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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

This is why I'm so skeptical that de-prioritizing SAT/ACT scores will make college admissions more equitable.

Yes, the SAT favors rich applicants who can afford to pay for (and spend time on) test prep. Unfortunately, rich applicants can also pay to boost whatever other signal is used by the admissions committee. Extracurriculars? Those violin lessons didn't pay for themselves! High School internship? Consider which families have the connections to find those opportunities. And now research papers...

I actually think standardized test scores are considerably less subject to bias than anything else!

IMO, the only actual solution is to specifically consider socioeconomic background as part of the admissions process. But everyone hates that because it feels unfair. And it is unfair, but that's the point—any system we come up with will be unfair, so we have to find the least-unfair one.

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That's cause the goal is not equity but to make the process more opaque, so they can admit legacy kids without issue, and enough students from various demographic groups at a volume they desire without anyone pointing to any embarrassing measures like SAT scores showing discrimination.

Legacy people have higher SAT admissions scores at Harvard at least https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-survey/academi...

Yeah, it's not legacy, but rather a carte blanche to admit people of whatever ethnicity the administrators deem in need of more "equity".

Can't have those pesky, studious asians suing the schools, after all.

I don't understand what you're arguing. The legacy admits' SAT scores were higher than non-legacy. The Asians suing Harvard argued the legacy admissions were used as a backdoor for white people specifically. It has nothing to do with equity.

Kids of rich people are on average smarter, because intelligence is heritable.

That doesn't change the incentive for the admissions committee to find a way to admit the left tail of legacies without criticism.

If they want to take all the money that's on the table, they have to admit all the kids whose parents they want to incentivize to donate, regardless of their test scores.

I did some math on this with statistics that are available. I was as conservative as I could be. I assumed an SAT score std dev of 240. I used the legacy score of 1523 as the mean. I assumed a normal curve. I took the highest bound on percent of white admitted students who are legacy: 35% (in reality at Harvard it's probably a lot less). I used Harvard's current student body stats:{1984 admitted students and ~40% white}.

I found that only 2% of the incoming class would be theoretical white people who were admitted with legacy status and who fell to the left of 1 std dev in SAT score. If these people exist, I don't know what other circumstances might exist for them. Their SAT score is still high by US standards and they may be athletes or overlap with some other category for all I know or something else.

I think the below average legacy admit trope is actually deployed as a racial stereotype of white students that the SFFA, who are Asian, are using to gain access to Harvard. I don't think the hypothetical upper bound of 2% which is ~40 students is meaningful.

Now there is one issue with this which is that we don't have legacy student SAT scores broken down by race. But other sources suggest legacy students are disproportionately white. This is not true of the student body generally.

This is a calculation on the distribution of admitted students. It isn't relevant to my point that elite colleges stand to benefit from admitting more legacies regardless of test performance.

If anything, if Harvard only admits high-performing legacies today, it only bolsters the case for how much more legacies they could admit with a more opaque, "holistic" process.

Which, mind you, is something similar to other things they've done historically.

ya that's valid. I don't think there is a clean answer about who should be admitted but my attempt was just to show that the dumb legacy trope doesn't seem to be completely factual. But yes, children of Harvard alumni probably have an advantage. But then again the legacies may be talented students.

> Yes, the SAT favors rich applicants who can afford to pay for (and spend time on) test prep.

"Rich" is the wrong word here and really distorts the comparison. A typical in-person SAT prep class is $1,000-$1,500. This is a one-time expense you can plan for over a number of years. That's affordable to the vast majority of the population in a country where 87% of teenagers own an iPhone: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/10/11/teen-survey-iphone-owne.... As for time, only 20% of teenagers work while enrolled in school. Only about 1/3 have a job during the summer. Yes, there are kids who are homeless, etc. Spending $1,000 and a couple of days a week in the summer going to prep classes might not be achievable for kids in the very bottom rung of society. But it's quite approachable for kids in the lower middle class and up. It's not only the "rich."

By contrast, a lot of college resume boosters are only available to the rich and well-connected. Lower middle class probably don't know anyone who works at a human-rights non-profit who can help secure an interesting internship. Most parents don't have the time to get their kids involved at the Olympic level in some obscure sport. As a matter of geography, many of the things that stand out to admissions officers at elite universities don't really exist in middle America; and the things that do, such as involvement in high-school football or FFA, are looked down upon.

There's also a matter of cultural capital. Pretty much everyone knows you should study for tests. That's a no-brainer, and accessible to all cultural groups. But figuring out what will pique the interest of some WASP in Harvard's admissions office takes special cultural knowledge. I was joking with my wife that our daughter's diversity essay should be about going to Bangladesh and getting in touch with her fundamentalist Muslim roots (my dad's grandfather was an imam). But we hang around enough rich white people to know that's not what they mean by "diversity." Instead, it would be far more helpful for her to go back to Bangladesh and fight against Bangladeshis to legalize abortion. That's what they mean by diversity.

