<p>Wow guys. Come on, this Affirmative Action topic is lame and played out. What college do you know uses raw, hard, academic stats solely as their determining factor for admitting students? (None. Which isn’t even practical. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Duke, Brown, Upenn, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, Caltech, and Uchicago all decided they wanted 4.0 2400/36 students, and are all taking more or less 1000 for each class, do you really think there will be 13,000 students in the country with that? And if even if they had lower cutoffs (say 3.75 gpa 2100/30 students, they will still have way more applicants than spots and will have to use other criteria).</p>
<p>1). If they all decided they were going to just admit people based on grades and test scores, and the highest of those. Well, statistically speaking, Hispanics and African Americans are scoring lower (average SAT score for an African American in this country is about a 1200 with all three sections, and the ACT equivalent according to the New York Times, and not much higher for Hispanic people). So in most cases, the top schools would become almost all White and Asian. While many of you probably don’t see a problem with that (after all, it’s not technically discriminating), if the top schools in the country are mostly White and Asian, then they are going to have some serious problems with A). The law, you can imagine what kind of lawsuits they’ll have against them, all the time, which will cost the school money and its image; and B). The American public and the media. We live in a day and age where that simply isn’t acceptable anymore, and honestly, I don’t think most of you want to go to homogenous schools. That’s part of the importance of the college experience that many people don’t get in high school. </p>
<p>2). GPA and standardized test scores as criteria are flawed majorly anyways. Look at the following case scenarios:</p>
<p>What about AP classes? Is a kid with a 4.0 that took all comprehensive classes and maybe a couple of honors classes going to get priority over a kid with a 3.67 that took 10 AP classes? I mean, I guess you could decide using weighted gpas, but that’s a problem too, because an AP arms race is an awful idea educationally, when kids start focusing on GPAs moer than actually learning. Some schools don’t even offer APs, or one or two so I guess those kids are out of luck. Some schools offer many APs. Some schools don’t let you take APs till junior or senior year. My high school lets you start as a Freshman. Some schools use a standard 1 point weighting scale, some (like mine) use a sliding scale, where an A= 5.0, B=3.75, C= 2.5, D=1.25, and some don’t weight for APs at all. Plus education standards are not standardized in this country. Some AP classes are easier in other schools, others aren’t. I have a friend in another state in AP chem who gets homework, classwork, labs, and tests counted for a grade. At my school, in AP chem: 80% tests/quizzes, 20% labs. But what if my friend got an A and I got a B? How would colleges know the difference! Gosh, what a mess!</p>
<p>What about the kid with a 3.95 that spent most of their time just doing homework and socializing during high school, but the 3.58 kid that spent 4 years researching properties of Vascular Endothelial Growth Factors in Breast Cancer at a Hospital and won national acclaim? Does the kid with the higher GPA still get priority? Or how about something that definitely hits close to home with us: The kid with a 4.0 GPA that has two parents, one is a lawyer, the other one engineer, is an only child, can afford any tutoring or outside assistant, can pay thousands of dollars for SAT prep classes and books, who has minimal if any home responsibility and has endless hours to study.What about the other kid with a 3.5 who’s been working 25 hours a week, caring for three siblings with one parent making $30,000 a year and cannot afford such outside help? Do we still admit the student with higher test scores, who has never stood on his own feet and is not prepared for the adversity he will surely encounter later? According to “cutoffs,” technically we can’t. Can you see where this can get messy?</p>
<p>Colleges realize this, which is why such cutoffs do not exist. Besides, if you want to be angry with the student who was accepted to whatever school instead of you even though you had better grades and test scores, be mad at all students who are, not just the ones that do because they are minorities. What about Athletes, who from what I can see get a leg up WAY more than minorities? What about the white person who got in instead of you because her father went to Brown and her Mother went to Brown and her grandmother and grandfather etc. etc.? Or the person that got in because she lives in Wyoming? None of these factors have anything whatsoever to do with raw academics. But these case scenarios are just as common as the minority situation. Perhaps even moreso. </p>
<p>In fact, all of us are getting a leg up through Questbridge. TECHNICALLY, our economic situation is not related to our academic performance and grades, but here we are, because people know that economic situations really are related. (I suppose the differnce is that economic disadvantage is probably more justified than the state you live in, but it’s still an advantage.) And believe it or not, Race in America is too correlated with academic performance because of the way our system has fixed itself. Almost all black people in America grow up in environments that aren’t conducive to education, which is a problem that goes well beyond this discussion and that Affirmative Action will never fix. Compared to your White and Asian counterparts at your school, how many African Americans do you know of that can’t even form a sentence structured properly? That is learned at a very early age, and the public school system can’t fix that. It’s no wonder so many are doing poorly on tests like the SAT.</p>
<p>I’m not saying no one is wrong to be frustrated, but unless we standardize the education system in America and give everyone an equal footing economically and base everything on grades (like socialism in France. Everyone takes the same tests, no one does anything but study at school. If you make certain grades,you go to college. If you don’t, oh well.), things probably are going to stay this way.</p>
<p>By the way, I was reading this yesterday:</p>
<p>[Christoph</a> Guttentag Named Dean of Undergraduate Admissions at Duke](<a href=“http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2005/10/christophdean.html]Christoph”>http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2005/10/christophdean.html)</p>
<p>Apparently Duke received 1800 applicants from African American students in 2005. It’s probably higher now. Given that Duke usually accepts about 20% of around 20,000 applicants, and Duke only has around 12% Black, I think a lot of of them are probably getting rejected.</p>