SAT test to now include "adversity" score

[breslin]

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sat-adv...playing-field/

This reads like something out of a bad marxist dystopia. Do you support this?

[Seranthor]

Lots of fake homeless people gonna be applying next year lol...

Maybe someone will murder their parents and claim orphan status.

Lots of applications with PO Boxes in low income zip codes

[Thirza]

Wouldn't it be better to increase funding for education so that low income areas don't have shitty schools?

[PACOX]

Where do I check all the adversity boxes?

I had to walk to school 15 miles barefoot, over lava, uphill both ways, in the snow, with my 6 siblings on my back while we passed around one jacket.

[Sunseeker]

Wouldn't it be better to increase funding for education so that low income areas don't have shitty schools?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA increase education funding AHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAA

[Celista]

This reads like something out of a bad marxist dystopia. Do you support this?

Honestly yes, once you understand all of the ways that poverty and abuse affect the brain and see how shitty some schools are (even when you're just comparing public schools to one another, completely discounting private schools) then you see how it's practically a miracle to see kids from places like the inner cities graduate with a high school diploma.

[Leadsop]

The SAT is a complete fucking joke.

[Seranthor]

Here's a good one! When your baby is born, pretend that the father is a light skinned black man so that you can claim your children are African American. Just have to make sure he doesn't have any custody rights.

There is that... or we could just claim we were of Native American descent... and if we are questioned we can handwave and say 'we have high cheek bones and our grammys told us we were'... then after college we'll be qualified to run for the Senate and eventually President.

[Detritivores]

Let's ignore for a moment how incredible meaningless the SAT is with regards to anyones ability to actually do anything of consequence...

Why would you not take into account the adversity a person has faced? This used to be what your personal statement was about. If the SAT gives it a numeric value who gives a shit? The answer is people who haven't faced adversity. But you know what? If you're qualified it doesn't matter. Go find something else to virtue signal about OP.

[PC2]

In my view they shouldn't be allowed to deceive people by calling it 'standardized' when the score is 'individualized'. This literally contradicts the purpose of standardization.

[breslin]

Wouldn't it be better to increase funding for education so that low income areas don't have shitty schools?

The shittiest parts of Baltimore where all of the riots were had some of the highest education spending per pupil in the nation

[breslin]

Honestly yes, once you understand all of the ways that poverty and abuse affect the brain and see how shitty some schools are (even when you're just comparing public schools to one another, completely discounting private schools) then you see how it's practically a miracle to see kids from places like the inner cities graduate with a high school diploma.

If poverty is that big of a deterrent I fail to see how sending them to a college fixes that problem, is the mental handicap going to dissapear when they turn 18?

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Let's ignore for a moment how incredible meaningless the SAT is with regards to anyones ability to actually do anything of consequence...

Why would you not take into account the adversity a person has faced? This used to be what your personal statement was about. If the SAT gives it a numeric value who gives a shit? The answer is people who haven't faced adversity. But you know what? If you're qualified it doesn't matter. Go find something else to virtue signal about OP.

Because its meaningless and incredibly difficult to measure.

[Dextroden]

Wouldn't employers and schools be on the lookout for artificially inflated scores and end up not accepting people because of it?

[Celista]

It's only a miracle because the inner city schools are designed to encourage mediocrity. There's no attempt to find the few high achievers and push them on to great things because everyone is focused on the hopeless attempt to raise the performance of every student. So the outstanding kids at bad schools are massively underserved and are stuck in the same classroom as the hopeless cases, and they don't learn anything. So colleges have to come up with fake ways to raise achievement.

Harvard and the like increasing diversity doesn't really matter by the way. To get a full class of students at Harvard, they can cherry pick full cohorts of Asian and White kids with basically perfect credentials, but for African Americans they have to drop down to SAT of around 1300.

Then the schools a tier below Harvard take white students with SATs around 1400, but Harvard has already vaccuumed up the 1300 scoring black students, so those schools have to go down to like 1100 to find their African American quota. Then the next tier down goes 1200 white, 850 black. Below that, it's impossible to even pretend that students can go to college, so at some point you just run out of African Americans and there's a tier of schools that are 75%, 80% white and 3% black.

So at the end of the day the net effect is that Harvard has more African Americans and lower tier schools have fewer, because Harvard has taken them. But even that overemphasizes the impact, because the African American students at Harvard can't take the truly difficult majors like engineering math etc because they are underqualified, so they gravitate to African American studies or other soft disciplines where their earning potential is relatively low.

