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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

Of course people shouldn't be rejected by their race.

But according to the article, "all" asians have the same profile. If this is true, I can understand why some of the similar profiles are rejected in the name of diversity.

Once an SAT score is sufficiently high, it makes sense to look at other things. I can see why a college would want 50/50 gender, and a wide spread of social backgrounds.

If I was teaching a class and I had to choose between 2 students for the last seat, I might choose the one with the (insignificantly) lower score if that student seemed more fun to be around.

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> If I was teaching a class and I had to choose between 2 students for the last seat, I might choose the one with the (insignificantly) lower score if that student seemed more fun to be around.

This doesn't bear any resemblance to current admissions policies. Discrepancies between races in average SAT score at a given college are in the hundreds of points, not the low tens.

The article and the person you are replying to are specifically talking about disadvantages faced by Asian Americans, and they have an SAT penalty of 50 points, according to the article and the paper it references: http://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/files/webAdmission%20Pre...

Without making a judgment one way or the other on the core issue - given that this paper is looking at "highly selective private research universities" with average SAT scores of over 1300, a 50 point difference is not very big and probably within each individual student's margin of error. When you are in that scoring range, each incorrect answer has a magnified score penalty to maintain the normal distribution.

So, two points.

1. Asians suffer a penalty of 50 points relative to whites. We can equally say, using the numbers from rjdagost's comment, that whites themselves suffer a penalty of 230 points.

2. The entire concept of the normally curved scores is that one 50-point difference is just as significant as any other 50-point difference. That's why we use standard deviations to compare things. It is true that scores at the very high end are more volatile, since most of the test's "space" is devoted to distinguishing between people in the middle of the range, but 1300 does not seem to be at a level where that worry would make sense; the data I have to hand is a score report from 2000 saying "on average, a person with a math score of 710 loses 2 points on a second testing", which is pretty reliable. And regardless, while an individual student might easily lose 30 points by retesting, group averages don't move so easily.

> "on average, a person with a math score of 710 loses 2 points on a second testing", which is pretty reliable

On thinking about this further, I've grossly misused the word "reliable". What that quoted bit says is precisely that while an individual's score may vary from test to retest (and is thus not necessarily reliable), the average score of a group is highly stable.

Yes but no one takes the writing portion as a real measure of anything concerning scholastic ability and its the most coach-able part of the test and even back when I was taking it a 200 point difference was taken to be no guarantee of differing levels of academic ability.

The difference has been hundreds of points since long before the merging of the writing test into the SAT. And yes, a 200 point difference is, and always has been, a large difference. I think the standard deviation is generally in the ballpark of 120 points.

They rescaled the test in 1990 so that the std deviation would be 200 points. So if that's the case that's really odd.

2014 statistics ( http://research.collegeboard.org/content/sat-data-tables ) say:

SD for verbal is 115, math is 120. This must have been what I was thinking of. SD for overall (V+M) score is 218. The overall SD is much more relevant here, but let's note that a difference of one standard deviation is still a very large difference.

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