New York’s Single Test for High School Defined My Life | Hacker News Reader

New York’s Single Test for High School Defined My Life

time.com

79 pointsajiang64 comments

> I worry that the proposed changes will simply create a new market for consultants to help affluent parents prepare their children to ace that competition, too. I wonder how well disadvantaged students and their parents would be able to navigate a complex and difficult maze of details, requirements and tasks.

It's interesting how standardized tests seem to birth eco-systems of 'test-prep' designed to circumvent to some degree what the test is designed to measure.

For example, how many of us simply memorized stacks of words to achieve higher scores on the SAT -- did that kind of memorization somehow quickly make us more 'prepared' for college? Of course not, it was just a way to game the metric. And many of us joined clubs in HS and attempted to become officers not because we really wanted to, but simply because it would look good on our college apps.

While one could make the argument that ability and motivation to jump through these exploitative 'hoops' is indicative of ability to achieve in college, it is far from the original motivation of the test, and distorts high school life in strange ways; i.e. makes participation in H.S. clubs and organizations disingenuous, and needlessly wastes hours upon hours on vocab flash cards.

More on topic: I'm not sure what distinguished the original test that the author took -- what made it less amenable to buying performance through specialized classes or courses -- but that perhaps is where the interesting research lies: In trying to create incorruptible tests, if that is even possible; for example, perhaps if the format and material changed wildly from year to year?

> how many of us simply memorized stacks of words to achieve higher scores on the SAT

I didn't.

> And many of us joined clubs in HS and attempted to become officers not because we really wanted to, but simply because it would look good on our college apps.

I did related things. But is that really a negative? I do a lot of things that I don't particularly want to, but are necessary for my career. So does everyone else with a career. Even the best job in the world is going to have scut work that needs doing despite not wanting to.

Wouldn't you look negatively at a job applicant who eschewed doing things he didn't particularly want to do?

I didn't either, but "how many of us" really means "how common is it" and the answer is very common, so individual experience isn't that relevant.

And doing things you don't want to is definitely not a negative, but trying to get a leadership position in something you have no interest in is. This isn't "I don't want to but it needs to be done", this is "I don't want to but I want to look like I want to". The "ideal" candidate was the president of the French club because they're passionate about the language and culture and their peers see them as a competent leader, not because they wanted to be president of something.

Wouldn't you look negatively at a job applicant who eschewed doing things he didn't particularly want to do?

What about those that had no time to do? There are very bright kids out there that have to cook dinner when they get home. Or babysit their younger siblings. Or any and all of the above. Basically, the system rewards those who have the opportunity to do more, not the desire to.

That's true. I'd like to hear a plan for accurately admitting those with certain attributes that exhibit no signs of them whatsoever, because I can't think of one.

In the absence of quality evidence, randomness is better than prejudicial bias.

In a way, randomness would be preferable because those with ability (who otherwise wouldn't meet the criteria or pass the tests) would get a chance to succeed. The ones that flunk out would make room for some more random attempts. Eventually the system would settle into a steady-state of X% of previously-found high performers and Y% of ever-rotating randoms, where occasionally one of the randoms moves into the high-performers group.

This stuff also continues to reinforce and highlight how arbitrary and capricious success often is; many people are successful as much for their family/money/connections/opportunities as for their actual talent.

Doing necessary work that you don't want to do is a normal part of life.

Being trained to do unnecessary work that you don't want to do to prove that you can game the system is simply degeneration.

It's one thing to do things you don't want to do because they're necessary, because they help people, or because it brings in money.

It's quite another to do things you don't want to which are completely useless but which tick some good boxes on some application form.

I see this sort of argument regarding schools put forward all the time. "The real world is full of busywork and arbitrary rules and you need to learn how to deal with it." It drives me batty, because it really is not true.

>It drives me batty, because it really is not true.

