<p>Not sure who this Dornbusch person is or what makes him the eminent authority on Asian work habits. </p>
<p>I know a lot of Asians of different ethnicities and at different income levels in Houston. Very few of them require their kids to get a job while in high school because that takes away time from all the other needed activities that the kids are expected to get better at. Most of the time they do volunteer work in summer to show that on the so called holistic process resume. These hours most likely don’t show up as part time hours since they have not been paid for. </p>
<p>My kid contributed over 400 hours to a major research facility this summer with zero pay (cost me a big chunk of money but that is another matter). Should I care that Dornbusch can’t find it in his Asian parttime hours?</p>
<p>Specifically, Asians spend more time but performing easier tasks on homework, due to the virtuous circle that Dornbusch and Steinberg describe in the book (where more homework makes later homework easier and more pleasant), and also the doing of homework in groups, making it a social task or allowing work to be shared.</p>
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<p>It is missing the point of the book to describe the distinction as pedantry, though of course you have not read the book from which you are quoting (and I have read it).</p>
<p>Asians spend more time on school but it is wrong to describe this as exerting more effort. The total work (in the physics sense, of effort multiplied by time) is higher but it does not follow that the effort is higher. Actually, it follows from Dornbusch et al’s analysis that the effort level is lower and they comment on this reduction of effort phenomenon as part of the virtuous cycle.</p>
<p>“Specifically, Asians spend more time but performing easier tasks on homework, due to the virtuous circle that Dornbusch and Steinberg describe in the book (where more homework makes later homework easier and more pleasant), and also the doing of homework in groups, making it a social task or allowing work to be shared.”</p>
<p>siserune - they sound like idiots in my opinion. Homework gets progressively harder, not easier.</p>
<p>“homework gets progressively harder, not easier” ----yes, but the escalation in difficulty (say from grade 8 to 10 to 12) in homework will be greater for someone who has done 1000 hours of previous homework, than for someone who has done 2000. You are always in an easier position having invested more time in preparation, such as by doing more homework earlier.</p>
<p>^ That is said by someone who has no clue what homework is or should be. To say that would imply that person is not studying anything increasingly difficult or handling 5 APs at the same time.</p>
<p>If someone kept repeating the 2 multiplication table in 2nd, 3 table in third and got to 10 table in 10th, then your rule applies. A kid who is tackling algebra in 6th, Calculus BC in 9th or 10th, has gone way beyond to being familiar with what they are doing and having a pleasant experience. Apparently your ivory tower dudes have no clue about taking physics, chemistry, biology and math all at once.</p>
<p>Btw, this is what us silly Asian parents expect of our kids. The fact that some of kids believe their accomplishments are being discounted at some of these schools because they see Asian listed on their applications is entirely a different matter.</p>
<p>I had to tell my kid not to omit the ethnicity on the common app. Although people seem to be debating this ad nauseum on CC it is becoming irrelevant. Most high school kids are taking it into their hands and refusing to check the race flag on their commonapps because they are believing that it adversely impacts them.</p>
<p>Yale admitted 10% with no flag. I would not be surprised it went up to 15% this year based on what I went through with my kid. I would like to see numbers on how many applications are being received with no flag.</p>
<p>I gave you one: an article from the NYT dated September 11, 1990. Dornbusch said, quote, “That is the first and most important reason for the differences: Asian-Americans work harder.”</p>
<p>You tried to say that the quote didn’t contradict you because you weren’t talking about homework. No, you were talking about “other findings” such as…“Asians spending a much higher number of hours on,” wait for it, homework.</p>
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<p>So when Steinberg et al. wrote, “[Asian-American students]…exert more effort on academic activities,” they didn’t actually mean that. They actually meant that Asians “spend more time on school,” and that in no way means that they work harder or exert more effort.</p>
<p>How interesting, siserune! Apparently, we non-sociologists cannot read a “mass market book” as if it were written in straightforward, plain English. We need doctoral students in sociology to tell us that when we read “exert more effort,” it actually means “spend more time” and not “exert more effort.”</p>
<p>Saying the workload is easier for us because we’ve worked longer and are therefore better doesn’t make it any less unjust, where apparently the more we perform, the more our performance works against us per capita.</p>
