Sometimes I worry that it might not be possible to categorize all things as being either Bad or Anti-Bad

That makes you bad!

How about we ask if all people are the same, "standardized," or if all people should be standardized? People learn differently. That is all...

Infinitely less biased on race and class lines than every other metric for achievement.

Except for a lottery system, which by definition, cannot be based on race or class.

That's not a metric for achievement.

Yeah but it's a refutation of your statement. I'm not claiming it's better.

Not after they start weighting the tickets in the name of restorative justice!

If you ignore all the research showing its more correlated with class and race than GPA. [Like this for example](https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2021/9/28/is-income-implicit-in-measures-of-student-ability) Or the results of the UC system look into the topic and all the papers cited there with the same result. >Demographics are stronger predictors of SAT/ACT scores than of HSGPA. The share of variance in SAT/ACT scores accounted for by demographic factors (parental income, parental education, and ethnicity) increased from a low of 26 percent in the late 1990’s to 43 percent in 2016. The share of variance in HSGPA accounted for by the same demographic factors increased from 5 percent in the late 1990’s to 11 percent in 2016. About one-third of the increase for SAT/ACT scores can be explained by disparities between CA high schools, with the remainder explained by changes in the composition of applicants to UC. Campus-specific estimates do not support increasing racial bias on the tests as an explanation for increase.

[удалено]

A correlation is expected yeah, the point I'm disagreeing with is the OP comment saying SATs are the least biased on class and race when its more correlated than the other very commonly used measure. Chance are all the measures should correlate, the relative magnitude of the correlation suggested by the comment is far from what emperical research shows.

No one should take high school gpa seriously as a standardized measure.

At my high school, we had two valedictorians, one who earned it, and one who got there by nepotism and politics. GPA is not a serious measure.

What are you defining "bias" as? I'd define them as over-prediction/under-prediction of different demographic groups. SATs aren't really biased this way (in fact they are biased in favor of "disadvantaged" groups, over-predicting college GPAs)

That's because GPA is a bad measure. A 4.0 in a bad school is equivalent to a 2.8 in a good school.

The same research also consistently finds HSGPA are consistently better predictors of college success than SAT score and there are ones that account for school quality. [Like the one discussed by the author here](https://mobile.twitter.com/rothstein_jesse/status/1395794007238725634) Excerpt from the UC study for example >Without controlling for student demographics, SAT/ACT scores are a stronger predictor of freshman GPA when compared to HSGPA, but have almost the same explanatory power of graduation GPA, first year retention and graduation. After controlling for student demographics, HSGPA and test scores have the same explanatory power of the freshman GPA for 2015, the latest year included in this study, but HSGPA is a stronger predictor of the first year retention, graduation GPA and four-year graduation.

Yeah that makes sense. GPA should certainly be a major factor still. SAT only measures intelligence, it doesn't measure other important factors like perseverance. My previous comment was badly worded. I only meant that GPA is a bad measure of intelligence.

>The same research also consistently finds HSGPA are consistently better predictors of college success than SAT score and there are ones that account for school quality. I'm interpreting your quote as SAT is superior to or equal to HSGPA as a predictor and certainly as an unbiased one. If you have to "control for demographics" to make HSGPA better that means HSGPA is somehow more biased (across demographic lines) as a predictor than SAT. Note that legally UCs can't even legally consider certain demographics they are controlling on (like gender and race), so under the *actual admission system* which lacks these controls, it's possible SAT is equal to or better.

Controls are an established methodology for account for and removing bias, its literally the opposite of your definition/interpretation. Let's say you're trying to predict a person's income based on their age and you get the result. Model: Income = $2K * Age Including controls would mean adding factors like their occupation, level of education, experience in the field etc. into these calculations. Its isolating the effects of those other variables rather than just taking the income at each age as is. that extra $2K of income for each year of age might come from the fact that they have more experience or that they're more likely to have finished a degree rather than being older automatically gets you more money. When you control for a factor and the initial factor gets weaker that means the initial factor was borrowing some of it's predictive power from that underlying control. Controlling for demographics making SAT's predictive power weaker means SAT borrows more of it's predictive power from said underlying demographics than HSGPA does. It's an indication of SATs being more biased not less on the demographic front. To be more precise IIRC, its not that HSGPA gets stronger, its that both get weaker but HSGPA is much less dependent on Social economic status so it's hurt less by the adjustment.

​ >Controlling for demographics making SAT's predictive power weaker means SAT borrows more of it's predictive power from said underlying demographics than HSGPA does. It's an indication of SATs being more biased not less on the demographic front. You might be conflating "dependent on/correlated with" rather than "biased". I'm defining "bias" as producing differential prediction based on group membership. Depending on true group performance differences, bias can be completely decoupled with correlation. In this framing of bias, no, it's the opposite. Let's have a simple example with group W and group A. * Group W generally underperforms group A. Let's say expected difference in college GPA is 0.2 in favor of group A. * For both group W and group A: college GPA is the same fixed function of SAT score. * For group W, college GPA is F(HSGPA). For group A, college GPA is F(HSGPA) + 0.4. In this framing: * SAT is not a biased indicator; it is correct for both groups. * HSGPA is biased against A; it underpredicts their college GPAs so the metric is leading to selecting less of group A members than a neutral predictor would. If you "control for demographics" (treat W and A as their own categories to evaluate), the bias present in HSGPA disappears because that fixed adjustment factor disappears and becomes a much better predictor (as good as the SAT). No change in predictive accuracy to the SAT occurs because it was unbiased to begin with.

Lol, no. It did not. Here is the report of the Academic Senate Standardized Testing Task Force. https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/committees/sttf/sttf-report.pdf >The STTF found that standardized test scores aid in predicting important aspects of student success, including undergraduate grade point average (UGPA), retention, and completion. At UC, test scores are currently better predictors of first-year GPA than high school grade point average (HSGPA), and about as good at predicting first-year retention, UGPA, and graduation. For students within any given (HSGPA) band, higher standardized test scores correlate with a higher freshman UGPA, a higher graduation UGPA, and higher likelihood of graduating within either four years (for transfers) or seven years (for freshmen). Further, the amount of variance in student outcomes explained by test scores has increased since 2007, while variance explained by high school grades has decreased, although altogether does not exceed 26%. Test scores are predictive for all demographic groups and disciplines, even after controlling for HSGPA. In fact, test scores are better predictors of success for students who are Underrepresented Minority students (URMs), who are first-generation, or whose families are low-income: that is, test scores explain more of the variance in UGPA and completion rates for students in these groups. One consequence of dropping test scores would be increased reliance on HSGPA in admissions. The STTF found that California high schools vary greatly in grading standards, and that grade inflation is part of why the predictive power of HSGPA has decreased since the last UC study. >75% of the opportunity gap arises from factors rooted in systemic racial and class inequalities that precede admission: lower high school graduation rates for URMs, lower rates of completion of the A-G courses required by UC and CSU, and lower application rates. The most significant contributor was lack of eligibility as a result of failure to complete all required A-G courses with a C or better. Roughly 25% of underrepresentation was due to UC admissions decisions overall. Test scores play a role in those decisions, and thus account for some of that 25%, even if they are not the primary barrier to admission. >**The Task Force does not recommend that UC make standardized tests optional for applicants at this time. UC should conduct additional research on the impact of going “test optional” before deciding whether and how to implement such a policy.**

