MIT admissions dean resigns over resume fraud. Ouch!

oldolddad · May 9, 2007, 9:05pm

MollieB: I agree that often scores do not increase after 7th grade, especially the 800’s :D

soozievt · May 9, 2007, 9:07pm

oldolddad, I agree with all the points you made!

Percy_Skivins · May 9, 2007, 9:08pm

Again people keep saying that the SET group is not representative of the general population but they offer no proof. The SET results mirror a lot of other academic measures. For example, if you look at SAT -M >= 750 as a HS senior, the black percentage is less than 1% of the total # of above 750 scores - about 250 out of 30,000 total. Virtually 100% of college bound blacks take the SAT or the ACT so there’s no possible selection effect, but the results are basically the same as the SET results. Likewise all the national math competitions, etc. The state NCLB tests. Whatever objective measure you use the results will be the same. I used that photo because you can’t get all 30,000 top finishers on the SAT in a single picture (and a picture is worth 1000 words) , but if you could it would look not much different.

People keep on hypothesizing all kinds of “discrimination” as an explanation but nobody can point to anything concrete. Are there armed guards standing at the gates of the SAT testing centers turning away blacks and letting in extra Asians? Does CTY screen the applications and throw the ones from kids with black sounding names in the trash? Where’s the beef? In fact it looks to me like the opposite is true - people like Weiss are bending over backwards and going out of their way to nurture and promote black academic achievement but nobody seems to be able to produce concrete results. Nor is this strictly about economics - Black children from homes with incomes >$100k score lower on the SAT than Asians from homes making under $20k. And a disproportionate # of the few black high scorers that do exist are from backgrounds that are not what we traditionally think of as “African-American” - the descendants of Southern slaves. Some stories have indicated that as many as 1/2 the blacks now enrolled in top schools are children of 1st generation immigrants (or themselves immigrants) from the Caribbean or Africa - this is already begin to cause resentment in the black community that foreigners are stealing “their” AA slots.

You do have to ask why it is so but you have to be prepared to accept whatever the true answer is, even if it isn’t “whitey is keeping the black man down”. What if the answer is that there’s some genetic factor involved? Or that there is a lack of respect for learning in American black culture? What then? O’connor said that AA had to go in 25 years no matter what, but the black-white score gaps show no sign of disappearing. Was she just kidding when she said 25 years and it’s over? What happens when we get to that 25th year and nothing has changed?

oldolddad · May 9, 2007, 9:15pm

soozievt: That is scary!

tokenadult · May 9, 2007, 9:15pm

<a href=“Estimated total and school-age resident populations, by state: Selected years, 1970 through 2004”>Estimated total and school-age resident populations, by state: Selected years, 1970 through 2004;

That’s a link to school-age population figures.

On the point of the top group on one test being the top group on another test, that is NOT exactly what one would expect. If the tests are highly correlated, they will largely sort a group of test-takers into the same order. But not entirely so, unless they are perfectly correlated. There is a chart of comparisons of scores by the same individuals during the norming of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, Second Revision (which came in two forms: Form L and Form M). Some test-takers who were “highly gifted” on one test were only just-plain gifted on the other, and the other way around. This always happens as between any two mental tests. It would take a specialized validation study and, most importantly, an agreement on what external validation criterion to use to settle the issue of which test is the best at identifying the brightest young people in the United States. (Similarly, it would take a specialized validation study to identify which test or combination of tests is the very best at identifying fitting students for MIT, which is possibly a distinct issue.)

MIT’s admission officers, of course, already have a “gut reaction” about which admission criteria make sense for their purposes of admitting a subset of all the high school students who apply for admission each year. A thoughtful [blog</a> post by Ben Jones](<a href=“http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/before/recommended_high_school_preparation/many_ways_to_define_the_best.shtml]blog”>http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/before/recommended_high_school_preparation/many_ways_to_define_the_best.shtml) mentions several of the issues that MIT admissions officers look at when evaluating applicants (said tokenadult, in a desperate attempt to keep this thread on topic). I hope that the recent embarrassing revelation about the former MIT admission dean prompts much reexamination at all levels of MIT leadership about what criteria to apply to applicants and how they are ACTUALLY applied, but I think what Ben wrote earlier on this subject will probably still be a good description of the process and of the key issues after the process is reexamined.

andi · May 9, 2007, 9:17pm

Thank you oldold dad. You made goodgood points.

oldolddad · May 9, 2007, 9:22pm

Percy: Maybe it means that blacks are actually smarter because they do not think the world or success should revolve around doing well on an SAT test?
I think you have to look a bit deeper and broader at the tests and the culture before suggesting that one race is inherently smarter than another due to SAT scores. Oh , I forgot you also said females are not as smart as males. Actually they are smarter and infinitley more patient, tolerant, and understanding-- wife says that is an absolute fact.

