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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]URM harping wrt Ivy admissions always fascinates me, because it is clear to me that most people don't fully understand or appreciate the pool of applicants. Just doing a little bit of math can actually illuminate things dramatically.

Harvard being Harvard has their pick of any and all applicants, black, white, latino or asian. Now the US Dept of Ed estimates that there are about 12 million college students in the US, of which about 15% are black. So there are roughly 1.8 million black college students. Of those, the College Board tells us that the 99% for college bound black SAT takers is a score of 2100. That means that there are 18,000 black college students in the country with a score at least 2100, if not higher.

According to the Princeton Review, 2110 is the 25th percentile for admitted SAT scores, while Harvard self reported a mean SAT score for the class of 2017 of 2237.

So taken at face value, there are at least 18,000 black college students with SAT scores at Harvard's 25th percentile or higher. Which I would deem to be standard minimum qualifications.

However, Harvard has an undergraduate student enrollment of about 7200, of which 12% is black. Therefore, there are about 1080 black students at Harvard, which is 6% of the 18,000 black college students with minimum standard qualifications for enrollment. And it cannot be farfetched to assume that these are the absolute cream of the crop, with an expectation that their test scores would be significantly higher than the 99th percentile of SAT scores for black college students.

So stop it with this undeserving URM nonsense already.[/quote]

Actually, if you look at the statistics it's not anywhere close to that number.

[b]"If we raise the top-scoring threshold to students scoring 750 or above on both the math and verbal SAT — a level equal to the mean score of students entering the nation's most selective colleges such as Harvard, Princeton, and CalTech — we find that in the entire country 244 blacks scored 750 or above on the math SAT and 363 black students scored 750 or above on the verbal portion of the test. Nationwide, 33,841 students scored at least 750 on the math test and 30,479 scored at least 750 on the verbal SAT. Therefore, black students made up 0.7 percent of the test takers who scored 750 or above on the math test and 1.2 percent of all test takers who scored 750 or above on the verbal section."[/b]

So, there are probably a few hundred Black students who scored at or above the mean score for Harvard.   [/quote]

Nice try, but I found the source of your data and it is from 2005. The College Board has changed both the exam and scoring since then. My data comes directly from the College Board itself and is from 2013.
http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html
http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/SAT-Percentile-Ranks-By-Gender-Ethnicity-2013.pdf

There are also a lot of other things about this that are not as clear cut as you think that this quote supports. Your data is for annual test takers, while I am extrapolating to the entire population of college students. So if these percentages still hold from 2005, despite modifications to the exam, it still proves that there are at least 1,000 black college students at or above the Harvard SAT mean. Which means that a substantial proportion of black Harvard undergrads will be above the mean score.

Anyway you slice and dice it, you are going to have a hard time finding significant preference for URMs in the data. [/quote]

Different poster here.  I just found the 2015 stats from the college board (link below). The attached shows that for 2015, there were about 219,000 African American students who took the SAT. To be in the 99% of all AA test takers on any part, one needed a score of 700.  Personally, I think even if the above poster is right that 2100 would be a Harvard minimum qualified score, I suspect those students who are successful at ivy league schools generally test higher.  In any event, the 99% for 2100 means that a total of about 2,190 AA students had a score of over 700 on any given part of the SAT.  I suspect many of those students did over 700 on multiple parts, in which case the total number of AA test takers scoring over 2100 total (for 3 parts) could have been as low as only 2190 students nationally but theoretically as high as 6,570 students (if and only if no AA student scored over 700 on more than one part of the test  -- seems doubtful).  If you look at 750 as the cut off -- 99.5% of the students -- these figures are all cut in half.  Here's the thing -- maybe the ivy league is filled with these relatively top test takers -- but the impact of affirmative action begins to look much more obvious as one goes down to students at the next tier of schools.

One thing that jumps out is that below the very top levels (near 800), the gap in relative percentiles by race gets much wider.  If you are a strong test taker AA student and the school looks at you to some extent as competing more against other AA students rather than against all students for admission, you are likely going to have a far greater chance of admission than a white or Asian student with the same statistics.  At 800, white and black students are at the 99th (or 99th+) percentiles measured against students of the same race.  But by 700, black students are still in the 99th percentile, while white students are in the 94-95% -- a huge decline in applying to schools that only accept 5-6% of all applicants.  I have no insight into admissions, but I suspect AA students at the 99th percentile have a much better shot at competitive admissions that white students at the same percentile since there are still more white students than AA students overall.   At 650, black students are in still in the 98th percentile but their white counterparts are only in the 85-87%, and by 600 black students are still in the 94-95th percentile by race, while white students are between the 71-78th percentile. As we think of how racial preferences are used to achieve diversity at many state schools and privates besides the ivy league, the basic numbers of students by race vs. slots probably drives the gap in preparation to succeed in college wider than even at the ivy league.

https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/sat/sat-percentile-ranks-gender-ethnicity-2015.pdf

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