MCATs, Affirmative Action, and DEI, Oh My

[Bomb#20]

Is that you, Loren?

First rule of tribal thinking: the outgroup are interchangeable parts.

Irony coming the author of

Tribalism is a mental illness -- people who think tribally can rarely be talked out of it any more than talk therapy can cure schizophrenia. They can hardly ever be made to understand that non-tribal thinking even exists -- when you don't decide what's right based on favoring their preferred tribes, their attempt to understand your point of view begins and ends with them making a judgment of which other tribes you favor.

What non-tribal inference procedure led you to write that imbecilic assertion?

Both of you need to give this collectivist ad hominem "ilk" nonsense a rest. Nobody is responsible for the behavior of his ilk.

Perhaps you should take your own advice and give this collectivist ad hominen "tribe" a rest.

How the heck is what I said a collectivist ad hominem? I exhibited examples of individuals thinking tribally and criticized that mode of thought; I didn't lay the errors of some tribe at the door of an individual as if he were part of an "ilk".

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Now, if you truly cared about Asians, you would also be calling WV schools discriminatory and demanding they open up to Asian candidates from out-of-state.

Looks like Toni is not the only tribal thinker here.

That isn't tribal thinking.

What non-tribal inference procedure led you to write that imbecilic assertion?

Such cool reasoning powers demonstrated by your devolution into insults and name calling…

I called it imbecilic because it was. Perhaps this will be clearer if we switch to the contrapositive form -- "if P then Q" is logically the same claim as "if not Q then not P". So if you disagree with my assessment, can you exhibit an intelligent reason to believe "If you don't call WV schools discriminatory and demand they open up to Asian candidates from out-of-state, then you don't truly care about Asians." is a correct inference? Why the heck should turning Californians into doctors be the job of West Virginia's taxpayers?

In other words,

This would ultimately be silly because WV is meeting a public need by preferring in-state residents for its limited seats.

If only someone had written that in context, like the very next sentence.

 

[Bomb#20]

As noted upthread, 90+ percent of NA doctors don't work on reservations.

The statistic about reservations is a red herring. Working on a reservation is merely one specific example of how different demographics might fulfill a public need. The broader and more rigorous data shows that NA doctors proportionally serve across all types of underserved areas at higher rates. Equating "underserved" exclusively with "reservations" artificially shrinks the success rate of the metric and erroneously manufactures an undeserved high failure rate.

If for the sake of getting one mission-fit doctor you rate nine premeds as mission-fit who aren't actually mission-fit, that looks a lot more like measuring race than measuring mission-fitness.

First, because NA doctors serve in other underserved areas at higher rates, the premise of a 9-in-10 false prediction rate doesn't hold up to the data.

Okay, can you cite the broader and more rigorous data? How accurate is the prediction?

More importantly, there seems to be a fundamental disconnect about the mechanism of how mission-fitness is plausibly applied. Let me try to clear that up:

Admissions committees do not look at just one or two metrics; they evaluate a multivariate set of data: MCAT, GPA, transcripts, community service, clinical work, essays, and interviews. They apply consistent weights to these different criteria to each individual. "Mission fitness" is an implied variable that emerges from assessing an individual's unique essays, past community service, and interview answers regarding their career goals. It is not a checkbox that blindly translates race into a bonus score--if it were, we wouldn't see such high absolute rejection rates for NA and Black applicants.

How are you getting that? A checkbox that blindly translates race into a bonus score is perfectly compatible with high absolute rejection rates for NA and Black applicants -- that's going to depend on how big the bonus is rather than on how well targeted it is to mission fitness.

What happens when you aggregate these individual assessments? The demographics naturally stratify. If we assume a baseline level of honesty across all applicants, NA applicants as a group are going to provide answers and track records that align more frequently with a commitment to underserved areas.

