The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. The stratification is more granular than Asian versus Black or White versus Native America. For example, Jewish students excel beyond the Caucasian average while Cambodian and other Southeast Asian Immigrants perform significantly below the national average for Asian Americans. The challenge for large and heterogeneously diverse nations like the U.S. is to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement. There is also the need to provide quality education to adult learners, a wholly different, but equally important topic in the area of rapid technological change.
> score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically.
Test prep has diminishing marginal returns.
On the flip side that means just 1 hour of prep makes a big impact.
This is what research has found and why a lot of focus is on getting kids to do any studying for anything at all.
Many kids do zero homework and zero studying. Getting them to 1 is the hardest part.
This is the biggest actionable problem for these exams. It doesn’t require race or culture or whatever at all. The research says it requires specialized instruction during school - something to achieve focused studying, as opposed to merely watching the clock go down. Difficult for the hardest students but on average, in aggregates, performs well.
My point is that there are a lot of Asian students at Harvard who did 10 hours of test prep for the SAT. They didn’t go to cram school. There are also students who DID go to cram school. I myself studied about 10 hours for the SAT.
You don’t need cram school to improve test scores. You need some studying instead of none at all.
It's kind of the opposite. I was a highschool dropout, highest level of math was basic algebra. I was able to change my mind about the whole education thing by buying a "prepare yourself for the SAT" book, studying it for a couple of months, doing well, and getting admitted to college. Ended up doing a math + physics dual major.
(I'm really grateful that that avenue to college existed -- I could not have written an admissions essay, done extracurricular activities, or generally been a "good boy" if my life depened on it.)
SAT math is geometry,a 10th grade class for average students. Scoring below 700 isn't due to lack of "push" it's lack of some combination of intelligence, nurture, health, teaching.
Due to the cost and complexity of transcontinental migration, most Asians in US now, and Jews last generation, come from elites from their previous family homeland who successfully migrated to escape bad government or seeking greater opportunity, when it was tactically hard to do so for the average person. It's a natural filter for smart, capable, effective people who can raise children to be same.
The effect tends to fade over time (shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, or docks to docks, in three generations). Now that Jewish immigration has mostly ended, their great-grandchildren (and the descendants of previous generations of Asian immigrants) are, as a cohort, not performing academically as well as today's Asian immigrant children and chidren of immigrants.
The math contest winners and teams, deep into the bench, are nearly all children of immigrants (and Polgar-esque homeschoolers who get to avoid time-wasting distractions of school)
Just a quick note on the word 'push'. We all now the 'tiger parenting' trope. Those parents exists and it makes a difference (with clear 'pushing', which I see as a negative).
But with maths I think it's a bit more subtle. Just the tiny things (even just 'talk' math) you do in early education can make a massive return later. There is no 'mean' in maths education even in ages 4-10 (my kids). We live in the Netherlands, that scores quite well in the table. And still I think math education is at least unambitious for the higher percentiles.
With just a few minutes here and there I've managed to get some pretty abstract concepts in their thinking (say: zero and the empty set, that's something small kids understand intuitively / or the first algorithms with russian multiplication or divide and conquer). There's no need for pushing, and still I think I've already help lay a good foundation of math in my 10 year old. No more than 30 hours invested in math his life.
I volunteer tutor teens in the SAT and the problem is a bit deeper than just parents. A few of my students have a similar amount of base intelligence as me, and if they studied as much as I did, they would have no problem with finding a path of least resistance to the upper-middle/lower-upper class. The problem is that even if I'm 100% sure this path exists, they are skeptical because it seems like I'm in a entirely different world from them, so I'm not different than an MLM influencer promising them $10k a week. I knew a lot of people who spent all their time studying and on extracurriculars, but the same isn't true for my students. It would require a Herculean amount of self-discipline to commit yourself to that much work when no one else you know is taking the same path.
> The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically.
I scored very high in both. Believe me, as new immigrants we were completely clueless about the heated race to top spots. In my case, credits goes to my makers (mom and dad :) and the fact that Iran had fairly good public schools.
Culture is important. Two relevant shockers for me (as a very young new arrival to US):
- disrespect for teachers.
- practically institutionalized disdain for the smart kids. I am talking cultural products here.
So I honestly think cultural backgrounds that feature things like special social and personal regard for those who teach, and special regard for individuals in STEM professions (for example "mr. engineer"), are more at play here than merely ambitious parents. And guess what is driving those ambitious parents? Culture has a lot to do with it.
My daughter credits the test-taking techniques they taught in her SAT prep course for a big boost in her SAT score. She says the test-taking techniques were orthogonal to how well she knew the material. I'm happy for her but at the same time it seems unfair that my ability to afford the SAT prep course gave her an advantage not available to families with lower incomes.
