<p>yes, what northstarmom is trying to say is you should have stated it
"12 girls and 1 guy were accepted"
Implying that gay males are still considered as guys is very nonsensical, ignorant, and extremely offensive.</p>
<p>"yes, what northstarmom is trying to say is you should have stated it
"12 girls and 1 guy were accepted"
Implying that gay males are still considered as guys is very nonsensical, ignorant, and extremely offensive."</p>
<p>What you wrote is even more offensive, nonsensical, and ignorant. Gay males still are males with X and Y chromosomes.</p>
<p>it's a joke, allbeit one in poor taste, but i specialize in those</p>
<p>If there were no discouragement of females in science pursuits, some high school teachers would not continue to call on boys first in science classes & ignore the girls. Not universally, not at every coed school, but at far too many, judging by recent research, not someone's assumptions about life in the '70's. It has gotten better. It is not as categorical & pervasive & intimidating as it once was, but it does still exist in high school, in the 21st century, to enough of a degree that many girls interested in science choose to go to girls' high schools which have a policy of supporting math & science ambition to the full. </p>
<p>And as an aside, I actually do believe in gender adjustment. If you want to call it Affirmative Action, so be it. The reason I want it? For purely selfish reasons. My daughters want to go to colleges where the gender split is pretty even. No 75% female schools for them, thank you. ;) They don't have a problem feeling smarter than, or being smarter than, the males. Happened to me also at my own U, btw. (Oh, but wait: those were the same males who bragged to me about their SAT scores. Unfortunately, when it came to the real work of written analysis, whoops, they sort of couldn't do that. Couldn't understand how "hard" the U was. Hmmm.)</p>
<p>epiphany, did you adopt those daughters? with that kind of feminist attitude i couldn't imagine you marrying a guy. Maybe im getting the wrong impression but geeze, lighten up and stop hating all men already.</p>
<p>Amherst has been pretty much equal in terms of male and female applicant and acceptance rates. The student body is 50/50. Perhaps it was a poor example?</p>
<p>Re Post 205:
What a ridiculous response to my post. I don't hate men; I get along with them great, & no my daughters are not adopted. If I (or my daughters) "hated" men, I'd hardly want, and they'd hardly want, to attend a coed college, now, would they? Plenty of female colleges out there for the taking. Not my own cup of tea, nor are my daughters choosing to enroll in any. </p>
<p>My post obviously went way over your head, though, that's clear. The fact is, far more males than females brag about high SAT scores. Never heard any females brag about them, although granted, some of the complainers on CC (about the "unfairness' of it all) may be female, since not everybody identifies his or her gender. I'm here to tell you that the proof of "qualification" to do outstanding work at a world-class University is not contingent upon stats like scores. I've seen it up close & personal, and the students (happened all to be male in my case) who were so sure that scores "qualified" them for University level work were in for a big surprise when they arrived on campus.</p>
<p>"The point of this thread is to discourage this sort of negative thinking and diminishing of other's accomplishments. What you and Narcissa are doing is the equivalent of telling someone who got an A on test that they probably would have failed if the test had been different and focused on different concepts. What I have been saying is what's the point of this sort of thinking? You are not helping anyone. In fact, you are probably hurting people."</p>
<p>I'm sorry if you think telling the truth hurts people. I've said repeatedly that I support colleges using factors such as ethnicity, gender, legacy, and others to build their classes and to achieve diversity. I simply think it's dishonest to pretend that they don't do this, and that there is no cost connected with this kind of decision.<br>
The example of gender is a pretty obvious one: if some colleges decide that gender balance is important, that imposes a cost on members of whichever gender is disadvantaged by that decision. Reasonable people can disagree on whether the benefit is worth the cost.</p>
<p>And what? It's impossible to separate background from the rest of one's accomplishments, but people act like it can. </p>
<p>Colleges do not evaluate you solely on race -- if you happened to be a whitewashed minority (e.g. someone's who's or more or less assimilated) then you don't really do anything to the school's diversity balance.</p>
<p>"Colleges do not evaluate you solely on race -- if you happened to be a whitewashed minority (e.g. someone's who's or more or less assimilated) then you don't really do anything to the school's diversity balance."</p>
<p>Sez you. Do you think the schools omit such people when they publish the percentage minority attending?</p>
<p>If you enter the discussion with the opinion that all colleges only seek to improve their rankings on US news then you there's no way you can possibly gain anything from the conversation.</p>
<p>I know it is very unfair but I'm pretty sure the people in admissions know what they're doing and what they're looking for in the students who they want to attend at their college(s). And I agree, even if some students have low stats, they show that they can do better in other things that would in fact, let them succeed in college. So we can't really say those who got accepted don't qualify.</p>
<p>Sorry to resurrect, but I just wanted to comment on this:</p>
<p>
[quote]
I don't believe the vast majority of girls are actively discouraged from math or science proficiency before graduate school. By "real discrimination," I mean having teachers saying things like, "Wow, you did well writing up this proof. Did your boyfriend help you with that?"
