Tokyo medical school admits changing results to exclude women
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
1. Oxford University - extends exam times for women's benefit - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/02/01/oxford-univ...
2. Prof Bumps Female Students’ STEM Grades (Because They’re Women) - https://reason.com/archives/2018/05/23/prof-bumps-female-stu...
You might think A isn't as qualified as B. But it is known that inherent bias against A is very likely. So you might decide, even though I believe B to be more qualified, I will go with A, knowing that my judgement might be wrong, because of the likelihood of inherent bias.
In a way, yes, the known biases, can create a new bias. I bias against my known biases. This does mean that at an individual level, I favored someone else, when I initially wouldn't have. But does it result in better outcomes? I think this is where it matters. Let me explain.
If one is chosen and given opportunity over another. That choice is always going to be judgemental and opinionated. You're trying to predict who will make better use of the opportunity and contribute back the most for being given it.
But predictions, like in machine learning, show that a biased data set often perform poorly. So I think part of positive discrimination is to say, diversity could actually yield better results. Yet, because we don't have diverse data, we don't know for sure. But its still okay for the person who chooses to be of the opinion that it would. I find that no different then saying, well I felt they were more knowledgeable. All of it are intractable metrics in an attempt to predict outcome.
Edit: Some more thoughts related to fairness. Is it fair to give opportunity only to those who would maximise it? What if it was true, that there was a genetic quality, sex, or race, or a more specific one, like height, IQ, EQ, etc., which was the key variable to maximize the opportunity? Is it fair to say only they shall be given such opportunity, always? Or should we pick at random? Would that be more fair? Are there other scheme? What does it even mean to be fair? Your genetics aren't fair, should society be fairer then them? Clearly in the modern western world, we seem to define fairness as, whoever can maximize the opportunity the most, shall be given it. Aka, meritocracy. Is this best for our society though? If so, are we doing a good job at it? What if we try to do that, but instead have been giving opportunity to those who most resemble us? Not to those who can most maximise it? What then? Is that unfair?
Positive discrimination is like bombing a village known to harbor terrorists. Sure, you may kill some terrorists and drive the rest underground. You'll also radicalize a bunch of villagers. Suddenly ideas that used to be relegated to the lunatic fringe are going mainstream.
Sound anything like the US political situation in 2018?
Evidence and facts dont support the retaliatory bias position - retaliatory bias is currently too insignificant a force in comparison to previous systemic or societal biases.
Maybe if we lived in a highly equitable society in the first place, the position would make sense - the forces would be more relatively matched.
Currently, all things being equal - the systemic biases are far more significant and harmful to society as a whole.
Judging fairness by maximizing opportunity sounds a lot like the hypothetical counter-utilitarianism argument about harvesting YOU for organs thus saving more lives. Maximizing fairness to society instead of the individual is the basis of ideologies like communism and fascism.
There are numerous examples of how written exams are often biased against minorities due to either using cultural references/vocabulary or to frame problems using metaphors that more apply to an average white person than an average non-white person, so there’s that.
For example we had here in Sweden for a short time a program which gave bonus points for university student applications if the student would end being a minority in their class based on gender. The problem was that rather then seeing more women entering male dominated fields, it was more men who applied for seats in female dominated fields and thus ended up gaining the benefit of this program. It was then challenged by feminist groups as being discriminative which they won which then resulted in the program being scraped. A major issue is that on average the higher education here in Sweden in female dominated so any positive discrimination that is intended to countering inherent bias would primarily benefit men, unless those actions are applied explicitly to the minority of programs which is male dominated such as abstract math, IT, engineering and a few more. As such modern affirmative actions programs are much more selective in where it get applied.
Same issue applies to using affirmative action to counter gender segregation in the work sector. Both men and women have the same employment rate here in Sweden, and about 90% of men and women work in a profession which is gender segregated. Neither gender is more likely or less likely to be a minority or majority, which means that affirmative action in the hiring process would apply equally to both men and women. The only way to break the symmetry is to only apply affirmative action in places which the intended group is the minority and thus get the benefit, such as two current political initiative to get more women into sport management and management boards. By limit to only gender segregation in those areas they can be sure that only women will benefit from the initiative and political this seems to be a major success.
If we use data sets and machine learning to counter bias then it would likely work but it would also benefit both men and women. Political this is not acceptable. People claim that positive discrimination is to be used to countering inherent bias but the way it is actually used is all about political power and who can benefit from it.
It's worse than that.
What doctor would you go to, a white man, a black man, or a woman, if you knew that there's affirmative action for blacks/women, and you wanted (and could afford) the best doctor?
Mind you, picking white man isn't even racist, it's rational in the Bayesian framework (the white/male had to have better exam scores to be admitted to the school than blacks/women).
Only if you assume no inherent counter-bias, which is of course ridiculous. Without affirmative action, blacks/women would have to have equal exam scores coupled with adverse conditions (statistically, on average) to the white/male candidate. By that logic, they would need to perform much better on aggregate.
