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Devil's advocate: do you think children who lack families that provide such advantages must necessarily "suffer" as a consequence of that lack? And conversely,

by prvc 7y ago

Devil's advocate: do you think children who lack families that provide such advantages must necessarily "suffer" as a consequence of that lack? And conversely, why did you wait to object until this, in particular, became a consideration instead of before (when ethnicity and other factors were already considerations)?

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
I can’t speak for the original commenter, but lots of people did not wait to object to this. What’s uniquely bad about this is that it doesn’t have even the facade of holistic analysis. The College Board is counting up how oppressed they think you are, and telling colleges to count your score less if you don’t have enough oppression points.
- dba7dba 7y ago
  Exactly. And who gets to decide how oppressed you are? Maybe you grew up in a poor neighborhood but have incredibly supportive parents/family? Maybe you grew up in a billionaire family but with parents who are never around because they have business to run and places to go (as they can afford to)? And the 'secret' part of the story really really bugs me. Why don't we turn US tax code into a state secret so that rich people/business cannot try to game the system to pay less tax? EDIT: I got downvotes. But really, I'd like to know who gets to decide how oppressed you are?
  - pesmhey 7y ago
    Language is probably a decent one. If there was a major language shift in your family tree within the last 500 years, you can probably count yourself as disadvantaged in a lot of ways. This includes Africans, indigenous people, but also people from countries where a central version of their language spread from the capital out, although not as bad of a case. If your Asian parents immigrated and sacrificed hard for you, but still speak the language that their grandparents and their grandparents before them spoke, well, your parents sacrificed, but like, people go through shit. White people, black people, Asians, all types of people get exploited into nothingness. Into being not even human. Not going on vacation is not a hardship.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      >Language is probably a decent one. If there was a major language shift in your family tree within the last 500 years, you can probably count yourself as disadvantaged in a lot of ways. 500yr is waaaaay too long. 100yr ago nobody in my family tree spoke English and they were all subsistence farming on a different continent. Every relative I know is decently prosperous. Some people make more of their lives than others but nobody is disadvantaged. I have a friend who's grandparents had everything taken by the Japanese, then again by the communists, moved somewhere they couldn't even speak the language (they got called crazy but they got the last laugh when everyone else starved) and my friend owns a house in a gentrifying city and makes six figures sitting on his butt staring at a screen. Not bad for two generations. I knew a woman who lost a good chunk of her immediate family to violence in a south American country her mom moved with her to the US (I'm pretty sure she came to the US as a refugee) they eventually wound up in one of the "worse" cities in NJ and her mom signed her up for some educational program that somehow led to her being sent to a prep school in New England and from there she wend to college and graduated from Colombia. Compare all of those to my girlfriend's family tree which is chock full of deadbeats. I don't know a single one who is actively engaged in working hard to move up in the world. They've been on this continent longer than the existence of the nation they reside in. Maybe they made something of themselves once upon a time but this branch of the family tree has done nothing productive. I think whether or not you grow up in a household with parents who are driven to raise their kids well is the primary determining factor. If colleges want to know how "disadvantaged" a kid is they should be looking at the parents. Immigrants for the most part tend to be very industrious and pass that on to their children and grandchildren but it seems to diminish over the generations and the variance among individuals takes over as the determining factor. Some individuals are highly driven. Some are deadbeats.
