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But that's entirely the point. The people bitching about how the SAT isn't fair aren't smart poor people who are being beaten out by upper middle class losers,

But that's entirely the point. The people bitching about how the SAT isn't fair aren't smart poor people who are being beaten out by upper middle class losers, but rather upper middle class losers being beaten out by smart poor people. They tell themselves that the test isn't fair, but a part of them knows that they could never get into the 1500's even with all the prep in the world, so they try to get the admissions changed to a more bullshit-centric approach that they know favors them. And they say they are doing it to help the poor and disadvantaged to give themselves moral cover.

llcoolv 7y ago
On top of that exam dumps are much less efficient when it comes to SAT IIs, where questions are much more diverse an subject knowledge is essential. SAT I is the one that is easy to game.
- jzoch 7y ago
  Eh its all easily game-able. The SAT (and ACT) is a joke. So are the subject tests. The only subject test that wasn't laughable are the language ones (since you can't "intuit" spanish as easily as math or physics or chemistry). Its not bad if you are a good test taker (a dumb skill but a useful one) or wealthy. My friends were tutored idiots and did well (2200+ SAT, 700+ subject tests) and i was a good test taker (same scores). Its all garbage
  - knzhou 7y ago
    You're just bragging that you hit the ceiling on those tests. That doesn't mean tests don't work; if you wanted to, you could have found much harder ones. (That's what I did, out of necessity. They wouldn't have given my app a second look if I hadn't.)
  - mgkimsal 7y ago
    30 years ago, the ACT test changed enough that it was no longer a valid test to use as entry for Mensa. Prior to 1990, an ACT test could be used as evidence for Mensa admission. So... the ACT wasn't always 'a joke', but doesn't have the same impact that it had decades ago.
    - ivalm 7y ago
      A lot of people would argue that Mensa itself is a joke...
      - Der_Einzige 7y ago
        I always tell people this who want "only high IQ" people to run society. "Oh, you want the people at Mensa to run your society?"
        opportune 7y ago
        Well to be fair, those are the subset of high IQ people who have the time/desire to join a club about having a high IQ. Kind of an adverse selection bias
        barry-cotter 7y ago
        The overwhelming majority of the high IQ are not Mensa members. They are academics, doctors, lawyers, successful businesspeople, the kinds of people for whom it is more common in their friends group to have a Master’s degree than to be a high school dropout.
        perl4ever 7y ago
        Some people consider a person with a Master's degree to be a dropout. (yes, I know, not necessarily...)
        barry-cotter 7y ago
        Those people are called academics. The kinds of Master’s degrees that are rent seeking credentialism, MBAs, MSWs, M.Ed.s are far more common than consolation prizes for those who didn’t get their Ph.D.
        perl4ever 7y ago
        Perhaps, but the context I heard it in was self-deprecating from someone working in industry, relative to engineers with PhDs.
  - MichaelDickens 7y ago
    If the SAT were a joke, you wouldn't expect scores to follow a bell curve with only ~0.3% of people getting a perfect score, but they do.
    - disgruntledphd2 7y ago
      This isn't a good argument, because the SAT (and other tests of the same kind) are normalised to have this property. The SAT may not be good tests, but that fact has nothing to do with the presence or absence of a normal distribution.
      - ebrenes 7y ago
        The SATs have a top score, if it were easy to game you'd find many people would clump at the top. That would make it impossible to normalize that distribution into a bell-shape because they're all clustered into the same bucket with no way of spreading them. OP's point was that the perfect scores remain consistently outside of people's grasp despite the variety of resources available to prep for the exam. I only once managed to hit perfect score and my other best scores were one or two questions off. I had been taking the test since I was 11 (for various extracurricular camps/activities) and prepped multiple times for them. The biggest scores jumps were more closely related with my age and academic achievements than anything else.