> The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically.
Is there any way to prove/disprove this? Also doesn’t this also beg the question as to why non-Asian parents apparently won’t teach their kids to be good academics?
Not only that, where one lives can impact the funding available to even provide basic education. We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded schools.
But if the education system provides quality education with parental involvement, doesn't that imply that it provides quality education without parental involvement? You know, since parental involvement is not a part of the education system.
Or, in other words, if parental involvement IS a part of the educational system, then it's impossible for the system to provide good outcomes without parental involvement since, you know, it's part of the system.
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm confused why some people seem to blame the educational system for lack of parental involvement in some demographics.
> to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement
That seems very naive to think that school overcome the impact of parenting. If a child doesn't have its physical and psychological needs met then there's not much the school can do. School can't make children do their homework at home either.
The only way I could see your plan of offering identical schooling opportunities for everyone is boarding school, ie taking kids away from their parents. How are you going to stop/force a parent from helping their kid with homework?
This data is certainly stark, but I don’t see how it follows from test scores in Michigan that China is going to do something or other regarding STEM. I guess the core assumption here is that Asian students in America are a proxy for Chinese students in China? As someone who works exclusively with Chinese high schoolers as a college application coach, I find this hard to believe. The thing that Asians very definitely do differently than other groups is parenting. Chinese parents in particular take their kids’ phones away at night. They helicopter over their homework until it’s done. Dating, parties, and many enrichment activities that are part of a “normal” high school experience are usually (not always—nothing is absolute!) off the table. This isn’t genetic, it’s cultural. And it becomes especially obvious once you separate out recent Asian immigrants from longer-term Asian Americans.
To zoom out a bit, I don’t think this post even asks the right question. Why does quantity of STEM major matter, as opposed to quality? The USA is home to the vast majority of leading universities, and no amount of PISA score dominance by Chinese children can change that. If anything, China should be worried about the continuous brain drain of their best, brightest, and most of all wealthiest to Canada and the USA. Not to take anything away from the hard work and ambition of those Chinese people who wish to stay in China, but I just don’t agree that this difference in test scores taken by public high school students is any sort of leading indicator of shifting geopolitical trends.
I think as a society we need to admit different race, in general, have different culture, values, and strengths. I don't even think that's a radical idea, but somehow it is. I have been watching this football competition youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrbljwLslYI
The fun and athleticism you see is awe-inspiring, but I haven't seen a single Asian person competing or even at the event. My guess is a math competition would look a lot different.
I think I'm mostly surprised to see how many of the "White" scores are so low, and so far behind "Asians," after years of hearing that the test is biased towards white / Anglo / native-English speakers raised in Western culture.
I'm also reminded that I (like probably most people commenting on Hacker News) exist in a really small bubble in which everyone I closely associate with was in the top two bands (after going off to college, being recruited from those colleges for careers, and ending up in the same neighborhoods...).
It has a lot to do with culture and expectations. And what you are willing to put your children through. One of my good friends is from Korea and told me about how awful it was to go to school all day, then be off for an hour or two, then go back to a private tutor until 9 or 10pm at night. Rinse and repeat. This is inhumane by American standards but apparently normal in Korea. That type of culture and mentality does not disappear when people immigrate to western countries.
I did get a little confused from how we went from Asians doing well in Michigan means the PRC is going to dominate the engineering sector. There seems to be an implication that these are connected. Its my understanding that these demographic data would represent South, SE, and East Asia as part of the same demographic.
Also, his top observation:
> In the top band there are many more males than females.
Seems like it could be within a margin of error (3 v 5%). Also, there are more males in the bottom band than females (18 vs 14%). This seems spurious at best.
> 2. The Asian kids are hitting the ceiling on this test.
> 3. There are very few students from under-represented groups who score in the top band.
I also suspect that taking his next two observations together imply that he might have a bias against out-groups and in favor of his own in-group. Especially considering much of the topics in the comments section focus on the upcoming SCOTUS trial over affirmative action.
> I did get a little confused from how we went from Asians doing well in Michigan means the PRC is going to dominate the engineering sector. There seems to be an implication that these are connected. Its my understanding that these demographic data would represent South, SE, and East Asia as part of the same demographic.
No, I think his observations about Asians doing well on the SAT in Michigan is unrelated to his point about China. He's saying that since China generally gets high scores on international math tests, and they have a greater population, there's just going to be many more qualified STEM grads than in the US. It's a higher proportion of talent multiplied by a higher population.
