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Comment by fmajid | Hacker News Reader

Except when alumni interviewed candidates, there was no such difference, only when university staff did. A pretty convincing smoking gun if you ask me.

I am glad I studied in France, where admission to elite schools is based purely on objective entrance exams (emphasis on Math). It’s not a perfect system, rich parents can afford tutors and teachers can tutor their kids, but it’s a hella fairer than the system in the US, corrupted by legacy admissions, sports scholarships and racial quotas that purposefully ignore socioeconomic disparity, because it’s easier for the powers-that-be to throw poor rural white kids under the bus than something that might adversely impact their own children.

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I think you got just about everything correct except for just one nitpick —- the alumni actually interviewed the candidates in person, and the university staff did not and assigned personality score purely based on the application.

I'm from the Netherlands. I feel like the US admission proces is more like job interview, while in Europe it is more like multi year internship. Secondary education is divided into levels. If you pass all classes on the highest level and pass the final exam, you are guaranteed university admission. If you were a late bloomer and you started at a lower level, there are of course proceses to go up.

Racial quotas in the admissions process have been ruled unconstitutional a long time ago.

https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/supremecourt/rights/print/land...

This is ironic because in the U.S. most people believe the S.A.T. is the most biased portion of the college entrance criteria.

1) Is that actually "most" people? 2) Is the belief that it's the "most" biased?

I've heard the claim that the SAT is biased against lower SES for a while now, but more on the left than the right, and I've never heard "most" biased.

We need to intervene much much earlier than college admissions if we want to fix that. But it's a really difficult problem because cultures in low SES areas like where I grew up tend to shame and beat the shit out of smart kids, and one culture's "intervention" is another's "unwelcome interference".

> This is ironic because in the U.S. most people believe the S.A.T. is the most biased portion of the college entrance criteria.

I don't see any evidence either that most people believe that or that it's true.

I personally find it more likely that high school grades and extracurriculars are probably the most biased portions (grades because a large portion of them usually depends on assignments with loose grading rubrics, which are empirically linked to greater racial and other bias for otherwise similar responses, and extracurriculars because both access and evaluation of them is impacted by cultural factors of both the student, the evaluators, and other members of society.

The SAT correlates more to college performance than high school grades. Also the current SAT has been determined to be not racially biased.

> Also the current SAT has been determined to be not racially biased.

Determined by who?

UC commissioned a study to see if the SAT was biased. The study found that it was not.

Do you have a link to the this study? All I can find is this 2019 quote from the UC commission investigating this that indicates otherwise:

UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol T. Christ, along with the UC system’s chief academic officer, Provost Michael Brown, said Friday that research has convinced them that performance on the tests is so strongly influenced by family income, parents’ education and race...

The Chancellor and chief academic officer are politicians not academics. The academics voted to keep the SAT and ACT.

> UC should keep SAT and ACT as admission requirements, faculty report says

> University of California faculty leaders are recommending the continued use of the controversial SAT and ACT as an admission requirement for now, citing UC data showing the standardized tests may actually help boost enrollment of disadvantaged students, according to a highly anticipated report released Monday

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-02-03/uc-shoul...

From the article you posted, the faculty senate found that it was fine to keep the SAT and ACT because admissions officers were already correcting for racial and socioeconomic bias, not that bias doesn't exist. It says nothing about a study that finds no racial bias in the test, which is what I'm asking for.

"The new yearlong faculty review found evidence that most UC admissions officers offset much of the bias against disadvantaged students by evaluating standardized test scores in the context of their high schools and neighborhoods."

"Among students with SAT scores of 1000 — the 40th percentile — half of Latinos were admitted compared to less than one-third of whites."

How can a standardized test be racially biased?

To make a target race to score higher, fill the test with things the target race tends to be disproportionally familiar with (owing to culture, relative affluence, etc.) To bump up the average Black score, for instance, fill the test with word problems involving rappers.

Perhaps the current SAT is, but remember SAT I and the "oarsman–regatta analogy" question? That could explain why some people continue to suspect it's racially biased against non-whites.

The math section isn't affected by this and shows an even greater discrepancy.

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