MCATs, Affirmative Action, and DEI, Oh My

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

As noted upthread, 90+ percent of NA doctors don't work on reservations.

The statistic about reservations is a red herring. Working on a reservation is merely one specific example of how different demographics might fulfill a public need. The broader and more rigorous data shows that NA doctors proportionally serve across all types of underserved areas at higher rates. Equating "underserved" exclusively with "reservations" artificially shrinks the success rate of the metric and erroneously manufactures an undeserved high failure rate.

If for the sake of getting one mission-fit doctor you rate nine premeds as mission-fit who aren't actually mission-fit, that looks a lot more like measuring race than measuring mission-fitness.

First, because NA doctors serve in other underserved areas at higher rates, the premise of a 9-in-10 false prediction rate doesn't hold up to the data.

More importantly, there seems to be a fundamental disconnect about the mechanism of how mission-fitness is plausibly applied. Let me try to clear that up:

Admissions committees do not look at just one or two metrics; they evaluate a multivariate set of data: MCAT, GPA, transcripts, community service, clinical work, essays, and interviews. They apply consistent weights to these different criteria to each individual. "Mission fitness" is an implied variable that emerges from assessing an individual's unique essays, past community service, and interview answers regarding their career goals. It is not a checkbox that blindly translates race into a bonus score--if it were, we wouldn't see such high absolute rejection rates for NA and Black applicants.

What happens when you aggregate these individual assessments? The demographics naturally stratify. If we assume a baseline level of honesty across all applicants, NA applicants as a group are going to provide answers and track records that align more frequently with a commitment to underserved areas.

Conversely, Asian applicants, in the aggregate, demonstrate lower rates of eventually working in these specific environments (for instance, White doctors end up serving in rural areas at higher rates than Asian doctors). If you expect Asian applicants to score equally well on essays and interviews regarding a commitment to underserved areas, you are essentially expecting them to lie at higher rates during the process. If we expect the same frequency of honesty across all racial demographics, the aggregate scores for this specific variable will naturally diverge.

To be clear: I am not claiming this is the absolute, guaranteed mechanism for every school. I am pointing out that this is a mathematically sound, plausible model of how weighted variables work. It explains the aggregate national data without requiring the assumption that committees are simply using race as a blind proxy for academic success.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Asked and answered. In brief: statistically, it is pretty much impossible for it to be due to chance. So it's either discrimination or some other factor that is relevant to admissions and where blacks and Hispanics best whites and Asians. Nobody here has even attempted to identify such a a factor, much less provide any evidence for it. So, discrimination is a logical conclusion.

I actually did and mentioned this plausible factor several times. I even did so recently in a post to you. You did not reply. Perhaps you missed it. It happens.
...
Let's parse the findings from that paragraph to see how the demographic groups actually rank in fulfilling this public good.
...
f(mission fitness) = { 9 if NA; 7 if Black or Hispanic; 5 if White; 3 if Asian }
...

You understand, don't you, that none of this is an argument that racial discrimination isn't happening? It's an argument that this particular racial discrimination fulfills a public good.

That is not what I argued in context. If an application packet includes essays and interviews assessing a candidate's commitment to working in underserved areas, the aggregate responses across different demographic groups will naturally stratify along the lines of that split function. I even linked a specific example of these exact criteria from a North Dakota medical school.

You can label that institutional mission discriminatory if you want to, but evaluating candidates on specific public-need criteria is fundamentally different from the claim that schools are simply fudging numbers or relying on a progressive stack of races.

You're missing the point. It's not that the institutional mission and/or specific public-need criteria are discriminatory; it's that the schools are not measuring candidates on mission fitness and fulfilling public-need criteria. The schools are not lowering the MCAT standard a student needs to meet because he's going to work in an underserved area. They don't know if he is; this isn't Minority Report and they aren't precogs. They're using a proxy. Ability to do well in school is an important quality in medical students, so what say we check "how the demographic groups actually rank" in that characteristic, observe that it's f(school success) = { 3 if NA; 5 if Black or Hispanic; 7 if White; 9 if Asian }, and then use that to judge applicants instead of, you know, actually looking at their GPAs? You'd agree assuming an Asian has a high GPA and a NA has a lower one, as a proxy, instead of actually measuring, would be racial discrimination, yes?

