On the other hand though it might be essentially impossible to close the gap between low income and high income students. Your parents have a huge impact on your learning, and if your parents are poor and have to work all of the time, they aren't going to be as available to help you learn.
Regardless, I think it is pretty impossible to calculate an adversity score that is actually accurate (how do you compare the challenges faced by a child in a single parent family with one who grew up in a poor neighbourhood?), and it seems pretty wrong to me to have a hidden score based on things you likely can't control influece admissions, but it would lead to some interesting research if it was actually used.
Furthermore, adversity scores should also be counted towards recruitment in elite military units, selection for senior military leadership and all significant promotions. The adversity you faced in childhood should give one guaranteed opportunity throughout life. This progressive path ensures harmonious diversity and a perfect union of our states. Adversity is Excellence! Merit is Privilege!
> (or adjust the SAT so it is more representative of their actual skills).
The problem, as you point out just one sentence later, is that adversity materially diminishes students' abilities. Either we can test them on their actual skills, which correlate strongly with socioeconomic status, or we can give disadvantaged kids preferential treatment at the last minute. You can't have both.
I don't know how to reconcile the belief that everyone deserves a fair shot with the reality that there are only so many open seats at America's premier universities (or anywhere else advancement and prosperity reside, for that matter). If you truly believe in equal opportunity, you must concede that the rich and poor are equally deserving of the chance to go to Harvard, and artificially closing the gates on some of the rich in favor of some of the poor is a crude facsimile of justice.
Not everyone can afford high quality tutoring, and high quality tutoring clearly has an impact on test scores.
I could be wrong, but my interpretation here is that there's a lot more data on students the CollegeBoard is reporting to colleges that students taking the test don't see or know about.
This also seems unfair to assess students on hidden metrics. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if the CollegeBoard were to (or currently does) partner with Equifax to see parents' credit histories. There's an entire analytics farm on students.
What it does do is outsource components of admissions decisions the colleges may want to distance themselves from and wrap it up in an opaque package so that they're not actually considering anything legally risky in their admissions decisions. This is potentially valuable to institutions that want to have affirmative action style admissions without risking the ire of state legislators.
If they think they can boil my kids into a single number without bothering to find the context of who my kids are then I will game it to as much as possible.
I don’t know why my family should be punished because my wife and I worked our asses off to get ahead. It’s an insult to hard working people across the spectrum.
Why are nice neighborhoods more expensive than bad ones? Why are good school districts more competitive than bad ones? Why do parents go to great lengths to get their kids better opportunity?
There will always be motivation to find the best ways to "play the system".
Also, what actually shows if someone is a good student or not?
A student with lower adversity could still have immense pressure if their family has sunk so much investment into their success.
For example, there are Asian parents I knew that had their kids regimentally studying for the SAT since age 12 like they were practicing to become professional athletes. Their parents left their entire lives behind to come to America and work their way up for the sake of their kids getting into a good college then getting a good job.
If it's just a thing schools can see, that adds to their additional soft tools they can use to evaluate an application, then it probably won't do much. If it actually becomes something that determines rankings, it will have a big impact. The latter seems unlikely, as schools would have to publicly report the score to US News and World report for it to affect rankings. But the score is private.
A few key points:
* First, this isn't the cheating scandal. If the rich parents could have gotten their kids good SAT scores, they wouldn't have needed to cheat and bribe. The SAT was keeping the wealthy people out in those case, not letting them in
* Test prep helps. But it's not a magic wand. The only real solution to getting better at the SAT is....having grown up reading and being good at arithmetic and algebra. Failing that, you can spend 12-16 months memorizing thousands of vocabulary words, reading novels, and memorizing every math concept tested, using Khan Academy. But....at a certain point that actually approximates being good at the material.
* What's the advantage of being better off? It's that your kids generally spend a lifetime more likely to read, have good teachers, have leisure time, parental involvement, parents that are married, good nutrition.
* But if a wealthy kid has made it to 12th grade and isn't that bright, wealth is no magic bullet. Like I said, the only way to do it is to take 16+ months to cram foundations into you. And the vast majority of parents lack such foresight.
* Actually, there is one magic bullet: it's making sure your kid has some kind of easily diagnosable mental health condition that gives them extra time. By "easily diagnosable", I mean in the sense that there's no real way to exclude it and you can find a doctor to say "oh sure, this kid seems to have ADHD". Extra time is a massive leg up. This rule came about due to Justice Department rules about not discriminating against those with disabilities. It did help the disabled, but it also gave the wealthy a loophole big enough to drive a truck through
* Will this be a similar loophole? Maybe. I am sure parents will try to exploit it. But....it's a rule actually made by the testing company, and not one imposed by the government. So, they have more control to avoid having it exploited. Also, some of the factors are more difficult to exploit. For example "kid with single parents". I mean, maybe the parents could temporarily divorce, though it's not clear if that counts. If it actually requires one parent to truly be out of the kid's life (or dead)....well, there's no easy way to fake that
* These are just temporary hardships due to upbringing, and they'll go away in the health college environment, right? Nope. You see the exact same gaps in higher level standardized tests. And in later measures such as bar passage rate. Whatever causes the issue, causes it the whole way through.
