MCATs, Affirmative Action, and DEI, Oh My

[Toni]

Fairly sure my score got me in, during undergrad I was very, um..., er,... social.

Scores are what gets everyone in.

But members of certain groups need lower scores and grades to get in. That's just a fact, no matter how much obfuscating you do.

That’s you assumption. Since there is no public database that lists individual scires by race, it’s only an assumption.

AFAIK or anyone of us knows, the highest score was by a black or Hispanic person and the lowest was w white or Asian applicant.

Besides which, test scores/MCAT are only part of the admissions requirements.

The only applicants who meet the threshold first scores are admitted but not all of those students who meet that threshold are admitted.

As has been pointed out repeatedly.

 

[Toni]

Actually very few students drop out of medical school. Those who do almost always do fir personal or financial reasons, not academic ones

[citation needed]

I believe I linked upthread.

 

[Toni]

Is academic ‘preparedness’ the best indicator of who will make the best doctors?

It's a big part of it, since medical school is largely an academic endeavor. There are other skills needed, of course, but those can't be readily assessed in college graduates.

It IS a big part of it which is why the standards are very high. Unfortunately it is not a case of those who score the highest in the MCAT making the best doctors. That would be great if it were true—easy peasy to select those who would be the best.

But it simply is not the case. There are other qualities and abilities which are as valuable as being able to score the highest on standardized tests.

 

[Toni]

You are making a few significant logical leaps here, primarily by conflating correlation with causation

I am making a logical inference from the available data. You are the one making leaps by trying to deny any significant role of academic metrics in failure in medical school.

and equating "dropping out" with "failing." Let's break down the variables and dimensions you are leaving out of this equation.
Retention vs. Failure: First, a 94% retention rate for the lower cohort is still overwhelmingly high.

It may be high, but 6% dropping out is certainly not negligible.

More importantly, you are equating "withdrawing" with "academic failure" (e.g., failing out due to poor grades).

Given the high sunk costs of attending medical school, not only the substantial tuition already paid, but taking the MCAT, prereq classes, and doing all the shadowing, volunteering and other subjective stuff adcoms look at, I do not think many medical students quit for non-academic reasons. Do you have any data showing otherwise?
Note also that MCAT and GPA is strongly correlated with academic success in med school, including massing Step 1 and graduating on time as well as graduating within 5 years (i.e. up to one extra year). See here. So it is hardly surprising that if you admit a certain group of people with lower MCAT and GPAs in the name of "diversity" that they also have higher failure rates.

A massive confounding variable here is socioeconomic status.Wealth correlates heavily with higher MCAT scores,

Wealth always helps. But wealth correlates far more heavily with having parents who have connection in medical schools, or connections at research labs (to get their scion on some papers) or can hire a professional writer to write their personal statements and other essays medical schools want. MCAT is about knowledge and reasoning, and parental wealth matters less than for those subjective measures your Ilk wants med schools emphasizing even more than they do now.

and it also correlates with the ability to survive the severe financial strain of medical school. Assuming that 6% attrition is purely a lack of intellectual ability is a uni-dimensional assumption that ignores the reality of medical student burnout and financial attrition.

Maybe not purely, but largely. 24% (almost 1/4) of those with a 498-501 MCAT fail Step 1 on the first attempt. 8% don't ever pass and can't proceed in their medical education. For those with 502-505 MCAT it's 14% and 5% respectively. So I don't think it's a leap at all to say that academics is also the reason why the group with lower MCAT and GPA also has a 2.5x higher rate of dropping out. I think it's a much bigger leap to assume that it's mostly other factors, or that MCAT and GPA do not measure the level of academic preparedness for med school.

And again, what do you think is better than MCAT and GPA at measuring academic preparedness?

Tests Predicting Tests: You highlight that the MCAT predicts USMLE Step 2 CK. That is true to an extent, i.e. there is some kind of non-zero correlation, but it is also circular.

It also predicts passing Step 1, both on first try and ever. 8% of those with 498-501 and 5% of those with 502-505 MCAT never pass it. That means that they have wasted years of their lives and tens of thousands of dollars of tuition because of academics.

Standardized test-taking ability predicts future standardized test-taking ability. That isn't a revelation, and it certainly doesn't contradict the fact that actual medical practice requires more skill sets than the MCAT tests.

Of course it requires more skill. I think scrapping the clinical skills portion of Step 2 was a mistake.
But how would you assess aptitude for those skills on a college graduate applying for med school?

And medicine requiring more skill sets does not discount the importance of medical knowledge and reasoning, which is what USMLE assesses in standardized fashion. I.e. every MD student (and many DOs) take the same test, and are thus compared using the same yardstick.

The "Subjective" Dismissal: You wave away clinical and residency evaluations because they are "subjective." Subjectivity isn't a flaw here; it is the only viable mode of observation for hands-on, real-world medical practice.

