62 %, approximately, of the students in New York City’s public schools are black or Hispanic. In its eight most prestigious and academically rigorous high schools, however, only10% of the students in the incoming freshman class will be black or Hispanic, just like last year. 80% of the seats will be filled with Asian and white students, mostly Asians. This pattern of racial and ethnic disparity has existed for years at the city’s elite public high schools. Not surprisingly, the seeming inequity creates anger, frustration, demagoguery and and accusations of racism. Solutions, however, have been elusive and remain so.
Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, perhaps the most famous of the city’s specialized high schools (after the renowned High School For the Performing Arts), only awarded three of its 777 offers to black students, 21 to Hispanic students, and the rest to white and Asian students. Admission to these schools is considered a potential way out of poverty, but that factor (true or not), is not included in the consideration of who gets in. The sole criteria are the scores on a 114-question, three-hour exam, the Specialized High School Admissions Test. It is designed to assess a student’s math, English and critical thinking skills, along with time management ability.
Under the boot-strapping “disparate impact” logic used to find racism whenever results don’t fall neatly into demographic percentages, the admission test has been perpetually attacked as racially discriminatory, but no one has figured out how or why. Nor has anyone been able to devise a skills or ability test that does not consistently result in the same racial and ethnic stratification. Hispanics do better than blacks, whites perform better than Hispanics, and Asians perform the best of all. Sure enough, while just 19% all public school students in New York City are Asian, they received 57% of the offers for the specialized schools.
Ethics Alarms 
Has anyone questioned why this is so?
Why not just let the chips fall where they may? Everyone takes the same test under the same rules.
I wonder if anyone has looked for a potential correlation between students with the highest test scores and students that are raised in stable, two-parent households.
Some rhetorical questions:
What is the percentage of Asians children raised in two-parent households? Hispanics? Whites? Blacks? I realize I’m playing the “identity” game to some degree, but what are the average divorce rates and illegitmate-birth rates when broken down by those four groups? Which children spend the most time without a father, or with a completely disengaged father? With a single mom who must work multiple jobs to support the kids and is therefore gone much of the time?
I’m pretty sure it’s not the tests that need revision.
“I’m pretty sure it’s not the tests that need revision.”
Bravo India November Golf Oscar!
PWS
As a graduate of one of these elite schools (Brooklyn Technical High School, class of 1965), I find these new approaches of elimating merit based admission abhorrent.
My yearbook predomintely Italian and jewish names whoe were able ato past the stringent entrance exams. Sociologically at the time those demographics matched the demographics of the city.
Todays yearbooks show, Asian names, againmatching the demogrpahics of the city.
Both eras sent the brightest of the demographic to take the exam. They passed based and were admitted based on merit and merit lone.
Kick all the political activists out of education at all levels. Bring back higher standards for teachers. Fail students that don’t pass, and hold parents accountable for not doing their jobs. Short term pain would produce long-term results.
When I was a student in college, I was part of a group that included administrators, professors, and students. At one meeting, the topic of admissions was discussed. One of the professors mentioned that not all “A’s” were equal in quality. Much depended on which high school the student attended. Some schools were less stringent in the requirements for high grades than others, so an A student from school X was not as well prepared as an A student from school Z. I was pretty naive and idealistic, and this shocked me.
It seems to me that a significant factor in the disparate test results is the quality of the courses at the students’ high schools. Some students may be able to achieve despite the deficiencies of their school, but many students will not make that effort.
The very idea that large groups possess, as a group, inherent advantages over other groups undercuts American ideals and values. The scientific and educational community, especially after the toxic battles over “The Bell Curve” have essentially agreed that the entire topic is taboo and should remain so. From the standpoint of all three major ethics systems, Reciprocity, Absolutism, and Utilitarianism, that is, in my view, an ethical result, if perhaps, a convenient myth.
According to the Gospel of John 8:31-32 the truth will set you free. Taboos and convenient myths are not the truth, and can have harmful consequences.
