SAT score distributions in Michigan | Hacker News Reader

SAT score distributions in Michigan

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157 pointsBostonian428 comments

The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. The stratification is more granular than Asian versus Black or White versus Native America. For example, Jewish students excel beyond the Caucasian average while Cambodian and other Southeast Asian Immigrants perform significantly below the national average for Asian Americans. The challenge for large and heterogeneously diverse nations like the U.S. is to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement. There is also the need to provide quality education to adult learners, a wholly different, but equally important topic in the area of rapid technological change.

Not only that, where one lives can impact the funding available to even provide basic education. We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded schools.

Funding schools based on local property tax was institutionalized as a way to ensure rich people don’t have to pay for poor people’s education.

Except local property taxes only pay for about half of k-12 education. The other half comes from federal and state governments and the way they give out funding is to selectively counteract that misallocation such that 47 states actually allocate more per-student funding to poor areas than to wealthier ones on average according to this article [0] and it has been this way since at least 1995.

[0]: https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-...

> only pay for about half

That's a lot. From your own link, a vast majority of schools are regressive, i.e poor people get less.

The 50:50 figure is in aggregate. You would not be able to infer if the distribution is a regressive based on that number alone. The linked article does not say that the vast majority of schools are regressive.

"A handful - Nevada, Wyoming and Illinois are weakly regressive, and the majority have a weakly progressive distribution of funding to poo vs non poor students"

I see, I didn't realize the graph of progressive / regressive changed as your scrolled the page.

Actually, looking at the data further, you can't really draw a conclusion about whether or not the funding is regressive or progressive. The local funding is definitely regressive, but you'd need to know how state and federal funds were distributed across schools to know if the end result was progressive or regressive. For instance, if federal funding was evenly distributed to every school, that would still be regressive.

Some of the worst districts in my state have the most funding and highest teacher pay.

The best teachers still don't want to work there because being called the c-word by 1st graders or having a 3rd grader threaten to stab you (and seem like they really mean it) and not being able to do anything about it because the two fights and one baggie of drugs admin's had referred to them by noon today has them too busy to spend any time on "minor" stuff like that, plus having lockdowns with police patrolling the halls and yelling at anyone who so much as pokes a head out a door without clearing it with them first, due to credible threats of violence, several times per year, makes you want to do literally anything else as a career in a hurry. 15-20% higher pay than the next-best-paying district doesn't make it worth it.

Schools can't fix poverty and ghettos no matter how much money you give them, but trying that is simpler than fixing the real problems that cause very, very "bad" schools, so that's what we do, even though it will never work.

1. School funding is actually somewhat progressive: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-f...

2. People who are concerned about the allegedly regressive character of public school funding would do well to spell out their model of how spending affects basic math and writing performance. For almost all of history, every educated person studied under conditions that made the most impoverished reservation school in North Dakota look like Andover.

This takes a consequence of a decentralized government and attributes it to the intent. The origins of public schools in America take their form from the structure of American government in the era when they formed. 200 years ago American government was virtually non-existent at the state and federal level. The oldest public education law in America comes from the Massachusetts Bay Colony which required every township of a certain size to establish a basic grammar school. The reason it was done at the local level is that there was no state wide administration to capable of collecting and managing the taxes, budgeting and administrating schools in that era. Thus it was handled at a very local level.

While a lot of modern education funding reforms in America focus on redistributing funds to support poorer communities, this is not an immediate win. In states like California where local property taxes have been effectively abolished by a voter backed constitutional amendment, there are big challenges in fairly negotiating the allocation of resources across the different regions of the state.

And it has continued for decades even after being declared unconstitutional in Ohio. So it is hard to change the attitude many people who live in suburbs have. The movement for integrated schools (https://integratedschools.org/podcasts/) is one group of people trying to fight the racial inequity aspect of this but considering the magnitude of the problem it is a big hill to climb.

I'm not sure where you live, but where I live, school funding is taxed and allocated at the county level. The county contains both extremely impoverished and extremely wealthy areas, in roughly a bell curve distribution. Schools are funded on a per-student basis within the county.

"We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded schools."

Explain Baltimore.

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/comm/larg...

Baltimore has stronger challenges to overcome, so funding it more makes sense. It can be the case that we're paying a lot for Baltimore students and also that we're underfunding them.

This is a commonly held myth but the numbers don't bear it out. Poor areas tend to be in cities and cities tend to have lots of commercial buildings that pay tax but do not send kids to school. Atlanta, where I live, spends 30%* more per pupil in APS than the surrounding suburban counties do. That's typical for American cities.

*Or so. I'm going off memory.

But urban schools are more expensive to run for many reasons including social pathology (metal detectors became widespread in some cities in the 1980s) as well as generally high operating costs.

> Atlanta, where I live, spends 30%* more per pupil in APS than the surrounding suburban counties do.

If you look a bit deeper at public school funding in more well-off areas and you will usually find a system of tax-deductible private donations to the school, organized by a PTA or similar organization. Much of the spending difference vanishes when you consider that.

When you count the value of the PTA volunteer time by professional parents (which doesn't appear on the books), it tips the scales even further toward greater spend in well-off areas.

>If you look a bit deeper at public school funding in more well-off areas and you will usually find a system of tax-deductible private donations to the school, organized by a PTA or similar organization. Much of the spending difference vanishes when you consider that.

Do you have a cite with those numbers?

Here is an article that explicitly breaks down the phenomenon with LA public schools:

https://laist.com/news/education/los-angeles-unified-parent-...

California is unique in that it intentionally gives less funding to higher-family-income public schools, expecting them to make up the gap with private fundraising. The result is that after adjusting for private donations, per pupil spending in CA is roughly equivalent across income-disparate schools, as can be seen in the charts in that article.

Here is a visualization of the disparities in Georgia's school spending by county:

https://wallethub.com/edu/e/most-least-equitable-school-dist...

Pick one of the "High Income / Low Expenditure" counties - Forsyth - as an example. It has an average household income of $112,834. In that county, there is an entire parallel non-profit organization that raises private donations to fund programs in the school district. Here is an article describing their work:

https://www.forsythnews.com/news/education/education-foundat...

This is in addition to other private fundraising at the individual school PTA/PTO level, and via charities like the United Way (https://www.unitedwayforsyth.com/civicrm/contribute/transact...)

Here is the same type of organization but in Michigan: https://www.bloomfield.org/support/about/bhs-foundation-faqs

What all of these have in common is that the capacity for private fundraising is a function of local household income.

In places like California with progressive school funding, this private fundraising serves to "bridge the gap" in state funding between schools in richer (receive less public funding) and poorer (receive more public funding) areas.

In other states where state/local per-pupil public school funding is flat or even regressive, it can exacerbate the disparities between districts.

>Parents in these 34 most-affluent LAUSD elementaries donate an average of $876 per student, our analysis shows.

That's like 1/5 of the gap between APS and the next highest school district. It looks like the wealthiest in LA are able to make up for the difference. But I am suspect of this article. The parental contribution is only 0.4% of the LAUSD budget but somehow it's making up a 20% funding gap between low and high income schools. Very suspicious that they're cherry picking but I don't have the time to dig in.

>Pick one of the "High Income / Low Expenditure" counties - Forsyth - as an example. It has an average household income of $112,834. In that county, there is an entire parallel non-profit organization that raises private donations to fund programs in the school district. Here is an article describing their work:

Google says APS spends 17k per pupil while Forsyth spends 10k. For 20 schools with 200 kids they'd need 28 million in contributions to equalize. Raising $115k by selling ducks is a drop in the bucket in comparison.

Also, APS does their own fund raising. Brief googling reveals that they've raised 7.4 million through this one site alone:

https://www.donorschoose.org/aps?active=true

> The parental contribution is only 0.4% of the LAUSD budget

> but somehow it's making up a 20% funding gap between low and high income schools.

Where are you getting the 0.4% coming from? Parents don't generally donate directly to public school district budgets. They donate to school PTAs and school-affiliated non-profits.

Perhaps you are referring to https://achieve.lausd.net/donorschoose but that's totally unrelated to outside PTA fundraising via the parent community, and it's usually tiny amounts used to pay for things like classroom supplies.

It's pretty straightforward. The article says $876 in private PTA donations are raised per year per pupil in the wealthier schools, and that is still $300 shy of what poorer schools spend overall per pupil. So the wealthier schools only make 3/4 of the spending gap.

I know this from direct experience since I write a check annually to my kid's California public school PTA for roughly the same amount.

>Where are you getting the 0.4% coming from? Parents don't generally donate directly to public school district budgets. They donate to school PTAs and school-affiliated non-profits.

It's in the article:

>In 2018-19, PTAs and booster clubs at LAUSD schools brought in more than $36.9 million in revenues. Compared to LAUSD’s annual $9 billion operating budget, that’s not that much money

36.9 million divided by 9 billion is 0.4%.

>The article says $876 in private PTA donations are raised per year per pupil in the wealthier schools, and that is still $300 shy of what poorer schools spend overall per pupil. So the wealthier schools only make 3/4 of the spending gap.

>I know this from direct experience since I write a check annually to my kid's California public school PTA for roughly the same amount.

Ok, but even if you and every other parent does that it still doesn't make up the difference between city spending per pupil and the surrounding suburbs.

> >In 2018-19, PTAs and booster clubs at LAUSD schools brought in more than $36.9 million in revenues. Compared to LAUSD’s annual $9 billion operating budget, that’s not that much money

> 36.9 million divided by 9 billion is 0.4%.

Read the article again. That's $36.9M raises mostly over the 126 most affluent schools, which is a quarter of the elementary schools in LAUSD, or over $500k raised per school, which would bridge that gap.

Furthermore a significant chunk of school district budgets go to pay for pension and health care obligations for retirees, building maintenance, law enforcement, etc.

> Ok, but even if you and every other parent does that it still doesn't make up the difference between city spending per pupil and the surrounding suburbs.

Not sure I understand what you are saying, but the affluent surrounding suburbs near me spend even more per student from privately raised donations. Some of their PTAs ask for $2k/student per year.

This is not the case here, since in Michigan the Detroit Public Schools not only have the worst test scores in the nation, but the highest funding per pupil in the state.

>> The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically.

What is the equitable solution to this then? You seem to be implying that SAT score differences are not inequitable but we know from recent research this is not true.

Standardized tests aren't perfect but there isn't anything better. There's no better way for a poor kid with high drive to compete with rich kids. That's why MIT decided to bring back scores in admission. There isn't a better solution.

Lower the ceiling and admit by lottery. End the artificial scarcity in education. Tax the rich to fund it.

How does that change anything? Kids who barely miss out on MIT arent sleeping on the streets. They are at good state schools or other top privates.

Indeed, and there are some studies to back that up.

Excerpt from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-ma...

But what appears obvious may not be true. In November 2002, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a landmark paper by the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger that reached a startling conclusion. For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.

At the end of the day the only real solution to the problem of inequity/representation will end up being hard quotas that roughly maintain a demographic balance at top institutions.

At that point you can make most competition intra-racial with obvious carve outs for socioeconomic, sexual and gender minorities.

the devil is in the details as to how such a controversial system could be implemented but it’d be a trial-and-error process for sure.

Ah, so you mean discriminating against Asians for their success?

May I remind you that Asians in the USA did not participate in mass enslavement of black and brown bodies.

Why should they have to give up spots for less qualified individuals? Have they not struggled enough? Most of their great grand parents were building our train tracks!

> The challenge for large and heterogeneously diverse nations like the U.S. is to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement.

But don’t your stats show that we already do?

We “provide access” to everyone. Otherwise it wouldn’t matter how much the parents pushed the children.

If your argument is that the system should push the children harder, how do you propose that? Give less hard working kids lower grades? I think we’ve tried that and decided it’s unfair.

> how do you propose that

All the proposals I've ever seen have been to handicap the students whose parents try to give them an advantage. It's a popular sentiment, growing in popularity every day.

This response smells strongly of FUD. Could you possibly elaborate?

California trying to remove math tracks and to make it harder/impossible to take advanced math in the final two years of high school.

Look this up, it's been discussed here extensively.

We don’t provide free access to test prep. We don’t provide equal access to parents and friends who are enthusiastic and pushed to do well on these tests. We don’t provide equal access to a culture that values academics over, say, sports and entertainment.

What would the end state of the latter part of look like? Taking kids away from their families at birth and raising them in state not-quite-orphanages?

Even the concept that academics should be valued over other topics should be a matter of family choice. If you want to prioritize music, art, sports, food, entertainment, fitness, religion, or something else over academics, should society over-ride that?

> What would the end state of the latter part of look like? Taking kids away from their families at birth and raising them in state not-quite-orphanages?

In other words, Plato's Republic.

Free after school programs, free lunches, Medicare for All, public housing. These are all things that would level the playing field for poor kids and allow them to make the same decisions that wealthy kids get to make.

It’s not about choosing for them, it’s about lifting the boot on these kids necks enough so they can choose for themselves.

> Free after school programs, free lunches, Medicare for All, public housing.

Poor kids in America already get all of these, even free healthcare. The families of middle class kids have to pay for all of that, but not the families of poor kids.

Quadruple all these programs and you'll still have a situation where some kids want to do well but simply don't have the brains for it, and some kids who could do well but have shitty parents.

Early childhood (0-3) nutrition could probably productively use more expenditures. Setting that aside, I think your last point is a very large part of the problem (which also includes the nutrition point).

I believe the model you're talking about is a Kibbutz, though I don't think they were state run.

If it's not state-run (or otherwise mandated), I think you'll still see significantly unequal access to friends (and family members) of different attitudes and aptitudes.

The really interesting thing about Kibbutzes is that they're radically communal - to the point where children are not supposed to belong to any individual, but to the community.

I'm sure it's impossible to factor out the human element of relationships, but it is interesting to me as an example of the spectrum that human societies will build.

Free SAT preparation is available through a partnership between the College Board and the Khan academy. https://www.khanacademy.org/SAT

> We don’t provide equal access to parents and friends who are enthusiastic and pushed to do well on these tests. We don’t provide equal access to a culture that values academics over, say, sports and entertainment.

Who is “we” in this case?

Are we talking about government solutions here, or something else?

> We don’t provide free access to test prep.

There's tons of sample tests, vocabulary flashcards, and advice on test taking strategy available completely free online. There's no secret information or techniques taught in these expensive SAT prep classes that you can't find on Youtube, Google or Khan Academy. I didn't spend a single cent on SAT prep (and not much time either) and still managed to get a 1500.

We don't provide access to everyone. If you are a kid who doesn't get fed at home, and you don't get a school meal until lunch, do you have the same access?

If your school can't afford state of the art computers or technology, do you have the same access?

If your school has class sizes of 35 and mine has class sizes of 18, do we both have the same access?

The financial solution chosen to drive equality is likely to be "you must fire half of your teachers, resulting in class sizes of 36 for you, which we think is close enough to 35".

Does that actually help anyone?

Or "we tax wealthy people more", which sounds fine to me. (As a wealthy person.)

That’s somewhat straightforward for states (and property tax is a weak proxy form of it), but wealth taxation at the federal level is debatably but likely unconstitutional.

You could tax high-incomes more federally in a straightforward way, which is almost surely therefore easier to implement.

> If you are a kid who doesn't get fed at home, and you don't get a school meal until lunch, do you have the same access?

My rural school district provided free breakfast for precisely this reason... is it not a common thing?

Public schools have been giving free breakfast to poor kids for as long as most people in this thread can remember; it's been a federally funded program since the early 70s.

The SATs also allow for children with non parental involvement but talent to excel because it's a simple process: take a test

It's hardly simple to prep for the SAT. It requires time and money and space.

So you'd rather use a holistic process where kids with rich parents can go off to Africa and start a volunteer school or fly across the country participating in Sailing competitions?

One process has a more level playing field, the other is clearly rigged in favor of rich well connected kids.

Please stop putting words in my mouth. I said nothing of the sort.

I'd prefer we provided the food, housing, education, and healthcare that would enable anyone to succeed on the SAT by eroding the worst disadvantages some kids face.

