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Comment by zebraflask | Hacker News Reader

I think you might have that backward. Test scores are somewhat influenced by the income level of the student's parents: wealthier families can afford to give their kids resources like study time, books, tutors, a home environment that values academic success, etc., that result in higher scores.

A holistic process mitigates that disparity.

I highly doubt the intent of this change is to "favor rich kids" or any of the things in the other comments in this thread, which strike me as exceptionally mean-spirited.

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I think the argument is that it's far easier for wealthy families to game metrics that aren't being objectively measured. E.g. they can pay for all sorts of extracurriculars. They know to play up any hint of multiculturalism / diversity. Etc.

Outside of cheating, there's truly a limit as to how much gaming can go into standardized testing.

> I highly doubt the intent...

I don't think the user was making the point that it was an intentional decision, but rather an unintentional consequence.

I don't think Harvard is oblivious to these effects.

High test scores are correlated with income but income is not a causative factor.

Most asian immigrants came here with nothing and much less resources than the caucasians who've already been here for years. They worked hard and performed well on the SATs and got into great schools and as a result are now generating a higher than average income than caucasians.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_Uni...

Not trying to brag about asians here. It's really just part of the culture and it can get really extreme. It stems mostly from parenting... the memes below are really illustrative:

https://www.pinterest.com/lindaschloss/asian-father-memes/

I think one time when I was a kid I mentioned to my dad I was interested in becoming an artist. My dad beat the shit out of me. Now I'm on hacker news and I'm definitely not an artist.

I would argue that what is causing the income disparity is the ability to work hard and study. This ability leads to higher test scores and higher income.

What you mention here is more of a cultural thing.In some, there's emphasis,if not obsession, to make sure the kids do learn so they could go to college/university/whatever. This is also pushed quite heavily at family level too. This may not be the same in other groups.

Its also pushing kids into career directions that they may not really want to do and in some cases are not just suited to.

The only time I have seen some one who was just not suited to development was case of this.

I have a cousin, who's both parents are heavily into medicine and wanted for him the same path,while he only wanted to do anything related to cars. Didn't work out well tbh. Pushing your own kids to learn isn't necessarily a bad thing,but to do so purely with a single goal of getting them into a university and then in a predefined job path, is outright crazy.

Immigration from a lot of Asian countries is also very targeted, like I'm Taiwanese and the weekend Chinese language school literally only had kids who had parents with advanced degrees in STEM. I don't think it should be a surprise that the children of a bunch of phds are doing well academically.

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