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Comment by Budabellly | Hacker News Reader

Is there any way that it could make sense to require reporting the # of hours a student spends in SAT/ACT tutoring, whether it be private, through your school, or other?

As a required field on the common app, this could help in making admissions decisions. There are so many reasons using standardized tests for admissions isn't fair across the board, but perhaps understanding how much prep went into the test would provide useful data for admissions offices, and also at the macroacademic (lol) layer.

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I can’t see how that makes anything more fair?

Some people are just bad test takers. What good does it make to penalize them for studying and trying to do the best they can do? Someone with a learning difference would be at a disadvantage.

Also, why wouldn’t I just lie?

I was thinking less about penalization or individual application decisions, and more about aggregate or anonymized datasets for institutions and governing bodies (College Board, Common App, etc.) to inform their policies.

And yeah, you could certainly lie, but I feel that's true for a lot of fields on college apps? Perhaps it could be reasonable to have your school validate or sponsor the answer?

It's well researched that private tutoring (among many other socio-economic factors) gives you a huge advantage on these tests. Having one of these bodies come out and say by how much could be a wake up call, and maybe spur more decisions like this one in the original post. Totally agree with your points, but also think tutoring != independent studying, the latter of which could not effectively be reported.

That’s a good point. Having those numbers would be interesting, and hopefully help us employ better use of funding.

Having an anonymous survey portion that you ripped off from the main test and is collected separately could be beneficial, I think. I would want to also ask questions about their parents backgrounds, if they had a connection with a teacher in high school, internet access, and general questions about social media usage.

Punishing the people who put in extra time to improve themselves really seems like an odd way to go.

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