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<p>That’s a pretty strong statement, and I think unwarranted based on my observation of him in the 60 minutes interview.</p>
<p>I’m curious as to why the civil complaint centered on Princeton if Espenshade’s study specifically omits Princeton. Li’s complaint specifically referenced the Espenshade study and not his own situation, yet you say that Princeton was not in the study. And it’s surprising that the institutions Espenshade studied were not named.</p>
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<p>Yep, Li was a jerk for DARING to take action against racial preferences. He’s an “entitled whiner” if he stays silent and a “clueless jerk” if he doesn’t. Hunt: the master of the Catch-22!</p>
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<p>No, it was just a coincidence that a person who “lack[ed] understanding of [our] social / cultural context” was an immigrant from China :rolleyes:</p>
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<p>Whoa, whoa, whoa. I tend to choose my words pretty carefully. </p>
<p>If I had intended to say, “It speaks to the fact that Asians / Asian-Americans just don’t understand the social / cultural context,” I would have said that. But I didn’t, as I was talking about Jian Li, an individual student, and how <em>he</em> doesn’t understand social / cultural context if he thinks that being admitted to one top school, wl at another and denied at a third means that he would be a sympathetic figure to champion the cause. That reflects only on Mr. Li himself, not anyone else. </p>
<p>How ironic that you saw him as a representative of his race, rather than the individual student that he is. I submit you looked for – and found – anti-Asian intent where none was either stated or implied.</p>
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<p>Why on Earth not take it again? If he is traumatized by the SAT and doesn’t want to test again or doesn’t care about tippy-top admissions, then certainly don’t re-take. Otherwise I would say he should retake it. </p>
<p>The received wisdom on CC is “just get to the threshold” score and after that it’s moot. I respectfully disagree.</p>
<p>Know that your son has achieved exceptional scores and a lot of anonymous advice-givers on CC don’t have kids scoring anywhere near that range and when you float that sort of question, you are going to offend and look sort of greedy for your kid. They will imply it’s sort of lowly and gauche to try and get the highest score possible.</p>
<p>Make of it what you will.</p>
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<p>Her son is a URM, although I get the feeling he is debating whether or not to mention that fact on his app for some reason. Obviously, that’s a different, highly personal issue. </p>
<p>But let’s assume he is going to mention it. I don’t know about the percieved wisdom on this website, but I got the impression the perceived wisdom on this thread is that a URM could get in with a much lower score than 2400.</p>
<p>Or am I wrong?</p>
<p>I’m perfectly willing to believe that the Asian kids seeking admission to the most selective schools not only have better grades and scores than non-hooked white kidss, but also have recommendations, essays, and leadership achievements that are just as impressive as those unhooked white kids. But they still may be gettiing admitted to top schools at a rate less than these criteria might suggest they “should” be, without any ethnic bias at all. This is because (as I’ve said over and over) they are most likely much less represented among “hooked” groups like legacies and recruited athletes, and because they are disadvantaged by certain demographic effects, like being geographically concentrated, disproportionately choosing a limited number of majors, and disproportionately choosing a limited number of ECs. When you are applying to an institution that uses holistic admissions and that is trying to fill a lot of different niches in the student body, your group is disadvantaged if it is not competing for all those niches.</p>
<p>Jian Li may come across as a nice guy; I have no idea. It’s what he did that reveals him to be a clueless jerk–for a guy who got into Yale to bring a complaint against Princeton shows an unbelievable tin ear. And he was mercilessly mocked by thousands of people for it. Perhaps he’s a martyr to the cause–but again, I note that he happily transferred to one of the schools that rejected him, and against which he filed no complaint. His actions speak for him, in my opinion.</p>
<p>Is Jian Li from New Jersey? I was being told by someone in NJ that Princeton has lowered admissions to local schools because someone is suing them stating they are ignoring locals (it is what a high school student told his parent). I was wondering if this is a new lawsuit or related to Jian Li or urban myth.</p>
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I don’t think so.</p>
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<p>I believe my example showed a direct correlation for Asians (and I admitted this was hypothetical). I did not imply there was an inverse relationship for other groups; if you read my post I said I believed it might no be as high (I never said it was negatively correlated)</p>
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<p>No profile would be without criticism.</p>
