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‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

nytimes.com

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Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#61

Post by bcoates »

verylongname wrote: post #40
xkcdefgh wrote: post #30

Why is SAT so ridiculously easy that thousands have perfect score?

It was "recentered" in 1995. The right side of the distribution was essentially truncated. A 1600 on the pre-1995 SAT was quite an accomplishment (I don't have data at my fingertips, but in most years, fewer than 10 students achieved a perfect score of 1600 and only a few dozen scored 1550+). By contrast, several hundred students a year scored 1600 on the recentered test. The scoring system has been changed several t…

It's hard bordering on impossible to make a single test that measures most of the college-bound high school graduate population and can also make non-arbitrary distinctions among top-1% students.

Lopping off the top of the distribution looks to me like a recognition that pre-recentering scores in the top 100 points or so were essentially measuring the luck of top-performing students on which questions they drew and how well their educated guesses landed.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#62

Post by tzs »

rspeer wrote: post #47
tzs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the sake of simplicity, let's assume all legacy admissions are white males, and that the diversity they claim to promote is racial and gender diversity. > Legacy admissions promote exactly the opposite of diversity That's only true if the number of white males that would be admitted in a fully diverse class is not large enough to accommodate all the legacy admissions. I suspect that this is not the case, and so l…

I am not sure where you're even going with this. It's like you're trying to have a different argument about privilege. Harvard-educated people don't have more male children. Making sure that Harvard students keep coming from the same families is, quite directly, the opposite of diversity. You don't have to count white males to see that Harvard keeps being shaped by the same group of people. This is classism, in parti…

Usually when organizations have diversity programs and goals, it is racial or pseudo-racial diversity they are talking about, or gender diversity, or both of those.

To achieve such goals, for every 1000 students a school should have about 127 black students, 178 Hispanic students, 613 white non-Hispanic students, 48 Asians, and 34 others.

About 290 of every 1000 Harvard students are legacy admissions. Legacy admissions are overwhelmingly white.

My point was that Harvard can admit those 290 legacy students without affecting its racial diversity easily, because fully diverse Harvard would have 613 non-Hispanic white students per 1000 students. They could arrange that every legacy admission who would not have made it but for being legacy displaces another non-Hispanic white student, so had no affect on racial diversity.

I would not be at all surprised if among the white applicants Harvard has enough from each income level that they could even make it so each legacy admission that would not have made it if not legacy is displacing a non-legacy who is white and in the same income range.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#63

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

tzs wrote: post #62
rspeer wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure where you're even going with this. It's like you're trying to have a different argument about privilege. Harvard-educated people don't have more male children. Making sure that Harvard students keep coming from the same families is, quite directly, the opposite of diversity. You don't have to count white males to see that Harvard keeps being shaped by the same group of people. This is classism, in parti…

Usually when organizations have diversity programs and goals, it is racial or pseudo-racial diversity they are talking about, or gender diversity, or both of those. To achieve such goals, for every 1000 students a school should have about 127 black students, 178 Hispanic students, 613 white non-Hispanic students, 48 Asians, and 34 others. About 290 of every 1000 Harvard students are legacy admissions. Legacy admissio…

Additionally, if a school admits an increasingly diverse mix over time, this should should impact the legacy admissions to become more diverse over time.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#64

Post by cycrutchfield »

verylongname wrote: post #45
lozenge wrote: post #44

'Yet another was “bright & busy” but it was “a bit difficult to see what would hold him in during a lop.”' 'admissions officers then fine-tune the final class using a form that lists five pieces of information about the applicant; they give an example of a form that has spaces for the applicant’s name, LIN (lineage), ETH (ethnicity), ATH (athlete), and HFAI (financial aid).' It's undeniably racism. I wonder what the…

See CalTech for an example of an elite school that has race-blind admissions. As far as I can tell, it hasn't put any pressure on the Ivy's to change. Incidentally, Caltech's latest class is roughly 50% Asian and about 30% white.

There may be some geographic bias there because California’s Asian population is much higher than the US as a whole.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#65

Post by DanBC »

speedplane wrote: post #52
DanBC wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obviously hard objective criteria are not be enough to get into Harvard, and they need to dip into subjectivity which is rife with bias. Why do they need to dip into subjectivity? Why not just set admission standards and then run a lottery on everyone who meets those standards?

Using randomness to evaluate students is an admission that it's impossible to evaluate them with any objective or subjective criteria. While it would be fair, it's a dereliction of responsibility on the part of admissions officers.

But from all we know about recruitment and bias we know that it is impossible to fairly evaluate candidates.

Random selection would be closer to meritocracy than anything that involves humans evaluating other humans.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#66

Post by cycrutchfield »

throwa_way_ wrote: post #9
chevman wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I graduated from highschool 20+ years ago (1997, holy smokes!) and it was the same deal then. There were about 25 of us in my graduating class that ran the table with perfect SATs, 5s on all our APs, perfect GPA, etc and we all applied to pretty much all the Ivies. It was arbitrary who got in where, no rhyme or reason as far as we could tell then. Sounds like it hasn't changed much.

Except for if you read the article you would see that it's not arbitrary, but based on racial discrimination.

That has not been proven at all.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#67

Post by cycrutchfield »

aiyodev wrote: post #59

It’s worth reminding everyone that Harvard is the reason there’s any discrimination in the admissions process. Students used to get accepted on academic merit alone. But Harvard wanted to covertly discriminate against Jewish applicants. The reason why you have to write essays about your extracurricular activities, for example, is because a Jewish applicant back then typically wouldn’t have any. It’s also when legacy…

Hell no. Optimizing solely for grades and test scores will get you rote-memorizing robots with zero personal skills and minimal potential.

A completely merit-based, objective admissions system simply does not exist.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#68

Post by IvyAdmisions »

From an earlier thread:

I was a college admissions officer for a few years and am familiar with the process at the top Ivies.

The outcome is racist but there's no intent to be racist.

Imagine your job is to create the best possible 2000-student freshman class for Harvard from the 40,000 students who apply.

You review the applications and notice to your horror that 600-1000 of them all have perfect or near perfect test scores, boring essays, so-so extracurriculars (Overwatch tournaments and robotics club don't cut it), play an instrument (very well, but not remarkably), and want to study pre-med.

Their grades and scores are STELLAR! But if you admit these students your campus is fucked. Half the freshman class can't do pre-med. Once the pre-med spots fill up what will the rest do? That seems like a very horrible situation to put students in. There's just not enough spots.

What's going to happen to campus social life if half the class has a history of not being social at all? Who's going to produce art and go into politics? Who's going into investment banking to pull down big bonuses 10 years from now?

So you work your way through them and try to take the very best of them. The rest of them you reject. They'll get into fine schools and be successful, there's just only so many slots of students like that in the class.

This cohort of students happens to be disproportionately asian. No one is out to discriminate against asian people, their applications are just very problematic at scale.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#69

Post by Molaxx »

I don't get why they don't use lotteries. Have a grade cutoff, then choose at random. You should get unbiased results. The remaining bias is grade bias which would reflect poor schools and their corellation with ethnicity. Which will give a clearer startegy for intervention.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#70

Post by reitzensteinm »

IvyAdmisions wrote: post #68

From an earlier thread: I was a college admissions officer for a few years and am familiar with the process at the top Ivies. The outcome is racist but there's no intent to be racist. Imagine your job is to create the best possible 2000-student freshman class for Harvard from the 40,000 students who apply. You review the applications and notice to your horror that 600-1000 of them all have perfect or near perfect tes…

We don't discriminate against asian people, just their problematic culture.
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