I think someone needs to switch to decaf.
Yes, your more likely reasons were “soft criteria” :rolleyes:
Wait. What?!?!
You’re the one quibbling about my interchangable use of the words disparity and disadvantage when describing the 3 to 1 disparity in acceptance rates between white applicants and Asian applicants (with the same SAT/GPA) and I’m the one that’s quibbling? Plenty of articles that were cited in that thread use the term disadvantage or disparity.
Yeah, according to the exact same admissions committees that are being accused of discrimination. Its not unusual for the accused to proclaim their innocence.
You seem to think I don’t understand the difference between causation and correlation, you don’t seem to understand that sometimes correlation indicates causation.
I gave a much better and more relevant example. Lets say that someone did a study of the NFL draft and was able top prove that white quarterbacks were 3 times more likely to be drafted before black quarterbacks with the same vital statistics and college record. The federal government launches an investigation and the NFL team owners explained it away by saying the disparity was the result of differences in soft criteria like leadership and presence and shit like that. Don’t you think it would be reasonable for people to discount the NFL owner’s explanation of the disparity or are they just crackpots because the NFL team owners have said over and over again that they chose the white quatrterbacks oer the black quarterbacks because of “soft critieria” After all the NFL team owners would be in the best position to know.
The reality: When news of this gets out and many light-skinned people with dark eyes apply, they find that they get rejected just the same.
I think there is some debate on that. Some people think that Admissions officers have been trying to dilute the importance of SATs (at least in part) because it makes it really hard to jsutify some of the huge racial gaps that we see in SAT scores from affirmative action.
And yes, the analogy is useful because it’s revealing the sort of erroneous logic you’re using, here.
And yet the AI calculator shows that it does.
I think there is a basic difference of opinion on the quality of your “evidence” versus the quality of my “evidence”
My evidence is a history of discrimination in the past. Discrimination that these schools confessed to in the past.
My evidence is a statistically signifcant disparity in admission rates between Asians and whites with the same SAT score and GPA.
You evidence is a blog by an MIT admissions counselor and “soft criteria”
Listen son, I’m TRYING to fix your ignorance but its taking longer than I thought. Help me help you.
No, you’re just a twat who doesn’t understand how to interpret statistics.
I also shouldn’t have to explain to you why “advantage” and “disparity” are totally different words. A disparity is a difference. Not all differences represent advantages.
Honestly, how stupid are you? Can you seriously not make this connection? It’s an important difference. It’s not quibbling.
If your claims are even remotely true, it means they, in violation of everything I’ve known and experienced there and everything the school stands for, looked only at pure numbers to the point they were willing to pay to fly people in, sight unseen, in an attempt to get them to attend. It means some of my friends who’ve worked in the Admissions Office in the past have been lying to me for years.
It would make them hypocritical douchebags.
And that they would even treat with anybody with such a poor grasp of logical reasoning, vocabulary, ability for self-analysis, or just basic presentation skills (as your typical mind-bogglingly stupidly insane novel-length multi-quotes indicate) reflects poorly on them and on all alums for also being the type of students they want. The school was known for having quirky nerds with a good sense of humor. Not pompous windbags inflated by their own overblown sense of worth.
For fuck’s sake, in the 80s there were only 2000 undergraduates TOTAL, from freshmen to graduating seniors. You think they budgeted the kind of money to fly people in from across the country with such a low enrollment?
By the way, I’m going to avoid the dick-measuring contest that all announcements of SAT scores inevitably become.
Which reminds me, if you’re going to make ridiculous claims about colleges flying you in based on scores, you might as well go the whole 10 yards. There are dozens of National Merit Scholarship finalists accepted at Rice each year, and test scores feature a large role in that selection. If you’re going to make crazy claims about your supposed high test scores, you might as include one of the few programs that actually makes test scores a large component.
Do you remember saying this:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=14737463&postcount=21
“If you admitted students by merit alone, Ivies would be primarily Asian and Jewish. You’ll notice those representations are already quite sizable as-is.”
The reason they are a dome a dozen at Harvard (another factoid you seem to repeat pretty frequently) is because they are important factors in the admission process, not merely a screening device.
