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Comment by Brusco_RF | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I see this take all the time. Admissions offices are allowed to take a student's means into account! So in deciding between two students with equal SAT scores, one from a Greenwich private school and one from South Tucson, the one from Tucson is the more impressive student.

Affirmative action was misguided because it assumed that because one student was Korean and the other Mexican, the Mexican kid must be disadvantaged. Besides the fact that there's an inherently racist worldview baked into that, Newsflash! There are tons of poor Korean kids and rich Mexicans!

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Why is SAT score a good way to decide which student is more deserving of a spot?

There should be some SAT score floor. But beyond that other factors should take over. If the floor is at n and two applicants appear - one with a score of 1.1n and the other 1.2n, I don’t think that’s enough information to decide who should get the spot.

> Why is SAT score a good way to decide which student is more deserving of a spot?

Name a better way.

SAT score floor + lottery?

What makes you think that is better?

Vox had an article about college lotteries earlier this year you might find interesting:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/4/19/23689402/colleg...

Lottery is a metric that can't be gamed, if implemented correctly. It may not ever be the best system, but it also can't end up being what was a better system that was gamed into a worst system. It provides a certain level of consistent mediocracy between various other systems which rise and fall as they are gamed.

what are the other factors?

There is an incredible about of SAT prep that is free.

It's a good way of figuring out who is intellectually capable. SAT scores have a very good prediction rate of success in college.

High SAT scores are only a good predictor against low SAT scores. Can you say that extremely high SAT scores are a better indicator of college success than very high SAT scores?

I’m not saying SAT scores are useless, just that they should only be used as a filter and not for ranking.

Spot on. I don't see why this is so hard for people to comprehend and why they are fighting the obvious. That very basic level of nuance tends to be missing from these conversations.

> I don't see why this is so hard for people to comprehend and why they are fighting the obvious.

It's because these people only see the world through the one-dimensional lens of skin color.

Further, it's an attractive way to view the world when you're a complete idiot with nothing of substance to offer society. It leads these people to infecting society with parasitic and fallacious ideas that you see manifested in the extremes of both political parties.

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