What I’ve been saying….does it benefit minorities to be admitted to colleges they don’t do well in?
“Preferential admissions keep drawing many insufficiently prepared blacks and Hispanics onto selective campuses where their chances of succeeding drop dramatically. In what sense is this a progressive idea?”
Razib adds:
And why would university presidents care about graduation rates or GPAs if their #1 criteria for evaluation of “diversity” is the freshmen or even general student body head counts?
Another thing-this article is a longer exploration of the book. There are many choice quotes on both sides. But this caught my attention:
“It is blatantly indefensible to suggest that black and Latino students never experience discrimination in grading,” he says. “There are stereotypes about their abilities and subterranean animosity towards these kids by professors.”
Well, yeah, if you mean soft fields, but if you take math, physics or chemistry, and most biology the grading is pretty straightforward (to the irritation of many students), but I don’t think those were the classes the person in question was talking about [1]. Also note that more whites (43%) had higher GPAs than Asians (40%). I suspect this might be attributable to the fact that Asians take hard science and engineering majors more often, which have lower GPAs on average. Also, the perception that black & Latino students are on average less capable is probably grounded in the fact that these kids come in with lower GPAs and test scores and almost surely tend to cluster in the bottom of the curve in any grade distributions (this applies mostly to selective/elite schools especially).
[1] I am sure there are old school professors that can’t judge the essays of people from other cultures very well-I have heard Korean theology students complain that their white professors simply don’t have a good understanding of their conception of the religion and so grade them down as not having a good grasp of the material. On the other hand, this should be balanced out by diversity tokenism in this day & age.
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