20 ms·

SAT score distributions in Michigan

• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• fullshark 4y ago
  This anecdote is really something https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2022/10/sat-score-distributions-in-michigan.html#comment-6004522520 https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2022/10/sat-score-distribution...
  • hker999 4y ago
    The Harvard university president has stated many times that admissions are weighted and if you are Asian, will have a much harder time getting accepted. It seems racism is accepted in academia, when it affects a demographic you deem 'problematic'
    • lo_zamoyski 4y ago
      The least conspiratorial explanation is the use of racial quotas.
    • jonahbenton 4y ago
      As a NYC public school parent now with kids in college, who sees mono-white, mono-asian and mono-black school cultures (all 3 of which NYC unfortunately has lots of) as abhorrent, there is nothing wrong with not wanting a mono-culture in a community. (Go ahead. Downvote. It does wonders to change my mind lol).
      • arolihas 4y ago
        Why is that abhorrent to you?
        • adamsmith143 4y ago
          The real world is not a monoculture so why would you want your child to socialize in one?
          • arolihas 4y ago
            A lot of the real world is a "monoculture". Just because a majority of people look similar doesn't mean they all share similar ideologies, experiences, and values necessarily. Race is merely a social construct, and the Asian category covers several unique nationalities and cultures. Black and white are similarly ludicrously diverse. And these are young adults who should be bright enough to seek out diverse experiences and places if it suits them. If Harvard really cared about not being a monoculture they would look at their legacy admissions.
          • dahfizz 4y ago
            "abhorrent" is much much stronger than "suboptimal for socialization skills". Besides, every other country in the world gets to have its own cultural identity. The "real world" is very much a collection of monocultures. Only in America is it considered bad to have a cultural identity.
          • ryan93 4y ago
            IF that is what harvard is doing why do they STRONGLY prefer black immigrants over descendants of slavery.
          • Gareth321 4y ago
            > The real world is not a monoculture Here you use the term "monoculture." You appear to be using culture and race interchangeably. Clearly they are not the same. Are you referring to monoculture or monorace?
          • googlryas 4y ago
            "Asian" isn't a culture. Hell, even "Chinese" isn't a culture. China recognizes 55 ethnic minority groups, plus the Han majority. I'm sure if you put one person from each group into a classroom, you might say "They're all Chinese. Monoculture!", but it couldn't be further from the truth.
      • alex_sf 4y ago
        Sure, it's not ideal. Is the solution to have different standards for different groups based solely on skin color or self-identification?
        • socialismisok 4y ago
          It reasonably could be, if you are trying to undo systemic disadvantages that different groups have. You have to make a conscious choice to accept some adjustments higher if the foundation is systematically unfair. It might feel unfair to the folks who benefit from systematic advantages early.
          • prottog 4y ago
            You're arguing that past discrimination justifies present discrimination, and that past discrimination is in fact solely or majorly responsible for present disparities in outcomes. I can't see a world in which these positions are provable in a meaningful manner and not devolve society into a bitter, recriminatory cesspit, especially when it means that some people will in fact be hurt by present discrimination.
            • socialismisok 4y ago
              Redlining is provable and had a clear outcome on income. It ended only very recently. And yeah, fixing that is going to cost some folks. Good news, we could figure out who benefitted or even just tax the very wealthy to get it fixed.
      • dahfizz 4y ago
        Why? Why does skin color == culture, and why is "mono-culture" abhorrent? Personally, I find treating people like trading cards and trying to "collect them all" is much more abhorrent.
    • hotpotamus 4y ago
      I see this brought up a lot and it always makes me wonder - what is the "correct" number of black people who should be admitted to Harvard? Like if you removed any racial consideration, what would be the results?
      • glerk 4y ago
        The correct number of X group who should be admitted is the number of individuals in X group who meet the academic standard to be admitted. How about we stop giving those arbitrary buckets so much importance and treat everyone like individuals?
        • hotpotamus 4y ago
          Yes, and I wonder what the racial composition of such a standard would be.
          • glerk 4y ago
            Take a look at the table in the linked post and you might get an idea. The real question is why are you so interested in these buckets? Why are you trying to impose them on the rest of us?
            • hotpotamus 4y ago
              I don't find the table all that helpful. I don't know the exact numbers, but given the number of black kids in the country, and the limited number of seats at Harvard, couldn't you construct a class of nothing but black students from the top SAT bracket and still have to deny most of them? As far as why I'm interested in these buckets - it's because this seems to be a very pressing matter of national concern - isn't there a supreme court case regarding this issue on the docket now?
              • glerk 4y ago
                > couldn't you construct a class of nothing but black students from the top SAT bracket and still have to deny most of them? You could do that, but if we disregard race as a factor and use a completely unbiased approach (example: simply select the highest scores and roll a dice in case of a tie), it is easy to see what the distribution would look like based on that table.
    • glerk 4y ago
      This is the subject of a current litigation. Hopefully the Supreme Court comes through and puts an end to this clown show.
    • googlryas 4y ago
      Why don't Asians just decline to self identify? Are admissions looking at names or something and saying "yup, this is an Asian"?
  • user2352 4y ago
    As someone with East Asian ancestry in North America, you quickly learn that hard work will only rarely help you find opportunities with institutions that have a huge demand of qualified applicants but not enough seats. This includes universities, high-prestige schools like medical schools, and a lot of creative industries (mentorship opportunities and scholarships just aren't there for you). This is unfair, but it's difficult to discuss this openly non-Asian people due to a lot of skepticism about disadvantages. But the nice thing is that the private sector truly doesn't care as much. So long as you can help make a company money, they will be eager to hire you. This includes FAAMG, Jane Street, and other companies - I personally know East Asian friends who had no difficulty working there, whereas others with similar or stronger work ethics faced a far more uphill battle getting into medical school. There is a lot of room for success at the most pragmatic and practical organizations, and there are plenty of other applicants for people doing do-good work that directly benefits society (hence the rejections despite hard work). If you really still want to contribute, effective altruism via donations to effective charities is still an option, along with entrepreneurship for good via founding your own company.
