The SAT is probably the most attainable piece of the application process for a poor kid to succeed at. You literally just need a guide book or two and enough time to study. One good smart friend helps if you're lucky enough to have one. Literally the lowest barrier to entry for a kid stuck in a shitty school with parents that aren't around and no money to your name. Is it still a hurdle for poor kids? Undoubtedly, but I can't think of anything that can show academic capacity that requires fewer resources.

I think it's important to realize just how extremely non-obvious this is, though, for many high school sophomores/juniors.

I went to a decent high school and was in honors classes, and even I would have had zero idea test prep was even a thing, if a single science teacher hadn't randomly mentioned it in class once. I went to the school library and found the "Princeton Review" and practice exams and everything. I absolutely credit it with raising my score by probably a couple hundred points.

But I never would have discovered it except for that single teacher's offhand comment. I just assumed it would be a test that was an accurate reflection of your knowledge/intelligence, so as long as you were going to school, you'd just take the test and get your grade. If someone had pressed me, I probably would have said that test prep would be something kids in rich schools wasted their money on that wouldn't make a difference anyways. I just had no idea.

Yes, I absolutely agree that the SAT is the most attainable way for a poor kid to succeed at. I personally don't support the movements to remove standardized testing, not at all. But I also want to highlight how there's still an utterly gigantic step needed to reliably educate kids both about the importance of the SAT and how to prepare for it.

Very often barriers aren't even primarily a question of money/time/effort -- they're simply a question of awareness that an option even exists or that it matters.

[1] https://blog.collegeboard.org/how-to-improve-your-sat-score [2] https://www.khanacademy.org/sat/confirmed

That remains non-obvious. After all, IQ tests aren't supposed to be something you can prepare for. So why should the SAT be, if it's this kind of supposedly holistic aptitude test? Why isn't "school overall" all the possible preparation you could do?

Again, the difficulty isn't primarily in getting the extra resources. It's in even knowing that it's something extra resources would help with at all.

So the idea that there's "no exuse" is awfully judgmental. It's not just what kids don't know -- it's what they don't even know they don't know. You're not going to Google something if you'd never even suspect it existed, and you shouldn't be blamed for that.

Maybe, but this is so far from my experience, I'm having trouble accepting it.

There's an important test coming up. Surely the default, baseline assumption must be that you should prepare for it? How could anything else be true? Everyone knows getting some practice in makes you better at something, right?

I guess your answers to all of these questions are "no", and I accept that, I'm not arguing, but man, this is weird.

I guess there some things the school do (unarguably) need to tell kids: the SAT is coming up and it's important. My impression is that schools don't always do that.

I barely tried and was in the top 1% of my class yet I didn't prepare for the PSAT or SAT that I can recall. Maybe I did do a few practice SAT tests, but it definitely was preached that the SAT was an aptitude test so you couldn't study for it.

I ended up getting $60k in scholarships mostly from my PSAT results but at the time I took the test I had no idea what was riding on the results. I thought it was literally just "Practice" SAT.

The reason I probably can't imagine this stuff is that I grew up in the UK, where exams are exams, and everyone knows you can study for them (even if they don't).

The idea of a set of exams being pitched as an aptitude test you can't study for (when in fact you definitely can study for aptitude tests) is weird.

I guess children in many public schools in America are being failed on such a basic level - not being told what the tests they're taking mean and whether you can study - that I had no idea.

> it definitely was preached that the SAT was an aptitude test so you couldn't study for it.

This seems like you were just straight up lied to, and is sad.

It's not an exam like any other high school exam, it's totally unique. It's not meant to be studied for -- it's meant to give a general overview of your total scholastic ability. (It's also not even run by the school system, it's a private company that you have to pay in order to take the test.)

But the reality is that you can "game" it by learning patterns in the types of questions they ask, and how to give the answer they're "looking for" on the verbal section, when the correct answer is often highly subjective for questions on analogies and reading comprehension. And you can also focus on a very narrow subset of words and math problems that tend to statistically recur. There's also literally strategy around when you should guess vs. when you should leave an answer blank, depending on your confidence. These are what test prep focuses on -- not on improving your general scholastic aptitude in any way.

So it's not studying for an exam in any normal sense. It's more like "gaming" it.

As for children being failed on such a basic level in many public schools in America -- on that, you couldn't be more correct, sadly.

This hasn't been true for almost a decade, and now you can guess on any question.

With standardized state tests, IQ tests, SAT/ACT, you don't get any feed back. For standardized state test you spend a lot of time on the test and are never given any feedback at all. When I was in school I just stopped taking them. I would sit there and not fill in anything. Why should I? The SAT was more of the same. I would not receive any feedback about what I got wrong and I have no idea what the questions will be or what I will be tested on. A lot of students then say why bother and just sit and fill in all A bubbles or leave their sheets blank. There is no point in studying for such a test as you have no idea what will be on the test.

Now the ACT is better since they have a test question bank and if you take it enough times you'll see most of the math and grammar questions. But the reading stuff is all random and lots of the questions arbitrary with even the authors of the excerpts used saying they have no idea what the correct answer is supposed to be about "what was the author's intent". Still how many students know any of this? Most teachers don't, fewer students.

With "high stakes" state standardized exams so many schools in the US spend most time in class drilling and prepping for these that everyone loses interest. It is incredibly boring prepping for this stuff and they push test prep for over 10-13 years, badgering the students about how important it is for a test they will get no feedback from, and which is taking up the majority of time in over a decade of state education. Everyone sane checks out and gives up.

If you are a high school student and the possibility of increasing your score doesn't even occur to you, I would suggest that college isn't for you.

Maybe it doesn't occur to students that they should attempt to increase their score because they have a certain innocent model of the world, perhaps one in which they put trust in educational institutions to (as they claim to do) tell them how they should best achieve personal success. If it were a valuable use of their time, surely someone would tell them?

Reminder: you are responding to a commenter who is telling you that an offhand comment literally changed their life.

How have you avoided maladaptive behaviors, perhaps such as procrastinating or distracting oneself with substance?

Do you believe that nature or nurture has played a larger role in your healthy response to environmental pressures?

I'd study for any test that was consequential to my future.

>Maybe it doesn't occur to students that they should attempt to increase their score

In my opinion, if it doesn't occur to someone that they can better their score on any test by studying, then they aren't ready for college. Studying isn't some sort of arcane concept available only to the privileged few.

>Reminder: you are responding to a commenter who is telling you that an offhand comment literally changed their life.

This is Hacker News, not a struggle session. It isn't disrespectful to tell people they aren't equipped and/or ready for higher education. It is one thing to argue that some people don't have the resources to access study courses, materials or have the free time to do so (due to work requirements or living conditions), it is entirely another thing to suggest that it would never occur to a college candidate that studying for a test would improve their chances of doing well.

>because they have a certain innocent model of the world, perhaps one in which they put trust in educational institutions to (as they claim to do) tell them how they should best achieve personal success. If it were a valuable use of their time, surely someone would tell them?

Perhaps this comment will inform some potential college-bound student, who has otherwise had their life crippled by a childlike dependence on whatever information (or lack thereof) was spoon-fed to them by incompetent school authorities, that studying will help increase their test scores. That would be a win-win!

This makes the very large assumption that you’re aware the SAT has anything to do with your future, and that’s it’s not another one of the half dozen standardized tests that you take every year, neither of which was communicated in my public school. I’ve heard from many that my school was not unique.

When I was really little a teacher referred me for a Stanford-Binet test, which was administered one on one by a psychiatrist. I did not know at the time what this test was, what a psychiatrist was, or that it would be consequential to my future since I tested above the range of the test and was put into a gifted program and thus got to avoid classes with students screaming and throwing chairs.

How should I have studied for the Stanford-Binet and what would have happened to my score if I did? What resources or guides do you use when studying for an IQ test and which would you recommend as suitable for someone 5 years old?

Would preparation have been helpful? Most likely. But I was happy with my >2000 score, and felt.lkke.i earned it more by not preparing.

Can you, or anyone else, say you learned something beneficial by studying for a standardized test? Was there anything worthwhile about it sans the score?

I really think HN should stop for a moment and think about how insidious and pervasively poverty creeps into every aspect of a poor child’s life, because some of what’s being written here is embarrassingly naïve.

In terms of fairness across racial and economic strata, standardized tests like the ACT and SAT are the fairest ways to judge college applications.

And I would very much love to live in a world where the sum total possible things a child has to worry about are extracurriculars or studying. Good lord what a better place we’d live in if that were true…

You'd expect there to be a tension if ACT/SAT scores measured free time.

In a poor family, the kids are likely working a part-time job before going to school and then another part-time job (or two) after school. There's not much free time. They might also be the caretaker for younger siblings since their parents are also working three full time jobs so they never see them.

Not all of us were so lucky.

Fine [0][1][2][3]. Keep in mind this isn’t some “1+1=2” problem, and people have dedicated their lives to figuring this out, so if you’re looking for a “conclusion” then I don’t recommend human psychology.

Let me know if you have any questions, but honestly I’m wary of an attempted trolling on your part so please come honestly and with curiosity. Also this is not my area of expertise, and you’ll likely get a better understanding of this very complex issue if you look into this on your own. At best I can be (and frankly am only interested in being) a starting point.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/03/the-m...

