The College Board plans to assign an adversity score to every student who takes the SAT to try to capture their social and economic background, jumping into the debate raging over race and class in college admissions.
My thoughts:
1. The graphics that accompany the article show that parents’ income, education, and race are predictive of their childrens’ SAT scores. I suppose that the politically correct interpretation is that this is because wealthy, well-educated, whites and Asians are the oppressors and others are the oppressed. In theory, when social justice prevails, there will be no more statistical differences in SAT scores. But I’ll just come right out and say that I am inclined to believe that the statistical differences primarily reflect genetics.
2. If it were up to me, there would be no admissions decisions and no charge for a college application. Admissions would be by lottery. A student who applies to Harvard is responsible for being able to pass the courses there. If you enter the lottery, get chosen, and flunk out, then the waste of time and money is on you and your parents.
3. With a lottery, the football coach would not be able to recruit players for admission. Oh gosh, what would that do to college sports teams? Make them. . .amateurish?
5. Meanwhile, I am rooting for the existing college admissions process to become discredited. I was glad to see it take a hit with this year’s scandal. I hope that the “adversity score” deals another blow.
The WSJ article is gated so I haven’t read it.
As I understand it, Hans Eysenck made a distinction between “fluid” intelligence and “crystallized” intelligence. Fluid intelligence is how smart you are–how fast you can learn and understand things, or how deeply and clearly and powerfully you can think. Crystallized intelligence is how much you have actually learned. Did you learn a foreign language or didn’t you. Do you know 50,000 words in English, or half that number. Did you learn conic sections in pre-calc, or did you never take algebra and can’t compute fractions.
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Adversity is a funny sort of concept in this particular regard. I can see how a low socio-economic status might depress “crystallized intelligence.”
A reason to be concerned about this new approach is that students need both fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence when they get to college.
* In math intensive sequential courses you often can’t master the current topics if you didn’t learn the pre-requisites.
* In reading intensive courses things are often less sequential in a cut-and-dried manner, but general knowledge, working vocabulary, and reading speed help a lot, as does the stamina to read for long periods with decent comprehension. E. D. Hirsch has made this point, as has Charles Murray in _Real education_.
Therefore, I remain skeptical about this latest innovation.
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. Paul Tough has argued that you can admit underprepared students to college and bring them up to speed their first year. You encourage and motivate them to work hard and diligently during their freshman year to catch up while the well prepared students spend more time socializing and hanging out. This is probably asserted toward the end of _How children succeed_.
Probably some students from high adversity settings might manage that. It still sounds only half plausible to me. The first year is when people bail out from engineering tracks. A lot of people shift away from hard majors.
I’m not convinced that the new system is going to do what advocates claim.
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Thomas Sowell once said that people like to say that IQ tests and scholastic aptitude tests are unfair. An alternative interpretation, he wrote, is that “Life is unfair and the tests measure the results.” Perhaps we are reaching a point where the tests will measure how unfair life has been to some students, and where they would be in a fairer world.
Better, college is going to be less unfair to them than K-12, once we can accurately measure just how unfair their life during k-12 really was. As people like to say, “Really?” “Really?”
P.S.: An interesting feature is that well constructed, the test could be more class-based, and we could stop using racial phenotype as a proxy for presumed slave ancestry.
It is my understanding that the value of the SAT is that it is a good predictor for success in college. The question is whether the new version, including whatever they do with the adversity score, will still be a good predictor.
When students with low SAT scores subsequently do poorly in college, the anti-meritocracy folks then claim that the problem is that colleges don’t provide sufficient support for groups with low average scores on the SAT. I suspect that something similar will happen if groups with high adversity but low (traditional) SAT scores subsequently do poorly in college.
They will just move into soft majors where there are no objectively correct answers and be assigned the grades the institution wanted them to get in the first place.
I’d prefer to see half the admissions slots sold by auction.
I’d prefer if colleges just transparently set aside slots for certain quotas for each identity group, with the understanding that however one is classified, one is competing with other members of one’s own group.
Then you need Official Race Auditors, or else all the Asian kids will mark “Black” on their applications. It would cause more problems than it solves.
These tests are probably only a decade away from fixing the scores themselves. Right now, it looks like your actual results will be reported alongside the adversity score- eventually the adversity score will be folded into the actual results to hide the difference.
Congestion price the Harvard testing, skip everything else.
