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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> It's letting in dumber people, worse students.

Is it?

Maybe a kid managing to struggle through a shitty school has to work harder than, say, Prince Charles with his private school and dedicated personal tutors.

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But does Oxford want the best student or some that had to work harder but ultimately aren't as good?

In France, our elite scientific schools recruit students based on anonymous nationwide tests. It turns out most of the recruits come from privileged backgrounds, and I've heard this is more the case today than it was several decades ago.

I'd love to see more diversity in these schools, but I prefer to maintain our educational excellence rather than dilute it artificially with worse students. I'm all for paying tutors to poorer but promising student, but they should be admitted against the same criteria as anyone else.

If you can pay to be better at the test, then the test just becomes a test of how wealthy you are.

When you have well off parents, you can literally be sent to prep schools which drill for these tests.

These tests are pretty advanced maths and physics, not just multiple choice question you can just drill. Also almost all the prep schools are public.

Pretty much all French physics Nobel Prize and Field Medal laureate when to the same top school.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_École_normale_supérieu...

It misses the point: if you split the universe in two identical parallel universe, but then take the same individual and in one universe train them 2h per week, and in the other universe, train them 8h per week, do you really think, whatever the test is, the second one will not perform better?

This is the point of training: the more training you have access to, the better you do. If it was not the case, then the notion of school itself as a way of training people to be able to think by themselves will not have any sense.

And that is just training. Even with the same amount of class hour, kids who don't have to worry about take care of their siblings, of the house chores, or of even having access to decent relaxing conditions will get higher score even if they are in fact less smart.

Yes, more training will invariably give better outcome for a given individual. But some people are just incredibly more talented than others due to genetics alone.

If you want to build an elite sport team, I don't think you want to artificially put less athletic kids for the reason they had to work harder.

I think the question is why do we need elite higher education at all. Maybe we don't. In my view, we want to funnel the brightest people there and make sure they get access to the best resources.

That's the point: people with more training that reach high grade are LESS GOOD than people with low training that reach lower grade.

You are saying that you don't want less athletic kids being accepted artificially. That's exactly the point: the score does not correspond to the talent, you have to correct for it: to compare 2 persons on their merit if they have had different training, you need to calibrate to get a variable that correspond to the merit.

Clearly, it's because talented people grow to the top (not just economically, they might be cultural elites, like people working in news, academia). Then, they marry people who are on the top. And they pass their genes and habits.

It's nothing bad that their kids end up good students again.

I think that French system is superior. It gives fair chances to everyone.

It's clearly not purely genetic though is it? A lot of it is wealth and opportunity. That's why there's "dynasties" in so many areas of the developed world, particularly in cultural spheres where that opportunity matters more than in scientific worlds.

This is not 'clear' at all. What is clear is the correlation. You imply that the cause is 'good genes and habit'.

An equally, if not more valid cause is that having money makes it much easier to get good condition/tutors etc for preparing for the exams.

There are studies that show how heritable intelligence is. Very.

It is quite common people say, that something is only a correlation and not causation. But if you can point to a common denominator, that has been shown multiple times, to have a massive effect, it's not likely to be just a coincidence. Genes are this common denominator. Society and habits (for example, protestants vs catholics) are another.

Things that consistently impact the whole population are not just a random process that picks: "You will be clever, ugly.", "You will be pretty, sporty, but will be dumb." It's always genes, society and habits.

Some research on the subject here : https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20180905-how-genes-infl.... Personally I question how one can definitely prove to what extent genes are the factor as there are so many other factors in play, but those researchers know more than I.

Which gene gives me a tutor to support me at the most critical point in my intellectual development?

The genes of your parents?

Or now, for $20/month OpenAI? Or for pennies through OpenRouter?

Honestly I feel like anonymous mass test in general is least worst way. Yes, parents can invest in tutoring and such. But there still needs to be effort and learning to do well on the test.

It's always the same argument.

If you are world-class talent (someone who gets to Oxford), you should be capable of similar results as kids from independent schools. Like Joe Seddon did (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Seddon - growing up with a single parent mom, working as a therapist in NHS).

It isn't fair to ask ones to have 4A* and others to have just 3As.

Only 1 in 2600 gets 4 A.

And 1 in 83 gets 3 As.

Making it 31 easier for people from state school is discrimination so bad, it should be illegal.

At my secondary school it wasn't possible to do more than 6 GCSEs vs. many of the most academically gifted independent school attendees who obtained at least double that number of GCSEs.

At A level my secondary school couldn't accommodate most A level subjects: students were sent off to many different schools for different subjects, and forced to choose which A levels they did based on complicated scheduling arrangements. The only reason some of them could afford to do A levels was because of the £30 benefits payments they received which covered their transport costs (I believe it was called EMA (something like "Education Maintenance Allowance") at the time, but it was a long time ago).

As far as I recall, the maximum possible qualifications from my secondary school was 6 A* GCSEs and 3 A levels.

If it's so much easier to get into Oxbridge from a state school, why do you think people with the means send their kids to private school? They'd save so much money not doing so.

