Their LinkedIn pages do not mention either of them getting into or attending medical school. That suggests that if they did apply, they were among the 60% who got no admissions.
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In the panel discussion, he said he was doing Teach for America for a couple of years. It didn’t seem as if he’s settled on a final direction.
I recall as she rattled off where she was applying, thinking, “Uh-oh. No safeties. No targets. All high reaches. Looming disaster.”
We don’t know what her GPA or scores were. We do know what Rachel’s GPA and scores were. Her mother proudly proclaimed that her 4.1 GPA and 33 ACT put her smack in the middle of the range of those accepted to the Ivies that her daughter had applied to. I can only imagine how the Asian kids felt, hearing that… I vaguely recall someone saying that the top student had a 4.9 GPA? So a 4.1 on that scale doesn’t sound very high. And a 33, while very nice, is far from a 36 - and that was in the era before test optional.
BTW, in searching online for info about Lowell’s grading and ranking system, I found this: The school’s 2018-19 “accountability highlights”. Nothing about level of achievement, test scores, college admissions. Only possible academic indicator was graduation rate.
But detailed results of the year over year change in the “Social-Emotional Learning Survey” and “Culture Climate Survey” offered to students, families, and all staff.
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I was shocked by this book.
Do you really think that only kids with prefect scores should be admitted to these schools? Maybe Rachel only had a 4.1 because she didn’t take every AP class, but her 4.1 was still all As. Clearly she was successful at Brown if she is graduating and applying to Med school.
I hope at least some of them thought, “Wow, that’s great for her. And well deserved. She’s been a bright, articulate, thoughtful, and kind classmate. I loved her articles in the school paper.”
But I doubt that’s what you meant. In every class at Lowell there are approximately 400-500 Asian students and around 15 Black students. Does it really make sense to diminish this one student, as if she personally kept hundreds of Asian students out of their dream schools?
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The challenge at these schools is getting in, not staying in. And yes, I do think that admission should be by merit, not race. I suspect that there were many Asian kids in that year’s class who had GPAs and standardized test scores that far exceeded 4.1 and 33, and if Rachel had any outstanding achievement that tipped the scales in her favor, beyond others with significantly higher GPAs and scores, the documentary didn’t mention it.
The corollary to your statement of, “Do you really think that only kids with (perfect) scores should be admitted to these schools?” is, Do you really think that Asian kids with stellar GPAs and very high test scores should be at a school that accepts half of its applicants, just because the more selective schools are afraid of admitting a class that “looks the same”?
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So there is nothing between schools with 5% acceptance rates and those who accept 50%?
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Ay the time of the film, Lowell was the star of SFUSD. Yet I was struck by the overcrowded classrooms, poor physical facility, and inadequate advising for its students. Now that it is no longer merit-based admission but by lottery, I expect the school is in the process of substantial transition downward.
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Note that the existence of test prep itself can reduce the test’s accuracy as an intended proxy measure of something, if test prep results in substantial test-specific learning that is not or only minimally applicable to what it intends to be a proxy of. It also adds to the test somewhat proxying measuring who has knowledge of and access to test prep.
Perhaps the most notorious example is the writing section of the three part SAT of 2004-2016. Some colleges noticed that the SAT II (subject) writing test was a better predictor of college grades than the (two part) SAT. So it was successfully lobbied to become part of the main SAT. However, some years after that happened and the writing test went from a relatively obscure subject test to part of the high profile main SAT, apparently some test prep companies managed to reverse-engineer the grading of the writing system so that they could teach test takers with not-so-great writing skills how to do very well on the SAT writing section, essentially destroying its usefulness.
I ended up watching all the panel discussion. While I liked the film, I didn’t care for the panel. By the end of the discussion, I absolutely DETESTED the director. YMMV.
I did some googling. Some stuff was left out of the documentary or perhaps I just failed to grasp it. Rachael was the editor in chief of the paper, having been active in it throughout high school. Rachael was also involved in a Rebekah Lodge, some sort of service organization affiliated with the OddFellows. She was a youth laison for the local chapter In addition she donated 4 hours a week to a local food bank. She participated in some science research competitions. In one, she was part of a group of 4 students who were in some sort of science research program sponsored by Berkeley. Her group won first place in its division. She lists 6 AP scores on her resume; 2 4s and 4 5s. (She may have taken other exams for which she doesn’t list scores or may have taken classes without taking exams. I don’t know.)
Sophia was the news editor of the school paper; she joined at the suggestion of a private college counselor. She was captain of the tennis team, but says she wasn’t that good at tennis. She was a co-pres or co vp of Girls Who Code or some such club. She had a part time job. She herself now says she had a “jumble of activities.”
