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I come from a poor Asian immigrant family, and this SAT shit seems wild. My parents always told me that America is an easy country to succeed in. Just do decently in school, ace the SAT, and boom full ride to a upper middle class life, no matter the background.

Its proven pretty true so far.

Not sure if America an easier country to succeed in, but I do believe it's a RICH country (with a high GDP per capita), i.e. it can afford to fund more colleges, imho, which means the competition is less.

Not just colleges, but colleges with prestige, there are a LOT of American college at every prestige level. The supply is rather high.

I am really impressed at the Land grant college schemes, for example. Really funneled a lot of money into the creation of colleges all over the country, not just in the populous cities.

This is what puzzles me. What is the intent of the SAT, is it to assess aptitude for something? Is that something the desire to achieve good grades? Is it intelligence? Is it the aptitude to fire guns in a tank? For sure if you have a test that tests something, then you assign outcomes based on that assessment, then anyone has the opportunity to understand what is being assessed and practice until they are good, but what does that tell you?

I don't doubt there's a correlation between some aptitude that measures propensity for success and SAT score, but I'm still struggling to see how that benefits the poor or the migrants in general? In truth, it benefits a narrow section that "fit the mould" that is expected by success on a SAT; that is, members of the notional outgroup that do the SAT in the expected way can benefit, those that don't still fall by the wayside.

There are very many intelligent people that for whatever reason - cultural, bad parenting, poor education - still fall to achieve this mark of success. Is that acceptable? I think there's at least scope for saying that maybe a SAT is not the optimal strategy for finding all those that would benefit most from higher education. I've no idea what is, but there seems to be some very strong opinions here that don't seem particularly intent on seeing the bigger picture.

the point of standardized tests, is from what I understand, getting some sort of "objective" ranking, not for the purpose of intelligence per se, but to have a number so that when there is a cutoff, no one complains because everyone had (ceteris paribas) had an equal chance of getting in that cut-off, if they had worked hard enough.

In countries like India, the test like JEE are really absurd, because the competition is just that tough. Just any sort of question that fits in the syllabus is thrown in, because what else can you do?

In countries like the US, where things are a bit less stressed, they can try to attempt to perhaps gain some secondary data, by testing reasoning or what not.

but in the end, it's just a way to rank "fairly" to create cut-off, to look too deeply into it is not worth it, that's the job for your regular school education.

> but in the end, it's just a way to rank "fairly" to create cut-off, to look too deeply into it is not worth it, that's the job for your regular school education.

Except, presumably, when there are debates about how the tests benefit or not one particular cohort?

Do they really? As compared to any other system?

Tests seem to be the cheapest, timely (OCR-marked tests can be marked quickly) and most equitable (in comparative terms, not absolute terms) way to gauge people when you have a lot of them.

Any other methods increases cost and time, and introduces subjectivity, which creates issues of its own.

It's supposed to test a combination of intelligence and work ethic, and it does an OK job at that compared to everything else while being the hardest thing for established and/or wealthy students to game.

> I'm still struggling to see how that benefits the poor or the migrants in general

Maybe there can be a better way, but today the options are SAT or no SAT. How can a smart, poor student who goes to a bad high school (e.g. my dad fleeing Iran) stand out other than the SAT?

I don't know what your definition for "ace" is, but I did pretty well. That was my peak. Ever since has been dealing with barrier after barrier, which often seem actively hostile. I suppose that some would chalk my failure up to laziness, but everyone that I've seen overcome those barriers had access to mentors, contacts, connections, and opportunities - resources that don't come my way. Too black, too short, too gay, too quiet, too whiny, too weird. Maybe I just I trip people's gut alarms?

Granted, most of my peers who received a full ride seem to be doing fine. For millennials, I guess your parents gave decent advice. When I look around today, though, I feel less like a one-off loser than someone at the vanguard of a socioeconomic reality where even coming out of an education with no debt weight isn't a guarantee of a clean and unencumbered launch. Increasingly, superficialities - affinity, attractivenes, imminence - are the criteria. Which means that playing by the old rules, going forward, is foolish.

I sometimes wonder where I'd be, with my dark skin (et al.) and high scores, in a country that cared less about the former and more about the latter. But, here, socially, I don't know what I'd have to do to beat out an Asian or white candidate.

> You simply CAN'T provide the same resource to all of them, some of them will have to vie for a lower-ranked resource.

