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Now we have the “adversity” SATs — 36 Comments

1. One more reason to devalue a minority person with a degree; one less reason to consider a minority in the job market.

2. Didn’t read the the entire article but is race going to a factor in the adversity test?

   With the obsession with white privilege and the efforts to tamp down the number of Asian students this is another area that is just waiting for a lawsuit.

   Does LeBron James’ son get bonus points for being black but the son of some white guy in WV get punished?

3. Griffin:

   I read somewhere else that race is not going to explicitly be one of the criteria.

   But there’s also no question, because of socioeconomic factors, that race will be heavily reflected in the criteria.

4. The left is heavily invested in equal outcomes for their favored, captive voter blocks. It is sad that they view these people as incapable of making their way on their own abilities.

5. neo,

   And with it being secret we would never know.

   What a terrible plan.

6. An article in The Atlantic notes:
   – One of the most notable aspects of the disadvantage level score is that there’s no explicit mention of race— the scoring system is mainly focused on capturing one’s economic reality.

   And apparently Adam Mortara [Federalist Society member and counsel for Students for Fair Admissions] is not opposed to it:
   –The new metric has gained a fan in one man currently fighting against race-conscious admissions; Adam Mortara, the lead trial counsel for SFFA, told me that he thinks this additional score is a much better tool for capturing what he calls “true diversity” in students, without factoring in race in a way that SFFA believes disadvantages Asian students.
   The article also says that Yale used a pilot program that were able to admit more ‘Pell-eligible’ students than in past years. As someone who has family who were economically disadvantaged but received grants this is good.

   I would say that there are definitely economic and social background differences between students and this tries to account for that.

7. Diversity breeds adversity.

8. Outrageous and unjustifiable.

9. Anthony Carnevale former College Board employee say ‘the purpose is to get to race without using race’.

   Sounds about right.

10. Bypass it all. Go to community college and learn plumbing, electric, welding, and best HVAC. Green New Deal wants to replace all this stuff in existing buildings. People with these skills will be making serious money long before the snowflakes get their Studies Study degrees and hit the Get-A-Job wall.

    And you will be doing something actually useful for society.

    [Brought to you by my inner Mike Rowe.]

11. Montage:

    Read Sowell’s book.

12. In the picture worth a thousand words department: The SAT to assign ‘adversity scores’ for all test takers, per The Wall Street Journa. Surprisingly, after being up for over 24 hours, this tweet is still up.

13. Unfortunately for those who want to game the SAT for advantaged/disadvantaged groups, the SATs do measure something. For example: what proportion of students obtaining graduate degrees in engineering or mathematics score below 600 in either the GRE-Math or SAT-Math? Not many. The odds are pretty good that if you can’t hack the SAT/GRE Math, you can’t hack grad school in math or engineering.

    Not long ago, Amy Harmon published an article in the NYT bewailing the low number of blacks in elite math departments.What I Learned While Reporting on the Dearth of Black Mathematicians: My recent reporting has highlighted why racial exclusion in “the queen of the sciences’’ may matter most of all .
    Amy Harmon informs us her tally indicates that blacks comprise 0.7% of tenured mathematicians “at the 50 top research universities” in math. She considers that an example of “racial exclusion.”

    It’s a fair bet that most math Ph.Ds. got 750 or above on the Math SAT. How do blacks do on the Math SAT? Of those who score 750 or above on the Math SAT, what proportion are black? How does this compare with the 0.7% of tenured mathematicians at the 50 top research universities who are black?

    An article from the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, The Widening Racial Scoring Gap on the SAT College Admissions Test(2006), gives us that information. In 2005, out of about 150,000 blacks who took the SAT, there were 244 blacks who scored 750 or above on the Math SAT. Blacks comprised 0.7% of those who scored 750 or above on the Math SAT the article in theJournal of Blacks in Higher Education informs us. Blacks comprised 0.7% of those who scored 750 or above on the Math SAT, and also comprised 0.7% of tenured Math faculty members at top research universities.

    Looks to me as if there is no racial exclusion at all in doctoral level mathematics. On the contrary, Math SAT scores and blacks as math professors track very well.

    In addition, this article has been available on the Internet for over a decade. One would hope that Amy Harmon, after several decades of being a journalist, had the capability to locate this article. Apparently that is hoping too much for a New York Times reporter.

14. The unspoken assumption behind all of these cosmic justice adjustments, is that no one is objectively better at anything, or objectively knows more, that merit does not actually exist. “Merit” and “qualifications” are labels bestowed on you, or not, by people who have power over you.

    When seen in this way, the cosmic justice adjustment demands make sense. Let me hasten to ass that I do not believe this myself: I am simply stating a position I do not hold in a way that an SJW would accept was a fair characterization.