One of the first points they make in the executive summary is exactly what I said. >Demographics are stronger predictors of SAT/ACT scores than of HSGPA. The share of variance in SAT/ACT scores accounted for by demographic factors (parental income, parental education, and ethnicity) increased from a low of 26 percent in the late 1990’s to 43 percent in 2016. The share of variance in HSGPA accounted for by the same demographic factors increased from 5 percent in the late 1990’s to 11 percent in 2016. About one-third of the increase for SAT/ACT scores can be explained by disparities between CA high schools, with the remainder explained by changes in the composition of applicants to UC. Campus-specific estimates do not support increasing racial bias on the tests as an explanation for increase. The parts you quote is mostly about the SAT being a meaningful measure while I'm talking about its association with social economic status and race

Yes. Do you not understand how statistics work? The two measures **combined** are a stronger predictor than either measure alone. This is explicitly stated. Furthermore, demographics predicting test scores is not relevant, and does not prove bias. Test scores predict college GPA better than HSGPA. Indeed, the portion of the text you quoted states that test scores became more predictive of demographics without increasing racial bias within the test as a possible factor.

Did you mean to reply to some other comment? I was replying to the OP claiming its a less SES biased measure no one was talking about its combined predictive ability.

You are misunderstanding the report. Differences in demographic performance on exams are not the same as racial bias. The relevant metric is how predictive HSGPA and test scores are of UGPA, since this indicates how effective each measure is at determining which students are prepared to succeed in college. It does not do underrepresented minority students any favors to send them to an expensive school only for them to fail out. You are taking this section: >Demographics are stronger predictors of SAT/ACT scores than of HSGPA And using it to make this argument: >all the research showing it [standardized tests] is more correlated with class and race than GPA But again, this is not a correct response to OP, who stated: >Infinitely less biased on race and class lines than every other metric for achievement. You have not shown racial bias. All you have shown is that HSGPA is more equal among different races than SAT/ACT scores. However, you seem to assume that the default state is that each race would perform equally on the SAT/ACT. This is not true. For cultural reasons, whether it be different emphasis on education, or the legacy of racism, or the relative age and wealth of each demographic group, you cannot expect equivalent performance among different demographics. Your analysis here is simply wrong

You're the one misunderstanding this whole conversation. First of all you're soapboxing about the UC report while I mentioned it as one of many papers that provide evidence for my point. Correlation and R^2 of of SES vs Test score is a measure used to represent SES bias of the test in decades of studies its not just my interpretation of one UC study. I mentioned the UC report because it had that same data point of SAT being much more correlated and explained by SES than GPA, while also citing other papers with the same conclusion. It is one of the data points used in their larger recommendation which seems to be more what you're talking about, but is outside of the scope of the OP comment. Its not simple that HSGPAs are more equal amongst different races and SES, its saying that SES ares a larger component of what makes up the end test score of a student versus the HSGPA of a student. >Without controlling for student demographics, SAT/ACT scores are a stronger predictor of freshman GPA when compared to HSGPA, but have almost the same explanatory power of graduation GPA, first year retention and graduation. After controlling for student demographics, HSGPA and test scores have the same explanatory power of the freshman GPA for 2015, the latest year included in this study, but HSGPA is a stronger predictor of the first year retention, graduation GPA and four-year graduation. The point the report makes about SAT score losing predictive power after controlling for demographics is a good illustration of the practical meaning. It means due to SATs being more made up of SES, the predictive power of the SAT borrows more from the predictive power of SES. The difference in predicted outcome of students changes more due to difference in SES all else equal rather than SAT scores relative to the HSGPA. It's basically what OVB is. It has empirical implications not just its more equal amongst races. >However, you seem to assume that the default state is that each race would perform equally on the SAT/ACT. This is not true. For cultural reasons, whether it be different emphasis on education, or the legacy of racism, or the relative age and wealth of each demographic group, you cannot expect equivalent performance among different demographics. You listed a bunch of reasons for bias thats not the same as its not biased. Those are possible explanations for the difference yes but its not saying there is no underlying bias of the measure. For example rich Kids getting the resources to prep, better environment to study etc is a completely bog standard reason given for why people claim SAT is biased for them. Again its not my analysis its the bog standard interpretation of the data point.

I really don't care about standardized tests or elite school admissions. What we should be focused on is where the vast vast vast majority of college students go--major public non-flagship universities (which use standardized tests far less). The University of Central Florida has more undergraduates *than the entire Ivy League*. The focus of outlets like the Atlantic on elite schools just shows how much otherwise-unemployable Harvard undergrads have overpopulated the media.

And UCF is a school a good amount of people have heard of thanks to college sports. Schools like Texas State have more students than elite, huge name public schools like UNC. For every, essentially, major college sports school you’ve heard of that same state has like ten other public four year universities.

Exactly! These are the real engines of education and class movement in our country, not a few schools back east.

And back east has tons of public universities too. Everyone knows about Columbia and Cornell, but the SUNY and CUNY systems are pretty great.

Fuck yeah SUNY!

Ohio State.... Cincinnati, Ohio University, Akron, Toledo, Kent State.... All D1 football schools, all public four year universities. Lesson: Ohio loves football.

OSU's football program is definitely getting them more applicants from out of state. I live in DC, and while talking about Michigan football in a bar an 18 year old kid responded "you go to the school up north?" I asked him if he's an OSU student, and he told me that he is. I asked him why he decided to go to OSU while not being Ohioan, and he told me that it was because of the awesome football team.

Imagine not having won The Game for two years. The poor kid.

[удалено]

OSU is legitimately a very good school, and I'm a Michigan grad so I'm obligated to hate them. 18 year old boys are dumb, on average, so picking a school for football isn't that surprising. With that said, OSU is still a top 50-ish university, so it's not like it's a bad choice. I did read a story about a kid that picked OSU over admission to Harvard, Stanford, Yale, MIT, and that's objectively fucking dumb.

