Ten years ago, the NYT et al. was railing against the unfairness of the SAT and ACT. Now, they're basically saying what we were saying then.

Thursday, May 15, 2014

The SAT probably is unfair to the disadvantaged but not for the reasons you've been hearing

This is another one of those posts that I started weeks ago as part of the big SAT thread then didn't get around to posting. One of the big questions was the fairness of the test. I had alluded to the problem but usually as a side question. Part of the reason I didn't spend more time on the question was because of my specialty. Though I did originally certify to teach math and English, I've been focused almost entirely on the former for a number of years, and almost all of the prep work I've done with student has been on the math side.

If I had been working with the verbal part, I would have had to address some uncomfortable questions. The verbal SAT is a good, well-designed and informative test but there are inescapable concerns about its fairness. It is very difficult to design a verbal reasoning test that is not culturally biased. Language and culture are so intertwined that it is almost impossible to even discuss one with out considering the other. Cultural biases are not nearly as much of a concern on the mathematics side of the test.

Still, even in the reasonably objective and unambiguous world of mathematics, there are any number of ways in which background can give an unfair advantage. These include (but are by no means limited to) enrichment activities, role models, high-achieving schools and community culture, support and tutoring, and expensive prep classes.

This last item has become one of if not the central element in the SAT/fairness discussion. All stories on the subject seem to be contractually obligated to talk about expensive test prep courses and yet, as far as I can tell, they all frame the issue in a way that makes the criticisms completely invalid.

There are two fallacies in this standard line of argument: The first is based on confusion over absolute versus relative values; the second is based on a common but profoundly wrong concept of the test itself.

As an absolute statement it is true that if prep courses do any good at all then the ability to pay for them will provide an unfair advantage. The question on the table now, though, is not absolute. The people who are arguing for the elimination of the SAT are also arguing, sometimes implicitly, often explicitly, for grades to take a much larger role in the college selection process to take up the slack. This leads to a very different question: does having money give one a greater advantage on the SAT then it does on GPA?

Private tutoring centers are a huge national industry, and if you send your child to one for any length of time, the cost will probably be far greater than what you would've spent on an SAT prep course. We could, of course, have a long discussion about the intrinsic value of what is taught in one versus the other, but from an economic fairness standpoint, all we care about is the cost and the effectiveness in improving the given metric.

A valid argument here would start with a comparison of the ways that privilege can provide an unfair advantage on the SAT versus GPA, but what we've gotten so far is the pseudo-argument: A is worse than B because A is bad ("French Fries are so fatty; I think I'll have onion rings instead."). As far as I can tell, none of the many stories describing the potential impact of prep courses even mention the existence of the private tutoring industry.

The other fallacy here is the very wrong but very common belief that the SAT is some kind of mysterious black box, the secrets of which can only be revealed by one of the illuminated. I've already been through this at some length but just to reiterate, because of the stability of the tests and the large number of previous editions that the College Board has published, the SAT is one of the most transparent exams you're ever likely to take.

At least on the math side (which is the area I have some experience with), this transparency, along with the nature of the questions, makes the test surprisingly easy to teach and to teach yourself. In the latter case, it goes like this:

Take one of the old tests (don't worry about the time limit);

Check your answers;

Read the explanations for the ones you got wrong;

If you don't understand the explanations for some of those problems, take them to a teacher or administrator and ask for help (as a former teacher, I can tell you that educators love to see this kind of initiative and will go to great lengths to encourage it). There are also free after-school programs that would be glad to help (I volunteer at one of them);

Repeat the process. After you start breaking fifty or sixty percent, work on reducing your time.

If it's this easy, why does anyone bother with a pricey prep course? Well, for one thing, it's not that easy. We are talking about a tremendous amount of work and self-discipline. The courses provide structure and external discipline, not to mention a large dose of motivation and reassurance to counteract the test's foreboding reputation (a problem greatly compounded by journalists' tendency to talk about the exam in dark and mysterious terms).

