<p>Re Post 1718, I never once said or implied that MIT created the SAT test. The collegeboard created the test (or commissioned it), but asserting, as some have, that it “objectively” measures potential, or is even the best measurement of potential, is a stretch.</p>
<p>…“though I did get a 770V and I’m white.”</p>
<p>And aren’t you double-dog dandy proud of that too, since the SAT proves that you are a member of “the superior race”? It must really gall you to have to sit in class with those undeserving and statistically inferior URMs.</p>
<h2>epiphany: (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).</h2>
<p>Have you considered that a school with myriad opportunities, say a public magnet, has greater competition and also some classes which are harder than MIT’s classes? </p>
<p>I was one of those kids that had more opportunities, so let me illustrate my point by using my own high school:</p>
<h1>1 We had 70 national merit finalists in my graduating class all vying for the same 10 spots for MIT and 4 or so at Harvard and CalTech.</h1>
<h1>2 Pretty much everyone in my HS was #1 in their high school prior to transferring to the public magnet, so the high SAT score really wasn’t created by the school.</h1>
<h1>3 Making the math and science team, an EC that MIT likes to see, is much more difficult at my school. In fact, we had more USAMO qualifiers than spots on the math team.</h1>
<h1>4 We may have had more opportunities in high school, but it is well-known that the extremes in intelligence, both high and low, are mistreated the most in the school district. Whenever I see one of these superstar kids, I wonder what he/she could have achieved without the school district jerking them around in elementary school/junior high. If you’ve ever been in a position to skip 3 or more grades, you know what I’m talking about.</h1>
<h1>5 My high school is available to everyone in the state and the admin does their best to do outreach to encourage people to apply.</h1>
<p>If your kid was smart enough to be valedictorian but not a superstar and you wanted him to go to a top 5 school, do you really think you increase your chances of admission by sending him to a school like Bronx Science or Stuyesvant? I think it’s hard enough as it is to get in out of a school like this. </p>
<p>My experience is that people always try to explain away intellectual accomplishments of kids.</p>
<p>Percy,</p>
<p>There was a great article in The Economist titled “Merit in Motion” where Karabel’s book was reviewed. (You have to register to see it online).</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5213394[/url]”>Merit in motion;
<p>Here are my favorites:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>and,</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Self-interest? Most definitely. Enlightened self-interest? I really don’t know…</p>
<p>Canuckguy,</p>
<p>To me, that’s too cynical a take on the system. When it came time in this country to outlaw racial discrimination, we didn’t say - “we can’t do that because the rich will always have their way.” Civil rights has always been about appealing to the better angels of our nature, in Lincoln’s words. </p>
<p>I don’t think that defining “merit” is all that mysterious or difficult a process - if you go back to the point before Lowell decide he had to assess “character” in our to reduce the Jew count (the moment when admissions lost it innocence and gained the corrupt character it has to this day) , admissions was by means of passing a test - each U. had it’s own test that was geared to it’s curriculum and level (this was before the SAT). This is how most countries in the world do admissions to their top schools. Berkeley and CalTech seem to do a decent job without race preference. MIT is already unburdened by the legacy and athletic preferences that weigh down HYP - how hard would it be to just get rid of race and gender as express plus factors? You could keep “holistic” evaluation if you really wanted to, as worthless as it is, just don’t discriminate expressly by race and gender so that a black surgeon’s son has a better chance of getting in that the daughter of a Chinese restaurant worker - I don’t think that’s an impossible task or even a particularly difficult one.</p>
<p>It’s especially mysterious to me that the so called “left” in America has become so cynical and lacking in idealism as to view admissions as nothing more than a naked power grab, so grab as much as you can for the group you are part of - aren’t we supposed to “fight the power”? I guess once you BECOME the power, you don’t need to fight it any more - see Animal Farm. I realize that we have had our idealism literally shot from under us and Rev. Sharpton is no Rev. King, but c’mon people, where’s the spirit of brotherhood?</p>
<p>Percy</p>
<p>I’m puzzled. You “get it” that one doesn’t need to use million dollar words to be smart, but not that you don’t have to have mile-high SAT scores to be smart. There are many smart and capable, even brilliant people who just don’t show up well on this kind of test. I really enjoyed going to a college that had a wide variety of people who enriched discussions with their broad and varied backgrounds. There are different ways to measure merit and qualification than just a number on a page. Some people will never accept that and will always believe that the person with the highest SAT score is “the best”.</p>