Of course it's true. Just look at how you think there are separate categories for things that are necessary, things that help people, and things that bring in money. The subset of the final category which excludes the former two categories consists of busywork and arbitrary rules we are nonetheless forced to deal with.

There is still a useful purpose in the end (making money). School busywork and arbitrary rules don't have that property, which makes them radically different to deal with.

> It's quite another to do things you don't want to which are completely useless but which tick some good boxes on some application form.

Most things we do in school are completely useless - you don't accomplish anything by answering homework problems. Except that you may learn something.

When you take a leadership role in a school club, you also learn something.

Sure, you learn about how to handle the leadership of a school club, something which has nearly zero applicability anywhere else.

I think it's fairly comparable to leading an open source project consisting of unpaid volunteers, which I have a fair amount of experience at.

It would be hard to change the material dramatically year-over-year. For example the literary section is predicated upon you having read a number of books from a certain selection, and along with other things essentially tests that you are well-read. But if the scope of books they might inquire about is too broad, many test-takers (very well-read individuals included) will fail.

There was nothing fundamentally un-gamable about the tests they used in the early 80s, if anything on the contrary.

But it was a very different time and culture. The notion that spending tens of thousands of dollars in test prep for a gifted and talented program was something a reasonable person would ever consider doing hadn't taken hold yet. Certainly not in NYC, which at the time was experiencing the height of "white flight", had just gone through a major funding crisis, and was in the midst of a crime wave.

There may be an ecosystem designed to circumvent the test, but it's mostly snake oil. Test prep generates very small improvements in scores.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/the...

If test prep did work, it would reduce racial gaps since blacks do more test prep than average.

> Test prep generates very small improvements in scores.

> If test prep did work, it would reduce racial gaps since blacks do more test prep than average.

You have some evidence for either of these propositions vis-a-vis NYC specialized school admissions tests, or did you just want to grind your axe regardless of relevance?

Do you believe that this particular narrowly specialized test with little data available is wildly different from the mainstream tests on which we have data? If so, why?

Is it really your claim that SAT prep rates by race are identical to prep rates for every narrow specialized test out there? No confounding factors having to do with how well known the SATs are in various communities as compared to other tests? None to do with public and charitable funding for SAT prep that doesn't exist for other tests? Nothing like that? It's a standardized test so let's extrapolate from whatever data happens to be handy?

Do you have data on any narrow, specialized exam to posit this correlation with the SAT?

I don't claim it's identical, I claim it's the best point estimate we have.

So blacks and whites are genetically inferior to asians? Is that what the data shows from your point of view?

It's people like you with your ablesist bias that are the problem. You conflated lower test scores with lesser moral worth. I really hope that was just an arguing tactic, i.e. a lie because if your estimation of people's moral worth is based on their IQ…

Of course it was an arguing tactic, it was an attempt to respond to yummyfajitas' race-baiting. If you want to be morally outraged, try reading the comment section of his marginalrevolution link.

This subthread is going down the toilet, which is unfortunate because it had the ingredients for an interesting conversation but then devolved into moralizing.

Something I've learned in 15 years of marriage: it's hard enough to maintain comity and charity in debates with someone who shares almost all of your values and principles, and with whose background you are thoroughly acquainted. A big part of that is that we use slightly different words and framings to convey ideas, but (I think perhaps due to combinatoric explosions) we can hear dramatically different things from each other as the little mismatches stack up. For me, this seems unsurprisingly to be especially the case in abstract discussions.

So I think there's little hope in sustaining a moral debate 3 comments deep on a thread with a stranger on HN, and I think we'd all be a little better off if we stopped pretending we could.

I regret the tone and the resulting loss of an opportunity to persuade bystanders who aren't mostly of the same opinion as me already. In future I shall aim to be more Scott Alexander and less Charles Clymer/Arthur Chu.

By this argument studying at all doesn't work... Why bother studying Calculus... Just take the AP test.

