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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

#101

Post by IvyAdmisions »

paulsutter wrote: post #97
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…

You might want to reconsider your distaste for the robotics club. Take a look at the CEOs of the 10 most valuable companies now vs 10/20/30 years ago (Hint: Larry Page, Mark Zuckerburg, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Satya Nadella...) Jack Ma was rejected by Harvard Business School ten times, by the way. Expect big changes in banking over the coming decades as well. You may want to evolve your thinking.

I wasn't taking aim at robotics club (which is awesome). I was taking aim at slim resumes with 1-2 activities.

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

#102

Post by whatshisface »

bcoates wrote: post #61
verylongname wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Why not administer a second test to distinguish between the SAT's high scorers? Students who knew they were very strong beforehand could just take the hard test to begin with.

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

#103

Post by paulsutter »

IvyAdmisions wrote: post #101
paulsutter wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to reconsider your distaste for the robotics club. Take a look at the CEOs of the 10 most valuable companies now vs 10/20/30 years ago (Hint: Larry Page, Mark Zuckerburg, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Satya Nadella...) Jack Ma was rejected by Harvard Business School ten times, by the way. Expect big changes in banking over the coming decades as well. You may want to evolve your thinking.

I wasn't taking aim at robotics club (which is awesome). I was taking aim at slim resumes with 1-2 activities.

You might also give Mark Zuckerbergs and Bill Gates a reason to actually stay at Harvard (I’m taking aim at the slim technical curriculum and easy As)

Philip Greenspun on “Lean In”:

> Sandberg confirms that “A is Average” at Harvard. Her brother David...takes “a class in European intellectual history”, skips all but two lectures and all but one book, gets tutored for three hours and receives an A for the semester (p32-33). The guy’s success is attributed to the general confidence of men. Sandberg does not consider how likely it is that her brother’s confidence would have resulted in an A in a physics class at Caltech.

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

#104

Post by NikolaeVarius »

IvyAdmisions wrote: post #101
paulsutter wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to reconsider your distaste for the robotics club. Take a look at the CEOs of the 10 most valuable companies now vs 10/20/30 years ago (Hint: Larry Page, Mark Zuckerburg, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Satya Nadella...) Jack Ma was rejected by Harvard Business School ten times, by the way. Expect big changes in banking over the coming decades as well. You may want to evolve your thinking.

I wasn't taking aim at robotics club (which is awesome). I was taking aim at slim resumes with 1-2 activities.

Whats wrong with one or two activities? I did design build fly in college, and it took up every single moment of time I wasn't studying or working.

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

#105

Post by baud147258 »

arkh wrote: post #99
drawnwren wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that top 5 US schools are taking a much smaller percentage of a much larger population. They simply can't differentiate on academic performance alone. They generally admit somewhere around 5% of their applicants. Keeping in mind that those applicants are self-selecting, to some degree, thanks to the previously known admit rates and high application fees -- they have to use something else. A professor of…

In France, the most sought after enginnering schools use an entrance exam. No need to check for old academic performances as everyone is tested on the same things. They usually also have alternate admittance system but that's for 2% or 3% of students.

In particular, these written part of the entrance exam usually cover multiple schools, which allow students to pass two or three written examination, whose result will examined by multiple schools.

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

#106

Post by IvyAdmisions »

dilap wrote: post #93
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…

how do you explain the fact that admissions officers rated asian students lower on "personality" than alumni interviewers? from here: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/06/harvard-discrimination...

Alumni Interview programs exist mainly to create a sense of continued involvement with the alma mater post-graduation so alumni will donate more. Their interview reports were rarely material to a decision.

A main reason for this is that alumni, like newly minted admission officers, have no clue how preposterously competitive the process is and how many monstrously academically qualified applicants there are. So they write rave reviews of smart kids who really aren't all that special in the context of the applicant pool.

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

#107

Post by IvyAdmisions »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #104
IvyAdmisions wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't taking aim at robotics club (which is awesome). I was taking aim at slim resumes with 1-2 activities.

Whats wrong with one or two activities? I did design build fly in college, and it took up every single moment of time I wasn't studying or working.

The kids winning the "at large" bids have 6-12 extracurriculars and standout in many of them OR they have 1-2 and are distinguished in them at the state or national level. So if you had a project that ate up all your time like that, we'd look to see if you'd won any sort of national or state recognition for it. If not then it wasn't going to help the cause.

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

#108

Post by IvyAdmisions »

fmajid wrote: post #94

They just repurposed a system that was designed in the 1930s to keep Jews out, to keeping Asians out. The smoking gun is how the admissions committee's ratings for “personality” differ so much from alumni volunteer interviewers.

Agreed and for similar reasons imo, to guard against admiting too many students with no ambition beyond a comfy middle class lifestyle.

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

#109

Post by baud147258 »

dang wrote: post #29
Veelox wrote: post #20

I think the part of the issue that bothers me most is how much of a double standard there is between what counts as racism against African Americans and rasism against Asian Americans. Objectively, if you have two identical applications to Harvard except one is labeled black and the other is labeled Asian, the black one has a higher chance of success. They do the same thing with fake job applications with white names…

Mods didn't. Users flagged it.

Thank you for the info.

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

#110

Post by Amezarak »

arkh wrote: post #99
drawnwren wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that top 5 US schools are taking a much smaller percentage of a much larger population. They simply can't differentiate on academic performance alone. They generally admit somewhere around 5% of their applicants. Keeping in mind that those applicants are self-selecting, to some degree, thanks to the previously known admit rates and high application fees -- they have to use something else. A professor of…

In France, the most sought after enginnering schools use an entrance exam. No need to check for old academic performances as everyone is tested on the same things. They usually also have alternate admittance system but that's for 2% or 3% of students.

By 'academic performance' he is almost certainly including their ACT and SAT test scores, which serve essentially as standardized university entrance exams in the US. The problem is for schools like Harvard or Stanford, almost all the applicants have near-perfect scores, so they're not a good differentiator - people with lower scores will not apply, since they know they will not be accepted.
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