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Comment by ekam | Hacker News Reader

I just saw the stats from a medical school— I believe it was UCSF but correct me if I’m wrong— where the average Asian reject had higher scores than the average Black/Hispanic accepted applicant

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An asian applicant scoring 25 on the MCAT has a 6% acceptance rate.

A black applicant scoring 25 on the MCAT has a 56% acceptance rate.

As a medical school dropout, scoring 33S... I had a hard time accepting this.

> I just saw the stats from a medical school— I believe it was UCSF but correct me if I’m wrong—

Given that affirmative action was banned at UC schools in 1996, I suspect that you're mistaken about at least the school in question.

Which, it should be noted, means that we've accrued ~25 years of data about the results of such a ban. And the answer is that it's bad: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-31/californ...

Affirmative action was banned across California and the article you cited itself says that the problem is only with UCs and not CSUs. The reasons proposed (distance, costs, number of UCs vs CSUs) intuitively ring true to me. Today's decision is obviously correct from a legal standpoint (equal protection clause bans all race-based discrimination) but the difference between CSUs and UCs actually suggests a positive path forward for helping boost Black and Latino enrollment in UCs- step one might be building a lot more and making them cheaper.

It's important to remember that if the average Asian score is higher than the average Hispanic score, then the average Asian accepted will statistically have a higher score than the average Hispanic accepted, even without discrimination.

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