Maybe not, it feels like to me that the Overton window[0] has been sliding left. My views on freedom of speech made me a 'leftist commie' when I used them to defend South Park and Eminem now most often I'm accused being 'alt-right' by those who disagree with those same views.
Scares the hell out of me.
While i don’t disagree on its face. That statement usually means “people should just be on my side”.
As written above; the Overton window has been moving left, and things like not prosecuting female gential mutilation in the US, straight socialism, not settling for anything less than full gun bans, open borders - things that would have got you locked up 50 years ago are being pushed by presidential candidates and congress members.
It’s moved left, and a little too far. So while I agree people with brains should be united, right now many of the balanced beliefs will get you called an alt-right Nazi.
Please don't lie. There is no mainstream Congress person or presidential candidate protecting FGM, advocating for full socialism or complete open borders. Just because you disagree with them doesn't make your projections true.
While South Park and Eminem both 'triggered' a lot of people because of their use of obscenity, neither is leftist in any way, shape or form. South Park regularly attacks anyone who tries to change society, which is in no way a leftist mindset. As for Eminem, I can't think of a single example of left-leaning thought in any of them outside of freedom of speech.
In general I think you'd have a very hard time making the claim that the overton window is sliding to the left. Maybe the overton window is moving to the left for gender identity and sexual expression, but that is about it. The right has succeeded in moving the overton window substantially in their favor in most social and economic programs.
Well, that's certainly not true. They are absolutely oppressing people. They may be oppressing people that you or even I think ought be oppressed, but that doesn't mean they're not doing it.
> We're still under the rule of the far-right in the US (a country which does not actually have a left wing by Western standards).
That's true around economic issues. It's not so true around identity politics. The political climate around those issues in the US is very much left of center.
> Voting with your dollar and pointing out bigotry and inequality is not oppression.
That kind of depends on what exactly you mean by that. Naming and shaming individuals for social transgressions based on hearsay seems pretty oppressive to me.
The Left-Right Overton Window has definitely moved Right, in that reductive to the point of uselessness, single-axis characterization of American politics. Some of Reagan's and Nixon's policies would be dismissed as "libtarded" now, as would some of W.'s.
Another Overton Window (or, more accurately, related group of Windows), describing discourse about and among the races, sexualities, gender identities, &c, have at the same time moved in a direction that is less welcoming to speech that is premised in a notion of superiority or morality about those things, especially when uttered by a person who believes that premise, and which is about the speaker's (and by implication their tribe's) own superiority, or someone else's inferiority or immorality.
The vector product of those Windows' movements is a culturally dominant polity who feels marginalized.
> My views on freedom of speech made me a 'leftist commie' when I used them to defend South Park and Eminem now most often I'm accused being 'alt-right' by those who disagree with those same views.
I think there's a meaningful difference between speech that is offensive, whatever that means, to cultural norms — especially those that are othering, or regressive, or shame-based, or whatever — and speech that is offensive, whatever that means, to individuals and populations — particularly when those individuals or populations are minorities, and have been historically subject to oppression, and which speech attempts to normalize their oppression.
Don't mistake me: Freedom of speech is for the speech one likes least, or it's for no speech at all; I want the bigots every bit as free to make their noise as I do the artists or the critics (who are often the same people), but for entirely different reasons.
Perhaps the comedian's notion of "punching up" versus "punching down" is relevant here. Perhaps also that people — on both sides — are generally just bad at disagreeing.
Plenty of people stand up for their rights because they legitimately care about freedom. It’s not all some conspiracy by hate groups to defend themselves.
The number of people siding with those groups will be more than zero. Support will grow and they’ll push their message farther and farther into extremism.
It’s not the first time this has happened. But each generation thinks they’re enlightened and extremism won’t take over again. Political extremists work with a grain of truth (“Look! They really ARE oppressing us”). If they were absolutely false nobody would support them.
For public universities, this is a breach of the first amendment no matter how heinous the speakers' viewpoints are. And for private universities it's a big blow to the institution's reputations for all but the most objectionable speakers.
> Most contemporary American free speech protests aren't apolitical affairs where nonsectarian activists are just "standing up for their rights because they legitimately care about freedom" for the sake of free speech as an ideal- they view freedom as a means to promote their ideology.
I don't disagree with you. But you're drawing the wrong conclusions from this observation. If the concerns over free speech is more prevalent on one end of the political spectrum, it could easily be due to the fact that said end of the political spectrum is being censored more frequently and more aggressively. And I can't argue with that, I've seen very stark disparities in enforcement over the past several years.
Numerous private universities (Christian schools in particular) enforce strict student code of conduct rules that severely limit the student body's freedom of expression as to way to enforce religious or secular compliance. And it doesn't hurt their reputation but instead is an integral component of the school's identity.
I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I'd argue that colleges and universities should have the right to police speech and expression: they should just be upfront about it. "Our house: our rules" as they say.
Perhaps you're coming from a different cultural context than, but in my circles such universities absolutely are mocked and looked down upon. Some people don't even consider applicants from BYU, and other heavily religious universities because they don't want to reward such institutions.
> I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I'd argue that colleges and universities should have the right to police speech and expression: they should just be upfront about it. "Our house: our rules" as they say.
For public universities, the First Amendment legally obligates them otherwise. For private universities they already have the right to police speech and expression. It is, as you say, their house and their rules. They don't police (or rather they are very liberal in their policing) because freedom of speech and expression are central to an effective academy. Once universities start policing heavy-handedly, or on ideological grounds people start to doubt whether the ideas voiced are genuine or whether people are censoring themselves out of fear of retaliation from the institution. This cloud of doubt hangs overall the research published by that university, and the reputation of that university suffers considerably.
That's just religious discrimination cloaked in something less intolerable: academic elitism. HBCUs probably face a similar problem: should we abolish or enforce strict racial quotes on them because there are racists who will toss a resume with Howard University on it?
> For public universities, the First Amendment legally obligates them otherwise.
This is absolutely true. But to your broader point, that freedom of expression yields greater institutional cache: how do you explain the strong performance (and reputation) of private institutions vs. "state schools"?
I don't necessarily agree with tossing such resumes in the garbage, but it is evidence that universities that enforce religious dogma on their students do suffer a hit to their reputation because of that.
> how do you explain the strong performance (and reputation) of private institutions vs. "state schools"?
Not every private school is Stanford, MIT, etc. Plenty of private schools are shitty for-profit enterprises (especially online universities) that essentially scam customers out of their money. Purely on the basis of return on investment many studies also conclude that public university is better than private universities.
Also most reputable private university do respect freedom of speech and expression to a similar degree as public universities. If you factor in the reactions of students, perhaps even better. When Berkeley hosted Milo Y students rioted, smashed up cars, etc. When Stanford hosted Dinesh D'Souza it was very tame with protesters being non-disruptive. Public universities aren't immune from going off the deep end regardless of constitutional protection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cMYfxOFBBM
Again, the private schools with good reputations do behave almost as if the First Amendment applied to them. The ones that don't generally aren't reputable. So your question is based on false premise.
> But to your broader point, that freedom of expression yields greater institutional cache: how do you explain the strong performance (and reputation) of private institutions vs. "state schools"?
as a way of insinuating that freedom expression is not important to institutional reputation because private schools (which aren't required to abide by the first amendment) are often very reputable, frequently moreso than public schools.
This is question loaded in false premises. Reputable private schools do support freedom of speech and expression to similar degrees as public schools. And not to mention, the claim that private schools are on aggregate better than public schools is likely untrue.
Education is not some kind of of enterprise free from regulations. The consequences of bad education is similar to bad health care. As I see it, let schools worry about education, political system deal with politics, legal system deal with enforcing the law, health system deal with health issues, and religious communities deal with religion. Trying to mix them together will only cause intolerance and tensions in society.
Next time you hear about this speak up and change the conversation.
Who cares if you have x number from certain race groups if everyone is from the same monoculture. Why not try to hire the best from African schools.. that will give you race diversity more important cultural diversity.