The claim that evaluating mission fitness requires "precognition" or serves as a blind substitute for GPA creates a false dichotomy. Admissions committees do not throw out transcripts to use race as a proxy; they evaluate a multivariate set of inputs where GPA, MCAT, essays, interviews, (and state residency or this can be a factor) are weighed concurrently. Claiming that non-numerical evaluation is invalid because committees aren't "precogs" would logically invalidate every job interview, letter of recommendation, or holistic assessment in higher education. Furthermore, we know non-MCAT structural factors heavily influence these weights: states like West Virginia, Mississippi, and North Dakota have resident acceptance rates between 48% and 58% despite lower average MCAT scores. These schools explicitly weigh state residency and public-need missions heavily to address regional physician shortages, proving that non-MCAT criteria routinely drive acceptance rates independently of racial proxies. They do so without throwing out MCATs or GPAs.

No doubt you'll argue that "essays and interviews assessing a candidate's commitment to working in underserved areas" isn't a racial proxy, but what evidence is there that that's true? What do those essays and interviews actually measure? Do they measure actual mission fitness, or do they just measure race? That's something that's testable retrospectively. If in fact schools aren't racially discriminating and the MCAT discrepancy results from relying on essays and interviews to forecast mission fitness, and if that allegedly nonracial proxy accurately predicts working in underserved areas, then that implies we could take a random sample of minority doctors who work in underserved areas, and a random control group of minority doctors who don't work in underserved areas, and check what their MCAT scores were back when they were accepted into medical school -- and the control group who don't work in underserved areas should turn out to have had MCAT scores similar to those of Asian and white matriculants. Only the group working in underserved areas would have statistically gotten the benefit of the relaxed MCAT requirements.

Your proposed retrospective experiment contains a fundamental flaw regarding base-rate distributions and multivariate confounding. You cannot isolate the MCAT in a vacuum after the fact, because every doctor in that admitted cohort was accepted based on a combined threshold of GPA, MCAT, interview scores, school, geography, etc. Because the starting applicant pool for any demographic has its own baseline distribution, splitting that admitted group retroactively based on practice location will yield similar average MCATs across both subgroups.

Additionally, this experiment ignores massive geographical confounders. Demographic groups do not reside evenly across the country; for example, a high concentration of Asian premed applicants reside in California, where intense in-state competition drops the overall acceptance rate to ~40.6% despite high average stats. Conversely, state schools in rural regions accept residents at much higher rates to fill local needs. Because state-level capacity and regional bottlenecking create acceptance rates that sit both well above and well below national racial averages, treating national MCAT variances as a pure function of racial preferences misses a broader structural picture that is heavily driven by public need.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

This seems to be an observation that is part of a broad structural dynamic but is largely unaddressed. I really do not understand why.

But stepping away from the partisan politics, have you considered a broader, far less ideological framework? Namely: school charters, state mandates, and the public good aspect of the medical profession. For example, earlier you wrote that a coal miner's daughter would have no shot at competing with these groups. Yet, I showed you that a medical school in West Virginia gives massive preference to in-state residents--the vast, vast majority of whom are White. There is literally a separate MCAT threshold for in-state versus out-of-state applicants. The mean MCAT for WV residents applying to medical school is only 502.5. The mean for WV matriculants is 507.4, and they enjoy a relatively large acceptance rate of 58.7%. It is larger than any of the groups under discussion.

The point isn't to say, "Hey look! Here's a counterexample!" Instead, the point is that there is one broad explanation for all of these observations, and it comes down to meeting the medical needs of the public.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

So because you showed up late to the discussion, I’m supposed to rewind the whole damn conversation and explain how we got here? Nigga, please.