<p>Li’s mixed results with elite admissions have led people to say that: he’s a brat because he got into a good school so what is he complaining about; Yale needed a 2400 but Princeton/Harvard have enough (?!) </p>
<p>Had he gotten into all the schools, people would say, “Why is he complaining?”</p>
<p>If he got shut out from elite schools, people would have said there was some non-quantitative fatal flaw in his personality–ECs, personality, etc.</p>
<p>Although the civil complaint didn’t refer to himself, Li’s record clearly shows more than a 2400 score.</p>
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<p>C’mon. Drownings have nothing to do with ice creams sales. SAT scores ARE part of the college admissions process. To try to explain the fact that 2400s get accepted at a much higher rate than 2250s people here seem to be resorting to “soft” factors not being equally distributed among the range of test takers. This seems like a stretch to me.</p>
<p>This has nothing to do with Asians vs. Whites, but simply whether or a higher SAT score really matters past a certain point.</p>
<p>He’s not traumatized at all. It’s just more money and more time and he’s a busy kid. He enjoys test taking. Before coming over to CC, some people in the homschooling community told me he’s one of the most desirable kids applying to college in the fall based on his SAT and his ECs which include graduate level physics research, national chess ranking, twice physics olympiad semi-finalist, professional freelance violinist, varsity baseball player, AIME twice, and so one. My son was very happy to be “one and done” with a 2320 but you’re saying 2320 is low. There <em>was</em> one Asian homeschooler who did tell me that score was on the low end for Ivies. Seems crazy to consider retaking but I suppose my son could retake in October and take his last SAT II in November.</p>
<p>^ Yes, I love how it’s just assumed that Li was a robotic bore of an applicant.</p>
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<p>No, of course it wasn’t. He graduated in the top 1% of his class, and while I couldn’t find the list of his extracurriculars (they were published), I recall the top ones being a delegate to Boys State and community service work in Costa Rica. Maybe someone else can remember more.</p>
<p><a href=“Hunt:”>quote</a>
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<p>The Espenshade study is evidence for this, although we don’t know what specific schools were included. But that study doesn’t tell us what the difference was in stats, if any, between unhooked whites and unhooked Asians, as far as I can recall.
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<p>The point of Espenshade et al’s studies was to try to control for “hooks” by recording the Legacy and Recruited Athlete status of each applicant as additional variables in the model. However, their results are largely dictated by the choice of methodology. Nearly every design choice that they made concerning which variables to omit, how to process the variables that they had, what type of statistical model to use, and how to report the results that they got – all of these generate phony “Asian SAT penalties”.</p>
<p>I gave many examples by now in this and the earlier discussions. Here are a few more.</p>
<p>-multiplying the Asian effect from 50 SAT points to 140 points (a much higher number that led media commentators to say “this is shocking”) simply by including more academic predictor variables. Adding SAT-II, AP, quality of high school, and other items as in the second Espenshade study (2009) will make the effect of SAT (alone) much weaker, so you need a higher number such as 140 points to get the same effect as 50 points in the earlier regressions. </p>
<p>-excluding Early Admission status of applicants from the analysis. Results of the Early Admissions Game study by Avery, Zeckhauser and their collaborators, was that the early decision pool was disproportionately white and that EA/ED were roughly equivalent to large SAT advantages (100+ points for ED). In Espenshade’s data, it is very likely that a higher fraction of whites than Asians applied EA/ED. The effect of early vs regular application would be detected in his regressions as an “Asian SAT penalty” even if the admissions were race blind, because whites would be more likely than Asians to carry the secret sauce.</p>
<p>-using only recruited athlete status rather than measuring athletic “credentials” more broadly. Never mind that using athletics is ridiculous as an admissions procedure, the question here is only whether the ridiculous procedure was applied equally to whites and Asians. Due to selection of sports more preferred in admission, and a lesser clustering of the types of sport, it’s likely that white non-recruited athletes would fare better (under race-blind but not athletics-blind admission) than Asian non-recruited athletes. This would appear as another Asian SAT penalty because Espenshade didn’t control for athletics in general, only athletic recruitment.</p>
<p>-mixing data from different years. SAT-sensitivity of the admissions was lowest in the years when more Asians applied (1997 after the 1994 dumbing down and 1995 recentering). This will appear as an Asian SAT penalty using Espenshade’s methods.</p>
