But that's entirely the point. The people bitching about how the SAT isn't fair aren't smart poor people who are being beaten out by upper middle class losers, but rather upper middle class losers being beaten out by smart poor people. They tell themselves that the test isn't fair, but a part of them knows that they could never get into the 1500's even with all the prep in the world, so they try to get the admissions changed to a more bullshit-centric approach that they know favors them. And they say they are doing it to help the poor and disadvantaged to give themselves moral cover.
I think this is true about the SAT but the subject tests are kind of niche and I assume a lot of poor people actually don't know about them. If you're not in an environment where a lot of people are applying to top schools, it's unlikely to be something you are familiar with
Top schools are more than fairly niche, especialy at the very top of the very top like MIT, which is extremeley niche.
Source: I was a poor kid who got into UC Berkeley based largely on my SAT II scores.
Any poor kid seriously considering applying to MIT or Cal is high information enough to be aware SAT IIs exist.
Do ya'll understand how patronizing and insulting this bigotry of low expectations is to brilliant trailer park trash kids like 1990s me?
PS I'm rich and early retired now thanks to (Bitcoin and) setting/enforcing high standards for myself, not lowered expectations.
I didn't have $20 to spend on an SAT prep book, so I checked some out from the HS library. It wasn't hard, it simply took initiative.
SAT IIs let applicants pick an area in which they can shine above and beyond the genereic g-weighted diagnostic.
My gifts are largely verbal, so the Writing subject test was my once-in-a-lifetime to demonstrate objective superiority to my peer group, regardless of income and race.
My SAT IIs were obviously vital to the package presented to the admissions committee because I lacked two key things critical to UC's usual stringent paradigm. One, my GPA was below Cal's 4.0+ standards. Two, I didn't take a single AP test (Dad's attitute towards APs was the same as Driving School: "It was free when I was in HS so I'm not gonna pay for that").
I approached getting into Cal FROM OUT OF STATE like a hacker: telling the system what it wants/expects to hear. That entailed a deep dive on how admissions officers think and weigh applications. Every single trade-off I made in HS was in light of that strategy. Job or heavy extra-curriculars? I'll just be broke and stack trophies. AP Econ/English/Bio or Debate? I'll suffer in Honors/Regulars and stack moar trophies. Dating or academic decathalon? Same. Prom or debate tournament? Ditto.
From this point going forward it is no longer a usual extracurricular item. The school that they are applying to has specifically told all applicants that they don’t want to hear about their subject test score. It would be unusual to include it, not to mention blatantly violating application submission instructions, which applicants are expected to carefully follow.
In any case, his name is “cognitive elite.” If he is who he says he is, then he would have find other ways to prove his eliteness/worthiness if subject tests were not being considered for any applicant. He had the initiative to study for that test. If he knew that it would have been a waste of time to study for it, then maybe he would have taken that same time and initiative to do something else to make his application stand out.
>If he is who he says he is, then he would have find other ways to prove his eliteness/worthiness if subject tests were not being considered
No, that's completely wrong and totally incorrect!
The SAT II Writing subject test was the only way for me to make up for lack of AP English, which is basically a prerequisite for the school hosting the world's top English and Rhetoric departments.
>maybe he would have taken that same time and initiative to do something else to make his application stand out.
Nope, I would have simply crossed MIT off the very short list (Stanford, Cal, MIT) of extremely niche institutions fortunate enough to be considered within my purview for eventual attendence.
MIT's anti-meritocratic, clown-world decision to ignore SAT IIs makes me furious. To hell with MIT and their woke, filthy Epstein-tainted staff/faculty/endowment. They are pulling up the class-mobility ladder on kids like me while pretending it's for the sake of social justice.
It just seems to me that MIT has looked at their data and saw that subject test scores are not a key differentiator between students who do well at MIT and students who do not. You’ve already mentioned MIT is niche. Is your alma mater with the top English and Rhetoric departments dropping these tests, or is MIT doing so? If subject test scores are not a differentiator of success at MIT, why should MIT make students go through with them, especially if that time and effort can be put towards doing other things that actually are better indicators? Maybe programming projects, etc, or whatever their case may be. Call it woke but maybe their actual numbers support their decision?
