<p>
Precisely. It would be more accurate to say that in most cases scores and grades qualify a student to enter the competition.</p>
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<p>But that’s far too simplistic. So and so caucaison might have been admitted because they were of course within the tag up region for SAT/GPA but they bring political savvy to the table. So and so asian might have been admitted because they were of course within the tag up region for SAT/GPA but they also bring great vocal talent to the table. So and so URM etc…</p>
<p>You can’t do a naviance that takes into account every variable. There are far too many besides race. Like, just sex, SES, region of country, country of origin, first gen college, special talents, awards… etc…</p>
<p>When your admit rate is as low as H,Y,P,S… you really are accepting outstanding INDIVIDUALS. Really. It’s true. You are taking Sasha an Malia Obama, and Chelsea Clinton, in addition to all sorts of people. Do you think Gates’ kids will or will not be accepted to Harvard? Yes…or … No. Check a box. I mean, it’s not like local stateU</p>
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I have no issue w harvard admitting on soft qualifications like this. But the bottom line is that despite the subjectiveness, harvard still “scores” the personal/leadership qualities of the applicants. So just show us the aggregated data for the personal/leadership qualities scores by race.</p>
<p>But, then you will come back and say those scores are subjective. </p>
<p>the only thing that will satisfy is the releasing of the applications themselves. All however many thousands of them.</p>
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<p>Sure you can. You just have multiple plots. The school already has the data. The school probably already does plot it. It came out in the Fisher v UT case that that’s what UT does. Harvard can’t possibly dumber than UT at plotting scatterplots from data columns on an Excel spreadsheet.</p>
<p>
Scoring SAT essays is also subjective, but it’s done.</p>
<p>Well, I don’t honestly actually care who Harvard admits, but I can tell you that until they release the actual applications themselves, and even after that, they will never have released enough information for those who believe they are not getting in because they are more qualified than the URM from a charter school in the inner city of Chicago. </p>
<p>I think many people have an erroneous picture of what the process really is. I think they imagine that there are numerical scores for everything, and that if you could only get them, you’d find out whether some group was being discriminated against. I don’t think that’s very likely at all. I think it’s more like, “What do you think about Joe X.” “Well, he’s from Idaho, which is a plus, but he doesn’t have a lot of ECs, so I don’t know.” “It says he’s a tenor, and the singing groups always need more tenors.” “His essay was pretty good, I guess.” “He only as a 2270, but I think it’s good enough.” Etc.</p>
<p>Note: again, the fact that an African-American kid with lower scores got in over an Asian kid with higher scores does not mean that Harvard is discriminating against Asians. It probably does mean that Harvard is discriminating in favor of URMs. That’s probably not illegal, as long as it’s part of holistic review. So you won’t get anywhere by showing that it’s happening. To show unlawful discrimination, you’ll pretty much have to show that Harvard is discriminating against Asians in favor of white applicants. And since qualifications include all sorts of holistic factors, it’s very difficult to say that one candidate is more qualified than another, especially based on stats.</p>
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</p>
<p>No. I don’t agree with that at all. What UNIQUE opportunities can you name–for grad school, professional opportunities, connections–that are ONLY available to graduates of Harvard? Can you demonstrate that, for instance, every single Rhodes scholar or Watson fellow or whatever the heck else is impressive to you comes from Harvard? Of course not.</p>
<p>“But all the people in my home country are convinced that Harvard is the bomb!”</p>
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</p>
<p>Of course, they do have all the data. And they could make presentations about how they do score the various elemnts of an application file on a given scale. Here’s an example</p>
<ol>
<li>GPA Weighted</li>
<li>GPA UW</li>
<li>GPA — analyzed for curriculum and school profile – School Rank</li>
<li>SAT/ACT </li>
<li><p>SAT analyzed for location</p></li>
<li><p>Essays</p></li>
<li><p>LOR
8 School activities
9 Non school EC
10 Awards</p></li>
</ol>
<p>11 Academic Competitions
12 Other awards in art
13 AP
14 AIME USAMO etc or that Intel boondoggle
15 Athletic recruiting</p>
<p>16, Family circumstances
17 Income
18 Hardship
19 Character
20 Demonstrated Interest</p>
<p>21-25 Expected contributions from certain students based on … historical performance at the school
That means things such as Intel geniuses never attempting anything close after getting accepted. Students dropping “passions” like flies in the summer as soon as the fat envelope reached them. Schools are not working in a vacuum! </p>
<p>You could add plenty more and scale them according to various maximum points from 1-25 and end up with a total of 250 to 400 total points. </p>
<p>But then what? What if a student earns maximum points on SAT/GPA but earns average or mediocre in half of the rest? Is there ANY doubt that Harvard could come up with plenty of justifications that make the basic GPA/SAT nothing but an … afterthought. The reality is that they do NOT need such an extensive scale to make their opening cuts: they find plenty of reasons to put 3 our 4 in the R pile. They KNOW what they are looking for and that is the basic problem for some people to accept.</p>
