Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

Middle class people always get the shaft with these sorts of things. There’s too many of them not to! My sister was the high school valedictorian and had a 99.97 high school average. She didn’t get into Harvard - there’s 5000 valedictorians every year. She went to a great school and life went on well.

Personally, I don’t really care that there’s a magical club for rich kids. If it wasn’t Harvard, it would be something else. I do think it would be better to just have different admissions slots and just have an auditable lottery. That way as a society we can move in from tiger moms forcing their kids into Cello, squash, or whatever the hot credential is this year.

View on HN

Did she have a near perfect SAT? Highschool grades and val/sal matter a lot less then ranking in a more standard way against everyone (speaking as someone who was waitlisted at 2 ivies). Personaly, I think SAT score makes a ton of sense to rank on, and we should do away with the other non-measurable aspects or stop blocking people from getting in because you're saving spots for legacies or kids of donors (or mediocre kids of presidents/VPs as we've seen).

Yeah, a standardized test that can be prepared for in short order via expensive tutors is absolutely a great way to rank applicants, you’re right on the money, which is great because money money money.

Compared to the old way[0 - but reversed] it's the best we have.

[0]https://tenor.com/view/family-guy-racist-racism-funny-gif-99...

Compared to hiring a coach who builds the perfect portfolio of extracurricular activities for the kid, for $10k+/year per year of high school.

At least poor people actually have some chance when it comes to standardized testing.

I had a friend with a life coach in high school and he was absolutely devastated when he was only accepted to state school. He also hated the extracurriculars he had to endure.

Criticizing the SAT as being something you can prepare for with “expensive tutors” is old-money WASP bullshit. The test-prep centers in New York City are full of poor Chinese and Vietnamese kids: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/magazine/asian-test-prep-.... It’s not that hard in a major city in the US for a family to scrounge up $1,000 or $2,000 one-time per kid.

What’s expensive is the kind of extracurriculars that Ivy League schools look at when test scores are deemphasized. The kids in Chinatown don’t live next door to anyone who can get them an internship at an impressive non-profit or NGO, or near college professors who can help them get published. The parents working at a Chinese restaurant can’t invest the time it takes to get a kid to be world class in some instrument or sport.

> The parents working at a Chinese restaurant can’t invest the time it takes to get a kid to be world class in some instrument or sport.

Plus those are explicitly peacocking, in the sense of being a burden on the rest of your life while having very little chance of being useful to you, other than as a flex to get into an elite college. Very very few people make a living of any kind in sports or in music.

Having been that Chinese restaurant kid myself I can promise you it would have been an extraordinarily expensive way to get an education, in comparison to just studying the same old academic books.

There are plenty of people on HN who grew up in poverty and did well enough on standardized tests through hard study to get into good schools. Why repeat false political propaganda when it's so easily caught?

What I don't understand is: if this is a standardized national test, isn't school supposed to prepare their students for it?

Every time SAT is mentioned it sounds like it's completely separated from US schooling.

Knowledge is relatively limited. A big part of it is the mechanics of the test. There’s a pattern to the questions. AP tests are similar - a teacher who worked as a grader gives his or her students a massive edge.

The norm in school is a grade based on number correct. SAT is a composite score with different weights and treatment of answers. When I took it, an incorrect answer deducted points while a blank answer was neutral.

When I was in school, the good students got 1280-1450, and the prep classes would yield 40-100 points in most cases. It’s an optimization exercise. If Johnny can’t read, Kaplan isn’t gonna save him.

SAT is even worse for ranking as a lot of parents can't afford or arrange for their kids to go to prep classes.

Most schools now offer free prep classes, and every school library (and public library) has more study materials than you could ever need.

Much SAT prep is free. The study materials are ubiquitous.

The SAT is also incredibly easy. I got a 1200/1600 when I was in the 6th grade while going to a inner city school. I wasn't exactly doing SAT prep then.

high school and public libraries have ton of _absolutely_free_ materials for SAT prep, this is really lame excuse.

it is not the lack of money that is holding the kids, it is lack of willpower to push yourself to top 10%/1%/0.1%.

It is hard work and not every kid can do it, considering all the leisure alternatives they got

Money==High SAT is silly meme that only lazy parents perpetuate. If money could give high SAT then there would be no need in Legacy Admissions in the first place! (Why need legacy backdoor, if you can hire tutor to get top 0.1% score?)

Implication here is that poor kids should need willpower, personal initiative, and self-discipline as teenagers, but that rich kids shouldn’t.

also not true, rich kids also have willpower, discipline and initiative.