* Will this solve inequality? Maybe, maybe not. Too soon to tell. One underappreciated risk to programs like affirmative action is that they don't actually help those they're aimed at. Here's an article citing Henry Louis Gates Jr. showing that Ivy League schools generally don't accept the sons and daughters of slaves. Instead, they accept foreign black students: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more...
This list seems aimed at addressing the last issue. Maybe not so much a ranking factor, but instead aimed at letting admissions officers see who, within a subgroup, actually had a disadvantaged upbringing, vs. having a more narrow checkbox applied.
This might be good, this might be bad, it's really too soon to tell and depends entirely on the implementation and how it's used. But the issue of over restrictive categories could certainly use fixing.
If the SAT correlates too strongly with wealth, then Collegeboard should make a better test. Make one that changes significantly every year so direct test-prep is hard. Choose different types of critical reading passages and questions each year, vary the style of the math questions - make the test different enough each time so studying past tests isn't valuable. Then, if you eliminate the advantage direct prep gives, the correlation to wealth should weaken, and the test should get closer to measuring aptitude.
But instead, Collegeboard continues to shoehorn political objectives into an already broken exam. This is a mistake.
If (a) scholastic aptitude has a significant effect on your lifetime income, (b) people tend to marry people of similar social and economic class, and (c) scholastic aptitude is fairly heritable (through genes, environment, whatever)...
... then you would expect the Perfect SAT scores to correlate pretty noticeably with family wealth. This wouldn't be a sign that anybody is doing anything wrong; it's just as natural as water flowing downhill. And these are reasonable premises, with strong empirical evidence for each of them.
So, question: just by looking at the correlation of SAT scores with family wealth, how can we possibly tell how broken the test is? How can we know how far the real SAT is from the absolutely un-gameable Perfect SAT?
I do not agree with this idea either, but only in that the adversity score will be opaque to students, so there is no recourse if it does a poor job of addressing the current issues with college admissions.
Most research points to this being true.
I truly loathe those who "help" the disadvantaged by lowering standards for them.
This seems really sketchy.
I mean, I can completely understand why the College Board would want to avoid blowback from students knowing their scores, but their convenience seems like insufficient cause to deny students access to their own information.
Not that I expect the shroud of secrecy to actually mitigate that problem.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think students get to check their college admission evaluation results.
All these pseudoscientific people have taken the comfy position of unaccountable gatekeepers. Society's true vultures.
The peer group may definitely dramatically different from what I can tell, but if you're a serious student and there for the learning above all, very straightforward to get into a school that will teach you just about anything you could learn at Harvard or any other Ivy League or similarly 'elite' school.
In practice, this is pretty much the case. State schools (e.g. the University of Virginia, University of California-Berkeley, Georgia Tech, etc.) are often quite good in terms of the education provided, and offer lower tuition rates to in-state residents. Forbes and U.S. News & World Report maintain rankings of the top 100 or so colleges in the United States; my school was ranked in the 60-70 range for computer science. Having spent a number of years at big (and small) companies in the Bay Area, I feel it more than adequately prepared me for the workplace.
Maybe the sense of “a few elite schools, and lots of bad ones” is reinforced by the popular media? Hollywood tends to focus on just the Ivies and MIT.
it's not about the curriculum, it's about who you meet there and what can you make of those connections. you can't avoid the elite to bunch up in few places, because they intimately know that the game is about whom you know and how you can leverage family ties well before the smart kid from middle class background learn that the world outside academia isn't a meritocracy.
even if universities were all equally performant in teaching, people who managed to connect with the elite frequenting key places would still get a jump start in the life outside.
Bell curve
You are aware that it is their small number that makes them desirable right? If you make them all the same level, they will be equally undesirable.
If you made imense effort to provide the best education possible to your child, to put him in a good school (even if that meant depriving yourself from a better material life and having 2 jobs), if you kept a non perfect marriage because that would be better for your child, if you only had one kid because you couldn't afford to provide a good education for more than one, what this law is telling you is: bad luck, you shouldn't have done it because now, we are going to adjust his score back for it so that none of that matters.
If anything, perhaps it punishes good parenting. But I'm not sure it rewards bad parenting.
It seems like yet another opaque metric to be gamed by the people with the resources to spend optimizing for those sort of things.