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/20734446

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanshapiro/2014/10/24/3-ways...

[3] https://talkpoverty.org/2017/06/01/matters-poor-kids-dont-ti...

My argument is not "Poor kids universally have time to do what they want." It's hard for me to believe you are having a good faith conversation, or even read my comments, if this is your opening line.

> Fine [0][1][2][3]. Keep in mind this isn’t some “1+1=2” problem, and people have dedicated their lives to figuring this out, so if you’re looking for a “conclusion” then I don’t recommend human psychology.

The fact that none of these represent a counter argument, and some actually support my premise, supports the above, you either haven't read my comments at all, or you flavored them in your own mind to such a degree that they no longer represent anything I actually said.

I'll restate my point a final time in hopes you'll actually address it: *time is the most equitably distributed resource amongst poor youth. Is it universally so? No. Is it perfectly so? No.* Two of your four links talk about the parents' time (either time with their children or otherwise) and the last two talk about time for recess. I fail to see how either of these represent less time for high school students, the kind who take the SAT, to study for the SAT.

Had you provided links that showed that kids in poverty have less time to study than their rich counterparts by some non-trivial margin, that'd be relevant, but all of your links just point out other places in poor kids lives that they are disadvantaged (less parental supervision, less childhood vocabulary, less childhood free social time, etc.), which are all definitely problems, but I fail to see where college administrators can use those to inform admissions in any meaningfully objective way.

If you can’t see how a leads to b, there are no words I can write here to convince you of anything, about anything.

I can’t make connections for you, you need to figure this out for yourself, which is why I never expected you to do anything but stick to your “let’s have an Internet argument about an obvious fact” strategy.

Again, vague disagreement isn't super helpful. I'd love to have my mind changed to match reality if I'm mistaken in some way.

There’s a good history of the SAT and where it succeeded and failed in its goal of making college admissions more fair, The Big Test by Nicholas Lehmann.

Try studying, and see if helps you learn. Studying to increase score on a test is scholastic aptitude.

If studying fails to raise your score, you lack scholastic aptitude.

SAT must agree, since they changed the test to be much more amenable to study. That must be the reason why right.

100% agree, and this was an experience I had as well coming from a single parent household with a high school dropout. I, thankfully, had a grandfather that had forgone college and regretted it. So, every chance he got, he reminded me to study, so my life wouldn't wind up as hard as his and my mother's. I wholeheartedly recognize that just knowing there was an attainable way out was a huge advantage over similarly poor kids. A lot of my friends and family pretty much self-selected themselves out before high school even began.

Also, just curious, how long ago was this that you were preparing for the SAT? It might have been non-obvious to study for it then, but I can't imagine that any kid today who is driven enough to want to get into a good college wouldn't just google this and find a bunch of practice resources.

Years after high school I eventually found my way to community college, then to a 4-year, a grad program and so on. It worked out to be a blessing as I graduated without debt from a major university and entered into a realm of well paying jobs that have put me firmly into a life the rest of my family can barely even comprehend.

To me the proof I should continue to a 4-year degree was doing well in my community college courses. I am fortunate to have been given the gift of automatic entry by policy makers who decided long ago that if you graduate from a Community College you can go to a State School no questions asked...and you can go to a Community College by basically walking off the street no questions asked.

I graduated my undergrad with a 4.0 and my grad with a 4.0, but to be honest I don't think my SATs would have been worth entry into any college and my high school GPA was around a 2.5.

My point is, there are other ways of assessing a child's entire future for entry than a single test, and many alternate paths to attainment. But we act as if there is only one kind of path and one kind of package, a 1600 SAT score, lots of extracurriculars, "differentiator" activities, and an original heart strings pulling letter.

Top schools need to get smarter, more creative, and maybe take a page from those "lesser" schools they turn their noses up at.

- Open enrollment - Cheap - Can drop out and retry later without any penalty - Entry into the final two years is granted based on first two year performance, state schools are guaranteed entry, and privates get to be selective based on major(s), student performance awards, and GPAs. - CC Associates degrees can be earned in periods much longer than 2 years. Allowing students to work, or retake remedial subjects, or try out multiple majors, without it being a huge deal.

The first two years of most undergraduate degrees are fairly similar. IIR there's been studies that show that students who arrive at the universities from CCs do as well as or better than their traditional peers. It helps with student cost and loan problems. Graduates who don't go on to their final 2 or have no plans to can simply treat the CC as a trade education. And many students who do flunk out of school due to partying, immaturity, etc. can simply come and try again when they are ready. Students actually get an education rather than studying for a mostly useless test.

Basically the CCs are a softer entry into higher education, and can be the test for performance in a way that actually is meaningful. Since student have to pay to be there, it's not just the same thing as high-school, and CC schedules are usually so flexible students can even enter the workforce while going to CC, or take more time to "figure out" what they want to really major in without it costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Also, as I've gotten older, and realized that tests like the SAT are just a product offered by a company, and not some Federal standard, I've started to view those kinds of tests as more of a racket than a real filter. People I know in higher education think the test is basically worthless, but also acknowledge that students have basically learned nothing over the pandemic, leaving them with very little to be selective for entry with.

It seems to me everything you want kids to do they can do today, they just aren't forced to do it. I got a scholarship for a state U, so it was actually just as cheap for me to do that as opposed to a CC (maybe cheaper since I had dorms available to me at the state school).

> Students actually get an education rather than studying for a mostly useless test.

I don't think the test is useless. A lot of the things you do on the SAT you have to do in those Gen. Ed. classes, so it seems to me it overlaps considerably with the classes you are proposing they take at a CC. That being said, it's hard for me to imagine the Gen. Ed. classes at a CC aren't as useless as anything else considering my experience with that at the U. I went to.

> or take more time to "figure out" what they want to really major in without it costing hundreds of thousands of dollars

Plenty of schools are significantly cheaper than that. The university I went to was about the same cost as a CC as my brother went to (granted he went to a CC in California and I went to a U. in Florida). That said, I do think students that are in the boat of wanting to go to a super expensive school, that they'll need loans to attend, should definitely get their Gen. Ed. credits from a cheaper school if possible. It's a waste of money to pay private school prices for "Algebra 1" or "Art History 1".

> Also, as I've gotten older, and realized that tests like the SAT are just a product offered by a company, and not some Federal standard, I've started to view those kinds of tests as more of a racket than a real filter.

Being offered by a private company doesn't make it a racket. Schools are free to consider it in their admissions process or not since it's private, but most choose to because it's useful in the selection process (as evidenced by this story).

(I’m not making that argument myself, I haven’t seen numbers explained well enough to form a solid opinion)

The problem is that this argument is in isolation. If SAT is a proxy, how much better are the other activities as proxies? Who has the leisure to participate all those sports clubs, volunteer clubs, writing all kinds of fancy essays? While the poor kids struggle with jobs outside the school work to support the family and are perpetual tired? If u get rid of the SAT score, who are supporting these poor kids?

I don't believe the people who is making the argument didn't know this. I firmly believe that they are bad faithed and hope others can't see through the crack of the logic and eat it up. Who benefit from this kind of policy which favors the kids with 'life fulfilling' resumes? Plus AA, you know fully well who are benefiting (hint, not the poor kids).

GPA: Schools weigh GPA differently. One thing I saw was that some schools with honors / AP you can get above a 4.0 to the point of a 5/4. Also GPA can be messed up when someone has a bad home life, or works a job.

honors/ap/ib: These are often related to which school you go to. Poor schools have few to no AP classes available. My school had 2 AP courses available, 0 IB. I was shocked when I went to college and talked to people that had 10 or 20 AP classes. Sure anyone can just take the AP exam, but I didn't know that at the time.

Extracurriculars: Bad and poor schools have fewer extracurriculars.

When you compare good schools (which are in wealthier more exclusive neighborhoods) with bad schools, not even accounting for private schools, its absolutely astounding the differences.

Which raises the question: why single out the SAT?

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

SAT is a rugged system that performs well while withstanding concerted efforts by hackers to undermine it. Replacing it with systems that perform no better (when not under anywhere near as much fire, and appearing to have no real security) is probably not going to work so well.

The handful of kids (including me) that didn't pay 5 digits for fancy SAT prep at my school poured over some study guides and watched pirated VCDs and ended up doing better than kids who half hearted their private prep.

I don't know otherwise, but that seems unlikely to me, so I'm interested if you have any evidence that poor kids pass these exams at the same rate.

Some will do, for sure. However, when tests are challenging enough, teachers and talent become dominating factors. Good teachers make sure that students work hard and have access to illuminating exercises to realize their full potential, and students with insufficient talent will not excel in those tests no matter how much tutoring they have. After all, tutoring is not education. Of course, I may have been biased per my own observation: the distribution of student performance in my schools hardly changed due to tutoring because my teachers simply gave challenging enough homework and exams, which did a good enough job to remove the advantages of tutoring, if there's any. Using an extreme example: yes you can find the best coach for you to prepare Math Olympiad, but you'd be able to cross a threshold first before you can even understand what the coach talks about. Similarly on the level of JEE or national entrance exams, I may spend 10 times as much time memorizing some patterns while my classmates whoop my ass by simply attending classes -- this is also why I think the progressives are doing a deservice to poor kids or minority groups. They could've raise standards and build better public schools to help the talented stand out, yet they choose to lower standards and really damage the perception on the otherwise truly talented group.