Conversely, Asian applicants, in the aggregate, demonstrate lower rates of eventually working in these specific environments (for instance, White doctors end up serving in rural areas at higher rates than Asian doctors). If you expect Asian applicants to score equally well on essays and interviews regarding a commitment to underserved areas, you are essentially expecting them to lie at higher rates during the process. If we expect the same frequency of honesty across all racial demographics, the aggregate scores for this specific variable will naturally diverge.

We shouldn't assume failure of essays and interviews to predict mission-fitness means applicants were lying -- people change their minds as they grow older and that often means youthful idealism takes a beating when it runs up against experience and practicality.

 

[Bomb#20]

I called it imbecilic because it was. Perhaps this will be clearer if we switch to the contrapositive form -- "if P then Q" is logically the same claim as "if not Q then not P". So if you disagree with my assessment, can you exhibit an intelligent reason to believe "If you don't call WV schools discriminatory and demand they open up to Asian candidates from out-of-state, then you don't truly care about Asians." is a correct inference? Why the heck should turning Californians into doctors be the job of West Virginia's taxpayers?

In other words,

This would ultimately be silly because WV is meeting a public need by preferring in-state residents for its limited seats.

If only someone had written that in context, like the very next sentence.

I.e., when you wrote what you wrote you already knew perfectly well why it was unreasonable. So why did you make such a silly claim?

 

[Bomb#20]

You're missing the point. It's not that the institutional mission and/or specific public-need criteria are discriminatory; it's that the schools are not measuring candidates on mission fitness and fulfilling public-need criteria. The schools are not lowering the MCAT standard a student needs to meet because he's going to work in an underserved area. They don't know if he is; this isn't Minority Report and they aren't precogs. They're using a proxy. Ability to do well in school is an important quality in medical students, so what say we check "how the demographic groups actually rank" in that characteristic, observe that it's f(school success) = { 3 if NA; 5 if Black or Hispanic; 7 if White; 9 if Asian }, and then use that to judge applicants instead of, you know, actually looking at their GPAs? You'd agree assuming an Asian has a high GPA and a NA has a lower one, as a proxy, instead of actually measuring, would be racial discrimination, yes?

The claim that evaluating mission fitness requires "precognition" or serves as a blind substitute for GPA creates a false dichotomy. Admissions committees do not throw out transcripts to use race as a proxy; they evaluate a multivariate set of inputs where GPA, MCAT, essays, interviews, (and state residency or this can be a factor) are weighed concurrently. Claiming that non-numerical evaluation is invalid because committees aren't "precogs" would logically invalidate every job interview, letter of recommendation, or holistic assessment in higher education. Furthermore, we know non-MCAT structural factors heavily influence these weights: states like West Virginia, Mississippi, and North Dakota have resident acceptance rates between 48% and 58% despite lower average MCAT scores. These schools explicitly weigh state residency and public-need missions heavily to address regional physician shortages, proving that non-MCAT criteria routinely drive acceptance rates independently of racial proxies. They do so without throwing out MCATs or GPAs.

I didn't say they do -- I was making an analogy to a hypothetical practice. My point was that you're talking about using a proxy instead of actually measuring what they want to select for, and using a racial proxy is still racial discrimination even if the thing you're trying to select for isn't.

No doubt you'll argue that "essays and interviews assessing a candidate's commitment to working in underserved areas" isn't a racial proxy, but what evidence is there that that's true? What do those essays and interviews actually measure? Do they measure actual mission fitness, or do they just measure race? That's something that's testable retrospectively. If in fact schools aren't racially discriminating and the MCAT discrepancy results from relying on essays and interviews to forecast mission fitness, and if that allegedly nonracial proxy accurately predicts working in underserved areas, then that implies we could take a random sample of minority doctors who work in underserved areas, and a random control group of minority doctors who don't work in underserved areas, and check what their MCAT scores were back when they were accepted into medical school -- and the control group who don't work in underserved areas should turn out to have had MCAT scores similar to those of Asian and white matriculants. Only the group working in underserved areas would have statistically gotten the benefit of the relaxed MCAT requirements.