I am not dismissing it, but pointing out that this is a major flaw of clinical evals and that we should not do away with even more objective measures in order to overly rely on these subjective ones. Every preceptor is different in how they evaluate their students, and evaluations can be affected by preceptor bias, personal connection or mood. And how about family connections? A student's father may be a physician who knows the preceptor, or knows somebody who knows the preceptor. Subjective measures are more susceptible to connections than an exam,

A multiple-choice exam cannot measure physical dexterity, social intelligence, bedside communication, or psychological resilience when dealing with patient trauma. The tests do not measure the multi-tasking nor real world on-the-job stress capacity either. Medicine is fundamentally a physical and social profession, in addition to knowledge.

But knowledge and reasoning matter a lot too. Other things you mention matter too (which is why again Step 2 CS should be brought back) but there needs to be a way to fairly assess these things. And that is the problem with subjective measures.

And why are we talking about rotations? This is about getting into med school. These premeds have not been on any rotations. They have not been given any incisions to suture. You can't base your admissions decisions on how they will have performed on their Year 3 rotations when they are still years away from it. Or do you think med school adcoms look like this?
View attachment 55193

You cannot simply hand-wave away some of the most critical dimensions to being a doctor just because they don't fit neatly into the uni-dimensional narrative you have constructed.

First of all, I am not arguing for a unidimesnsional narrative. I am just saying that all these things you listed are hard to assess in med school applicants. And writing essays and volunteering at a soup kitchen doesn't do much to assess somebody's dexterity either. So it's not even the case that medical school admissions are based on many of the metrics you listed. They may be assessed during rotations, but not for med school admissions.
Second, there is no reason to think that other metrics med schools use go the opposite way to MCAT and GPA. Because in absence of deliberate racial preferences, that would have to be the case.

The Statistical Trend: You are missing that the article shows a decaying relationship as training progresses and is backed by broad empirical data. In studies, the predictive validity (r value) of the MCAT to written boards like Step 1 is stronger. However, its correlation to clinical clerkships begins to plummet. The later lack of correlation to MCAT in 1st year of residency is part of the overall trend.

That the predictive value of MCAT/undergrad GPA wanes over time is hardly surprising. One reason is attrition. If you never pass Step 1, you never see rotations. Another reason is that of course, people continue developing over time. But why should that matter? Adcoms do not have access to their hypothetical future performance. They only have access to what the student has done so far, of which MCAT and GPA are a big part.
And if you say, well, we should give 502 MCAT scorers a chance anyway, then why does a 502 black student have a decent chance of US MD admissions, while an Asian with the same score has basically no chance? Do you think Asians on average lack social skills etc. compared with blacks, or is it more likely that medical schools practice racial preferences like they have done far more overtly in the days of UC Davis quota system?

So, once a student survives the classroom years, the variance in their success is driven by real-world physical and social dimensions. Trying to flatten the complexity of producing a good doctor down to a single test score is just not an intellectually rigorous way to look at the data. That does not mean MCATs are not valuable nor should be utilized early in the medical school process; it just means that once medical school is completed and the doctor has made it through all the testing and the whole process, the difference in scores is far less significant than other factors.

I never said other things do not matter.
But certainly two students with comparable applications should have a comparable chance at admissions. I see no reason why we should require Asians and whites to have better academic qualifications than blacks and Hispanics. And yes, the data clearly show that they do. Unless you want to claim that blacks on average have so much better essays and volunteering experiences that it compensates their lower MCAT/GPA averages. I find that very unlikely, and denying the obvious - that med schools practice racial preferences - is untenable. Especially since we know that academia, including med schools, have a long history or practicing and defending racial preferences.

You would be wrong according to the
Mental health issues can lead to a decline in academic performance and, ultimately, to attrition, Dr. Boyd noted. The heavy workload that medical students take on can contribute to burnout and affect personal well-being.

Dr. Boyd cited several other factors that contribute to medical student attrition. These include:

• Career path changes, with students opting to leave medicine altogether.
• Financial concerns, including tuition and living expenses, a stressor that may be particularly prevalent for students from low-income backgrounds.

Few medical students drop out—but when they do, here’s why

Medical school graduation rates exceed 95%. When attrition happens, it’s usually tied to life outside the classroom, not academics.

www.ama-assn.org

I’ve already mentioned people I know personally who are extremely bright and had very high GPAs and MCAT scores but who did not get into medical school despite their obvious intelligence and ability to achieve a high GPA and MCAT scores. There is no doubt in my mind that they are extremely intelligent people who could handle the academic rigors quite well but it simply was a poor fit for their actual interests.

That is not uncommon.

 

[Derec]

You took the topic sentence of my paragraph out of context. You are also narrowly focusing on Puerto Rico and HBCUs which entirely misses the broader structural point I was making. It is not about schools "catering" to anyone. It is about a complex, multi-tiered filtering system.

How so? And it wasn't I who brought up the PR school and HBCUs.

Medical schools have vastly different missions. A state or regional school tasked with generating primary care physicians for underserved areas is going to have a different baseline applicant pool than a top-tier research institution. Because applicants self-sort based on their scores, lower scorers apply to lower tiers, and higher scorers apply to higher tiers. Modeling this entire ecosystem as a single applicant pool with a single set of cutoffs is statistically invalid.

