Here is some actual data:
Mathematics doctoral degrees by race, 2000
Mathematics doctoral degrees
by race 2002
Take a look at the first column. It is breakup of doctoral degrees awarded to
US citizens via race. I see no over representation by asians.
Here is some actual data:
Mathematics doctoral degrees by race, 2000
Mathematics doctoral degrees by race 2002
Take a look at the first column. It is breakup of doctoral degrees awarded to US citizens via race. I see no over representation by asians. This directly contradicts some of the theories already proposed.
You are wrong. Looking at the population of the U.S., Asians are outnumbered by both Blacks and Hispanics yet earn more degrees than them. They are overrepresented.
They are adding the SAT II writing section to the SAT in 2005 but that is because the University of California was balking at the original SAT saying it was too biased.
Why are asians better at math? Because they’re out to prove that you’re someone who subscribes to racial stereotypes, and they’ve been monitoring your dreams from space via asian satellite network, which peeks into your bedroom through your window and scans your western mind while you sleep.
They’re aware of how you think, and they’ve planted Taiwanese agents all around you, who are good at math, to ensure that your until now hidden biases rose to the fore. This is part of a larger plan that they have to make all white people think they are not as well endowed mentally as the asian race is.
They also make blacks think they’re more well endowed than all the whites, and they further ensure that this stereotype is true by scanning all white peoples brains while they sleep and implanting the thoght that blacks all have larger penis sizes than white men.
The asian race is out to take over the world all holding their little red cookbooks aloft and acting in an inscrutable fashion. It just takes another western mind to unravel this fiendishly asian plot and decode it for westerners like you.
Oddly enough this plan is working so well, that even when I reveal the truth to you, you’ll just deny it, and deny you have any hiden biases to speak of. You’ll probably also point out that in other posts I have revealed myself to be white and from England. Mind you, that too is part of a larger inscrutable plan!
Sleep well. 
Logic.
I’m a graduate student working towards a PhD in mathematics. Just to add some more anecdotal evidence regarding which groups are stereotypically good at math:
No one thinks it’s the Asians are unusually skilled. It’s those preternaturally gifted Russians who everyone talks about. I’ve heard more than one math talk on some arcane subject begin jokingly with “As the Russians in the audience learned in junior high school . . .”.
We should get some Chinese guy to figure out the stats for us!
Enmeshed in very complicated identity politics.
I used to help run a tutoring company, and I can tell you that the Asian parents were really much more on top of their kids about school (overall) than the white parents. I did have some Asian students who just never were going to even graduate from college probably, but they were much more likely to have had their scholastic ability maximized by lots of hours studying.
There is a LOT more value placed on academics in Asian cultures, IME. We had one tutor who told me that he was going to UCLA because when he got accepted to Harvey Mudd, his parents said, “Never heard of it. We can’t tell your aunts and uncles in Taiwan that you’re going to something no one ever heard of.” In reality, HM is definitely harder to get into than UCLA, but they couldn’t face people without a good-looking report on their son.
[warning: extremely geeky Slavophile joke ahead]
This just adds more fuel to the fire for those who believe that Russia is not really part of Europe; it’s part of Asia. Maybe the Mongol hordes left behind some kind of super-duper dominant math gene?
I was educated in India till the 12th grade, so I’ll chip in.
In a class of 60, for an average difficulty exam (passing = 35% fixed, good = 80%), about 10-12 would get good scores and 4-6 would fail. Seems par for the course.
That said, in India, education is pretty competitive, since it is vital to any decent career for most people. So, a disproportionate amount of time, effort and attention is spent on education, especially the sciences.
No it is you who is wrong.
Yes certainly blacks and hispanics are underepresented. But is is not Asians
who are grossly overrepresented in the above statistics. It is whites.
According to the 2000 census the breakup of the US population was 75.1% white ;12.3 % African American; 3.6% Asian ; and others.
Looking at the 2002 stats I supplied a simple calculation shows that
258/291 = 88.6% of doctoral degrees in math were awarded to whites.
14/291 = 4.8 % of doctoral degrees in math were awarded to Asians.
The 2000 stats are slightly more favourable to your position
343/391 = 90.5% of doctoral degrees in math were awarded to whites.