To sum up, there is tremendous unfairness in our education system. The SAT is sometimes part of that unfairness, but neither for the reasons or to the extent you often hear.

I've spent almost a decade pointing out Nate Cohn's statistical and logical errors. It's a nice change of pace to talking about his plain old bad reporting.

From Monday's NYT:

Gerard Willingham, 30, works as a web administrator and lives in Riverdale, Ga. He voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, but he plans to vote for a third-party candidate in November because of the president’s response to the conflict in Gaza, the issue about which he cares most right now.

“I think it’s made quite a bit of difference in that it made me more heavily than in the past push toward voting for a third party, even if I feel that the candidates almost 100 percent won’t win,” Mr. Willingham said. “It’s starting to reach into my moral conscience, I guess.”

I doubt Cohn himself actually did any of the interviewing for this story, but it's his byline so he gets to take responsibility for this...

Yet again, at first glance in the Georgia voter file the only Gerard Willingham I can find who is 30 and lives in Riverdale... did not vote for Joe Biden in 2020 because he did not vote (in Georgia at least!) in 2020. pic.twitter.com/rbOFPSYR6P

— stephen fowler (@stphnfwlr) May 13, 2024

Many things in the file + searching. Last contact date in the file was in 21, social media/work profiles appearing to match the person don’t show any out of state moves, the registration date is 2018 and would likely be post 20 if he moved away/back.

— stephen fowler (@stphnfwlr) May 13, 2024

 

Before I share a tweet, I like to check out the source (and often more importantly, who follows them). This guy looks pretty solid. 

 

 As far as I know, there's no way of telling when the NPR's Fowler saw the NYT story, but The tweet was time stamped at 12:37 PM the same day that NYT article ran so it was at most a matter of hours for him to do the research necessary to uncover the lie. Furthermore, he did this on his own without the resources of the paper of record.

Since then, other details have emerged supporting the idea that Willingham lied or the paper misreported what he said.

The one guy the Times found who said he voted for Biden in 2020 and won't vote for him over Gaza never actually voted for Biden hahahaha

According to his linkedin, he's also lived in Georgia since at least 2010, so he can't have voted in another state. He just lied to the Times https://t.co/8LvorZ9SEX

— Swann Marcus (@SwannMarcus89) May 14, 2024

This is the latest in a long series of fact checking fails in the political reporting of the New York Times, as was noted by a number of tweets along these lines.

Glad you cleared this up on twitter because usually the NYT prefers to interview GOP operatives and call them undecided voters.

— Jeff (@omelight1) May 14, 2024

To understand what's going on here you first need to go back to the process behind the typical New York Times story (according to former editor, Michael Cieply). 

From Deadline: [Emphasis added.]

Having left the Times on July 25, after almost 12 years as an editor and correspondent, I missed the main heat of the presidential campaign; so I can’t add a word to those self-assessments of the recent political coverage. But these recent mornings-after leave me with some hard-earned thoughts about the Times’ drift from its moorings in the nation at-large.

For starters, it’s important to accept that the New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”
 
It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.

Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?”

The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.”

The impetus is on the reporter first and foremost to find anecdotes which support the narrative. I'm certain there are times when a reporter will come back the next day with a great quote that goes against the story the editor wanted to tell – – most journalists on some level want to be good at their jobs – – but that's not how the incentives line up. The safest course of action is to find someone who will say what your boss wants to hear. The more difficult it is to find those narrative aligned anecdotes, the less likely a reporter, particularly a journeyman reporter overworked and with little sense of job security, will be to look a gift source in the mouth.

The other part of the equation is a lack of consequences for leaving out significant facts or printing things that just aren't true. If the people at the top actually cared about getting these details right, these mistakes would become increasingly rare and, when one did slip through, it would immediately be addressed and very publicly corrected. Furthermore, routinely getting facts wrong would not be a path career success with the paper.

As of this writing, neither Nate Cohn nor the New York Times have acknowledged the error, let alone fixed it.