> I was joking with my wife that our daughter's diversity essay should be about going to Bangladesh and getting in touch with her fundamentalist Muslim roots (my dad's grandfather was an imam).

...that actually sounds to me like it could be a great diversity essay, I don't think I agree with your interpretation.

Compared to fighting for legalizing abortion in Bangladesh though? Getting in touch with her roots is great and all, culture heritage yadda yadda. But the fight for women's rights will really engage the essay readers and make them want to have her in their school.

I’m sure an essay on how arranged marriage and Islamic gender roles are great for women would go over well with the white ladies in the admissions office.

> But figuring out what will pique the interest of some WASP in Harvard's admissions office takes special cultural knowledge.

Given that the Ivy League is only 33% non-Jewish white (compared to ~55% of the US population), and Jewish students have a ~12x better chance than non-Jewish whites at Ivy League admission [1], and are 7x over-represented compared to their US population, while whites are 0.56x under-represented, maybe it's not WASP cultural knowledge you should be targeting.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31306230

Almost 80% of the tenured faculty at Harvard is white. You can be sure that the key donors who actually run everything are even whiter.

Saying that a $1000 SAT prep class is affordable is arguably true but also greatly undersells the case for the SAT. There's never been a time in history with more free, high-quality test prep resources. They're just as easy to come by as TV and video games. The only issue is motivation. And you can't do anything for an unmotivated kid that's socioeconomically fair. You can spend a lot of money to try and motivate them, or spend a lot of money to have others do things for them that they can take credit for, but those are things that only the wealthier can do.

With the SAT, motivated kids are on the most level playing field in the history of civilization. And that's the best you can do without making society much more redistributive, which no one in this college admissions conversation is offering as an option anyway.

Frankly, I think hating on the SAT is either woefully misguided, or a cynical ploy to appear good without being good. And in the case of elite college admissions committees, I lean towards the latter. Am I supposed to believe that the people running these elite institutions can't think of simple stuff like this? They probably thought it all through before announcing anything to us common folk.

I agree - I did a fair amount of SAT tutoring, and there's no question in my mind that preparation improves performance. However, all preparation is basically the same - take a practice test and see what you need to improve, then learn like a dozen tricks (on a math question you should maybe try plugging in the answers and calculating rather than doing algebra, get a good night's sleep, bring two pencils, ...).

These resources are essentially free - there's not much that an in-person class teaches that isn't available in a test-prep book from the local library.

Now, you need to know the book exists, go to the library, check out that book, read it, and do the exercises. Having a parent pay for classes dramatically lowers that bar (they'll get you out of bed and into a tutoring classroom on a sunny summer Saturday), but, unlike virtually everything else on a resume, money can't actually buy you that much of an advantage on the materials available.

It seems to me that a good standardized test score is one of the only things that someone with a lot of motivation and talent, but very few resources, can use to distinguish themselves.

> It seems to me that a good standardized test score is one of the only things that someone with a lot of motivation and talent, but very few resources, can use to distinguish themselves.

That's the way poor immigrant Asian kids and rural whites did it a generation ago. Nowadays, CRT activists are trying to get "holistic" criterions to be used by admission committee. [0] You guessed it, they also argue that the SAT should be de-emphasized.

[0] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-harberson-asian-...

There is nothing about CRT activists in the link you posted, and if anything the "tag" criteria seem to favour children of alumni and people from well-connected, wealthy backgrounds.

> rich applicants can also pay to boost whatever other signal

This applies to all signals. "It will be gamed. No exceptions."

If you care about being equitable, there is no way to fix the elite university system. There are by definition only a few elite universities and they can only admit a small fraction of the population. Even if it were a lottery it'd still exclude the vast majority of people.

I feel like a lot of the over-the-top "wokeness" coming out of places like Yale is a case of "they doth protest too much." The vanguard institutions of an inherently discriminatory elitist system of conferred nobility are trying to deflect from this by blathering about diversity. The nobles are lecturing us about how woke they are in the hope of distracting us from the fact that we are not and probably never can be nobility.

The only real solution is to make that system obsolete. A person should be hired on the basis of their ability to do the job well. Nothing else. No degrees. No name dropping. No elitism based on what region of the country you're from or where you went to school. Just ability.

Colleges would only be able to justify their existence (and cost) by arguing that they are good places to learn and hone one's abilities. This would not only be more equitable but might allow people to get into the workforce without a writ of indenture in the form of a giant student loan to repay.

Reasonable standards + lottery selections is far less gameable. And it has the right incentives, as it pressures rich folks to develop more high-quality universities.

The problem is you cannot trust those who run the lottery, or the exams. People will cheat to get in, and they can be quite creative:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53316895

> A person should be hired on the basis of their ability to do the job well.

And how do you do that? The reason education is considered is because it's a signal of who can do the job well.

I can talk to someone for 20 minutes and know if they can be a good engineer on our projects. I don't need secondary signals.

