IIRC this tends to be borne out--more affluent people are both more likely to have had the kind of structured education that lends itself to high SAT scores and more likely to be able to afford (both in terms of time and money) prep courses.

This matters much less than people think it does.

First, test prep has only a modest effect on test scores, on the order of 20-40 points combined ...

The average SAT score among those with a family income of $20,000-$40,000 is 1402 while the average score among those with an income $100,000 higher, $120,000-$140,000, is 1581 for a 179 point difference. Even if every rich family had a private tutor and none of the poor families had any test prep whatsoever, test prep would explain only 20% of the difference 37/179. If rich families rely on tutors and poor families rely on high school courses, the difference in test prep would explain only 6% (11/179) of the difference in score.

The second surprising fact about test prep is that it doesn’t vary nearly as much by income as people imagine. ...

The third fact is that test prep varies by race in the opposite way that people imagine. In the quote above, Chris Hayes suggests that whites use test prep much more than blacks. In fact, blacks use test prep more than whites ...

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/the...

This is anecdotal, but there are different forms of test prep which the wealthy have access to that are way better prep than private tutors.

For example, Kaplan training offers 4-8 (you can pay for more) fully proctored fake SATs, written, tested and graded 100% in the style of the SAT, which they then use to tell you all the answers that you got wrong, where you lost points, what subjects those points were lost in, and then gives you test prep books specifically for the microtopics you don’t know, AND THEN gives you the books most people associate with test prep, AND THEN connects you with a group class, (AND if you wanted to pay for one) a private tutor. The tutors are trained on the subjects, are there to track your progress, and to teach speed tricks.

And if it’s still at all a possibility it doesn’t work, they guaranteed a refund on anything less than a 40% point boost on points you didn’t score or an 80% final score on someone untested.

My point is, test prep as I saw it for the wealthy is not just books, or a tutor, its a vast network of trained practitioners and materials which probe at your weaknesses and give feedback at a rate books or tutors alone could never match. Test prep between the poor and rich looks fundamentally different.

THAT, aside from all of the benefits of economic stability and the educational support parents making 100k+ can provide, is where you get these differences in outcome.

Well, that and the fact that IQ is significantly hereditable, tends to correlate with high income, and also correlates with high standardized test scores.

That only addresses one minor aspect of what might be implied by "structured education".

AFAIK intelligence (i.e., IQ) is correlated with lifetime financial success - or at least is indicated as such in psychological literature, and to me seems sensible intuitively. So, it is believable that the children of the affluent (and probably intelligent) tend also to be intelligent, in addition to receiving better education capitalizing on this. Both (or perhaps really two sides of the same coin) may play a role.

Consider the word "regatta". Someone affluent may have been to such a boating event, or at least heard of it. Someone poor, unless they were extremely well read, would not have had the same opportunity to know the word as someone affluent.

I remember having to ask the teacher to explain a word problem that involved a baseball player hitting "a double" and "a triple", because I had no clue what that meant. That test discriminated against nerds who don't give a shit about baseball.

Sports questions were added to IQ tests to make them harder for women, according (if memory serves) to a BBC documentary on stupidity.

(Fairly fascinating, though packed sufficiently with examples of its topic to make it painful to watch.)

http://www.earthprotect.com/index.php/media-gallery/mediaite...

Drat, that video is not available. (At least not in my area.) But I'll dig around for it now that I know the title. Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ82lJkR-OQ

>This documentary about stupidity tells us the history of the word "moron" ...

That's so relevant now that we all know the Secretary of State called the President of the United States a "Fucking Moron", and nobody challenged or disagreed with him, because they all knew he was right.

Yeah, I'm aware the video itself isn't available. I'd run across it on YouTube a while back, though that version is also down. I've not found a canonical link via the BBC yet though I'd expect there is one.

Cub scouts tend to have one every year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raingutter_regatta

But the elite catamaran style tends to dominate over the standard design.

But yes, there are concepts that allow a single question to be preferential to people of specific backgrounds.

There's also the Royal St. John's Regatta [1], the oldest annual sporting event in North America. The day of the race is a holiday in St. John's (if weather permits boat races) so everyone in town knows about it.

(There's a Dingle Regatta in Ireland, there's a famous dance tune named after it but I've not been to Dingle and don't know what their regatta is actually like.)

Come to think of it, for all the talk of recognizing the word as a class thing, isn't it much more likely to be an "old coastal area" thing? You might need to be fairly rich to have a sailboat to race, but every place I've been around boat races it's been a huge party environment with very broad appeal and probably 100% local recognition. They're just not called regattas in Michigan...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_St._John%27s_Regatta

And until very recently, gay people weren't allowed to join the scouts.

I guess a non-affluent, prepubescent (cub scouts are 7-10 years old), gay boy might have missed that chance to learn the word "regatta".

