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> Yet Harvard’s admissions officials assign Asian Americans the lowest score of any racial group on the personal rating—a “subjective” assessment of such traits

> Yet Harvard’s admissions officials assign Asian Americans the lowest score of any racial group on the personal rating—a “subjective” assessment of such traits as ... “attractive person to be with,” is “widely respected,”... Why is such an evaluation is even necessary? What is its purpose? To give higher scores to one's relatives and friends? And how do you measure the wideness of respect? Well, if it is completely private institution then it might be fine but if they use government money such subjective ratings are a good opportunity for corruption.

fraudsyndrome 8y ago
I reckon it's to purposely give them a "reason" not to accept Asian Americans. People like to believe we live in a meritocracy and Asian Americans as a group did better than other races - so they put in "well-roundedness" which ends up being super subjective but a reason for them to deny others based on other factors not relating to scores. The respect part is a cop-out as it plays on peoples bias. This is where social stereotypes of groups as a whole tend to work it's magic. Asian Americans are seen as "not able to lead", "worker bees" etc. Even though there is no objective measure for that, just peoples bias and this leads them to apply certain characteristics to groups (based on names/photos) no matter what their application looks like.
albntomat0 8y ago
> Why is such an evaluation is even necessary? What is its purpose? In general, selecting for good personality traits make sense. In the extreme, only selecting for test scores and grades ignores all of the characteristics that make a person good in real world endeavours (ex: all of the recurring HN stories about genius coders sucking at team work). That said, evaluating for these in a consistent, non-biased way, at a scale of 40k/year seems incredibly difficult.

fraudsyndrome 8y ago

I reckon it's to purposely give them a "reason" not to accept Asian Americans. People like to believe we live in a meritocracy and Asian Americans as a group did better than other races - so they put in "well-roundedness" which ends up being super subjective but a reason for them to deny others based on other factors not relating to scores. The respect part is a cop-out as it plays on peoples bias. This is where social stereotypes of groups as a whole tend to work it's magic. Asian Americans are seen as "not able to lead", "worker bees" etc. Even though there is no objective measure for that, just peoples bias and this leads them to apply certain characteristics to groups (based on names/photos) no matter what their application looks like.

albntomat0 8y ago

> Why is such an evaluation is even necessary? What is its purpose? In general, selecting for good personality traits make sense. In the extreme, only selecting for test scores and grades ignores all of the characteristics that make a person good in real world endeavours (ex: all of the recurring HN stories about genius coders sucking at team work). That said, evaluating for these in a consistent, non-biased way, at a scale of 40k/year seems incredibly difficult.