The New Haven Firefighter Case

Great Debates
121

Why is it bogus? Even within the NBA, in the last 15 years, there has been a large influx of foreign-born players, many from countries like Serbia and Croatia. How do you explain that?

Black representation in boxing and baseball are two other examples.

Baseball players make even more than basketball players, and there are more of them. There is obviously more of an incentive for Blacks to play the game today than there was in 1975. What genetic changes have happened since then? If it’s not genetic, what is it?

Is it different, but that doesn’t give any credence to your dubious contentions

Which is why they realize that trying to play in the NBA isn’t rational. All those advantages means they also have far more options with a higher expected rate of return. What would have, a one in a million chance to play in the NBA, or a one in 20 thousand chance to be a doctor like you dad? Most people with options don’t have that burning desire to dedicate themselves to a sport at the detriment of everything else in their lives.

But this notion of highest potential is something you just pulled out of your ass. How do you explain the fact that Blacks are not represented in the same proportion in baseball? How do you explain the fact that Blacks are more likely to be overweight and obese too? Is that genetic too? Super-athleticism and morbid obesity is kinda of a weird combination isn’t it?

Fair enough. But I would still like to hear how an appeals court judge, like Sotomayor, could have justified the opposite decision in this case.

Bullshit. Dubya just raised $100 million for his fucking presidential library. PETA raises a ton of money every year as do crazy people like Lyndon LaRouch. People will donate money to damn near anything. There are plenty of people who believe the nonsense you do that would fund research into such things. They don’t do it because they know that even pinning down what “race” is would be nearly impossible. They trade in pseudoscience, intuition, and fallacies. They won’t ever try to test their theories because they know they cannot stand up to rigorous scientific scrutiny, and because they decided that anecdotes are as good as data.

But they have closed. See here and here. Furthermore, you ignore the fact that rich Black kids are still treated as Black kids regardless of their wealth. How many poor White kids do you know that would become Black if it meant they could grow up upper-middle class? The general consensus is that being Black is a greater burden in most circumstances.

122

Do you have a cite for that?

We can’t effectively decide who is misdiagnosing and who or not, but we can tell who is genetically inferior by looking at them? :dubious: We can’t tell who is managing their patients better, but we can tell that a guy who does better on his MCATs will have a better mastery of the material, and/or will be a better doctor?

But that is the case when those tests are given on that basis.

Because people don’t have the same opportunity to learn exactly the same material. Some people, like the Frank Ricci have six months and $1000, others have nothing. By your logic all, doctors with equal resumes and test scores should make the same diagnoses. Why don’t they?

I go back to the cite about the role societal expectations have in our behavior. How do you reconcile the fact that people change the way the walk when they are around old people, with your understanding of genetics? Or that people don’t do as well on tests when they are primed with the fact that they are expected to do poorly?

It’s not a valid concern so long as it doesn’t result in less competent physicians.

123

There’s an article on race and IQ here: Liberal Creationism (4 parts). It seems like a good introduction to the subject.

Anyway, all this talk about genetics is a red herring.

If doing well on a test like this is a useful predictor of future job performance (and I’m sure it is) then it doesn’t matter why someone did well. Throwing away the test and not hiring the best qualified candidates because you were unhappy with the color of their skin is wrong and (hopefully) illegal.

If the test is not useful for anything then I don’t see how the underlying cause of any racial disparity matters, morally or legally.

124

Originally Posted by **Chief Pedant **
“The performance difference for blacks and whites persists into the post-medical school licensing exams (called the USMLE) and into the Specialty Board exams (these are usually 3-7 years post medical school). So ten to fifteen years out from entering college, with identical training over the prior ten to fifteen years, we still see a disparity on medical exams.”

As you may be aware, all institutions of higher learning are quite protective of their admission preferences, race-based data and any data which show obvious disparities by group. They are sensitive to the potential misuse of such information by the hate-mongering crowd, and frankly are uninterested in what Mr Holden apparently wants: an honest dialogue on race instead of being cowardly about it.

Here are a few cites for some of the assertions I’ve made:

**Children of wealthy (>100k/yr) underperform children of poor (<10k/yr) whites on the SAT: ** The Widening Racial Scoring Gap on the SAT College Admissions Test the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education)

*"But there is a major flaw in the thesis that income differences explain the racial gap. Consider these three observable facts from The College Board’s 2005 data on the SAT:

• Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score of 993. This is 129 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.

• Whites from families with incomes below $10,000 had a mean SAT test score that was 61 points higher than blacks whose families had incomes of between $80,000 and $100,000.

• Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 85 points below the mean score for whites from all income levels, 139 points below the mean score of whites from families at the same income level, and 10 points below the average score of white students from families whose income was less than $10,000. "*

Black USMLE scores are lower than whites: http://journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/Fulltext/2001/12000/Racial_Bias_in_Using_USMLE_Step_1_Scores_to_Grant.21.aspx

"Substantial differences in test performances across racial groups on the National Board of Medical Examiners’ (NBME) examinations, the USMLE’s predecessor, were previously reported.5 In 1988, the overall mean score on NBME Part I was 480; however, African-American students had mean scores that were 100-120 points lower than those for white students. Only limited data on USMLE Step 1 performances by racial groups have been reported. However, analysis of first-time takers (n = 11,279) of the USMLE Step 1 in June 1994 revealed that the mean score for white students was 210, while the mean score for African-American students was 187.2.

Since the USMLE Step 1 scores of African-American medical students have been shown to be lower than those of their white counterparts…"

Black specialty exam scores are lower than whites: This is the most difficult area to give you a specific cite because of the way medical training happens. During a residency, underperformers drop out of (or are dropped) so that by the time of specialty certification, the trainees actually sitting for the boards are a residual group of the original starters. In general, it’s been found that those who do poorly on the USMLE (of any color) do poorly on specialty board examinations down the road. Here’s a quote from a study on predictive value of the USMLE by the American Board of Orthopedic Surgery: http://www.ejbjs.org/cgi/content/extract/86/5/1092

“Consequently, the
relative risk of failing the ABOS Part-I
examination for students with USMLE
Step-I scores below 204 was 2.63 (95%
confidence interval, 0.48 to 14.38) times
that of students scoring above 204.”

It’s a pretty good rule of thumb in higher academics that those who performed marginally on written exams did so all their lives, before, during and after their college years.

Back to the NBA and those Croatians and Serbians: I’d say there’s a population gene pool there somewhere with a high concentration of folks with a superior potential for basketball. Of course it could be that the Mbuti just haven’t been told of the NBA’s fame and fortune yet…

And no, we don’t decide if someone is genetically inferior by looking at them. We decide if whole groups have disparate potential that is genetically conferred by testing whole groups while controlling for variables. The genetic variability within the human species renders prediction for a given individual a shaky proposition at best. That we group people at all is a shame, but of course the dilemma is that any group which cries “foul” for its self-described grouping opens itself to an examination of its group performance to determine whether it has been fouled or has simply–as a group–underperformed. If the whites in this country rose up and cried “foul” over their under-representation in the NBA, the response would not be sympathy, but laughter.

125

Do you have cites to show this “coddling” programs exclude males? It’s easy to make that assumption, but it’s far from a given.

I went to an engineering undergrad and yes, there were tutorial programs that were managed by the minority office. But you know what? There was nothing preventing white students from taking advantage of these services. Many did, in fact.

Tutoring, by the way, is not the same thing as applying a different grading or testing systems to blacks or other minorities. It’s one-on-one teaching, and is no more coddling than is having a professor invite his students to get extra help during office hours. At end-game, the students are still held to the same standards.

This sounds like an isolated incident, not a systematic, institutionalized process. I can just as easy fire off an anecdote or two about some rich white kid who got some underserved extra credit at one point in time because he whined enough, but that doesn’t mean that schools have policies in place that “coddle” white students.

126

Again, I’m getting that “are you whooshing me?” feeling. Mentoring programs are allover the place. Googling “medical student mentors” makes that patently obvious. You’ve simply singled out one that focuses on minorities. Surely you’re not under the impression that white students aren’t given access to practicing physicians while black students are, because that is borderline crazy.

Tutoring and mentoring are red herrings anyway because you’ve failed to show how these programs mean black students are evaluated differently than white students in the classroom, by institutions. I’m gonna need somebody to do that, because as a black veterinarian it goes against my experiences.

127

So you can’t address the question without ad hominems?

And maybe women who are let in with lower SAT scores ARE coddled through the whole process.

128

Yes, it is. Having a different set of standards based on race is coddling. If you have more opportunities for mentoring and help, and have lower standards on the tests, that is by definition ‘coddling’.

129

Well then maybe you’d be better served showing that it doesn’t actually happen that way rather than hurling insults at such concerns. Chief Pedant says that the lower scores occur all the way up the chain. Is he right or is he wrong?

130

And how do I know that it doesn’t?

131

Are you asking me to prove that lower standards aren’t used to evaluate black medical students? This is called proving a negative and is a waste of time.

If you think blacks are coddled in medical school while white students are left to fend for themselves in the harsh, hard world with nary a friend or resource to guide them, show this. I don’t know by what mechanism this would take place, such practices more than likely would have gotten a lot of media attention and yet I’ve heard nothing about this, and it doesn’t jive with my own experiences in vet school (which is generally considered tougher than med school). But go on and put up something to justify your assumptions.