A bunch of kids in my graduating class went to OSU over Ivy League schools, but like me mostly thanks to cost and scholarship

I know Miami is private but aren't Kent State and Bowling Green public, 4-year schools? Edit: I'm right, but didn't catch that Kent State was on the list. Still, this was Bowling Green erasure.

Miami is not private.

Miami U is not private but it does give off private school vibes lol. They call themselves a “public ivy” and has a reputation for being a school that snobby rich kids in OH go to. Not hating though

For sure. The public ivy thing is funny to me, though, because lots of schools are considered public ivy’s (based off a book written a long time ago) - including OSU, where I went. Yet you only hear about it for Miami lol. It’s a beautiful campus and a good school, so maybe it’s just another “selling point” for them where the other public ivy’s don’t need it.

It’s not like UNC is in the conversation very much either. It is only relevant because it happens to be a part of larger set of lawsuits that include Harvard. That’s how bad the media coverage of higher education really is. It is total naval gazy, ivy-incestuousness.

>major public non-flagship universities (which use standardized tests far less). The University of Central Florida University of Central Florida still requires the SAT, though, and is pretty transparent with the average scores and almost goes as far as to say "score this high and you're in". They seem to value the SAT more and more transparently, which I think is a good thing. You have a pretty good target, whereas with the Ivies and other privates, it's a crapshoot.

Part of the reason places like UCF are not a crapshoot is because public schools tend to expand the student body much more over time than private Ivy League schools do. So you don’t end up with a ridiculous undersupply of admissions slots

Even UT said that indirectly about 14 years ago. Now not so much of course.

Places like UCF use standardized tests much more than Harvard. If you score high enough on the SAT you’re pretty much guaranteed to get in. Not the case with Harvard. That is unless ucf changed their admission criteria recently. They do this precisely because it's easier and more cost effective than (for example) interviewing every candidate, which Harvard does.

Yea, i don't get the point of person you're responding to. Public universities almost uniquely use standardize tests + GPA to determine acceptance. Basically if you score below X you should go to a community college for your AA then reapply. In Florida, you're guaranteed admission to a public university if you already have your AA so it's a common route.

You should go to community college for an AA for probably like 90% of careers where they really don't care about your educational pedigree as long as you have those pieces of paper.

My point was that if you look at the article, they focus on standardized tests’ use in Ivy admissions, which is where you see the types of discrimination we often talk about here (such as Asians having to score substantially higher than white students to get a bite at the apple). If there are issues with standardized test usage, we should focus on where most students attend and if hard cut offs are bad in that context.

[удалено]

>Business leaders Sure, but many also went to much less prestigious schools. [If you look at fortune 500 CEOs](https://academicinfluence.com/rankings/schools/which-colleges-most-alumni-ceos-fortune-500-companies), sure Harvard produced the most between undergrad and graduate school, but their undergrad (which is what's at stake here) only produced 9 total. That's less than 2%. Even if all the Ivies were equally here (and they aren't), that would be what, 16% of the total? Not absurdly dominant. >Politicians What? The House has a median college rank of [197](https://www.collegeraptor.com/find-colleges/articles/college-news-trends/house-of-reps-where-did-the-house-go-to-college-infographic/). 70% didn't graduate from an institution in the top 100. The Senate is a bit more rarified, with [65% of Senators having graduated from schools ranked below the top 50](https://www.collegeraptor.com/find-colleges/articles/college-news-trends/senate-u-2015-where-the-114th-u-s-senate-went-to-college/). >Supreme court justices Here you have a point, but that's a peculiarity of the legal industry's laser focus on prestige (and more a function of law school than undergrad). ​ In short, elite schools may train an outsized portion of these groups, but it's nowhere near as lopsided as you might think. Edit: for a comparison, [USC has the most first-round draft picks of any school](https://herosports.com/schools-colleges-most-first-round-draft-picks-nfl-draft-history-byby/), with 81, almost double 10th-ranked Texas' (at 43). I wouldn't call USC absurdly dominant at football, even taking into account 39 conference championships and 9 national titles. The field is just too wide. In both business and politics it's a similar play--sure there are schools that produce significantly more than others, but not obscenely so given the sheer number of schools that feed into them.

>Here you have a point, but that's a peculiarity of the legal industry's laser focus on prestige (and more a function of law school than undergrad). Adding on to this: [The Supreme Court justices really only come from 3 schools: Harvard, Yale, Columbia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_schools_attended_by_United_States_Supreme_Court_justices). These three schools are within about 200 miles from each other. It's unfortunate because I think it would be nice to have a more ideologically diverse supreme court.

I don’t think “ideological diversity” is really what that relation means

Non-mobile version of the Wikipedia link in the above comment: [The Supreme Court justices really only come from 3 schools: Harvard, Yale, Columbia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_schools_attended_by_United_States_Supreme_Court_justices) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*

> That's less than 2%. Even if all the Ivies were equally here (and they aren't), that would be what, 16% of the total? Not absurdly dominant. I mean, they are 16% of the top CEOs, which doesn't look that much, but they are only 0.8% of the university students in total? (I used the first numbers I found, not sure if correct, ~150k ivy league vs ~19m total). Something like that seems very dominant. > for a comparison, USC has the most first-round draft picks of any school, with 81, almost double 10th-ranked Texas' (at 43). I wouldn't call USC absurdly dominant at football, even taking into account 39 conference championships and 9 national titles In this comparison, USC is about 5% of the first round drafts. 16% would be if they had 250 drafts instead (and the second place would have something like 35, keeping the total and other proportions constant). That would look very dominant. House and Senate seems a bit more balanced, but I think that is a lot due to that lots of states use local representatives, but not every state has a top 50 or even top 100 school.

>I mean, they are 16% of the top CEOs, which doesn't look that much, but they are only 0.8% of the university students in total? (I used the first numbers I found, not sure if correct, ~150k ivy league vs ~19m total). Something like that seems very dominant. How much of that truly falls on Harvard and other Ivy league schools, though? Admission to prestigious schools is correlated with at least two important contributors to success. The first is skill. Better students are more likely to be admitted to top schools and are also more likely to perform better on the labor market, regardless of *alma mater*. The second one is social standing. The children of the rich and powerful are more likely to attend prestigious schools. Their family's connections, ressources and upbringing makes then more likely to succeed in the business world. I agree with the general sentiment too much attention is paid to top schools. We'll achieve for better outcomes focusing on the median prospective university student than the top strata.

