10 ms·

I see this as another way to pull the ladder to success away from talented poor kids under the guise of somehow being more fair. This really only benefits rich

I see this as another way to pull the ladder to success away from talented poor kids under the guise of somehow being more fair. This really only benefits rich kids who can pad their applications in other ways and makes admissions standards even more opaque. Any kid can get a used copy of an SAT prep book for cheap and get similar results to a rich kid getting private test tutoring.

dsizzle 5y ago
Right, and won’t the fancy private school count for more comparatively now?
- kenhwang 5y ago
  Relative performance compared to peers at the same school will likely be weighed much more heavily.
  - vasilipupkin 5y ago
    if you have a shitty class rank and you submit a stellar ACT score, it will still count in your favor, that has not changed. They just don't require you to submit it.
dominotw 5y ago
> Any kid can get a used copy of an SAT prep book for cheap and get similar results to a rich kid getting private test tutoring. I would say the environment, social/parental expectations, exemplars within family/friends, peers ect matter more than a book. Talented poor kids acing SAT by reading a cheap book is stuff from the movies.
- ren_engineer 5y ago
  only way to effectively end that would be to have government seize all children upon birth so every child has an identical environment growing up. The fact is a standardized test is far less biased than the metrics they will use to replace them. That's the reason they were created in the first place
- ekam 5y ago
  My sibling and I are were like this and we were definitely not the only ones. You’re out of touch if you think this just stuff from the movies.
- echlipse 5y ago
  There are many such examples in the real world. That's not stuff from the movies. I don't think these things get reported in US but in India we see this in the news all the time. You can make a generic google search[1] and find tons of such people. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=poor+family+child+tops+exam+india https://www.google.com/search?q=poor+family+child+tops+exam+...
  - naravara 5y ago
    If it's being reported in international media I would guess it's still newsworthy enough to not be a regular occurrence. Like India is huge so you'll find a steady stream of events that are common enough to be frequent in absolute terms, but still unusual in proportional terms.
  - dominotw 5y ago
    This doesn't counter my point through. From the first link[1] > "I could not study because of financial problems, so I thought I must send my children to school and wipe out the darkness from their lives," > "I got tremendous support from my school teachers," he said. This is exactly what i said. Environment of achievement is more important. "poor" doesn't mean just lack of financial resources. you cannot simply overcome lack of parental and social investment and care by reading a SAT book. > I would say the environment, social expectations, exemplars within family/friends, peers ect matter more than a book. 1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-32791175 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-32791175
  - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    There aren't enough to be statistically significant, which is why they are being reported in the media.
    - simplestats 5y ago
      I think every school, has its "smart kids" who define their identities by their academic achievement, and who seek to ace every test. It's their way of standing out and being special so they try extra hard to keep it that way. Unfortunately they often tend to be introverts which colleges want less than overachievers in other areas. Except for the science/technology departments, who were probably overruled by other departments if decisions like abandoning test scores are made.
- stuff4ben 5y ago
  Yeah, no. I took the SAT back in the day and scored horribly. Bought a SAT prep book, worked through it during lunch and brought my score up 300 points in 6 months.
- gmadsen 5y ago
  while rare, thats exactly how I got in a good school
- BadCookie 5y ago
  Add me to the list of counterexamples to your claim. While my family was more lower-middle-class than poor, I was (evidently, according to the financial aid office) the poorest person in my graduating class. And my SAT score was likely the reason for that. (I increased my score by 200 points to a perfect score using practice books.) I was also admitted to Harvard but didn’t attend because of the insufficient (at the time) financial aid that was offered.
  - dominotw 5y ago
    > I increased my score by 200 points to a perfect score using practice books. what motivated you to do this at the time ? Also, I never said its not possible to do it with practice books. > I would say the environment, social/parental expectations, exemplars within family/friends, peers ect matter more than a book. my point was the word "more" in that sentence.
    - Erik816 5y ago
      What motive would you need beside "a higher score gets me into better schools"? Surely someone smart enough to get a perfect SAT score can figure that out pretty easily.
      - dominotw 5y ago
        I guess what i meant was why gp had this motivation while their peers didn't, what is the difference.
        BadCookie 5y ago
        Late replying, but I readily admit that supportive parents and a school subculture that valued academics were both factors. I didn’t mean to suggest that I single-handedly pulled myself up by my bootstraps. But the SAT was the main path I had to stand out in applications as a public-school-educated person from a rural place you’ve never heard of.
        maeil 5y ago
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
  I did it
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
Interesting. I see it as another way to pull another ladder up so that the kid who didn't get to go to the private prep school to train to take a test isn't being discriminated against for his parents' financial position. There are literally entire private schools where I grew up whose average student performs better than the best public school student.
- chernevik 5y ago
  That's probably selection bias. The SAT is actually pretty tough test to game. Anxiety drives parents to pay a lot for test prep, but there isn't much indication that it actually improves scores.
  - canaus 5y ago
    Do you have any verifiable information to back up the claim that test prep doesn't improve scores? I have a handful of sources that disagree. https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/R1710-investigating-test-prep-impact-2018-07.pdf https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/R171... https://collegefinance.com/college-admissions/does-sat-prep-make-a-statistical-difference https://collegefinance.com/college-admissions/does-sat-prep-... https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/04/why-should-sats-matter/who-benefits-most-from-sat-prep https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/04/why-should-...
    - simplestats 5y ago
      Your third source summarizes the common knowledge that has already been stated here: anyone can practice on their own with cheap or free materials to achieve the same benefit of those expensive classes.
