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Comment by troupe | Hacker News Reader

If a school asks for SAT or ACT scores but, hypothetically, wants to discriminate based on race or some other characteristic, doesn't requiring the ACT/SAT make them more likely to be liable for discrimination because there is an objective standard to show that they are treating some groups differently than others? I thought that some of the recent rulings against selecting students based on their race hinged on the statistics showing that some groups were able to get in with lower ACT/SAT scores, while other groups had to have a much higher score to be admitted.

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The NY Times article about this addressed that concern specifically, indeed it was the key point of the study:

> It’s worth acknowledging a crucial part of this story. Dartmouth admits disadvantaged students who have scores that are lower on average than those of privileged students. The college doesn’t apologize for that. Students from poor neighborhoods or troubled high schools have effectively been running with wind in their face. They are not competing fairly with affluent teenagers.

> I also asked whether she was worried that conservative critics of affirmative action might use test scores to accuse Dartmouth of violating the recent Supreme Court ruling barring race-conscious admissions. She was not. Dartmouth can legally admit a diverse class while using test scores as one part of its holistic admissions process, she said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/briefing/dartmouth-sat.ht...

A. People who attend poor high school and get a 29 on his ACT are admitted over students to went to a college prep private school and got a 32.

B. People who are of a certain race that get a 29 on their ACT are admitted over people of another race that get a 32.

It sounds like Dartmouth is doing A. The recent court cases had to do with schools that were doing B. If a college requires SAT/ACT tests and continues doing B, then it is pretty easy to see they are doing so based on objective data.

I believe those court cases are one of the reasons schools are moving to test optional--not because the SAT/ACT isn't useful to predict success at college, but because they see it as a liability in their acceptance process.

They still might do B, but use proxies to determine probable race. This can be determined based on scales they apply to different high schools. Of course the underlining issue is US socioeconomic fabric that is the root cause of this issue.

> It’s worth acknowledging a crucial part of this story. Dartmouth admits disadvantaged students who have scores that are lower on average than those of privileged students.

They may have a higher bar for "privileged" students, i.e. Asian/white, but the bar is far lower for the truly Privileged legacies/donors.

That doesn’t actually address the concern if I understand it correctly. If Dartmouth is primarily concerned with accuracy, and SAT alone is predictive of performance, and wealthy students tend to score higher even for equally qualified applicants, then a test score only admissions process will naturally disadvantage poorer students.

I am conservative and I have no problem with poor students from disadvantaged backgrounds having their scores weighed differently.

I absolutely do have a problem with race-based admissions. Most conservatives have a problem with race-based admissions because it is not fair to poor students.

I remember a girl from my college (elite institution on west coast) that would go on and on about how disadvantaged she was because she was 'black'. Firstly, she's like a quarter black and looks completely white. Secondly, and more importantly, she's filthy rich. I mean... like multiple international trips a year growing up. Super picky about fashion, etc. Both parents had PhDs. Nevertheless, she qualified for all the diversity offerings the school had, including scholarships, special programs, etc.

Meanwhile, we had kids whose parents never attended college and grew up in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with very disadvantaged background, who were given nothing because of their race and sex.

Now, I'm certainly not part of the latter group (grew up middle class and am neither white nor black or any 'disadvantaged' minority) and frankly don't have a whole lot to lose in this debate, but seeing this with my own eyes has convinced me that we need to look at actual disadvantage, not just race. There are A LOT of high-achieving black, latinos, <insert minority here>. That's great! More power to them. I have no qualms with rich people.

I do have qualms when they pretend to be disadvantaged to get an advantage over obviously more disadvantaged others. This is annoying when Donald Trump does it. It's annoying when Elon Musk does it. And it's annoying if someone who's not white does it too.

The idea that simply because you're of a particular race, you're automatically disadvantaged is retarded.

I agree with 90% of this but I would say it's not entirely "retarded". It USED to be a very valid disadvantage across the board to have a minority race or skin color, but now as racism becomes less pervasive and "affirmative action" has had time to take effect it is becoming less of an effect. To dismiss it entirely ignores how much it seems to have accomplished.

I do hate to see poor and working class white male children pretty much hung out to dry in the eyes of progressives these days.

> It USED to be a very valid disadvantage across the board to have a minority race or skin color

I completely agree that this used to be the case. I might even argue that it is still true to an extent. I will also agree that we should still address it. My problem is when addressing it involves discriminating against asian Americans like me. The people who want to discriminate against asian Americans are just using "historical disadvantage" as an excuse, their actions are political/ideological.

The thing that made the least sense about Harvard's case was that Asians had a harder time getting in than white students. I could see the argument for other minorities being given a leg up over Asian students, but white students? That made no sense.