<p>To make an analogy, this is a discussion about why people might choose a car based on the color and size of engine. After your groups show preferences for black or grey and a six cylinder engine, you have two dozens options starting with comfort, interior, radio, sunroof, size of trunk, and name the rest. </p>
<p>As it stands, the current complaints are based on the color and engine size. People like Espenshade built an entire argument on SAT and a few other gross elements without being able to make much headways for the remaining elements. Unfortunately, this is a fool’s errand as the decision are using an algorithm that defies the simplistic approach of comparing test scores and GPA. </p>
<p>In addition to the obvious, one should also note that the bulk of the data presented as "evidence: is based on the enrolled students and NOT based on the pool of applicants. As usual, we can “speculate” about why a certain student got the nod. Speculating about why a student was NOT admitted is an entirely different ballgame. </p>
<p>We do not know. The schools DO know, and they surely have an endless pool of contributing factors why they pick one student over another. Despite the attempts to simplify the results into a simplistic common denominator, there is probably no smoking gun! </p>
<p>“Note: again, the fact that an African-American kid with lower scores got in over an Asian kid with higher scores does not mean that Harvard is discriminating against Asians.”</p>
<p>These are also not one-off comparisons. It is not as though seat #762 in the freshman class is up for grabs, and the Asian kid with higher scores and the African American kid with lower scores are competing directly with one another for that particular seat, such that if the Asian kid doesn’t get in, his rightful #762 is handed to the Afr-Am kid.</p>
<p>Perhaps that Asian kid didn’t get in because another Asian kid who had an even higher GPA, SAT, better ECs, etc. took “his” spot. It’s amusing to me how the “competition” is always a URM with lower scores. It’s so arrogant and so entitled, that “your” spot was wrested away, and amazingly always by a URM as opposed to another Asian or a white kid from Exeter. </p>
<p>“Pizzagirl you would have that right if they discriminated against you as a member of a protected class. Heard of the Civil Right Act?? If your an employer, tell an applicant he/she can’t have the job because hs/she is not White, see what happens.”</p>
<p>If I interview a black person, and decide not to give her the job offer, I am not discriminating against her because she is black. I may not like her for the position, and it so happens that she is black, which is very different from “the moment I saw her black face, I knew I wasn’t going to hire her.” </p>
<p>It’s like you almost can’t imagine a world in which, when presented with a candidate with the “right” GPA/scores, Harvard wouldn’t want them. </p>
<p>Thought experiment. Let’s assume all of the candidate pools I’m describing are equally qualified for the sake of argument.</p>
<p>Let’s say for easy-math-sake there are 1,500 spots at Harvard, there is 100% yield and they receive:</p>
<p>20,000 applications from Asians
9,800 applications from whites
200 applications from AA</p>
<p>If the admit rate is 5% and qualifications are distributed evenly in each pool, that would give them:
1,000 Asians
490 whites
10 AA </p>
<p>Harvard believes that there is not sufficient of a mass of AA with only 10 of their 1500 students. They want to increase their applications among AA people and they don’t want to “promise” them a campus with only 40 AA (10 per class). So they set an unofficial kind-of-around-here target of admitting 100 AA per class.</p>
<p>Is that something you all think they should be permitted / allowed to do? That actually comes out of the hide of both Asians and whites, because, well, obviously seats have to come from somewhere.</p>
<p>Is that “discrimination against Asians / whites” or is that merely “helping AA get a hand up”? What’s the difference?
(I see a big one, but that’s me.)</p>
<p>Do you think that if a certain race / ethnicity “crowds” the applicant pool far and above their presence in the population, the school needs to make their admitted pool reflect that “crowding”? </p>
<p>Pizzagirl You seem to miss the point of my post. If the black person can show that you discriminated against her because she was black, she surely does have a claim against you.</p>
<p>sally305 Try to get into any Harvard Club without an Harvard degree if you really insist on an example or any other social network that requires an Harvard degree. </p>
<p>Hunt Since you like to give your hypothetical about how the admission process goes, why isn’t it done as follows:</p>
<p>AdCom1 “What do you think about this Asian American applicant? She has great EC and wonderful essay but she has below average SAT of 2100, let’s admit her?”
AdCom2 “Can’t do that, we have too many Asian American applicants who have similar EC etc and also have higher SAT scores so it’s a no go for her.”
AdCom1 “But we admit others with low SAT?”
AdCom2 “But not if they are Asian Americans.”</p>
<p>is that really how you imagine this?</p>
<p>I think it’s telling that you want to discuss the SAT, though.</p>
<h1>134</h1>
<p>Surely you are kidding?</p>
<p>People I’m just giving an hypothetical. Since I am not an Harvard admission officer so I have no clue as to the workings of admission office. I was just playing the devil’s advocate to Hunt’s hypothetical. Although by the responses, it seems to have hit a cord. </p>
<p>A cord? Not really. We just expect a better level of rhetoric here. B-) </p>
<p>“I gave this kid eleven points. Yours only has ten.”
“Yes, but . . .”</p>