This makes sense intuitively. But I'm unsure how reliable these international tests are. Is the test being given at an elite school in Shanghai or in a small rural village? Is it representative of all of China? Do higher scores translate to more innovation down the line? Are high scorers likely to also come up with creative ideas for solving problems? Lots of questions.
"Omitted variable bias" is what is going on here and is a statistical term that everyone needs to understand because it is causing so many race issues in America. The feature that is missing in this simplistic model of intelligence is cultural values. I am definitely not a racist but I am a "culturalist". Some people have a set of personal values (culture) that express themselves as doing better or worse in standardized tests and in life in general. If you were to add in the average weekly time studying variable into this model I can guarantee you the race effect would get washed away. Anyone who has a basic understanding of statistics know about omitted variable bias and it is frustrating to me that society breaks down these issues into simplistic race terms because they are too dumb to do any kind of root cause analysis deeper than the color of your skin.
Why is this extreme "nurture over nature", "blank-slate" mentality not applied to any other disparities in biological expression save for the brain/intellect?
Do we all think that, say, the massive racial disparities in 100m Olympic sprinters, or NBA basketball, is due to "practice" "culture" and "work ethic" primarily rather than genetic/biological factors of physical ability?
Are say a group of 5'8" Asians going to have the same potential ability to play top level basketball compared to a group of 6'8" Blacks? Does practicing change this dominant variable? Is the differentials in height due to "culture" or "biology"?
Is it not common sense that people have a natural range of potential ability for certain things that are biologically constrained, and practice and effort can shift ones ability within this range but not change the biological constraint to where this range lies?
Why does evolution and natural selection stop at the neck? Is the brain not also a part of the body, made up of the same organic material?
And finally, is "work ethic", "culture", "attitude", "affinity for intellectual focus/interests" 0% biological/heritable? Is that not also partially genetic along with the natural potential? Not that this is definitive for one individual to another, but in aggregate group averages bear this out statistically over long periods of time in different locations.
Let's take a step back and just think about the obvious here: how many "hackers" here on hacker news can say they did fairly well on the SAT and standardized tests, above average or well above average, and didn't prepare much at all? Whose parents didn't put much effort at all into pushing them to study for it? I'm sure quite a bit. Is that not an example of natural ability, nature, dominating over nurture? Not that they couldn't have done a bit better if they had, but that their cognitive potential to do well on these tests, to a significant degree was biologically determined? To deny this is similar to the myth that everyone can pull themselves up by the bootstraps. No, often one's inheritance, monetary or biological, have some say in this.
After reading the top comment in the OP; boy, I do not envy Asian high school students trying to get into a college these days! You already work your ass off getting top grades and crafting the most stellar of resumes, and it doesn't matter that your peers worked half as hard with half the achievements: you're going to get rejected by many top universities simply because of your race, a factor that was completely out of your control.
That has to be so frustrating.
If society has normalized folks with 1/8 Native American heritage claiming the legal benefits of that status, then as an Asian I'd be doing my geneology to see if I can justify claiming any other race on my own college admissions.
That student was not rejected because of their race. They were rejected on merit.
Their grades and test scores were median among admitted cohorts at the "reject" institutions, and there's nothing else of note to an elite admissions office on their resume.
I'll say it again. Again, from the perspective of the schools on that list, his kid's grades and test scores are average, not exceptional.
The student meets the minimum bar for consideration, but so do 10X of other students competing for X seats.
The father is suffering snowflake syndrome. Participating in off-season JV track or placing third at one local high school debate tournament are not the sort of accomplishments that elite institutions care about, and nor should they, lest people demonstrating truly elite merit in those endeavors while also receiving top grades and test scores have their very real accomplishments cheapened.
So, the applicant is an average student and in every other way not notable. What would an elite university admit? Again, from their perspective, his academics aren't elite. They are average.
Ironically, the comment ostensibly arguing for merit is actually just saying "my kid should get more credit than is due and if he doesn't it's because of racism".
It's just testing and rewarding people who studied for the stupid test, that's all. It also rewards conformist personalities.
It reminds me of undergrad calculus, where you had to memorize how to do dozens of types of integrals. You're not supposed to ask "what does dx mean?" Asking those types of questions will give you a worse grade.
I remember back when I was supposed to "study" for this thing. I asked "if it's an aptitude test, how does it make sense to study for it?" No one could give me a good answer so I decided it was stupid and never studied for it. I thought it was disgusting that so many people were paying for services, books, etc. to specifically prepare for the test even though the whole pretense of the thing is that you're not supposed to be able to do that.
