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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 d

by 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

by mcny 9y ago

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