What Happens if SAT Scores Consider Adversity?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-happens-if-sat-scores-consider-adversity-11574773201?mod=rsswn

by alistairSH • 7 years ago

20 84 7 years ago

wsj.com

forgotmypwd123• 7 years ago

What's happens to the title?

dang• 7 years ago

Fixed now.

pcurve2• 7 years ago

Some schools already consider geographically correlated socio-economic background into evaluation criteria. It's not really up to college board to decide this, though I'm sure they have sizable empirical data.

I'm afraid it will just be one more way for unscrupulous people to game the system.

mywacaday• 7 years ago

Are there any studies post college to see if there is any correlation between adverse backgrounds and success post college?

kevindong• 7 years ago

The NY Times has something similar to what you (see the very bottom of the page): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/27/upshot/make-y...

That graphic lets you compare and contrast between various gender/race and their income mobility.

nkkollaw2• 7 years ago

Is adversity always bad? Many times adversity creates more motivated people. That's why so many successful companies are created by smart immigrants, and many times spoiled rich kids do drugs and end up losing all the money they inherit.

Regardless, when we stop looking at merit to judge people's work, we get into a very dangerous territory.

Identity politics is cancer.

alphabettsy• 7 years ago

The problem is that average poor and middle-class kids don’t make it into college at anywhere near the rates wealthy kids do and it has almost nothing to do with their capability.

There are a lot of capable people that will never have the same opportunities just by lottery of birth. It’s true they could try to be exceptional, but everyone can’t be and that’s a ridiculous way to attack poverty.

OCASM5• 7 years ago

College education isn't the only way to escape poverty. Trade schools are a thing, for example.

cobookman• 7 years ago

Socioeconomic mobility doesn’t happen overnight.

Maybe the poor kid goes to a trade school moving up from poor to upper middle class.

The kid of said person would have a better start...repeat the cycle and after just 2-3 generations you have a Harvard/Stanford graduate

This is how many Jews and Asians moved up from being broke poor

nkkollaw2• 7 years ago

Why don't they though? I'm in Europe and school is free.

I also went to college in New Orleans, and my classmates got $700/mo. from the government if they stayed in school (no idea how, though).

tachyonbeam3• 7 years ago

I hope that this isn't hinting at boosting SAT scores based on such a measure, because the obvious problem here is that you can't possibly objectively measure how much adversity a child was exposed to. Some schools are poorer than others, that's for sure, but some of the kids from rich schools are queer, getting bullied, or getting chronically abused by alcoholic or mentally ill parents at home. There's a lot of suffering out there that is not visible, not spoken about, and not identified by race, place of birth or skin color.

IMO, the best way to avoid issues like this would be to ban private schools, and make sure all schools have the same amount of funding per student. In other words, target the poverty problem directly, don't try to adjust SAT scores based on some guestimate of how oppressed you think a person might have been.

OCASM5• 7 years ago

No, communism isn't the answer. Some people having an edge over others is not an issue in the first place.

tachyonbeam3• 7 years ago

I believe that it's useful to have capitalistic motivations to motivate people to perform. You should be able to start a business and get outsized returns if you take risks and succeed. However, I also believe in equal opportunities, and giving kids a more equal start.

jamescostian6• 7 years ago

This isn't someone having an edge over someone else because they worked for it, took a risk for it, or earned it in any way. It's because they had different parents - capitalism is about rewarding work, risk, etc not having parents who can afford to send you to a better school.

Communism pretends to seek equality at all times for all, but this is only proposing a more equal start for all, and still allows some to do better than others. Are you sure authoritarianism isn't the word you were looking for?

daenz2• 7 years ago

IMO, the best way to avoid issues like this would be to ban private schools

Why should it be illegal to give my child a better education than what the state provides?

tachyonbeam3• 7 years ago

It's a way to give children a more equal start, even if they come from poor families. Right now there's clearly a two-tier education system structured in a way that poor kids have very limited access to better schools. Equal opportunities.

jbay8083• 7 years ago

You have input regarding what the state provides. If you want to give your child a better education, you can improve the public system. No, not (only) by voting. Yes, you can do this as a single individual without coordinating with the rest of the country.

If the students of wealthy families are in those public schools, the quality of education there going to go way up. Wealthy parents have much more time to take an active role in their child's school, volunteering for events, organizing fundraisers (and donating to them), scrutinizing the curriculum, and holding teachers to account. Parents living in poverty tend to be too busy to pay much attention (let alone to run for the school board), or may not realize what opportunities for improvement exist.

There's no reason the state can't provide an excellent education, and in many countries it does. But if public education is de-facto only for the poor, then it s not going to be much of a priority for the state either.

scoot2• 7 years ago

the best way to avoid issues like this would be to ban private schools

Private schools increase the funding available per-student in public schools.

make sure all [public] schools have the same amount of funding per student. In other words, target the poverty problem directly

That only addresses one aspect of the problem. None of the other issues measured, or others like the subjective ones you listed would benefit from that.

carlmr3• 7 years ago

Private schools increase the funding available per-student in public schools.