>MIT has looked at their data and saw that subject test scores are not a key differentiator between students who do well at MIT and students who do not.
Objection. Assumes Facts Not In Evidence.
Following the OP link reveals no such analysis, only a statement SAT IIs are being suddenly being ignored because "We believe this decision will improve access for students applying to MIT." That's coded language, 100% typical for their woke, clown-world admissions functionaries.
>maybe their actual numbers support their decision?
Maybe we should be verifying the actual numbers instead of swallowing whatever just-so story MIT plops out to justify the woke thing they wanted to do anyway.
After reviewing other HN articles from MIT admissions, such as “Picture yourself as a stereotypical male” (which includes the blatantly racist gem "A Good Night’s Sleep, A Hearty Breakfast, and Being White"), along with "Black Lives Matter...until they don't", and the Epstein fiasco, it becomes very clear MIT doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Let’s go back to the point where he said poor kid. It’s really hard to get those opportunities. Many poor kids have to work through high school or provide unpaid child care for their family, many of those also have to deal with food and/or housing insecurity. It’s extremely difficult to not only have the connections to get in someplace for an internship or a volunteer experience for your scholastic resume but also to be able to get there or have the time outside of work/school/family to do it.
> PS I'm rich and early retired now thanks to (Bitcoin and) setting/enforcing high standards for myself, not lowered expectations.
Awesome!
> My gifts are largely verbal, so the Writing subject test was my once-in-a-lifetime to demonstrate objective superiority to my peer group, regardless of income and race.
Same, though I don't really consider skills like oratory to be a gift; rather I think it's something you simply refine with time and experience.
I was actually the first to score a perfect score (at the time) in my English Placement Exam at the University I ultimately started at, however, my writing legibility is admittedly horrendous and I was docked 2% after I was asked to read it aloud for the inconvenience of the reviewers: yielding a 98%. It was about the Tobacco Industry--I understood this topic well as my childhood best friend's Father was an Exec at Phillip Morris.
But, and I have to ask as I think this follows the Bitcoin meritocracy ethos: wouldn't you have preferred to have your admission be based on your ability to have positively contributed to your field of study rather than some arbitrary score on an exam which, if you were like me had to prep and take several times before you took it serious? And probably purposely forgot 85% of it as soon as you got up and walked out the door?
I mean isn't awesome to see a project where some of the most World renowned Academic Cryptographers (Adam Back) work alongside College dropouts (Peter Todd), and absolute nutters in the best way (Amir Takki) contribute to a project on equal terms and be judged by their skills rather than anything else? Especially when you see how vital its role can be in your financial well being?
That's what I always thought University was going to be, rather than the petty politicking non-sense I saw. Which is acutely seen when trying to get Peer Reviewed Journals to be even approved for review.
I personally have since shunned academia after my experience, I have a BS in Biology and that was enough BS for one life time; but a part of me wonders what I could contribute to my field now that I have experience in Agriculture, Culinary, and (very limited) Aerospace fields as well as a background in Automotive Industry and its Supply Chains.
Side note: I was that guy in class in University setting up study groups among my peers for notes, homework assignments, and lecture recordings because I had to work during school hours and I couldn't attend class nor afford the required texts; so I understand very well what having to over-perform despite not having the supposed 'bare essentials,' is like as my upper division years were during the financial crisis.
>wouldn't you have preferred to have your admission be based on your ability to have positively contributed to...
Uni-bound HS kids don't usually know which field(s) they will study, hence the S.A.T. is a Test for generic Scholastic Aptitude using general intelligence metrics (math+verbal) as a proxy. HS me intended to be a cyberlaw lawyer at Wilson Sonsini but wound up in cogsci, a field HS me wasn't even aware existed! There was NO WAY my admission could have been based on my eventual contributions to cogsci.
