9 ms·

An alternate title would be: Jewish students were given more difficult math problems than their Russian non-Jewish counterparts Otherwise, the title implicitly

An alternate title would be: Jewish students were given more difficult math problems than their Russian non-Jewish counterparts Otherwise, the title implicitly implies that Jewish and non-Jewish students received the same questions. That would be interesting!

ajmurmann 9y ago
Yes, from the title I assumed exactly that. I spent several minutes reading the paper till I realized that different students received different tests which made this much less interesting.
- mcny 9y ago
  This is something I've heard people say about the SAT (a test high school students planning to go to college take in the US) that more affluent people tend to do better. I'm not sure about the specifics though.
  - eropple 9y ago
    IIRC this tends to be borne out--more affluent people are both more likely to have had the kind of structured education that lends itself to high SAT scores and more likely to be able to afford (both in terms of time and money) prep courses.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - blfr 9y ago
      This matters much less than people think it does. First, test prep has only a modest effect on test scores, on the order of 20-40 points combined ... The average SAT score among those with a family income of $20,000-$40,000 is 1402 while the average score among those with an income $100,000 higher, $120,000-$140,000, is 1581 for a 179 point difference. Even if every rich family had a private tutor and none of the poor families had any test prep whatsoever, test prep would explain only 20% of the difference 37/179. If rich families rely on tutors and poor families rely on high school courses, the difference in test prep would explain only 6% (11/179) of the difference in score. The second surprising fact about test prep is that it doesn’t vary nearly as much by income as people imagine. ... The third fact is that test prep varies by race in the opposite way that people imagine. In the quote above, Chris Hayes suggests that whites use test prep much more than blacks. In fact, blacks use test prep more than whites ... http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/the-sat-test-prep-income-and-race.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/the...
      - n4r9 9y ago
        That only addresses one minor aspect of what might be implied by "structured education".
      - scryder 9y ago
        This is anecdotal, but there are different forms of test prep which the wealthy have access to that are way better prep than private tutors. For example, Kaplan training offers 4-8 (you can pay for more) fully proctored fake SATs, written, tested and graded 100% in the style of the SAT, which they then use to tell you all the answers that you got wrong, where you lost points, what subjects those points were lost in, and then gives you test prep books specifically for the microtopics you don’t know, AND THEN gives you the books most people associate with test prep, AND THEN connects you with a group class, (AND if you wanted to pay for one) a private tutor. The tutors are trained on the subjects, are there to track your progress, and to teach speed tricks. And if it’s still at all a possibility it doesn’t work, they guaranteed a refund on anything less than a 40% point boost on points you didn’t score or an 80% final score on someone untested. My point is, test prep as I saw it for the wealthy is not just books, or a tutor, its a vast network of trained practitioners and materials which probe at your weaknesses and give feedback at a rate books or tutors alone could never match. Test prep between the poor and rich looks fundamentally different. THAT, aside from all of the benefits of economic stability and the educational support parents making 100k+ can provide, is where you get these differences in outcome.
        maehwasu 9y ago
        Well, that and the fact that IQ is significantly hereditable, tends to correlate with high income, and also correlates with high standardized test scores.
      - mellowdream 9y ago
        AFAIK intelligence (i.e., IQ) is correlated with lifetime financial success - or at least is indicated as such in psychological literature, and to me seems sensible intuitively. So, it is believable that the children of the affluent (and probably intelligent) tend also to be intelligent, in addition to receiving better education capitalizing on this. Both (or perhaps really two sides of the same coin) may play a role.
  - forapurpose 9y ago
    Part of the problem is that the context for the questions involves things that affluent students are familiar with. As I understand it, that can have a much larger impact than what one might think: For example, imagine if you (or many HN readers) took a test with questions framed around coding ('I'm going to own this', I'd be thinking), or the same questions in an abstract sense but framed around the details of working in an oil refinery. Now add that you are 16 or 17 years old, from a family where nobody has taken SATs or gone to college before, wondering whether you belong, and under enormous pressure to do well enough to get a scholarship. Your future - whether you live as a college-educated professional or as a career Amazon warehouse picker and Uber driver - depends on it. A major reason kids like that drop out of college at high rates is that they feel isolated and like they are living in a foreign culture with no other 'ex-pats' around. College is a big step for affluent kids but everyone they know has gone, and the campus and town are built around their culture; few or no college environments are like the poor side of town. The non-affluent kids feel like they don't belong, even that they are imposters (and when they go home, their new experiences make them fit in less and less, and people there question why they are wasting time and money). Now imagine those same kids taking the SAT.
    - ctoth 9y ago
      I don't really understand this whole idea that this one test is the difference between a successful career and being an Uber driver for the rest of your life. I didn't even take the SAT. I took the ACT, I have no idea how I did on it. I dropped out of college. And yet somehow I'm still making six figures at a technology company in Denver. And want to talk about coming from rough backgrounds? I'm totally blind. This, among other things, means that I never had math books I could use, often times having to have classmates read me the material so I could even try to do the homework. It means that my top reading speed in Braille is something like 90 words a minute, absurdly slow. But yet, somehow, that one test didn't ruin the rest of my life. survivership bias you might ask? Why certainly. But if I was able to make it through, maybe the tests in question don't act as quite the filter function you're indicating.
      - jacalata 9y ago
  - tedunangst 9y ago
    Criticism of the SAT and other standardized tests ranges from the reasonable to the ridiculous. If your high school doesn't teach geometry, you're going to have a hard time. A lot of troubled schools can be several years behind the standard progression. Less reasonable is criticism like inner city kids being unable to answer "alice has two yachts, bobby has three yachts, how many yachts do alice and bobby have?" because they've never seen a yacht.