      - sanxiyn 5y ago
        "Anyone can practice" is pretty meaningless. The largest component of benefit of expensive classes is how they motivate students. Motivating students (unless they are already self-motivated) is very difficult and skill and resource intensive, that's why the service is expensive.
foobarian 5y ago
If the rich kids are also getting SAT prep books AND tutoring on top, and everyone gets maxed out scores, seems like it's a waste of everyones's time and we're better off just skipping it.
- stephenhuey 5y ago
  I don’t think you should be downvoted for asking an honest question. As someone who tutored in SAT test prep a couple decades ago, I’m aware of the issues with standardized testing. However, the solution you propose is not so simple. The parent had a good point: high test scores may have given many students a boost in the eyes of admissions teams, especially if they did not attend a high school that is notable in the eyes of those admissions teams. They may not see top grades as equitable to those from a top prep school if they don’t know much about the school and don’t have high test scores to confirm their view of the student. Again, it’s not fair, but for these students, it’s a way to stand apart. If you take that away, it could be harder for them to be noticed until we have something else that’s sufficient.
- hpoe 5y ago
  The alternative is to make it completely subjective and based on the whims of the committee. I can't see that going wrong at all, like because there are no committee members who might be racist or sexist or have a bias against religious people or anything like that. No the college acceptance committee stands as paragons of virtues moral giants in this land of ethical pygmys they alone are incorruptible unswayable and perfectly and completely fair in all things. So standardized merit based metrics serve only as a barrier to their ineffable judgement and pure deductions let it be them alone and their powerful "algorithm" that is too pure and holy for mortal eyes to sully with their gaze be the new standard by which we determine if a student can go to Harvard, for clearly this is the one true way forward and will never be manipulated by self serving or short sighted beauracrats to manipulate and politic in.
- bryan0 5y ago
  SAT proposed an adversity score to address this, but it was extremely controversial and abandonded: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/us/sat-adversity-score-college-board.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/us/sat-adversity-score-co...
thehappypm 5y ago
Let’s say there’s two high schools, one is the ritzy private school (Eagleton Academy) and the public school that has a lot of poorer students (Pawnee High). Harvard needs a way to distinguish between students across schools. An A at Academy, after all, might be harder to achieve than an A at High, after all, Academy is a world-class institution. So, Harvard needs to tune its algorithm to factor that in. So, the A+ prodigy at High might not stand out against a sea of B+ students at Academy, after all, Academy is much more rigorous. Enter standardized testing: the prodigy gets a 2400 and the B+ students at High get ~2000s. Suddenly the prodigy can actually catch the attention of the Harvard admissions.
- abduhl 5y ago
  Yes, but the prodigy at Pawnee High happens to be Asian and we're full up on them so we take the B+ students at Academy whose parents went to Harvard. Sorry, we've been advised by legal to say that we're not really "full up" because that would imply we have quotas and also that we only consider race peripherally and only ever as a plus factor. It just so happens to not be a plus factor here, while it's a default plus factor for some other candidates.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    I'm glad I live in a country where only grades and standardized tests are taken in account, and colleges don't even know the race or background of anyone.
    - boppo1 5y ago
      Where? Seems like DEI is turning up in most western universities.
      - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
        Slovenia. But the system is pretty much the same in other former socialist countries (atleast the end results... some colleges have specialised entry exams in some countries or even a combination of both, but in the end, the students are sorted by whatever score they get (based on grades and exam scores, not race or whatever), top X get acceppted, and only the cutoff score is published - everyone with that score or more is accepted, everyone below is not). This may be a leftover of socialism though, because in yugoslavia everyone was considered equal to everyone else.
DnDGrognard 5y ago
The poor kid will have more motivation than "Tim nice but dim" who would need pushing by his parents.
dilap 5y ago
Yep, defnly matches my experience as a dirt-poor high-school dropout. SAT saved me. It's very sad to me to see these developments.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Same story here. I graduated with my GPA in the bottom 10th percentile of my class. My SAT scores were in the top 95th percentile across the nation though. Seeing this change just makes me reflect on how much it will harm the disadvantaged kids, while giving a free pass to the people who learned how to Google the answers to their homework. It's been said many times, many ways, but the education system is totally broken.
  - vasilipupkin 5y ago
    Nothing in this change says that a kid like you wouldn't be able to get into Harvard under new policy. They won't REQUIRE SAT scores, they aren't saying they won't use them if you submit them.
    - dominotw 5y ago
      > they aren't saying they won't use them if you submit them. gp is wants others won't be rejected because of low sat scores
      - vasilipupkin 5y ago
        right, harvard reserves the right to admit someone who may potentially have really bad SAT scores. But that's fine, if admission officers see that person as Harvard material, why shouldn't they? Most candidates will still submit ACT/SAT scores, and average ACT/SAT score of the incoming class will likely still be high.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
TechnoTimeStop 5y ago
But but ... insert racist ass shit about a specific race ='s the main reason stupid things like this even get accepted to begin with.
garbagecoder 5y ago
Look at what happened in San Francisco when they dumbed down the math for these same reasons. The rich kids just supplemented it with private tutoring. Which is what they will always do and you aren't ever going to be able to stop people with money from spending it on their children, at least not in a semi-free society. I was poor growing up and got into Pomona College because of my test scores.
throw_m239339 5y ago
It certainly targets "asians" students who are deemed too successful at school, despite their diverse economic background, as they are already discriminated against in Ivy league colleges right now. It's just obfuscate discrimination. Yes, when you are told "you're too successful as a community" to get in, it's not only discrimination, it's straight out racism. It will change absolutely nothing for actual rich kids, no matter their race, who can buy in admission through donations, unlike what some people are claiming here. For these kids, SAT scores already don't matter.

