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<p>The fact still remains that my child was brought up in a home where the parents did not make him cram for the SAT or he would not have scored sub 1200 on the SAT at age 13.</p>
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<p>Why “quite unexpectedly”? It remains that your son had something I would guess most of his former peers at the “low income / high URM neighborhood school” did not have: a (formally) well-educated parent who cares about his child’s future. I told you this before: had your son attended average schools as I did, he probably would have scored ~1800/2400 at age 13 or higher.</p>
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<p>And who is pushing this idea in this thread?</p>
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<p>So every kid who leaves his ethnic school to attend a top school has betrayed the “we’re in this together” mentality consistent with “caring deeply about the plight of poor blacks.” lol.</p>
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<p>Where did I say you pushed the idea? </p>
<p>All I am suggesting is that it is a concept used to question Affirmative Action. For example, as discussed in the book Mismatch by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr… This was in addition to the fact that his example demonstrates how school environment influences SAT performance and how defacto segregation works to keep minorities out of competitive schools.</p>
<p>“Duke basically recruited rich kids of all racial classifications. I’ve no reason to expect significant differences at Duke’s peers. Sure, the average family incomes of Hispanics and Asians were also lower than whites, but both were over $150,000. Again, on average, those students were not poor.”</p>
<p>That was not my experience, nor what was reflected in reading the posts of black students on college confidential. It may have been the result, assuming “rich” means middle class as defined by collegeconfidential. I don’t see how they would have access to financial records at the recruiting stage.</p>
<p>I’m no math wiz, but is it correct to describe “the average kid” in this scenario? If you have a relatively small “n”, coudn’t that make the mode and the average pretty different? I also wonder if when that data was collected, the poorer kids who got into both went to an Ivy, because they had better financial aid. It seemed to me that the top schools admitted the same 800 or so black students. </p>
<p>By the way, this is where I usually pop in to imply there needs to be a threshold of black kids, whether “rich” or poor, to attract the rest of the desired kids. And fab, that’s when you go ballistic about the concept of threshold, and why I would suggest the numbers might drop below that threhold with race-blind admissions.</p>
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<p>I do not think I have seen a single study that suggests this is possible but several that suggest the opposite is true. </p>
<p>My guess is that if we were the type of parents who made our son cram for standardized tests he would have scored 1800+ in his middle school. However, we were not so he did not. However, I think, when he came into a competitive school he was influenced by the kids and the courses he took and did well.</p>
<p>I have no idea if you did well on the SAT because you had the ability to learn in class or if your parents made you cram when you were a kid. However, my feeling is that your parents probably made you cram if you were not a world or national champion in some of the academic Olympiads/ competitions by the time you finished high school. To get a better sense of what happened in your case, can you share how many high school honor courses you took in middle school?</p>
<p>My point is that kids like my child are prevented from accessing good high schools because wealthy districts practice defacto segregation that tracks such kids to alternative schools and prevents them from taking honors and AP level courses that makes it nearly impossible for them to get admitted and succeed in competitive programs at flagship state universities.</p>
<p>This is when I mention I stumbled upon collegeconfidential when my husband suggested my daughter practice, maybe even take a class, and repeat the SAT. (She did take a class, but did not repeat the test by the way. Her score did not increase much during the class.) I thought that was the craziest thing I had ever heard. An interesting artifact of the different things we were exposed to.</p>
<p>Three years later, son studied on his own, and his score increased significantly, but still not to hers.</p>
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<p>SAT recycles old tests questions. Some kids spend years learning to recognize the question and match it with the right answer. They are the pretenders. Hopefully the new SAT can eliminate/reduce such nonsense.</p>
<p>thoughts on affirmative action pertaining to college admissions? I personally disagree with it.</p>
<p>It’s wholly misunderstood. Most people think of it in terms of he gets so I don’t. Instead, people should be thinking in terms of everyone getting, which will create more for everyone.</p>
<p>BTW There are plenty of college seats out there. Under AA no one is denied a seat. Also AA is like a pyramid. The elite colleges at the top of the pyramid likely employ very little AA. It’s much more prevalent at T2 &T3 state schools. Is anyone really complaining about not being able to get into a T3 school?</p>
<p>It’s not a prevalent as you think, it’s just a “boost” like being a legacy.
