It seems you haven't spent much time in a "cheap neighborhood with bad schools." I can assure you that no one there is making $X. In my city, the average household income is $38k; the state average is $74k. Almost all people, including poor people, make sacrifices and want what is best for their kids.
You're missing the point. The original comment in this chain comes from someone whose family made sacrifices in order to live in an area with good educational opportunities. This 'Adversity Score' would penalize them for making that sacrifice. Between two families with identical incomes, the one that chooses to curb luxuries to live in a place with a better school district would be penalized for that choice. The fact that good school districts tend to be populated by people with higher incomes is largely tangential to the point at hand.
> Almost all people, including poor people, make sacrifices and want what is best for their kids.
I don't doubt that people of all income levels want their kids to succeed. But there definitely are differences in behavior between demographics. The wealthier people are the more likely they are to use test prep across all demographics, but Asians are more likely to do so regardless of income. Asians also spend more than twice as much time studying outside of class than any other race [1]. There are differences in how much emphasis is put on education, this cannot be denied.
Yeah, but if you're doing all that, and you're landing between 34 and 36? I mean, let's be frank, Stanford is not looking at you if you're lower than 33. (Unless you have a wicked 3 point shot. Or you're a genius on the piano or something.) So, yeah, you did all that test prep, and end up scoring about the same as some local yokel from Angleton, TX who took the test cold? Or some broke kid from Chicago who took the test cold?
Sure, the Angleton guy's parents may be strung out on opioids or whatever, but I gotta be honest, I'm just not seeing why Stanford takes a chance on you as opposed to just giving it to one of the two kids who've proven they can perform at a high level academically test prep or no test prep?
> Yeah, but if you're doing all that, and you're landing between 34 and 36? I mean, let's be frank, Stanford is not looking at you if you're lower than 33. (Unless you have a wicked 3 point shot. Or you're a genius on the piano or something.) So, yeah, you did all that test prep, and end up scoring about the same as some local yokel from Angleton, TX who took the test cold? Or some broke kid from Chicago who took the test cold?
There's still a shitload of applicants between a 34 and 36. Easily more than one for every five spots. When you're talking about these universities with single digit admittance rates its not enough to just get good grades and good standardized test scores. Nine AP classes, fives on all the tests, and 4.0 GPA, and a perfect SAT score will guarantee you enough to get in the pile but you've still gotta make yourself shine like the diamond in the bush that all these schools are looking for. Having this 'Adversity Score' that's supposed to measure how much challenge you faced in life make it seem like you're an underdog that toughed it out against all the odds has the potential of being a big advantage.
> Sure, the Angleton guy's parents may be strung out on opioids or whatever, but I gotta be honest, I'm just not seeing why Stanford takes a chance on you as opposed to just giving it to one of the two kids who've proven they can perform at a high level academically test prep or no test prep?
Because not everyone believes in meritocracy. Some believe that Stanford should take bet on the guy's parents that are strung out on opioids even if he has lower test scores to advance their perception of social justice. That's just one possibility. There's also plenty of evidence to suggest that this may be a mechanism to enforce certain informal caps (like the one proven to be enforced on Asians) through geographic discrimination. Basically, a deliberately opaque (remember, this score is private and not given to the student) set of knobs and dials that can be used to achieve what normally can't be achieved legally.
As an analogy, that automatically popped to my mind when I initially heard the idea of "adversity scores", we can think about a common squad or platoon level personnel situation in the military.
Some guys win lots of trophies at shooting contests, and display impressive marksmanship down at the shooting range. But some guys can shoot at that same superhuman level in a fog, with contacts all around them, at night, and under a level of fire so high you'd probably label it "Hollywood". Well, if you get to pick and choose, the guy who can shoot at that level while under fire is obviously a superior pick for you than the show pony who shoots well at the equivalent of beauty pageants.
To me, this seems like the same kind of situation.
No one is taking a bet on anyone's parents, strung out or not. They're taking a bet on one of these kids. I posit that Stanford or SAT or whoever would be correct. The impoverished local yokel from Angleton, TX with strung out parents and a cold, unpracticed 35, is a better bet than the guy with 35 through the efforts of a ton of expensive test prep. And it's obvious that part of why he's a better bet is that he can score the 35 under much less optimal conditions than the guy with expensive test prep can.
Now you can call that difference the "adversity score". Or you can call it "performance consistency". Or you can even just call it "common sense". But it really does seem obvious to me that given two applicants, the one who performed at a high level consistently under sub-optimal conditions is a better choice.
> Some guys win lots of trophies at shooting contests, and display impressive marksmanship down at the shooting range. But some guys can shoot at that same superhuman level in a fog, with contacts all around them, at night, and under a level of fire so high you'd probably label it "Hollywood". Well, if you get to pick and choose, the guy who can shoot at that level while under fire is obviously a superior pick for you than the show pony who shoots well at the equivalent of beauty pageants. To me, this seems like the same kind of situation.
It's not. Some students apply with subpar scores, but often the majority of applicants to these universities apply with perfect or close to perfect grades and SAT scores (think 3.9+, as many AP classes as the school offers, good extracurricular, and probably a >2200 SAT or >33 ACT). It's not just about performance, there's a lot of additional character judgement and luck involved. I went to one an institution widely considered "elite" myself, and I can say firsthand that plenty of students from other universities are just as smart and can work just as effectively under pressure as my classmates. The universities themselves state that many more qualified students apply than are positions. For universities where this is legal, race absolutely comes into play as far as which applicants are selected. There are many universities that can't discriminate based on race due to legal restrictions, and it's widely suspected that this adversity score will be engineering to be strongly correlated with demographics these institutions discriminated in favor of when such discrimination was legal. A backdoor means to what is meant to be prohibited discrimination.
> No one is taking a bet on anyone's parents, strung out or not. They're taking a bet on one of these kids. I posit that Stanford or SAT or whoever would be correct. The impoverished local yokel from Angleton, TX with strung out parents and a cold, unpracticed 35, is a better bet than the guy with 35 through the efforts of a ton of expensive test prep. And it's obvious that part of why he's a better bet is that he can score the 35 under much less optimal conditions than the guy with expensive test prep can.
Yeah, but how we engineer the metric to measure how much of an "impoverished local yokel" is easily subject to abuse. The fact that these 'Adversity Socres' are kept private is highly suspicious. This comes on the heels of racial discrimination becoming more prohibited by the current government. There's strong reason to suspect that this is about circumventing the principles of equal protection of the law. And this is to mention the possibility of people gaming this system to portray themselves as enduring adversity. Wealthier people can probably better min-max this system to boost their diversity scores. Not to mention, in doing so we may be discouraging things that are demonstrated to be healthy. If this adversity score penalizes two parent households, then we're basically discouraging marriage. Even if its creation is earnest, it could easily have negative effects.
