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Likewise, in what way are questions of racial fairness verifiable or falsifiable? Straightforward: "Do American universities routinely intentionally discrimina

• ritchiea 12y ago
  Straightforward: Do you think the SAT and high school GPA are excellent metrics (note that I'm not asking are they decent metrics that measure something, I'm asking do you believe they are excellent metrics)? It seems to me that the SAT is a gameable system and that some groups (people who are wealthy, people inclined to spend money on education) are more likely to spend money on the types of things that help them game the system (SAT courses that guarantee certain score improvements because they teach the student how to game the system). If one group has less money they are less able to game the system. Or if you are from a less affluent family that doesn't even realize there are New England, SV, NYC & LA parents paying for multi-thousand dollar SAT prep courses that your child is competing with. And high school grades are subjective evaluations, often from mediocre teachers, that are likely to themselves be subject to bias because the subjective evaluators have many of the same biases as the culture at large.
  • raincom 12y ago
    I agree that SAT/GPA are gameable. Can you find an alternative that is not gameable, but which is better than the blacbox of HYP admission machine? If you can't, what is there to argue, except to favor the blackbox policies of HYP.
• leereeves 12y ago
  Flipping that argument: Do American universities routinely discriminate against African Americans and Latinos as a consequence of reliance on standardized tests and curricula on which they are known to receive lower scores? Adjustment for the bias in these measures might correct for discrimination, not create it.
  • SiVal 12y ago
    The purpose of admissions testing for almost any organization (businesses for prospective employees, military for recruits, schools for students, basketball teams for players) is to find those who are most likely to succeed at what they will have to do if admitted. The only question is whether these measures are good or bad at predicting who is likely to succeed. In the university case, that means do well in classes and graduate. If they are bad predictors, they need to be replaced with good predictors. If they are good predictors, the problem for groups who are "known to receive lower scores" is not the measurement. The fact that Massachusetts routinely receives lower temperature scores than Florida is not evidence that thermometers are bad.
    • leereeves 12y ago
      A college's ultimate goal isn't for their students to get good grades and test well. A college's promise is to prepare students for life, and at present that means life in a diverse world. Success beyond academia may be predicted well by SATs and high school grades in some fields, but certainly not all.
• skwirl 12y ago
  You just completely missed the entire thrust of my argument, which is not whether something meets patio11's criteria of discrimination, but the very question of what constitutes discrimination, and how your point of view and cognitive biases lead you to your own criteria, and not anything "objective" or "logical" or "scientific." Your response to my point - "It's a question of values" - was to simply re-state your value. If you grew up black in a black community, black piato11's straightforward definition would probably be: "Do American universities engage in recruiting and admissions practices that ensure that black students are significantly underrepresented among the student body?" This is also a binary question with a single, verifiable answer. At may elite U.S. universities, the answer is a resounding "yes," whether or not the "yes" is intentional. You are operating at a level where not only do you believe the question itself has already been decided, but it doesn't seem to even have occurred to you that the question itself was ever in question, and that anyone might have a different view at all.