"Socioeconomic status (SES) and SAT scores are positively correlated: Students from higher income backgrounds generally achieve higher scores, and “21.2% of variance in SAT scores is shared with SES, as measured here as a composite of mother’s education, father’s education, and parental income.” The researchers note that the “source of the SAT-SES relationship is likely due to some combination of educational opportunity, school quality, peer effects and other social factors.”
https://journalistsresource.org/economics/ses-socioeconomic-...
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/16/books/what-is-intelligenc...
https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/1994/10/16/books/what-is-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
* https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/neu.10160
* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270739/
* https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S183242741...
From that wiki article:
Twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73% with the most recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%. IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults. The heritability of IQ increases with age and reaches an asymptote at 18–20 years of age and continues at that level well into adulthood.
Those are the only claims I made, and no, I don't have citations for them. Mostly just intuition that the requirements existed to ensure merit rather than nepotism carried the day, so undoing those requirements is likely to have the inverse effect.
> Anecdotal but where I grew up it was never much work for students to get high SAT scores, most people I knew scored relatively high even before preparing.
"Getting into prestigious schools" high? If you're doing that effortlessly then you should bottle your local water and sell it, because there's something in it. :)
Yeah, I think it's pretty standard for certain Bay Area public high schools. If I remember correctly the school average was around 1470/1600 (though after prep). For reference Google says the average at Harvard is 1510. Probably has to do more with the parents than the water though.
To tease that apart you'd need a counterfactual universe where those same Bay Area people weren't wealthy but still had kids. So, uh, good luck finding that...
One datapoint that at least gestures in "correlates" but doesn't "beget" is that half of the students at Stuyvesant High School, the most prestigious math/science school in New York with an admission based on a test akin to the SAT, are economically disadvantaged[0]. If wealth truly "begot" high scores on these tests, you'd probably not see that.
(It also demonstrates that Stuyvesant does a great job making the test accessible: there's free study materials, test times on weekdays and weekends, free shuttles to test site, etc. I wish that was the takeaway here with the SAT discussion: help low income folks prep for and take the test, don't eliminate the test altogether.)
[0] https://data.nysed.gov/enrollment.php?year=2018&instid=80000...
Parent's attitude toward education is also extremely important.
Is it normal to read books for fun? Is using "big words" acceptable at the dinner table? Is asking questions encouraged?
My wife once taught a kid whose father kept brusquely "correcting" them any time they they used saw, as in the simple past tense of to see, correctly. The father insisted on seen, and not in a "that's how we talk here" way, but in a "that's how you talk period" way. I'm sure that wasn't the only way he was harming (or trying to harm, anyway) his kid's prospects.
Of course they were poor, too. :-(
Yes and socioeconomic status and being able to write a good essay, come accross as charming in an interview, etc. are even more correlated, which means that people with a high socioeconomic status still benefit from removing SAT scores.
1. Pulling up the drawbridge for smart kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, thus making room for less talented children of the wealthy.
2. Getting rid of objective, falsifiable assessments so they can select instead for ideology and party loyalty.
Already being done, but not yet at the student level: https://reason.com/2020/02/03/university-of-california-diver...
Not officially, at least. The kind of organization that requires a political pledge as condition of employment, was not bias-free the day before the requirement became official.
Interviews by alumni honestly seems like a pretty good evaluation metric - it is quite susceptible to legacy favorship though.
I'm willing to bet poorer people don't do so well on those.
Applying data from other complex systems besides our own might not be easy, but surely other countries have some studies we could compare with our own. I'm going to go look. Hope you're having a nice day.
The drive to eliminate standardised testing is insane, and it can only hurt minorities and the already-disadvantaged, to the benefit of the elite. But then that's the whole point.
We’re optimizing for the wrong problems (selective admissions for limited slots), versus working towards universal access to high quality instruction regardless of location.
Existing colleges do not have incentives to do this. They are incentivized to protect the value of their brand and their institution, and to preserve scarcity and gated access to credentials.
Why not? A lottery could still have the most basic requirements for entry but beyond that what makes you think anyone's qualification system would beat random chance?