    • arolihas 4y ago
      Private sector is better but it isn't some meritocratic utopia. There is a lot of nepotism and elitism in the upper echelon.
    • vxNsr 4y ago
      I’ve got a friend applying to med schools, he’s a little older (late 20s vs early 20s) so he took the spray and pray approach and applied to 60 MD and DO schools. He said by and large he’s the only or one of ~3 non-minorities in any of the MD group interviews, additionally Asians aren’t well represented there either. DO group interviews on the other hand are mostly white/asain.
      • throwaway6734 4y ago
        Do?
        • 4y ago
  • armchairhacker 4y ago
    The kid got accepted to UMass Amherst and Northeastern University. Those colleges are really highly-rated for CS, and Northeastern in particular has recently become really selective. The college rejections are weird, yes, but I don’t feel bad for him
    • user2352 4y ago
      With life experience and age, you really appreciate the opportunities like UMass Amherst and Northeastern for CS. But if you're a high school senior, it's really common that you don't really realize that in the moment, and feel hugely demotivated or even end up depressed at the start of university. A lot of these people spend hours a week studying for the SATs and courses with the dream and imagination of getting into an Ivy League. You could say it's a misplaced effort, that these kids should lower expectations, and that these people should be happy with the opportunities they have, and there's merit. But in the moment, it's a huge blow to feel like hard work just won't pay off, and it certainly caused depression among a few people I knew. This can be mitigated by good mentorship and parenting, but not all people end up with good mentors, and parents who didn't experience the process might not understand it either.
      • the_only_law 4y ago
        > With life experience and age, you really appreciate the opportunities like UMass Amherst and Northeastern for CS Unfortunately that point it’s a pain in the ass to go back.
      • thehappypm 4y ago
        UMass Amherst is where I hope my children want to go. It’s a prestigious school by all means, and it’s a beautiful campus-oriented life not too far from civilization. Plus in state tuition. I went to a prestigious private school and don’t think it’s really better than a flagship state school.
    • arolihas 4y ago
      Yeah, an Eagle Scout who did debate and very well academically going to a pretty good public school for computer science isn't some travesty. I am a little surprised at some of the results but I guess admissions have become more competitive over the past decade
  • adamsmith143 4y ago
    Kind of useless in isolation. Who knows how competitive the CS classes are at the places they were rejected. I mean CS is probably the most competitive of any Major currently and they were rejected from arguably the top undergrad programs in the world. Out of state students are also at a disadvantage so that didn't help their case. Also seemed to lack any CS related extra curriculars, when they're applying against kids who won IOC's or have been building software since they were 12. Probably would have done fine applying to USC, Duke, JHU and other elite privates or in any other major.
  • fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
    That stood out to me too. For all the self-appointed power that higher education institutions have given themselves to balance the proverbial scales of justice, I wonder if they ever take the time to consider the moral hazards of their decision making. Will the presidents, chancellors, board of governors, or deans of these institutions ever have to compete for these seats? Obviously no, and their own children will likely benefit in some form, whether it is legacy status or academic nepotism/networking, from their parents’ existing positions of power. So on whom does the burden of balancing the scales, not in theory but in practice, fall? Not white students at the nation’s elite schools, whose enrollment numbers even after various forms of affirmative action have been implemented have remained steady. Not black, latino/a/x, or Native American students whose enrollment numbers have benefited from targeted recruitment. Not international students, whose full-tuition payments have ensured their enrollment numbers have only increased with the decline of public funding (in the case of public institutions) and budgetary restructuring (in the case of private institutions). From a racial dimension, the primary group paying for higher education’s experiments in educational racial composition have primarily been Asian-American students, among whom there are prospective students (as we can see in the linked comment) with top-percentile scores in their respective areas of study, high-level achievement in non-academic pursuits, and a widely dispersed range of target schools. For all the moral certainty that higher education likes to presume, they have a dumbfounding lack of self-awareness when it comes to the moral hazard of making others pay for the consequences of their self-appointed mission. This is, of course, assuming they aren’t fully aware and satisfied with the results they’ve produced.
    • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      It is actually a fascinating study and I wonder why the results were not studied closer. If anything, the approach that it seemingly disadvantaged asian applicants and benefited black applicants had the opposite effect due to cultural norms, which only forced asian parents to, apparently, force their kids to study even harder. Full disclosure. I am mostly done with affirmative action. Standardized testing all the way. It is not perfect, but its better than 'whose ancestors suffered the most recently'. Otherwise we will continue to see a steady degradation akin to students voting a chemistry out for tough grades ( recent news that is making rounds on social media ).
  • green-eclipse 4y ago
    That comment is wild, and as such -- remember, don't believe everything you read on the internet. Who knows if this is accurate or not. Disinformation campaigns and anger-boosting campaigns (aimed at both sides of the ideological aisle) from all corners of the internet are very sophisticated these days.
  • treis 4y ago
    I'm having trouble coming up with the right words to make my point. But, to me, this application says "my parents made me do a lot of shit" more than it says that this person is exceptional. What's this kid's resume if he's born in the hood to a single mom instead of a Boston suburb to an associate partner at IBM? IMHO it's sour grapes from someone that tried to game the system but didn't get the prize they wanted.
    • edflsafoiewq 4y ago
      What's your point, anything you do that doesn't flow from some deep internal fire so powerful it overwhelms any external circumstance "doesn't count"?
      • treis 4y ago
        My point is that "quality of parents" shouldn't be the way we pick the elite
        • z7 4y ago
          Why not extend this to attractiveness, general health, enviromental factors like air pollution, gender, quality of local libraries, height etc., all likely influencing an individual's success in life?
          • treis 4y ago
            Of course I don't think we should pick out elite based on these things either
        • edflsafoiewq 4y ago
          No they should be picked for "ability", and it's all the same whether that "ability" was inculcated by good parenting or not.