        chongli 7y ago
        A lot of the reason the SATs are able to maintain a spread that lets them normalize the distribution is that they fill the tests with stupid tricks that fool people into wasting time. If you do a ton of prep then you learn to spot these tricks and then a lot of the questions become really easy and you can knock them off quickly. A poor smart student may have mastery of the material but their score will suffer if they don't know the tricks.
        barry-cotter 7y ago
        And you can find out about all these tricks for free on Khan Academy or for $20 in a SAT prep book.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
pozdnyshev 7y ago
I mean this is America, a country where the poor are extremely marginalized and have no avenue for representation and public opinion. This is absolutely helping those with less resources.
opportune 7y ago
I think this is true about the SAT but the subject tests are kind of niche and I assume a lot of poor people actually don't know about them. If you're not in an environment where a lot of people are applying to top schools, it's unlikely to be something you are familiar with
- buzzy_hacker 7y ago
  That’s a good point I hadn’t considered, they are fairly niche
  - cogntive_elite 7y ago
    Top schools are more than fairly niche, especialy at the very top of the very top like MIT, which is extremeley niche. Source: I was a poor kid who got into UC Berkeley based largely on my SAT II scores. Any poor kid seriously considering applying to MIT or Cal is high information enough to be aware SAT IIs exist. Do ya'll understand how patronizing and insulting this bigotry of low expectations is to brilliant trailer park trash kids like 1990s me? PS I'm rich and early retired now thanks to (Bitcoin and) setting/enforcing high standards for myself, not lowered expectations. I didn't have $20 to spend on an SAT prep book, so I checked some out from the HS library. It wasn't hard, it simply took initiative. SAT IIs let applicants pick an area in which they can shine above and beyond the genereic g-weighted diagnostic. My gifts are largely verbal, so the Writing subject test was my once-in-a-lifetime to demonstrate objective superiority to my peer group, regardless of income and race.
    - mygo 7y ago
      > I was a poor kid who got into UC Berkeley based largely on my SAT II scores. So did the admissions officer mail you a letter that said “congrats! Based largely on your SAT II scores, you’ve gotten in!” If not, what enables you to discount the possibility that you still would have gotten in without the subject test?
      - TomVDB 7y ago
codyb 7y ago
That’s nuts, I got a 1590 on my second try with a calculator that turned out to be missing batteries, the day after going to a friends house and drinking with my only prep being reading a few paragraphs from some big book. I had a lackluster performance on the new writing section the first time around or I wouldn’t have spent any time upping the original 1520 or whatever. The point is to brag a little yes because I really never get to tell that story now that I’m 30. The point is that rewarding me for skipping class to smoke weed with my friends because I aced some test turned out to produce a university student who spent a lot of time partying. I’ve changed a lot since then, and I do also have the blessing of being a rather natural and amiable person to talk too, but there was a long time where by sheer luck I was getting glided along because I ace tests like those and AP tests, but it certainly not indicative of someone who was going to spend a lot of time producing some great research paper in college or anything. So I always thought it was kind of bullshit and I nailed the shit out of that test. Probably just an imperfect science all in all. Much like hiring tech workers. Edit: small grammatical errors, on a phone
- bananamerica 7y ago