On the other hand, I loved a lot of the AP stuff (chemistry, physics, calculus) since you were rewarded based on understanding the actual content of a subject, a system that made sense. But it's a good thing I didn't think to ask what "dx" meant back then, otherwise I would have probably gotten a worse score.
has the SAT gotten way easier on recent decades or have students just gotten that much smarter or better at taking it, and universities gotten a lot stricter about accepting students with lower scores?
one of the commenters in the linked article mentions that their son, with an SAT score of over 1500, was rejected by a number of normal state universities such as the University of Texas at Austin (a great school but not like an ivy league exclusive school)
in 1995 I went to university of Texas, they had a policy of automatically accepting anyone with a score over 1200 without any additional requirements. many of my peers were accepted with far lower scores. Now, according to collegesomply.com, the average SAT score for students at University of Texas is 1350
I haven't really been following the evolution of this test, but have scores risen dramatically over the last could decades, and why?
I think a sometimes-easy-to-overlook factor is that many state flagship institutions like UT-Austin have a strong bias or preference for in-state applicants. Famously, I remember being told that out-of-state applicants to my state's big, somewhat well-known, public university needed better credentials than highly selective private institutions required/recommended . . .
Kids are applying to more schools today than in the past (pre Covid study)
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/09/a-majority-...
It could be with the higher applications that just means the 1200 score naturally migrated higher, they really could not accept the same number of students at that score.
I had something like that commenter's score in the 1980's and was offered scholarships for four years for public universities in Texas and both gave me a private pre high school graduation tour so maybe the other criteria for this particular student (extracurricular activities, school scores, rank) were not comparable or that is just a random internet troll (disqus is particularly easy to spam based on other websites I've seen use it or maybe that's just the ubiquity of disqus, although it would not load for me:) ).
It matters to what degree you are applying too. The average SAT score will vary by school (I think the School of Engineering is the highest and the College of Natural Sciences the second) and by major. UT has a top 10 CS program and will only accept a certain number of out-of-state residents. We would have to know the academic achievements of the out-of-state residents applying to the CS program to say if anything funny is going on here.
IIRC scores actually went down for a while, as some schools/states were mandating or heavily encouraging students to take the SAT. That made the test-taking pool less self-selective, so it now includes more students who are less prepared for the test.
A related issue, that people are slowly starting to realize, is that there are big variations in life expectancy between races. Asians live 10 years longer than blacks on average (and about 7 years longer than whites) [0]. Also, women live about 4 years longer than men.
These differences may not seem big relative to total lifespan, but they are enormous relative to retirement span, and that has huge implications for the fairness of defined-benefit programs like Social Security. If we take 65 as the retirement age, then the average black male gets about 8 years of retirement, while the average Asian female gets 23 years.
That creates grotesque unfairness in Social Security payouts. The Asian female and black male might contribute the exact same amount to the program over the course of their careers, but the former will receive about 3x more in payouts than the latter.
I doubt our society is capable of repairing the grievous unfairness of life expectancy gaps. But we should at least not add racist insult to racial injury by using schemes like Social Security.
The other side of this is that the average Asian also has longer to accrue wealth. So when we're looking at racial equity data, and Asians end up wealthier, at least part of the reason is that they just live longer. It's not all structural racism, as some propose.
The fact of the matter is that different groups are different. For example, Asian parents are notorious for making their kids study six hours a night. African American parents are notorious for not making their kids study six hours a night. These two groups are never going to end up in the same place. And you have to let that happen because we all have the freedom to choose how we live our lives. We cannot, and should not, force values onto any people.
> Asian high-school students spend significantly more time studying and doing homework, Ramey found, than any other ethnic or racial group. Averaged over the entire year (including summer vacations), the average, non-Hispanic white student spends 5.5 hours per week studying and doing homework, while Hispanic and non-Hispanic black students spend even less. In contrast, the average Asian student spends a whopping 13 hours per week. Parents' educational levels do not explain the differences, Ramey said, as these become even greater if the sample is limited to children who have at least one parent with a college degree. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110505103345.h...)
This is why I encourage all my south asian friends/relatives to not identify as asian when applying to jobs/universities. Even mixed race is better, hispanic and african american makes things easy mode - I get interviews guaranteed wherever I want.
There’s actually a very interesting 1995 research paper that studied the relationship between SAT scores and race and family income.
In every single money bracket white and Asian students outperformed URMs. Perhaps most surprisingly white students whose parents made less than 10k a year performed roughly equal to black students whose parents earned between 60-70k a year.
These numbers are almost 30 years old but id doubt there’s been some massive change. It’s reductive and not accurate at all to boil it down to just socioeconomics. There’s obviously more going on but there’s sadly very little research going on that is not heavily ideologically motivated (on both sides).