Either ineffective or unaltruistic

I'm not saying that effective altruism is a scam. I believe that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett sincerely want to use their billions to improve the world. Furthermore with one or two notable exceptions, I think that the Gates foundation and similar organizations have produced important, worthwhile work.

My feelings about some of the specific proposals and methods are a bit more mixed. There's nothing wrong with taking a cold cost-benefit approach to these questions – – if anything that's how I like to do it – – but too much what we've seen has been both overly assured of its own rightness and insufficiently aware of the assumptions that have to be made and the innate murkiness of many of the questions that have to be answered.

My three major issues with effective altruism are:

I have an instinctive distrust of "we're just saying _____________" pitches where invariably the seemingly simple common sense statements are hiding lots of far more debatable and less straightforward claims;

while there are notable exceptions and I can almost hear the eyes rolling what I say this, I generally trust the judgment of governments over rich people in these matters;

any philosophy built around encouraging individuals to accumulate fantastic fortunes so that they can spend them on worthy causes will soon run into the problem that while lots of wealthy people will loudly voice their support for this idea, their actual commitment to the first part will be considerably more reliable than their commitment to the second part.

On a somewhat related point, check out this story from Matt Levine's newsletter:

A less clever — but faster? — form of effective altruism would be “we build a giant casino for crypto gambling, then we steal all the money and use it to buy mosquito nets.” Arguably that is closer to what Bankman-Fried was actually up to, though that’s not quite right either. FTX actually recovered most of the client money, but also it does not seem to have notably devoted a ton of customer money to effective charitable works on behalf of the world’s poorest. 

“We build a giant casino for crypto gambling, steal the money and use it to buy a castle for effective altruist philosophers” is even weirder? Like that’s a good assignment for a philosophy class? “Explain, using utilitarianism, how this is Good, Actually”:

Effective Ventures Foundation bought Wytham Abbey in April 2022 for £14.9 million ($18.6 million) with grants from Open Philanthropy, whose funders include billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. The purchase initially stirred controversy that a charity dedicated to the most efficient use of money for the maximum good was buying one of the finest manor homes in England—and later for Effective Ventures’ connections to crypto swindler Sam Bankman-Fried. ….

While grants from Open Philanthropy were used to fund the purchase and maintenance of Wytham Abbey, Effective Ventures also received money from FTX Foundation—the charity associated with Bankman-Fried, who was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Effective Ventures has since come to a settlement with the FTX estate and paid back the $26.8 million given to it by FTX Foundation.

It’s amid such turmoil that Wytham Abbey is being listed on the open market for £15 million with Charles Elsmore-Wickens at Savills, who spoke exclusively with Bloomberg ahead of the historic listing. For that price, a buyer would get a 27,000-square-foot stately home with 27 bedrooms and 18 bathrooms on 23 acres just 3 miles west of Oxford.

Fine right FTX didn’t actually buy them the castle, but now they have to sell the castle after paying back the money that FTX did give them. Probably that was for mosquito nets.

 

Would manipulating stocks by spreading conspiracy theories about stock manipulation be considered meta-fraud?

Even by meme stock standards, Trump Media is an insane story.

For starters, as James Surowiecki points out "His company has $4 million in revenue, and it lost $58 million last yr, and it was valued at $9 billion, making it arguably the most overvalued company in history."

Then there was the disintegration of the company's auditor, the kind of revelation that would normally make people reexamine a high-flying stock, but as the inimitable Matt Levine points out, with Trump Media this sort of thing doesn't matter. 

(From his newsletter)

 

The funniest job in public accounting is now open:

The Securities and Exchange Commission accused the auditor of Donald Trump’s social-media company of massive fraud affecting hundreds of companies and more than 1,500 regulatory filings.

BF Borgers CPA PC and its founder, Benjamin Borgers, will be permanently suspended from practicing and appearing as accountants before the SEC, and will pay a total of $14 million in fines to settle the probe, the SEC said in a Friday release.