On the negative side, we also have reservations depending on your caste, so whether or not you get admission into a prestigious institute depends on your family history.

With a harder test like the JEE, we can separate these two outcomes

It's no better than each of these, but it improves the prediction when combined with them.

But worse, those other things: GPA, AP course participation, impressive extracurriculars--- are far more receptive to being "bought" than a good SAT score. Being on a travel sports team, or having leisure / advice to do "impressive" volunteering, or having systemic tutoring support... do much more to move these other metrics than you can move SAT with any amount of prep.

I'm less inclined than normal to challenge your view because I know how much of an anomaly I am: I was headhunted in HS by several UCs (that I didn't apply to as I focused on CSU because of the costs) despite having pissed off my HS administration who tried to impede my graduation despite holding a 3.2-3.5 GPA but only attending for the exam days. The irony being I'd later go on to get honors and letters of recommendation despite detesting and being a vocal critic of this system during my time in University. And after graduating in 2009 I barely made into my field, health sciences, and because of my strength in physics I was encouraged by my advisors several times to take the MCAT despite having absolutely no interest in medicine.

But, the SAT system is ONLY the best option if only we accept we rely on a model that only have bad options. The amount sheer amount of rote learning needed plus defaulting to deciphering cryptic deductive reasoning with misleading questions as a way to show 'academic capacity' underscores why plagiarism, fraud and just outright mediocrity plagues academia. I wonder if having more written or presentation based examinations, like they do in Cambrdige and Oxford in the UK, would be best. The issue is that it doesn't scale at all and thus cannot be so heavily monetized as it is at present.

As a person with a BSc and going for my 2nd in AI and ML I think the notion of university being used as a gate-keeping mechanism for mos roles needs to be re-evaluated: the Germanic model has proven that engineering doesn't suffer because you don't follow the 'straddle your undergrads with immense amounts of debt in a cram model from 8th grade onward' which ultimately often fails to deliver for many since the economic down-turns puts so many either of their fields entirely or dropping out for all but a select few who get cherry picked as the norm.

In short, the apprentice model works best of all as it gives talented students to shine better than anything else, but because of the current status quo and Paper signalling that University degrees have become (not to mention the admission corruption scandals) this doesn't mean much for the majority of said 'talented' individuals.

Agreed, and good public schools can be of great help. Only when public schools fail do tutoring and socioeconomic status matter. No, I'm not talking about frills like one ipad per kid or low kid-to-teacher ratio or amazing extra-curriculums. I'm talking about teachers who can really explain concepts and deliver inspiring homework. I'm talking about an incentive system that students are motivated to learn instead of mocking those who try as "teacher's pets". I'm talking about an incentive system that ordinary students like me are pushed to achieve excellence even when they do not feel like studying. Really, it really does not require much to learn high school curriculum. It just requires a lot of dedication from teachers and students. Take a look at Asian countries. The have millions of students who went through daily hardship, yet they had a national system that drives students and teachers to focus on learning what matters, even though they can't necessarily afford what kids in the US can enjoy.

A law school dean once told to me that for years the ABA was constantly demanding, privately, that they increase the number of black students. The problem (as I saw it, we didn't discuss it much) is that this university had a reputation for being libertarian, which in the broader political climate translated (especially back then) as conservative, which translated as potentially hostile to black students. There were black students, but they deliberately chose the school for its somewhat unique curriculum which in many respects absolutely did lean libertarian. Most black students, like most students generally, wouldn't have strong enough preferences to override such a negative impression.

The woke crowd is far more vocal and fervent, and they're that way because they know that, at least in the short-term, being forceful can be effective, at least superficially. People with more reasonable sentiments and preferences, OTOH, aren't eager to put themselves in harm's way to defend those who are being targeted.

For all I know, the ABA was applying pressure because the ABA was being pressured by some other interest groups. And perhaps the ABA pulled their punches, keeping everything on the down-low, precisely because they believed the demands were less than reasonable. As the saying goes, "shit rolls down hill."

If we are talking about the US, no, I disagree.

The greatest source of admissions inequity are shit K-12 education.

I'll give you a direct example from when my kids were at the local middle school. Their science teacher --a Chiropractor-turned-teacher-- was, well, there's no other way to put it, a moron. The guy actually taught the kids that the moon does not spin...at all. They, quite literally, had to answer the question that way on a test in order to get the points. I can't even remember the number of horrifically wrong things this guy was teaching his students. By the time my kids got to his class he had been there for about twenty years.

It didn't end there. This guy was a bad teacher. He was angry, had self-confidence problems, would yell and scream at the kids, etc. If a kid had a question he would sometimes tell them "That's stupid question" in front of the entire class. Just horrible.

I lost count of how many times I met with the school principal and vice principal to file complaints. I had many (friendly) conversations with him. He was clearly intimidated by someone who's daily life was about science and engineering. I offered to come in once a week to help out and bring stuff with me to inspire the kids (robots, space-related stuff I was working on, etc.). Heck, I offered to arrange for the kids to take a tour of a rocket-making factory. He never took me up on the offer.

My kids, to this day, tell me their science education happened at home because that guy was a clown and other teachers were ineffective. There was no way to get this guy fired. He did not belong in a school, at all. He is still there. That school might get a better science teacher once he retires...with full benefits for life.

I have other examples of truly bad teachers doing the kids a horrible disservice. Unions protect them. You can't get rid of them. We somehow accept this and it permeates the land.

The bottom line is that we, the inhabitants of this land, pay taxes and fund schools that are going a horrible job of educating our children. The school is where we can clearly make an effort to provide kids from all walks of life with better outcomes, regardless of socioeconomic status. They can be learning calculus and science even if their parents didn't finish high school and are not in a position to help or advise them. They can be using computers even if they can't afford them at home. They can take inspiring field trips to the most amazing universities, museums and companies even if they don't have the means to do that outside of school.

And yet, we don't do that. We don't have a unified nation-wide standard of excellence based on an absolute dedication to giving kids the best opportunities to learn, regardless of socioeconomics. Instead we hire people like the moron from my story, who, for thirty years, will not only teach nonsense to class-after-class, he also manages to destroy any potential opportunity for kids to get excited about learning science by being an absolute asshole.

Put a different way: If we had really good K-12 schools and results, university admissions would not be a problem for anyone at all and success rates would be amazing.

> If we are talking about the US, no, I disagree.

> The greatest source of admissions inequity are shit K-12 education.

You've missed the step where the higher socioeconomic classes opt-out of the shit K-12 education by moving to better school districts, sending their kids to private schools, or homeschooling them.

No, I did not.

I stated that our schools are garbage.

If we fixed that, it really won't matter what anyone else does with their kids, public schools would be great.

Put a different way: There is no justification whatsoever for our public schools should be crap. The only reason this happens is because we do not exercise the kind of control and set the kinds of standards needed to provide every child in the country with the education they deserve. Teaching should be a profession where the standards and performance we demand from teachers are of the highest levels. That implies (and requires) that bad teachers are expunged from the system like a bad infection. Curriculum and teaching standards have to be optimized for top-of-the-world results.

This, BTW, also has to include kids who, for whatever reason, are not college-bound. Not everyone needs to or has to go to university. The problem is our schools are so bad that the average high school graduate is good for nothing other than maybe, again, maybe, going to college. The average high school graduate in the US is good for stacking boxes and, with training, making coffee. That is a tragedy and a massive failure of the system.

What people with money would not matter at all of our public schools were driven by a merit, performance and results-based system that floated the best teachers, teaching methods, technology and curriculum to the top.

This would require up-ending our entire system of education. Which means it is likely just-about impossible.

Good luck with this, when the working conditions and compensation are such that staffing education at all is a massive struggle, let alone being selective.

(I do think that quality of teachers is sometimes an issue, but I think there are larger systemic issues impeding education than the quality of workers on the front line.)

> teaching methods, technology and curriculum

Teaching methods and curriculum are important. And educational research is mostly crap: well controlled studies basically don't exist.

EdTech, etc, is part of the problem. Occasionally technology is a great support to teaching, but I'm a STEM teacher who teaches the "T" without much technology at all: certainly much less than is trendy in core classrooms (like, no joke, having middle school students write out machine language programs on paper). Edtech is expensive and very often unproven snake oil that allows distractions into your classroom, but it's something administrators love to point to to show they're doing something.

Of course. And that needs to change. Right?

However, this should not be a freebie. Pay more? Absolutely. And, with that, comes a require for excellence and performance that should be no different from any job where, if you don't perform, you are out looking for work elsewhere.

> I'm a STEM teacher who teaches the "T" without much technology at all

This is crazy. I am not sure how to put it other than, with the money we spend our public schools should be so good that private schools --not just in the US, world-wide-- should use them as a tough-to-follow metric.

I have tried very hard in our own school district to help up the level of STEM education in a range of ways.

My first attempt was with one of the local elementary schools. I offered to fully fund and conduct a model airplane STEM program for up to 100 students (about three classrooms). I would provide airplane kits to build and, for the more advanced class, also the radio control equipment. I met with the Principal to discuss. A couple of meetings later the county and school district got involved. The only way I can described what happened is "dystopian". Rather than jump on the opportunity to provide our kids with something like this, the reaction and interaction was in a range between being ghosted and feeling like I was the enemy at the gates. Truly incomprehensible.