    Let’s belabor engineering as an example. “Engineering” as practiced today is a way for white males to award other white males money and status. Consequently, the qualifications needed (C or better in statics, differential equations, etc) are simply deemed necessary by white males because they know white males are often awarded those qualifications by other white males. Engineering qualifications are a racist conspiracy for awarding white males money and status for being white, but without coming out and saying that.

    If women and minorities took over engineering tomorrow, they could change the qualifications for being an engineer to whatever they value, because “engineer” is a label awarded to people who have what other engineers value. SJWs do not believe that there is anything objective whatever to engineering.

    And now someone from the right side of the aisle will say “but your bridge falls down”. And the retort would be, perfectly “qualified” engineers have had their bridges fail too. SJWs implicitly reject that there is anything objective about “good engineering” or “good engineers”: they would say, if pressed, that these are labels that imply only that the power structure approves of those awarded them.

    And that is why they say everything is white supremacy/patriarchy unless it explicitly devalues whites and males.

15. Asian children, even children of recent immigrants, outperform other groups on the math part of the SAT and perform almost as well as whites on the verbal part, even though many Asians do not speak English at home. In contrast, blacks as a group do badly on the SAT regardless of parental income. As long as blacks and their white enablers shift the blame for black failure and failings on everybody else, nothing will improve and we’ll be having the same conversation one hundred years from now.

16. Bob Kantor:

    Yes, if the College Board folks were really serious about an adversity score, the children of Asian immigrants would totally dominate elite universities.

    But I’m sure the College Board will find a secret way around that.

17. Frederick,

    What SJW and advocates say and what they know in their hearts to be true are entirely different things. If they really believed what they promote and needed a kidney transplant, they’d be perfectly fine with a janitor doing the surgery. After all, professional certifications are just a ‘label’… right?

    No, what they say and promote is just a duplitious means to power. Only the “useful idiots” actually believe it.

18. The “Education Industry”* has been making a mockery of education for over half a century now. “You don’t have to know it, you just have to know where to look it up.” *hurl* And nowadays, you don’t have to know how to read well enough to know how to look it up.

    And millions of poor saps, which includes the fleeced (who pay for the “education”) as well as a good many of the fleecers, go along with this drivel.

    *I found the urge to exaggerate irresistible, but of course the fact is that there are very good educators, i.e. teachers, and very good schools out there in the wild. Nevertheless, I become more and more persuaded that the Education Industry as a whole is deranged. ….Or maybe they’re just too dismayed by ItAll to be able to think straight … indeed, to think at all.

19. Looks to me as if there is no racial exclusion at all in doctoral level mathematics. On the contrary, Math SAT scores and blacks as math professors track very well.

    Gringo: I sure get tired of movies showing the genius STEM guy or wizard computer hacker as black.

    There must be a few somewhere, but I never ran into any working hi-tech in Boston and the Bay Area from the late-seventies on.

20. Official schools output a bunch of drones for society’s zombie legions. Not that effective or good.

    Even a perfect SAT score means little to nothing to the Divine. It certainly means not much to Mensa and Prometheus Society, and Mensa and Prometheus society are merely “slightly better than average” to me.

21. There must be a few somewhere, but I never ran into any working hi-tech in Boston and the Bay Area from the late-seventies on.

    They are good at hiding. Those that get too public, such as Malcom X, tend to die a lot.

22. Malcolm X was a bright fellow but he wasn’t a genius STEM guy or wizard computer hacker.

    Top tech firms are desperate to get black faces into their tech ranks, but look at the group shots of their engineering teams — almost all white or Asian.

23. O joy. Wouldn’t you know…

    College board president behind SAT ‘adversity score’ was also the mastermind of the controversial K-12 ‘Common Core’ curriculum changes that has children just learning for a test…

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7041345/College-board-president-SAT-adversity-score-mastermind-controversialCommon-Core.html

24. Another take on the SAT insanity, about a family who moved at great sacrifice OUT of a high-adversity neighborhood so their kids would have the education they needed to get into good colleges, but will now be penalized because the new score only looks at where you are, not where you came from to get there.

    https://www.redstate.com/kiradavis/2019/05/16/the-new-sat/

    RTWT

25. From the Daily Mail link by huxley:

    ‘There is talent and potential waiting to be discovered in every community – the children of poor rural families, kids navigating the challenges of life in the inner city, and military dependents who face the daily difficulties of low income and frequent deployments as part of their family’s service to our country,’ Coleman said in a statement Thursday.

    ‘No single test score should ever be examined without paying attention to this critical context,’ he added.

    However critics, including Michael Nietzel, president emeritus of Missouri State University, have said ‘there’s not a straight line from socioeconomic background to SAT performance.’

