Well, that’s not the students’ fault, is it?
Also related, puddlegum, even if they realize I’m a minority, they may not know who I am when grading. Nowadays, especially for exams, no one writes in their names, they use the university ID numbers (not even their SSNs). So for most exams, they do not even know who wrote/submitted it.
Also, in many courses, the exams are now geared towards multiple-choice (especially bigger class sizes). In such places, there is no “scantron answer key for minorities” and “scantron answer key for whites”, it is “scantron for all”, and the grades are the grades.
The vast majority?
So that explains Ben Carson!
AKA “The Asian F”. 
I don’t know that you can say that with any accuracy; even at my alma mater, which had something like 2% black students and 15% hispanic students, that was never the assumption among students.
If you’d have asked us why the black percentage was so low, we’d have answered that it’s because A&M was a predominantly white school with a decidedly rural and country slant, located in a smallish Central Texas town. In other words, not somewhere most black students would voluntarily want to attend, AA or not.
As a matter of fact, until very recently, that hick-school appearance was often considered a handicap in football recruiting relative to UT and other Big-12 schools.
Maybe it’s different between public schools and private ones (do they even have to deal with AA?), but I never had the impression that the default assumption has always been that a minority applicant is a beneficiary of AA.
And, while we’re at it, let’s come out and say “black” rather than “minority”. For whatever reason, the percentages of black students in colleges trails the hispanic percentages by quite a bit, even in places where the black population is quite large, like say LSU/Louisiana, which has nearly 3x the number of hispanic students to black students, even with 32% of the Lousiana population being black, and only 5% being hispanic.
Something’s going on with that other than racism, AA and socio-economic status, I suspect.
Of course not. But nor is it the fault of those discriminating.
Put it this way: if I operate under the assumption that I want to hire the best young lawyer, and all I knew about them was their appearance and the school they graduated from - whom should I choose? And would my choice be different, if I knew AA existed from if I knew AA did not exist?
Assume for the sake of argument that I’m ruthlessly rational and otherwise care nothing about racial matters - that is, I’m not swayed by being racist, or by sympathy for racial minorities.
My guess that my choice would be indifference to appearance if AA did not exist (or maybe even slightly favorable to the minority person, knowing rationally that minority people have to struggle harder to achieve the same position), but to care (somewhat) if AA exists - because, in that case, discrimination makes sense. You can’t in this scenario actually ask the person if they recieved help from AA, after all.
To provide an example from the other direction: in Canada prior to the 1950s, there existed a “quota system” that effectively limited the number of Jewish people who were allowed to go to medical schools. The effect of this was that only the academically superior Jewish students could get in - and they needed much higher marks than their non-Jewish competitors.
The effect of this was to strongly re-enforce the stereotype that Jews ‘made good doctors’. The reason being that, in a ruthlessly rational sense, they did - artificially - because only the best Jewish students got to be doctors. It was the reverese of AA.
Of course there isn’t a 1:1 mapping of “being better academically - i.e., having higher marks” and “being a better doctor”. Some people with high marks go on to become lousy doctors, and some people with barely-adequate marks go on to become excellent physicians. A far better system would be to track actual job performance over time.
But - people are often working with very limited information. A person wanting to hire a doc or lawyer isn’t necessarily to know their work history, or even their marks. Hence the use of reasonable assumptions.
To summarize: typically, discrimination based on minority status is irrational and a result of irrational prejudice. What AA and quota-type systems do, is give discrimination a certain amount of rational basis under certain circumstances.
This is the price one pays for it - to measure against whatever positive social goods such systems do. It seems foolish to deny that price, though a good argument can, of course, be made that paying it is worthwhile.
You think grade inflation only applies to minorities? My daughter went to Chicago, where there is no grade inflation. A guy came from Harvard and gave a talk about the perils of grade inflation. The students booed him.
However grade inflation makes sense if you are admitting only really top students.