I am not modelling it as a single set of cutoffs. Of course different schools have different criteria. That does not mean that comparing mean MCAT and GPAs of students who were accepted to at least one school is statistically invalid.

That means, you cannot model it with a singular universal cutoff by saying, "okay, let's hypothetically make a cutoff of 500 and see how many of each cohort goes where or is not accepted." They apply to different tiers.

That was merely in response to Emily's model, which used such cutoffs, but modelled the groups with very different standard deviations (I believe one of her groups had SD twice the other) to get the result she wanted. That does not fit the AAMC data, because the groups do not have very different SDs.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Central Limit Theorem. That theorem states that the sampling distribution of the sample mean becomes approximately normal as N increases. It says absolutely nothing about the underlying population distribution becoming normal. If you have a population bounded by hard limits (like an MCAT floor of 472 and ceiling of 528), the population itself does not magically transform from a beta distribution into a Gaussian bell curve just because thousands of people took the test.

It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the point I was making. I wasn't saying that the distribution magically changes, but that we can be confident in saying that the means of the distributions are truly different and not some random fluke.
This part of the discussion started (weeks ago, this is one of those threads) when Emily wrote that because of the SDs of ~6 or so we cannot say that the differences in means are real and not just due to random chance. I retorted that because of large N we can say that because standard error of mean is SD divided by square root of N.
I was comparing means, not saying anything about underlying distribution changing.

Additionally, because test-takers with low scores regularly drop out of the pipeline and choose not to apply, the subsequent applicant distribution is heavily truncated at the bottom. The matriculant distribution is truncated again. You are trying to use assumptions of pure normality at the extreme tails of a restricted, post-filtered population. Mathematically, that will always yield inaccurate projections.

Not so. But what is your hypothesis? That despite the much higher mean accepted blacks actually perform just as well academically? Or do you accept that blacks perform, on average, much worse than whites and Asians but are just arguing for the sake of arguing?

You are shifting the burden of proof. You made the affirmative claim that differences in MCAT means are absolute proof of vast systemic discrimination. I am simply pointing out that your mathematical model--which completely ignores beta distributions at the tails, applicant self-sorting across tiers, and non-random dropout rates between test-takers and applicants, among several other problems--is severely flawed.

As I said, CLT says that distribution of means will behave normally no matter the underlying distribution, and that this distribution will be very narrow when N is large.

But let me give you a challenge: can you give me a reasonable set of distributions that will give you means of 514.3 and 505.7 while one group does not on average truly outperform the other. I am genuinely curious if you can come up with one or are you just pissing in the wind.

Also, if 514.3 vs. 505.7 was a statistical fluke, it should change substantially from one cycle to the other. But we do not see that.

Ironically, your own beliefs work against your model here. If you believe certain groups inherently score much lower,

I never said anything about "inherent". But it is real, and persistent. And that is what academia should be focusing on.
Why do blacks and Hispanics perform worse in education? How can that be fixed?
Giving members of these groups preferences in admissions is treating the symptoms, such as there being few black doctors, but does not treat the underlying problem of lower average performance. I think the symptomatic treatment is partly causing the problem to persist. If black and Hispanic students know they can get in with lower grades and MCAT's, just like they got into college with lower grades and SATs, why work hard? Why apply yourself more than you have to? It's a vicious cycle.

Emphasis added.
This is a strawman. I never argued that we should completely abandon the MCAT, nor did I claim it has zero validity.

So what exactly are you arguing? Do you think blacks and Hispanics should receive preferences in order to increase their numbers despite lower average academic performance? Do you think MCAT should play smaller role in admissions? What do you think should play greater role, other than melanin and Spanish-speaking ancestry?

The MCAT does exactly what it is designed to do: it acts as a baseline threshold to predict who can survive the grueling didactic years (Years 1 and 2) and pass Step 1. But once that academic baseline is cleared, the empirical data shows that extreme precision at the upper end of the MCAT scale does not strongly correlate with clinical success during residency or long-term physician competence.

You can call that a resolution problem--that the precision of the MCAT score is taken too seriously. That's one way to look at it.

Bilby doesn't think even a 10 point difference is significant, which is just bollocks.

Another is that holistic admissions policies recognize this. They use the MCAT to verify the academic baseline, and then they look at the rest of the applicant to determine if they actually fit the specific mission of the school.

But that's not how it works. It's not just about clearing a baseline. Higher MCAT increases your chances of admissions. It's not as if say a school has a 505 cutoff, 506 and 516 have the same chance. That applies across races. Higher MCAT blacks have higher chance than lower MCAT blacks. But the black curve is lower than Asian curve. That is because of racial preferences.
I do not see how that can be denied.

 

[Toni]

You took the topic sentence of my paragraph out of context. You are also narrowly focusing on Puerto Rico and HBCUs which entirely misses the broader structural point I was making. It is not about schools "catering" to anyone. It is about a complex, multi-tiered filtering system.

How so? And it wasn't I who brought up the PR school and HBCUs.

Medical schools have vastly different missions. A state or regional school tasked with generating primary care physicians for underserved areas is going to have a different baseline applicant pool than a top-tier research institution. Because applicants self-sort based on their scores, lower scorers apply to lower tiers, and higher scorers apply to higher tiers. Modeling this entire ecosystem as a single applicant pool with a single set of cutoffs is statistically invalid.

