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Definitely agree that removing the SAT appears to be related to the upcoming supreme court case about affirmative action. COVID was a good reason to delay it fo

Definitely agree that removing the SAT appears to be related to the upcoming supreme court case about affirmative action. COVID was a good reason to delay it for a couple years. But schools are pushing it out further. That makes no sense. It seems the SAT is increasingly considered "racist" because it reveals racial disparities in learning. What's next? Get rid of the driver's license test because it turns that white kids pass it at a higher rate than black kids? Sam mentions that schools could down-weight the SAT but should still consider it. Why don't schools want to do that? My guess: if they have mediocre scores on record for a kid, then admitting him means reporting those scores to USNews. They'd rather not know that the kid has a score that would bring down their average.

tessierashpool 5y ago
that is entirely a guess, though. there's actual documented evidence of colleges admitting less Asian-Americans and Jews than the test scores of either group would suggest, and Altman refers to this phenomenon in the thread. > It seems the SAT is increasingly considered "racist" because it reveals racial disparities in learning. What's next? Get rid of the driver's license test because it turns that white kids pass it at a higher rate than black kids? the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth, which is indeed due to racist public policy as well as racist private actions. it may be intended not that way, but that's how it functions. so what's next would be removing other methods of laundering racist public policy and racist private action. probably drivers' licenses would not show up on that list, and your assertion that it might is so ridiculous that it's hard to believe you're examining this topic with good faith.
- crackercrews 5y ago
  > the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth, which is indeed due to racist public policy as well as racist private actions. it may be intended not that way, but that's how it functions. Wealthy students do score better than poor students on the SAT. Do you know who also scores well? Students who study very hard, including poor students. If you get rid of the SAT then the poor students will find it harder to stand out. The rich kids will have ghost-written essays and extracurriculars. They won't be hurt at all. > so what's next would be removing other methods of laundering racist public policy and racist private action. probably drivers' licenses would not show up on that list, and your assertion that it might is so ridiculous that it's hard to believe you're examining this topic with good faith. I have never heard someone say that disparate impacts only matter if there is a laundering of wealth or public policies or private actions. Where have you seen this distinction drawn?
- gruez 5y ago
  >the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth, which is indeed due to racist public policy as well as racist private actions. it may be intended not that way, but that's how it functions. But what are SATs being replaced with? "holistic admissions"? A poor kid can prepare for the SAT by studying his ass off, with mostly free/cheap materials from the internet. How can you do the same with "extracurriculars" (eg. going to africa to dig a well) and "hobbies" (going the country club every week)?
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    From my viewpoint in Europe I never understood the whole extracurricular, hobby or even the essay or recommendation letter part of admission process. All of those felt like nothing to do with actual capability to study. If SAT is a bad idea, replace it with field specific national entrance exam. Other fun alternatives, just outright auction off certain number of admission slots. Or just award slots randomly to all applicants.
    - School-Cotton 5y ago
      > From my viewpoint in Europe I never understood the whole extracurricular, hobby or even the essay or recommendation letter part of admission process. First, a meta-point about questions like “why doesn’t the US have policy X Y or Z”: The US is essentially set up to be ungovernable by design (any meaningful reform requires the cooperation of both major political parties, a situation that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the developed world), you can’t really find rational reasons for most policies. I notice this a lot, actually: the fundamental thing Europeans miss about the US is they think “a rule exists, thus it must be there on purpose”, because in your countries, unlike in the US, you have functioning parliaments and governments that can change laws as necessary. Anyway, the US arrived at its education system, as with most things, through a long and largely random process. The catalyst for the weird non-academic admissions standards in particular is well-documented to have been pure anti-Semitism: college administrators felt that with purely academic admissions standards, too many Jews were being admitted.
    - hotpotamus 5y ago
- mistrial9 5y ago
  > the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth this is a ludicrous modern reinterpretation of SAT testing.. sure, testing has lots of downsides.. linking it to "wealth laundering" is your own obsessions showing IMO
- 015UUZn8aEvW 5y ago
  >the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth, which is indeed due to racist public policy as well as racist private actions. it may be intended not that way, but that's how it functions. I'm not aware of data on SAT scores and family net worth, but there is plenty of data on SAT scores and family income. Controlling for income doesn't come close to accounting for racial gaps; the richest black kids barely do better than the poorest white kids. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ezekiel-Dixon-Roman/publication/280232788/figure/tbl2/AS:669299509309449@1536584846547/Mean-SAT-Mathematics-and-Verbal-Scores-by-Family-Income-for-the-2003-College-Bound.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ezekiel-Dixon-Roman/pub...