I'm willing to bet that anyone who knows any area well can do the same thing. A construction worker can probably talk to someone for 20 minutes and tell if they can work on a construction site.

It does mean that bureaucrats who don't actually know an area can't hire people for that area, but they've never been good at that.

For qualified interviewers secondary signals are only useful at the initial filtering stage of deciding who to interview. For that I've found that some mix of (has gone to any college | has worked in the field | has side projects or hobby projects in the field) combined with just describing the job and asking them if they could do it is good enough. Then a quick 20 minute call determines if they're worth talking to more. Then a longer call with some questions and involving other team members, then maybe a test project and/or reference checks if possible.

That would require for you to be a well-rounded person that hasn’t optimized for only one facet of the job (e.g. money, technical skill, etc.) — at that point might as well be an entrepreneur.

It would also require that your interviewees are not comprised of psychos willing to take whatever measure necessary to get what they want (i.e. play the game/talk the talk) — which usually does not happen when a lot of money or power is being offered.

Maybe we can ask that employers make standardized tests for a proper can kicked down the road situation?

Interestingly that has been illegal since 1971: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

> High School internship? Which families have the connections necessary to find those opportunities?

Less connections than being able to get to and from a non-paying internship.

The good news is that test prep seems to have a very small effect: https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/Briggs_Theeffe...

There are a number of papers making related claims. The typical conclusion is: test prep helps, but paying for test prep is only marginally better than self study.

For some strange reason they are often summarized as "test prep had no effect".

The context is often "Can someone buy themselves into a better college by paying for test prep?"

But yes. If only because of the time constraints of the test (and it's more than that), sitting down and taking the SAT cold would be really hard for most people without prior exposure to similar tests. Heck, I'm pretty sure I couldn't today. I'm guessing I would do pretty well on verbal but too much of the math would be way too far in the past. And I wouldn't have time to derive formulae even if I remembered enough first principles to do so.

Yeah. And the context often assumes that dollars are expensive, minutes are cheap, and knowledge is free.

Test prep certainly helps. Knowing that test prep helps is key knowledge that is suppressed by these studies. Having the time to engage in test prep is often a luxury. Having the skill and discipline to do effective test prep is a lot to ask.

> Having the skill and discipline to do effective test prep is a lot to ask.

This is part of what colleges are selecting for.

Everything I've seen suggests that, once you get beyond familiarizing yourself with the basic form of the test which you can do with a test prep book from the library, you get into pretty diminishing returns relative to free/almost free resources.

Of course, heaving learned the material in the first place and doing a modicum of test prep so the test isn't a wholly unfamiliar thing is still important but it's probably fair to say that the SAT is far less gameable by spending money than many things.

Isn't this a good thing. Yes - rich folks can pay for prep. But at least the not so rich folks know "what" to pay for and can try to plan for it early on. As much as I hate standardized tests, I hate opaque arbitrary subjective decision making by random gatekeepers with vested interests and biases.

SAT/ACT difficulty ceiling is too low. 10% applicants scored higher than 1350, which is around 1350/1600 = 81%. Should made it so only less than 1% applicants scored higher than 80%.

Why is that too low? It seems like 250 points and 20% of the questions is plenty of room to distinguish the good from the excellent. Even the most elite universities don't need to distinguish between the top 0.1% and the top 0.5%.

10% of applicants getting the top marks 1600/1600 - which happens on other tests! - would indicate a problem.

It's been a long time since I've known someone involved with admissions at a top school. But my understanding was that not only were quantitative academic scores only part of the process, but by aand large they didn't really use SATs to fine tune admission decisions at the very top of the scale. They used SATs to set an academic floor and, while higher was better, that was only one of the factors in play at that point.

My ideal test would be something like JEE Mains where getting 200 out of 300 means you are top of 99.4% applicants.

Except as I wrote earlier, most top schools in the US don't care about discriminating using standardized tests to that degree. They want to apply a reasonable filter and then move on to other aspects of the application. One may disagree with that approach but pretty much no top school in the US wants to admit solely (or maybe even primarily) on the basis of a standardized test score.

This was my thought. Should be very difficult to score high, with score as close to IQ as possible (100=1000). We'll see how many people get a 1600 at that point.

I imagine that will raise uncomfortable questions about the achievement gap, as removing the cap will make the gap even more stark.

> the SAT favors rich applicants who can afford to pay for (and spend time on) test prep.

Its not just rich, it favors boys across all economic classes. I think one of the ideas was that de-prioritizing SAT/ACT will get more women into stem.

Women already represent almost 60% of incoming freshmen[1]. Do we really need to further discourage boys from going to college?

[1] https://feed.georgetown.edu/access-affordability/women-incre...

Everyone wants the system that is least unfair to their group.

The fact that some rich people literally went to prison for paying someone to take their kid’s SAT illustrates there are limits to much scores can be improved even with coaching.

I think that says more about the work ethic of unethical rich people's children than it does about the efficacy of coaching.

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