    ‘At a time when standardized testing is under increased scrutiny and is even being discontinued or minimized as an admission tool by hundreds of colleges, one must wonder whether adversity scores are primarily an attempt to protect the SAT’s market or to promote social mobility,’ Nietzel wrote in an opinion piece for Forbes.

    ‘Colleges that are genuinely concerned about the bias built into the tests or the cheating associated with the SAT or the ACT, have a simpler choice: don’t require students to take them,‘ he added.

26. Paul Mirengoff echoes Kira Davis’s concerns in her Red State post:

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/05/the-adversity-score-gambit.php

    How would Asian-Americans fare? It depends on how “adversity” is scored. An applicant who, for example, came to this country from Asia as a six-year old, and whose parents don’t make much money and don’t speak good English faces considerable adversity by any fair measure.

    However, that applicant’s parents may have sacrificed to make sure the applicant grows up in an okay neighborhood and goes to a good high school. The “adversity score,” as it has been described, seems to place considerable emphasis on neighborhood conditions and the quality of the high school applicants attend.Thus, Asian-Americans who face real adversity may be penalized for their parents’ attempts to help them overcome it.

    Even without knowing the full details on calculating the adversity score, I think we can conclude that a fair amount of subjectivity is involved in determining the calculation. And I have no doubt that the subjectivity tilts the score in favor of Black applicants, and intentionally so.

    As Carnevale, the former College Board employee, says: “The purpose is to get to race without using race.” That’s an improper and, I think, unconstitutional purpose.

27. Heather MacDonald, via Powerline
    https://www.city-journal.org/college-boards-sat-adversity-score

    The College Board’s adversity score will give students a boost for coming from a high-crime, high-poverty school and neighborhood, according to the Wall Street Journal. Being raised by a single parent will also be a plus factor. Such a scheme penalizes the bourgeois values that make for individual and community success.

    The solution to the academic achievement gap lies in cultural change, not in yet another attack on a meritocratic standard. Black parents need to focus as relentlessly as Asian parents on their children’s school attendance and performance. They need to monitor homework completion and grades. Academic achievement must no longer be stigmatized as “acting white.” And a far greater percentage of black children must be raised by both their mother and their father, to ensure the socialization that prevents classrooms from turning into scenes of chaos and violence.

    At present, thanks to racial preferences, many black high school students know that they don’t need to put in as much scholarly effort as non-“students of color” to be admitted to highly competitive colleges. The adversity score will only reinforce that knowledge. That is not a reality conducive to life achievement. The only guaranteed beneficiaries of this new scheme are the campus diversity bureaucrats. They have been given another assurance of academically handicapped students who can be leveraged into grievance, more diversity sinecures, and lowered academic standards.

28. Thomas Lifson, via Powerline
    https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/telling_the_awful_truth_about_the_new_sat_adversity_score.html

    In his introduction Carlson outlined many problems with the whole idea:

    It’s kept a secret. “Trust us,” in effect, they say. There is no appeal possible. And as a black box whose inner workings are secret, it becomes an ideal vehicle for engineering the racial results admissions offices desire.

    It is easily gamed – fake addresses, even possible income manipulation (by claiming a lot of depreciation, for instance, the way that Donald Trump reported negative income in the 1980s)

    And it provides perverse incentives, rewarding victim status, not achievement. Parents who start out with no advantages and work hard to provide a better life for their kids will now be handicapping them if they have high incomes and live in nice neighborhoods with good schools.

    But leave it to Heather Mac Donald to cut to the chase: all of this diversity engineering is driven by the seemingly intractable racial achievement gap. If we could close the gap by changing culture, the whole diversity discussion would go away.
    …
    She says that the idea that privilege, not hard work, persistence and discipline drive better scores is ridiculous. She adds that blacks kids know that they are not held to the same standard, have less incentive to push themselves, making the problem worse.
    …
    Some further thoughts from me:

    Since college admissions are a zero-sum issue (for every person who gets in, another person is denied submission), what is called an “adversity” score used to grant an advantage becomes a “privilege” penalty for those who do not have an adversity plus added to their admissions file. This is precisely why the federal prosecutions of families that paid bribes to gain advantages for their children in elite college admissions are harming the public. Their crimes have victims. So does the SAT’s scheme.

    Heather Mac Donald states that David Coleman, the head of the College Board (and also called “the architect of the common core curriculum in the media) has “thrown the College Board into the excuse-making grievance industry,” which is true. But it is important to add that the financial self-interest of his organization is at stake. The College Board is reacting to demand from colleges, many of which are making use if the SATs optional, or even dropping the requirement entirely, precisely because it does not yield the desired racial distribution of scores. Fewer students taking the test, because colleges don’t require it, means less money for the College Board.

    By adding the adversity score and therefore a veneer of pseudo-science to the racial engineering of outcomes, the College Board is feathering its own financial nest. So it’s not only about hypocrisy, racial engineering, and achievement gaps, it’s also about the money.

