SCOTUS case: Fisher v. Texas (Affirmative Action) - Page 19

On June 25 2013 10:27 biology]major wrote:
some people are born into shit circumstances, and they need help to level the playing field. Going off race is indefensible, but going off socioeconomic background is justified.

On June 25 2013 10:38 Livelovedie wrote:
See but the problem if you allow these extracirriculars that are subjective then you are automatically allowing people of higher economic classes to get an advantage over lower income students (who are more likely to be minorities). The student from a more privileged background has the ability to connect with people like doctors for shadowing and internships, work for their dads company, or do research at a school. The problem with just going on different socioeconomic backgrounds alone is it does not take into cultural considerations like Asian parent's focus on education even in poorer income levels, though I would support some sort of socioeconomic affirmative action boast. Affirmative action may have been used to account for past wrongs but now it has another purpose that the courts and I personally deem legitimate.

On June 25 2013 10:22 Judicator wrote:


So, yeah. You should do some research before making claims about genetics and heritable traits. The stuff your spewing is pretty laughable among neurobiologists. Whatever revolutionary breakthrough you underwent while discovering behaviorism is what everyone already went through with Skinner, you aren't breaking any new ground, so slow down there.

Also, it would be wise to post actual decent evidence and not that pretty flimsy piece you posted earlier.

On June 25 2013 11:30 Signet wrote:
We probably just won't totally agree, which is fine.

I am curious what factors/influences you think it is okay to differentiate people based upon? Surely, even it we could remove all unfair influences, it would be illogical to have a system that gives all applicants the same rating.

Or do you not agree with the statement "all differences in achievement can ultimately be traced back to differences in genes/family/economics/culture/etc that were not chosen by the individual"?

On June 25 2013 10:27 biology]major wrote:
some people are born into shit circumstances, and they need help to level the playing field. Going off race is indefensible, but going off socioeconomic background is justified.

On June 25 2013 11:46 ghrur wrote:
I think one thing that affirmative action doesn't account for is whether or not said minorities are even prepared for the colleges they are attending. If there is such an educational disparity, you're not going to fix it by shoving the unprepared minority kid into Harvard and then having him drop out 2 years later. I mean, college drop out rates for minorities have been shown to be significantly higher than for whites, and affirmative action may be the cause of that.

Also, I completely disagree with LiveLoveDie. I think that way of thinking stereotypes Asians, discriminates based on race, and punishes a culture we would prefer to support/cultivate. We want our kids to be educated and focus on education, yet we're punishing the one minority group which supports that? That's retarded.

On June 25 2013 11:11 Livelovedie wrote:
The reason I support affirmative action is to remove the families and background from the equation in regards to determining what college someone goes to. Apparently you believe that a kid's parents should be a contributing factor in whether they get into a certain college. I disagree. A parents "laziness" should be all the more reason one kid gets admitted because of what they had to overcome. Some underrepresented minority isn't not qualified by getting into a certain school whether you believe it or not. There are more qualified people than there are spots. Harvard has stated before that it could make 5 classes that would be just as good as the class that it assembles. I don't understand how people in society can defend subjective criteria when it applies to rich kids but not generally disadvantage kids.

Racial and Ethnic Preferences and Consequences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine

• Black enrollees generally have much greater difficulty in medical school than do whites, Asians, and Hispanics, despite UMSM’s massive program of academic intervention and remediation specifically for “underrepresented minorities.”
• The median medical school GPA in the first two years was 2.50 for blacks, 3.00 for Hispanics, and 3.17 for Asians and for whites.
• The median medical school GPA for the third and fourth years is 3.29 for blacks, 3.50 for Hispanics, 3.50 for Asians, and 3.38 for whites.
• UMSM black enrollees perform considerably worse on the medical licensing exams than do their Hispanic, Asian, and white counterparts, again despite UMSM’s academic intervention and remediation for underrepresented minorities.
• More than a quarter of the black enrollees (7 out of 27) failed “Step 1” of the medical licensing exam on their first try. Two whites, one Hispanic, and no Asians failed. The median Step 1 score for black enrollees was roughly the same as that for Hispanics, but lower than that for 75 percent of Asian and white enrollees.
• About a quarter of the black enrollees (4 out of 15) taking “Step 2” of the medical licensing exam failed it on their first try. No student from another group failed.
• The four-year graduation rate for blacks was 68 percent. Blacks graduated at a higher rate than do Asians (63 percent), but at a much lower rate as compared with whites (82 percent). Hispanic graduation rates are not reported.