    - sidlls 9y ago
      Where does the "less reasonable" criticism you use as an example occur? I don't believe I've ever heard such a criticism in this context.
    - UncleMeat 9y ago
      The yacht criticism is usually in the analogy section, where the meaning of the word is critical.
      - tedunangst 9y ago
        Ah, you're right. And it was the word regatta, not yacht, that was the problem.
        DonHopkins 9y ago
        You've just proven that regatta is such an unusual word, that you mis-remembered it as "yacht". It sounds like a kind of Italian cheese to me. As an elementary school child, I couldn't understand a word problem about baseball that used terms like "hit a double" and "hit a triple," because I didn't give a shit about baseball. If more recently I read a word problem about rugby that used the term "scrum", I would understand it to mean the players were having a stand-up meeting.
        tedunangst 9y ago
        In my defense, it's been a long time. The criticism of the question is more than 20 years old; the question older still. If I'd known this was SAT criticism test Saturday I'd have prepped better.
  - striking 9y ago
    Consider the word "regatta". Someone affluent may have been to such a boating event, or at least heard of it. Someone poor, unless they were extremely well read, would not have had the same opportunity to know the word as someone affluent.
    - kbutler 9y ago
      Cub scouts tend to have one every year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raingutter_regatta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raingutter_regatta But the elite catamaran style tends to dominate over the standard design. But yes, there are concepts that allow a single question to be preferential to people of specific backgrounds.
      - DonHopkins 9y ago
        And until very recently, gay people weren't allowed to join the scouts.
        kbutler 9y ago
        I guess a non-affluent, prepubescent (cub scouts are 7-10 years old), gay boy might have missed that chance to learn the word "regatta".
      - colomon 9y ago
        There's also the Royal St. John's Regatta [1], the oldest annual sporting event in North America. The day of the race is a holiday in St. John's (if weather permits boat races) so everyone in town knows about it. (There's a Dingle Regatta in Ireland, there's a famous dance tune named after it but I've not been to Dingle and don't know what their regatta is actually like.) Come to think of it, for all the talk of recognizing the word as a class thing, isn't it much more likely to be an "old coastal area" thing? You might need to be fairly rich to have a sailboat to race, but every place I've been around boat races it's been a huge party environment with very broad appeal and probably 100% local recognition. They're just not called regattas in Michigan... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_St._John%27s_Regatta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_St._John%27s_Regatta
drharby 9y ago
Bingo, the title implies that heritage impacts cognitive ability. Fake news indeed, batman
- sinxoveretothex 9y ago
  > the title implies that heritage impacts cognitive ability. In this case, the title was misleading, but genetic heritage does impact cognitive ability, otherwise we'd have no cognitive advantage over our Great Ape distant cousins.
  - drharby 9y ago
    Heritage, not genetic differences brah
dorfsmay 9y ago
Exactly! I went through the PDF going "what kind of advantage does a christian or otherwise non-jew has here?". Then I started looking at the problem wondering how I'd go at solving them!
stevenwoo 9y ago
Well, then in case of identical tests the grader would just automatically pass members of the favored group and destroy the results/evidence right away. See also, USA history in denying African Americans the right to vote by any means necessary. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_rights_and_the_supreme_court_the_impossible_literacy_test_louisiana.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_right...
- ChemicalWarfare 9y ago
  ... or you can simply enforce a handicap along the lines of how Asians and to a lesser extent Whites get discriminated by US universities admission process today.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - jedrek 9y ago
    And yet all of that absolutely pales in comparison to the legacy advantage almost exclusively white US university students have at the top Ivy League schools. But sure, go chasing the race angle fed to you by the powers that be.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - randallsquared 9y ago
      I have nothing interesting to say about the topic itself, but this struck me: "fed to you by the powers that be". One of the things that's most bizarre to me about rhetoric around culture war topics in America right now is that both sides want to take as an assumption that the other side is in charge. I'm not sure if this is more because, as a practical matter, existential threats tend to produce more alarm and action, or if it's more about the American love of the come-from-behind-to-win underdog trope.
cdoxsey 9y ago
An example of such a test, taken from the Old Testament, is a shibboleth. From the book of Judges: Jephthah captured the shallow crossings of the Jordan River, and whenever a fugitive from Ephraim tried to go back across, the men of Gilead would challenge him. “Are you a member of the tribe of Ephraim?” they would ask. If the man said, “No, I’m not,” they would tell him to say “Shibboleth.” If he was from Ephraim, he would say “Sibboleth,” because people from Ephraim cannot pronounce the word correctly. Then they would take him and kill him at the shallow crossings of the Jordan. In all, 42,000 Ephraimites were killed at that time.
- mikebenfield 9y ago
  Everyone involved was Jewish though (or, at least, they were all Israelites).
- knodi123 9y ago
  "In all, 42,000 Ephraimites were killed at that time." Reminds me of the old joke which I can't remember enough details of to preserve the humor, where a dumb FBI agent is given the task of hunting communists, and his boss gives him a test which he humorously misunderstands, and at the end of the week he proudly reports "I've already killed several thousand communists sir. And you sent me here just in time, the communists were really entrenched, I haven't found a single loyal american." Sorry I botched it. But anyway, this is a fascinating archaeological record of a classic bias, where you assume your test was 100% accurate because the opposite would be horrifying...
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Like why the death penalty in the USA has never been applied to someone who didn't deserve it: because the alternative would be horrifying.
- AlexCoventry 9y ago
  You may not have noticed that in response to an accusation of racial persecution, you have brought up an ancient report of genocide perpetrated by the notional ancestors of the targeted racial group. It's probably going to come across as cryptic what-aboutist anti-semitism.
gniv 9y ago
I misunderstood as well! I thought non-Jewish students were given hints beforehand.

