<p>Of course, there is far more to Native American culture than this, but I only have so much space. Most of the things listed in those articles/entries are, in one way or another, strictly Native American. The title “Native American” simply covers the broad spectrum of tribes who have inhabited the North and South American continents for a very long time. The fact that it covers a broad spectrum of tribes does not make this title any less significant or accurate.</p>
<p>You chose to attack the accuracy of my data; that is fine with me and I welcome fact-checking and will be happy to correct any error you or any poster point out. But if you want to attack, the least you could have done is doing an accurate counting of that one year data (2009) you decided to pick on. The numbers are all [url=<a href=“American Mathematics Competitions | Mathematical Association of America”>American Mathematics Competitions | Mathematical Association of America]here[/url</a>]. No, that would be too hard for you, why not just copy it from wikipedia?
“…wiki was correct”? Really? How would have you known?
Hint: there is a reason that most university professors dont allow students using Wikipedia as references for their sources.</p>
<p>Actually, I *demonstrated numerically<a href=“now%20for%20the%20third%20time”>/i</a> the inaccuracy of your USAMO data. I listed the correct counts for 2009 in the posting you just linked, with specific numbers for several categories. I explained my method for getting the result, i.e., making and re-checking a hand count from printouts. This is, apparently, more reliable than your computer program to “import and process” the data.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That’s what I did. Twice. By hand. As explained in my earlier posting. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Because I checked it myself. Twice. By hand. As explained in my earlier posting.</p>
<p>Here you don’t even need a full hand count to see that 514 is the correct number.
The AMC site with the historical data has a PDF file for 2009. It is 9 pages long, with 59 students listed per page (the pages line up, so you can see the number is the same each time). The first page has only 57 due to the title. The last page has 44. </p>
<p>Total: 57 (p.1) + 7*59 (pp.2-8) + 44 (p.9) = 57 + 413 + 44 = 514. As I said and as Wikipedia said. Your numbers are simply wrong.</p>
<p>This was just the first year that I checked carefully, and that’s only for the total number of students. </p>
<p>Conclusion:</p>
<p>Your data aren’t replicable. (And there are still problems with your other table, of USAMO/MOSP/IMO data for 2006-9.) The only thing that would cure these problems is to standardize the database by disclosing it. That would, of course, expose the data to all sorts of publicly documented (with posted source code) statistical tests. Let us know if that’s a problem.</p>
<p>I have produced data of E. Asian students in USAMO qualification over the last 26 years. Did you find evidence for your repeated claims of “underperformance” and “decimation” of E. Asians?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yes. As I explained in the earlier thread, in the period of “modern demographics” that you have proposed as explanation of the recent USAMO qualification trends, a pattern of decline in the E.Asian representation is seen as students age (e.g., the grade 12 qualification rate is the lowest for each age cohort of students, with the odds of such patterns occuring by chance being on the order of 32000-to-1 or 1000-to-1 depending on whether you include the noisier grade 9 data). As I wrote in the other thread, it would be great if you can come up with an explanation of these amazing coincidences as a result of changing Asian demographics in the pool of competitors.</p>
<p>My apology if you did try to count the rows in those pages. But apparently you need more fingers and toes to correctly count numbers greater than 20.</p>
<p>SOCIOPOLITICAL CONSTRUCTS. You got that right. That’s why I get on a soapbox and applaud students who refuse to answer the question. I like “postracial” myself.</p>
<p>I heard an opinion piece on the radio from someone of middle Eastern heritage who grew up in this country. He was wondering why Hispanics aren’t “white” but he is, by Census Bureau rules (and college app rules.) He said something like, “All those years of being taunted by my classmates, called a “rag head”…I could have just told them, Hey man, I’m white!”</p>
<p>I guess it will not help a lot without disclosing your race. To meet their goal of diversity among race, selective colleges might choose to interview all and every one of their applicants. I wonder if this will result in higher COA.</p>
<p>The more nuanced statement is that Hispanic persons can be of any race. But, yes, it appears that usually Hispanic persons are counted as “minority” students (even though in some parts of the United States they make up the plurality or perhaps even the majority of the local population) while Arab students don’t form a separate federally recognized category. That is politics.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to be racist or anything but why do so called ‘minorities’ get priorities with schools? I have seen this in my high school over the few years I’ve been here. There has been many cases where the top few kids are of different races. For example this year, our rank 2 was white (one of the smartest people I’ve met- a superior applicant than the next 2 i will mention) and was rejected from HYPM and Darmouth… only got into UPenn and her safeties. The number 5 and 6 were hispanic and both got into HYM. One got into JHU and Dartmouth. So why is race such a matter in college admissions?</p>
<p>it’s funny this thread is featured because i was just checking my demographic info on my college’s online portal and it classified me as “hispanic.” while i did check off yes and spain on the common app, since i have a great-grandparent from spain, i’m also white and consider myself to be white first and foremost. so i sent the student service office an email and i hope they change it, because i am white, but like i said, i have some Spanish heritage.</p>
<p>i’m a little worried they’ll rescind my admission for lying on the app. technically i am Spanish, but i am also white and i want to be considered white. i swear to god this will go to the Supreme Court if theres any kind of problem.</p>
<p>Espenshade et al. indeed document Asian underperformance in their 2009 book, but siserune’s hypothesis is plainly illogical as it is premised on a highly dubious assumption: “group representation” should remain constant at increasing levels of selection in any given selection process.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>If you have a hypothesis that I actually posted and you think is illogical, just quote it.