          • treis 4y ago
            The point is that two kids with equal ability can have dramatically different accomplishments based on things outside their control
  • a2tech 4y ago
    He applied for Computer Science, so I looked at the University of Michigan's Engineering School SAT scores, and he was just a bit over the median score for the engineering school. Since admissions at these schools is slammed with applications its not unreasonable that he just didn't get in because he was in an ocean of similar applications.
    • prottog 4y ago
      Would it not be fair to look at the median score for different racial groups, since we know that many universities do in fact discriminate on the basis of race in admissions?
      • a2tech 4y ago
        In Michigan publicly funded institutions are no longer allowed to use race as a factor.
        • gnicholas 4y ago
          Same in California, but I nonetheless heard a dean from UC Berkeley talking about how they "push the envelope" in terms of legality. It's easy to accomplish via a "holistic assessments".
  • WORMS_EAT_WORMS 4y ago
    What if he just checked White vs Asian American. Do colleges even check that? Probably lots of fraud the other direction. E.g.: A white person claiming to be Native American. Colleges definitely look to the other way a bit to hit metrics / numbers, but what about the other direction?
  • nnm 4y ago
    The kids should really also apply to international schools.
  • raunak 4y ago
    I'm a current sophomore at Harvard, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. But those ECs and stats really aren't impressive enough to even qualify him for admission at any Ivy or T20. UIUC and UT Austin I agree, little surprising, but again, the CS program is very competitive, and it doesn't surprise me he didn't get in. Stats are irrelevant for Asians - if you have a 1500+ you're considered "good", you can't gain anything by having a 1580 vs. a 1520 for example. It really does come down to your essays, extracurriculars, and overall 'package'. Which I genuinely believe is the most fair way to accept folks into college.
    • downvoteme1 4y ago
      Is it 1500 for everybody or 1500 for Asians, 1400 for whites, 1300 for African Americans and so on. Just curious?
• greatpostman 4y ago
  puts head in the sand
  • rizzaxc 4y ago
    if anybody doubts that the future isn't in the US (or rather, the west), this is the evidence. China has both the brains and brawn to bully every other nation (provided it doesn't collapse under its own weight)
    • commandlinefan 4y ago
      If so... what do you do about it, then? If Chinese people are just smarter than everybody else and smarter wins (both just theories, but if they're true)... we can't just will ourselves into getting smarter.
      • rizzaxc 4y ago
        Individually we can't get smarter all of a sudden, but as a society we can provide better platform for the smartest of us to contribute: bring (quasi)meritocracy back; do away with all these AA nonsense. Not very feasible with the political climate right now (or just American culture in general - `nerd` is such a weird insult). We can't win them on quantity, but at least we don't lose outright. And no I don't think Chinese are just smarter, they just try gigahard because you gotta compete with the other babillion Chinese peers somehow, and there's no AA to save you
• hackeraccount 4y ago
  Hard to call this surprising. The surprising thing is and always will be the answer to why and how to respond.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  That is because Asians designed the SAT to further Asian supremacy and it is heavily biased towards Asian culture. /s But that seems what Harvard believes and as such stacks the odds against Asian applicants.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• mberning 4y ago
  It has a lot to do with culture and expectations. And what you are willing to put your children through. One of my good friends is from Korea and told me about how awful it was to go to school all day, then be off for an hour or two, then go back to a private tutor until 9 or 10pm at night. Rinse and repeat. This is inhumane by American standards but apparently normal in Korea. That type of culture and mentality does not disappear when people immigrate to western countries.
  • fny 4y ago
    Sure... but I went to a public high school, got a 1590, and did not spend day and night studying nor did my parents have any expectation of me to perform well in school. I was just really lucky to go public schools with teachers who cared and peers that cared. It makes a huge difference.
    • mberning 4y ago
      You’re an outlier. That’s great. Most people are not scoring that high without a lot of effort, and a basic public school education, regardless of the quality, is not going to get them there. They will need additional resources within the home and outside of normal schooling.
      • geraldwhen 4y ago
        None of my friends scored below 1400 and none had tutors. All public school.
        • mberning 4y ago
          The data in OP shows that your personal experience is quite different than the public school students of Michigan. That's great for you, but not the normal experience of most students.
        • skavi 4y ago
          This seems to say more about your friends than anything else.
• socialismisok 4y ago
  Interesting data set. Sure seems like there are some systemic factors at play here that are putting some groups ahead and some groups behind. (Or, in the case of young men, both at the same time).
• aabajian 4y ago
  The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. The stratification is more granular than Asian versus Black or White versus Native America. For example, Jewish students excel beyond the Caucasian average while Cambodian and other Southeast Asian Immigrants perform significantly below the national average for Asian Americans. The challenge for large and heterogeneously diverse nations like the U.S. is to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement. There is also the need to provide quality education to adult learners, a wholly different, but equally important topic in the area of rapid technological change.
  • socialismisok 4y ago
    Not only that, where one lives can impact the funding available to even provide basic education. We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded schools.
    • zwkrt 4y ago
      Funding schools based on local property tax was institutionalized as a way to ensure rich people don’t have to pay for poor people’s education.
      • mrep 4y ago
        Except local property taxes only pay for about half of k-12 education. The other half comes from federal and state governments and the way they give out funding is to selectively counteract that misallocation such that 47 states actually allocate more per-student funding to poor areas than to wealthier ones on average according to this article [0] and it has been this way since at least 1995. [0]: https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-get-fair-share/ https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-...
        • uup 4y ago
          > only pay for about half That's a lot. From your own link, a vast majority of schools are regressive, i.e poor people get less.
• hackerlight 4y ago
  Male variability hypothesis confirmed once again.
  • helf 4y ago
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • tgv 4y ago
      Nice one: no arguments, just imply bigotry. What's wrong with the idea that the performance of men has a larger variation?
    • powera 4y ago
      Please try harder to make constructive comments, rather than vague insults.
  • lexapro 4y ago
    The question is whether it's biological (I doubt it) or cultural.
    • hackerlight 4y ago
      It's probably biological. A sizeable majority of our ancestors are women. Only a few men get to have kids. This creates a selective pressure for males to have higher variance traits. If it's winner take all, higher variance strategies pay off better.