<p>I’m not really that wedded to the SAT - it is a dumb test in a way - the entire 3 years of HS compressed into a single morning, with time pressure and a multiple choice format that rewards trickery. But in the end, your grades at college will be based in large part on timed exams, so it’s no surprise that the best way to see how well you’ll do on your college tests is to give you another timed exam. Even having the sense and initiative to prepare for the test and all its tricks says something about your future prospects as a student. And it’s not about money - I never took a course - I bought a book of old SATs that cost less than a pair of sneakers. Remember that there are hundreds of (admittedly very bright) 12 year olds who score in the 700s even though they have not even been to HS and have not done any test prep. Even the fact that you choke under pressure or are unable to work quickly enough to finish the test says something about you. Certainly more than assessing some highly subjective and easily manipulated “leadership quality” based on the number of clubs that you were the president of or whether you spent your summer in some village in Africa - as little as the SAT has to offer, those “holistic measures” have even less. If there were a better test or other objective measure out there (schools like MIT used to have their own placement tests, constructed by their own faculty) then I’d favor that one. But, it doesn’t really matter which test you use - SAT I, SAT II, ACT, etc. - the people who do well on one tend to do well on all, and vice versa, because those tests really are measuring something. They are not the be-all and end-all but they offer just about the only objective universal yardstick that can be used to compare all applicants on an equal footing. It’s sort of like Churchill’s view on democracy - it’s the worst possible system, except for all the others. </p>
<p>“Holistic admissions” OTOH has a very dubious history as a tool for racial and ethnic manipulation and I don’t think it every has really outgrown that - as I said before, if everyone in America was one race and ethnic group it never would have been started in the first place, and if it could no longer be used for that purpose (for example by coding applications so that the race and ethnicity of the candidate were masked, just like orchestras audition candidates behind a curtain so that you are measuring only the candidate’s abilities and not your own prejudices), then the steam for the holistic admissions charade would disappear in a hurry.</p>
<p>As you say, there are some people who don’t do well on it. It’s not a moral or character flaw not to be the sharpest tack in the box, but fortunately in this country we have a whole range of colleges - if you didn’t get a 2300 it wasn’t written anywhere that you have to go to MIT - there are plenty of other schools with students who are at your level. I think communities of learners work best when all the kids in the classroom are at a roughly similar level of ability - either class tends to proceed at the speed of the slowest learner or else the slowest learner gets left in the dust, neither of which does anyone any favors.</p>
<p>The truth is places like MIT have no problem in relying on tests to sort people within racial groups. If two Chinese kids apply to MIT from Bronx Science who are otherwise similar and one has a 2300 and one has a 2050, then the admission committee will have no problem looking at their SATs and 99% of the time they will take the kid with the 2300. But if the 2050 is a URM, suddenly we have all kinds of philosophical questions about the value of the SAT and maybe that kid really is a better admit than the Chinese w/ the 2350 after all. And, BTW, why stop there - if the SAT is as worthless as you say it is, why are 92% of MIT’s admits above 2100? Shouldn’t a “smart and capable” minority from a deprived background, etc, etc. be able to get in with a 1500 if the SAT doesn’t really mean a thing? Or does the SAT really tell us at least something? </p>
<p>The SAT does not have to be the ONLY measure. I have no doubt that if MIT could be freed from the need to achieve racial and gender “balancing”, the good statisticians on the faculty (and it’s telling that Marilee probably could not have done a regression to save her life), based on the database of past years’ data, could model in SAT, GPA, various math contests, science prizes and other objective measures and spit out a weighted formula that has the best fit for predicting future grades that would work better than some subjective committee process. In any other field at MIT, would you make any other important decision by vote of a committee rather than by working the numbers first (that is, except for picking the Dean of Admissions, where they didn’t check the available data either)? Would you submit a journal article saying “a committee met and the majority of them voted for the hypothesis that the sun orbits around the earth, so that’s our conclusion. We know the available data points in the other direction, but data isn’t everything - we are really rooting for earth being at the center so the committee gave earth a “plus factor” and that put it over the top vs. the heliocentric theory”.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>poetsheart directed this comment to Percy Skivins, but she’s previously directed a similar remark to me in another thread.</p>
<p>I haven’t seen a single sentence from Percy that remotely indicates a belief that so-called “under-represented” minorities are always undeserving or statistically inferior.</p>
<p>I would very much appreciate it if the people who castigate me for “not getting” the virtues of preferential treatment would criticize poetsheart for making such intellectually dishonest comments.</p>
<p>Regarding post 1713 (epiphany), I have no problems with either proposals for improving transparency. I believe, however, that they lack one important proposal which is related to the first. It would be nice if “the race breakdown, gender breakdown, income breakdown, academic backgrounds, interests, and subject preferences” of the students admitted to MIT were revealed and organized based on their score ranges. Of course, I recognize that epiphany may not like to have this information alongside her suggested proposals, for obvious reasons.</p>