Universities are meant to be institutions of learning. Learning isn’t always comfortable. Some long held truths turn out to be wrong at some point. What we all think is true or right right now could completely reverse in a decade. Letting people speak especially when it’s against your morals is important for learning and understanding. Even if it’s bizarre and incoherent, if somebody believes it, we should try to understand why so that we can better educate those who were persuaded.
As an example of the rapid change in public thought and what’s acceptable, almost nobody publicly supported gay marriage a little over a decade ago. Saying you did would result in mockery, people questioning your sexual identity, people bringing up the religious history of America, etc. Now publicly opposing it is career suicide.
They should be, but in this country they are essentially businesses now, and so will likely have the same institutions (TOS and so forth) accordingly.
The student body is going to have its own set of values, some of which may challenge the prevailing norms of society or the university itself. Should a university ignore, nurture, or challenge the views of its students? I feel like, as a student, you should be allowed to pick. Because depending on the issue, or the individual, the answer may change.
For example, at one time Gen-Xers and Millennials were significantly more tolerant of homosexuality than society overall (they still are, but society has largely come around). Did universities do them a disservice by either nurturing or ignoring these views, rather than intellectually challenging their pro-gay marriage views?
And what happens when students cease to challenge their own views? They become accustomed to a monoculture and become adverse to views other than their own. In time, the refusal to challenge their own views morphs into hostility towards those that dare challenge those views.
> For example, at one time Gen-Xers and Millennials were significantly more tolerant of homosexuality than society overall (they still are, but society has largely come around). Did universities do them a disservice by either nurturing or ignoring these views, rather than intellectually challenging their pro-gay marriage views?
It did them a service. By being force to challenge these views, these students were prompted to developed effective arguments to refute those challenges. This better equipped them to turn around and challenge the rest of society's views on these topics.
Twitter et al. seem to want to have it both ways.
At a point where each issue is extremely polarizing, where we connect people around the world - blurring the local and the global - and there’s a new crazy event happening every minute around the world minute - people lose nuance and the ability to stop and compartmentalism events.
Since everything is now part of a never ending stream of outrageous actions, content consumers have adapted by looking at meta identifiers to get a grip on the world around them.
Who is speaking? What are they saying ? Oh? It matches statements used by white supremacists ? Ok, good bye.
I don’t have the time or bandwidth to invest in you.
When everything is accessible and people have only limited processing space - decisions are made on lossy fast information.
It does when allegations of dog whistling are levied against mainstream viewpoints. Saying "build the wall" is a white supremacist dog whistle is absolutely a means of expanding white supremacy to encompass support border enforcement. Nothing about building a wall on a national border is white supremacist. White supremacists may be in favor of such a viewpoint, but that does not make the viewpoint itself white supremacist.
Accusations of dog whistling is a very cheap and effective way of stuffing words into one's opponents' mouths and many do use it to try and paint acceptable views as white supremacist.
I recently attended a diversity workshop at a large organization that you’d recognize where we were taught some key elements of white supremacy are things like: perfectionism, urgency, defensiveness, individualism, etc.
https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/white-supremacy-cu...
1. Like it or not, plenty of families in America have had it worse than you had, and would not find it at all impressive that you have never gone on a vacation or eaten out.
2. You should save your anger for the huge number of spots saved for legacies and athletes. Being the child of alumni means you have a 45% greater chance of getting into a college. (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/07/harvards-freshman-class-is-m...) If you must get angry at someone, don't get angry at the people who are struggling as hard, or harder than you are--get mad at the rich assholes who quietly sail into these so-called elite institutions.
3. If you have good grades and good test scores, there are tons of good colleges you can go to. They just might not be Harvard. Is not going to Harvard worth pushing yourself to the right? Worth aligning yourself with the guy pushing a trade war with China, which is going to do wonders for the image of Asians in America? Personally, I don't think so.
4. The adversity score is designed to ensure equality of opportunity, dude. If they were capable of making a good adversity score, they would certainly take into account your family's struggles. They probably won't be able to, because these things are unquantifiable, but frankly the SAT and the whole college admissions process are bullshit anyway, and you'll be happier once you let go of your belief that because your family sacrificed a lot, the system ought to reward you. It should, but it won't, because it's a capricious and unfair monster.
What's crazy about this whole controversy is that HN is usually skeptical towards college anyway. Even beyond the pro-Peter Thiel arguments back in the day about how college is a waste of time, nowadays there are plenty of allegations on HN about how higher ed is a bubble. About how CS, or at least programming, can be self-taught. So I don't understand why so many people here are giving College Board and the college industry any credence here.
I've always thought of them as a loud minority and, to be fair, they're not wrong: a lot of web jobs, even well paid ones, really don't require that much education or even much in the way of cognitive acuity.
The people who actually need to use their college education, the FAANG folks and people in other cutting edge tech jobs, don't bother to be vocal about it.
The point there is the power of wealth and social connections. Thats what is unjust. Dragging race into it sort of undermines the point, and it certainly hurts the universality of the point, as other countries have different dominant class identifiers.
Is it still worth to breath when we know Hitler breathed too? This was rhetorical and I apologize for starting a little blunt. There is no singular right wing like there is no singular left wing.
As I understand it, the parent is actually not talking about aligning with Trump, but rather their thought process is getting more individualistic i.e. more right wing in a broad sense.
Point of fact: the Chinese had tariffs on American goods long before the “trade war.” That isn’t fair and it’s correct to call a government out on that policy. China has been called out by the WTO on numerous occasions and now, somehow Trump is wrong for agreeing with the WTO?[1] France has had high tariffs on American products for a long time, but now Trump is the bad guy? I don’t agree with any tariffs, but when other countries use tariffs, it’s only logical to retailiate.
Secondly, you seem to be suggesting that the OP should just accept not going to Harvard as fair when other people who didn’t work as hard get to go? That is just un-American and the complete opposite of a meritocracy. What do kids that have lower grades and don’t score as well get a preference to the most elite schools in the country? We are outraged when rich people bribe their way into a school, how is this any different? These lower performing students could also go to state schools just as you suggest the OP do. What gives them a right to a school for which they wouldn’t normally qualify? There is real anti-Asian discrimination at many of the Ivy League schools. This is documented and is not unlike the anti-Jew initiatives of years past. May the smartest student win — and if that results in an entirely Asian class at Harvard, so be it. It isn’t like Asians have any super-powers in academics. They’re human like the rest of us, but it might seem that their cultural emphasis on education is paying off. Instead of handicapping Asians, why not try to change the culture of non-Asians to better compete?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/19/us-wins-wto-ruling-against-c...
I'm all about parents sacrificing for their kids, but when the system is set up to push people that far something about the system is broken.
However, there is another component to it: one's advantage is always relative to others' lack of advantage. This is why equal access education will never be truly supported (no matter what people say); if all kids have the same advantage as their kids, then their kids don't actually have any advantage at all (in social terms).
Your family is not model to be aspirational of. Yours is a warning to others.
> But why do you think such a thing is a warning?
Because it's a bad way to spend your life.
Adding more rules will just create perverse incentives (e.g. parents incentivized to increase crime rate in their neighborhoods to boost their children's scores.)
For example, if Alice is raised by two loving parents in a so-so neighborhood she gets a score of 50. If Bob was abused as a child, put into foster care at 10, and adopted into a good neighborhood at 14 he gets a score of 25. Due to Bob's past he is way behind in school but works hard. Bob and Alice both end up getting 1400. At a selective school its possible that because Bob his a lower adversity score his application automatically gets rejected while Alice's application gets looked at and accepted.
This is the kind of case that is possible with an "Adversity Score" that bothers me.
You go to a better school, you get a better education, you are more educated and you get a 34 on the ACT.
If you go to a crappy school and you get the same score than there's no qualitative difference between the schools and your parents skipped vacations for nothing.
But obviously the OP must believe there was value in the better school otherwise they wouldn't mention it. So they would believe they would have got a lower score in a different school, and if that's a proxy for education, then the OP must have ended up with a better education, and is also much more likely to succeed at _any_ college they go to, even if it's not Harvard.
So, you're saying that people who have the misfortune to have parents who can't do those things for them should suffer a handicap, right? How well you are able to compete for a slot in college should depend on who your parents are?