- prvc 7y ago
  My comment was tailored specifically to be a response to the comment above it. Haven't read all of the other comments in this thread, or looked into the implementation details yet, but yes, a fundamental criticism of this action is that the SAT purports to measure "aptitude" rather than "oppression", and it's hard to immediately see how such a feature would improve the test score's accuracy with regard to the former characteristic. Another criticism is that this could increase the attack surface for "gaming the system" rather than reduce it.
dba7dba 7y ago
> Devil's advocate: do you think children who lack families that provide such advantages must necessarily "suffer" as a consequence of that lack? As for me, of course not. I don't want other kids to suffer. And I'm sure it's the same for everyone else. But why should I or my children who did the right things (study, sacrifice, etc) suffer because some faceless bureaucrats gets to decide who get an advantage via a 'secret' score?
- thex10 7y ago
  I concede your point about faceless bureaucrats directing people's future, but, > why should I or my children who did the right things (study, sacrifice, etc) suffer Because plenty of other families and children do the same right things (study, sacrifice, etc), AND suffer other adversity. You're not special.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
lr4444lr 7y ago
It's not a question of deserving their suffering: it's about interfering with a standardized preparation metric for college level work to the disservice of everyone. No one is saying to make college admissions purely SAT based; applications are already multifactor composites. This is about an effort to undermine the numerically objective part of it under political pressure.
mises 7y ago
For years, there has been strong criticism of reliance on standardized tests, as there are quite a few people who "just don't test well". This extends the flawed philosophy of attempting to condense a complicated question into a single statistic to an even more complicated question. My parents worked very hard to get me into a good school. I was one of the poorest in my neighborhood, and our house was one of the smallest. The college board did not have access to my parents' actual incomes. To answer your question, I think many will suffer, though they must not necessarily. I would have objected long before; ethnicity should never be a consideration. Why? Because people are not statistics. When thinking on statistics, you can't use them to judge one individual case, only to make predictions about a population. That means while these predictions or introduced biases are generally true, some people get screwed. We, as a society, are set up to work differently. Look at our justice system: a very high burden of proof means that we believe it better for ten guilty men to walk free than for one to go to jail. I would argue the same premise applies here: it is better for ten people to judged without race (though availability of opportunity can be a consideration) and result in a somewhat unfair distribution than for one unprivileged person to be kept out of college because he's the wrong race. In other words, I would rather we don't tinker with the ratio based on race than for one poor white kid out of Appalachia to have his score "adjusted" down and his application turned down. I guess both are unjust, but one has injustice as the result of intervention, and the other has injustice as the result of non-intervention. There was a skit by a comedian years ago called "Modern Educayshun", which predicted this almost exactly. That was comedy then.

