why would they merge my post thats so dumb…its different and this one is all clogged up
Bescraze I may not agree with your views of AA, but I do think you should get your own thread :). The opening post addresses self-identification policies but does not even begin to address the larger debate surrounding affirmative action. I don’t understand how merging every single AA thread into this one is helpful to CC members. Presumably, CC is divided into different forums and threads to make it easy for posters to navigate. The electronic landfill that this thread has become flies in the face of that goal.
There have been dozens, maybe hundreds by now, of requests from regular contributors to College Confidential to keep the forums from being clogged up with threads about affirmative action policies of colleges. On the one hand, the consensus of the moderation team, and the policy effectuated by forum management, is to acknowledge that affirmative action policies are a legitimate issue of interest to college applicants and worth civil, thoughtful, informed discussion. On the other hand, it is also the observation of numerous participants on College Confidential, including the various members of the moderation team, that most discussions of affirmative go bad rapidly because they are insufficiently informed by facts and too uncivil to elevate the level of discourse on College Confidential.
As any regular reader of College Confidential should know, at the turn of the year a FAQ thread was posted titled “Fastest-Growing Ethnic Category at Great Colleges: ‘Race Unknown’”
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/441477-fastest-growing-ethnic-category-great-colleges-race-unknown.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/441477-fastest-growing-ethnic-category-great-colleges-race-unknown.html</a>
with links to external data sources about college affirmative action policies, including federal definitions of the ethnic categories used in college statistical reporting. That thread instantly became the site of yet one more debate on affirmative action policies. Since then, various members of the moderation team have merged other affirmative action threads from various forums into that thread, and various members of College Confidential have posted links to it when other threads undergo topic drift and bring up issues of affirmative action. That result seems to keep the discussion more informed and more civil, and helps answers frequently asked questions such as which national origins belong to which “race” according to the United States federal classifications.
When I see an extremely long thread that I have not yet posted in, I stay away from it because I don’t want to wade through all of the previous posts before adding my own thoughts. Other posters have expressed similar attitudes toward long threads. So by merging a given thread with tokenadult’s FAQ, moderators are decreasing the probability that someone not already subscribed to that thread will respond. This does not serve the interests of the CC community.
I can appreciate the desire to keep the forums from getting cluttered. But I can’t understand how anyone who doesn’t like clutter sees merging threads as the solution. All it does is confine the clutter to a single thread. Dave_Berry recently [asked</a> for suggestions](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/community-forum-issues/532607-new-topics-forums-cc-nothing-new-under-sun.html]asked”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/community-forum-issues/532607-new-topics-forums-cc-nothing-new-under-sun.html) for how to improve CC. I propose that an affirmative action subforum be created in the College Admissions forum with tokenadult’s FAQ placed at the top as a sticky. Instead of moving all AA threads to the FAQ, mods could move them to the subforum. No more clutter, no more merged threads. What’s not to like?
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll ask some follow-up questions.
So is your proposal that any time an affirmative thread is found on any forum it would moved to the subforum devoted to affirmative action threads? What if three different users in the course of a week open three different affirmative action threads in three different forums (which I have seen happen in the last half year) so that after the move there are three very new threads in the devoted forum all covering much the same ground?
What’s the difficulty, by the way, for any user in simply using the forum search function to look for previous threads on a frequently discussed topic? How many new threads are either needed or desired on topics that have been discussed in many threads beforehand?
How is the situation you describe handled now? Are all three threads merged with the FAQ? Off the top of my head, I would say yes–just move all three threads into the AA subforum. To the extent that this is undesirable, I don’t see how merging all three into the FAQ is any better. I agree that it’s not that hard to use the search feature instead of posting threads on the same topic over and over again, but new CC posters have shown time and time again that they are unwilling to do so.
The main problem I have with merging threads is that it seems to give the mistaken impression that all AA questions are the same and hence belong in the same thread. Two topics which were recently merged were:
<li>Do colleges distinguish between rich African Americans and poor African Americans</li>
<li>Do colleges distinguish between Chinese/Indian applicants and less represented Asian applicants</li>
These are two very different topics, and I think it is helpful for CC’ers to have them in separate threads.
Do you have any answers for question 1. or question 2. that didn’t already appear in the affirmative action FAQ thread?
I haven’t bothered to wade through the whole thing, so I can’t say. But my point is not that these questions do not get answered somewhere in your thread. Rather, I’m saying it would be easier for someone new to CC to go to an AA subforum and see each AA topic listed separately than to have to find it all in one thread. In an analogous way, I divide the My Documents folder in my computer into subfolders so that I can find things more quickly. I’m well aware that I could simply keep everything in a single folder and use my computer’s search feature, but I like having things organized. Clearly CC favors this organized structure as well, or else it would not have created distinct forums, subforums, and threads in the first place. Creating an AA subforum would solve the clutter issue, and with that issue solved, I don’t see how it would be advantageous to merge faintly related topics into the same thread.
I would agree with this, as a factual statement, if and only if most participants on CC posted threads with titles that are informative about the question being asked in the thread. I’ll let you decide for yourself whether or not that usually happens.
One perspective I have on forums versus subforums versus new threads versus long-standing FAQ threads is that I have some awareness of how much time the moderation team spends retitling threads, merging some threads, and moving lots of threads from the wrong forum into the proper forum. That’s why I wonder how much a designated subforum helps for finding topics that will initially usually be put in the wrong forum and often have thread titles that are less than transparent. As you can imagine, until the moderators get paid (they are all volunteers), I’m strongly in favor of policies that allow them to enjoy their participation on the forums without taking up too much of their personal time.
