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Comment by fiblye | Hacker News Reader

>The most explicit example is that ancestry correlates with whether you are a native speaker of the dialect the test was written in.

What kind of absurd "argument" is this? If you're testing for a university in America, the expectation is that not only will the test be in English, but the vast bulk of your university courses. And Asian Americans, despite a large number coming from families of non-English speakers, still do disproportionately well. But if the local language is something you struggle with, that local university isn't for you, unless we're also going to argue that degree awarding requires lower standards.

In which case, just throw university in the dump because it's worthless.

If we're at a point where having a majority language and doing important business in that language is bordering on discrimination, this society is lost.

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So you disagree with the assertion that native speakers of a specific dialect score higher than non-native speakers of that dialect--all else being equal?

Or did you just decide you'd rather argue with something I didn't write?

Even if it is case that native speakers of a specific dialect score higher, it's not clear that the result is due to language barriers, and could be a correlation with socio-economic groups. That is the point of bringing up non-native speakers doing well, as the test is not even their native language, which is certainly a greater disadvantage than a different dialect.

So you don't think that there is an advantage gained by being a native speaker of a dialect a test is written in?

The academic consensus is that there is.

The clearest example is that vocabulary is a large part of most standardized tests and native speakers have larger vocabularies than proficient L2 speakers.

How about the math part? Besides, if I was on a college admissions board, I'd give consideration to an L2 speaker if his verbal scores were unusually below his math scores.

I'm less familiar with math testing in general, but as far as direct effects go (not something caused by language of instruction) my guess is that it would be limited to instructions and word problems.

I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that it's not clear that the advantage is so much as to be a relevant factor. I grew up in a very poor minority neighborhood and the language the teachers used in school was the same as the ones on the standardized test, so it's not like I wasn't prepared.

It's almost insulting to think that dialect matters that much considering how much exposure everyone gets to the mainstream dialect.

In China they've got a standard dialect and there doesn't appear to be any advantage for those that are from the area north of Beijing where the dialect originates.

How much of an impact it has is debatable, but the academic consensus is that it is relevant. If you trust your own experiences and opinions more than the current research, there isn't much I can do to convince you otherwise.

>It's almost insulting to think that dialect matters that much considering how much exposure everyone gets to the mainstream dialect.

Whether it's insulting is irrelevant to whether it's true.

>In China they've got a standard dialect and there doesn't appear to be any advantage for those that are from the area north of Beijing where the dialect originates.

I'd be interested to know what your basing this assertion on. Gaokao scores in Beijing are distorted by families who try to move there from other areas to take the test and migration in general.

Combined with with relative lack of reliable data, I'm not sure how you could confidently make this claim.

Do you have a link to the study? I'm curious what "relevant" means in this case.

From the beginning I've not denied that dialect can have an effect, only that I believe it to overwhelmed by a sea of countless other factors that cause someone to succeed or fail at getting into college, and I haven't seen any data that shows that it is the prevailing factor and one that truly matters.

The subtext to my comments is that this a debatable point, and I interjected because others were throwing veiled insults and calls of racism at anyone who tries to discuss this, which is an unfair way to shut conversation down.

>only that I believe it to overwhelmed by a sea of countless other factors that cause someone to succeed or fail at getting into college

Yes it can be and is at an individual level.

If you removed 50 points from every Black student's SAT score just because they were Black, there would still be countless other factors that caused them to succeed for fail at getting into college. Their being Black wouldn't be the largest factor (family income still would be).

But across the entire population, you would see a significant drop in the number of Black students in college.

As to a link: Here's a link and a quote from the abstract of a relevant metastudy

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26090843

"The results showed a negative and moderate relationship between dialect use and overall literacy performance (M effect size = -0.33) and for dialect and reading (M effect size = -0.32). For spelling and writing, the relationship was negative and small (M effect size = -0.22). Moderator analyses revealed that socioeconomic status and grade level were not significant predictors for relations among dialect use and literacy skills."

All languages are going to have dialects. Trying to eliminate that "bias" is going to just result in removing language entirely from exams, unless we decide to make tests for every single test taker. But the point of standardization is to have a solid, uniform goal for all to work towards. And if you're applying to an American university and you have difficulty with what's considered standard American English, you will have far worse troubles in university.

And again, people from families of non-native speakers do well. Generally better than people who only have family who speak the native language and dialect.

That people think it's discrimination is quite clearly silly. :)

It sounds like you really want to be arguing with something other than what I'm writing, so you've just decided to make that happen.

There is in all cultures a language of educated discourse. To take an extreme example, nobody ever natively spoke scholarly Mandarin and wrote eight-legged essays for fun. The SAT is less severe, but, yeah, it requires some effort and practice to be familiar with the language and the essay format. Not being able or willing to put in the effort to learn this very accessible information is not a good sign for being able to survive equally or moreso arbitrary environments in university.

What is it with this topic causing people to argue with straw men?

>Not being able or willing to put in the effort to learn

This has nothing to do with putting in effort. Across a population, people who grew up speaking a dialect will perform better on a test than people who learned to speak that dialect later.

This isn't a controversial statement.

If your goal is to ensure that speakers of other dialects have equal access to top tier higher education, you will need to account for that somehow.

If you dont care about equal access to speakers of other dialects, then you don't have to do anything.

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