    • eej71 4y ago
      I believe the evidence that's used in support of the biological viewpoint is that we see similar distributions patterns in other species - aka - sexual dimorphism.
    • nemo44x 4y ago
      It's very likely biological. Here's the thing - the variability of males on average isn't a socially constructed thing. What is socially constructed is what society values generally speaking - or what it values over other things. We value smart people and for good reason. But it's a social construct that we hold Nobel Prize winners over James Beard Award winners, for example. Progressives should stop fighting science and play on subjective grounds (like what society values and why) where they can actually win.
• athew 4y ago
  I find it very surprising that the term "Asian" lives in this twilight zone where nobody is sure if it includes India, the second largest country in the region. For the SAT distribution tables, the term Asian includes Indians I assume, while the following table from the German professor does not break out India. smh.
  • socialismisok 4y ago
    The categories come from the US government, I believe. The same reason why the data doesn't include non binary genders, for instance.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • lexapro 4y ago
    India is clearly in Asia. So yes, by definition Indians are Asians.
    • xeromal 4y ago
      So is europe. It's all the same continent. At least in the US, Indians aren't considered Asians.
      • rendang 4y ago
        They absolutely are for demographic purposes, even though the typical American will think of East Asians if you say something like "there's an Asian boy in my class"
  • mistrial9 4y ago
    generally in the USA, w.r.t. demographics, people from India are classified as 'caucasian' source: professional demographics practice in the USA using Federal Census data
    • 4y ago
• chewbacha 4y ago
  I have another spin on it. Of those demographics, asians tend to be very recent migrants (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/09/asian-americans-are-the-fastest-growing-racial-or-ethnic-group-in-the-u-s/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/09/asian-ameri...) and migrants tend to be very hard-working within the first generation of migration (https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2012/07/12/ten-ways-immigrants-help-build-and-strengthen-our-economy https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2012/07/12/ten-way...). Some of this could be selection bias (those who choose to move are those who are motivated to seek a better life). I did get a little confused from how we went from Asians doing well in Michigan means the PRC is going to dominate the engineering sector. There seems to be an implication that these are connected. Its my understanding that these demographic data would represent South, SE, and East Asia as part of the same demographic. Also, his top observation: > In the top band there are many more males than females. Seems like it could be within a margin of error (3 v 5%). Also, there are more males in the bottom band than females (18 vs 14%). This seems spurious at best. > 2. The Asian kids are hitting the ceiling on this test. > 3. There are very few students from under-represented groups who score in the top band. I also suspect that taking his next two observations together imply that he might have a bias against out-groups and in favor of his own in-group. Especially considering much of the topics in the comments section focus on the upcoming SCOTUS trial over affirmative action.
  • pradn 4y ago
    > I did get a little confused from how we went from Asians doing well in Michigan means the PRC is going to dominate the engineering sector. There seems to be an implication that these are connected. Its my understanding that these demographic data would represent South, SE, and East Asia as part of the same demographic. No, I think his observations about Asians doing well on the SAT in Michigan is unrelated to his point about China. He's saying that since China generally gets high scores on international math tests, and they have a greater population, there's just going to be many more qualified STEM grads than in the US. It's a higher proportion of talent multiplied by a higher population. This makes sense intuitively. But I'm unsure how reliable these international tests are. Is the test being given at an elite school in Shanghai or in a small rural village? Is it representative of all of China? Do higher scores translate to more innovation down the line? Are high scorers likely to also come up with creative ideas for solving problems? Lots of questions.
• davidn20 4y ago
  I think as a society we need to admit different race, in general, have different culture, values, and strengths. I don't even think that's a radical idea, but somehow it is. I have been watching this football competition youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrbljwLslYI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrbljwLslYI The fun and athleticism you see is awe-inspiring, but I haven't seen a single Asian person competing or even at the event. My guess is a math competition would look a lot different.
  • commandlinefan 4y ago
    > different race, in general, have different culture, values, and strengths The coarse divisions that we call "race" don't help much here, either - there's a lot of variance between different groups of asians as well as different groups of whites (think of how different italians are from irish). The way we're lumped together is actually very arbitrary (and changes depending on how the lumpers are trying to score political points).
    • PubliusMI 4y ago
      Are the divisions arbitrary if they are reflected in objective measures of athleticis and scholastics?
      • genera1 4y ago
        Neither athletic nor scholastic performance are objective measures. Sports are contests of arbitrary skills, that on the highest level require time intensive and expensive commitment since basically childhood, and whatever method you choose to measure scholastic performance with it's never going to be free of class/geographic/cultural factors.
    • dqpb 4y ago
      According to this article, African Americas have been separated from their indigenous continent long enough that they are now their own distinct race.
  • 4y ago
• fasteddie31003 4y ago
  "Omitted variable bias" is what is going on here and is a statistical term that everyone needs to understand because it is causing so many race issues in America. The feature that is missing in this simplistic model of intelligence is cultural values. I am definitely not a racist but I am a "culturalist". Some people have a set of personal values (culture) that express themselves as doing better or worse in standardized tests and in life in general. If you were to add in the average weekly time studying variable into this model I can guarantee you the race effect would get washed away. Anyone who has a basic understanding of statistics know about omitted variable bias and it is frustrating to me that society breaks down these issues into simplistic race terms because they are too dumb to do any kind of root cause analysis deeper than the color of your skin.
  • dwater 4y ago
    OK, assuming you are correct, what's the root cause of difference in time spent studying? If the primary cause is less study time spent by black and brown students, how do you address that?
    • fasteddie31003 4y ago
      Cultural values. Cultural values are more complex than genetic make up. Part of it comes from generations of values that lead to success of previous generations. An overlooked reason I believe there is such a statistical discrepancy of African Americans is that slavery effectively cut the cultural heritage of values from earlier generations of Africans. Slavery broke up families and with that erased generations of successful values that were passed down.