Your proposed retrospective experiment contains a fundamental flaw regarding base-rate distributions and multivariate confounding. You cannot isolate the MCAT in a vacuum after the fact, because every doctor in that admitted cohort was accepted based on a combined threshold of GPA, MCAT, interview scores, school, geography, etc. Because the starting applicant pool for any demographic has its own baseline distribution, splitting that admitted group retroactively based on practice location will yield similar average MCATs across both subgroups.

If that's true then the proxy they use to assess mission-fitness must correlate poorly with doctors ultimately actually working in underserved areas. If we can see a systematic difference in matriculants' MCAT/GPA by race, but we can't see a systematic difference by practice location, that would seem to imply the proxy predicts race better than practice location.

Additionally, this experiment ignores massive geographical confounders. Demographic groups do not reside evenly across the country; for example, a high concentration of Asian premed applicants reside in California, where intense in-state competition drops the overall acceptance rate to ~40.6% despite high average stats. Conversely, state schools in rural regions accept residents at much higher rates to fill local needs. Because state-level capacity and regional bottlenecking create acceptance rates that sit both well above and well below national racial averages, treating national MCAT variances as a pure function of racial preferences misses a broader structural picture that is heavily driven by public need.

That's a fair point; to properly account for it we'd need data broken down school by school. The schools typically don't release it, which is exactly what we'd expect if the state variances were the function of racial preferences that the national variances look like.

 

[Bomb#20]

I do not think standardized tests or even grades are the "sole valid metric". But I think weird secondary essays are virtually useless other than as a figleaf for adcoms to give a boost to whomever they like.

It seems like you are focusing on just a few medical schools out of many, and along the way, assuming your conclusion. Your observation began by pointing out differences in means across racial demographics, and you effectively said, "Aha, that proves discrimination!" For discrimination to be the prevalent cause, it would have to encompass the vast majority of the variance in the data. Yet you consistently handwave away any discussion of legitimate variance. You rinse and repeat: assume your conclusion as the only explanation for the differences. There doesn't seem to be a serious attempt to discuss the data or test alternative hypotheses; you just repeat your assumption.

To test this mathematically, I ran a simulation of a medical school similar to the Medical College of Georgia (MCG). Interestingly, this school accepts very few non-residents (~98% are in-state), which underscores the point again about geographic enrollment constraints. Using recent data, we have about 1,821 in-state US citizen and permanent resident applicants competing for roughly 304 enrollment spots.

Even assuming every medical school applicant in Georgia applies to this school, we can use the national MCAT and GPA means and standard deviations for each racial cohort to accurately represent the baseline applicant pool.

Then, I ran a holistic admissions committee scoring algorithm on that simulated pool. I made it 100% race-blind, and to your favor, I completely excluded any "mission fitness" variables or simulated questions about SES/economic adversity. The algorithm simply uses MCAT and GPA (accounting for the fact that the two are correlated, so they aren't completely independent) and adds three other completely race-blind metrics--it doesn't matter if they represent transcripts, recommendations, clinical work, community service, secondary essays, or interviews. That is 5 metrics weighted equally. ZERO "mission fitness," meaning no evaluations about where someone's career might take them (which would naturally give a fair aggregate advantage to Black and Hispanic applicants over White and Asian applicants). Just a pure, strictly race-blind holistic score.

The result? Black applicants still get accepted. Hispanic applicants still get accepted. And a significant gap between their MCAT means still naturally emerges. For example, Asian matriculants can still have a 7.0+ higher MCAT mean over Black matriculants even under a strictly race-blind admissions algorithm.

This experiment isn't about whether or not I have found the exact proprietary weighting parameters that Georgia uses--I probably haven't. It's about mathematically proving that multi-variate admissions packages are a major driver of the statistical differences you claimed are absolute proof of widespread discrimination.