21/379 = 5.5% of doctoral degrees in math were awarded to Asians
It’s the sideways vaginas
Another perspective for the OP, assuming that it was a real question, might be that, in Australia at least, doing well in mathematics is a pre-requisite for a number of the more prestigious and potentially well-paying careers.
If you want to be a doctor, or an engineer, or a dentist or a pharmacist, you’ll need to do well in maths, physics and chemistry to be selected for those courses.
In the area where I used to live was a large population of Vietnamese people, many of whom had come to Australia as refugees. Some of them had been professional people before they came to Australia, but had left everything they had behind, and on arriving here, had nothing. People with overseas qualifications often face an uphill battle getting those qualifications recognised in Australia, so many of those refugees took whatever jobs they could.
Many of them worked extremely hard and diligently to ensure that their children would have decent educations, and those kids take their responsibilities to their families very seriously.
I don’t think it’s unlikely that one of the effects you see is kids, who recognising what their parents have sacrificed on their behalf, determine to go into careers which might offer large salaries, so that they, in turn, can fulfil their responsibilities to their siblings and to their families.
I think if you couple that sense of responsibility with a cultural bias toward academic achievement you might explain some of the success of students from South-East Asia and neighbouring countries.
An Arts degree is well and good if you have the luxury of choosing a course of study for its intellectual benefits, but if you want to be sure you’re able to make enough money to provide for your family and increase their standard of living, you might choose to be a dentist instead of a PhD in film theory.
Yes.
It’s to make up for the fact that you think your penis is bigger than theirs.
Statistically-speaking, of course.
:rolleyes:
Tinactin,
Do the math.
4.8/3.6 => 33% more Asian doctoral degrees than expected on the basis of population alone.
88.6/75.1 => 18% more White doctoral degrees than expected on the basis of population alone.
So, for taking advanced math classes in HS, for SAT scores, for rate of being awarded math doctoral degrees … for all those measures Asians are overrepresented. And those White numbers are boosted by including the preternaturally gifted Russians too!
(You teach college level math? Hoo boy. Remedial classes I presume.)
And Tinactin, if you don’t think that rote memorization is an important part of math, then you’ve bought into that “New Math” crap a bit too much. Math is not just memorization but memorization is requisite. If you can’t memorize your math facts and formulae cold then you are tremendously handicapped when you try to solve the problems. It would be like trying to write great poetry or literature having to look up the spelling of every word and checking your style book for every grammar rule every time every step of the way. Fluency in any language, including math, requires having the rules down to a point that they are second nature.
American education in both math and reading spent some time too far* swung into the holistic approaches. “Whole language” and “New Math” tried to deny any importance to boring drills whether they be on phonics and spelling and grammar or needing to memorize the times tables and various formulae. My impression is that famlies with strong Asian cultural influences made their kids memorize their math facts anyway, achieving more of a total balance with the American “New Math” approach in school itself.
*Please note: I think that rote approaches without functional contexts are equally insufficient. Our pendulum is swinging back towards that direction now in many school systems.
And BTW, for actual employment in math related fields, see here. 29% of all employed engineers in the US were Asian as of 1997, and about half of all engineers employed by industry in 1997 in the US were Asian. (Less than 1% each for Black and Hispanic.)
Of course it continues to only beg the question: Math gifted Asian adults immigrating to the US for high paying jobs in industry (brain drain) having math savvy kids and perpetuating self fufilling stereotypes or how culture and/or bias informs the educational process?
My experience (albeit limited to two years teaching math). Is this: Chinese, Vietnamese, and Japanese-American families emphasize discipline and respect for learning. So, my asian students always had their homework done on time and were prepared for class…unlikeother ethnic groups who were out shooting baskets and having fun after school. The fact is, if you don’t do your homework, you will not do well in math…simple isn’t it!
Here’s my ironic personal anecdote: my wife is Asian. I am ABH (:)). I don’t look particularly “ethnic”. Once people meet my wife, and sometimes without, they are assumed to be Asian. So they will probably get counted as Asian in these statistics someday. But I had much better Math SATs (perfect with adjustment, I think 780 without) than her. Whose “genes” should get the credit? Whose will get the credit? Hers, of course. Of course, if they do well it will be because we’ve always pushed them to work hard in school, generally give them our own homework when the teachers don’t assign any, do math problems when we’re out for a drive, etc.