<p>“Indeed De Furor himself marveled at the advances in their findings.”</p>
<p>DING DING DING - Godwin’s Law is proved right again - it only took 1539 posts for one side to accuse the other of being Nazis.</p>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin’s_Law">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin’s_Law</a></p>
<p>Percy, many of your comments come across to me as racist and offensive. the following one takes the cake…</p>
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<p>To speak about Jews as having “big noses” buried in a book…is an offensive manner of making your point. And then to say, “…the way REAL Americans did…”…excuse me? When were Jews not considered REAL Americans?? I also see no anti-Asian bias at MIT or on this thread at all. In fact, MIT has a larger percentage of Asians in its student body than in the American population.</p>
<p>I would much rather accept a student with a 750/750 SAT who had many other accomplishments and worthy traits to contribute to the life of the university than someone who had an 800/800 SAT who was simply smart but didn’t have much to offer otherwise. That is what admissions is about, even though you don’t seem to like that type of selection process. </p>
<p>Your talk about African Americans is coming across as offensive as well. I believe the African Americans accepted to MIT are academically qualified. Who cares if their SATs were not as high as someone else who was rejected? There is more to admissions than SAT scores. Their SATs were high enough to be in the ballpark of what MIT is looking for in academically talented students. They are also looking for other attributes that make a good admissions candidate. Get with the program.</p>
<p>Btw, StickerShock…I totally agree that SAT prep for a talent search in middle school is entirely different than SAT prep for college admissions. My kids who took the SATs in 7th and 8th grades did not prep. There was no point to prepping. They entered the talent search and they were academically recognized with an award. Works for me and for them. For college admissions, they did do practice tests to improve their SAT scores to be in line with their academic potential as reflected in their high GPAs, etc. Much more was riding on the line.</p>
<p>PS…I think conversations on message boards morph and transition into something else. But really, this has become an AA thread and was to have been about the MIT admissions dean’s ouster.</p>
<p>There are 3,000,000,000 people in the US. Assume 5% are age-eligible to play in the NBA, 50% are male, 13% are black and 4% are Asian. That leaves 9,750,000 age-eligible black males and 3,000,000 age-eligible Asian males. The top >2 SD of this black population is 204,750, while the top >3 SD (let’s stick to a 1 SD difference) of the Asian age-eligible male population is 3,000. So, while it is indeed more likely that you can find a black male with a “jumping index” that enables him to play in the NBA, you also could populate the entire league with qualified Asian males. That is, the “skinny end” of the bell curve is not so skinny when you have a large enough denominator. Which is also why any individual cannot be judged based on the attributes of his/her population cohort, but rather based on his/her own individual performance.</p>
<p>“I don’t think you can do good science if you have one eye on the political implications of your results.”</p>
<p>Of course you can’t. That’s why the Eugenicists were such pure scientists. They had no interest in the political implications of their results.</p>
<p>“I’m not buying the idea that humans are a totally homogeneous species except for skin color or that race is a political construct only.”</p>
<p>Of course you aren’t.</p>
<p>“Which is also why any individual cannot be judged based on the attributes of his/her population cohort, but rather based on his/her own individual performance.”</p>
<p>thank you! I say this interminably on the Admissions Forum. Seems so obvious, yet apparently not so to many students, who seem to believe you should get points added to your application because of overall group performance. (And vice-versa: that you should get penalized if your “group” performs poorly overall.) I.e., we should admit more from your group – presumably including you – based on historical good performance of your group, and vice-versa. Admissions committees are just not interested in how your “group” does, but in how <em>you</em> do.</p>
<p>drb wrote:
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<p>I wholeheartedly agree and that is why admissions is based on individuals. Whole individuals.</p>
<p>“DING DING DING - Godwin’s Law is proved right again - it only took 1539 posts for one side to accuse the other of being Nazis.”</p>