- ryan93 5y ago
  The average math SAT for kids whose families make over 250k would put you in the bottom ten percent at fucking Boston university.
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
    I teach at a top 40 university in the South and I promise you, the coaching for the math SAT shows, especially with COVID, there is a huge amount of overfitting going on.
moltke 5y ago
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > ...are just more academically inclined than others... It's not "races", it's culture. We should just remove this whole idea of "race" from our understanding of social phenomena, all it can do is mislead. There are African, Black subcultures like the Igbo and Ashanti that achieve to the highest levels academically (including in the West!) and Asian subcultures that don't place any focus on education, and struggle as a result. Culture is what matters. Forget race.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    I have lived in a USA urban metropolitan area most of my entire life.. Asian and Black are not nearly descriptive enough terms.. there are massive variations in the populations.. as the post above said.. its not sufficient, and directly misleading, to distinguish people in education.. secondly, "White Males" repeatedly get left out of special offers and incentives, and there are tons of those special incentives, for decades.. the educational spectrum of "White Males" is also huge .. its a real mess and people get angry about the topics right away when discussing them..
  - twofornone 5y ago
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      > the only seemingly rational explanation for inequity is discrimination Wait, this is not what I said and is not how serious social science is done. In many ways, public K-12 education is equally abysmal for everyone. It may not overtly discriminate, but it lets people fall through the cracks in a way that amplifies the causal influence of pure luck (i.e. randomness, noise in outcomes) and external factors such as different cultural attitudes and generational history (such as whether your grandparents and great-grandparents happened to be educated or at least literate), that account for much of the observed correlation with race.
acidbaseextract 5y ago
Polymatter recently had a great video on the way the college ranking system is a hustle for foreign student money, and just how heavily it distorts colleges incentives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQWlnTyOSig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQWlnTyOSig
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Who or what is Polymatter? Why do you trust them? It would be useful if people said why they trust whatever they are linking to. Random stuff on the Internet isn't worth the time.
  - rmbyrro 5y ago
    To 99.99% of people on the internet, your comment would be "random stuff on the Internet". I'm sorry, but who are you and why should I trust your reasons to trust other people?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - newsclues 5y ago
    It’s a brand for a YouTube channel, like the name for TV programs. Judge the content for yourself.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      > Judge the content for yourself. IMHO the onus to establish an assertion (as a general term) is on the person making it: 1. Imagine I post an assertion, 'the moon is made of blue cheese', and it's read by 20 people. Should all 20 do the research themselves? That's much less efficient than my doing it - I already know where I got it, it's my claim, and it's 1/20th the labor. 2. Think of all the assertions you read: Do you have time to research them all? 3. The Internet is filled with information, mostly BS. I don't have time for even a fraction of the accurate info. If we had 1% of the info, but it was backed by credible research, it would be no loss in info (nobody can process even 1%) and great gain. Finally, people can't judge content it unless they have expertise in the domain. There is plenty of research showing that to be true - that fact is fundamental to misinformation and disinformation, even something as simple as paid Amazon reviews - and it's easy to observe. Think of something in which you have expertise, like your profession: Could you persuade a non-expert? I could persuade one of almost anything, it seems; they just have no idea what are the questions, the facts (beyond a very limited range), or the answers.
sometimeshuman 5y ago
As an ancedote, I was told by my low income peer group that you get 600 points just for filling out your name on the SAT and that 800 points could get you into a great school like MIT. So I assumed it was a pass/fail exam in a sense and left early during the verbal part because I found it condescending and boring. Before the exam, I couldn't understand why the higher income kids were paying for SAT training classes. What is the point of scoring 1600 if 800 could get you in the "best" school. It would have interfered with my after school job anyway. To add further, I thought MIT was just DeVry for rich people but otherwise equivalent and that only black kids get scholarships (ironic since I am Latino). Are things different now ? Are most kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds still clueless about the college admissions process, the difference between colleges, and scholarships. It seems like that is the part that needs to be fixed and eliminating SATs is shortsighted.
- crackercrews 5y ago
  You get 200 points per section automatically. [1] And to get into MIT you'd need at least 1,000 points, no matter your race. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT
  - edflsafoiewq 5y ago
    Why does it have such a weird score range?
    - xadhominemx 5y ago
      You get negative points for answering incorrectly, to disincentivize blind guessing.
      - crackercrews 5y ago