oldolddad · May 9, 2007, 9:34pm

token: The old L-M has been useful because of the ceiling effects on the SB IV and WISC tests. It can further discriminate even more than the SAT at 6th grade. Yes it has been used to show an abnormal population bump in the upper ranges of 4 or more SD above the mean. These kids are really interesting and as you pointed out (I think on other threads) are ones that need massive interventions and special programs if they are really to develop. I know one locally who just cannot function in a normal setting and has had special math training since about age 7. It is a challange becuase he is almost ADD and will not do the regular work. But some of the higher level pattern recognition stuff that truly separates a math prodigy from the just really “bright” kids is there.

higherlead · May 9, 2007, 9:50pm

“They are giving the motivated, bright, and promising students (minorities or no) the opportunity to step outside of whatever environment they grew up in.”

If that is the case and MIT is truly admitting students holistically without regard to race or gender then, and forgive me because I am not a math genius, wouldn’t we expect the SAT and GPA 25% and 75% of admitted students to be the same for Asians, whites, and URM’s? And wouldn’t we expect them to be the same for men and women? Or is creativity found disproportionately is some groups?

Of course if there is something else going on like siloing applicants so Asians compete against Asians and URM’s against URM’s and womene against women but nobody else then we would expect results that reflect different ranges for different groups.

Anybody know why the Big Bang theory was developed at a relatively little known school in DC more noted for its Political Science department than its physics department and not MIT? Because MIT withdrew its scholarship offer to 16 year old Ralph Alpher when they found out he was Jewish. The years was 1937.

You cannot pick for something without picking against something else. When race or sex or religion or national origin or any other category that has nothing to do with intellectual ability then you are by default selecting against people of ability on the basis of race, sex, religion etc. The word for that is discrimination not diversity.

tokenadult · May 9, 2007, 10:02pm

I’ve presented a seminar on this topic and related topics for my state gifted association. The president of the association, a Ph.D. licensed psychologist with specialized training in gifted education, agrees with my take on this issue, which is that the L-M test does NOT have any special ability to identify highly gifted individuals. A good book on the subject to get you started is [Terman’s</a> Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Termans-Kids-Groundbreaking-Study-Gifted/dp/0316788902/]Terman’s”>http://www.amazon.com/Termans-Kids-Groundbreaking-Study-Gifted/dp/0316788902/) by the first independent researcher to have full access to the Terman longitudinal study files.

dmd77 · May 9, 2007, 10:11pm

Umm, Big Bang theory originated in 1912 and was developed by George Gamow, one of whose associates was Alpher. He might have been at GWU in 1937 when he published papers, but did a lot of the work at the Cavendish Lab in Britain, which is hardly obscure. (For that matter, neither is GWU.)

oldolddad · May 9, 2007, 11:05pm

" Examiners who assess the exceptionally gifted offer out-of-level testing to children who achieve on a standard IQ test (e.g., the WISC-IV, WPPSI-III, SB5, DAS-2, KABC-2, etc.) at or above the 99 th percentile on at least two subtests (particularly those subtests that are good measures of g). In the case of the Ravens Progressive Matrices, a score at the 97 th percentile would probably warrant an out-of-level supplementary test. The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (Form L-M) is given purely as a supplemental measure to test the limits of childrens abilities when they achieve ceiling-level scores on tests with lower ceilings (Silverman & Kearney, 1989; see also, Silverman & Kearney, 1992; Wasserman, in press). When the child exceeds the scores in the norm table of the SBL-M, a formula IQ is derived according to the instructions on page 339 in the manual (Terman & Merrill, 1973). The formula IQ is a ratio metric."

From current guidelines for using IQ test to test gifted children… See Linda Silverman site for more details. Gifteddevelopment.com

richs73cas · May 9, 2007, 11:13pm

The Internet Archive documents the “Cult of Personality” that Marilee developed over the years.

Gotta love this letter from Marilee, archived on December 19, 2000. Certain phrases just jump out.
<a href=“http://web.archive.org/web/20001205141200/web.mit.edu/admissions/www/whymit/index.html[/url]”>http://web.archive.org/web/20001205141200/web.mit.edu/admissions/www/whymit/index.html</a>

Guess she would know best :rolleyes:

soozievt · May 9, 2007, 11:29pm

This thread is really getting steered toward AA and stuff of that sort.

