Some good from Affirmative Action?


Fether
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Been listening to the book David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell. In it he talks about how the bottom 25% of students in top schools, despite being more intelligent, do worst and drop out more often than the top students at low level schools. The reason being is the psychological effect of feeling average or being the worst in the room is too much for most people to deal with. So a tactic high level schools use is they admit athletes and other less intelligent people with excellent extra curricular talents to act as academical canon fodder for those there purely for the degree.

I suspect this is inadvertently happening with schools everywhere due to affirmative action. Admitting a bunch of unqualified students on the basis of race helps the qualified students succeed as their competition is on a drastically lower level than them.

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4 minutes ago, Fether said:

Been listening to the book David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell. In it he talks about how the bottom 25% of students in top schools, despite being more intelligent, do worst and drop out more often than the top students at low level schools. The reason being is the psychological effect of feeling average or being the worst in the room is too much for most people to deal with. So a tactic high level schools use is they admit athletes and other less intelligent people with excellent extra curricular talents to act as academical canon fodder for those there purely for the degree.

I suspect this is inadvertently happening with schools everywhere due to affirmative action. Admitting a bunch of unqualified students on the basis of race helps the qualified students succeed as their competition is on a drastically lower level than them.

I can see how such statistics can exist.  But even so, how did he come to the conclusion that he did? I realize I'm saying this out of ignorance.  That is why it is a question rather than a statement of judgment.

Without knowing all the data, my initial inclination is to believe this would only be true for a small percentage of the students.  If one is qualified and intelligent enough to grasp the material, they are capable of succeeding.  It MAY be that "top schools" simply have more demanding curricula.  Therefore, even the more intelligent student can find themselves wanting.  But I'd think that only a small number of them have such egos that they are willing to drop out if they're not in the top of their class.

And I also wonder at the condition that these bottom 25% of students of top schools are somehow magically more intelligent than the top students of lower level schools.  Too many moving parts and too many variables to see if this claim can accurately be measured.

Meanwhile, we have the Spartan myth of killing all babies that are not perfect.  And we have the legend of Thermopylae as the result.

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1 hour ago, Carborendum said:

I can see how such statistics can exist.  But even so, how did he come to the conclusion that he did? I realize I'm saying this out of ignorance.  That is why it is a question rather than a statement of judgment.

Without knowing all the data, my initial inclination is to believe this would only be true for a small percentage of the students.  If one is qualified and intelligent enough to grasp the material, they are capable of succeeding.  It MAY be that "top schools" simply have more demanding curricula.  Therefore, even the more intelligent student can find themselves wanting.  But I'd think that only a small number of them have such egos that they are willing to drop out if they're not in the top of their class.

And I also wonder at the condition that these bottom 25% of students of top schools are somehow magically more intelligent than the top students of lower level schools.  Too many moving parts and too many variables to see if this claim can accurately be measured.

Meanwhile, we have the Spartan myth of killing all babies that are not perfect.  And we have the legend of Thermopylae as the result.

I'll add some more context. It is an hour long chapter on my audio book, but I'll do my best. And admittedly, as I listen to the chapter again, he doesn't mention the rigorous nature of the school as being the reason people drop out, but he does offer a lot of other insights that back the find/claim.

 

- Harvard has been believing this way since the 1960s. They  specifically admit high level athletes with minimal intelligence needed to enter the school purely because those students have enough success outside the classroom that they won't become overwhelmed with the stress of keeping up with their peers. They then become the bottom 25% so that the truly intelligent students don't feel worthless when they only score a 90% on a test. There will always be a bottom 25% and so they make sure the bottom 25% are people that succeed elsewhere in life.

 

- There were two interviews in the book, one with a student that went to Brown, and the other that want to Harvard. Both Were extremely bright, one of which had enough credits for a bachelor's degree by the time he graduated high school. They both went to school and ended up switching to an easier major. Both said they did it cause they weren't able to keep up with the other students. One even said she would still be in science (original major) had she gone to an easier school. Had you compared her test scores to every other student in the nation in the same course, she would have been in the 95th percentile.

 

- In academic economics, there are economic journals that everyone reads and respects. Journals are accepted based on content and creativity. When you compare "big fish in little ponds" (smart kids at small colleges) and "little fish in big ponds" (average students at top colleges), the top students at the small schools were almost always better at producing journals than good students at the best schools.

The 99% percentile of Harvard and MIT students produced over 4 articles in the first 6 years of their academic career journals while the top 50%. at the 80% percentile they average LESS than 1 paper over the 6 years. at the 55% who are brilliant enough to make it into Harvard will not produce a single paper.

