Hacker News Reader

The brutal truth is that shelling out that kind of money for test prep might actually result in academically better prepared students.

In other words, if the test prep leads to learning the material more thoroughly, it may still be a good predictor of who is going to thrive in an advanced educational environment.

It’s not clear that any system that accurately predicts future student success, cannot be games by parents throwing money at it.

I think the current proposal agrees - "Minimum bar plus lottery" caps the returns on spending money, but also other forms of merit.

I also agree that it's impossible and probably undesirable to keep folks from investing in every kind of preparation they can.

However, I think the test is a uniquely concentrated opportunity to invest in swaying the admissions system rather than in preparing more holistically. What I'd love to see explored are:

- A more holistic admissions packet that includes evaluation beyond GPA. - Public resources on advanced education earlier in the curriculum. - Some examination of Chicago-style admissions, which ranks students within local geographies to pick highest achievers from many backgrounds (yes, I'm aware of many arguments from both sides against this structure).

> However, I think treating this as the abandonment of meritocracy is a straw man. Discourse with other grads changed my mind. A key factor is how much the test is now being gamed.

> Based on some facebook polls of ~500 alumni (not scientific but moreso than any other direct evidence presented!), the percentage of accepted students going through specialized test prep has climbed from <2% in my day to >50% today. Some of these programs cost thousands of dollars for a chance to change your admissions outcome.

The median income for a family in Fairfax county is over $140,000. A few thousand dollars isn’t a lot of money for them. It surely is for some people, which is why I would support a holistic admissions system. But I’m not sure why, for everyone else, we can’t just treat that as the cost of doing business. Especially if, as you say, everyone is doing it. Everyone studies for the LSAT, the MCAT, etc.

Now, if your point is that it’s a bit mental to treat admissions for a high school like admissions to medical school, in sympathetic to that argument.

Your comment got me interested in FCPS income distribution, which is indeed skewed high (although I couldn't find $140k median [1]). If you're in the 20th percentile at $54k, or even the 40th at $94k, you have significantly less available after the many living expenses that don't scale with income.

With that said, I recognize that household expenditure on education is going to play a role in preparedness for an advanced curriculum. But I think expecting folks to shoulder an early test prep burden (with uncertain result) is directionally un-meritocratic. For me it raises the evidence necessary that the test is playing an otherwise useful role. What's the best argument you've seen there?

[1] https://statisticalatlas.com/county/Virginia/Fairfax-County/...

Those are medians for all households, which includes say a recent college grad living alone. The median income of a family with kids in Fairfax County is close to $140,000: https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/9184-median-inc.... Probably well over $150,000 for people with high-schools aged kids, who tend to be at peak career earnings.

Thanks for the refs - that makes sense.

And how is this any different than what has happened with high-school athletics over the same time-frame?

Parents regularly now spend thousands (tens of thousands!) of dollars on elite athlete training for 5th-8th graders in order to make the varsity team once they hit high-school. In my state (MN) it's not unheard of to rent an apartment in a desirable (aka good athletic) school district to play for that team.

My sister was an elite athlete and spent a few post college years at a specialized training academy. Multiple professional athletes trained here in the off-season.

She had multiple classes of middle school children to run training sessions with. Some of these middle schoolers even paid for 1 one 1 training with her for even more money.

Replace "Admission test" with "varsity tryouts" and you have basically the same system, with the same gamesmanship and money being spent.

You're starting with the assumption that you can't buy merit. But you absolutely can. At every opportunity in my life where the resources available to me did not support further growth, someone else could have bought more merit. It's still a meritocracy when that person is selected.

What it isn't is a pontetial-ocracy or a inherent-worth-ocracy, and I don't understand the argument for those models.

And you are starting with the assumption that admissions should reward merit rather than produce it. If a public school is not intended to convert potential to merit, I don't know what is. A school is not actually an "-ocracy" of any kind and this is a weird semantic argument.

If one were going to take a fundamentalist view of merit and exclude potential (again, weird choice for a school!) it would be especially important to define what merit it is you think you can measure. Are you sure the test (+ prep system) do that well? Does spending money on a specialized prep that improves your score translate to producing the merit you are talking about? Or are you retroactively defining merit as "the thing you can measure", because measuring is itself the appealing part?

I would agree with you if this were the national or even regional model, such as the case in some countries in East Asia. But it's not. This is a single school with a unique model that has proved succcessful and is being torn down. No one was being denied a highschool education or a chance to succeed over this.

Questioning the measurement of merit is easy when you don't have to offer an alternative. There's always something to pick at in every methodology, including every alternative you may think of.

If test scores didn't correlate to academic performance that would be embarrassing and really easy to show. But they do. Test prep is just focused studying. It doesn't have any hacks or shortcuts other than learning the material better.