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> While I believe there is belief that Harvard is accepting C-students over asians A+ students I think the reality is much closer; they are rejecting students w

> While I believe there is belief that Harvard is accepting C-students over asians A+ students I think the reality is much closer; they are rejecting students with perfect scores and accepting students who scored in the 98th percentile. You don't need to speculate, the gap is more like 99th vs 93rd percentile: "Asian-Americans admitted to Harvard earned an average SAT score of 767 across all sections. ... African-American admits an average of 704." https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/22/asian-american-admit-sat-scores/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/22/asian-american...

cuteboy19 4y ago
Point being racial discrimination is acceptable so long as there is some plausible deniability
- xbar 4y ago
  Is that point obvious? Perhaps the point is taking race completely out of the equation is going to descimatr Native American Latino and black attendance at Harvard. ~11% of white students will be be replaced by Asian students but the population will remain overwhelmingly white. I think the ~1300 Asian students that didn’t get into Harvard from 2010-2015 that scored above white students that were admitted really suffered as a result of Harvards policies. I am not convinced the new system is going to be any better for society in the long run. But Asian applicants to Harvard will likely be less victimized.
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    > but the population will remain overwhelmingly white. That is highly unlikely. As a comparison, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a magnet school in Northern Virginia that has often been ranked the best high school in the US, had a student body that was 73% Asian in the last year that they had completely race-blind admissions (largely based on scores on an entrance exam and grades) despite Asians making up 20% of students in the entire county. In 2021 they switched to a policy that gave automatic admission to the top X% of students in their respective schools with the goal of increasing black and Latino enrollment. Asian enrollment fell from 73% to 54%, black enrollment went from 1% to 7%, Hispanic enrollment from 3% to 11%, and white enrollment from 18% to 22%: https://apnews.com/article/hispanics-racial-injustice-science-race-and-ethnicity-education-b02f6ed353ef89258e0eadf7eabec24d https://apnews.com/article/hispanics-racial-injustice-scienc... Point being, Harvard currently has a freshman class that is < 50% white, so going to a completely race-blind policy would take that down considerably.
    - xbar 4y ago
      My statement was based solely on the 2010-2015 data where 14% more than the 18% of 1950. 18% of 1950 = 351 * .14 = 49 Asian students per year that scored above whites and should have been admitted. This is from the filing, but I can't verify externally. If the data in this thread is correct: LatinX, Native American, and Black students averaged lower scores than whites on those same GPA/Tests. Those 49 Asian students would have displaced, therefore, more of those groups than whites. How many more? It's not clear--as few as 1 each for those groups (but those scores would have been outlier-bad) but likely, more black students than any other category (again just based on the numbers presented here). Will there be more Asians than whites in the Harvard freshman class if Harvard goes race-blind? I appreciate why that question is very important to Asian applicants, but I am more concerned about the further-marginalizing of the other groups.
  - csa 4y ago
    > I think the ~1300 Asian students that didn’t get into Harvard from 2010-2015 that scored above white students that were admitted really suffered as a result of Harvards policies. Grades and test scores are not the primary determination for admissions at elite schools. They say as much on their admissions web sites. I have no idea why some people continue to believe and repeat that grades and tests scores are the key to elite school admissions. It’s much more than that. Once the applicant has crossed a reasonably high threshold, all of the other stuff is what makes the difference between admit and reject. Some folks may not like that elite school admissions are more than grades and test scores, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Check out this article: https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/articles/15-tips-minority-students-get-accepted-ivy-league- https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/articles/15-tips-minority-st... #3, the hook, is what a lot of folks who complain about elite school admissions completely ignore. Good recommendations are also important, and these are often not cultivated (and usually they need to be, either organically or structurally). The applicants who feel like they were “victimized” based on their race were more likely victimized by their parents or guidance counselors for focusing their efforts on the wrong things during high school.
