Split SAT scores as a measure of your potential and college worthiness

[Loren Pechtel]

If the institutions actually had a valid criteria for best student they would present it.

It likely includes an understanding that "criteria" is a plural, whose singular form is "criterion".

Yes, I meant it as plural. The "it" is the mistake.

 

[laughing dog]

If the institutions actually had a valid criteria for best student they would present it. Instead, they try to hide the data.

You are babbling again. Most institutions hide nothing.

You are babbling again. If the intent of "race blind" policies is to produce disparate outcomes, it is racial discrimination.

The problem is with the yardstick. A race-blind policy will admit students in proportion to their prevalence in the pool of the applicants. The current policy admits students biased towards the racial distributions overall, not the applicant pool.

As usual, that is non-responsive to my comment. Try again.

Referring to my words as babbling and non-responsive doesn't make it so.

No, your words make it so.

 

[bilby]

If the institutions actually had a valid criteria for best student they would present it.

It likely includes an understanding that "criteria" is a plural, whose singular form is "criterion".

Yes, I meant it as plural. The "it" is the mistake.

Then so is the "a".

 

[Bomb#20]

If the institutions actually had a valid criteria for best student they would present it.

It likely includes an understanding that "criteria" is a plural, whose singular form is "criterion".

Yes, I meant it as plural. The "it" is the mistake.

Then so is the "a".

I take it you weren't just making petty grammar corrections in random threads as a pastime, but actually meant to raise a substantive point concerning the topic of discussion.

The fact that the institutions have multiple criteria rather than a single criterion is only relevant if Asians average worse on some of those criteria, balancing out the observed fact that they average better on others. Well then, which criteria? According to the documents Harvard was required to produce during discovery, Asians average worse on subjectively evaluated personality traits. To put it baldly, Harvard admissions officers have de facto claimed in their paper trail that Asians are typically not as nice people as the rest of us.

So the question for anyone who wants to defend Harvard and to argue that its officers know which criteria for student admission are sound better than a bunch of internet cranks needs to answer is: are Asians really typically not as nice people as the rest of us?

 

[Elixir]

the question for anyone who wants to defend Harvard and to argue that its officers know which criteria for student admission are sound better than a bunch of internet cranks needs to answer is: are Asians really typically not as nice people as the rest of us?

Asians need not answer due to inherent bias?

 

[laughing dog]

If the institutions actually had a valid criteria for best student they would present it.

It likely includes an understanding that "criteria" is a plural, whose singular form is "criterion".

Yes, I meant it as plural. The "it" is the mistake.

Then so is the "a".

I take it you weren't just making petty grammar corrections in random threads as a pastime, but actually meant to raise a substantive point concerning the topic of discussion.

The fact that the institutions have multiple criteria rather than a single criterion is only relevant if Asians average worse on some of those criteria, balancing out the observed fact that they average better on others. Well then, which criteria? According to the documents Harvard was required to produce during discovery, Asians average worse on subjectively evaluated personality traits. To put it baldly, Harvard admissions officers have de facto claimed in their paper trail that Asians are typically not as nice people as the rest of us.

So the question for anyone who wants to defend Harvard and to argue that its officers know which criteria for student admission are sound better than a bunch of internet cranks needs to answer is: are Asians really typically not as nice people as the rest of us?

I find your “de facto” interpretation a bit hard to take at face value.

I am not defending Harvard or any of the hundreds of higher education institutions that dropped standardized test scores as admissions requirements. I seriously doubt that the wide variety of institutions dropped that requirement so that they could discriminate based on race. Certainly no one in this thread has presented evidence to support their assertion that is the reason for the elimination of that requirement.

 

[bilby]

I take it you weren't just making petty grammar corrections in random threads as a pastime, but actually meant to raise a substantive point concerning the topic of discussion.

Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realise that this was your first day on the Internet.

 

[Bomb#20]

And race blind policies only produce disparate outcomes, they do not produce discrimination. No matter how many times you claim you don't believe that a disparate result proves discrimination you continue to show that you actually believe it to be true.

You are babbling again. If the intent of "race blind" policies is to produce disparate outcomes, it is racial discrimination.

That's a whopping big "If". The intent of race-blind policies is not to produce disparate outcomes. The disparate outcomes are a side-effect of combining race-blind policies with applicant source populations in which whatever characteristics the intent of the policies is to select for happen to correlate with race; that doesn't magically make the disparate outcomes an intended goal. The intent of race-blind policies is to not racially discriminate.