While I won't get into whether the SATs also "discriminate" in some way against students who are disadvantaged by poverty, etc., eliminating the SAT won't solve the problem. It will just make things worse! They are, for all their problems, a great equalizer.
Probably less of a factor at (most) state schools, though.
That's quite the accusation. Citation needed.
> it's always upper middle class people bitching about the SAT's
in the first place. This is a mainstream reddit tier comment.
SAT scores are strongly correlated to your parent’s income level.
Additionally, you presume all people whose first language is not English is an international student. If that was the case, American public schools would not have ESL courses. Then there are natural born American students whose first language is English but with ethnic or regional variations. Those students may have a much more comprehensive lexicon from Urban Dictionary than the SAT developers, but the SAT developers cannot avoid projecting the set of vocabulary from their own middle-class upbringing thru academia. It would be to entertaining to see the SAT include "deadass" on the vocabulary item when every New Yorker knows the term and, with the help of meme culture, youth on the West Coast knows it too. To the point of academia, the ethnic distribution of academia is not representative of the general population. Finally, this expectation of English and normalized American cultural knowledge involves the forced assimilation and white-washing of indigenous Americans.
I am one of those immigrant children who was born in the US and speaks English as a second language, I was in ESL until the 4th grade until my parents thought that I was at minimum decent enough at English to figure out a way to ask for help if I got lost.
We were not rich, we had very little money
I grew up in my formative years in the inner city with mainly immigrant families.
In high school, i had many acquaintances who were studying for TOEFL. I don't really need someone explaining to me what taking these exams are like.
I studied for the SATs since the moment I could express ideas in English, and had nothing else to do at home because my parents were working, and in the 7th grade got a 1160/1600 on the SATs.
I have multiple friends who got into university through the TOEFL.
It is absolutely infuriating that the woke left wants to remove agency from experiences like mine and assume we are all stupid and unable to figure out how to succeed in a system.
I dont understand how the woke left thinks its appropriate to treat people like they don't have intelligence and agency and merely sit around waiting for the white man to help.
To be clear, I am the opposite of the left. I also share all those same personal background with you. Ultimately, I do not believe immigrants are waiting for white man to help. In fact, when I'm pointing out privilege and entitlement, I am ironically using the left's weapon of choice against them. The loudest woke people are highly educated, privileged, white and Asian liberals.
If we're having oppression olympics, I grew up in Section-8 housing of the inner city. I have friends who are serving life terms in prison and dozens other dead in gang violence. I've had a gun pointed at me twice. If my parent's weren't working all the time, they were gambling the rest. I didn't even know the SATs existed until I was 16, and when I finally took the SATs, my dad told my mom "he's taking the exam, but he's not going to do well".
We can call it even because you also assumed I was a woke white social justice warrior.
> I have multiple friends who got into university through the TOEFL.
And they don't have to take the SATs?
My original assumption is that the TOEFL is complimentary to but not a substitute for the SAT. To return to your original comment, your point is that in the presence of the TOEFL universities put zero weight on the SAT reading/writing section?
Vietnamese Americans that have much lower educational attainment rates than whites?
Or international students from China that in recent decades comprise primarily of multi-millionaire families? If you're genuinely concerned about effect sizes, China has a billion people. If you had any cultural awareness about international students from Asia, Chinese students who attend undergrad in America did not score well enough to get into an elite university in China.
> If you had any cultural awareness about international students from Asia, Chinese students who attend undergrad in America did not score well enough to get into an elite university in China.
Are you trying to ballpark the effect size of wealth, and are you arguing that wealth is the explanation for why Asians do well despite linguistic differences?
https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-h...
I mean, I notice you're not talking about linguistic differences anymore, and just about (1) wealth and (2) the fact that Chinese students coming to the US are rejects from Chinese elite universities.
Also, are we talking about race or nationality? "Asian" is a racial classification, as is "black" or "Hispanic". And then you're comparing Vietnamese to whites? What kind of argument do you think you're building here?
What kind of international clarity do you think you have with regards to Asian Americans?