Anyway, my original question was about fairness :).
I guess the hope is that increased participation will slowly reduce the severity of adversity, but whether that is effective I'm less sure of (I don't really believe it will ever disappear completely tbh).
As for it being more rational to choose the person who contends with adversity on the assumption that the adversity never disappears (and therefore continues to impair), this only works on the assumption that affirmative action is a complete, perfect remedy to adversity: otherwise those contending with adversity must still overachieve to a certain degree to get the same positions (and therefore represent a potentially better rational choice).
Of course I wouldn't really, I'm just using your logic.
Although technically that's a different effect. Affirmative action is, AFAIK, meant to counter negative bias before (i.e. positive discrimination at university entry is meant to counter worse education and poverty at a primary- and high-school level), whereas you're talking about overcoming biases after graduation ("old boys network" etc).
Just philosophizing.
However, to take the bait and make an attempt at analysing it:
- (race/gender-based) adversity in education usually has the effect of reducing your chances of succeeding in exams, admissions, etc.
- (race/gender-based) adversity in professional practice usually has the effect of reducing your chances of acquiring customers, partners, progression within an organisation.
So while she may still face after admission, that adversity should have a much more significant affect on her paycheck than on her medical performance.
How would that work? If we talked about oral exams or job interview then surely there can be a bias. But written exams? I can't imagine how it would be affected by your race.
What can be however affected is your access to quality education prior to the admission, which will affect your admission changes, which should not be an issue after the admission because now you are getting the same quality education as others.
While I can imagine that socio-economic issues (like being black=poor) may affect your access to quality education prior to the admission, I can not imagine how being a woman would affect your access to quality education. Maybe stereotypes in case of STEM?
What is it with this obsession that every requires the best doctor? I don't want the best doctor, I want a good enough doctor who is close to my house location or I will stick to my current doctor because I had good experience with them. Once I stumble upon problems with that doctor I might reevaluate. Sometimes good is good enough, you don't always need the best of the best. My dentist is a woman, and not white. She's great. My doctor is a white male, he is also great. Skin or gender mean nothing to me in this context.
Being only willing to settle for the absolute best doctor in the world is ridiculous, but it is perfectly rational to want to choose the best one out of a small group of candidates. I can't imagine approaching it any other way when my personal health is on the line.
[1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medisch_tuchtcollege
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_van_Leeuwenhoekziekenhu...
Feeling safe is related to rapport with the person which is again related to ethnicity, gender, age, behavior, etc.
1. Seems like a legitimate choice on what a test is designed to measure. Exam times are the same for all students.
2. "Fortunately, the plan appears to have been vetoed." - so it didn't actually come to pass.
In this case extending the time because "female candidates might be more likely to be adversely affected by time pressure" negates the advantage people that can work under pressure have.
I'm curious how they're going to do this in real life when (unsurprisingly) they will be expected to work under pressure and it will highlight a big mismatch between academic and professional performance levels.
The pressures STEM employees face at work are usually very different from exam pressure, so I would lean towards "very little" as the answer to that question.
Everything about academic studies is an arbitrary "neutral point". The quantity of information for one topic, the difficultly of the exam, the time allotted.
It's exactly like saying that you don't actually need to show all that knowledge during the exam since Wolfram Alpha can do that for you. And in real life deadlines are no longer like an arbitrary exam time or even a standardized interview test. They're usually as tight as the best people on your team can afford. That becomes the "neutral point". And that's when it will matter that two people that previously looked equal start performing differently.
An exam tests you for a lot of things and they just lessened one. Which isn't in itself a necessarily bad thing if it didn't give ammo to every person claiming that men are better at STEM. Now their bias is backed by universities so good luck fighting it.
*Just highlighting again that this is discussing the "increased exam time" topic, not the "let's change results to exclude women" topic.
> It's exactly like saying that you don't actually need to show all that knowledge during the exam since Wolfram Alpha can do that for you.
I don't get how this is at all equivalent. Could you please clarify?
And I'm not even touching the situations where it could be a matter of life and death and you have to fix it now.
> I don't get how this is at all equivalent. Could you please clarify?
I was referring to this:
> The pressures STEM employees face at work are usually very different from exam pressure, so I would lean towards "very little" as the answer to that question.
Exams rely on a lot of memorizing which can easily be replaced by Google and WA and is not a reflection of how you will do real work so why test that "knowledge"? The pressure to properly allot time to every question and finish in the exam in time after providing all or most of the solutions is an ability to work under pressure perfectly equivalent to the one you feel doing a task at work. You can't replace the working under pressure skill with almost anything else.
You have to know if those future engineers can do it fast and well even under pressure. Lessening one burden is no different from lessening the other. And when you do it for the benefit of a single group it can't not feel like it's strengthening arguments that some people need help to get through STEM. That's the last thing women in STEM need, having to fight yet another prejudice.
A being a better sprinter than B neither means B can't work under pressure nor that B is the worse mid-distance runner. The same is true for mental tasks.