Finally, this once again goes back to what Jimmy Higgins wrote: broadly speaking, acceptance rates correlate with the MCAT means for the national demographics. Explaining the remaining variance is simply a matter of statistics skill, not assuming a national conspiracy.

Can you post the code?

 

[Politesse]

I was referring to individuals' habits of thought, not to social organization.

Yeah. I know. With a racist metaphor.

Yes, I know you didn't mean that. You just said that. It's not fair to hold you accoutnable for what you say, only what you mean, and we can never really know what you mean, except through what you say. Magic.

 

[Emily Lake]

As a generalized comment... I'm so incredibly tired of any disagreement on policy or social practice being immediately greeted with an accusation of racism or sexism or transphobia or some other "you're evil" label. It's been so overused by people who can't make an actual argument that it's lost all meaning.

At this point, if some ultra-progressive arrogant snotrag calls me a name, I take it as proof that they're incapable of rational thought. It's as impactful to me as if you called me a poopyhead.

 

[Emily Lake]

Speaking offhand of "tribal" society as though it were inherently evil is indicative of a sheltered and prejudicial upbringing. It's a common aphorism on "Right" and "Left" alike, but have you ever noticed that people who actually have a tribal background don't use it? Not just because it is prejudicial, but because it is intellectually absurd to blame Europe's habitual and violent factionalism on the social organization of their favorite victims.

This is moronic. You know perfectly well that it's not at all a reference to any indigenous group of people. It's damned near retarded to pretend it is.

Some of youse are straight up linguistic terrorists who seem to delight in redefining words to make your moralistic positions seem righteous, even when they're of no higher caliber than schoolyard name-calling by the local bully.

 

[Emily Lake]

Such cool reasoning powers demonstrated by your devolution into insults and name calling…

You've spent pages calling people racists, and insinuating that all disagreement to your beliefs is evidence of bigotry... and you're deeply offended by Bomb accurately describing your interactions as tribalistic?

 

[Emily Lake]

Calling anything they don't like "tribal" is itself a common habit of racists...

In order for you to have a reason to believe that, you'd need to be competent at identifying racism.

Speaking offhand of "tribal" society as though it were inherently evil is indicative of a sheltered and prejudicial upbringing. It's a common aphorism on "Right" and "Left" alike, but have you ever noticed that people who actually have a tribal background don't use it? Not just because it is prejudicial, but because it is intellectually absurd to blame Europe's habitual and violent factionalism on the social organization of their favorite victims.

I don't recall speaking of tribal society, offhand or otherwise. You appear to be equivocating between the meanings of "tribal" in political and sociological contexts. I was referring to individuals' habits of thought, not to social organization.

I think you're being too generous in framing this as if it's an unintentional equivocation.

 

[laughing dog]

Such cool reasoning powers demonstrated by your devolution into insults and name calling…

You've spent pages calling people racists, and insinuating that all disagreement to your beliefs is evidence of bigotry... and you're deeply offended by Bomb accurately describing your interactions as tribalistic?

I believe the point was that the pot was calling the kettle black. That you missed the point is not ironic, even given your post 788.

 

[Emily Lake]

I was referring to individuals' habits of thought, not to social organization.

Yeah. I know. With a racist metaphor.

Yes, I know you didn't mean that. You just said that. It's not fair to hold you accoutnable for what you say, only what you mean, and we can never really know what you mean, except through what you say. Magic.

If noting that people engage in tribal thinking - which you 100% know means in-group assumed morally right, out-group cast as bad - is "racist", then you, sir, are not very smart.

 

[Emily Lake]

Such cool reasoning powers demonstrated by your devolution into insults and name calling…

You've spent pages calling people racists, and insinuating that all disagreement to your beliefs is evidence of bigotry... and you're deeply offended by Bomb accurately describing your interactions as tribalistic?

I believe the point was that the pot was calling the kettle black. That you missed the point is not ironic, even given your post 788.