ajmurmann 9y ago

Yes, from the title I assumed exactly that. I spent several minutes reading the paper till I realized that different students received different tests which made this much less interesting.

mcny 9y ago
This is something I've heard people say about the SAT (a test high school students planning to go to college take in the US) that more affluent people tend to do better. I'm not sure about the specifics though.
- eropple 9y ago
  IIRC this tends to be borne out--more affluent people are both more likely to have had the kind of structured education that lends itself to high SAT scores and more likely to be able to afford (both in terms of time and money) prep courses.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - blfr 9y ago
    This matters much less than people think it does. First, test prep has only a modest effect on test scores, on the order of 20-40 points combined ... The average SAT score among those with a family income of $20,000-$40,000 is 1402 while the average score among those with an income $100,000 higher, $120,000-$140,000, is 1581 for a 179 point difference. Even if every rich family had a private tutor and none of the poor families had any test prep whatsoever, test prep would explain only 20% of the difference 37/179. If rich families rely on tutors and poor families rely on high school courses, the difference in test prep would explain only 6% (11/179) of the difference in score. The second surprising fact about test prep is that it doesn’t vary nearly as much by income as people imagine. ... The third fact is that test prep varies by race in the opposite way that people imagine. In the quote above, Chris Hayes suggests that whites use test prep much more than blacks. In fact, blacks use test prep more than whites ... http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/the-sat-test-prep-income-and-race.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/the...
    - n4r9 9y ago
      That only addresses one minor aspect of what might be implied by "structured education".
    - scryder 9y ago
      This is anecdotal, but there are different forms of test prep which the wealthy have access to that are way better prep than private tutors. For example, Kaplan training offers 4-8 (you can pay for more) fully proctored fake SATs, written, tested and graded 100% in the style of the SAT, which they then use to tell you all the answers that you got wrong, where you lost points, what subjects those points were lost in, and then gives you test prep books specifically for the microtopics you don’t know, AND THEN gives you the books most people associate with test prep, AND THEN connects you with a group class, (AND if you wanted to pay for one) a private tutor. The tutors are trained on the subjects, are there to track your progress, and to teach speed tricks. And if it’s still at all a possibility it doesn’t work, they guaranteed a refund on anything less than a 40% point boost on points you didn’t score or an 80% final score on someone untested. My point is, test prep as I saw it for the wealthy is not just books, or a tutor, its a vast network of trained practitioners and materials which probe at your weaknesses and give feedback at a rate books or tutors alone could never match. Test prep between the poor and rich looks fundamentally different. THAT, aside from all of the benefits of economic stability and the educational support parents making 100k+ can provide, is where you get these differences in outcome.
      - maehwasu 9y ago
        Well, that and the fact that IQ is significantly hereditable, tends to correlate with high income, and also correlates with high standardized test scores.
    - mellowdream 9y ago
      AFAIK intelligence (i.e., IQ) is correlated with lifetime financial success - or at least is indicated as such in psychological literature, and to me seems sensible intuitively. So, it is believable that the children of the affluent (and probably intelligent) tend also to be intelligent, in addition to receiving better education capitalizing on this. Both (or perhaps really two sides of the same coin) may play a role.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  Part of the problem is that the context for the questions involves things that affluent students are familiar with. As I understand it, that can have a much larger impact than what one might think: For example, imagine if you (or many HN readers) took a test with questions framed around coding ('I'm going to own this', I'd be thinking), or the same questions in an abstract sense but framed around the details of working in an oil refinery. Now add that you are 16 or 17 years old, from a family where nobody has taken SATs or gone to college before, wondering whether you belong, and under enormous pressure to do well enough to get a scholarship. Your future - whether you live as a college-educated professional or as a career Amazon warehouse picker and Uber driver - depends on it. A major reason kids like that drop out of college at high rates is that they feel isolated and like they are living in a foreign culture with no other 'ex-pats' around. College is a big step for affluent kids but everyone they know has gone, and the campus and town are built around their culture; few or no college environments are like the poor side of town. The non-affluent kids feel like they don't belong, even that they are imposters (and when they go home, their new experiences make them fit in less and less, and people there question why they are wasting time and money). Now imagine those same kids taking the SAT.