At mediocre schools (non top 30), the very best students (I believe he said top 90%) at the non-top 30 schools produce 1.5 journals on average each.

 

 

Concerning your question about the worst students at high level schools being smarter than top students at low level schools, this likely isn't the same everywhere, but the top 1/3 math SAT scores at Hartwick University were 500 and the worst 1/3 SAT Scores at Harvard with 580. 

 

All in all... It makes perfect sense to me. It is human nature to compare yourself and base your worth off of how everyone else is doing. People hate being the worst in class more than they enjoy being the best in the world.

 

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Meanwhile, we have the Spartan myth of killing all babies that are not perfect.  And we have the legend of Thermopylae as the result.

This isn't a matter of killing imperfect babies, it is a matter of adding disabled babies so that the less than perfect babies have a higher self image and succeed more.

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15 minutes ago, Fether said:

All in all... It makes perfect sense to me. It is human nature to compare yourself and base your worth off of how everyone else is doing. People hate being the worst in class more than they enjoy being the best in the world.

It makes absolute zero sense to me.  In elite places, if you are so mentally weak such that being in the low 25% of elitism makes you go bonkers, you don't deserve to be counted as a member of that elite group.

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26 minutes ago, Fether said:

All in all... It makes perfect sense to me. It is human nature to compare yourself and base your worth off of how everyone else is doing. People hate being the worst in class more than they enjoy being the best in the world.

I agree, it makes sense to me too.  But that doesn't necessarily make it accurate.  For each of the points you just made, I can come up with other explanations that are just as plausible.  I summarized most of them.  And everything you posted is also supported by these other interpretations.

Now, one glaring inconsistency I saw was that the original comparison was the top 25% to the bottom 25%.  But the SAT scores you provided were 1/3 rather than 1/4.  That can skew the numbers quite a bit.

The one student you mentioned would have been in the 95th percentile across the nation.  But the top students in "lesser schools" would be a bit higher than that.  And can you compare with people who did not take the SAT, but took the ACT instead?

And what does that have to do with intelligence?  It means they can do well on those particular tests -- on the day they took the tests.  I got a slightly above average score on the SAT* but a 99th percentile on the ACT**.  Because I went to BYU, I didn't need the SAT, so I didn't bother studying for it or learning the strategies for that particular test.

It really is difficult to compare when there are so many moving parts.

26 minutes ago, Fether said:

This isn't a matter of killing imperfect babies, it is a matter of adding disabled babies so that the less than perfect babies have a higher self image and succeed more.

Now, back to the original point about this being analogous to affirmative action:

If we assume the premise is valid (and it may be, I'm just not 100% convinced) then it would not apply to real world economics.  Here is a grossly simplified take on it.

  • Schools succeed by getting the maximum number of capable students to graduation.
  • Businesses succeed by using the fewest resources possible to output the highest quantity and quality of product.

For schools to succeed, they can very well take less qualified students (academically) to achieve their goal with minimal down-side.  Businesses cannot support less qualified people without hurting the business.  

Schools are not really subject to negative effects of the ups and downs of the economy.  Businesses have to be able to cut off dead weight whenever and wherever they can.  In today's world, they can only get away with it during a down economy.

Schools don't give lower grades to qualified students because they less academic students are in the same classes.  Businesses have to cut salaries of more qualified employees in order to carry less qualified individuals.

 

*I don't remember my SAT scores exactly.  But they met with the minimum requirements for the Air Force Academy.

**They did ACT scores differently in my generation.  So, they don't carry over to compare to today's numbers.  But I nearly maxed out all the categories.

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1 hour ago, Carborendum said:

And can you compare with people who did not take the SAT, but took the ACT instead?

So my son is gonna be in senior year come September... this is my 2nd son and I still haven't figured out what's the difference between the 2 and why there are 2 of them....

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19 minutes ago, anatess2 said:

So my son is gonna be in senior year come September... this is my 2nd son and I still haven't figured out what's the difference between the 2 and why there are 2 of them....

They are the two standardized tests for high schoolers to take in order to provide standardized results to colleges.

The ACT is more like a common test (like the Scott-Foresman test).  It covers a variety of topics.  Answers are multiple choice (although, they added an essay portion since I took it).

The SAT only has two topics Verbal & Math.  But they tend to cover many topics forced into those categories.  The great weakness (or strength depending on how you look at it) of the Verbal section is that is that it relies so heavily on 

  • Vocabulary
  • Specific rules of syntax

Many well educated students who did very well in their classes don't do so well in the vocabulary section because they were simply never taught.  This is mainly a weed-out mechanism because they do tend to be taught in private schools.