I dont buy this argument for a second. You can buy a used sat prep book for cheap or even borrow one from a library.

Practice twice a week leading up to the test with practice tests once every two weeks.

taking a prep course will help, but thats not necessary at all.

Practicing won't teach you language and math.

practicing means practicing problems and learning ones you don’t understand. with the abundance of youtube videos/free sources on the internet, today there is no excuse except for a parent not teaching a kid what to prioritize in life imo.

I was homeless my senior year of highschool and I didn't have many adults helping me. There's a fair amount of kids on paths like mine.

It's cold comfort to be told my parents fucked up. That's true, but it doesn't actually help.

Practice is the only way to learn language and math, subjects which children are initially wholly ignorant of before learning through practice.

I keep hearing this, and I don't doubt that statistically access to test prep helps, but amongst all the tests I've seen, the SAT is still the easiest to do well in if you're willing to self study.

I got in the elite range simply by buying SAT prep books. I memorized the vocabulary, and the book had enough tricks for me to do well.

Granted, I always excelled in math in school. I, however, did not excel in English (my 10th grade score was a well deserved C). But I still did great on the verbal section, and it was primarily due to reading 1-2 SAT prep books.

If you think you're going to start prepping 1-2 months before the test and do well, it won't work. For both the SAT and the GRE I started about 12 months prior (but very low intensity - a few minutes a day). I did even better in the GRE, scoring well in the top 1% nationally.

If you treat the SAT as a possible golden ticket for your future, you'll take it seriously and start prepping early. If it's merely a "Meh, that thing I need to do to get into a college", no amount of prep will help.

Also, wanted to point out that all the people around me who did great on the SAT used only the prep books - none took one of those dedicated classes. Right or wrong, we all thought tutors and tutoring institutes were for struggling students - because none of the top students utilized them. The notion of a great student becoming even better with the help of a tutor was foreign to us. It was only years later did I learn that tutors for top students existed (basically dedicated 1:1 instruction by a "true master").

It's easier to prep for the sat than any other hoop to jump through to get into college like GPAs, various deadlines, FAFSA, knowing which clubs to join, knowing how to right a catching essay, etc

Time, yes. For space you just need a desk. And if you have an internet connection, it doesn't require any money beyond what you've already paid your ISP.

K, not every kid has access to a desk and the internet. Those things take money not every family has.

Both of these can be had for free at your local library. And to be pedantic, you don't even need a desk to study you can do it on a park table or the sidewalk. If someone doesn't have access to a desk (they're homeless?) or an internet connection, I doubt they're even taking the SAT.

I was homeless my final year of highschool, and basically homeless the year before. I took the SAT, but it was hard to figure out how. Even harder to bring myself to study rather than work.

Exactly. You can’t hide a high IQ, even though parental and societal involvement will always act as a multiplier on what a kid can naturally do.

You can hide a high IQ with starvation, sleep deprivation, withholding books from a child, and stress hormones from an unsafe environment.

IQ is highly correlated with nutrition. Very likely, being food-insecure has a direct causal effect of lowering IQ. It isn't a thing fixed from birth.

Do Asian Americans have better nutrition than other categories?

It would seem so. CDC statistics show that people who identify as Asian have a lower obesity rate compared to other racial and ethnic categories. Obesity is known to cause decreased cognitive function.

https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html

Correlated, yes. Highly correlated - I doubt it. Einstein didn't get that way by eating enough blueberries and salmon oil or whatever.

Now of course, if you are raised on a diet of sugar and lead-laced air and water, you won't reach your natural genetic potential. And if you are raised by billionaires with a live-in chef and nutritionist and tutors, in a place with squeaky-clean air and water, you might reach your full potential.

But those things merely optimize, or impede, the raw material you were born with.

So is height, and historically there have been large differences in height between the rich and poor. In modern developed countries, however, there doesn't seem to be any significant difference based on socioeconomic level. That leads me to believe that these "nutritional deficiencies" don't exist and are not what is causing any observed gap in IQ or academic achievement.

> high IQ

Therein lies the rub, the controversy mostly comes from people who reject the very premise of IQ.

Interesting.

There was quite a significant difference between my IQ results and my standardized testing scores (based on percentile rankings -- IQ => higher rankings).

(FWIW, I think both test are utter horseshit anyway.)

Just a quick note on the word 'push'. We all now the 'tiger parenting' trope. Those parents exists and it makes a difference (with clear 'pushing', which I see as a negative).

But with maths I think it's a bit more subtle. Just the tiny things (even just 'talk' math) you do in early education can make a massive return later. There is no 'mean' in maths education even in ages 4-10 (my kids). We live in the Netherlands, that scores quite well in the table. And still I think math education is at least unambitious for the higher percentiles.

With just a few minutes here and there I've managed to get some pretty abstract concepts in their thinking (say: zero and the empty set, that's something small kids understand intuitively / or the first algorithms with russian multiplication or divide and conquer). There's no need for pushing, and still I think I've already help lay a good foundation of math in my 10 year old. No more than 30 hours invested in math his life.

maybe pushing is the wrong word but i would say parents who care about their child's education have children who score substantially higher than children who don't have parents who care. And "caring" is highly related to family stability and the education level of one or both parents. Where education level manifests itself is in how a parent cares. My uneducated mom (who is asian) asked us to study and get good grades (an asian cultural value), but she couldn't really tel if we were actually "studying" since she was uneducated. Now the asian values meant that i at-least got "bare minimum" grades compared to other races of people but i never had enough "care" to excel (which i think i could have done). Now imagine a group of people with neither cultural values emphasizing education nor educated parents who might have their child's best interest and tell them to 'study and work hard' but given the circumstances and how kids will be kids, it is very very difficult for those kids to achieve.

I see that there is a finite bucket of cognitive energy. Learning higher-order concepts, as well as dealing with unstable family dynamics takes away from this bucket.

If you’re scraping the bottom to deal with family (or mental health in the parents, restricted finances, less-than-ideal living conditions, etc.), then your capacity to integrate abstract concepts becomes fairly limited.

These issues often feed into each other, and it becomes difficult to break out of this cycle, leading to trans-generational opportunity loss.

I saw a similar effect teaching at a coding school for adults: one of our strongest predictors for success was whether or not the student had someone close to them who was in tech. Having someone outside the system to practice lingo, talk about culture, or give an opinion on what topics matter makes a huge difference. I see no reason why grade school math would be different - I know my parents made a huge difference for me, not by "pushing", but by just being there to talk.

Kids are incredibly perceptive as to "what matters in this family". If parents show an interest in how the kid is doing in school, kids see that school is important. If parents show an interest in whether they won or lost a sports game, kids learn that's important. If parents show no interest but someone else does, whatever that person values takes on an outsized importance in the kids' life.

"Just being there to talk" is more than half the battle (but also more than half the time investment) pretty much no matter the topic.

Part of the struggle, at least in the US, is you have parents trying to help their kids with math being taught in ways they never learned.

My wife literally cannot help our 7 year old with her math because we were raised in a school system that taught rote memorization. I was too, but I suck at memorization and have had to rely on fundamental understanding in order to survive in math. So luckily I can help with things.

And parent involvement helps a ton. When our kid got 50% on the practice test I spent a few hours going over the material she didn't understand. She ended up getting 100% on the real test.

> We all now

As a non-native English reader, it took me a while to understand that this means: We all know.

I think native speakers hash the words in their brain based on how they sound. And people who learned English at school primarily by reading and writing, hash the words by how they are written. The latter data structure makes it difficult to find that "know" and "now" are almost the same word.

Now and know sound nothing alike, so hashing by character composition would get you much closer than the hypothetical native speaker.

Sorry. Non-native so you figured me out. This was a pure error though. My mental pronunciation is quite different.

My daughter credits the test-taking techniques they taught in her SAT prep course for a big boost in her SAT score. She says the test-taking techniques were orthogonal to how well she knew the material. I'm happy for her but at the same time it seems unfair that my ability to afford the SAT prep course gave her an advantage not available to families with lower incomes.

Those techniques are things like skipping questions or calculated guessing which can help but certainly won't get you into elite score territory.

They increase speed, which buys you time to work on harder problems. I bet a nonzero number of 2nd tier students could get a 1st tier score if given an extra 10 mins on each section.

I attended prep courses and they didn't have an impact on my scores, measured by before and after practice testing (~1500 in the late 90s).

What did help is that I was encouraged to read a lot from a young age, which seems fairly accessible to most families.

Support your local libraries.

MY SO is a professional tutor, and she often has clients for standardized testing prep.

From what I have gathered it seems a lot of students really need a confidence boost. Once they realize they are capable to doing well, they tend to improve their performance.

There is also like tricks and gimmicks, but that is a different discussion.

Our [public] school gave a 1-hour class on the basics of the SAT test mechanisms and how to get your score to what I'd call "reflective of your ability". If kids are showing up to the SAT barely knowing how a #2 pencil works, that's bad. If they've had 1 hour on "if you can eliminate even a single answer that you know is not correct, do not leave the question blank" and "D means that no can determine which is greater not that you have no idea which is greater", that puts them in a position to demonstrate their ability and that's well within the reach of any school district that gives half an ounce of care for their students.

I legit think that my parents' successfully instilling a strong sense of fair play and honesty in my from a young age hindered me more than a little. The world's simply not like that. The ones who win take every advantage—if a test is trying to measure you, you'd damn well better study its "game", because you're competing against kids who did and they will receive zero negative consequences for doing so, only benefits, even if doing so seems against the spirit of the thing and feels dirty.

... which is part of why having parents who have themselves succeeded at these things is an advantage. Mine were from poor (quite poor, in one case) backgrounds but were worked-hard-and-eventually-did-OK sorts, not early-success sorts. So they taught me fairness and honesty in all things, and didn't know they should clue me in that some things are just bullshit games that you should do whatever you can to beat short of taking too-large risks. I mean, they hadn't even played most of those games, so how could they know?

I bet it would never occur to kids from an upper-middle-class background (doctor parents, lawyer parents, business exec parents, that kind of thing) that test prep is a bit dirty. Wouldn't even cross their minds. It's just what you do, obviously.

If SAT prep was effective, then it would be an educational miracle, because a good SAT prep course is under $1,000. American schools spend 10 times that much money per student every year and barely move the needle.

Test prep is effective at getting you an accurate score.

One bit of knowledge improved my ACT score from 27 to a 33: internalizing how long I have for the tests. I was so used to being able to finish school tests with a comfortable amount of time remaining, so I took the test at a casual pace which means I didn't finish. The second time, I sprinted through the test as fast as possible and my score improved dramatically.

I doubt I could have done better with more coaching or prep.

Similarly, a single 30-minute lesson taught me what I was doing wrong on the ACT Science section (trying to understand the science instead of treating it as 'find the answer in the text'). Brought my overall score from 32 to 35 (I was already a good test taker, but those 3 points made a big difference),

You can get the same improvement by reading a test prep book. You need to know the 3-4-5 triangle, this list of word definitions, a handful of other stuff. How much time you have. Now take a few practice tests, also freely or cheaply available anywhere. All of it should be a review of methods and skills you already have from school. That is the point of the test after all.

To me, those test prep places always seemed to be struggling with legitimacy. It's not like hiring a tutor to help you learn difficult concepts for the first time.

> an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement.

I do wonder if this is possible. If you up the baseline of school provision, won’t involved parents provide a further advantage over and above that?

Not if the test difficulty stays the same, and you get more 800s and lotteries (or, dare we say it, more seats?!) for next level positions, at college or career. Tides, boats , bars.

When you talk about some of the least served communities, there is a lot of moving from school to school as people move from one housing solution to another. My wife taught in public school and out of the 35 students in a class there might have been a third to 40% who stayed with her the whole semester. She would have two extra pages of names of students who came and went throughout the year.

Involved parents will likely always improve the scores of students, but the disparity between those who do and don't need not be so dramatic.

It's fun to read biographies of 20th century scientists. Quite a few of them came from humble backgrounds and credited their success to education (and perhaps libraries). They often did not have well educated or motivated parents. Nick Holonyak is one such example. Carl Sagan is another.

And this is even more apparent when I look at the British ones. It's a bit funny given how rigid and uninspiring the British education system was.

SAT math is geometry,a 10th grade class for average students. Scoring below 700 isn't due to lack of "push" it's lack of some combination of intelligence, nurture, health, teaching.

Due to the cost and complexity of transcontinental migration, most Asians in US now, and Jews last generation, come from elites from their previous family homeland who successfully migrated to escape bad government or seeking greater opportunity, when it was tactically hard to do so for the average person. It's a natural filter for smart, capable, effective people who can raise children to be same.

The effect tends to fade over time (shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, or docks to docks, in three generations). Now that Jewish immigration has mostly ended, their great-grandchildren (and the descendants of previous generations of Asian immigrants) are, as a cohort, not performing academically as well as today's Asian immigrant children and chidren of immigrants.

The math contest winners and teams, deep into the bench, are nearly all children of immigrants (and Polgar-esque homeschoolers who get to avoid time-wasting distractions of school)

> Jews last generation, come from elites from their previous family homeland who successfully migrated to escape bad government or seeking greater opportunity, when it was tactically hard to do so for the average person. It's a natural filter for smart, capable, effective people who can raise children to be same.

The large majority of the US Jewish population came after the 1850s. They were not selected for wealth. Like the Irish immigrants were negatively selected. They were less educated than those who stayed at home, on average. Similarly Italians in the relevant period of mass migration. The middle class were doing well so they were more likely to stay home.

> The effect tends to fade over time (shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, or docks to docks, in three generations).

This has no basis in evidence. Every psychological trait I’m aware of is strongly heritable, including ones with obvious impacts on earnings like intelligence, conscientiousness and extraversion[1]. Social class is so heritable the only society to make a dent were the Chinese during the cultural revolution[2]. If you want to know more about the extraordinary persistence of social class see Gregory Clark’s work[3].

[1] Genetic Influence on Human Psychological Traits

https://utahpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bouchard.0...

[2] Persistence Despite Revolutions

http://davidyyang.com/pdfs/revolutions_draft.pdf

[3] https://faithandheritage.com/2017/06/the-heritability-of-soc...

It's not clear if you're trying to contest with the parent or agree with him, but you are doing the latter.

> you are doing the latter

Not necessarily. If intelligence is genetic, then by OP's hypothesis, immigrants are more likely to be intelligent and pass that on to their children - whereas GP's hypothesis (seems to suggest) that intelligence is effectively random but determination is what's passed down from parent to child. Of course, it's probably a combination of both.

It depends on the degree of regression to the mean, and to which mean the children are regressing to. Due to selection criteria bias of immigrants they are more likely to be outliers than non immigrants. While it's very likely that the outliers have a genetic advantage it seems that important combinations of genes are often lost and on average subsequent generations do regress to the mean intelligence of the general population that they come from more. If intelligence was a single gene or the average of multiple genes what would normally be expected would be an average of the parents intelligence. It appears that the actual results are the mix of the two which could be readily explained by important combinations of genes not being lost some of the time.

In the future when the important combinations of genes yielding more intelligence are known it'll be possible to select for certain combinations and children selected this way would be expected to have a higher intelligence than either parent. i.e. making multiple draws from a distribution and picking the highest value.

And I'd argue it doesn't really matter because whether it is one or the other, it is highly transmissible, and there isn't much you can do about it as a matter of public policy, unless you take away children from their parents.

> Now that Jewish immigration has mostly ended, their great-grandchildren (and the descendants of previous generations of Asian immigrants) are, as a cohort, not performing academically as well as today's Asian immigrant children and children of immigrants.

Source? Judging by elite college representation [1], they're doing at least as well if not better than Asian Americans (which granted, is not limited to just Asian immigrant children).

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24166064

Judging by elite college representation

Elite college representation is a poor metric because of legacy admissions, influence of donors, and the reported efforts to limit Asian admissions.

Look at schools with more merit-based admissions (MIT, Caltech, etc.). Asians are overrepresented to a much higher degree.