My suspicion is that university administrators in their hearts believe in the basic conclusions of “The Bell Curve”, but you have to torture them on the rack to have them admit it. Many of them use psychological defense mechanism to repress these beliefs (reaction formation, repression) to not to feel racial guilt.
The Bell Curve, authored by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, presents several controversial conclusions regarding intelligence and its implications in society. The key points include (using Google AI):
The critical implication that makes this book so controversial is that there is a relation between race and intelligence, and this relationship cannot be explained away by taking social and historical factors into account. This suggest that this relationship may be innate, e.g. genetical factors may play a role.
This book has been shouted down, declared taboo, and as a result the conclusions have never been rebutted in the proper scientific way. The conclusions have been declared unacceptable not on scientific grounds such as facts, but based on beliefs and ethical points of view.
What other things do we see in the educational system:
The operating assumption is that on average members of certain ethic groups are unable to strike it out on their own, as they would lose the competition against members of other groups. (NOTE: this assumption aligns with the conclusions of the Bell Curve). This is why members of some ethnic groups need to be helped at every inch of the way; they are basically dragged to the education system, and and the end they are simply allowed to graduate, despite being lacking in knowledge and skills that their diploma is supposed to signal.
Professors who notice that students who “benefitted” from affirmative action struggle extraordinarily in college have been fired for publicly noticing. An example is Amy Wax who was fired from UPenn for mentioning this to a college; some have called her a white supremacist.
Affirmative action and DEI have led to a decline of educational standards, the content of education (worthless majors e.g. gender studies), and the value of a college degree.
Business notices as well. They have been reluctant to hire recent college graduates, as the graduates are unprepared and unable to solve real business problems. The signal value of a diploma has gone down. Business also found out that putting incompetent and indoctrinated graduates to work in HR, PR, or a DEI related function has disadvantages. Since the Trump reelection DEI is on the way out in business, leading to layoffs.
Graduates notice as well. They find that it is hard to find employment, as their degree is not valued in the labor market, and who have massive student loan debt.
Graduated high school students of certain races who do not benefit from affirmative action notice as well. White students with good grades and SAT who want to get into college encounter significant headwinds. Being a valedictorian is not a guarantee for being selected to a good college. So we now have created a population white male graduates from high school, with nothing to do, who have been bludgeoned over the head at school with anti-white and anti-male messaging, but who are in that situation because of discrimination. These young males without perspective turn bitter and resentful, reject all the ideology and cant on race and gender they have been thought, and have a tendency to turn to the (far) right (e.g. “Groypers”).
And society at large also sees that all the poverty programs since the 1960s, affirmative action, DEI, have not lifted the needle at all to help black people out of poverty. What they see (and what is noticed by e.g. Thomas Sowell) is that things get worse. What is also visible to society that the lack of black success correlates with disfunction such as single motherhood, crime rates, drug related issues, and antisocial behavior (“ratched” or “ghetto” behavior) leading to a phenomenon called “black fatigue”.
After the Trump election it has become clear that accusations of racism have lost currency; as do the theories behind DEI and affirmative action. Many people are not afraid anymore of being called a racist due to overuse. This was different in the 1970s and 1980s, where such an accusation led to intensive soul searching and guilt, and in the 2010s where it lead to denial; now many people just shrug their shoulders.
Due to the change in climate the discussion about why black people do worse on average in the USA than whites and Asians should be revisited. This requires a frank discussion, without taboos.
So what if we conclude (following “The Bell Curve”) that certain groups are less intelligent that other groups, is that shockingly taboo? Why? I am pretty sure college professors have on average a higher IQ and are more intelligent than janitors. So what? Is that observation ethically relevant? Does this determine the level of courtesy someone is due?
Thomas Sowell argued that students need to be met where they are at. Instead of pushing students in colleges they are not qualified for and where they are set up to fail, they need to go to lower tier colleges where they can successfully graduate. Those who do not qualify at all should be steered to the trades, or jobs that require little schooling.