IMO, Rachael’s high school ECs were more focused and more impressive than Sophia’s, which isn’t the impression I got from the movie.
Of course, it’s possible that googling gave me a false impression. However, one thing I’ll note is that Sophia didn’t seem to have any community service of any sort and Rachael had a lot of it. Brown seems to really value community service.
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I have to chime in and ask what makes you think she was admitted because of her race? Because she didn’t have a perfect ACT score? Despite scoring in the 98th percentile and having strong grades, you make the blanket assumption that she was not deserving of her acceptances. How obnoxious. Have you read her essays or files? As someone who lives on CC from what I can tell, you should know that if universities were to accept students on “Merit” only as you propose, then what happens to the thousands of kids like the ones featured who still wont get accepted despite perfect grades and test scores?
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That was the mistake that Sophia made in her applications - it appears that she only applied to high reaches, no safeties or matches. I don’t even recall her having mentioned applying to UCSC (which has an acceptance rate of about 50%). None of us know exactly what was in these kids’ applications. None of us were in the admissions committee rooms when these kids’ applications were evaluated. None of us know what happened in the interviews, what was in their letters. But when it’s at the point that the school admissions counselor is warning them, and the Stanford rep is making the “it’s for your own good” excuse, it’s pretty darn obvious that the Asian kids are fighting a race quota.
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Hmm, didn’t look that bad to me… but then again, my kids went to public schools, too, in a building of that very same vintage and style, right down to the “It was designed by an architect who specialized in building prisons” rumor, and their classes had about 30/class in the honors/AP levels. Didn’t matter. You could put 40 in a class of those highly motivated kids, and have crappy facilities, and as long as you give them books and a decent teacher, they’ll do just as well as if they’d had the new building with the atrium and the coffee bar, and 20 kids in a class.
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The quality of physical facilities isn’t nearly as essential as the quality of people. For schools, that means the quality of the teachers, and even more importantly, the students. If the quality of either isn’t maintained, the school won’t be the same for long.
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What school is just admitting kids based stats and not even considering major or interest?
There is no way to know if any of the higher stat Asian kids were applying with the same interest as Rachel. There are kids that are admitted to ivies because they played an instrument the orchestra needs. We have no idea if Brown wanted another reporter for the student newspaper instead of a girl who codes.
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The kids themselves, including Rachel and Sophia, seem to recognize the reality of the racial quotas some try to pretend don’t exist.
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For the sake of accuracy, there was no scene showing a Stanford rep asking the students if they wanted to attend a college where all the students “looked” the same. Rather, there was a scene showing a student talking about a meeting from the year before , and claiming the Stanford rep. asked the students if they wanted to attend a college where all the students “were” the same.
Even setting the aside the issue of relying on a student anecdote from the year before (we don’t even know if the student was there, or if he just passing on gossip), I think looked vs. were may be important. Your version (“looked”) suggests the statement was solely about race. But in the student’s version (“were”), it could have been about diversity more generally. Geographic diversity, urban vs. rural diversity, socioeconomic diversity, represented school diversity, interest and experience diversity, etc.
The reason this stuck when I watched the movie is that I have heard admissions representatives and college counsellors provide almost this exact same reasoning at another high performing California high school in order to explain why more high performing kids from that school weren’t accepted to tippy top colleges. But it wasn’t about race, it was about the fact that colleges were looking at a broad swath of students from a variety of locations and backgrounds, interests, and experiences. If that is the type of diversity a college is after, it doesn’t necessarily make sense for them to accept a large number of students from a single high performing school, even if all the applicants from those schools were qualified.
Also, regarding your insistence that Stanford is enforcing an unwritten racial quota for Asian applicants, I don’t think this anecdote supports it. Likewise regarding the ill-advised UC Irvine stereotype joke. But if you have other evidence, I’d love to hear it.
Maybe they received incorrect information from their parents, community, or even on CC?
If Stanford has an Asian quota, what is it? Last year Stanford students were about 25% Asian Americans, plus about 11% international students, many of whom are also Asian.
What is the quota? 25% Asian American plus some International students? What would the percentage be without the alleged quota?
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I also think if the students want to be upset at another student, it should be at the kid that was accepted to Harvard early and also Stanford. He was the top student and if he didn’t apply to Stanford after he was already admitted to Harvard, maybe they would have accepted another student from the school.
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My expectation is that if there isn’t a bias, then the percentage of Asians at Stanford would close to the fraction of Asian applicants to nearby UCB. For the past few years that was around 39%.
I used applicants since admissions numbers must introduce a different UC bias. If you know the actual numbers for Stanford applicants that would obviously be better.
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