I am not modelling it as a single set of cutoffs. Of course different schools have different criteria. That does not mean that comparing mean MCAT and GPAs of students who were accepted to at least one school is statistically invalid.

That means, you cannot model it with a singular universal cutoff by saying, "okay, let's hypothetically make a cutoff of 500 and see how many of each cohort goes where or is not accepted." They apply to different tiers.

That was merely in response to Emily's model, which used such cutoffs, but modelled the groups with very different standard deviations (I believe one of her groups had SD twice the other) to get the result she wanted. That does not fit the AAMC data, because the groups do not have very different SDs.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Central Limit Theorem. That theorem states that the sampling distribution of the sample mean becomes approximately normal as N increases. It says absolutely nothing about the underlying population distribution becoming normal. If you have a population bounded by hard limits (like an MCAT floor of 472 and ceiling of 528), the population itself does not magically transform from a beta distribution into a Gaussian bell curve just because thousands of people took the test.

It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the point I was making. I wasn't saying that the distribution magically changes, but that we can be confident in saying that the means of the distributions are truly different and not some random fluke.
This part of the discussion started (weeks ago, this is one of those threads) when Emily wrote that because of the SDs of ~6 or so we cannot say that the differences in means are real and not just due to random chance. I retorted that because of large N we can say that because standard error of mean is SD divided by square root of N.
I was comparing means, not saying anything about underlying distribution changing.

Additionally, because test-takers with low scores regularly drop out of the pipeline and choose not to apply, the subsequent applicant distribution is heavily truncated at the bottom. The matriculant distribution is truncated again. You are trying to use assumptions of pure normality at the extreme tails of a restricted, post-filtered population. Mathematically, that will always yield inaccurate projections.

Not so. But what is your hypothesis? That despite the much higher mean accepted blacks actually perform just as well academically? Or do you accept that blacks perform, on average, much worse than whites and Asians but are just arguing for the sake of arguing?

You are shifting the burden of proof. You made the affirmative claim that differences in MCAT means are absolute proof of vast systemic discrimination. I am simply pointing out that your mathematical model--which completely ignores beta distributions at the tails, applicant self-sorting across tiers, and non-random dropout rates between test-takers and applicants, among several other problems--is severely flawed.

As I said, CLT says that distribution of means will behave normally no matter the underlying distribution, and that this distribution will be very narrow when N is large.

But let me give you a challenge: can you give me a reasonable set of distributions that will give you means of 514.3 and 505.7 while one group does not on average truly outperform the other. I am genuinely curious if you can come up with one or are you just pissing in the wind.

Also, if 514.3 vs. 505.7 was a statistical fluke, it should change substantially from one cycle to the other. But we do not see that.

Ironically, your own beliefs work against your model here. If you believe certain groups inherently score much lower,

I never said anything about "inherent". But it is real, and persistent. And that is what academia should be focusing on.
Why do blacks and Hispanics perform worse in education? How can that be fixed?
Giving members of these groups preferences in admissions is treating the symptoms, such as there being few black doctors, but does not treat the underlying problem of lower average performance. I think the symptomatic treatment is partly causing the problem to persist. If black and Hispanic students know they can get in with lower grades and MCAT's, just like they got into college with lower grades and SATs, why work hard? Why apply yourself more than you have to? It's a vicious cycle.

Emphasis added.
This is a strawman. I never argued that we should completely abandon the MCAT, nor did I claim it has zero validity.

So what exactly are you arguing? Do you think blacks and Hispanics should receive preferences in order to increase their numbers despite lower average academic performance? Do you think MCAT should play smaller role in admissions? What do you think should play greater role, other than melanin and Spanish-speaking ancestry?

The MCAT does exactly what it is designed to do: it acts as a baseline threshold to predict who can survive the grueling didactic years (Years 1 and 2) and pass Step 1. But once that academic baseline is cleared, the empirical data shows that extreme precision at the upper end of the MCAT scale does not strongly correlate with clinical success during residency or long-term physician competence.

You can call that a resolution problem--that the precision of the MCAT score is taken too seriously. That's one way to look at it.

Bilby doesn't think even a 10 point difference is significant, which is just bollocks.

Another is that holistic admissions policies recognize this. They use the MCAT to verify the academic baseline, and then they look at the rest of the applicant to determine if they actually fit the specific mission of the school.

But that's not how it works. It's not just about clearing a baseline. Higher MCAT increases your chances of admissions. It's not as if say a school has a 505 cutoff, 506 and 516 have the same chance. That applies across races. Higher MCAT blacks have higher chance than lower MCAT blacks. But the black curve is lower than Asian curve. That is because of racial preferences.
I do not see how that can be denied.

I don’t see how you can actually know that is in fact an accurate statement.

 

[Derec]

The thing is, certain people are the ones focused on race.

Because certain people either deny that racial preferences exist, or else support them.

We've seen the stats.

Indeed we have.

Students with better grades have higher acceptance rates.

