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People who work hard deserve the fruits of their labor, regardless of their economic status. I have no problems with economically disadvantaged hard working people getting into great colleges, I have problems with equally hardworking people being disadvantaged because their parents are successful.


But the richer children are inherently privileged, yet you think providing privilege to poorer children is immoral. Why is one acceptable but the other is not?


Wouldn’t you agree that two people who achieve the same score on the test may not have worked equally hard? If someone scored the same as your child, except they didn’t have good security, good quality schools, parents that could help them, etc, I would say that they in fact worked much harder than your children.

And by the logic of “those who worked harder deserve it more”, well I think you see where this is going.

If anything this adversity score IS making things more fair because it’s providing light to the extra challenges someone might have had and thus who indeed worked harder at it.


We don’t know if they worked harder or not. It’s almost impossible to determine if the reason for any particular success is good teachers, hard work, or genetics.


If this score was unrealistically perfect and able to accurately account for every possible detail, maybe. If instead it just does a cheap job of assuming anyone with a certain set of data points is at a major disadvantage, nope.

The test claims to be measuring a students ability to learn in the first place, not just their current knowledge, so why not aim to make that more accurate instead of bypassing it?


So let me get this correct...

The subject area is the SAT, a test, which is imperfect like all tests, with research which indicates that it's actually problematic for such a diverse country like the USA. So a test like the SAT, which boils down to a single number. Yes that's the subject.

And now they're making the results 2 numbers. The test and some, well known summary of information about the student.

And THIS, THIS is the bridge too far?

Honestly, do you even hear yourself? What should a third party think about your words? Perhaps you could help me and provide a back story of how you've been in opposition to the SAT for a long time, and how this just reinforces a flawed test.

But nope, it sure does seem like you're focusing in on how this test might provide opportunities to black and brown people.

But I'm sure that's not that, because it's hackernews, and we are so polite to each other and reasonable.

So, tell me again why the SAT is good, but SAT + adversity score is bad?


Growing up in a zip code is not a challenge. This "adversity score" doesn't measure adversity.




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