According to this study if affirmative action was eliminated black acceptance rates would fall by 66%. That is colleges overall, to selective colleges it would be more. For example the article mentions Cal Berkeley law school where acceptance rates for blacks fell 81% when affirmative action would be eliminated.
I don’t think it would actually fall quite that much since black high school students would likely try harder if they knew they were being held to the same standard as everyone else.
I went to a school with only a slightly lower acceptance rate than A&M and never thought that minorities were AA beneficiaries, that really only applies at selective colleges. However, since getting in is easier, in order to make the credential worthwhile it is easier to drop out. Thus the dropout rate for blacks is twice as high as the white droput rate for A&M.
Very interesting. Did you see the where they dispelled the myth that eliminating affirmative action would help white students?
Grade inflation happens to everyone at top schools, it makes it much easier to graduate. At most top schools hardly anyone who trys flunks out.
Having a degree from a top school means two things, that you were smart enough to get in and you were conscientious enough to attend classes for four years. Since the number of really smart people is outnumbered by the number of adequately conscientious people most of the signal comes from being smart enough to get in. Since affirmative action sends the signal that you were being judged by lower standards having a degree from a prestigious college means less for Black and Hispanic students.
Why should I care if it only helps white students? Asian people pay taxes like everyone else, their food is wonderful, their women are beautiful and even their music is good. They have done nothing worthy of being discriminated against.
To my mind, the significant harm or cost of AA is not that it is unfair to otherwise-deserving White students (a small number), but that it both dilutes the perceived value of the accomplishment generally, and lends rationality to race-based discrimination that would otherwise be lacking.
The people who “lose out” most in this analysis are members of the same minority group eligible for AA who did not require AA to obtain admission.
Again, whether this cost or harm is overall “worth it” when balanced against the goals of AA is an open debate. It may well be.
In my experience from going to a top university the habits that got you there don’t suddenly disappear. (I understand that they do in Japan, but not here.) The floor I lived on did not have the highest cum in the entire school, but there was lots of self-pressure to do those problem sets and study for those exams. Plus people helped each other when needed. And the professors did not let you slack off.
There were no gut courses. I knew some people who took one they kind of laughed off - it did not work out well.
I don’t have much personal experience with AA students, except one who I interviewed and encouraged the manager to hire. He did, and the guy turned out to be damned smart. The other one had a good career also. After all, AA students are not picked randomly. They are usually the top of their often bad schools. A lot of AA is not just giving them a pass, but reaching out to students who would never think it possible to apply or get into a good university.
Do you really think that a majority student who is mediocre but whose parents can afford to send him to get coached on the SATs is more deserving than a smarter minority student without these advantages?
I have an interesting comparison between two sets of white students. The parents of the kids in the town I used to live in worked in research centers nearby. Many had PhDs. Many of the mothers did not work and volunteered at the schools - which were open to parents coming in and teaching what they knew. A GATE meeting at our elementary school was absolutely jammed.
Here the parents have more normal jobs. There was relatively little interest in GATE in our high school and elementary school.
the kids from NJ went to much better colleges than the kids here. They had better SAT scores. many of them have excelled.
is the difference average IQ? I doubt it. Parents here aren’t poor. the neighborhoods are of the same quality. The difference is in the parents, for the most part.
What part of the gap between AA students and those “more deserving” comes from parents and environment, and not smarts? You can’t do much to control for lazy or uncaring parents, but you could do at least something to control for poverty and bad schools, which are not caused by the kids.
The Jungle is not the Meritocracy we idealize, in the Digital Age. Society can redistribute wealth and still sustain notions of success/intelligence/talent/entrepreneurialism.