<p>Princeton’s media relations manager, Ms. Cass Cliatt, went on record as saying that this type of information (i.e. race breakdown of scores) would be released if there was sufficient public interest. When numerous students wrote e-mails to her asking for the release of the data, she claimed that these students were part of an “e-mail campaign” and that there was no way that Princeton would ever reveal this information, due to its potential repercussions.</p>
<p>Fabrizio - thanks for pointing out this slander. I’m no longer shocked when the “racist” allegation gets flung around freely - it’s sort of the modern all purpose label for a “bad person” , like “fascist” or “enemy of the people” - a neat and easy way of shutting down debate. Once you have been suitably labeled, then there’s no further need to give any serious consideration to your views - why would anyone listen to anything a “racist” has to say? </p>
<p>It’s sort of an amazing topsy turvy world that we live in, when advocating for an admission policy that is not explicitly based on race makes you a racist according to pretzel logic, while those whose “race consciousness” colors their every move are the “non-racists”.</p>
<p>
This is flatly untrue. </p>
<p>MIT has stated many times in the blogs that test scores are a “check” factor – does the kid have scores in the range? Check. After that check, they are not used as a deciding factor. </p>
<p>
From [this</a> entry](<a href=“http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/standardized_test_requirements/whats_the_big_deal_about_402.shtml]this”>http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/standardized_test_requirements/whats_the_big_deal_about_402.shtml).</p>
<p>Kids with higher SAT scores are admitted at higher rates (although not stratospherically higher rates), presumably because the kids with higher scores often do have more to offer than the kids with lower scores. But SAT scores, if “in the range”, are not used to make admissions decisions for members of any race.</p>
<p>
Well, for starters, 70% of the applicant pool has over a 700 in CR, and 90% of the applicant pool has over a 700 in math. (Data [url=<a href=“http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/admissions_statistics/index.shtml]here[/url”>http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/admissions_statistics/index.shtml]here[/url</a>]; no data on Writing scores given.) It doesn’t take too much enrichment for SAT scores to get an admit pool that’s 92% over 2100.</p>
<p>I don’t think anybody’s argued that the SAT is actually meaningless, just that it’s not a useful discrimination tool given two applicants whose scores are relatively close. Put another way, the SAT doesn’t give MIT any information that they can’t find in other ways on the application.</p>
<p>And to address your last point, the admissions office does track applicants after they’re admitted, and they use the results to refine their criteria. That tracking is the source of the statement I made earlier – that grades in freshman math classes at MIT don’t correlate with SAT math scores, so long as the SAT math score was over 700 in the first place.</p>
<p>Percy,</p>
<p>No problem. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I could not agree more.</p>
<p>I have never understood the “logic” of the preferential treatment advocates. They claim that if we do not look at an individual’s skin color, then we discriminate against him. This type of thinking rightly got you labeled a racist forty years ago by our nation’s liberals. Now, this same group has been overran by socialists who define discrimination as “not considering race.”</p>
<p>The liberals should reclaim their fundamental principle of freedom of choice and drop their support for social justice. They should dissociate themselves from the closet-bigots who masquerade as anti-racists but in reality have no problem discriminating against “over-represented” minorities in their quest for justice via engineering. These socialists have the right to call themselves liberals if they choose, but they do not deserve to be in the same company.</p>
<p>Supposedly, Ms. Jones tried to make the admissions process more transparent, which is a worthy goal. This can be advanced further by either abolishing racial preferences or being more forthright with its application. Although I prefer the first, the second will still add much needed transparency.</p>
<p>Percy, from my vantage point, you’ve been talking out of both sides of your mouth during this entire discussion. Now and again, you disingenuously trot out the the jargon of humanitarianism, asking that we "appeal to “the better angels in our nature”, and, “where’s the spirit of brotherhood?”, while from the other, much more vocal side, you trot out reams of statistical evidence that “prove” the intellectual inferiority of black people to that of every other race on the planet, and suggested that the eugenicists’ wet dream of inherent genetic inferiority has merit. What am I supposed to think?</p>