As an employer, "working under pressure" is not very high on my list of considerations. I would much rather have a complete picture of the candidate's ability to learn and retain information. Well-designed systems take months and months to build, I would prefer information about the candidate's general aptitude than their ability to work in crunch time.
If I was looking for employees for a job in which "working under pressure" was a central component, I would rather test for that in the interview process and have their university scores be uncompromised by pressure.
It's because academic performance is by design an average of skills displayed over multiple years. You can't fulfill the expectations of all employers at once with a standardized test. The degree (and the marks attached to it) just show the average performance per topic over the years. How fast you can finish your assignment is an integral part of any academic program. That's why you get tight(ish) deadlines for any assignment, and exam times.
By extending that time you can no longer make the difference between 2 people with good knowledge but different working under pressure skills. That's the difference between good and best.
I'm not saying the exams become irrelevant, just that this kind of thing does more to discredit the image of women in STEM than a slightly lower exam mark. This just strengthens preconceptions that some groups need help to be equal. And it's backed up by universities and whatever science they used to reach this conclusion.
> By extending that time you can no longer make the difference between 2 people with good knowledge but different working under pressure skills. That's the difference between good and best.
This is true, but if two students have the same score from elongated tests and one does not test well under pressure, it's straightforward to understand that one of the students would have performed better on a time pressure exam. However, consider:
Student A achieves 92% on a 1.75 hour exam but would have achieved 90% on a 1.5 hour exam. Student B achieves 94% on a 1.75 hour exam but would have achieved 88% on a 1.5 hour exam.
In a 1.5 hour exam, the clear conclusion is that student A is the better student. But is student A truly the better student in this scenario? The exam length is a rough estimate made by a university, and it seems like an arbitrary line to draw.
Allowing every student to have enough time to show the breadth of their knowledge on the subject material is not "helping" women. The same principle is applied to both men and women. It is an attempt to provide a level playing field and work towards meritocracy.[1]
Consider an exam on a technical subject that contains questions that are difficult to parse in English. Non-native English speakers have trouble parsing the questions which results in lower test scores. If I suggest that we simplify the language in order to accurately gauge the students knowledge of the subject, you may suggest that this is discrimination against native English speakers. This is undoubtedly true in the context, but it is an attempt to move towards a level playing field which tests knowledge of the subject, which is the entire point of the exercise. You can test for English proficiency separately, that is not the point of the exam.
[1] Contrast this with link 2 in the GP which is straightforward discrimination against men and was roundly rejected for that reason.
If they decided to lengthen times to better fit real world conditions, it is fair. If they went searching for 'fair' changes that could be made that would statistically boost one group over another, it isn't a fair change.
#2 is a completely misleading headline. It ... never happened. An article in which the 2nd paragraph contradicts the headline isn't written in good faith.
[*] I would also argue that extending exams so that each student has a reasonable amount of time to finish is not a bad practice. A student that gives a correct answer in the extra 15 minutes is no less knowledgeable than a student that gives the correct answer in the original allocated time. We are selecting for breadth and depth of knowledge, not speed of recitation or ability to perform under pressure. In a CS exam, you either know the answer or you do not. Extra time is not going to allow you to falsify your level of knowledge. It will, however, give slower workers the ability to fully complete the exam.
Students that work quickly but are less knowledgeable than their peers are the only ones that would be penalized by this change. Those students have inflated scores relative to their knowledge, therefore this penalization should be encouraged. In an untimed test, the most knowledgeable student will always get the highest test score, therefore knowledgeable students should not be opposed to increasing test times, they should encourage them.
This is simply not true. Consider an algorithm proof, with enough time you might be able to derive a proof that you should have known cold.
The real world does have deadlines & performance matters, and the women who spent the time studying should get the better grade
My argument comes from the perspective of the real world. It is, in effect, the same type of argument that drives the "interview questions on a whiteboard" discussion -- which qualities are actually important in an employee? As someone involved with hiring for a company that consistently produces high quality, critical code used in important systems, my experience is that "working under pressure" is pretty far down the list of important qualities.
I'm not saying the person that came to the proof with 30 mins extra is not smart, but they were not able to meet the same expectation as the other students.
If everyone gets a 50, the grades will scale, and your final grade will depend on how you performed compared to the rest
I've brute forced a few proofs, and if i had done so in overtime, i would 100% stand by my viewpoint that i deserve less points than the student next to me who met the expectation.
In an interview it's different too, because you have not been preparing for a clearly defined expectation for 3 months.
Now on the other hand, if you were to argue for completely untimed exams, i can get behind that. I really enjoyed some of my take home CS finals, and it really let me perfect my solution to the best of my ability.
It really depends on what expectation is set (imo)
Secondly: any school that has GPA is essentially holding a contest. Many job postings consider GPA and may use it as a tiebreaker between 2 canidates from school X. It's not a perfect metric by any means, but it is relevant in the world today for new hires.
Work in the real world is largely the ability to deliver on expectations.