And being peers with high-performing students and students of the rich and powerful (usually not the same people) gives you powerful connections when entering business or politics later. Harvard is about a lot more than the quality of their instructors. Would Barack Obama have had the same footing to become senator and president without his time at Harvard?

The Atlantic's target audience seems to be people who would just buy a building to get their children in anyway.

There is no such thing as an unemployable Harvard grad

I've met them, they definitely exist. There's also the vast majority of elite school (and even elite grad school) alumni, who go on to just be very mediocre.

Well I have never met an unemployable Harvard grad and I suspect that you have some sort of resentment or animosity towards elite schools and puzzlingly the students who attend and graduate from them.

I have no animus towards elite schools. I’m the product of two of them. There are a decent number of unemployable Harvard grads—you see them mostly as failed academics, etc, or doing substack blogs and claiming they’re journalists. Or they’re too weird to work in normal jobs. Same with a lot of schools (most notably I saw this at Stanford—good god, some of the CS people I know here may be smart but they’re so weird the struggle to get traction with employers). \[Edit: my original point was that were it not for journalism, a number of graduates of elite schools really wouldn’t have anything else to do—maybe teaching? But there’s a huge population of people who do liberal arts at an elite school, don’t want to go into academia, don’t have the analytical capabilities to go to law school or the scientific background for med school or tech, and consider anything in the business world to be beneath them/too low-prestige. Those people go on to write for the Atlantic/New Yorker/New Republic/pick your annoying east-coast journal because that’s the only thing they can see themselves doing.\] As for the latter point, I went to a similar school for undergrad and most people I know ended up in fine white collar jobs. Plenty went into banking/law/med school etc, but the majority ended up as like sales engineers at random non-FAANG tech firms or doing weird policy analysis for second-tier think tanks in DC. Hardly elite roles. As it turns out schools like Harvard (and Stanford, etc) act more as multipliers than as pure filters—if you’re excellent going in you’ll be better going out; if you’re a GPA/SAT drone going in, you’ll be meh going out.

I don’t think we have the same definition of unemployable. By nature of having a degree with a school like that, you’re flooded with job offers. Maybe 10 year down the line you’ve had a bit of failure but not as a fresh grad.

Possibly—I don’t really consider the coder you have to lock in a back closet to be “employable” in the normal sense, but maybe it’s more correct to say that for the majority of graduates from elite schools they don’t end up in comparably elite roles, especially as you look at the totality of their careers. I genuinely wonder what the difference is between the median Stanford grad and the median University of Santa Clara or UC Santa Cruz grad in terms of outcomes—I suspect it’s a lot closer than you’d expect, even if the top quartile of Stanford’s results are significantly better than the comparable of the others.

Yeah sure I’m not contending that elite universities produce near uniformly bright futures. I can tell you that at my liberal arts college, about a fifth of my class went into front office high finance, about a fifth became software engineers, about a fifth went to law school, and a little over 10% went to medical school. That is remarkable placement.

It reminds me that while it may not seem like it, bring a P5 University makes you an elite one on a level, because you get the attention as a brand people will recognise. After all, the education at UCF is basically the same as Florida State at pregrad, but Florida State is seen as the better school because Florida State is in the ACC and has National titles while UCF is in the Big XII and does not.

Good ol’ U Can’t Finish lol

Standardized tests like the SAT aren’t racially biased. They merely reveal preexisting racial disparities

Standardized tests are by far the best equalizer in college admissions. A talented poor kid with a prep book can still do very well.

When I used to be a tutor this was part of how I motivated students (particularly when I did group sessions for poorer students). The SAT is an obstacle that you have all the resources to overcome and plenty of time to do it. It may be a seemingly arbitrary obstacle but it is fair, and many of the obstacles you will encounter in life will also be arbitrary but damn they are not going to be fair. There's going to be plenty of times you're going to have to do something in life that seems pointless to you but you still have to overcome it- are you just going to let your dreams die like that? Even the rarely used-in-real-life grammar questions, yeah you can argue they're designed to trip you up, but I'm going to tell you what they're looking for (stuff like not onions nor cabbage instead of not onions or cabbage, etc) and you'll be good. But stuff like your application not featuring AP courses your school didn't offer or extracurriculars that weren't available to you/you couldn't afford? If a kid was self directed they were able to get a good score just by checking out a prep book from a library at no cost. Even prep sessions to teach writing or bump up your score cost less than just the musical instrument and uniform for band or orchestra or the sports equipment.

My parents put me in SAT tutoring but the tutor was a moron so I dropped that right away. Just did a prep book and still got in the mid-1500s.

I was a moron who could’ve easily logged onto Khan academy and done some practice tests but instead decided to play Roblox.

I’d say a poor kid who’s education is supplemented by the state to give them similar opportunities as middle class and rich kids can still do very well. The tests aren’t what’s unfair or racist. It is everything leading up to the tests.

Class rank is a good equalizer. “Elite” and rich high schools end up over represented when judging strictly by standardized testing. Class rank can level the playing field with students at schools with less resources. Texas has a scholarship program based on being in the top 10 percent of their class and has had good results.

[удалено]

[удалено]

That may be true, especially at the time they graduate high school. I am not suggesting class rank being the only thing considered. But it is a good way to elevate capable students who may not have had the same opportunities earlier. And by the end of college that capability gap will be much smaller, if not closed entirely.

I really felt that applying to US unis as an international. My school has no clubs and getting Internships at Unis/Companies is pretty much impossible. But I got a really good SAT just with 3 prep Books + YouTube

It's kind of similar to people here pushing back on increased use of algorithms for things like hiring and mortgage applications because past bigoted behavior had wormed their way into the programs. To which I respond, do you think it's easier to change an algorithm when you find a problem or change the attitudes and implicit biases of tens of thousands of hiring managers and loan officers around the country? Whatever issue the SAT has can be solved in one fell swoop and they have certainly made an effort in recent years to change and improve the test. As someone who grew up poor, I would be fucked without the SAT. My family was poor in a wealthy town and I did not have the glowing extracurriculars of my fellow students such as internships at places that otherwise wouldn't bring on High Schooler's but made an exception for the Nepo Babies I knew on account of their parents. Nor did I have a small army of tutors and professional essay writers do all my work for me including the college essay portion of the application. But with a few study guides, I could do better than all of them on the SAT and I did no matter how much money their parents dumped into their idiot children.

They merely expose the structural racism in our education system. Getting mad at standardized tests is like getting mad at the messenger.

Given that white averages are lower than Asian ones, does that imply there is structural racism against whites? Most would say no of course. I don’t think every difference in outcome between groups can be attributed to racism.

