6 ms·

As an Asian person, I think it's a cultural thing. There is this old joke about how even if you are a one-in-a-million person, there are still 8000 of "you"s t

As an Asian person, I think it's a cultural thing. There is this old joke about how even if you are a one-in-a-million person, there are still 8000 of "you"s to choose from; how does one chose who to pick, if there aren't positions for all of them? So how do you make it "fair"? Since of the number of seats are limited, so imagine if the cut-off for the last seat is for someone who is in the 90.3765335th percentile, look at how many significant digits that is! (Yes, that's how specific it can get, when population sizes grow large enough.) Yes, you can argue about having a "bad day", but there are thousands of other people ALSO in the same percentile as you, and you all didn't have a "bad day", at some point it's about resource limitation. There are two and a half billion Asians of different varieties, that means MILLIONS of people at each economic/social strata. You simply CAN'T provide the same resource to all of them, some of them will have to vie for a lower-ranked resource. If there are limited number of seats, and your economy cannot afford to fund more seats, then a standardized test is the only fair way, at least it allows you to have SOME sort of control at your luck. ---- That same thinking applies to Asians who move to the US. It's patently unfair, from their PoV, to give weightage to things they CAN'T control for (race/wealth etc.) and not give weightage to a thing they CAN control for; a standardized test.

