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Comment by warner25 | Hacker News Reader

I think I'm mostly surprised to see how many of the "White" scores are so low, and so far behind "Asians," after years of hearing that the test is biased towards white / Anglo / native-English speakers raised in Western culture.

I'm also reminded that I (like probably most people commenting on Hacker News) exist in a really small bubble in which everyone I closely associate with was in the top two bands (after going off to college, being recruited from those colleges for careers, and ending up in the same neighborhoods...).

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Shitloads of whites come from disadvantaged backgrounds and have terrible lives. This is part of why one party is able to capitalize so well on lazy and loose rhetoric from the other about race and inequality. "The fuck I had unfair advantages! They want special treatment because their skin's a different color, they can go to hell! I'm voting for the other guy!" (this is not an endorsement of that attitude, but an explanation—and, confounding matters, you get similar reactions from people who did have advantages but are either deceiving themselves or are idiots)

There was an episode on New York Times - The Daily, I believe it was "(6/24/22) One Elite High School's Struggle Over Admissions", in which one side of the debate argued that the over-representation of Asian's was actually an instance of white supremacy.

And what arguments did they use to support this point?

You'll notice the same thing if you look at arrest rates for white men or the percentage of people killed by police who are white men. That demographic cohort is over-represented in both. Asian males and women of all races are under-represented. Not exactly the common wisdom despite the data being widely available.

I was surprised that Asians only make up 4.6% of the total students, where Whites are nearly 69%. I'm not sure that we can make too many observations about Asians when the sample is so low.

Might be interesting to see how those demographics compare in CA where Asians are 16.91% of the population. (https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/asian-popul...)

4.6% of a large number isn't low. There are 107,000 students in total. 4.6% would correspond to 5000.

That's still a lot of students.

Universities across American have been racially discriminating against Asians for decades. It's so bad that a case against Harvard has now been accepted by the Supreme Court (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...). There is a good chance that the case finally abolishes the longstanding practise of institutional racism against Asians, and any other race which might otherwise be granted admission in excess of their general population composition.

and any other race which might otherwise be granted admission in excess of their general population composition

Which seems to be, at least at Michigan according to the data submitted, only "mixed" kids. Which I would not have thought given how the narrative is generally pushed in this conversation. How could we have collectively missed that for so long? Or maybe it was only me who didn't realize how well kids in this "mixed" category seem to do relative their population percentage?

The test is biased toward people who study for it. Asian culture tends to demand more test prep so they do better.

calling this test biased is stupid. people who study hard score better. its the same with any test all over the world.

> after years of hearing that the test is biased towards white / Anglo / native-English speakers raised in Western culture.

Media bias/lies. It's similar for the GRE, many people coming in from China score extremely high on the English portion even though they do not speak English properly. I learned to stop listening to these divisive media outlets that have a clear agenda to tear down the fabric of society.

Is "divisive" really the most specific term, when only one group is targeted this way?

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