Comment by rg111 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rg111 | Hacker News Reader

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> as a result, not having SATs/ACT scores to consider tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education

It all come down to me to what this point touches.

When you have a test, you have something definite to prepare for. Even if you do not have dedicated mentors or well-wishing, caring teachers, you simply know there is a test that significantly improves your chances for MIT.

When you don't have a test, you have to study all the year round, do all homeworks, be active members of math, chess, or debate club all the year round and win at least province-level competitions, play an instrument at the school band, be elected the class monitor, create social equity clubs, do social service and so on.

Which path do you think will be easier for someone from an impoverished, troubled background?

Is it easier to prepare for a test for three months or be a whole different person severely constrained by your background?

Whom does no-test policies benefit? The rich White student living in a gated community, or a Black/Hispanic person living in slum-like condition?

____

I have little first hand experience (was born in a middle-of-nowhere small town, but wasn’t truly poor), and a lot of second-hand experience. I know a lot of friends, acquaintances who moved up the socio-economic ladder just because test-score based admission policies existed.

The people who promote no-test policies are deluded ivory-tower dwellers detached from reality.

The no-test policy is espoused by two groups who find themselves to be unlikely allies: naive progressives and actual racists.

The naive progressives think what you’d expect: “Minorities and poor people can’t possibly be expected to do well on anything objective, so it’s unfair to test them”. It is bigotry, but at least it’s well-meaning.

The actual racists are more cynical: “I don’t want Yale to be 67% Asian.” Obviously, this is even worse.

There are other groups too. Like Big Rich Daddy who wants his kid to go to Yale as a legacy but he only has a 26 ACT and has only donated like $1m. When test scores are required, top schools basically have a “budget” of 25% of their student body they can admit with any score without it adversely affecting college rankings. Making tests optional makes it easier to admit more students that don’t “meet the bar” otherwise, since they don’t count against the 25% quota.

When I went to $(fancy school not quite Yale but like Yale), they were even more blatant - the admissions people just flat out stated they have a quota for legacies and they have different standards.

You sound like they should be ashamed of it? I'd rather go to a school where the under-performing students at least had well connected and wealthy families: much of the point of these institutions are networking-- if you just want to learn there are many other alternatives.

I mean, I'm definitely a naive progressive (and probably hold some internalized bigotry that I'm unaware of), but I was against the SAT/ACT requirements sort of for the opposite reason than what you described.

I half-assed my entire way through high school, but studied for about a month for the ACT and did extremely well (perfect in all categories except Math, which I got a 32 in). I didn't get into MIT (I never applied) but I did get into a few other relatively well-regarded universities (Auburn, NYU) despite my awful grades, almost exclusively riding off the strength of my ACT scores, and ended up going to Florida State (since it was cheaper than the other two I listed). I dropped out after 2 years (nearly flunking out due to low grades).

To me, this showed that the tests are not an accurate measurement of how successful someone will be at college, but instead just how well someone can prepare for a specific test. If that's the case, why add the extra cost, both time and money-wise? If a mediocre student can just cram for a few weeks and do well on the test, then it seems to me that it's not a great test.

I acknowledge that this is pure anecdata, but that was my perspective, not "minorities can't be expected to do well on anything objective" and not "I don't want Yale to be 2/3 asian."

Edit: I should add, thanks for pointing out a third group - people who think the tests don’t work!

> To me, this showed that the tests are not an accurate measurement of how successful someone will be at college

The test proves you are smart enough.

Like, do you believe you were not intellectually capable of getting through college? That you flunked out for a pure lack of IQ and no other factors? From the writing in your comment alone I find that hard to believe.

There are some other factors you need to be successful in college, like interest, motivation, work ethic. Also luck - avoiding illness for example.

And I don’t think anybody is suggesting colleges should ONLY use standardised IQ tests for admittance, they should try to select for those other things too if they can do so fairly and accurately.

I can’t pretend to know you enough to know why you dropped out. But if I had to bet it wasn’t raw IQ.

> I can’t pretend to know you enough to know why you dropped out. But if I had to bet it wasn’t raw IQ.

No it almost certainly wasn't raw IQ (not that I take a lot of stock in IQ in itself anyway), it was a combination of depression and attention issues.

> The test proves you are smart enough.

I wouldn't exactly call the ACT (I never took the SAT so I cannot speak to it) an objective measure of intelligence. It's extremely formulaic, and you can get "good" at taking it just by doing a boatload of practice tests, which is what I did. If the Kaplan practice tests are anything to go on, I would have gotten about 21 (not a great score) the first time taking the test had I not studied for it. I doubt I got considerably "smarter" in a month, I think I just got better at taking ACT tests.

The 'truer' measure of your aptitude was likely your highest score. They allow multiple takes of the test because they understand that testing has errors from jitters, misunderstanding the wording, time management, a bad night of sleep, etc. Even within the bounds of a single class, we often get better at taking tests in a class once we understand the instructor's style.

Ultimately, the score of everyone who takes the test fairly is capped by their aptitude. If we want to even the playing field, we should find a way to allow disadvantaged kids to have multiple tries at the test with some preparation. They may already have it.

What happened at FSU? It is enough of a good deal that I might send my kids there one day.