My next attempt, years later, was to introduce a robotics class as at four local schools (two elementary, one middle and one high school). I scheduled and met with all four Principals from these schools. I brought with me a short presentation as well as a small inexpensive robot made from 3D printed parts and RC servos with an Arduino for control.

Once again, I volunteered to fund the entire thing at all four schools. Well received. Good conversation. One of the Principals took lead and proposed to organize a meeting with the science and math teachers from all four schools. This felt like progress.

What happened next?

I was ghosted. Seriously. And my kids attended two of these schools at that time.

The meeting never happened. Emails and calls were never returned. Nothing. Once again, I eventually dropped the matter.

Fast forward to just about a month ago. I offered the local high school's Physics teacher to come in every so often to help with anything she needed. I could bring interesting STEM show-and-tell items from my work in aerospace, robotics and more. She was kind enough to thank me for the offer. Since then, silence. I asked one more time. Nothing. One of my kids is in her class. I spend more time teaching my kid the Physics she is not teaching than she probably does actually teaching the kids in class. It's crazy.

We have a bad teacher problem. We have a bad schools problem. Until the system is morphed into one where excellent teachers and excellent schools survive and bad ones do not, we are not going to improve outcomes. And, yes, of course, this affects lower socioeconomic sectors far more than others.

The odd thing is that we already spend more per student than most nations of the world. Our return on that investment are high school graduates who are only good for stacking boxes in a warehouse and barely good to work at the local coffee shop. Being that about 60% of kids go from high school to college, that means 40% of adults leaving high school have no marketable skills whatsoever.

From there you have to look at what portion of that 60% actually finish college with what I will call a useful degree and how many drop out. A useful degree adds enough value to have better than minimum wage employment. There are lots of degree programs out there that are a straight path to minimum wage + no real marketable skills + lifetime college debt. Those who drop out are back to having no marketable skills due to the failure of our K-12 education.

The data [0] (interesting site) seems to show that only about 30% of the 60% who go to college actually graduate. Once again, that is terrible. No useful skills from high school and the vast majority of our college-bound students don't or can't graduate.

This is not an example of a school system designed to lift people out of their station in life. Quite to the contrary. It is an expensive mess with bad outcomes everywhere.

I could go on. STEM education is a topic I am obviously passionate about. I can't say I have not tried to make things better. I can only hit my head against a brick wall for so long. At some point all I could do is revert inward to devote my time, attention and resources to my own kids. They are doing great. They are far more advanced in STEM than any of their peers. I was willing to devote a nontrivial amount of time to help hundreds of kids in this region. The system expelled me, rather than those who are likely actively causing damage to our kids. That's sad.

[0] http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/index.php?submeasure=24...

I teach in a private school and the school resources my programs well, and I'm willing to kick in whatever else is needed. I chose the "crazy" because it's a better way.

https://github.com/mlyle/armtrainer

Most of the course was pencil-and-paper and the special computers come out at the end. If you choose to let the students get their 1 to 1 laptops out, there's a million additional distractions you have to deal with.

For the most part you don't need a lot of "stuff". And the stuff you have, it's better to get out sparingly so it's exciting and use of it is focused.

(I do coach 2 FTC teams and 1 FLL team; sure, computers are out more in those rooms, and there's capital costs to coaching a robotics team...)

> We have a bad teacher problem.

Don't mistake not being welcomed with open arms for the teacher being "bad". In many public schools, there's a whole lot of heavy management on hitting specific test goals and curriculum items. Your offer would likely not help the teacher in this task.

My closest experience with this is that I teach AP Microeconomics. In most classes, I have a lot of discretion on curriculum, etc. But this is an AP course, and the College Board stuffed the course 110% full of stuff I need to cover and my performance is measured by students' performance on the end-of-year exam.

If a Nobel Laureate wanted to come do a fun activity or give a talk in my econ classroom, I'd say no. I don't have the class time.

It's terrible: I have a few students that are independently game theory nerds. I have half a class period to talk about game theory in the context of oligopolies. If it were up to me, I'd gladly shear off some content to talk more/play with a subject that my students are passionate about...

I also have only 2-3 simulations/activities in the semester; with just a little bit less material I could have a lot less direct instruction and present the material in a way that is much more likely to be retained in the long run.

Understood. I do know teachers who are, objectively speaking, just terrible. Like the teacher who, years ago, was "teaching" a Lego robotics class. My kid told me she would come into the room, take out her magazines and tell the kids to do whatever they wanted. My kid ended up teaching the others, she did nothing all year.

When I characterize things as "bad" I am thinking about what I will call the system rather than, for the most part, individuals. Few people are motivated --in any profession-- to push hard and excel without a process, structure and stimulus that drives them there. The colloquial term is "self starters". Most are not self-starters, that's just normal and independent of profession. Add a unionized system within which a genuinely bad teacher can "hide" and be protected for decades and you have the makings of bad educational outcomes.

You seem to be the kind of teacher we should strive to have at every school. Your students are lucky to have you. As a kid I attended both private and public schools (about the same number of years each) and I know the difference. My argument is our public schools should be far better than they are and, perhaps, even better than anything private schools could deliver. For one thing, they have the financial backing of an entire nation. The only reason they are not is that our policies and focus are wrong.

I come down hard on unions, not out of spite or ideology but rather out of experience. I was a member of a union for about ten years when I was in my 20's. I saw the sausage being made. Unions had every reason to exist back in the day. It is my opinion that, in a wide range of industries (maybe not all) unions are horrible beasts that exist for the benefit of the wrong people. This is to say, their management. Union members are not the problem. They are average folk who just want a good life and everything anyone else would want. Unions, however, are driven into creating the problems they do because their mission isn't aligned with the outcomes of what it is they affect; in this case, educational outcomes.

Getting off that subject, I was a mentor for our local FRC team for many years. We got to Nationals a couple of times.

While not a teacher, I am pretty good at teaching complex subjects in ways that make them accessible. Well, at least that's the feedback from my own kids and FRC team members. I very much understand you don't need a lot of stuff to teach. It can get in the way.

I absolutely love working with kids. I would hate to be under the thumb of a system that did not allow me to help them excel (in real terms, not just pass tests).

Regarding your microprocessor trainer. You'll appreciate this. I own a couple of these:

https://i.imgur.com/ZsIJj1p.png

I am of the 8080, 6502, MC6800 era. I actually owned an IMSAI and such things as a real DEC VT100 terminal.

I used the 8085 trainer to teach my kids assembler and show them how things work at the base level. They had a lot of fun with it.

I've been thinking of doing a series on YouTube that goes from basic gates and logic through actually building a small microprocessor and defining your own assembler instructions. From there I would implement Forth, move on to programming block-based storage, write a text/code editor and then implement a few interesting higher-level projects. I know this would be a lot of fun to do (at least for me). It's a question of time. I might be able to jump on this in a few months. It's one of those things that's been in the back of my mind for, quite literally, years.

The real dirty secret is that schooling is an adverse selection problem. Private schools usually spend far less per student, but can be selective behaviorally and in learning capability. Further, parents who are willing to spend for "better" education are a far different cohort than those who are not.

I'm able to teach undergrad material to MS students, because they come in primed to learn, without many substantial behavioral problems. All of the resources can go to top-end programs, because there's no need to provide services to students with learning disabilities 1:1. Etc.

Even with more resources, as long as we're going to insist on mainstreaming students with behavioral problems or who just don't care about the educational process, outcomes for the other students in the rooms are going to be affected. Indeed, the direction of policy change is to make many of these things worse, with increased mainstreaming and reduction of tracking for equity reasons.

> I come down hard on unions

IMO, unions are part of the problem, but really mostly a symptom of it. We have terrible administrative systems, terrible societal expectations for teachers, and unions are seen as a necessary response to make the job halfway survivable (but end up perpetuating the worst parts of the system in the process).

I think we need to accept:

- Education will take more resources than are currently given.

- Education can not fix equity issues: lack of parental support is a powerful disadvantage that we cannot expect a classroom teacher to overcome.

- Differentiated experiences, magnet schools, tracking, behavioral selectivity for classroom environments, etc, are necessary to get the best outcomes for top students and acceptable outcomes for students with problems.

> I used the 8085 trainer to teach my kids assembler and show them how things work at the base level.

Computers are more accessible now. But the terrible thing is there's not a really good onramp to figuring out how things work anymore. I try and get students to tinker, and they're not really used to it in the way 70s and 80s kids were.

> I've been thinking of doing a series on YouTube that goes from basic gates and logic through actually building a small microprocessor

This was basically what we did in my Comp Org & Design class, though after we got the "gist" of our own processor with registers, an ALU, flags, and a skeleton of control logic we pretty much hand-waved it and pivoted to ARM THUMB. We didn't do any of the higher level stuff. We didn't get to any higher level stuff (didn't even really reach procedure calls for most students-- lots of spaghetti code of branches everywhere).

I've been thinking about teaching a Verilog + microprocessor design class in our high school. It's a challenge, though, because our high school is relatively small. I also seem to have a bit less success getting HS students to really stretch in the way middle school students do in my classroom-- in part because there's so much other academic weight for high school students to carry.

