal access to quiet study areas, and financial aid so that students didn’t have to take on full time jobs to afford college.

None of these included norming test scores or norming job performance measures.

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