Your unquoted (or snippet-quoted) attributions of what I (or anyone else) have said, implied, claimed, or thought, are consistently inaccurate and misleading.</p>
<p>FYI, underperformance is not the same as a decline in group representation levels, though such declines (especially across a variety of metrics, as we see with the US E.Asian numbers) can certainly provide evidence of underperformance. Espenshade includes a nontechnical definition of underperformance in his book and you can look there if you want to start making correct statements. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You miscounted. We’re discussing US East Asian underperformance. If foreign Asians are over-performing in the US, Canada, or Australia, that’s great, but it has little to do with the US Asian vs US white performance and college admission patterns.</p>
<p>Here’s the Putnam data for 2009. I’ll post my analysis later, but you can see that the US E.Asian representation is lower than the rates of qualification for USAMO, MOSP and IMO.
It appears to be worse for 2008 and I will post that data when I have time to check the contestant origins.</p>
<p>William Lowell Putnam competition results, December 2009:</p>
<p>Top 5:</p>
<p>WILLIAM A. JOHNSON U of Washington, Seattle
[China] XIAOSHENG MU Yale
[China] QINGCHUN REN MIT
ARNAV TRIPATHY Harvard
[Canada]YUFEI ZHAO MIT</p>
<p>Next 10 (ranks 6-15)</p>
<p>YAKOV I. BERCHENKO-KOGAN Caltech
SERGEI S. BERNSTEIN MIT
JASON C. BLAND Caltech
[Lithuania] KESTUTIS CESNAVICIUS Rice
PALMER C. MEBANE Harvey Mudd
JOHN V. PARDON Princeton
JACOB N. STEINHARDT MIT
YI SUN Harvard
ALEX ZHAI Harvard
BOHUA ZHAN MIT</p>
<p>Second 10 (ranks 16-25)</p>
<p>[Taiwan] YI-WEI CHAN U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
JEFFREY CHEN Stanford
MILES D. EDWARDS U of Indiana , Bloomington
SAMUEL S. ELDER Caltech
ZHOU FAN Harvard
[Korea] WHAN GHANG MIT
[Korea] SEOK HYEONG LEE Stanford
[Thailand] PANUPONG PASUPAT MIT
COLIN P. SANDON MIT
ERIC M. STANSIFER Caltech</p>
<p>Honorable Mention (next 56, ranks 26-81)</p>
<p>ZACHARY R. ABEL, Harvard
[Canada] CEDRIC YEN-YU LIN, U of British Columbia
ALEKSANDER ARKHIPOV, MIT
TONY J. LIU, MIT
JOHN D. BERMAN, MIT
XUE (GAKU) LIN, Princeton
TIMOTHY J. BLACK, Caltech
[China] YE LUO, MIT
[Moldova] IURIE BOREICO, Harvard
JEFFREY A. MANNING, Caltech
[Moldova] IVAN BORSENCO, MIT
RICHARD MATTHEW McCUTCHEN, Uof Maryland, Park
GEORGE A. BOXER, Princeton
[India] VIMANG MEHTA, Brown
ZARATHUSTRA E. BRADY, Caltech
[Brazil] HENRIQUE P. OLIVEIRA PINTO, MIT
ROBERT M. BRASE, U of Nebraska, Lincoln
[Korea] DOO SUNG PARK, Caltech
[Brazil]GABRIEL BUJOKAS, MIT
[Korea]JAEHYUN PARK, Stanford
PAUL F. CHRISTIANO, MIT
[Canada]DONG UK (DAVID) RHEE, Uof Waterloo
ROBERT T. CORDWELL, U of New Mexico
DAVID S. ROLNICK, MIT
[China] YU DENG, MIT
DAVID B. RUSH, MIT
PETER Z. DIAO, Stanford
KRISHANU R. SANKAR, MIT
MICHAEL Z. R. GOTTLIEB, Caltech
[Canada] JONATHAN SCHNEIDER, MIT
RISHI V. GUPTA, MIT
[Canada] XIAOLIN (DANNY) SHI, MIT
ADAM C. HESTERBERG, Princeton
[Korea] JEONG SOO SIM, Stanford
JASON R. HOCH, MIT
CORY B. SMITH, MIT
[Korea] YOUNG HUN JUNG, Stanford
ANDREW L. SOFFER, Washington , St. Louis
[Canada]STEVEN N. KARP, U of Waterloo
[China] XIAOQING TANG, U of Rochester
SHAUNAK KISHORE, MIT
[Thailand] WUTTISAK TRONGSIRIWAT, U of Virginia
ERIC P. KNIGHT, Princeton
DMITRY VAINTROB, Harvard
MIKHAIL P. LAVROV, Duke
AMEYA A. VELINGKER, Harvard
HOLDEN LEE, MIT
[China/Singapore] TENGYAO WANG, Princeton
KEVIN LEE, Harvard
[Korea] YEOIL YOON, Caltech
PAUL D. LEWIS, U of Michigan, Ann Arbor
QIAOCHU YUAN, MIT
[Canada] BOYU LI, of Waterloo
[Romania] ADRIAN I. ZAHARIUC, Princeton
[China] JIZHOU LI, Michigan Technological
[Albania] GJERGJI ZAIMI, Caltech</p>
<p>So you admit you’ve been wasting time with your percentage analyses? Fine with me.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So how do you explain “foreign Asians’ [overperformance]”, then, siserune? Are you suggesting that East Asians who immigrate to the U.S. encourage their children to pick “low hanging fruit” and employ “less sophisticated educational strategies” but the East Asians who stayed in Asia do neither of those?</p>
<p>I cant believe this is real. It is just downright pathetic and comical. I cant find other words to describe it: I have been trying to have a rational discussion about the supposed underperformance of E. Asians in USAMO with someone who has trouble counting up to 60, even after being told twice to do a careful recount. Yes, I am talking about THE USAMO, a math competition only about 250 out of more than 8 million high school students in the U.S. qualified for this year.</p>
