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Among other things, it reeks of of Simpson’s Paradox.
If the number of Asian applications is 10x the number of spots available, their admittance rate can never be higher than 10%. No “discrimination” required. Same for white applicants.
If you only have 10 black applicants and you accept 5 of them that’s a 50% admittance rate. Which looks huge and you can scaremonger about how much bite and Asian people are unfairly getting sidelined.
Until you see there were 10,000 white applicants with a 8% admittance rate, ie 800 people.
800 from 8% vs 5 from 50%.
Again without absolute numbers the percentages can be very deceiving.
If admissions were race-neutral, then students with the same GPA and MCAT score should have similar acceptance rates. But the data shows black and Hispanic applicants get accepted at much higher rates than equally qualified Asian and white applicants.
Your example about total applicants (10 vs. 10,000) doesn’t apply here because the issue isn’t how many people applied, but who gets in when they have the same credentials.
You can’t have separate entrances for your establishment based on what folks look like, the group you prefer getting better service doesn’t make it equality.
Maybe there are other factors, and they're correlated with the buckets being used here?
A black applicant with GPA and MCAT scores in the lowest bucket still has a 56% chance of admission. That’s on par with an Asian applicant who has GPA and MCAT scores in the highest bucket.
There have been studies suggesting that elimination of the MCAT does little to nothing to prediction of student performance beyond the second year or so.
As others have pointed out, there are a lot of unmeasured variables not being controlled for in this finding as well.
I'm not surprised board exam scores predict outcomes, I just think there's lots of other variables along that path from one to the other, and even more from MCAT -> board exam.
This is false. You're probably getting this idea second hand from this study: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1913405117
Probably because it was famously misused by SC Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who got it wildly wrong https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/06/14/statistics...
Anyway, that study is bogus: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2415159121
The only evidence for your claim that I know of is an NBER paper https://www.nber.org/bah/2018no4/does-doctor-race-affect-hea...
Where they randomly assign black male patients to white or black doctors, IIRC, and patients get advice on preventative care. Outcomes for black patients are better because they are more willing to take black doctors' advice. Obviously, newborns in the first study, so it's about doctor competence straight-up.