Yes, for the reasons that I outlined. If you don't reward kids for their parents investment, their parents won't invest, and that will be worse for everyone.
If you spending 1 hour or 10 hours teaching your kids at night makes no difference to their life outcomes, which will you choose?
There's a lot more to success in life than what college you go to. Going to Harvard is pretty worthless if you haven't even been set up with the skills to be able to graduate, for instance -- which the kid with highly invested parents is more likely to have.
Sure that may be true in relative terms. But at the margin, decreased reward -> decreased investment.
> There's a lot more to success in life than what college you go to. Going to Harvard is pretty worthless if you haven't even been set up with the skills to be able to graduate, for instance -- which the kid with highly invested parents is more likely to have.
That sounds like something that could be true, it just isn't. A Harvard degree is mostly about signaling. Once you are accepted to Harvard, you're nearly guaranteed to graduate (the graduation rate is 97.5%). Once you've gotten in, you're set. A huge number of jobs care more about marketing their ivy league staff than the actual skill output of that staff. You can do extremely well with zero talent and a Harvard degree. Obviously having both is better, but the Harvard degree itself confers tremendous value on anyone who has it, even if that person has no real skills or intelligence.
How does the ability to move into a rich neighborhood correlate with college success? I teach math, so that would be a great place to give an example.
However, the adversity score policy being proposed here would blunt the impact of that resource allocation. When you blunt the return to an investment, you get less of that investment. If those same Asian families cannot improve their kids chances by making those sacrifices, then they have no reason to make those sacrifices.
I don't get you, batbomb. But that's OK sometimes.
Somehow, all of that is rendered worthless when somebody going to a shitty school with shitty food wins the shitty school and home life lottery and edges them out of the more prestigious school with lower test scores thanks to the adversity bump.
Ultimately, good school kid must settle for highly regarded state school and post about how unfair the system is on a website for engineers and entrepreneurs. Shitty school kid becomes rich and famous because they went to an Ivy, everybody in the VC office loves them, buys a Tesla and their single mom a mansion.
Just kidding, shitty school kid had to drop out when their mom got sick junior year.
That's assuming they calculated their adjustments precisely. And if they didn't, then welcome to all sorts of artificial biases in the system where a few more people appointed themselves to determine the fates of many. Congrats on solving nothing at all.
What’s uniquely bad about this is that it doesn’t have even the facade of holistic analysis. The College Board is counting up how oppressed they think you are, and telling colleges to count your score less if you don’t have enough oppression points.
Maybe you grew up in a poor neighborhood but have incredibly supportive parents/family?
Maybe you grew up in a billionaire family but with parents who are never around because they have business to run and places to go (as they can afford to)?
And the 'secret' part of the story really really bugs me. Why don't we turn US tax code into a state secret so that rich people/business cannot try to game the system to pay less tax?
EDIT: I got downvotes. But really, I'd like to know who gets to decide how oppressed you are?
If your Asian parents immigrated and sacrificed hard for you, but still speak the language that their grandparents and their grandparents before them spoke, well, your parents sacrificed, but like, people go through shit. White people, black people, Asians, all types of people get exploited into nothingness. Into being not even human.
Not going on vacation is not a hardship.
500yr is waaaaay too long. 100yr ago nobody in my family tree spoke English and they were all subsistence farming on a different continent. Every relative I know is decently prosperous. Some people make more of their lives than others but nobody is disadvantaged.
I have a friend who's grandparents had everything taken by the Japanese, then again by the communists, moved somewhere they couldn't even speak the language (they got called crazy but they got the last laugh when everyone else starved) and my friend owns a house in a gentrifying city and makes six figures sitting on his butt staring at a screen. Not bad for two generations.
I knew a woman who lost a good chunk of her immediate family to violence in a south American country her mom moved with her to the US (I'm pretty sure she came to the US as a refugee) they eventually wound up in one of the "worse" cities in NJ and her mom signed her up for some educational program that somehow led to her being sent to a prep school in New England and from there she wend to college and graduated from Colombia.
Compare all of those to my girlfriend's family tree which is chock full of deadbeats. I don't know a single one who is actively engaged in working hard to move up in the world. They've been on this continent longer than the existence of the nation they reside in. Maybe they made something of themselves once upon a time but this branch of the family tree has done nothing productive.
I think whether or not you grow up in a household with parents who are driven to raise their kids well is the primary determining factor. If colleges want to know how "disadvantaged" a kid is they should be looking at the parents. Immigrants for the most part tend to be very industrious and pass that on to their children and grandchildren but it seems to diminish over the generations and the variance among individuals takes over as the determining factor. Some individuals are highly driven. Some are deadbeats.
As for me, of course not. I don't want other kids to suffer. And I'm sure it's the same for everyone else.
But why should I or my children who did the right things (study, sacrifice, etc) suffer because some faceless bureaucrats gets to decide who get an advantage via a 'secret' score?
> why should I or my children who did the right things (study, sacrifice, etc) suffer
Because plenty of other families and children do the same right things (study, sacrifice, etc), AND suffer other adversity. You're not special.
To answer your question, I think many will suffer, though they must not necessarily. I would have objected long before; ethnicity should never be a consideration. Why? Because people are not statistics. When thinking on statistics, you can't use them to judge one individual case, only to make predictions about a population. That means while these predictions or introduced biases are generally true, some people get screwed. We, as a society, are set up to work differently. Look at our justice system: a very high burden of proof means that we believe it better for ten guilty men to walk free than for one to go to jail. I would argue the same premise applies here: it is better for ten people to judged without race (though availability of opportunity can be a consideration) and result in a somewhat unfair distribution than for one unprivileged person to be kept out of college because he's the wrong race. In other words, I would rather we don't tinker with the ratio based on race than for one poor white kid out of Appalachia to have his score "adjusted" down and his application turned down.
I guess both are unjust, but one has injustice as the result of intervention, and the other has injustice as the result of non-intervention.
There was a skit by a comedian years ago called "Modern Educayshun", which predicted this almost exactly. That was comedy then.
I'm also Asian American.
This to me seems like it IS opportunity over outcome though. If you have two people who are equally hard working and one grows up in a disadvantaged environment, the latter going to score lower.
My parents sacrificed a lot so I could go to a good school. It was completely obvious to see that not that hard working people at my school would do much better than extremely hard working people from poorer districts.
The thing is, I imagine the people who worked harder but scored lower would probably fare better if given equal opportunity but they aren't.
> My family sacrificing vacations and eating out for 12 years (literally ate out 5x max) to afford to live in a good school district shouldn’t penalize us. My dad commuted 4 hours daily instead of moving...I’m getting pushed further and further to the right
If implemented correctly (and that's a big if) this should just make it so parents don't have to go through those sacrifices. Isn't that a good thing?
Simply put, parents are now forced to weigh the comparative benefit of a high-end university education over the child's development. I'm betting that diminishing returns on development investment will at some point encourage investment in gaming the adversity score instead.
No disagreement from me there. However, I would prefer if a child's outcome were not so dependent on how willing their parents are to make sacrifices.
> Simply put, parents are now forced to weigh the comparative benefit of a high-end university education over the child's development. I'm betting that diminishing returns on development investment will at some point encourage investment in gaming the adversity score instead.
I'd argue the current system already does this. Placing such a high emphasis on scores just makes it so that parents are strongly encouraged to put their children in SAT/AP prep scores while ignoring other things that would likely be much more important.
I went to a school full of wealthy students. Almost all of them took prep classes to get really high scores.
As far as I could tell, there was absolutely no instance of people learning for the sake of learning and little no to interest in doing something for the sake of a child's development.
Somebody needs to get a class action going asap, tomorrow.
Its so so true that so many Asian families have made massive financial and personal sacrifices in the hope to provide their children the best opportunities possible. This is clearly protected activity under the founding documents of our nation, pursuing life, liberty and happiness for themselves and their children through education.
I can’t imagine the sinking feeling running through so many of those incredibly honest and hardworking families tonight. Imagine you saved everything, lived in the smallest apartment possible barely in the good school zone, spent extra money on tutors and extra circulars and your high school senior or junior learns all his or her effort all the family’s effort they want to cancel out.