It's nonsense.

That is true about gifted students getting the shaft. Schools are reluctant to write IEPs now because they cost money, and are trying to keep everyone in the same classroom because it costs money. And we wonder why our education rankings are slipping.

I will say that there were clear diversity candidates during my graduate school experiences and it is truly frustrating to have unqualified/underqualified classmates in your program. It brings down the whole quality of the program and has a significant impact on the class, when there are 1-2 students that can't handle the content and the professor has to take his or her time out of the lecture to dumb things down for these individuals. It is frustrating, even if you understand WHY these students are underperforming, due to their adversity background.

The real solution is not to modify standardized tests but to address the root cause of poverty and adversity, which we seem farther and farther away from doing.

[Celista]

If poverty is that big of a deterrent I fail to see how sending them to a college fixes that problem, is the mental handicap going to dissapear when they turn 18?

Depends, more education can have positive impacts on the brain/ability to learn. Really depends on the quality of education and whether the student has the desire to stretch themselves, and whether or not they have the support to do so.

[Detritivores]

You state "if you're qualified it doesn't matter". I agree. It doesn't matter.

The issue is, even if they've overcome impressive odds to do so, students who have scored a 1300 on the SAT are gonna be lost in a classroom full of students who've achieved a 1600 - at least in STEM subjects, english is another story. They're not qualified to be there. And they shouldn't be.

Speaking as someone who had a 1600 and still flunked engineering calculus, I disagree. It's hard to predict who will be successful. If I had had to work hard for my SAT score, I might have known how to study and not failed out of the hardcore STEM courses. But as it happened I was handed perfect scores by virtue of being smart and going to good schools. When I first encountered adversity, I had no idea what to do. I understand that on average, a standardized test score is a decent proxy for how a student will perform, but it is not the complete picture. This is what this is attempting to address.

[Thirza]

The shittiest parts of Baltimore where all of the riots were had some of the highest education spending per pupil in the nation

What I'm hearing everyone in this thread saying is that we should take the kids away from bad environments outside of school.

[Detritivores]

If poverty is that big of a deterrent I fail to see how sending them to a college fixes that problem, is the mental handicap going to dissapear when they turn 18?

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Because its meaningless and incredibly difficult to measure.

On what are you basing this assertion? It seems fairly easy to assess and there are numerous tools for doing so.

[Underverse]

Honestly yes, once you understand all of the ways that poverty and abuse affect the brain and see how shitty some schools are (even when you're just comparing public schools to one another, completely discounting private schools) then you see how it's practically a miracle to see kids from places like the inner cities graduate with a high school diploma.

How does giving such students a more qualified person's slot do them a favor?

[exochaft]

Honestly yes, once you understand all of the ways that poverty and abuse affect the brain and see how shitty some schools are (even when you're just comparing public schools to one another, completely discounting private schools) then you see how it's practically a miracle to see kids from places like the inner cities graduate with a high school diploma.

I was inner-city and dirt poor with terrible school systems in a single-parent home, yet I almost aced the SAT when I was 13 (perfect on math, missed something in the Verbal, but I remember questions worded asking what I thought or felt... which is completely subjective and I was pretty stubborn/defiant about those since I hated standardized tests). I probably would've had a near-max adversity score with the metrics I've seen, but I still think its concept is a farce as the work I put in was something anyone in my situation could've done. If you do terribly on the SAT, you can always take it again, but generally scoring terribly means you either don't know the information and wouldn't survive higher education... or you're terrible at tests or working under stressful exam conditions, and you'd still wouldn't survive higher education in most scenarios anyways. Having a higher adversity score doesn't mean you'll survive higher education at all.

The stated intent for the adversity score (if its intent is actually that) is to find those "diamonds in the rough," but they already have systems in place for that: recommendations and interviews. Pretty much any learning institution where the SAT scores actually matter for gaining admission also have extensive recommendation and recruitment processes. Also, some schools have known for a long time that ACT/SAT scores don't mean much, and set their acceptance levels really low to give anyone a chance. There a tons of places where you can get a solid education and degree without having good SAT scores, and you'll likely save tons of money on tuition since places with super-strict SAT acceptance standards are generally expensive. This is still under the assumption that everyone needs to go into higher education immediately after high school to be successful in life, which is completely untrue.