Imagine applying to an elite school and not understanding what their priorities were. So smart, yet so stupid. |
For all we know every other kid admitted to those schools for the same major had a 1600 and higher GPA. 1590 wasn't good enough. |
yet, so many on here see Asian Americans as a monolith - "prepped, tutored, no personality, only knows how to take a test". My issue with Harvard is how the AO has marked so many Asian American students as "not likeable" without ever having met them, while the Interviewer marked them as "likeable". That tells me that they are engaging in stereotyping at best, and discrimination at worst, all in the name of keeping the number of Asian American students from getting too big at Harvard. This is exactly why Harvard introduced holistic admissions way back, except swap Asian Americans with Jews. |
indeed.. imagine not realizing that an elite academic institution cares more about sports than academics. |
Check your math. Three are close to 2 million test takers each year, and only about 1,000 get the 1600 perfect score. Harvard alone admits about 2000 students. Clueless people are pending its not a big deal to get 1600 1590, and prepping would easily do that, but it's extremely hard and a big accomplishment. |
I think reality is not so black and white, as always it is more grey. I do support favoring kids who are working jobs and then working hard to achieve good results in academics, regardless of race and ethnicity. However, I do think that due to Asian Americans doing well on test scores, schools/colleges have suddenly started placing more emphasis on non academic aspects of an application. That is the only way they can promote sports and other fluff and accommodate White and Black kids.
I was at my 6th grader's promotion ceremony the other day, their school handed out every single award under the sun for patrol, choir, theater, art, community service but there was absolutely no recognition of academic achievement. Partly, it was also so that they could inflate the egos of PTA moms by giving their kids these fluff awards but it really surprised me. Having said that, this world is not fair and owes us nothing. We have to roll with the punches and come out strong. Guess who they will be calling when that "holistic" admissions doctor botches up the surgery. |
Again, the holistic stuff was invented to target Jews in the past. Of course, Asians know what holistic is, so they also get high scores on ECs, leadership, interview, essay, award, music, art,s etc. However they keep moving the goalpost, and invented BS scores like courage/kindness/likability stuff. Furthermore the funny thing is that Asian kids actually scored higher on likability by interviewers who actually talk to the students person to person. So I think it's more black then grey. |
I bet if this kid put down Russian Literature or Women's Studies as his major he might have gotten in. But he didn't and rolled the dice. He didn't think outside the box. |
Unless you're new here you would already know that. Being culturally clueless isn't a defense. |
But as has been explained 100 times now, those 2000 students admitted are not all STEM majors. STEM majors are held to a different standard compared to theatre majors because they have different academic foundations and requirements. There are very few students who could hack any major. Your 1590 pre-med student is NOT just competing with other pre-med students in undergraduate- there are X amount of spaces already reserved within majors. That reduces the amount of available spaces within certain programs, thus making it more competitive. You also are competing within regions, school districts, whether parents have degrees, etc. They will once it further narrows to med school but again, not all students who enter med school have STEM undergrad degrees. My ultimate frustration is the thinking that this one kid was competing for one of 2000 spots.And to be completely frank, with the data on Harvards incoming class the problem is not that this kid isn't smart enough, it is that he isn't wealthy. About a fifth of respondents reported receiving help preparing college applications from a privately-hired counselor. Of these students, 42.9 percent of those who disclosed their parents’ financial status reported a combined family income of $250,000 or more; 8.2 percent reported a parental income of less than $40,000. Nearly 30 percent of members of the Class of 2024 who answered a question about parental income in The Crimson’s survey of freshmen said their families make $250,000 or more per year — earnings higher than 95 percent of American households. |
You are conveniently forgetting superscoring. Many of these kids with 1500+ got there by superscoring. Maybe it’s 1,000 one shot, but the are multitudes more through superscoring and, sadly, the colleges don’t know if it is one time or super scored. |
and you think it makes total sense that an elite academic institution cares more about sports than academics? |
Yeah, those are the Americans whose family has been here forever. Talk about entitled. |
People are focusing on this case as if there is a real mob of people who got upset because their kid didn't get accepted and they filed a lawsuit. As with many, if not most, constitutional law cases that get to the Supreme Court, they are brought by an organization that has a particular political/ideological mission and they recruit a sympathetic plaintiff to be the face of the case. This case was brought by a group called Students for Fair Admission, which was founded by a very white, conservative, guy with an objective of eliminating affirmative action. They needed to recruit students to get standing so they could file the lawsuits. Selecting Asian-Americans as the students to use as a front for their efforts was strategic because they believed it would help in their cause to have students from a minority group that has high "objective" stats, but Students for Fair Admission does not have any particular interest in helping Asian-Americans and it would have thrown them over at the first hint that they would not help their cause. This group, the people running the group and contributing to it, and the justices who may vote in favor of the case, are by no means friends of the Asian-American community. That doesn't mean that there aren't Asian-American organizations aligned with the lawsuit, but they only got involved by filing amicus briefs after the case was filed.
What that means is the opinion may not actually be written in a way that is best for Asian-American applicants in the long run. For example, it may provide support for (or at least leave untouched) other non-stats based criteria that benefit white students, which would give universities license to beef those up and allow those students to take the spots that Asian-Americans think will now go to them. It also means that criticizing Asian-Americans and their kids is probably not the most productive way to think about the case. They are just pawns in a legal gambit and may end up being unwitting victims. The groups bankrolling this case would like to pit non-elites and minority groups against each other to distract from their main mission. |
+1 Majority of the 1500+ SAT scores are BOUGHT with extensive private test prep and superscoriing (paying for multiple tests). Household financial wherewithal drives the scores. Even the College Board has admitted this. Reason why the "merit" argument citing standardized test scores is laughable. The AOs know this. |