<p>Is that what you think “one side” did? Go back and reread my post. I accused no one of being a Nazi, except Hitler himself. I accused certain “researchers” of donning the cloak of science in order to further their own foregone conclusion—that being the inherent inferiority of black people. And I accused you of having a less-than-scientific motivation for embracing their findings wholeheartedly. I rather doubt you’re a Nazi—merely a garden variety, albeit, “extremely intelligent” bigot.;)</p>
<p>Stickershock-- I doubt any Jew would have a problem with Percy’s post.</p>
<p>When I found out how Jews were systematically discriminated against in the early half of the 20th century, I was astounded. The interview and the whole idea of “holistic” admissions was specifically designed to limit the amount of jews in ivy leagues. They even had a rating system that the interviewers would fill out. they had to mark a box next to “definitely Jewish, Jewish characteristics but not maybe Jewish, not Jewish”. They might have still been represented according to their percentage in the population, but even so, it was clear discrimination. For whatever reason, they were scoring much higher on the entrance exams. Maybe because of cultural values, maybe because they couldn’t rely on connections like Americans whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower.</p>
<p>From the Godwin’s Law wiki:
</p>
<p>This round goes to poetsheart.</p>
<p>Poetsheart, while the eugenics movement was clearly populated by racists like Dorothy Sanger & the Nazi scientists, I do think that the fear of admitting racial differences can be harmful. Medical research has to consider race & gender when studying diseases. If we are afraid to face the fact that there are racial differences, then higher rates of asthma, diabetes, and high blood pressure among blacks won’t be addressed honestly. Achievement gaps, too. We can’t be afraid of the answers we may find. Doing so will taint the research methodology.</p>
<p>Percy: I don’t believe we are scornful of hard work at all. However, if my kid was doing 100 math problems a night & still not excelling in that subject, I’d give it a rest. Time to look for another strength. And I hope my kids will do a reasonable amount of SAT prep when the time comes. D is 15 and hasn’t yet cracked a review book open. The very idea of cram schools make me sad, because it is time kids should be spending enjoying life. And the reason that holistic admissions (within reason, of course) appeals to me is that my kids will not want to be surrounded by classmates who spent beautiful spring days in a cram school or with an SAT tutor.</p>
<p>“Stickershock-- I doubt any Jew would have a problem with Percy’s post.”</p>
<p>Soozivet, do you want to tell 'em, or should I?</p>
<p>BTW, I don’t think it was Percy’s statements about the Ivy League’s systematic discrimination against Jews that Sooz found offensive.</p>
<p>Don’t be so coy- you just happened to mention Hitler? You didn’t mean to imply that Hitler was on the same side as I was, to tar me with Hitler’s brush?</p>
<p>Apparently even suggesting genetics as a possible explanation or an avenue for further research is the same as a “wholehearted embrace” in your book. This is what is so scary to me - we are way outside the realm of science and into the realm of religion or thought crime where certain thoughts are not even permissible to think. Again, I can understand perfectly why in this kind of McCarthyite climate any scientist in his right mind would not want to get within 100 meters of any kind of research along these lines. It’s really a very effective tactic - step 1 you shout down any possible research on a topic, step 2 if someone brings the topic up you say that there hasn’t been enough research and it’s racist to bring the topic up in the absence of conclusive research.</p>
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<p>There are? I know the borders are porous, but when did the US population suddenly exceed that of China and India combined?</p>
<p>My bad - divide everything by 10. So only 60% of the NBA could be Asian.</p>
<p>drb - you need a new calculator 'cause your numbers are all wrong, and your assumptions are way off - there’s no way that 5% of the population has the ability to play basketball at the NBA level. Personally I doubt that there really are enough Asians in the US who could play at the NBA level to populate the entire NBA - if this is true, where are they? Is the NBA discriminating against Asians to keep them off their teams? </p>