Yes. But an Asian student needs to have much better stats than a black student to have similar acceptance chances.

We've seen that drop out rates in Med School are very low.

They are low, but not that low as to be negligible. And chances of dropping out after one year are 2.5x higher for black. I think largely because racial preferences mean that more marginal black students are accepted.

It also implies that MCAT's and GPA aren't holy grails to determining qualification for being a student that can be successful in medical school, or in that the spread in MCAT and GPA isn't highly relevant.

The spread of 514.3 vs. 505.7 average MCAT is highly relevant.

As to MCAT and GPA being "holy grails", let's look at some stats I have mentioned before, but bear repeating until they are hammered into some thick skulls we have on here.
Passing Step 1: Only 2% don't ever pass Step 1 overall, but if your MCAT is 502-505, 5% fail all attempts. 498-501? It's up to 8%. Even lower than that, it gets to >10% failure rate. That means you just wasted two years of your life (not counting the application cycle) and probably north of $100k in tuition. Low GPA increases failure rate further.
Graduating within 5 years: It looks similar. Overall, 6% fail to graduate within 5 years. 502-505, it's up to 9%, and below that it's >10%, the lower the MCAT the higher your chances of not graduating with up to one extra year.

So yes, MCAT is significant to one's medical school success.

When looking at race, we see the races with better average scores have higher acceptance rates.

Slightly higher. If acceptance rates made up for the difference in average scores of applicants, we would see matriculants have similar stats across groups. But these differences persist, which means that differences in acceptance rates would have to be much higher.

We see that in general, drop out rates in Med School are very low across races.

I would hardly say "very low".

We see that Asians are much more over-represented in medical school than their percentage of population.

That shouldn't matter any more than blacks being heavily overrepresented in the NBA.

The statistics imply that admission (or lack there of) based on race isn't much of a thing. So, why in the heck is this thread up to 260 posts regarding race and admissions?

The statistics imply no such thing. If they did, the stats of admitted students would show similar means. But they don't.

 

[laughing dog]

The statistics imply that admission (or lack there of) based on race isn't much of a thing. So, why in the heck is this thread up to 260 posts regarding race and admissions?

The statistics imply no such thing. If they did, the stats of admitted students would show similar means.

First, similar is in the eye of the beholder. Second, if there are other non quantitative factors and/or sorting by schools by mission and students, there is no reason to expect stats to be “similar “ (as Don so thoroughly explained earlier in the thread).

Apparently “disparate outcomes” means discrimination only against whites and Asians.

 

[Toni]

The thing is, certain people are the ones focused on race.

Because certain people either deny that racial preferences exist, or else support them.

We've seen the stats.

Indeed we have.

Students with better grades have higher acceptance rates.

Yes. But an Asian student needs to have much better stats than a black student to have similar acceptance chances.

We've seen that drop out rates in Med School are very low.

They are low, but not that low as to be negligible. And chances of dropping out after one year are 2.5x higher for black. I think largely because racial preferences mean that more marginal black students are accepted.

It also implies that MCAT's and GPA aren't holy grails to determining qualification for being a student that can be successful in medical school, or in that the spread in MCAT and GPA isn't highly relevant.

The spread of 514.3 vs. 505.7 average MCAT is highly relevant.

As to MCAT and GPA being "holy grails", let's look at some stats I have mentioned before, but bear repeating until they are hammered into some thick skulls we have on here.
Passing Step 1: Only 2% don't ever pass Step 1 overall, but if your MCAT is 502-505, 5% fail all attempts. 498-501? It's up to 8%. Even lower than that, it gets to >10% failure rate. That means you just wasted two years of your life (not counting the application cycle) and probably north of $100k in tuition. Low GPA increases failure rate further.
Graduating within 5 years: It looks similar. Overall, 6% fail to graduate within 5 years. 502-505, it's up to 9%, and below that it's >10%, the lower the MCAT the higher your chances of not graduating with up to one extra year.

So yes, MCAT is significant to one's medical school success.

When looking at race, we see the races with better average scores have higher acceptance rates.

Slightly higher. If acceptance rates made up for the difference in average scores of applicants, we would see matriculants have similar stats across groups. But these differences persist, which means that differences in acceptance rates would have to be much higher.

We see that in general, drop out rates in Med School are very low across races.

I would hardly say "very low".

We see that Asians are much more over-represented in medical school than their percentage of population.

That shouldn't matter any more than blacks being heavily overrepresented in the NBA.

The statistics imply that admission (or lack there of) based on race isn't much of a thing. So, why in the heck is this thread up to 260 posts regarding race and admissions?

The statistics imply no such thing. If they did, the stats of admitted students would show similar means. But they don't.

Asian and white applicants are accepted at the highest rates.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

We've seen that drop out rates in Med School are very low.

They are low, but not that low as to be negligible. And chances of dropping out after one year are 2.5x higher for black. I think largely because racial preferences mean that more marginal black students are accepted.

It also implies that MCAT's and GPA aren't holy grails to determining qualification for being a student that can be successful in medical school, or in that the spread in MCAT and GPA isn't highly relevant.

The spread of 514.3 vs. 505.7 average MCAT is highly relevant.