(Unfortunately, parents want this academic pressure and "rigor" even though it is often counterproductive to the best learning).

> Even with more resources, as long as we're going to insist on mainstreaming students with behavioral problems or who just don't care about the educational process, outcomes for the other students in the rooms are going to be affected.

The insistence on equality at all levels and all things is a problem. I know there are people reading this comment thinking "this guy is a bigot". If you are that person, please stop, calm down and think.

Everyone understands that there are people who will never been competitive swimmers, basketball players or good dancers. While I am not terrible at sports, I could not become one of those three, no matter what I do. One of my kids will never be an artists. Just not interested, at all. Another cannot think about anything else. Why is it that we want to shove everyone into the same mold when it comes to intellectual capacity, IQ, etc.? Should I force one of my kids into art class and the other into engineering? No. That would be insane.

We don't all have to be engineers. It would be a really sad planet if that were the case. It is not bigoted to suggest we need to allow kids to excel at what really drives them. Expose them to a range of topics, of course. Don't torture them by forcing them into a mold. Should a kid who is an artist not graduate high school if they don't pass algebra, physics and calculus? Why?

I love this Ted talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

The whole thing is interesting, however the story that starts about 15 minutes in speaks loudly to this matter of treating all kids as if they were clones of some made-up model of humanity. I won't spoil it for those who might not have seen it. Watch this and think about what we are doing to our kids in school.

> who just don't care about the educational process

I don't know enough about this. I wish I understood it better. My uninformed thinking is that we damage both groups of kids by forcing them together. One of my kids had to ask to be moved to a desk at the front of the class because the kids in the back were not interested in the class at all and made it impossible to pay attention and learn. The uninterested group should not be discarded. They need a different focus and help. If their families can't support them, perhaps better programs can. I revert back to this idea that not everyone in K-12 is, or should be, college-bound. That's an unnecessary model that might just be causing more damage than good.

Of course, this has policy implications that transcend schools. There has to be opportunity outside of college-centric careers for that large percentage of non-college-bound students to be able to access middle-class living. This perspective, if accurate, results in many tentacles affecting wider policy and politics. In other words, it isn't just about schools and the policies that control them.

> Education can not fix equity issues: lack of parental support is a powerful disadvantage that we cannot expect a classroom teacher to overcome

Maybe I am being naïve. My thinking is, if, a big "if", we could "fix" --whatever that might mean-- the system for one generation, maybe two, the parental problem might self-regulate over time. Sadly, there are kids who are in a really bad environment. Can we address that as a society? Equal outcomes are a fantasy. That does not mean we don't try. I would gladly devote half or more of our war-machine budget towards a better educational system and better outcomes. For that to happen humanity needs to change. None of these things are simple. Easy to throw around grandiose ideas. Hard to make them happen. Also, very easy to throw your hands up and give up when nobody seems to care (as I have done locally).

> I've been thinking about teaching a Verilog + microprocessor design class in our high school.

I've done tons of work with FPGA's. They are great. My fear, when it comes with using them as a teaching tool at that level, is that the student could suffer from exactly the same problem they have when they learn Python as their first language: Everything is magic. I could be wrong. Perhaps it is because of the fact that I came up wiring raw gates together on breadboards that I feel getting down to that baseline has greater value than instantiating an entire circuit with half a dozen lines of code.

Here's a thought I had for yet another attempt to help our local schools with STEM. There are so many well executed resources out there that one could create a hybrid program based on using them under supervision.

My example of this is having my own kids take the MITx 6.00.1 and 6.00.2 courses on edX under my guidance and supervision. This was a lot of work, yet, a lot easier than coming-up with a full curriculum and coursework from scratch. I could see taking this kind of an approach with HS kids to teach a CS class or two. They would get to boast about earning CS certificates from MIT, which I would hope would me motivating enough.

No US school system requires proficiency in Calc to graduate. Here in California, graduation requirements are 3 years of math. The low track in public schools around me is "Integrated Math I" to "Integrated Math III" which perhaps slightly goes beyond Geometry-- a pretty decent path for votech (building some intuition for triangles and solving equations is going to serve you well in a whole lot of trades). If you can't cut it in integrated math, you can graduate taking the "Math Skills" class which is even more practical/vocational-oriented.

Similarly, Physics CP (tracked beneath Physics 1 or Physics 2) is not very rigorous. Indeed, the top class my local public high schools offer is AP Physics 2, which doesn't even require any calculus and is all Algebra-based.

I don't think the graduation requirements are too high, in general. And I think there's a decent votech path available through many high schools interwoven with the supports community colleges provide. The problem is it's stigmatized and everyone expects to go to college.

(And, honestly, US comparative advantage is predicated upon sending a whole lot of kids to college... though we need to do better at getting people into practical majors and control college costs).

My local public high schools do offer "CTE" tracks in food/hospitality, agricultural business, basic IT, vet tech, multimedia production, woodworking, and construction. Before there was automotive and trades, but that's now been centralized to the adult school and the community colleges (a bit of a heavy lift for high schools to do well).

> The uninterested group should not be discarded. They need a different focus and help.

They need smaller ratios and easier, more engaging material.

I can handle 24 students and present very high level material. Because I have a student population that is very much "easy mode". I can even be excessively hands off at times like your kids' robotics teacher-- sit back and see what the room does (after establishing a bit of culture and common goals in the room in prior classes).

In other contexts, I've worked with 6-7 students who were not invested or interested. It is really hard to build that investment if it isn't there.

> My thinking is, if, a big "if", we could "fix" --whatever that might mean-- the system for one generation, maybe two, the parental problem might self-regulate over time. Sadly, there are kids who are in a really bad environment. Can we address that as a society?

Maybe as a society, but probably not in mainline education.

You want things like Big Brothers Big Sisters (which has the highest quality of research in support of their program that I've seen from any nonprofit, based on a study controlled between students-on-the-waitlist and students-allowed-to-skip-the-waitlist). You want social work. You want coaching. Teachers can be subsidiary members of such a team: another set of eyes and hands supporting whatever the big plan is.

BBBS is able to make a radical difference in the likelihood of students attending class, avoiding violence, avoiding drugs, etc, in just several months.

> I've done tons of work with FPGA's. They are great. My fear, when it comes with using them as a teaching tool at that level, is that the student could suffer from exactly the same problem they have when they learn Python as their first language: Everything is magic.

There's always magic. There's a lot of circular dependencies in knowledge and you need to spiral.

When I started with gates, there was "well, wait, what are transistors?" When I started with transistors, there was "how does anyone build something useful from this and how do they work?" I haven't tried starting from semiconductor physics, but I don't picture it going perfectly, either ;).

Few students in middle/high school are going to be able to grasp (and it's arguably not a great use of their time to force them to specialize enough to do so) the whole relations between semiconductors, circuit analysis, gates, combinatorial logic, boolean algebra/synthesis, sequential logic, the software/hardware interface, compilers, etc. The normal approach is to try and handwave through all of it. I teach classes where I give a really deep window into one part of it and handwave around other parts (and maybe if they take another of my classes they get a really deep window into another part and slightly different handwavy explanations of the other parts).

> My example of this is having my own kids take the MITx 6.00.1 and 6.00.2 courses on edX under my guidance and supervision.

This works well with a few highly driven kids, but mostly hasn't been successful for me. Even in my academic environment, flipping with lessons from OCW, etc, gets pretty low engagement. Having a passionate, motivated presenter in the room with a social connection seems to be essential.

(Also, as much as I hated groupwork as a kid... think-pair-share and groupwork is a superpower for retention and overall class esprit de corps. Many kids hate explaining stuff to fellow students, but it makes everyone so much better. Few of these outside resources are set up to really allow you to do that well).

The best thing I've been able to do with outside presenters / material is to use them in a "adversarial" mode in the classroom. Superstar presenters like Jacob Clifford, Richard Rusczyk, or Walter Lewin are great, but students are inclined to tune out from multimedia... OTOH, if everyone is sitting on the edge of their seat trying to figure out if Mr. Lyle is going to go on a rant about what "Mr. Richard" is saying this time, then they pay attention. ;)

I'll repeat, I wish more teachers were like you. It really sounds like the kids in your classes get access to really cool and valuable material and thinking they are unlikely to see with other teachers.

> I am particularly interested in what you said about BBBS

I, too, give to BBBS. Money definitely helps (but it's not super clear how to e.g. make it 2x bigger). It's my sense that many Boys and Girls Clubs are also good in the same way, but less supported by research.

> I'll repeat, I wish more teachers were like you.

I do my best. I'm not a career teacher but it's my second (third? fourth?) career after retiring from tech. (I hear rockstar teachers through my walls, and I'm able to do well in part because I can just piggy back on a lot of their efforts).

> It really sounds like the kids in your classes get access to really cool and valuable material and thinking they are unlikely to see with other teachers.

Last thought: IMO it doesn't matter too much what you teach, as long as the teacher thinks it is cool and it builds a tolerance for taking on difficult work in the students. Most of my students will never use the stuff I'm ostensibly teaching them, but that's OK.

Precisely correct. Our public schools should be the example the entire world tries to emulate rather than the substandard mess they use as something to avoid.