dsizzle 5y ago

Right, and won’t the fancy private school count for more comparatively now?

kenhwang 5y ago
Relative performance compared to peers at the same school will likely be weighed much more heavily.
- vasilipupkin 5y ago
  if you have a shitty class rank and you submit a stellar ACT score, it will still count in your favor, that has not changed. They just don't require you to submit it.

dominotw 5y ago

> Any kid can get a used copy of an SAT prep book for cheap and get similar results to a rich kid getting private test tutoring. I would say the environment, social/parental expectations, exemplars within family/friends, peers ect matter more than a book. Talented poor kids acing SAT by reading a cheap book is stuff from the movies.

ren_engineer 5y ago
only way to effectively end that would be to have government seize all children upon birth so every child has an identical environment growing up. The fact is a standardized test is far less biased than the metrics they will use to replace them. That's the reason they were created in the first place
ekam 5y ago
My sibling and I are were like this and we were definitely not the only ones. You’re out of touch if you think this just stuff from the movies.
echlipse 5y ago
There are many such examples in the real world. That's not stuff from the movies. I don't think these things get reported in US but in India we see this in the news all the time. You can make a generic google search[1] and find tons of such people. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=poor+family+child+tops+exam+india https://www.google.com/search?q=poor+family+child+tops+exam+...
- naravara 5y ago
  If it's being reported in international media I would guess it's still newsworthy enough to not be a regular occurrence. Like India is huge so you'll find a steady stream of events that are common enough to be frequent in absolute terms, but still unusual in proportional terms.
- dominotw 5y ago
  This doesn't counter my point through. From the first link[1] > "I could not study because of financial problems, so I thought I must send my children to school and wipe out the darkness from their lives," > "I got tremendous support from my school teachers," he said. This is exactly what i said. Environment of achievement is more important. "poor" doesn't mean just lack of financial resources. you cannot simply overcome lack of parental and social investment and care by reading a SAT book. > I would say the environment, social expectations, exemplars within family/friends, peers ect matter more than a book. 1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-32791175 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-32791175
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  There aren't enough to be statistically significant, which is why they are being reported in the media.
  - simplestats 5y ago
    I think every school, has its "smart kids" who define their identities by their academic achievement, and who seek to ace every test. It's their way of standing out and being special so they try extra hard to keep it that way. Unfortunately they often tend to be introverts which colleges want less than overachievers in other areas. Except for the science/technology departments, who were probably overruled by other departments if decisions like abandoning test scores are made.
stuff4ben 5y ago
Yeah, no. I took the SAT back in the day and scored horribly. Bought a SAT prep book, worked through it during lunch and brought my score up 300 points in 6 months.
gmadsen 5y ago
while rare, thats exactly how I got in a good school
BadCookie 5y ago
Add me to the list of counterexamples to your claim. While my family was more lower-middle-class than poor, I was (evidently, according to the financial aid office) the poorest person in my graduating class. And my SAT score was likely the reason for that. (I increased my score by 200 points to a perfect score using practice books.) I was also admitted to Harvard but didn’t attend because of the insufficient (at the time) financial aid that was offered.
- dominotw 5y ago
  > I increased my score by 200 points to a perfect score using practice books. what motivated you to do this at the time ? Also, I never said its not possible to do it with practice books. > I would say the environment, social/parental expectations, exemplars within family/friends, peers ect matter more than a book. my point was the word "more" in that sentence.
  - Erik816 5y ago
    What motive would you need beside "a higher score gets me into better schools"? Surely someone smart enough to get a perfect SAT score can figure that out pretty easily.
    - dominotw 5y ago