<p>What you consider unjust does not affect whether the statement is accurate and predictive. If Asian students, as you claim, “work harder” than other groups on average, then the absolute value of their credentials is the same (i.e., the same test score indicates the same level of mastery of the material tested, whether the student is Asian or white or Martian) but the value of the credentials as an indicator of future performance is lower if the future selections are more difficult. </p>
<p>To the extent that admissions selection at the top schools is a prediction of future outcomes, and not a reward for past accomplishment or a determination of present qualification, a meritocratic procedure will discount the Asian credentials either through disparate treatment (subtract X points from Asian applications) or disparate impact (subtract X points from applications of likely “hard workers” identified using race-neutral criteria). Either approach will appear in statistical studies as a negative Asian effect, equivalent to some number of virtual SAT points.</p>
<p>This reminds me of the “rate-busters” we learned about in the history of labor practices. Yes, if you consistently out-perform the norm, you will be punished for making it harder for everyone else to justify their level of achievement.</p>
<p>Whether “rate-busting” academic stats is good or bad for America is open for debate, and certainly is a value judgment. While extreme academic achievement is unquestionably valuable, if it comes at the expense of social and community development, maybe it is not worth it.</p>
<p>Lest we forget, the NYT article is being discussed because you cited it in opposition to something I did not write, and that you had fab-ricated from my writing. My own writing stated clearly what content I was citing from Dornbusch’s studies, and we have seen by now that his studies contained exactly what I described. This would appear to close the matter, but not in fab-world.</p>
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<p>The author of that article is Daniel Goleman, not Prof. Dornbusch. An “interview where X is one of the authors” means an unedited record of X presenting his views, or long enough unedited segments of such a presentation, so that one can read, hear or see X speaking on his own behalf and not in excerpts presented by journalists and editors. This was obviously not the case in Goleman’s article where Dornbusch is at times quoted in incomplete sentences.</p>
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<p>Find one publication where Dornbusch, in a complete sentence under his own authorship, makes this blanket generalization about Asians (going beyond academics, as in the “Asians work harder” meme that appeared in this discussion). I’m not saying it exists or not, only that you are stretching his comments to fit the current discussion.</p>
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<p>What does “tried to say” mean? I actually did say a number of things, for which the original text is available, and which were correct in the original, but instead of quoting them directly, you provide fab-ricated substitutions that are easier to attack. </p>
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<p>Had you quoted the full paragraph where I talked about Dornbusch’s work, instead of expecting others to trust your statements as to what I wrote, it would be immediately clear that from the outset you misquoted that paragraph to fab-ricate a (nonexistent) conflict with his comments on “hard work” in the NY Times. Dornbusch said exactly what I attributed to him: that Asian students have lower employment rates and equal time spent watching television, compared to non-Asians. If in addition he thinks that Asians are the hardest working people in America, or whatever else he may think about Asians, then that’s an interesting opinion (and of course you misrepresented his book and his remarks in NYT in the course of characterizing his opinion) but it has no bearing on my comments about the “Asian hard worker” meme. I did not cite Dornbusch as an authority on how the words “hard work” should be used, but as a source of factual evidence when arguing against a particular and common use of the term. How he uses the term is obviously irrelevant – as others have noticed.</p>
<p>There’s nothing meritocratic about that at all. Your entire argument for “discount[ing],” which you’ve long espoused, is based on the notion that anybody who reaches a certain level of qualification through time (i.e. preparation) isn’t as good as somebody else who reaches the same level through innate characteristics like talent. That is, the former isn’t actually that good; he only appears to be that good because he <em>gasp</em> *spent time<a href=“such%20heinous%20behavior!”>/i</a>, and so to determine how good he really is, just downgrade his credentials.</p>
<p>What’s meritocratic about that? Nothing. In fact, it’s the very opposite of meritocratic, and I’m not sure whether it’s perverse or hilarious for you to be calling your “discount[ing]” meritocratic in any way.</p>
<p>I pride myself on my integrity and am saddened to go low and play the game, but I’m a senior applying to college this year. I was wondering if marking Asian rather than unknown would give me a disadvantage, especially in terms of expected high math SAT scores and privileged background, of which I have neither. </p>