29. https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/k12_educrats_are_parasites.html

    An interesting metaphor, well developed and disturbingly accurate.

30. Geoff said: “After all, professional certifications are just a ‘label’… right?”

    This is an issue, to me at least, in the field of social work. In terms of title protection, some in the field don’t see it as an issue since their reasoning is “as long they can do the job then it shouldn’t matter.”

31. If I recall correctly years ago the University of Texas used to require a mathsat of 650 to be admitted to the school of engineering. The administration found that this had an adverse impact on women and minorities so they dropped the requirement. To their surprise there was no big increase in women and minority enrollment in engineering. The administrators totally missed the obvious fact that engineers have to take lots of math courses like calculus, differential equations, vector analysis, complex variables etc. If you can’t do the math, you will not become an engineer and the mathsat score was just an indication you can do the math. The school I went to didn’t have a mathsat requirement, you just had to pass the two semester freshman calculus course as a requirement for being accepted in the college of engineering. Most engineering courses required calculus, so if you couldn’t do calculus you wouldn’t pass the course.

32. Blacks, on avg, have lower IQs. That’s both a genetic and cultural issue.

    There’s no “fair” way for poor people to get the benefits of middle-class virtues without putting in the work to live the middle class lifestyle:
    1) Finish high school (and be able to read, write, and do arithmetic)
    2) Not have children before getting married
    3) Keep a job for at least a year.

    Virtually nobody in the USA is “poor” who has followed these three rules. But #2 is especially hard — the only safe behavior to avoid children before marriage is to avoid sex. And the consumer sex (-crazy) society pushes all teens to be more sexually active. Especially still strong in the black community.

    The world is not fair – reality is not fair. The unfairness of “life” is NOT a matter of justice, and there is no justice based way to compensate for the unfairness. Still, most folk do think that those who are born disadvantaged “deserve” some extra help.

    I think a rich, civilized society WILL and SHOULD provide extra help. Still, extra help is not a “right”, nor is it really a matter of “justice”, altho it’s not unreasonable to call it “social justice”. Unfortunately, any help that’s available can be combined with LESS effort by those “being helped”, with the result being continued poverty. Plus, if help is given, “how much” is given to “whom” become important political questions.

    Makes me want to support “reparation rewards for poor blacks” — those who reach age 18 or over, and have done the top 3 requirements (HS, no kids before marriage, keep job for a year) should get a college tuition no-interest loan of $40k/ per year, for 4 years. Whether they go to college or not.

    A problem mentioned above is that this adversity score helps those who fail to help themselves, and hurts those who do help themselves. This is a common failure of all gov’t, and most non-gov’t, programs of aid and assistance — as well as being the reason “aid” for Africa has failed so miserably.

    What the market capitalist system does is to reward those who give back what others really want — want enough to pay for. That’s how it’s know that it’s really wanted. Producing things people really buy. Working for bosses in ways the bosses, who pay them, really want. And capitalism rewards success, usually based on hard work, smart work, and luck.

    It’s too bad about the luck, even “unfair”. But it’s real. At least it rewards those who help themselves, and that is what poor blacks need to do more of, as well as poor whites, and even the few poor Asians.

33. Linking an excellent comment from Snow on Pine, which echoes and expands what Tom said.

    https://www.thenewneo.com/2019/05/16/harvard-and-ronald-sullivan-the-dancing-bears-of-the-university-give-in-to-student-pressure/#comment-2435161

34. Now we can have an adversity Senator as well.
    https://www.nationalreview.com/news/sanders-to-propose-ban-on-for-profit-charter-schools/

    In his Saturday speech in South Carolina, Sanders plans to endorse the NAACP’s claim that charter-school expansion has had an adverse effect on African Americans who suffer from the resulting lack of funding for public schools. In order to combat this alleged harm, Sanders will call on the government to cut off public funding for all charter schools until an extensive audit has been conducted.

    While other 2020 Democratic contenders have expressed skepticism about the role of charter schools in improving America’s educational standing, Sanders is the first aspirant to explicitly call on Washington to cut off their funding.

    Sanders’s plan would also limit charter schools’ ability to develop innovative curricula by mandating that they comply with many of the same oversight measures applied to traditional public schools.

    Opponents of the plan argue that it would harm the very people it intends to help, namely low-income African Americans and other minorities who continue to struggle with high attrition rates and disproportionately low standardized-test scores.

35. “The year was 2081, and finally everyone was equal….”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SICa0tWHzJQ&feature=youtu.be

36. “Simply put, it is hubris to think we could do this. It simply cannot be done with any fairness whatsoever”

    Isn’t hubris the driving force of progressivism? The idea that the current elite are smarter than the accumulated wisdom tried and tested through generations, smarter even than biology?

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