The problem is with the yardstick. A race-blind policy will admit students in proportion to their prevalence in the pool of the applicants.

No it won't -- not unless either applicants are selected randomly or the selected-for traits are uncorrelated with race. Neither is generally the case.

 

[laughing dog]

And race blind policies only produce disparate outcomes, they do not produce discrimination. No matter how many times you claim you don't believe that a disparate result proves discrimination you continue to show that you actually believe it to be true.

You are babbling again. If the intent of "race blind" policies is to produce disparate outcomes, it is racial discrimination.

That's a whopping big "If". The intent of race-blind policies is not to produce disparate outcomes.

You cannot possibly know that is true in each instance .

 

[Toni]

And race blind policies only produce disparate outcomes, they do not produce discrimination. No matter how many times you claim you don't believe that a disparate result proves discrimination you continue to show that you actually believe it to be true.

You are babbling again. If the intent of "race blind" policies is to produce disparate outcomes, it is racial discrimination.

That's a whopping big "If". The intent of race-blind policies is not to produce disparate outcomes. The disparate outcomes are a side-effect of combining race-blind policies with applicant source populations in which whatever characteristics the intent of the policies is to select for happen to correlate with race; that doesn't magically make the disparate outcomes an intended goal. The intent of race-blind policies is to not racially discriminate.

The problem is with the yardstick. A race-blind policy will admit students in proportion to their prevalence in the pool of the applicants.

No it won't -- not unless either applicants are selected randomly or the selected-for traits are uncorrelated with race. Neither is generally the case.

Sometimes, the intent of face blind policies is to not racially discriminate. That's true to a certain extent but you have to also take into account who is setting those policies, their perspectives and structural racism that is pervasive throughout society, at least in the US and from what I can tell, every other country on earth, although perhaps with different targets and different preferred groups.

Suppose school EPIC wishes to have race blind admissions. They also have a long history and a long relationship with recruiting students predominately from 7 high schools. All of those high schools are predominately white and Asian, with only a small minority of students who are Black, Hispanic, or NA. It is almost certain that most of the students who demonstrate academic excellence at those 7 high schools are either Asian or White, simply by the numbers. This effect increases over generations of students admitted under this policy and favored pool of admissions guidelines.

Universities establish a recruiting relationship with certain high schools if history has demonstrated that students from those certain high schools tend to perform well at EPIC, and go on to graduate, forge good careers and perhaps even make some donations. So, more parents strive to get their kids into the chosen 7 schools. Most of the likely successful applicants to those 7 high schools will come from families who are able to move close to one of those 7 schools and to provide whatever support and extras those 7 schools expect from the students and their families. Trying to expect parents who are working 2-3 jobs each in order to pay rent to volunteer or to chip in extra money for...anything is not reasonable. Parents and kids do not feel fully welcome or fully part of the school. They select out of attempting to attend those schools. This says NOTHING at all about the academic potential of any of the students whose families cannot afford to live close to one of the 7 schools or who cannot afford the uniforms or the extracurriculars which are mandatory or any of the extra lessons and instruments and other expectations. Students who are on scholarship or otherwise get financial breaks are ALWAYS aware of those breaks---and so are all of the other students. There is a strata of students who belong and those who 'belong.' It does follow socioeconomic lines but also racial ones. Race and socioeconomic class are extremely intertwined. And where there are students who are wealthy from a group that is traditionally not wealthy, there are divided loyalties. Everyone wants to fit in. And everyone wants to stand out....a little bit.

At Harvard, more than 40 percent of its students come from the Northeast; another 16 percent come from the West Coast. That's a whole lot of geography to to fill up the rest of the student body, spread very, very thin. Fewer than 10% of Harvard students come from rural areas, with most coming from suburban areas or urban areas.

It is extremely difficult to design a truly race blind selection criteria. SATs have biases inherent in all of their tests, mostly biases for upper and middle class white kids. Not necessarily by design but by....tradition. Going with the flow. It's so much easier.


When I started typing this up, I either never actually knew and made an astoundingly good guess or I had forgotten that I had read this but: At Harvard, one in every 20 students attending Harvard attended one of 7 high schools in the NE.

