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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

#71

Post by danieltillett »

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…

Umm they are out to discriminate against Asian people.

More seriously if your aim is to limit the number of people applying for premed then limit the number of pre-med slots and let the applicants know.

If demand is greater than supply then just put everyone over the acceptable score into a pool and draw out at random. Why resort to outright racism to solve a problem of supply and demand?

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

#72

Post by danieltillett »

Molaxx wrote: post #69

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.

This is the solution. It also solves the problem that all your candidates are cluster so tightly together by grade score that it is impossible to separate them by any ranking process. Just set the threshold to enter the lottery and go from there.

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

#73

Post by zimablue »

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…

Extracurriculars have been moved away from in the UK because you're basically discriminating on class. I went to a uni much like the one you describe, Imperial College London. It has it's problems but I wouldn't have traded all the engineers and scientists for lit students. Pretty sure we produce our share of investment bankers. A uni discriminating on extracurriculars and perceived sociability is insane. We're supposed to be building a meritocracy not constructing weird model societies based on your own preconceptions of what that would look like.

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

#74

Post by nopinsight »

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…

So out of curiosity, what would be some optimal sets of characteristics for being admitted to top Ivies?

Are they largely looking for people with ‘change-the-world’, ‘make-a-big-impact’ potentials and great academic records (with the former being the more important criterion)? Or something else?

I expect these criteria can be described in words and it is not only learned through apprenticeship as supposedly there are tens or hundreds of officers doing the filtering.

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

#75

Post by 1337biz »

lordnacho wrote: post #39

This is terrible to read about from a European perspective. - It seems getting into America's most prestigious institution on merit is incredibly unlikely, compared to if you happened to have rich relatives. If 50 or 60 rich kids a year out of a pool of what? A few hundred people rich enough to be z-listed? Maybe not even that. Versus the busload of ordinary kids who need to slip through the eye of the needle. - Athl…

Coming from a European perspective as well, I do understand the idea behind Harvard's admission process.

They want to mold a group of people that are coming from the money, brain, physical and societal elite. It is not a school, it is an elite network generating institution.

The academic aspect is their legitimacy generating element. If you take this viewpoint, everything they do makes sense.

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

#76

Post by IvyAdmisions »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #70
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.

Correct. There's a belief at the very top of these schools that they only want so many people leading one-dimensional lives focused on entering upper middle class trades like law and medicine.

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

#77

Post by drawnwren »

zimablue wrote: post #73
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…

Extracurriculars have been moved away from in the UK because you're basically discriminating on class. I went to a uni much like the one you describe, Imperial College London. It has it's problems but I wouldn't have traded all the engineers and scientists for lit students. Pretty sure we produce our share of investment bankers. A uni discriminating on extracurriculars and perceived sociability is insane. We're suppo…

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 mine at Stanford told me that Stanford starts by disqualifying all students that they believe won't make it at Stanford. This leaves them with about 60% of the applications. They then take the academic prodigies out. You know, researched mouse cancer at 14. That's about 1%. Stanford's admit rate was 4.something% last year. Getting that other 3% is a pain for US institutions.

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

#78

Post by IvyAdmisions »

nopinsight wrote: post #74
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…

So out of curiosity, what would be some optimal sets of characteristics for being admitted to top Ivies? Are they largely looking for people with ‘change-the-world’, ‘make-a-big-impact’ potentials and great academic records (with the former being the more important criterion)? Or something else? I expect these criteria can be described in words and it is not only learned through apprenticeship as supposedly there are…

Generally they want a mix of people like that; people skilled in sports, music, various arts; and some people TRULY gifted intellectually (actually doing research or showing strong promise to). They also need to admit enough rich kids to satisfy the annual giving org and make sure enough poor kids and black and latino kids get in to meet liberal/progressive racial goals.

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

#79

Post by imbokodo »

lordnacho wrote: post #39

This is terrible to read about from a European perspective. - It seems getting into America's most prestigious institution on merit is incredibly unlikely, compared to if you happened to have rich relatives. If 50 or 60 rich kids a year out of a pool of what? A few hundred people rich enough to be z-listed? Maybe not even that. Versus the busload of ordinary kids who need to slip through the eye of the needle. - Athl…

> from a European perspective

Go to Wikipedia and read about the 1960s in the US - Freedom Riders (whites and blacks sitting next to one another on a bus) almost being beaten to death, buses burned, riots on school integration, dogs and firehoses turned on black children, people registering black voters murdered, 4 little girls murdered at a black church by the Klan, civil rights workers and leaders beaten and jailed and murdered and on and on.

Look to the USA currently - before US football games are played the team must stand and salute the USA and the controversies around that, the Black Lives Matter movement and the politician and media hatred of the concept of black lives mattering - which means police killing blacks for no reason. Or the rage against tearing down Confederate statues with inscriptions praising white supremacy like the one in New Orleans. The anti-blacks murdered someone who wanted the Confederate statue in Charlottesville taken down last year - in fact hundreds of Nazis and Klansmen and other far right groups marched there, and the state government and judiciary has blocked the city government from tearing down the statue. Dylan Roof hated blacks and walked into a church murdering blacks.

And on and on. The former African nation enslaved in the US is still an oppressed nation in the US, along with Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians and such.

Africans being represented at Harvard at a level proportional to their population in the US is an anomaly in the existing oppression of Africans on the US, and all this hubbub is an attempt to correct that.

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

#80

Post by reitzensteinm »

IvyAdmisions wrote: post #76
reitzensteinm wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Correct. There's a belief at the very top of these schools that they only want so many people leading one-dimensional lives focused on entering upper middle class trades like law and medicine.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that history will judge this line of argument poorly.
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