I don't like it. Why bother with standardized testing if you're just going to skew the results with a nebulous, subjective factor?
The lack of transparency makes it even worse.
I think because standardized testing is unfair in that it rewards (in relation to intelligence):
1. A large amount of mediocre rich people
2. A decent chunk of honestly probably slightly above average upper middle class people
3. A small percentage of extremely intelligent poor people
Though yeah, I think the lack of transparency makes most of us Asian Americans go... uh, this is "holistic review" all over again, aka yellow fear.
(And for full disclosure, for academic/socioecon purposes, I consider myself a mediocre to slightly above average upper middle class person. I do extremely well on standardized tests, but I honestly attribute it primarily to my SE background. If I were poor, I wouldn't be getting the scores that I get. I have the scores of a slightly above average middle class person- everything above 750s, but I would probably be scoring around the low 600s if I were poor.)
I'm not a fan. However, I'm less of a fan of how white and Asian conservatives have hijacked the issue of affirmative action as a racist policy.
Asian-America, the diaspora, is not in the best place. People can't seem to get past that Asian-America is more than just China, Japan, Korea and maybe India. The newer immigrant groups are struggling in this country economically and academically. The high school graduation rates for some Southeast Asian immigrant groups is profoundly low.
It is weird and nebulous. I want there to be a better option.
But my "Fuck you" instinct towards white conservatives that use Asian-Americans as a wedge against other people of color, and well off immigrant groups who don't give a fuck about the diaspora or Asian-America as a whole, is much, much stronger.
PREACHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
Also, I recently refound this great article about
why Asian Americans "do" so well in school.
https://items.ssrc.org/it-takes-more-than-grit-reframing-asian-american-academic-achievement/
Key passages:
In Los Angeles, Asians graduate from college at higher rates than all groups, including Whites. More than half (51 percent) of Asians in LA have at least a college degree compared to 48 percent of whites, 26 percent of blacks, and 12 percent of Latinos.1 Most of us are no longer surprised by findings like these.
We hear and read about the exceptional educational outcomes of Asian Americans when colleges and universities—especially Ivy Leagues—release their latest admissions figures.
"These figures would be unremarkable if Asian American students uniformly hailed from high socioeconomic backgrounds, but this is not the case."
Asian Americans make up more than one-fifth of the entering classes in Ivy League universities like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia yet are only 6 percent of the country's population. In prestigious public universities like the University of California, Berkeley, they comprise more than 40 percent of the student body. These figures would be unremarkable if Asian American students uniformly hailed from high socioeconomic backgrounds, but this is not the case.
Even the children of Chinese immigrants and Vietnamese refugees whose parents have less than a high school education graduate from college at nearly the same rate as their middle-class peers, pointing to a vexing Asian American achievement paradox.
First, not all Asian groups—even those who share a Confucian orientation—boast high levels of education. For example, while 72 percent of Indians, 53 percent of Koreans, and 49 percent of Chinese in LA have earned a bachelor's degree or higher, the corresponding figures for Vietnamese and Cambodians is 30 percent and 18 percent, respectively. Moreover, about one-third of Vietnamese (30 percent) and Cambodians (36 percent) and nearly one-fifth of Chinese (18 percent) do not have a high school diploma.
Disaggregating data highlights the enormously diverse outcomes among Asian Americans, who are often studied as a monolith.
[We] assert that
there is nothing essential about Asian culture or values that promote exceptional academic outcomes. Rather, the cultural manifestations of Asian American achievement have legal and structural roots—namely the change in US immigration law in 1965 that altered the socioeconomic profiles of Asian immigrants. Privileging those with high levels of education and skills, the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 ushered in a stream of highly educated, highly skilled immigrants from Asia.
The change in immigration law explains why contemporary Asian immigrants are, on average, highly educated and highly selected. For example, 51 percent of US Chinese immigrants have a college degree compared to only 4 percent of adults in China, meaning that Chinese immigrants in the United States are more than 12 times as likely to have graduated from college as their non-migrant counterparts. In addition, they are more highly educated than the general US population, 28 percent of whom are college-educated. We refer to this dual positive immigrant selectivity as
hyper-selectivity, and as figure 1 shows, we find similar patterns for Korean immigrants in the United States. While Vietnamese immigrants are less likely to have graduated from college than the US mean, they are still positively selected compared to their non-migrant counterparts.
Hyper-selectivity has both direct and spillover effects. First, hyper-selected immigrants import class-specific cultural frames, institutions, and mindsets from their countries of origin, including a strict
success frame. The frame not only spells out a clear definition of success, but it also lays out a clear pathway to achieve it.
Many Americans work hard, are smart, and exhibit grit in spades. In spite of this, Americans will not graduate from college at the same rates because we begin the race at different points on the starting line. Moreover, some Americans get extra boosts during the race to help them speed across the finish line. So before we measure someone's success by their diplomas, jobs, or zip codes, let's first ask about the diplomas, jobs, and zip codes that came before them.