      • RetpolineDrama 4y ago
        >Cultural values are more complex than genetic make up. In the same way that a hologram has greater volume than the 2D film that produced it. "Culture" is the collective expression of shared preferences. Country A has a culture of coffee consumption, because the people there like coffee, because the population possesses an above average expression of gene CR22423 subtly changes how caffeine and dopamine interact leading to increased pleasure seeking. Then some undergrad comes along and makes the point that Country A has a "coffee culture" because it's "more widely available" and "climate factors", when in reality it's the gene driving the behavior that lead to the increased demand which lead to increased cultivation which self-reenforced because Tribe A was hyped up on coffee so they conquered Tribe B and bred their women further spreading the _coffee preference gene_ so that the modern population is now largely descended from the coffee addicts. It's just a simplified example, but the point is that culture is just an abstraction layer running on top of a collective set of shared preferences
• questime 4y ago
  This is why I encourage all my south asian friends/relatives to not identify as asian when applying to jobs/universities. Even mixed race is better, hispanic and african american makes things easy mode - I get interviews guaranteed wherever I want.
• alexk307 4y ago
  Comments on that blog post are a mix of thinly veiled racism and political insults, mixed with parents posting their entire children's resume online complaining that they didn't get into <elite school goes here>.
• afterwalk 4y ago
  I wonder how much of this is a self fulfilling prophecy due to racially weighted admission. i.e Many Asian parents are painfully aware of how much the deck is stacked against their kid, and therefore allocates extra time and resources accordingly to overcome the difficulties.
• helf 4y ago
  Good lord, the comments on the parent link immediately devolved into dreck.
• digdugdirk 4y ago
  The race distributions are interesting, sure. But the full report has some better data points for drawing conclusions. Of particular interest to me was the income/parental education differential (obvious increases, but interesting to see by how much) but especially a category for results by when the test was taken - weekend vs in-school. Students who took the test on a weekend were nearly 300pts higher, and the "met requirements" percentage nearly doubled. It would be particularly interesting to see this parsed out by the same economic and education related parameters in order to see how much an effect just having a smaller quieter "separate" test environment helps a student's score.
  • sokoloff 4y ago
    Isn't that likely driven by a selection bias? "Everyone in school A takes the test in-school" vs "School B does not offer the test, so a subset of school B's students take the test on a weekend." From that alone, I'd expect school B's test results to substantially outperform school A's results.
    • uup 4y ago
      The test was mandatory for all HS students to take, but I do think there is an element of selection bias. Those who took the test on the weekend may have been more invested in the result. They certainly dedicated at least an extra weekend's worth of time.
      • sokoloff 4y ago
        It was "mandatory", but still had only an 85% compliance rate. I would bet that almost none of the most academically inclined students were in that 15%.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• lettergram 4y ago
  It comes down to culture, society, and policies. The parents in my community growing up were poor. But all our parents worked with us every day to push us to success. We had a neighborhood working together every summer, parents involved in the school board, etc. I’ve see that slip over time. Particularly, the idea parents can make enough to spend time. But also a general attitude. One thing during the George Floyd riots I heard was “it’s horrible what happened to Floyd. But the real issue is that George Floyd should have been a foreman in a factory. He should have had a family to go home to, a reason not to be doing drugs and children to care for. The tragedy is those opportunities don’t exist” It comes down to parents being involved. Often they can’t or they’re distracted due to stress. Government can’t help directly, it’s about providing the opportunity for parents to nurture and support. It’s also that parents need to potentially pick their focus. I personally took a 50% pay cut, moved to a better area and made other sacrifices to ensure my children can have the best opportunity. I could afford that, all Americans should be afforded that. It starts with more good jobs.
• t-3 4y ago
  Admittedly, I haven't been paying attention, but since when does MI do SAT? We all took the ACT when I was in school.
• warner25 4y ago
  I think I'm mostly surprised to see how many of the "White" scores are so low, and so far behind "Asians," after years of hearing that the test is biased towards white / Anglo / native-English speakers raised in Western culture. I'm also reminded that I (like probably most people commenting on Hacker News) exist in a really small bubble in which everyone I closely associate with was in the top two bands (after going off to college, being recruited from those colleges for careers, and ending up in the same neighborhoods...).
  • shafoshaf 4y ago
    I was surprised that Asians only make up 4.6% of the total students, where Whites are nearly 69%. I'm not sure that we can make too many observations about Asians when the sample is so low. Might be interesting to see how those demographics compare in CA where Asians are 16.91% of the population. (https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/asian-population https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/asian-popul...)
    • tgv 4y ago
      4.6% of a large number isn't low. There are 107,000 students in total. 4.6% would correspond to 5000.
    • drpgq 4y ago
      That's still a lot of students.
    • Gareth321 4y ago
      Universities across American have been racially discriminating against Asians for decades. It's so bad that a case against Harvard has now been accepted by the Supreme Court (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v._President_and_Fellows_of_Harvard_College https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...). There is a good chance that the case finally abolishes the longstanding practise of institutional racism against Asians, and any other race which might otherwise be granted admission in excess of their general population composition.
• jaqalopes 4y ago
  This data is certainly stark, but I don’t see how it follows from test scores in Michigan that China is going to do something or other regarding STEM. I guess the core assumption here is that Asian students in America are a proxy for Chinese students in China? As someone who works exclusively with Chinese high schoolers as a college application coach, I find this hard to believe. The thing that Asians very definitely do differently than other groups is parenting. Chinese parents in particular take their kids’ phones away at night. They helicopter over their homework until it’s done. Dating, parties, and many enrichment activities that are part of a “normal” high school experience are usually (not always—nothing is absolute!) off the table. This isn’t genetic, it’s cultural. And it becomes especially obvious once you separate out recent Asian immigrants from longer-term Asian Americans. To zoom out a bit, I don’t think this post even asks the right question. Why does quantity of STEM major matter, as opposed to quality? The USA is home to the vast majority of leading universities, and no amount of PISA score dominance by Chinese children can change that. If anything, China should be worried about the continuous brain drain of their best, brightest, and most of all wealthiest to Canada and the USA. Not to take anything away from the hard work and ambition of those Chinese people who wish to stay in China, but I just don’t agree that this difference in test scores taken by public high school students is any sort of leading indicator of shifting geopolitical trends.