I think the point is that some people, including Toni, can dish it out but can't take it. And by that I mean they'll fling out insults with abandon, but the merest whiff of criticism of their behavior is the insult to end all insults.

If youse want to be consistently treated with civility and respect, then it's incumbent upon youse to treat others with civility and respect. If youse treat others with condescension and contempt, youse should expect the same in return.

 

[laughing dog]

Such cool reasoning powers demonstrated by your devolution into insults and name calling…

You've spent pages calling people racists, and insinuating that all disagreement to your beliefs is evidence of bigotry... and you're deeply offended by Bomb accurately describing your interactions as tribalistic?

I believe the point was that the pot was calling the kettle black. That you missed the point is not ironic, even given your post 788.

I think the point is that some people, including Toni, can dish it out but can't take it. And by that I mean they'll fling out insults with abandon, but the merest whiff of criticism of their behavior is the insult to end all insults.

Whoosh - it went past you once again. Perhaps if you weren't so intent on whiteknighting a fellow tribal member, you'd get it.

BTW, if you don't think there are at least 2 racial bigots participating in this thread, then you are not very smart.

 

[Toni]

As noted upthread, 90+ percent of NA doctors don't work on reservations.

The statistic about reservations is a red herring. Working on a reservation is merely one specific example of how different demographics might fulfill a public need. The broader and more rigorous data shows that NA doctors proportionally serve across all types of underserved areas at higher rates. Equating "underserved" exclusively with "reservations" artificially shrinks the success rate of the metric and erroneously manufactures an undeserved high failure rate.

If for the sake of getting one mission-fit doctor you rate nine premeds as mission-fit who aren't actually mission-fit, that looks a lot more like measuring race than measuring mission-fitness.

First, because NA doctors serve in other underserved areas at higher rates, the premise of a 9-in-10 false prediction rate doesn't hold up to the data.

Okay, can you cite the broader and more rigorous data? How accurate is the prediction?

More importantly, there seems to be a fundamental disconnect about the mechanism of how mission-fitness is plausibly applied. Let me try to clear that up:

Admissions committees do not look at just one or two metrics; they evaluate a multivariate set of data: MCAT, GPA, transcripts, community service, clinical work, essays, and interviews. They apply consistent weights to these different criteria to each individual. "Mission fitness" is an implied variable that emerges from assessing an individual's unique essays, past community service, and interview answers regarding their career goals. It is not a checkbox that blindly translates race into a bonus score--if it were, we wouldn't see such high absolute rejection rates for NA and Black applicants.

How are you getting that? A checkbox that blindly translates race into a bonus score is perfectly compatible with high absolute rejection rates for NA and Black applicants -- that's going to depend on how big the bonus is rather than on how well targeted it is to mission fitness.

What happens when you aggregate these individual assessments? The demographics naturally stratify. If we assume a baseline level of honesty across all applicants, NA applicants as a group are going to provide answers and track records that align more frequently with a commitment to underserved areas.

Conversely, Asian applicants, in the aggregate, demonstrate lower rates of eventually working in these specific environments (for instance, White doctors end up serving in rural areas at higher rates than Asian doctors). If you expect Asian applicants to score equally well on essays and interviews regarding a commitment to underserved areas, you are essentially expecting them to lie at higher rates during the process. If we expect the same frequency of honesty across all racial demographics, the aggregate scores for this specific variable will naturally diverge.

We shouldn't assume failure of essays and interviews to predict mission-fitness means applicants were lying -- people change their minds as they grow older and that often means youthful idealism takes a beating when it runs up against experience and practicality.

I’m not certain that your reply is the flex you think that it is

Fewer Asians express interest in working in underserved populations during the pre-acceptance part of med school and fewer end up working with underserved populations. It is not surprising that those who express no interest in working with a particular population end up still feeling that way a few years later.

People change their minds. Or don’t. People, especially newly minted graduates of any program face significant financial pressures. It’s not surprising if people choose financial survival over altruism.

