MCATs, Affirmative Action, and DEI, Oh My

[thebeave]

Your typing is getting worse along with your strawmen. I thought you were going to type extra slow. What happened?

LMAO!!

 

[Toni]

I’m going to type this very slowly and patiently: Please try to hear it in your head as I type this:

You keep repeating this even though we keep telling you that you are misrepresenting our positions.
I shall type equally as slowly in the hope you stop erecting these tired old strawmen.

It is not discrimination against whites, Asians, or makes to no longer be automatically considered the best candidate for all good things.

Nobody is saying they should be. But they should not have to line up at the back of the line either. And that goes whether your justification is some idea of transgenerational payback for past wrongs or "diversity über alles".

It us not racist ( or sexist) to recognize that it was once the presumption that all Hugh paying, highly skilled and prestigious and desirable positions and benefits were by rights, designed for males, preferably white ( or more recently, Asians) and the entire selection process was built on that presumption—how to select the best suited white or Asian ) male for whatever spot was available.

Again, what was in the past is in the past. You cannot fix wrongs from the past by yourself discriminating in the present. You just keep introducing more injustice.

But now too ma y women and darker than pasty white people started making noise and wanting to push in and darn it if a lot of them were not just as good or even better than the white guys— Plus patients really like them

Better based on what metrics? Certainly not by academics, since whites and especially Asians accepted to med schools have much better academic metrics than blacks and Hispanics.
Btw, AAMC does not disaggregate data by sex. At least not in the tables I was looking at. So let's leave women out of this discussion.

No longer having first place or the first 100 places) reserved for you does not mean you are now being discriminated against. It means that others are now being given a fair chance and sometimes they are the better candidate.

You are getting worse with your ridiculous strawmen! Nobody is advocating for anything of the sort.
We just want applicants to be seen as individuals. That means that skin color or ancestors who spoke Spanish should not make up for middling academic performance.

Sorry Llren: The era of white male ( supposed) suprenacy is fading.
Y’all still get plenty of chances but now so do other people.
Guess what: Competition got stiffer.

Your typing is getting worse along with your strawmen. I thought you were going to type extra slow. What happened?

If you ‘just want applicants to be seen as individuals,’ why do you reduce them to test scores and race?

Why do you not believe that medical schools are highly invested in admitting into their program only students they think will succeed?

If MCAT scores are not sufficient, why not put your faith in the more rigorous USMLE exams which are given at different stages of the med students medical school education?

You have no evidence that students are admitted who are not up to the eulogies of med school and residencies.

You just cannot stand that some black or brown person might be a better candidate than a white or good minority Asian.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But it's not the second half.

Now it's a new game, new players. Why should they be punished for the previous game they had no part in? You are punishing completely innocent people for having the wrong parents. The Constitution specifically prohibits this.

Denial of the generational effects of racism.

1) The Constitution still prohibits it.

2) Said generational effects have not been demonstrated. What you are seeing is socioeconomic, not racial.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You're not citing any evidence here.

My position is you’ve not produced any “high quality evidence”. Still waiting. Instead of avoiding the question, produce some.

Nobody's challenged the numbers presented, all the discussion has been about their meaning.

One would think that means the numbers are not “high quality” evidence if their meaning is unclear.

The numbers say what they say. Nobody's questioning that they do. It's all about some mysterious other factor that makes Asians bad and blacks good that supposedly counters the difference. But nobody can point to it, nobody can present any supposed measurement of it. Just take it on faith that they're doing it right.

 

[Derec]

SAT’s are far less an objective measure of academic ability than they are a measure of parental socioeconomic status.

Not true. SATs assess math and language skills in a way where every student takes the same test. It it far less prone to gaming by affluent parents than other measures like essays and extracurriculars.
Killing the SAT To Help Underprivileged Students Actually Benefits Rich Kids

It’s been discussed before.

It's also been debunked before.

One also must account for the fact that students attending high school during the pandemic frankly are behind what their older peers would be at the same age.

True, the Pandemic really messed with education. However, the educational establishment should have come up with ways to resist the drop in learning, not lean into it. And we are now half a decade past the Pandemic. Why is it still used as an excuse for "test optional" and other nonsense that came out of that era?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

"Pure normality" is not required from real-world data. Assumption of normality works if the data is approximately normal. Second, the distribution of the mean trends toward normal with increasing N regardless of the underlying distribution (Central Limit Theorem). The width of the distribution of the means is also gets narrower with increasing N (inversely proportional to square root on N in fact). With thousands of students, the distribution of means becomes very narrow.
So yes, we can compare MCAT and GPA means even if the distribution is not perfectly normal.

We are looking at the side of a curve. The distribution is very much not normal. But this whole thing is a red herring--they made a technically correct claim, that it's possible the highest scorer was black. But that doesn't matter. If you assume anything like rational behavior in admissions the mean will represent the group. (You could hypothesize that the black scores are lower because they're admitting a bunch of basketball stars or the like and have a binominal distribution, but that makes no sense.) Quit trying to prove red herrings can't exist.

You ought to consider how these three factors: non-universal cutoffs, different subgroups applying to different schools, and beta distributions play a role rather than just throwing your hands up in the air and saying, "that's a shitty school!"

But you are assuming all these things work out to effect blacks and Hispanics being accepted with far lesser average scores than whites and Asians in absence of discrimination. But why should we assume that? Especially when academia is strongly in favor of practicing racial preferences in order to enhance "diversity" (except in schools like Morehouse and Meharry, where diversity doesn't matter).