I appreciate very much the time and effort the moderation team puts into this forum. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t see how merging threads is any less time consuming than moving them to a subforum. In a similar vein, I don’t see how merging threads into the FAQ makes the specific topic of discussion any clearer than if the thread had been left alone. If the mods choose to modify the title, this could be done just as easily in either circumstance. So while moderator time commitment is an important issue, it appears to be logically independent of the FAQ vs. subforum question. Obviously I’m not a mod, so please correct me if I’m missing something.
I rarely post to afirmative action threads anymore, but I read them all the time. I find I am often drawn to them , and I am often offended as well. As a “student” of psychology ( well, psychiatry really) I am intrigued by the behavior of my fellow posters, and by how popular ( as measured by number of posts) affirmative action threads are. Personally, I feel I can tell when a title is blatently trying to initiate ( yet another) such discussion, but also when a more subtle thread is about to “jump the shark”. Inevitibly it seems, it’s all been said before, and I have been tempted to keep a file of responses to several permutations, so that I can just copy and paste when the usual posts surface. Then I think it is not my place to be a part of these discussions. This is obviously something that means something different, feels different, to those people, at that stage of their life, that frequent CC. From where I sit, afirmative action seems so small in the “Big Picture”. So while I appreciate the fact that many posters here ( or is it a small number that are really devoted to the subject?) might post a lot on an affirmative action forum, it seems it would take an awful lot of resources and maybe second guessing, for moderators to decide when a thread was going that way and where to put it. Even then, I don’t know if anything here, can fill whatever need is being relected by many of the posts I’ve seen.
Considering the same posters always end up covering the same points over and over again anyway…
The thread titles I have seen have often not been very clear. My attempt in the FAQ thread I posted at the turn of the year was to put some information directly in the title of the thread, to benefit people who skim the forum for information. I have received a suggestion from two other moderators about a way to retitle that thread (or a new replacement thread) in a way that should make clear that it is both a FAQ thread and a thread for affirmative action discussions. Rereading that thread, I am struck by how many regular College Confidential participants really DON’T want a lot of different affirmative action discussions, perhaps because they indeed always end up sounding the same. A lot of members have made a lot of referrals to the current FAQ thread when new AA discussions pop up.
After purusing these posts and the posts on the links above, I think I would really like to see the AA threads in their own subforum. All questions of race, ethnicity, reporting, standards, definitions, permutations, financial aid related to same, etc. could then be handled under one heading and anyone who wanted to go there, could look in that section. So, down the left side, in addition to Financial Aid, SAT, Admissions, etc., there could be an entire subforum for topics including Affirmative Action. I would also like to see subforums for athletics, and for political issues.
Under those subforums, perhaps the OP’s original titles would remain. Maybe their could be a check off system; "Click here for African American, North African, Asian, Pacific Islander, South American, Native American, and General Discussion (that forum would have to be monitored for flame, spam, and bad behavior).
just my 2cents, and I’ll have to consider it further.
The creation of an AA subforum is a great idea and would allow users to discuss the topic in an organized manner. As some have mentioned, topics on AA tend to pop up in a number of places and need to be moved constantly. By having an AA subforum, this problem would most likely be solved and new users who are curious about AA can easily search through one subforum to find the answers to their questions or simply discuss the matter. You might also be able to create less repetition if users can simply see and join an existing discussion that addresses a similar issue. My only concern would be that some debates may get too heated in the process… Aside from that, I do like the idea of an AA subforum.
I would like to see us try the AA subforum and see how it goes. But I do have a concern: If the lively thread “Bestview College Admission Criteria” appears in the Colleges and Universities subforum, and at post #50 someone first mentions AA and the thread then effectively morphs to predominantly AA issues, would the entire thread be moved to the AA subform? I think there is no easy or good answer; moving only the AA posts would not be practical, it seems, and moving only #50 and beyond could erroneously move some posts to the AA subforum. Of course, the same problem can occur now when a thread is merged into the AA thread. Perhaps this problem is rare, not requiring a policy.
vossron, the mods’ current approach seems to be to move only AA related posts and leave the rest in the original thread.
tokenadult, I must not understand your position. Creating a subforum seems to solve the issues you bring up while having the added benefit of being more organized than a long FAQ. Those posters who are tired of the AA discussions can simply steer clear of the subforum. I don’t understand why you’re opposed.
I think that I agree that the creation of a sub-forum would allow new users more accesibility to pertinent discussions…My concerns are the same as aquamarinee, but with moderator adherence, the debates will undoubtedly be kept civil…to have the threads all merged together is confusing and possibly discourages input from those who do not want to read through all the pages of the thread…
I’d rather not have an AA subforum. AA is an issue like any other, it should be discussed as other issues are. Isolating it in its own forum would make people unable to comment on it any other forum, even when it’s relevant.
What about this–how about a subforum on “Special Admissions Categories (Underrepresented Minorities, Legacies, Athletes, and Development Cases).” Discussions about affirmative action in college admissions (but only college admissions) could go there, as well as discussions of the fairness/unfairness of legacy and development admissions, etc. Those topics are often closely related, anyway. More general political discussions of AA should go to one of the cafes.
I have to say that I don’t like the giant merged threads, because they are just too difficult to read. The problem of multiple threads in the same forum usually solves itself as one of them becomes the “main” thread, and the others drop off the screen.