zozbot234 4y ago
> You simply CAN'T provide the same resource to all of them, some of them will have to vie for a lower-ranked resource. It depends what the "resource" is. If it's the mix of prestige and the individualized attention of highly impressive scholars that you get at elite colleges, then of course not. If it's simply high-quality educational content plus some average-quality tutoring, that's a scalable resource that could be provided to many more people at very low cost.
- ryzvonusef 4y ago
  I get the gist of your comment, but isn't prestige kind of the point (at least partially)? If education was the point, you don't even need to spend money for cheap local community colleges, you can get a very good education from MOOCs like Coursera (I am doing one right now, in fact), edX, heck youtube even. But the whole point is that an organization is staking their prestige against your qualification. There wouldn't be a barrier to entry in the first place for the MOOCs, so the point wouldn't even arise. ---- I know the HN commenter base prides itself of favoring "experience" over "qualifications", but let's be honest here. When they are both starting from fresh, a "traditionally qualified" person would have access to more opportunities, because the barriers are lower, which is what parents are aiming for, and the more prestigious the qualifying authority, the lower the barrier.
nervousvarun 4y ago
You've articulated this very well. It's something I also have for years believed as a non-Asian person that has become a "conceptual framework" (my words...probably inadequate) to better understand Asian co-workers now and co-students back in my school days (to unfortunately generalize here). For me at least it really does explain a lot of the cultural differences that lead to lazy western stereotypes. So many examples of casually thrown around of borderline racist-ish terminology/dog whistles..."tiger parents", "hard working"...all the "model minority" stuff. It really is a population density issue...which leads to resource scarcity...as a westerner all you have to do is interact personally with someone from India or China where you have millions of people competing for a seat at a university and it becomes pretty clear how you get the "Asian work ethic".
- hedora 4y ago
  This happens in the US too though. We have about 10% as many people, so for undergrads, it’s really just ~ one more level of applicant filtering than we have in the US.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  My roommate in undergrad (State university) many decades ago was an Indian guy. The whole "asian work ethic" stereotype: Driven, hard working and brilliant. It dawned on me really early on that there were probably 20 million people his age in India and out of them all, he was one of the (relative) handful to pass all the gatekeepers and come study in the USA. Whereas I had a mediocre GPA and SAT score and basically out of laziness applied to my home State's university only and got in because of my address. Super early and instructive lesson on white (and American) privilege.
- rayiner 4y ago
  That's part of it, but as an Asian American immigrant myself, the stereotypes aren't really far off. "Tiger parents" is an American characterization of how Asian families are generally structured: parents (who have knowledge and life experience) dictate to kids (who lack both). Dating and relationships are discouraged (freeing up huge bandwidth for studying) while marriage is expected (heading off the tendency for extended adolescence). "Hard working" is a byproduct of being not that far removed from subsistence agriculture. "Finding yourself" is discouraged. "Carrying out your role" is encouraged. These are cultural adaptations to an environment that's very different from America. My dad grew up in a Bangladeshi village, where people who didn't work literally didn't eat, and the vocational choices for 99% of people were "subsistence farmer." I don't think the words "fair" or "unfair" were ever uttered in my house. (And it drives me nuts when my American-born kids say that.) In America, these cultural traits become positively adaptive, because most of the competition isn't trying as hard. It boggles my mind how many Americans don't study for the SATs, but do have iPhones.
tekla 4y ago
I come from a poor Asian immigrant family, and this SAT shit seems wild. My parents always told me that America is an easy country to succeed in. Just do decently in school, ace the SAT, and boom full ride to a upper middle class life, no matter the background. Its proven pretty true so far.
- ryzvonusef 4y ago
  Not sure if America an easier country to succeed in, but I do believe it's a RICH country (with a high GDP per capita), i.e. it can afford to fund more colleges, imho, which means the competition is less. Not just colleges, but colleges with prestige, there are a LOT of American college at every prestige level. The supply is rather high. I am really impressed at the Land grant college schemes, for example. Really funneled a lot of money into the creation of colleges all over the country, not just in the populous cities.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hgomersall 4y ago