<p>When it comes to the SAT, we know the answer already - there are around 250 black students each year nationally who score above 750M, less than 1% of those who score at that level. These 250 get split up among all the top schools so maybe if MIT was extremely lucky they could get 10 or 20 of them, but MIT usually seeks to enroll around 80 blacks, so for the other 60 or 70 they have no choice but to relax their standards and discover in those applicants their magic creativity or whatever in order to fill those seats. It’s literally impossible for them to choose on the same basis as white/Asian admits - if they did that they’d have 1% black enrollment (see CalTech). That’s what all this “holistic” smoke and mirrors is about nowadays, just like in the old days it was about excluding Jews. This is classic misdirection, just like magicians use and it’s an amazingly effective tactic - maybe now that Marilee is unemployed she could set up a 3-card monte game on Mass. Ave.</p>
<p>Women are a different case - out of the 30,000 or so who score above 750M, maybe 1/3 are women, so they could fill all the women’s slots without relaxing their standards if they chose to do so.</p>
<p>What are you talking about? I stipulated 5% of the total population as being eligible - by age - to play. I then applied your jumping index to that population (broken down by ethnicity) to identify the ones who have the genetic ability to play.</p>
<p>Sports aren’t a good analogy anyway. A 700Sat kid could do very well in a non-math major at MIT. A BBall player who is a SD lower in his jumping ability than the average NBA player will not succeed. Look at last weekend’s NFL draft. Tenths of a second in 40 yd dash speed seperate a first round pick from a guy who isn’t drafted. There are far too many variables involved in academic/career success to assume any significant predictive value in a 50 or 100 point SAT gap.</p>
<p>Well, this thread is about Marilee Jones, so I might as well quote her here. I have one recently published book at home, How to Get Into the Top Colleges (2nd ed. 2006), which has on page 268 a quotation from Marilee Jones of MIT: “Wouldn’t you prepare the best you could? I really get frazzled when people talk about how evil test prep courses and independent counselors are. Why shouldn’t kids do everything in their power to do better in the admission process?” </p>
<p>Why not, indeed?</p>
<p>Mathson has never prepped for the AIME - and has never scored very high either.</p>
<p>Well in that case I must have set the “jumping index” too low. We know that there are only around 450 NBA players total, so maybe you have to set the jumping index much further out, around where SET sets their bar - say 6 S/D’s out, or .01% of the total population. On the SAT’s a 750M bar gets you around 30,000+ people total, which is a reasonable bar for filling the say the top 25 colleges but way too big for the NBA. How many Asians vs. blacks do you come up with at 6 SD’s out? Or maybe I set the difference in jumping index too low - again if you assume that there are no barriers to Asian entry in the NBA (nor any “affirmative action” on their behalf), you could work backwards from the actual NBA enrollment and figure out the actual difference in jumping index. Again for the SAT we know exactly what these #'s are.</p>
<p>The people who keep saying that this says nothing about individuals is absolutely right - that’s why you can have a Yao Ming or a Larry Bird. That’s why MIT could find A black student willing to enroll who was as high scoring as their average white or Asian applicants (or 10 or 20 such students). Likewise, when you see a black face on campus he or she could be one of those 10 or 20, so you should never make assumptions about an individual based on their group membership, absolutely. (BTW, this is one of the undermining things about AA - people who see URMs on campus tend to automatically assume that they are there as AA admits (and 3/4 of the time they’d be right, so it’s a normal human inference to make, but it must be hurtful to those who ARE fully qualified to get lumped into that group) - if admission was colorblind you’d know for sure that each student was as qualified as any other regardless of their race) But the NBA could NOT, even if it wanted to, enroll Asians in proportion to their % of the US population (and if you asked each NBA team to take at least 1 Asian American in order to accomplish this, they’d tell you where to stick it). Nor is it physically possible today (unless somehow MIT could convince 1/3 of all the black 750 scorers in the US to enroll at MIT) for MIT to fill its entire black “quota” (and that’s what it is, an unwritten quota) with blacks who are equally qualified with their other students. Things that are possible on the individual level may become impossible once you are talking about large groups.</p>