FSU was a perfectly fine school, you can certainly do a lot worse (at least the CS department, I can't speak for anything else really).

I was suffering from a lot of "don't give a shit" syndrome, leading to me not going to class, which makes it a lot harder to get decent grades.

I’m interested to see what happens if schools become truly race blind. I’ve heard that top schools may be >50% Asian. What would that mean for these schools? Would being predominantly Asian mean Harvard isn’t Harvard anymore? Would lopsided racial makeup make these schools less pretigious? Would they produce even more value with the top minds and nothing else?

Caltech is probably the closest to race blind in the US. Their current undergraduate enrollment is 44% Asian American [1].

[1] https://registrar.caltech.edu/records/enrollment-statistics

Not quite the same as an Ivy, but UC Berkeley (top public university) is doing just fine with disproportionate representation of East Asian Students. Still prestigious, still a great school, and still stocked with hippie coops if that’s your idea of the school’s culture.

Ivy League schools are a bit different. Part of the value is access to capital, which means maintaining a wealthy community of alumni. The legacy admissions are grotesquely unfair but they do happen for a reason.

One would hope that if admittence into these schools is truly based on merit, then they'd pick the best regardless. I mean, what if Inuits turned out to be the most gifted genotype of humans WRT intelligence. Would it be wrong if Harvard became 80% Inuit? Presumably the student body would be smart enough to retain the culture that works and dump the stuff that doesn't, at a relatively conservative rate. (Personally I think elitism itself is what these institutions are defining/producing/protecting, and math ability is (relatively) easy to measure. I personally would love it if MIT started feeding us Presidents and Senators instead of Harvard -- or maybe better, if Harvard really kicked people out for failing to learn calc by second year.)

Practically, the University of California system is as close as you will get to that, as they are bound by law to not use affirmative action. Looking through the statistics[1], you definitely do see strong ethnic trends in admissions, especially for the top tier schools of Berkeley and UCLA, even when looking only at domestic applications.

That being said, the UC system maintains a prestigious reputation.

1. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-...

You will likely not have to wait long to see, given that the supreme court is most likely going to strike down affirmative action next year

They just want to see some races and ethnicities more at colleges.

This is a sad case of Goodheart's Law [0] in action.

Some people have chosen one metric as a measure of progress of historically oppressed races- enrolment in college degrees.

And this serves no one.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17320640

I think we can disagree with a policy without saying, "The people who agree with this policy are racist.". I mean weren't the elimination of standardized tests also justified on them supposedly being racist? At this point I couldn't care less what people assume the motivations of their opponents are.

That’s why I made the comment.

One group wants to delete the tests because they think the test is racist.

The other group wants to delete it because they are actually racist.

I found the irony of it amusing.

right, I think that type of bigotry is commonly identified with the phrase the soft bigotry of low expectations. Never knew the origins of that phrase until today. Interesting to see the word implicit show up in the definition, sounds about right. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/soft_bigotry_of_low_expectati...

The far right and far left share a surprising amount of common ground in their beliefs. Vaccines are bad. Science is a conspiracy. Big tech must be strictly controlled by government. Speech must be tightly controlled. Individual rights are less important compared to overall societal benefit. We must not be race-blind but rather use race as a critical factor in deciding outcomes.

> The far right and far left

I wish we could just call them all “far” people and ignore the side.

It would help those of us who are not “far” recognise that we have more common values with each other than with the “far” regardless of side.

I grew up not terribly well off and I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that college admission depended on extracurriculars and such - I never really thought much about that until I grew up, did relatively well for myself and had my own kids. Then I found out just how much these extracurriculars cost and how much parental guidance is involved in sticking with them. My kids did sports in high school - but the busses don't take kids to and from the school in the off-hours that sport practices take place, so I had to drive them in early and pick them up late. That was an option for me - it wouldn't have been for my dad. The only reason they made the teams in the first place, also, was because they had been doing rec league sports since they were little kids and were already competitive going into high school (we knew plenty of kids who tried out for the teams and didn't make it). We've sunk who knows how much money into private lessons/coaching/one-on-ones, etc. None of this would have been possible for my parents, even if we'd been the type of family that did that sort of thing.

Yes, extra-curriculars are expensive, too.

The ones that I did- needed spending of little to no money, but needed a lot of time. I could afford it.

Someone I know, who is now a pharmacist at a big-pharma had to help his dad in his men's salloon after school. He has zero extracurriculars, but good scores, and he reached a reputed college with much of his fees paid for due to standardised test scores.

I see myself as a well-rounded person. But if I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t be where I am today as a person; I would be much less. (You can see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30821265)

I am not saying I would have been the same as him. Because I have seen people grow up as comfortable as, or in much better situations than me, yet achieving much lower than me.

Equal opportunity does not ensure equal outcome.

You don't put out fires by disabling smoke alarms. And you don't solve socioeconomic / class-related barriers by disabling their indicators.

> When you have a test, you have something definite to prepare for. Even if you do not have dedicated mentors or well-wishing, caring teachers, you simply know there is a test that significantly improves your chances for MIT.

Totally tangential, but this is also why I’ve slowly come around to appreciating technical interviews. Yes, it’s annoying, but it’s also a pretty straightforward path to getting a $150k+/yr job.

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