It’s a blatant attempt to punish Asian families for believing in America.
While the right's policies may benefit us a bit, culturally the right will be just as happy to screw us to benefit themselves/their majority constituents when the time comes.
I would, but you haven't yet so why should I?
So no, it doesn't account for you to secretly discriminate against you. What it does do, for the penalization part, is that the schools that are in affluent neighborhoods have access to much better resources than ones from Compton or Watts.
To me, a kid from Compton who scores 1500 on the SAT far outweighs someone from Palo Alto High who also scores 1500 because of all the resources the latter received to be able to reach it.
Moving is orthogonal to the problem, except that the district could be brutally hard for some kids.
Also, imagine the other folks in your neighborhood who got literally everything. Driving to school in a Maserati and spending for 4 different tutors over the course of 12 years.
Who is more deserving? You, who scored 1500, or him, who scored 1500? I sure hope you don't say, "it should equal!"
Q: What do you call the person who graduated last in their class in medical school? A: Doctor.
Sure, I'd probably prefer the higher performing doctor in this hypothetical scenario, but at the same time, it feels very much artificial (maybe a false dichotomy?). Sure, you always want the best for everything -- that's what "the best" means! Reality is that there are always going to be B students operating on people. If I were to propose my own false dichotomy, I might ask whether you prefer the B student who got tutored to pass the SAT, or one who self studied?
To answer your question, I would prefer a person who is passionate about what they are doing and capable of thinking outside the box. However, unfortunately, it's not something that could be easily formalized. Sure, self-taught students would likely be better motivated than tutored ones, however once you begin counting it as a part of the score, people would start gaming the system. Someone would lie about not being tutored. Someone else would actually skip taking private lessons and will miss out on learning something important, because doing so would give them a better score. A much better solution, IMO, would be to point out and quantify the traits and skills the self-taught people show, and include them in the test, giving everyone a chance to learn and practice them.
Ben Carson is an apparent moron, who thinks the pyramids were for grain storage. He'd fail a history course. He's also apparently a phenomenal brain surgeon.
Clinical skills and raw academic scores can be wildly disparate in a single person. Frankly, if I were picking a surgeon, I'd look for the one who enjoys tinkering with electronics and engines in their spare time.
I say this of course from the Computer Science perspective. Students scoring A are not necessarily the best Hackers.
I gotta say, people in this discussion are acting as if suddenly colleges will totally forget that they need to admit for the lacrosse team and the rowing team and make sure they get the legacy admits in etc. That will not happen. Those people make money for the college. People who pay full tuition will always statistically have an advantage. You know how I know? I have done admissions scoring for higher ed! I don't decide who gets in, I just read all the letters of rec and the personal statements and look at the transcripts and send in an Excel spreadsheet.
Of course a single numerical score never captures the complexity of students. I really don't understand why HNers think this will make or break admissions. Any college has to meet their budget first. People who pay full price fill those spots. Everyone else is fighting for the remaining spots. Ok, maybe I answered my own question: HNers realize that despite being moderately successful in our current regime, they can't afford to pay full price and so their kids will be scrapping it out with every poor kid who busted their ass too, and it's just less compelling to hear "son/daughter of software engineer from well-off neighborhood, with robotics team experience and high SAT score and hours of tutoring and an internship at a local biotech firm" than "son/daughter of welfare mom, with robotics team experience and high SAT score and an internship at a local bank"....
Rich people can have crappy lives. No doubt about it. But they sure do help a small liberal arts college meet their budget goals more easily anyway.
She's probably gonna mention the MS in her essay, though.
There are always edge cases. That we can't perfectly capture each and every one of them doesn't mean some data on common advantages/disadvantages can't be useful.
(Plus, there's going to be a number of more conventionally disadvantaged kids with MS, too, who don't have the billions of dollars to lean on.)
You didn't eat out much so... home cooked meals most nights? You lived in a good school district? You had parents and/or other family as a support structure for 12 years? You had a dad?
Imagine having none of those things.
Be proud of what you have accomplished. Fuck the people that want to tear you down because there's some poor wretch that "deserves" a shot more than you do.
The fact is that different ethnic groups don't seem to mix organically unless they are all quite wealthy, at which point they have more in common with their socioeconomic class than with their ethnicity.
That goes both ways. If you've got a group of mostly upper middle class whites, Asians and Indians (i.e. your average tech company) the poor whites are going to hand out with the blacks, Mexicans and eastern Europeans. Not having much in common with the majority group is the trait that ties the minority group together.
A poor asian community that sends their kids to after school schools and does very well as a whole will suddenly fight themselves without the boost that others at that economic level might have.
All theoretical at this point I guess. I would prefer to let this play out a little bit more rather than race based quotas/scholarships which more often than not seem to go to kids with the same good backgrounds who just happen to be minorities.
They'll also be punished for having established a low-crime neighborhood and learning english, since crime level and english as second language are also factors in the adversity score.
Of course, no single one of them is entirely responsible for their parents and community teaching them english, or for the low amount of crime. Because those are results of collective instead of individual effort, they're not labeled as laudable accomplishments, but as shameful privileges.
Honestly, given that the sole purpose of the SAT is to apply to college, which get tons more information about the test taker/applicant than College Board, hopefully this gets ignored and college admissions make their own judgements on "adversity" versus the SAT's simplistic, reductionist view of quantifying it... Admissions should and will have full ability and better info to do a much better job at this. Indeed, the Ivies do seem to take these things into serious account based on the stats they release every year on new admits.
Also, the cynic in me thinks this is more of a way to make up for the losing market share to the ACT and attract more test takers away from the ACT that would benefit from this adversity scoring system.
Family A makes $X and goes through significant sacrifices (e.g. commuting 4 hours) to live in a wealthy neighborhood with good schools.
Family B makes the same $X and lives a leisurely live in a cheap neighborhood with bad schools.
Which should have a better chance of succeeding? This adversity score says family B deserves a bonus over family A.
> Almost all people, including poor people, make sacrifices and want what is best for their kids.
I don't doubt that people of all income levels want their kids to succeed. But there definitely are differences in behavior between demographics. The wealthier people are the more likely they are to use test prep across all demographics, but Asians are more likely to do so regardless of income. Asians also spend more than twice as much time studying outside of class than any other race [1]. There are differences in how much emphasis is put on education, this cannot be denied.
1. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/...
Sure, the Angleton guy's parents may be strung out on opioids or whatever, but I gotta be honest, I'm just not seeing why Stanford takes a chance on you as opposed to just giving it to one of the two kids who've proven they can perform at a high level academically test prep or no test prep?
There's still a shitload of applicants between a 34 and 36. Easily more than one for every five spots. When you're talking about these universities with single digit admittance rates its not enough to just get good grades and good standardized test scores. Nine AP classes, fives on all the tests, and 4.0 GPA, and a perfect SAT score will guarantee you enough to get in the pile but you've still gotta make yourself shine like the diamond in the bush that all these schools are looking for. Having this 'Adversity Score' that's supposed to measure how much challenge you faced in life make it seem like you're an underdog that toughed it out against all the odds has the potential of being a big advantage.
> Sure, the Angleton guy's parents may be strung out on opioids or whatever, but I gotta be honest, I'm just not seeing why Stanford takes a chance on you as opposed to just giving it to one of the two kids who've proven they can perform at a high level academically test prep or no test prep?
Because not everyone believes in meritocracy. Some believe that Stanford should take bet on the guy's parents that are strung out on opioids even if he has lower test scores to advance their perception of social justice. That's just one possibility. There's also plenty of evidence to suggest that this may be a mechanism to enforce certain informal caps (like the one proven to be enforced on Asians) through geographic discrimination. Basically, a deliberately opaque (remember, this score is private and not given to the student) set of knobs and dials that can be used to achieve what normally can't be achieved legally.
As an analogy, that automatically popped to my mind when I initially heard the idea of "adversity scores", we can think about a common squad or platoon level personnel situation in the military.
Some guys win lots of trophies at shooting contests, and display impressive marksmanship down at the shooting range. But some guys can shoot at that same superhuman level in a fog, with contacts all around them, at night, and under a level of fire so high you'd probably label it "Hollywood". Well, if you get to pick and choose, the guy who can shoot at that level while under fire is obviously a superior pick for you than the show pony who shoots well at the equivalent of beauty pageants.