        I believe it doesn't disincentivize blind guessing. It just counteracts it. If you can eliminate one answer you should guess. Even if you can't eliminate an answer you break even.
agumonkey 5y ago
It's extremely difficult for me to pinpoint when / where the tendency to flatten (as in no more disparity) started. It's super weird. Everything is flat. I sense some kind of rejection of it from fear of potential dominance. But it's still odd to me.
- fuckcensorship 5y ago
  You’re not the only one who notices this. I think you would be interested in Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut [1], a great short story related to this topic. [1]: https://www.cvccworks.edu/Downloads/HarrisonBergeronByKurtVonnegutJr.pdf https://www.cvccworks.edu/Downloads/HarrisonBergeronByKurtVo...
  - octoberfranklin 5y ago
    This was an assigned text when I was in high school. Any teacher who puts this on the syllabus today would be fired for doing a racism.
wolverine876 5y ago
> the SAT is increasingly considered "racist" because it reveals racial disparities in learning Could you provide an example of that claim? Usually the SAT is considered discriminatory because the way the testing is done favors wealthy, well-educated people, and gives negative results for equally talented people who lack those advantages. Colleges have found that the SAT is excluding a large part of the talent pool. Also, SAT scores do not correlate well at all with college outcomes. Why then use the SAT?
- ryan93 5y ago
  SAT math scores combined with GPA are 5 times more predictive than gpa alone at Berkeley. They also found the test was more predictive for low income students
  - sjg007 5y ago
    For the SAT the difference between winning and losing in college admission is if you can prepare for it. It's not a test you take cold. That is the biggest issue with it so it advantages those with more resources.
  - walkhour 5y ago
    SAT correlates well with college performance and moreover must be used to obtain the best college performance predictors we have (or something highly correlated with SAT).
    - sjg007 5y ago
      Some elite law schools did a study where they admitted underprivileged students with bad LSAT scores and guess what, those students did great and got great jobs.
      - walkhour 5y ago
        Do you have the link to the study?
  - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
glued 5y ago
I was on track to go to a prestigious university in high school when my fundamentalist christian parents kicked me out of the house at the age of 16. I ended up jumping around to live with different friends then eventually my grandparents. I had no money and thought I had no future. The stress was killing me, my grades and SAT score suffered. I ended up at a small state school in rural Georgia because of this. Today I work at one of the FANG companies but it was a long and challenging struggle to get here. A single test in high school shouldn’t define your long term success. It didn’t in my case but there are many folks who are living through difficulty at that age.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  You can always retake the SAT. That or prove your worth by achieving a high GPA at a community college. It sounds like maybe money would have been the limiting factor in your case but I don’t know.
- hackernewds 5y ago
  Although I'm glad it worked out for you, this sounds like a very niche case that would fail every single measure of exampination. Neither is working at a FANG company a signal of intelligence.
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    > Neither is working at a FANG company a signal of intelligence You really believe that? I find it extremely hard to believe that the distribution of intelligence for engineering roles at a FAANG company is the same as that of the general population. It seems far more likely that the distribution is shifted 10-15 points to the right.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    I know anecdotes are not the singular of data, but I knew plenty of people whose young lives mirrored the OPs. My family had two couch-surfing classmates (at different times). Neglectful parents are common.
jeffbee 5y ago
The SAT's past racial bias is still echoing through the nation. There were still test questions based on Very White Things like cotillions and yachting as recently as 40 years ago. The repercussions of those things could be that some person barely missed getting admitted to a university, took a lifetime earnings hit, lived in a poorer town with worse schools, and now their kids who may be very smart and talented also don't score well on tests. The whole point of affirmative action is to swing the pendulum to the other side for a while, to not just make it fair now, but to counteract past unfairness.
- google234123 5y ago
  I wish that those institutions and people on your side of the issue would be more honest about what they are doing. If Harvard would just come out and admit to the Supreme Court that they discriminate based on race, it would made the case much easier and much easier politically to shut it down.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Anyone actually in the position to make change won't, since change means work and directly puts them and their coworkers' jobs in jeopardy. The road to non-discriminatory behavior can only be implemented by the management and investors running the show, so it's done in their way and on their time table.
- ryan93 5y ago
  “As recently as 40 years ago” lol. Also please find me some math SAT questions that require knowledge of upper class white shit
- visarga 5y ago
  That sounds stretched. Smart kids failing because their parents didn't know yachting trivia 40 years ago... And in 4 decades their family couldn't crack open a math book? The main reason for failing education is not money, it's family attitude towards education. Educational parents get better results than rich parents. Look at how the Asian group is faring. In fact having too rich parents is pulling down the kids.