Harvard recruits the Nobels to sit on committee and recommend material. They grade anyone who pays the testing fee, a bunch of passing grades make a Harvard degree. Eliminate all the Ivy and brick and mortar and suits and ties. It is up to the student to figure out how to put the material in the brain.
The elite private universities appear to be on track to hang themselves, so, I imagine the best course of action in regard to them would be to just stay off the rope. Although cutting off eligibility for federal grants, tuition subsidies and loan guarantees is of course in order.
The states are where reform is going to happen.
And once again, I will, despite their hatred for freedom of speech, point to the Canadian model.
In Canada, no admissions testing. GPA alone controls. A college applicant can simply submit a single application (sans recommendation letters, essays, and all the rest of the rot, along with their high school transcript, a rank ordering of their university choices and they are done with it. Sweet, clean, simple, transparent, and cheap.
Wikipedia summarizes thusly:
“Admission to colleges and universities in Canada has been a straightforward process since the 1970s. Students generally rank their chosen institutions in order of preference and submit their transcript to the institution or provincial application service for evaluation. In the majority of cases, acceptance is based entirely on marks, with potential for elevation depending on what province an applicant may be from. Applicants in-province may have less stringent grade requirements than out-of-province applicants. For instance, a student applying from an Ontario high school to a university in Alberta or Quebec is likely to require marginally elevated grades as opposed to applying to any school in Ontario itself, where universities and colleges may have lower requirements for their own province’s high school graduates.[citation needed]
“In most cases, Canadian universities require students’ high school transcript along with an application for admission. Applications for admission outline additional academic and extra curricular achievements that cannot be expressed through a students’ transcript. Generally, universities require that students have taken a university-prep grade 12 English course. Additionally, programs involving mathematics and/or natural science often require students to take a university-prep grade 12 calculus course, as well as university-prep grade 12 biology, chemistry, and physics. Overall, universities base admission around a pupil’s academic performance in university/advanced level courses in their grade 11 and 12 years. Also, most universities establish GPA cut offs for admission. This cut off is established based on the competitiveness of individual programs at specific universities. A more competitive program could have a cut off average of 90 percent or higher, while most prestigious programs maintain cut offs around 80 percent. Universities with more liberal application processes could have admission cut offs as low as 65 percent. Students must take university/advanced level courses in grades 11 and 12 in order to apply for university.”
Advancing this proposal would appear to be a quick attention getting tactic for some smart state legislator looking to get a national name for themself. The first state to adopt it would certainly make a name for itself as a reform leader.
I don’t know about Canada, but plenty of US schools issue corrupted GPA.
You write: “I’ll just come right out and say that I am inclined to believe that the statistical differences [in SAT scores across ethnic groups] primarily reflect genetics.” It’s too bad that this very plausible speculation can only be expressed by someone who cares little about what the opinion leaders in the U.S. think of him.
A lottery handles when demand for education exceeds supply. Why not just increase supply to meet demand? The textbook + lectures + grading piece is easily scalable.
Part (most?) of the value of Harvard is its exclusive reputation and identity and its social peer group and community. These pieces aren’t scalable. But they also are the pieces that government should not be subsidizing. If the elites want to build their elite social circles and communities that’s fine, but they shouldn’t expect the rest of us to help foot the bill.
If it were up to me, the top brands in education would drop the model of being a specific place and convert to global services that provide education curriculum and testing services to the masses in every city in every nation.
Adversity-adjusted admissions is a predictable fall back approach to the potential loss of the increasingly discredited racial quota system. (Texas had an income-based tweak to its state university admissions process.) Adversity-adjustment is a powerful (read insidious”) tool that could allow its users to select for almost any population they want to over-represent against the intractable residual effects of intelligence, ability, effort, and simple interest in committing to such a track. For example, if an “intelligence residual” is still showing up, why not introduce a “genetic adversity” variable? If a target victimized class is still under-represented, introduce “victim-specific” descriptors of adversity, etc.
The lottery system seems to me an honest way to even the playing field, with the added benefit that it could accelerate the re-assessment of the real value college adds.
There was an article in the NYTimes by some black guy that was basically pissed off at the adversity score. As he put it, his parents worked two shitty jobs each to afford the money scrape by on a mortgage in the white part of town with the “good school”. Why the hell should he be penalized in college admissions because his parents strived to make a better life for him?