And white females benefit the most from affirmative action.
AA doesn’t mean that someone can have a 500 point lower SAT and get in, it just makes the person more desirable to the school.</p>
<p>Race shouldn’t be a factor in the admissions process. Until applications don’t have a box for their race, it’s racist and unfair. It makes me unhappy that other people will have an advantage over me because of the color of their skin.</p>
<p>It’s a racist system that has outlived it’s usefulness</p>
<p>Unfair, race shouldn’t matter even the slightest in college applications yet because of AA it does, I’m Indian and I have to list myself as Asian on College App’s and AA is just not fair if you’r asian. AA also I believe hurts the Hispanic and Black community because know people have this perception that these two minorities got into a Elite Univ because of AA not because they deserved to get in and if AA was removed no one could bash the Black and Hispanic community by saying stuff like “Oh, you only got in because of AA”</p>
<p>Is it unfair? Yes.</p>
<p>Do I really care? No, not at all.</p>
<p>-Everything @sosomenza said was A++</p>
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<p>You don’t have to do anything- it’s not required to mention your race.</p>
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<p>Again, I would have done what you did were I in your shoes. I just wouldn’t have given off a big, hollow, ostentatious show of pretending how much I “cared deeply about the plight” of the people I just ran away from. It’s not what you did that I criticize; it’s the self-righteousness you exude that I mock.</p>
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<p>I didn’t say you did. I asked you who pushed that idea.</p>
<p>Honestly CE said it best, “who cares”
I’m black, and I really don’t care either way (I’d rather it be income based)
Elite Colleges can deny you just because, so whining that you didn’t get in cause of AA doesn’t change the fact that you didn’t get in. Colleges like diversity, and can achieve it however they want. Nobody gets denied from a school because they are white or asian or black or hispanic. Everyone needs to simmer down, cause at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. If you get denied from a school and want to say “It’s just cause they had to have black people there…that’s why I didn’t get in” it doesn’t change the fact that you didn’t get in.</p>
<p>And again, AA benefits white females more than any other group.
The program will also probably be done with in the next 20 years or so, considering America’s minorities are increasing, while the majority is decreasing.</p>
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<p>Here’s where I inadvertently insult you while commending your son. You’re trying to make the case that your son is a genius because he went from <1200/2400 at 13 to ~2100/2400 at 16. My guess is that your son could easily have scored ~1800/2400 at 13 had he attended schools that were “just average.” You yourself offer the reason why: “he [would have been] influenced by the kids.” It isn’t that your son’s ability improved from attending the “competitive school” so much as it was unlocked.</p>
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<p>I find this whole anti-preparation mindset to be very humorous. It’s something that only high schoolers and parents do: “ooh, look at me, I’m so smart / my kid is so smart because I / he can do well on standardized tests without preparation.” When I prepared for graduate school standardized exams, the only people I knew who denied preparing were the ones who scored perfectly on math but bombed English, as in performed worse than international students. Everyone else freely admitted having prepared.</p>
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<p>And racial preferences eliminate these arbitrary rules…how?</p>
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<p>My apologies for unclear wording. The data is from Duke’s incoming freshmen for the years 2001 and 2002. These are students who chose to attend Duke.</p>
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<p>Always fair to point out whether averages are meaningful. From a [separate</a> source](<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/04/20/mismatch]separate”>http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/04/20/mismatch), it’s true that 63% of the black freshmen who entered Duke those years came from households earning less than $100,000; so a minority of black freshmen, 37%, came from households that earned more than $100K. But when grouped into those three brackets, the 37% minority is the plurality. Moreover, even if the average income in the $100K+ bracket is less than the corresponding averages for whites, the 37% plurality dominates the 63% majority, as the overall average income for black freshmen was ~$120K.</p>
<p>Make of that what you will.</p>
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<p>Yes, perazziman feels the same way. I criticize this not so much because it’s an outright call for a quota but because of what it implies: elites should admit blacks to facilitate self-segregation. Again, I find it very humorous that perazziman makes such a big deal about how important cultural differences are and how it isn’t “fair” to expect blacks to interact with whites, yet he thinks 70% of black women should be married to white men in the United States, which could only be possible if the cultural differences he thinks are so important don’t matter.</p>