It's kind of the opposite. I was a highschool dropout, highest level of math was basic algebra. I was able to change my mind about the whole education thing by buying a "prepare yourself for the SAT" book, studying it for a couple of months, doing well, and getting admitted to college. Ended up doing a math + physics dual major.

(I'm really grateful that that avenue to college existed -- I could not have written an admissions essay, done extracurricular activities, or generally been a "good boy" if my life depened on it.)

Jim Webb who was a Marine officer in Vietnam, a journalist, a novelist, and then a Democratic senator from Virginia saw standardized tests as his route to social mobility from a poor background in the rural south.

It's a damn shame Jim Webb stepped away from politics.

I've long thought that our intuitions about IQ tests are backwards; they are the most fair and least biased method we have to sort applicants for things. The more 'holistic' the process, the more that subjectivity (and therefore bias) creeps in. The only way around it is affirmative action, which leads to the current state of affairs.

I think some of the persistence of hating on standardized tests is that standardized tests are one of the few barriers against the worst rich kids inheriting status from their parents.

Sure, a little bit of test prep will help many people, if you’ve never seen a standardized test before some familiarity is good for you. But some of these kids could not test their way out of a paper bag and the only hope for them is hire a ringer to take the test in their place.

Yeah I mean we just had a whole college admissions scandal a few years back with rich parents trying to get their not-so-smart kids into elite colleges.

Not even elite colleges! UCs...

Are you suggesting that we should close schools and ship that book to every family? Might have worked for you, but I can guarantee you that it will be disastrous for most students.

Nah, not at all -- just that the SAT is a reasonable test of ability that is in fact accessible to people w/o rich educational backgrounds.

If you're born poor or somehow outside of the social mainstream, standardized testing is your friend.

(I wasn't commenting one way or the other on K-12 education -- I had a mixed experience personally...I think it could've been done a lot better. My wife had a great experience. But she went to private school.)

> The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically.

Is there any way to prove/disprove this? Also doesn’t this also beg the question as to why non-Asian parents apparently won’t teach their kids to be good academics?

Yes there is a way, you put kids in test prep and see if they do better. They generally do not improve much.

The SAT is an IQ test, and IQ is mostly inherited from your parents.

> The SAT is an IQ test

In that case I weep for the future, because I’ve met plenty of dumbass people who managed to get a high enough SAT score to get in school.

I also weep for people that extrapolate too much meaning from an IQ test.

(I'm not talking about you).

So you are saying that Asians have higher intelligence, and not just a little bit higher, but significantly higher than other race?

of the ones present in Michigan, yes.

The Asians present in North America are not a random sample. A large portion of them came here specifically to work in STEM or other fields requiring high levels of intelligence and education. It's very probable that the ones here are, on average, significantly more intelligent than both the average American and the average Asian in Asia.

For that matter, the Asians you see in studies of the average test scores in somewhere like “China” aren’t representative of the educational ability of the average rice paddy farmer, but of more urbanized populations.

I feel this must at least be a factor.

Is this supposed to be a "Gotcha"?

There is no way the SAT is a purely IQ test, when i didn't get a hot score on my first SAT, i practiced for 1 week straight and substantially improved my scores (like 300 points range). The way i liken this to is if a MLB pitcher throws the same pitch at the same velocity and i know this ahead of time, i could practice for a year and when the time comes i could hit that ball. Does that mean i'm a major league level batter? Heck no, it is the same way with the SAT's, Leetcode and other tests, they measure how much you want it more than raw IQ.

Using that logic, everything is an IQ test :-)

Extensive test prep can do a significant amount to increase SAT scores, but the test is designed to minimize it.

People do see over 100 point increase ~20 hours of prep, and extensive as in 3+months can push that to 200 though with diminishing returns at the top of the curve. Which shouldn’t be surprising as increasing speed, even just from not needing to read instruction, provides an advantage for most people.

Yes there is a way, you put kids in test prep and see if they do better.

For this to be a real test, you'll need parents of twins willing to send only one kid to test prep..and not send the other one..you know..for science. Doubt there is a parent who would do that.

> For this to be a real test, you'll need parents of twins willing to send only one kid to test prep..and not send the other one

What's the issue with testing someone without prep, then giving them a week to study up, and then testing them again? People take SAT multiple times, you know, and it is a brand new set of questions every time.

I did that myself (took it 3 times total), and I can say this: taking it without prep and then taking it later with just a week of studying on my own for about an hour per day made a massive difference. Even before I got my results back on the second try, I already felt i did much better, as I was second guessing much less and felt more confident about my answers. And the final scores reflected that really well.

However, studying beyond that (which I did for my third attempt, months later) didn't help much and just marginally changed my scores by +-20 in different categories (out of 700 total max in each of the three categories, which is how it was scored at the time). I didnt feel any more prepared either. Judging by my acquaintances, it was a similar pattern. Massive boost in scores on the second try, marginal or non-existent in scores on attempts beyond the 2nd.

I don't think the SAT is an IQ test. I'm sure IQ helps but parents clearly have a pivotal role - the single biggest external factor to explain variation in score perhaps. Surely the biggest factor in SAT scores is how much you the student _care_ about the SAT score. Why do you care? Maybe because your parents care, maybe because your parents don't care? At the end of the day parents are crucial to the success of their children positively and negatively.

This paper found a 0.82 correlation between general mental ability g and SAT scores

https://archive.org/details/ScholasticAssessmentOrG/page/n1/...

That’s relatively low considering what kind of test it is. Elementary school sees a 0.7 correlation between IQ and academic performance.

.82 is an insanely high correlation in any kind of social science

A benchmark of everything across all of social sciences is extremely broad when comparing two different tests of mental performance designed to correlate with other tests of mental performance.

It’s like being shocked that resting heart rate and VO2 Max happen to correlate quite well relative to other health indicators. Yes they are testing different things, but not that different.

> Also doesn’t this also beg the question as to why non-Asian parents apparently won’t teach their kids to be good academics?

Because they don't value their kids being good at academics.

I've lived in multiple countries. In the non-US ones, people don't brag about being bad at math (even when they are bad at it). As an adult, if you couldn't add/subtract/multiply two large numbers on paper without a calculator, that would not reflect well on you.

> Because they don't value their kids being good at academics.

Yes, my memory of high school is that everyone including the adults celebrated sports, and hardly anyone gave a crap about the high academic achievers, who were often social outcasts.

I spent a lot of my childhood trying (though largely failing) to pretend that I was not so smart. I can't speak for other countries, but anti-intellectualism is widespread in the US.

Not my experience at all (Midwestern small city, ~90% white). Parents with Honor Student bumper stickers, subtle humble-brags, and general celebration of academic ability were all around me.

I have a (completely unresearched, unfounded, probably not accurate) theory that the exceptional prosperity in US that the boomer/early-gen-x generations saw, which had ultra-cheap housing relative to income across the US, ultra-cheap everything in the US, industries expanding so fast that schooling became less important in the US, all of that was a fluke.

For a couple decades a majority of people in the US had effectively gotten coupons for half-off everything they desired.

It wasn't normal, but it made those generations in the US so mentally lazy that it effectively poisoned huge swaths of the following generations, fooling them into thinking it was always going to be that easy. So now we're trying to sort out exactly why those born and raised in the US are doing so poorly now.

After WWII, Europe's industry was effectively destroyed. The USA enjoyed prosperity as it was the only industrial power left standing. The unemployment rate from 1951 to 1953 were 3.3, 3.0, and 2.9 percent. [1]

Anyone who wanted a job got a good paying job. It was possible in those days for the average American to support a household as the sole breadwinner. What is happening now is that those halcyon days are over. Things are more competitive. We have not approached the cut throat levels as they have in South Korea. American jobs today pay less and have less benefits than in the 1950s. We are headed towards a two tier economy. Full time employees with benefits. Gig workers who wander from job to job with no benefits.

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

> score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically.

Test prep has diminishing marginal returns.

On the flip side that means just 1 hour of prep makes a big impact.

This is what research has found and why a lot of focus is on getting kids to do any studying for anything at all.

Many kids do zero homework and zero studying. Getting them to 1 is the hardest part.

This is the biggest actionable problem for these exams. It doesn’t require race or culture or whatever at all. The research says it requires specialized instruction during school - something to achieve focused studying, as opposed to merely watching the clock go down. Difficult for the hardest students but on average, in aggregates, performs well.

My point is that there are a lot of Asian students at Harvard who did 10 hours of test prep for the SAT. They didn’t go to cram school. There are also students who DID go to cram school. I myself studied about 10 hours for the SAT.

You don’t need cram school to improve test scores. You need some studying instead of none at all.

Right, I think this is true. I scored really well on my SAT despite being a poor student and having parents that did not give a fuck at all, b/c I did just some minor prep for the test.

Yeah, this is interesting, and it's close to my experience. Just by working through the questions in the official SAT practice booklet a couple weeks prior to the test (which I think was "free" upon signing up), and learning a couple lessons from my first sitting (set a faster pace and guess rather than leaving questions blank), I probably raised my score by 300 points into the 1400+ band on my second sitting. An instructor could easily teach those lessons in a single prep session that starts with a short mock test.

The hard-core, months-long, daily prep courses for super-high-achievers seem like extreme overkill. The kids who need that are probably the ones in the 700-900 range, who need to learn a baseline level of math and English for the first time (of course, if that were possible, it would have already happened in school).

Just want to make sure, and correct me if I'm wrong, but is this your argument? "some students did X and their outcomes were good, therefore doing X is all anyone needs to have a good outcome"

How can you in read that comment in good faith and come to that conclusion?

There is a commonly held belief that "Asian students do better because their parents push them really hard".

The parent comment is arguing that the "really hard" part is not necessary. They are stating that if you condition on "studied at all" (above some minimum threshold) you'll explain away most of the group variance.

They're also not even arguing against the claim that studying more is better, just that the biggest improvement is in studying at all.

The final conclusion is spelled out clearly: If you want to improve test scores across the board you don't have to "push kids really hard", rather you have to work to get all students to get over the initial hurdle of studying some minimum threshold.

Now the parent might not be correct, but it's hard to see how you're even coming across with the reading of that comment you are.

5-10 hours of test prep may add a couple hundred points to someone’s score, but probably won’t take someone from ann 850 to 1200.

Looking at the math section, you might get a 600 if you don’t study but could know all the material but don’t know how to take the test.

But to get a 600 requires you to know a certain amount of material and know how to take the test. Most kids at my HS couldn’t get a 600 math even with 40 hours of math prep.

I may be the exception to this: my parents did not care at all, and I still scored really well on the SAT. I don't remember exactly what b/c I can't look up the score anymore, apparently, but definitely above 1500.

I also did not care much as a student. I don't think I am remarkable here, I think I just took the test really well. I did do one short practice course that taught some of the small tricks to the test (most common problem patterns, to leave blank if you are really not sure, to come back to the question at the end, etc..) which I think probably helped for like 100pts at least.

Don’t forget apathy. I easily qualified for every college in my state with my scores and out-of-state tuition meant there was no reason to ever push any harder for a better score.

> The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically.

I scored very high in both. Believe me, as new immigrants we were completely clueless about the heated race to top spots. In my case, credits goes to my makers (mom and dad :) and the fact that Iran had fairly good public schools.

Culture is important. Two relevant shockers for me (as a very young new arrival to US):

- disrespect for teachers.

- practically institutionalized disdain for the smart kids. I am talking cultural products here.

So I honestly think cultural backgrounds that feature things like special social and personal regard for those who teach, and special regard for individuals in STEM professions (for example "mr. engineer"), are more at play here than merely ambitious parents. And guess what is driving those ambitious parents? Culture has a lot to do with it.

> disrespect for teachers ... disdain for the smart kids

I've gotten the impression from every high-achieving-country immigrant that I've ever talked to that schools in those countries just kick out the troublemaking kids before they have a chance to disrupt the environment for everybody else. Nobody gets kicked out of US public schools, for any reason - so the kids who don't want to be there and spend all of their time trying to ruin it for everybody else are always there.

That's very much true. I remember very clearly that when I was a new 1st grade student in a poor southeast asian country that the kid that yelled back at my teacher in my 60-person class didn't come back next week, whereas I suspect the same would not fly in US public schools. The things I've read (threatening violence, etc) would've never happened in my home country's schools, and if it did would've led to corporal punishment (caning was regularly practiced) and expulsion, not necessarily in that order, and very quickly at that.

My impression is also that the academic culture is very different - even in my poorly funded primary school full of poor kids, there was a sense of academic accomplishment being of the highest importance -- all the students knew the importance of good grades, and students that disagree were socially shunned. Smart kids were the popular kids, and the people who ranked the top 10% got into a special class and were widely admired.

This is how it should be here too.

Inequality is accepted in so many other places in the USA, in ways that are far worse than this.

The anti-intellectualism is a very, very real thing in the USA. In not good schools, you WILL be bullied for being cerebral.

At this point, no amount of understanding of "oh the bad kids grew up in poverty and had social/economic reasons for being bad" is going to fix these kids up.

You want to disrupt education for the rest? Teachers will disrupt the rest of your earning potential. Seems like a fair trade too, since the criminals are all getting laid and the MIT kids are all staying virgins. It takes 15 years to mint another "elite" educated individual. Just a few bad apples can destroy all of this work of trying to get someone to the MIT level. Get the bad apples out.

> practically institutionalized disdain for the smart kids. I am talking cultural products here

Escaping this is certainly a piece of why people pursue "good" schools in wealthy areas, gifted programs, and private schools. Obviously it's not a guarantee you can avoid this attitude, but there are obvious differences between educational environments.

I went to a good public school K-8, where I was part of the gifted program (what amounted to a handful of students in my year who had a few special class session per week), and then a top private high school.

One of the biggest differences from a typical American public school that I saw in the gifted program and private school was that being smart/curious/interested/engaged/academically ambitious was generally admired and encouraged. I was endlessly curious but never a particular diligent student, and had a tendency to "coast" in school, but I think being in this environment helped frame things for me in a really positive way.

It got a bit ridiculous at the end of high school as my classmates started aggressively competing for limited slots at top universities, but I feel the environment–being among people who valued ambition and using your brain–was super motivating and raised my internal bar for success in general. I'm reminded of something a tennis coach told me as I was first learning to play: the best way to improve your own game is to play with others more skilled than you.

> Culture has a lot to do with it.

If you admit this, you'd be saying one culture is worse and needs to change. One party in the US is against saying anyone but white men (and Karen) can do anything wrong, so the problem is everyone else. But it obviously isn't, some groups have cultures which denigrate learning and the consequence is those groups do not succeed academically or economically.

All of the USA has at least some cultural issues (drunk driving is popular, for example). So who could we really trust to drive cultural change? Current teachers seem to be reinforcing victim mindset in children, the entire educational system is setup to keep kids away from people doing better than them -- grade separation alone, for example, prevents kids from learning from peers who already understand the material. The churches are corrupt and fractionated. Who would have the moral authority to drive cultural change for the better?

No so broad a notion of 'culture', mainly cultural 'content'. This can be, and it is tweaked (worldwide), as needed. Cinema/TV in US has always been a leading indicator of societal change, rarely a lagging indicator. So it has always been, in a sense, understood and used as a pedagogical platform.

They actually tried this in US starting in late 80s and 90s, when we got a slate of 'geeks who get babes, and social acceptance' movies - War Games, Real Genius, Revenge of the Nerds, Weird Science, Hackers, etc.

[p.s. didn't finish that thought! /g]

But imho this was the wrong set of adjustments. The inducements - sex, money, and social acceptance -- are certainly attractive, but any kid with half a brain can note that there are far easier and certainly more exciting ways than learning -- culturally celebrated ways, yo -- to get that very same set of inducements. It did however get us to the geek hero celebrity stage, with Jobs and now Musk.

[edits]

The only way I could see your plan of offering identical schooling opportunities for everyone is boarding school, ie taking kids away from their parents. How are you going to stop/force a parent from helping their kid with homework?