    - barry-cotter 4y ago
      > I have no idea why some people continue to believe and repeat that grades and tests scores are the key to elite school admissions. It’s much more than that. Everyone believes this. The people who disagree with you disagree on the reason. They think it’s mostly racism. You think Asians are in some way on average inferior in a way that’s obvious to admissions staff but not to alumni interviewers.
      - csa 4y ago
        > Everyone believes this. Based on the replies I get here and elsewhere (I beat this drum a lot since I think many people have such in accurate perceptions), many people still think that grades and scores are the primary determining factor in elite school admissions, apparently with a dose of racism thrown in to hold down groups who are good at grades and scores. I get very few people who really embrace the idea of “the hook” (link below) and try to learn more about it. I’m imagining because it’s hard and not concrete — that is, there is no formula to create a good hook and there are few litmus tests to know if your hook is good enough. https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/articles/15-tips-minority-students-get-accepted-ivy-league- https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/articles/15-tips-minority-st... > You think Asians are in some way on average inferior in a way that’s obvious to admissions staff but not to alumni interviewers. Yes, I trust the staff to have a better idea of where all applicants (including Asians) fit into the total applicant pool versus the alumni interviewers. If I had to take a guess, I’m guessing that bias in personal score (for all people, not just Asians) impacted fewer than 20 applicants at Harvard last year. Maybe fewer than 10. There are strong efforts to combat rater bias in the process. One of the Supreme Court justices asked why that score was used if it mattered so little. The short answer is that really strong scores probably got straight admitted, really weak scores got straight denied, and the marginal candidates are selected based on a number of variables (so this score would be just one of those). Said another way, finding bias that is going to make a few percent of failing applicants have a slightly better failing score is something that should be looked into (mainly to see if it impacts marginal candidates), but it’s not going to change the admission status of those candidates. In Harvard terms, if the personality score is in a very low category, bumping it up one notch doesn’t make any difference. Any time spent on fine tuning one failing rating in a failing application is inefficiently used time, and these folks are on a clock.
- dendriti 4y ago
  Can we just stop with these bullshit word games? I'm so tired. Describing a form of legal discrimination (in this case, affirmative action) as "racial discrimination" is not an argument. Or even an invitation to discussion. There are major problems with policies like affirmative action. But smirking and saying "But... but you said racial discrimination is BAD! But then you DO THE RACIAL DISCRIMINATION. So YOU BAD!" is so tiresome.
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    But it is racial discrimination, and the people you're arguing with think it's bad...
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    You are missing my point entirely. In many of the oral arguments for this case the Harvard lawyers insisted that race based affirmative action is ok because race is a factor among many. Implying that if it was the only factor then it would not be ok. So theirs is not a principled defense of affirmative action but rather based entirely on plausible deniability
    - purephase 4y ago
      You keep throwing "plausible deniability" around, thinking that is what is happening here. You're assuming that the decision is someone selecting a candidate solely based on their race, when it is far far more nuanced than that. For Ivy's, the pool of candidates is so unbelievably large to available spots, that they look at hundreds of different data points when evaluating candidates, and they weight certain ones higher/lower depending on the criteria set by the faculty and institutional goals. If the goal of the institution is to have a student body that is more representative of the overall population, this isn't "plausible deniability" it is the institution attempting to prepare their students for the real world. Prior to affirmative action (and it's not perfect by any means) these institutions were overrun with white men, and our society has still not course corrected from the overwhelming benefit that afforded that specific class of people. I fail to see how taking two students, one from an afluent area who happens to be white, and one from a less affluent area, with fewer advantages, but the latter scored at or near the former candidate and has nearly the same extra-curriculars, volunteer experience etc. is such a bad thing. Your "plausible deniability" is really just a lazy way of saying that you would prefer purely "objective" bias when it comes to evaluating students, but the world is not purely objective, and I think we're better served with a bit more subjective consideration when we're allocating scarce resources that have traditionally benefitted (significantly) one class/race over another.