In college, I did well on math exams precisely because I had a strong understanding of what I was doing. I did not mechanically follow a recipe for a solution like some other students did.
The result was that I usually took the entire exam period (right up to the last minute) to finish, but I usually had a perfect score or close to it. I outperformed high scorers who had completed the exam 30 mins before me by almost 10 points.
The only exam that got the best of me was the first linear algebra exam, which was a lot of mechanical matrix multiplying. I only completed 3/4 questions before the time was up.
Maybe it's just me, but I would wager that a student that can derive a proof is more likely to understand that proof than one who writes it from rote.
Perhaps that person also makes a habit of not preparing & just winging it (Which is fine until it's not)
The student who was most prepared would be able to derive proofs (by the process that was taught, like knowing to apply a theorom, or being comforatable with induction, etc) in a timely manner.
The exam is there to see how well you grasp the material taught, not how good at winging it you are (which is a very useful skill of course, but not the one being tested)
But some questions in the exam required us to apply some algorithms by hand. I knew how they worked and I could also do them by hand. Did it on whiteboard with toy problems while studying for it. But what I didn't really expected was how fast the time run with manual execution on paper.. Even for modest data sizes.
I thought that the algos really could be improved to be much faster by hand, refactor to optimize for different operation costs when doing by hand given the available tools in the exam, reducing operation costs by speeding up hotspot manual steps by training right into muscle memory and better memory alignment on paper for faster data lookups in the first place.
I probably could have finished that exam in time, but with a baaad score. So I just quit and gave them a blank paper with my name to try again next time.
I knew what the real problem was: time, and I had a plan how to prepare for it. It worked =)
What's the alternative, be forced to drop out of university once you fail an exam?
We wouldn't have been forced to drop out (at least not due to that exam in isolation), but the 0 would have been considered as part of our final grade for the course.
At my university the year was divided into three trimesters with exam periods at the end, and a fourth exam period at the end of summer holiday. Each exam period would have the exams of all the courses of the previous trimester and also exams of courses of the trimester before for people who still needed to pass that course. If you fail the exam twice, you have to try again when the exam is given again next year (or try to argue with the prof to get special arrangements, say if it's the only one you still need for your degree).
You don't know how common the reader thinks this is occurring, but you're implying its common. Given your sources are both debunked by another reader I'd appreciate a plethora of other sources.
Maybe you don't actually think that the issue in the Tokyo medical school was such a big deal after all?
But really Japan has to seriously put an effort to positively utilize the other half of their able worker pool. If they engaged and got similar participation rates as men, that could go a long way in expanding their economy.
Total paid on childcare is higher in a family without a stay at home patent, though the two earner family generally will have more net disposable income (After child-care)
If you begin to optimize social and political decisions on the basis of having more tax payers, you'll get weird results. For a second example, cutting reproductive education funding in schools will lead to more tax payers (though arguably tax payers who pay less, so then the question becomes are you optimizing for tax payers or for future taxable income in total).
Do you have a citation for this? One with "cutting funding" in it and not the generic comparison between Somalia and Germany.
Your primary fallacy here is that you think you can always "mince the meat back". You usually can't. It doesn't work that way.
Actually, it is a correlation between educated women having educated partners that know how to use contraceptive methods. Educate all men and women's education will be less relevant. Or stop any education of men, contraceptive methods will decline and fertility grow.
> Is this, in the long run, also good for the taxpayers?
It all depends. Is it good for "taxpayers" that humanity does not go extinct? Is taxes the only moral compass for our society?
Each time someone mentions a social advance for our society there is a big reaction against it because "costs money". Yes, it costs money, and it is money well spend in the citizens well being.
Is the legal system, schools, the police force, firefighters, etc good for taxpayers? Yes.
Does it costs money? Yes.
And that is why there is taxes. To pay for our needs.
Quality is more important than quantity. More educated people will produce better product and improve everyone's lives. Not saying that denying 50% of population a chance to live their lives as they want is plainly wrong and immoral.
Not everyone wants to have kids and family. Some will work, some will stay at home. Same goes for men btw.
Child care is subsidised heavily by other taxpayers, but only government childcare - get a grandparent round and there's no tax break. The tax system works hard to discriminate against single parent families too (two people with two kids on total £80k pay a marginal tax of 32%. One person on £55k pays marginal 60%)
The observation is that they will cling to worse opportunities, delay having children or avoid having them entirely.
See e.g. France vs. Italy.
But the real issue is the women were artificially denied an opportunity to decide by themselves.
Also, once you're in, you'll have to pick the kid before 6pm in most daycares which means you must leave the office at 5pm and since a lot of companies do not have flex time, that single hour will push you to a part-time position. Then the daycare will refuse to take your child if they have a fever of 36.8℃ and do regular temperature checks during the day and force you to drop your work and come pick the child straight away if they go above 36.8℃.
Unless you work close to home and have a very flexible and comprehending employer (or have grand parents close by and ready to help), even with a lucky spot in daycare it is extremely complicated to continue working.