  • thwayunion 4y ago
    > The USA is home to the vast majority of leading universities, and no amount of PISA score dominance by Chinese children can change that. Those leadership placements are measured primarily by academic standards, and particularly research output. In CS, over 60% of PhD students -- the food soldiers of academia -- are here on student visas. Another huge fraction are first gen residents/citizens. I'd guess fewer than 20% of CS PhD students in the US are > 1st gen. Again, those are the people doing the actual work. > If anything, China should be worried about the continuous brain drain of their best, brightest, and most of all wealthiest to Canada and the USA. If we get to the point where the USA depends on Chinese out migration in order to compete economically or militarily with China, China may well choose to turn off the spigot. We should welcome immigration but also need home grown talent. There's also a serious moral issue with the "depend on immigration" path -- we owe it to our citizens to provide them with opportunities.
• johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago
  It's disheartening and infuriating to see even after the last president is gone the racism against LatinX people still exists. Not just at the border. This is probably a good time to abolish racist standardized system.
  • commandlinefan 4y ago
    How did you get THAT from the linked post?
• sam1r 4y ago
  PRC === Peoples Republic of China. Wasn’t intuitive to me and I had to google it.
• gsatic 4y ago
  Deepmind is going to outperform everyone. Its not going to matter one bit who is scoring more on "calculus based physics".
• ChemSpider 4y ago
  "PRC... K12 performance on international tests like PISA is similar to what is found in the table above for the Asian category" Not true. Only a very few select schools China are allowed to participate in the PISA test. It would be like only allowing the top private Boston and Stanford high-schools to join.
  • TMWNN 4y ago
    >Only a very few select schools China are allowed to participate in the PISA test. Correct. Americans do well on PISA compared to their ethnic relatives.<https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-scores-usa-usa/ https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco...> Asian Americans do better than Asians; whites do better than Europeans; Latinos do better than Latin Americans; and blacks do better than Africans. As this post about Michigan students shows, Hispanics and especially blacks' scores drag the US average down. Both white and Asian Americans score higher than Canada (and white+Asian is essentially Canada's racial makeup), and higher than New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Norway, and the UK; Estonia is below US Asians but above white Americans. Norway is by far the wealthiest Nordic state but its average is only two points higher than the US national average, despite not having a demographic that is 13% of the population and scores 85 points below the white American average.
• paulpauper 4y ago
  4. By looking at the math score distribution (see full report) one can estimate how many students in each group are well-prepared enough to complete a rigorous STEM major -- e.g., pass calculus-based physics. Doubt it. Calculus based physics at a university level is a tough SOB. Vectors, dels, series, operators, etc. SAT math is kid's play by comparison, the conceptual leap is huge. Yeah, it is predictive to some degree, but high level physics will tax even top scorers. Maybe on the old SATs it was more predictive but the SATs have gotten easier with lower ceiling.
• uglycoyote 4y ago
  has the SAT gotten way easier on recent decades or have students just gotten that much smarter or better at taking it, and universities gotten a lot stricter about accepting students with lower scores? one of the commenters in the linked article mentions that their son, with an SAT score of over 1500, was rejected by a number of normal state universities such as the University of Texas at Austin (a great school but not like an ivy league exclusive school) in 1995 I went to university of Texas, they had a policy of automatically accepting anyone with a score over 1200 without any additional requirements. many of my peers were accepted with far lower scores. Now, according to collegesomply.com, the average SAT score for students at University of Texas is 1350 I haven't really been following the evolution of this test, but have scores risen dramatically over the last could decades, and why?
  • vjshah 4y ago
    Sat scoring was “recentered” in 1996, causing a significant jump in average score.
  • clusterhacks 4y ago
    I don't have a good answer to your question here are some results from a quick google search: https://blog.prepscholar.com/average-sat-scores-over-time https://blog.prepscholar.com/average-sat-scores-over-time I think a sometimes-easy-to-overlook factor is that many state flagship institutions like UT-Austin have a strong bias or preference for in-state applicants. Famously, I remember being told that out-of-state applicants to my state's big, somewhat well-known, public university needed better credentials than highly selective private institutions required/recommended . . .
    • mariojv 4y ago
      This is a good answer. UT Austin in particular used to automatically accept anyone whose GPA was in the top 10% of their school for in state applicants, regardless of that school's performance. It was meant to give people from different calibers of schools from across the state a fair chance, since school quality would inevitably affect test scores. Now, it looks like the top 6%: https://admissions.utexas.edu/apply/decisions https://admissions.utexas.edu/apply/decisions
• PKop 4y ago
  Why is this extreme "nurture over nature", "blank-slate" mentality not applied to any other disparities in biological expression save for the brain/intellect? Do we all think that, say, the massive racial disparities in 100m Olympic sprinters, or NBA basketball, is due to "practice" "culture" and "work ethic" primarily rather than genetic/biological factors of physical ability? Are say a group of 5'8" Asians going to have the same potential ability to play top level basketball compared to a group of 6'8" Blacks? Does practicing change this dominant variable? Is the differentials in height due to "culture" or "biology"? Is it not common sense that people have a natural range of potential ability for certain things that are biologically constrained, and practice and effort can shift ones ability within this range but not change the biological constraint to where this range lies? Why does evolution and natural selection stop at the neck? Is the brain not also a part of the body, made up of the same organic material? And finally, is "work ethic", "culture", "attitude", "affinity for intellectual focus/interests" 0% biological/heritable? Is that not also partially genetic along with the natural potential? Not that this is definitive for one individual to another, but in aggregate group averages bear this out statistically over long periods of time in different locations. Let's take a step back and just think about the obvious here: how many "hackers" here on hacker news can say they did fairly well on the SAT and standardized tests, above average or well above average, and didn't prepare much at all? Whose parents didn't put much effort at all into pushing them to study for it? I'm sure quite a bit. Is that not an example of natural ability, nature, dominating over nurture? Not that they couldn't have done a bit better if they had, but that their cognitive potential to do well on these tests, to a significant degree was biologically determined? To deny this is similar to the myth that everyone can pull themselves up by the bootstraps. No, often one's inheritance, monetary or biological, have some say in this.