What is the purpose of college admissions -- to award a select few or to match students with colleges where they are most likely to succeed?
This move feels almost as though it was intended to stir up unnecessary controversy.
That's... kinda scary.
Once we have a number it tends to become An Important Thing, regardless of how much the number reflects reality. It is ironic that SAT is making a new number that has little reflection of reality to provide more context with their SAT test scores, which is another number that has only a poor approximate measurement of reality.
Otherwise, every college application would need an addendum of "List every hardship or limitation you have ever experienced". It's not practical.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_College_Entrance_...
[1]: (Chinese Wikipedia) https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E5%B9%B411%E6%9C%88%E6%B5...
https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1595620876524810727&wfr=spi...
[1] http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/What-Matters-M...
Though from experience talking with people who work in admissions at "selective" schools, SAT scores and grades are mainly used to filter out the bottom 90% of non-preferred (e.g. not athletes, legacies/donors, or geographic/demographically desirable) applicants and the rest is extremely subjective and/or random, and is influenced by many non-academic factors such as whether you are too similar to some already-accepted applicant, etc..
If you are rejected it often has nothing to do with your qualifications so it should not be taken as a negative judgment of same; similarly, if you are accepted often it's often due semi-random factors that placed you ahead of students with better qualifications.
I think this agrees with other studies about hiring, FWIW, where, as I understand, the best way to measure somebody's ability is a work-sample plus an IQ test. As someone who has been involved in hiring, we crudely approximate this by looking at work experience and how selective somebody's college education was.
So that they can infer the same "adverse conditions" and call it a holisitc process like they do now?
You might done well to have stopped there.
I think broadly, the SATs aim to provide some independent consistent data points a school can use to determine the desirability to admit certain students vs. others.
You're thinking academic aptitude is the only thing the SATs should measure and report, but if schools want more, it's just good business to provide it.
"...surely bumping up the scores..."
You might have misunderstood. It doesn't look like they will be changing SAT scores here but rather providing a separate "adversity score".
That said, colleges already have access to this information through publicly-available high school rankings and ZIP-level demographic data. All this new metric does is add opacity and plausible deniability, shifting responsibility from college admissions departments to a centralized (and, most importantly, private) authority.
Once the ZIP code to score mapping is known, it's trivially gameble to get a mailing address in the best scoring ZIP code that won't get you kicked out of your school, if the ZIP code comes from school records. People do this all the time in reverse to get kids into desirable schools.
Actually getting your kid into an undesirable school to get the full score might be less likely, although that may depend on the specific time requirements to get the score and the magnitude of the score related to other factors.
I would say that in addition to this just one organization has to do the research & math instead of the [large number] of colleges admitting students. It also provides for a degree f standardization.
How do we know this? Why should the College board be reporting this? The lack of transparency is the real issue. What data are they collecting to generate this score and why? Is it just going to be an 0-100 index of the average score for that particular test location?
https://priceonomics.com/post/48794283011/do-elite-colleges-...
Then one month before SAT move to a very poor area and attend the worst high school you can find.
That way you got a good adversity score as well.
This sounds like affirmative action only at a much more granular and non-racial level.
Even better if it can take into account a student's whole academic history (e.g. if a student used to go to a fancy prep school and then moved to a local public school the year they took the SAT, or vice-versa).
Given the incredible disparities between schools/neighborhoods, they feels like it can only give a more accurate picture of a student's abilities relative to their situation.
I wonder how, 4+ years after it's implemented, the results of the test's predictive accuracy are shown.
--------
Method 1.
Give everyone equal chance at competing in the admission process itself, regardless of how they got prepared. Someone who prepared well, for any reason, might do well in the future too, for the same reason.
Result 1: Get the best prepared students to best colleges, maximize the number of top scientists / engineers / lawyers / etc graduating. Stronger academia and industry in the end.
Result 2: Meritocracy.
Result 3: On the feeling level: objective reward for hard work (no good example comes to mind, but maybe a Cinderella-type story).
--------
Method 2.
Give everyone equal chance both during the preparation and taking the test. Since that cannot actually be done by the time tests are taken, instead normalize the test result to adversity levels, on the assumption that someone held back by difficult circumstance is likely to perform ~25% better once released from the difficulty.
Result 1: Uncover potential geniuses in the rough, remove mediocre-or-lazy-but-pampered kids.
Result 2: Reduce stratification of society, even if at the expense of overall academic performance of the country.
Result 3: On the feeling level: a fighting chance for poor kids in bad situations (think "The Wire" type kids).
Privilege Points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM
This “Adversity” score has me thinking of an analogy to physical beauty/attractiveness. I believe there is an incredibly high correlation, especially residual to other factors, between physical traits and success and wealth. Something very unfair for those who are uglier.
