<p>Right, Hunt #1097, and Goldman-Sachs asserts that they handled the sale of Dragon Systems (voice recognition) responsibly, even though they “vetted” the sale of the company on a shares-only basis to a Belgian business that went bankrupt about 6 weeks later, rendering the shares worthless, while having decided not to invest any Goldman funds in that business, and while representing another voice-recognition software company.</p>
<p>I think that proof goes beyond “awfully hard to come by” pretty much all the way to impossible.</p>
<p>Beliavsky, you are being ridiculous. You and I know for a fact that that teacher recommendations are completely subjective and should be banned from the process completely. Furthermore, why on earth, in a test based system, would anyone be given preference based on any kind of status outside the test?</p>
<p>URM, OR first gen? what’s the difference.</p>
<p>There will be plenty of spots at the lesser schools for them. Sheesh!</p>
<p>"Students change their plans. Students are more likely to switch out of math and the hard sciences than into them. Thus, the percentages of hard science, math and computer science majors will be lower among the graduates than the entering freshmen. "</p>
<p>This is most likely to be true, in my academic experience at least. </p>
<p>However, we are discussing the overcrowding of Asians among APPLICATIONS in STEM fields. All the adcoms have is the intended majors from all applicants, not what degrees the students may graduate in four years later. I do not believe that adcoms can or should predict the future.</p>
<p>Everybody always thinks there is proof for their opinion. Or at least that there is inadequate proof for the opposing point of view. Especially on this topic. I don’t think I’ve seen any significant movement in anyone’s opinion despite thousands of posts on multiple threads.</p>
<p>If all you want to do is complain, sure, you don’t need proof. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion and to make their arguments.</p>
<p>But if you want to force a change in the status quo, clear proof is certainly very helpful. It is less necessary when the current policy reflects your desire, since things will likely stay that way if only based on inertia.</p>
<p>What would constitute proof of discrimination against Asian-Americans in college admission, given uneven distribution among majors and standards that go beyond test scores, grades, and other objectively listable factors? And how would one obtain it? </p>
<p>If there is discrimination, then short of a former admissions staff member ignoring the “You’ll never work in this town again, sonny,” type of comments, in what way do you think it could be proven, Hunt? (And even if one person came forward, the testimony of a single person could be discounted fairly easily.)</p>
<p>Actually, I was beginning to suspect discrimination, since my objective stats (time on CC, number of posts) top those of other posters sporting more vegetation.</p>
<p>While proving discrimination is nearly impossible in the absence of detailed admissions data, disproving it is quite easy for the schools: just open up the admissions data/files to experts/scholars.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>We should acknowledge that all of the relevant colleges, have long done one of the most important things they could and should have done to guard against racial discrimination, and that is to make certain that the voice and perspective of different types of Asian-Americans were well-represented on their admissions staffs. I haven’t done a systematic study, but I believe all of the elite colleges have multiple Asian admissions officers – maybe not 40%, or even 20%, but more than token representation, and anyway admissions departments work by consensus, not majority rule. Whatever is or was going on with admission of ethnic Asians, with a bunch of them in the room it couldn’t possibly have been as simple as a clear quota or a persistent stereotype.</p></li>
<li><p>Periwinkle – Harvard’s Allston campus plan doesn’t include a single new undergraduate dorm room. And at a place with a strong tradition and value of essentially 100% on-campus living for undergraduates, the class is not going to expand without building more dorms. The problem is that new dorms would have to be as nice as the old ones, and the old ones (though they have problems are are currently just at the outset of a ten-year $1 billion-plus renovation program) are awfully nice. Yale is currently building two new residential colleges (the equivalent of Harvard’s houses), and I think they are budgeted at about $650 million for space to expand Yale’s class size by about 250. It would cost Harvard a lot more than that. Land in Cambridge is way more expensive than land in New Haven, and because Harvard (unlike Yale) has no tradition of freshmen living in dorms that house upperclassmen, Harvard would have to build new freshman dorms, too.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>And you’ll find that they could have picked 3 equally qualified classes from the pile of rejected students. Big whoops. You know that already; they tell you that already.</p>
