MIT admissions dean resigns over resume fraud. Ouch!

siserune · May 12, 2007, 1:47am

<a href=“cellardweller:”>quote</a> Where did you do learn statistics? Not MIT for sure!..If yield could be predicted within a percentage point by linear regression then you get the Fields Medal. Anybody with the least amount of math background could tell you the predictive power of such a model would be very low, together with a huge estimated error.

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While yield models are not an exact science, I think the error can be reduced much more than you suppose. Particularly if “match” is estimated so carefully during the selection process, and with applicant data computerized.

siserune · May 12, 2007, 2:15am

There are visible discrepancies in graduation rates and probably other measures as well. MIT dropout (more precisely, 6-year nongraduation) rates are several times higher for URM than whites and asians. The genderwise numbers are skewed because the interaction of MIT’s race and gender balance requirements forces the overadmission of high-graduating groups, i.e. Asians, whites, and possibly internationals, among females, and an overadmission of low-graduating minorities among the male admits.

This also partly explains mollieB’s numbers about the percentage of engineering majors going as Native American > black/hispanic > white > Asian. The harder it is to admit (based on stats) members of a given group the less MIT can preferentially admit women from that group, and the resulting excess of males skews the Native American, etc numbers toward engineering. The other part of the explanation is that immigrants (40-50 percent Caribbean and Africans among blacks), the less affluent, and first-generation college students veer toward employable professional training such as engineering, over more frilly MIT majors such as linguistics or more theoretical majors (math, physics) for which qualifications are rare in those applicant groups.

collegealum314 · May 12, 2007, 3:07am

double post…

collegealum314 · May 12, 2007, 3:09am

mardad: "Anyone who is motivated and has SATs above 1250 (or 1950) can succeed. It will require more effort for some, but they can do it. "

Maybe at the ivies, but not at MIT or CalTech. If you meant to include MIT/CalTech, then I think you have no clue how hard these places are.

pebbles · May 12, 2007, 3:27am

no, the actual yield was 69%.

siserune · May 12, 2007, 3:36am

<a href=“pebbles:”>quote</a>this current “holistic” approach has made the U.S. education system arguably superior to that of many other countries

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It is not superior when controlled for tuition fees. For the price of a holistic-admission US education, you could also get a world-class education in Europe, Africa, or Antarctica. In some places you wouldn’t need the education at all, you could go ahead and retire on that amount of money.

marite · May 12, 2007, 7:37am

If we are going to include tuition fees, let’s keep in mind the high rate of taxes in Europe along with the substandard conditions at many of the universities, the fact that at most universities students live at home (so no room and board, health fees, etc…).

epiphany · May 12, 2007, 8:45am

^^^…and the high cost of residence (often) overseas, for something comparable in the U.S. Ditto cost of food and many everyday items. At a prime US University, tuition is the premium, room & board less so. At Oxford & Cambridge, living expenses are considerably higher than tuition for an international.

Canuckguy · May 12, 2007, 10:32am

This is probably the most honest statement on this threat. I can never understand why folks create convoluted explanations when simple self-interest would suffice.

For the sake of symmetry, I would probably say the very very powerful easing their consciences by throwing a bone to the less powerful at the expense of the least powerful. I would argue that ability and power are not necessarily the same thing. My feeling is that governments and individuals would react more quickly and forcefully to brute force than to intelligent debates.

This article about Indiana Law seems to support your suspicion.

<a href=“http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-wood052103.asp[/url]”>http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-wood052103.asp</a>

Exactly, StickerShock.

siserune · May 12, 2007, 12:14pm

Taxes, government subsidies, off-campus and commuter students exist in the USA, too. The average live-at-home college education is rather poor in the US, which is one reason it’s so unpopular. The substandard offerings of state funded US commuter colleges don’t compare favorably to the equivalents in Europe.

For internationals? Oxford and Cambridge make money on internationals, hand over fist. Oxford charged 10-15 times higher fees for internationals until a couple of years ago, and a mere 4-5 times higher today. The cost of living is substantially lower than the tuition and enrollment fees.

The correct comparison is of domestic students. Oxford and Cambridge costs are published online as are the exchange rates. You are welcome to find out for yourself what level of US private colleges, if any, can be afforded at that price. Some US residents with non-US citizenships and an ineligibility for financial aid go to non-US universities after making those calculations.

Percy_Skivins · May 12, 2007, 12:45pm

“My feeling is that governments and individuals would react more quickly and forcefully to brute force than to intelligent debates.”

From the review of Karabel’s book in Slate:

“Karabel, whose role in redesigning Berkeley’s admissions policy in the late '80s in order to pass constitutional muster is described in The Big Test, and who remains one of the most thoughtful advocates of affirmative action, candidly concedes that the Big Three ramped up the admission of black students almost overnight owing not to some midnight conversion but to terror at the rising tide of black anger and violence—owing, that is, to racial blackmail.”