I volunteer tutor teens in the SAT and the problem is a bit deeper than just parents. A few of my students have a similar amount of base intelligence as me, and if they studied as much as I did, they would have no problem with finding a path of least resistance to the upper-middle/lower-upper class. The problem is that even if I'm 100% sure this path exists, they are skeptical because it seems like I'm in a entirely different world from them, so I'm not different than an MLM influencer promising them $10k a week. I knew a lot of people who spent all their time studying and on extracurriculars, but the same isn't true for my students. It would require a Herculean amount of self-discipline to commit yourself to that much work when no one else you know is taking the same path.

This is why (imo), test prep should be a class you take at school. Why should it be a separate thing and a multi billion dollar industry? A lot of the SAT/ACT prep for HS students is about understanding how the tests work and how to approach questions.

We already have a bunch of federally mandated AYP testing (no) thanks to No (ALL?) Child Left Behind, why can't this just be old copies of the ACT or SAT. By the time kids are ready to apply for college, it will be second hand and not another extra thing they have to learn.

That is probably the reason it isn't taught at school. School itself does very little to encourage class mobility, starting from being funded by local property taxes.

You can already get 8 free SAT practice tests and Khan Academy offers a free online class. If you go through all of them and learn from your mistakes, that should be more than enough to get a decent score. With tutoring and classes, you're mainly paying for someone to pressure you to put the effort in, similar to with fitness classes.

these are standardized tests, taking normal classes _is_ prep for them

Your success in life is partially a reflection of how you were raised, just like your success in math.

But if the education system provides quality education with parental involvement, doesn't that imply that it provides quality education without parental involvement? You know, since parental involvement is not a part of the education system.

Or, in other words, if parental involvement IS a part of the educational system, then it's impossible for the system to provide good outcomes without parental involvement since, you know, it's part of the system.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm confused why some people seem to blame the educational system for lack of parental involvement in some demographics.

I am not saying the US education system is good but there is only so much you can ask from schools to offset a dysfunctional environment. And the solution isn't to take children away from their parents. You need to change the culture, and culture is hard to change. I always refer to Poland which, out of 50 years of communism, is the most religiously and socially conservative country in europe.

Another factor is parents' choice of where to live. Every real estate web site now prominently displays standardized test scores for the local public schools. Parents who care about academics will sacrifice financially to move near the highest scoring schools (or even cheat with a fake home address), thus creating a positive feedback loop.

> to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement

That seems very naive to think that school overcome the impact of parenting. If a child doesn't have its physical and psychological needs met then there's not much the school can do. School can't make children do their homework at home either.

That's reductive. My parents were white liberal hippies who didn't push me at all. I got C's in school and a perfect math SAT and SAT 2.

To be fair, I did spend a lot of time thinking about math because I liked it.

> To be fair, I did spend a lot of time thinking about math because I liked it.

Spending childhood doing things you enjoy and which also have economic utility is a secret power.

Most people in the top 5th percentile of academic things also happened to spend a truly absurd amount of their youth obsessing over that academic thing. They may also be gifted, but spending all that free time in youth thinking about things is probably way more important than IQ.

(For me it was programming and law... I was reading legal briefs and slinging code most evenings of middle school through high school, which set me up with a rather absurd advantage over my peers once I got to college.)

BTW: elite unis/programs are looking for those types of people. It's not the extra curricular box checking that interests them, it's evidence of thousands of hours of practice at high value add skills. The practice can be forced with absurd amounts of grit, which is why it's a secret power when it comes out of intellectual curiosity.

Legal theory is a joy I discovered much later in life. The LSAT brain-teaser questions are also pretty fun. I've considered switching careers (now in my 30s), but I expect the realities of the job are much less thought-provoking.

Law is cool because it's like math, but because language is less precise than math, the rules are more malleable, and there is more room for creativity.

> The challenge for large and heterogeneously diverse nations like the U.S. is to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement.

It's a challenge, for sure. Should it be the overriding goal? Maybe if we weren't competing with other countries on the world stage.

> to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement

This sounds good in theory, but it can have unintended consequences. One way to read what you are saying here is that we should have a system where parent involvement has no impact.

I may be biased (as a parent), but I think parental involvement should be encouraged, not disincentiviezed. Parental involvement is one of the forces of nature. It should not go to waste.

This data is certainly stark, but I don’t see how it follows from test scores in Michigan that China is going to do something or other regarding STEM. I guess the core assumption here is that Asian students in America are a proxy for Chinese students in China? As someone who works exclusively with Chinese high schoolers as a college application coach, I find this hard to believe. The thing that Asians very definitely do differently than other groups is parenting. Chinese parents in particular take their kids’ phones away at night. They helicopter over their homework until it’s done. Dating, parties, and many enrichment activities that are part of a “normal” high school experience are usually (not always—nothing is absolute!) off the table. This isn’t genetic, it’s cultural. And it becomes especially obvious once you separate out recent Asian immigrants from longer-term Asian Americans.

To zoom out a bit, I don’t think this post even asks the right question. Why does quantity of STEM major matter, as opposed to quality? The USA is home to the vast majority of leading universities, and no amount of PISA score dominance by Chinese children can change that. If anything, China should be worried about the continuous brain drain of their best, brightest, and most of all wealthiest to Canada and the USA. Not to take anything away from the hard work and ambition of those Chinese people who wish to stay in China, but I just don’t agree that this difference in test scores taken by public high school students is any sort of leading indicator of shifting geopolitical trends.

> The USA is home to the vast majority of leading universities, and no amount of PISA score dominance by Chinese children can change that.

Those leadership placements are measured primarily by academic standards, and particularly research output. In CS, over 60% of PhD students -- the food soldiers of academia -- are here on student visas. Another huge fraction are first gen residents/citizens. I'd guess fewer than 20% of CS PhD students in the US are > 1st gen. Again, those are the people doing the actual work.

> If anything, China should be worried about the continuous brain drain of their best, brightest, and most of all wealthiest to Canada and the USA.

If we get to the point where the USA depends on Chinese out migration in order to compete economically or militarily with China, China may well choose to turn off the spigot. We should welcome immigration but also need home grown talent.

There's also a serious moral issue with the "depend on immigration" path -- we owe it to our citizens to provide them with opportunities.

> If we get to the point where the USA depends on Chinese out migration in order to compete economically or militarily with China, China may well choose to turn off the spigot.

America's biggest advantage over other nations is our immigration system, regardless of the myriad issues it has. The best and brightest are born all over the world, and they immigrate to America. Even if China stops immigration, we still have the other 6/7ths of the world to pull from.

Our immigration system is our biggest advantage? Are you sure it's not the thing(s) that makes people want to immigrate here that is our biggest advantage?

Anyone willing to leave their home country is almost always guaranteed to be a hard worker. It’s why immigrants are disproportionately successful compared to natives. Anyone who isn’t already a hard worker will not bother immigrating.

That doesn't explain why they choose the US in such large numbers though. If this is the best and the brightest they could go be just as successful anywhere else too. So why is the US such a magnet?

Cause US is the largest and the most superior on so many indices economicaly, sometimes providing the only top notch opportunities in the whole world (e.g., advanced high-tech). However, lots of hard working people from poorer or less developed parts of the world immigrate to countries other than the US in large numbers (legally, for education and skilled work). Most people in African countries (North Africa in particular, but also subsaharan, with the exception of South Africa) immigrate to Europe, namely France, Germany and Sweden. And immigration is just as successful as in the US (there are lately immigration issues in Europe, but it's a different type of immigration, refugees and asylum seekers, caused by destabilised regions in the middle east. I'm talking about regular immigration for education and skileld work).

You can't separate those things. Immigrants create conditions (prosperity) that make people want to immigrate.

Is that a logical conclusion? Seems like other countries would do the same if it were that simple.

Simple does not mean easy. It is hard to become a country that attracts the brightest immigrants in the world.

Isn't yours a recursive argument then? You say immigrants are what makes it attractive to immigrate here.

It's a positive feedback loop.

Getting one started usually isn't a conscious policy choice. You have relatively better conditions to start with (no war, good location with stable climate, good civic institutions, limited immigration restrictions) which kicks off the virtuous cycle.

Here's an example. The Irish famine led to Irish emigration down the road, which benefited the US and Australia. This wasn't a policy choice of the receiving countries. It was mostly luck. These kind of relative differences in liveability between the two countries (US > Ireland) leads to a positive feedback loop in the US.

I think it’s currently pretty hard for these people to stay in the US after getting their phds. I think immigration rates still haven’t recovered to pre-pandemic levels. I think immigration is just not popular with the American voters at the moment.

But it seems obviously bad if someone goes from China to the US for a phd in some critical field and wants to stay in the US (either for better opportunities or for the relationships they have developed or because they like living in a free country) but is forced to return to China by the US immigration system. Maybe phd students in stem in the US also bias foreign because there are just more non-Americans than Americans in the world or because American citizenship allows natives access to better opportunities (eg getting paid a lot more money in tech or just having a job where you get some level of support from your superiors).

>6/7ths of the world to pull from.

Realistically US draws from ~1.2B of English speakers. PRC draws from ~1.1B of Mandarin speakers. Actually pool of relevant STEM talent is obviously much smaller, but PRC generates about as much as all OECD countries combined, which is multiple times US can absorb via immigration unless (unpopular) shift in policy. PRC academic / S&T / R&D pipeline is maturing towards generating "best and brightest" in numbers comparable to rest 6/7th of the world, much of whom are already retained in PRC. And despite how many Chinese foreign students are in western universities, this isn't the 90s anymore where CCP actually sent out their best and brightest to learn abroad, most of the international PRC students now are those who can't hack it in high competitive PRC system but have the wealth to pursue education abroad. They're extremely competitive bench warmers. Which isn't to say US brain drain isn't a great competitive advantage, it just may not be disproportionately so, something that keeps US in the game instead of thoroughly dominating it.

I appreciate this extra insight on the PhD situation and generally agree with your points. I don’t necessarily agree that we (Americans) should worry about those figures. If you believe talent is more or less equally distributed worldwide, and that grad school attendance is at least partly meritocratic, it should be the case that most grad students in all fields come from elsewhere, since most humans live outside the USA.

I do agree strongly that we need opportunities for home grown talent. On the other hand, just because an American is born in the capital of the world economy should not place upon them the burden of rising to become one of its leaders. Not everyone is cut out for that, and that’s okay. As for depending on immigration, almost no American today is descended from the “original” Americans (the white ones that is), and we seem to be doing okay. Obviously past performance doesn’t guaranteed future returns, but I find reason for hope in that fact.

>If we get to the point where the USA depends on Chinese out migration in order to compete economically or militarily with China, China may well choose to turn off the spigot. We should welcome immigration but also need home grown talent.

You're massively overselling the impact of academics. Although they are important, the other machineries of society are more so.

There's no reason to think that these same students would excel or contribute as much at home.

I do somewhat agree with the latter. I think foreign students are more aggressive to meet criteria to get into PhD programs and to slave away for advisors because they have far fewer options than native students.

The Chinese may outnumber the Indians in the US but Indians are also included in the “Asian” number and make a significant percentage so it’s definitely not purely genetic.

I think as a society we need to admit different race, in general, have different culture, values, and strengths. I don't even think that's a radical idea, but somehow it is. I have been watching this football competition youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrbljwLslYI

The fun and athleticism you see is awe-inspiring, but I haven't seen a single Asian person competing or even at the event. My guess is a math competition would look a lot different.

> different race, in general, have different culture, values, and strengths

The coarse divisions that we call "race" don't help much here, either - there's a lot of variance between different groups of asians as well as different groups of whites (think of how different italians are from irish). The way we're lumped together is actually very arbitrary (and changes depending on how the lumpers are trying to score political points).

Are the divisions arbitrary if they are reflected in objective measures of athleticis and scholastics?

Neither athletic nor scholastic performance are objective measures. Sports are contests of arbitrary skills, that on the highest level require time intensive and expensive commitment since basically childhood, and whatever method you choose to measure scholastic performance with it's never going to be free of class/geographic/cultural factors.

According to this article, African Americas have been separated from their indigenous continent long enough that they are now their own distinct race.

It's not racial, it's cultural, socio-economic, and historical. Things like redlining, jim crow, GI Bill (lack-there-of for black people after WW2) all directly lead to the huge educational/economic inequality we see today. That said, it's clearly not racial based, because you can take a look at various non-American black populations and see big differences in educational levels and cultural values. For example, Nigerian immigrants (both first and second gen) are vastly more educated than the average American. I haven't dug too deep into sources but here's a random article I found https://www.chron.com/news/article/Data-show-Nigerians-the-m... where they cite census data (too lazy to verify but one could do that if interested).

It is racial in the sense that's the way people have been grouping things. Else we wouldn't even have this conversation. There would be no inequality of races because the grouping wouldn't exist in the first place.

I hesitate, to think obstacles are the reason why things are the way they are. Again, going back to sports. Black people faced all the same obstacles in the sport arena and still came out on top. Also, Asian people also faced discrimination too. Don't forget concentration camps.

And yes, all those other things you mention cultural, socio-economic, and historical are true too. Even within the Asian "grouping" there are groups that don't live up to the "stereotypical" standard of success. John Oliver talked about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29lXsOYBaow

This is such a bad-faith comment and so dog-whistly that I feel wrong for even engaging with it, but I have to.

> Black people faced all the same obstacles in the sports arena?

No, African-Americans endured physical slavery for hundreds of years, leading to a disposition for physical work. Africans also come from a continent with the hottest average temperature, and in general are more athletically inclined.

And let's look past even that for a moment - why do you think some of the best players in the NBA are starting to come from Eastern Europe? Hmm, I wonder, could it have anything to do with the massive amount of investment into training and player facilities that is pouring into the area? Perhaps we could apply that analogy to academics as well, and realize the INCREDIBLY obvious fact that Asians tend to perform well because our parents have money to push us, we grow up in a culture surrounded by other kids who push us to do better, and we have _privilege_.

It has absolutely nothing to do with "race". It is an entirely privilege-driven issue (do you have resources, or do you not?), and if you still fail to see that, then you're most likely just letting your intrinsic bias/racism drive your thought process.

I agree, I'm simplifying the issue. But I feel like you're agreeing with me. You stated all the reason why African-Americans history and culture is different.

If it has nothing to do with "race" let's stop talking about race.

> For example, Nigerian immigrants (both first and second gen) are vastly more educated than the average American

This is not a good example because the immigration process itself is highly selective. For the most part, only best and brightest from Nigeria are able to come to the US. Try comparing the average black American to the average Nigerian in Nigeria instead.

I thought that was interesting too. I mean, the reason Nigerians do so much better in the US than everyone else is because, of all the "black" population groups, the immigration process is most strict on Nigerians. There is a reason it is more strict on Nigerians than Barbadians, or Bahamians, or Kenyans. And that reason is not because Nigerians are smarter.

You compare the average Nigerian in Nigeria to the average Kenyan in Kenya, or Jamaican in Jamaica, or black American in the US, and you'll see an entirely different story.

There is something to these racial differences, and it can't be explained away by, "Well, if i only consider the top 0.01% of whatever group then they can do as well as the run of the mill 25 percentile Asian!"

Now I will concede that "mixed" kids outperforming all other non Asians was a surprise. But other than that one positive surprise, all this information is surprising in the other direction. Asians outperform at a level that is undeniable. No one is even in their league. Heck, no other racial grouping even catches the "mixed" kids. And unless I'm reading that data wrong, at the top, Asians are doing 3 times better even than the "mixed" kids. And 5 to 25 times better than any group other than the "mixed" kids.

We have to up our education game, because that is pathetic if this data is factual. (And I have seen no reason presented in these comments to believe it is not.)

> That said, it's clearly not racial based, because you can take a look at various non-American black populations and see big differences in educational levels and cultural values.

There are big differences in educational levels and cultural views within every racial group. Is that relevant to the question of whether there are significant mean differences between racial groups on the population level?

First you have to define a sensible racial grouping. Good luck.