Increasing underrepresented minority (URM) admissions to medical schools has been a major project of the academic medical establishment for many years. The late Bernard D. Davis, Emeritus Professor at Harvard Medical School, recounts his firsthand experience of how Harvard began to award racial and ethnic preferences in admissions to medical school. Davis pointed out that, after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Harvard Medical School decided to admit a substantial number of black students who otherwise lacked the requisite qualifications. Not surprisingly, they performed poorly. Rather than abandoning preferences, Harvard Medical School chose to lower classroom standards. The decision was made with no open faculty debate. Departments were required to allow failing students to retake exams until everyone passed, letter grades were replaced by a pass/incomplete system (and, once a student had passed, he or she retained no trace of the incompletes), the number of required courses was reduced while the number of electives was substantially increased, passing scores on the national licensing exams were lowered, and one minority student was even allowed to graduate from Harvard after having failed the required medical licensing exam five times.

On June 25 2013 12:15 bugser wrote:

The reality is that very substandard unqualified people do get admitted under affirmative action. Not only are admittance standards lowered for them, the standards for graduation have consistently been lowered to accommodate them. It's scary to think these people actually end up practicing in their fields despite their subpar performance, and employers are obligated to hire them due to government mandated racial preferences.

There is absolutely no logical justification for racial discrimination. People should be admitted based on competence. The reason some people wouldn't be admitted without racial preferences is simply because they shouldn't be there.


http://www.ceousa.org/attachments/article/653/MDMED.pdf

On June 25 2013 10:02 S:klogW wrote:
Any updates on this case?

On June 25 2013 12:57 Signet wrote:

Yeah I was more interested in the philosophical than the practical

My philosophy is that we should try to take into account as many things as possible that can be fixed by their college (or whatever) going forward. So if, say, family income correlates highly with high school achievements, but when poor kids get into college they have similar success rates as rich kids, then economic factors should be taken into account. But if it were the case that, after getting into college, those poor kids performed roughly as badly as rich kids who had similarly low high school achievements (that is, they didn't do well), then it shouldn't be taken into account.

Using med school as a specific example, the goal should be to produce the best pool of physicians possible. Since it is almost surely the case that some of the people who would go on to become high-quality physicians were stuck in situations that artificially deflated their college resumes, it makes sense for med schools to try to adjust people's resumes to take this into account. On the other hand, while it isn't fair and sucks, it is true that a 22 year old who has had a life of advantages may not have been ideally more suited to become a physician than some other 22 year old who had a disadvantaged childhood, it is nevertheless the case that the first person might be so far ahead of the second by that point in their lives that he would go on to make a more effective doctor as a result of his cumulative years of advantaged upbringing.

If I had the power to do it, I'd have them do this via a massive applicant database creating a statistically sound model regressing actual future success against whatever relevant characteristics can be put on an application (including achievements/scores and socioeconomic/demographic). Since we now have several decades of affirmative action in admissions, we should have a large number of poor/minority/etc people getting preferenced admission... so, such a model would create a way to evaluate people that takes into account their disadvantages, but does so in a way that ensures that these are things which a preferenced admission would allow them to overcome.

Of course that is unfair because it means people's life outcomes are dependent on their starting conditions, but that is why we have social safety nets. Meritocracy is a good thing, but even if we were to achieve total meritocracy with minimal unfair influences, we still want less-productive people to have a decent life, right?

I also think we should seriously consider that the vast inequality of childhood experiences creates a horribly inefficient use of our nation's "human resources" that cannot be totally solved by applying adjustment measures later in life. There should be a much more urgent focus on creating a minimum standard for the developmental environment that our children grow up in. It would be a pretty crappy outcome if somebody's brain could have unlocked the cure for cancer, and he becomes a low-level worker as a result of a disadvantaged upbringing. (I realize this is politically unlikely in the near future.)


Very OT sorry...