<a href=“http://www.slate.com/id/2128377/[/url]”>http://www.slate.com/id/2128377/</a>

(I otherwise disagree with Traub’s conclusion, which is that AA at least counterbalances legacy and other preferences that favor the elite - two wrongs do not make a right, especially when there is a third group (Asians and middle/working class whites) that is getting screwed in this grand bargain between the “elites” and the “URMs”. )

Maybe some Asian kids need to mau mau the flak catchers, in Tom Wolfe’s words? Not their style, I guess. I think there is one Chinese-American 1600 SAT kid who is suing Princeton - I dunno where his law suit stands. Frankly I have more hope for the ballot box than the court system. The court system is loaded with the same elites who like AA so much at the U and corporate levels for the reasons given above (although w/ O’connor off the court, if they can get a new AA case in front of the SC its goose may be cooked). Voters are also not as craven in the face of threats as say the average NBC or HYP official.

Karabel’s “reforms” at Berkeley did not stick (as of 1994 there was a 288 pt. black/white gap at Berkeley (on the 1600 pt. scale). The overall average was in the 1200s, which meant that the average black Berkeley student was below 1000. The guys in the admissions office may have been intimidated but the voters of California, led by the brave Ward Connerly, did not allow this ridiculous situation to remain. Berkeley is now 3.6% black and 41% Asian, which is probably close to the colorblind level for a U. at it’s level, maybe slightly manipulated by disguised AA- the bureaucracy has a way of foot dragging and not fully carrying out legally mandated changes that they don’t like ( the colorblind black enrollment would be around 1% or 2% - I think this is what it was the 1st year of no-AA in Calfif. before they figured out ways to bypass the law). BTW, the abundance of Asians and absence of blacks has not seemed to hurt Berkeley’s reputation in the “market” (nor Caltech’s).

mardad · May 12, 2007, 1:22pm

collegealum314, I agree that those schools need to be more careful on ability. I have a nephew at MIT, but my point was not the specific numbers but that the admission committes at the superselectives can drop down quite a bit for a URM applicant and still have someone who can succeed. So, Columbia’s average SAT may be 1450 for the Asian group and 1300 for the URM which seems larger than it turns out to be. MITs numbers may be 1550 and 1400 respectively.

epiphany · May 12, 2007, 1:24pm

siserune,
I’m aware of the Oxbridge & Cambridge fees, both for internationals and for domestics. As to “the correct comparison,” you are actually the one that brought up overseas universities as a comparison with MIT. Originally I assumed that you meant that the quality of an overseas education is greater than the quality of a U.S. education — which would be interesting, since so many students overseas long to go to college here. (The quality of Elites over there is impressive indeed, requiring quantifiable elements of achievement in academic areas.) However, I see now that you are arguing for dollar value, and concluding that that value is superior overseas. That may even be true at their Elites, but how many such institutions do they have, employing top-notch profs? Not many, and not nearly as many as we have. A tiny acceptance rate at Oxford or Cambridge. (Cannot apply to both.) Many European students would argue that one can also get a world-class education at U.S. Elites, not just at oxford & cambridge, and that an extremely well-prepared student there may barely miss Oxbridge, but would not necessarily miss an acceptance at our elites. (Even though it is likely that he or she might not be able to afford our own international tuition, just as U.S. students are challenged to afford theirs.)

But in any case, I’m interested in how this thread has proceeded: O.k., so we went from the shocking news of lying about academic (not administrative) qualifications for an administrative (roughly entry level) job, to –> “casts doubt on the reliability of policies employed during MJ’s term” (supposedly), to —> casts doubt on MIT’s integrity in general (how they hire, how accountable they are), to ----> any college (including MIT) utilizing holistic admissions criteria has a student body of suspect quality.

And if that progression is more or less accurate, I’m thinking that the common thread leading to this conclusion is the aspect of transparency. Opaque MJ + opaque admissions process = cloudy/clouded student body. (Somewhere in there was a very long, winding discussion in which the ever-popular effort to blame AA appeared. Lost in that illogic was the fact that holistic admissions similarly applies to white & Asian males, some of whom – gasp!–get in despite imperfect quantitative elements but exceptional “other” elements.)

Let’s let the parentheticals rest and get back to transparency. Terrific. I’m all for transparency. Let’s examine some ways in which transparency can be improved:

(1) a revelation about the race breakdown, gender breakdown, income breakdown, academic backgrounds, interests, and subject preferences of those who initially created the SAT “Reasoning” test, and of those who have participated in the test content changes since then (including those responsible for eliminating the analogy section).
(2) a revelation about the science opportunities – on high school campuses and off high school campuses – of those who have been admitted to MIT, by income breakdown, gender breakdown, and race breakdown. That would include the level of adult (staff) encouragement of those opportunities, facilitating of those opportunities, publicizing of those opportunities. It would include the availability of advanced science & math courses in the high schools of those accepted to MIT (with the mentioned category breakdowns).

That’s just for starters. I could include a complete list, but most people with high SAT scores should be able to imagine a rather comprehensive list.

soozievt · May 12, 2007, 2:21pm

I love number 2 because it relates to the whole discussion about using SAT scores as the measure of who should get into a school like MIT or not. The fact is, there are applicants who participate in things like Intel and Westinghouse and all sorts of research opportunities and college level courses, and so forth, and there are students in other locations, high schools and backgrounds who do not have such opportunities or even know about them. I have read on CC about what students are doing in other areas of the country in math/science etc. and there simply isn’t stuff like that going on here where I live at all. However, we also have smart kids here who can succeed at MIT. That is why colleges like MIT look at the whole applicant in the context of their opportunities and what not.