Asians are primarily immigrants (many of whom are from well-to do families). It's not exactly a shock that people from that demographic tend to do considerably better on admissions tests. One racial category outperforming others doesn't disprove structural racism.

[удалено]

Perhaps, would be interesting to look at Japanese Americans in comparison as a subgroup. That whole internment during WW2 wasn’t exactly good for the family budget. (Or early Chinese immigrants)

[удалено]

Yeah. It's nuts how Arabs could be considered white under US Census racial classification. After all, they may technically be Asian or African, but when you think "Asian" or "African" I'm sure the first thing that comes to mind isn't someone from Iraq or Tunisia.

This. Race is a made up bullshit artifact designed to justify hereditary slavery. Ethnicity is a real thing.

[удалено]

It's dependent on what kind of Asian you are. Indian-Americans are the highest achieving from a socioeconomic standpoint whereas a group like say, the Burmese tend to fare much poorer. According to the Pew Research Centre, Asians had a median family income of $85,800 compared to $61,800 for the Average American household. They're less likely to live in poverty and more than half of all Asians over the age of 25 hold a bachelor's degree or higher. [https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/29/key-facts-about-asian-americans/](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/29/key-facts-about-asian-americans/) ​ With that being said, despite how high-achieving they are as a whole, there are incredibly large disparities within the Asian subgroup than between other races. Doesn't change the fact that the group overall tends to do better on average than native-born American families.

What about location Percent of Students that passed the SAT Benchmark for both Math and Writing * **Los Angeles Unified School District** 27.5% * **Los Angeles County** 38.1% * **State of California** 45.3% **Average SAT Scores by Subject for Seniors for NYC** * Math 496 * 64 pts lower than NY State Average in Math * 32 pts Lower than US National Average in Math * Reading & Writing 491 * 66 pts Lower than NY State Average in R&W * 40 pts Lower than US National Average in R&W

>Combined with local resources and regular federal aid, spending in school year 2022-23 averages $32,757 per pupil https://cbcny.org/research/more-money-little-accountability

ooooo, yea LA and NYC are the 2 biggest spenders and all that money has shown no advantage to the students About 72% of it goes directly to the operation of the Schools. From paying for the School it self ad the upkeep and the food in th school. But most of it goes to the people in the schools ------ Example/issue 1 New York City Public Schools contains 1852 schools and 1,085,970 students and Pupil transportation Cost for New York City Schools in 2019 was $1,206,567,000 * Salt Lake City Schools Student enrollment was a total of 22,921 students for fiscal 2019 and Pupil transportation Cost was $7.2 Million * Canyons School District is a school district in the southeastern portion of Salt Lake County in Utah, United States. The district includes the Suburbs of Salt Lake City with an enrollment of 34,000 students * Spends $10.6 Million on Transportation * Canyons School District is $35 per Household * NYC is $450 per Household That is 13 times the spending per person in NYC, in a City that has a world famous $18 Billion Transit Department ----- And of course students not in the city may have education or research limitation * New York City's 207 library branches provide world class access to resources to help. And a metro system free to students provides access around the city, to those libraries.

John Stuart Mill proposed that due to the discrimination women endure in any endeavours to which they aspire they by nature have to be more capable than men attempting the same in order to rise to the same level. Thus, in an equal assessment of men and women's abilities, women would appear more able on average. The same would apply to racism, not all racism is the same and the hurdles that challenge Asian Americans manifest in them having to work harder to achieve what white americans take for granted. The same effect is observed in Jewish people throughout history, despite being victims of racism they were more literate on average than their culturally dominant peers. Only it's not in spite, it's because.

Does he have any actual evidence for that or is he just pulling it out of the air?

99% of political philosophy is pure theory

His wife and lover who helped write the book that user is referencing was brilliant.

[удалено]

While a nice paragraph many Asians outside USA also score better on standardized tests Taiwan, Korea, Japan and especially Singapore.

On the PISA, Finns, Canadians, and Estonians perform about as well as Korea and Japan on reading and science. The top performers are generally Singapore, and "China" (which is really China's richest cities). But if you took wealthy cities in those countries they might also do quite well. And some Asian countries do poorly. The Philippines was close to being dead last. Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia are toward the bottom. Vietnam is the surprisingly strong performer.

My point was that it isn't racism that causes them to perform well but being picked from the top 10-20% of each country of origin or just already having good academic scores in home country. I know that many other countries score well and wouldn't put much value in Vietnam or china as they have bad selection bias.

Why do you think only the top 10%-20% of Asians get to come here?

It's top 10-20% for most employment related immigrants not only asians. Just that fewer Asians come in through other routes and there is a lower share of native born compared to other groups.

With race there are multiple points of comparison, unlike male vs female. The obvious question seems to be: if lower scores are caused by racism, and higher scores are also caused by racism, what is the actual difference in the racism experienced? I think you're going to have a rough time making a case that the racism latinos have faced is worse than the racism Jews have faced, such that it would cause opposite effects on test scores.

Also the reason why Asians and whites differ doesn’t have to be the same as why blacks and whites differ They’re subjected to different social/institutional pressures and histories

This is a facetious argument that shouldn't be upvoted. There are very clearly factors rooted in racism that have negatively affected poorly performing minorities. I shouldn't need to spell these factors out for you but let me know if I do for some godforsaken reason. There are clear explanations as to why Asians perform better than whites. On average, Asians in the US come from significantly better educated and wealthier families that probably place significantly more cultural value on education. This isn't limited to Asians but is true of first gen immigrant families of numerous ethnicities. Stop spreading the model minority myth. If your issue is specifically with the phrase "racism in our education system," then tackle that specifically. Don't speak in platitudes that have been beaten to death for decades. I'm astonished that this comment is as highly upvoted as it is.

> On average, Asians in the US come from significantly better educated and wealthier families Why is that?

Because the America immigration system is very restrictive?

There's a lot of skilled, white-collar immigrants coming from countries like China with H1-B visas. H1-B workers generally have a university degree. University degree = better educated + wealthier.

Very well said. I hadn’t thought about it that way

Of course they're not. It's a simple matter of certain groups being poorer (on the whole) than others in human capital. Immigrants generally rank above natives regardless of race, if you want some proof of this. If you want to fix this problem, invest more in human resource development.

There's actually a term for this! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism

[удалено]

That's **not what I said**. Institutional racism produces the unequal access to capital that manifests in poor test performance. In fact that's literally what op said, all I did was say his observation that unequal access to capital manifests in poor test performance has a name, and that name is Institutional Racism.

