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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2015, @12:00AM
A professor friend of mine told me that in his experience foreign Asian students approach college differently than most Americans do. They tent to help each other and focus on grades above all else. So they engage in a lot of behaviors we would classify as cheating whereas they are familiar with schooling as a series of check boxes so what's the big deal? The teaches then have to work to avoid stereotyping foreign Asian students and discounting their achievements because 'they probably did not earn them'. I wonder if that phenomenon had any impact on this study?