Academic achievement was my ticket out of the trailer park so I always took it seriously, starting in middle school when I devoured a book called 999 Words You Need To Know For The SAT. I didn't "purposely forget 85% of it" after the tests, I still know them all and never stopped building on that foundation, serving Master Satoshi well while fighting against the BCashers in the trenches of the Blockchain Wars.
Bitcoin's meritocracy is an extension of the hacker ethos (on the internet no one knows your a dog...etc) and yes, I love it. I idolize Back and adore trollish Todd, and while Amir's cringe black flag left-wing anarchism is tedious it's forgivable given the obvious sincerity.
If your Uni experience was "petty politicking non-sense" SFYL, but that's on you. Should have transferred and done STEM at a different/better institution.
I did 3 years then dropped out for financial reasons. The degree meant nothing to me; the Promethean knowledge base and powerful lifelong social network are what I wanted. But I'll always be an academic at heart.
On top of that exam dumps are much less efficient when it comes to SAT IIs, where questions are much more diverse an subject knowledge is essential. SAT I is the one that is easy to game.
Eh its all easily game-able. The SAT (and ACT) is a joke. So are the subject tests. The only subject test that wasn't laughable are the language ones (since you can't "intuit" spanish as easily as math or physics or chemistry). Its not bad if you are a good test taker (a dumb skill but a useful one) or wealthy. My friends were tutored idiots and did well (2200+ SAT, 700+ subject tests) and i was a good test taker (same scores). Its all garbage
The SATs have a top score, if it were easy to game you'd find many people would clump at the top. That would make it impossible to normalize that distribution into a bell-shape because they're all clustered into the same bucket with no way of spreading them.
OP's point was that the perfect scores remain consistently outside of people's grasp despite the variety of resources available to prep for the exam. I only once managed to hit perfect score and my other best scores were one or two questions off. I had been taking the test since I was 11 (for various extracurricular camps/activities) and prepped multiple times for them. The biggest scores jumps were more closely related with my age and academic achievements than anything else.
So the SATs are (almost certainly) 3-pl (actually 2) IRT models. Essentially, it's a multivariate generalised linear mixed model to estimate both question difficulty and participant ability.
Normally, they'll estimate the abilities on the logistic scale, and use the percentile to back transform to a standard normal.
Most people don't cluster at the top because they are a good proxy for g, which is an imaginary statistical construct that we use to explain differences in school outcomes.
So I had a long digression here about the usefulness of penalties for guessing, but it turns out the SATs don't do that anymore, so wth?
A lot of the reason the SATs are able to maintain a spread that lets them normalize the distribution is that they fill the tests with stupid tricks that fool people into wasting time. If you do a ton of prep then you learn to spot these tricks and then a lot of the questions become really easy and you can knock them off quickly.
A poor smart student may have mastery of the material but their score will suffer if they don't know the tricks.
No, but I think the point is a combination of Chesterton fence and Goodhart's law. The personal statments and the like, by becoming the primary targets, will cease to measure achivement, and instead measure wealth. So instead of changing without a plan, make a plan to replace SAT2 with something less subject to wealth
MIT is removing a test which rewards the wealthy and punishes the poor. That's good. But the other metrics that MIT currently use are more punishing to the poor, and more rewarding to the wealthy.
With the removal of this element, MIT is left relying on personal statements, recommendations, and the like. With those metrics as the targets, the kids of the wealthy will fund their child's various activities for the sake of giving them a better application.
I find this truly baffling. How can it be considered good use of time for someone to sink endless hours of time into learning the ins and outs of some stupid test that is not useful for anything? Just think about the man years of enthusiasm and creativity wasted on learning to score on a test, instead of something truly useful.
I understand why the students do it, I don't understand why anyone would consider it a good system.
There are plenty of kids in the US who can't afford to bring lunch to school, let alone pay $20 for a SAT prep book. Many of these kids don't have a computer or Internet access at home for that matter, so Khan Academy isn't much good to them either. When we talk about rich vs poor kids, there's a HUGE gap that many people don't realize.
Anecdote: When I was younger, I used to take a public bus to a local bookstore and work through the SAT practice books (on separate scrap paper of course).
