As an ancedote, I was told by my low income peer group that you get 600 points just for filling out your name on the SAT and that 800 points could get you into a great school like MIT. So I assumed it was a pass/fail exam in a sense and left early during the verbal part because I found it condescending and boring.
Before the exam, I couldn't understand why the higher income kids were paying for SAT training classes. What is the point of scoring 1600 if 800 could get you in the "best" school. It would have interfered with my after school job anyway.
To add further, I thought MIT was just DeVry for rich people but otherwise equivalent and that only black kids get scholarships (ironic since I am Latino). Are things different now ? Are most kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds still clueless about the college admissions process, the difference between colleges, and scholarships. It seems like that is the part that needs to be fixed and eliminating SATs is shortsighted.
I grew up a low income student as well but why kind of bullshit were they feeding you? My athlete friends were well aware you needed a 950 for any kind of NCAA consideration. It didn’t matter how good your grades or athleticism if you couldn’t pass that hurdle you were relegated to juco.
If anything most of the high school counselors in predominantly poor and black schools just don’t push very hard. They would tell you MIT was too far of a reach. They would tell you the best you could hope for was a private local, community college, or public state university. Who would ever consider Devry and MIT as equivalent?
He's responding to an anecdote - one that sounds absurd, by the way - so I would say that responding with an anecdote is fine, especially one that actually sounds realistic. Let's hear some anecdotes about being pushed hard in schools based in poor areas before dismissing it.
"sounds absurd, by the way".. that perhaps explains all the downvotes. One of the surprises about getting older is that stories from your youth sound more and more absurd with time. I didn't grow up with the Internet and the "MIT whiz kid" wasn't common in movies/shows until the mid 90's and ever after. What was a thing during my high school days were the relentless TV commercials for tech schools masquerading as advanced degree institutions. Who lies on HN about a personal story BTW ? What would be the point.
The downvotes are the aggressive reactionary tide through HN, that rises and falls. Your personal observation suggests that some 'progressive' action might be valuable, that there's a systemic problem, and therefore it is shut down.
Don't stop telling it please. We need more voices from the real world here.
Repeating what someone told you that shaped your behavior in the past is anecdote. The information given was incorrect but your conclusion that this anecdote is hearsay is in error.
I didn’t claim the anecdote was hearsay, I used the word “it” to refer to the hearsay, not the anecdote. The mistake is in the assumption of what it refers to, especially without asking me to clarify, or in not extending the principle of charity.
I was told by my low income peer group that you get 600 points just for filling out your name on the SAT and that 800 points could get you into a great school like MIT.
The minimum score for the SAT if you do nothing is 400, not 600.
It sounds absurd to you, but isn't that your own ignorance? You weren't there; they were. I've heard many tell similar stories. Again, look in the NY Times from a few years ago; elite colleges not only accept it, but have tried to mitigate it.
> one that actually sounds realistic
Isn't this just saying that it agrees with what you already believe?
> It sounds absurd to you, but isn't that your own ignorance?
Or my experience.
Of course, perhaps schools in poor areas really are pushing the children hard to go to extraordinary heights and it’s just the fault of poor people for being so damned useless that they ignore it or fail.
Or, perhaps, there’s a middle ground to be found, but I doubt it includes people who no one would describe as bright being unaware of the scores they need to enter the next stage of education, if that’s what they desire.
> perhaps schools in poor areas really are pushing the children hard to go to extraordinary heights and it’s just the fault of poor people for being so damned useless that they ignore it or fail.
That's not how I understood it - are we talking about the same comment. I understood the commenter to be saying that their school didn't give students the resources to understand and apply to top colleges, including basic understanding of colleges (e.g., who MIT is) and the admissions process. Are we talking about the same comment?
The comment that you paraphrase is, I agree, absurd!
800 points on one section will get you into MIT, as that's a perfect score. 1000 on combined seems very unlikely to get you into SAT; the 25th percentile is 1500.
I was replying to a comment indicating that URMs can get in with extremely low scores. My point is that they can get in with somewhat lower scores. But they still have to clear a much higher threshold than 800 combined.
I believe it doesn't disincentivize blind guessing. It just counteracts it. If you can eliminate one answer you should guess. Even if you can't eliminate an answer you break even.
I grew up in lower socioeconomic status and can confirm that the university admissions process was never really taught to us in any meaningful way. Teachers never talked about it, my parents never talked about it, counselors didn't talk about it, etc. Our education was built around testing because if our school got bad testing, then the school would lose funding. Our education was damaged as a result, every teacher talked about it as an awful system, and the kids who did well in testing had enough money to pay for tutors, ie they were already advantaged
Getting rid of SATs from my perspective sounds like a fantastic idea.
> Our education was built around testing because if our school got bad testing, then the school would lose funding.
> Getting rid of SATs from my perspective sounds like a fantastic idea.
There are two types of standardized tests. The first kind you reference measures the school. They are not used for college admissions. They can affect school funding.
The second type of test measures the student. Sometimes a school will report those numbers. But they do not affect the funding a school gets.
Getting rid of the SAT would have zero effect on contingent funding for schools.