Let's not even talk about elementary school where mandatory partake in time-consuming useless PTA activities basically assumes one of the parent does not work.
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/pregnancy-and-baby/how-to-take... says:
> A normal temperature in babies and children is about 36.4C (97.5F)
The temperature elevation that is considered "abnormal" depends upon the age of the child and the site of measurement. The temperature elevation that may prompt clinical investigation for infection depends upon the age of the child and the clinical circumstances (eg, immune deficiency, sickle cell disease, ill-appearance, etc); in most scenarios, the height of the fever is less important than other signs of serious illness (eg, irritability, meningismus) [35-38].
●In the otherwise healthy neonate (0 to 28 to 30 days of age) and young infant (one to three months of age), fever of concern generally is defined by rectal temperature ≥38.0°C (100.4°F). (See "Febrile infant (younger than 90 days of age): Definition of fever", section on 'Definition of fever'.)
●In children 3 to 36 months, fever generally is defined by rectal temperatures ranging from ≥38.0 to 39.0°C (100.4 to 102.2°F) and fever of concern by rectal temperatures ≥39.0°C (102.2°F) if there is no focus of infection on examination. (See "Fever without a source in children 3 to 36 months of age", section on 'Fever of concern'.)
●In older children and adults, fever may be defined by oral temperatures ranging from ≥37.8 to 39.4°C (100.0 to 103.0°F) and fever of concern by oral temperatures ≥39.5°C (103.1°F).
Oral thermometers average one half of a degree Celsius lower than rectal.
The above is pretty much straight out of UTD, as I am far too lazy to retype it for anyone’s benefit.
OTOH I'd guess that low natality in Japan has other factors, as other comments pointed, even for men: long, long hours of work, living in a cage called "apartment", probably no leeway in the work to handle domestic problems (yes, even living under the most conservative marriage arrangement possible, there will be domestic emergencies all the time, where a man needs to step in).
Firstly, this is a small and modestly exclusive institution. So much so that it could hardly be a causal factor in motivating women to decline to have children in preference to their career. Simply declining to let qualified women be doctors to make room for privileged rich sons is a repugnant insult to human intelligence, and should be viewed as the sexist attitude it is.
Secondly, if the "force women to stay at home by disadvantaging them in the workplace" were such a great strategy, Japan wouldn't have a declining birthrate because until very recently (and ongoing, to a marginally lesser degree) this is the case.
(BTW, the previous HN discussion referenced above is definitely worth referencing if a reader wants a more wide-ranging discussion.)
Making employment easier for women is clearly not related to birth rate. It seems to be inversely correlated with first world living status and education more than anything.
> It seems to be inversely correlated with first world living status and education more than anything.
Well, at least for Germany I can provide some anecdata: either you're on welfare and have the state fund your life including kids or you're rich. The middle class and especially the young (20-30y) population in the major cities simply often cannot afford kids, not with the exploded rents and the trend to unpaid (!) internships, year-limited contracts, "gig work" and other things making my generation's life a living hell. I'm 27 and lucky to have landed an unlimited employment contract. The whole situation reminds me more and more of the setting of Idiocracy, and that without the US president in that movie being obviously inspirational for the current real world one.
In addition the young population that fled the rural areas (due to e.g. job availability, the lack of public transport, any form of Internet faster than ISDN, ...) but left their parents/grandparents behind cannot rely on them to help with bringing up a child, further lowering the birth rate.
For Italy, the situation is even worse - depending on the source and demographic target, up to 70-80% of young people still live with their parents because they cannot afford their own home (https://www.thelocal.it/20161024/two-thirds-of-italian-mille...). Hard enough to... uh, get going with your partner when your parents are next room, much less actually wanting to raise a child.
1. Newer generation's extended adolescence
2. More selfish attitude (selfish with time and more materialistic than previous generations)
3. Lowered sperm count because of WIFI, Cell phones and ingesting large quantities of plastics and other chemicals, both from the goods imported from china and the pollutants in the air soil and water largely also from China.
4. High housing costs which are primarily caused by women now commonly working. A two income household can afford to pay much more for a home than the traditional one. So prices have risen to what people can commonly now afford (a sad affect of women giving up raising their own children, to essentially make nothing monetarily, but achieve a power that commonly splits their family apart from the resulting power struggle combined with the lack of co-dependence which traditionally incentivized parents to work through their problems at home, and consequently grow into better people with a satisfying relationship).
5. Kids used to mean status for women (and for men). Now it means you are a failure because you don't have a college degree and a career (very sad since raising a child to be a great person is actually the most important career that could ever exist. We are seeing the devastating affects in today's kids and young adults when child care programs raise kids).
[1]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10216510/The-...
Really? I don't recall seeing any hand sewn backpacks in Japan- only commercially manufactured ones- but I wasn't looking that closely- so I am wondering if you have a citation for this interesting bit?
Regarding policy - of course the size of the class should instead be expanded to accommodate all who meet the bar, but unfortunately Japan also has issues with institutional rigidity and artificial licensure restrictions.