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Maybe not the vast majority, but probably a large number of girls in rural schools, or so would my experience demonstrate. Absolutely happened to me in high school, particularly in math and economics. In fact, I got that exact comment (replace "proof" with "homework") from the (female!) teacher in one of my senior economics courses. In junior high, I was one of the math department darlings, but once I moved into senior high, even though I consistently did well (sometimes top of my class) in math, I was largely ignored. Sure, a lot of my guy friends were also good at math, but our calculus teacher would nine times out of ten call on the male student with a calculator in his hand over me, whether the problem was computational or conceptual. I remember at one point my male classmate being rewarded extra points for doing exactly what I had done on an exam, but which the teacher had assumed he had done out of careful reasoning and I had done out of ignorance. Tooting my own horn makes me a little uncomfortable, but I know with little room for doubt that I was ignored (and thereby passively discouraged) in math and science far more often than similarly-performing guys.</p>
<p>I have little trouble imagining that there are schools across the country like this, and plenty of talented girls who have filtered through them in the last decade. I had a casual friend in high school who was planning to be an English/Biology double major, but once she got to college completely gave up on English in favor of Biology, and is now doing a self-designed summer research stint at the U of Chicago. Come to think of it, I know two girls from my high school who made that exact choice. I had a similar awakening (as a prospective Math/Linguistics dbl. major) once I got to college. High school was a frustrating time for us to be girls.</p>
<p>You entered college with the hope of being a linguistics major?</p>
<p>Oooh. :) Did you have previous exposure to linguistic theory? What made you interested? (I came across it quite by accident -- it's never brought up iat primary/secondary level, which is a shame.)</p>
<p>
[quote]
You entered college with the hope of being a linguistics major?</p>
<p>Oooh. Did you have previous exposure to linguistic theory? What made you interested? (I came across it quite by accident -- it's never brought up iat primary/secondary level, which is a shame.)
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yes, I was interested in linguistics in high school. I loved literature and grammar growing up, and thought foreign languages were great once I reached senior high. I definitely never heard about linguistics in school (except once, when a literature teacher mentioned analyzing something through "psycholinguistics" without further explanation). When I was a junior in high school, one of my friends' sisters started a linguistics concentration, and a friend of mine (who was a couple of years older than me) started a linguistics degree in Texas. So, I knew a lot of people who were interested in the field (including the girl I mentioned in my first post who was torn between Bio/English). </p>
<p>At first I was drawn to linguistics because it was a field full of jargon and structures and explanations for all the cool things I'd discovered when learning a foreign language. Then, because I was a bit into programming, I started getting really interested in Chomsky's research and computational linguistics in general. But once I saw that the field had noticeably drifted from the computational paradigm (for good reason, I hear), I sort of lost interest. I'm just not much of a social scientist at heart. And not much of a communicator, either. For instance, the book Um... by Michael Erard got rave reviews from most of the accomplished linguists I keep up with (through blogs mostly), and when I read it I was underwhelmed. That could just be my distaste for watered-down, "entertaining" books for laypeople, but I think it had more to do with the fact that I'm just not as fascinated by language in certain lights.</p>
<p>The summer after high school I became very interested in Biblical criticism and scholarly analysis of ancient Hebrew in dating parts of the Torah, and that's probably the most intriguing area of linguistics to me at the moment. But I don't think there's much room there for further research (correct me if I'm wrong).</p>
<p>I do like finding the underlying structure in complex problems (like speech), and I still like hearing what my linguist friends are up to (one has an unrelated job right now, but the other is religious and is working on translations of the Christian Bible). I'd like to learn more about phonology and syntax someday, but mostly just for play. Are you studying linguistics now?</p>