I don’t think “lazy and uncaring” explains all the gap. Nor do I think it’s all about the parents, or all about poverty. As one of the few people on this board willing to call themselves an “AA beneficiary”, I should also be honest and admit that I did not grow up in an impoverish home. I was raised by two college-educated parents. I attended the best public schools in the city. I didn’t have to dodge either KKK rallies or drug dealers on the way to school. I grew up watching 3-2-1 Contact and reading science text books, and at any early age I identified with everything scientific and analytical. I excelled in my studies (despite attempts to put me in remedial classes…but I digress). By all intents and purposes, I should have knocked the SAT out of the park–especially since I took not one, but TWO prep courses. But my SAT score was just average. It was below-average for my undergraduate institution. When I got that score, I knew there was no way I was going to get accepted at any “good” school. I was so demoralized about my future that my father found me in the fetal position on the living room floor with the crumpled piece of paper in my hand, barely able to speak. I was so ashamed of myself. It seemed like all that hard work was all for naught. That’s the thought that reverberated in my sad little head.
Fast forward five years, when I took the GRE for graduate school. The first time I took the test, I was so anxious that I got lost on the way to the testing center and ended up doing horribly. The second time I took the test–at the urging of my mother and after my twin sis had done so well on it–percentile-wise I scored in the 90s for all three sections. My subject test score was off the chain too. I was so proud of myself no one could tell me nuthin’!
So according to the SAT, I had only fair-to-middling aptitude. Not shameful if you are aiming for a community college, but horrible if you are aspiring for a Research I institution. But on the GRE, I was at the head of the class. The score was good enough to make me eligible for Mensa.
I don’t think my IQ changed over the span of five years. Someone doesn’t go from “average aptitude” to “gifted” just by going to college. But I do think my confidence level increased a whole lot. That is the only variable that changed for me.
In high school, there’s a clear hierarchy of “smart” kids, “kinda smart” kids, “average” kids, and “remedial” kids. Every semester, I’d hurry to look at my class schedule to make sure I hadn’t been accidentally placed with the “remedial” kids AGAIN. I was self-conscious about my math ability, since all the “smart” kids were in calculus, but I was in trigonometry like the “average” kids. Peek into the remedial and average English and social studies classes, and you’d see a sea of brown faces. Peek into the honors and AP classes, and it was always a sea of white–except for my face and a couple of others. It would have been a special black kid who wouldn’t have internalized anything negative seeing this scene playing over and over again since the sixth grade.
But when I got to college, every classroom was a sea of white. There weren’t any remedial classrooms dominated by black kids. I wasn’t under any threat of being “accidentally” placed in a class for dumb kids. I didn’t have classmates teasing me about not being in the “smart” classes in college. I had a couple of really cool professors in college that made me feel extra smart and competent. I experienced that kind of encouragement in high school, too. But it’s different being compared against an assortment of students versus super-duper intelligent ones. I always thought the HS teachers were just being sweet. But I actually believed my college professors, because why would they lie? My HS teachers knew I was insecure. My college professors didn’t.
So to be honest, I think the gap for me was purely psychological. As a young teenager, I had internalized a lot of the negative messages about blackness, and I think it ended up manifesting itself in poor test performance. But by the time I was 21 years old, I’d shrugged a lot of that baggage off. (My confidence would wane once I was in grad school. But it didn’t have anything to do with race and everything to do with grad school being a soul-sucking obstacle course of failed experiments, rejected manuscripts, and blowhard dissertation committee members).
I think my case is a perfect example of stereotype threat. But for someone else, maybe it’s something else.
I should also add…I ended up scoring fairly high on the PSAT. Don’t remember the score, but it was closer to the average for my undergrad institution and wound up earning me a National Achievement scholarship.
I think I did well on it because it was just play-play, not for real-real. I’m grateful that no one had clued me in on how important the test was for scholarships, because I’m almost certain having this knowledge would have caused me to screw up.
It sounds as if you are hoping exceptions to the average define the group. This is a common error when people are trying to understand race-based affirmative action.
I was referring to average differences and the way they persist through a career, and perhaps re-reading the rest of the post more carefully will be of benefit to you.