Correlation != causation. It could be that people with genes for high intelligence tend to be in high demand on the job market and make a lot of money, and also tend to pass those genes on to their children, which gives them an advantage SAT
I wonder how much of this is a self fulfilling prophecy due to racially weighted admission. i.e Many Asian parents are painfully aware of how much the deck is stacked against their kid, and therefore allocates extra time and resources accordingly to overcome the difficulties.
>1. In the top band there are many more males than females.
Is 5% of boys scoring in the top band, compared to 3% of girls, really "many more males"? (Yes, I know that means that 60% more boys than girls scored in the top band. But the percentages are what matter here.)
EDIT: From a comment:
>Also, in the bottom band, there are many more males than females.
>It seems to be yet another confirmation of the greater male variability hypothesis
I feel foolish for not mentioning this. I think 18% of boys in the bottom band versus 14% of girls is "many more males" only in the sense that the 5% versus 3% figure above is, but taken together, yes, this is more evidence of male scores being the same on average but having a wider distribution.
The parents in my community growing up were poor. But all our parents worked with us every day to push us to success. We had a neighborhood working together every summer, parents involved in the school board, etc.
I’ve see that slip over time. Particularly, the idea parents can make enough to spend time. But also a general attitude.
One thing during the George Floyd riots I heard was “it’s horrible what happened to Floyd. But the real issue is that George Floyd should have been a foreman in a factory. He should have had a family to go home to, a reason not to be doing drugs and children to care for. The tragedy is those opportunities don’t exist”
It comes down to parents being involved. Often they can’t or they’re distracted due to stress. Government can’t help directly, it’s about providing the opportunity for parents to nurture and support. It’s also that parents need to potentially pick their focus. I personally took a 50% pay cut, moved to a better area and made other sacrifices to ensure my children can have the best opportunity. I could afford that, all Americans should be afforded that. It starts with more good jobs.
Asian parents send their kids to extracurricular learning centers like Kumon while everyone else lets their kids obsess over Tik Tok dance videos. Not surprised by the result.
SAT Math is just like Leetcode. It's recognizing problem patterns and strategies for solving them in a timely fashion. To be successful you have to practice, practice, practice.
I find it very surprising that the term "Asian" lives in this twilight zone where nobody is sure if it includes India, the second largest country in the region.
For the SAT distribution tables, the term Asian includes Indians I assume, while the following table from the German professor does not break out India. smh.
[+] [-] aabajian|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] basic_test_prep|3 years ago|reply
Test prep has diminishing marginal returns.
On the flip side that means just 1 hour of prep makes a big impact.
This is what research has found and why a lot of focus is on getting kids to do any studying for anything at all.
Many kids do zero homework and zero studying. Getting them to 1 is the hardest part.
This is the biggest actionable problem for these exams. It doesn’t require race or culture or whatever at all. The research says it requires specialized instruction during school - something to achieve focused studying, as opposed to merely watching the clock go down. Difficult for the hardest students but on average, in aggregates, performs well.
My point is that there are a lot of Asian students at Harvard who did 10 hours of test prep for the SAT. They didn’t go to cram school. There are also students who DID go to cram school. I myself studied about 10 hours for the SAT.
You don’t need cram school to improve test scores. You need some studying instead of none at all.
[+] [-] dilap|3 years ago|reply
(I'm really grateful that that avenue to college existed -- I could not have written an admissions essay, done extracurricular activities, or generally been a "good boy" if my life depened on it.)
[+] [-] lupire|3 years ago|reply
Due to the cost and complexity of transcontinental migration, most Asians in US now, and Jews last generation, come from elites from their previous family homeland who successfully migrated to escape bad government or seeking greater opportunity, when it was tactically hard to do so for the average person. It's a natural filter for smart, capable, effective people who can raise children to be same.
The effect tends to fade over time (shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, or docks to docks, in three generations). Now that Jewish immigration has mostly ended, their great-grandchildren (and the descendants of previous generations of Asian immigrants) are, as a cohort, not performing academically as well as today's Asian immigrant children and chidren of immigrants.
The math contest winners and teams, deep into the bench, are nearly all children of immigrants (and Polgar-esque homeschoolers who get to avoid time-wasting distractions of school)
[+] [-] wjnc|3 years ago|reply
But with maths I think it's a bit more subtle. Just the tiny things (even just 'talk' math) you do in early education can make a massive return later. There is no 'mean' in maths education even in ages 4-10 (my kids). We live in the Netherlands, that scores quite well in the table. And still I think math education is at least unambitious for the higher percentiles.