As a kid I had the experience of attending school in other countries due to my parents moving around for work. The best example I have of just how bad things are in K-12 education in the US is that coming back to US schools felt like a vacation, a joke. My level of preparation when compared to US students of the same age almost didn't compare. I could read, write and do math better than anyone in my class. And that's after attending school at a third world country. That says a lot.

I'm all for that point, I grew up in Switzerland which on the whole exemplifies that attitude (make sure the schools are good). But "we should fix the schools" is not a counter-argument to the fact that current admission inequity is primarily driven by socio-economic status.

Maybe I didn't make my point clearly enough?

If admission is based on testing and our schools are top-of-the-line, kids would not any problem at all passing the test.

We need better education before university. Make that happen and admission isn't an issue.

Beyond that, the world is wide open now. There are tons of universities anyone can attend remotely and get a degree. Some have very permissive admission policies.

2) "If you can study for the SAT that defeats the point" is wrong. Nassim Taleb made a point of demonstrating that these tests are study-able. The idea that you can't really study for the SAT is loserthink promoted by the SAT. Nearly everyone I know who wanted to succeed in school studied multiple times, took the test multiple times, and greatly improved their scores. It might still be unfair insofar as the better-prepared<->better-supplied kids get a head start but if you grind out a 1600 from a bad school that is still impressive and demonstrates hard work.

3) The solution to inequities in SAT/admissions is to devalue education via school, a la Caplan/ScottAlexander.

Nope. SAT offers an official curriculum via Khan Academy.

https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/scores/what-to-do-with...

It's extremely difficult to compare grades from hundreds or thousands of different schools. You have to really know how rigorous each individual school's grade scale is.

However, they are comparable with respect to the hoop-jumping conscientiousness of the students involved, and there's a decent argument that it's the latter is what matters for successful completion of college.

Top students who come from one school (to take one extreme example, Stuyvesant high school in New York, which has produced four Nobel Prize winners) may be on a completely different academic level than top students from the average school.

High school GPA as a predictor of college success results in a much higher representation of low income and underrepresented minority students in the top of the UC applicant pool, than do SAT scores.

Amen. I loosely put GPA in my "portfolio/body of work" mentally.

                          Ivy League   US      Ratio  Mean SAT score [1]
  Jewish                  17.2%         2.4%    7.16  n/a
  Asian                   19.6%         5.3%    3.71  1216
  White (incl. Jewish)    50.3%        61.5%    0.82  1148
  Hispanic                11.4%        17.6%    0.65  1043
  Black                    7.8%        12.7%    0.61   966
  White (non-Jewish)      33.1%        59.1%    0.56 ~1141 (lower estimate)

[1] https://www.ednc.org/eraceing-inequities-the-influence-of-ra...

Jews and Asians are overrepresented because they give the hard signal. Some absurd double-digit number of Asian students at Harvard have a perfect SAT score.

What's taking assessment tests out of that picture likely to do to the percentage?

It's not more WASPs, there are exactly twenty of those matriculating per year and they all drink blood out of a skull†. It's less Asians and more, heartfelt college essays about: you can fill that in, I'm sure.

†I'm not actually blood-libeling WASPs, something about how conversations have gone here recently compels me to point this out. Remember the 2004 election? Me neither.

That is why I included the SAT score in the table. Non-Jewish whites don't benefit from a higher score - they get admitted at approximately the same rates as Hispanic and Black students, despite 100-180 points higher mean SAT scores.

On the other hand, the smaller, 70 point lead of Asians gives a 6.6x higher admission rate, and the unknown lead of Jewish students a 12.8x higher admission rate. Strange, isn't it?

If you do, you probably did ok on the SAT.

Certainly not by the normal normal distribution - unless there were truly dramatic differences in the standard deviation. Do you have any evidence that there are, and are in the correct direction for your argument?

Or you could look at e.g. Harvard's own documents and see that they required higher SAT scores for whites, and highest for Asians [1]. Of course they do not count Jews separately in those figures.

[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/widget/2018/10/21/sat-by-race-gra...

Moreover, you are talking about "admission rate" which you haven't clearly defined.

Also, the normal distribution is a law of averages - that does not apply here. You have to use the actual distribution of data, not the normal distribution of averages.

If you want to make a proper statistical argument you must have the acceptance ratio at a given college for every race for a particular SAT score (say a SAT score of 1250) Any other data is just muddling signal with noise.

In fact, the paper that you linked does just that

https://www.ednc.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Screenshot-2...

The darker bar graph us what needs to be used.

Asians most discriminated. Whites and Pacific islanders a distant second. Hispanics and multiracial follow closely at 3rd position. Blacks benefit the most, but given that the number of students in each ethnicity is not specified then the discrimination level is unclear.

If there are very few Asian students and plenty of black students, whites can be experiencing discrimination. However, if there are lots of Asians and very few black students, then whites are beneficiaries!

They could have used the average as a zero control, but they used whites, which means that definitive statements can only be made about black and Asian students!

Because each university belongs to the whole world, and none were founded to serve their country.

In other words, WASPs have a positive view of Jews, while Jews have a very negative view of WASPs.

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2014/07/16/how-american... 2nd table

In fact, no country has a more positive view of Jews than the US (at least among those polled by Pew research): https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2008/09/17/chapter-1-view... - 2nd graph

But this sampled all US residents, not just WASPs.

Besides, the idea that you have to be wealthy to avail yourself of test prep is absurd. I buy books at the thrift store all the time, and there are always test prep books there for a couple dollars. The local public library has them for free. yootoob is loaded with test prep videos. There are no excuses.

If you want to prep for the test,

1. read lots of books meant for adults

2. pay attention in math class

Why? Prior to test prep I was solving the problems as I was taught in calculus. Deriving equations. The test prep re-inforced memorizing key formulas and how to think not about solving the problem but eliminating options and determining when it's faster to validate if a given answer is correct.

SAT test prep does work. Similar to how FANG interview prep also works.

> not about solving the problem but eliminating options and determining when it's faster to validate if a given answer is correct

Those skills are not specific to test taking, they are general problem solving skills. You'll use them all the time in industry.

BTW, I picked up an SAT vocabulary prep book to see what was in it. I knew nearly all the words. That's simply from reading a lot. I kinda doubt that memorizing words from a vocabulary book is going to help. The SAT prep book had "hundreds" of words in it. The typical high school graduate has a vocabulary of 10,000 words, for college graduates it's 30,000 words. Hundreds of words isn't going to make much difference. Besides, memorizing words is not the same as organically learning them from routinely encountering them.

The TV vocabulary is 3,000 words if I recall correctly. That's right, TV is dumbed down. (On the other hand, that means one can learn a foreign language by only learning 3,000 words!)

I don't agree that math classes are enough because teachers do vary, some sucks, some are great, but also at the end of the day they have to teach whole class, not just you, meanwhile maths on youtube runs at your pace

I don't see how spending more time on memorizing formulas instead of actually understanding formulas, deriving them, and going above and beyond the high school curriculum would be a deficiency, and you would definitely be penalised in the SAT with such an approach over an objectively worse education where students are exposed to less math and more memorization. There is objectively no value to memorizing what amounts to trivia that you will then immediately forget.

That is to say, I strongly disagree that SAT prep is actually going to be just making you a better student, and we seem to both agree that it is strongly correlated to SAT score, while using such prep is correlated to SES.

It worked for me, too, though I already had a high score, and wanted to see if I could get it even higher. (It worked; I did.)

That's great that you managed to develop SAT-ready vocabulary and math techniques on your own before taking the test. Many, many people don't, and test prep can help fill that gap, not only in their knowledge, but in strategies that work well for the test itself. And that last bit was probably what helped most for me: I, too, had a solid vocabulary (I read a lot growing up), and I never had trouble acing my math classes. But understanding how the test itself worked was helpful too, and netted me a nearly-perfect score.

It's pretty irrefutable that this can work; not sure why this is the hill you've decided to die on.

Because gaming the test works, as the stats prove. And these tests are very important for college admissions.

There is no reason to handicap one's self, just because someone from the peanut gallery is yelling in incredulous outrage.

1. Read the rules of the tests. Come on! Does one really need handholding with this?

2. Understanding the probability of success at guessing based on how many of the answers you can eliminate is trivial probability, which goes back to my advice to pay attention in math class.

3. "how long to spend on a question" I'm laughing/crying now. It's third grade arithmetic to figure out the time per question. You know, number of minutes for the test divided by the number of questions. Of course skim the test picking off the easy ones then the medium ones and save the hard ones for last. This is just common sense.

If this is what test prep is, things are much worse than I thought. Who needs to be told that reading the instructions is a strategy for doing well on the test? My gawd.

For some tests, that's not the right approach. Going in order may be a bad idea. Actually trying to immediately solve the problems may be a bad idea. For example, it may be more efficient to check the units of all the multiple-choice answers first, to see if there's only one that's possibly correct.

You could try to figure out the best strategy during the test, but it's far more effective to learn these things before the test.

If you've already done a dozen practice tests, you'll know what kinds of methods there are to quickly eliminate incorrect multiple-choice answers. You'll know, say, that there are fundamentally 8 types of problems, and you'll be able to skim the test and immediately recognize which problems call into which categories.

This is why people who do test prep get higher scores.

That doesn't mean that we should throw out standardized tests, but it is silly to deny that test prep helps (a lot).