So let’s have a discussion about intelligence, and reopen the discussion on the Bell Curve. Let’s also open another taboo discussion, namely about dysfunctional conduct and social attitudes, that prominently affect low-income neighborhoods, and that correlate strongly with race.
The taboos need to be lifted, as they have resulted in unethical consequences such as low standards, discrimination against whites and Asians, racial distrust, and persistent social dysfunction.
My conspiratorial side believes the social taboos on the topic are more a method to preserve power than to inadvertantly empower racist ideology.
If people are allowed to study the actual outcomes of ill-conceived but plausibly helpful social programs, it means less power to those who administer the programs.
This is true for welfare leading to fatherlessness, education policies saddling debt onto people who otherwise wouldn’t accrue it, housing “assistance” that steers people away from affordable generational wealth because the neighborhood is already “disproportionately minority-occupied” etc. etc.
The most blatant example that it’s about power preservation? “Voter ID is racist.”
It has a lot to do with the community and household you are raised in and your priorities as parents and the expectations of the community. It also has to do with time invested. When your primary priority as a parent is to pay the bills instead of read to your kid before bed, it makes a difference. If your parents encourage education vs think it’s just a waste of effort and who cares, it makes a difference. If the community expects you to do better or be a waste of space, it makes a difference. There isn’t one thing, there’s likely 100 little ones, perhaps the biggest is the expectations others place on you to do better, or that you never will.
The growing perception that college degrees are worthless is not helping.
The problem has not been identified and linked with a corresponding method to replace it with a solution.
Is the problem that the “color” distribution does not match the population pool? Performance and color are two different things and neither produce the other.
Is the problem that culture produces outcomes that are independent of “color”? As I see it, the fact that there are more high performing Asians has to do with cultural family values where children are submissive enough to parents to obey the expectation to study, not color/race/ethnicity. The only caveat to this and “color” would be for people of other colors who may be intellectually stunted by malnourished, exposure to lead/drugs during fetal and/or later development.
Our class valedictorian, dubbed “the smartest guy to ever come down the pike” to the college according to a professor friend, entered the college from Bronx Science, at age … wait for it … SIXTEEN. He put us all to shame. Alan went on to graduate from Yale Law School and did white-collar criminal defense work. If I was a white-collar criminal, I’d want Alan defending me. And, oh by the way, Alan’s Jewish.
I’d be okay with banning prep tests, but I’m not sure how that would be enforced. So I think it would be useless.
My solution: send black and Hispanic kids to the best high school they can get into and then admit them to the best college or university they are qualified to get into and have them get jobs commensurate with their ability. Then they can get married and have kids and their kids can do the best they can, and so forth. These things take time. But to throw your hands up because these problems can’t be solved in an instant is dumb. To say a black kid can’t get into Harvard and become a managing partner at Goldman Sachs is nuts. As HT sagely observed recently, lefties assume everyone can be a doctor or an investment banker or an airline pilot or a Wall Street lawyer. All they need is to be let into the right school. WRONG.
The explanation for this inequity is Jewish and Chinese families insist their kids do super well in school. Black and Hispanic families don’t. For various reasons, but still, end of story.
Whether or not the Bell Curve reveals differences in inherited intelligence, there was a time when children in good schools did quite well, irrespective of ethnicity. Public school education was quite decent before leftists dominated academia and one place to start is with the basics – get back to reading, writing, ciphering, science, history, language and vocational education. Free teachers from any and all social engineering, DEI, sex/gender education and any other misguided fluff. Increase the time children spend in school. Insist that there will be no increases in education spending, teacher pay and benefits until substantial, real educational metrics are achieved, such as reading at grade level. Current statistics are deplorable. Stop paying for poor results.
Take a good, hard look at any and all government programs that purport to help … for example, the Head Start program was supposed to equal the playing field for impoverished children who entered kindergarten without the same knowledge and skill set as children of better economic station. It has been around for some six decades and educational outcomes are, in fact, worse than ever. Has the program ever worked? Can it be overhauled and useful? Should it be discarded?
