Diversity in general is, I suppose, but the Ivy Leagues are at least as bad as others. Harvard is
in the crosshairs today.
An attorney for the plaintiff asked why a white boy in, say, immigrant-rich Las Vegas with a score of 1310 would get the letter, while his Asian classmate with a 1370 would not. Fitzsimmons responded with generalities about the need to recruit from a broad array of states to achieve diversity.
There's another fudging mechanism they use too:
sports scholarships.
By the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s own estimate, 61 percent of student athletes last year were white. At elite colleges, that number is even higher: 65 percent in the Ivy League, not including international students, and 79 percent in the Division III New England Small College Athletic Conference, which includes elite liberal-arts colleges like Williams College and Amherst College....
All applicants to Harvard are ranked on a scale of one to six based on their academic qualifications, and athletes who scored a four were accepted at a rate of about 70 percent. Yet the admit rate for nonathletes with the same score was 0.076 percent—nearly 1,000 times lower. Similarly, 83 percent of athletes with a top academic score got an acceptance letter, compared with 16 percent of nonathletes.
If any of you know a junior in high school who would like to go to the Ivy Leagues, there's still time to get them into a sports program. It'll help if they're not Asian.
12 comments:
This was shocking enough, but I was surprised that the cut-off even for Asian men was as low as 1380. I thought Harvard was more elite than that.
Indeed. I would have cleared that threshold easily, if that were what it was in my day. Even without any interest in participating in organized sports.
How do you even compare scores? I think the SAT scoring has changed twice since my day.
Regardless of my scores, I definitely wasn't an athlete, and didn't have any other extracurriculars to bolster my application, so I'm sure I'd never have made it.
There are charts available online. If you know which generation of test you took (you can google it by year), and whether it was a 1600 or 2400 point version of the test, you can compare.
Boy, it's not easy to figure out- I couldn't find a direct translation chart anywhere that made sense. As best I can tell, my scores would not have been good enough (mostly because my math scores weren't great because I never wanted to put in the work to master the subject,and you can't 'wing' math no matter how smart you are).
Looking again I guess I didn't scroll far enough down- the links were separated on the page, with ACT to SAT above, and old-new SAT below.
Mine translated to 1220 apparently.
Not that I think much of IQ tests or even IQ in and of itself (except possibly as some estimator of potential), but it's kind of interesting to check out this estimator based on SAT scores.
Heh. The links are very flattering. :)
I have a good friend who works for LSAC in test design. He’s a trained philosopher and logician. His opinion is that these tests are fairly reliable at determining processing power. But discipline, well... that’s something else.
Truthfully, though, I didn't have the math for the SAT at the time I took it either. I just looked at the answer sets they gave as a kind of logic puzzle, to figure out which one was the one the other answers were there to mask. I had never taken the math I'd need to do well on it; I just approached it as a kind of game.
Looking back at my source, the 1380 cut-off was for Harvard to send out letters inviting high school students to apply. The average of the incoming class is quite a bit higher, just above 1500 out of 1600, close to Vanderbilt's average. Yale's average is 1540 on the 1600 scale. That's more like what I would have guessed.
Rice skated in at an average of slightly under 1500.
;) Well, you know, Rice does have music and fine art majors, and a really good baseball team. That might explain the lower bar. Those and the MOB (which is the only marching band that refuses to march.)
Full disclosure: MomRed was an Owl, and I made the wait list except my HS counselor sat on the paperwork to get even with Mom for something.
LittleRed1
Rice likes to call itself the Harvard of the South, which maybe isn't too far off, but evidently it really can't call itself the Yale of the South.
I see that Harvard students are calling for an end to the letter policy because it helps rural white kids (that bastion of privilege, rural whiteness).
https://www.thecollegefix.com/student-editorial-board-affirmative-action-shouldnt-benefit-white-rural-students-so-much/
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