Huh? Sensible racial grouping is trivial. The overwhelming majority of people on earth fall neatly into racial cateogies of white (European), black (African), Native American (American Indian), or Pacific Islander. Sure, the edges are fuzzy, (and good luck with the whole race/ethnicity thing vis-a-vis hispanics) but to pretend that makes it difficult to measuring population-level averages is just silly.

> Sure, the edges are fuzzy

Handwave of the century

It's much easier to offer up a flippant rhetorical parry than to actually make an argument. Cognitive dissonance and all that.

Here's a question: How is it that we're able to measure the degree to which various racial minorities are underrepresented in congress, in colleges, in industry and in Emmy Award nominations? How is it that we're able to measure racial disparities in income, in COVID exposure, in medical outcomes and in every other conceivable context, if race is such a tricky concept to nail down?

"not racial".

Well, given that track and field is brutally dominated not just by black Africans/Caribbean Islanders, but that they tend to come from only a handful of ethnic groups, I tend to think that direct race has at least some influence.

Most body builders intuitively understand that being black is an advantage in building muscle.

But don't trust me, trust a study that also points this out: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26298766_Ethnicity-....

We should not, because race is a useless concept.

There are traits individuals can have, some of which are immutable, and some of which correlate with what we call "race". But race itself is, even taking the most benign meaning possible, at best a surrogate.

The sooner we get rid of that awful meme the better.

I agree it isn't "race." However, there are groups of people who have similar characteristics where it might be beneficial to look at the group as a whole not just individuals. For example, it may be that a certain group of people, with a common background and in a particular geography have specific notions about whether they trust that education will work or that health care will be honest. It might help to look at those communities and have discussions about what can be done for them at large. I think it would be very difficult to only look at individuals. Obviously, we then get the problem of group labels and stereotypes being used for malicious purposes...

Isn't it true though that you can tell someone's race by their genome, skeletal structure, and other physical traits apart from skin color? Additionally, is it not also the case that race is generally agreed to result from geographic isolation, and that if that persisted long enough, speciation might occur?

Not stating this is reality. I'm genuinely curious what the science is on this.

No, unless with "race" you mean something other than the ordinary meaning of the word. You can find those differences and draw lines between populations, but they don't overlap very well with the folk interpretation of race.

The traditional concept of race (i.e. the one where "white", "black", "asian" and so on are well-defined terms) is scientifically untenable (fact) and socially harmful (opinion).

There are some narrow use-cases where the concept can be fruitfully applied. For example, some diseases are correlated with genetic characteristics themselves correlated with race. If you are a physician making a diagnosis, the patient's race is usually very apparent; you can and should make use of that information. But that's just keeping the English friar happy, correlation does not imply causation.

>We should not, because race is a useless concept.

This may be true, but I find it interesting that white people are the only ones who think this way.

Every other group has in-group racial bias, and actively organizes to that end.

> white people are the only ones who think this way

Not really - Asians are pretty quick to point out that lumping Japanese immigrants in with Indian immigrants makes for a pretty meaningless classification.

Are you from the UK by chance? That's the only place I've been that considers Indians "Asian". I've also never heard any of my Indian-American friends call themselves Asian, they're very proudly (sometimes obnoxiously so) "Indian".

And of course the Philippines, Japan, China, Korea etc all have very different cultures/customs. However in my experience at a fortune 500 my Korean and Filipino coworkers still organize an "Asian Culture Club", in fact one of them is the president of an Asian advocacy group that interacts with the city for events around Asian American And Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

All that's fine, I'm not bashing anyone, just saying that from what I've seen it's seemingly only white people who are averse to any kind of ethnic organization.

> race is a useless concept.

Tell that to the medical community, who routinely give different interventions based on race.

Exactly. I've made this point before in this forum, but there's no reason at all to believe that the distribution of interests, values, and strengths between different ethnic and cultural groups should be identical. The classical liberal idea that "all men are created equal" is a beautiful one, and should not be perverted to mean that everyone is literally equal to each other in every respect.

I think the point is that

are those differences just because of race

or they are made because of external factors due to race?

For example:

You're successful because of X race

You're successful because you were treated differently than if you had Y race

Neither statement is falsifiable, so it should be meaningless from a policymaking standpoint.

>The classical liberal idea that "all men are created equal" is a beautiful one

Is it even really "classical liberal"? I'm fairly certain it's religious in nature. If the sky daddy made us all 6,000 years ago then we are in fact all the same.

The problem arrises when science discovers that humans co-evolved over millions of years and that we are a hybrid of multiple species _with no single common ancestor_. Even "modern" humans have had geographic isolation for tens of thousands of years in very different climates/selective pressures.

Race is probably useless in that list. There’s definitely some credence to culture and values however.

I’d guess you’re not a baseball fan!

Nigerian immigrants to the US have significant rate of achievement compared to African American and they both would be classified under the "same race". I think "cultural" groupings would serve better.

I think I'm mostly surprised to see how many of the "White" scores are so low, and so far behind "Asians," after years of hearing that the test is biased towards white / Anglo / native-English speakers raised in Western culture.

I'm also reminded that I (like probably most people commenting on Hacker News) exist in a really small bubble in which everyone I closely associate with was in the top two bands (after going off to college, being recruited from those colleges for careers, and ending up in the same neighborhoods...).

I was surprised that Asians only make up 4.6% of the total students, where Whites are nearly 69%. I'm not sure that we can make too many observations about Asians when the sample is so low.

Might be interesting to see how those demographics compare in CA where Asians are 16.91% of the population. (https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/asian-popul...)

4.6% of a large number isn't low. There are 107,000 students in total. 4.6% would correspond to 5000.

That's still a lot of students.

Universities across American have been racially discriminating against Asians for decades. It's so bad that a case against Harvard has now been accepted by the Supreme Court (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...). There is a good chance that the case finally abolishes the longstanding practise of institutional racism against Asians, and any other race which might otherwise be granted admission in excess of their general population composition.

and any other race which might otherwise be granted admission in excess of their general population composition

Which seems to be, at least at Michigan according to the data submitted, only "mixed" kids. Which I would not have thought given how the narrative is generally pushed in this conversation. How could we have collectively missed that for so long? Or maybe it was only me who didn't realize how well kids in this "mixed" category seem to do relative their population percentage?

You'll notice the same thing if you look at arrest rates for white men or the percentage of people killed by police who are white men. That demographic cohort is over-represented in both. Asian males and women of all races are under-represented. Not exactly the common wisdom despite the data being widely available.

Shitloads of whites come from disadvantaged backgrounds and have terrible lives. This is part of why one party is able to capitalize so well on lazy and loose rhetoric from the other about race and inequality. "The fuck I had unfair advantages! They want special treatment because their skin's a different color, they can go to hell! I'm voting for the other guy!" (this is not an endorsement of that attitude, but an explanation—and, confounding matters, you get similar reactions from people who did have advantages but are either deceiving themselves or are idiots)

There was an episode on New York Times - The Daily, I believe it was "(6/24/22) One Elite High School's Struggle Over Admissions", in which one side of the debate argued that the over-representation of Asian's was actually an instance of white supremacy.

And what arguments did they use to support this point?

The test is biased toward people who study for it. Asian culture tends to demand more test prep so they do better.

calling this test biased is stupid. people who study hard score better. its the same with any test all over the world.

> after years of hearing that the test is biased towards white / Anglo / native-English speakers raised in Western culture.

Media bias/lies. It's similar for the GRE, many people coming in from China score extremely high on the English portion even though they do not speak English properly. I learned to stop listening to these divisive media outlets that have a clear agenda to tear down the fabric of society.

Is "divisive" really the most specific term, when only one group is targeted this way?

It has a lot to do with culture and expectations. And what you are willing to put your children through. One of my good friends is from Korea and told me about how awful it was to go to school all day, then be off for an hour or two, then go back to a private tutor until 9 or 10pm at night. Rinse and repeat. This is inhumane by American standards but apparently normal in Korea. That type of culture and mentality does not disappear when people immigrate to western countries.

Sure... but I went to a public high school, got a 1590, and did not spend day and night studying nor did my parents have any expectation of me to perform well in school. I was just really lucky to go public schools with teachers who cared and peers that cared.

It makes a huge difference.

You’re an outlier. That’s great. Most people are not scoring that high without a lot of effort, and a basic public school education, regardless of the quality, is not going to get them there. They will need additional resources within the home and outside of normal schooling.

None of my friends scored below 1400 and none had tutors. All public school.

The data in OP shows that your personal experience is quite different than the public school students of Michigan. That's great for you, but not the normal experience of most students.

This seems to say more about your friends than anything else.

1400 is 93rd percentile. The odds of, say, 7 random kids scoring above the 93rd percentile is pretty small. I bet you drew your friends from AP/honors classes, or from some nerdy/academic pursuit.

I don't know that my situation was exactly at that 1400 threshold, but I was all public schooled, basically all of my friends were from AP/honors classes, none of took SAT tutoring (that I ever heard about) and most of us scored in that range.

It seems (overwhelmingly?) common for ones high-school friends to be your classmates.

The data is stratified heavily by race and school district. Limit to <white and Indian within a zip code> and the odds are probably much, much higher.

Highschool students are not randomly distributed to schools across America. There are schools that look like war zones, and places where kids actually learn. Moving the kids to different schools isn’t a solution because it’s the kids that are the problem.

Also, "public school" doesn't mean anything in the US in terms of educational quality. Some public schools are better resourced with more blue blood attendees than any but the richest of private schools.

This is my point. Literacy rates in the US blow compared to other developed countries.

A lot of people forget about this point. Arbitrary municipal boundaries are set up all across the US to create pseudo-private schools that, while public, are really only accessible to people who can afford to live in the very pricy areas that make up those school district. I grew up in an affluent area and went to a private catholic high school. The public school I would have gone to had better average test scores and way more funding/resources than my school, and indeed the majority of the private schools in the area.

I don't know... I went to a very competitive public high school in an affluent suburb. In most of my friend groups (self-segregated based on taking honors and APs), most people got at least above a 1450 on the SAT or maybe 32 on the ACT. At the end of the day we were taking Calc II (AP Calculus BC) when the highest math on either exam is the very beginnings of trigonometry.

EDIT: Many did take the exam 2 or 3 times, until they got a score they were satisfied with.

We still partied, drank, played a fuck ton of video games, generally did stupid shit, normal teenager things. This was largely the case in neighboring schools as well (the Atlanta northern sprawl is very large).

I'm not saying we didn't have parental involvement; we absolutely did. They had the resources and investment in our education to push us along that path. Our school also had a lot of resources. But it wasn't prison.

I'm not sure if it was the parental involvement and their expectations or the resources and quality of education at our affluent school. Most likely both. Whatever it is, I think it's a travesty that it isn't the norm everywhere to have an opportunity for that kind of education. There is so much wasted potential in this country.

Schools and even individual classes in a school can skew "smart", probably for some combination of chance and socio-economic circumstances.

My (public) high school class was commented on from grade school as being remarkably bright. But about 3/4 the bright kids were lazy as fuck and got terrible grades (myself included—and I don't mean the try-hard version of terrible grades like "oh no I got one b-", I mean Cs and Ds not being uncommon)—but then killed on standardized tests, 95+ percentile, very certainly not due to application of remarkable effort or even trying all that hard.

I have another spin on it. Of those demographics, asians tend to be very recent migrants (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/09/asian-ameri...) and migrants tend to be very hard-working within the first generation of migration (https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2012/07/12/ten-way...). Some of this could be selection bias (those who choose to move are those who are motivated to seek a better life).

I did get a little confused from how we went from Asians doing well in Michigan means the PRC is going to dominate the engineering sector. There seems to be an implication that these are connected. Its my understanding that these demographic data would represent South, SE, and East Asia as part of the same demographic.

Also, his top observation: > In the top band there are many more males than females.

Seems like it could be within a margin of error (3 v 5%). Also, there are more males in the bottom band than females (18 vs 14%). This seems spurious at best.

> 2. The Asian kids are hitting the ceiling on this test. > 3. There are very few students from under-represented groups who score in the top band.

I also suspect that taking his next two observations together imply that he might have a bias against out-groups and in favor of his own in-group. Especially considering much of the topics in the comments section focus on the upcoming SCOTUS trial over affirmative action.

> I did get a little confused from how we went from Asians doing well in Michigan means the PRC is going to dominate the engineering sector. There seems to be an implication that these are connected. Its my understanding that these demographic data would represent South, SE, and East Asia as part of the same demographic.

No, I think his observations about Asians doing well on the SAT in Michigan is unrelated to his point about China. He's saying that since China generally gets high scores on international math tests, and they have a greater population, there's just going to be many more qualified STEM grads than in the US. It's a higher proportion of talent multiplied by a higher population.

This makes sense intuitively. But I'm unsure how reliable these international tests are. Is the test being given at an elite school in Shanghai or in a small rural village? Is it representative of all of China? Do higher scores translate to more innovation down the line? Are high scorers likely to also come up with creative ideas for solving problems? Lots of questions.

if it's any help, Gaokao is a much, much harder test than SAT, and there's only 1 test in a year, so an average Chinese (or Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese,... as they all have the same thing) in general would do much better than your average American in SAT

> Seems like it could be within a margin of error (3 v 5%).

There is no margin of error when your sample is the entire population.

There is if you are missing more than 10% and trying to make extrapolations. Also, there is variations between individuals between tests. You’d need to make multiple samples to reduce noise from the test itself.

So if you're worried about it, do the math. My napkin calc puts the margin at around +-0.3, enough to easily separate 3% from 5%.

So, you expect the exact same results next year? If the same students all retook the SAT with different questions would we get the exact same breakdown +/-0.3%? I doubt it. These data are for this specific measurement and must be tempered in their extrapolation into other areas. I don’t think you can declare them significant.

You must not believe any statistics if you think sampling 85% of a 110k population can't resolve a score like this to 1%. Your original question, which I have been addressing, was about generalization to the population (i.e. what the margin of error quantifies) not nebulous "other areas."

I would expect a re-test to have slightly higher averages overall because all the kids now have experience with the class of questions, whereas only some did the 1st time.

Not at all, I trust statistics a great deal. I don't have statistics on the reliability of the SAT nor how reproducible it is, so I have no way to know based on the numbers presented how noisy the distributions ought to be. You can imagine that some band of test-takers is on the bubble and can fall above or below the "top-tier" line on any given day. You are asserting that this is less than 1% of the population, I'd argue it's likely higher than that. But I don't believe I have the data to present either way.

To address the population; if the "population" you are referring to is only the seniors in Michigan on _that_ day then it's might be pretty accurate. Looks like the population of Michigan is around 10 million (20% of that is under 18), meaning that this would be extrapolated much more to address just the population of Michigan, not to mention what it means if we apply it to the entirety of the united states. Any population that we apply this to that isn't the sample audience at that specific time will incur some error.

At each of these higher levels of population abstractions we have orders of magnitude higher error margins, which would quickly dwarf the ppt difference between males and females in a single test.

This anecdote is really something

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2022/10/sat-score-distribution...

The Harvard university president has stated many times that admissions are weighted and if you are Asian, will have a much harder time getting accepted.

It seems racism is accepted in academia, when it affects a demographic you deem 'problematic'

The least conspiratorial explanation is the use of racial quotas.

As a NYC public school parent now with kids in college, who sees mono-white, mono-asian and mono-black school cultures (all 3 of which NYC unfortunately has lots of) as abhorrent, there is nothing wrong with not wanting a mono-culture in a community.

(Go ahead. Downvote. It does wonders to change my mind lol).

Sure, it's not ideal. Is the solution to have different standards for different groups based solely on skin color or self-identification?

It reasonably could be, if you are trying to undo systemic disadvantages that different groups have.

You have to make a conscious choice to accept some adjustments higher if the foundation is systematically unfair. It might feel unfair to the folks who benefit from systematic advantages early.

You're arguing that past discrimination justifies present discrimination, and that past discrimination is in fact solely or majorly responsible for present disparities in outcomes. I can't see a world in which these positions are provable in a meaningful manner and not devolve society into a bitter, recriminatory cesspit, especially when it means that some people will in fact be hurt by present discrimination.

Redlining is provable and had a clear outcome on income. It ended only very recently.