<p>-mixing verbal and math SAT. Higher weighting of the verbal, although a race-neutral admissions policy, would appear as an Asian SAT penalty. I explained the math in that calculation puzzle that Fabrizio refuses to solve. </p>
<p>-mixing ACT and SAT. Proportionally more whites than Asians submitted ACT, which was dominant in midwest states. If “geographic representation” played to their advantage, along with lower National Merit semifinal cutoffs compared to the SAT states, this would appear as an Asian SAT penalty even if the standards for using ACT and SAT were race-blind.</p>
<p>-mixing data from different schools. SAT-sensitivity is lowest at the schools where Asians are likeliest to apply, which would generate an “Asian penalty” after mixing the data and running Espenshade’s analyses, especially the one from 2009.</p>
<p>-using blocks of SAT scores (such as 1500-1600) rather than SAT percentile within each school’s set of applicants, as the predictor variable. This conceals the rarity and the huge admissions effect of high verbal scores (740+) on the old, pre-1994 SAT that appears in two thirds of Espenshade’s data. Whites would appear to have a secret advantage if this effect is not accounted for, leading to another Asian penalty appearing in Espenshade’s regression results as the result of race-blind processes.</p>
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<li>exaggeration of results (blowup of regression coefficients) when using a series of logistic regression models, as Espenshade does, for binary outcomes such as Accept/Reject. </li>
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<p>There’s a more basic issue. Even if these studies were perfect, it is not correct to interpret the effects they find as reflecting admissions processes. Espenshade’s 2009 study found that in some ranges, increasing the SAT or ACT scores or number of AP exams reduced the chances of admission. This is not a statistical error, it is a correct description of his data, and is a real effect. But the source of the effect is applicant behavior, not the admissions offices. Applicants with better test scores and more AP exams apply to schools with lower admission rates, and Espenshade’s study mixed more and less selective schools in his data set. (This was pointed out to Fabrizio over a year ago. He didn’t get it and posted nonsense about regression analysis that might have kept him out of grad school had the professors seen it. Lucky that CC is anonymous!)</p>
<p>sbjdorlo,</p>
<p>I said he’s already scored exceptionally well. I did not say the 2320 is too low. </p>
<p>I merely think that if he likes to test and has a spare Saturday, why not? The writing is the most coachable of the sections for a super smart kid.</p>
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<p>Wow, a superior race in all areas. Do you understand the depth of what you’re saying here?</p>
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<p>As shown by your trying to trick me way back when and your referring to me as “allegedly non-racist” (emphasis added)?</p>
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<p>Clarification accepted. Thank you.</p>
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<p>Oh, I saw Li as an individual. It just happens that as an individual, he’s Chinese. No contradiction. Perhaps if you were more accommodating in your views on Asian “behaviors” for college admissions, you wouldn’t have to explain your comments as often as you do.</p>
<p>But this does bring up a good point about familial/cultural expectations. Maybe I can assume the people who tell my son to retake are Asian. They already know how to “play the game”. Again, before I knew anything about scores, CC, etc. I had always assumed that if my son got a 2250 plus all his other great qualities, that would make him competitive. See the difference? Apparently, well off Asians (and whites and blacks and Hispanics, I would guess) from either competitive publics or privates knew all about the “game” long ago. I didn’t until well into my son’s junior year. Would I have made him study more? Probably. Could he have scored higher on his SAT? Yes. He got a 78 on writing on the PSAT with no studying. It was just one of those things that I didn’t think too much about. We’re not wealthy and I wasn’t privy to this info until earlier this year. I wonder if colleges think about these things?</p>
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<p>He likes to test? Can’t find anything better to do with a Saturday? Is he going to spend his free time at Harvard trying to take more tests or trying to make the world a better place?</p>
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sbjdorlo:
Shockingly, to me at least, I sort of agree with sewhappy. I have no idea how siginificant the difference is between 2320 and 2400. I would guess not very much, but that is purely a guess.</p>
<p>But in your case it sort of seems as if you are really concerned about this and you might be second guessing yourself about it if you don’t get the admissions decisions you want. If it isn’t too much of a burden financially, since I get the impression taking the test is not a biggie for him, maybe you should consider it for that reason alone.</p>
<p>Of course, there’s no guarantee his scores will go up, but with superscore and score choice it’s not a big risk -except money and time. He might even get an 800 in math this time. Just my 2 cents in your particular case.</p>