It seems to me that you’d either have to obtain documents showing a discriminatory intent, or the testimony of witnesses to it. Of course, neither has appeared in the years that this has been a controversial topic.</p>
<p>Perhaps a better case could be made for disparate impact if somebody did a study of, say, just potential STEM or non-STEM majors. But I suspect that this won’t be done, because the results might be inconvenient for those who think discrimination is going on.</p>
<p>As for the colleges opening their admissions records, why would anybody think this would disprove discrimination? Do you think there’s going to be a scoresheet telling the “real” reason each applicant was admitted or rejected? I don’t think so.</p>
<p>And why should the elite colleges bother? They’re still getting plenty of applications, including plenty of Asians. What’s their motivation to humor the fears of people who think they are doing something they say they aren’t?</p>
<p>Isn’t that precisely how those who, quite frankly, are just incapable of thinking holistically, think the practice works? That students are sorted into piles of “worthy” and “not worthy” and then a few URM’s are pulled from the not-worthy into the worthy pile and the decision is made to displace predominantly Asians? Or, for the even more conspiratorial, the worthys are then re-examined with an eye to kicking every nth Asian back into the not-worthy pile? They all seem to feel that one’s race is a yes/no disqualifier - that Jane is worthy but she’s Asian so we reject her, that Roberto isn’t worthy but his URM so we accept him.</p>
<p>Sacre Bleu! Holistic admissions isn’t a matter of downloading apps and having a computer score them.</p>
<p>Yes, close all the elites, herd kids into mega publics and while you’re at it, have them all wear the same outfits, follow the same lesson plans, walk in straight lines. The best gpa kids can then grad and go on to little cog jobs- and forget what makes life exciting, that what distinguishes one from another is a heck of a lot more than points on a test.</p>
<p>Well, with all due respect and not meaning this snarkily – duh. </p>
<p>How do you think teachers write recommendations? They don’t just reiterate that Bobby got a 95 on the midterm and a 92 on the final – they take into account their whole intuition in dealing with Bobby, drawn together from a bunch of disparate pieces – is he intellectually curious? Helpful to others? Creative? Insightful? Goes the extra mile? These aren’t derived from strict data points - they are derived from keen observation and an insightful eye. Yet no one argues that they don’t provide some useful insight into a student (assuming that the teacher is well-motivated and articulate). But that’s just as “holistic” as anything, otherwise the teacher would simply recite test scores.</p>
<p>The problem comes when people don’t realize that intuition can also be a source of knowledge. For example, if I were assembling my Dream Team of posters-that-I’d-want-on-my-team-to-solve-a-problem, I can pretty easily figure out who I think is quite bright, insightful, clever, creative, sees a problem from different angles, etc. based on all the postings we’ve had together. I don’t know anyone’s SAT scores or GPA, though. So what? It’s holistic in nature. Assuming good intent and good will, why would that result in discrimination?</p>
<p>Suppose PG liked 100 posters and could only take 10 on her team? And the challenges would be varied- some needing math skills, some needing acute reasoning and others where teamwork, organizational skills and some interpersonal savvy matter? She should pick on stats? Because…why?</p>
<p>As a matter of fact, data themselves reveal a lot, and are much more reliable than some people’s testimonies. In Freakonmics, Steven Levitt demonstrated clear cheating in student tests by the teachers and match fixing in sumo wrestling by examining the patterns of bubbled answers on tests and match results. And by examining law school admissions data, Richard Sander convincingly showed that law schools have soft quotas for URM (paper [here](<a href=“http://www2.law.ucla.edu/sander/Systemic/final/SanderFINAL.pdf]here[/url]”>http://www2.law.ucla.edu/sander/Systemic/final/SanderFINAL.pdf)</a>).</p>
<p>But what you call transparency is really predictability. Something is only transparent if it’s predictable - I know in advance that if I “send in” Johnny with a 2300 and a 3.9 and editor of the student newspaper, and Susie with a 2200 and a 3.95 and lead in the school play, that Susie will get in and Johnny won’t, and that will be the same for every set of Susies and Johnnys from now until kingdom come. You can’t ever have that. </p>
<p>Is there “transparency” in how you selected your friends, or who you fell in love with? Was there a criteria you started out with, against which you methodically evaluated everyone you came in contact with?</p>