To me, this seems like the same kind of situation.
No one is taking a bet on anyone's parents, strung out or not. They're taking a bet on one of these kids. I posit that Stanford or SAT or whoever would be correct. The impoverished local yokel from Angleton, TX with strung out parents and a cold, unpracticed 35, is a better bet than the guy with 35 through the efforts of a ton of expensive test prep. And it's obvious that part of why he's a better bet is that he can score the 35 under much less optimal conditions than the guy with expensive test prep can.
Now you can call that difference the "adversity score". Or you can call it "performance consistency". Or you can even just call it "common sense". But it really does seem obvious to me that given two applicants, the one who performed at a high level consistently under sub-optimal conditions is a better choice.
It's not. Some students apply with subpar scores, but often the majority of applicants to these universities apply with perfect or close to perfect grades and SAT scores (think 3.9+, as many AP classes as the school offers, good extracurricular, and probably a >2200 SAT or >33 ACT). It's not just about performance, there's a lot of additional character judgement and luck involved. I went to one an institution widely considered "elite" myself, and I can say firsthand that plenty of students from other universities are just as smart and can work just as effectively under pressure as my classmates. The universities themselves state that many more qualified students apply than are positions. For universities where this is legal, race absolutely comes into play as far as which applicants are selected. There are many universities that can't discriminate based on race due to legal restrictions, and it's widely suspected that this adversity score will be engineering to be strongly correlated with demographics these institutions discriminated in favor of when such discrimination was legal. A backdoor means to what is meant to be prohibited discrimination.
> No one is taking a bet on anyone's parents, strung out or not. They're taking a bet on one of these kids. I posit that Stanford or SAT or whoever would be correct. The impoverished local yokel from Angleton, TX with strung out parents and a cold, unpracticed 35, is a better bet than the guy with 35 through the efforts of a ton of expensive test prep. And it's obvious that part of why he's a better bet is that he can score the 35 under much less optimal conditions than the guy with expensive test prep can.
Yeah, but how we engineer the metric to measure how much of an "impoverished local yokel" is easily subject to abuse. The fact that these 'Adversity Socres' are kept private is highly suspicious. This comes on the heels of racial discrimination becoming more prohibited by the current government. There's strong reason to suspect that this is about circumventing the principles of equal protection of the law. And this is to mention the possibility of people gaming this system to portray themselves as enduring adversity. Wealthier people can probably better min-max this system to boost their diversity scores. Not to mention, in doing so we may be discouraging things that are demonstrated to be healthy. If this adversity score penalizes two parent households, then we're basically discouraging marriage. Even if its creation is earnest, it could easily have negative effects.
No, it does not say that it deserves a bonus _over_ family A. It deserves that that circumstance (a circumstance of the parents, not the kid!) is taken into account to close the gap somewhat.
Family B gets a triple mushroom, basically, and family A a green shell.
Yeah, but whatever version of Mario Kart this is, it's pretty obvious how those two objects are going to stack up in terms of balance. Affirmative action has always been used for either of two purposes: to advance a left leaning view of social justice, and to enforce de-facto caps on disproportionately successful minorities. If you're an optimist you can portray this as giving groups labeled disadvantaged a better chance that they deserve (but invite criticism from those that may not believe in either how you define disadvantage, and from those that more broadly disagree with putting one's finger on the scale). If you're a pessimist you suspect that this is a way of enforcing informal caps on successful groups, namely Asians which have been demonstrated to have been subjected to such caps in the last several decades.
If you want to incentivize character built through life experiences? OK, I guess. But it should have to be the life and character of the actual student that counts. Not his mom.
Whereas equality of outcome would focus more on who gets in even if it means treating people differently based on what they look look, how much money they have, where they live, etc.
I can, just off the top of my head, think of several situational variables impacted by wealth, which impact cognitive capacity:
- sleep - diet - training - study time
My father was physically abusive, and child services got involved. My father's lawyers sorted things out to get the investigation to stop and drop charges if I lived somewhere else. I unfortunately went into the Troubled Teen industry (which I had definitively no reason to be in other than as part of his lawyers' story blaming me for what happened). That industry is filled with abuse.
The day I turned 18 I was pulled from there and struggled with homelessness for a year. It was extremely hard to succeed when you are homeless.
Financial aid for university is tied to your childhood guardian's social security number until you are 25, so I was a homeless person, and not eligible for any financial aid.
This is just a start. I've never broken any laws or done anything particularly wrong.
Did you ever think of my story? Apparently bureaucrats didn't.
Also, why should I need permission from some bureaucrats to study from the top degree programs? Shouldn't the goal be the opposite: to expand the best education opportunities to as many people as possible?
We have so much wealth and enormous social spending in America, and yet look at our outcomes with homelessness, poverty and suicide...
If you had been in the Netherlands, you'd get a stipend of ~$10k per year when enrolling in school, and other countries have similar systems. UBC in Vancouver, Canada generally pays masters students $30k a year, having had a few friends depart to Canada due to said offer.
From the college board's description of the tool, it weights applicant scores by the quality of their neighborhood and high school. So a disadvantaged student whose family focused on moving to a neighborhood/school where lots of students succeed is not given a high score in this analysis.
The OP had the same opportunity, but because they did the traditional things for a poorer family to encourage their students to succeed (moving to a good school district and sacrificing on the commute) they will be considered a privileged student in this analysis.
Compared to the poor students whose parents didn't make those sacrifices, they are privileged.
If my dad makes a sacrifice by working 100 hours a week to buy me a Maserati, the car is definitely a privilege not something I earned. And yeah, I may have lost out on spending time with my dad, but that wasn't a choice I made, so while it cost me something it wasn't a sacrifice on my part.
Are need based scholarships denigrating the hard work of wealthy parents?
No, you certainly are not. But this is completely different from adding a hidden adversity score to the SAT. Your proposal is equality of opportunity to earn merit. The other proposal is manipulation of outcome to negate merit.
Declaring that one denigrates people while the other doesn't based solely on outcome vs opportunity requires arbitrarily picking an observation point that supports your view.
A policy that gives 5K to low-income families to allow their children to compete effectively on the SAT is not denigrating.
I firmly believe that if you pose this question to the world, a near complete majority of people will rule the latter is fair, the former is not. There is no arbitrary pick of an observation point here. These are two completely different policies.
And the first sentence is strange. If equal opportunity versus equal outcome is a merely a matter of perspective, then you can draw your lines even further! After all, whatever effects poverty and weaker education had on students in their ability to perform on the SAT certainly won’t have disappeared once they stroll across the campus green!
You can contribute the hidden adversity scores to course grades, contribute it to graduate honors, contribute it further to employment opportunity and promotion. You can draw your line at retirement and benefits if equal opportunity vs equal outcome is merely a matter of perspective.
Even the definition of merit and earned achievement is largely arbitrary. I'm successful because of the way I was created and raised. It's not a personal accomplishment.
Hard work should be rewarded because it's a basically useful for society to do so, not because it's some kind of absolute moral imperative.
To the extent that this proposal ceases to award hard work, from a societal perspective, it's gone too far. However it doesn't come close to doing that.
Looking at the metrics they're using, the only likely widescale impact on behavior is that people are less likely to move to rich neighborhoods with high scoring schools. I don't see this as a problem.
And that sacrifice will be for nought, due to adversity scoring.
This is a very bad idea.
But for college admissions, I don't think it is unreasonable to judge a kid for how well they did relative to the advantages they were given.
You were fortunate, not everybody was.
You might also consider that the great sacrifices your parents made to place you in a certain environment robbed you of an education others less academically focused learned well. And that some of those skills have value.
Colleges have limited ability to help with those factors so they apply weights where they can. Hell even the SAT itself has a pretty regressive impact because most colleges will let you submit your highest score from multiple tests, I got 2 800s but it took 2 tests (not counting a couple PSATs I got various times) to get that a chance a poorer person is much less likely to have.