<p>Self-study so far, as an HS student.</p>
<p>IMO, there's a LOT to be researched in linguistics. Modern linguistics is relatively young.</p>
<p>I get turned off by current studies of syntax -- IMO it's headed in the wrong direction. To me, at least the marginal benefit of pursuing such an endeavour doesn't seem so great. Like really, I'm not into how the Minimalist Programme fixes the "shortfalls" of X-bar. The really useful syntactic research, IMO, will only start taking shape when linguistic psychology and linguistic neuroscience advance. </p>
<p>However, I'm very interested in the psychological portion of linguistics -- syntax originally interested me because I knew that in some languages with exotic syntaxes and morphologies (e.g. polysynthetic languages), native speakers automatically parsed what I considered "weird structures". I was very interested in how syntax got processed into thought; also, the concept of "universal constraints" appealed to me because if you listen to any arbitrary language, never mind how complex it is in one area or simple it is in the other, the "sum complexity" of any language seemed to always turn out to be the same. Of course, it's hard finding out ways to "quantify" this instinct.</p>
<p>I want to go into biolinguistics (custom major), researching the evolution of language, creating models for language change (which is still much of a mystery), researching psychological structures behind language, establishing experimental methods of distinguishing cognitive production of a language feature from a slip-up, etc. There are some interesting ways that get closer to this today, such as a machine that tracks eye movement and how long and how often the eye comes back to a word, as a measure of "cognitive load" (how "natural" a construction is).</p>
<p>To me, the computational data should support the paradigms, which it seems to me will ultimately be due to psychological structures, when we discover them.</p>
<p>Sociolinguistics is an interesting field where it intersects with language change -- it sort of involves some biological themes. Studying how language change occurring in cultural units (memes), and these units compete amongst a population as alternants (allophones, allomorphs, etc.). Language change sees excruciatingly slow, but it also seems to correlate heavily with the linguistic equivalent of "evolutionary pressure". Unsavoury as it sounds, higher-security prisons seem to me the perfect "language change laboratory," to study how different code terms and constructions emerge and die among a population, or even between populations (between prisons). Many code words and avoidance terms aren't prescripted -- they evolve, take root, die, and gang leaders rarely publish decrees that declare, "Oh, these are the new code words we will use." It would be too slow, too inefficient. </p>
<p>I'm also a Singlish creole speaker, and the sociolinguistics of the different languages in the Malay Archipelago (in a postcolonial environment), with all their variants, are something I want to study, mainly because of the huge wealth of data on linguistic interaction that can be collected. For example, many of the groups that historically spoke different dialects of Chinese in Singapore have now adopted Mandarin after government pressure -- but the phonology of the Mandarin differs! This becomes more complex when you realise Mandarin was already a fragmented dialect during the colonial era, and different Chinese migrants came from different regions, and at the same time, Mandarin was a substratum for Singlish creole.</p>
<p>All of this a very long-winded way to say I think, that besides psycholinguistics, I am fascinated by dialect continua and language change, and I think there's plenty of room for research.</p>
<p>go away evil troll</p>
<p>Looks more like a spammer to me...</p>
<p>My sister was so annoyed that her friend got into Cornell while she did not. Her friend did worse than my sister on SATs, GPA, and EC's. The friend is part Native American, though. She ended up not being able to afford Cornell, so she went to honors UMD instead, which is still freakishly difficult to get into (sister didn't get into it).</p>
<p>Back to page 10 or so...</p>
<p>I don't think this is a question that anyone has asked yet,</p>
<p>What is the real value of diversity?</p>
<p>I'm sure we can all agree that AA exists (the degree however, is debatable)</p>
<p>Is the rejection of somewhat more qualified candidates in favor of "under" qualified candidates because of race or socio-economic status inherently justified?</p>