Once there is demand for education you can't roll it back by not delivering.
Moreover you can't fix anything by cheating on people and/or making their lives miserable. That's putting oneself in a very bad position indeed.
It sounds more and more of a bad joke. In Russia, you cheat on exams for University, but in Japan, University cheats on exams for you.
I would be interested in seeing the opposite examples where screwing people over fixed their birth rates (and introduced pink unicorns) but I'm pretty confident there will not be any.
The only difference is that in this specific case, they decided to use a clear different required test score in order to apply the unfair advantage at selection.
In most other places, specifically in the US they use soft, improvable information (such as an "essay") to cover their base and make it non-obvious that the selection process is unfair. The most famous case would be the Asian discrimination case at Harvard, weirdly everyone is mostly ok with that one
In 2010, before the measure was allegedly introduced, female student participation was about 40%.
The newspaper reported that after the two-round application process earlier this year, only 30 female applicants were accepted to study, versus 141 men.
That may be the intent, but in practice it also hurts certain underrepresented groups. For example, among all Asians, if you break down the demographic further by nationality, you'll find some groups strongly over represented and other groups strongly underrepresented. Affirmative actions applied to Asians as a whole hurts the groups which are already underrepresented, and while it hurts Asians in general compared to all other demographics, it helps over represented Asians compared to underrepresented Asians.
[0] https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/11-01-2018/sfr247-higher-educati...
This forum itself never fails to remind MacDonald and Wallmart workers of their status. Status has always been a central facet of every society. Even a cursory scratch beneath the surface will reveal the rigid class consciousness and status hierarchies in every society.
"We invited you in with your lower score because we recognize it is more difficult for you to achieve that score, and as such are more likely to succeed" versus "We didn't like how smart we were so we lied to you about passing the exam to hide the fact that we're biasing entry standards."
Biasing entry standards is a thing that may or may not make sense. For public and public-funded institutions, transparency and honesty are absolutely essential.
This seems like a generous description of affirmative action given it punishes asian students and examples of demographics that benefit underperforming once accepted.
One of the key criteria for performance today is "grit", which is an evolution over the previous performance indicators such as education/SAT scores (which had poor long term correlation).
The assumption that they will underperform is unsubstantiated.
Especially considering - all/most Asian American/SE Asian kids go through the ringer to prepare them from the word go, to get into a prestigious school. (Do note - that if they dont get into their first choice college, they will get into their equally good backup schools.)
As the dean of Harvard said - he could fill his class with Valedictorians (and probably have many more to spare).
Academic achievement is not the main criteria for admissions - and at least in an american system it shouldn't be.
----
Living in a world where Academics decide everything, you can easily see the kind of damage it does to daily life.
Societal worth, marriage prospects depend on what is said on that Degree - even if you are terrible at solving real world problems or have 0 motivation to actually work in your field.
Instead it should be the color of your skin?
That they will underperform is not unsubstantiated in cases like black law students.
The same is true, by the way, of folks with extremely religious anti-science backgrounds (like me!).
Either way, graduation standards don't change.
>which is what studies show
Which studies? Graduation standards have changed for all races, in undergraduate institutions grade inflation is rampant and hard curves or class ranks are relics. The performance of the student body and specific demographics is increasingly muddled. In premier law schools affirmative action demographics continue to underperform, as well as have lower LSAT scores which strongly predicts probability of passing the bar.
No. And this, "If anything I am an asian supremcist" angle is so dated, so boring, and so tedious I'm not going to entertain you further. Everyone can see what you're doing. Go debate a 6 year old youtube video rather than waste an instant more of 2018's time.
Folks are acutely aware that Asian immigration in the US only allowed extremely rich and overqualified immigrants until relatively recently, and that economic disparity is clearly reflected in many social scales. We're also acutely aware of many eugenicists using "well asian people are just genetically and culturally better" as a blind in America for their racial oppression for years. That history is well-documented.
>Folks are acutely aware that Asian immigration in the US only allowed extremely rich and overqualified immigrants until relatively recently
18th century Chinese laborers are rich and overqualified? Why say "no", whites don't have it harder than asians, then 180 and state that asian americans are all drawn from some privileged group. I'm not a eugenicist I'm just surprised by how easily affirmative actions proponents cast aside asian american concerns and commonly stereotype them as soulless grade grinders with "Tiger Moms" etc.
For folks who don't know (hnaccy almost certainly does because this is the standard rebuttal to this lousy argument): Because the Chinese Exclusion Act was a real thing, the total combined Asian American population between the 8th census and the 1965 Immigration & Naturalization Act never exceeded 500,000 nationally, and that's adding a healthy margin of error. The recruited labor force was minuscule and not a significant contributor to today's booming population of over 20m.