Consider this: if the schools weren't dependent on the test scores, then they could use that same energy-for-testing to teach their students methods for improving their SAT scores. I genuinely doubt they'll switch energy, but the fact remains that the requirement to game a test-well-or-lose-funding system by necessity removes education opportunity for students in order to focus on the tests over education, especially for schools in lower income areas because they stand to suffer the most. We're relying on a system that ensures that people stay where they are. Now, if there isn't a correlation between lost education opportunity and SAT scores, then you might be right, but...
I don't understand what you are trying to argue. Your first GGP comment talks about school testing and then ends with a conclusion about the SAT. That is not a school test. It is a student test.
Your immediate parent comment indicates that if school testing were eliminated then students would improve their SAT scores. I agree with that. But it is beside the point. This thread is about whether the SAT should be eliminated, not whether school testing should be eliminated.
At the end, you start to make a point about correlation between "lost education opportunity" and SAT scores. But my reading is that you're saying there's a correlation between LEO and SAT scores. Are you saying it's a positive correlation? Or are you saying students are spending time prepping for SATs, and what they are learning there is negatively correlated with actual learning?
I am trying to understand what you mean. Are you advocating elimination of the SAT? If so, why?
My point was about this: "Are most kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds still clueless about the college admissions process, the difference between colleges, and scholarships." My original post was saying that kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds aren't as aware of these processes, largely because of the broken incentive systems around testing.
So, I'm opposed to standardized tests, in general, as a strong measure for capability because of their tendency to force the focus of schools on testing over education and in doing so, deep and localized problems are reinforced. I gave the example of my own school, because the school barely touched on the SAT since the focus was, by necessity, focused on the ACT. The SAT was an afterthought. For the teachers, it was a legitimate existential crisis if the ACT wasn't taught well, while the SAT was effectively irrelevant to them.
A large body of students don't know how important the SAT is, nor whether or how they should push themselves to test well -- we weren't taught that because of a shift in priorities. In some ways, both tests were expressed as on the same level of importance, despite the ACT not mattering in the slightest to the future of the individual student, leading to confusion by students about what is actually important.
For schools that the SAT isn't an afterthought, the SAT might make sense, but in doing so, we are culturally prioritizing the reinforcement of already-strong communities while simultaneously continuing to weaken already weak communities.
In other words, a proxy besides the SAT should be sought after, at least while we have so many broken systems and wildly different implementations of incentive systems in-place. I don't know what that proxy is.
> the school barely touched on the SAT since the focus was, by necessity, focused on the ACT. The SAT was an afterthought. For the teachers, it was a legitimate existential crisis if the ACT wasn't taught well, while the SAT was effectively irrelevant to them.
The ACT and SAT are two tests used for college admissions. If you take one, you don't need to take the other.
> despite the ACT not mattering in the slightest to the future of the individual student
The ACT is used for college admissions. Are you thinking of a different test?
It sounds like you have an issue with the teach-to-the-test mentality and the fact that "the test" isn't the SAT. I understand the concern that students are pulled in too many directions. But according to what you've written "the test" is the ACT. That is a substitute for the SAT. They are only being pulled in one direction. It is the direction that will help get them into college.
I think this is a real fundamental problem and something that seems to easy to fix. People just don't know how the other half live. There's a persistent belief that rich people and poor people are like two different species. I got a CS degree from a pretty good school but it was almost pure luck. My high school had programming classes and I enjoyed them. I didn't realize what I was setting myself up for.
> There's a persistent belief that rich people and poor people are like two different species. I got a CS degree from a pretty good school but it was almost pure luck. My high school had programming classes and I enjoyed them.
When Covid hit, schools in poor communities tried to implement distance learning and discovered that only half (for example, in one city which I don't remember) of families had a desktop or laptop for the student to use - probably those kids aren't going to become programmers. Programming classes are non-existent, at least based on limited knowledge - seriously, look up the programming classes in a nearby poor school district.
Out of curiosity, where did the “leave early” belief come from in your opinion? In my community, leaving early would have been considered embarrassing and equivalent to conceding inability, and I fail to be but a representative member - but for you it was actually embarrassing to continue (the opposite).
> Are most kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds still clueless about the college admissions process, the difference between colleges, and scholarships. It seems like that is the part that needs to be fixed
There's been a lot of research and work on that, though I don't know what progress has been made. You can find NY Times articles from a few years ago.
> eliminating SATs is shortsighted
Why does the above make SATs any better? They don't predict college outcomes, and they are structured and written in ways that favor wealth, thus providing bad data on students (other than their wealth). Why use them?
Before the exam, I couldn't understand why the higher income kids were paying for SAT training classes. What is the point of scoring 1600 if 800 could get you in the "best" school. It would have interfered with my after school job anyway.
To add further, I thought MIT was just DeVry for rich people but otherwise equivalent and that only black kids get scholarships (ironic since I am Latino). Are things different now ? Are most kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds still clueless about the college admissions process, the difference between colleges, and scholarships. It seems like that is the part that needs to be fixed and eliminating SATs is shortsighted.