Obviously the logical solution to that inequality isn’t to kick in the faces of the beautiful and handsome but instead focus on opportunities for those uglier to try and make themselves more attractive. In extremes plastic surgery for those with say cleft lip or other deformations.
Those who can’t understand the analogy says much about the source of their rage.
Hating the rich is still hate.
If the college board really wants to love the poor why don’t they come up with a plan to provide FREE tutoring to all the zipcodes in their model. I bet if they asked a few billionaires like Gates and Buffet they would even fund it.
Lifting the bottom up is not done by holding the top down. It just doesn’t work in reality.
Taken to its logical conclusion, the SAT will cease to exist and the only thing the College Board will report to schools is a secret student dossier.
This dossier can contain anything. Think about the ways in which it might be possible to compute an "adversity" score.
What if we mix this "adversity" score with some factors indicating "deservingness?"
Today the dossier may be composed of mostly harmless stuff. In the very near future it may well become a terrifying concoction of privacy infringements.
There may be a silver lining in all of this, though. College today is increasingly a mere credential. The information conveyed through a degree can be obtained by those who want it from numerous sources.
If initiatives like the one in the article become widespread in admissions, then a degree will increasingly symbolize not accomplishment but rather something much less worth talking about. Colleges themselves would have precipitated their own well-earned demise.
- Get a summer job "because your family needed money"
- Move out of your parents house for a summer "bad living conditions"
- Adopt some non-binary gender temporarily "bullied for identifying as x"
- CEO dad drops salary to $20k for a year and instead gets stock vesting equivalent "poor family"
etc. etc.
> It would be calculated using 15 factors, like the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood. The score would not be reported to the student, only to college officials.
None of those suggest they're linked to individual actions like your examples are -- and that makes sense since the SAT can know the student's schools and addresses but little else.
And I don't think sending your kid to a worse school is gaming the system... because they'll probably do worse.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/adversity-score-sat-exam-colleg...
"Neighborhood environment will take into account crime rate, poverty rate, housing values and vacancy rate. Family environment will assess what the median income is of where the student's family is from; whether the student is from a single parent household; the educational level of the parents; and whether English is a second language. High school environment will look at factors such as curriculum rigor, free-lunch rate and AP class opportunities."
These are hard to game, and in many cases if you do game them it's a "Mission Fucking Accomplished" situation. Most billionaires are not willing to move into a high-crime, high-poverty neighborhood with shitty housing, nor are they willing to put their kids in bad schools with poor people. If they are, great, that neighborhood probably won't stay poor with shitty schools for long.
Colleges are pretty wise to this trick. You aren't the first to think of it.
Relatedly is legally emancipating a child so they have "no parental support" and get a bunch of grants. That doesn't work either.
I suspect the colleges would get good as sussing out all those other tricks too.
This just sounds like the SAT board doing what school admissions boards already do: decreasing or increasing scores based on race.
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-rac...
If we have 2 people, A and B. A belongs to a wealthy family and lives in a nice neighborhood and goes to a nice high school. B has a poorer family, lives in a worse neighborhood and goes to a worse high school. What would providing equal opportunity look like? It seems like it should be something along the lines of B should also be able to attend the nice school, have access to tutors if desired etc. Not adjust B's scores up by some arbitrary amount because of circumstance.
Look, it's a question of implementation. There's a quantitative threshold at which students qualify for admission. Either we change that threshold, or we fudge the score.
Since when does GPA/SAT completely describe fitness for the future?
specifically for your example, there doesn't seem to be any factor in the score calculation that takes into account 'distance from school,' while 'quality of high school' does play a role. so it's quite possible that since your high school did better overall (i.e. serviced 'wealthier' kids, skewing the score), your score would look better than things actually were.
And this is a problem why?
You can't compare one zip code versus another to say which is geographically more "adverse". Poor white, trailer trash neighborhood vs drug-infested, gang-ridden city streets. Schools with 75% of students on free-lunch vs schools that have suffered mass shootings. Single black mother working as a nurse making $80k a year raising two kids versus Indian single mom who was abused by her husband and filed for divorce and custody.
On the flip side, what message do you tell to a white male from an upper middle class background who is raised in a good school district? He wants to go to an Ivy League. What should he do, how can he prepare?
Also it seems Chinese and Indian kids with immigrant parents will be affected the hardest in general
I guess there could be both use cases for test scores, given that higher education might actually find itself more concerned with showing improvement as an important metric. They might prefer students that show more aptitude for a given level of input, moreso than the total aptitude achieved.
I constantly hear employers mentioning that same desire - to have "lifelong learners" are employees. I have to believe at some level that there is some desire for a measure of absolute capability, too.
So the best predictor of future success in a good environment probably does include a correction for past adversity.
Contaminated Childhood: The Chronic Lead Poisoning of Low-Income Children and Communities of Color in the United States: https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20170808.06139...