This is focusing on small patterns of pixels instead of looking at the image. That isn't isn't duck... look at this patch of 25x25 pixels, it looks like a windmill!

The paper also indicates the economic disparity was about as large for racial disparity, which would make economic sense. And yes, the disparity isn't of no importance, however, I was quite surprised by the number, assuming black students had to be dropping out in droves in order to justify the gnashing of teeth.

> 95% of black medical school students are graduating medical school. This implies the value of deviations in MCAT and GPA between med school applicants vs the viability of handling and graduating medical school is of low importance. Otherwise, a medical school entry form would be name/address/college transcript/MCAT scores.

As to MCAT and GPA being "holy grails", let's look at some stats I have mentioned before, but bear repeating until they are hammered into some thick skulls we have on here.
Passing Step 1: Only 2% don't ever pass Step 1 overall, but if your MCAT is 502-505, 5% fail all attempts. 498-501? It's up to 8%. Even lower than that, it gets to >10% failure rate.

According to your numbers:

• 98 of 100 people above 505 on the MCAT graduate.
• 95 of 100 people with an MCAT of 502-505 graduate.
• 92 of 100 people with an MCAT of 498-501 graduate.

So people who barely didn't get to 500 on the MCAT, but were accepted into medical school... almost certainly graduated medical school. Those are freebie gambling numbers. Yes, there is a drop off, but the drop off isn't as catastrophic as advertised. I've got to imagine that those who did have lower MCAT scores needed something else to buoy their application. Of course, we don't have those in front of us. So we have no idea why the medical school picked the applicant with a 498 on their MCAT but they saw them move on to graduate.

When looking at race, we see the races with better average scores have higher acceptance rates.

Slightly higher. If acceptance rates made up for the difference in average scores of applicants, we would see matriculants have similar stats across groups. But these differences persist, which means that differences in acceptance rates would have to be much higher.

We see that in general, drop out rates in Med School are very low across races.

I would hardly say "very low".

When I went to college, freshman year, lots of people had engineering as a major. I'd say at least 33% disappeared by sophomore year after the weeding out classes were completed. So 5% to me is low. One can look at 8% and compare to 2% and say that is a 400% increase. But I'd rather look at the two crowds, the crowd of the initial 100 who graduated at 98% and the initial crowd of 100 the graduated at 92%. Are you really saying that you'll notice which group has 6 more people in it?

The statistics imply that admission (or lack there of) based on race isn't much of a thing. So, why in the heck is this thread up to 260 posts regarding race and admissions?

The statistics imply no such thing. If they did, the stats of admitted students would show similar means. But they don't.

Derec, the statistics show better grades mean higher acceptance. The statistics show that Asians far exceed their percentage of the population in medical school student percentage and have a higher rate of acceptance overall, ie not being discriminated against! The statistics show graduation rates are on par with one another, which indicates that admission policies are not taking in people that are not capable of graduating. Which means the admission policies are taking in data well beyond just test and GPA scores into the fold. Nothing is broken.

 

[Toni]

Also please note: The deviations inGPA and MCAT are quite small.

No one can become a physician without passing each part of the USMLE, which is more rigorous than the MCAT.

 

[Toni]

Am I the only person here who has had a teacher or professor who was absolutely brilliant but garbage at actually conveying knowledge at the level of the students?

Not every requisite talent or ability can be assessed on a standardized test.

Not every person with extremely high scores on any test or highest GPA is good at ( set of all qualities requisite in being a good teacher, physician, lawyer, police officer, social worker, astronaut, POTUS, etc.)

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Am I the only person here who has had a teacher or professor who was absolutely brilliant but garbage at actually conveying knowledge at the level of the students?

Not every requisite talent or ability can be assessed on a standardized test.

Not every person with extremely high scores on any test or highest GPA is good at ( set of all qualities requisite in being a good teacher, physician, lawyer, police officer, social worker, astronaut, POTUS, etc.)

Looking back, my worst math teacher in college was female. My best math teacher in College was female. My worst teacher in the weeding classes was male (also had a stroke). The best was male. My best engineering teacher was male. I didn't really have a bad engineering teacher, just some better than othera. My worst liberal arts teacher was black and a woman (it was the worst experience as it was supposed to be an advamced course which was risky for me to take as a engineering major, but the teacher didn't really seem to be up to the tasl of teaching it. A government major noted the teacher wasn't the best but was nice.), my best liberal arts teacher was black or maybe a woman. They were both very good teachers.

Best overall was White American male and Lebanese male. Had teachers that were Greek, Scottish, Aussie, Lebanese, American British, Turkiah (as in nation of origin). Colo, gender, natiomality appeared independent on how smart, competent, good as a teacher they were. Probably should have asked what they got on their SATs.

 

[Gospel]

But I’m actually less bothered by AA/DEI itself than I am by the argument always being about minorities getting positions they didn’t fully earn on merit.

That's the whole idea of AA/DEI though.

No, it is not the whole idea of AA/DEI. The idea of the two is to promote fair treatment and representation for all people, especially historically underrepresented minorities. Nothing in its precept is about anyone getting position that they didn't earn fully on merit.