<p>I have been trying to have a rational discussion about the supposed underperformance of E. Asians in USAMO with someone who has trouble counting up to 60
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Since you claim to have far better mathematical skills than I do, can you finally comment on the probability calculations I posted (128-to-1, 1000-to-1, 8000-to-1, 32000-to-1) of some of the E.Asian decline patterns in your new USAMO tables, and if so, what “demographic” explanations you propose for these amazing coincidences? These are declines after controlling for students’ year of graduation, so the demographics would seem to be fairly constant within each cohort as you go down the pipeline. Yet the Asian numbers still show a pattern of decrease. </p>
<p>Of course, the probabilities would get a lot lower if we added to the table further pipeline data from grades 8, 13-16 (Putnam competition), 17+ (elite grad school fellowships), and would drop again after also controlling for difficulty of the selections. This is because there are both “time” and “selectivity” effects on the E.Asian numbers.</p>
So you admit you’ve been wasting time with your percentage analyses?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Keep on flailing. Raw percentage analyses will underestimate the degree of underperformance. Examples:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Espenshade’s data on college class ranks did show Asians lagging whites, but only by a couple of percentiles. After controlling for high school credentials, field of study and other factors, his regression analysis came up with much larger Asian deficits of 5-10 points.</p></li>
<li><p>US East Asians are under-represented, relative to their share of undergrad population (10-20 percent), as valedictorians at the Ivy League universities for which I gathered data. However, if you account for the incoming student credentials, this underperformance is much worse because the share of E.Asians in the de facto selection pool for valedictorians — the group of the top 100-200 students in each entering class with highest grades, test scores, competition results, or similar accomplishments — could be as high as 40-60 percent. </p></li>
<li><p>Similar to #2 for the top research prizes and grad school fellowships. For example,</p></li>
</ol>
<p>For the Hertz fellowships, notice that the fields of study are in areas of science where, especially in the pool of US students, Asians are highly concentrated. So although it’s true E. Asians are under-represented in these prizes on a group basis, the odds ratios are incredibly high, on the order of 10-to-1, when considering the selection pool. Even accounting for the possibility that this is a statistical sample of a somewhat smaller effect, such as “only” a 4-5 times lower chances for an ostensibly qualified E.Asian to get these awards in the past 10 years, that’s a fairly large reduction. </p>
<p>I’ll leave the terminology to you. Whether decimated, depleted, sliced, diced, hosed, or subprimed, the E. Asian numbers appear to be dropping as time progresses and selectivity rises. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Foreign Asians, like foreign students in general, will overperform their population numbers in top US universities because they face a higher admissions standard than Americans (“negative action”, if you will). That the opposite happens for US E.Asians suggests that not only is there no clear discrimination (as this would imply overperformance, just as seen with the foreign students), but those US Asians are receiving a form of academic affirmative action in the admissions. </p>
<p>As for overperformance of foreign Asians relative to credentials or relative to other groups of foreign students, I’m not sure that it exists. Do you know of any examples? Are the IMO high scorers from China doing better in research or even competitions compared to those with the same scores from the USA, France or Argentina? I see no indication of this, though based on population size and training levels, for some of the Chinese contestants a perfect IMO score may underestimate their abilities. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In China, for example, there isn’t a lot of low-hanging fruit to be feasted upon. Entry to the elite universities is through entrance exams and such selections can’t be gamed by acquiring secondary credentials (analogous to AP exams, high grades in high school, “advanced” college courses during high school, placement in lower-tier science competitions, etc).</p>