No, you don't have to rewind the entire conversation. But it seems reasonable to expect that you refrain from being an asshole for no good reason.

In complete sincerity, and without any intent to mock, have you at least considered that sometimes you're simply not as clear as you think you are? Or that perhaps sometimes you misinterpret other people's posts?

 

[Toni]

You understand, don't you, that none of this is an argument that racial discrimination isn't happening? It's an argument that this particular racial discrimination fulfills a public good.

Your post seems to demonstrate that you’re ok with certain people refusing to consider much less commit to providing much needed medtcal services to underserved communities.

Your post seems to demonstrate that you're from some other planet where language works differently. My post did not contain any value judgments.

Asked and answered. In brief: statistically, it is pretty much impossible for it to be due to chance. So it's either discrimination or some other factor that is relevant to admissions and where blacks and Hispanics best whites and Asians. Nobody here has even attempted to identify such a a factor, much less provide any evidence for it. So, discrimination is a logical conclusion.

I actually did and mentioned this plausible factor several times. I even did so recently in a post to you. You did not reply. Perhaps you missed it. It happens.
...
Let's parse the findings from that paragraph to see how the demographic groups actually rank in fulfilling this public good.
...
f(mission fitness) = { 9 if NA; 7 if Black or Hispanic; 5 if White; 3 if Asian }
...

You understand, don't you, that none of this is an argument that racial discrimination isn't happening? It's an argument that this particular racial discrimination fulfills a public good.

That is not what I argued in context. If an application packet includes essays and interviews assessing a candidate's commitment to working in underserved areas, the aggregate responses across different demographic groups will naturally stratify along the lines of that split function. I even linked a specific example of these exact criteria from a North Dakota medical school.

You can label that institutional mission discriminatory if you want to, but evaluating candidates on specific public-need criteria is fundamentally different from the claim that schools are simply fudging numbers or relying on a progressive stack of races.

You're missing the point. It's not that the institutional mission and/or specific public-need criteria are discriminatory; it's that the schools are not measuring candidates on mission fitness and fulfilling public-need criteria. The schools are not lowering the MCAT standard a student needs to meet because he's going to work in an underserved area. They don't know if he is; this isn't Minority Report and they aren't precogs. They're using a proxy. Ability to do well in school is an important quality in medical students, so what say we check "how the demographic groups actually rank" in that characteristic, observe that it's f(school success) = { 3 if NA; 5 if Black or Hispanic; 7 if White; 9 if Asian }, and then use that to judge applicants instead of, you know, actually looking at their GPAs? You'd agree assuming an Asian has a high GPA and a NA has a lower one, as a proxy, instead of actually measuring, would be racial discrimination, yes?

No doubt you'll argue that "essays and interviews assessing a candidate's commitment to working in underserved areas" isn't a racial proxy, but what evidence is there that that's true? What do those essays and interviews actually measure? Do they measure actual mission fitness, or do they just measure race? That's something that's testable retrospectively. If in fact schools aren't racially discriminating and the MCAT discrepancy results from relying on essays and interviews to forecast mission fitness, and if that allegedly nonracial proxy accurately predicts working in underserved areas, then that implies we could take a random sample of minority doctors who work in underserved areas, and a random control group of minority doctors who don't work in underserved areas, and check what their MCAT scores were back when they were accepted into medical school -- and the control group who don't work in underserved areas should turn out to have had MCAT scores similar to those of Asian and white matriculants. Only the group working in underserved areas would have statistically gotten the benefit of the relaxed MCAT requirements.

As noted upthread, 90+ percent of NA doctors don't work on reservations. If for the sake of getting one mission-fit doctor you rate nine premeds as mission-fit who aren't actually mission-fit, that looks a lot more like measuring race than measuring mission-fitness.