Of course, recognize that there are many well-intentioned talented teachers in the field. Problems begin with administration and required curriculum. Start at the top in the system, at at the bottom with the children. Purge the corruption, and start actually educating beginning with pre-K.
Bring back Old School …. most of us educated in the 50s and 60s were well prepared for life and/or university. Public education wasn’t ‘broke’ and shouldn’t have been ‘fixed.’
“Free teachers from any and all social engineering, DEI, sex/gender education and any other misguided fluff. Increase the time children spend in school. Insist that there will be no increases in education spending, teacher pay and benefits until substantial, real educational metrics are achieved, such as reading at grade level. Current statistics are deplorable. Stop paying for poor results.”
Ban cellphones in classrooms.
PWS
Amen!!!
This is a topic to which I’ve given a great deal of thought. I think the impasse you identify stems from a fundamental miscalibration of what it means to be “equal”. When we say that all people are equal, do we really mean that every human being can play basketball as well as LeBron James, or vault like Simone Biles, or write music like Mozart? Clearly people are not “equal” in this sense, and to hew to such a definition is to expose a bedrock principle of Western Civilization to scorn and derision. And if we accept that individuals may differ in ability but still remain “equal” in some sense, why should it be beyond the pale to accept that groups of individuals may differ in their abilities and yet remain equal in the same sense?
So which ‘sense’ are we talking about here? Locke, in his work on natural rights, made appeal to two lines of argument. The theological argument identifies human beings as being equal in their natural rights by virtue of all being made in the image of God, all sharing that same spark of divine grace. The secular argument examines humans in a state of nature, having the same basic needs, and the capacity to make moral choices. Both arguments arrive at the same destination: that all persons and therefore all subgroups of persons are *morally* equal. I do not mean, of course, that their *conduct* is morally equal, but that they share the same dignity, the same rights, the same capacity and duty to do right by one another. All are bound to one another by the same rules. This is the lodestar that underpins such products of the Enlightenment like the US Constitution, not some misguided notion that all people are possessed on the same ability, which every person of any experience must know to be false.
This whole topic is being viewed through the lens of what is ‘fair’ to the individuals. What is missing is the cost to society. This is seen as a problem that has to be solved. “Solutions, however, have been elusive and remain so.” What if it isn’t a problem to be solved? Insisting that this can’t be and refusing to admit the reality of the situation (at least for the time being) is destroying our civilization.
Let’s look at computer science. Almost all of our key software is written in C, fortran, or assembly language. Universities have been reducing the amount of C, fortran, and assembly taught in favor of easier languages. This is due to the ability and willingness of the students to learn difficult subjects. There are students who would probably be willing to learn such languages, but we have been systematically excluding them. At this point, you can get a computer science degree from MIT without learning a single compiled language. At my state’s flagship university, C is offered as a class specifically for non-computer science majors only. C++ is only offered as a graduate-level class. Fortran and assembly aren’t offered. Most computer science programs are only offering Python and Java. No C, fortran, or assembly. What I am hearing is that when companies have problems with C, fortran, or assembly code, they call a retired employee in as a consultant to fix the problem. What do we do when they die?
What about air traffic controllers? Under Obama, relevant skills and experience were discouraged in favor of poor family structure. To get into the air traffic control program, engineering background, pilot’s licence, air traffic control experience, and radio operation were all considered NEGATIVES. Poor education, single-family home, and skin color were the qualifications they used to enroll people.
Medical education is a shadow of what it was 2 decades ago. They aren’t even recording grades anymore, even for board exams. So, who is getting the good residencies if no one knows who are the good students? They are being assigned by the new criteria of DEI. You can’t claim unfair discrimination if you can’t prove who the best people are.
Our research efforts are pretty much at a standstill because we have excluded the only people who really make discoveries from the positions. The people who actually move us forward, who make foundational discoveries, are few and far between. Based on the ones I have met, I would say the MINIMUM of 170. This is so high that our IQ tests can’t even measure it accurately. Well, we aren’t hiring people like this into those positions anymore. We are hiring 130 IQ people into them. Well, they can do research, but they don’t make those foundational discoveries. They make incremental changes using what we already know. They follow the rules we have, they don’t make new rules. At an IQ of 150, the population is about 80% male. It gets skewed more male as you go up. You don’t want to even look at the minority distribution. So, we have decided to put our fingers in our ears, cover our eyes, yell really loudly, and pretend reality doesn’t exist.