<p>The thing is, I am of mixed Chinese and Korean ethnicity, with Japanese nationality. Ispent my childhood in both Japan and China and immigrated to America at 7. I don’t have an obvious Asian name.</p>
<p>In this case, would my complicated and multinational background give me a edge in diversity, or would being Asian still give me overall a disadvantage? </p>
<p>Stated clearly? Really? Let’s see the full paragraph, without any “editorializing” on my part:</p>
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<p>You put quotes around several statements, including “work harder.” But now, you are telling me that everything except “work harder” came from at least one of Dornbusch’s studies. Uh, then why’d you put quotes around “work harder” if you didn’t mean for that to be included with everything else you claim came from at least one of Dornbusch’s studies? A “[sic]” or a “As noted by Dornbusch, they ‘plan longer’,…” would’ve cleared things up with little inconvenience on your part.</p>
<p>As far as “stated clearly” goes, you gave a “partial citation [sic]” that gave me three clues: I should look for articles published by a Dornbusch between 1970 and 1990. Since I’m not in your area, I had to google the name and thus initially thought you were talking about the late Rudi Dornbusch. A look at his CV quickly revealed that he did not study education. I then added the term “sociologist” and discovered Sanford Dornbusch.</p>
<p>I could not find a full vitae, only a [brief</a> bio](<a href=“http://www.stanford.edu/group/adolescent.ctr/Research/OriginalFacPages/dornbusch.html]brief”>http://www.stanford.edu/group/adolescent.ctr/Research/OriginalFacPages/dornbusch.html), which did not list any papers published between 1970 and 1990. Next, I tried to search for papers published during that time frame, and I came up with a coauthored paper in Child Development published in 1987 that employed data from the SF Bay Area. I discovered that the article did not purport to say anything was “well-established” about Asian parents and their children’s academic performance; to the contrary, Dornbusch et al. noted that their findings raised more questions than answers.</p>
<p>But alas, my search from three clues was all for naught. No, from those three clues, I was supposed to look for Beyond the Classroom, a “mass market book” where Dornbusch is part of the “et al.” and published in 1997, almost two decades after the 1970’s had ended. Yep, that’s “stat[ing] clearly” in siserune’s world! Referees must LOVE your “clear” writing style. But hey, if your style is going to get you loaded with ASR pubs, more power to you!</p>
<p>Last but not least, “exactly what [you] described”? Really? Is that why you had to explain that “exert more effort on academic activities” doesn’t actually mean more effort was exerted, it only means that more time was spent? Wow, that’s really exact, siserune!</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter what they meant by their word choice, and I did not comment on what they “actually meant”.</p>
<p>The question is what is meant, here and elsewhere, by the words work harder, especially when used in self-serving sentiments of the form “we Asians work harder but are punished for that”. If hard work means only that certain objective or pragmatic characteristics are present, such as Asians on average doing more hours of homework or taking more classes during their schooling, then there is no strong reference to subjective notions of work, effort or difficulty, except as a manner of speaking or an abbreviation. This is certainly consistent with the NYT article with the professor’s comment on “working harder”, which followed some statistics about hours per week spent on homework.</p>
<p>It appears though, that when Asians in CC (and the same occurs in other contexts, not necessarily related to Asians) talk about their “hard work” it is meant to evoke emotional and dramatic concepts, such as suffering, pain, sacrifice, difficulty, and notions of virtue or valor connected to those. In that usage the question arises of just how much effort it actually is, whether it presents significant difficulty, how much more difficult any of that is compared to non-Asian behavior or non-academic activities, and whether it should be viewed more from a moralistic or a game-theoretic, strategic, value-neutral lens. Here the distinction between time and effort does become important.</p>
<p>Yes. I put sarcastic quotes around the words “work harder” that had been applied to Asians, and I placed several other concepts in quotes to emphasize their substitutability for “work harder”.</p>
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<p>I did not say at any time that any of those quotations came from a study. I said that Dornbusch’s studies contained two items A and B, that I described but without any quotation marks. You located A in his book yourself after I cited it, and a search in the book for the word “television” would disclose item B. Unlike the fab-rications, what I said appears to be correct.</p>
<p>Why should any Asian care what Dornbusch says about them or what he studied back in 1970 which is light years behind in terms of Asian development since that point?</p>
<p>Frankly you are quoting someone who is irrelevant to this discussion to prove anyone’s point.</p>
<p>As an Asian, I might add his studies have contributed zilch to do anything to do with Asians. He is an absolute nobody.</p>