With just a few minutes here and there I've managed to get some pretty abstract concepts in their thinking (say: zero and the empty set, that's something small kids understand intuitively / or the first algorithms with russian multiplication or divide and conquer). There's no need for pushing, and still I think I've already help lay a good foundation of math in my 10 year old. No more than 30 hours invested in math his life.
[+] [-] Aunche|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eternalban|3 years ago|reply
I scored very high in both. Believe me, as new immigrants we were completely clueless about the heated race to top spots. In my case, credits goes to my makers (mom and dad :) and the fact that Iran had fairly good public schools.
Culture is important. Two relevant shockers for me (as a very young new arrival to US):
- disrespect for teachers.
- practically institutionalized disdain for the smart kids. I am talking cultural products here.
So I honestly think cultural backgrounds that feature things like special social and personal regard for those who teach, and special regard for individuals in STEM professions (for example "mr. engineer"), are more at play here than merely ambitious parents. And guess what is driving those ambitious parents? Culture has a lot to do with it.
[+] [-] billsmithaustin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] faeriechangling|3 years ago|reply
Is there any way to prove/disprove this? Also doesn’t this also beg the question as to why non-Asian parents apparently won’t teach their kids to be good academics?
[+] [-] socialismisok|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway6734|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmah|3 years ago|reply
Or, in other words, if parental involvement IS a part of the educational system, then it's impossible for the system to provide good outcomes without parental involvement since, you know, it's part of the system.
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm confused why some people seem to blame the educational system for lack of parental involvement in some demographics.
[+] [-] TeeMassive|3 years ago|reply
That seems very naive to think that school overcome the impact of parenting. If a child doesn't have its physical and psychological needs met then there's not much the school can do. School can't make children do their homework at home either.
[+] [-] ajhurliman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaqalopes|3 years ago|reply
To zoom out a bit, I don’t think this post even asks the right question. Why does quantity of STEM major matter, as opposed to quality? The USA is home to the vast majority of leading universities, and no amount of PISA score dominance by Chinese children can change that. If anything, China should be worried about the continuous brain drain of their best, brightest, and most of all wealthiest to Canada and the USA. Not to take anything away from the hard work and ambition of those Chinese people who wish to stay in China, but I just don’t agree that this difference in test scores taken by public high school students is any sort of leading indicator of shifting geopolitical trends.
[+] [-] davidn20|3 years ago|reply
The fun and athleticism you see is awe-inspiring, but I haven't seen a single Asian person competing or even at the event. My guess is a math competition would look a lot different.
[+] [-] warner25|3 years ago|reply
I'm also reminded that I (like probably most people commenting on Hacker News) exist in a really small bubble in which everyone I closely associate with was in the top two bands (after going off to college, being recruited from those colleges for careers, and ending up in the same neighborhoods...).
[+] [-] mberning|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chewbacha|3 years ago|reply
I did get a little confused from how we went from Asians doing well in Michigan means the PRC is going to dominate the engineering sector. There seems to be an implication that these are connected. Its my understanding that these demographic data would represent South, SE, and East Asia as part of the same demographic.
Also, his top observation: > In the top band there are many more males than females.
Seems like it could be within a margin of error (3 v 5%). Also, there are more males in the bottom band than females (18 vs 14%). This seems spurious at best.
> 2. The Asian kids are hitting the ceiling on this test. > 3. There are very few students from under-represented groups who score in the top band.
I also suspect that taking his next two observations together imply that he might have a bias against out-groups and in favor of his own in-group. Especially considering much of the topics in the comments section focus on the upcoming SCOTUS trial over affirmative action.
[+] [-] pradn|3 years ago|reply
No, I think his observations about Asians doing well on the SAT in Michigan is unrelated to his point about China. He's saying that since China generally gets high scores on international math tests, and they have a greater population, there's just going to be many more qualified STEM grads than in the US. It's a higher proportion of talent multiplied by a higher population.
This makes sense intuitively. But I'm unsure how reliable these international tests are. Is the test being given at an elite school in Shanghai or in a small rural village? Is it representative of all of China? Do higher scores translate to more innovation down the line? Are high scorers likely to also come up with creative ideas for solving problems? Lots of questions.
[+] [-] bloaf|3 years ago|reply
There is no margin of error when your sample is the entire population.
[+] [-] fullshark|3 years ago|reply
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2022/10/sat-score-distribution...
[+] [-] fasteddie31003|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PKop|3 years ago|reply
Do we all think that, say, the massive racial disparities in 100m Olympic sprinters, or NBA basketball, is due to "practice" "culture" and "work ethic" primarily rather than genetic/biological factors of physical ability?