• mistrial9 4y ago
  cant stand the angles here - try this one American scored 1540 SAT while smoking marijuana at 17 years old; refused to do the repetitive, command-and-control lessons of public school and dropped out; threw middle finger at prestige universities with their publicity, worked at a nightclub in a bad part of town, sought out emerging artists and built art shows and music events SAT Scores are competition, not pure intelligence.. tons of competitive ego comments with racial implications here .. Extreme intelligence is a wild ride and not predictable.. some sort of "mental health" problems are common right alongside the ability current USA culture is drowning in toxic social problems around sex and family .. no children means no more of your race.. race people stand up and say "we are winning" .. more toxic side effects are inevitable..
• nnm 4y ago
  If we look at not only academic, but also sports, i.e. ski, ice skating, soccer, tennis, swimming, ... etc., among competitive teams in middle schools or high schools, the number of Asian students are bigger than what one would expect from their population. You can even see this in winter Olympic: 1. https://www.thepostathens.com/article/2022/03/asian-americans-winter-olympics-2022-chloe-kim-nathan-chen https://www.thepostathens.com/article/2022/03/asian-american...
  • PKop 4y ago
    >bigger than what one would expect What would one "expect", and why? In any case, the numbers we find are not "bigger" in raw terms (or per capita) in many sports than say, Blacks. How about Olympic sprinting, or NBA basketball? If work ethic is the primary determinant, why are they so absent from these sports at high levels?
• sweezyjeezy 4y ago
  Is it reasonable to assume that an African American with SAT score in the top band(s) would probably get accepted to a better college than Michigan? There are loads of kids here with pretty low scores, so clearly this is not representative of the highest performing students in the US, nor that the race breakdowns are representative of the highest performing students in each race. This only seems to give us information about the admittance criteria of Michigan. Without understanding the distributions of other institutions (especially the more competitive ones), it seems hard to draw stronger conclusions.
  • thwayunion 4y ago
    For CS, getting into Michigan is incredibly competitive. They are tied (at #11) with places like CIT in CS and way above a lot of ivies and elite technical schools. Michigan CS is like Carnegie Mellon CS -- getting into the school for non-CS is waaay easier than getting into the school with the intention to major in CS, and the filter starts at admissions. Michigan is closer to an ivy than a "state school" for CS.
    • sweezyjeezy 4y ago
      My question was specific to African Americans, and not specific to CS.
      • thwayunion 4y ago
        CS isn't the only field where Michigan is an excellent and highly selective school. Some state flagships serve as "come all" institutions -- any decent student gets admitted. States like Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota, and I think still Wisconsin come to mind. Michigan doesn't work like that. Lots of their undergraduate programs are extremely competitive, and therefore admissions overall is competitive. Saying "better school than Michigan" is like saying "better school than Carnegie Mellon". The acceptance rate is around 20%. It's not a safety school, for anyone, particularly with an intended major in much of STEM. It's a highly selective institution. Which changes the nature of your question. Thinking of Michigan as a "median school" is not an accurate mental model. If you want a "median school" use Michigan State instead.
• d_burfoot 4y ago
  A related issue, that people are slowly starting to realize, is that there are big variations in life expectancy between races. Asians live 10 years longer than blacks on average (and about 7 years longer than whites) [0]. Also, women live about 4 years longer than men. These differences may not seem big relative to total lifespan, but they are enormous relative to retirement span, and that has huge implications for the fairness of defined-benefit programs like Social Security. If we take 65 as the retirement age, then the average black male gets about 8 years of retirement, while the average Asian female gets 23 years. That creates grotesque unfairness in Social Security payouts. The Asian female and black male might contribute the exact same amount to the program over the course of their careers, but the former will receive about 3x more in payouts than the latter. I doubt our society is capable of repairing the grievous unfairness of life expectancy gaps. But we should at least not add racist insult to racial injury by using schemes like Social Security. [0] : https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/life-expectancy-us-increased-between-2000-2019-widespread-gaps-among-racial-ethnic-groups-exist#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20overall%20life%20expectancy,73.1%20for%20the%20AIAN%20population https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/life-expectanc....
  • Gareth321 4y ago
    The other side of this is that the average Asian also has longer to accrue wealth. So when we're looking at racial equity data, and Asians end up wealthier, at least part of the reason is that they just live longer. It's not all structural racism, as some propose. The fact of the matter is that different groups are different. For example, Asian parents are notorious for making their kids study six hours a night. African American parents are notorious for not making their kids study six hours a night. These two groups are never going to end up in the same place. And you have to let that happen because we all have the freedom to choose how we live our lives. We cannot, and should not, force values onto any people. > Asian high-school students spend significantly more time studying and doing homework, Ramey found, than any other ethnic or racial group. Averaged over the entire year (including summer vacations), the average, non-Hispanic white student spends 5.5 hours per week studying and doing homework, while Hispanic and non-Hispanic black students spend even less. In contrast, the average Asian student spends a whopping 13 hours per week. Parents' educational levels do not explain the differences, Ramey said, as these become even greater if the sample is limited to children who have at least one parent with a college degree. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110505103345.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110505103345.h...) Stats taken from: https://www.bls.gov/tus/ https://www.bls.gov/tus/
• cpif 4y ago
  I have no experience in data interpretation, so please be forgiving. But isn't it the case that: 60,000 white students * 0.04 = 2,400 4,000 Asian students * 0.25 = 1,000 These cohorts seem fairly similarly-sized, to my thinking. If you're thinking of either curriculum, culture, or parental involvement (I don't think it matters which), it seems to me that looking at this at the level of percentages is not the best heuristic for thinking about which students are prepared to attend top universities. There just aren't that many students who get whatever it is they need to achieve that.