It depends what the "resource" is. If it's the mix of prestige and the individualized attention of highly impressive scholars that you get at elite colleges, then of course not. If it's simply high-quality educational content plus some average-quality tutoring, that's a scalable resource that could be provided to many more people at very low cost.

I get the gist of your comment, but isn't prestige kind of the point (at least partially)?

If education was the point, you don't even need to spend money for cheap local community colleges, you can get a very good education from MOOCs like Coursera (I am doing one right now, in fact), edX, heck youtube even.

But the whole point is that an organization is staking their prestige against your qualification. There wouldn't be a barrier to entry in the first place for the MOOCs, so the point wouldn't even arise.

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I know the HN commenter base prides itself of favoring "experience" over "qualifications", but let's be honest here.

When they are both starting from fresh, a "traditionally qualified" person would have access to more opportunities, because the barriers are lower, which is what parents are aiming for, and the more prestigious the qualifying authority, the lower the barrier.

You've articulated this very well. It's something I also have for years believed as a non-Asian person that has become a "conceptual framework" (my words...probably inadequate) to better understand Asian co-workers now and co-students back in my school days (to unfortunately generalize here). For me at least it really does explain a lot of the cultural differences that lead to lazy western stereotypes.

So many examples of casually thrown around of borderline racist-ish terminology/dog whistles..."tiger parents", "hard working"...all the "model minority" stuff.

It really is a population density issue...which leads to resource scarcity...as a westerner all you have to do is interact personally with someone from India or China where you have millions of people competing for a seat at a university and it becomes pretty clear how you get the "Asian work ethic".

This happens in the US too though. We have about 10% as many people, so for undergrads, it’s really just ~ one more level of applicant filtering than we have in the US.

My roommate in undergrad (State university) many decades ago was an Indian guy. The whole "asian work ethic" stereotype: Driven, hard working and brilliant. It dawned on me really early on that there were probably 20 million people his age in India and out of them all, he was one of the (relative) handful to pass all the gatekeepers and come study in the USA. Whereas I had a mediocre GPA and SAT score and basically out of laziness applied to my home State's university only and got in because of my address. Super early and instructive lesson on white (and American) privilege.

That's part of it, but as an Asian American immigrant myself, the stereotypes aren't really far off. "Tiger parents" is an American characterization of how Asian families are generally structured: parents (who have knowledge and life experience) dictate to kids (who lack both). Dating and relationships are discouraged (freeing up huge bandwidth for studying) while marriage is expected (heading off the tendency for extended adolescence). "Hard working" is a byproduct of being not that far removed from subsistence agriculture. "Finding yourself" is discouraged. "Carrying out your role" is encouraged.

These are cultural adaptations to an environment that's very different from America. My dad grew up in a Bangladeshi village, where people who didn't work literally didn't eat, and the vocational choices for 99% of people were "subsistence farmer." I don't think the words "fair" or "unfair" were ever uttered in my house. (And it drives me nuts when my American-born kids say that.) In America, these cultural traits become positively adaptive, because most of the competition isn't trying as hard. It boggles my mind how many Americans don't study for the SATs, but do have iPhones.

How does one study for the SAT, would you say, and what impact do you believe that studying has?

The SAT assumes a baseline vocabulary and familiarity with basic logic, which a lot of kids don't meet now that so many people take the test. My score went up by 120 points from my first practice test in 8th grade to the real thing in 11th grade, but some of that was just covering the ground on the expected high school math and vocabulary.

I tend to agree that studying and practicing for the SAT has a material impact, but most people on your side of the issue dispute that.

As someone who is (I think) on rayiner's side more or less, my impression of the evidence is that the SAT and similar tests (even IQ tests) can be practiced for to an extent, and scores can be improved, but only up to a "natural ceiling". So, while it should be possible for a while to improve everyone's scores on the SAT by providing test prep, you shouldn't expect everyone to be able to score near the upper limit on the SAT, just higher than they would be without test prep. Test prep has diminishing returns (unless that test prep is effectively cheating because the test questions and answers have been leaked) because the upper limit of a person's score is limited by their natural potential. The end state for the SAT, assuming the test isn't changed, is to produce a distribution more or less like a bell curve, but with a mean higher than before widespread test prep (and possibly some groups disproportionately improving compared to other groups, but not necessarily reaching the exact same mean as the other groups).

I'm not in favor of eliminating the SAT. I don't necessarily believe that SAT prep is materially impactful (I think it improves scores, but not, like, up a tier of selectivity). But all of the SAT improvement factors available to well-off families certainly do materially improve scores; those improvements include not just SAT prep, but also taking the test multiple times, having your results tracked by family and being forced to take the test multiple times, and disability accommodations, which are rampantly abused.