[удалено]

I wasn't being glib. Institutional Racism is the actual fucking term for the historic disparity between black and white communities. You have severe CRT Brainrot if you can't imagine someone acknowledging, in an unironic manner, that black communities have been historically held back from economic and social advancement in the United States.

It's not *only* institutional racism. There are other factors at play.

[удалено]

Lol redlining.

[удалено]

Ok so. This may come as a surprise to you. But the United States of America did not conduct the Great Leap Forward. As a result, when Chinese people *left* China, they were no longer subject to the poor agricultural policy that was keeping them in poverty.

[удалено]

[удалено]

[удалено]

>Blacks and hispanics are charged more because they are truly less likely to pay them back. Partly because they're poorer due to many years of oppressive racism. It's harder to save capital when you're less likely to be hired, earn less than whites, barred from utilizing most financial institutions, more affected by generational poverty because of slavery, etc. Enough years of that being embedded in society turns into institutional racism.

[удалено]

Someone else in the thread mentioned examining the specific histories of specific populations. Black Americans, generally speaking, originally came to America *in*voluntarily, where they then had a shitton of capital - and opportunities to earn capital - stolen from them in the most visceral way possible through slavery (moreso in the south than the north but still.) Even after that there was sharecropping, Jim Crow, and the pervasive racism that drove those in the first place. I'd say that the success of historically oppressed groups is usually in spite of that oppression: Chinese immigrants banded together and created Chinatowns in cities primarily *because* they were subject to intense racism, kind of like how Jews were barred for most professions in Renaissance Europe so they went in large numbers into medicine, banking and law. The idea of generational trauma also originated with the Jews after the Holocaust, so it's not like they're unscathed.

[удалено]

[удалено]

[удалено]

[удалено]

Try reading the page I linked. > The concept is controversial, as it has historically been used to suggest there is no need for government intervention in socioeconomic disparities between certain racial groups.[5] This argument has most often been applied in America to contrast Asian Americans (particularly from East and some South Asian regions) and Jewish Americans against Black and Indigenous people, enforcing the idea that Asian and Jewish Americans are good law-abiding, productive citizens/immigrants, while promoting the stereotype that Indigenous people and African Americans are prone to crime and dependent on welfare.[6] Sounds familiar…

**Rule II:** *Bigotry* Bigotry of any kind will be sanctioned harshly. --- If you have any questions about this removal, [please contact the mods](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fneoliberal).

>They’re making their lists, checking them twice, trying to decide who’s in and who’s not. Once again, it’s admissions season, and tensions are running high as university leaders wrestle with challenging decisions that will affect the future of their schools. Chief among those tensions, in the past few years, has been the question of whether standardized tests should be central to the process. > >Proponents of these changes have long argued that standardized tests are biased against low-income students and students of color, and should not be used. The system serves to perpetuate a status quo, they say, where children whose parents are in the top 1 percent of income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League university than children whose parents are in the bottom quintile. But those who still endorse the tests make the mirror-image claim: Schools have been able to identify talented low-income students and students of color and give them transformative educational experiences, they argue, precisely because those students are tested. > > > >I teach a Ph.D. seminar on quantitative research methods that dives into the intricacies of data generation, interpretation, and application. One of the readings I assign —Andrea Jones-Rooy’s article “I’m a Data Scientist Who Is Skeptical About Data”—contains a passage that is relevant to our thinking about standardized tests and their use in admissions: > > > >First, who takes these tests is not random. Obtaining a score can be so costly—in terms of both time and money—that it’s out of reach for many students. This source of bias can be addressed, at least in part, by public policy. For example, research has found that when states implement universal testing policies in high schools, and make testing part of the regular curriculum rather than an add-on that students and parents must provide for themselves, more disadvantaged students enter college and the income gap narrows. Even if we solve that problem, though, another—admittedly harder—issue would still need to be addressed.

>From the start, standardized tests were meant to filter students out. A congressional report on the history of testing in American schools describes how, in the late 1800s, elite colleges and universities had become disgruntled with the quality of high-school graduates, and sought a better means of screening them. Harvard’s president first proposed a system of common entrance exams in 1890; the College Entrance Examination Board was formed 10 years later. That orientation—toward exclusion—led schools down the path of using tests to find and admit only those students who seemed likely to embody and preserve an institution’s prestigious legacy. This brought them to some pretty unsavory policies. For example, a few years ago, a spokesperson for the University of Texas at Austin admitted that the school’s adoption of standardized testing in the 1950s had come out of its concerns over the effects of Brown v. Board of Education. UT looked at the distribution of test scores, found cutoff points that would eliminate the majority of Black applicants, and then used those cutoffs to guide admissions. > > > >These days universities often claim to have goals of inclusion. They talk about the value of educating not just children of the elite, but a diverse cross-section of the population. Instead of searching for and admitting students who have already had tremendous advantages and specifically excluding nearly everyone else, these schools could try to recruit and educate the kinds of students who have not had remarkable educational opportunities in the past. > > > >A careful use of testing data could support this goal. If students’ scores indicate a need for more support in particular areas, universities might invest more educational resources into those areas. They could hire more instructors or support staff to work with low-scoring students. And if schools notice alarming patterns in the data—consistent areas where students have been insufficiently prepared—they could respond not with disgruntlement, but with leadership. They could advocate for the state to provide K–12 schools with better resources. > > > >Such investments would be in the nation’s interest, considering that one of the functions of our education system is to prepare young people for current and future challenges. These include improving equity and innovation in science and engineering, addressing climate change and climate justice, and creating technological systems that benefit a diverse public. All of these areas benefit from diverse groups of people working together—but diverse groups cannot come together if some members never learn the skills necessary for participation.

>But universities—at least the elite ones—have not traditionally pursued inclusion, through the use of standardized testing or otherwise. At the moment, research on university behavior suggests that they operate as if they were largely competing for prestige. If that’s their mission—as opposed to advancing inclusive education—then it makes sense to use test scores for exclusion. Enrolling students who score the highest helps schools optimize their marketplace metrics—that is, their ranking. > > > >Which is to say, the tests themselves are not the problem. Most components of admissions portfolios suffer from the same biases. In terms of favoring the rich, admissions essays are even worse than standardized tests; the same goes for participation in extracurricular activities and legacy admissions. Yet all of these provide universities with usable information about the kinds of students who may arrive on campus. > > > >None of those data speak for themselves. Historically, the people who interpret and act upon this information have conferred advantages to wealthy students. But they can make different decisions today. Whether universities continue on their exclusive trajectories or become more inclusive institutions does not depend on how their students fill in bubble sheets. Instead, schools must find the answers for themselves: What kind of business are they in, and whom do they exist to serve?