“Ben Borgers and his audit firm, BF Borgers, were responsible for one of the largest wholesale failures by gatekeepers in our financial markets,” Gurbir Grewal, the SEC’s enforcement chief, said in a statement. “Borgers and his firm completely abandoned that role, but thanks to the painstaking work of the SEC staff, Borgers and his sham audit mill have been permanently shut down.” …

Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. became a public company in March. Trump Media “looks forward to working with new auditing partners in accordance with today’s SEC order,” a representative for the company said.

I’m kidding, the job isn’t actually open; last week Trump Media “engaged Semple, Marchal & Cooper, LLP (‘SMC’) as BF Borgers’ replacement.” Here is the SEC’s press release; here is the order shutting down Borgers; here is the SEC staff statement on what to do if you are a pubic company that used Borgers and now needs to find a different auditor. [2]

I have said before that, since Trump Media’s financial statements don’t matter — to its shareholders, to its managers, to its stock price, to its value proposition for its promoters — it doesn’t especially matter that Trump Media used a “sham audit mill.” Still it’s not, you know, good. When it turns out that a company has a fake auditor, that raises some questions. I guess not that many questions. When Trump Media went public, I would not have guessed that it employed a fake auditor, because I was not aware that that was a thing. But if someone’s going to employ a fake auditor, why not Trump Media.

But the fun doesn't stop there. One of the safety valves that keep the upward pressure from getting too high on these stocks is shorting. Grifters trying to inflate stock bubbles hate short sellers. The classic case being Elon Musk who has demonized them to the point of antichrist status, but Trump Media seems to have hit upon a new innovation in that direction.

Trump Media is making a point of telling its shareholders how to prevent their stock from being loaned to short sellers — who bet the price of the shares will drop.

The short-selling-prevention tips posted Wednesday on Trump Media’s website come as its DJT stock has fallen sharply in price since it began being public trading on March 26 — and as short sellers have taken a keen interest in the owner of the Truth Social app despite relatively high fees to finance such trades.

“It certainly shows concern” about short selling of Trump Media stock, said Kevin Murphy, a business professor at the University of Southern California who is an expert on executive compensation.

“I haven’t seen it before,” Murphy said when asked how common it is for companies to give shareholders instructions on how to thwart short sellers.

“Managers who ... think the stock is undervalued aren’t going to be overly concerned about short sellers,” he said.

 

It's possible that the anti-shorting measures have had an impact. The stock has gained back most of the ground it lost in the first half of April.

 

Then again, that might have more to do with this.

Devin Nunes says it’s “very suspicious” that Trump Media’s stock price has dropped so much, he thinks a RICO investigation should be done, and although he prefers to focus on tech he is prepared to launch an investigation himself if Congress doesn’t do something. pic.twitter.com/37ANpKlwAU

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 27, 2024

From CNBC:

Shares of Trump Media shot up more than 9% on Wednesday, hours after the company revealed it was urging House Republican committee leaders to investigate possible “unlawful manipulation” of its stock.

The stock boost also came one day after a deadline passed for former President Donald Trump, the company’s majority owner, to become eligible for an additional 36 million “earnout” shares. That stake was worth more than $1.3 billion as of the share price at 3:25 p.m. ET.

It was unclear what spurred the sudden rise of Trump Media, which began the trading day down nearly 5% before turning positive later Wednesday morning.

The company’s CEO, Devin Nunes, in a letter Tuesday asked the GOP chairs to probe “anomalous trading” of the stock in order to gauge the extent of the alleged manipulation and “whether any laws including RICO statutes and tax evasion laws were violated.”

The request doubles down on Nunes’ claim that Trump Media, which trades under the ticker DJT, is the apparent victim of “naked” short selling, the practice of selling a company’s shares without first borrowing them for that purpose.

Trump Media, which began trading on the Nasdaq on March 26 after completing a lengthy public merger, was far and away the most expensive U.S. stock to short as of early April.

 I'm not going to try to unravel this or comment any further except to share a quote that meme stocks always bring to mind.