Affirmative Action Battle Has a New Focus: Asian-Americans

It's a payback time ? What goes around, comes around.

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"Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than any other race on personal traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday in federal court in Boston by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university.

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"To avoid adopting a blatant quota system, Harvard introduced subjective criteria like character, personality and promise. The plaintiffs (Asian-Americans) call this the “original sin of holistic admissions.”

"The plaintiffs’ papers appeared to offer other examples of grudging or derogatory descriptions of Asian applications, but they had been redacted."

My edge-in conclusion? "to offer other examples of grudging or derogatory " - got come down to specific examples - evils are in details, one by one, side by side comparison.

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""In its admissions process, Harvard scores applicants in five categories — “academic,” “extracurricular,” “athletic,” “personal” and “overall.” They are ranked from 1 to 6, with 1 being the best.

"Whites get higher personal ratings than Asian-Americans, with 21.3 percent of white applicants getting a 1 or 2 compared to 17.6 percent of Asian-Americans, according to the plaintiffs’ analysis.""

"Mr. Waxman, Harvard’s lawyer, said the statistical analysis could not measure the impact of material like teacher and community recommendations and personal essays.

Mr. Waxman said it was implausible that Harvard’s 40-member admissions committee, some of whom were Asian-Americans, would conclude that Asian-American applicants were less personable than other races. In any case, he said, such individual decisions did not prove systemic discrimination."

My edge-in conclusion? Pattern recognition comes up out such "individual assessment" -

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Harvard’s 2013 internal review found that if Harvard considered only academic achievement, the Asian-American share of the class would rise to 43 percent from the actual 19 percent. After accounting for Harvard’s preference for recruited athletes and legacy applicants, the proportion of whites went up, while the share of Asian-Americans fell to 31 percent. Accounting for extracurricular and personal ratings, the share of whites rose again, and Asian-Americans fell to 26 percent.

What brought the Asian-American number down to roughly 18 percent, or about the actual share, was accounting for a category called “demographic,” the study found. This pushed up African-American and Hispanic numbers, while reducing whites and Asian-Americans."

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"Mr. Waxman said the internal Harvard study of Asian-American admissions did “tend to show you would expect more Asians to be admitted.” But, he said, it was preliminary and incomplete."

My edge-in conclusion? commonly used "preliminary" "incomplete" - my follow-up was "define both" to me, let's get the bottom.

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"Almost the entire page in which the plaintiffs describe that fine-tuning has been blacked out. Mr. Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions, said Friday that it was “disreputable” of Harvard to complain that information was being taken out of context while at the same time insisting on significant redactions of the evidence."

Gotcha !

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"Harvard’s class of 2021 is 14.6 percent African-American, 22.2 percent Asian-American, 11.6 percent Hispanic and 2.5 percent Native-American or Pacific Islander, according to Harvard’s website."


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html