It wasn't until after substantial immigration changes (oh, and federally guaranteeing non-whites could own property) that more folks were allowed in, and so we've had a relatively tiny fraction of US history where immigration was possible and desirable (who's gonna immigrate if you're legally forbidden to own a business or a home because of your skin color?). Folks moving in initially were folks who were rich and capable of going to a country with only minimal resources and support structures. The first year after the I&NA came about, the Asian population in America surged by over 200% and has grown at a healthy clip since then, dramatically skewing the characteristics of the population's wealth distribution.
So yeah, there's a substantial bias in Asian immigration, which has had a lot less time to give people with less means (a reliable predictor of maximum academic performance). We'd expect to see this in the data if economic resources enable academic performance, which we can point to multiple obvious mechanisms of. hnaccy's argument only makes sense if you believe there is some essential quality to Asian and White genetics that, in isolation of every other factor, reliably makes them "smarter" than black or brown people. Even a casual knowledge of genetics and epigenetics suggests that this is at best radically implausible at worst an outright lie dating back to 1930s propaganda trying to co-opt science for political gain.
I believe my confusion stems from you answering no to my question
>So you believe that white americans start from a harder place than asian americans?
When it sounds like you do believe asian Americans start in a better place due to historical immigration policies and trends.
I agree. However, you went a step further and started suggesting a biological essentialism and history erasure. If you simply didn't know you were doing that then admit your opinion is ahistorical and go research the subject.
I think you're are now walking this statement back because it was such a weak point. I'm going to take screenshots in case you attempt to abuse editing.
> When it sounds like you do believe asian Americans start in a better place due to historical immigration policies and trends.
Please see Dr. Eugenia Cheng's 2017 talk "Category Theory in the Real World" for a primer in how to interpret this. There are multiple axis of privilege. Interestingly enough, admissions standards often address these axis by also considering family income and other historical details like presence or loss of family members.
The existence of affirmative action for specific groups does not create a zero sum exercise for white Americans, who also have access to a larger number of economic and social criterion for admissions and financial aid.
Where?
The existence of affirmative action for specific groups necessarily disadvantages other groups based on their race.
Why?
Ultimately we're asking for what proportion of applicants WERE qualified but denied because they didn't have a "spot", the total admissions volumes, and what that intersection is. What's more, most students apply to multiple colleges and only a few have specific environments that are specifically necessary (you might argue, for example Stanford's connection with the startup world makes it especially desirable, but look at what a untalented failure Lucas Duplan is... maybe not...), it simply changes outcomes in a way that isn't particularly disadvantaging.
Personally and in an unsubstantiated musing: I believe that the actual case where a student "doesn't get in to college because of their race" is astonishingly rare. The US has a large enough population that the law of large numbers surely makes a few, and that's one of many reasons I've dedicated my career to providing education for as long as I stay in the field.
But your argument seems to carry this unspoken corollary that there aren't resources for white folks or men, but that's something that seems to follow from what evidence I've found. I've found a few sources that suggest white people get about 60% of the private scholarship funding in the US.
>For example, Dr. Card’s simulations show that if Harvard had not considered race, the proportion of African-American students in the Class of 2019 would have dropped from 14% to 6%, and the proportion of Hispanic or Other students would have dropped from 14% to 9%.
It follows that there was a group of applications numbering 13% of the Class of 2019 who were disadvantaged due to their race.
Yes it's probably quite rare that a student is rejected at say HYP and does not get into any other college but I don't see why that matters? We accept that there is a benefit to attending certain schools over others why should it depend on your race whether or not you "deserve" your first choice or should be happy with second or third choice college?
>But your argument seems to carry this unspoken corollary that there aren't resources for white folks or men
You're inferring that.
Because the opposite case, where the economic destiny of folks from previously disadvantaged-in-America ethnic minorities is real and more common. If you're looking for a justification, more good than harm.
That in itself is reasonable. The fact that the key criteria where Asian students had low performance was on the scores from interviews with admissions officers, but their scores on interviews with Harvard alumni were just fine is a pretty damning indicator that Harvard was specifically excluding them because of race and not because of their non-academic qualifications.
But if you think publicly funded colleges should have 100% transparent admission standards, I'm behind you all the way. They should!
What bullshit. Accepting someone underqualified means rejecting someone perfectly qualified, by definition.
> But if you think publicly funded colleges should have 100% transparent admission standards
I think all colleges should have transparent standards. Publicly funded ones should have fair and non-racist transparent standards.
Ah yes, because college admission caps are not at all arbitrary and never change.
> Publicly funded ones should have fair and non-racist transparent standards.
Careful there with your language. Racism is an institutional proposition, discrimination is an individual one. So long as "white" (whatever that means) Americans hold the majority of political and economic power in America, the conditions for "racism" don't exist except in the most degenerate dictionary sense of the word.
E.g. "I made something nicer for you" vs. "I made something worse for you". Of course the second is the negative, dishonest one.
Both are equally dishonest.
> "We invited you in with your lower score because we recognize it is more difficult for you to achieve that score, and as such are more likely to succeed" versus "We didn't like how smart we were so we lied to you about passing the exam to hide the fact that we're biasing entry standards."