  This is what puzzles me. What is the intent of the SAT, is it to assess aptitude for something? Is that something the desire to achieve good grades? Is it intelligence? Is it the aptitude to fire guns in a tank? For sure if you have a test that tests something, then you assign outcomes based on that assessment, then anyone has the opportunity to understand what is being assessed and practice until they are good, but what does that tell you? I don't doubt there's a correlation between some aptitude that measures propensity for success and SAT score, but I'm still struggling to see how that benefits the poor or the migrants in general? In truth, it benefits a narrow section that "fit the mould" that is expected by success on a SAT; that is, members of the notional outgroup that do the SAT in the expected way can benefit, those that don't still fall by the wayside. There are very many intelligent people that for whatever reason - cultural, bad parenting, poor education - still fall to achieve this mark of success. Is that acceptable? I think there's at least scope for saying that maybe a SAT is not the optimal strategy for finding all those that would benefit most from higher education. I've no idea what is, but there seems to be some very strong opinions here that don't seem particularly intent on seeing the bigger picture.
nathan_compton 4y ago
"You simply CAN'T provide the same resource to all of them, some of them will have to vie for a lower-ranked resource." Why not just distribute those resources via lottery? Why not actually just split resources evenly across the population? There are good practical reasons not to do this, but they are, fundamentally, ideological (eg, we might feel it is inefficient to spend resources on someone which may not provide as much productivity as someone else). It serves nothing to pretend these things are inevitable.
- hedora 4y ago
  Different people have different skill sets. It makes sense to evenly distribute resources in elementary schools, but that’s not what is being’s discussed here. You could give me the same violin lessons as a virtuouso, and stick a functionally-illiterate Michelin-starred chef in my favorite calculus series, but doing so would be a complete waste of everyone’s time.
  - nathan_compton 4y ago
    "doing so would be a complete waste of everyone’s time" I simply don't believe this. Playing violin is virtuous even if you aren't a virtuoso and knowing about calculus is virtuous even if you're a Michelin starred chef. Its certainly true that the situation you describes may not be an _efficient_ distribution of resources if all you care about is productivity, but there are other ways to think.
- ryzvonusef 4y ago
  > Why not just distribute those resources via lottery It comes back to the concept of "fairness"; or rather, something you can control for, something you can work hard and strive for. Race/Gender/Ethnicity/Location/Wealth etc. are all lottery variables already, people was something that is not a lottery.
lordnacho 4y ago
I would do a very very selective 1st round, eg a college with an intake of 1000 would admit 10 people who are special in some way, so you can get that kid that is head and shoulders above everyone else. For the other 990 spots, you make a minimum bar of achievement (lots of As, high score, whatever) and put everyone who meets it in a lottery.
- majani 4y ago
  The lottery system would be bad for the image of the school, who probably want to be seen as meticulous pickers of talent. Though I wouldn't be shocked if there were some lottery mechanics being applied by school admins behind the scenes
- ryzvonusef 4y ago
  As I replied to another comment, lottery doesn't achieve what (Asian) people really want; an attempt to control destiny, some sort of idealized version of fairness and justice. A test allows them to (seemingly) achieve that.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    It's one of those things where people kid themselves that it was all them. To some degree it's a useful fiction, we can't be going about being all gloomy about our prospects. But it also creates a heck of a lot of stress. What your parents think of you, how they talk about you to their friends, is going to depend on this test. On top of it all, you're not even really learning anything, you need to spend the time learning the test.
    - ryzvonusef 4y ago
      isn't a (limited) exam stress a worthy tradeoff compared to life-time stress from uncertainty of sustenance? Because that's what Asian parents would say, stress a bit now, be sure of an income for a lifetime. obviously, I am not going to discount that stress does not scale well and that for children, who do not have the maturity to deal with it all, exam stress and peer pressure could lead to devasting outcomes... but asian parents, who have long since forgotten their one-time exam stresses, but face daily stresses from inflation etc, would argue that it's worth it in the end, since they would be comparing themselves to their old classmates who didn't make the cut and are worse-off than them. ---- The exam themselves to tend to be absurdist, but when the seats are limited, and "fairness" is still required... asking candidates to do a special dance might be the only alternative left.
pmoriarty 4y ago
"a standardized test is the only fair way" It depends on who writes the tests and who the tests are written for. There's a long and shameful history of standardized tests being written to benefit certain groups over others, or to stigmatize certain groups. Just because a test is standardized doesn't make it fair.
- ryzvonusef 4y ago
  Most such standardized tests, atleast now-a-days, are objective-MCQ type questions that feature heavily on certain core stem subjects as Maths, Science etc. This is partially to allow examiners to create a bank of questions that can be rotated around easily, and also to create easily markable exams that can be OCR-ed automatically and don't require manual markers. (I think the SAT English essay is an outlier, in most countries these sorts of subjective questions are simply not a part of standardized test, at least for competitive tests like University Entry) I think it's hard to argue an MCQ marginalizes anyone.