Thus my earlier point about white women being beneficiaries of DEI, and, yes, affirmative action as well. Yet I haven’t seen anyone jumping out of their seat complaining every time a white woman benefits from those policies. Guess it went over his head because... well... he just never considered that.

 

[Toni]

Am I the only person here who has had a teacher or professor who was absolutely brilliant but garbage at actually conveying knowledge at the level of the students?

Not every requisite talent or ability can be assessed on a standardized test.

Not every person with extremely high scores on any test or highest GPA is good at ( set of all qualities requisite in being a good teacher, physician, lawyer, police officer, social worker, astronaut, POTUS, etc.)

Looking back, my worst math teacher in college was female. My best math teacher in College was female. My worst teacher in the weeding classes was male (also had a stroke). The best was male. My best engineering teacher was male. I didn't really have a bad engineering teacher, just some better than othera. My worst liberal arts teacher was black and a woman (it was the worst experience as it was supposed to be an advamced course which was risky for me to take as a engineering major, but the teacher didn't really seem to be up to the tasl of teaching it. A government major noted the teacher wasn't the best but was nice.), my best liberal arts teacher was black or maybe a woman. They were both very good teachers.

Best overall was White American male and Lebanese male. Had teachers that were Greek, Scottish, Aussie, Lebanese, American British, Turkiah (as in nation of origin). Colo, gender, natiomality appeared independent on how smart, competent, good as a teacher they were. Probably should have asked what they got on their SATs.

I’ve had teachers from all over the world and of a variety of skin colors, etc.

My point was that a couple of my teachers/professors were absolutely brilliant—but not at teaching.

Mastery of information, including a deep understanding of the subject is a different set of skills and intelligence than being able to convey that material to a classroom of students at somewhat different by abilities, even in advanced classes or in guiding them to figure out the issues and problems.

Master of the requisite sciences, even at a level that allows you to achieve very high or even perfect scores on tests is not the sane thing as being able to relate to patients and to diagnose and convey results and gain trust so that the patient will hear, understand and follow instructions and trust you enough to follow up if there are problems.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

But I’m actually less bothered by AA/DEI itself than I am by the argument always being about minorities getting positions they didn’t fully earn on merit.

That's the whole idea of AA/DEI though.

No, it is not the whole idea of AA/DEI. The idea of the two is to promote fair treatment and representation for all people, especially historically underrepresented minorities. Nothing in its precept is about anyone getting position that they didn't earn fully on merit.

Thus my earlier point about white women being beneficiaries of DEI, and, yes, affirmative action as well. Yet I haven’t seen anyone jumping out of their seat complaining every time a white woman benefits from those policies. Guess it went over his head because... well... he just never considered that.

Daisy Ridley, Danica Patrick (of all people to be big Trump supporter), Katherine Switzer, Hillary Clinton, the secret service agent who had memes pop up instantly after the attempt on Trump's life in PA. White women these days also can't get into any position of authority or newness without gnashing of teeth about how they slept up the ladder, only because they were a woman, etc... Derec just doesn't complain about it as much as VP Harris, but he isn't the sole bar on this sort of stuff.

But, to be fair, if this were the 1980s, this thread would have been comparing men's and women's scores on the MCAT.

 

[Gospel]

But I’m actually less bothered by AA/DEI itself than I am by the argument always being about minorities getting positions they didn’t fully earn on merit.

That's the whole idea of AA/DEI though.

No, it is not the whole idea of AA/DEI. The idea of the two is to promote fair treatment and representation for all people, especially historically underrepresented minorities. Nothing in its precept is about anyone getting position that they didn't earn fully on merit.

Thus my earlier point about white women being beneficiaries of DEI, and, yes, affirmative action as well. Yet I haven’t seen anyone jumping out of their seat complaining every time a white woman benefits from those policies. Guess it went over his head because... well... he just never considered that.

Daisy Ridley, Danica Patrick (of all people to be big Trump supporter), Katherine Switzer, Hillary Clinton, the secret service agent who had memes pop up instantly after the attempt on Trump's life in PA. White women these days also can't get into any position of authority or newness without gnashing of teeth about how they slept up the ladder, only because they were a woman, etc... Derec just doesn't complain about it as much as VP Harris, but he isn't the sole bar on this sort of stuff.

But, to be fair, if this were the 1980s, this thread would have been comparing men's and women's scores on the MCAT.

I know Derec isn’t the sole bar for whether this kind of bias exists. I’m using him because he is on this forum and his own comments make his particular bias clear as day.

So no, I don’t dispute that white women have faced plenty of the same “she only got there because she’s a woman” garbage. That actually reinforces part of my point. White women benefited from affirmative action and other efforts to expand opportunity too, yet I don’t see nearly the same reflexive assumption that every accomplished white woman must be unqualified because of it. With Black people, that suspicion seems to come out almost automatically from those against AA/DEI here.

But don’t get it twisted: I’m still opposed to AA/DEI. Not because I think racial discrimination should be tolerated, but because I think we’ve chosen the wrong remedy for it.

