What evidence is there that her assessment was fair or unfair?
It is implied by the phrases "students who came", "
were pretty bad" (referring to specific prior event), and "take it seriously" that her evaluation of them was based not merely on their prior experience but on in person interaction at some kind of screening exercise where they have them show their debate chops.
IOW, she had way more predictive information of their actual skills and their ethnic category than almost all University administrators do about either trait when applying AA policies. She had their name, she saw them, heard their speech and accents, etc.. Yes, the stuff that 100% humans use on a constant basis to infer ethnic groups and can do so with high accuracy when the groups are as broad as "Latinx".
Oh, and she knew that this student who complaining was the head to of the Latinx Student Council, because she clearly knew about the extra curricular activities as referenced in her email. AA administrators regularly use the same type of information or much worse, rely on inaccurate and incomplete checking of ethnic identity boxes on applications.
The "obviously" obviously refers to the fact that felt most confident that these 3 students were latinx but recognized she couldn't be sure that were others with a less predictive combo of name, skin tone, accent, and membership in Latinx student groups.
Other relevant evidence is that never having taken a mock trial course is a good predictor of ability to do well at the most advanced course at the nation's premiere University for Mock Trial competition (they have won more than all other schools).
The coach outright lying about their prior course experience in a private email to her dad is implausible, given that it is an easily verifiable fact that the complaining student would have refuted if not true.
The fact that the intro courses we're not listed as formal pre-recs means nothing. The instructor completely determines the pre-recs and they could not register without the coaches permission, which clearly includes come type of of trial/interview. So it merely means that the coach wants to reserve the ability to bring in the occasional student that either has other debate experience or shows exceptional skill in the trial. In doesn't imply they don't and shouldn't regular use prior course experience as a critical factor. They wouldn't have the Intro 200 level course if it wasn't generally thought to be an important stepping stone for most students.
Finally, the daughter is the one who raised the issue of wanting to have a more diverse team. If she had motive to judge these students unfairly negative, then she'd never have raised the diversity issue, just give her Dad her rank order list and put them down at the bottom. She raised this in a private email, not some public statement where she might feign diversity concerns.
This leaves the only plausible inference that any bias was one in favor of assessing these students as more capable than they are. While that doesn't mean she engaged in reverse discrimination, it largely rules out that she unfairly assessed their ability as too low based on inferred race.
There is zero information supporting an unfair assessment. That students' feelings have no relevance, because they proved their opinion invalid irrationally inferring the email to be racist based on her fallacious reasoning. In fact, that student's own comment is yet another piece of good evidence that she is "mediocre" at best concerning the kind of rational discourse and argumentation required for this high level advanced course.