It sounds like you didn't have to pick up younger siblings at school when you were younger. That's the reality for a lot of poor kids. Raised by a single parent, the older siblings are in charge of looking after the younger ones. The parent often does not get home from work until late (and may have multiple jobs).
I'm not saying the poor aren't disadvantaged. It's just that the disadvantages are more along the lines of attitudes towards education in the first place (along with everything else). There are also fewer people nearby that serve as an "example" on how to learn or get ahead.
I don’t think that gap is huge in terms of internet access - there’s certainly a gap but it’s mostly a function of parents limiting access in my experience.
84% of teens have smartphones in the US. A large percentage of that remaining 16% have access to internet at school, as 98% of schools have broadband internet.
> The SATs have a top score, if it were easy to game you'd find many people would clump at the top.
I understand and appreciate my school was statistically abnormal but that is exactly what happened. I graduated in a class 334 students and several achieved perfect scores. Perhaps more than a third of the students achieved greater than 1300 and greater than 20% achieved greater than 1400. This is when 1600 was the perfect score.
All these scores indicate is the degree of conditioning imposed upon a student. I know people want these tests to mean something more for personal reasons, but according to all available data this is biased wishful thinking. The research on standardized convergent testing indicates it is not a measure of academic success or potential, but rather an indicator/discriminator of class distinctions due to availability of preparation.
Because I did not come from well groomed pedigree, did not value the subculture of excess vanity, and came from a family that was lower positioned financially I deliberately inverted the goals for a personal social experiment. I wanted to see how close to the bottom I could get and still graduate on time. This was exciting because the risks were greater. If you fail to estimate the conditions correctly you don’t graduate whereas other people get a slightly lower test score or grade point average. Because the goals were different you had plan and weigh the conditions in unexpected ways. Even with all the effort I put in there were still 5 people who graduated with a lower class rank than me.
What impact did that have in later life? I did not get a free ride to an Ivy League school like many of my classmates, enter corporate management immediately out of college, or become a corporate executive within 10 years. I did enter and graduate college. I became a self taught software developer without much challenge and have found very low resistance attaining employment as a senior developer in my full time job. I also became a managing principal in my part time job without as much effort. The greatest tragedy in all this isn’t lost status or earning potential but how boring life has turned out.
If you had a multiple choice quiz with the actual questions hidden you would get a normal distribution in results. Anything where you sum lots of small random effects.
You're just bragging that you hit the ceiling on those tests.
That doesn't mean tests don't work; if you wanted to, you could have found much harder ones. (That's what I did, out of necessity. They wouldn't have given my app a second look if I hadn't.)
30 years ago, the ACT test changed enough that it was no longer a valid test to use as entry for Mensa. Prior to 1990, an ACT test could be used as evidence for Mensa admission.
So... the ACT wasn't always 'a joke', but doesn't have the same impact that it had decades ago.
That's irrelevant, what matters is that a high IQ society has a vested interest in measuring IQ as a proxy for general intelligence and standardized testing results should reliably correlate to IQ and general intelligence.
It's not impossible that these tests measure something other than general intelligence, that just happens to correlate with social outcomes (like historical, relative familial wealth).
IIRC general intelligence also doesn't simply measure speed of cognition, but also ability to choose what to focus on ("intuition"), which these tests do not measure.
Adoptees have IQs in line with their biological parents, not their adoptive ones. It’s heritable like every other psychological variable I’m aware of.
Speed of cognition is absolutely correlated with IQ but the difference in speed doesn’t cause the differences in results. Both are downstream of being more intelligent.
> Speed of information processing and general intelligence
> One hundred university students were given five tests of speed-of-processing, measuring their speed of encoding, short-term memory scanning, long-term memory retrieval, efficiency of short-term memory storage and processing, and simple and choice reaction time or decision-making speed. They were also given the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the Raven Advanced Progression Matrices. A number of multiple regression analyses show that the cognitive processing measures are significantly related to IQ scores. Other analyses indicate that this relationship cannot be attributed to the common content shared by the reaction time and the intelligence tests, nor to the fact that parts of the WAIS are timed. It is concluded that the reaction time tests measure basic cognitive operations which are involved in many forms of intellectual behavior, and that individual differences in intelligence can be attributed, to a moderate extent, to variance in the speed or efficiency with which individuals can execute these operations
There is no evidence connecting IQ to hereditary traits. This has been demonstrably proven false multiple times. What you are arguing is eugenics and that is patently false.