About 20% of NA in the US live on reservations. People who live on reservations leave the reservation for work, shopping, entertainment, school: many reasons, including health care. So if 90% or more NA doctors do not work ON reservations, it does not follow that they are not serving NA patients or other patient populations who are underserved.

Or that they are so obligated. They still bear enormous student debt that may be forgiven in whole or in part by serving underserved populations. At the same time, they are of ages where they may wish to start their own families, purchase homes, etc. plus save for their kids’ educations and their own retirement.

As hospitals consolidate, rural communities are losing hospitals and medical providers and need to travel further to see a physician or to go to a hospital.

Even when physicians work at smaller hospitals and clinics, they often do not stay. Part of it is monetary: GPs earn less than most specialties but carry the same amount of student debt.

 

[ZiprHead]

About 20% of NA in the US live on reservations. People who live on reservations leave the reservation for work, shopping, entertainment, school: many reasons, including health care. So if 90% or more NA doctors do not work ON reservations, it does not follow that they are not serving NA patients or other patient populations who are underserved.

Reservations may be bigger than you think. This is the Treaty assigned reservation for the Sault Tribe Of Chippewa Indians. It encompasses many large cities.

 

[Toni]

Ah, in my state, reservation encompasses a great deal of land but no large cities.

 

[Derec]

I know Derec isn’t the sole bar for whether this kind of bias exists. I’m using him because he is on this forum and his own comments make his particular bias clear as day.

I am not the one who is biased.

So no, I don’t dispute that white women have faced plenty of the same “she only got there because she’s a woman” garbage. That actually reinforces part of my point.

And where they are given preferential treatment, that is certainly not "garbage". That's the other issue with AA and similar policies. It discriminates against certain people based on nothing but gender and race, which obviously harms them directly. But competent and high-achieving members of the preferred groups are also harmed indirectly because there is always understandable suspicion that they only got there because of polices that give people like them preferences.

I have said many times, we need to get away from these collectivist policies and treat people as individuals.

But don’t get it twisted: I’m still opposed to AA/DEI. Not because I think racial discrimination should be tolerated, but because I think we’ve chosen the wrong remedy for it.

We agree there.

If you intentionally discriminate against someone because of their race and materially harm them, deny them a job, promotion, housing, education, or some other protected opportunity because they’re Black, I’d rather see the government come down much harder on the person who actually did it. And yes, I mean criminal penalties, including prison in serious cases. Make deliberately screwing someone over because of their race carry consequences severe enough that people are genuinely afraid to do it.

Instead, we try to remedy discrimination at the group level. To me, that’s like discovering that some restaurants are deliberately shortchanging female servers and, rather than finding the managers who are doing it and putting them behind bars for intentionally violating those women’s rights, the government says, “We can’t establish exactly who screwed over whom, so from now on every restaurant has to pay women 15% more than men until the numbers balance out.”

Regrettably, none of what I’m arguing works if America gets to say, “Well, the people we fucking cheated are dead now, so I guess the debt died with them.” Fuck that. If you rob a man and he dies before you repay him, you don’t suddenly get to keep the money because you managed to outlive him. The debt doesn’t disappear. The loss was passed down, so the compensation should be passed down too.

That is possible in your case because the wrongful act is specific and also close in time to "now". The dead man has an estate that can be paid. The robber may still be alive, or his estate can be used to pay the damages. But what we should not do is give benefits to everyone who sort of looks similar to the victim, and charge everyone who sort of looks similar to the victim. That is what racial policies are like.

If we go back in time, every people group, every living person's ancestors, has some sort of victimization. And even slavery is more complex than "white people oppressors, black people victims" that the left-wing academia and activists are peddling. On the front end of slave trade you had Africans selling their fellow Africans into slavery. Often these were defeated enemies. So when Ghana demands "slavery reparations" it's quite disingenuous, and frankly disgusting. Arab slave trade is also largely ignored, even though it lasted far longer than the Atlantic one. But Arabs are not European whites, and thus do not fit neatly into the oppressor-oppressed narrative peddled by race warriors.