  - ctoth 9y ago
    I don't really understand this whole idea that this one test is the difference between a successful career and being an Uber driver for the rest of your life. I didn't even take the SAT. I took the ACT, I have no idea how I did on it. I dropped out of college. And yet somehow I'm still making six figures at a technology company in Denver. And want to talk about coming from rough backgrounds? I'm totally blind. This, among other things, means that I never had math books I could use, often times having to have classmates read me the material so I could even try to do the homework. It means that my top reading speed in Braille is something like 90 words a minute, absurdly slow. But yet, somehow, that one test didn't ruin the rest of my life. survivership bias you might ask? Why certainly. But if I was able to make it through, maybe the tests in question don't act as quite the filter function you're indicating.
    - jacalata 9y ago
- tedunangst 9y ago
  Criticism of the SAT and other standardized tests ranges from the reasonable to the ridiculous. If your high school doesn't teach geometry, you're going to have a hard time. A lot of troubled schools can be several years behind the standard progression. Less reasonable is criticism like inner city kids being unable to answer "alice has two yachts, bobby has three yachts, how many yachts do alice and bobby have?" because they've never seen a yacht.
  - sidlls 9y ago
    Where does the "less reasonable" criticism you use as an example occur? I don't believe I've ever heard such a criticism in this context.
  - UncleMeat 9y ago
    The yacht criticism is usually in the analogy section, where the meaning of the word is critical.
    - tedunangst 9y ago
      Ah, you're right. And it was the word regatta, not yacht, that was the problem.
      - DonHopkins 9y ago
        You've just proven that regatta is such an unusual word, that you mis-remembered it as "yacht". It sounds like a kind of Italian cheese to me. As an elementary school child, I couldn't understand a word problem about baseball that used terms like "hit a double" and "hit a triple," because I didn't give a shit about baseball. If more recently I read a word problem about rugby that used the term "scrum", I would understand it to mean the players were having a stand-up meeting.
        tedunangst 9y ago
        In my defense, it's been a long time. The criticism of the question is more than 20 years old; the question older still. If I'd known this was SAT criticism test Saturday I'd have prepped better.
- striking 9y ago
  Consider the word "regatta". Someone affluent may have been to such a boating event, or at least heard of it. Someone poor, unless they were extremely well read, would not have had the same opportunity to know the word as someone affluent.
  - kbutler 9y ago
    Cub scouts tend to have one every year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raingutter_regatta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raingutter_regatta But the elite catamaran style tends to dominate over the standard design. But yes, there are concepts that allow a single question to be preferential to people of specific backgrounds.
    - DonHopkins 9y ago
      And until very recently, gay people weren't allowed to join the scouts.
      - kbutler 9y ago
        I guess a non-affluent, prepubescent (cub scouts are 7-10 years old), gay boy might have missed that chance to learn the word "regatta".
    - colomon 9y ago
      There's also the Royal St. John's Regatta [1], the oldest annual sporting event in North America. The day of the race is a holiday in St. John's (if weather permits boat races) so everyone in town knows about it. (There's a Dingle Regatta in Ireland, there's a famous dance tune named after it but I've not been to Dingle and don't know what their regatta is actually like.) Come to think of it, for all the talk of recognizing the word as a class thing, isn't it much more likely to be an "old coastal area" thing? You might need to be fairly rich to have a sailboat to race, but every place I've been around boat races it's been a huge party environment with very broad appeal and probably 100% local recognition. They're just not called regattas in Michigan... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_St._John%27s_Regatta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_St._John%27s_Regatta