And yeah, fixing that is going to cost some folks. Good news, we could figure out who benefitted or even just tax the very wealthy to get it fixed.

Why is that abhorrent to you?

The real world is not a monoculture so why would you want your child to socialize in one?

A lot of the real world is a "monoculture". Just because a majority of people look similar doesn't mean they all share similar ideologies, experiences, and values necessarily. Race is merely a social construct, and the Asian category covers several unique nationalities and cultures. Black and white are similarly ludicrously diverse. And these are young adults who should be bright enough to seek out diverse experiences and places if it suits them. If Harvard really cared about not being a monoculture they would look at their legacy admissions.

"abhorrent" is much much stronger than "suboptimal for socialization skills".

Besides, every other country in the world gets to have its own cultural identity. The "real world" is very much a collection of monocultures. Only in America is it considered bad to have a cultural identity.

IF that is what harvard is doing why do they STRONGLY prefer black immigrants over descendants of slavery.

> The real world is not a monoculture

Here you use the term "monoculture." You appear to be using culture and race interchangeably. Clearly they are not the same. Are you referring to monoculture or monorace?

"Asian" isn't a culture. Hell, even "Chinese" isn't a culture. China recognizes 55 ethnic minority groups, plus the Han majority. I'm sure if you put one person from each group into a classroom, you might say "They're all Chinese. Monoculture!", but it couldn't be further from the truth.

Why? Why does skin color == culture, and why is "mono-culture" abhorrent?

Personally, I find treating people like trading cards and trying to "collect them all" is much more abhorrent.

I see this brought up a lot and it always makes me wonder - what is the "correct" number of black people who should be admitted to Harvard? Like if you removed any racial consideration, what would be the results?

The correct number of X group who should be admitted is the number of individuals in X group who meet the academic standard to be admitted. How about we stop giving those arbitrary buckets so much importance and treat everyone like individuals?

Yes, and I wonder what the racial composition of such a standard would be.

Take a look at the table in the linked post and you might get an idea. The real question is why are you so interested in these buckets? Why are you trying to impose them on the rest of us?

I don't find the table all that helpful. I don't know the exact numbers, but given the number of black kids in the country, and the limited number of seats at Harvard, couldn't you construct a class of nothing but black students from the top SAT bracket and still have to deny most of them?

As far as why I'm interested in these buckets - it's because this seems to be a very pressing matter of national concern - isn't there a supreme court case regarding this issue on the docket now?

> couldn't you construct a class of nothing but black students from the top SAT bracket and still have to deny most of them?

You could do that, but if we disregard race as a factor and use a completely unbiased approach (example: simply select the highest scores and roll a dice in case of a tie), it is easy to see what the distribution would look like based on that table.

This is the subject of a current litigation. Hopefully the Supreme Court comes through and puts an end to this clown show.

Why don't Asians just decline to self identify? Are admissions looking at names or something and saying "yup, this is an Asian"?

As someone with East Asian ancestry in North America, you quickly learn that hard work will only rarely help you find opportunities with institutions that have a huge demand of qualified applicants but not enough seats.

This includes universities, high-prestige schools like medical schools, and a lot of creative industries (mentorship opportunities and scholarships just aren't there for you). This is unfair, but it's difficult to discuss this openly non-Asian people due to a lot of skepticism about disadvantages.

But the nice thing is that the private sector truly doesn't care as much. So long as you can help make a company money, they will be eager to hire you. This includes FAAMG, Jane Street, and other companies - I personally know East Asian friends who had no difficulty working there, whereas others with similar or stronger work ethics faced a far more uphill battle getting into medical school. There is a lot of room for success at the most pragmatic and practical organizations, and there are plenty of other applicants for people doing do-good work that directly benefits society (hence the rejections despite hard work).

If you really still want to contribute, effective altruism via donations to effective charities is still an option, along with entrepreneurship for good via founding your own company.

Private sector is better but it isn't some meritocratic utopia. There is a lot of nepotism and elitism in the upper echelon.

I’ve got a friend applying to med schools, he’s a little older (late 20s vs early 20s) so he took the spray and pray approach and applied to 60 MD and DO schools. He said by and large he’s the only or one of ~3 non-minorities in any of the MD group interviews, additionally Asians aren’t well represented there either. DO group interviews on the other hand are mostly white/asain.

Do?

Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine. It's known as the alternative for med school rejects basically (not saying this is a fair or completely accurate characterization but that is the perception).

> Asians aren’t well represented there either

What does this mean? Does it mean proportionally compared to the US population or does it mean proportional to their test scores?

[1] has data on US med school matriculants for MD granting institutions. It seems to show that of the approximately 22k matriculants to US med school between 2018-2019 and 2021-2022 admissions cycles, 5k (4,687 at the lowest and 5,151 at the highest) are Asian Only. So Asian Only is roughly 21 to 22% of med school matriculants.

US census results from 2020 seem to say Asians make up 6% of the population [2]. I know this isn't perfect because we really care about Asian population from those in the med school application age range, but I'm not familiar enough with US census data to find it.

Unfortunately I can't find data for DO schools or for GPA and MCAT scores for admissions by race.

[1] https://www.aamc.org/media/6031/download?attachment

[2] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/improved-race...

The kid got accepted to UMass Amherst and Northeastern University. Those colleges are really highly-rated for CS, and Northeastern in particular has recently become really selective.

The college rejections are weird, yes, but I don’t feel bad for him

With life experience and age, you really appreciate the opportunities like UMass Amherst and Northeastern for CS. But if you're a high school senior, it's really common that you don't really realize that in the moment, and feel hugely demotivated or even end up depressed at the start of university.

A lot of these people spend hours a week studying for the SATs and courses with the dream and imagination of getting into an Ivy League. You could say it's a misplaced effort, that these kids should lower expectations, and that these people should be happy with the opportunities they have, and there's merit.

But in the moment, it's a huge blow to feel like hard work just won't pay off, and it certainly caused depression among a few people I knew. This can be mitigated by good mentorship and parenting, but not all people end up with good mentors, and parents who didn't experience the process might not understand it either.

> With life experience and age, you really appreciate the opportunities like UMass Amherst and Northeastern for CS

Unfortunately that point it’s a pain in the ass to go back.

UMass Amherst is where I hope my children want to go. It’s a prestigious school by all means, and it’s a beautiful campus-oriented life not too far from civilization. Plus in state tuition. I went to a prestigious private school and don’t think it’s really better than a flagship state school.

Yeah, an Eagle Scout who did debate and very well academically going to a pretty good public school for computer science isn't some travesty. I am a little surprised at some of the results but I guess admissions have become more competitive over the past decade

Those are decent schools, though I may be biased as they are my undergraduate and graduate schools respectively.

Getting something out of College is a lot of what you put into it. At Umass we had students who didn't go to class and did rather poorly. Many left. We had some who worked really hard and went on to Ivy league grad schools. Northeastern had the Coop program which was really useful for friends that went there undergrad to get work experience. Some of college is luck (who you end up meeting, if classes give you background on work. My CS Operating Systems class was invaluable for me in my first post grad school job)

Kind of useless in isolation. Who knows how competitive the CS classes are at the places they were rejected. I mean CS is probably the most competitive of any Major currently and they were rejected from arguably the top undergrad programs in the world. Out of state students are also at a disadvantage so that didn't help their case. Also seemed to lack any CS related extra curriculars, when they're applying against kids who won IOC's or have been building software since they were 12. Probably would have done fine applying to USC, Duke, JHU and other elite privates or in any other major.

That stood out to me too. For all the self-appointed power that higher education institutions have given themselves to balance the proverbial scales of justice, I wonder if they ever take the time to consider the moral hazards of their decision making.

Will the presidents, chancellors, board of governors, or deans of these institutions ever have to compete for these seats? Obviously no, and their own children will likely benefit in some form, whether it is legacy status or academic nepotism/networking, from their parents’ existing positions of power.

So on whom does the burden of balancing the scales, not in theory but in practice, fall? Not white students at the nation’s elite schools, whose enrollment numbers even after various forms of affirmative action have been implemented have remained steady. Not black, latino/a/x, or Native American students whose enrollment numbers have benefited from targeted recruitment. Not international students, whose full-tuition payments have ensured their enrollment numbers have only increased with the decline of public funding (in the case of public institutions) and budgetary restructuring (in the case of private institutions).

From a racial dimension, the primary group paying for higher education’s experiments in educational racial composition have primarily been Asian-American students, among whom there are prospective students (as we can see in the linked comment) with top-percentile scores in their respective areas of study, high-level achievement in non-academic pursuits, and a widely dispersed range of target schools.

For all the moral certainty that higher education likes to presume, they have a dumbfounding lack of self-awareness when it comes to the moral hazard of making others pay for the consequences of their self-appointed mission.

This is, of course, assuming they aren’t fully aware and satisfied with the results they’ve produced.

It is actually a fascinating study and I wonder why the results were not studied closer. If anything, the approach that it seemingly disadvantaged asian applicants and benefited black applicants had the opposite effect due to cultural norms, which only forced asian parents to, apparently, force their kids to study even harder.

Full disclosure. I am mostly done with affirmative action. Standardized testing all the way. It is not perfect, but its better than 'whose ancestors suffered the most recently'. Otherwise we will continue to see a steady degradation akin to students voting a chemistry out for tough grades ( recent news that is making rounds on social media ).

That comment is wild, and as such -- remember, don't believe everything you read on the internet. Who knows if this is accurate or not. Disinformation campaigns and anger-boosting campaigns (aimed at both sides of the ideological aisle) from all corners of the internet are very sophisticated these days.

I'm having trouble coming up with the right words to make my point. But, to me, this application says "my parents made me do a lot of shit" more than it says that this person is exceptional. What's this kid's resume if he's born in the hood to a single mom instead of a Boston suburb to an associate partner at IBM?

IMHO it's sour grapes from someone that tried to game the system but didn't get the prize they wanted.

>I'm having trouble coming up with the right words to make my point. But, to me, this application says "my parents made me do a lot of shit" more than it says that this person is exceptional. What's this kid's resume if he's born in the hood to a single mom instead of a Boston suburb to an associate partner at IBM?

Try: speculative, imaginary, and unsubstantiated by evidence. Stereotypical, if you’re feeling adventurous.

Yes, that's what we do when translating accomplishments to ability

Perhaps, but more germane here: it’s also being used by you to discredit real accomplishments with hypothetical ones.

I’m not discounting that you could be right, just that you could be right in a totally contrived scenario.

You're assuming your point by calling them "real accomplishments". But that's the whole debate. Is being an Eagle Scout a "real accomplishment" or is it a participation award? And if it's a participation award did the kid get it through his own initiative or because he was forced by his parents? The answer to that question is the whole debate.

And this is not a "totally contrived" scenario. The guy is posting his kid's resume on some blog post about SAT scores in another state. That's very strong evidence as to his involvement and importance he placed on college admissions.

Eagle Scout is the highest rank in American scouting, and is achieved by less than 5% of those who pursue it. Eagle Scouts include U.S. Presidents, Judges, Astronauts, Generals, and technology Founders. Those who achieve it and pursue a career in the military are advanced to a higher rank and higher payscale upon enlistment in all branches of the armed services.

https://www.baylorisr.org/wp-content/uploads/Boy-Scouts-Repo...

Yes, that's why this dad (probably) forced his kid to become an Eagle Scout. But it is not evidence that being an Eagle Scout is an accomplishment. Because it's really not. It's the ultimate box checking exercise. No individual step is something that a kid with a room temperature IQ couldn't do. It's simply sustaining a modest amount of effort for ~8 years.

If a kid does that of their own volition then it's evidence of something.

If a kid does it because their parents made them do it in order to put it on their college application then it's meaningless.

Fifth percentile in an optional activity is NOT the big number you think it is in the case of elite university admissions. For reference, being in the fifth percentile of all track participants or all debate participants doesn't rise to the level that would move the needle on admission to CMU CS or HM. Just making the Varsity team in either is already above the 50th percentile in many cases, and setting yourself apart for super elite college admissions requires being in the top percentile or so of that 50th percentile of Varsity participants.

Seriously. Let's compare to scouting, which starts young. Every year, 4.14 million students participate in track across all age groups. There are at most 9,516 D1 track and field scholarships. That's a maximum 0.2% (not 2%, 0.2%), often lower. Again, good enough for a D1 partial scholarship is often the "bar" for consideration of athletics in admissions beyond "participation item". And even then, it's not automatic admissions. It's just the bar you need to clear for them to care. To consider it as part of the package. You probably need something else, in addition to this and great scores.

And, to be clear, the difference between 5% ability and 1% ability is HUGE. The difference between 1% and 0.5% is again huge. In many activities, there's an exponential curve in terms of talent and effort. So we're not merely talking about a few percentage points, we're talking about a very qualitatively significant difference in kind.

The other issue with scouting in particular is that it's not competitive and the requirements are, honestly, mostly box checking. And the ones that aren't pure box checking are subjective and opaque.

Now, don't get me wrong. Scouting is a worthy endeavor and achieving Eagle Scout is RIGHTFULLY a crowning achievement for many youth! It's something to be proud of and which should be awarded!

But here, the sour grapes are not about good or even great schools. It's about admission to the absolutely most competitive departments at the absolutely most competitive schools. And in those cases, Eagle Scout just doesn't move the needle as much as people here assume. It's the minimum to even start taking scouting seriously as a resume item, not a needle mover.

Not the OP. Just want to add that it takes years of work to become an Eagle Scout. Usually at least two, but often three to five. Don't want to assume too much without clarification but feels a little uncharitable to imply that that level of effort is without value and/or not worthy of recognition.

Yes, it's a real accomplishment. It's also not the sort of accomplishment that moves the needle on elite admissions. There is no contradiction. The bar is higher than people think. CMU CS/HM don't have enough seats for everyone with good grades, good test scores, and an Eagle Scout-level accomplishment.

For reference, you probably have to be in the 0.2 percentile of track and field athletes (plus have a raving letter for your coach about your leadership of the team) in order for these types of departments at these types of schools to factor your athletic accomplishments into their decision making. But 5% of scouts make it to Eagle Scout. And going from fifth percentile in something to 0.2 percentile in something is... absolutely huge. In most endeavors, 5% is "show up, work hard, and care" while 0.2% is "be absolutely exceptional".

That doesn't mean that making Eagle Scout or doing well at regional track meets is a non-accomplishment. It just means that you're competing to be one of a few hundred or at most a few thousand in the entire ocean, not the pond or even the lake.

The kid got a big scholarship at a very excellent school. It's not like his effort was not rewarded. He just wasn't one of the 1K best in the country.

What's your point, anything you do that doesn't flow from some deep internal fire so powerful it overwhelms any external circumstance "doesn't count"?

My point is that "quality of parents" shouldn't be the way we pick the elite

Why not extend this to attractiveness, general health, enviromental factors like air pollution, gender, quality of local libraries, height etc., all likely influencing an individual's success in life?

Of course I don't think we should pick out elite based on these things either

No they should be picked for "ability", and it's all the same whether that "ability" was inculcated by good parenting or not.

The point is that two kids with equal ability can have dramatically different accomplishments based on things outside their control

It's a real shame that this guy posted his son's resume non-anonymously, but I have to agree.

Aside from grades and AP scores, it's a lot of "showing up" dressed up as accomplishment. JV track explains itself, the debate stuff is the equivalent of getting third place in one track event at one regional meet, and Eagle Scout is impressive but IMO doesn't show anything that doing well in school doesn't already show.

Everyone applying to CMU CS or Harvey Mudd has high GPAs, high standardized test scores, and lots of 4s and 5s on AP tests. So the extra curricular stuff really does matter, because there are way fewer seats than people with good grades and test scores. And in this applicant's case, the ECs just are not there.

The applicants who are setting themselves apart via debate are consistently doing well at the best national tournaments in the most demanding and competitive formats for years; not getting 3rd place in Congressional at one regional tournament. The ones setting themselves apart with track are participating in Varsity at least a few years, doing well at State, and a likely courting at least D2 athletic scholarships. The ones who are setting themselves apart via scouting are going way beyond the minimum requirements for Eagle Scout.

