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Comment by nervousvarun | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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.

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.

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.

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