I digress, but I fail to see how some 24 year old's great-great-grandfather having been born a slave should lead to him needing lower MCAT and GPA to get admitted to med school. Especially when, as I said, people of other races likely have ancestors who suffered greatly during the same time frame. For example, my own country had been under brutal Ottoman Turk occupation for centuries at the time US abolished slavery.

America doesn’t get to inherit the benefits of what it did while telling the descendants of the people who inherited the damage, “Sorry, you weren’t personally there.” That bill doesn’t vanish because the people who were originally owed are in the ground. That’s a reality America is going to have to face whether it fucking likes it or not.

>60 years of racial preferences not payback enough? What exactly do you want?

 

[Derec]

I'd say there are two things to consider.

The negative cost to the nation over AA is negligible. The benefit of increasing inclusion of people within industries and professions has benefited the country.

Even if it were true (and I do not agree that it is), this is a very collectivist way to look at it. What about the individual? Is it ok to discriminate against individual Asian and white students in order to get an outcome you think is better for the collective?

Unemployment for whites is still notably lower than for blacks. White people survived! Someone wants to argue that is immoral, they can take that up with a philosopher.

You are talking about race-level outcomes, I am talking about how individuals should not be discriminated against just because of their race (or gender). I guess it is a philosophical difference. But very concretely, if somebody is denied a spot in a medical school because of his melanin content or epicanthic folds, he or she is still harmed no matter the average unemployment rates.

AA was necessary in part due to the self-perpetuating impacts of racism.

I do not think it was ever necessary in the form it developed, i.e. as preferential treatment. It should have remained in the form described by the LBJ executive order from 1965.

The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.

Note that this understanding of "affirmative action" is diametrically opposed to what "affirmative action" has come to mean not long after.

Just look at the NFL. How many black QBs? How many black head coaches?

About half of starting quarterbacks are black. Way more than the 14% blacks in the population. But you want there to be even more?

That isn't active racism, that is perpetuation of former racism within the football ladder.

How so?

I refuse to believe blacks can't handle the QB position (that doesn't require running the ball, has there been a single black Joe Montana?) or be a head coach. Yet, somehow, these two positions are very uncommon. The ladder in the 1960s for blacks was cut off and people could only get so high up. Just adding the rungs back doesn't make it a piece of cake to get to the top. Plenty of other people already there, it got crowded.

There are far more black QBs than their share in the population. People like you will not be happy until NFL is as lopsided as the NBA.
To left-wing race-warriors like you, diversity means nothing more than "fewer whites". Your NFL QB rant proves it.

 

[Toni]

I know Derec isn’t the sole bar for whether this kind of bias exists. I’m using him because he is on this forum and his own comments make his particular bias clear as day.

I am not the one who is biased.

So no, I don’t dispute that white women have faced plenty of the same “she only got there because she’s a woman” garbage. That actually reinforces part of my point.

And where they are given preferential treatment, that is certainly not "garbage". That's the other issue with AA and similar policies. It discriminates against certain people based on nothing but gender and race, which obviously harms them directly. But competent and high-achieving members of the preferred groups are also harmed indirectly because there is always understandable suspicion that they only got there because of polices that give people like them preferences.

I have said many times, we need to get away from these collectivist policies and treat people as individuals.

But don’t get it twisted: I’m still opposed to AA/DEI. Not because I think racial discrimination should be tolerated, but because I think we’ve chosen the wrong remedy for it.

We agree there.

If you intentionally discriminate against someone because of their race and materially harm them, deny them a job, promotion, housing, education, or some other protected opportunity because they’re Black, I’d rather see the government come down much harder on the person who actually did it. And yes, I mean criminal penalties, including prison in serious cases. Make deliberately screwing someone over because of their race carry consequences severe enough that people are genuinely afraid to do it.