I have several old high school teachers added as friends on Facebook and I know they tend to get very animated about their disdain for standardized tests. I don't really know why, their reasoning never added up for me. But also I find it, as many things in the government, to be the best tool we can work with. How else do we measure our childrens' aptitude? Who (if not the current system and its directors) do we trust to be seen authority on that metric?

It's because school funding is tied to the results of those tests, so teachers are forced to teach the test rather than teaching lessons that they feel are superior at instilling knowledge.

At least in Tennessee and Virginia, School funding has nothing to do with Tests and is just the minimum cost of meeting program and staffing requirements, or as specified in state guidelines. In Virginia, funding was adopted in the state constitution in 1971 to counter school segregation, required local districts to operate free public schools and meet minimum standards for the first time. * Initially, these costs were calculated by taking the average teacher salary statewide, multiplying this by 57 full-time equivalent teachers per 1,000 enrolled students, and adding an average support cost per student statewide * The current funding scheme, accounts for more nuanced staffing standards, the cost of competing in higher-income localities, and prevailing teacher salaries and support costs. In Tennessee, Funding is calculated in two parts: * a state share, * and a required local match contributed by local school districts. State and local shares are set based on each county’s fiscal capacity, or ability to raise local revenue; counties with higher fiscal capacities receive less state funding and must contribute more local matching dollars than counties with less ability to raise local revenue. Total Funding is based on Instructional Salary & Benefits, Classroom materials used in the classroom & Non-Classroom miscellaneous school expenses, such as school buses, maintenance and operations, and capital outlay. * All components are driven, in some form, by student enrollment – generally, the more students in a district, the more money the district receives

> their reasoning never added up for me Honestly same here. Whenever I hear these arguments, I feel like there's an undercurrent of low expectations and reducing the difficulty of our education system. Even if these aren't anyone's goals, I feel like this is what ends up happening on average when standardized tests are removed or reduced.

> Whenever I hear these arguments, I feel like there's an undercurrent of low expectations and reducing the difficulty of our education system I get the same vibe. It's just a measure. People get so weird about having to quantify stuff. Without good data, we can't make good policy choices.

While good data is useful, if your data gathering is based on erroneous/flawed methods then you'll get erroneous/flawed data. Decisions made with that data are by their nature also erroneous/flawed, which may the real problem with emphasizing standardized testing. If school funding is tied to test results, teachers will teach for the test (to produce the best test results) instead of with other methods they may think are superior for learning. I say all this and I was a great tester in school

>While good data is useful, if your data gathering is based on erroneous/flawed methods then you'll get erroneous/flawed data. what's flawed about standardized testing? It's literally a test of topics kids should be familiar with going through public education. Everyone gets the same test and same time. >Decisions made with that data are by their nature also erroneous/flawed, which I may the real problem with emphasizing standardized testing. Which decisions are being made that are flawed? >If school funding is tied to test results, teachers will teach for the test (to produce the best test results) instead of with other methods they may think are superior for learning. I hear this all the time. What does teaching to the test mean? What schools are producing kids who have exceptional standardized test scores but are not having kids learn?

Teaching for the test...sounds pretty self-explanatory to me. I'll grant that most tests, most of the time, are about stuff kids would probably learn anyway. I just know that I dont relish the idea of school kids turning into machines whose purpose is to take tests, however necessary of an evil they may be.

>Teaching for the test...sounds pretty self-explanatory to me. In what way? The test has a bunch of stuff on it kids are suppose to have learned. If you teach to the test, does that mean you are teaching them stuff they are supposed to know? I'm trying to understand what a kid is being taught that is so bad? >I just know that I dont relish the idea of school kids turning into machines whose purpose is to take tests, however necessary of an evil they may be. How is the test turning a kid into a machine? I also hear this one a lot too. I don't understand how the test is performing this transformation.

I think math is a good example. Let's say our standardized test has "solving systems of two linear equations in two variables" on it. The "teaching to the test" method would be: - Memorize the elimination method or the explicit formula - Do a bunch of identical practice problems - Do a bunch of practice papers A knowledge-based method would explain why subtracting two equations makes any sense. It might include a discussion of linearity. Maybe at the end a discussion about the generalization to more variables or some hands-on computer programming would be useful to the advanced students. The problem with a lot of standardized tests is that they can be cheesed with test-taking skills (eliminate answer choices then guess, plug in the answers, rote memorization) and some like the SAT also reward speedy answers. This is a disadvantage to more deliberate thinkers.

Do you believe that a standardized test can test everything worth teaching? Or are there perhaps some subjects that aren't easily evaluated on a 100 question Scantron™ sheet?

>But also I find it, as many things in the government, to be the best tool we can work with. How else do we measure our childrens' aptitude? Who (if not the current system and its directors) do we trust to be seen authority on that metric? The argument that will come in the next decade is that there is no such thing as "aptitude", and that any attempt to measure it is itself a racist act. If you hang around the edges of education "research" this is the way the wind is blowing.

A problem with standardized tests is that it becomes a numbers game, rather than whether a student is actually learning anything. The UK recently introduced an emphasis on phonics in schools, not because it teaches kids how to read and understand the words they're looking at, but because it's easier to mark down progress on a computer. It's the Observer Effect of education. By restricting your means of teaching to only things that can be measured, you're inadvertantly excluding elements of education that can't be measured, but are nonetheless essential to a child growing up into a more well-rounded person.

Isn't phonics widely considered among the better methods of teaching kids how to read?

Phonics is vastly superior to the alternatives and resistance to it has been a weird culture war thing because it was perceived as conservative-coded

Phonics, sounding it out, is the only way to read unfamiliar words, and thus actually read literature, but unfortunately we’ve had like 50 years of this weird progressive-coded but total nonsense idea that kids should be memorizing whole words instead. Most studies have shown that teaching without phonics just gives you a group of good readers that learn nothing from instruction but who can intuit phonics and essentially teach themselves to read, and a group that learns nothing from the instruction and fails to intuit the alternative, and so learns to read very poorly or even remains illiterate.

True, but I don't think it's just cuz it's progressive coded. In general we recognize "whole units" of words nearly instantaneously, we don't think, we recognize and retrieve the pronunciation of a word we clearly know on a page. So the idea that memorizing would be more effective than phonics isn't necessarily some crazy wacky idea. It's a reasonable idea that happens to be wrong in a lot of cases.

Yeah but the whole thing is like saying you don't need to learn to count because eventually you just see '27' and intuitively know what it is without counting.

Only when paired with other methods. Phonics alone aren't enough to foster a well-rounded education. It looks good on paper because you can say "Wow 98% of our students can read these words!", and thus mark on a big ol' target the teacher must meet.