> Substantial genetic influence on cognitive abilities in twins 80 or more years old.
> General and specific cognitive abilities were studied in intact Swedish same-sex twin pairs 80 or more years old for whom neither twin had major cognitive, sensory, or motor impairment. Resemblance for 110 identical twin pairs significantly exceeded resemblance for 130 fraternal same-sex twin pairs for all abilities. Maximum-likelihood model-fitting estimates of heritability were 62 percent for general cognitive ability, 55 percent for verbal ability, 32 percent for spatial ability, 62 percent for speed of processing, and 52 percent for …
This is great for Swedish people. The problem is that humanity consists largely of not-Swedish people. Same for most studies of this kind, which are largely concerned with populations that are already genetically closely related; it stands to reason that the differences between people who are closely related will be more attributable to their inborn differences, than the differences between people who are not closely related. They haven't been able to do an interracial, intercultural comparison on this because socioeconomic circumstances are so substantially different between groups (and have been so since the rise of modern empirical research) that it's impossible to set up a decent comparative study.
So if intelligence is inherited, then children of geniuses should be uber-geniuses. And if intelligence is a desired trait, then people can breed for that. And that's eugenics, so I believe you're agreeing with me.
Or intelligence is correlated with familial wealth because it is hereditary and smarter people tend to end up in more complex cognitively demanding professions which tend to pay more.
Maybe? The confounding factors are many. How to account for war (which often accrues wealth to the most brutal among the reasonably intelligent), disease (where selection is based on behavior, e.g., adherence to cultural norms, not necessarily intelligence), disparities in wealth across geography and culture (relative shifts in the normal distribution of IQ across demographics are reflected exactly in measures of wealth)? Let alone that procreation necessarily requires the joining of individuals who might have disparities in wealth, or intelligence, or both.
I tend to err on the side of caution with this one.
This is more of a joke story, but a few years ago a friend of mine who is neither ambitious nor succesful surprisingly scored 165-170 on their test.
When they offered him a membership and told him the membership fee, his reaction was - Alright, but as I am in the top 5% of your members - should not you be paying me to hang out with you? :D :D :D
Well to be fair, those are the subset of high IQ people who have the time/desire to join a club about having a high IQ. Kind of an adverse selection bias
The overwhelming majority of the high IQ are not Mensa members. They are academics, doctors, lawyers, successful businesspeople, the kinds of people for whom it is more common in their friends group to have a Master’s degree than to be a high school dropout.
Those people are called academics. The kinds of Master’s degrees that are rent seeking credentialism, MBAs, MSWs, M.Ed.s are far more common than consolation prizes for those who didn’t get their Ph.D.
Alternatively it could be objection to numerous examples of somewhat arbitrary standardised testing which takes over student education to the exclusion of pretty much anything else, limiting a lot of the creativity and enjoyment students might otherwise take part it.
As someone who went to a boarding school on scholarhsip after moving from a bad public highschool and couldn't afford the $1600 SAT prep classes that preprogrammed in solvers in your calculator, I agree with you in general and deeply resonate with this argument.
However, my initial thought was that MIT maybe has so many perfect scores it's useful at this point and not really a differentiating factor.
For example they can afford to have a perfect 1:1 ratio of men to women for a tech school and I don't think they lower their standards for that.
On the contrary, I went to a highly ranked engineering school of the same limitations (limited other genres of degrees) and it was 30% females overall roughly, but actually in general it was more like 6%-8% females in the actual engineering degrees.
I worked in the admissions office one summer and was hard pressed to find a B on any Q4 report cards which was one of my summer tasks to ensure no early admission students entirely flunked out. I got to see other things like scores and in general I have to say even at a lesser well ranked school, and reading the averages of every incoming class, my notion is not that there is a difference between the scores of smart hard working lower middle class vs the upper rich as much as there is an over emphasis on the exam as a whole.
