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Comment by abhiyerra | Hacker News Reader

I was on the UC Berkeley campus on Tuesday. So many more black and latino students than when I was on campus. It was nice.

I had many black friends in high school and none when I went to Berkeley in 2005-2010. I can say the SAT, ACT, etc. are biased against anyone who doesn't have the money to get the prep for them.

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I don’t know about the ACT, but the SAT in that time period was trivial to study for. I had one Barrons book, and the rest was accomplished by being a student in a public school. There were no surprises come test day.

I genuinely don’t understand when people say the SAT is so biased, because it seemed quite fair to me compared to alternative metrics. Unless asking someone to spend a lot of time studying is too much to ask.

The SAT isn't hard to study for, but the question is, if your dad is in jail (which many of my black friend's dads were), you are feeling uncertain about the world because of the color of your skin, would you put in the effort? I think people look at tests like the one and all, but many kids have other stuff to work out.

what part of this is fixed by getting rid of the SATs, exactly? do all the other problems that are making it hard to get on top of school suddenly disappear? do they magically disappear in college? how is it even beneficial to remove one possible avenue for demonstrating aptitude beyond the ability to succeed in a classroom environment, which is profoundly tilted toward rich families who can help kids with homework, bitch at teachers about bad grades, etc.?

Strength leads to strength. If you can get to a place of prestige and that place continues to have high standards, then the people who are bound for the streets or no purpose have a means to a higher goal. Maybe I believe that if you give people a little bit of chance, they end up better?

ah, so you just find a way to continue to have high standards while continuously lowering the standard for admission

but that's not even the point... the post was about how students who don't care about school will somehow be better served by getting into a good school anyway. sure, some people will have an "oh shit i cant screw this up" moment, but... many will just fail. right? and in the meantime, the student who didn't get the chance to pursue their dreams... does what? it is unfortunately a pretty zero sum game. i wish it weren't. i think it'd be great for universities to figure out how to scale up much bigger than they are currently for exactly this reason.

I don't think you have to worry here. The people who take the SAT are a minority. We need to stop thinking everyone takes the SAT. It is not valid. This policy benefits the people who take the SAT, which is likely a minority of students.

Hardly a minority of students. The year before the pandemic, 77% of college applicants took the SAT or ACT.

That was 2019-20, after colleges had starting going whatever you want to call not requiring standardized tests.

https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2021/09/13...

If you aren't willing to put in the effort for a multiple choice (easy) exam, you are failing any STEM college degree (the only ones that give you a chance at making it out of the poorhouse), straight up. Compared to the SAT intro calculus at any top university is magnitudes harder.

If you admit the kids you're talking about under affirmative action they'd just be weeded out in intro courses and get relegated to some social sciences degree with negative return on tuition. That is objectively worse than rejecting them.

I have a History degree, and I'm doing fine. I'm sure most of the PMs who design the tech engineers build will also agree.

You may be doing fine, but objective measures of the average salary of humanities majors at schools like UCB say otherwise.

Most of the PMs I know have either business or STEM degrees.

I guess we aren't talking about the same humanities majors. Most of my friends from Berkeley who are history or humanities majors are lawyers, academics, or doctors (yes, many of the humanities became doctors). They don't really seem to care about the money even though we as engineers seem they should care. Or they had to go through additional layer of study which depresses their true value.

So they took the easy road to get into medical or law school.

What about the humanities majors that went straight into the workplace?

Ok, lets take your example. why should the kid in your example get a step over a kid with a stable family. Even kids in stable families have dreams. Even stable families got problems.

I think they both need to meet in the middle. I came from a low-income family and had plenty of wealthy friends.

Kids with stable families have money. Take away the money, and the thing that gave them the advantage goes away. For the poor kids, the money is no longer a blocker.

You know what meets in the middle? Standardized tests.

I have no problem if a kid in that situation decides to not put in the effort. I also have no problem if decisions to put in more effort yield better outcomes.

where are all these people spending hours getting "prepped" for the SAT, exactly? not at my high school... and where are all these test prep gods that are somehow getting enormous scores for "undeserving" students? does anyone actually know anyone who "prepped" their way to more than, what, 100-200 points of improvement max? and honestly that's pretty generous. surely less than the advantage from taking the test multiple times (which is a huge advantage for people with money, surely). unless we are talking very low score -> moderate score improvement... but i don't think that's gonna get anyone into Berkeley... setting hard admissions criteria on scores was already WAYY out of fashion by the time i went to college... i can't imagine it is somehow more in vogue these days.

i have a hard time understanding how affirmative action + SAT scores is somehow worse than affirmative action w/o SAT scores. the former seems like a clear win?

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