The Making of a Harvard Feeder School | News | The Harvard Crimson

In total, one out of every 20 Harvard freshmen attended one of the seven high schools most represented in the Class of 2017—Boston Latin, Phillips Academy in Andover, Stuyvesant High School, Noble and Greenough School, Phillips Exeter Academy, Trinity School in New York City, and Lexington High...

www.thecrimson.com

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If the institutions actually had a valid criteria for best student they would present it.

It likely includes an understanding that "criteria" is a plural, whose singular form is "criterion".

Yes, I meant it as plural. The "it" is the mistake.

Then so is the "a".

I take it you weren't just making petty grammar corrections in random threads as a pastime, but actually meant to raise a substantive point concerning the topic of discussion.

"Criteria" is one of those strange words that while plural is sometimes grammatically singular--referring to the set of criterion as a single entity. Hence I made a singular/plural oops in a borderline case and got attacked for it to avoid addressing the actual point.

The fact that the institutions have multiple criteria rather than a single criterion is only relevant if Asians average worse on some of those criteria, balancing out the observed fact that they average better on others. Well then, which criteria? According to the documents Harvard was required to produce during discovery, Asians average worse on subjectively evaluated personality traits. To put it baldly, Harvard admissions officers have de facto claimed in their paper trail that Asians are typically not as nice people as the rest of us.

Exactly--fudge factors. Rule of thumb: see a fudge factor in something like this and you know the outcome will be substantially different with honest data since nobody puts in fudge factors unless they need to. (Or perhaps Harvard is lying and simply made that likability bit up.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I find your “de facto” interpretation a bit hard to take at face value.

I am not defending Harvard or any of the hundreds of higher education institutions that dropped standardized test scores as admissions requirements. I seriously doubt that the wide variety of institutions dropped that requirement so that they could discriminate based on race. Certainly no one in this thread has presented evidence to support their assertion that is the reason for the elimination of that requirement.

They didn't drop them so they could discriminate on race. They dropped them to make it harder to prove they were discriminating on race. It's a major red flag--they are discarding the very thing that was used to show they were discriminating.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

And race blind policies only produce disparate outcomes, they do not produce discrimination. No matter how many times you claim you don't believe that a disparate result proves discrimination you continue to show that you actually believe it to be true.

You are babbling again. If the intent of "race blind" policies is to produce disparate outcomes, it is racial discrimination.

That's a whopping big "If". The intent of race-blind policies is not to produce disparate outcomes.

You cannot possibly know that is true in each instance .

I find it hard to imagine a race-blind policy designed to discriminate, but even if one exists that doesn't mean that race-blind isn't in general non-discriminatory. AA was originally effectively about race-blind, although with most things handled on paper it couldn't be truly race-blind without expending a lot of effort. It was a wild success, did it's job and should be retired instead of it's current use as a tool of discrimination.

 

[laughing dog]

I find your “de facto” interpretation a bit hard to take at face value.

I am not defending Harvard or any of the hundreds of higher education institutions that dropped standardized test scores as admissions requirements. I seriously doubt that the wide variety of institutions dropped that requirement so that they could discriminate based on race. Certainly no one in this thread has presented evidence to support their assertion that is the reason for the elimination of that requirement.

They didn't drop them so they could discriminate on race. They dropped them to make it harder to prove they were discriminating on race. It's a major red flag--they are discarding the very thing that was used to show they were discriminating.

Let me get this straight - you have evidence that hundreds of higher education institutions dropped standardized tests as a requirement for admissions in order to avoid evidence that they were discriminating based on race but you won’t produce it?

 

[Bomb#20]

...To put it baldly, Harvard admissions officers have de facto claimed in their paper trail that Asians are typically not as nice people as the rest of us.

So the question for anyone who wants to defend Harvard and to argue that its officers know which criteria for student admission are sound better than a bunch of internet cranks needs to answer is: are Asians really typically not as nice people as the rest of us?

I find your “de facto” interpretation a bit hard to take at face value.

Do tell. What de facto interpretation of the observation that Asian applicants on average have substantially lower personal quality ratings in Harvard's admission decision records than non-Asian applicants would you find a bit easier to take at face value?

I am not defending Harvard or any of the hundreds of higher education institutions that dropped standardized test scores as admissions requirements.

No? What's this then?

Institutions arę better judges of the kind of student and the mix of studenta than internet sjws.

Looks to me like defending them.

I seriously doubt that the wide variety of institutions dropped that requirement so that they could discriminate based on race.