And how did this score account for, as he put it, the difficulties of being the only black kid in a school of whites. His friends on the other side of the tracks certainly had their own problems…but at least they had an easier time fitting in.
Reminds me of the one black kid in my charter school. I wonder how much this type of thing disincentizes things like charter schools. Down the street we have the Baltimore charters which are basically high schools for the few smart black kids. It’s great there exists schools to catch these people and get them into environments where they can learn, but this adversity score would effectively punish them for it.
Also, I wonder if this will only accelerate the “flight from Asian” that you see in UMC communities and schools. Now being near Asians could hurt your adversity score on account of their excellent life performance and busting the high schools SAT curve.
Which gets to the main beef. Imagine anything you would actually want a parent to do for their child.
1) Work hard
2) Build a better community
3) Improve the local school
4) Stay married
5) Learn and speak English at home
All of these are now the acts of an oppressor. As someone else put it, “it’s like China’s social credit system, but it rewards social dysfunction.”
The purview of shit that can hurt my child has now expanded from my skin color to anything positive I could possibly do in this world.
I hope this puts to rest the idea that you can have some sort of “noble lie” about genetics. Once you admit a single “noble lie” people don’t just stop there. They try to build an entire crazy ideological edifice to explain the world based on that noble lie. They carry it to its natural clown world conclusions.
This is also why Handle’s race quotas won’t work. The people drafting this are drafting it based on a certain ideology. “Your stupid and its pointless to have you here, but we are setting aside 10% of slots for you idiots out of some realpolitik calculus.” That’s not going satisfy the noble lie. They don’t just want the slots. They want to be told they deserve the slots. And that the people saying it actually believe it, not that they just mouth it.
And they are smart to enforce that. After all, get rid of the noble lie and its just thugs using thug force to get what they don’t deserve. How stable a political/cultural equilibrium is that?
A lottery isn’t going to work either. In addition to the obvious practical problems, if your logic comes down to “performance will weed people out” then you’re not understanding the problem. Performance is based on reality. The dominant ideology denies reality. Until you defeat the dominant ideology, there will be no interest in any system based on reality because it gets the “wrong results.” This entire adversity score is a naked attempt to “correct” reality once the current correction mechanism is outlawed “its a way to get at race without using race” as the WSJ quotes an admission officer.
Jason Riley wrote a book called _Please stop helping us_ about race relations. The title is from a speech from Frederick Douglass.
Riley is Black, grew up in Buffalo, as detailed in the beginning part of the book. He noted that his father tried to raise his kids around whites, as he thought there were “too many knuckleheads” in the Black neighborhoods. His parents were divorced–the mother became a Jehovah’s Witness, so young Jason met a lot of Black men who were very disciplined, devout, and abstemious.
Offhand I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t think it’s fair that large urban school districts are far worse than the suburban districts 5 miles away. The impacts set in early.
Here in Rochester where I live the latest party line from liberals is that the problems with the city schools is “concentrated poverty” but on one level I think the family structure, social norms, and just basically what happens within households is a major factor. So the findings of the Coleman Report are still relevant.
I have a question for the adversity score to put in a discriminant function. “As a little kid, did you know the word ‘incarcerated’ by the time you were 8 years old?” That’s the anecdotal news here: little kids in the ‘hood all know that word long before they are 10 years old.
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I’m thinking off the top of my head here. John Ogbu’s research is relevant. He distinguished between caste-like minorities, sect-like minorities, and immigrant minorities. Poor blacks in the ‘hood are caste-like minority. Mennonites are a sect like minority. African immigrants, even if phenotypically Black, are an immigrant minority. I think I’ve got his argument right, but it’s been a while. His book is worth reading.
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How to put this in an SAT score? beats the hell out of me
This is still worth reading.
Charles Murray at AEI, was also in the WSJ, 3/24/2015
https://www.aei.org/publication/why-the-sat-isnt-a-student-affluence-test/
“If you enter the lottery, get chosen, and flunk out, then the waste of time and money is on you and your parents.”
And, on all the other students that could have benefited from studying with a more worthy peer. Also, when professors inevitably adjust course requirements so that most of the class can pass, that might have a detrimental effect on the better students that could have benefited from a more rigorous program. Do we really believe that there is absolutely no value at all in grouping students by academic ability?
Suppose, you need life-saving surgery. Would you rather your surgeon have graduated from a program with rigorous admissions requirements or one that offered admissions by lottery? In the latter case, the surgeon must have been able to handle the course requirements since he didn’t flunk out, so there should be no problem, right?