They are schools, not prize contests.
https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/pr...
Looks like they try to account for neighborhood environment, family environment, and high school environment. Seems a bit fairer than I expected, assuming family environment is given the weight it deserves. Otherwise it may penalize people who try to go to a better school or a better neighborhood.
Also looks like a play to sell a dashboard. Maybe related to the regulatory environment of colleges - they can prove they're selecting across a broad enough socioeconomic stratus, similar to how banks like to prove they're meeting HUD requirements for lending.
Let's take an example of Elon Musk. His childhood was full of abuse but they weren't poor. How would you compare objectively his score from someone who wasn't abused but was poor? And let's say you give lesser points to Elon, do you think you did the right thing considering he has achieved a ton to push mankind forward?
Brilliant. Another aspect of the already sketchy admittance process that will be overanalyzed and ultimately gamed to death -- assuming that this score truly has value to begin with.
I don't trust any of these people to do it correctly. I wouldn't even trust them to make random truly random.
I used to believe in the value of collecting these stats to problem solve what we can do to help everyone achieve. But increasingly these stats are just being used for a different kind of discrimination.
We've all got problems, and they're immeasurable. In high school I had severe anxiety that led to a lot of procrastination and avoiding school clubs. And as a 1st-generation immigrant, there were subtle cultural differences, even though I fit in with my appearance.
The truth is, except for a small handful of schools (whose seats are mostly already spoken for, either through donors, athletes, or the elite prodigies who are going to get in regardless of their socioeconomic background) it is almost irrelevant whether or not you go to school A or school B in the long run.
Your grit, your personal talents, your luck/karma/destiny etc are basically what carry you through anyway.
Anyone who blames their failure in life on “some kid took my seat at Harvard because adversity score” probably doesn’t have what it takes to make it anyway.
I am now both a US Army officer and a self-taught senior software developer working for a company that until recently generated more revenue than Google. As a hobby I write open source software that is arguably superior and outperforms similar projects coming out of Facebook. My adversity and persistence allowed me to learn a skill that formal education did not and I have been rewarded accordingly.
I've always felt that it was completely ridiculous that a Laotian student from a low-income family would be penalized under modern American systems when competing against an African-American student whose parents are both doctors/lawyers/engineers, and surpass the aforementioned family's income by 10x or more.
This is a very thorny issue, and I am uncomfortable with a centralized organization influencing it to such a large degree.
Whether, and how much, to take into account these factors should be a local decision made by the college itself.
It could also be used to signal to schools which kids are likely to need some remedial classes in the first year despite what they scored on the SAT. Of course one can imagine a scenario where the admissions looks at the adversity score to weed out kids who they don't think are going to be prepared regardless of how smart they are.
This whole process assumes that the universities are interested in reforming the kids that the school system failed in the first place.
Also, is it just me, or are SAT scores wildly overvalued? Maybe it's just my high school, but SAT scores were never emphasized, versus the ridiculous race for grades, extracurriculars and good essays. The days of a "good" SAT score getting you into a college are over. I can generally tell how old someone is just from how much they emphasize SAT scores.
But, I don't understand why College Board is computing this score, and not colleges themselves.
At what point, if any, does the responsibility of getting out of adversity lie on the individual?
If education and opportunity were abundant, maybe we wouldn't be at each other's throats and/or concocting elaborate ways to game the system.
Maybe not, it feels like to me that the Overton window[0] has been sliding left. My views on freedom of speech made me a 'leftist commie' when I used them to defend South Park and Eminem now most often I'm accused being 'alt-right' by those who disagree with those same views.
1. Like it or not, plenty of families in America have had it worse than you had, and would not find it at all impressive that you have never gone on a vacation or eaten out.
2. You should save your anger for the huge number of spots saved for legacies and athletes. Being the child of alumni means you have a 45% greater chance of getting into a college. (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/07/harvards-freshman-class-is-m...) If you must get angry at someone, don't get angry at the people who are struggling as hard, or harder than you are--get mad at the rich assholes who quietly sail into these so-called elite institutions.
3. If you have good grades and good test scores, there are tons of good colleges you can go to. They just might not be Harvard. Is not going to Harvard worth pushing yourself to the right? Worth aligning yourself with the guy pushing a trade war with China, which is going to do wonders for the image of Asians in America? Personally, I don't think so.
4. The adversity score is designed to ensure equality of opportunity, dude. If they were capable of making a good adversity score, they would certainly take into account your family's struggles. They probably won't be able to, because these things are unquantifiable, but frankly the SAT and the whole college admissions process are bullshit anyway, and you'll be happier once you let go of your belief that because your family sacrificed a lot, the system ought to reward you. It should, but it won't, because it's a capricious and unfair monster.