zozbot234 4y ago

> You simply CAN'T provide the same resource to all of them, some of them will have to vie for a lower-ranked resource. It depends what the "resource" is. If it's the mix of prestige and the individualized attention of highly impressive scholars that you get at elite colleges, then of course not. If it's simply high-quality educational content plus some average-quality tutoring, that's a scalable resource that could be provided to many more people at very low cost.

ryzvonusef 4y ago
I get the gist of your comment, but isn't prestige kind of the point (at least partially)? If education was the point, you don't even need to spend money for cheap local community colleges, you can get a very good education from MOOCs like Coursera (I am doing one right now, in fact), edX, heck youtube even. But the whole point is that an organization is staking their prestige against your qualification. There wouldn't be a barrier to entry in the first place for the MOOCs, so the point wouldn't even arise. ---- I know the HN commenter base prides itself of favoring "experience" over "qualifications", but let's be honest here. When they are both starting from fresh, a "traditionally qualified" person would have access to more opportunities, because the barriers are lower, which is what parents are aiming for, and the more prestigious the qualifying authority, the lower the barrier.

nervousvarun 4y ago

You've articulated this very well. It's something I also have for years believed as a non-Asian person that has become a "conceptual framework" (my words...probably inadequate) to better understand Asian co-workers now and co-students back in my school days (to unfortunately generalize here). For me at least it really does explain a lot of the cultural differences that lead to lazy western stereotypes. So many examples of casually thrown around of borderline racist-ish terminology/dog whistles..."tiger parents", "hard working"...all the "model minority" stuff. It really is a population density issue...which leads to resource scarcity...as a westerner all you have to do is interact personally with someone from India or China where you have millions of people competing for a seat at a university and it becomes pretty clear how you get the "Asian work ethic".

hedora 4y ago
This happens in the US too though. We have about 10% as many people, so for undergrads, it’s really just ~ one more level of applicant filtering than we have in the US.
ryandrake 4y ago
My roommate in undergrad (State university) many decades ago was an Indian guy. The whole "asian work ethic" stereotype: Driven, hard working and brilliant. It dawned on me really early on that there were probably 20 million people his age in India and out of them all, he was one of the (relative) handful to pass all the gatekeepers and come study in the USA. Whereas I had a mediocre GPA and SAT score and basically out of laziness applied to my home State's university only and got in because of my address. Super early and instructive lesson on white (and American) privilege.
rayiner 4y ago
That's part of it, but as an Asian American immigrant myself, the stereotypes aren't really far off. "Tiger parents" is an American characterization of how Asian families are generally structured: parents (who have knowledge and life experience) dictate to kids (who lack both). Dating and relationships are discouraged (freeing up huge bandwidth for studying) while marriage is expected (heading off the tendency for extended adolescence). "Hard working" is a byproduct of being not that far removed from subsistence agriculture. "Finding yourself" is discouraged. "Carrying out your role" is encouraged. These are cultural adaptations to an environment that's very different from America. My dad grew up in a Bangladeshi village, where people who didn't work literally didn't eat, and the vocational choices for 99% of people were "subsistence farmer." I don't think the words "fair" or "unfair" were ever uttered in my house. (And it drives me nuts when my American-born kids say that.) In America, these cultural traits become positively adaptive, because most of the competition isn't trying as hard. It boggles my mind how many Americans don't study for the SATs, but do have iPhones.

tekla 4y ago

I come from a poor Asian immigrant family, and this SAT shit seems wild. My parents always told me that America is an easy country to succeed in. Just do decently in school, ace the SAT, and boom full ride to a upper middle class life, no matter the background. Its proven pretty true so far.

ryzvonusef 4y ago
Not sure if America an easier country to succeed in, but I do believe it's a RICH country (with a high GDP per capita), i.e. it can afford to fund more colleges, imho, which means the competition is less. Not just colleges, but colleges with prestige, there are a LOT of American college at every prestige level. The supply is rather high. I am really impressed at the Land grant college schemes, for example. Really funneled a lot of money into the creation of colleges all over the country, not just in the populous cities.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hgomersall 4y ago
This is what puzzles me. What is the intent of the SAT, is it to assess aptitude for something? Is that something the desire to achieve good grades? Is it intelligence? Is it the aptitude to fire guns in a tank? For sure if you have a test that tests something, then you assign outcomes based on that assessment, then anyone has the opportunity to understand what is being assessed and practice until they are good, but what does that tell you? I don't doubt there's a correlation between some aptitude that measures propensity for success and SAT score, but I'm still struggling to see how that benefits the poor or the migrants in general? In truth, it benefits a narrow section that "fit the mould" that is expected by success on a SAT; that is, members of the notional outgroup that do the SAT in the expected way can benefit, those that don't still fall by the wayside. There are very many intelligent people that for whatever reason - cultural, bad parenting, poor education - still fall to achieve this mark of success. Is that acceptable? I think there's at least scope for saying that maybe a SAT is not the optimal strategy for finding all those that would benefit most from higher education. I've no idea what is, but there seems to be some very strong opinions here that don't seem particularly intent on seeing the bigger picture.

