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The Los Angeles Times is running an article describing the challenges faced by Asian Americans as they apply for acceptance to top colleges.
The article describes the impact that their race and ethnicity has on their SAT scores:
Lee's next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant's race is worth.
She points to the first column. African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.
She points to the second column. “Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”
The last column draws gasps. Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.
“Do Asians need higher test scores? Is it harder for Asians to get into college? The answer is yes,” Lee says.
A core tenet of the American philosophy, even from before the days of the Founding Fathers, is that through hard work and excellence one should be able to obtain success in life. But is this ideal even possible when certain underachieving groups are given artificial advantages, while those with the most merit are artificially held back?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Monday March 02 2015, @10:29AM
Affirmative action - admitting poorly qualified people based on their race (or gender, or whatever) - has always been a really dumb idea. Well-meant, but absolutely dumb. Consider:
- A college admits person of category X with low scores. The federal government runs statistics and notes how many X's fail out of the college. So the college is under pressure to pass the X's through the program.
- Some of the X's go on to further studies - let's take medicine as an example. The whole story repeats: medical schools are under pressure to increase their diversity, so they admit underqualified X's. At which point they are under further pressure to graduate these students, even when they actually should fail. So now we have underqualified doctors.
Consider the effect on the qualified people from the protected category! Everyone in the group is under a permanent shadow, because of a program that was supposed to help them.
Specific example: In my CS PhD program, there was a hispanic woman who was clearly there because of her minority status. She flat out said that she intended to exploit her double-minority status to the hilt, to land jobs regardless of her actual qualifications. The rest of the women in the program cringed, because this is exactly the kind of attitude that could make their future careers more difficult, by making people question their qualifications because of their gender.
Where there are genuine biases, we need to work on those. For example, from what I read, the US currently has a huge bias against boys in the education system. Large numbers are diagnosed with ADHD and drugged into docility, because teachers are unwilling to admit or deal with gender-based behavioral difference. This has resulting in ever-lower college admission rates for boys. Rather that introducing affirmative action for men, one should attack the real problem: feminized schools, zero-tolerance policies, etc..
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 02 2015, @10:48AM
"I am not a racist because I am a boy, and
Large numbers are diagnosed with ADHD and drugged into docility
.
And I knew this one chica in school who was gaming the system." You got issues.
(Score: 5, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday March 02 2015, @10:50AM
To get into caltech one has to be really good at math and science; some students are admitted who are really poor writers.
Those students are required to attend a special summer session before the beginning of their freshman year, during which they are taught to write.
Rather than lowering the bar for the disadvantaged classes, how about giving them extra help? Tutoring and such.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]