I'm also Asian American.
This to me seems like it IS opportunity over outcome though. If you have two people who are equally hard working and one grows up in a disadvantaged environment, the latter going to score lower.
My parents sacrificed a lot so I could go to a good school. It was completely obvious to see that not that hard working people at my school would do much better than extremely hard working people from poorer districts.
The thing is, I imagine the people who worked harder but scored lower would probably fare better if given equal opportunity but they aren't.
> My family sacrificing vacations and eating out for 12 years (literally ate out 5x max) to afford to live in a good school district shouldn’t penalize us. My dad commuted 4 hours daily instead of moving...I’m getting pushed further and further to the right
If implemented correctly (and that's a big if) this should just make it so parents don't have to go through those sacrifices. Isn't that a good thing?
Somebody needs to get a class action going asap, tomorrow.
Its so so true that so many Asian families have made massive financial and personal sacrifices in the hope to provide their children the best opportunities possible. This is clearly protected activity under the founding documents of our nation, pursuing life, liberty and happiness for themselves and their children through education.
I can’t imagine the sinking feeling running through so many of those incredibly honest and hardworking families tonight. Imagine you saved everything, lived in the smallest apartment possible barely in the good school zone, spent extra money on tutors and extra circulars and your high school senior or junior learns all his or her effort all the family’s effort they want to cancel out.
It’s a blatant attempt to punish Asian families for believing in America.
While the right's policies may benefit us a bit, culturally the right will be just as happy to screw us to benefit themselves/their majority constituents when the time comes.
So no, it doesn't account for you to secretly discriminate against you. What it does do, for the penalization part, is that the schools that are in affluent neighborhoods have access to much better resources than ones from Compton or Watts.
To me, a kid from Compton who scores 1500 on the SAT far outweighs someone from Palo Alto High who also scores 1500 because of all the resources the latter received to be able to reach it.
Moving is orthogonal to the problem, except that the district could be brutally hard for some kids.
Also, imagine the other folks in your neighborhood who got literally everything. Driving to school in a Maserati and spending for 4 different tutors over the course of 12 years.
Who is more deserving? You, who scored 1500, or him, who scored 1500? I sure hope you don't say, "it should equal!"
You didn't eat out much so... home cooked meals most nights? You lived in a good school district? You had parents and/or other family as a support structure for 12 years? You had a dad?
Imagine having none of those things.
You were fortunate, not everybody was.
You might also consider that the great sacrifices your parents made to place you in a certain environment robbed you of an education others less academically focused learned well. And that some of those skills have value.
Colleges have limited ability to help with those factors so they apply weights where they can. Hell even the SAT itself has a pretty regressive impact because most colleges will let you submit your highest score from multiple tests, I got 2 800s but it took 2 tests (not counting a couple PSATs I got various times) to get that a chance a poorer person is much less likely to have.
If parents value education, they find a way. Perhaps having a two parent, tightly knit family helps. If we want to really help future generations, we have to find ways to support and encourage two-parent families. That’s one of the biggest predictors of academic and social success and there is plenty of data to back it up. Limited income, educational level of the parents, crime ridden neighborhoods — somehow, statistically, Asians don’t seem to care, they find a way. Until we reverse many of the social policies created in the early 1970s that destroyed the two-parent family in certain communities, you’ll get more of the same results. Interestingly, black kids from two parent families perform just as well academically as does a white student from a two-parent family. All of these other “factors” are just noise. The problem is in the home, not with the tests.
No one's pushing you. If you really are a conservative, you should take responsibility for your own views and actions. Don't blame them on someone else.
I'll also note that all of the things you describe as your personal virtues that are supposedly under attack were actually things provided to you by your parents. Not accomplishments of your own. Why should someone who's parents are addicts, have mental health issues, or crippling medical issues feel like the testing is a level playing field when they didn't get those advantages?
So, a separate number being added to College Board's overall package is secret discrimination against Asian students? The "adversity score," according to the article, is calculated based on 15 different factors. The two listed (relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate/poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood) are not directly tied to any one race.
I know that promoting affirmative action is tantamount to blasphemy on this site, but let's be honest here.
Standardized tests alone are really not the great equalizer that many might think. I am a Nigerian-American immigrant, but my parents were able to afford expensive, one-on-one ACT tutoring/prep, and I scored a 34, and was awarded the National Merit scholarship after SAT prep. Not everyone can say that they had the same opportunities I did.
A so-called "adversity score" doesn't have to be the end-all, be-all. If it can provide additional context to the scores students receive, then it can really give first-generation, low-income, etc. students a fair shot at competitive universities.
Besides - nobody said schools have to consider the "adversity score," anyways.
> I’m getting pushed further and further to the right.