• nemo44x 4y ago
  Overlay these statistics with multi-parent family percentages and suddenly it becomes even more clear what is going on.
• kirevmaco 4y ago
  It's just testing and rewarding people who studied for the stupid test, that's all. It also rewards conformist personalities. It reminds me of undergrad calculus, where you had to memorize how to do dozens of types of integrals. You're not supposed to ask "what does dx mean?" Asking those types of questions will give you a worse grade. I remember back when I was supposed to "study" for this thing. I asked "if it's an aptitude test, how does it make sense to study for it?" No one could give me a good answer so I decided it was stupid and never studied for it. I thought it was disgusting that so many people were paying for services, books, etc. to specifically prepare for the test even though the whole pretense of the thing is that you're not supposed to be able to do that. On the other hand, I loved a lot of the AP stuff (chemistry, physics, calculus) since you were rewarded based on understanding the actual content of a subject, a system that made sense. But it's a good thing I didn't think to ask what "dx" meant back then, otherwise I would have probably gotten a worse score.
  • ryan93 4y ago
    Schools do teach what "dx" is. But it is important for upper level engineering and physics to know "dozens" of integrals.
    • kirevmaco 4y ago
      My point was that if you aren't willing to memorize stuff before you understand it, you often do worse in school.
• TheMagicHorsey 4y ago
  I wonder how Indians rank in this. Are they grouped in with Asians here? In my experience, all the Indians I went to school with did very well in the SAT, but perhaps not as well as the Chinese-Americans and Taiwanese-Americans.
• mlindner 4y ago
  > 1. In the top band there are many more males than females. Except that's not what the data says. It shows females as being more grouped in the center whereas males are more spread out.
• thehappypm 4y ago
  This is almost completely explained by income. https://statisticalatlas.com/state/Michigan/Household-Income https://statisticalatlas.com/state/Michigan/Household-Income
  • Paul_S 4y ago
    That just moves the bubble - what explains income?
  • ffwszgf 4y ago
    There’s actually a very interesting 1995 research paper that studied the relationship between SAT scores and race and family income. In every single money bracket white and Asian students outperformed URMs. Perhaps most surprisingly white students whose parents made less than 10k a year performed roughly equal to black students whose parents earned between 60-70k a year. These numbers are almost 30 years old but id doubt there’s been some massive change. It’s reductive and not accurate at all to boil it down to just socioeconomics. There’s obviously more going on but there’s sadly very little research going on that is not heavily ideologically motivated (on both sides).
  • throwaway8582 4y ago
    Correlation != causation. It could be that people with genes for high intelligence tend to be in high demand on the job market and make a lot of money, and also tend to pass those genes on to their children, which gives them an advantage SAT
  • lukas099 4y ago
    What exactly do you mean when you say it is 'explained by' income? edit: added '?'
    • thehappypm 4y ago
      The ethnic groups with the highest incomes are the ones with the highest SAT scores.
      • 4y ago
• naet 4y ago
  This chart focuses on race, but I'd be curious to see the breakdown based on school. In my previous experience as a substitute teacher, different schools are not anywhere near equal in their instruction or academic quality, and there is a high correlation between race and school in my area.
• scombridae 4y ago
  That PISA chart was an egregiously bad layout.
• coryfklein 4y ago
  After reading the top comment in the OP; boy, I do not envy Asian high school students trying to get into a college these days! You already work your ass off getting top grades and crafting the most stellar of resumes, and it doesn't matter that your peers worked half as hard with half the achievements: you're going to get rejected by many top universities simply because of your race, a factor that was completely out of your control. That has to be so frustrating. If society has normalized folks with 1/8 Native American heritage claiming the legal benefits of that status, then as an Asian I'd be doing my geneology to see if I can justify claiming any other race on my own college admissions.
  • thwayunion 4y ago
    That student was not rejected because of their race. They were rejected on merit. Their grades and test scores were median among admitted cohorts at the "reject" institutions, and there's nothing else of note to an elite admissions office on their resume. I'll say it again. Again, from the perspective of the schools on that list, his kid's grades and test scores are average, not exceptional. The student meets the minimum bar for consideration, but so do 10X of other students competing for X seats. The father is suffering snowflake syndrome. Participating in off-season JV track or placing third at one local high school debate tournament are not the sort of accomplishments that elite institutions care about, and nor should they, lest people demonstrating truly elite merit in those endeavors while also receiving top grades and test scores have their very real accomplishments cheapened. So, the applicant is an average student and in every other way not notable. What would an elite university admit? Again, from their perspective, his academics aren't elite. They are average. Ironically, the comment ostensibly arguing for merit is actually just saying "my kid should get more credit than is due and if he doesn't it's because of racism".
• atlgator 4y ago
  Asian parents send their kids to extracurricular learning centers like Kumon while everyone else lets their kids obsess over Tik Tok dance videos. Not surprised by the result. SAT Math is just like Leetcode. It's recognizing problem patterns and strategies for solving them in a timely fashion. To be successful you have to practice, practice, practice.
• TMWNN 4y ago
  >1. In the top band there are many more males than females. Is 5% of boys scoring in the top band, compared to 3% of girls, really "many more males"? (Yes, I know that means that 60% more boys than girls scored in the top band. But the percentages are what matter here.) EDIT: From a comment: >Also, in the bottom band, there are many more males than females. >It seems to be yet another confirmation of the greater male variability hypothesis I feel foolish for not mentioning this. I think 18% of boys in the bottom band versus 14% of girls is "many more males" only in the sense that the 5% versus 3% figure above is, but taken together, yes, this is more evidence of male scores being the same on average but having a wider distribution. >or is it considered a fact by now? It sure wasn't in 2005! (For others' benefit, the commenter is alluding to what happened to Larry Summers as Harvard president. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_between_the_sexes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_b...>) EDIT 2: The blogger himself addressed it back in 2005! <https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2005/02/summers-lynching.html https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2005/02/summers-lynching.html>
• meechi555 4y ago