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Comment by cncrnd | Hacker News Reader

I used to be anti affirmative action. Then, I met a lot of students at a similar tier school who were basically shoved there by their parents. Little original thought or unique qualities, just sent to an expensive private school and drilled on the SAT like monkeys.

So now I am in support of affirmative action, maybe out of disappointment in my traditional upbringing classmates.

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You could be in favor of more extra-curriculars, or more 'holistic' criteria. But why affirmative action? That is an orthogonal issue.

The main change I would make to affirmative action would be considering factors like location, family income, etc that better represent a person's situation. But race, while not perfect, often captures these factors.

They already consider extra curriculars, and those are easily gamed since everyone knows they're important.

Since location and family income are perfectly observable variables, shouldn't we use them directly instead of race?

SAT training leads to modest gains of around 20-30 points on average. Also I don't see how racial background is a unique quality.

If that were actually true, no one would train for the SAT. It's a simple test easily trained for, not some ideal measure of aptitude.

It's not about race. You want people with diverse upbringings because they will do different things, and because they had the chance to go to a good school maybe they can do those different things better.

It's absolutely true. Take a look at these papers, they have data on how much test prep increases scores:

* http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionst...

* https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/89/2/435/223527...

There is very little room for training in the SAT.

Again, results depend on the person and effort exerted.

>For students that have taken the test before and would like to boost their scores, coaching seems to help, but by a rather small amount.

This is very different than having a large part of your education dedicated to doing well on the SAT, which is what I think the original comment was referring to.

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