- nemothekid 4y ago
  >Point being racial discrimination is acceptable so long as there is some plausible deniability I don't think my point was clear, Harvard, or most other elite institutions, has never implied to some meritocratic institution where acceptance is based solely on test scores. If that were true, there are ~22,000 applicants with perfect scores; Harvard wouldn't struggle having an incoming class of perfect SAT students. If Harvard is forced to be "race blind", I highly doubt they would just switch to a completely objective ranking; there's no reason for them to, again, they have never been a meritocratic institution. They will find other subjective hairs to split, such as making interviews count higher or further combing through essays. Given the history of the institution (and some of the more notable graduates it produces), it's not even a given that the school becoming race blind would necessarily benefit asians.
runako 4y ago
> You don't need to speculate, the gap is more like 99th vs 93rd percentile: This is easily the gap between a single individual on two different test days. Which is another way of saying that the difference is not useful in assembling a university's incoming class. Once you get above a certain level, the tests decrease in utility to categorize individuals into tiers. Once you get to a certain level of capability, you're broadly talking about smart people who can graduate from your university. Once you've cleared that bar, there's less utility in determining how far over the bar an individual goes versus looking at other ways (which are not measured on a test) in which an individual can add to their campus, class, and the world. (Source: worked in SAT/ACT/GMAT test prep. Have administered hundreds of sample tests in whole and in parts.)
- hardware2win 4y ago
  >This is easily the gap between a single individual on two different test days. Skill difference between top 1% and top 7% is huge in ELO based games
  - perpetualpatzer 4y ago
    They can be, and that's a statement about the distribution and consistency of skill in those activities. I see little reason to believe those distributions apply to SAT taking or general capacity to learn (which is what you're really aspiring to measure). If we set up an ELO league for best-of-three rock paper scissors, I'd expect score to diverge over sufficiently many hours, but would give almost even odds to a 99th v 93rd percentile candidate.
  - runako 4y ago
    Sure, that may be true of ELO-based games. In the realm of the standardized tests used for school admission, we also have a lot of data about performance so we can use that data instead of looking for analogues in other fields. And my experience with the SAT & ACT leads me to believe that on these tests, the difference between 1% and 7% could be something as simple as how well the student slept the night before the test.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago

cuteboy19 4y ago

Point being racial discrimination is acceptable so long as there is some plausible deniability

xbar 4y ago
Is that point obvious? Perhaps the point is taking race completely out of the equation is going to descimatr Native American Latino and black attendance at Harvard. ~11% of white students will be be replaced by Asian students but the population will remain overwhelmingly white. I think the ~1300 Asian students that didn’t get into Harvard from 2010-2015 that scored above white students that were admitted really suffered as a result of Harvards policies. I am not convinced the new system is going to be any better for society in the long run. But Asian applicants to Harvard will likely be less victimized.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  > but the population will remain overwhelmingly white. That is highly unlikely. As a comparison, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a magnet school in Northern Virginia that has often been ranked the best high school in the US, had a student body that was 73% Asian in the last year that they had completely race-blind admissions (largely based on scores on an entrance exam and grades) despite Asians making up 20% of students in the entire county. In 2021 they switched to a policy that gave automatic admission to the top X% of students in their respective schools with the goal of increasing black and Latino enrollment. Asian enrollment fell from 73% to 54%, black enrollment went from 1% to 7%, Hispanic enrollment from 3% to 11%, and white enrollment from 18% to 22%: https://apnews.com/article/hispanics-racial-injustice-science-race-and-ethnicity-education-b02f6ed353ef89258e0eadf7eabec24d https://apnews.com/article/hispanics-racial-injustice-scienc... Point being, Harvard currently has a freshman class that is < 50% white, so going to a completely race-blind policy would take that down considerably.