Not every rich kid is like Don Trump Jr!!!! A lot of them are quite capable (esp the ones who make it to ivies)

You can't improve that much on the SAT. Anyone can buy the online test prep courses and study them. They aren't going to turn a knuckle dragger into a genius, they're just going to maximize an individual within their band and remove the penalties for lack of familiarity with the test context.

My prep classes in high school were worth about 200 pts. _Massive_ difference when applying to elite schools.

Hard disagree.

Ranking off SAT scores alone would “maintain racial inequity”: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sat-math-scores-mirror-an...

Admissions departments at schools like Harvard are not naive and are very familiar with probably the top 500 public high schools across the country, and another 100-200 top private schools, which ones grade inflate, how their academic rigor compares, etc.

Ever notice how it's a small set of phenotypes among dogs that are chosen as high level working dogs, e.g. police dogs?

Some dogs are highly intelligent and readily trained and some dogs aren't. You can guess by looking at their phenotype, i.e. breed, although not every dog of a preferred phenotype is capable.

Someone may be gifted at dancing. Someone may be gifted at singing. Someone may be gifted at hunting.

Why do we insist academic pursuits are equally available to everyone if we only throw enough resources at them?

Any selective program, music, athletics, military has a minimum entry level they're willing to accept. They know you can't turn a random person into an elite musician, athlete, or soldier.

Why does academia have to pretend that academic talent is evenly and randomly dispersed?

Because our assessments of the outcomes of different phenotypes have been hopelessly polluted by 16th - 19th theories, often based on the Bible, that have caused people to unleash untold and unrelenting violence on people with naturally servile phenotypes for dozens of generations.

That being said, slavery and colonialism are clearly dysgenic. Slavery kills the brave, the strong, the honest, the compassionate, those who can see the bigger picture, those with self-respect, those who love their parents, those who love their children, those who will not be raped, those who will not be enslaved. It selects for the apple-polisher, the scammer, those who are best at concealment, the selfish, the ruthless, the wily, the drone, those who can bear endless misfortunes, those who can lift heavy weights.

"Readily trained" isn't synonymous with "highly intelligent," although readily trained is the goal of breeding. To be "readily trained" is to be obedient; ready to take the master's priorities as your own.

Even with full reparations and the lack of further obligation that would mean for the US, black people will be in the position of trying to silence that part of our brains that has been bred to prioritize the problems and the presence of white people. Luckily it was only 400 years of damage.

White people were enslaved a lot in the Roman Empire and following into the Middle Ages.

What are “white people”?

When you follow the narrative of white slavery, you’re taking a road that leads to some racists spewing whataboutism to somehow establish that slavery in America was acceptable.

There are no white people. There are Italians, Germans, Slavs, Nords, and so on. They are different groups of people with different cultures and languages.

Grouping all light skinned people into one made up ethnic group is completely disregarding their unique and special heritages, and the oppressions that happened between them.

There are cultures that never invented the wheel, written language or permanent buildings. They are highly intelligent in their own ways, but they are as unlikely to fit into elite academic as elite academics are to survive in a jungle on their own.

Dogs aren’t chosen, they were bred over thousands of years for the job.

The problem is that peoples assessments of whom is best suited to what doesn’t work with sentient humans as it does with pack animals or dogs. The conversation tends to degrade towards whatever social biases are held vs any meaningful assessment.

When those great minds of the 19th century were opining on this, they weren’t thinking about the stupid white/black/indigenous (with or without Hispanic) categories used in the United States. They wanted to make sure that Irish and Italian bumpkins stayed away from polite society - because they were poor and presumably unsuitable.

Bullshit dogs aren’t chosen. My wife very carefully chooses each pup she keeps, and they’re often “culled” from her program as young adults when they don’t meet her standards.

Anyone doing working/sport dog stuff 100% chooses the dog.

For instance, a friend of ours (has a pup from us) went through 4-5 litters where she was told “I have the perfect pup for you!” Only to have it not be anywhere even close. She eventually came to us, and we did have the right pup. And now he gets to sniff out dead bodies, ride I’m helos, and find lost people in the nm woods.

Yeah hers was very high. This was 20+ years ago.

My cousins got in to Harvard and Yale. They had a portfolio of extracurriculars, service, etc.

The issue with SAT is that it correlates to IQ, and its been rules in courts that there are racial differences in performance that are problematic. Civil service exams have been similarly impacted - if there are exams, they are trivia and grammar questions.

It was 20 years ago (my time flies); we had a kid who score a perfect on the SAT who was rejected by Harvard. We assumed it was lack if leadership based extracurriculars that sunk him.

ya I agree. I think it's a disingenuous argument to make that Harvard is the only way poor or middle class people (who often have two parents with advanced degrees) can achieve success. It wasn't historically a school to help poor people achieve 'success' and it isn't now. It's a school for credentialists.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com