Are say a group of 5'8" Asians going to have the same potential ability to play top level basketball compared to a group of 6'8" Blacks? Does practicing change this dominant variable? Is the differentials in height due to "culture" or "biology"?
Is it not common sense that people have a natural range of potential ability for certain things that are biologically constrained, and practice and effort can shift ones ability within this range but not change the biological constraint to where this range lies?
Why does evolution and natural selection stop at the neck? Is the brain not also a part of the body, made up of the same organic material?
And finally, is "work ethic", "culture", "attitude", "affinity for intellectual focus/interests" 0% biological/heritable? Is that not also partially genetic along with the natural potential? Not that this is definitive for one individual to another, but in aggregate group averages bear this out statistically over long periods of time in different locations.
Let's take a step back and just think about the obvious here: how many "hackers" here on hacker news can say they did fairly well on the SAT and standardized tests, above average or well above average, and didn't prepare much at all? Whose parents didn't put much effort at all into pushing them to study for it? I'm sure quite a bit. Is that not an example of natural ability, nature, dominating over nurture? Not that they couldn't have done a bit better if they had, but that their cognitive potential to do well on these tests, to a significant degree was biologically determined? To deny this is similar to the myth that everyone can pull themselves up by the bootstraps. No, often one's inheritance, monetary or biological, have some say in this.
[+] [-] coryfklein|3 years ago|reply
That has to be so frustrating.
If society has normalized folks with 1/8 Native American heritage claiming the legal benefits of that status, then as an Asian I'd be doing my geneology to see if I can justify claiming any other race on my own college admissions.
[+] [-] thwayunion|3 years ago|reply
Their grades and test scores were median among admitted cohorts at the "reject" institutions, and there's nothing else of note to an elite admissions office on their resume.
I'll say it again. Again, from the perspective of the schools on that list, his kid's grades and test scores are average, not exceptional.
The student meets the minimum bar for consideration, but so do 10X of other students competing for X seats.
The father is suffering snowflake syndrome. Participating in off-season JV track or placing third at one local high school debate tournament are not the sort of accomplishments that elite institutions care about, and nor should they, lest people demonstrating truly elite merit in those endeavors while also receiving top grades and test scores have their very real accomplishments cheapened.
So, the applicant is an average student and in every other way not notable. What would an elite university admit? Again, from their perspective, his academics aren't elite. They are average.
Ironically, the comment ostensibly arguing for merit is actually just saying "my kid should get more credit than is due and if he doesn't it's because of racism".
[+] [-] kirevmaco|3 years ago|reply
It reminds me of undergrad calculus, where you had to memorize how to do dozens of types of integrals. You're not supposed to ask "what does dx mean?" Asking those types of questions will give you a worse grade.
I remember back when I was supposed to "study" for this thing. I asked "if it's an aptitude test, how does it make sense to study for it?" No one could give me a good answer so I decided it was stupid and never studied for it. I thought it was disgusting that so many people were paying for services, books, etc. to specifically prepare for the test even though the whole pretense of the thing is that you're not supposed to be able to do that.
On the other hand, I loved a lot of the AP stuff (chemistry, physics, calculus) since you were rewarded based on understanding the actual content of a subject, a system that made sense. But it's a good thing I didn't think to ask what "dx" meant back then, otherwise I would have probably gotten a worse score.
[+] [-] ryan93|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uglycoyote|3 years ago|reply
one of the commenters in the linked article mentions that their son, with an SAT score of over 1500, was rejected by a number of normal state universities such as the University of Texas at Austin (a great school but not like an ivy league exclusive school)
in 1995 I went to university of Texas, they had a policy of automatically accepting anyone with a score over 1200 without any additional requirements. many of my peers were accepted with far lower scores. Now, according to collegesomply.com, the average SAT score for students at University of Texas is 1350
I haven't really been following the evolution of this test, but have scores risen dramatically over the last could decades, and why?
[+] [-] clusterhacks|3 years ago|reply
https://blog.prepscholar.com/average-sat-scores-over-time
I think a sometimes-easy-to-overlook factor is that many state flagship institutions like UT-Austin have a strong bias or preference for in-state applicants. Famously, I remember being told that out-of-state applicants to my state's big, somewhat well-known, public university needed better credentials than highly selective private institutions required/recommended . . .
[+] [-] stevenwoo|3 years ago|reply
I had something like that commenter's score in the 1980's and was offered scholarships for four years for public universities in Texas and both gave me a private pre high school graduation tour so maybe the other criteria for this particular student (extracurricular activities, school scores, rank) were not comparable or that is just a random internet troll (disqus is particularly easy to spam based on other websites I've seen use it or maybe that's just the ubiquity of disqus, although it would not load for me:) ).