I asked several times for you to exlplain why it was that Asians seemed to lose out so heavily on the “soft critieria” and you have not really provided very satisfying answers. So forgive me if I don’t “concede the point already” because I don’t want to accept your conjecture, theories and stereotypes without some hard evidence.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=14743774&postcount=99
Listen son, I’m trying to fix your ignorance but its taking longer than I thought.
Help me help you.
Yes, we definitely need two threads about this. Actually I wouldn’t have to moderate this one, so I’m all for it. I give props to FixMyIgnorance for trying to make “pettifogging” cool again, and Damuri Ajashi, while I disagreed with you in the first place and I think your opponents might be being a little too strict in interpreting the data, they are doing a much better job than you are at making and supporting their arguments.
Well, it’s better than the N threads we have on Sandusky and child rape. Or is it SA and child rape?
I figure better a self-deluded and self-important windbag than a latent pedophile.
Yes.
Might as well summarize why your stance is retarded here:
This is why you don’t get it.
You claimed this disparity was in the 1300-1400 old-SAT range, right? Those thresholds are below-average for Ivies. When you start dipping into lower scores, you start entering realms where you start looking at greater numbers of recruited athletes, most of whom are overwhelmingly non-Asian. Are you going to argue that sports recruiting is anti-Asian discrimination, too?
Even if you’re looking at a disparity at higher score thresholds, you continue to ignore the fact that SAT scores simply stop mattering past a certain point. There are diminishing marginal returns at the tail end of the test. A few extra questions past a 2300 or even a 2250 is not going to make up for an otherwise lacking soft-profile. Every admissions officer will tell you this. Seriously. Go pick up a phone. Get up off your ass. Call an admissions officer.
But of course, you’ve already admitted you don’t trust admissions officers. Apparently it’s all a conspiracy. Admissions aren’t actually holistic despite all the evidence, and watered down metrics like the SAT are actually the be-all end-all. I guess Harvard rejects 2400’s all the time just for shits and giggles to throw people off.
As for the AI, it is a ROUGH correlation tool built from historical data. Of course it’s going to show that higher scores result in higher admit rates. It’s the same logic behind why we see higher admit rates for higher SAT scores. However, you make the same error in assuming that correlation is causation. The higher admit rates are not largely because of the SAT. It’s because of soft criteria (and the rest of the “objective” criteria). Again, strong students tend to have a lot of both. Many 2300+ scorers also put in a lot of effort into things like EC’s, good essays, good grades, and have strong recs. When’s the last time you saw a slacker pull off Harvard-worthy SAT scores? You’ll find a lot more super-high SAT scores among people who are very active in their academic communities.
You don’t have all the data you need and yet you keep harping on the SAT like it’s far more relevant than it actually is, and then you use this skewed interpretation to act like colleges are using soft criteria to keep Asians out when they have higher SAT scores on average.
Diversity-based holistic admissions isn’t about keeping races out. It’s about bringing a wide variety of people in. In doing so, some segmented clusters will be affected more than others, absolutely. But this is not the same as anti-Asian discrimination and it’s not evidence of some crackpot conspiracy theory.
What I meant here is that if you went by grades/SAT scores, you’d largely see Asians and Jews get admitted. But as has been repeated ad nauseum, holistic admissions are much more than that. You need MORE than grades and scores. The fact that some groups can squeeze out a couple extra questions on average doesn’t make them a more optimal choice for a student body. Ivies are not strictly in the business of admitting numbers. They want to admit interesting, diverse, talented people who also have high numbers, but they aren’t going to fall over themselves if someone has a “lowly” 2310 instead of a 2380.
Well, I’m sorry if you think that it reflects poorly on your alma mater. It wasn’t particularly relevant to the conversation and I’m sorry I even brought it up.
I get criticized for using multiquote and for not using multiquote. If I ignore some of the posts to shorten length, I get accused of sidestepping questions. You just can’t win. 
I think FixMyIgnorance might be the only one who has given out his SAT scores (and LSAT scores too just in case), are you asking me for my scores? I never said it was that big a deal to be a national merit scholar, there are literally thousands of them every year. I don’t know what you mean by your last sentence.