      I guess what i meant was why gp had this motivation while their peers didn't, what is the difference.
      - BadCookie 5y ago
        Late replying, but I readily admit that supportive parents and a school subculture that valued academics were both factors. I didn’t mean to suggest that I single-handedly pulled myself up by my bootstraps. But the SAT was the main path I had to stand out in applications as a public-school-educated person from a rural place you’ve never heard of.
      - maeil 5y ago
NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
I did it
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

MisterBastahrd 5y ago

Interesting. I see it as another way to pull another ladder up so that the kid who didn't get to go to the private prep school to train to take a test isn't being discriminated against for his parents' financial position. There are literally entire private schools where I grew up whose average student performs better than the best public school student.

chernevik 5y ago
That's probably selection bias. The SAT is actually pretty tough test to game. Anxiety drives parents to pay a lot for test prep, but there isn't much indication that it actually improves scores.
- canaus 5y ago
  Do you have any verifiable information to back up the claim that test prep doesn't improve scores? I have a handful of sources that disagree. https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/R1710-investigating-test-prep-impact-2018-07.pdf https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/R171... https://collegefinance.com/college-admissions/does-sat-prep-make-a-statistical-difference https://collegefinance.com/college-admissions/does-sat-prep-... https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/04/why-should-sats-matter/who-benefits-most-from-sat-prep https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/04/why-should-...
  - simplestats 5y ago
    Your third source summarizes the common knowledge that has already been stated here: anyone can practice on their own with cheap or free materials to achieve the same benefit of those expensive classes.
    - sanxiyn 5y ago
      "Anyone can practice" is pretty meaningless. The largest component of benefit of expensive classes is how they motivate students. Motivating students (unless they are already self-motivated) is very difficult and skill and resource intensive, that's why the service is expensive.

foobarian 5y ago

If the rich kids are also getting SAT prep books AND tutoring on top, and everyone gets maxed out scores, seems like it's a waste of everyones's time and we're better off just skipping it.

stephenhuey 5y ago
I don’t think you should be downvoted for asking an honest question. As someone who tutored in SAT test prep a couple decades ago, I’m aware of the issues with standardized testing. However, the solution you propose is not so simple. The parent had a good point: high test scores may have given many students a boost in the eyes of admissions teams, especially if they did not attend a high school that is notable in the eyes of those admissions teams. They may not see top grades as equitable to those from a top prep school if they don’t know much about the school and don’t have high test scores to confirm their view of the student. Again, it’s not fair, but for these students, it’s a way to stand apart. If you take that away, it could be harder for them to be noticed until we have something else that’s sufficient.
hpoe 5y ago
The alternative is to make it completely subjective and based on the whims of the committee. I can't see that going wrong at all, like because there are no committee members who might be racist or sexist or have a bias against religious people or anything like that. No the college acceptance committee stands as paragons of virtues moral giants in this land of ethical pygmys they alone are incorruptible unswayable and perfectly and completely fair in all things. So standardized merit based metrics serve only as a barrier to their ineffable judgement and pure deductions let it be them alone and their powerful "algorithm" that is too pure and holy for mortal eyes to sully with their gaze be the new standard by which we determine if a student can go to Harvard, for clearly this is the one true way forward and will never be manipulated by self serving or short sighted beauracrats to manipulate and politic in.
bryan0 5y ago
SAT proposed an adversity score to address this, but it was extremely controversial and abandonded: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/us/sat-adversity-score-college-board.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/us/sat-adversity-score-co...

