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Bias: I almost aced the SAT-I (/1600) without studying but I made a dumb error on one question on the math section. GATE had zero effect (I always wondered if t

Bias: I almost aced the SAT-I (/1600) without studying but I made a dumb error on one question on the math section. GATE had zero effect (I always wondered if their primary purpose was to inventory smart kids for potentially-surreptitious scenarios and needs). I didn't even bother applying to Ivys or Pac12s where "everyone else" was going because those places didn't interest me. Other people got full/partial rides to Harvard, Yale, MIT, Berkeley, etc. but I kept looking. --- Oh good, so merit is out the window. So what was the net good of shipping me 3 hours by bus roundtrip per day to a crappier school across town? (Waking-up before 5 am.) Oh that's right, because there were too many other white and/or Asian kids in the school a block from my house. I guess I just didn't have the right skin color. Leave it to 80's Californian affirmative action to "fix" schools with culture-shock, not fitting-in, racism, violence, and gang warfare. "We'll get you, whitey/Asian, by giving you our pain. That'll teach you not to be white/Asian." is the message it sends. So this grand social experiment is so the kids who didn't earn admissions can get a degree they won't earn to get a job they won't earn so they won't know anything but entitlement because social justice through identity promotion fixes everything. That'll teach all those hard-working overachievers' parents to move to a different country like Finland, send China's sea turtles to go elsewhere, and destroy what was once America's greatest advantage. Oh yeah and you know, the scientific method is "racist" (I, no shit, had a roommate applicant tell me this with a straight face recently). I became so flabbergasted I couldn't talk to them anymore. This makes me sad. Instead of becoming more meritocratic and fairer, we're further entrenching racism and discrimination without calling it that. Orwellian doublespeak and doublethink. What would MLK Jr think of all this? Let's just have no standards of excellence at all and give everyone an Ivy or Pac12 degree for participation. Double gold stars if people in any of your attribute groups ever had anything bad happen to them. First peoples? Slaves? Armenians? Jews? Italians? Irish? Spanish? Where does it stop? At some point we just have to say "enough," or it devolves into absurdity and dishonesty when admissions are unmoored pure merit and reality. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

bigbillheck 5y ago
> Leave it to 80's Californian affirmative action to "fix" schools with culture-shock, not fitting-in, racism, violence, and gang warfare. There's not a lot of easy solutions to undoing decades of segregation. > didn't even bother applying to Ivys or Pac12s where "everyone else" was going because those places didn't interest me. Based on your username and talking about the 80s I'm going to guess you were born in 1978, i.e. are roughly the same age as me. I find it interesting you talk about "Pac12" (and it's not just a typo, you do it a lot) considering that until 2011 it was the "Pac10". For those not familiar with US college sports, the Pac10 at the time doggodaddo78 and I would have been applying to college was, in vague north-to-south order, University of Washington, Washington State University, University of Oregon, Oregon State University, UC Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, University of Southern California, University of Arizona, and Arizona State University. The Pac12 retains those same teams, but adds University of Colorado and University of Utah. There's definitely some world-class schools in there, but with respect to all the Cougs I've ever known, I would not put, say, Washington State among the greats. (Disclaimer: I was accepted to two of those Pac10 schools but could not afford to go to either, so went instead to a smaller state school).
GoodJokes 5y ago
Ivy League schools are not meritocratic. The SAT is not meritocratic.

bigbillheck 5y ago

> Leave it to 80's Californian affirmative action to "fix" schools with culture-shock, not fitting-in, racism, violence, and gang warfare. There's not a lot of easy solutions to undoing decades of segregation. > didn't even bother applying to Ivys or Pac12s where "everyone else" was going because those places didn't interest me. Based on your username and talking about the 80s I'm going to guess you were born in 1978, i.e. are roughly the same age as me. I find it interesting you talk about "Pac12" (and it's not just a typo, you do it a lot) considering that until 2011 it was the "Pac10". For those not familiar with US college sports, the Pac10 at the time doggodaddo78 and I would have been applying to college was, in vague north-to-south order, University of Washington, Washington State University, University of Oregon, Oregon State University, UC Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, University of Southern California, University of Arizona, and Arizona State University. The Pac12 retains those same teams, but adds University of Colorado and University of Utah. There's definitely some world-class schools in there, but with respect to all the Cougs I've ever known, I would not put, say, Washington State among the greats. (Disclaimer: I was accepted to two of those Pac10 schools but could not afford to go to either, so went instead to a smaller state school).

GoodJokes 5y ago

Ivy League schools are not meritocratic. The SAT is not meritocratic.