Instead, we try to remedy discrimination at the group level. To me, that’s like discovering that some restaurants are deliberately shortchanging female servers and, rather than finding the managers who are doing it and putting them behind bars for intentionally violating those women’s rights, the government says, “We can’t establish exactly who screwed over whom, so from now on every restaurant has to pay women 15% more than men until the numbers balance out.”

Regrettably, none of what I’m arguing works if America gets to say, “Well, the people we fucking cheated are dead now, so I guess the debt died with them.” Fuck that. If you rob a man and he dies before you repay him, you don’t suddenly get to keep the money because you managed to outlive him. The debt doesn’t disappear. The loss was passed down, so the compensation should be passed down too.

That is possible in your case because the wrongful act is specific and also close in time to "now". The dead man has an estate that can be paid. The robber may still be alive, or his estate can be used to pay the damages. But what we should not do is give benefits to everyone who sort of looks similar to the victim, and charge everyone who sort of looks similar to the victim. That is what racial policies are like.

If we go back in time, every people group, every living person's ancestors, has some sort of victimization. And even slavery is more complex than "white people oppressors, black people victims" that the left-wing academia and activists are peddling. On the front end of slave trade you had Africans selling their fellow Africans into slavery. Often these were defeated enemies. So when Ghana demands "slavery reparations" it's quite disingenuous, and frankly disgusting. Arab slave trade is also largely ignored, even though it lasted far longer than the Atlantic one. But Arabs are not European whites, and thus do not fit neatly into the oppressor-oppressed narrative peddled by race warriors.

I digress, but I fail to see how some 24 year old's great-great-grandfather having been born a slave should lead to him needing lower MCAT and GPA to get admitted to med school. Especially when, as I said, people of other races likely have ancestors who suffered greatly during the same time frame. For example, my own country had been under brutal Ottoman Turk occupation for centuries at the time US abolished slavery.

America doesn’t get to inherit the benefits of what it did while telling the descendants of the people who inherited the damage, “Sorry, you weren’t personally there.” That bill doesn’t vanish because the people who were originally owed are in the ground. That’s a reality America is going to have to face whether it fucking likes it or not.

>60 years of racial preferences not payback enough? What exactly do you want?

My dear: Racial and gender preferences still favor white and male. Sadly enough. And in this country known as the United States, that has been true since colonial times.

Now what is happening is that candidates who are not white or the ‘good’ kind of Asian are no longer automatically chosen, with other candidates moved to the rear of the line, if they are ever allowed in line in the first place.

White people like to make themselves feel better by believing or telling themselves to believe that the only way any person of color or female gets chosen ahead of a white or preferred type Asian is because of Affurnstive Action. It’s comforting to believe that you lost out because of preferences for a demographic you don’t fit.

People with expertise have shown over and over again that a great deal of the bias you think you see does not actually exist, except to the extent that t that there is a lot of self selection going on.

Most students at any level tend to attend schools in their home state.

Most state schools give preference to in state students, both for admissions and for tuition. This, in part is because state taxes pay for the universities/med schools and partly in hopes of retaining their graduates.

Students choose which schools to apply to based upon cost and likelihood of admissions and also proximity to home—in addition to what programming/educational offerings are available.

Parents usually have some to a lot of influence over which schools their kids apply to. Sometimes they urge their kids to apply to their Alma maters. Often they are helping pay for school. And some schools give preferences to legacy students —and the offspring of donors.

 

[Derec]

No one has claimed to discard MCAT scores or GPAs. That has been made clear numerous times by numerous posters. Your insistence in repeating that straw man does not advance your argument.

Actually, there have been people effectively saying that by dismissing differences in academic achievement.

Also, your apparent ignorance of the other factors such as interviews, and differing missions among schools which have been mentioned many times by numerous posters drives these straw men.

