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You're missing the point. There is no way to quantify leadership potential and so they have to come up with various heuristics. One heuristic is being an outlie

You're missing the point. There is no way to quantify leadership potential and so they have to come up with various heuristics. One heuristic is being an outlier in some socially/politically relevant cluster. That is, group people by various factors such as race, income, region, etc. Those who are outliers of those groups are likely to have leadership potential: whatever drove them to succeed where others failed in similar circumstances is a strong signal for leadership potential.

ThrowawayR2 8y ago
> One heuristic is being an outlier in some socially/politically relevant cluster. That is, group people by various factors such as race, income, region, etc. Then, pray tell, which lack of "being an outlier in some socially/politically relevant cluster" is common to Asian applicants, year after year? I'm sure we would all be fascinated to hear the specific areas in which Asian applicants are failing to match these heuristics where other minority applicants do.
- hackinthebochs 8y ago
  Your responses seem to indicate you don't understand the points I'm making (or you're just very invested in the narrative you're pushing). It's hard to see what I can say that won't invite a further response such as this. But to put a very fine point on it, Asians with stellar scores, similar backgrounds, similar interests, similar extra curriculars lack diversity in backgrounds, interests and extra curriculars by definition. There's nothing deeper to be noted about this. Whether Asians that apply to Harvard actually have similar backgrounds, interests and extra curriculars is certainly up for debate. But it is plausible. The issue is that the distribution of leadership potential in the applicant pool is not equivalent to the distribution of top GPA and test scores (past a certain threshold). So when you use your GPA/SAT metric to analyze something that doesn't follow the same distribution, you will conclude there is bias. But it is your metric that is wrong. If your argument is that they necessarily should use your GPA/SAT metric, then you have to argue for this directly. It is not self evident.

ThrowawayR2 8y ago

> One heuristic is being an outlier in some socially/politically relevant cluster. That is, group people by various factors such as race, income, region, etc. Then, pray tell, which lack of "being an outlier in some socially/politically relevant cluster" is common to Asian applicants, year after year? I'm sure we would all be fascinated to hear the specific areas in which Asian applicants are failing to match these heuristics where other minority applicants do.

hackinthebochs 8y ago
Your responses seem to indicate you don't understand the points I'm making (or you're just very invested in the narrative you're pushing). It's hard to see what I can say that won't invite a further response such as this. But to put a very fine point on it, Asians with stellar scores, similar backgrounds, similar interests, similar extra curriculars lack diversity in backgrounds, interests and extra curriculars by definition. There's nothing deeper to be noted about this. Whether Asians that apply to Harvard actually have similar backgrounds, interests and extra curriculars is certainly up for debate. But it is plausible. The issue is that the distribution of leadership potential in the applicant pool is not equivalent to the distribution of top GPA and test scores (past a certain threshold). So when you use your GPA/SAT metric to analyze something that doesn't follow the same distribution, you will conclude there is bias. But it is your metric that is wrong. If your argument is that they necessarily should use your GPA/SAT metric, then you have to argue for this directly. It is not self evident.