@Data10 - In your post#2040 it seems to me that you are misquoting the actual document that @SatchelSF referred to and effectively mischaracterizing the process. It is very clear, on page 140, that the three “Standard Strong” black candidates were the ONLY Standard Strong black applicants in a pretty large sample-- that included thousands of applications (10% of total applications). Harvard only wanted to look at 10% - I am sure the plaintiffs would have been happy to have the court order them to look at every one of the application sheets.
The process could not be clearer, and here is the actual explanation from page 140 of the source linked by @SatchelSF:
(quote) Harvard readers use the label “Standard Strong” to characterize an application that had strong qualities but not strong enough to merit admission. Harvard was ordered to randomly select 10% of the domestic summary sheets of applicants for the Class of 2018[meaning thousands]; to search those summary sheets for particular keywords, including the phrase “Standard Strong”; and to produce (to SFFA) the summary sheets that included those terms. [footnote omitted] Harvard ultimately produced 256 summary sheets that included the phrase “Standard Strong” for domestic applicants who were either white, African American, Hispanic, or Asian American….Table C.1 shows the rate of being labeled “Standard Strong” by race/ethnicity for domestic applicants as well as the characteristics of applicants labeled “Standard Strong”.
@Data10: you can see that your quote is not accurate, and the main ideas behind it actually come from the next section of the report, 3.2 of Appendix C, which deals with a qualitative examination of 480 different files (complete, not just the summary sheet) and is largely redacted. Read Section 3.1 (p.140) quoted directly above for the information about how the “Standard Strong” candidates were identified. It really does look like there are only three black candidates out of THOUSANDS of sheets examined (10% of the total), which is really not that surprising since Standard Strong is not used for admits but rather for those who are “close.” The average (1240 total SAT) is actually quite low, I agree. Maybe one of the black candidates had a 1000 and the others 1300s? That we can’t know.
Also, while the z-score data you posted are mildly interesting, the real question is how black admits compare to white and Asian admits, not really to the overall pool of applicants, the great majority of whom are rejected. Someone who is better at statistics than me should extract the comparative data, both for the baseline applicants (who do not include preference legacy, development and athletic admits) as well as for the expanded pool of applicants (which does include those groups). It should be easy to compare at what percentile of the white and Asian admits the average black admit falls on each of those measures (comparisons on another measure, left out of your post, the Academic Index, are very illuminating. All the z-scores are in the Appendix under B.3.1 and B.3.2 in the documents (the rebuttal reports contain some slightly revised tables as well). With that info out there now, people will be able to calculate themselves where the black admits fall in comparison to white and Asian admits. I hope this makes sense.