I agree objective results are very important, and I don't have an answer for a way to calibrate across schools. I think AP exam scores are better indicators but not all schools have AB or IB classes, etc.
It is really at the end of the day like most things about your commitment and ability to get something done regardless of how tangential you think it is to your core goals or study. In real life it is the same way there are lots of silly things people have to do all the time to get where they want to be and the weeding out is those who don't stop trying vs those who find a comfortable spot and stay there and blame everyone else for not having the right priorities.
Regardless, I still fill like even amongst high ranking SAT scorers, students are good at acing them now. My theory though I'm not confident is true is that studying for them has been systemized so much that it is actually difficult for MIT to tell above a certain threshold of score what the bell curve is.
This is all with the exception we need to realize that the SAT is not objective or perfect (the top comment this one is in response to) it was only less than five yrs ago they pulled sailing terminology from the reading and vocabulary portions after having to admit children growing up in the Bronx indeed might not have casually sailed not had sailing related literature in their curriculums, making this a bit unreasonable even for "guessing from context".
I've never been sailing but had no problem with the terminology because I read books. Books reflecting our civilization's Greco-Roman and Anglo-American historical ties to seafaring.
It's a form of cultural genocide to foment linguistic amnesia regarding the source domain for so many metaphors and narratives.
Nice use of "the Bronx" as a dog whistle for 'muh poor helpless minority yoof chilldrunz'. Guess what, smart kids of any color can read Treasure Island. Even in the Bronx, you can check out a copy of Moby Dick and 20000 Leagues Under the Sea. Even in landlocked Iowa, HS classes read Homer's Oddesy and Kon-Tiki.
Your unreasonable, emotional bleating about how we all need to lower our expectaions of non-sailing children is insulting to those of use who bothered to learn everything we could in spite of divorce, poverty, etc. and came out ahead.
Your unkind assumptions are full of holes and don't hold water; they are not seaworthy and should be scuttled forthwith.
The idea one can only learn about nautical terminology by literally being on the water is asinine and untrue. If you can't learn sailing terminology except by acutally sailing, you lack the capacity for abstract thought required for scholastic aptitude.
Removing sailing terminology is a way to subsidize illiteracy and pretend non-sailing kids are so stupid they need to be coddled with softened expectations.
That’s nuts, I got a 1590 on my second try with a calculator that turned out to be missing batteries, the day after going to a friends house and drinking with my only prep being reading a few paragraphs from some big book.
I had a lackluster performance on the new writing section the first time around or I wouldn’t have spent any time upping the original 1520 or whatever.
The point is to brag a little yes because I really never get to tell that story now that I’m 30.
The point is that rewarding me for skipping class to smoke weed with my friends because I aced some test turned out to produce a university student who spent a lot of time partying.
I’ve changed a lot since then, and I do also have the blessing of being a rather natural and amiable person to talk too, but there was a long time where by sheer luck I was getting glided along because I ace tests like those and AP tests, but it certainly not indicative of someone who was going to spend a lot of time producing some great research paper in college or anything.
So I always thought it was kind of bullshit and I nailed the shit out of that test.
Probably just an imperfect science all in all. Much like hiring tech workers.
I also had excellent SAT scores (I didn't bother to retake them, but perhaps I should've).
I also resonate with the idea that rewarding smart kids for being good at taking tests tends to undermine their work ethic and grit; when I finally got to math classes I couldn't just ace the test on, I had a very hard time; I truly didn't know how to buckle down, on my own, and do homework, because I'd never actually had to do that before.
On the other hand, when I'm hiring people, I've discovered I really do want to hire people who are able to ace simple math questions quickly. It's not sufficient, but it seems to be very correlated with being able to wrap your head around complicated code.
As I told a couple others, you just hit the ceiling.
That doesn't mean tests don't work; if you wanted to, you could have found much harder ones. (That's what I did, out of necessity. They wouldn't have given my app a second look if I hadn't.)