Interesting link. Goes to prove that test prep in the easily measurable metrics (enrollment in prep courses, tutors) has negligible effects. Somehow the writer manages to waive away all unequal environmental factors due to income with that one proof, (even turns it on its head: "black people actually do more test prep!") which speaks volumes about his agenda.

I think test prep helps a ton for standardized tests. It familiarizes you with the subjects and testing format. Which means when it's time to do the real thing, it's all old hat.

The article only mentions the average score increase, which is useless without a distribution. Because a great many kids have no interest in improving and are just being forced to do test prep by their school and parents. It won't help kids that don't care.

This assumes all test prep is equal quality. Having worked in this field while in grad school I can assure you it is not.

It does not assume this. If you read the study Tabarrok links to, you'll see that different sorts of test prep get different outcomes.

Private tutoring (the best kind) tends to get the largest (but still small) improvements.

I didn't mean different classes of prep, but different quality. You would be surprised how much test prep gives detrimental guidance. I had to unteach a lot of poor or dated suggestions.

And I should note I did this for free... Not party of a program or company.

It is amenable to test prep. Perhaps the one difference is that since it's on an off year (7th grade rather than 9th), is only for one school, and there aren't many spots, it isn't as widely prepped for as the 9th grade exam that covers the rest of the top schools.

> For example, how many of us simply memorized stacks of words to achieve higher scores on the SAT -- did that kind of memorization somehow quickly make us more 'prepared' for college? Of course not, it was just a way to game the metric.

Personally, I studied vocabulary extensively for the SAT and GRE, and retained the majority of it; that preparation made a major difference in my baseline everyday vocabulary. Not all test preparation needs to go to waste immediately after the test.

>For example, how many of us simply memorized stacks of words to achieve higher scores on the SAT -- did that kind of memorization somehow quickly make us more 'prepared' for college?

Dear God, no. I just had that large a vocabulary.

:-) me to - at my junior school I was in the small 3-4 group that where allowed to go off and read by our selves as we where so far ahead.

Probably get labelled as a trouble maker and be managed out of the school nowadays.

Successfully gaming an aptitude test seems like a good demonstration of aptitude anyway.

I went to Stuyvesant HS and I believe this is the classic quick fix that wont work. The nice thing about the test is that it is objective, simple to administer, and most of all ensures that all entering students have an educational baseline.

I agree that it's awful that there were very few minorities other than asians while I was there (2001-2005) but introducing a process that allows for favoritism and the introduction of underprepared hard cases will change the nature of the school. There is a certain esprit de corps amongst the students since you know that no matter how shitty someone is doing in a class or how weird they are, you both passed the same hard measuring stick which encourages a baseline respect for your peers. Introducing underprepared students means that teachers will need to expend disproportionate resources on them or they'll just not do well.

The real, and hard fix is that the schools around the city have to do better. That's a hard multilayered problem, but I don't think relaxing standards or replacing objective with subjective measures is the way to go.

For what it's worth, if you allow the school administration to o much leeway in deciding who gets in, bad things will happen. Specialized school administrations are just as shitty as others. It's the student body and teachers that make these places rock. Keeping the test objective will prevent the grubby hands of politically motivated ambitious administrators from screwing things up.

You can have an admissions test that is meritocratic or one that fits your preferred racial demographics, but not both. Because no two demographic groups are exactly equal.

"Specialized school administrations are just as shitty as others. It's the student body and teachers that make these places rock."

This times 1000. The administration at Bronx Science was comically inept and somewhat corrupt, at least when I was there. A painted turtle would have gotten the same results, given the student filter they are gifted.