Percy_Skivins · May 12, 2007, 6:12pm

^Your #1 is ridiculous - who cares who prepared the test? Should we also disclose if Jooos worked on it? BTW, the black-white score gap is greater in math than in the verbal sections, so you can’t blame unfamiliarity of black people with say yachts, to site a famous example of how the SAT was “culturally biased” (an analogy involving the word “regatta”, as if the average white person owned a yacht.) In 40 years of SAT, this was the only example I’ve ever seen of “cultural bias” and whoever put that on there must have been suitably flogged, and then they dropped analogies completely so it would never happen again.

BTW, the same black-white gap exists on almost every academic measure - the ACTs, the SAT II’s, etc. etc, so shooting the messenger wont help.

As for your #2, disclose all you want, I’m for more openness, but it won’t do anything to change the need for AA if MIT wants to keep up it’s black enrollment - the gap exists in rich districts, poor districts, children of blacks making over $100k, whatever. No one has been able to “explain away” the gap by accounting for any kind of measurable school, income, parent educational level or other difference, so good luck.

I assume, in the interest of full disclosure, you’d also want MIT to release SAT/GPA grid scores and admit rates broken down by race, gender, etc. so that an Asian male with say 700M SAT would know whether he was wasting his money on the application fee or not?

Yes, they do apply “holistic” measurement within race/genders but this pales next to the racial manipulation - this is like the old days when black people had to sit in the back of the bus - you could have sorted all the blacks sitting in the “colored section” but even the black sitting in the first row of that section had to sit behind the white in the last row. Nowadays, the bus is travelling in reverse so the “back” has become the “front” and maybe the border between the sections is a little mixed, but not much - at Mich. , certain grid SAT/GPA position that had 100% admit rates for blacks had 8% admit rates for whites/Asians.

epiphany · May 12, 2007, 10:47pm

Laughably, naturally PS assumed I meant “cultural bias,” when I meant nothing of the sort.

momfromme · May 12, 2007, 11:29pm

What exactly does SAT correlate with? I seem to remember that SAT scores correlate with first year grades. Beyond that – zilch – not later grades, graduation rates, graduate admissions, earnings, etc. So why do people seem to think that it’s such a great measure of merit?

Percy_Skivins · May 12, 2007, 11:43pm

'Cause it’s the only (aside from the ACT or the SAT II’s) universally administered test so it (unlike GPA) provides a common yardstick with which every student can be compared.

'Cause even though it doesn’t predict future performance that well, it predicts it better than any other measure.

Epiphany - now I’m really mystified. What DID you have in mind when you asked MIT to document the racial composition of the authors of the SAT if not cultural bias (and why would MIT have access to this data if College Board and not MIT is the author of the test). If I were the College Board and MIT asked me such a racist and irrelevant question, I’d tell them where to go stick it. I think it’s outrageous that you would suggest this for any reason. What if the people who prepared the SAT were all Klu Klux Klan members? - an Algebra problem is an Algebra problem and everyone takes the same test.

siserune · May 13, 2007, 12:06am

<a href=“Percy%20opines:”>quote</a> BTW, the black-white score gap is greater in math than in the verbal sections, so you can’t blame unfamiliarity of black people with say yachts, to site a famous example of how the SAT was “culturally biased” (an analogy involving the word “regatta”, as if the average white person owned a yacht.)

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Percy, you have succumbed to cultural bias, and while you’re not black, you may still be eligible for an extra 40 points admissions credit on the verbal SAT if you cite (that’s the correct spelling, with a ‘C’) learning disabilities, first-generation immigrant background, or all-around contributions to human brotherhood on CC. The famous SAT question was an analogy where the correct answer was “Oarsman :: Regatta”. A yacht is a sailing vessel, and has no oarsmen.

Good to know the ghetto isn’t the only place where people are disadvantaged by tough SAT questions. Next thing you know they’ll put REIFY and ESSENTIALIST on the vocab list.

Percy_Skivins · May 13, 2007, 12:50am

Siserune - you really need to get outside of your academic bubble - in the real world no one talks about reifying essentialism or esssentializing reification or whatever. It reminds me of the current Geico caveman commerical where the caveman, asked to respond to a similar spew of jargon on a talk show , replies “Yeah, I have a response - What?” Really smart people don’t have to use ten cent words to prove how smart they are - only insecure academics write impenetrable prose to mask the fact that they are spouting nonsense.

As for the regatta thing, that just proves my point - before I got into college I had never seen a crew rowing boat in my life and a “Regatta” was the name of a Buick model. I didn’t remember the full analogy - just that it had the word regatta in it - don’t yachts hold regattas too? I still don’t know to this day, though I did get a 770V and I’m white.

MIT admissions dean resigns over resume fraud. Ouch!

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