And yet despite your incredulous, fake outrage, the stats simply show that test prep helps people significantly.

If you really want more reasons, read the other response that DiogenesKynikos gave to you in the post.

My problem is with you make false statements here. Be as mad as you want about the fake that test prep helps a lot of people, significantly, but do not make false claims, and ignore the fact that the stats show that it works.

As the book said, it wasn't a guessing penalty, it was a guessing-wrong penalty. They told you it was a guessing penalty to scare you into not guessing.

The penalty was a quarter point. Most questions had four options. So it was already an expected zero points on average, not a penalty, and if you could eliminate a single answer it was a net positive to guess.

Preparation absolutely did help. I didn't develop any new generally-applicable skills, but I did:

1. Practice the style of essays these tests require.

2. Improve my speed at spotting specific types of incorrect answers.

3. Learn a few grammatical rules that were different from the way I learned English growing up. (It was a long time ago, and sadly I don't remember the specifics.)

Not quite. You have assumed that money is the only barrier, but that is not the case.

Arguing that "test prep is free - or nearly free - so anyone must be able to prep", doesn't account for the fact that both money and time are barriers to test prep.

What if you have no time prep because you must support your family through work? You have no free time to prep - or do any extracurricular - because you have a job. This is not uncommon! Or you have a parent or guardian who is incapacitated in some way and you must act as their care-giver? Again, not uncommon.

It's very uncommon for minor children to have to act as caregivers for their parents.

BTW, admissions officers do look for diamond-in-the-rough applicants. Those whose test scores are lower, but have a solid reason for why. An example could be a significant accomplishment at their job.

There’s a very obvious correlation between the SATs de-emphasizing essays (~2000-2005ish) and Asians absolutely blasting past Whites in terms of average SAT score.

I don't think WASPs have any influence on the admissions policy at Harvard and I have seen no evidence that they are over-represented there. Others have pointed out who are. I could go on about US history, immigration, and WASPs but its better to be brief. I think they lost their power. That better fits the data than the theory that WASPs control Harvard and despite being racist and anti-semitic seem to prefer every racial group but their own. It's really just a racist trope at this point that untalented, privileged, and elitist WASPs are the villain.

It's likely that if explicit racial discrimination is taking place, it's more for pragmatism. The Black and Hispanic student body % shall not be reduced. The country is still ~60% white but the white student body % has been reduced dramatically over the last decade. That trend will continue but it's not pragmatic to do it all at once. Nothing like the scale of immigration in the US has happened ever in history. The top 0.01% of populations > 1B in Asia can move to the US and within one generation achieve elite status and that's still more than enough to fill every spot at Harvard.

Meanwhile, Harvard remains a seat of major power in places like DC and corporations and law schools and science. There are far more elites on the planet than there are seats at Harvard so it's likely to cause major tension in the future and my best guess is Harvard is being pragmatic and slowly reducing the white population as it increases the Asian %. Who knows what the Jews do? Maybe claim victim status and get a guaranteed seat. Since Harvard is a gateway to power, it's likely this is going to be a source of major tension in the future.

I think the WASPs fell from power decades ago. It's almost inexcusable that they could have any power in a hyper race conscious society. I think they are kind of viewed as an archvillain in this country in some sense. As a result, I don't think the WASPs are still in control there. I think the sensibilities you mentioned to get in are not WASPy, but reflect the new elite.

a lot like another distinct tribe

You are making a nuanced argument for sure then. But the Students for Fair Admissions have explicitly made the case that whites are given an advantage that takes Asian seats at Harvard via the children of faculty admissions, donations, essays, athletics, etc. But this discounts donations from certain foreign governments and I think it creates a misconception about the average white student there and pressures Harvard to specifically accept fewer whites (WASPs in particular imo) because that is the only socially acceptable result of their lawsuits despite whites being underrepresented there anyway. No one questions whether any other group has a backdoor admissions advantage though.

But the institutions are controlled by them. And minorities must appeal to their fancy to get in.

If you had said this about any other group it would not be socially acceptable even though a case could plausibly be made that Harvard is not run by the stereotypical blazer and khaki wearing WASPs. That's really what I am trying to point out is how strange it is that only WASPs can ever be criticized. I am not even trying to play a race card and I am strongly in favor of free speech. I am just trying to point out that in my opinion there is misdirection going on and that WASPs are probably being scapegoated in the fight over Harvard. Especially since anti-WASPishness has been the esprit de corps in academia for some time, I doubt they have any real control there. See other commenter's posts for example.

edit: this is a deep topic for sure and touches on a lot of American history. Given that every US president until Kennedy was a WASP, and that Harvard was started by WASPs for WASPs, Harvard's student body was undoubtedly slanted towards WASPs. But I personally doubt this has been true for at least a decade now but probably longer.

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/09/jhj-changemaker-in-a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Bacow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Salovey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_L._Eisgruber

That doesn't full show the degree to which those institutions reflect the Jewish view of the world, but it gives one an idea.

In a sense all of the above were indeed WASP institutions: Those evil, evil WASPs created them, funded them, and built them into fine schools. But that part of their history is over and now they are controlled by a different group with a different purpose.

you would have to convince me of this. It was previously a WASP institution but I don't think it is anymore or has been for some time. There are still fencing teams and professors in tweeds but that doesn't make it a WASP institution, maybe one that borrowed WASP culture. The ethnicity of the current president and provost and past few say otherwise. I think WASPs have been defeated in the court of public opinion and Harvard is no exception in fact more sensitive to public opinion because of its global significance.

The root of your confusion seems to be thinking that I’m using “WASP” to mean “white people” generically.

I am not sure it really matters to admissions but I know what the difference is. No one will argue there should be fewer Hispanic or Black students. It will never happen, it is socially unacceptable. There is a lot of momentum to accept more Asians and Harvard can't possibly accept being called racist. The end result will be whites of all groups will be accepted less as the future goes forward in order to appease all the other groups. This is in spite of the fact that whites appear to be within a general SD of Asian test scores[1]. Of course it seems unlikely that the school would deliberately accept fewer Jews because that also seems like a socially unacceptable result given that there was previously a Jewish quota. That could never happen again.

But I think the stereotype of modern WASP as a lazy, corrupt, and dumb legacy admit is nefarious because no one really knows what a WASP is, it's not obvious, so any white student there could fit this. Also WASPs themselves are not necessarily this stereotype. Couldn't they be as hardworking and studious as any other group?

edit: my point here is that Harvard admissions policies and lawsuits just seem like blatant evidence of ethnic conflict in the US and WASPs are a scapegoat who I don't think even have a say in the policies. Also here is the current fencing team[2]. Doesn't look WASPy.

[1]: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/22/asian-american...

[2]: https://gocrimson.com/sports/mens-fencing/roster

When I was in high school we were advised, in no uncertain terms, that the mixed race students should not hesitate to identify with their Non-White ancestry on their application and that doing so gives them an advantage.

Universities and Colleges are all about diversity and I can’t imagine the admissions department being an exception to this. Diversity scores also factor into university rankings and I can’t imagine there are many schools that are actively trying to be less diverse in their admissions process.

I don’t follow the logic of needing social capital in order to get involved in charitable or social activities. I can’t really think of a local charity that would turn down volunteers because they aren’t WASP-y enough.

One important caveat to this - I am not quite sure this would accomplish the desired effect if the other parent of such a kid was asian. Listing themselves as an asian instead of white for pretty much all top schools would almost definitely decrease their chances.

Asians are a pretty big and diverse group but I would say there's pretty strong support the lawsuits that will soon dismantle affirmative action.

Objective metrics can easily be gamed, and usually are, at the moment they are chosen. Metrics are almost always imperfect proxies, and the choice of metric is almost always driven by chosing the one that produces the most desirable results to the decision maker that can be sold given the notional purpose.

(East) Asians that support these measures get the media platform. In East Asian dominant neighbourhoods I've been in, opposing these measures are one of the few things that has politically activated the community in decades.

None of the colleges I applied to asked for my family's tax history or income level, except for on the separate financial aid application.

And how did students get home after the club meetings were over, since the school buses weren't running anymore?

> The Boy Scouts also met within walking distance.

Is it really that hard to understand that many people don't live within walking distance of their school, or of where clubs might meet?

Or at least safe walking distance; the last house I lived in before college was certainly within walking distance of quite a few things, but that would require walking along sidewalk-less, shoulder-less, limited-visibility, twisty roads with cars zipping around corners at 45mph. Even if my parents would have allowed me to walk along those roads (they wouldn't), I don't think even my "invincible" teenage self would have felt comfortable with that.

I was lucky that my mom was available to drive me to and from places after school, and on days when she wasn't, I could sometimes find a neighbor, or a schoolmate's parents to help. But many kids just don't have that option. More kids than it seems you realize.

True. You can say anything at all about people, and there will be many exceptions.

Parents with kids tend to make an effort to be within range of the local school.

> More kids than it seems you realize.

I'm aware I have a different perception of walking distance that is quite a bit further than most parents, based on how far from the local schools I see kids walking to/from. It peters out to about 0 at the half mile mark.

I’m being clear when I am saying there really aren’t any EC options . In poor areas , there’s no money because school funding comes from property tax . Where I went, the funding was so tight they had to fire the foreign language , art teachers and music teachers . If they can’t afford regular instructors , where is the money coming from for the ECs?