I also don't understand how a single organization making a change to its testing package, in the interest of leveling the playing field, is somehow "pushing" your political beliefs in any one direction... It's your choice whether you want to align your beliefs more closely with any side.
Cycles of poverty will never end when people with the privilege of dedicated and capable parents facilitate their success feel like victims. How about some alternate suggestions for poor kids without parents like yours?
If this were almost any other example of adding a modifier to correct for a bias in an initial scoring system, nobody would bat an eye, and we'd be discussing specifics.
> The rating will not affect students’ test scores, and will be reported only to college admissions officials as part of a larger package of data on each test taker.
So there is no discrimination, unless this is used in a feedback loop, which maybe it is.
> "My family sacrificing vacations and eating out for 12 years"
So your family has hardship, but managed to skew things so you can have it better. If this analysis means more is done to help kids from poor backgrounds, you'd be doubly helped, one by your parents hard work, and again by the system.
Edit: This guy’s parents might have actually been through some shit. Asia was not a nice place over the last century. If he had said something like ‘my parents escaped pol pot’ or something ummmm, actually horrendous, then, I mean, that’s a hardship. And had this commenter framed it in that way, then it gives a whole other dimension to the discussion. But he didn’t.
I’m going to repeat this for anyone spoiled enough by western society to ever say this:
The lack of vacations is not a fucking hardship.
What if your family had the choice to move wherever without sacrificing opportunity?
This isn't about penalizing anyone. It's about offering a modicum of equality in a privilege-drowned world.
But we've never heard anything about internal disagreement or resistant against this stuff. This fact tells something.
To be a bit blunt (and hopefully not offensive, just for example), if someone who didn't have those kind of parents and that type of situation makes the same scores as you, likely they either worked harder or have more ability.
Still I feel where you are coming from. Reverse discrimination for people who work hard is still B.S.
I'd argue that you not eating out, getting socialized, and traveling actually made you less of a well-rounded individual and you probably should be penalized for those things. Colleges need diversity. They don't need the same kind of kid replicated 10,000 times. Racquetball, violin, AP calculus does not an interesting campus make.
Grade families like classes. The "class average" should always be a C (assume for sake of explanation that a C is 2000).
C, the student's initial score (call it the "crude score", C) is computed the same way it's always been
P is the student's penalty, computed from a weighted average of all of their ancestors' crude scores (w_k...w_1) as well as theirs (w_0).
For the next generation,
set w_k := w_(k-1)
if C > C_av: w_0 = w_1 * w_2 else: w_0 = w_1
normalize w_0...w_k
P = (sum(w_0...w_k) - C_av) * urgency
Where urgency is a measure of how in need the disadvantaged groups are as well as their numbers. This can be adjusted manually based on the political climate, maybe by a DAO that governs the College Board on the Ethereum blockchain.
Hopefully micro-credentialling/MOOCs/the fact that a lot of good careers are slowly turning into software (which is one of the easiest things to objectively test) eventually kill this fake-meritocracy bullshit.
From the perspective above, this is lipstick on a pig.
We say "celibrate diversity", but then try to quash it by making everyone appear equal and the same.
We are born in different circumstances. Sometimes being rich is a hindrance, making people lazy and unmotivated. Sometimes being poor is a hindrance. But sometimes it is motivation to work hard to escape poverty.
I think it's a little crazy that a committee of people get together and think they can "fix" someone's life circumstances, while in the process they are also hurting others'. We are not wise enough to make these decisions for others.
I did good but not great on the SAT and only got into CMU because I was a student athlete. But once I had my foot in the door I did very well (high gpa, TA'ed, graduated w/ honors and awards) and then continued to do very well in industry (arguably).
If an adversity score can help out other kids like me who don't happen to be "impressive-for-a-D3-school" level athletes, then I think it's a great thing.
All this will likely serve to do is show that given two equally scored students, the one with less adversity tends to get in because they help the college pay its bills or provide connections to their family's firms.
Schools already have financial aid data for poor students for grants, so this just makes this data more transparent to the rest of us.
I'll be interested to see if future data shows I'm correct on this.
I don't think it's ever going to work trying to rally against the math the universe is built out of.
Assuming that means AP classes that have been properly registered to use the trademark on transcripts, we will likely see pseudo-AP substitutes. The material will be taught, and students will take the tests, but officially there will not be AP at the school. Students will have to go elsewhere on test day.
Another possibility is that a completely different alternative will become far more popular. This could be dual-enrollment or International Baccalaureate.
If we want to have a real impact we need to be examining the factors contributing to the disadvantage leading up to this point and find a way to address those.
If someone went to a decent school, lived a care free life, and scored decently well, and then another student had the same score despite coming from a worse school district and having to work a part time job throughout high school, my bet would be on the later persons success.