I think you summed up the problem quite well and acknowledged that colleges aren't in much of a position to solve it, but seem happy with a solution that ignores the problem. A much more effective effort would be to solve the problem and ensure that there is equality of opportunity as much as possible, like eliminating your postcode determining your quality of schooling.
Don't forget that not everyone is college bound, those that don't get help from the college will still have a poor education, will still live a poor community and will still have another generation of kids facing the same issues.
I could consistently help even the poorest students move from below 50th percentile to 75th percentile. Moving from < 600 to mid 700s is totally doable with sufficient tutoring [1]. Even for pretty dumb students.
I think SAT/ACT are pretty good tests [1], but they're horrendously over-gamed at this point. I have very little faith in either as anything other than a demonstration of how badly the student wants to be admitted to a good school and has money for tutoring.
[1] edit: i.e., SAT/ACT are not easy to game wit short-term coaching, but sustained tutoring can substantially increase students' performance... see thread below for further elaboration and discussion of "coaching doesn't help" studies.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-service/201903...
I worked with students throughout the school year with a focus on the underlying content, and only switched to "coaching" the last few weeks before the exam. For many students, I tutored them weekly or biweekly, for 1-3 hours per week, for multiple years!
NONE of the studies on the effect of coaching consider the effect of this sort of longer-term individualized instruction.
I'm willing to believe that short-term coaching only has small effects, but sustained individual instruction has a huge impact on mathematical ability. And as I explicitly said in my original post, SAT/ACT do a good job of measuring that ability.
But claiming that sustained access to individualized high-quality teaching doesn't effect performance on subject-specific tests that require nontrivial content knowledge and practice is, on face, absurd. At the very least, the studies you're citing say absolutely nothing about this sort of sustained intervention.
(Also, College Board loves amplifying those studies. I wonder why...)
This... is a feature, not a bug. The SAT is a tool to measure educational attainment, and you boosted scores by legitimately educating students. The SAT is not a test to measure natural ability (I can't believe this needs to be said, but so many people claim that no intervention should be able to boost SAT scores, and the only logical conclusion is that they want the SAT to measure some sort of unchangeable inborn ability? Of course, I think the actual problem is that they haven't realized that if you eliminate all environmental differences, all you're left with is the genetic lottery.)
But anyway, I think this is absolutely fine. Would you expect someone who hasn't gone to high school to do well on the SATs? Then why in the world would you think legitimate education shouldn't boost SAT scores?
The SAT (and other standardized tests) make a lot of sense when you're comparing people who have spent more-or-less the same amount of time and money preparing. They also make sense as one component of a holistic picture, weighed appropriately.
The the true value of these tests for predicting potential is a lot less useful otherwise.
The huge problem, from a predict-success perspective, is that you can't tell the difference between:
1. a brilliant person;
2. a kind-of-smart person who's very driven; and
3. an average person with no work ethic who was forced to sit with a tutor for many hours each weekend.
> Then why in the world would you think legitimate education shouldn't boost SAT scores?
It should. That's what the SAT is for. As I've said twice now, the SAT is a well-designed test. I don't think the SAT should change. I'm just now sure how useful it is, especially as a holistic measure.
To be really concrete about this: colleges should shy away from the SAT because I won't be holding those students hands forcing them to study and custom-designing their course of study at their first job!
At some point soon after graduating college, the hand holding disappears and you sink or swim. Academic preparation helps, but work ethic and the ability to learn on your own is really important. Colleges are, or at least should be, attempting to select people who are more likely to "swim".
If I were a college admissions officer, I'd probably weigh "good enough scores to know you're not an idiot, plus a compelling demonstration of grit and work ethic" WAY over "great scores with no demonstration of independent drive".
(FWIW I think we're now completely disconnected from the actual topic of the article, since that's not what the hardship score is measuring)
Back to the hardship score, I just don't think that the College Board should be in this business at all. Individual colleges certainly know where an applicant is coming from, and what high school they went to, and they have a lot more additional information not available to the College Board. So they have a much better idea of what hardships the applicant went through. Furthermore, different colleges want different things from their students which would and should lead to them weighing different kinds of hardships differently. Reducing all of this to a single number based on very coarse data is exactly the opposite of what holistic admissions is supposed to achieve.
If parents value education, they find a way. Perhaps having a two parent, tightly knit family helps. If we want to really help future generations, we have to find ways to support and encourage two-parent families. That’s one of the biggest predictors of academic and social success and there is plenty of data to back it up. Limited income, educational level of the parents, crime ridden neighborhoods — somehow, statistically, Asians don’t seem to care, they find a way. Until we reverse many of the social policies created in the early 1970s that destroyed the two-parent family in certain communities, you’ll get more of the same results. Interestingly, black kids from two parent families perform just as well academically as does a white student from a two-parent family. All of these other “factors” are just noise. The problem is in the home, not with the tests.
No one's pushing you. If you really are a conservative, you should take responsibility for your own views and actions. Don't blame them on someone else.
I'll also note that all of the things you describe as your personal virtues that are supposedly under attack were actually things provided to you by your parents. Not accomplishments of your own. Why should someone who's parents are addicts, have mental health issues, or crippling medical issues feel like the testing is a level playing field when they didn't get those advantages?
> The score would not be reported to the student, only to college officials.
They give you a standardized test, but you can't even find out how well you did.
You don't get your "adversity score" which is not based on how well you did, but only on where you live and what high school you attend.
Maybe we should also have a hidden citizen score, to be used behind the scenes in the courts of law?
Your SAT score is just about the only bit of the admission process you have access to. You don't get the admissions officers' opinions on your essay, what they thought of your extracurriculars, how they perceive the reputation of your high school, what their alumni interviewers said, etc.
(Chances are you can make a pretty good guess at what the adversity score is going to be, too.)
So, a separate number being added to College Board's overall package is secret discrimination against Asian students? The "adversity score," according to the article, is calculated based on 15 different factors. The two listed (relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate/poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood) are not directly tied to any one race.
I know that promoting affirmative action is tantamount to blasphemy on this site, but let's be honest here.
Standardized tests alone are really not the great equalizer that many might think. I am a Nigerian-American immigrant, but my parents were able to afford expensive, one-on-one ACT tutoring/prep, and I scored a 34, and was awarded the National Merit scholarship after SAT prep. Not everyone can say that they had the same opportunities I did.
A so-called "adversity score" doesn't have to be the end-all, be-all. If it can provide additional context to the scores students receive, then it can really give first-generation, low-income, etc. students a fair shot at competitive universities.
Besides - nobody said schools have to consider the "adversity score," anyways.
> I’m getting pushed further and further to the right.
I also don't understand how a single organization making a change to its testing package, in the interest of leveling the playing field, is somehow "pushing" your political beliefs in any one direction... It's your choice whether you want to align your beliefs more closely with any side.
It sounds kind of like, "put a gold star on all of the Jewish applicants, and allow each reviewer to decide how to act on that information individually."
"put a gold star on all of the Jewish applicants"
I don't think that this adversity score has anything to do with the Nazis, I have to say. It sounds like the data is publicly available financial information. So this whole little branch of HN commentary is an unnecessary diversion.
To return to the article, colleges have been giving extra points to legacy admits, children of donors, people from X region, tuba players, violists (but not violinists haha), rowers, lacrosse players, merit students, Lutherans, etc etc etc forever. I think schools should have to option to get the adversity score or not. I went to Caltech; they probably don't care and should stick to their quirky admissions as many of us 'minority' admissions found it comforting in the midst of failure to know that we were admitted on nothing but the material in the application. But other schools serve a different purpose and if they want to admit twelve poor kids by "adversity score" that's great. I have to say I read the coverage and it's just a bunch more rich parents freaking out that they don't have every single last advantage possible. Ask me in 15 years -- maybe I'll be doing the same.
www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-racial-discrimination-at-harvard/
Everything i learned and can do is because of my own intelligence and skill. Fuck anyone giving me points for things i didn't work for or that are outside my control. I want to be recognized for the things i can do, not because i grew up in a broken, poor family in a low income neighbourhood.
As was mentioned in the article - it doesn't alter your test score.
Your "intelligence" is definitely one of those things completely outside your control. What you've done with it is at least partially under your control, but you probably weren't born with any sort of brain disorder, for example.