tessierashpool 5y ago

that is entirely a guess, though. there's actual documented evidence of colleges admitting less Asian-Americans and Jews than the test scores of either group would suggest, and Altman refers to this phenomenon in the thread. > It seems the SAT is increasingly considered "racist" because it reveals racial disparities in learning. What's next? Get rid of the driver's license test because it turns that white kids pass it at a higher rate than black kids? the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth, which is indeed due to racist public policy as well as racist private actions. it may be intended not that way, but that's how it functions. so what's next would be removing other methods of laundering racist public policy and racist private action. probably drivers' licenses would not show up on that list, and your assertion that it might is so ridiculous that it's hard to believe you're examining this topic with good faith.

crackercrews 5y ago
> the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth, which is indeed due to racist public policy as well as racist private actions. it may be intended not that way, but that's how it functions. Wealthy students do score better than poor students on the SAT. Do you know who also scores well? Students who study very hard, including poor students. If you get rid of the SAT then the poor students will find it harder to stand out. The rich kids will have ghost-written essays and extracurriculars. They won't be hurt at all. > so what's next would be removing other methods of laundering racist public policy and racist private action. probably drivers' licenses would not show up on that list, and your assertion that it might is so ridiculous that it's hard to believe you're examining this topic with good faith. I have never heard someone say that disparate impacts only matter if there is a laundering of wealth or public policies or private actions. Where have you seen this distinction drawn?
gruez 5y ago
>the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth, which is indeed due to racist public policy as well as racist private actions. it may be intended not that way, but that's how it functions. But what are SATs being replaced with? "holistic admissions"? A poor kid can prepare for the SAT by studying his ass off, with mostly free/cheap materials from the internet. How can you do the same with "extracurriculars" (eg. going to africa to dig a well) and "hobbies" (going the country club every week)?
- Ekaros 5y ago
  From my viewpoint in Europe I never understood the whole extracurricular, hobby or even the essay or recommendation letter part of admission process. All of those felt like nothing to do with actual capability to study. If SAT is a bad idea, replace it with field specific national entrance exam. Other fun alternatives, just outright auction off certain number of admission slots. Or just award slots randomly to all applicants.
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    > From my viewpoint in Europe I never understood the whole extracurricular, hobby or even the essay or recommendation letter part of admission process. First, a meta-point about questions like “why doesn’t the US have policy X Y or Z”: The US is essentially set up to be ungovernable by design (any meaningful reform requires the cooperation of both major political parties, a situation that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the developed world), you can’t really find rational reasons for most policies. I notice this a lot, actually: the fundamental thing Europeans miss about the US is they think “a rule exists, thus it must be there on purpose”, because in your countries, unlike in the US, you have functioning parliaments and governments that can change laws as necessary. Anyway, the US arrived at its education system, as with most things, through a long and largely random process. The catalyst for the weird non-academic admissions standards in particular is well-documented to have been pure anti-Semitism: college administrators felt that with purely academic admissions standards, too many Jews were being admitted.
  - hotpotamus 5y ago
mistrial9 5y ago
> the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth this is a ludicrous modern reinterpretation of SAT testing.. sure, testing has lots of downsides.. linking it to "wealth laundering" is your own obsessions showing IMO
015UUZn8aEvW 5y ago
>the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth, which is indeed due to racist public policy as well as racist private actions. it may be intended not that way, but that's how it functions. I'm not aware of data on SAT scores and family net worth, but there is plenty of data on SAT scores and family income. Controlling for income doesn't come close to accounting for racial gaps; the richest black kids barely do better than the poorest white kids. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ezekiel-Dixon-Roman/publication/280232788/figure/tbl2/AS:669299509309449@1536584846547/Mean-SAT-Mathematics-and-Verbal-Scores-by-Family-Income-for-the-2003-College-Bound.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ezekiel-Dixon-Roman/pub...
ryan93 5y ago
The average math SAT for kids whose families make over 250k would put you in the bottom ten percent at fucking Boston university.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  I teach at a top 40 university in the South and I promise you, the coaching for the math SAT shows, especially with COVID, there is a huge amount of overfitting going on.