It’s also not surprising if new graduates feel a financial pressure to help extended family financially or to continue to live or aspire to live at the upper middle class strata to which they are accustomed.

Medical students are people, just like the rest of us. They graduate after years of extremely grueling work, inhumane hours and a lot of pressure. Like the rest of us they make decisions based on what they need and what they want—and what they can live with.

 

[Toni]

I was referring to individuals' habits of thought, not to social organization.

Yeah. I know. With a racist metaphor.

Yes, I know you didn't mean that. You just said that. It's not fair to hold you accoutnable for what you say, only what you mean, and we can never really know what you mean, except through what you say. Magic.

If noting that people engage in tribal thinking - which you 100% know means in-group assumed morally right, out-group cast as bad - is "racist", then you, sir, are not very smart.

I think some people accuse others of ‘tribalism’ because they see it as a retort to implications of racism against them. I don’t think it’s the flex they think it is, but that’s me.

Most of us have some degree of racism that we are not aware or conscious of. Most of us have biases—or perspectives that are informed by our upbringing, education, association with friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, education, training, reading, life experiences. We don’t think of them as biases but they are.

Sometimes many of us use words or terms which have racist meanings or traditions we may not be aware of. It’s good to become more aware and to try to do better.

 

[Bomb#20]

I was referring to individuals' habits of thought, not to social organization.

Yeah. I know. With a racist metaphor.

Yes, I know you didn't mean that. You just said that. It's not fair to hold you accoutnable for what you say, only what you mean, and we can never really know what you mean, except through what you say. Magic.

Can you remind me which race "tribe" is a racist slur against?

01: Caledones
02: Taexali
03: Carvetii
04: Venicones
05: Epidii
06: Damnonii
07: Novantae
08: Selgovae
09: Votadini
10: Brigantes
11: Parisi
12: Cornovii
13: Deceangli
14: Ordovices
15: Corieltauvi
16: Iceni
17: Demetae
18: Catuvellauni
19: Silures
20: Dubunni
21: Dumnonii
22: Durotriges
23: Belgae
24: Atrebates
25: Regni
26: Cantiaci
27: Trinovantes

 

[Politesse]

I was referring to individuals' habits of thought, not to social organization.

Yeah. I know. With a racist metaphor.

Yes, I know you didn't mean that. You just said that. It's not fair to hold you accoutnable for what you say, only what you mean, and we can never really know what you mean, except through what you say. Magic.

Can you remind me which race "tribe" is a racist slur against?

01: Caledones
02: Taexali
03: Carvetii
04: Venicones
05: Epidii
06: Damnonii
07: Novantae
08: Selgovae
09: Votadini
10: Brigantes
11: Parisi
12: Cornovii
13: Deceangli
14: Ordovices
15: Corieltauvi
16: Iceni
17: Demetae
18: Catuvellauni
19: Silures
20: Dubunni
21: Dumnonii
22: Durotriges
23: Belgae
24: Atrebates
25: Regni
26: Cantiaci
27: Trinovantes

Are you pretending to be dumb for some rhetorical reason, or just to waste our time? Even if you did mean, by smearing your interlocutors as "tribal", only to compare them to the Cantiacci (as we all know you most certainly did not) your comment would still be ethnocentric, bigoted, and factually misleading, just on the basis of political type rather than skin color. If you aak an archaeologist rather than a right-wing blowhard, they'll happily correct you on your misguided beliefs that the period before Roman imperialization was more violent or even more culturally insular than what followed.

 

[Politesse]

If noting that people engage in tribal thinking - which you 100% know means in-group assumed morally right, out-group cast as bad - is "racist", then you, sir, are not very smart.

Yes. That is exactly what I mean. Using loaded and historically racialized terms as a stand in the general concept of anri-social behavior is racist. Your Colonislism-shaped beliefs about what "tribes" are like is wrong, prejudicial, and speaks volumes about how you see the world. It is also, given the cause you are supposedly championing, incredibly ironic.