Giving a student a bonus for having rich or well educated parents strikes me as straight up immoral. Google says the University of California is a public institution, so I hope so you are wrong and they are not doing such a thing. I can’t believe you think that is okay, or that people who claim to care so much about helping disadvantaged students would do it.
AIUI, the point of holistic review is to take more factors than simply grades and SAT scores into account, not to let the people in charge of admissions make arbitrary decisions. I’m sure it sometimes happens, but that is a great way to allow actual bias and prejudice into the process.
That depends entirely on how the demographic factors are used vs how SAT scores are used. Do you also believe a high SAT score can be positive or negative depending on whim?
Exactly what procedure(s) need to be followed, in your opinion, in order for you to consider the applicant selection process non-“arbitrary”?
The fact is, AFAICT, that most US higher education institutions that are considered “selective” or “competitive” or above apply some standard academic achievement criteria to determine which applicants seem basically qualified to attend. But that eligibility assessment generally still ends up with a significantly larger number of qualified applicants than there are spaces to fill in the student body.
At that point, it becomes a matter of figuring out how to decide among applicants that are all reasonably well qualified to attend. I’d be happy to hear your detailed proposal for exactly how that should be done in a way that can never be accused of being “arbitrary”.
(Unless you’re simply going to take the easy way out by declaring that colleges need to rank applicants quantitatively in accordance with their grades and test scores. If you want to run your own private college that way, I have no objection, but it’s not a useful strategy for institutions that are trying to resist the effects of systemic bias on outcomes like grades and test scores.)
Okay, add 3 million for Lenin and the entire Russian Civil War. I already included Cambodia. This brings us to… 55+20+10+3+3=91 million as an upper bound, these are like worst case numbers. We’ll add another full million for Qey Shibir (Ethiopia '76-'77) although Amnesty International pegs the toll at half a million. So something under 92 million total… still seven or eight million short of 100.
I’m not personally aware of any other leftist African countries killing millions of people but I don’t know much about twentieth century Africa. (Wikipedia tells me the Congo Crisis may have killed an estimated 100,000 people; only a handful under the late Ratsiraka’s rule in Madagascar; no idea about Benin)
No, but it includes them. In order to show a genetic component that did not involve dyslexia, it would have needed to exclude them – and not only the ones with formal diagnoses, unless they were going to have all the children with poor reading ability tested.
And here’s one of those three instances, in which they specifically ascribe the genetic influence to dyslexia:
the data cannot speak to how the home literacy environment might influence, not only children’s reading development (Hamilton, Hayiou-Thomas, Hulme, & Snowling, 2016; Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002), but also their motivation to read. However, we argue that, given the stability of reading over time, it is unlikely that later levels of print exposure could account for future growth in reading, or override the powerful g-e correlation that manifest itself in dyslexic readers choosing literary activities less.
Admissions decisions at the University of Cambridge are based solely on academic criteria – your ability and your potential. Along with all the other information you provide, interviews help Admissions Tutors to assess your application.
Basing it on potential means they can do something like the ‘strivers’ to favour students who come from difficult circumstances. But not favour students because they have rich or well educated parents, or went to a good school! I don’t understand how you can support that, or why a public university would be allowed to do it. Do you have any evidence that UC is actually doing this?
You’d kind of hope they would have checked for an effect like that. They wouldn’t need formal diagnoses, I’d think they could just eliminate the bottom 10% of the sample and see how the correlation changes. For you to be correct the A component in the model would have to become zero, which seems extremely unlikely.
I looked up the other studies that were cited as showing that differences in reading skills are largely due to genetic factors, but they are not open access. Perhaps @Kimstu is able to see them?
Heritability was consistently high in the Netherlands across educational domains, while this was not always true for the USA and the UK.
That could be due to lower or more variable quality of education than in the Netherlands. Genetic influences are generally stronger for groups in good environments than those in poor ones.
An objection to the present conclusion is that we only measured reading at one point in time, during the early stages of reading acquisition (1 year after the commencement of reading instruction in the Netherlands). Moreover, the data cannot speak to how the home literacy environment might influence, not only children’s reading development (Hamilton, Hayiou-Thomas, Hulme, & Snowling, 2016; Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002), but also their motivation to read. However, we argue that, given the stability of reading over time, it is unlikely that later levels of print exposure could account for future growth in reading, or override the powerful g-e correlation that manifest itself in dyslexic readers choosing literary activities less. We contend, nonetheless, that longitudinal data are required to validate these assumptions.
They are not ascribing the genetic influence to dyslexia. First, they say it is a weakness of their study that they only examined reading ability at a single point in time. It could be possible that print exposure has an effect on reading ability at a later age. But they then say this is unlikely, because reading ability is very stable over time, and the effect they demonstrated in this study means print exposure relative to peers is unlikely to increase much for the worst (aka dyslexic) readers.
At any rate, the paper does not even try to demonstrate that the heritability of reading ability is solely due to dyslexia, so it would be totally unjustified to claim that as a conclusion.
Shouldn’t you be torching a courthouse, looting some Jordan’s, or smashing a brick on the head of someone exercising freedom of speech or assembly? You realize dressing in black and screaming social justice slogans is a get out of jail free card?
Of course it doesn’t. That’s not the issue they’re addressing.
Nevertheless, they did say
it is unlikely that later levels of print exposure could account for future growth in reading, or override the powerful g-e correlation that manifest itself in dyslexic readers choosing literary activities less.
Which certainly seems to me to mean that the genetic effect they’re talking about is, or at least is primarily, dyslexia.
However I don’t expect that either of us is going to write to them and ask them. So there’s not likely any point in pursuing this further.
Only in the mind of a deranged far leftist are pro-individual rights and freedoms equated with bigotry. Do you not realize how far the illiberal left which is intellectually dishonest and morally degenerate have sunk? As I’ve said before even Humpty Dumpty would be a pink egg if he attempted that sort of disingenuous linkage.
Being at home with Mao, Robespierre, theocracies throughout time, etc. should not be a desired place asahi.
The difference is that it’s utterly ridiculous to assert, aside from it being a brainless and reflexive action, that pro individual liberty is in any way associated with fascism. The reason why that’s a go to insult from the left, much like dat’s racist!11! and that’s sexist is that it’s an excuse for the left to engage in illiberal and criminal behavior on the nominally noble crusade of fighting against The Man.
Anti free speech, anti individual liberty, pro political violence to advance a collective agenda are features of the modern left. In the name of God, flag, or Wokenism no tactic is unjust is it?