  Congratulations, you’re probably very smart.
- mercutio2 7y ago
  I also had excellent SAT scores (I didn't bother to retake them, but perhaps I should've). I also resonate with the idea that rewarding smart kids for being good at taking tests tends to undermine their work ethic and grit; when I finally got to math classes I couldn't just ace the test on, I had a very hard time; I truly didn't know how to buckle down, on my own, and do homework, because I'd never actually had to do that before. On the other hand, when I'm hiring people, I've discovered I really do want to hire people who are able to ace simple math questions quickly. It's not sufficient, but it seems to be very correlated with being able to wrap your head around complicated code.
- knzhou 7y ago
  As I told a couple others, you just hit the ceiling. That doesn't mean tests don't work; if you wanted to, you could have found much harder ones. (That's what I did, out of necessity. They wouldn't have given my app a second look if I hadn't.)
whotheffknows 7y ago
As someone who went to a boarding school on scholarhsip after moving from a bad public highschool and couldn't afford the $1600 SAT prep classes that preprogrammed in solvers in your calculator, I agree with you in general and deeply resonate with this argument. However, my initial thought was that MIT maybe has so many perfect scores it's useful at this point and not really a differentiating factor. For example they can afford to have a perfect 1:1 ratio of men to women for a tech school and I don't think they lower their standards for that. On the contrary, I went to a highly ranked engineering school of the same limitations (limited other genres of degrees) and it was 30% females overall roughly, but actually in general it was more like 6%-8% females in the actual engineering degrees. I worked in the admissions office one summer and was hard pressed to find a B on any Q4 report cards which was one of my summer tasks to ensure no early admission students entirely flunked out. I got to see other things like scores and in general I have to say even at a lesser well ranked school, and reading the averages of every incoming class, my notion is not that there is a difference between the scores of smart hard working lower middle class vs the upper rich as much as there is an over emphasis on the exam as a whole. I agree objective results are very important, and I don't have an answer for a way to calibrate across schools. I think AP exam scores are better indicators but not all schools have AB or IB classes, etc. It is really at the end of the day like most things about your commitment and ability to get something done regardless of how tangential you think it is to your core goals or study. In real life it is the same way there are lots of silly things people have to do all the time to get where they want to be and the weeding out is those who don't stop trying vs those who find a comfortable spot and stay there and blame everyone else for not having the right priorities. Regardless, I still fill like even amongst high ranking SAT scorers, students are good at acing them now. My theory though I'm not confident is true is that studying for them has been systemized so much that it is actually difficult for MIT to tell above a certain threshold of score what the bell curve is. This is all with the exception we need to realize that the SAT is not objective or perfect (the top comment this one is in response to) it was only less than five yrs ago they pulled sailing terminology from the reading and vocabulary portions after having to admit children growing up in the Bronx indeed might not have casually sailed not had sailing related literature in their curriculums, making this a bit unreasonable even for "guessing from context".
- 7y ago
zarify 7y ago
Alternatively it could be objection to numerous examples of somewhat arbitrary standardised testing which takes over student education to the exclusion of pretty much anything else, limiting a lot of the creativity and enjoyment students might otherwise take part it. But that's just my cynical educator's view.
mnky9800n 7y ago
This is only for subject tests. You still have to submit regular sat scores

