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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

He didn’t get that much smarter to improve his test scores by as much as he did. I know plenty of people who took the test more than once, got help by going to “SAT prep” classes before school etc. and didn’t get any better. The entire point is that money and connections opens doors. I didn’t grow up poor but I did grow up in a relatively poor city. I saw the lack of opportunity when I was growing up. When I go back home now, it’s even worse. All of the “smart kids” who just so happened to be the teachers, doctors, lawyers kids moved away.

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Tell that to the parents who tried to bribe their kids' way into college. The fact is, SAT prep costs $0. You'll notice that kids growing up in trailer parks magically don't have these hurdles when their parents are recent immigrants.

Edit: To add some clarity about what I am saying: Preparation can certainly improve test scores. For example, I did poorly on the SAT verbal because I didn't even have the vocabulary for many questions. I was even, I dare say, unpracticed at reading. Actually preparing would have improved my score.

Also, some "professor" doesn't have access to special mind altering techniques that other tutors don't have. Teaching and test prep is not rocket science.

Isn’t that kind of the point of both the article and what I was saying? Reports are that many of the kids didn’t know that their parents were bribing colleges. They actually thought that they got into prestigious colleges because of their own “capabilities”.

And general intergenerational income mobility isn’t that high. Also, statistically (and no fault of their own), English as a second language students don’t do as well as native born speakers (https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/02/23/512451228/5-milli...) so I fail to see the relevant of bringing up recent immigrants.

I edited my post right as you responded. Immigrants are relevant because they're often poor but because of language and happenstance, for very specific reasons, not because they're stupid or unreliable. Their kids have a lot more upward mobility and they outperform academically.

Not according to the citation I posted.

That doesn't have a breakdown by income, so it's impossible for your link to address anything I've said.

So do you have a better citation of immigrants doing better or is it just the meme of “the model hardworking immigrant”?

I said poor immigrants' kids doing better than other poor people's kids.

Citation?

I’m probably a failure in the eyes of people like you. I’m 23. What should I do now instead? I only got a 1500/1600 on M+R. Didn’t get into any elite schools.

This is a serious question. I didn’t score well on the SAT and didn’t have prep tutors despite having very intelligent parents and lots of prep.

I went to a no name state college in the same city I grew up in - you know the one I said was the one of the poorest cities in the US?

Why? They gave me a full ride scholarship including room and board even though I stayed at home. I really just wanted the piece of paper to get pass the HR filters of “needs a degree in CS”. My first job out of college based on an internship I had the year before was as a computer operator. I took it so I could move to the “big city” where I still live and figure out my next steps.

Well, I didn't get into my school's full ride scholarship either....

Well, right after I graduated, any state resident with a 3.0 GPA and 1000 SAT score (out of 1600) could get their tuition paid for any public college in our state thanks to the lottery funding. The standards are slightly higher now and it only covers 90% of tuition I believe.

So there is that....

Yeah, that's definitely a difference.

I still feel the sting of not performing well on my SAT to this day, and it's been 5 years! It's like a mark against my humanity.

99th percentile is "didn't score well" nowadays? (going by the 2018 charts - the ones from when you were presumably in high school are out of 2400 - and in 2012 the cutoff for 99th percentile was 2210/2400 [0])

0: https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-historical-percentiles-for-...

My superscore was 2230. 99th percentile or not, it’s irrelevant because it’s not good enough to get into any top schools.

That's actually around the median for Harvard students, IIRC. It's not enough to guarantee your admission, but then 2400 isn't either.

The median includes recruited athletes and legacies. It’s effectively useless as a measure.

Half of Harvard students are athletes and legacies? In any case, my experience was that SAT basically doesn't matter past 2200/2400 - everything after that is extracurriculars, connections and luck.

I have doubts - most people I know got far more than me and none got into elite institutions. I can’t even imagine how exponentially superior the people who got into multiple must be.

Oh, I don't mean that getting higher scores makes you likely to get in - only that having a 'low' score (less than 2100, let's say) makes it far harder to the point of being nearly impossible. If you check out some stats from Stanford [0] and MIT [1] you can see that admit rates fall off VERY quickly. For instance, Stanford's fall 2014 freshmen had a 5.1% overall admit rate, climbing to 13% for those who received an 800 on their critical reading SAT but only 2% for those scoring below 600 on the same. Or look at MIT - 9% admit rate for 750+ Math SAT, 0.05% for <700. (Literally one person out of 1828)

0: https://admission.stanford.edu/apply/selection/profile14.htm...

1: https://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/stats/

Right, I’m in the middle ground where I’m still considered to be exponentially inferior to the admits.

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