And the people who want to discriminate against Black Americans are just using "discriminating against Asian Americans" as an excuse, their actions are also political and ideological.

The last word of your post is considered a slur by people other people historically used it to describe.

Please don't use slurs here. There's no need for that.

I guess that by your standards "stupid" would be equally invalid. We don't use "retarded" as medical term. If you have a medical condition then you are "intellectually disabled". Retarded is now mainly used to mean "very stupid" or "incredibly stupid" in informal context e.g. like in HN comments.

We've changed to "blocklist" and "allowlist" to avoid giving offense.

Is it really too much to ask people to come up with another word to use that hasn't been hurled at innocent people as an insult?

Blockhead has definitely been hurled at innocent people as an insult.

The way you phrased it, yes. But, that isn't what the report was saying. It was using a generalized criteria of disadvantaged meaning low income or non-english speaking. Race based criteria can't be considered, but income can which means poor white kids from Appalachia as well as poor black and latino kids from urban areas.

Yes the report sounds like Dartmouth is trying to do a good job of weighting the scores based on things that matter for college success--meaning not the race of the person.

The point I was trying to make was that it appears many colleges may have an incentive to NOT require ACT SAT tests if they want to continue to use race or proxy for race and avoid what the report from Dartmouth is suggesting. Dartmouth looks like they are considering ACT/SAT along with the students background / opportunities, but specifically NOT treating people differently based on the color of their skin.

Dartmouth is assuming that they will get racial diversity just by getting better at selecting the best students instead of trying to penalize or reward people for the color of their skin.

Although my family moved around too much to actually be from Appalachia, I was a white kid with an Appalachian family background that grew up on government assistance (on and off) that was significantly helped on my academic journey by the use of the ACT to award scholarships.

Depends- if they end up doing race based red-lining, where they’re only boosting minority dominated zip codes instead of generally poor ones, they could still get dinged.

That’s why they choose something not directly associated with race like socioeconomic environment. If the result is correlated with race, that’s not necessarily an issue with admission processes.

There are other non-academic tests like CogAT, Wechsler, etc. that may be even better since they evaluate abstract reasoning and scale from young to old without significant modification. Those are used by gifted programs and organizations like Mensa. It’s possible that these would be adequate replacements for college admissions as well, but you may get a bunch of mildly on-spectrum kids who have never had to work hard for academic success (from my personal experience).

> If the result is correlated with race, that’s not necessarily an issue with admission processes.

True, though if socioeconomic status were not correlated with race, then there would be much less of a reason to want to select based on race in the first place.

> There are other non-academic tests like CogAT, Wechsler, etc. that may be even better

They probably would, for a while. Anything different from the SAT/ACT but correlated with some sort of capability is going to do better when the problem is specialized preparation for existing tests. And that was precisely the problem that caused colleges to stop looking at SAT/ACT. It wasn't because the tests are bad. It was the usual "you make what you measure".

Switching tests isn't free, though. You lose all the historical data that show the association between a test and the specific outcome you care about (eg graduation rates at this institution). You have to go through a bootstrapping period, and by the time you're done, it's possible that people are now targeting the new test and it starts losing its utility too.

> mildly on-spectrum kids who have never had to work hard for academic success

I think a lot of these types will probably also show up among the people who do extremely well on the SAT and ACT.

Yes, it will be easier to sue Dartmouth (successfully) for race-based discrimination if/when they return to requiring standardized tests. For example, they won't be able to admit certain minorities with low test scores while not admitting other applicants with similar/better test scores.

However, it sounds like their system works around this problem by weighting the test score based on the average score at the school. So they can still down-weight the application of a poor Asian student from a more challenging school, compared to a different minority student who goes to a school with worse SAT performance. If Dartmouth's percentage of Asian students doesn't tick upward materially in coming years, I would assume this is what they are doing.

To steelman the argument for this process, it's effectively boosting the scores of kids whose parents didn't care as much about education, or who had no avenue into a challenging school. On the other hand, this process dings students from families that prioritize education, who work really hard. Those kids would probably succeed at Dartmouth, and beyond.

Not just a higher score. Kids with 1600s (or close) were straight up not even considered.

They weren't admitted, but how do you know they were not even considered?

More generally, a 1600 is not some kind of "get into college free" card.

I did admissions for a very competitive university program many years ago and we primarily used test scores to establish a baseline. One reason was to make sure we only considered people who could handle the program's rigour, but equally valid was that the four of us couldn't possibly review thousands of applications so we needed an automatic filter. But after that filter we didn't pay attention to test scores except as a tiebreaker when filling the last few spots.

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