<p>It continues to be of concern to me that people actually reify categories that are made up by the government and are subject to political whim. When I was born, there was no such category as “Hispanic” and people who came to the United States from India (who were few in number because of national origin immigration restrictions at the time) were classified as “white” in the United States. Better to have no official categories at all, and to let people self-identify as broadly or as narrowly as they please for impermanent reasons that shift with context.</p>
<p>That was never the argument. Notions of who is “good” or has more “merit”, whatever that is supposed to mean, are totally foreign to what I have argued and I have often used terms like “pure academic selection” or “predictive modeling” to avoid the spurious linguistic associations that come with the term meritocracy. By meritocracy I mean only a purely performance-oriented selection that does not care about racial, socioeconomic or other outcomes (but could certainly use racial etc information if doing so improves the performance metric, such as the average ability level of the class).</p>
<p>The actual argument is that future outcomes that are more selective than the admission itself will load more heavily onto unobservable factors like “talent”. For example, if you try to construct a statistical prediction model of the probability of graduating (e.g., a regression) it will give more relatively more weight to conscientiousness factors such as HS-GPA but if you want to predict outcomes like graduating with high distinction, elite graduate admission, patent filings or winning the Putnam math competition, then the weight will shift to more to talent or “IQ” factors, and you are stuck having to estimate those (or just the outcome in question) from the factors known at the time of admission. </p>
<p>If score on the SAT is a function of, let’s say, “talent” and “effort”, with more of each increasing the score, then the estimate of talent from observing a score of 750 on a particular section of the test is lower if you have reasons to estimate effort higher than otherwise. If being Asian, or some other observable attribute, correlates with effort it has to correlate negatively with “talent” (or whatever the variables that cannot be influenced much by effort) when given the score. Hence the discount. If you knowingly refuse to apply some sort of discount then it is functionally equivalent to academic affirmative action for Asians, i.e., taking a weaker class (in terms of predicted future high-level attainments) than would have been the case otherwise, by making room for some Asians who would not have gotten in under a pure performance-driven selection.</p>
<p>If you object to race-based academic affirmative action then of course the lack of an Asian discount could present a problem. It’s interesting that AA can be achieved by ignoring an applicant datum instead of explicitly considering it, but mathematically it is equivalent.</p>
<p>Anyway, that was the argument. Linguistic disputes about what is “merit” or what is “good” do not play a role and it would be a waste of time to pursue them.</p>
<p>Statistics only prove what some wants to prove with them but as Mark Twain said, all statisticians equivocate because they need to prove a point.</p>
<p>Just by spending time at it people don’t always get to where they want to be, which seems to be the ivy league or stanford or whatever else the current flavor is. Otherwise, all Asians who seem to be spending a lot of time getting all these crappy requirements holistic process demands of them should make it to their desired xyz school. </p>
<p>However, from what I have seen, this is not just with Asians but a lot of other races out there who seem to vent about how their top rank in a private school and all other accolades they have gathered through schooling did not get them into their favorite school or all that plus having double legacy did not get them in either. </p>
<p>An SAT score is just a score. But when so much weight is given to it, some people work hard at it and others pay someone to take it on their behalf. And yet some others in their ivory towers seem to discount hard work vs some high IQ BS. Tell that to Nolan Ryan who was working his bu*t off at 45 trying to throw 93 mph balls that someone half his age could throw it at the same speed with half the effort. It is the desire + effort that gets someone from point A to point B. If we depended on only smart people in this world, we would still be in caves because they get nothing done.</p>
<p>^I think you misunderstood the role of effort.</p>
<p>As selection difficulty is progressively raised, of course you need higher and higher levels of talent AND effort to pass. It is only the relative importance of effort compared to talent that decreases. Super-talented people who do not make enough effort will be eliminated at some stage no matter what, often an early and not very selective stage. But at the top levels it becomes more and more difficult to substitute effort for talent and the rank ordering starts to look the same as the ranking by talent. </p>
<p>The effect I described is very visible in theoretical science, computer programming, music, sports, and other fields where individual performance can be compared easily. It is a very different idea from “only talent matters”.</p>