Also, Northeastern and Amherst have fantastic CS programs and getting into CS programs like those at Harvey Mudd or CMU is probably harder than getting into ivies these days.

I looked at some of those institutions SAT scores and his scores would have been very close to the median scores of them. IE he was just one application in a sea of very similar applications. Obviously he worked really hard and that is impressive, but clearly so did many other people.

Absolutely agree with your point, and I'll add onto it from experience.

> The ones setting themselves apart with track are participating in Varsity at least a few years, doing well at State, and a likely courting at least D2 athletic scholarships

Sports (especially track and field) don't set you apart at all as an applicant for unless you're good enough to make the college's varsity team. That's the sole metric highly selective schools are using to assess athletic ability unless you have some extenuating circumstance that makes your participation in the sport especially meaningful.

> Everyone applying to CMU CS or Harvey Mudd has high GPAs

I think his point was that any kid of any race other than Asian with identical stats would have been accepted.

> I think his point was that any kid of any race other than Asian with identical stats would have been accepted.

And my point is that this is not true.

His scores are near the median for those cohorts, and only a tiny fraction of students with those scores are admitted. Test scores are literally the only non-average thing on his resume for college applicants in general, and among CMU CS/HM CS they don't set him apart from anyone admitted or even tons of other people rejected.

Now, if he received an NDT bid and/or made it deep into nationals? Placed in State and had D1 track scholarship potential? Special distinctions from the Scouts? Sure. Those might raise my eyebrow. But he has average scores _for the cohort_ and nothing else of note on his resume other than participation in a few after-school activities.

Schools like CMU CS and HM can demand both his scores and also excellence in other dimensions. They have tons of applicants with NDT bids in policy/PF/LD and similar or better scores. They have tons of applicants who are on Varsity track teams, even do well at state, and have similar or better scores.

Even more importantly, they have tons of applicants who do really interesting and unique things outside of the official college prep extra-curricular stuff -- run apps/websites with tons of users, OSS packages with lots of stars, various types of civil society involvement, and so on. Those students also have similar or better scores.

And they turn down a lot of those applicants who have the same scores as this student but are also top percentile at their extra-curricular activities.

Good test scores aren't enough to get into CMU CS/HM, and that's all this student has. It's not racism. It's merit.

Again, this discussion is about a real person and it's a shame his dad entered his resume into this discourse non-anonymously.

But the narrative is just wrong. The bar is absurdly higher than this dad thinks it is. Period.

I think most people don't appreciate the extent to which extracurriculars, athletics and personal factors affect elite college admissions. Especially for things like computer science programs. I was in that bucket too, believing that it was mostly SAT scores that mattered in making admissions decisions, and the other factors being largely supplemental. Reading the expert witness report in the Harvard case ( https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/diverse-education/file... ) opened my eyes in that respect.

Maybe it should be different--for example, I'm at a loss to understand how athletics might predict success in computer science programs (grit, maybe?)--and there's probably a reasonable argument that the four-factor (academic, extracurricular, athletic, personal) model creates more systematic biases than it avoids. But what you're saying is pretty accurate.

> for example, I'm at a loss to understand how athletics might predict success in computer science programs (grit, maybe?)

Grit, leadership, team work, the crucible of (a different type of) competition, tactics and strategy, etc. Again, not sports in general, but specifically being good enough at a sport to get a D1 or D2 scholarship, requires significant discipline and inter-personal skills.

(I also think tech folks under-appreciate that physical movement is a type of intelligence that might just correlate well with certain types of high-stress/low-information decision making... at least as well as IQ correlates with similar types of things... but that's an evidence-free conjecture on my part.)

> there's probably a reasonable argument that the four-factor (academic, extracurricular, athletic, personal) model creates more systematic biases than it avoids. But what you're saying is pretty accurate.

That's definitely true -- eg a student from outside the college-going class or without enough economic capital wouldn't be able to participate in niche sports and become elite by virtue of big fish/small point dynamics. And their parent wouldn't have friends who could give advice or open doors. But, do note that the student in the referenced paragraph is not a victim of that type of systematic bias. His father, a partner at IBM, is exactly the type of person who is positioned to provide those unfair advantages.

(edit: my posts above should be referring to TOC not NDT.)

> game the system

Getting good grades is "gaming the system" now?

Of course? I'm struggling to imagine how someone could have gone through an American high school and think otherwise.

But either way that's just one part of the resume. It's all the extra curriculars that look like blatant box checking without any real accomplishment.

> But, to me, this application says...

To me, it says that a kid had ambition, intelligence, determination, and conscientiousness, but to each his own.

He applied for Computer Science, so I looked at the University of Michigan's Engineering School SAT scores, and he was just a bit over the median score for the engineering school. Since admissions at these schools is slammed with applications its not unreasonable that he just didn't get in because he was in an ocean of similar applications.

Would it not be fair to look at the median score for different racial groups, since we know that many universities do in fact discriminate on the basis of race in admissions?

In Michigan publicly funded institutions are no longer allowed to use race as a factor.

Same in California, but I nonetheless heard a dean from UC Berkeley talking about how they "push the envelope" in terms of legality. It's easy to accomplish via a "holistic assessments".

What if he just checked White vs Asian American. Do colleges even check that?

Probably lots of fraud the other direction. E.g.: A white person claiming to be Native American.

Colleges definitely look to the other way a bit to hit metrics / numbers, but what about the other direction?

The kids should really also apply to international schools.

I'm a current sophomore at Harvard, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. But those ECs and stats really aren't impressive enough to even qualify him for admission at any Ivy or T20.

UIUC and UT Austin I agree, little surprising, but again, the CS program is very competitive, and it doesn't surprise me he didn't get in. Stats are irrelevant for Asians - if you have a 1500+ you're considered "good", you can't gain anything by having a 1580 vs. a 1520 for example. It really does come down to your essays, extracurriculars, and overall 'package'. Which I genuinely believe is the most fair way to accept folks into college.

Is it 1500 for everybody or 1500 for Asians, 1400 for whites, 1300 for African Americans and so on. Just curious?

"Omitted variable bias" is what is going on here and is a statistical term that everyone needs to understand because it is causing so many race issues in America. The feature that is missing in this simplistic model of intelligence is cultural values. I am definitely not a racist but I am a "culturalist". Some people have a set of personal values (culture) that express themselves as doing better or worse in standardized tests and in life in general. If you were to add in the average weekly time studying variable into this model I can guarantee you the race effect would get washed away. Anyone who has a basic understanding of statistics know about omitted variable bias and it is frustrating to me that society breaks down these issues into simplistic race terms because they are too dumb to do any kind of root cause analysis deeper than the color of your skin.

OK, assuming you are correct, what's the root cause of difference in time spent studying? If the primary cause is less study time spent by black and brown students, how do you address that?

Cultural values. Cultural values are more complex than genetic make up. Part of it comes from generations of values that lead to success of previous generations. An overlooked reason I believe there is such a statistical discrepancy of African Americans is that slavery effectively cut the cultural heritage of values from earlier generations of Africans. Slavery broke up families and with that erased generations of successful values that were passed down.

>Cultural values are more complex than genetic make up.

In the same way that a hologram has greater volume than the 2D film that produced it.

"Culture" is the collective expression of shared preferences.

Country A has a culture of coffee consumption, because the people there like coffee, because the population possesses an above average expression of gene CR22423 subtly changes how caffeine and dopamine interact leading to increased pleasure seeking.

Then some undergrad comes along and makes the point that Country A has a "coffee culture" because it's "more widely available" and "climate factors", when in reality it's the gene driving the behavior that lead to the increased demand which lead to increased cultivation which self-reenforced because Tribe A was hyped up on coffee so they conquered Tribe B and bred their women further spreading the _coffee preference gene_ so that the modern population is now largely descended from the coffee addicts.

It's just a simplified example, but the point is that culture is just an abstraction layer running on top of a collective set of shared preferences

If what you say is true, then the only solution is to build a better performing culture for African Americans.

While this is obviously a controversial position, the solution can take multiple forms. One can say that even reverse discrimination is an effort to form a different cultural norms in a younger generation by elevating their economic position

Why can't Asian and Black cultural values be different? Asians are over-represented in academic pursuits. Blacks are over-represented in athletic, musical, acting, and fashion pursuits. The only surprising thing to me is the lack of Black leaders and owners in enterprises with majority Black talent. It means less of a Black person's economic output is kept within the Black community.

Why is this extreme "nurture over nature", "blank-slate" mentality not applied to any other disparities in biological expression save for the brain/intellect?

Do we all think that, say, the massive racial disparities in 100m Olympic sprinters, or NBA basketball, is due to "practice" "culture" and "work ethic" primarily rather than genetic/biological factors of physical ability?

Are say a group of 5'8" Asians going to have the same potential ability to play top level basketball compared to a group of 6'8" Blacks? Does practicing change this dominant variable? Is the differentials in height due to "culture" or "biology"?

Is it not common sense that people have a natural range of potential ability for certain things that are biologically constrained, and practice and effort can shift ones ability within this range but not change the biological constraint to where this range lies?

Why does evolution and natural selection stop at the neck? Is the brain not also a part of the body, made up of the same organic material?

And finally, is "work ethic", "culture", "attitude", "affinity for intellectual focus/interests" 0% biological/heritable? Is that not also partially genetic along with the natural potential? Not that this is definitive for one individual to another, but in aggregate group averages bear this out statistically over long periods of time in different locations.

Let's take a step back and just think about the obvious here: how many "hackers" here on hacker news can say they did fairly well on the SAT and standardized tests, above average or well above average, and didn't prepare much at all? Whose parents didn't put much effort at all into pushing them to study for it? I'm sure quite a bit. Is that not an example of natural ability, nature, dominating over nurture? Not that they couldn't have done a bit better if they had, but that their cognitive potential to do well on these tests, to a significant degree was biologically determined? To deny this is similar to the myth that everyone can pull themselves up by the bootstraps. No, often one's inheritance, monetary or biological, have some say in this.

After reading the top comment in the OP; boy, I do not envy Asian high school students trying to get into a college these days! You already work your ass off getting top grades and crafting the most stellar of resumes, and it doesn't matter that your peers worked half as hard with half the achievements: you're going to get rejected by many top universities simply because of your race, a factor that was completely out of your control.

That has to be so frustrating.

If society has normalized folks with 1/8 Native American heritage claiming the legal benefits of that status, then as an Asian I'd be doing my geneology to see if I can justify claiming any other race on my own college admissions.

That student was not rejected because of their race. They were rejected on merit.

Their grades and test scores were median among admitted cohorts at the "reject" institutions, and there's nothing else of note to an elite admissions office on their resume.

I'll say it again. Again, from the perspective of the schools on that list, his kid's grades and test scores are average, not exceptional.

The student meets the minimum bar for consideration, but so do 10X of other students competing for X seats.

The father is suffering snowflake syndrome. Participating in off-season JV track or placing third at one local high school debate tournament are not the sort of accomplishments that elite institutions care about, and nor should they, lest people demonstrating truly elite merit in those endeavors while also receiving top grades and test scores have their very real accomplishments cheapened.

So, the applicant is an average student and in every other way not notable. What would an elite university admit? Again, from their perspective, his academics aren't elite. They are average.

Ironically, the comment ostensibly arguing for merit is actually just saying "my kid should get more credit than is due and if he doesn't it's because of racism".

It's just testing and rewarding people who studied for the stupid test, that's all. It also rewards conformist personalities.

It reminds me of undergrad calculus, where you had to memorize how to do dozens of types of integrals. You're not supposed to ask "what does dx mean?" Asking those types of questions will give you a worse grade.

I remember back when I was supposed to "study" for this thing. I asked "if it's an aptitude test, how does it make sense to study for it?" No one could give me a good answer so I decided it was stupid and never studied for it. I thought it was disgusting that so many people were paying for services, books, etc. to specifically prepare for the test even though the whole pretense of the thing is that you're not supposed to be able to do that.

On the other hand, I loved a lot of the AP stuff (chemistry, physics, calculus) since you were rewarded based on understanding the actual content of a subject, a system that made sense. But it's a good thing I didn't think to ask what "dx" meant back then, otherwise I would have probably gotten a worse score.

Schools do teach what "dx" is. But it is important for upper level engineering and physics to know "dozens" of integrals.

My point was that if you aren't willing to memorize stuff before you understand it, you often do worse in school.

has the SAT gotten way easier on recent decades or have students just gotten that much smarter or better at taking it, and universities gotten a lot stricter about accepting students with lower scores?

one of the commenters in the linked article mentions that their son, with an SAT score of over 1500, was rejected by a number of normal state universities such as the University of Texas at Austin (a great school but not like an ivy league exclusive school)

in 1995 I went to university of Texas, they had a policy of automatically accepting anyone with a score over 1200 without any additional requirements. many of my peers were accepted with far lower scores. Now, according to collegesomply.com, the average SAT score for students at University of Texas is 1350

I haven't really been following the evolution of this test, but have scores risen dramatically over the last could decades, and why?

Sat scoring was “recentered” in 1996, causing a significant jump in average score.

I don't have a good answer to your question here are some results from a quick google search:

https://blog.prepscholar.com/average-sat-scores-over-time

I think a sometimes-easy-to-overlook factor is that many state flagship institutions like UT-Austin have a strong bias or preference for in-state applicants. Famously, I remember being told that out-of-state applicants to my state's big, somewhat well-known, public university needed better credentials than highly selective private institutions required/recommended . . .

This is a good answer.

UT Austin in particular used to automatically accept anyone whose GPA was in the top 10% of their school for in state applicants, regardless of that school's performance. It was meant to give people from different calibers of schools from across the state a fair chance, since school quality would inevitably affect test scores.

Now, it looks like the top 6%: https://admissions.utexas.edu/apply/decisions

It matters to what degree you are applying too. The average SAT score will vary by school (I think the School of Engineering is the highest and the College of Natural Sciences the second) and by major. UT has a top 10 CS program and will only accept a certain number of out-of-state residents. We would have to know the academic achievements of the out-of-state residents applying to the CS program to say if anything funny is going on here.

Kids are applying to more schools today than in the past (pre Covid study) https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/09/a-majority-... It could be with the higher applications that just means the 1200 score naturally migrated higher, they really could not accept the same number of students at that score.

I had something like that commenter's score in the 1980's and was offered scholarships for four years for public universities in Texas and both gave me a private pre high school graduation tour so maybe the other criteria for this particular student (extracurricular activities, school scores, rank) were not comparable or that is just a random internet troll (disqus is particularly easy to spam based on other websites I've seen use it or maybe that's just the ubiquity of disqus, although it would not load for me:) ).

IIRC scores actually went down for a while, as some schools/states were mandating or heavily encouraging students to take the SAT. That made the test-taking pool less self-selective, so it now includes more students who are less prepared for the test.

A related issue, that people are slowly starting to realize, is that there are big variations in life expectancy between races. Asians live 10 years longer than blacks on average (and about 7 years longer than whites) [0]. Also, women live about 4 years longer than men.

These differences may not seem big relative to total lifespan, but they are enormous relative to retirement span, and that has huge implications for the fairness of defined-benefit programs like Social Security. If we take 65 as the retirement age, then the average black male gets about 8 years of retirement, while the average Asian female gets 23 years.

That creates grotesque unfairness in Social Security payouts. The Asian female and black male might contribute the exact same amount to the program over the course of their careers, but the former will receive about 3x more in payouts than the latter.

I doubt our society is capable of repairing the grievous unfairness of life expectancy gaps. But we should at least not add racist insult to racial injury by using schemes like Social Security.

[0] : https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/life-expectanc....

The other side of this is that the average Asian also has longer to accrue wealth. So when we're looking at racial equity data, and Asians end up wealthier, at least part of the reason is that they just live longer. It's not all structural racism, as some propose.

The fact of the matter is that different groups are different. For example, Asian parents are notorious for making their kids study six hours a night. African American parents are notorious for not making their kids study six hours a night. These two groups are never going to end up in the same place. And you have to let that happen because we all have the freedom to choose how we live our lives. We cannot, and should not, force values onto any people.