Low SES families are not taking the SAT on a level playing field with high SES families.

I would do a very very selective 1st round, eg a college with an intake of 1000 would admit 10 people who are special in some way, so you can get that kid that is head and shoulders above everyone else.

For the other 990 spots, you make a minimum bar of achievement (lots of As, high score, whatever) and put everyone who meets it in a lottery.

As I replied to another comment, lottery doesn't achieve what (Asian) people really want; an attempt to control destiny, some sort of idealized version of fairness and justice.

A test allows them to (seemingly) achieve that.

It's one of those things where people kid themselves that it was all them. To some degree it's a useful fiction, we can't be going about being all gloomy about our prospects.

But it also creates a heck of a lot of stress. What your parents think of you, how they talk about you to their friends, is going to depend on this test. On top of it all, you're not even really learning anything, you need to spend the time learning the test.

isn't a (limited) exam stress a worthy tradeoff compared to life-time stress from uncertainty of sustenance?

Because that's what Asian parents would say, stress a bit now, be sure of an income for a lifetime.

obviously, I am not going to discount that stress does not scale well and that for children, who do not have the maturity to deal with it all, exam stress and peer pressure could lead to devasting outcomes...

but asian parents, who have long since forgotten their one-time exam stresses, but face daily stresses from inflation etc, would argue that it's worth it in the end, since they would be comparing themselves to their old classmates who didn't make the cut and are worse-off than them.

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The exam themselves to tend to be absurdist, but when the seats are limited, and "fairness" is still required... asking candidates to do a special dance might be the only alternative left.

Yes, that is exactly what they say. I've heard it many times since I am one of those kids.

But they don't really think about how to deal with the fallout if things don't go well. I mean sure, tell the kid it's important to do well, but don't put everything on passing the test. I've never heard any strategy for what to do in case it doesn't go well. You'll destroy the kid's confidence and possibly his friendships too if you make it about your worth as a person.

Because there is no safety net otherwise.

also, wages (and respect) for employees are already limited, and the lower down the "totem" pole you are the worse it gets. parents don't want to imagine such a scenario, even if they have moved to the US where despite everything, things are still much better, minimum wage wise.

The lottery system would be bad for the image of the school, who probably want to be seen as meticulous pickers of talent. Though I wouldn't be shocked if there were some lottery mechanics being applied by school admins behind the scenes

"a standardized test is the only fair way"

It depends on who writes the tests and who the tests are written for.

There's a long and shameful history of standardized tests being written to benefit certain groups over others, or to stigmatize certain groups.

Just because a test is standardized doesn't make it fair.

Most such standardized tests, atleast now-a-days, are objective-MCQ type questions that feature heavily on certain core stem subjects as Maths, Science etc.

This is partially to allow examiners to create a bank of questions that can be rotated around easily, and also to create easily markable exams that can be OCR-ed automatically and don't require manual markers.

(I think the SAT English essay is an outlier, in most countries these sorts of subjective questions are simply not a part of standardized test, at least for competitive tests like University Entry)

I think it's hard to argue an MCQ marginalizes anyone.

"You simply CAN'T provide the same resource to all of them, some of them will have to vie for a lower-ranked resource."

Why not just distribute those resources via lottery? Why not actually just split resources evenly across the population? There are good practical reasons not to do this, but they are, fundamentally, ideological (eg, we might feel it is inefficient to spend resources on someone which may not provide as much productivity as someone else). It serves nothing to pretend these things are inevitable.

Different people have different skill sets.

It makes sense to evenly distribute resources in elementary schools, but that’s not what is being’s discussed here.

You could give me the same violin lessons as a virtuouso, and stick a functionally-illiterate Michelin-starred chef in my favorite calculus series, but doing so would be a complete waste of everyone’s time.

"doing so would be a complete waste of everyone’s time"

I simply don't believe this. Playing violin is virtuous even if you aren't a virtuoso and knowing about calculus is virtuous even if you're a Michelin starred chef. Its certainly true that the situation you describes may not be an _efficient_ distribution of resources if all you care about is productivity, but there are other ways to think.

> Why not just distribute those resources via lottery

It comes back to the concept of "fairness"; or rather, something you can control for, something you can work hard and strive for.

Race/Gender/Ethnicity/Location/Wealth etc. are all lottery variables already, people was something that is not a lottery.