The surgeon question seems like a good one in any debates about admissions policies. When comparing policies A and B, would you rather your surgeon have graduated from a program with admissions policy A or B?
Myself, I would have no qualms at all if my surgeon graduated from a university with an elite football program or that carved out slots for other narrow specialties (music, arts, etc.). I would care, however, if that university applied non-academic criteria for the broad student population.
It’s dumb. Maybe there would be some value to “lottery for applicants scoring above X”, but again these institutions pick their class composition for a reason. This is fantasy land type stuff.
Charles Murray thinks this will end the SAT, which will somehow be a good thing (because he thinks its a little less g-loaded then a few decades ago or whatever). As if what replaces it will be more g-loaded. Ha! For better or worse the SAT was an objective way of keeping these people honest.
These are called “peer group effects”. Any changes to the grouping and sorting criteria will generally benefit some students and cause detriment to others. In K-12, this issue is infamous.
K-12 sorting/segregation is primarily driven and financed by individual families. Higher-ed sorting/segregation is primarily driven and financed by the state and state run or state financed universities and their administrations. There is strong moral and philosophical reason to support the former and not the latter.
Let individuals and families choose and work and pay to segregate for their own interests. But a university that is an organ of government has much less moral authority to sort people into ranks and castes and decide who is welcome in the prestigious schools and social groups and who is not.
“I was glad to see [the admissions process] take a hit with this year’s scandal.”
I am puzzled by how many people have claimed that cheating a system discredits the system itself, and not because of any claim that the system is difficult to enforce. Suppose a burglar bribes a cop to let him go. Does that mean that burglary shouldn’t be illegal? That so many critics of the admissions system make such claims shows just how low a bar people have for accepting arguments that reach their desired pre-determined conclusions.
People actually believe that SAT scores are determined by the environment. Like most people of all classes and races. I can’t emphasize enough what a cultural bubble anyone who believes the truth on this is in.
They think rich people (or really committed poor Asians) can buy SAT scores. Sure, this admission scandal proves the opposite (they couldn’t buy better SAT scores and thus had to cheat their way in), but for most people its good enough to prove their priors that one way or another rich people purchase “merit” including SAT scores and its all some rigged game.
The scandal tends to discredit the system in a couple of ways:
1. The close similarity the illegal cheating (bribing coaches) and legal cheating (bribing schools by making large gifts). To use your analogy, suppose it were illegal to bribe a cop to get out of burglary but legal to bribe city hall for the same purpose.
2. The fact that the under-qualified students admitted via both illegal and legal cheating don’t tend to fail. This demonstrates that while these ‘elite’ schools are difficult to get into, they’re not particularly difficult to graduate from (with a few exceptions — people were bribing their way into Harvard and Yale but, AFAIK, nobody was bribing their way into Cal Tech).
And the scandal comes on the heels of stories about Harvard’s anti-Asian discrimination. All taken together, this leads more and more people to conclude that the admissions systems are thoroughly corrupt and biased and that the schools not particularly demanding of their students.
The fact that the under-qualified students admitted via both illegal and legal cheating don’t tend to fail. This demonstrates that while these ‘elite’ schools are difficult to get into, they’re not particularly difficult to graduate from
I’m sure half or more of college aged kids are perfectly capable of passing most Harvard courses. Harvard is not in the business of flunking people. Other things are in play here.
I think you are very wrong about that. Harvard certainly makes every effort (counseling, etc.) to make sure that admitted students graduate but all the admitted students are well above the median of college students when it comes to academic smarts. Courses are harder and, yes, grading is harder than it is at 90% of the courses offered in the USA.
I was thinking half or more of kids that get through college, which is around 30% of the population, so the top 15% or so, which are capable of the general work at an elite college. The undergraduate canon is not that abstruse.
Yes, the undergraduate canon is remarkably uniform. But courses with the same name will be noticeably broader and deeper at a “selective” school than at a non-selective school. A person who can pass the non-selective course without major difficulty might have major trouble passing at a selective school.
And even within the schools. Some universities have “honors colleges” which offer “broader and deeper” courses, that are harder to pass.
With the present level of SJW control over faculty selection and course content, classes are being dumbed down to worthlessness even when SJ myth isn’t being substituted wholesale for fact. Combine that with the effect on students’ attitudes and it is not just the admissions process but the colleges themselves that are rapidly becoming discredited.