[+] [-] vjshah|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megaman821|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnicholas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d_burfoot|3 years ago|reply
These differences may not seem big relative to total lifespan, but they are enormous relative to retirement span, and that has huge implications for the fairness of defined-benefit programs like Social Security. If we take 65 as the retirement age, then the average black male gets about 8 years of retirement, while the average Asian female gets 23 years.
That creates grotesque unfairness in Social Security payouts. The Asian female and black male might contribute the exact same amount to the program over the course of their careers, but the former will receive about 3x more in payouts than the latter.
I doubt our society is capable of repairing the grievous unfairness of life expectancy gaps. But we should at least not add racist insult to racial injury by using schemes like Social Security.
[0] : https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/life-expectanc....
[+] [-] Gareth321|3 years ago|reply
The fact of the matter is that different groups are different. For example, Asian parents are notorious for making their kids study six hours a night. African American parents are notorious for not making their kids study six hours a night. These two groups are never going to end up in the same place. And you have to let that happen because we all have the freedom to choose how we live our lives. We cannot, and should not, force values onto any people.
> Asian high-school students spend significantly more time studying and doing homework, Ramey found, than any other ethnic or racial group. Averaged over the entire year (including summer vacations), the average, non-Hispanic white student spends 5.5 hours per week studying and doing homework, while Hispanic and non-Hispanic black students spend even less. In contrast, the average Asian student spends a whopping 13 hours per week. Parents' educational levels do not explain the differences, Ramey said, as these become even greater if the sample is limited to children who have at least one parent with a college degree. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110505103345.h...)
Stats taken from: https://www.bls.gov/tus/
[+] [-] questime|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thehappypm|3 years ago|reply
https://statisticalatlas.com/state/Michigan/Household-Income
[+] [-] ffwszgf|3 years ago|reply
In every single money bracket white and Asian students outperformed URMs. Perhaps most surprisingly white students whose parents made less than 10k a year performed roughly equal to black students whose parents earned between 60-70k a year.
These numbers are almost 30 years old but id doubt there’s been some massive change. It’s reductive and not accurate at all to boil it down to just socioeconomics. There’s obviously more going on but there’s sadly very little research going on that is not heavily ideologically motivated (on both sides).
[+] [-] throwaway8582|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Paul_S|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukas099|3 years ago|reply
edit: added '?'
[+] [-] afterwalk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TMWNN|3 years ago|reply
Is 5% of boys scoring in the top band, compared to 3% of girls, really "many more males"? (Yes, I know that means that 60% more boys than girls scored in the top band. But the percentages are what matter here.)
EDIT: From a comment:
>Also, in the bottom band, there are many more males than females.
>It seems to be yet another confirmation of the greater male variability hypothesis
I feel foolish for not mentioning this. I think 18% of boys in the bottom band versus 14% of girls is "many more males" only in the sense that the 5% versus 3% figure above is, but taken together, yes, this is more evidence of male scores being the same on average but having a wider distribution.
>or is it considered a fact by now?
It sure wasn't in 2005! (For others' benefit, the commenter is alluding to what happened to Larry Summers as Harvard president. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_b...>)
EDIT 2: The blogger himself addressed it back in 2005! <https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2005/02/summers-lynching.html>
[+] [-] lettergram|3 years ago|reply
The parents in my community growing up were poor. But all our parents worked with us every day to push us to success. We had a neighborhood working together every summer, parents involved in the school board, etc.
I’ve see that slip over time. Particularly, the idea parents can make enough to spend time. But also a general attitude.
One thing during the George Floyd riots I heard was “it’s horrible what happened to Floyd. But the real issue is that George Floyd should have been a foreman in a factory. He should have had a family to go home to, a reason not to be doing drugs and children to care for. The tragedy is those opportunities don’t exist”
It comes down to parents being involved. Often they can’t or they’re distracted due to stress. Government can’t help directly, it’s about providing the opportunity for parents to nurture and support. It’s also that parents need to potentially pick their focus. I personally took a 50% pay cut, moved to a better area and made other sacrifices to ensure my children can have the best opportunity. I could afford that, all Americans should be afforded that. It starts with more good jobs.
[+] [-] atlgator|3 years ago|reply
SAT Math is just like Leetcode. It's recognizing problem patterns and strategies for solving them in a timely fashion. To be successful you have to practice, practice, practice.
[+] [-] athew|3 years ago|reply
For the SAT distribution tables, the term Asian includes Indians I assume, while the following table from the German professor does not break out India. smh.
[+] [-] socialismisok|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lexapro|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistrial9|3 years ago|reply
source: professional demographics practice in the USA using Federal Census data