“Personal” or “personal qualities.” Not personalty, per se. The first can be demonstrated or not, via traits or attribtes the school looks for. Cloudy, yes. But saying “personality” sounds more savage. Lol.
The were two analyzed groups – a “baseline sample” that excluded the listed hooks and an “expanded sample” that used the full application pool. In the 2nd rebuttal following response to the Harvard’s comments, there were also calculations done with recruited athletes removed from the “expanded sample.” Arcidiacono felt that the admission selection for recruited athletes was so different from other students that it was not even appropriate to include them in the “expanded sample.” Links to the full reports are below:
Arcidiacono’s (Plantiff) Original Report On Analysis of ~200k Admissions Decisions – http://samv91khoyt2i553a2t1s05i-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Doc-415-1-Arcidiacono-Expert-Report.pdf
Card’s (Harvard) Rebuttal – https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/diverse-education/files/expert_report_rebuttal_as_filed_d._mass._14-cv-14176_dckt_000419_037_filed_2018-06-15.pdf
Arcidiacono’s (Plantiff) Rebuttal to Card’s Rebuttal – http://samv91khoyt2i553a2t1s05i-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Doc-415-2-Arcidiacono-Rebuttal-Report.pdf
Card’s (Harvard) Rebuttal to Arcidiacono’s Rebuttal – https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/diverse-education/files/expert_report_rebuttal_as_filed_d._mass._14-cv-14176_dckt_000419_037_filed_2018-06-15.pdf
I’m confused now - you’re saying he did or did not consider athletes, legacies etc? You’re saying he ONLY focused on the one category that is discussed in the other thread?
I was hoping to understand the reasoning behind his thinking in ignoring a large favored category - recruited athletes - in his analysis, Card DID include athletes and that alone could account for their very different conclusions.
Why would personal ratings be expected to closely follow academic index decile? I posted my opinion on the personal ratings at http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21621880/#Comment_21621880 . A brief summary is quoted below:
The Harvard OIR report you are referring to is on page 11 of http://samv91khoyt2i553a2t1s05i-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Doc-421-145-Admissions-Part-II-Report.pdf . The 43% Asian includes a model with only 2 factors – Academic Rating and Academic Index. In short, the percentage that would occur if you admit all the Academic = 1 (“brightest minds”), admit the Academic = 2’s who have the highest AI (combination of GPA and scores), and reject everyone else.
This model is extremely basic. Both the plantiff and Harvard’s expert agree that the one from the Harvard OIR memo linked above is not adequate and have their own models that incorporate many additional controls. The plantiff and Harvard’s model are similar and dispute what I consider to be relatively minor factors that differ between their models, such as whether it is appropriate to control for parents’ occupation, which has notably overlap with race. The plantiff’s model found that the percentage of Asian students would change as follows under different considerations, assuming full sample and full controls (including personal rating).
Default: 22% Asian
No Asian Penalty: 23% Asian
No Racial Preferences (no URM or Asian Preferences): 28% Asian
No Athlete Preference: 24% Asian
No Race, Legacy, or Athlete Preference: 33% Asian
“Totally agree with @hanna: why wouldn’t the best universities in the world (according to most measures) strive for excellence in everything that is part of your mission, academic, physical, aesthetic and cultural education, and show it not just in the quantitative preference, but also in the way the is structured?”
Because the schools have to. That’s just how it is in sports. Unless your brand is going to be Caltech and MIT (we proudly suck at sports because we’re too smart to care!").
Remember that the Ivy League was created as an athletic conference (although it has grown from those roots some). It basically was created and exists for the primary purpose of limiting the amount of admissions breaks that can be given to athletes. The AI system started just with football, but now includes all sports. Including the extremely obscure ones.
No such system or league has ever been created for student journalists or artists. Because it isn’t needed. If Yale wants to bulk up the YDN or the Whiffs by cutting admissions standards, Harvard doesn’t care. No one will know the difference if Yale actually does that.
In contrast, if Yale wins The Game every year by 50 points, people know. And Harvard will have to do something about it. Scoreboard.
“and, btw, all of this “transparency” into how private universities make choices isn’t solving issues but creating new ones”
Whoa. Transparency doesn’t ‘create’ issues, it enlightens us to the issues that already exist. Let’s not hide our heads in the sand because we would rather not have to deal with issues at hand. Geesh “let’s not look into whether women are paid less than men, it will just create new issues”, “Let’s not consider race as a factor in admissions, it will just create more issues”.
A quote from the first report I linked is below. You can compare the “baseline” and “expanded” analysis to see how much these hooked groups influenced conclusions.
Transparency obviously creates confusion.
Look at all the fuss and muss in reaction to the lawsuit details. As I firmly believed when we had a very long thread about UT and Fisher, revealing doesn’t accomplish much if the vast audience can’t grasp. There needs to be some co-learning process. Just telling isn’t enough. As a group, we CC folks often struggle to agree.
If one accepts “personal rating” as unbiased and accurate then yes these would be the outcomes both sides think would occur. But this would belong to another thread.
The confusion primarily relates to lack of transparency, particularly when admission decisions emphasize vague and unclear holistic criteria. This also relates to why the lawsuit exists in the first place. How many threads on CC have related to people having incorrect opinions about the holistic admissions process and/or being confused about aspects of the decision process? Tens of thousands?
