Who do you think is going to be a more successful student at an IVY league school? Someone who did well in school and did well on the SATs (but not scoring a perfect score) or someone who achieved a perfect score because their entire life was about building the perfect resume to gain admittance to an Ivy League school?
I think both of these students are likely to do very well. Who is less likely to do well is somebody who got in with SAT scores well below those of the rest of the student body simply because of his or her race.
Let's look at Harvard stats again, shall we. I took the graph I posted previously from
Harvard Crimson. Here is an excerpt:
Harvard Crimson said:
A Crimson analysis of the previously confidential dataset — which spans admissions cycles starting with the Class of 2000 and ends with the cycle for the Class of 2017 — revealed that Asian-Americans admitted to Harvard earned an average SAT score of 767 across all sections. Every section of the SAT has a maximum score of 800.
By comparison, white admits earned an average score of 745 across all sections, Hispanic-American admits earned an average of 718, Native-American and Native-Hawaiian admits an average of 712, and African-American admits an average of 704.
This shows that not even Asian students generally have the perfect score. But they do, on average, very well on the SAT.
767 is 99th
percentile for reading and writing and 96-98th for math. White average, 745, is 97-99th and 94-96th percentile respectively, still a very good result. When we get down to blacks, 704 is 93-96/91-93th percentiles. A good score for most universities for sure, but they would never have gotten a second look at Harvard if not for their race.
And who took extra cram courses to score well on a test, rather than took classes to learn and to learn what it is that they actually liked?
Why do you assume those who got admitted with mediocre stats but preferred skin color are more likely to take classes "to learn and to learn what it is that they actually liked"? This thread is about racial preferences.
What benefit do you imagine schools gain if they admit students who are unlikely to do well in their classes?
The benefit to the bigwigs is that their student body has a more politically correct racial breakdown. Even if they have to dumb down classes somewhat. In the case of Harvard, they give such a huge boost for being black, that their freshman class is 15% black. That is even more than percentage of blacks in the population at large!
As to not being able to keep up with the curriculum, some colleges plan to hide that by getting rid of some grades. In the name of "equity" of course.
To help new students adapt, some colleges are eliminating grades
NPR said:
"These efforts are meant to improve learning outcomes, as well as to be fair and advance equity, especially for new students and transfer students," Lewis said.
You eliminate SATs so you get crappier students. To hide that, you eliminate grades. Hooray for "equity"!
Perfect GPA isn't as predictive as you might think, even if the student took all the AP classes available to them. Perfect SAT scores are not, either.
Who is talking about perfect GPA or perfect score?
But a good GPA and a good SAT means that the student is more likely to succeed than a student with a mediocre SAT and GPA. That student would be more likely to succeed at an institution that is a better fit for their aptitude. It's not Harvard or bust. There are many good schools a notch less selective than the Ivys.
All a perfect SAT score means is that someone is good at taking that particular type of test. SATs are much better indicators of socioeconomic status of the student's parents than of the student's actual academic ability.
It's difficult to disentangle a student's actual academic ability from the family socioeconomic status. A student with successful parents is beneficiary not only of the family's greater financial resources, but he or she inherited parents' genes (nature) and was raised by them (nurture). It would be interesting to see how for example a family who won the lottery compares to a family that is successful through professional employment in their offspring's SAT scores.
This is not the 1950's anymore. Universities and businesses across many different specialties are discovering that increased diversity increases productivity in everything from IT to medical research and practice.
Why is diversity hailed only for mainstream universities but not HBCUs? With HBCUs the lack of diversity is a selling point. A bit of a hypocrisy there.
I do not have a problem with diversity. I have a problem with racial discrimination and the idea that less capable students should be admitted in order to achieve a desired racial breakdown (in the case of Harvard, even above parity).
Universities should not have banned black students in the past. Harvard should not have discriminated against Jewish students in the past. That was as wrong as the current discrimination they practice.
When you have a more diverse group in a school, a business, a classroom, a team, you gain multiple perspectives instead of the groupthink that comes from only admitting students who all took exactly the same courses and scored exactly the same perfect scores and..that's all there is to those students.
So what is your opinion of very non-diverse HBCUs. Is groupthink not a problem there? And again with "perfect scores". You do not need to restrict yourself to "perfect scores" to recognize that a student scoring 750 shows more aptitude than somebody scoring 700.
Groupthink, btw, can manifest itself other ways. Like hiring almost exclusively "progressive" faculty.
SAT scores and GPA do not indicate maturity, which IS a big predictor of academic success although that is difficult to measure or assess.
Neither does race. Nobody is saying SAT/GPA measure everything. But they are very good objective metrics of a student's academic performance.
SAT scores do not tell you if the student is suffering from acute depression, is able to think and act independently, is able to get along well with others.
Neither does race. So why do you insist race should be used, but SATs should not be.
More recent studies show that GPAs are more predictive of future academic success compared with SAT or ACT scores.
And both together are best. High school coursework is much broader and takes into account all four years of high school. But it suffers from significant differences between schools, so the numbers are not directly comparable. SAT is a test taken on one day, and measures a thinner slice of knowledge and skills, but it is equal for all test takers, and thus more comparable. These two metrics meausure different things, and both are very valuable.
Other studies show that the best predictor of academic success at a university is parental income.
Again, nature and nurture. Academic success is correlated (not perfectly, of course, but significantly) with income. And academically successful parents are more likely to have academically successful children. Both due to genes and due to the values and habits they pass on. Nature plus nurture, a powerful combo.