Well should not schools be trying to widen all their students reading ability? is this not a given if you want to goto university

Part of the problem is that the context for the questions involves things that affluent students are familiar with. As I understand it, that can have a much larger impact than what one might think:

For example, imagine if you (or many HN readers) took a test with questions framed around coding ('I'm going to own this', I'd be thinking), or the same questions in an abstract sense but framed around the details of working in an oil refinery. Now add that you are 16 or 17 years old, from a family where nobody has taken SATs or gone to college before, wondering whether you belong, and under enormous pressure to do well enough to get a scholarship. Your future - whether you live as a college-educated professional or as a career Amazon warehouse picker and Uber driver - depends on it.

A major reason kids like that drop out of college at high rates is that they feel isolated and like they are living in a foreign culture with no other 'ex-pats' around. College is a big step for affluent kids but everyone they know has gone, and the campus and town are built around their culture; few or no college environments are like the poor side of town. The non-affluent kids feel like they don't belong, even that they are imposters (and when they go home, their new experiences make them fit in less and less, and people there question why they are wasting time and money). Now imagine those same kids taking the SAT.

I don't really understand this whole idea that this one test is the difference between a successful career and being an Uber driver for the rest of your life.

I didn't even take the SAT. I took the ACT, I have no idea how I did on it. I dropped out of college. And yet somehow I'm still making six figures at a technology company in Denver. And want to talk about coming from rough backgrounds? I'm totally blind. This, among other things, means that I never had math books I could use, often times having to have classmates read me the material so I could even try to do the homework. It means that my top reading speed in Braille is something like 90 words a minute, absurdly slow. But yet, somehow, that one test didn't ruin the rest of my life. survivership bias you might ask? Why certainly. But if I was able to make it through, maybe the tests in question don't act as quite the filter function you're indicating.

That's not even survivorship bias, that's a single anecdote. By that logic, you can't even argue that being blind is a disadvantage because you are blind and you were successful.

Criticism of the SAT and other standardized tests ranges from the reasonable to the ridiculous. If your high school doesn't teach geometry, you're going to have a hard time. A lot of troubled schools can be several years behind the standard progression. Less reasonable is criticism like inner city kids being unable to answer "alice has two yachts, bobby has three yachts, how many yachts do alice and bobby have?" because they've never seen a yacht.

The yacht criticism is usually in the analogy section, where the meaning of the word is critical.

Ah, you're right. And it was the word regatta, not yacht, that was the problem.

You've just proven that regatta is such an unusual word, that you mis-remembered it as "yacht".

It sounds like a kind of Italian cheese to me.

As an elementary school child, I couldn't understand a word problem about baseball that used terms like "hit a double" and "hit a triple," because I didn't give a shit about baseball.

If more recently I read a word problem about rugby that used the term "scrum", I would understand it to mean the players were having a stand-up meeting.

In my defense, it's been a long time. The criticism of the question is more than 20 years old; the question older still. If I'd known this was SAT criticism test Saturday I'd have prepped better.

But for an American knowing basic facts about baseball is not that unusual after all you play it a school and American Football does have the concept of a "line of scrimmage" which is derived from scrum.

The point is that boys are EXPECTED to play it at school (while girls are expected to cheer from the sidelines), so if you don't spend your time doing all the gender-appropriate activities that are expected of you in your spare time, then you miss questions on tests.

The question I couldn't understand discriminated as much against girls who don't give a shit about baseball as it did nerds who don't give a shit about baseball.

I don't give a shit about football (soccer) but do know at least the basics.

University is about a rounded education not just memorising text books - even more so in the USA with 4 year courses and major /minor.

As someone said its passing the airport test - high school should make this clear to students just be thank full its not like the UK when until fairly recently you had to have done Latin at school to get into Oxbridge

I was in fourth grade at the time, not a university. And it was a math test, not a phys-ed test. At no point did anyone in school ever sit me down and teach me what a "single" or a "double" was in baseball. And phys-ed classes never had quizzes or lists of sports terms to memorize, they just told me to get out there in the outfield and wait until it was time to come back in.

My point is to give but one concrete example of some trivial cultural knowledge that was actually required in a real mathematical test, which some people (like you, for example) assume everyone knows the answer to, but that other people (like 9-year-old me, for example) don't, which could cause someone to fail to understand a mathematical question which they were otherwise capable of answering.

I learned a lot about software development from my Gesture Drawing and Rock Carving classes at university (they complemented each other: one was additive, the other subtractive). Gesture Drawing taught me to get something bold and energetic down immediately that captures the overall flow, then iterate quickly and fluidly to incrementally refine it. Rock carving taught me to imagine something hidden deep inside that's solid and tangible, and keep chipping away at it with little nicks and scratches over a long period of time, until it finally reveals itself and becomes smoothly polished.

(And the comment about "scrum" was a joke. Can you imagine a team of rugby players standing up together in front of a dry-erase board before a game, sticking post-it-notes with user stories about tackling and passing scribbled onto them? Isn't that how it works?)

Where does the "less reasonable" criticism you use as an example occur? I don't believe I've ever heard such a criticism in this context.