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E-PrinceEliminating standardized test scores as a factor in the college admissions process would lead to more racially and socioeconomically diverse undergraduate populations, according to a recent study by two University researchers.
Using data collected from 250,000 applications to 10 ...
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this is extremely shocking and surprising.
Eliminating objective standards of comparison lets admissions officers use whatever BS reasons they like to maintain their nice perfect race ratios, without all that nasty business about maintaining academic standards.
http://opr.princeton.edu/faculty/tje/espenshade...
All other things being equal, being a black applicant is worth 230 points on the SAT scale (out of 1600). Being Hispanic is worth 185, white is 0, and being Asian will PENALIZE you 50 points. By comparison being a legacy is only worth 160 points. Put it another way, black acceptees score 230 points below the mean, etc.
One thing I'd love to do sometime is to ask an admissions officer why non-Asian minorities get a 200-250-point boost on the old (1600) SAT. Their stock response will be that they include many factors, including "intangibles" that conveniently can't be measured to hold admissions officers accountable. Then I'd ask them if whites and Asians were singularly deficient in these "intangibles." Of course logically that must be true, but admissions officers are PC-indoctrinated to pretend there are absolutely no differences between racial groups. The resulting logical black hole would make their heads explode.
It doesn't stop at college admissions. Graduate school, when you'd assume that the massive affirmative action boost will have given non-Asian minorities (NAMs) more than an equal opportunity to prove themselves, show even greater differences in ability by race, which of course need to be smoothed out by reverse racism.
http://vdare.com/sailer/090406_graduate_school.htm
Thus, for example, on the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), the gatekeeper for the M.B.A. degree, the mean score for whites falls, by definition, at the 50th percentile of the white distribution of scores. The mean score for black test-takers would rank at the 13th percentile among whites. Asians average a little better than the typical white, scoring at the 55th percentile.
I'd love to see the College Republicans or some other political group start a ballot referendum to ban affirmative action in New Jersey public schools, along the lines of California Prop 209 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposition_209). Can any policy wonks get the ball rolling on this?
The elimination of grades would increase diversity even more. In fact, just have an application where you check off your ethnicity and gender.
This study is ridiculous. It's like the removal of outliers in your data. Of course once you remove outliers, everything will look nice. If you remove admission criterion, diversity will increase because you can admit whoever you want.
*parodying 'pic'*: This is extremely shocking and not surprising.
The former bc someone actually wasted their time on this, and the latter because it should be self-evident (bc AA exists) that adcoms are not able to have as much racial diversity as they would like.
"The SAT has generated need for affirmative action."
Well no shit, if you didn't HAVE the SAT, you wouldn't need to justify letting in kids with lower scores through AA.
While I understand it would be cool for us to be able to recruit whoever we liked (academic indices be damned) and that there is some case to be made for weighting the SAT less heavily in the admissions process, eliminating it or making it optional is a load of bullshit. There needs to be a national standard by which we can measure applicants.
P.S. I support Affirmative Action, but most certainly not this... ESPECIALLY at Ivy League-caliber schools.
Does the SAT have a racial bias? That is, do black or latino students of equal academic caliber score worse than white or asian students?
Does Princeton does have an obligation to accept subpar students of any race, gender, or creed in the name of diversity?
My beliefs: no and no. If the set of contributors to the arts and sciences is not naturally diverse, you certainly aren't going to increase the contributions by eliminating those homogenous contributors to bring in token students who are lucky enough to have the right pigmentation. Yes, most of the asian and white students have been lucky enough to have the better socioeconomic background to obtain the skills that lead to SAT domination. But that doesn't mean we should tell them that inferior students will be let in to make up for the fact that they are too much like the general population of succeeders.
Even Michelle Obama herself admitted that she got into Princeton despite having significantly lower grades and test scores, and if you read her senior thesis, she clearly states that affirmative action has a lot of negative effects on the people it is supposed to help. If we do away with the SAT, I believe it would do more harm than good - it would be an insult to whites and non-whites alike.
Dear Daniel Douglas,
If your name was Pedro Sanchez, you would answer "yes" and "yes" to your questions.