  - xbar 4y ago
    My statement was based solely on the 2010-2015 data where 14% more than the 18% of 1950. 18% of 1950 = 351 * .14 = 49 Asian students per year that scored above whites and should have been admitted. This is from the filing, but I can't verify externally. If the data in this thread is correct: LatinX, Native American, and Black students averaged lower scores than whites on those same GPA/Tests. Those 49 Asian students would have displaced, therefore, more of those groups than whites. How many more? It's not clear--as few as 1 each for those groups (but those scores would have been outlier-bad) but likely, more black students than any other category (again just based on the numbers presented here). Will there be more Asians than whites in the Harvard freshman class if Harvard goes race-blind? I appreciate why that question is very important to Asian applicants, but I am more concerned about the further-marginalizing of the other groups.
- csa 4y ago
  > I think the ~1300 Asian students that didn’t get into Harvard from 2010-2015 that scored above white students that were admitted really suffered as a result of Harvards policies. Grades and test scores are not the primary determination for admissions at elite schools. They say as much on their admissions web sites. I have no idea why some people continue to believe and repeat that grades and tests scores are the key to elite school admissions. It’s much more than that. Once the applicant has crossed a reasonably high threshold, all of the other stuff is what makes the difference between admit and reject. Some folks may not like that elite school admissions are more than grades and test scores, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Check out this article: https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/articles/15-tips-minority-students-get-accepted-ivy-league- https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/articles/15-tips-minority-st... #3, the hook, is what a lot of folks who complain about elite school admissions completely ignore. Good recommendations are also important, and these are often not cultivated (and usually they need to be, either organically or structurally). The applicants who feel like they were “victimized” based on their race were more likely victimized by their parents or guidance counselors for focusing their efforts on the wrong things during high school.
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    > I have no idea why some people continue to believe and repeat that grades and tests scores are the key to elite school admissions. It’s much more than that. Everyone believes this. The people who disagree with you disagree on the reason. They think it’s mostly racism. You think Asians are in some way on average inferior in a way that’s obvious to admissions staff but not to alumni interviewers.
    - csa 4y ago
      > Everyone believes this. Based on the replies I get here and elsewhere (I beat this drum a lot since I think many people have such in accurate perceptions), many people still think that grades and scores are the primary determining factor in elite school admissions, apparently with a dose of racism thrown in to hold down groups who are good at grades and scores. I get very few people who really embrace the idea of “the hook” (link below) and try to learn more about it. I’m imagining because it’s hard and not concrete — that is, there is no formula to create a good hook and there are few litmus tests to know if your hook is good enough. https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/articles/15-tips-minority-students-get-accepted-ivy-league- https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/articles/15-tips-minority-st... > You think Asians are in some way on average inferior in a way that’s obvious to admissions staff but not to alumni interviewers. Yes, I trust the staff to have a better idea of where all applicants (including Asians) fit into the total applicant pool versus the alumni interviewers. If I had to take a guess, I’m guessing that bias in personal score (for all people, not just Asians) impacted fewer than 20 applicants at Harvard last year. Maybe fewer than 10. There are strong efforts to combat rater bias in the process. One of the Supreme Court justices asked why that score was used if it mattered so little. The short answer is that really strong scores probably got straight admitted, really weak scores got straight denied, and the marginal candidates are selected based on a number of variables (so this score would be just one of those). Said another way, finding bias that is going to make a few percent of failing applicants have a slightly better failing score is something that should be looked into (mainly to see if it impacts marginal candidates), but it’s not going to change the admission status of those candidates. In Harvard terms, if the personality score is in a very low category, bumping it up one notch doesn’t make any difference. Any time spent on fine tuning one failing rating in a failing application is inefficiently used time, and these folks are on a clock.
dendriti 4y ago
Can we just stop with these bullshit word games? I'm so tired. Describing a form of legal discrimination (in this case, affirmative action) as "racial discrimination" is not an argument. Or even an invitation to discussion. There are major problems with policies like affirmative action. But smirking and saying "But... but you said racial discrimination is BAD! But then you DO THE RACIAL DISCRIMINATION. So YOU BAD!" is so tiresome.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  But it is racial discrimination, and the people you're arguing with think it's bad...
