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posted by janrinok on Wednesday June 03 2015, @03:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the but-he-can't-tap-dance! dept.

Business Insider reports:

With a perfect ACT score and 13 Advanced Placement courses under his belt, Michael Wang applied to seven Ivy League universities and Stanford in 2013.

As an Asian-American, Wang suspected his race might work against him. But but he was still shocked when he was rejected by Stanford and every Ivy League school except for the University of Pennsylvania.

Wang says he worked incredibly hard and excelled in every area possible. But it still wasn't good enough.

"There was nothing humanly possible I could do," Wang told us, explaining that he felt utterly demoralized after his rejections.

After Wang was rejected from most of the Ivies, he says he filed a complaint with the US Department of Education alleging Yale, Stanford, and Princeton discriminated against him because he was Asian-American.

[...] Wang isn't alone in his belief that the Ivies discriminate against Asians. A coalition of Asian-American groups filed a lawsuit against Harvard University last month alleging the school and other Ivy League institutions use racial quotas to admit students to the detriment of more qualified Asian-American applicants. The more than 60 Asian groups are coming together to fight what they say are unfair admission practices.

[...] He also stressed that he was not just academically driven, but also a well-rounded applicant who maximized his extracurricular activities. He competed in national speech and debate competitions and math competitions. He also plays the piano and performed in the choir that sang at President Barack Obama's 2008 inauguration.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Wednesday June 03 2015, @10:24AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday June 03 2015, @10:24AM (#191521) Journal
    I'm responsible for computer science admissions in one of the Cambridge colleges and I completely agree with the grandparent. We'd love it if someone could come up with an objective metric that strongly correlated with degree success (exam results prior to university are, sadly, not such a metric). If we had one, we'd have a much less stressful time trying to find which 10% of the applicants we should let in. Unfortunately, we don't, so we end up weighing a large number of factors and making a subjective call. Given the quality of our applicants, we invariable let good people go, and we almost certainly let some people go who would have done better than some that we let in. We try to make the best call we can with the imperfect knowledge available. Every student that we reject can probably think of some form of discrimination that might have applied in their specific case.
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by bob_super on Wednesday June 03 2015, @04:43PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday June 03 2015, @04:43PM (#191670)

    Let me tell you how I got into an engineering school:
      0) Be a good student in high-school
      1) You spend two years after high school learning Math and physics 30+ hours a week, and some humanities. Free classes in the public system (usually inside high-schools)
      2) 40000 kids (now 18 to 20-yr olds) sit down for a week-long "group of schools" entrance exam, typically 2x 4hours of maths, 1x 4hr physics, 1x 3-4hours chem, 2-3hr each of the other topics. Actual time on each varies, with up to 7 continuous math hours for the most competitive math school.
      -> Important: None of the math/physics exams CAN BE FINISHED in the allotted time. A 100% overhead is required.
      2-bis) kids spend a month to 6 weeks applying to the various groups they believe are worth trying for, week after week.
      3) All these exams are graded, multipliers applied, scores summed (per week), and you end up with a list of names sorted by grades.
      4) call 110% to 300% of your actual seat quota (you need less if you're the top school), starting at the top of the list. Give them an oral exam in math, physics and a few others. man vs blackboard
      5) Grade, sum. Offer a seat to the ones at the top of the list, going down until you're full.

    It sucks. I've been there, it's grueling and painful.
    But if you're looking to select people who can apply two years of hard knowledge and deliver it under extreme stress, because what you want is to graduate the best engineers, then I can't think of a fairer system.

    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday June 04 2015, @11:30AM

      by TheRaven (270) on Thursday June 04 2015, @11:30AM (#192004) Journal
      We used to use a system quite like this. It turned out to be very heavily biased towards independent school students. Students from state schools had far less exam coaching and far less exam practice. The one difference with your model is this:

      You spend two years after high school learning Math and physics 30+ hours a week, and some humanities. Free classes in the public system (usually inside high-schools)

      I can't imagine why any of our potential applicants would be willing to do this. If we required it, then they could be 2/3 of the way through their degree at another top-tier university by the time that we considered them for admission. This doesn't seem like a choice that someone as intelligent as our desired students would make.

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      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday June 04 2015, @05:09PM

        by bob_super (1357) on Thursday June 04 2015, @05:09PM (#192167)

        That's what the two years get you: a massive pile of the basics you'll need anyway, learning to work long hours under stress, and exam coaching.

        I understand that it looks odd to be doing that while other are at a regular university. I didn't add an important factor: these two years are recognized by all other post-HS programs as equivalent to two years (transfer credits, in a nutshell), to catch those who fail the exams but are still assumed to be as good or better as those who didn't try.
        The major incentive is that it's the only way to get into the top 200 schools (engineering or business). Courtesy of the safety net, and since it's free, most whose teachers think they can handle it give it a try.

        I don't believe it can be transposed to a place like the US, because it takes too much system-wide coordination and enforcement (it would require the top schools to all commit at the same time). It's also got its flaws, since bright people who are not good at exam-taking just get denied the best schools. But it's one example of doing it in a more fair way overall than the arbitrary and conflicting admission rules in the US.