What we see from SAT results may be results. What's not obvious is whether the students had to study more to attain the same results. In Asia, grade school students spend much more time doing academic work than in the states. Sure, the international Asian student can read about Benjamin Franklin and other American cultural elements to be on the same playing field with an American, while the American can go hangout with their friends during this same time. Does that mean that the SAT is fair if these students receive the same score?
> Also, are you trying to ballpark the effect size of wealth, and saying that wealth is the explanation for why Asians do well despite linguistic differences?
The demographic of East Asians who come to America are from wealthier and more affluent background. When you're looking at averages, it does not include the general Chinese population. Additionally, to attain a visa and stay in America, salary data selects for people in professional fields. If you want to point to income as a measure of "succeeding", you have to drill-down into demographics and whether they are filled with high-skilled workers versus other labor.
> I mean, I notice you're not talking about linguistic differences anymore, and just about (1) wealth and (2) the fact that Chinese students coming to the US are rejects from Chinese elite universities.
I am saying the say Chinese international students in America are from a very specific socioeconomic background and educational attainment. This is wildly different from certain Asian American groups. This is not relevant to my original argument, but I pointed this out because you bucketed all Asian people together. It's toxic and ignorant, that is why I am educating you.
> What kind of international clarity do you think you have with regards to Asian Americans?
What does "international clarity" even mean ? I don't know what you're looking for.
You're offering your cultural awareness about international students, and implying that I might not have any. I suppose this prose issues from your conversational instincts.
I offer data to anchor discussion for effect sizes, and so far you're building your own pet theory from scratch, as if the discussion just began here! And you're building your own little causal story (with implied effect sizes) about why metrics collected in the US look the way they do.
I'm putting Asians into a bucket because that's how bureaucratic data collection works in the US! If available data sources do not offer reliable drill-downs into the demographics, then you are making up your own fantasy version of data.
Meanwhile you are making awful, awful accusations about whether I am supporting "model minority" arguments, and whether I'm being toxic by grouping Asians together.
Yes. When you start out with "What about Asians?" alluding to the fact that Asians as a whole fare better on the SATs. I am aware of that, what I am questioning is whether given an native-English speaking American vs anyone with English as their second language, where if they work the same amount, would achieve the same results on the SAT.
> I'm putting Asians into a bucket because that's how bureaucratic data collection works in the US! If available data sources do not offer reliable drill-downs into the demographics, then you are making up your own fantasy version of data.
We are talking about the SAT's language and cultural biases here. That is independent of whether the SAT wants to group people as Asian or Not. Then there is college application process which is a separate conversion. My question is whether a minority has to work harder to attain the same results as an native-English speaking American. Whether certain buckets as defined by bureaucratic data collection processes score better and why that is the case is not my original point
> If available data sources do not offer reliable drill-downs into the demographics, then you are making up your own fantasy version of data.
Yes, official sources do not because there are political agendas and initiatives to bucket people into races. The fact that you think I am making up fantasy data about the "model minority" MYTH is exactly why I took a tangent from my original argument
> Yes, official sources do not because there is a political convenience to group all Asians together.
Really, the arrogance and rudeness is outstanding here, I have to wonder whether you are talking about your own toxicity and ignorance.
Your concept of illumination is to offer pet analysis and pet causal theories, and imaginary drill-downs into the data which don't exist! You are engaging in theory-crafting as if the conversation just began here, today.
American data collection culture, including academia and government, groups Asians together. You are making your own fantasy data, and making awful accusations based on your personal fantasies of what people are doing.
I'm talking about effect sizes, and not from the basis of my own self-proclaimed international awareness.
Observe for yourself how many replies this thread can go before you offer any semblance of something that isn't your own pet analysis.
And that can't be challenged?
In some dictatorships, the government can claim 95% of the election votes went to the incumbent.
The US unemployment rate published by the Bureau of Labor does not reflect the true unemployment rate.
The Three-fifths Compromise considered certain people only worth 3/5th of a person. Government defined metrics aren't a scientific / objective measure of the physical or moral world.
> pet analysis and pet causal theories, and imaginary drill-downs into the data which don't exist! ... You are making your own fantasy data
Let me know if you get a 404 error
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/chart/educational-...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/these-groups-of-asian...
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/04/19/524571669...