There is no reason to assume that blacks interview better than Asians, and certainly not to the extent that it would account for black matriculants having significantly lower academic achievement metrics. But interviews and other subjective metrics can be gamed (unlike MCAT) by adcoms who want to smuggle in consideration of race when they shouldn't. You and your Ilk keep ignoring all that.

In summary, it appears these repetitive straw men of yours arise out of a desperate need to support your tenuous position.

Wrong. It is you and your Ilk who keep erecting these strawmen no matter how often you get refuted.

 

[Derec]

Here’s the thing, Derec. It’s not about ‘liking’ certain groups more than others. Or at least not for me

I don't think so. The very emotional defense of racial preferences on here, and nasty name calling against anyone who dares disagree, suggests otherwise.

or for people arguing that medical schools seem to know what they are doing.

That is classic argument from authority. They are the medical schools, they must know what they are doing.
I am not even saying that they don't know how to admit qualified applicants. That's why for every racial or ethnic group, you are more likely to get admitted if you have a higher MCAT and GPA. But this does not preclude them also having other motivations that interfere with them wanting to admit the most qualified applicants. And their belief in racial preferences does that.
I do not think arguing that adcoms at med schools do not engage in racial preferences is tenable, or intellectually honest at this point.

So in your opinion, black students no longer face discrimination in education?

No they don't. They are discriminated for, not against. Of course, I think that they are still harmed by that positive discrimination.
For one, racial preferences breed complacency. I am firmly convinced that the achievement gap would have been much narrower by now if AA had ended decades ago, for example in 2003 when SDoC kept it alive.
For other, high-achieving blacks are still subject to suspicion because blacks in general receive preferences. If a business owner has the habit of hiring is numerous nephews even if they are lazy and/or dim, then even a smart, hard-working nephew will be looked at askance. But at least the nephew has the opportunity to look for work elsewhere. Black, Hispanic and American Indian premeds are "nephews" at every med school in the country.

 

[Derec]

Don has talked upthread at length that the statistics do not account for which schools various applicants apply to, or how many schools they apply to or if there is different admissions criteria for each school. Any/all of those factors would cause an affect and all are in play.

And I have shown that for example at Duke, there is still a big difference in MCAT scores between racial and ethnic groups in at least that individual school. I see no reason to assume that other schools are different in that regard, and Don2 certainly hasn't shown anything approaching that.

And Don2 was handwaving with different schools and number of schools applied to. He has not shown how that would produce AAMC data, or even that members of different racial groups apply to significantly different number of schools.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Don has talked upthread at length that the statistics do not account for which schools various applicants apply to, or how many schools they apply to or if there is different admissions criteria for each school. Any/all of those factors would cause an affect and all are in play.

And I have shown that for example at Duke, there is still a big difference in MCAT scores between racial and ethnic groups in at least that individual school. I see no reason to assume that other schools are different in that regard, and Don2 certainly hasn't shown anything approaching that.

I actually have addressed this directly, though you have yet to reply to those posts.

And Don2 was handwaving with different schools and number of schools applied to. He has not shown how that would produce AAMC data, or even that members of different racial groups apply to significantly different number of schools.

It isn't handwaving; it is pointing out massive, verifiable confounders. We can at least look at this at a state/territory level which shows the impact of a subclass of schools where different racial demographics attend at different rates.

First, we know that racial demographics vary wildly from state to state, and a vast majority of medical students apply to and attend their in-state public schools. Because state schools grant heavy admissions preferences to their own residents (and sometimes outright bar out-of-state applicants), this creates geographic bottlenecks that unevenly impact different demographic groups.

You can see this clearly by looking at West Virginia, Puerto Rico, and California. For example, roughly 20% of all Hispanic medical students matriculate in Puerto Rico rather than the mainland US. That massive concentration fundamentally alters the national acceptance rate and average stats for that cohort.