drharby 9y ago

Bingo, the title implies that heritage impacts cognitive ability. Fake news indeed, batman

sinxoveretothex 9y ago
> the title implies that heritage impacts cognitive ability. In this case, the title was misleading, but genetic heritage does impact cognitive ability, otherwise we'd have no cognitive advantage over our Great Ape distant cousins.
- drharby 9y ago
  Heritage, not genetic differences brah

dorfsmay 9y ago

Exactly! I went through the PDF going "what kind of advantage does a christian or otherwise non-jew has here?". Then I started looking at the problem wondering how I'd go at solving them!

stevenwoo 9y ago

Well, then in case of identical tests the grader would just automatically pass members of the favored group and destroy the results/evidence right away. See also, USA history in denying African Americans the right to vote by any means necessary. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_rights_and_the_supreme_court_the_impossible_literacy_test_louisiana.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_right...

ChemicalWarfare 9y ago
... or you can simply enforce a handicap along the lines of how Asians and to a lesser extent Whites get discriminated by US universities admission process today.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jedrek 9y ago
  And yet all of that absolutely pales in comparison to the legacy advantage almost exclusively white US university students have at the top Ivy League schools. But sure, go chasing the race angle fed to you by the powers that be.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - randallsquared 9y ago
    I have nothing interesting to say about the topic itself, but this struck me: "fed to you by the powers that be". One of the things that's most bizarre to me about rhetoric around culture war topics in America right now is that both sides want to take as an assumption that the other side is in charge. I'm not sure if this is more because, as a practical matter, existential threats tend to produce more alarm and action, or if it's more about the American love of the come-from-behind-to-win underdog trope.

cdoxsey 9y ago

An example of such a test, taken from the Old Testament, is a shibboleth. From the book of Judges: Jephthah captured the shallow crossings of the Jordan River, and whenever a fugitive from Ephraim tried to go back across, the men of Gilead would challenge him. “Are you a member of the tribe of Ephraim?” they would ask. If the man said, “No, I’m not,” they would tell him to say “Shibboleth.” If he was from Ephraim, he would say “Sibboleth,” because people from Ephraim cannot pronounce the word correctly. Then they would take him and kill him at the shallow crossings of the Jordan. In all, 42,000 Ephraimites were killed at that time.

mikebenfield 9y ago
Everyone involved was Jewish though (or, at least, they were all Israelites).
knodi123 9y ago
"In all, 42,000 Ephraimites were killed at that time." Reminds me of the old joke which I can't remember enough details of to preserve the humor, where a dumb FBI agent is given the task of hunting communists, and his boss gives him a test which he humorously misunderstands, and at the end of the week he proudly reports "I've already killed several thousand communists sir. And you sent me here just in time, the communists were really entrenched, I haven't found a single loyal american." Sorry I botched it. But anyway, this is a fascinating archaeological record of a classic bias, where you assume your test was 100% accurate because the opposite would be horrifying...
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Like why the death penalty in the USA has never been applied to someone who didn't deserve it: because the alternative would be horrifying.
AlexCoventry 9y ago
You may not have noticed that in response to an accusation of racial persecution, you have brought up an ancient report of genocide perpetrated by the notional ancestors of the targeted racial group. It's probably going to come across as cryptic what-aboutist anti-semitism.

gniv 9y ago

I misunderstood as well! I thought non-Jewish students were given hints beforehand.