<p><a href=“MITChris:”>quote</a></p>
<p>Nowhere have I said that our women or URM applicants have lower scores than other applicants. I have not said this for two important reasons.</p>
<h1>1 - It isn’t true.
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<p>Is it true or untrue that, as one moves higher on the math-SAT-and-science-olympiads scale (that is, the SAT scale thought of as extending beyond 800 by including national and international math/physics/CS olympiad results, chess ratings, or other SAT-style objective data of the kind the Caltech admissions guy said are gender-disparate at Caltech), two things happen:</p>
<p>(a) admission rate goes up;
(b) the ratio of US females to US males (or URM to non-URM) at that level in MIT’s applicant pool goes down?</p>
<p>Please note that in discussing SAT data I am referring only to the math SAT and things that could be considered as substantially an extension of the math SAT scale but are nationally uniform, comparative, and based on objective exams. Possibly one should add other science competitions such as the chemistry & biology olympiads or Intel/Siemens talent searches, but it’s not clear how much these are cognitive selectors rather than contests of scholarship. Also, in MIT’s pool, using total (math plus verbal) SAT scores will mask the gender differences because MIT’s distribution is very compressed on the math scale (due to the 800 cutoff) but further from the top on the verbal, where women are more competitive.</p>
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<p>The admission probability goes up with SAT (and further olympiad results, etc) in a nonlinear and steepening fashion. This was graphed nicely for MIT in the College Admissions Project study data from ten years ago (the “Revealed Preferences Ranking” paper downloadable from SSRN and frequently cited in these parts). If the SAT were merely a cutoff, meaning that admissions results would be identical if in each candidate’s file the SAT data were suppressed and replaced with the words “GOOD ENOUGH” if above the break-points, the curve might rise a little bit, but basically would be flat. The only way that would not be the case (under a break-point-only usage of SAT) is if the rest of the selection is looking at factors that correlate so well with the math SAT that they effectively are the math SAT, or measuring the same thing, such as physics olympiads, TopCoder results, USAMO qualification etc.</p>