Yes. It looks like they dropped that requirement not so they could discriminate based on race but so that they could get more of the races they wanted without needing to discriminate based on race. If you eliminate whichever criteria Asians do better on then you can comply with the Civil Rights Act's race-blindness requirement and still get no more Asians than you want. For that matter, if having a student body that racially matches their applicant pool is their highest priority, all they need to do is admit students randomly. That way they can obey the law and the dictates of their ideology simultaneously; all they'd be losing is their status as elite schools.

 

[Bomb#20]

Loren and I have a many years long history of discussing SAT scores and their relevance. Loren is free to correct any misconceptions I have about his positions or statements. I freely acknowledge that I may be mistaken and am happy to be corrected where I am. However, you are not the person to correct me about Loren's opinions or perceptions.

It's a free country. Anybody who wants to correct you about them gets to. Of course you're perfectly free to regard it as presumptuous on anyone else's part -- but you aren't rational to.

If you told a Jewish guy he was littering, no doubt you'd figure he could speak for himself and anyone swooping in to his defense was a buttinski. Maybe so, fair enough. But if you told a Jewish guy he was using the blood of Christians in his synagogue's wicked religious rituals, you should expect to be rightly upbraided for it by whoever's in earshot. The accusation that people who oppose affirmative action oppose it because they're racist is the exact same vicious blood libel that progressives have been slinging at liberals ever since affirmative action was invented. If you want Loren to be the only person to correct you about Loren's opinions and perceptions, get some original material.

You are not Loren and you are no more privy to his thoughts and opinions than am I.

And yet somehow I did a quite good job of understanding his position, as judged by him. How do you think I did that, dumb luck? I got it right because Loren has not been at all secretive or unclear about his thoughts and opinions. He has "a many years long history" of explaining them to you patiently. I am not Loren and you are just as privy to his thoughts and opinions as am I -- so why can't you get it right when other people can?

You seem very fixated on what you perceive to be my ideology. Your fixations are misplaced and inaccurate.

So what's your explanation for why your words match progressives' catechism? What hypothesis matches the facts better than you wearing ideological blinders? The circumstance that you can't get it right after all those years and the circumstance that the erroneous theory you came up with is the precise well-poison that progressivism always uses against liberalism is just a coincidence?

 

[Shadowy Man]

If the institutions actually had a valid criteria for best student they would present it.

It likely includes an understanding that "criteria" is a plural, whose singular form is "criterion".

Yes, I meant it as plural. The "it" is the mistake.

Then so is the "a".

I take it you weren't just making petty grammar corrections in random threads as a pastime, but actually meant to raise a substantive point concerning the topic of discussion.

"Criteria" is one of those strange words that while plural is sometimes grammatically singular--referring to the set of criterion as a single entity. Hence I made a singular/plural oops in a borderline case and got attacked for it to avoid addressing the actual point.

I know it’s a derail, but huh? When has criteria ever been “grammatically singular”? I personally have never heard or read that and “criteria is” will always ring harsh in my ear. Nor does the dictionary, which simply states that criteria is plural of criterion.

It’s ok to just admit you made a mistake and move on. No one here will think lesser of you for that.

 

[laughing dog]

...To put it baldly, Harvard admissions officers have de facto claimed in their paper trail that Asians are typically not as nice people as the rest of us.

So the question for anyone who wants to defend Harvard and to argue that its officers know which criteria for student admission are sound better than a bunch of internet cranks needs to answer is: are Asians really typically not as nice people as the rest of us?

I find your “de facto” interpretation a bit hard to take at face value.

Do tell. What de facto interpretation of the observation that Asian applicants on average have substantially lower personal quality ratings in Harvard's admission decision records than non-Asian applicants would you find a bit easier to take at face value?

Read your own italicized words and then get back to me.

I am not defending Harvard or any of the hundreds of higher education institutions that dropped standardized test scores as admissions requirements.

No? What's this then?

​

Institutions arę better judges of the kind of student and the mix of studenta than internet sjws.

Looks to me like defending them.

I stand corrected.

I seriously doubt that the wide variety of institutions dropped that requirement so that they could discriminate based on race.