That's cute.. Brooklyn Tech.. well our principal was legendary... (not in a good way)

Since many people reading this aren't familiar with the NYC public school system, I think it is important to emphasize NYC has many, many, opportunities for students to get specialized education at the high school level that is not dependent on standardized tests. When i was in High School there was The Urban Academy, the School for the Arts, City as School, and many high schools had "magnet" programs that students could apply to and if accepted, they would attend a school that was "better" than their local (zoned) school on a academic track with a particular emphasis (journalism, science, etc.) This system was byzantine, and made going to high school much like applying to college, but there was no lack of options. Since that time many more alternatives have been introduced, not only charter schools but many other schools based on particular theories and approaches to education. The only schools predicated on a single standardized test are the ones referenced in the article, and i think it is great there are schools with objective criteria for admission.

I attended Stuyvesant in the 90s, and the student body wasn't very diverse. However, changing from a single objective test to an array of subjective criteria does nothing to alleviate the root problem, that some kids are getting better primary education than others. All such an initiative can do is weaken those schools and make them more like every other school in the city.

Any admissions criteria will be inherently flawed. I share the author's concern that more fixes will be worse than the flaws.

So, ironically, I propose my own 'fixes'. Leave the admissions test as is, but reserve 10% of the student body to be admitted by random lottery.

Agree!

That could work, though it should probably be random lottery among people who are in some way determined to be students capable of handling the work.

Again, that's back to having a flawed admissions test.

The criteria should simply be those who apply.

That defeats the purpose entirely. There are plenty of schools that take anyone who applies. These specialized schools only take kids who are capable of handling a more advanced workload. And on top of that, the average NYC public school student is in a pretty bad place in the eighth grade. A quarter of them won't make it to graduation no matter what school they attend.

>They want to introduce a broader range of criteria into the admission process, with the hope of addressing what is a current, and striking, lack of diversity at elite schools where the numbers of lower-income, Latino, and African-American students have sunk to disproportionally low levels. In addition to the current test, admissions officers would possibly consider things such as grade point averages, attendance, interviews, community service and extracurricular activities.

So.... I have one question, is the test racist, and if so how? If it's not racist, you might want to focus attention on improving performance of the primary schools that less represented minorities are enrolled in instead of just lowering the bar for them such that they fail when presented with challenging course work or hold other students back by slowing down the rest of the class because their previous schooling left them unprepared for that work.

It's racist in the same ways that SAT, IQ, and PISA tests are racist - Asians and whites do better than other groups.

As a reasonably successful white male, let me explain:

It is quite obvious, if you bother to look, that the majority of black and hispanic students do not have as much access as us whites. They are more often from single-parent households or households where both parents work multiple jobs. They live in worse neighborhoods (because they can't afford anything else), and their older social peers are of worse character. Because of where they live, they attend worse schools. They may not have a computer or internet access at home.

The abject failure you see at the high-school level has its ground-work laid way, way back in elementary school, both in-school and at home. It takes a whole system to grind kids down and eliminate creativity, inquisitiveness, confidence, and a desire to succeed. Sure, some people will just meander through life and there's nothing you can do about them, but in my experience the majority of young kids have at least some area they show promise in and some level of curiosity. By the time they reach junior high-school, a greater percentage of black and hispanic kids have been put through the meat grinder and ruined. Further, since far more of their social peers are a result of the same failures, they spread an attitude of despair and pessimism about school and the potential for a better life. Just think back at the stupid crap you did when you were young as a result of peer pressure, now imagine everyone is peer-pressuring you to quit school because it's a waste of time.

This negative feedback loop continues to recycle people back into the same old situations and set them up for failure. Sure, some will overcome that and succeed, but it takes far more effort than it took for someone like me to succeed. Now we are just talking averages here, any individual case may be different. Chris Rock's kids live a life of luxury much greater than the vast majority of white children in the US, but that doesn't prove or disprove anything about the overall picture.

Similarly, I see people claiming that "some people are just going to be homeless", when actual experience shows that if you give homeless people an apartment free of charge first, then work with them to find a job, etc a far, far greater percentage of them do not go back to being homeless and end up as reasonable employed people who pay their own bills and are productive members of society. But that doesn't fit the story we like to tell ourselves that people "get what they deserve", so if they are homeless they must deserve it. Or the narrative that "some people are just losers/lazy/-insert adjective here- and there's nothing you can do about it."