When what you pay into public schools becomes your tax contribution to private schools they will on average have more per student if more students from higher tax brackets join.

datashow2• 7 years ago

IMO, the best way to avoid issues like this would be to ban private schools, and make sure all schools have the same amount of funding per student.

Funny you forgot students still get different education resources from home.

When schools are equal, other factors become more significant. I think the next steps are:

- ban private tutoring

- ban zoning, not sure how this is going to work

- ban educational books from the market, so all educational books are equally distributed through public libraries

- wait, parents can still teach their kids. This is not fair. We also need to ban parents from teaching their kids. For an equal society, programmers should not be allowed to teach their kids programming.

- etc.

daenz2• 7 years ago

You missed a step:

- remove children from their families and put them in state-run facilities[0]

People who promote "equality by handicap" will be happy to go down the path you outline, if/when they don't see the results they expect from the previous step. I have yet to see a line they aren't willing to cross for "no, that infringes on individual freedom too much."

0. https://destroycapitalismnow.wordpress.com/2017/03/26/abolis... "The guarantee of protection of children will be taken away from the backwards bourgeois family and assigned to new, progressive social institutions."

isbwkisbakadqv• 7 years ago

Banning private schools is an extreme position, but I see some sense in it. Here's how I think about it.

It tends to be the wealthier, better connected, more influential people who send their kids to private schools. So, we have a situation where the influential people don't have a lot to lose if public schools happen to be under-funded (their kids get private education). So it is more politically tolerable than it should be to under-fund public schools.

kkarakk• 7 years ago

Being poor is simply a lack of resources and opportunity. A rich kid in a poor school will still have access to the same opportunities as a rich kid in a private school...

username90• 7 years ago

Parental wealth only matters if the parents are willing to spend on the kid. A "rich" kid in a poor school probably doesn't have parents who care to help the kid, making the parents money moot.

CapmCrackaWaka• 7 years ago

I work in this space, and this study is getting a lot of attention. At the end of the day, colleges don't care. They have their pell eligibility quotas, their ethnicity ratio considerations, net tuition revenue requirements, etc etc.

Their objective is to maximize their reputation - if they find students with lower SAT scores from poorer neighborhoods become more successful in their careers and donate more money/become notable figures/contribute more to academic research, that's who they will admit (given the profitability with financial aid and federal incentives).

Colleges aren't going to change anything based on this study, however it does enrage the wealthy white families and rally the poor black ones with the topic of racial/financial adversity, so it's bound to get a lot of attention.

remarkEon3• 7 years ago

I think you’re right, universities are reputation maximizers - but so are parents and students, and I’m not so sure they think of the university as another rational actor in the same vein as themselves. The more I think about it the more I’m starting to believe that the only winning move is not to play.

sabujp• 7 years ago

depends on what you're trying to become, if you want to be a doctor it's still required

GhettoMaestro• 7 years ago

[...]their ethnicity ratio considerations [...]

I really hate coded language like this. Call it what it is: race-based social engineering. Yeah, it doesn't sound as "nice", right? Something to ponder deeply.

hyperbovine• 7 years ago

Call it what it is: race-based social engineering.

Race-based social engineering, aka racism, has been a thing for as long as society has existed. Not exactly a new concept. This is a small attempt to right thousands of years of injustice.

remarkEon3• 7 years ago

Interesting plots. What would actually happen though is that anxious elites would attempt to game the adversity system, doing things like maintaining an address in a “distressed” neighborhood for how ever long it takes to matter. The moral-ethical considerations aside (we’re actually going to punish or reward the children for the decisions the parents make?), this is just going to be abused. I’m skeptical it would even work as intended. Putting students into schools that they’re not academically prepared to be at because they had a rough time growing up sounds like setting them up for continued failure.

I also didn’t know UC was considering dropping the SAT all together. You know who will be the loudest cheerleaders for that? The same anxious elites that would move to a crappy neighborhood to boost their kid’s SAT score. Dropping the closest proxy we have for future academic performance (and a darn good one at that) would make everyone run for the side-door entrances to these institutions - and the back door will get a lot more lucrative. What a shame.

SolaceQuantum2• 7 years ago

" Dropping the closest proxy we have for future academic performance (and a darn good one at that)"

I'm actually super not educated in this- do you have proof that good SAT score is a strong predictor of good academic performance, and vice versa? (The vice versa is the most important part to me.)

alistairSH2• 7 years ago

There's a loose correlation between SAT and college grades. There's also a correlation between parents income and college grades. And several other things. The common thread - they're almost all related to socio-economic status - the more educated and wealthy the parents, the more successful the student, on average.

polski-g2• 7 years ago

SAT is a proxy for IQ, which is a good predictor for life success, and that includes academic performance.

C1sc0cat• 7 years ago

SAT is not good if you are neurodiverse

tuesdayrain• 7 years ago

Can't please everyone.

tobib• 7 years ago

Off topic, I'm wondering, do people on here tend to have subscriptions to sites like wsj.com that are behind a paywall or is there a known way to get past it without one that I just don't know about?

gnicholas• 7 years ago

These days, twitter seems like a reliable way in. Just search the article url.

What Happens if SAT Scores Consider Adversity?

Related Stories