Comment by helveticar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by helveticar | Hacker News Reader

Here in the UK the educational system is equally stratified. Now, it is true that excluding the very few admitted for sporting prowess (rowing at Oxbridge) the typical student at an elite University is of a higher calibre than the typical student at a non elite University. This is due to selection.

BUT, children of the affluent are able to access much greater educational opportunities than children of less wealthy parents. This means they have a better education and are better prepared to pass the entrance procedure at the best Universities, while equally capable but poorer children are disadvantaged from the outset. However strenuously denied, the suspicion that "people like us" are being selected is difficult to avoid.

I went to a second tier University where many of my fellow students were affluent but not good enough for an elite University. Even then it was clear that their life experience and future expectations were vastly different to my own. I have, I believe, succeeded on my own merits in the UK tech industry but even so I have ended up financially and socially below where the affluent kids started.

In a class based society birth and/or wealth are a far greater determinant of life success than talent or any other attribute. In this, the UK and US are identical.

>In a class based society

Does the entirety of human history offer as examples any other type of society?

It seems that people making this argument and its similar variations severely discount the heights they have attained. Your kids are one of the 3-5 most important things in your life, so what could be more ridiculous than the idea that you shouldn't have agency to improve their futures? And if you do, then you should expect to succeed more with more resources to the extent that the greater resources don't cause your own character flaws to achieve escape velocity in magnificent ways that stunt your children. If that's not true, a lucrative business of child-rearing consultancy should rapidly emerge to fix that.

This reminds me of the SAT, which is a major college entrance exam in the US. One of it's original goals was to level the financial playing field with an objective measurement of abilities. But then SAT preparation classes became a major thing and more affluent students were earning higher SAT scores due to the additional preparation. I hear some universities are considering removing the exam because it's no longer an accurate indicator of the student's abilities.

My recollection is that there were also scoring changes for the SAT in 2010s that significantly reduced its predictive power.

Those prep classes can only increase scores a modest amount.

A mediocre rich kid is still gonna get trounced by a smart poor kid on the SAT.

The data presented in the article shows how, after controlling for test scores, the wealthiest children get enormous preference on all the non-standardized factors that people want to replace standardized tests with.

Dropping the transparent and standardized metric means the wealthy will game the system in ways that are only going to be harder to detect. Money buys extracurriculars and niche hobbies and elite coaches/trainers/tutors/etc.

It only benefits the rich and mediocre.

> The data presented in the article shows how, after controlling for test scores, the wealthiest children get enormous preference on all the non-standardized factors that people want to replace standardized tests with.

No, it shows that they get higher ratings (“preference” would be ratings for the same objective facts) on the existing aggregate of the other factors used in admissions, which is not:

(1) Showing preference, (2) Showing the advantage on each of the factors, or the particular ones which would actually replace standardized testing in any particular evaluation.

The usual concrete recommendation I’ve heard when anyone discusses it is to replace the role of standardized testing by filling its weight by expanding the weight of the existing other objective academic criteria with which it is highly but not perfectly correlated, largely removing the test prep issue and the cost factors it involves, but not upweighting other non-academic factors (which have cost, access, and network factors much stronger than standardized testing does.)

While true, standardized testing is still more fair than qualitatively judging extracurriculars or applying arbitrary GPA normalization across high schools.

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