If you intentionally discriminate against someone because of their race and materially harm them, deny them a job, promotion, housing, education, or some other protected opportunity because they’re Black, I’d rather see the government come down much harder on the person who actually did it. And yes, I mean criminal penalties, including prison in serious cases. Make deliberately screwing someone over because of their race carry consequences severe enough that people are genuinely afraid to do it.

Instead, we try to remedy discrimination at the group level. To me, that’s like discovering that some restaurants are deliberately shortchanging female servers and, rather than finding the managers who are doing it and putting them behind bars for intentionally violating those women’s rights, the government says, “We can’t establish exactly who screwed over whom, so from now on every restaurant has to pay women 15% more than men until the numbers balance out.”

That's ass backwards to me. You’re imposing a remedy on people who may never have discriminated against anyone, potentially disadvantaging people who had nothing to do with the original wrongdoing, while the actual racist who denied someone an opportunity might walk away with a fine, a settlement, or his employer paying the bill.

I’d rather individualize both the crime and the punishment: prove that someone intentionally discriminated, punish that person severely, and make the actual victim whole. If racial discrimination is serious enough that we believe society needs extraordinary measures to counteract it, then make the act of deliberately discriminating against someone carry extraordinary consequences. Don’t make race itself the mechanism through which we distribute the remedy.

And yes, if this were the 1980s, we very well might be arguing about men’s and women’s MCAT scores instead. Which is kind of the point: the group being treated as presumptively “less qualified” changes, but the underlying habit of looking at someone’s identity and assuming they didn’t earn their place remains remarkably familiar.

Regrettably, none of what I’m arguing works if America gets to say, “Well, the people we fucking cheated are dead now, so I guess the debt died with them.” Fuck that. If you rob a man and he dies before you repay him, you don’t suddenly get to keep the money because you managed to outlive him. The debt doesn’t disappear. The loss was passed down, so the compensation should be passed down too.

America doesn’t get to inherit the benefits of what it did while telling the descendants of the people who inherited the damage, “Sorry, you weren’t personally there.” That bill doesn’t vanish because the people who were originally owed are in the ground. That’s a reality America is going to have to face whether it fucking likes it or not.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I'd say there are two things to consider.

The negative cost to the nation over AA is negligible. The benefit of increasing inclusion of people within industries and professions has benefited the country. Unemployment for whites is still notably lower than for blacks. White people survived! Someone wants to argue that is immoral, they can take that up with a philosopher.

AA was necessary in part due to the self-perpetuating impacts of racism. Just look at the NFL. How many black QBs? How many black head coaches? That isn't active racism, that is perpetuation of former racism within the football ladder. I refuse to believe blacks can't handle the QB position (that doesn't require running the ball, has there been a single black Joe Montana?) or be a head coach. Yet, somehow, these two positions are very uncommon. The ladder in the 1960s for blacks was cut off and people could only get so high up. Just adding the rungs back doesn't make it a piece of cake to get to the top. Plenty of other people already there, it got crowded.

 

[Bomb#20]

Thus my earlier point about white women being beneficiaries of DEI, and, yes, affirmative action as well. Yet I haven’t seen anyone jumping out of their seat complaining every time a white woman benefits from those policies. Guess it went over his head because... well... he just never considered that.

Daisy Ridley, Danica Patrick (of all people to be big Trump supporter), Katherine Switzer, Hillary Clinton, the secret service agent who had memes pop up instantly after the attempt on Trump's life in PA. White women these days also can't get into any position of authority or newness without gnashing of teeth about how they slept up the ladder, only because they were a woman, etc... Derec just doesn't complain about it as much as VP Harris, but he isn't the sole bar on this sort of stuff.

But, to be fair, if this were the 1980s, this thread would have been comparing men's and women's scores on the MCAT.

Are you guys complaining about Derec not complaining about women enough?

This thread is focused on race instead of sex for two reasons. (1) It's a spinoff from the Arday thread. (2) The score discrepancy for sex is much smaller than for race. Men who get into medical school on average only score 1.6 points higher on their MCATs than women who get in. Moreover, on average women who get in have 0.02 higher GPAs than men who get in; that might be enough to account for the MCAT disparity without sex discrimination if the schools weight GPA enough.

(Source)

 

[Bomb#20]

But I’m actually less bothered by AA/DEI itself than I am by the argument always being about minorities getting positions they didn’t fully earn on merit.

That's the whole idea of AA/DEI though.

No, it is not the whole idea of AA/DEI. The idea of the two is to promote fair treatment and representation for all people, especially historically underrepresented minorities. ...

And that's a perfectly coherent argument for racial gerrymandering. But a school or a profession is not a bleeding legislature. People don't become students or doctors or whatever in order to represent anyone.

The notion that an Asian with an MCAT of 509 who gets turned away for being Asian from the same school that delightedly snaps up a Native American with a 509 MCAT has received "fair treatment", and is "represented" because the school accepted some other Asian with a 515 MCAT, is absurd on its face. The guys who got in represent no one but themselves; and claiming the guy who got rejected on account of his race was treated fairly because of what color some other guy is is an utter betrayal of the whole concept of fairness.