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  You are missing my point entirely. In many of the oral arguments for this case the Harvard lawyers insisted that race based affirmative action is ok because race is a factor among many. Implying that if it was the only factor then it would not be ok. So theirs is not a principled defense of affirmative action but rather based entirely on plausible deniability
  - purephase 4y ago
    You keep throwing "plausible deniability" around, thinking that is what is happening here. You're assuming that the decision is someone selecting a candidate solely based on their race, when it is far far more nuanced than that. For Ivy's, the pool of candidates is so unbelievably large to available spots, that they look at hundreds of different data points when evaluating candidates, and they weight certain ones higher/lower depending on the criteria set by the faculty and institutional goals. If the goal of the institution is to have a student body that is more representative of the overall population, this isn't "plausible deniability" it is the institution attempting to prepare their students for the real world. Prior to affirmative action (and it's not perfect by any means) these institutions were overrun with white men, and our society has still not course corrected from the overwhelming benefit that afforded that specific class of people. I fail to see how taking two students, one from an afluent area who happens to be white, and one from a less affluent area, with fewer advantages, but the latter scored at or near the former candidate and has nearly the same extra-curriculars, volunteer experience etc. is such a bad thing. Your "plausible deniability" is really just a lazy way of saying that you would prefer purely "objective" bias when it comes to evaluating students, but the world is not purely objective, and I think we're better served with a bit more subjective consideration when we're allocating scarce resources that have traditionally benefitted (significantly) one class/race over another.
nemothekid 4y ago
>Point being racial discrimination is acceptable so long as there is some plausible deniability I don't think my point was clear, Harvard, or most other elite institutions, has never implied to some meritocratic institution where acceptance is based solely on test scores. If that were true, there are ~22,000 applicants with perfect scores; Harvard wouldn't struggle having an incoming class of perfect SAT students. If Harvard is forced to be "race blind", I highly doubt they would just switch to a completely objective ranking; there's no reason for them to, again, they have never been a meritocratic institution. They will find other subjective hairs to split, such as making interviews count higher or further combing through essays. Given the history of the institution (and some of the more notable graduates it produces), it's not even a given that the school becoming race blind would necessarily benefit asians.

runako 4y ago

> You don't need to speculate, the gap is more like 99th vs 93rd percentile: This is easily the gap between a single individual on two different test days. Which is another way of saying that the difference is not useful in assembling a university's incoming class. Once you get above a certain level, the tests decrease in utility to categorize individuals into tiers. Once you get to a certain level of capability, you're broadly talking about smart people who can graduate from your university. Once you've cleared that bar, there's less utility in determining how far over the bar an individual goes versus looking at other ways (which are not measured on a test) in which an individual can add to their campus, class, and the world. (Source: worked in SAT/ACT/GMAT test prep. Have administered hundreds of sample tests in whole and in parts.)

hardware2win 4y ago
>This is easily the gap between a single individual on two different test days. Skill difference between top 1% and top 7% is huge in ELO based games
- perpetualpatzer 4y ago
  They can be, and that's a statement about the distribution and consistency of skill in those activities. I see little reason to believe those distributions apply to SAT taking or general capacity to learn (which is what you're really aspiring to measure). If we set up an ELO league for best-of-three rock paper scissors, I'd expect score to diverge over sufficiently many hours, but would give almost even odds to a 99th v 93rd percentile candidate.
- runako 4y ago
  Sure, that may be true of ELO-based games. In the realm of the standardized tests used for school admission, we also have a lot of data about performance so we can use that data instead of looking for analogues in other fields. And my experience with the SAT & ACT leads me to believe that on these tests, the difference between 1% and 7% could be something as simple as how well the student slept the night before the test.
- mrguyorama 4y ago