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I've spent some time thinking about this - and you have a devil of a test issue. You need a test that doesn't correlate with income, but that can be seen as fa

I've spent some time thinking about this - and you have a devil of a test issue. You need a test that doesn't correlate with income, but that can be seen as fair and transparent. You're better off doing an evaluation that has absolutely nothing to do with actual skills. If you measured, say, reaction time, you'd end up with something that's just not likely to be correlated at all to income - just to innate ability and practice. Assuming all the kids from all the income levels would practice the same amount and that families of wealth do not have higher reaction times, you're going to end up with "winners" that aren't limited to the high income. Doing a test based on reaction time seems incredibly unfair - you're not looking for kids who are the most promising from the get go - but you're guaranteed to not just get the wealthy. In the end, you'll be helping more kids who need the scholarship than you would be with an aptitude test. Since that's the goal, this plan has a net benefit. It's not perfect, and it's not pretty, and it's probably duplicitous, but you'll at least have a better outcome than you would with your existing tools. Ideally, yes, you'd want to find a "fair" aptitude test that wasn't income-correlated, but that is going to be incredibly difficult to do.

markessien 18y ago
You know, you may have a point there. If one makes a test that involves something like who is the quickest to figure out how to use some program like excel, this may not correlate to income, assuming that none of the children has previous experience with excel. But on the other hand, it may still correlate with income. It's just a waste to give a scholarship to children of extremely wealthy people when there are people struggling to put their children through school. Ideally, what one would like to do is make a test, then just eliminate all the children from wealthy homes, and then give the scholarship to the top of the list. But that would cause resentment if everyone took the same test. Also, remember, it's just 2 students from a class of 30.

markessien 18y ago

You know, you may have a point there. If one makes a test that involves something like who is the quickest to figure out how to use some program like excel, this may not correlate to income, assuming that none of the children has previous experience with excel. But on the other hand, it may still correlate with income. It's just a waste to give a scholarship to children of extremely wealthy people when there are people struggling to put their children through school. Ideally, what one would like to do is make a test, then just eliminate all the children from wealthy homes, and then give the scholarship to the top of the list. But that would cause resentment if everyone took the same test. Also, remember, it's just 2 students from a class of 30.