7 ms·

It's just affirmative action. This sort of thing happens in every multicultural country, especially when one group apparently does better financially than the

• DaniFong 14y ago
  Affirmative action? Are you mad? Perhaps you're unaware of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Russian_Empire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Russ... Affirmative action is not the same thing as making it artificially harder for a discriminated minority!
  • jonnathanson 14y ago
    I think what he was trying to say is that this is affirmative action for gentiles. In other words, Russia made it easier for non-Jews by virtue of giving them easier entrance exams. I still think "affirmative action" is a clumsy and not entirely correct way of describing what he's trying to articulate. But he's not trying to be as provocative as he comes across. At least I don't think (?) he is?
    • goldfeld 14y ago
      Just because you have a name for non-Jews doesn't make it a cohesive group and most importantly nowhere near a minority. It's insane to say discriminating against a minority is like affirmative action for everyone else. So if I don't like Bob I could phrase it that it's not that I don't like him--I do!-- it's just that I like everyone else better (including other people I dislike). And for someone to fall for that would be ridiculous.
      • taejo 14y ago
        > most importantly nowhere near a minority. Affirmative action is not just for minorities... in some (many?) places, the historically excluded group form a majority.
        • eli_gottlieb 14y ago
          And yet, Russians have never been the historically excluded group in Russia. Jews were.
  • deleted 14y ago
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  • _delirium 14y ago
    It sounds less like a serious attempt to understand this episode in history, and more like a way to score a quick point about 21st-century American politics.
  • htf 14y ago
    > Affirmative action is not the same thing as making it artificially harder for a discriminated minority! It is practically the same. When it comes to limited entrance, you can't make it easier for a certain group without making it harder for the rest.
    • davidkatz 14y ago
      Principally yes, but I'd disagree on essence. Say you have a minority that's 1% of the population, and unhindered it would also make up 1% of enrollments. If you don't allow that minority to enroll, you're increasing the acceptance chance of a majority group member by just over 1%, while decreasing the acceptance chance of the minority member by 100%. The correct way to describe this is then most definitely discrimination against the minority, and not affirmative action for the majority.
      • smm2000 14y ago
        Actually Jews were about 1% of Soviet Union population and 5%-10% of University students. If Jews were only 1% of student population it would not be an issue. I went to mathematical magnet school (best math school in 5M+ city) and easily 30%-50% of students had Jewish roots. Essentially it was more difficult for Jews to get into university, neutral for Russians, easier for Tatars and some other minorities and extremely easy for what's called Northern Minorities (they had - and still have special quotas, no exams necessary) Speaking as 1/4 Russian-Jewish, 1/4 Chuvash, 1/8 Latvian and 1/rest Russian.
        • davidkatz 14y ago
          Thanks. I assumed that Jews would be overrepresented amongst students, but opted for making a more general point.
  • continuations 14y ago
    It is exactly like affirmative action: http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/04/17/high_achieving_asian_americans_are_being_shut_out_of_top_schools/?page=full http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/04... "Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and found what looks like different standards for different racial groups. They calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African-Americans who got 1100. Whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian-Americans." In Russia a minority like Jews are asked special questions in admission tests to make it harder for them to get in, while in America a minority like Asians are hit with a penalty of 450 points in SAT to make it harder (15 times harder) for them to get in. There's no difference.
    • ibotty 14y ago
      please have a look at the history of antisemitism in europe. you cannot compare things which are not comparable at all.
      • deleted 14y ago
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      • continuations 14y ago
        Or you could take a look at the long history of anti-Asian racism in America (Chinese massacre of 1871, imported Asian slave labors for building the transcontinental railroads, Chinese Exclusion Act, Asiatic Barred Zone Act, etc). Just because you want to claim they are not comparable doesn't mean they are not.
