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You never showed any data to support the claim. Here is the claim you are trying to support:</p>
<p>I saw something that says if your Asian they take 50 points off your SAT, if your white its nothing, if your hispanic you get 170, if your black you get 230, and if your legacy you get 180 points.</p>
<p>Again, you did not support this claim at all – not even in the least. What you did was post a link to a study that extended the Espenshade and Chang study. That study by no means supports the initial assertion. That is why epiphany said “You saw/heard wrong. Pure nonsense.” It is indeed wrong, and pure nonsense.</p>
<p>Read the study closely if you have to. No one is taking or adding points to anyone’s SAT. The study tries to quantify the amount of selection pressure placed on certain groups of applicants at a few schools. It even states plainly that such a study is inherently difficult because American college admissions is not based on raw numbers (which are limited in discovering how well a student speaks, paints, loves, hates, or any of thousands of factors that can be picked up in an interview or essay). Also, it claims the study is inherently difficult because the factors that control the makeup of an entering class can themselves be affected by the assumptions the study requires in order to create its simulations. Now, I know that last sentence was all hard and stuff. But if you folks are honest, you’ll just decipher it and realize that the point is critical and that it does away with all this ridiculous mess about wanting to change your ethnicity. If an American college admission process is great enough to cause you to want to actually change your race, then you have a much bigger problem than getting into a school.</p>
<p>The study is not trying to say that the schools are taking unqualified students and then adding points to their SAT scores to make them qualified. What the study is trying to do is show what we already know, that some groups are getting more focus than others when it comes to students who are already qualified. It is saying something like this:</p>
<p>‘These few schools in our study are searching a lot harder for qualified students of some groups than they are for others. To compare how much their efforts vary by group, let’s try to covert the effort to SAT points (we’ll call it the SForce). The schools are searching for qualified blacks with an SForce of 230. The effort for athletes is 200. For Hispanics it is 185. For legacies it is 160. The effort for whites is marginal because qualified whites abound. And when it comes to Asians, the Sforce is –50 because they get so many qualified Asians they don’t have to search at all. If we remove the Sforce, the effect will be that colleges will almost completely overlook the qualified blacks and hispanics who enter the applicant pool. Asian numbers will go up about 5% because there are so many of them entering the pool. White numbers will basically remain stagnant.'</p>
<p>I personally don’t like what is happening to UC Berkeley. I don’t like it for the same reason I don’t like what has happened at Howard U (though, of course the history is different and understandable here. Even Howard is now trying to diversify its student body. Which is a fine thing). I think a school that is so overrun by students of one race that it leaves no room for a substantial presence of other races, makes for a pretty dull school. Overall, I think the educational experience at such schools is inferior.</p>
<p>I think we should keep the Sforce because without it, the schools will lose qualified blacks and hispanics. Since the blacks and hispanics are already qualified, academic quality does not suffer because the only thing the Sforce does is hunt down qualified people from the least represented groups. It takes race into account, but not only race. It could work for Asian Idahoans as well as it could for black New Yorkers. That the required Sforce is so high for blacks relative to Asians is a measure of how much of a problem education is for some groups compared to others. Where blacks are concerned, the problem is deeply rooted in history.</p>