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"MIT also has an active commitment to affirmative action. We do have affirmative action at MIT which means that we will admit every qualified African American, Mexican American, Puerto Rican and Native American student in our pool, Jones said. She also noted, though, that, The mean SAT scores of our minority undergraduate students are higher than the mean SATs for all of the students enrolled in the Ivy League. In short, these students are the best in the U.S.
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<p>It looks like at MIT, the minorities they admit are not underqualified when it comes to test scores. So why the prevaling sentiment that minorities are underqualified?</p>
<p>Yeah, I think it is funny that usually all the threads about affirmative action go on for pages with alot of asians and whites complaining about "underqualified" minorities, but then a source straight from an admission officer goes to say the exact opposite and all of a sudden hardly anyone responds. Funny.</p>
<p>"It looks like at MIT, the minorities they admit are not underqualified when it comes to test scores. So why the prevaling sentiment that minorities are underqualified?"</p>
<p>The evidence you used in your quotation compares the average SAT scores of URMs at MIT to the average SAT scores at all the Ivy's combined. I'm going to go ahead and assume that the average SAT score of URM's at MIT is lower than the overall average SAT score.</p>
<p>(That's not to say that SAT scores are everything, or even a good predictor of qualification/success/etc, just that URM are given slightly more leeway on their applications).</p>
<p>You would assume incorrectly. It is very reasonable to assume that a specific small subset of the population of MIT could have higher scores on the SAT than the overall Ivy league mean. When you combine mean scores it is the average and therefore entirely possible. Especially considering the fact that MIT probably attracts more science/math types and those subject and SAT sections are easier to obtain a 800 on. So the average would likely be high.</p>
<p>Also on what basis is there to assume that the minorities admitted to MIT actually have lower scores? Sure as an aggregate minorities preform at lower levels, but the few who excel are the ones who are going to be attending these colleges. The concept of being underqualified is largely a fabrication of people's own opinions and something that they have no objective proof of.</p>
<p>I never said that URMs are underqualified. I just said that the average SAT score of URMs is going to be lower at MIT than the overall average SAT score at MIT.</p>
<p>Whether Affirmative Action is fair, or whether it should exist or not are debate of their own. I'm not gong to try and initiate a anger rant thread. I'm just saying, Affirmative Action exists (at MIT), and by definition, this means that URMs are getting a boost in the admissions process based on their race.</p>
<p>There is a parsing of rhetoric that is occuring in your post. If you look at the actually quote she said that MIT admits every qualified minority student, meaning that the students on thier own creditionals were qualified in a statistical sense but that their admission was probably bc of thier race. The dichtomy is important bc when ppl speak of affirmative action they largely equate AA to help minorities who are underqualified get accepted which I believe is largely not the case.
AA probably helps those who are statistically as qualified as the asian applicants get in, not those who are underqualified. I mean does anyone honestly believe that MIT accepts EVERY qualified asian/white applicant? Nope, but the director of admissions said that is the policy for URM candidates.
Neither I nor you have a look at the scores of those minorities they admit, but someone who works in the actually office said that the minorities at MIT have SAT scores that are higher than for all of the Ivy league so why would that be disputable?</p>
<p>The relevant comparison, which is never published, would be to compare URM to non-URM stats at the same school. Putting aside URMs, a substantial portion [at least 15% IMO] of each Ivy league class is composed of recruited athletes, other special admits (big money development cases, published authors, employees kids, actors, politician and celebrity offspring, and to a somewhat lesser extent recently, legacies).</p>
<p>At the Ivies, this whole special admit thing, taken together with their outreach and urm programs, tends to drag down their overall means somewhat, which is why schools love to publish those top 25%, middle 50% , only-25%-are-less- than-type statistics. Since these same categories of special admits are not present at MIT or at least not to the same degree [other than urms], I think that the dear departed Marilee Jones was just playing a statistical game to put MIT's urm program in the best possible light viz the Ivies. It's a bit of an apple to oranges kind of thing though, IMO..</p>
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So why the prevaling sentiment that minorities are underqualified?
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<p>It's accepted as "common sense" in much of white US society (possibly much of Asian-American society as well? but I cannot speak for them and would be uncomfortable making that sort of assertion). It's one of those things that "everybody knows", especially at a place like CC where people are desperately searching for any reason to believe that the process is screwing them over so that they can explain away any rejection they get.</p>
<p>To MIT's credit, I saw <em>very</em> little of this attitude from actual MIT students, same as I saw very little of the parallel attitude about women from actual MIT students. I think that MIT students tend to have a certain level of baseline respect for the intelligence and abilities of other MIT students by default, and that even if these assumptions are dashed about an individual, they still apply to others from demographic groups to which the individual belongs.</p>