Enough. Education isn’t to ’empower’ people. It is to generate the people with the skills we need to run the country. We are destroying our society because we don’t want to face the truth that all individuals are not the same and not all groups are the same. We tie ourselves in knots because the people qualified for the top 200 research positions in some fields are overwhelmingly male and white or Asian. Then, we don’t blink an eye when the NBA is 90% black, but only 2% hispanic, and about 0.2% Asian.
Primo, MR; COTD-worthy!
PWS
Test. I have about a dozen opinions and insights and musings and suspicions to share. Jack, feel free to delete this test message.
Test successful!
For most people, math is hard and learning it requires diligent effort
One of the best articles I can cite offhand on the general issue is “Culture and Achievement” by Kay Hymowitz at _City Journal_ more than a decade ago.
She cites Annette Lareau and the concept of “concerted cultivation,” which can be contrasted to “natural growth.”
The issue is not just race but class–social class.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/culture-and-achievement
charles w abbott
rochester NY
Overall this is an ongoing issue worthy of the debate it is getting. But when it comes to the specific topic of the schools in NYC, this is simply a rearranging of the chairs on the deck chairs on the Titanic.
NYC and Seattle are doomed by their choice to elect communists to lead their cities. Both those cities are on a destiny to become the next Baltimore and Detroit. Even if the electorate switches back to more sane candidates, the flight is irreversible. At least for NYC, the financial companies haven’t left yet, unlike Amazon and Starbucks for Seattle. But you know those in charge of Wall Street, the fed and so on are rapidly figuring out how to make this happen. Once those institutions depart, NYC is done.
For the schools specifically, this is the one-two punch of the student pipeline and the financial support going away. There may be the rare low or middle class students who come there, but the majority come from the upper middle class and above. They’re all headed for Florida, Texas or other greener pastures.
If Jack Marshall is trying to “troll” me by proposing that private sector test prep be prohibited, he’s doing a good job.
He wrote in part
>> A good starting place would be for progressives and Democrats to stop
>> attacking the tests as racially biased in the absence any substantive evidence
>>> that they are. The next step, and I believe this wholeheartedly, would be to
>>> ban test prep courses, which create an income bias in the process.
>> The problem eventually has to be resolved by promoting effective family
>> involvement in a child’s intellectual and behavioral development. So far,
>> at least, the cultural resistance to that approach has proven overwhelming.
= – = – = – =
Ok…after the progressives and Democrats stop attacking the tests as racially biased, we have to ban test prep courses because “they create an income bias in the process.”
The tests already have all kinds of bias. The tests have an IQ bias–they are presumably “g-loaded” as the psychologists say. The tests also have a diligence bias, an test-taking bias.
What makes for good test takers? Other things being equal, we can imagine it’s (1) the ability to concentrate, (2) the ability to plan one’s work, (3) the ability to maintain diligence throughout the entire exam period, and (4) the ability to proceed strategically (do the easy questions first for example, and later return to difficult items that seem to require more time).
The whole situation partakes of a bias that favors kids from families that plan ahead and encourage (or arm-twist) their children into preparing for the competitive world.
We’re talking about families living in a city of 8 million people–how surprising it is that the getting into the most competitive free public schools is difficult, and some of the applicants plan in advance! The next thing you will tell me is that it’s hard to find free parking on the street in Manhattan in the middle of the day!
To wax sarcastic, it’s almost as if athletes practice before tournaments, perhaps even under the supervision of a coach. Isn’t preparing for a difficult exam a similar thing?
It’s hard for me to make sense here, and I really don’t want to be sarcastic, but I wish to express my disbelief! Jack is “barking up the wrong tree.”