Yes. It looks like they dropped that requirement not so they could discriminate based on race but so that they could get more of the races they wanted without needing to discriminate based on race. If you eliminate whichever criteria Asians do better on then you can comply with the Civil Rights Act's race-blindness requirement and still get no more Asians than you want. For that matter, if having a student body that racially matches their applicant pool is their highest priority, all they need to do is admit students randomly. That way they can obey the law and the dictates of their ideology simultaneously; all they'd be losing is their status as elite schools.

Ah, the "everything looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer" logic. While I see the reason for the obsession about Asians because of the Harvard case, the OP is about higher education institutions in general. There are hundreds more institutions of higher education. And I know from experience that their admissions process is not Harvard's admission process.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Ah, the "everything looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer" logic. While I see the reason for the obsession about Asians because of the Harvard case, the OP is about higher education institutions in general. There are hundreds more institutions of higher education. And I know from experience that their admissions process is not Harvard's admission process.

One of the elite places I applied to had a very different set of criteria--there was this form to give to a teacher and it had questions about rating the student. Each question was a category and each of those were broken down into rankings like "best 1 or 2 students I ever had," "top 5%," "top 10%-20%" etc. Not all of the categories were purely academic in the sense of technical ability as some were about what kind of person the student was.

I can see two things from this:

1. Being someone with super high technical skill but not someone who was something more than just academically inclined would not do very well. My own teacher talked about how I constantly helped other students with academics in her answer to one of the categories. And mentioned extracurricular activities in another. I can't remember what all those categories were but it should be clear that a student who only focuses on their scores is damaging their chances at admission to at least some of the colleges.

2. At least for this particular college, that "best 1 or 2 students I ever had" ranking creates a situation where it is harder to students in the same school to get into the college. A single teacher can't give a recommendation every year to 3 students with that sort of ranking as that wouldn't be believable. So within school across years, even, it would be very competitive between students applying to that college, not merely across different schools. There could be some residual trend that distributes admissions across schools for this type of college.

For this particular elite school, the practice of having criteria beyond mere academic scores is shared with Harvard, though the particulars of those criteria seem different. The second feature of "best 1 or 2 students I ever had," seems quite different than Harvard because someone up thread said a good portion of Harvard comes from just a few private schools.

 

[Toni]

Loren and I have a many years long history of discussing SAT scores and their relevance. Loren is free to correct any misconceptions I have about his positions or statements. I freely acknowledge that I may be mistaken and am happy to be corrected where I am. However, you are not the person to correct me about Loren's opinions or perceptions.

It's a free country. Anybody who wants to correct you about them gets to. Of course you're perfectly free to regard it as presumptuous on anyone else's part -- but you aren't rational to.

If you told a Jewish guy he was littering, no doubt you'd figure he could speak for himself and anyone swooping in to his defense was a buttinski. Maybe so, fair enough. But if you told a Jewish guy he was using the blood of Christians in his synagogue's wicked religious rituals, you should expect to be rightly upbraided for it by whoever's in earshot. The accusation that people who oppose affirmative action oppose it because they're racist is the exact same vicious blood libel that progressives have been slinging at liberals ever since affirmative action was invented. If you want Loren to be the only person to correct you about Loren's opinions and perceptions, get some original material.

You are not Loren and you are no more privy to his thoughts and opinions than am I.

And yet somehow I did a quite good job of understanding his position, as judged by him. How do you think I did that, dumb luck? I got it right because Loren has not been at all secretive or unclear about his thoughts and opinions. He has "a many years long history" of explaining them to you patiently. I am not Loren and you are just as privy to his thoughts and opinions as am I -- so why can't you get it right when other people can?

You seem very fixated on what you perceive to be my ideology. Your fixations are misplaced and inaccurate.

So what's your explanation for why your words match progressives' catechism? What hypothesis matches the facts better than you wearing ideological blinders? The circumstance that you can't get it right after all those years and the circumstance that the erroneous theory you came up with is the precise well-poison that progressivism always uses against liberalism is just a coincidence?

Wow. Yes, Loren has for years explained to me how not racist he is while bemoaning that Black students and Hispanic students get into Harvard. And about how undeserving those students are for not having had the wisdom of being born to families who could send them to a handful of select high schools. Oh, I forgot about the deficits in 'black culture.'

I was unaware that being progressive was a religion outside of the minds of those who are looking for ways to cast aspersions upon those with whom they disagree. Since you are fond of doing so, I will take it that is your religion and those who do not align with your beliefs are, in your POV, heretics or apostate. Or infidels. Now, where have I seen that last term?????