llcoolv 7y ago

On top of that exam dumps are much less efficient when it comes to SAT IIs, where questions are much more diverse an subject knowledge is essential. SAT I is the one that is easy to game.

jzoch 7y ago
Eh its all easily game-able. The SAT (and ACT) is a joke. So are the subject tests. The only subject test that wasn't laughable are the language ones (since you can't "intuit" spanish as easily as math or physics or chemistry). Its not bad if you are a good test taker (a dumb skill but a useful one) or wealthy. My friends were tutored idiots and did well (2200+ SAT, 700+ subject tests) and i was a good test taker (same scores). Its all garbage
- knzhou 7y ago
  You're just bragging that you hit the ceiling on those tests. That doesn't mean tests don't work; if you wanted to, you could have found much harder ones. (That's what I did, out of necessity. They wouldn't have given my app a second look if I hadn't.)
- mgkimsal 7y ago
  30 years ago, the ACT test changed enough that it was no longer a valid test to use as entry for Mensa. Prior to 1990, an ACT test could be used as evidence for Mensa admission. So... the ACT wasn't always 'a joke', but doesn't have the same impact that it had decades ago.
  - ivalm 7y ago
    A lot of people would argue that Mensa itself is a joke...
    - Der_Einzige 7y ago
      I always tell people this who want "only high IQ" people to run society. "Oh, you want the people at Mensa to run your society?"
      - opportune 7y ago
        Well to be fair, those are the subset of high IQ people who have the time/desire to join a club about having a high IQ. Kind of an adverse selection bias
      - barry-cotter 7y ago
        The overwhelming majority of the high IQ are not Mensa members. They are academics, doctors, lawyers, successful businesspeople, the kinds of people for whom it is more common in their friends group to have a Master’s degree than to be a high school dropout.
        perl4ever 7y ago
        Some people consider a person with a Master's degree to be a dropout. (yes, I know, not necessarily...)
        barry-cotter 7y ago
        Those people are called academics. The kinds of Master’s degrees that are rent seeking credentialism, MBAs, MSWs, M.Ed.s are far more common than consolation prizes for those who didn’t get their Ph.D.
        perl4ever 7y ago
        Perhaps, but the context I heard it in was self-deprecating from someone working in industry, relative to engineers with PhDs.
- MichaelDickens 7y ago
  If the SAT were a joke, you wouldn't expect scores to follow a bell curve with only ~0.3% of people getting a perfect score, but they do.
  - disgruntledphd2 7y ago
    This isn't a good argument, because the SAT (and other tests of the same kind) are normalised to have this property. The SAT may not be good tests, but that fact has nothing to do with the presence or absence of a normal distribution.
    - ebrenes 7y ago
      The SATs have a top score, if it were easy to game you'd find many people would clump at the top. That would make it impossible to normalize that distribution into a bell-shape because they're all clustered into the same bucket with no way of spreading them. OP's point was that the perfect scores remain consistently outside of people's grasp despite the variety of resources available to prep for the exam. I only once managed to hit perfect score and my other best scores were one or two questions off. I had been taking the test since I was 11 (for various extracurricular camps/activities) and prepped multiple times for them. The biggest scores jumps were more closely related with my age and academic achievements than anything else.
      - chongli 7y ago
        A lot of the reason the SATs are able to maintain a spread that lets them normalize the distribution is that they fill the tests with stupid tricks that fool people into wasting time. If you do a ton of prep then you learn to spot these tricks and then a lot of the questions become really easy and you can knock them off quickly. A poor smart student may have mastery of the material but their score will suffer if they don't know the tricks.
        barry-cotter 7y ago
        And you can find out about all these tricks for free on Khan Academy or for $20 in a SAT prep book.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

pozdnyshev 7y ago

I mean this is America, a country where the poor are extremely marginalized and have no avenue for representation and public opinion. This is absolutely helping those with less resources.

opportune 7y ago

I think this is true about the SAT but the subject tests are kind of niche and I assume a lot of poor people actually don't know about them. If you're not in an environment where a lot of people are applying to top schools, it's unlikely to be something you are familiar with

buzzy_hacker 7y ago
That’s a good point I hadn’t considered, they are fairly niche
- cogntive_elite 7y ago
  Top schools are more than fairly niche, especialy at the very top of the very top like MIT, which is extremeley niche. Source: I was a poor kid who got into UC Berkeley based largely on my SAT II scores. Any poor kid seriously considering applying to MIT or Cal is high information enough to be aware SAT IIs exist. Do ya'll understand how patronizing and insulting this bigotry of low expectations is to brilliant trailer park trash kids like 1990s me? PS I'm rich and early retired now thanks to (Bitcoin and) setting/enforcing high standards for myself, not lowered expectations. I didn't have $20 to spend on an SAT prep book, so I checked some out from the HS library. It wasn't hard, it simply took initiative. SAT IIs let applicants pick an area in which they can shine above and beyond the genereic g-weighted diagnostic. My gifts are largely verbal, so the Writing subject test was my once-in-a-lifetime to demonstrate objective superiority to my peer group, regardless of income and race.
  - mygo 7y ago
    > I was a poor kid who got into UC Berkeley based largely on my SAT II scores. So did the admissions officer mail you a letter that said “congrats! Based largely on your SAT II scores, you’ve gotten in!” If not, what enables you to discount the possibility that you still would have gotten in without the subject test?
    - TomVDB 7y ago