moltke 5y ago

zozbot234 5y ago
> ...are just more academically inclined than others... It's not "races", it's culture. We should just remove this whole idea of "race" from our understanding of social phenomena, all it can do is mislead. There are African, Black subcultures like the Igbo and Ashanti that achieve to the highest levels academically (including in the West!) and Asian subcultures that don't place any focus on education, and struggle as a result. Culture is what matters. Forget race.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  I have lived in a USA urban metropolitan area most of my entire life.. Asian and Black are not nearly descriptive enough terms.. there are massive variations in the populations.. as the post above said.. its not sufficient, and directly misleading, to distinguish people in education.. secondly, "White Males" repeatedly get left out of special offers and incentives, and there are tons of those special incentives, for decades.. the educational spectrum of "White Males" is also huge .. its a real mess and people get angry about the topics right away when discussing them..
- twofornone 5y ago
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > the only seemingly rational explanation for inequity is discrimination Wait, this is not what I said and is not how serious social science is done. In many ways, public K-12 education is equally abysmal for everyone. It may not overtly discriminate, but it lets people fall through the cracks in a way that amplifies the causal influence of pure luck (i.e. randomness, noise in outcomes) and external factors such as different cultural attitudes and generational history (such as whether your grandparents and great-grandparents happened to be educated or at least literate), that account for much of the observed correlation with race.

acidbaseextract 5y ago

Polymatter recently had a great video on the way the college ranking system is a hustle for foreign student money, and just how heavily it distorts colleges incentives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQWlnTyOSig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQWlnTyOSig

wolverine876 5y ago
Who or what is Polymatter? Why do you trust them? It would be useful if people said why they trust whatever they are linking to. Random stuff on the Internet isn't worth the time.
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  To 99.99% of people on the internet, your comment would be "random stuff on the Internet". I'm sorry, but who are you and why should I trust your reasons to trust other people?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- newsclues 5y ago
  It’s a brand for a YouTube channel, like the name for TV programs. Judge the content for yourself.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > Judge the content for yourself. IMHO the onus to establish an assertion (as a general term) is on the person making it: 1. Imagine I post an assertion, 'the moon is made of blue cheese', and it's read by 20 people. Should all 20 do the research themselves? That's much less efficient than my doing it - I already know where I got it, it's my claim, and it's 1/20th the labor. 2. Think of all the assertions you read: Do you have time to research them all? 3. The Internet is filled with information, mostly BS. I don't have time for even a fraction of the accurate info. If we had 1% of the info, but it was backed by credible research, it would be no loss in info (nobody can process even 1%) and great gain. Finally, people can't judge content it unless they have expertise in the domain. There is plenty of research showing that to be true - that fact is fundamental to misinformation and disinformation, even something as simple as paid Amazon reviews - and it's easy to observe. Think of something in which you have expertise, like your profession: Could you persuade a non-expert? I could persuade one of almost anything, it seems; they just have no idea what are the questions, the facts (beyond a very limited range), or the answers.

sometimeshuman 5y ago

As an ancedote, I was told by my low income peer group that you get 600 points just for filling out your name on the SAT and that 800 points could get you into a great school like MIT. So I assumed it was a pass/fail exam in a sense and left early during the verbal part because I found it condescending and boring. Before the exam, I couldn't understand why the higher income kids were paying for SAT training classes. What is the point of scoring 1600 if 800 could get you in the "best" school. It would have interfered with my after school job anyway. To add further, I thought MIT was just DeVry for rich people but otherwise equivalent and that only black kids get scholarships (ironic since I am Latino). Are things different now ? Are most kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds still clueless about the college admissions process, the difference between colleges, and scholarships. It seems like that is the part that needs to be fixed and eliminating SATs is shortsighted.

crackercrews 5y ago
You get 200 points per section automatically. [1] And to get into MIT you'd need at least 1,000 points, no matter your race. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT
- edflsafoiewq 5y ago
  Why does it have such a weird score range?
  - xadhominemx 5y ago
    You get negative points for answering incorrectly, to disincentivize blind guessing.
    - crackercrews 5y ago
      I believe it doesn't disincentivize blind guessing. It just counteracts it. If you can eliminate one answer you should guess. Even if you can't eliminate an answer you break even.

