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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: 2) by subs on Wednesday June 03 2015, @11:50AM

    by subs (4485) on Wednesday June 03 2015, @11:50AM (#191537)

    How was this not implemented, say, a decade, or two decades ago? When I was applying to college over a decade ago, we already had a written entrance exam. The only personal data on the application form was name, place of residence and phone number (simply for administrative contact purposes) and for the test, everybody was assigned a random 5-digit number, thus guaranteeing that the examiners (who were separate from the faculty handling the administrative side of the admissions process) had no idea who's test they were scoring. Admission was determined simply by sorting the test results and drawing a line where the maximum number of admission slots had been reached or the test scores were below "acceptable".

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday June 03 2015, @01:16PM

    by VLM (445) on Wednesday June 03 2015, @01:16PM (#191571)

    Well over two decades ago this is how my local state schools did admissions, by ACT score. Each individual school admitted top down. They published historical cut offs and they were basically constant over the years so the day you got your ACT results was pretty much the day you found out which state school you could get into. Drop out rates were high enough that if there was any question as to if you could get in, then you would be guaranteed drop out even if you got in. Even the most competitive engineering oriented school was only around 26 or so.

  • (Score: 1) by twistedcubic on Wednesday June 03 2015, @03:54PM

    by twistedcubic (929) on Wednesday June 03 2015, @03:54PM (#191641)

    It wasn't implemented because it won't work. All students who take violin and piano classes, and express an interest in pre-med, biology, or chemistry will be assumed Asian anyway. All the forbidden extracurriculars in the Tiger Mom book (marching band, saxophone, etc) will suggest a non-Asian student. Also, non-Asian students are certainly free to discuss their culture and affiliations in their applications. You would have to be an incredibly sophisticated teenager to successfully hide your culture or identity from an experienced application reader. Simply naming your high school will narrow your race down considerably.