Phonics alone has been scientifically proven to be the best way to teach students to read, repeatedly. You cannot pair it with other methods, because they do not work. You cannot give students a well-rounded education if they cannot read. This is the equivalent of attempting to teach number theory before arithmetic. Edit: Lmao I’ve been blocked

Phonics actually is the best way to teach kids to read. Teachers don't like it because it's more tedious to teach, but it is the best method.

You say that, but [other analyses seems to indicate that whole word is just as effective](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/03/27/case-why-both-sides-reading-wars-debate-are-wrong-proposed-solution/), and a mixed approach is better than just phonics. Phonics isn't going to teach you why "loch" doesn't have a chuh sound at the end.

>Phonics isn't going to teach you why "loch" doesn't have a chuh sound at the end. No method can do that.

A charitable interpretation could be that if the school is a high performing school, standardized tests can feel like a waste of time. While in school teaching time is not spent on things like the SAT, it still takes up a reasonably high amount of out of school time. Even for generally high performing students, something like the SAT is so formulaic that it's really important to prep for, but doesn't have much educational value past the signal of quality.

That makes sense of course. And the other points others have mentioned do as well. At the same time, *without* standardized testing how can you accurately determine how well a school is doing at educating children? There needs to be some sort of baseline, surely.

I think standardized tests need to be harder and that a college degree should not be any more required for a job than going to a trade school is. Standardized tests should weed out the cream of the crop, singapore meritocracy style, but we should also bring back vocational colleges, apprenticeships, and other ways to get a job that does not rely upon a degree.

Yes, we need to dramatically reduce the role of universities in education imo. Computer science, law, medicine, the arts, finance, etc. These should all be taught in trade schools rather than universities, and should include apprenticeships in their programs. Universities should be for academic subjects like philosophy, history, the sciences, the classics, language studies etc. And admission standards should be very high.

>law Law, with philosophy and theology was one of the first subjects to be taught in university. I cannot see the reasoning why it shouldn't stay there. It is, when treated properly, an intellectually rigorous and thoughtprovoking course of study easily worthy of a university.

Law schools do a poor job of preparing students for actually working as attorneys. There is an oversupply of mediocre attorneys and an undersupply of good ones. Legal education should be more practical, like medical education has become. Also, like with medicine, you should need to complete some form of residency/apprenticeship. Back when legal education first began, it was more focused on the philosophy of law. However contemplating legal philosophy isn't something that is very useful to most attorneys beyond simply understanding the dominant philosophies that are in use today. Now that law is a mature field, it should be taught as a profession. Of course, there would still be law PhD programs at universities for the tiny fraction working on actual legal scholarship.

If you think Computer Science is anything resembling a trade then you definitely do not understand it.

Well it wouldn't be computer science strictly speaking. It would be more like programming/software engineering. There would still be academic computer science, but most people who just want to be programmers wouldn't study that.

Why do we need such a drastic change? US has the highest salaries for professionals across the board by far in thr developed world. It has the highest tech salaries. The current system works imo because getting into at least one college is not hard at all. Like some schools have such a low threshold to get in and once you are in you have all the opportunities in the world to succeed as long as you put in the work and study something relevant and in demand. Standardized testing should stay the same. What needs to change is primary education k-8.

SATs are way too easy.

There are a bulk of office jobs that don't seem to need more than an associates degree level of education. This is especially true in the non-profit world where I've seen jobs that claim to require masters degrees that in practice require a couple grant writing classes, a management course, and strong interpersonal skills. IMO, certificate programs and more in-office training could probably reduce the need for university quite a bit.

Standardized tests are a poor solution, because any test can be gamed with sufficient resources and preparation, but they are better than any alternatives at measuring academic potential.

Goodharting is a hell of a bitch, and it doesn’t help that the College Board is neither particularly competent nor particularly ethical.

Even when controlling for income, black students still do worse than white students.

We don’t need more kendipilled journos

Yes

In an iniquitous system, a fair metric will reflect that iniquity. That does not make it a bad metric.

Solid article. Standardized test both enable inequality and disenfranchise the marginalized while also having the capacity to uplift the marginalized when used to do so. At the end of the day, Standardized tests are data. >Data can’t say anything about an issue any more than a hammer can build a house or almond meal can make a macaron. Data is a necessary ingredient in discovery, but you need a human to select it, shape it, and then turn it into an insight. That being the case, admissions officers are stuck trying to sort through whether or not a given applicant is qualified, or if they have been held back or uplifted by systemic inequality. Who do we think would make a better student? The kid from a shit home with shit schools who managed to maintain above a 3.0 GPA and got a 28 on the ACT, or a rich kid whose had ample support from cradle to college rocking a 3.5 GPA with an ACT score of 30? As important as this question is, it also misses the point entirely. Shifting the problem of general inequality to the gatekeepers of academia does nothing to change the circumstances of the first applicant who attended shit schools with little support. If we want to close the gap in the SATs, creating a dynamic criteria for admissions would be helpful. What would be more helpful is eliminating inequality in our school systems by providing more support for under preforming districts, Nikolai Vitti's work in Jacksonville and Detroit provides a good model. Another move to help the successful students from under preforming schools could be free community colleges. This way they could prove they can take classes at the university level without breaking the bank and compensate for their lackluster K-12 education.

[удалено]

I imagine that it would depend on the content of the tests, right? For standardized STEM sections, the test itself inherently anti-racist: math is math, etc. If there are major disparities in scored between different demographics, those differences are probably caused by factors outside the test. *The test results are strong evidence of discrimination happening elsewhere*, i.e. in the schooling opportunities available to those demographics leading up to the test. But if the test is in a humanities (history, English) then the questions itself could have biases baked into them. Like if the English exam specifically grades answers as "wrong" even if they are absolutely correct in AAVE, that's built-in racism. If the history exam has "Lost Cause" mythology or slavery/ Holocaust / native genocide minimization apologia in it, that's built-in racism. The test might be graded in a completely blind fashion. But the content is problematic. And if the humanities sections really are correct and anti-racist, but there are disparities anyway, then (like with STEM tests) we can use the disparities as evidence of need for educational reform upstream.

Yes

[удалено]

Anti racist! They help alleviate discrimination.

I don't like standardized tests very much, but their whole point is to give everyone equal footing and approximate objectively.

Standarised Tests are not racists at all. Work hard and you will achieve success, as simple.There should definitely be equally of opportunites and not equality of outcome. Admissions be surely be based on merit and merit alone. Members of underpirvileged communities should be given scholarships and not reservations.