nathan_compton 4y ago

"You simply CAN'T provide the same resource to all of them, some of them will have to vie for a lower-ranked resource." Why not just distribute those resources via lottery? Why not actually just split resources evenly across the population? There are good practical reasons not to do this, but they are, fundamentally, ideological (eg, we might feel it is inefficient to spend resources on someone which may not provide as much productivity as someone else). It serves nothing to pretend these things are inevitable.

hedora 4y ago
Different people have different skill sets. It makes sense to evenly distribute resources in elementary schools, but that’s not what is being’s discussed here. You could give me the same violin lessons as a virtuouso, and stick a functionally-illiterate Michelin-starred chef in my favorite calculus series, but doing so would be a complete waste of everyone’s time.
- nathan_compton 4y ago
  "doing so would be a complete waste of everyone’s time" I simply don't believe this. Playing violin is virtuous even if you aren't a virtuoso and knowing about calculus is virtuous even if you're a Michelin starred chef. Its certainly true that the situation you describes may not be an _efficient_ distribution of resources if all you care about is productivity, but there are other ways to think.
ryzvonusef 4y ago
> Why not just distribute those resources via lottery It comes back to the concept of "fairness"; or rather, something you can control for, something you can work hard and strive for. Race/Gender/Ethnicity/Location/Wealth etc. are all lottery variables already, people was something that is not a lottery.

lordnacho 4y ago

I would do a very very selective 1st round, eg a college with an intake of 1000 would admit 10 people who are special in some way, so you can get that kid that is head and shoulders above everyone else. For the other 990 spots, you make a minimum bar of achievement (lots of As, high score, whatever) and put everyone who meets it in a lottery.

majani 4y ago
The lottery system would be bad for the image of the school, who probably want to be seen as meticulous pickers of talent. Though I wouldn't be shocked if there were some lottery mechanics being applied by school admins behind the scenes
ryzvonusef 4y ago
As I replied to another comment, lottery doesn't achieve what (Asian) people really want; an attempt to control destiny, some sort of idealized version of fairness and justice. A test allows them to (seemingly) achieve that.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  It's one of those things where people kid themselves that it was all them. To some degree it's a useful fiction, we can't be going about being all gloomy about our prospects. But it also creates a heck of a lot of stress. What your parents think of you, how they talk about you to their friends, is going to depend on this test. On top of it all, you're not even really learning anything, you need to spend the time learning the test.
  - ryzvonusef 4y ago
    isn't a (limited) exam stress a worthy tradeoff compared to life-time stress from uncertainty of sustenance? Because that's what Asian parents would say, stress a bit now, be sure of an income for a lifetime. obviously, I am not going to discount that stress does not scale well and that for children, who do not have the maturity to deal with it all, exam stress and peer pressure could lead to devasting outcomes... but asian parents, who have long since forgotten their one-time exam stresses, but face daily stresses from inflation etc, would argue that it's worth it in the end, since they would be comparing themselves to their old classmates who didn't make the cut and are worse-off than them. ---- The exam themselves to tend to be absurdist, but when the seats are limited, and "fairness" is still required... asking candidates to do a special dance might be the only alternative left.

pmoriarty 4y ago

"a standardized test is the only fair way" It depends on who writes the tests and who the tests are written for. There's a long and shameful history of standardized tests being written to benefit certain groups over others, or to stigmatize certain groups. Just because a test is standardized doesn't make it fair.

ryzvonusef 4y ago
Most such standardized tests, atleast now-a-days, are objective-MCQ type questions that feature heavily on certain core stem subjects as Maths, Science etc. This is partially to allow examiners to create a bank of questions that can be rotated around easily, and also to create easily markable exams that can be OCR-ed automatically and don't require manual markers. (I think the SAT English essay is an outlier, in most countries these sorts of subjective questions are simply not a part of standardized test, at least for competitive tests like University Entry) I think it's hard to argue an MCQ marginalizes anyone.