codyb 7y ago

That’s nuts, I got a 1590 on my second try with a calculator that turned out to be missing batteries, the day after going to a friends house and drinking with my only prep being reading a few paragraphs from some big book. I had a lackluster performance on the new writing section the first time around or I wouldn’t have spent any time upping the original 1520 or whatever. The point is to brag a little yes because I really never get to tell that story now that I’m 30. The point is that rewarding me for skipping class to smoke weed with my friends because I aced some test turned out to produce a university student who spent a lot of time partying. I’ve changed a lot since then, and I do also have the blessing of being a rather natural and amiable person to talk too, but there was a long time where by sheer luck I was getting glided along because I ace tests like those and AP tests, but it certainly not indicative of someone who was going to spend a lot of time producing some great research paper in college or anything. So I always thought it was kind of bullshit and I nailed the shit out of that test. Probably just an imperfect science all in all. Much like hiring tech workers. Edit: small grammatical errors, on a phone

bananamerica 7y ago
Congratulations, you’re probably very smart.
mercutio2 7y ago
I also had excellent SAT scores (I didn't bother to retake them, but perhaps I should've). I also resonate with the idea that rewarding smart kids for being good at taking tests tends to undermine their work ethic and grit; when I finally got to math classes I couldn't just ace the test on, I had a very hard time; I truly didn't know how to buckle down, on my own, and do homework, because I'd never actually had to do that before. On the other hand, when I'm hiring people, I've discovered I really do want to hire people who are able to ace simple math questions quickly. It's not sufficient, but it seems to be very correlated with being able to wrap your head around complicated code.
knzhou 7y ago
As I told a couple others, you just hit the ceiling. That doesn't mean tests don't work; if you wanted to, you could have found much harder ones. (That's what I did, out of necessity. They wouldn't have given my app a second look if I hadn't.)

whotheffknows 7y ago

As someone who went to a boarding school on scholarhsip after moving from a bad public highschool and couldn't afford the $1600 SAT prep classes that preprogrammed in solvers in your calculator, I agree with you in general and deeply resonate with this argument. However, my initial thought was that MIT maybe has so many perfect scores it's useful at this point and not really a differentiating factor. For example they can afford to have a perfect 1:1 ratio of men to women for a tech school and I don't think they lower their standards for that. On the contrary, I went to a highly ranked engineering school of the same limitations (limited other genres of degrees) and it was 30% females overall roughly, but actually in general it was more like 6%-8% females in the actual engineering degrees. I worked in the admissions office one summer and was hard pressed to find a B on any Q4 report cards which was one of my summer tasks to ensure no early admission students entirely flunked out. I got to see other things like scores and in general I have to say even at a lesser well ranked school, and reading the averages of every incoming class, my notion is not that there is a difference between the scores of smart hard working lower middle class vs the upper rich as much as there is an over emphasis on the exam as a whole. I agree objective results are very important, and I don't have an answer for a way to calibrate across schools. I think AP exam scores are better indicators but not all schools have AB or IB classes, etc. It is really at the end of the day like most things about your commitment and ability to get something done regardless of how tangential you think it is to your core goals or study. In real life it is the same way there are lots of silly things people have to do all the time to get where they want to be and the weeding out is those who don't stop trying vs those who find a comfortable spot and stay there and blame everyone else for not having the right priorities. Regardless, I still fill like even amongst high ranking SAT scorers, students are good at acing them now. My theory though I'm not confident is true is that studying for them has been systemized so much that it is actually difficult for MIT to tell above a certain threshold of score what the bell curve is. This is all with the exception we need to realize that the SAT is not objective or perfect (the top comment this one is in response to) it was only less than five yrs ago they pulled sailing terminology from the reading and vocabulary portions after having to admit children growing up in the Bronx indeed might not have casually sailed not had sailing related literature in their curriculums, making this a bit unreasonable even for "guessing from context".

7y ago

zarify 7y ago

Alternatively it could be objection to numerous examples of somewhat arbitrary standardised testing which takes over student education to the exclusion of pretty much anything else, limiting a lot of the creativity and enjoyment students might otherwise take part it. But that's just my cynical educator's view.

mnky9800n 7y ago

This is only for subject tests. You still have to submit regular sat scores