Blacks from wealthy families in wealthy school districts exhibit the exact same test gap. Whatever the cause of "the gap" it isn't the schools or access to opportunity. We really need to stop wasting literally billions of dollars pretending otherwise.

Yep! I think you are referring to the SAT data. Fortunately, we have data to test our beliefs: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2014/03/2008-sat-scores-by-race-b...

Which is what a friend who is a govern of a school in the UK does that actually fund extra teachers to go into primary's to help kids prepare to move up to high school

Studies don't bear out the idea that one test for a G&T program defines someone's success. One study that compares folks on the margin (those who just got in versus those who just missed) suggests that the programs don't matter as much as we think.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/do-gift...

That said, I'm a New Yorker who doesn't want to send my kids to the school down the street where 85% of the kids fail the state exams. (The DOE's response is "Perhaps the tests aren't capturing the learning that's happening there.")

I was a terrible student before college. But I developed a great love of learning through my journalist father and bilingual mother and a few anti establishment teachers. I'm not sure this would have worked today, as it seems students are even more considered fungible commodities than ever before. So perhaps the critical component missing is the behavior of his mentor, who recognized the boy in the first place as a human being worthy of enough encouragement. Because we exploit what we merely conclude to be of value. But we defend and nurture what we love. Policy alone cannot fix this.

of his mentor, who recognized the boy

Jean Kwok is the author of two novels, Girl in Translation, and Mambo in Chinatown, out June 24. She was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to Brooklyn as a young girl.

  She lives in Amsterdam with her husband and children.

What a god damned cop out. She doesn't even live in New York. Way to contribute back to the economy that nurtered her so well, yeah?

How about she puts her money where her mouth is?

Oops. Thanks for correcting me. I assumed an overwhelming male audience and authorship that is typical of HN. Utterly my fault.

Once again we see how sad it is that things are so centralized. One test. An interview system. To get into a few good schools where there are great teachers and opportunities. Meanwhile, we could be flipping the classroom and delivering great lectures to everyone, keeping school for actual remedial tutoring and socializing. But that is too radical of a change because school is used as a daycare center while both parents work.

Its all a scam any way. Has any one ever attributed success in their life to their great schooling?

No one. Ever.

There's "great schooling" which is becoming educated and is obviously a "no".

Then there's "attended a great school", WRT you must attend Yale or Harvard to become president of the united states. Its an oligarchy thing, nothing to do with education at all. Or must go to Stanford if you want to do a (successful) startup.

I know I'm being trolled, but sure, I'll jump in.

My high school held me to high standards and introduced me to broad influences - beyond technology - that help me see problems in a new light. Technically, I had access to a modern computer lab that let me try new things; when I found security holes, I didn't get kicked out but was tasked with fixing them.

In undergrad, I took a program that taught every new computer science class in a different language - without teaching you the language; assuming you'd have to pick it up in order to learn the underlying concepts. That kept me on my toes, helped remind me that I wasn't an expert in everything, and made me much more agile in keeping up with the languages and technology that have come out since undergrad. (I graduated in 2001... so almost none of the languages I do my daily work in existed then.)

In grad school, I expected to go in to study security but was exposed to infovis by joining a program known for it -- meaning I got to interact with people who knew the field forward and backward, giving me skills quickly, something to strive for, and a peek into the future of the field. This took my career in a different, and, I think, more exciting direction.

So what great schooling enough? Of course not. I worked my tail off, took a variety of good and less good jobs, and tended to relationships outside of school that helped me find other ways to learn and to do. And we'll never know the counterfactual. But I can point to a bunch of specific ways where good schooling put me on a successful path, and I'm honestly surprised that the sentiment here is so negative.

The schools aren't managed any better, but you do get much smarter and better behaved peers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com