> Asian high-school students spend significantly more time studying and doing homework, Ramey found, than any other ethnic or racial group. Averaged over the entire year (including summer vacations), the average, non-Hispanic white student spends 5.5 hours per week studying and doing homework, while Hispanic and non-Hispanic black students spend even less. In contrast, the average Asian student spends a whopping 13 hours per week. Parents' educational levels do not explain the differences, Ramey said, as these become even greater if the sample is limited to children who have at least one parent with a college degree. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110505103345.h...)

Stats taken from: https://www.bls.gov/tus/

This is why I encourage all my south asian friends/relatives to not identify as asian when applying to jobs/universities. Even mixed race is better, hispanic and african american makes things easy mode - I get interviews guaranteed wherever I want.

This is almost completely explained by income.

https://statisticalatlas.com/state/Michigan/Household-Income

That just moves the bubble - what explains income?

There’s actually a very interesting 1995 research paper that studied the relationship between SAT scores and race and family income.

In every single money bracket white and Asian students outperformed URMs. Perhaps most surprisingly white students whose parents made less than 10k a year performed roughly equal to black students whose parents earned between 60-70k a year.

These numbers are almost 30 years old but id doubt there’s been some massive change. It’s reductive and not accurate at all to boil it down to just socioeconomics. There’s obviously more going on but there’s sadly very little research going on that is not heavily ideologically motivated (on both sides).

Correlation != causation. It could be that people with genes for high intelligence tend to be in high demand on the job market and make a lot of money, and also tend to pass those genes on to their children, which gives them an advantage SAT

What exactly do you mean when you say it is 'explained by' income?

edit: added '?'

The ethnic groups with the highest incomes are the ones with the highest SAT scores.

So there is a correlation. What does this explain, and how?

I believe this correlation between wealth and SAT scores explains the distribution of SAT scores by ethnicity.

Breakdowns of SAT scores by race and parental income exist. Why don’t you check them out?

I wonder how much of this is a self fulfilling prophecy due to racially weighted admission. i.e Many Asian parents are painfully aware of how much the deck is stacked against their kid, and therefore allocates extra time and resources accordingly to overcome the difficulties.

>1. In the top band there are many more males than females.

Is 5% of boys scoring in the top band, compared to 3% of girls, really "many more males"? (Yes, I know that means that 60% more boys than girls scored in the top band. But the percentages are what matter here.)

EDIT: From a comment:

>Also, in the bottom band, there are many more males than females.

>It seems to be yet another confirmation of the greater male variability hypothesis

I feel foolish for not mentioning this. I think 18% of boys in the bottom band versus 14% of girls is "many more males" only in the sense that the 5% versus 3% figure above is, but taken together, yes, this is more evidence of male scores being the same on average but having a wider distribution.

>or is it considered a fact by now?

It sure wasn't in 2005! (For others' benefit, the commenter is alluding to what happened to Larry Summers as Harvard president. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_b...>)

EDIT 2: The blogger himself addressed it back in 2005! <https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2005/02/summers-lynching.html>

It comes down to culture, society, and policies.

The parents in my community growing up were poor. But all our parents worked with us every day to push us to success. We had a neighborhood working together every summer, parents involved in the school board, etc.

I’ve see that slip over time. Particularly, the idea parents can make enough to spend time. But also a general attitude.

One thing during the George Floyd riots I heard was “it’s horrible what happened to Floyd. But the real issue is that George Floyd should have been a foreman in a factory. He should have had a family to go home to, a reason not to be doing drugs and children to care for. The tragedy is those opportunities don’t exist”

It comes down to parents being involved. Often they can’t or they’re distracted due to stress. Government can’t help directly, it’s about providing the opportunity for parents to nurture and support. It’s also that parents need to potentially pick their focus. I personally took a 50% pay cut, moved to a better area and made other sacrifices to ensure my children can have the best opportunity. I could afford that, all Americans should be afforded that. It starts with more good jobs.

Asian parents send their kids to extracurricular learning centers like Kumon while everyone else lets their kids obsess over Tik Tok dance videos. Not surprised by the result.

SAT Math is just like Leetcode. It's recognizing problem patterns and strategies for solving them in a timely fashion. To be successful you have to practice, practice, practice.

I find it very surprising that the term "Asian" lives in this twilight zone where nobody is sure if it includes India, the second largest country in the region.

For the SAT distribution tables, the term Asian includes Indians I assume, while the following table from the German professor does not break out India. smh.

The categories come from the US government, I believe. The same reason why the data doesn't include non binary genders, for instance.

India is clearly in Asia. So yes, by definition Indians are Asians.

So is europe. It's all the same continent.

At least in the US, Indians aren't considered Asians.

They absolutely are for demographic purposes, even though the typical American will think of East Asians if you say something like "there's an Asian boy in my class"

generally in the USA, w.r.t. demographics, people from India are classified as 'caucasian'

source: professional demographics practice in the USA using Federal Census data

You are wrong. 'Caucasian' is used to classify white Europeans.

The US Government defines 'Asians' as 'having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.'[0]

[0] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/note/US/RHI625221#:~:....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_classification_of_India...

lots of anecdata there -- the division in the US politically between former slave-owning states and those opposed to slavery, and their vacillating political power, definitely adds to the extreme cases listed here. Plenty of classification and census work counts the majority of people with Indian Sub-continent history as "caucasian" . Those with the reverse axe to grind, spying racists everywhere, will emphasize the unjust and archaic examples. In the demography work I saw with my own eyes, people from the Indian Sub-continent were counted as "caucasian" without question.

not interested in partial arguments that can be misquoted by extremists on either side of this.

The US Census Bureau have been categorising Indians as Asians for more than 20 years. I'm not interested in any racial discussion, just stating how they are classified as.

Hard to call this surprising. The surprising thing is and always will be the answer to why and how to respond.

The race distributions are interesting, sure. But the full report has some better data points for drawing conclusions. Of particular interest to me was the income/parental education differential (obvious increases, but interesting to see by how much) but especially a category for results by when the test was taken - weekend vs in-school. Students who took the test on a weekend were nearly 300pts higher, and the "met requirements" percentage nearly doubled.

It would be particularly interesting to see this parsed out by the same economic and education related parameters in order to see how much an effect just having a smaller quieter "separate" test environment helps a student's score.

Isn't that likely driven by a selection bias? "Everyone in school A takes the test in-school" vs "School B does not offer the test, so a subset of school B's students take the test on a weekend."

From that alone, I'd expect school B's test results to substantially outperform school A's results.

The test was mandatory for all HS students to take, but I do think there is an element of selection bias. Those who took the test on the weekend may have been more invested in the result. They certainly dedicated at least an extra weekend's worth of time.

It was "mandatory", but still had only an 85% compliance rate. I would bet that almost none of the most academically inclined students were in that 15%.

Male variability hypothesis confirmed once again.

The question is whether it's biological (I doubt it) or cultural.

It's probably biological.

A sizeable majority of our ancestors are women. Only a few men get to have kids. This creates a selective pressure for males to have higher variance traits. If it's winner take all, higher variance strategies pay off better.

I believe the evidence that's used in support of the biological viewpoint is that we see similar distributions patterns in other species - aka - sexual dimorphism.

It's very likely biological.

Here's the thing - the variability of males on average isn't a socially constructed thing. What is socially constructed is what society values generally speaking - or what it values over other things. We value smart people and for good reason. But it's a social construct that we hold Nobel Prize winners over James Beard Award winners, for example.

Progressives should stop fighting science and play on subjective grounds (like what society values and why) where they can actually win.

Fantastic observation, I hadn't noticed it until now. Thank you.

I have no experience in data interpretation, so please be forgiving. But isn't it the case that:

    60,000 white students * 0.04 = 2,400
     4,000 Asian students * 0.25 = 1,000

These cohorts seem fairly similarly-sized, to my thinking. If you're thinking of either curriculum, culture, or parental involvement (I don't think it matters which), it seems to me that looking at this at the level of percentages is not the best heuristic for thinking about which students are prepared to attend top universities. There just aren't that many students who get whatever it is they need to achieve that.

Is it reasonable to assume that an African American with SAT score in the top band(s) would probably get accepted to a better college than Michigan? There are loads of kids here with pretty low scores, so clearly this is not representative of the highest performing students in the US, nor that the race breakdowns are representative of the highest performing students in each race.

This only seems to give us information about the admittance criteria of Michigan. Without understanding the distributions of other institutions (especially the more competitive ones), it seems hard to draw stronger conclusions.

For CS, getting into Michigan is incredibly competitive. They are tied (at #11) with places like CIT in CS and way above a lot of ivies and elite technical schools.

Michigan CS is like Carnegie Mellon CS -- getting into the school for non-CS is waaay easier than getting into the school with the intention to major in CS, and the filter starts at admissions. Michigan is closer to an ivy than a "state school" for CS.

My question was specific to African Americans, and not specific to CS.

CS isn't the only field where Michigan is an excellent and highly selective school.

Some state flagships serve as "come all" institutions -- any decent student gets admitted. States like Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota, and I think still Wisconsin come to mind. Michigan doesn't work like that. Lots of their undergraduate programs are extremely competitive, and therefore admissions overall is competitive. Saying "better school than Michigan" is like saying "better school than Carnegie Mellon". The acceptance rate is around 20%. It's not a safety school, for anyone, particularly with an intended major in much of STEM. It's a highly selective institution. Which changes the nature of your question.

Thinking of Michigan as a "median school" is not an accurate mental model. If you want a "median school" use Michigan State instead.

I never said it is, but I do think there are MORE competitive places out there. People seem to be commenting on assumption that this is representative of races at large, I don't think you can draw that conclusion. You could infer that African American's are basically never in the top band, but you could also think that the ones that are get accepted at the most competitive places. Likewise you could say Asians are MUCH more likely to be in the top band, but you could also say that the most competitive colleges are less likely to accept them, so more likely they go to Michigan.

I'm not saying either is true, just commenting that this data on its own is too incomplete to draw the kinds of conclusions people are assuming here.

Do you have to declare a major when you apply? Can't you be ambivalent about it? Or apply for a different major and then switch to CS after you get in?

> Do you have to declare a major when you apply?

Sometimes. I'm not sure about Michigan's policy here. I would assume no, or at least "ambivalent" is okay.

> Or apply for a different major and then switch to CS after you get in?

MANY try, few succeed. Not worth the risk if you intend for CS to be your primary major. If you want a double major with CS as the secondary of the two, maybe.

You have to apply to the program (just went through this with my own son this year). If you don't get accepted into your preferred major, you can apply to a different major and then switch, but applicants are warned that that's harder than just getting accepted into the program in the first place.

I think you misunderstand the article. "The state of Michigan required all public HS seniors to take the SAT last year". That's not related to universities or applying to them. It is the data for all high school seniors in the state of Michigan.

Yep you're correct.

This post isn't about UMich. This is about ALL public high school seniors, who were compelled to take the SAT by the state of Michigan in May 2022.

4. By looking at the math score distribution (see full report) one can estimate how many students in each group are well-prepared enough to complete a rigorous STEM major -- e.g., pass calculus-based physics.

Doubt it. Calculus based physics at a university level is a tough SOB. Vectors, dels, series, operators, etc. SAT math is kid's play by comparison, the conceptual leap is huge. Yeah, it is predictive to some degree, but high level physics will tax even top scorers. Maybe on the old SATs it was more predictive but the SATs have gotten easier with lower ceiling.

If we look at not only academic, but also sports, i.e. ski, ice skating, soccer, tennis, swimming, ... etc., among competitive teams in middle schools or high schools, the number of Asian students are bigger than what one would expect from their population. You can even see this in winter Olympic:

1. https://www.thepostathens.com/article/2022/03/asian-american...

>bigger than what one would expect

What would one "expect", and why?

In any case, the numbers we find are not "bigger" in raw terms (or per capita) in many sports than say, Blacks. How about Olympic sprinting, or NBA basketball?

If work ethic is the primary determinant, why are they so absent from these sports at high levels?

Interesting data set. Sure seems like there are some systemic factors at play here that are putting some groups ahead and some groups behind. (Or, in the case of young men, both at the same time).

"PRC... K12 performance on international tests like PISA is similar to what is found in the table above for the Asian category"

Not true. Only a very few select schools China are allowed to participate in the PISA test. It would be like only allowing the top private Boston and Stanford high-schools to join.

>Only a very few select schools China are allowed to participate in the PISA test.

Correct.

Americans do well on PISA compared to their ethnic relatives.<https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco...> Asian Americans do better than Asians; whites do better than Europeans; Latinos do better than Latin Americans; and blacks do better than Africans.

As this post about Michigan students shows, Hispanics and especially blacks' scores drag the US average down. Both white and Asian Americans score higher than Canada (and white+Asian is essentially Canada's racial makeup), and higher than New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Norway, and the UK; Estonia is below US Asians but above white Americans. Norway is by far the wealthiest Nordic state but its average is only two points higher than the US national average, despite not having a demographic that is 13% of the population and scores 85 points below the white American average.

This chart focuses on race, but I'd be curious to see the breakdown based on school. In my previous experience as a substitute teacher, different schools are not anywhere near equal in their instruction or academic quality, and there is a high correlation between race and school in my area.

Comments on that blog post are a mix of thinly veiled racism and political insults, mixed with parents posting their entire children's resume online complaining that they didn't get into <elite school goes here>.

I wonder how Indians rank in this. Are they grouped in with Asians here?

In my experience, all the Indians I went to school with did very well in the SAT, but perhaps not as well as the Chinese-Americans and Taiwanese-Americans.

> 1. In the top band there are many more males than females.

Except that's not what the data says. It shows females as being more grouped in the center whereas males are more spread out.

Deepmind is going to outperform everyone. Its not going to matter one bit who is scoring more on "calculus based physics".

Admittedly, I haven't been paying attention, but since when does MI do SAT? We all took the ACT when I was in school.

Overlay these statistics with multi-parent family percentages and suddenly it becomes even more clear what is going on.

cant stand the angles here - try this one

American scored 1540 SAT while smoking marijuana at 17 years old; refused to do the repetitive, command-and-control lessons of public school and dropped out; threw middle finger at prestige universities with their publicity, worked at a nightclub in a bad part of town, sought out emerging artists and built art shows and music events

SAT Scores are competition, not pure intelligence.. tons of competitive ego comments with racial implications here .. Extreme intelligence is a wild ride and not predictable.. some sort of "mental health" problems are common right alongside the ability

current USA culture is drowning in toxic social problems around sex and family .. no children means no more of your race.. race people stand up and say "we are winning" .. more toxic side effects are inevitable..

Good lord, the comments on the parent link immediately devolved into dreck.

PRC === Peoples Republic of China.

Wasn’t intuitive to me and I had to google it.

That is because Asians designed the SAT to further Asian supremacy and it is heavily biased towards Asian culture.

But that seems what Harvard believes and as such stacks the odds against Asian applicants.

That PISA chart was an egregiously bad layout.

puts head in the sand

if anybody doubts that the future isn't in the US (or rather, the west), this is the evidence. China has both the brains and brawn to bully every other nation (provided it doesn't collapse under its own weight)

If so... what do you do about it, then? If Chinese people are just smarter than everybody else and smarter wins (both just theories, but if they're true)... we can't just will ourselves into getting smarter.

Individually we can't get smarter all of a sudden, but as a society we can provide better platform for the smartest of us to contribute: bring (quasi)meritocracy back; do away with all these AA nonsense. Not very feasible with the political climate right now (or just American culture in general - `nerd` is such a weird insult). We can't win them on quantity, but at least we don't lose outright. And no I don't think Chinese are just smarter, they just try gigahard because you gotta compete with the other babillion Chinese peers somehow, and there's no AA to save you

It's disheartening and infuriating to see even after the last president is gone the racism against LatinX people still exists. Not just at the border. This is probably a good time to abolish racist standardized system.

How did you get THAT from the linked post?

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