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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Don't you understand that the people behind this lawsuit are using the model minority as a front to end affirmative action?[/quote]

"Between Dec. 29, 2012 and Feb. 12, 2013, members of OIR and the Admissions Office exchanged over 100 emails as the office gathered information on the College’s admissions procedures, according to court filings.

Both Harvard and SFFAprovided accounts of the institutional review—as well as hundreds of pages of other information related to Harvard’s admissions process—in court filings over the course of the day Friday. The University and SFFA filed the documents as part of SFFA’s ongoing lawsuit alleging Harvard discriminates against Asian Americans in its admissions process.

SFFA pointed to the OIR reports as evidence supporting its discrimination charges—charges Harvard has repeatedly denied. Edward Blum, president of SFFA, wrote in an emailed statement that “today’s court filing exposes the startling magnitude of Harvard’s discrimination against Asian applicants.”

In its own filings, Harvard strongly contested SFFA’s version of events and called the internal review inconclusive and incomplete.

In one 2013 report, OIR concluded that “Asian high achievers have lower rates of admission.” The office’s analyses formed part of broader study modeling the roles various factors—including gender and socioeconomic status—play in the College’s admissions procedures.

High-up Harvard administrators reviewed the OIR findings, according to court filings. On separate occasions, Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67, and senior members of the Admissions Office all examined the reports.

But the report itself argues against sharing its findings with the public.

“We imagine that sharing any analysis of admission weights will draw attention to the variety of factors that compete with one another in the admission process,” one of the OIR reports reads.“While we find that low income students clearly receive a ‘tip’ in the admissions process, our descriptive analysis and regression models also shows that the tip for legacies and athletes is larger and that there are demographic groups that have negative effects.”

The only demographic group which saw “negative effects” were Asian Americans, according to the OIR analyses.

Following a period of information gathering in late 2012 and early 2013, OIR wrote a report titled “Admissions and Financial at Harvard College.” In addition to examining issues of gender and early action admissions, the report was specifically meant to address the question: “Does the admissions process disadvantage Asians?”

Using 10 years of admissions demographic data and logistic regression models, OIR created a model that estimated the probability of admission for individuals based on certain characteristics.

This model included estimated demographic breakdowns of classes admitted given different weighting of various characteristics used to evaluate applicants. One of the breakdowns considered the demographics of a class that would be admitted if Harvard judged only by rankings and ratings of academics success.

Under this scenario, “the percentage of Asians would more than double to 43 percent,” according to SFFA’s Friday filings. SFFA’s document alleges representatives from OIR met with Fitzsimmons to present its findings and that Fitzsimmons took little—if any—further action to address the report.

“Following this presentation, Dean Fitzsimmons did not request any additional work from OIR into whether Asian-American applicants were being disadvantaged in response to the February 2013 Report,” the document states. “Dean Fitzsimmons did not share or discuss the February 2013 Report with anyone else in the Admissions Office or any senior leaders outside the Admissions Office.”

In early 2013, following the first report, OIR produced a second document titled “Admissions Part II” which specifically focused on differences in admission rates between Asian American and white applicants. The report solely compared admissions rates for “non-legacy, non-athlete” students.

The report found that Asian American applicants performed significantly better in rankings of test scores, academics, and overall scores from alumni interviews. Of 10 characteristics, white students performed significantly better in only one—rankings of personal qualities, which are assigned by the Admissions Office.

The report also found that, for students with comparable academic rankings or SAT scores, white students were generally admitted at higher rates than were Asian American students. The second report was also presented to Fitzsimmons and also spurred little further action, according to the SFFA filings."

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/6/15/admissions-internal-report/[/quote]

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