    • eli_gottlieb 14y ago
      There is a slight difference. If elite American universities didn't penalize Asians, they would almost literally have no non-Asian students. This is because Asian-Americans optimize the entire lives of their youth around maximizing their admissions chances to elite universities. There's racism here, but there's also just Goodhart's Law, normal old American anti-intellectualism, and the proper acknowledgement that standardized exam scores show very little about a university applicant's real life prospects. Part of turning 18 in the USA is making the transition from subservient child to independent adult, over a period of years (usually by 26 you're considered definitely adult or way behind). Part of the problem with Asian-Americans is, they don't make the transition. Striver-immigrant culture and extreme focus on family (at one time a part of Jewish-American immigrant culture too, often more an immigrant thing than a particular culture's thing) cause people to overoptimize their kids' upbringing on being good little subservient worker-bee children, often leaving them semi-crippled when required to function as independent adults. And then let's not even get into the cultural differences in areas of authority, ego and freedom between East Asia and America, which put Asians at a severe disadvantage due to their inclination, ground in by "Chinese mothers" over periods of years, to expect being ordered around all the time. Before anyone calls me a vicious racist, a Chinese student in a class at university once referred to me as "more Asian than the Asians". I like to look back on how completely wrong he was :-). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
  • jarek-foksa 14y ago
    The term "affirmative action" is so easy to manipulate that it could be used to cover any form of discrimination. I guess Soviets would describe their discriminatory policy as an affirmative action to increase the social and ethnic diversity of the class of intellectuals, or something between those lines.
• shmerl 14y ago
  Don't call semi-officially government sanctioned antisemitism with stupid euphemisms. It's plain insulting.
  • ucee054 14y ago
    Don't conflate prejudice with anti-semitism. It's plain insulting.
    • shmerl 14y ago
      Better don't tell this "wisdom" to those who were discriminated in Russia. They won't appreciate it.
      • ucee054 14y ago
        You weren't talking about those who were discriminated against in Russia, you were talking about jews who were discriminated against in Russia. Implying that all the others who were discriminated against don't count. And there were lots of them. Including, by these articles, victimized by MGU admissions. EDIT: check out in the article where it says "These problems were designed to prevent Jewish people and other undesirables"
        • shmerl 14y ago
          Universities had national census not only for Jews obviously. This doesn't preclude the fact of that it was manifestation of antisemitism. If you don't get it - there is little point in explaining it to you.
        • davidkatz 14y ago
          Unnecessary bashing. The OP singled Jews out, which framed this discussion mostly around Jews. Prejudice against Jews is called anti semitism. There's really nothing to see here, nobody implied that there was no discrimination against other groups.
          • 14y ago
• deleted 14y ago
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• jvm 14y ago
  I can't believe this troll comment is the top comment. > Our team of the best eight Soviet students, during the month we had the problems, solved only half of them. Those questions weren't hard. They were impossible. The point was simply to not allow any undesirables to pass. Higher standards for Asians might be bullshit but it's not the same as literally keeping all Asians out regardless of skill.
  • pandaman 14y ago
    The entrance math exam in MSU is not pass/fail but graded. There are two math exams (at least in the "math department", I imagine she meant either Mech-Mat or VMK), written and oral. Written exam consists of 6 problems with the passing mark 3 and maximum 5 (you only need to solve 5 correctly, 5th and 6th problems are the hardest and usually allow a choice between an algebra and a geometry problem, giving the time limit it's hard to solve both). Oral test is administered by drawing a random "ticket" with two general questions from the school program (e.g. "What are properties of a triangle?") and the problems the person conducting the test can choose based on the answers and the result of the written test. Answering two "ticket" questions correctly gives you the passing grade (3) already. So there is no way anybody could be failed by any number of the problems given during the oral test if they managed to answer the "ticket". At the worst case one could be dropped to 3 at the oral test, giving total of 8 for the both math tests and that's a pretty good mark. Total test score of 13 (you need to get 5 for the third marked test, written Physics and pass unmarked written Russian) is guaranteed admission. 12 - is a good chance of admission and, depending on the year, even 11 can get you in. However there is a shortcut - under some conditions (either being a subject of one of Soviet "AA" incentives or being a winner of a math Olympiad), 4 or 5 for the first test (written math) gives automatic admission. 9 for the both math tests is also automatic and unconditional admission. So the way the hard questions in the oral test come up is usually when you get 4 for the written test. If you could not solve 5th or 6th problem in the written test you are at the average level and giving you 5 (and automatically admitting you) in the oral test would defeat the whole purpose of the shortcut rule to secure admission for the exceptional students. So you have to get 4 or, really, 3 and such a question is to ensure that. I don't know about anti-semitism, maybe there was some yet I have seen plenty of Jews both among students and faculty so, evidentially, they have not been entirely kept out. Yet I have seen a lot of people (of all origins) complaining about entrance exam being "too hard" and them being persecuted for various reasons. The reality is that pretty much every year from 70s to late 90s there had been several candidates for each student place so some people had to fail the test.