<p>As NCL continues to ponder the theory that “recent Asian demographic changes” can explain the (US, East) Asian underperformance pattern seen in math competition data, let me explain in more detail how bad the odds are against such theories.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>NCL’s point is that since the numbers don’t steadily decrease down the columns, but do move up and down, this refutes the notion of declining E.Asian performance as the students get older. But is there, in fact, no pattern to the numbers? Happily, there is a precise statistical model for testing that assertion. </p>
<p>If you assume that the numbers in the table have (within each graduation year of students) no relationship with student age, then the ordering of the numbers in each column should be random. Each of the 24 possible orderings of the numbers should be equally likely — the table would not differ statistically from one where for each column, the same 4 ratios for each age cohort (graduating class) of students are given, and then placed in random order into the 9/10/11/12 slots. The random orderings of the columns are all chosen independently from each other.</p>
<p>Under this random model of what the data should look like with no time effect on the Asian representation,</p>
<p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>Earlier I suggested multiplying these probabilities (as though they were independent) to get the overall odds of such a pattern being a coincidence. A more careful calculation shows that independence doesn’t hold… but this effect isn’t strong enough to raise the odds above 1/1000. </p>
<p>Let’s calculate the probability that, when choosing random permutations of the 7 columns in the table, phenomena 1,2 and 3 in the quotation all occur. Imagine that the random orderings of {9th, 10th, 11th, 12th} are formed by first placing the number 12 on a line, then 11 before or after it, then 10 in one of the three intervals thus formed, then 9. For example,</p>
<p>----------12----------
----(a)—12—(b)---- (choose (a) or (b) to place 11 as lower/higher than 12; a.) </p>
<p>----11-----12----------
–(a)–11—(b)—12—(c)---- (choose a,b or c to place 10; b.)</p>
<p>----(a)—11—(b)—10----(c)—12----(d) (choose a,b,c or d to place 9; c.)</p>
<p>----11----10----9----12----</p>
<p>Now to the probabilities.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>12th grade < 11th grade each year. This has probability 1/2 every year, so (1/2)^7 = 1/128.</p></li>
<li><p>Given that 12th < 11th, we also have 12th < 10th in at least 6 years. Here we are making seven random choices of a,b,c from -----(a)—11—(b)—12----(c)----- with at least 6 of the 7 choices being {a or b}. This has probability 64/243 or approximately 1/4.</p></li>
<li><p>Given that 12th < 11th and 12th is usually less than 10th, we also have 12th < 9th in at least 6 of 7 years. This probability is a bit lower than 7290/16384.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Combining (multiplying) these probabilities we get (1/128) times (a bit less than 1/8.5).</p>
<p>Result: probability is about 1 in 1100 of seeing a table like this if there were no connection between grade level and Asian representation.</p>
<p>The exact calculation in 3 would be a bit detailed. Maybe NCL can have a troupe of 3rd graders work it out. </p>
<p>The real point is that the same model applies to the table extended by further “pipeline” data. For example, if the 8th grade numbers are always higher (this is likely the case) than the ones in the table, and the college (Putnam contest) numbers are always lower (seemingly the case in recent years), that would lower the odds for the entire calculation above by a factor of (30^7) — a 1-in-30 coincidence occurring each of the seven years. </p>
<p>So, yeah, maybe “recent Asian demographics” can explain these 1-in-1000 or 1-in-millions levels of odds. I wouldn’t bet on it.</p>
<p>First, siserune said that “…underperformance is not the same as a decline in group representation levels, though such declines…can certainly provide evidence of underperformance.” Now, he says that “raw percentage analyses will underestimate the degree of underperformance.” So apparently “underperformance is not the same as a decline in group representation levels” when the data does not fit siserune’s hypothesis, but when it does fit his hypothesis, “raw percentage analyses will underestimate the degree of underperformance.”</p>