The specific rules of syntax is unfortunate because when I was in high school there were a half-dozen standards that I was even aware of.  And I was only familiar with two of them.  So, again, if you happened to be taught a different set of rules, you'll fail.

If you take a specific SAT prep class, you will do better.  But the person who was raised in a private school where they taught these specific things will have a much easier time of it.

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4 hours ago, Carborendum said:

The ACT is more like a common test (like the Scott-Foresman test).  It covers a variety of topics.  Answers are multiple choice (although, they added an essay portion since I took it).

The SAT only has two topics Verbal & Math.

I remembered the SAT as having added an essay section in the mid-2000s.

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14 hours ago, Fether said:

I suspect this is inadvertently happening with schools everywhere due to affirmative action. Admitting a bunch of unqualified students on the basis of race helps the qualified students succeed as their competition is on a drastically lower level than them.

Thomas Sowell has been talking about this for decades.

 

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21 hours ago, Carborendum said:

They are the two standardized tests for high schoolers to take in order to provide standardized results to colleges.

The ACT is more like a common test (like the Scott-Foresman test).  It covers a variety of topics.  Answers are multiple choice (although, they added an essay portion since I took it).

The SAT only has two topics Verbal & Math.  But they tend to cover many topics forced into those categories.  The great weakness (or strength depending on how you look at it) of the Verbal section is that is that it relies so heavily on 

  • Vocabulary
  • Specific rules of syntax

Many well educated students who did very well in their classes don't do so well in the vocabulary section because they were simply never taught.  This is mainly a weed-out mechanism because they do tend to be taught in private schools.

The specific rules of syntax is unfortunate because when I was in high school there were a half-dozen standards that I was even aware of.  And I was only familiar with two of them.  So, again, if you happened to be taught a different set of rules, you'll fail.

If you take a specific SAT prep class, you will do better.  But the person who was raised in a private school where they taught these specific things will have a much easier time of it.

Is there an advantage in the college application between one or the other?  Or do you think taking both is best?  Or is this basically depending on which college you apply to and their specific admissions process?  The last year, my son has been flip-flopping on what major he's going for so we don't know what school he'll be going to.  And, unlike his brother, he usually scores lower on tests than his knowledge base.  That's why his math grades are horrendous.  He knows the subject matter, he understands how to solve the problem... but when it comes to testing, he always somehow messes up a negative or some small detail stuff like that.

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10 minutes ago, anatess2 said:

Is there an advantage in the college application between one or the other?  Or do you think taking both is best?  Or is this basically depending on which college you apply to and their specific admissions process?  The last year, my son has been flip-flopping on what major he's going for so we don't know what school he'll be going to.  And, unlike his brother, he usually scores lower on tests than his knowledge base.  That's why his math grades are horrendous.  He knows the subject matter, he understands how to solve the problem... but when it comes to testing, he always somehow messes up a negative or some small detail stuff like that.

Some schools only take one or the other.  Some schools accept either.  That's the only thing that is different.

Because my finances were low, I knew I could only afford a few schools.  So, I only applied to a few.  All of the accepted the ACT.  Some accepted either one.

I did well on the ACT and not so well on the SAT.  So, in all my applications, I sent the results of the ACT.  And they were fine.  The one exception was the Air Force Academy.  They REQUIRED both scores be sent.  So, I sent the SAT as well.

In my interview with their recruiters, one of them asked about the disparity in my scores.  I said I didn't know.  But I pointed out that I met the minimum score requirement and I was very high in the ACT, so I didn't know what he was getting at.  He said he recognized that I passed.  But when there is a disparity like that, there's usually something up with that.

At the time, I didn't know why.  But looking back, I realized that it was the format and subject matter of the test.  The ACT is such that if you simply pay attention in class and learn the stuff that is normally learned, you'll do well on the test.  But the SAT has subject matter and a format that requires you specifically prepare for the test.  And I simply didn't do that.

One quirk worth pointing out is that on other tests, you can make a guess without penalty.  But on the SAT, if you guess wrong, you don't just NOT get the point for the test.  You are actually docked 1/4 point for guessing wrong in addition to not getting the point in the first place.  So, they expect you to leave it blank if you don't know.

FWIW, I specifically did NOT want to take the SAT because I knew I had done well on the ACT.  And all my schools would accept it.  But my mother insisted that it would be better if I did.  Turned out she was wrong.

Unless the school you're applying for specifically requires it, I wouldn't bother.

Edited by Carborendum
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