The AI built into Google is already directing me how to prepare for the exams in question. It mentions guide books, free tutoring, and various tips, such as taking old exams under timed conditions and then reviewing the answers I got wrong, seeking to understand how to arrive at the correct answer. Getting this information was not hard.
The test prep courses are a symptom of the unpleasant reality that family background matters. The essential unfairness isn’t being unable to afford test prep. Here’s my guess: I hypothesize that the essential unfairness is that some applicants know that the best thing to do is start preparing for the exam years in advance–by devoting oneself to scholarly excellence. Not least of all, in mathematics.
There are many things a person can buy in New York City, and many of them you’d be better off not having. Please do not assert that the real problem is that there is a service that you can buy that, if used faithfully and diligently, improves your performance in a “tournament-like” exam to get into one of the best free public high schools.
The ethical problem is a real one. To paraphrase from memory, Thomas Sowell said something like this.
“Some people say the tests are unfair. In reality, life is unfair–the tests measure the results.” –Thomas Sowell.
= – = – = – = – =
What could we do to make life more fair?
1. Maybe families from the lower classes don’t know that you have to start preparing for the exams a few years in advance–this message needs to get out. Perhaps that many parents “kind of know” but don’t really get it. It’s a general message of “concerted cultivation.” It’s a rare student who ends up at Stuyvesant while just drifting through school and “going with the flow.” It’s more like training for competitive sports.
2. Maybe a policy tweak could be added where students who couldn’t initially pass the exam can get into the school later on, starting as a provisional student. The US Army doesn’t just train officers at West Point, for example, but (as I understand it) promising recruits can go to OCS while enlisted men/women.
3. To get into West Point, as I understand it, you need a Congressional nomination. Maybe something like that–promising students can be “nominated” based on on their membership in some geographical area or ethno-racial classification –probably what the progressivs and Democrats are hoping for. It makes me wonder–how are failures “washed out”??
Often I recommend the book _The dream hoarders_ by Richard Reeves, published by Brookings. It’s about ten years old now. He covers the unfairness of objective competitive exams better than I can.
I’ll probably write more. Thanks for reading.
charles w abbott
rochester NY
Keep writing. I still don’t see how test preps can be anything but distorting and unfair. Now bar exam prep courses, which is the only one I ever took, is taken by virtually all law school grads because the exams are state specific and law schools are not. Moreover, it is impossible for all law school students to cover the same. material. I never took an SAT prep or an LSAT prep, because I believe tests should test the test-taker rather than what test-gaming courses his or her parents paid for.
Is the athletic comparison apt? I doubt it. If you are going to have to pass a fitness exam, you can start working out and targeting muscles so you become, in fact, more fit. Test preps are closer to “okay, here is a neat trick when you do pull-ups that will help you do more without getting stronger.” I get it: I have a brilliant niece who has always had problems with standardized tests. My son, in school, could ace standardized tests on topics he knew little about. So to the extent the tests test test-taking, that’s an argument for test prep. It’s also an argument for students having the option of an interview and oral examination in place of the standard test.
Thanks for your reply. You make some good points.
I don’t really know a lot about the whole test prep industry–I never took an in-person test prep course. I did work my way through some SAT Review books or Baron’s GRE Review books. And, for what it’s worth, I have always been a good test taker, though slow.
It’s not sensible to place so much emphasis on a single test in “tournament” like fashion. I’m not sure what the answer is.
–charles w abbott
rochester NY
I’m not sure what the answer *is*.
I fixed it.
Here are a few ideas that may be useful in our discussion.
IDEA NUMBER ONE
Is the entrance exam an “Aptitude Test?” Or is it–in contrast–an “Achievement Test?”
There is probably a difference. An Aptitude Test is going to assess problem solving skills and the ability to understand problems and approach them. An achievement test is going to assess sheer proficiency in increasingly difficult topics.
Perhaps we could say that aptitude is more about teachability, while achievement is more about “Performance Right Now.”
= – = – = – =
IDEA NUMBER TWO: There is more than one sort of “test prep.”