thehappypm 5y ago

Let’s say there’s two high schools, one is the ritzy private school (Eagleton Academy) and the public school that has a lot of poorer students (Pawnee High). Harvard needs a way to distinguish between students across schools. An A at Academy, after all, might be harder to achieve than an A at High, after all, Academy is a world-class institution. So, Harvard needs to tune its algorithm to factor that in. So, the A+ prodigy at High might not stand out against a sea of B+ students at Academy, after all, Academy is much more rigorous. Enter standardized testing: the prodigy gets a 2400 and the B+ students at High get ~2000s. Suddenly the prodigy can actually catch the attention of the Harvard admissions.

abduhl 5y ago
Yes, but the prodigy at Pawnee High happens to be Asian and we're full up on them so we take the B+ students at Academy whose parents went to Harvard. Sorry, we've been advised by legal to say that we're not really "full up" because that would imply we have quotas and also that we only consider race peripherally and only ever as a plus factor. It just so happens to not be a plus factor here, while it's a default plus factor for some other candidates.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  I'm glad I live in a country where only grades and standardized tests are taken in account, and colleges don't even know the race or background of anyone.
  - boppo1 5y ago
    Where? Seems like DEI is turning up in most western universities.
    - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
      Slovenia. But the system is pretty much the same in other former socialist countries (atleast the end results... some colleges have specialised entry exams in some countries or even a combination of both, but in the end, the students are sorted by whatever score they get (based on grades and exam scores, not race or whatever), top X get acceppted, and only the cutoff score is published - everyone with that score or more is accepted, everyone below is not). This may be a leftover of socialism though, because in yugoslavia everyone was considered equal to everyone else.

DnDGrognard 5y ago

The poor kid will have more motivation than "Tim nice but dim" who would need pushing by his parents.

dilap 5y ago

Yep, defnly matches my experience as a dirt-poor high-school dropout. SAT saved me. It's very sad to me to see these developments.

smoldesu 5y ago
Same story here. I graduated with my GPA in the bottom 10th percentile of my class. My SAT scores were in the top 95th percentile across the nation though. Seeing this change just makes me reflect on how much it will harm the disadvantaged kids, while giving a free pass to the people who learned how to Google the answers to their homework. It's been said many times, many ways, but the education system is totally broken.
- vasilipupkin 5y ago
  Nothing in this change says that a kid like you wouldn't be able to get into Harvard under new policy. They won't REQUIRE SAT scores, they aren't saying they won't use them if you submit them.
  - dominotw 5y ago
    > they aren't saying they won't use them if you submit them. gp is wants others won't be rejected because of low sat scores
    - vasilipupkin 5y ago
      right, harvard reserves the right to admit someone who may potentially have really bad SAT scores. But that's fine, if admission officers see that person as Harvard material, why shouldn't they? Most candidates will still submit ACT/SAT scores, and average ACT/SAT score of the incoming class will likely still be high.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

TechnoTimeStop 5y ago

But but ... insert racist ass shit about a specific race ='s the main reason stupid things like this even get accepted to begin with.

garbagecoder 5y ago

Look at what happened in San Francisco when they dumbed down the math for these same reasons. The rich kids just supplemented it with private tutoring. Which is what they will always do and you aren't ever going to be able to stop people with money from spending it on their children, at least not in a semi-free society. I was poor growing up and got into Pomona College because of my test scores.

throw_m239339 5y ago

It certainly targets "asians" students who are deemed too successful at school, despite their diverse economic background, as they are already discriminated against in Ivy league colleges right now. It's just obfuscate discrimination. Yes, when you are told "you're too successful as a community" to get in, it's not only discrimination, it's straight out racism. It will change absolutely nothing for actual rich kids, no matter their race, who can buy in admission through donations, unlike what some people are claiming here. For these kids, SAT scores already don't matter.