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Comment by newnewnew | Hacker News Reader

> affirmative action has been pretty much dead for the past decade.

According to the article, being black is like getting 450 extra points on your SAT compared to an Asian student. I don't think AA is as dead as you think it is.

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If I thought the SAT was a useful metric you might be on to something. I used to be an SAT coach (back when the top score was 1600) and I could typically raise someone scoring between 1000 to 1300 by 200 points in 6 weeks.

IMO it's just not a useful test, and I suspect the Harvard admin committee knows so as well.

That said, it can be used as something to see how much work people are willing to do. In which case I think the delta over their HS peers is more useful than anything else. A 1500 at Andover would be a lot less impressive than a 1300 at Crenshaw.

The SAT is highly g-loaded, and highly correlated with all other measures of intelligence. 450 points on the SAT is a big deal, very significant, especially when dealing with large populations.

For a large population I'd agree that it is significant, because a large population doesn't prep for the SAT. For Ivy class schools I think it's counter intuitively not that big of a deal if one portion of the population hasn't prepped.

Furthermore the data isn't really believable (remember the article used pretty much made up data). Data from actual schools disputes that. For example:

"Harvard's Asian Americans in the Class of 1995 have average SAT scores of 1450, Blacks averaged scores of 1290, whites scored 1400 and Hispanics averaged 1310, the report states. "

"Asian-American students who enrolled at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in 2001 and 2002 scored 1457 out of 1600 on the math and reading portion of the SAT, compared to 1416 for whites, 1347 for Hispanics and 1275 for blacks, according to a 2011 study co-authored by Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono."

"Asian-Americans admitted to the University of Wisconsin’s flagship Madison campus in 2008 had a median math and reading SAT score of 1370 out of 1600, compared to 1340 for whites, 1250 for Hispanics, and 1190 for blacks, according to a 2011 study by the Center for Equal Opportunity"

And I suspect if you control for recommendations, geographic, and socio-economic diversity the gaps would shrink, not grow.

In reality it is simply not possible to create such gains on average. SAT score is still a very good predictor of future academic performance.

"Does test preparation help improve student performance on the SAT and ACT? For students that have taken the test before and would like to boost their scores, coaching seems to help, but by a rather small amount. After controlling for group differences, the average coaching boost on the math section of the SAT is 14 to 15 points. The boost is smaller on the verbal section of the test, just 6 to 8 points. The combined effect of coaching on the SAT for the NELS sample is about 20 points."

http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionst...

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