The lawsuit documents include over 1000 pages of detailed reports. Is there any other lawsuit containing a set of 1000+ detailed documents and statistical analysis that the average layperson would find clear? Being clear to laypersons wasn’t the purpose of the lawsuit documents. Many selective colleges could do far more to increase transparency about the admissions process and decrease confusion, besides posting 1000+ pages of legal documents.
"Whoa. Transparency doesn’t ‘create’ issues, it enlightens us to the issues that already exist. "
Here’s the thing…why should we (the general public) have any insight or say into how Harvard selects its students? In addition, where did we get the knowledge to understand how they should choose better? And I will argue that the more we find out, the angrier we grow…and with most of us (certainly me) having no background in how to do it better.
Staying away from race, since there’s a thread for that…
IMO a very misleading statement that gives sports much greater importance than the reality. The “Ivy League” official name was given to the schools in the 1950s along with the NCAA D1’s creation, that’s all.
It’s not like the colleges didn’t exist before that. All the colleges in the Ivy League pre-date the athletic league by hundreds of years (as do their reputations as elite universities).The term “Ivy” was used to refer to these colleges long before that, too (Ivy day plantings in the 1800s blah blah). And the schools existed long before even football.
Saying it was “created as an athletic conference” suggests that the primary purpose of the member institutions is sports, and clearly, it is not.
Data, tell a person as much as you wish. But if they can’t grasp it- or kneejerk reject it- it’s futile.
I don’t care how clearly some public or other rack and stack wants to be; our flagship takes it down to minimum gpa and scores. The Cal States reveal that. You want a tippy top? I want you to be savvy enough to approach with an open mind, look for the various info that is available, and process that. And then realistically self assess. Find ways to give a strong self presentationin the app and any supp. Because those are part of the freaking skill sets those top colleges want, in the first place.
Think about it. Why should Harvard tell you, “Here’s the checklist we want. Please show us x% of these attributes, strengths and preparaton?” It’s not the level of thinking, activation, and energy they want to see.
Fitzsimmons has been open about very much. But, nooo, people still see rigging.
The primary purpose for forming the Ivy League athletic conference (which is what the Ivy League is) was to govern sports at the member schools.
And the main purposes of that conference were (i) to outlaw athletic scholarships and (ii) limit the admission breaks provided to athletes. There’s never been a need among those schools to enter into similar type of restrictive agreements regarding student singers, artists or journalists.
Don’t know where you are getting that I suggested that the HYP etc. schools were formed as sports organizations.
@northwesty It seemed to me that you were suggesting that the fact that they have belonged to a sports league for some fraction of their existence as elite colleges means something about the importance they place (or should place) on athletics over music or theater or what-have-you.
If I was wrong about your point I certainly apologize.
I think the problem isn’t that sports are valued in the U.S. over almost anything else, it’s that watching sports is valued, significantly more than doing sports. So we have HS athletes who spend untold hours practicing, but doing a sport just for the pleasure of it, trying to get as good as you can without completely sacrificing your free time doesn’t count for much (and is in fact the opportunities are hard to find once you’re past the elementary school age). And we have the Ivies trying to build great teams, but not necessarily to provide great phys ed for all students.
My earlier post related to claiming transparency creates confusion. Saying being transparent about admissions will confuse people is a really pathetic excuse for being opaque.
Whether Harvard should be more transparent about their admissions process is another issue. Many selective colleges are more transparent, beyond just “some public or other rack and stack.” For example, the Dean of Admissions at Duke has been helpful in decreasing transparency by writing about the six categories in which the rate applicants and how those ratings are used to make decisions. Duke also has supported statistical analysis of their admission process to be published in peer reviewed journals. . The author of one such study was selected to be an “expert” in the Harvard lawsuit and perform a similar analysis on the Harvard admissions decisions.
Sorry, I have to agree with northwesty on this one. The Ivy League is an intercollegiate athletic conference, pure and simple. Many colleges had “Ivy days” in the 1800s, not only the current Ivy League. And the Ivy League schools aren’t all ancient. Cornell was founded in 1865, fourteen years after Northwestern (1851), four years after MIT (1861), a few years before Johns Hopkins (1876) and only 25 years before the University of Chicago (1890). What makes Cornell Ivy League while these other, similarly august academic institutions are not? Affiliation with an athletic conference, nothing more.
The tern “Ivy colleges” was first used by a New York Tribune sportswriter in 1933 to refer to a meeting of the present Ivy League schools plus the U.S. Military Academy to discuss football. The precise term “Ivy League” was first used in 1935 by an AP sports editor, again in reference to football. The first “Ivy Group Agreement” was signed by the present-day Ivy League schools in 1945 establishing common academic standards and eligibility requirements and prohibiting athletic scholarships, for football only. In 1954 the Ivy Group Agreement was extended to all intercollegiate sports.
It’s no more misleading to call the Ivy League an athletic conference than it is to call the Big Ten, the ACC, or the Pac 12 an athletic conference. All those conferences include some very distinguished academic institutions, and saying they’re members of their respective athletic conferences doesn’t diminish their academic stature or imply in any way that their “primary purpose . . . is sports.” Sports is something they do, and do well, alongside their primary mission of teaching and research. There’s just no confusion about that.
None of this is new at Harvard:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/27/AR2005102701733.html
to fix the new imbalance in admissions:
Looks like little has changed since 1920. The schools still want well bred leaders.