The Boy Scouts didn't run on money. A chess club, book club, drama club, dance club, photography club, math club, etc., don't require money.

Besides, creating something from nothing is going to look a lot better on an application than following a course that is laid out by instructors and papered with cash.

In the United States in the 2020s being able to walk yourself to and from school without A) having your life in grave danger from motor vehicle traffic and B) having someone call CPS or the police on your parents is an incredible luxury.

The neighborhood where I grew up was built in the early 90s and its elementary school and middle school are on the opposite side of an eight lane highway that has no crosswalks or sidewalks (on the school side) for at least a quarter mile. The town believes so strongly that no one should walk or bike to school that they zoned the school and built out the roads such that attempting to do so would sooner or later result in certain death.

High schoolers can walk around unattended. Even a quarter mile, both ways. It's not a big deal. In the summer I often try to get in 5 miles a day of running/walking.

> incredible luxury

Don't overstate your case.

The irony in this thread is all the complaining about "can't do things that will look good on a college application" just means that another student who does find a way around obstacles is going to be the one admitted. Surmounting obstacles makes one a standout candidate.

My schools were never within walking distance, and my parents wouldn't have been comfortable with the type of roads I'd have to traverse even if they were, even when I was in high school.

Your assumption that everyone -- or even most kids -- have a situation like you had is just flat-out wrong.

> Surmounting obstacles makes one a standout candidate.

This is just hogwash; being in a position to surmount obstacles is privilege too. And you seem to be ignoring the fact that some kids didn't have obstacles, and so it was easier for them to participate in all these other activities: they started out with a built-in advantage. Even if you do have obstacles, and are able to overcome them, you're still going to have a harder time than the kids without the obstacles. And not in ways that are obvious to admissions departments such that your experience would give you a leg up.

Lower middle class. Pretty ordinary.

> in a position to surmount obstacles is privilege

I presume you live in America. That makes you just as privileged. Consider all the millions with nothing that are desperate to get into America. They see something you're missing?

> you're still going to have a harder time than the kids without the obstacles

Well, yes. Overcoming obstacles makes for a more compelling candidate.

> And not in ways that are obvious to admissions departments such that your experience would give you a leg up.

The opportunity to bring how you surmounted obstacles to the attention of the admissions people is through your application.

Extremely ___location dependent. Where I live today, in Virginia very close to DC, I commute by bike and do lots of biking/walking for fun and to run errands. What you are saying about walking around as a means of getting from place to place is just completely untrue in many parts of the United States.

I made a specific point about my ES/MS because of how egregious it was to have them at a half mile's walk away but with unacceptably dangerous terrain, in the very place I grew up. My HS was a couple miles away and, until ~2010 when they built a protected ~800ft long MUP, would have required walking/riding on the highway to reach without a car as well.

The point of that is that if you live in an area like this and your parents work, you are extremely handicapped in what you can do by yourself. You would need a third car to get yourself around and if you cannot manage that then you are completely subservient to your parents' availability and your local school bus schedules for all of your transportation needs. Which has repercussions on clubs, extracurriculars, your social life, really the full range of experiences you can have growing up.

When I was in K-12 my life consisted mainly of school, sleep, and playing video games in the basement. Now that I am in a city and can go wherever I want whenever I want I find I am extremely active and social and have many different hobbies.

Most parents with kids try to pick places to live that are reasonably kid friendly. Real estate people know that, and advertisements emphasize things like walkability and distance to schools.

In the United States today it is the norm for middle and upper middle class parents to raise their children in car-dependent suburbia. Particularly in the last half century, most new residential developments have been exactly this. The defining features of these places are sprawling circuitous developments of detached single-family homes, massive parking lots, impassable highways, and strip malls.

If you'd like an example, please come visit Loudoun and Fairfax counties. I grew up in that area. They are some of the wealthiest counties in the country, a common destination for families in the DMV, and you will see how much walkability and proximity to schools that money has bought them.

Not sure how much was teachers volunteering, but we did have old instruments, old computers, etc.

There was no religious requirement for being a Boy Scout, there were never any religious ceremonies at meetings, religion was never even mentioned in any of the activities or meetings.

The only thing was one requirement for the Eagle Scout.

The religious thing was just a convenient excuse for the people who hated the Scouts.

Both my immigrant parents worked crazy hours so I spent my evenings playing with friends and in various clubs.

Computer Club, Orchestra (early morning practice), various sports like tennis and soccer.

None of it cost my parents a penny, it was all free. Even school uniforms were free. I know generally in public schools, things are almost always free. If they aren’t, there are pathways to pay for it.

Obviously that's not the point, as I'm sure you understand. It's that children lower-income families tend to have a harder time succeeding in school or participating in extracurriculars (maybe they don't have transportation, maybe they need to help with chores and cooking because parents work two jobs, maybe they don't have educated parents with free time to help with homework, etc etc etc), while higher-income families can afford all the help. Note that of course the same problem applies in myriad other situations: children in unstable households, with parents victim of domestic violence, with parents with mental health or drug addiction issues, etc.

This (correlation between parent's income and educational success) is both intuitively clear and also amply documented.

"He says the standardized exams are most helpful for assisting the admissions office in identifying socioeconomically disadvantaged students who are well-prepared for MIT’s challenging education, but who don’t have the opportunity to take advanced coursework, participate in expensive enrichment programs, or otherwise enhance their college applications."

https://news.mit.edu/2022/stuart-schmill-sat-act-requirement...

> [W]hat I think many people outside our profession don’t understand is how unfortunately unequal all aspects of secondary education are in this country. And unlike some other inequalities — like access to fancy internships or expensive extracurriculars — our empirical research shows the SAT/ACT actually do help us figure out if someone will do well at MIT.

> It turns out the shortest path for many students to demonstrate sufficient preparation — particularly for students with less access to educational capital — is through the SAT/ACT, because most students can study for these exams using free tools at Khan Academy, but they (usually) can’t force their high school to offer advanced calculus courses, for example. So, the SAT/ACT can actually open the door to MIT for these students, too.

I don't mean this as a "anti-woke" or "pro-woke" harangue, or as a middle school cynical pose.

Admission in the USA is a manual and largely arbitrary process. Just like judges' rulings, it's influenced by which person happened to read the application, what they had for breakfast and what time of day it is. Plus random factors like the orchestra's french horn player having just graduated.

We recognize this for hiring, why not school applications? Acknowledging it will reduce a lot of heartache.

(Another heartache reducer would be the elimination of the "common application")

In addition, the common app really restricts what you can say. For example two kids might have earned an Eagle Scout rank: one just did the minimum to get a check box; the other might have really used it to learn and develop. In the common app there isn't really room to differentiate unless you devote your essay to it.

Back when each school had a unique application, the burden of applying makes you more judicious in your choices. However it also allowed you to adapt your application to what you wanted to emphasize to each school.

For a quantifiable difference: back when I was applying to universities in the 1980s, MIT had quite a high acceptance rate compared to its peers, ~18% IIRC. Why? Turns out few people applied because they (probably correctly) assumed they wouldn't get in anyway.

Is it fair that my parents went on an extended walkabout and so I happened to be in the US during high school and had the chance to go to amazing universities?

Is it fair that some kid with a 160 IQ grew up on a reservation with parents who desperately wanted to help the kid succeed but had no idea how, while the kid had to go to crappy schools, learn only the basics, and worry about their next meal? They would be waay smarter than I, but I would be far better prepared and would get more out of an MIT education.

Trying to diversify the student population sounds like a good thing for schools to be doing, something that in the medium term will hopefully ablate some of the second case. And if that excludes someone with high test scores, which is "fair"? Hell, if it excludes someone who diligently labored to worked the system, well, the there's a reasonable case to be made that such a person will do OK regardless while the student with less opportunity might end up with a greater benefit for society.

And, as far as "fair" goes: private universities, at least, are going to accept a certain number whom they believe will provide future donations, helping the institution survive and grow, even if they are otherwise unqualified. Is that fair?

A way to find highly capable students based on a very low bar (relative to college education), with a low ceiling, avoiding peacocking.

Well that's hardly an interesting solution is it? x) Yes things are not good, and they might never be perfect. But that can be better.

For example, I'm bald. That's unfair. At some point, one has to just accept it and move on.

Also, as a fellow man afflicted with male-pattern baldness, I wouldn't dream of comparing that with the injustices discussed in this thread.

At least the public school has not made any objective improvement since around 1970 or so. That's pretty good evidence that that system cannot get any better.

This is the crux of the affirmative action fascists. They picked what they thought was a “fair” set of criteria and it didn’t produce the outcome they wanted. They concluded it wasn’t “fair” because it didn’t produce they wanted. That’s garbage.

Backing into an outcome simply based on skin color that they want is racist and truly unfair.

If you want certain communities to do better in education, you don’t manipulate the outcome by changing the selection criteria, you produce better candidates. Invest in education and safety in lower income areas. No one does this. South side Chicago and St. Louis Missouri and Baltimore aren’t filled with stupid people. They are filled with people who have suffered generational poverty, living in some of the most violent areas of the world. If you dump money into schools, jobs, and police in those areas, you will produce a thriving middle class in a single generation and from there you can create hundreds of thousands and millions of educated “underrepresented” people that are COMPETITIVE.