EDIT: adding on things like your visual appearance - race, hair color, pigmentation, height, etc - all of those are outside your control, and you generally can't control how other people initially react to those things outside your control.
You didn't control where you were born, or - at least early on - what resources you had access to. You were a victim of (or success due to) your geography, at least early on in your life.
But hey, you 'worked hard' and didn't watch as much tv as some lazy bastards who might get a $1000 scholarship because they grew up in a high-crime area, and fuck that, right?
> How?
The capacity for intelligence is outside of your control for example genetic disorders are not chosen by the individual. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_syndrome
Further, when it comes to intelligence and Nature vs Nurture it’s really both. People 15,000 years ago people had nearly identical genetics, but their society lacked the knowledge to pass a SAT level math test.
Now, making the best of your social and genetic background is up to everyone. But, assuming everything is balanced is at best willful ignorance.
a hypothetical person who was born an autistic savant who is a musical genius. They sold out concert halls at age 9-10, playing the hardest classical music ever written. To what degree did they “earn” their skills and their genius? At a certain point you must agree that people are born with brains that are wired better, and they had no control over that. Effort should be rewarded, but luck should not. Determining how much of someone’s success was luck vs hard work is not at all easy to determine.
Through hard work and discipline, you did the best with the hardware you were given. But don’t think for a second that you wired your own brain.
Edit: and just to clarify, I think some fuzzy new metric on a standardized test will probably never summarize whether someone “earned” their score or lucked into it. My comment here is mostly a reminder to be humble.
Not "outstanding ability, after considering factors X, Y, and Z", but simply "outstanding ability".
It's true that I value demonstrated objective competence rather than subjective predicted future competence.
Presumably you want them to go to that school so they can produce the best music possible with their abilities, for the benefit of society. The other option I see is that you might want them to go to that school because they have "earned it", but this is silly, especially considering a case where they haven't done anything, and are just naturally talented!
You now have two problems- first, one school might be excellent at training good musicians but not so great at training savants. Second...
Suppose you have one spot in a magical "savant school", which is able to develop somebody's skills better than anywhere else in the world. You'd want to assign the student who would benefit most to this spot- the one who has greatest potential.
This is NOT the student who currently writes the best music- this is the one who will write the best music after attending the school.
You don't care about ability now- you care about ability later. Predicting the latter from the former alone has an obvious flaw- training and practice improve ability.
Because of this, it's a good idea to consider measures of how much training somebody has had, in addition to their current ability, for admissions decisions.
Unfortunately, quantifying that is hard- so other metrics are used as proxies. In considering admission to an Olympic swimmer training program, for example, perhaps one might consider how early somebody learned to swim, or how often they visited a swimming pool.
No?
Some music savants want to attend a music school that the composer or musician they most admire attended, others the one that is closest to home.
I don't understand why one would want a talented student to get preferential admission to a school because, for example, he liked the design of the campus. I only get the argument that a talented student should get admitted to a school that'll best develop those talents. The link between "you're talented" and "...so you should get to go to any school you want!" is one I don't get.
Why doesn't that lead to absurdities like a school which specifically excels at teaching "low-talent" students, churning out competent (if unexceptional) composers, still admitting talented students preferentially?
personally, I'm no savant, but as a child I really didn't have to work hard at anything in school. I was pushed up a grade, and was still at the top of that class, and bored, for years. i put in basically no effort in to any schooling for years, and was still, generally, way ahead of many other students who, looking back now, were struggling (this was in the day when students could be 'held back' to repeat a grade - I don't think that's done much today?).
i have learned plenty of skills, and some took years, and it's never ending. but some came - essentially - effortlessly (or appeared effortless relative to peers' efforts).
My claim is that the latter is a skill that nobody is born with. Autistic savants aren't some type of magic creature that know things just by virtue of being savants. They still have to go through the process of skill acquisition. Now that process may be accelerated compared to me or you, but I disagree with your claim of proficiency with zero effort, especially with skills that have shown to require thousands of hours of deliberate practice to establish proficiency.
I think the key is in your last statement: "or appeared effortless relative to peers' efforts". It seems you found yourself in an environment which didn't sufficiently challenge you. This would only argue that you should've been pushed up to more challenging AP/honors classes. This would again have the effect of placing you in a higher standing compared to your peers. So if both you and your peers would be pushed to your true potential, it seems consistent with your statements to say your performance/output would've been superior.
So why should colleges deny you entry because of your ability to be proficient in the system they've set up?
Plus, to what extent is the capacity for hard work based on luck? If long hours give you clinical depression because you got 50 bad genes and experienced neglect as a child and lived in a house with lead paint, do you get sent to live in a slum with the rest of the "lazy" people?
You would still score well, and the fact that you have extra work will still hold in good stead.
Let me turn this question that puts your self interest first.
You’ve got two people who you can hire for your team.
I turns out one guy got a lower sat score than the other.
The lower scorer is someone from the projects where people don’t go to college. He still managed it, and crunched his way through everything to get to community college.
The other chap has good parents who are highly educated and comes from a stable household.
Without a doubt, the first individual has proven a tenacity required to overcome a world of adversity.
Frankly - this is a handicap we already give people if we are made aware of their context.
The same reason people respect first responders, or people who’ve made it out of poverty are respected.
Because it IS harder, and far more fail to get out in the current environment, than those who do.
This will end up being more of a “how effective were you with the opportunities you had.” Measure than any other - and that’s provided it takes off in the first place.
Why should we be shoving people who aren't capable of being the very best students into this environment? Why give them the expectation that this is what they must do to be successful? What must everyone learn from a university (including those in the Ivy League and their peers) that we expect them to all need to go, as a fundamental right, regardless of the fact that they will be displacing students who are quantifiably better-fit for this place?
Who will be the first responders if we make everyone get a four-year degree before they can start their lives?
Physical traits have huge correlations and almost certainly causation to wealth and success.
Tax credits for the ugly. Or maybe mandatory minor face disfigurement for the very beautiful.
Hating the rich is hate.
College board should use their zipcode model to provide free tutoring services instead of trying to punish Asian families who made sacrifices to live in better neighborhoods.
Holding down the top doesn't work, isn’t ethical and is not the same as lifting up the bottom.
Love the poor by helping them lift themselves up.
I did good enough and then went on to do a Masters degree. There I'd get my direct scores. I really feel much better about it. I knew what I did right and what I did wrong.
I think the adjusted score in my undergrad benefited me (some exams were too damn hard!) but I still hated the system.
In first year university, I did a semester of Latin. For the first few weeks I was feeling very motivated; then depression hit me. I stopped going to class. What I should have done, is go see a doctor or psychologist, and got a letter saying I was depressed, and given it to the university administration, and I'm sure they would have given me some form of special consideration. But I didn't do that (it simply never occurred to me that I could do that, I wish it had.)
Anyway, since I'd missed more than half the semester of lectures and tutorials, I was thinking to myself - why bother turning up to the exam? I know I am going to fail anyway. But, I said to myself, I should go, you never know, I might somehow scrape through.
So, I sat down at the exam. I think I got the first page right. The subsequent pages, I had no idea. I sat there and waited until they let me leave early. (The university had some rule, you couldn't leave the exam early until after the first half-hour was up, or something like that.)
I waited for my results, I expected to fail. I was very surprised to find out I passed 50.0. I didn't understand how that could happen.
Next semester, I was enrolled in Latin again. I decided to drop it. But I thought, before dropping it, I should just go to the first lecture. As I was leaving at the end, the lecturer pulled me aside. He said to me, "You know you failed the exam, right?". "Yes", I replied. Then he said: "Too many students failed, and the administration told us we had to give some of them passes. We liked you, thought you were really enthusiastic at the beginning, didn't know what happened to you, and are hoping you might continue the subject, so we decided you'd be one of the lucky ones whose fail gets turned into a pass." I thanked him for his kindness, but I still dropped the subject anyway.
It was an interesting insight into just how "flexible" university marking can be.
Sorry, but there are people who work just as hard as you and don't get as far because the deck is even more stacked against them, and this is an attempt at getting them some relief.