Conversely, look at California: it has incredibly high applicant MCAT means, creating severe bottlenecking for in-state admissions. In California, the vast majority of applicants are Asian but there are only so many available seats. Moreover, because a massive portion of Asian applicants reside in California, that geographic bottleneck artificially suppresses their overall acceptance rate and inflates their required scores, driving up the national averages for that cohort.

While the AAMC doesn't publish perfectly cross-tabulated tables of matriculation schools by race, the data we can see makes it explicitly clear: state-level residency requirements and geographic distribution demonstrably warp these national racial averages. These kinds of differences are a subset of the larger superset of different racial demographics attending different schools with different thresholds.

P.S. You are still refusing to talk about West Virginia and the broader pattern it represents.

 

[Toni]

Don has talked upthread at length that the statistics do not account for which schools various applicants apply to, or how many schools they apply to or if there is different admissions criteria for each school. Any/all of those factors would cause an affect and all are in play.

And I have shown that for example at Duke, there is still a big difference in MCAT scores between racial and ethnic groups in at least that individual school. I see no reason to assume that other schools are different in that regard, and Don2 certainly hasn't shown anything approaching that.

And Don2 was handwaving with different schools and number of schools applied to. He has not shown how that would produce AAMC data, or even that members of different racial groups apply to significantly different number of schools.

You really aren’t reading Don’s posts very carefully and you aren’t addressing his excellent, detailed points, at least not that I saw.

I’m much more interested in reading your responses to Don’s points than I am of your flaccid defense of white privilege with an Asian beard.

 

[laughing dog]

No one has claimed to discard MCAT scores or GPAs. That has been made clear numerous times by numerous posters. Your insistence in repeating that straw man does not advance your argument.

Actually, there have been people effectively saying that by dismissing differences in academic achievement.

Also, your apparent ignorance of the other factors such as interviews, and differing missions among schools which have been mentioned many times by numerous posters drives these straw men.

There is no reason to assume that blacks interview better than Asians, and certainly not to the extent that it would account for black matriculants having significantly lower academic achievement metrics. But interviews and other subjective metrics can be gamed (unlike MCAT) by adcoms who want to smuggle in consideration of race when they shouldn't. You and your Ilk keep ignoring all that.

In summary, it appears these repetitive straw men of yours arise out of a desperate need to support your tenuous position.

Wrong. It is you and your Ilk who keep erecting these strawmen no matter how often you get refuted.

Your use collectivist “your ilk” in a post is consistent with content free straw men and illogic. If history is any guide, a “no u r” will follow.

 

[Bomb#20]

There is no reason to assume that blacks interview better than Asians, and certainly not to the extent that it would account for black matriculants having significantly lower academic achievement metrics. But interviews and other subjective metrics can be gamed (unlike MCAT) by adcoms who want to smuggle in consideration of race when they shouldn't. You and your Ilk keep ignoring all that.

In summary, it appears these repetitive straw men of yours arise out of a desperate need to support your tenuous position.

Wrong. It is you and your Ilk who keep erecting these strawmen no matter how often you get refuted.

Your use collectivist “your ilk” in a post is consistent with content free straw men and illogic. If history is any guide, a “no u r” will follow.

Yes u r. Both of you need to give this collectivist ad hominem "ilk" nonsense a rest. Nobody is responsible for the behavior of his ilk.

There being non-academic reasons for dropping out does not weaken our claim. If anything, it strengthens it. If academic reasons cause dropping out (or flunking Step 1 for that matter) in only a subset of cases, then the association between mediocre GPA/MCAT and dropping out for academic reasons is stronger, not weaker.

I assume you mean “non-academic reasons” in the start of your syllogism. Otherwise, it is a tautology.

It seems to me, you and your ilk think causes have distinct and separate influences on human decision making like admissions or dropping out.
...

Maybe its time for a new thread. We could call it, "Democrats seem to have a big embarrassing brother/son problem". We could add Hunter Biden, Roger Clinton and Billy Carter to the list, for starters.

No one is stopping you or your ilk.