Maybe they’d perform similarly in college, and the struggler would still struggle, but post graduation my bets would be on the person who had to struggle.
> A true critic might call for an end to funding schools by local property taxes and the creation, as in many advanced countries, of a common national pool that funds schools more or less equally. What a thought leader might offer MarketWorld and its winners is a kind of intellectual counteroffer—the idea, say, of using Big Data to better compensate star teachers and weed out bad ones.
Hardship score is a symptom. A large part of the problem lies in aristocratic-like school funding system.
"Adversity" levels are already assessed by all big name universities in the United States. This score will likely change very little, especially if the 15 factors are broken out and included in the report. What's more likely is that the score will oversimplify "adversity" to a level that can be exploited (even more so).
This could be seen as a good thing, even if you don’t like affirmative action. Instead of relying on crude metrics like zip code, race and income, this will allow for a more granular approach. If we are going to give a leg up to the disadvantaged (and therefore a push down for the advantages) we might as well do as good of a job as possible.
I think this is just meant to add some standardized and measured context for admissions officers, like an objective version of other "adversity factors" already present in the admissions packet.
However, I think College Board have no business doing this themselves. Seems out of line and very different from standardized testing.
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/01/21/chinese-...
That just seems so limited considering the variability of life.
It seems there are so many well intentioned efforts out there that seem focused on sort of economic or just easily measured statistics .... and people just try to unweave the weave by putting pressure on those easy to measure numbers.
I'm not sure that solves anything.
Colleges already weigh a GPA as better if the school district is more wealthy (competitive). So the adversity score counter-balances that existing bias.
If you go to a big state school you meet a lot of mediocre people who went to rich public schools and got mediocre scores and high (memorization-oriented) GPAs. They had access to lots of AP credits and get admissions advantages not just for the results but for taking the AP classes in the first place (weighted GPAs, etc.).
The adversity score, if it works correctly, will help colleges find students who attended high schools that were little more than daycare, offered no weighted GPA, few AP classes, lousy teachers, etc. A high potential student from one of those districts will fly under the radar compared to the kid who had a memorization 3.8 GPA and 8 AP classes from a big suburban high school.
Pretty concerning and really doesn’t capture various types of adversity faced in childhood. Feels like another box kids would need to fit in to...
Identity politics is becoming a parody of itself.
The only solution is UBI.
For example, if Harvard admitted purely by academics (assuming that a suitably hard version of SAT exists), they'd certainly have a student body that overcame more adversity they currently do. But they'd miss out on the likes of Jared Kushner who, despite low test scores, certainly had better career prospects than the average Harvard student. In reality top schools are generally looking for well-bred, well-rounded rich kids that are going to be successful no matter what. Everything about their process optimizes for this - relatively easy tests and low cutoffs, focus on extra-curricular and well-roundedness in general, ridiculous emphasis on sports no one without money would play, legacy preference, the list goes on. Admissions officers are even known to prefer more expensive extra-curricular activities - it's not about ability, it's not about effort, it's about interestingness and rarity, which are essentially synonymous with expensive.
Then to mask the fact that this is what their admissions process optimizes for, they just put the lipstick on the pig to make the result superficially palatable. This is where race-based affirmative action comes in - the whole holistic admissions process is fairly blatantly regressive, but somehow it's sold as a package deal with race-based affirmative action (it doesn't have to be) to put the critics on the defensive, as though they are the ones defending privilege. It's a fairly brilliant rhetorical technique, I must say. The holistic admissions process is primarily used to admit rich kids who aren't quite good enough academically over middle-class/poor kids who are great academically, but just have a hard time distinguishing themselves due to their chea, extra-curriculars that are available to far too many people to be interesting. But the fact that this process, combined with race-based affirmative action, yields a few more upper-middle class African immigrants and far fewer poor white and Asian kids, is apparently enough to give them the moral high ground.
They've done such an amazing job pushing this narrative that most people seem to think rich kids getting SAT tutoring is a big problem from a privilege perspective and de-emphasizing objective metrics is about leveling the playing field. It's the exact opposite - they want every excuse to admit the people that they think are going to be successful (and what better predicts success than growing up already successful?) and de-emphasizing objective metrics allows them to fill the entire class with mostly privileged people, without the riff-raffs that are academically good, but don't have the connections or the upbringing or the money to be successful.
Adversity score: tries to make the student a statistic
Which makes a lot of sense since income correlates with intelligence and intelligence is partially heritable.
A century ago the SAT was used to fine diamonds in the rough for first-generation college students. After multiple generations of college students mating with college students, you're not going to find that many first-generation college students anymore.
Inserting dumber students into college because of their upbringing is hostile towards the success of a nation.
EDIT: Please point out something that's incorrect instead of downvoting because it makes you uncomfortable.