If a poor kid in a high crime inner city school who has very limited access to tutors or mentors scores a 1600, that's a much more impressive achievement than an affluent kid in the suburbs who took the test 3 times, had access to experts in the various fields, got 3 good meals every day, etc. getting that same score.
Just imagine what that poor kid could do if given the same resources as the rich kid...
The classic example is Shylock in the Merchant of Venice. The Jews had a racial stereotype of being moneylenders; that stereotype didn't evolve because of a racial disparity, it evolved because Christians generally didn't charge interest. So the moneylenders were non-Christian and that correlated with being a different race.
There is evidence of a slight bias where Asian migrants sacrifice more to set up their children's educational future. Policies that cheapen the impact of sacrifice will disproportionately affect them. It may not be explicitly racist, but the outcomes will likely be delectably different in different racial groups, to the net loss of the Asians.
Yes, let's be honest! I was from one of those locations where "adversity" would have benefited me. Worst school district in the state, low income, etc.
I am and I suspect will continue to be upset that the harder I work, the less benefit I receive. I pulled myself out of that situation. People in similar situations don't. I don't think everyone can, but they have an equal opportunity to. All they have to do is study or even just work hard or join the army / navy and do their 20 years.
I understand equal opportunity, but at this point we are forgoing equal opportunity and have been for a long time. By setting limits, calculating scores based on hardship, etc. We are doing the opposite of making it equal opportunity by definition.
> additional context to the scores students receive
Most people lack motivation to get out of their situation and improve, because either they are happy with it or they don't have drive. If they don't have drive, they likely wouldn't succeed anyway and they are taking the spot of someone with said drive. If they are happy - good for them. I’m sure they’d be happy to take a hand out, but they are taking someone else’s spot more deserving.
It seems logical and reasonable to give more help to those who need it more. And realistically, you're always going to be way better off by maximizing your own success (even if it means you might get less help) than by minimizing your own success and maximally relying on help. A life lived solely on assistance isn't really a pleasant one.
It does, but that is because all the counter-arguments are complicated and sound mean-spirited. That approach, when tested, sometimes works out absolutely terribly.
Liberty and assuming everyone has an equal capacity to better themselves is the winning philosophy.
Helping people who need it is a lousy strategy. Giving them opportunities is a great strategy. However, the opportunity needs to be to show that they will work hard for a goal, not shoehorning them in to university. Nobody needs a degree to succeed. They need safe shelter, clear/consistent/unbiased rules, food and a system that allows accumulation of capital. A good universal level of high school education. The basic foundational things that underpin a civilised society.
> And realistically, you're always going to be way better off by maximizing your own success
Most people don't actually work that way, I don't have a statistic but based on anecdote I'd expect most people to minimise risk. People who optimise for success are quite rare.
I promise you that I know people who, in a short few months, who burn the light out of the brightest soul.
Make them that test subject’s parent and I’ll give you a sure shot to medicority and a life of emotional issues.
Anecdote is never data. On a large enough scale of human data we see that programs that improve basic things like food, interaction with parents and teachers - all improve student outcomes.
Unsurprisingly - these are also things that better off families tend to take care off and spend their resources on.
Leveling the outcome is NOT leveling the playing field. And by keeping the algorithm secret, it is tyranny not justice.
The powers that be do not get the benefit of the of doubt after all the shenanigans they've pulled over the past century.
For instance, take the mean SAT of admitted students, lower it by X% and pick candidates to random pool with scores above that level.
I imagine that to many people it wouldn't be "fair" because it wouldn't bring the outcome they want. But it'd be fun to watch them argue that random system privileges XYZ group!
The siren call of hackernews.
Who the hell is even here anymore?
Cycles of poverty will never end when people with the privilege of dedicated and capable parents facilitate their success feel like victims. How about some alternate suggestions for poor kids without parents like yours?
If this were almost any other example of adding a modifier to correct for a bias in an initial scoring system, nobody would bat an eye, and we'd be discussing specifics.
Big difference.
What would "well prepared" mean here anyway?
And so the answer is that colleges already can and should take into account % learning through GPA.
I was imagining that the good school presented more and better information, (perhaps more at the style and pacing of a good college classroom,) While the poor school may not have even presented all the information, or done so in a rushed way. (Focusing on that majority of students bound for community college.)
> The rating will not affect students’ test scores, and will be reported only to college admissions officials as part of a larger package of data on each test taker.
So there is no discrimination, unless this is used in a feedback loop, which maybe it is.
> "My family sacrificing vacations and eating out for 12 years"
So your family has hardship, but managed to skew things so you can have it better. If this analysis means more is done to help kids from poor backgrounds, you'd be doubly helped, one by your parents hard work, and again by the system.
Edit: This guy’s parents might have actually been through some shit. Asia was not a nice place over the last century. If he had said something like ‘my parents escaped pol pot’ or something ummmm, actually horrendous, then, I mean, that’s a hardship. And had this commenter framed it in that way, then it gives a whole other dimension to the discussion. But he didn’t.
I’m going to repeat this for anyone spoiled enough by western society to ever say this:
The lack of vacations is not a fucking hardship.
What if your family had the choice to move wherever without sacrificing opportunity?
This isn't about penalizing anyone. It's about offering a modicum of equality in a privilege-drowned world.
But we've never heard anything about internal disagreement or resistant against this stuff. This fact tells something.
To be a bit blunt (and hopefully not offensive, just for example), if someone who didn't have those kind of parents and that type of situation makes the same scores as you, likely they either worked harder or have more ability.
Still I feel where you are coming from. Reverse discrimination for people who work hard is still B.S.
This is insane, and it's going to encourage absurd behavior meant to dupe this system - and don't kid yourself, there will be (see all the wealthy Hollywood types cheating on their kids SAT scores). There might be less nefarious antics if the College Board at least was transparent about how they calculate the score and released it after the test - but they're not. That's how you know this is a shell game, meant to give Universities an "out" for manipulating the demographics of their matriculating classes as they see fit. These incentives are wrong and unethical.
As a silver lining, maybe this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back and folks will start to realize what a fraud the modern "university" is. When the fiance and I start having kids, we've already discussed how college shouldn't be the default scenario. I hope others start considering this. It is mind-boggling to think that my kid could be disadvantaged specifically because I sacrificed to make a better life than I had growing up, so we won't be playing this game.
The policy is dumb and dangerous, agreed.
But advantage is real. You can't list all the sacrifices your parents made while in the same breathe implying "no advantage here, this isn't fair".
The devil is in devising a fair system to determine advantage in an objective way that won't be rife with corruption and gaming the system. I highly doubt this will be possible and attempts likely will result in less fair and worse outcomes.
So policy wise, agree with OP. But from the story he tells, I think it obvious he does indeed have "advantages" many people don't and this is worth recognizing.
Should we be admitting the most qualified students or the best grinder parents kids?
The potential of this policy is more than "social justice" (if it were to succeed which seems unlikely).
I'd argue that you not eating out, getting socialized, and traveling actually made you less of a well-rounded individual and you probably should be penalized for those things. Colleges need diversity. They don't need the same kind of kid replicated 10,000 times. Racquetball, violin, AP calculus does not an interesting campus make.
I would put my chips on someone who has at least proven themselves academically.
everyone seems to be conflating academics with person-building in this thread.
Why don't these same people seem to have any problem with non-academic scholarships?
Here's the grand reason why it's a good idea to make schools mixing-pots : You can expose the really effective students to ideas and concepts that they may have never experienced, which they may use more constructively than other individuals.
In other words : Colleges need people that create the idea of Napster , but they also need the folks that can implement it. Both groups are only marginally effective without the other.
Similar line of philosophical questioning : 'Why do managers exist?'
So how about kids from single parent family or poor neighborhoods who cannot eat out and/or cannot travel because of lack of money? Are they less rounded kids too?
Just because you are asian and do 'Racquetball, violin, AP calculus' doesn't make one asian same as the next asian. How damn racist of you.
Homogeneity can traditionally be attacked by exploiting a vector that the entire crowd is weak towards. Randomness helps to solve this problem on a macro level by varying the crowds weaknesses and strengths from individual to individual.