That's just rationalizations to justify your bias. The japanese made similar rationalizations. Female candidates are likely to get pregnant and society is better off with females getting pregnant because japan has a low birth-rate problem.
Their justification is just as "good" as yours. Both are discriminatory and evil.
Not absolute mark. Just the same standards.
> If you are looking at ability to apply oneself as being the criteria you have to examine a lot more.
Which is fine with me as long as the same criteria is applied equally.
Equal being the key here.
An effort is being made to provide opportunity to those with less access to it, but painting affirmative action as a free ride is a malicious category error that needs no debunking, it's simply a garbage argument that involves talking as fast as possible and hoping no one notices.
What? Who is talking about graduation criteria?
> An effort is being made to provide opportunity to those with less access to it
That's fine, as long as the criteria is the same.
> but painting affirmative action as a free ride is a malicious category error that needs no debunking
That's called straw man. I said it is discrimination. This is called fact.
> simply a garbage argument that involves talking as fast as possible and hoping no one notices.
As far as I can tell, you are the one talking as fast as possible and hoping no one notices. This is something called projection.
I'm making fairly straightforward assertions. Discrimination is wrong. Simple as that. The japanese shouldn't discriminate against women. We shouldn't discriminate against asians and whites.
Then why is it okay to have admisisons standards at all? Don't they inherently discriminate amongst people in such a way as to favor rich people who can afford to give their child the necessary nutrition, time and stability to perform all the rituals that college campuses look for?
> We shouldn't discriminate against asians and whites.
We also have to undo the generation's of economic and social harm principle perpetrated by white people against other ethnic minorities in the US. You can't simply wave away the US's obligations.
I do agree that Asian Americans face a lot of issues in the US and it's unfair how they're treated as a managed ethnic minority that schools like Harvard can keep in a separate managed bucket.
Because we want the best and brightest attending these universities? People most capable of actually performing and graduating? Is this a serious question?
> Don't they inherently discriminate amongst people in such a way as to favor rich people who can afford to give their child the necessary nutrition, time and stability to perform all the rituals that college campuses look for?
No. No more than the NBA discriminates.
> We also have to undo the generation's of economic and social harm principle perpetrated by white people against other ethnic minorities in the US.
We have. It's called evening the playing field by ending discrimination. Punishing asians ( who haven't done anything ) or young white students ( who haven't done anything ) is the definition of evil.
> You can't simply wave away the US's obligations.
Once again, we have. It's called ending discrimination.
> I do agree that Asian Americans face a lot of issues in the US and it's unfair how they're treated as a managed ethnic minority that schools like Harvard can keep in a separate managed bucket.
Yes. Discrimination is evil. I'm glad we are agreed. Using your logic, in 20 years, are we going to have to discriminate against blacks to make up for the discrimination against asians/whites today? The neverending cycle of discrimination?
The condescending affirmative action ideology is a new form of "supremacy". The idea that minorities are incapable of overcoming and need "help" is another form of white supremacy. Only this time, it's leftist faction looking down on minorities for social cred.
Discrimination is wrong. Simple as that. You don't achieve equality by removing hurdles from one group of people and putting them in front of another group of people. That's illogical and it's wrong. No amount of rationalization is going to make it right.
This is a value judgement, and a tedious one at that. You cannot compel women in a free society to have children to meet your expectations. If you want to encourage women to have children, you need to create an environment where it is equitable for them to do so without being unduly penalized.
Again: if your approach worked then Japan would not have a birthrate decline. This is, and has been, already their stance. Women are effectively removed from the workforce upon pregnancy. They are declining that proposition because it's unfair, and society COULD structure to redress that.
Yes. Discrimination is a value judgment and tedious one at that. We are agreed. Not sure why you support discrimination though.
> If you want to encourage women to have children, you need to create an environment where it is equitable for them to do so without being unduly penalized.
Actually, we already know that "equitable" society leads to lower birth rates. The more equal the society, the lower the birth rates.
> Again: if your approach worked then Japan would not have a birthrate decline.
You missed my point. It's not my approach. It's japan's approach. And I'm against that.
If you had paid attention, you'd realize that I am against discrimination, no matter what the ends. I don't believe the ends justify the means.
I just offered japan's rationale for discriminating against women, just like you offered your rationale against discriminating against people in the US.
I think all people should be treated fairly.
Pray, tell us more about the difference between subtracting points from someone for their identity, versus giving extra points to someone for their identity?
But that's not what admissions processes do. They say, "Here is the criterion for folks with consideration to their ethnic minority." All the research I've done does not suggest there is a single score folks are adding and subtracting to.
In the case of the article, they didn't say, "Sorry your womb makes you ineligible" they actually graded the tests with a penalty attached. They "changed the results" of the entrance exams.
> Pray, tell
Prithee sir, read with care. I hope thy question was answered. Fie, sir, fie! For this craven fear of loss and refusal to harken to the scope of history holds back your potential.
I'm a moderate liberal, and even I can see that this smacks of what conservatives accuse the left of doing.