ONE KIND OF TEST PREP: Some “test prep” courses specialize in teaching “One weird trick” or perhaps “Five weird tricks” to get a large “bang for the buck”–a substantive improvement in test scores with 5 or 10 hours of work, an outlay of cash, and some hand holding and exhortation.
For example–in the tests I’m familiar with (SAT and GRE of the 1980s) you were advised to answer every multiple choice question if you could eliminate even one answer. Often there were four possible answers and you chose one and filled in a bubble. If you couldn’t really find the answer, you were encouraged to eliminate one or two possibilities and guess from the remaining ones.
= – = – = – =
ANOTHER KIND OF TEST PREP
I would hypothesize that there are “test prep” courses which are to some extent diagnostic. You take a sample test (or previous year’s test) under controlled conditions that replicate the actually test. The results indicate where to lightly review and where to hunker down, review, and perhaps re-learn entirely (or learn for first time) certain topics.
For example, any test of my math skills would show that I still know “pre-calculus” algebra and especially conic sections, while I would have more trouble solving trigonometry problems, especially under time pressure. Geometry is somewhere in the middle in my own skill set. Someone else in the same test prep course might be stronger in trigonometry and weaker in conic sections.
Were I to prepare for a test with a mathematics component, the rational thing to do–for me–would spend 10x more time on trigonometry topics than on conic sections. I’d want to do it over some months–not in a week.
Additionally, there are various “identities” that are helpful when memorized. If I knew them, I’ve forgotten them. Perhaps its time to memorize them again, or for the first time.
For example, search “indefinite integrals to memorize” and Google AI will provide some. I still recall them being on the end-papers of my 3 semester calculus text book.
= – = – = – = – =
I’ll toss in one of my favorite blog posts on the difficulty of math. It’s from Gregory Cochran, who used to write more at the “West Hunter” blog with his late colleague Henry Harpending. He’s slowed down his blogging there, alas.
It’s worth reading periodically just for the quote from Luis Alvarez
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/07/31/biology-and-human-capital/
thanks for reading!
charles w abbott
rochester NY
P.S.: I know that Cochran and Harpending have/had various controversial ideas and hypotheses. Such things do not easily offend me or make me stop reading.
My favorite definition of IQ tests is “IQ tests measure what IQ tests measure.” Same with admission tests, and the line between “achievement tests” and “aptitude” tests is too blurry to be helpful. I read a story recently about a futuristic quiz show that allowed a contestant to “steal” physical and mental characteristics from his or her opponent based on answering increasingly difficult questions. At one point, a lower IQ contestant took all the knowledge from a much higher IQ contestant. Guess who won?
I agree: no single test is likely to adequately assess both learning and skills, and tests themselves are hostages to moral luck. Remember the “Cheers” episode when Cliff was on Jeopardy and the categories came up “Civil Servants,” “Beer” “Stamps from Around the World”, “Bar Trivia,” “Mothers and Sons,” and “Celibacy.”
As for testing prep, that advice about eliminating answers is basic critical thinking. If a test-taker can’t figure that out by herself, it’s significant. If an applicant wants to do well on a test, then that that individual should do independent research to learn techniques like that, not have parents pay to have someone explain it.
My favorite book on the general topic is _Successful intelligence_ by the psychologist Robert J. Sternberg, who is generally no fan of intelligence tests. No need to bore you with the details. He’s a prolific scholar.
= – = – = – =
Norman Borlaug, who some consider the “human face” of the Green Revolution, said he could just barely get into the University of Minnesota because he wasn’t a good test taker. He said his son later faced the same challenge. There are statues in Borlaug’s honor in Des Moines, and a “World Food Prize” award / lecture annually in Des Moines.
His hometown was Cresco Iowa– his alma mater is the U. of Minnesota.
= – = – =
The even better anecdote is from the scholar of uncertainty and financial trader (and gadfly) Nassim Nicholas Taleb who notes that “There are high schools in the U.S. name after high school dropouts.”
Thanks for coming out to play!
charles w abbott
rochester NY