This is... Wild.
I think the "paradox" is that you'd expect disadvantaged students to perform worse on standardized testing.
Sports frequently just requires a ball or a place to run.
In both scenarios, you can still purchase better equipment/training. There are very expensive, effective SAT prep options out there for the wealthy.
If you are in a school that doesn’t have a well funded PTA, you are at a disadvantage.
Plus, for some kids writing a practice exam at home isn’t the same thing as a simulated seating with kids all around and a proctor in the room.
The visible result has been the weakening of these institutions. Do also observe that this is recursive — as these institutions have lowered their standards over decades, the people who go through them and end up leading them are weaker, too.
For one, why pay UC prices for remedial math? For two, community college has a lot more sections of remedial math and more experience teaching it.
If you're in a degree that doesn't need much math, taking remedial math at UC is probably fine; but all the STEM degrees want at least the full calculus series (afaik).
Eh, somewhat. They want some of those outliers hobnobbing with the legacies.
Is that actually the case?
On the other hand, we have: Allen Iverson, Larry Bird, Shaquille O'Neal, Carmelo Anthony, Michael Vick, Bo Jackson, Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Fernando Valenzuela, Albert Pujols, Jim Thorpe, ...
Oh, and LeBron James himself!
So my view is that people of both rich and poor upbringings have a good chance in the sports world these days, at least for those sports where the necessary gear is relatively cheap.
What is the marginal gain of expensive SAT prep? Versus just doing hundreds of mock tests out of some prep book, like SWEs grinding LeetCode?
It was the silly idea that with tests you could produce a fair ordering of students based on potential to succeed.
Flip answer: the bucket width should be 2.5 times the score improved of a prep course.
Obviously, if a school has a cutoff score bucketing is easy, but with excess applicants ordering becomes necessary. I guess this sort of probabilistic score would induce an order for any given student relative to sufficiently superior or inferior applicants.... I'm now kinda curious to figure this problem out. Did not expect an algorithms problem to arise in this thread lol