I find this reasoning bothersome, sorry. MIT or other institutions of its strata are not selecting based on race, sex, or religion (btw, how do they even know an applicant’s religion?) IN LIEU of intellectual ability! All whom they accept have the intellectual ability to succeed at MIT. There are WAY more applicants with the requisite academic stats to be admitted to MIT than slots available. AMONGST such INTELLECTUALLY qualified applicants, they then pick out students who meet other attractive criteria as indviduals and also to build a class. That is NOT discriminatory. All who get in are intellectually qualified. I think what I am observing is the same sort of thing I see kids post on CC…“What??? He got rejected? He had a higher SAT than she/he did who got in! Not fair!”

MIT is not picking females, or certain races, or anything else instead of academic and intellectual ability. They are selecting amongst qualified academic students as the initial “cut”. Then other factors kick in. Important factors to success in college and beyond. One must have the intellect and academic stats to make that first cut. Beyond that, once other criteria factor in (and we are all more than one dimension after all), it can turn out that the final accepted pool of applicants will not be exactly the same as it would have been had they just taken the top 1000 SAT scorers off the app file pile. I, for one, am surely glad this is the case.

oldolddad · May 9, 2007, 11:35pm

I personally see nothing wrong with the letters of Ms. Jones. She was speaking to parents and prospective students. Nothing she did makes these letters anything other than an articulation of what MIT was/is all about or how the institution was marketing itself to future students. Would make me want to go there and obviously hit home to many folks. Did not see kids lose interest in going there under her term. Remember these are the brightest kids who obviously liked the message.

richs73cas · May 9, 2007, 11:36pm

How long before this post by Matt gets put in the Memory Hole??
<a href=“http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/before/helping_your_parents_through_this_process/marilee_jones_in_the_news_1.shtml[/url]”>http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/before/helping_your_parents_through_this_process/marilee_jones_in_the_news_1.shtml</a>

Any one want to start a Pool?

I bet it is gone by May 31st. :)

siserune · May 9, 2007, 11:43pm

<a href=“Percy%20wrote:”>quote</a> You do have to ask why it is so but you have to be prepared to accept whatever the true answer is, even if it isn’t “whitey is keeping the black man down”. What if the answer is that there’s some genetic factor involved? Or that there is a lack of respect for learning in American black culture? What then?

[/quote]

The trouble is that the cost of a false positive (or a true but overestimated positive) becoming accepted as “the” answer, is extremely high, for all groups in the population. It is not a purely academic issue that can be revised as further data comes in; there is something pernicious, damaging and irreversible in reifying essentialist notions about black/white differences. It is not enough that some data are consistent with such hypotheses or might suggest them to some. Extraordinary assertions require extraordinary evidence, and the ease with which many people reach for essentialist explanations (i.e. the low standard of evidence they find impressive on this issue as opposed to, say, tax policy or gun control) itself is an indicator of racism.

cheers · May 9, 2007, 11:49pm

^^Agree with siserune.

tokenadult · May 10, 2007, 12:08am

oldolddad, I’ll send you a PM detailing why that Web site’s information is not accurate.

Percy_Skivins · May 10, 2007, 12:17am

It seems to me the ones who are “reifying essentialist notions” (whatever the hell that means) are the advocates of the current AA/diversity discrimination system. You don’t have to have any theories at all on the roots of black/white or male/female differences in order to have a color and gender blind admissions policy - all you have to do is believe in and carry out the words of the Declaration - that all people are created equal, and thus consider all applicants without regard to race or gender, period. Get your thumb off the friggin’ scale - scale thumbing is certainly a form of “reifying”, wouldn’t you say? .

Accepting AA at the college level means that you don’t have to do anything to cure whatever is causing the score differentials in the first place. Maybe it is fixable somehow, in some way that no one has figured out yet, but rigging the system with AA at the college level relieves a lot of the pressure to fix it at the HS and elementary level.

It also means that you don’t have to even THINK about what it would mean if these differences were truly innate and somehow unfixable. I get the strong feeling that people don’t really want to examine the causes too closely because it might mean looking under some rocks that we don’t want turned over (this is the opposite of science where you are supposed to go where the data takes you). The flip side of being impressed with a low standard of evidence is not being willing to change your views regardless of how much evidence is presented - I get the feeling that that you would be immune to any amount of evidence - you would refuse to accept genetics as an explanation for IQ differences even if Darwin and Mendel came back and presented you with twelve peer reviewed papers each. You say extraordinary assertions require extraordinary evidence - I never knew this was part of the scientific method - there are no “extraordinary assertions”, just hypotheses which you can either prove or not. Something tells me that no amount of evidence could ever be “extraordinary” enough to overcome your pre-existing views in this case.

MIT admissions dean resigns over resume fraud. Ouch!

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