And maybe there was a second shooter on the grassy knoll.

132

Let’s suppose he’s right. It doesn’t mean that black students are coddled in their training, so I don’t know what his assertion has to do with anything.

133

Well it is possible to falsify a hypothesis like Maeglin has attempted calling into question the value of the psychometrics.

I don’t know one way or the other, and that’s the problem. How am I to know? How am I to trust that the education is the same if the standards are lower for entrance into medical school? I’m not making ANY assumptions. I am alarmed by information that has been presented and your ad hominems and appeals to emotion have done very little to allay that alarm. Don’t get me wrong, I have met some brilliant black people in my life, people whose intelligence I respect deeply. So I am sure that there are many brilliant black Doctors, and it is likely that you are a brilliant veterinarian. The problem is one of verification. If standards are lowered, how do I know how deep it goes?

The problem here isn’t whether or not black doctors are qualified, it is a matter of verification. How do I verify?

And maybe handwaving appeals to emotion are unpersuasive. You need to decide whether trying to fight my ignorance has any value to you, because making fun of me is something I’m pretty immune to. I like to talk trash as much as the next guy, but I don’t consider it a substitute for reasoned debate.

134

I don’t like the term “coddling” as it’s been applied in this thread, because I find it unnecessarily pejorative. Certainly all institutions of higher learning attempt to help their struggling students, and there are specific efforts that are directed toward efforts to ensure that Under-represented Minorities get any help they need.

At the risk of muddying this water further, let me clarify:

For medical (and law) licensure and certificaton, the standardized exams required for licensure and/or certification are NOT adjusted. You either pass them or you do not; if you pass you are certified, and if you don’t pass you are not. Those exams (the Bar exam and the USMLE, for instance, are the minimum level requirements. As with any other exam, its possible to barely pass them or ace them.

For admission to training schools (law and medicine, and presumably many others) the standards for entry ARE adjusted, and preferential treatment is given to URMs (Under-Represented Minorities). This is true at the college level, and equally true at the Professional school level, because the weak standardized scores of URMs at college entry do not close testing gaps four years later. So if a medical or law school wants to promote diversity, they must create a double standard for URMs and lower any standardized admission test criteria for that pool of applicants.

Four years later still, the USMLE will continue to reflect lower scores for URMs, who still have not closed the gap. In medicine, which for the most part requires yet additional Residency training to become Board Certified in a specialty, programs who seek diversity for their trainees must again create a double standard for entry into the program because the URMs will be disproportionately represented in the lower test echelons. Over-reliance on scores would effectively “discriminate” against acceptance of URMs since arbitrary score threshholds exclude lower performers.

The USMLE is usually sufficient for state licensure, however, and once its components are passed, individual state boards can use that to grant licensure for medical practice in that state. If a state requires USMLE passing scores, no double standard is used that somehow lets a URM get a license without passing the same test everyone else did.

135

When you go to a doctor, ask to see his license. Then call the state medical licensing board and ask them to verify that he/she is qualified to practice medicine in your state.

136

:rolleyes:

137

And that’s the point, isn’t it?

MCAT may have some predictive value on later tests, when you look at large groups of people. But if you have two docs, both of whom passed their boards, then what does it matter what their MCAT scores were? Obviously both docs were smart enough to 1) successfully get through med school and 2) pass their board exam.

Let’s suppose we find out that Dr. Smith had a craptastic MCAT score and was only able to get into med school because he came from a prestigious undergrad, had a high undergrad GPA, and/or is Native American. All that tells me is that in his case, the MCAT was not a reliable predictor of his ability to become a doctor, since he was able to successfully master the training and pass the USMLE. If the MCAT score is the end all-be all, then the guy should have flunked out the first or second year.

Again, I ask the incredulous: why don’t employers bother with asking applicants for SAT, GRE, or MCAT scores, if they have so much meaningful predictive value?

138

So why is it that the MCAT is not a good predictor of his ability but the standardized licensing exams are?

139

The MCAT is not measuring a physician’s knowledge. It’s a test that is taken before medical school, before the person even receives the training they need to distinguish a wart from a pimple. That alone makes it a weird basis for judging a physician.

Who would you most trust to know what they’re doing in the operating room? The board-certified surgeon who had the lowest MCAT score in their class? Or the 1st year medical student who had the highest.

140

You’re being evasive here. No one is judging by the MCAT, I am wondering if it’s not indicative of a larger trend of lowering standards to meet quotas from entrance to med school on to hiring at hospitals.

I’m not going to answer your question because it’s utterly irrelevant.