<p>You are a white male who has never had to endure a single moment of true racism in your entire life, so how do you know the soul destroying effects of having your humanity, your worth, questioned and deemed lacking, in ways both subtle and overt, on a daily basis? You were born into this world with a default status of assumed superiority, one that serves you so constantly and seamlessly, in ways both large and small, that you obviously take it entirely for granted, a status honed through centuries of political and social engineering. Yes, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ENGINEERING. Yet the thing that seems to bothers you more than any anything, apparently, is the idea that your place at the head of the line might sometimes have to be shared with someone whose SAT may be 50 or more points lower than your own stratospheric 770, with someone who in ways both subtle and overt, usually occupies a space near the end of the line . Only THEN do the ideals of pure “merit” become all important. THEN, you conveniently ignore the fact that there always has been and still is, “a finger” weighting your side of the social and political scales.</p>
<p>I can’t begin to count the number of times I have read posts by the AA’s most vociferous detractors (who talk as if race aware admissions is a brand new concept in America) that claim that blacks and other URMs now have the upper hand in everything in this country, and that by means of “reverse discrimination”, whites are now the beleaguered race. Yet, when asked if they would, not one of them has ever claimed that they would trade places with a black person. I wonder why that is…:rolleyes:</p>
<p>I’m with you poetsheart. That last post says it all. Great summation.</p>
<p>poetsheart, you have no credibility in this thread until you apologize for your baseless slander of Percy. Honestly, it is outrageous to say…“And aren’t you double-dog dandy proud of that too, since the SAT proves that you are a member of “the superior race”? It must really gall you to have to sit in class with those undeserving and statistically inferior URMs.” You are revolting.</p>
<p>A small segment of American society uses multi-cultural ‘speak’ but that ‘speak’ does not hide their deep distrust and dislike of races they consider inferior (which would be every race except theirs).</p>
<p>Thank heavens American educators adopted the Teaching Tolerance program–in such huge numbers. Their efforts in conjunction with the work of the SPL is awe inspiring.</p>
<h1>1732: Great post.</h1>
<p>Why is it talking out the other side of my mouth to site statistics if these statistics are true? Maybe such statistics can be interpreted as supporting a genetic explanation which would gladden the heart of a Nazi - I can’t help it if they do or can be twisted so they do. I wish these statistics were wrong. I wish that there were more than 250 black kids a year who scored above 750 on their SATs. I wish there wasn’t a 1 SD gap. Nothing would make me happier. I wish that we could fix our school systems or the lack of emphasis on learning in black culture or whatever the heck it is that is creating a huge black-white gap in these scores. Heck if it’s genetics then I wish they would have a genetic cure. But what I don’t wish is that we just paper over this gap by a race conscious admissions policy - that just takes the pressure off fixing the real underlying problem - it’s a band-aid on a gaping problem in our society.</p>
<p>The clock is going to run out on AA soon, one way or the other, whether thru the voters or the courts or whatever - O’connor optimistically capped it at 25 more years. We’ve now had 30 years of working on this issue since Bakke and we’ve gotten exactly nowhere with erasing this gap. Maybe it’s time for another approach?</p>
<p>You don’t know who I am or what my life is like, so don’t tell me how awful it is to be black in America - no one is putting black people in gas chambers. I don’t see any more lynch mobs out. Yes, we once upon a time had a horrific and shameful history of mistreating blacks in this country, but the average 18 year old today has experienced none of that.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Your ignorance is astounding.</p>
<p>Let’s see…30 years of AA = 150 years of slavery + 100 years of institutionalized racism? </p>
<p>In your dreams, Percy. AA is not going away because the majority of Americans believe it is an effective method of redressing past wrongs. Not perfect–but better than nothing. Thank heavens most of the 18 to 22 year olds that I’ve met agree that AA is worth supporting. the baton has been passed onto future generations.</p>
<p>Considering the fact that geneticists generally feel that race doesn’t exist in the traditional sense so much as the sense of darker or lighter skin being as different as darker or lighter hair (so, only visually different), I see where Percy’s coming from. I also see where the rest of you are coming from. I actually agree with holistic admissions to an extent because unique experiences and backgrounds are important. AA for, let’s say, blacks – it is (or should be) more about bringing forth people with different experiences than it is about “paying them back” for what has been done to them. To have the experience of being black is different than having dark skin, even if that’s a really vague nuance. The experience of being black makes somebody unique and interesting in a way that the assertion of their skin color making them interesting is lacking. </p>
<p>Percy: Blacks aren’t sent to gas chambers or kept as slaves, but it is pretty devastating to be discriminated against even when it doesn’t harm one in any measurable way. Though I can’t scientifically prove to you that it hurt a hell of a lot when somebody I knew stopped talking to me after finding out that I’m 1/4 Jewish (she called me a “mud” before ignoring me), it did. That has only happened once in my entire life, and it still hurt an awful lot. I can’t imagine experiencing it on a daily basis, and I feel that I have been broadened as a human being by having such an experience at least once. Now I know what it’s like. I question whether or not you have ever had such an experience.</p>