agumonkey 5y ago

It's extremely difficult for me to pinpoint when / where the tendency to flatten (as in no more disparity) started. It's super weird. Everything is flat. I sense some kind of rejection of it from fear of potential dominance. But it's still odd to me.

fuckcensorship 5y ago
You’re not the only one who notices this. I think you would be interested in Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut [1], a great short story related to this topic. [1]: https://www.cvccworks.edu/Downloads/HarrisonBergeronByKurtVonnegutJr.pdf https://www.cvccworks.edu/Downloads/HarrisonBergeronByKurtVo...
- octoberfranklin 5y ago
  This was an assigned text when I was in high school. Any teacher who puts this on the syllabus today would be fired for doing a racism.

wolverine876 5y ago

> the SAT is increasingly considered "racist" because it reveals racial disparities in learning Could you provide an example of that claim? Usually the SAT is considered discriminatory because the way the testing is done favors wealthy, well-educated people, and gives negative results for equally talented people who lack those advantages. Colleges have found that the SAT is excluding a large part of the talent pool. Also, SAT scores do not correlate well at all with college outcomes. Why then use the SAT?

ryan93 5y ago
SAT math scores combined with GPA are 5 times more predictive than gpa alone at Berkeley. They also found the test was more predictive for low income students
- sjg007 5y ago
  For the SAT the difference between winning and losing in college admission is if you can prepare for it. It's not a test you take cold. That is the biggest issue with it so it advantages those with more resources.
- walkhour 5y ago
  SAT correlates well with college performance and moreover must be used to obtain the best college performance predictors we have (or something highly correlated with SAT).
  - sjg007 5y ago
    Some elite law schools did a study where they admitted underprivileged students with bad LSAT scores and guess what, those students did great and got great jobs.
    - walkhour 5y ago
      Do you have the link to the study?
- 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

glued 5y ago

I was on track to go to a prestigious university in high school when my fundamentalist christian parents kicked me out of the house at the age of 16. I ended up jumping around to live with different friends then eventually my grandparents. I had no money and thought I had no future. The stress was killing me, my grades and SAT score suffered. I ended up at a small state school in rural Georgia because of this. Today I work at one of the FANG companies but it was a long and challenging struggle to get here. A single test in high school shouldn’t define your long term success. It didn’t in my case but there are many folks who are living through difficulty at that age.

jimbob45 5y ago
You can always retake the SAT. That or prove your worth by achieving a high GPA at a community college. It sounds like maybe money would have been the limiting factor in your case but I don’t know.
hackernewds 5y ago
Although I'm glad it worked out for you, this sounds like a very niche case that would fail every single measure of exampination. Neither is working at a FANG company a signal of intelligence.
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  > Neither is working at a FANG company a signal of intelligence You really believe that? I find it extremely hard to believe that the distribution of intelligence for engineering roles at a FAANG company is the same as that of the general population. It seems far more likely that the distribution is shifted 10-15 points to the right.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  I know anecdotes are not the singular of data, but I knew plenty of people whose young lives mirrored the OPs. My family had two couch-surfing classmates (at different times). Neglectful parents are common.

jeffbee 5y ago

The SAT's past racial bias is still echoing through the nation. There were still test questions based on Very White Things like cotillions and yachting as recently as 40 years ago. The repercussions of those things could be that some person barely missed getting admitted to a university, took a lifetime earnings hit, lived in a poorer town with worse schools, and now their kids who may be very smart and talented also don't score well on tests. The whole point of affirmative action is to swing the pendulum to the other side for a while, to not just make it fair now, but to counteract past unfairness.

google234123 5y ago
I wish that those institutions and people on your side of the issue would be more honest about what they are doing. If Harvard would just come out and admit to the Supreme Court that they discriminate based on race, it would made the case much easier and much easier politically to shut it down.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Anyone actually in the position to make change won't, since change means work and directly puts them and their coworkers' jobs in jeopardy. The road to non-discriminatory behavior can only be implemented by the management and investors running the show, so it's done in their way and on their time table.
ryan93 5y ago
“As recently as 40 years ago” lol. Also please find me some math SAT questions that require knowledge of upper class white shit
visarga 5y ago
That sounds stretched. Smart kids failing because their parents didn't know yachting trivia 40 years ago... And in 4 decades their family couldn't crack open a math book? The main reason for failing education is not money, it's family attitude towards education. Educational parents get better results than rich parents. Look at how the Asian group is faring. In fact having too rich parents is pulling down the kids.