The reason I listed my scores/my admitted schools/etc in that thread is to help add credibility to my claims, here. It’s not about cockwaving or bragging. I’ve spent a lot of time studying the admissions process. My understanding of the process is exactly what got me into so many schools in the first place. I know how easy/hard it is to get certain scores and I can also assess that context with respect to my peers. The time I’ve spent actually ATTENDING an Ivy League school has allowed me to better understand the types of students they admit and what traits they possess. I’ve read blogs, spent time on message boards, read books, and I’ve even met a few officers (one of which is a decent friend of mine now). It’s to help indicate that what I am telling you is more than mere armchair speculation, but rather years of firsthand experience. This doesn’t even begin to address the cited articles/statistics/books that brickbacon and I showed you that further support conclusions against your stance.
What you have is a dubious, bullshit story about Rice flying you out because of SATs alone, a cited study whose own author doesn’t even agree with you (lmfaooo), and a massive misconception about the college application process.
While there may be thousands of National Merit Scholars, they only comprise about 1% of the total population, and that one IS based on scores.
If you were such a hotshot that schools were wanting to fly you out, you might as well also make up the claim you were one yourself. Otherwise, you had high enough scores that schools were interested but not high enough to be a National Merit finalist.
Does Not Compute, much like your other posts.
Oh, and I’d say you were wrong about the multi-quote. Your posts sidestep questions quite well even when you posts thousands of words.
For whatever it’s worth, he said Rice offered (in a pre-acceptance letter) to fly him out on their dime. You can offer something to impress people without actually doing it and still get your message across. I’ve never heard of that kind of thing, but I was also never an Asian student being pursued by colleges in the late '80s.
Whether he actually flew out isn’t relevant to me. The fact that the offer even existed in the first place is what I am actually calling BS on.
I don’t trust them either, since it’s human nature to lie about discrimination. An admissions officer will never say “We don’t want to admit too many Jews.” At best, they will say that they want “geographic diversity” so they give preference to applicants from Bismarck, ND over applicants from Scarsdale, NY.
So too with Asians (I prefer to use the more traditional word “Oriental”). I will speculate that Harvard admissions officers don’t want too many freshmen from California who happen to play the violin and that they (the admissions officers) feel they have enough such people already. I wonder why that is.
Yes, I’m just speculating but I’m pretty confident that the bar is higher for people from traditionally high-achieving groups.
Screw that noise.
He later backtracked on that claim.
So, now it’s a matter of accepting this claim based on what has already been shown to be a faulty memory.
So, now it’s “trust me, this is what they said to me on the phone, even though I earlier claimed it was in a letter and other people got the same letter”. Well, that’s a load of Texas-sized BS.
Though, now I’ll have to backtrack on one of my own. He did actually mention he was a National Merit Scholar in one of the posts (they’re so damned long, it’s hard to remember each one).
I don’t. I’m also Asian, so I get a say.
I’m sure there’s lots of redneck trash who prefer to use the more traditional “nigger” but they don’t get a say, either.
Also, it’s just wrong. People from the subcontinent were not typically called “oriental”, but they are Asian and are included as “Asian” in college demographics.
Enjoy your racism, you racist. At least you’re open about it.
Do you even read your asinine posts before submitting them? This just makes no fucking sense.
I saw. And I’m not saying it’s true- like I said, I’ve never heard of anything like that and it’s hard to swallow. I did want to make sure his statement was represented accurately: “Rice offered to fly me to their campus based on my SATs” may be hard to believe, but it’s less unbelievable than “Rice flew me out to their campus based on my SATs.”
I see nothing pit worthy here. Just because you don’t believe someone’s claims about themselves or agree with someone doesn’t somehow make them a “moronic troglodyte of a crackpot”.
Now with that said, I stopped arguing in that thread precisely because, even though I provided a link to a study detailing how Asian’s college admissions would be affected by adopting a “race-blind” approach to admissions, some people were content to continue to assume that the college admissions process contained some grand, non-arbitrary factor for deciding who gets in which did not boil down to “we don’t want your kind around here!”.
That’s fair.
Still a ridiculous claim, of course.
And this is the kind of moronic reasoning being trashed.
If athletics were no longer a factor in college admissions, this would adversely affect African-American admissions over other races. But it would NOT boil down to targeting African-American students in particular.
This point has been brought up repeatedly.
Try reading the rest of the thread before you post.
Wait — it’s entirely possible I’m suffering from some kind of momentary lapse of reason, but why is the former statement more believable than the latter? The only difference I see between the two scenarios is that in the second he actuality takes them up on their offer.