There is a growing number of parents who, because of this exact overt and known discrimination against applicants from private schools, will first send their kids to elite private primary schools and then they switch them to the best secondary state schools they can find, using the money to supplement their education with private one-to-one tutors.

This is an entirely expected outcome. Water will find a way to ground.

Oh yes, I have kids in a prep school where half of the class goes to Eton, and the rest to Winchester, Harrow, Seven Oaks, Derby... Now, for the past few years, almost no parents want to send kids to Eton. They know how much are those kids discriminated against. It's better to send them to a school with lower profile.

Doesn’t this prove the reason for the existence of the disparity? The wealthy kid’s parents want tutors to supplement the education they get from their state school.

I understand an argument saying people will game this setup, but arguing that state school kids are not disadvantaged is indefensible, in my opinion

There is absolutely a disparity between private and state teaching quality.

I don't think thats an objectionable statement.

Also, while not wanting to paint with a broad brush, people I know who work in state run schools are aware of how many other challenges students must face when they're on school grounds. They're fighting more than the test criteria, they're fighting their peers, outside criminal influences, prostitution, drug dealing etc etc.

Meanwhile this stuff is rarer and more swiftly dealt with at private schools because the parents won't have it, and they pay the bills and have some leverage, the financial incentives are different in the model and it shows.

I personally don't have a problem with loosening the grade criteria, even if it's gamed, the candidates are all interviewed anyway, it's not like a free pass, more an opportunity.

Most people sending their kids to the very best British schools are not expecting their kids to get into Oxbridge.

Maybe they aren’t doing it purely as a numerical exercise to get into a specific university 13 years in the future?

> In total, almost half (49.4 per cent) of A-level entries at independent schools this year were awarded A or A*, compared with less than a quarter (22.3 per cent) at comprehensives.

https://www.schoolmanagementplus.com/exams-qualifications/a-...

Much more on the disparity if one cares to search.

> Only 1 in 2600 gets 4 A.

> And 1 in 83 gets 3 As.

And what if that’s not always an indication of which person is smarter?

But we know that it’s true. That’s why we have been using objective metrics like test scores for millennia, across societies are different as China, India, and Britain.

Your best argument is "we've done it for a long time, so it can't be wrong"?

Quite the contrary: there is a long history of "objective" tests being shown to be deeply flawed and biased towards certain factors (often cultural and class based), we explicitly know it isn't the case that test scores are purely about some innate intelligence characteristic: there is a reason the rich spend a lot of money to raise their children's scores.

My secondary school claimed to have the best results for Business Studies A-levels in the country. They achieved this by taking the pre-released case study, writing every possible question they could think of about the study, writing model answers, and telling the students to memorise them. The idea that these scores represent some innate intelligence of the student is obviously nonsense if you interact with the system at all.

The notion that the British A levels have “cultural bias” is absurd, given that Asians outperform white British: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education....

In the U.S., research shows the SAT is highly predictive of college performance: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-week-educatio... (summarizing research).

It is strange to pretend that there is no cultural bias and then given an example that is usually explained because Asians seem to culturally value more education than white British.

How will you explain that Asians outperform white British otherwise, knowing that the idea that Asians and white British are genetically different enough to explain this has been scientifically debunked, or that adopted Asians don't show the same pattern as not adopted Asians?

(and, yes, of course SAT is highly predictive of college performance, isn't that the point: people who get better training get better college performance while not being "smarter", just "better trained")

I’m talking about the supposed cultural bias of the test itself, not cultural differences among test takers. A culturally biased test is one that requires familiarity with a particular culture, generally that of the people who wrote the test. If Asians do better on a test developed by British people, that suggests that the test itself is not culturally biased.

Your argument would have been more convincing if the Asians were getting the same as British people. But as soon as the Asians do better, it means that the whole comparison is meaningless. It means that Asians and British scores differently. Maybe Asians normally should score 14 and British score 10, but they score 12 because the test is culturally biased.

(sure, we expect that a small difference in "normal situation" should be relatively small, but the samples are defined as biased, so you cannot really rely on them unless making unproven assumptions)

There is no reason to expect that the test results would be the same across all demographic groups, and in fact, everything we know about psychometry (i.e. the science of mental testing) suggests that we should expect exactly opposite. See e.g. "Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns", which described the consensus position of the American Psychological Association as of 1995:

> The cause of [test achievement] differential is not known; it is apparently not due to any simple form of bias in the content or administration of the tests themselves.

https://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/APA%201985%20Intelligence%2...

Not sure what is your point, the "test achievement" mentioned in the document refers to totally different "test" that the ones we were talking about.

Also, on just pure logic, I don't think the document shows what you think it shows. The document you provide (which is 30 years old, so with just this one, we should not assume it reflects today's consensus) explains that the difference is not understood, and that there is no _obvious_ answer, neither from biology, from group culture or from bias in the tests. In other words: the difference is due to something _not obvious_, for example (but not limited to, of course, it's just an example), _not obvious_ form of bias.