If I were hiring I would summarily shun anyone who got a Harvard degree after 2010, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. If there is any prospect for reform it would not be through new admissions policies, but by replacing the management and abolishing all tenure.
You’re absolutely right:
I am inclined to believe that the statistical differences primarily reflect genetics.
Which is the The Bell Curve argument, and true, and racist. The truth is racist – black avg intelligence is lower than white or Asian avg intel.
The truth IS racist.
The PC-lie is that the truth is not racist, but believing that lie is at heart of much of the PC-Klan eLynching behavior. (The truth is also sexist, but not as bad male-female IQ/ SAT differences.) Including the end of Free Speech, because to speak the racist truth is racist.
We need to get back to treating individuals as separate, individual people, not so much as representatives of their various identity groups.
Your conclusion undoes everything you wrote before it. What an odd combination of rhetoric. Getting us to think in terms of group generalities and then suddenly pivoting unconvincingly to individualism.
Not at all. He’s talking about averages when he talks about groups. Individuals within those groups can be above or below average.
But he’s also saying, “Hey, when you treat everyone as an individual, don’t be surprised if different groups come out differently ‘on average’ and don’t assume that the process is unfair.”
But I’ll just come right out and say that I am inclined to believe that the statistical differences primarily reflect genetics.
I’m inclined to believe the differences primarily reflect culture (just as I am inclined to believe that high levels of achievement in south and east Asian students — and Ashkenazi Jews — primarily reflect culture). But that does not mean that these cultural influences are easy to change in universities or that SAT scores underpredict the expected performance of those with high ‘adversity’ ratings.
I’m inclined to believe the differences primarily reflect culture
Yes, but kids today are pretty much from the same culture. We have a fairly universal retail culture with its money matters and procedures; road system and travel protocol; etc.
Any cultural differences are a minor player in cognitive differences.
“Yes, but kids today are pretty much from the same culture. ”
No, they’re not. Parenting styles differ significantly between racial/ethnic/religious groups (as they do between rural, suburban, and urban families). Even when it comes to popular culture, these groups do not listen to the same music or watch the same TV shows. And the differences have grown rather than shrunk in the internet era as the number of listening and viewing choices has exploded.
But are those differences that matter? Most kids face a similar curriculum in primary and secondary school. Tweaking culture above a certain minimum has rapidly diminishing returns, as evidenced by twin and adoption studies, and anecdotal examples: d’Alembert did fine coming out of an orphanage; the Prince didn’t show much promise though he was tutored by Cauchy.
Culture/environment and genetics seem to be quite entangled. Particularly with those exposed to violence as a child, “if/then” clauses in DNA may trigger. I heartily recommend Robert Sapolsky’s lecture series at Stanford.
Universities used to be a dumping ground for “spares” ( in the “heir and a spare” sense ) while the rest of the society just raged on. If you went to Harvard in the 18th century you were studying theology/divinity. By inserting the university as a critical path we’ve harvested some advantages ( how much is a good question ) but we also pay a price.
And for all the filtering, somewhere a surgeon is now in the process of committing malpractice as I write this….
There is explicit resentment of meritocracy, not just because minorities don’t do well on the SAT but also lazy white progressives resent working hard (see “participation trophies). The end game of overthrowing merit is destruction because so much of modern society can only work if the top people have certain jobs. Do you really want a surgeon who got in because of his adversity score?
Generally agree.
There is explicit resentment of meritocracy
Partly because the meritorcratic have taken on too much power.
Aristocrats have some claim on the right to rule, but they are famous for overreach.
Charles Murray makes a strong case that American higher education has an elephant in the room (intelligence).
Bryan Caplan makes a strong case that higher education is largely a zero-sum ‘signaling’ game with massive negative externalities.
Jason Brennan and Philip Magness expose myriad cracks (and moral mess) in the ivory tower.
The internet has disrupted major information industries (news, publishing, betting), but hasn’t shaken up the selective segment of higher education.
Disequilibrium is growing in the marriage market, as the gender ratio in college attainment becomes skewed, whilst matching by educational attainment increases.
By construction, supply and demand don’t balance in admissions markets at selective colleges.
The system is permeated by hypocrisy.
And yet, somehow, despite all the uncompensated strains, the system is seemingly … an equilibrium.