by prvc 7y ago

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago

I can’t speak for the original commenter, but lots of people did not wait to object to this. What’s uniquely bad about this is that it doesn’t have even the facade of holistic analysis. The College Board is counting up how oppressed they think you are, and telling colleges to count your score less if you don’t have enough oppression points.

dba7dba 7y ago
Exactly. And who gets to decide how oppressed you are? Maybe you grew up in a poor neighborhood but have incredibly supportive parents/family? Maybe you grew up in a billionaire family but with parents who are never around because they have business to run and places to go (as they can afford to)? And the 'secret' part of the story really really bugs me. Why don't we turn US tax code into a state secret so that rich people/business cannot try to game the system to pay less tax? EDIT: I got downvotes. But really, I'd like to know who gets to decide how oppressed you are?
- pesmhey 7y ago
  Language is probably a decent one. If there was a major language shift in your family tree within the last 500 years, you can probably count yourself as disadvantaged in a lot of ways. This includes Africans, indigenous people, but also people from countries where a central version of their language spread from the capital out, although not as bad of a case. If your Asian parents immigrated and sacrificed hard for you, but still speak the language that their grandparents and their grandparents before them spoke, well, your parents sacrificed, but like, people go through shit. White people, black people, Asians, all types of people get exploited into nothingness. Into being not even human. Not going on vacation is not a hardship.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    >Language is probably a decent one. If there was a major language shift in your family tree within the last 500 years, you can probably count yourself as disadvantaged in a lot of ways. 500yr is waaaaay too long. 100yr ago nobody in my family tree spoke English and they were all subsistence farming on a different continent. Every relative I know is decently prosperous. Some people make more of their lives than others but nobody is disadvantaged. I have a friend who's grandparents had everything taken by the Japanese, then again by the communists, moved somewhere they couldn't even speak the language (they got called crazy but they got the last laugh when everyone else starved) and my friend owns a house in a gentrifying city and makes six figures sitting on his butt staring at a screen. Not bad for two generations. I knew a woman who lost a good chunk of her immediate family to violence in a south American country her mom moved with her to the US (I'm pretty sure she came to the US as a refugee) they eventually wound up in one of the "worse" cities in NJ and her mom signed her up for some educational program that somehow led to her being sent to a prep school in New England and from there she wend to college and graduated from Colombia. Compare all of those to my girlfriend's family tree which is chock full of deadbeats. I don't know a single one who is actively engaged in working hard to move up in the world. They've been on this continent longer than the existence of the nation they reside in. Maybe they made something of themselves once upon a time but this branch of the family tree has done nothing productive. I think whether or not you grow up in a household with parents who are driven to raise their kids well is the primary determining factor. If colleges want to know how "disadvantaged" a kid is they should be looking at the parents. Immigrants for the most part tend to be very industrious and pass that on to their children and grandchildren but it seems to diminish over the generations and the variance among individuals takes over as the determining factor. Some individuals are highly driven. Some are deadbeats.
prvc 7y ago
My comment was tailored specifically to be a response to the comment above it. Haven't read all of the other comments in this thread, or looked into the implementation details yet, but yes, a fundamental criticism of this action is that the SAT purports to measure "aptitude" rather than "oppression", and it's hard to immediately see how such a feature would improve the test score's accuracy with regard to the former characteristic. Another criticism is that this could increase the attack surface for "gaming the system" rather than reduce it.

dba7dba 7y ago

> Devil's advocate: do you think children who lack families that provide such advantages must necessarily "suffer" as a consequence of that lack? As for me, of course not. I don't want other kids to suffer. And I'm sure it's the same for everyone else. But why should I or my children who did the right things (study, sacrifice, etc) suffer because some faceless bureaucrats gets to decide who get an advantage via a 'secret' score?

thex10 7y ago
I concede your point about faceless bureaucrats directing people's future, but, > why should I or my children who did the right things (study, sacrifice, etc) suffer Because plenty of other families and children do the same right things (study, sacrifice, etc), AND suffer other adversity. You're not special.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

lr4444lr 7y ago

It's not a question of deserving their suffering: it's about interfering with a standardized preparation metric for college level work to the disservice of everyone. No one is saying to make college admissions purely SAT based; applications are already multifactor composites. This is about an effort to undermine the numerically objective part of it under political pressure.

mises 7y ago

For years, there has been strong criticism of reliance on standardized tests, as there are quite a few people who "just don't test well". This extends the flawed philosophy of attempting to condense a complicated question into a single statistic to an even more complicated question. My parents worked very hard to get me into a good school. I was one of the poorest in my neighborhood, and our house was one of the smallest. The college board did not have access to my parents' actual incomes. To answer your question, I think many will suffer, though they must not necessarily. I would have objected long before; ethnicity should never be a consideration. Why? Because people are not statistics. When thinking on statistics, you can't use them to judge one individual case, only to make predictions about a population. That means while these predictions or introduced biases are generally true, some people get screwed. We, as a society, are set up to work differently. Look at our justice system: a very high burden of proof means that we believe it better for ten guilty men to walk free than for one to go to jail. I would argue the same premise applies here: it is better for ten people to judged without race (though availability of opportunity can be a consideration) and result in a somewhat unfair distribution than for one unprivileged person to be kept out of college because he's the wrong race. In other words, I would rather we don't tinker with the ratio based on race than for one poor white kid out of Appalachia to have his score "adjusted" down and his application turned down. I guess both are unjust, but one has injustice as the result of intervention, and the other has injustice as the result of non-intervention. There was a skit by a comedian years ago called "Modern Educayshun", which predicted this almost exactly. That was comedy then.