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Comment by contagiousflow | Hacker News Reader

> If there's one school that claims it successfully teaches children to love reading, and another school that makes no such claim, but has +50 on SAT over the first school across the board? The second one is probably a better school.

Or it's better at SAT prep? That's the entire point of OPs comment. Metrics become targets and then anything (that may still be incredibly important) but doe not contribute to that target gets lost.

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"+50 on SAT across the board" requires at least being fairly good at SAT prep.

"Claims it successfully teaches children to love reading" requires nothing but a willingness to make unsubstantiated claims.

Both are imperfect performance indicators, but one is considerably less imperfect than the other.

SAT prep per se is an unbelievably shitty thing for people to waste their time on. It's largely mindless and uninteresting, stifles rather than encourages curiosity, emphasizes judging people by substantially arbitrary numerical scores, gives the false impression that some people are inherently better than others, and, in the medium to long term, is a grossly inefficient way to improve performance on the SAT.

If you want your own kids to get a high SAT language score when they are high school students, the top things you can do to help them are: (1) read aloud to them when they are very young, as much as you have time for, ideally choosing excellent books of wide variety, (2) keep reading aloud to them when they are older, (3) encourage them to read for pleasure, (4) converse about the world with them, without condescending.

If you want your own kids to get a high math score, (1) surround them with technical materials (construction toys, logic puzzles, board games, circuit parts, programmable robots, or whatever) and play with them together – or if on a tight budget, improvise materials from whatever you have at hand, and (2) spend time working non-trivial word problems one-on-one. Start from https://archive.org/details/creativeproblems0000lenc

If you have the personal time to do these steps, you won't have to give a shit about what their SAT score is, because it will be good enough for whatever they need it for. (Sadly as a society we don't have the resources or motivation to get every child enough listening-to-books-read-aloud time or enough playing-with-technical-materials-with-adult-help time, so we try to replace it with cheaper and more scalable vacuous alternatives like multiplication drills, spelling quizzes, and SAT prep.)

In Poland, many schools pride themselves for how good they are at preparing for end of high school exams. Nobody fails, nobody gets bad score.

Because if they as much as suspect you will fail, they will not let you graduate.

But statistics are kept clean :)

you might find this interesting : https://www.morethanascore.org.uk Says a lot of what you're saying, with some statistical evidence to back it up

(Note that the the British "SAT" is different than the American "SAT".)

Let me make a comparison.

If your manager says your performance is based on lines of code, you will be incentivized to write lots and lots of code. Does lots and lots of code mean you are being productive and making good software? Sometimes yes! Sometimes heaps of code means you are being ultraproductive and making amazing software. It could also mean you are writing much more code than you need to, introducing new bugs, not thinking about generalizing patterns, creating technical debt, making a worse UX, all of which I'm guessing you would agree are important to software engineering. But none of those things are going to matter in the lines of code metric.

So yes, sometimes having metrics for performance are worse than imperfect. Sometimes they are antithetical to the supposed goals. Student time is a zero sum game, and having a large portion of a crucial time in their development spent cramming for one metric is not going to have good outcomes for a society, only good outcomes for a metric.

The optimal amount of "teaching the students the actual subjects" you need to do to have them get good SAT scores is significantly higher than zero.

Sure, you can cram for SAT, and you can get gains on the metric from that. But you can't just cram all the answers into the students and have them get a perfect score via rote memorization. Students still have to learn things to be able to do well. Which is why SAT beats the "performance is based on lines of code" tier of shitty hilariously gameable metrics.

Out of curiosity, when was the last time you were involved in the school system? Things have changed a lot over decades what time previously spent "teaching the students the actual subjects" or time spent with extracurriculars continues to be eaten away by SAT prep. The downside of a bad score is now a disastrous outcome, and other parents have continued to optimize for the best score.

Oh, I don't doubt it that parents and students are optimizing for SAT outcomes themselves. You can't expect them not to. But no amount of SAT prepmaxxing can save you if you just genuinely know nothing - and having SAT is a huge upgrade over not having SAT. For one, it's a huge equalizer.

I've seen a few countries that went from "no standardized testing" to "full send standardized testing", and the benefits are too large to ignore. You can improve upon the tests, but removing them is a road to nowhere.

I'm sure the introduction of standardized tests are an improvement upon a current system, but that's not really the point I am making. My point is the ongoing use and optimization of them leads to worse outcomes overall in terms of actual understanding of the material.

> For one, it's a huge equalizer

Could you explain this for me? It's nice that everyone is taking the same test but every piece of data I've seen points to a clear correlation between household income and SAT score, hardly an equalizer.

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