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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

I never thought the tests were "objective." Anyone can practice and improve their score. They're biased towards students whos parents or school pushes them to practice.

In the late 1990s I practiced and bumped my score up about 100 points. Do I think it made a difference to the college I went to? Doubtful.

I think the better question is: Do the tests accurately predict if a student will do well in college? That's their point, and if schools have better ways to predict if an applicant will succeed, there's no point in using the test.

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Critiques of the bias of testing need to come with a defense of what replaces them. Can extra curriculars be gamed? Of course. What makes a good essay? That would depend on the eye of the evaluator.

The dismay here is not due to a believe that testing correctly plucks the best minuscule number of deserving applicants that get in. It’s that everything else that is used is worse.

You don't need to offer an improvement to the SAT to complain about its obvious faults.

Unless the complaints result in the elimination of the SAT without a good replacement. Which is exactly what is happening.

I find it to be extremely destructive to spend all your time complaining about problems, and none finding solutions. That’s more or less what Maxism is: a long list of faults with capitalism and a half-baked untested idea of what could maybe be a solution. And we’ve seen the damage that ideology has done.

Grades are also biased towards kids whose parents and schools push them to practice. Being good at your job is biased towards being pushed to practice. Achieving the things you want in life is biased towards being pushed to practice.

Maybe instead of lowering standards, we should push kids to practice.

> Anyone can practice and improve their score. They're biased towards students whos parents or school pushes them to practice.

You just stated a very objective and valuable thing: they benefit people who practice. And it turns out that the will to practice doing things you don't know how to do is the most important skill you can have in life.

> Anyone can practice and improve their score. They're biased towards students whos parents or school pushes them to practice.

You can say that about GPA too.

Sounds like FAANG and the leetcode obsession.

> Anyone can practice and improve their score

Sure, as long as they have the free time to devote to that (which they may not, if they have to work through high school). Alternatively, they can hire an (expensive) tutor, which can help.

If scores are an important factor for admission, then that selects for people who:

  * are good at standardized testing
  * or, have the extra time and/or money to improve their score

The latter has strong correlation with socioeconomic status (and by extension, race). If their goal is to broaden the range of students attending, then eliminating the test as a factor helps.

There are, of course, many other things at play here; but it's a start!

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