You could fairly say that China’s pre-Opium Wars obsession with testing and meritocracy based on said testing is what brought them into all that mess, I’m pretty sure that the Portuguese that had gotten all the way from their small country all the way to Southern China using some stingy boats were not clerks nor great (potential) test-takers, and yet it was those Portuguese seafarers that were to change the fate of most of Asia forever, not the test-taking Chinese.

Testing and meritocracy of what, though?

Don’t forget that China chose Confucianism to put a halt to the perpetual, European style wars.

Stagnation was by design, and caught up with them after 2000 years.

We’ve done all sorts of dumb things for thousands of years.

It’s one metric of many. We know that paying for a tutor can change test scores. We know that a shitty home life can, too. They’re just harder to measure.

If you’re suggesting that having “a shitty home life” can make people perform badly on tests, but not perform badly in real world tasks, we don’t “know” that. It’s something people want to be true, but there’s not much evidence for it. Meanwhile, there’s reams of evidence that standardized tests scores are highly predictive of performance.

Most people don’t go to Oxford just to go right back home to said shitty home life.

Okay, but where is the evidence that those people perform better in real world tasks than their test scores would indicate once they are no longer in that shitty home life?

I got six A's at A level, over 20 years ago.

Am i objectively smarter than every single other peer who only got 4 As?

(I, for one, am confident I know the answer to this question).

I'm confident you're a better judge of the worth of A-levels than the people who've never even taken them furiously insisting they're objective indicators of merit, and not high school syllabus-recollection/essay-writing tests which are easily taught to, actively fudged by some schools and greatly variable in actual difficulty from one subject and exam board to another.

Still, your grades (and mine) pale in comparison to all these youngsters with an opportunity to get A* grades...

Close. If you take a group of 50 people like you, who got six A’s, and a group of 50 people who only got 4 A’s, then the former group will be smarter.

So people who've been taught more things are "smarter" than people who've not been taught as much?

All babies are stupid, I therefore assume?

What about the people who never get the chance to do any A levels? Are they all less smart than those who do?

How would you measure this?

Before you continue, there are governments in the UK that have created formulas to mathematically measure your level of "struggle"...these happen to, in a massive coincidence, benefit areas that vote for them.

The same logic is also being applied within universities to boost grades as managers at universities have quotas to hit from government. This leads to odd situations where a subject like Scottish Law at Edinburgh has no quota for students without appropriate social credit because it is a subject which, unlike other courses at that university, gets largely Scottish students applying so it has to be used to fill quotas. And these students have to be carried to the end of their course because they are there to fulfill a quota.

Sounds like a great idea but, as with everything like this, the assumption is that a university administrator or bureaucrat can accurately measure your struggle...they can't, I am sure the wisdom of this approach will dim when you are being operated on by someone who filled a quota at medical school.

Maybe. Unfortunately it's very hard to measure that. Moreover, how hard you have to work doesn't necessarily correlate to how good you are. The reality is elite schools are supposed to filter for "the best and brightest" not "the hardest workers".

> The reality is elite schools are supposed to filter for "the best and brightest" not "the hardest workers".

I think the point the OP is making is that getting 4 A*s when you benefit from exemplary schooling and personal tutoring doesn't necessarily make you the best nor the brightest.

>The reality is elite schools are supposed to filter for "the best and brightest" not "the hardest workers".

Maybe they are supposed to do this, but let's not act like the filter doesn't quite apply the same way if your parents are rich and or well connected. They're however very effective in filtering out bright kids whose parents can't afford the tuition and aren't lucky enough to get a scholarship.

We're not talking about individual cases, we're talking about statistical averages.

Maybe the statistically average kid managing to struggle through a shitty school has to work harder than, say, the statistically average Prince Charles with his private school and dedicated personal tutors.

This is quite the insult.

We could fill the world with Maybes, but the one thing I’ve noticed about people who succeed, is that it’s generally their work that performs, while anticlass-based triage has only made hateful people reach high positions.

Maybe statistically gifted child is more often than not born to parents who were gifted too. Then, they read more to the child, speak more with him. And maybe either have higher disposable income, or liberty to recommend books, and learn with the child.

In the future, it's going to be a nil argument anyway, as world-class AI tutors are going to be available for every child 24/7 for a penny.

Statistical averages would tell you that you wouldn't have some schools getting 150 pupils into Oxbridge while others only get 2. But has long been the reality.

No, they absolutely might, because schools group a load of students together with similar attributes relevant to academic success (quality of teachers, school funding, wealth of the surrounding area).

The context is explicitly statistical, so yes, of course - but your point is valuable to keep in mind to avoid subconsciously painting individuals with the same brush as the big picture.

>Maybe a kid managing to struggle through a shitty school has to work harder

It sounds like you think admissions should be based on how hard people think they worked relative to others.

Maybe they should be based on a range of factors that influence how successful the university thinks the candidate will be as an undergraduate? Not just exam results?

It means I think admissions officers sometimes know there’s more to a human than their raw test scores. They likely also know that a decent result at some schools requires more work than a great result at others.

I’ve met smart people who do poorly on exams. I’ve met dumb people who do well on them.

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