<p>I’m starting to wonder whether siserune types these posts to practice playing Devil’s Advocate, as he has a habit of discarding any evidence that doesn’t corroborate his hypotheses, even if the evidence was his own. siserune claimed that as selectivity increased from USAMO to MOSP to IMO, East Asian representation declined. Yet his own [url=<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/858679-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-7-a-64.html#post1064850875]tables[/url”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/858679-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-7-a-64.html#post1064850875]tables[/url</a>] did not support his claim. We see that though the percentage of East Asians decreased from USAMO to MOSP in the years 2006 to 2008, they increased from MOSP to IMO. When asked to reconcile this discrepancy with his hypothesis, siserune argues that the “true Asian qualification rate” for the IMO could actually be lower than 50%. siserune previously balked at what he dismissed as my “denominator of six” dismissal of his argument, but as usual, he discards whatever doesn’t support his hypothesis only to use the very same device should it support his hypothesis. What’s more, the only year that satisfied siserune’s “consistent” decline observation was 2008, which was the year that Alex Zhai, a “less sophisticated educational strategy” and “low hanging fruit” guy, scored 42/42 on the IMO. siserune is either very intellectually dishonest, or he doesn’t actually believe any of what he writes and he’s only posting these messages to practice lying with statistics.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Ah, I get it now. East Asians who stay in East Asia employ “more sophisticated educational strategies” and discourage the picking of “low hanging fruit,” but the East Asians who emigrate to North America somehow adopt a radically different educational strategy even though they were raised in the same environment as the ones who stayed in East Asia.</p>
<p>siserune, for the *n-*th time, you seem to have collected a ton of data supporting your belief that East Asians are “decimated, depleted, sliced, diced, hosed, or subprimed” in “high IQ” fields. Espenshade himself stated that it is not known why Asians underpeform in college. You appear to have the answer. Why don’t you contact him and potentially get a paper published? You yourself previously claimed that it is not difficult to get published in the social sciences. Why not make good on your claim? Is it because you know that your intellectually dishonest behaviors of cherry picking the evidence won’t hold a candle to peer review?</p>
<p>Also, as for your marvelous observation that the twelve grade USAMO pass rates for East Asians are lower than the eleventh grade USAMO pass rates for the same high school cohort, um, did you consider the phenomenon of senioritis? Why don’t you conduct an analysis on the “more sophisticated educational strategy” groups and see if they did not suffer from senioritis? If it turns out that they don’t, hey, I’ll say it once more: contact Espenshade and tell him you have the answer–“less sophisticated educational strategies” and excessive chasing of the “low hanging fruit”!</p>
<p>Oh, please! Stop making stuff up to flatter yourself. What I said was that many 3rd graders I have known over the years have better number sense than what you have demonstrated here.</p>
<p>In my table [url=<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064848458-post956.html]here[/url”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064848458-post956.html]here[/url</a>], I have compiled 26 years of data with 25 sets of direct comparison between 11th and 12th graders of the same class. You picked only 7 years, where the percentage of 12th graders are all lower the 11th graders. But if you look at all 25 years, 12 graders had higher percentage 10 times and lower percentage 14 times (and 1 equal). If treated as a coin flip, that is 2, one third of the standard deviation, away from distribution mean of 12. </p>
<p>Then there was more data manipulation. With some selectively double-dipping on the same 7 year data set by comparing 9th and 12th graders, after some mumble-jumble that totally lost me, you came with a number 1:1100, which is suppose to be a probability, but of what? </p>
<p>I can look at the same data set you selectively picked and choose to compare other subgroups of numbers. E.g., in 6 of the 7 years, 10th grader did better than 9th graders, using your trick, that has a probability of 7/128; similarly 5 out 7 years 11th graders did better than the 9th graders, again a probability of 21/128; and from 10th to 11th grade, 3 did better, 3 worse and 1 tie, but lets call that 3 out 7, which gives a probability of 35/128. If we multiply them together 7/128<em>21/128</em>35/128≈0.002 . But what does it really mean? These kids are superheroes?</p>