What he's suggesting is possible. We do have the observation that black people supposedly receive on average inferior medical care. Technically true--people who go to medical facilities that see a lot of poor people do not get as good care as those who go to medical facilities that have more money. The difference disappears when you compare care by hospital. But, if it were true the result would be there were some school out there with horrible reputations.

MCAT and GPA are correlated with passing Step 1. They are correlated with likelihood of dropping out, which is very costly for the student and not great for the school either.
MCAT is a tool used for med school admission. There are four years of med school to get through, and variable number of years in residency. They all shape the student. So it's hardly surprising that performance on an entrance exam fades in importance in the years after. But med schools cannot look forward in time and see directly who will be successful later on. They have to make predictions from what they have. If not MCAT, what do you propose that would have a greater validity? The advantage of the MCAT is that everybody takes the same test (college classes are highly variable between institutions) and the student has to actually take the exam - can't outsource that like essay writing.

Yeah, in university admissions affirmative action actually turns out to be bad for blacks. It doesn't change whether someone goes to university, it changes which university they go to. So you get some blacks with higher prestige degrees but more flunking out. Removing it had the effect of increasing the number of blacks getting degrees.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I’m going to type this very slowly and patiently: Please try to hear it in your head as I type this:

Typing it slowly and patiently doesn't change the fact that you're arguing against a strawman.

You're the one supporting reserving slots for people of the correct race. We aren't.

I've already said what I want: strip all racial information from applications.

 

[Derec]

It makes no difference to the community being denied loans whether there is a "logical argument" for being discriminated against. They are still being systematically turned down for loans, whether the bank manager is secretly a Klan member or has three black friends and listened to a hip hop album once.

There is a huge difference between more blacks being denied because they are black and more blacks being denied because some variable that is relevant to mortgage approval correlates with being black, e.g. houses in certain neighborhoods appreciating less than in others.
What you want is basically to have equal average outcomes between groups despite the groups not being equal on average.

That is basically going on with med school admissions. The outcomes are not equal, sure, but they are "more equal" than under a race-blind approach. That's because the groups are so different based on academic markers like GPA and MCAT.

That is exactly the problem, and everyone involved knows that. You're not breaking anyone's mind by observing that ghettoized Black neighborhoods in the US are almost universally poorer than whatever mainly white neighborhoods adjoin them, for a whole host of reasons from historical housing covenants, to employment discrimination, to systemic denial of city services, to, yes, loan discrimination.

So you agree that these neighborhoods are a worse risk for the lenders. Why do you think that this should not result in lower mortgage approval rates or higher interest rates? Isn't risk a legitimate metric lenders use? Then why would you call it discrimination?

People don't want an "explanation", they want fucking houses. If you had any common sense you'd understand why, it's not that complicated.

So you think banks should be required to incur higher risk just to give more people in worse risk neighborhoods "fucking houses"?

Btw, I always thought a "fucking house" was something like this:

RIP Dolly Parton ...

Yes, and for obvious reasons. But that doesn't change the fact that severe race discrimination takes place in banking environments, even for the very wealthy.

But looking at the lending risk in a particular neighborhood is not discrimination. That is what Loren was talking about. There may be discrimination besides it, but lenders looking less favorably on neighborhoods less likely to appreciate (for whatever reason) is not evidence f it.

The Role of Race in Mortgage Application Denials | Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

www.minneapolisfed.org

You posted a lot of links, so let me just randomly look at this one.

Our work extends the existing literature by controlling for newly available characteristics of the borrower, including credit score and more detailed loan-to-value and debt-to-income ratios associated with an application. In our baseline specification, we estimate that Black applicants are 2.9 percentage points more likely to have their mortgage application denied relative to White applicants, while Asian and Latinx applicants are 2.2 percentage points and 1.5 percentage points, respectively, more likely to be denied.

The difference in approval rates is <3%? And that is not even controlling for neighborhood characteristics.

Also, whoever unironically uses the silly neologism "Latinx" has already lost credibility.

 

[Derec]

Another of the standard ways of lying with statistics is to highlight the large percentage difference between two things both of which have a small percentage ocurrence.

5.7% dropout rate after first year may be small, but it is not small enough to be negligible.

Also look at 12% vs. 4% rate of not completing med school in five years (four is normal). 12% is not exactly "a small percentage ocurrence[sic]".

 

[Derec]

We are looking at the side of a curve. The distribution is very much not normal. But this whole thing is a red herring--they made a technically correct claim, that it's possible the highest scorer was black. But that doesn't matter.

Well there isn't a single highest scorer because many people get 528, but I am sure some of those were black.

If you assume anything like rational behavior in admissions the mean will represent the group.

Right.

(You could hypothesize that the black scores are lower because they're admitting a bunch of basketball stars or the like and have a binominal distribution, but that makes no sense.) Quit trying to prove red herrings can't exist.

I already mentioned that. In absence of discrimination, there would have to be another metric med school use that happens to be correlated in the opposite way with race. But nobody has proposed such a metric, much less showed it exists. Not even basketball stars.

 

[Derec]

You do realize people drop out of school for all sorts of non-academic reasons.

There being non-academic reasons for dropping out does not weaken our claim. If anything, it strengthens it. If academic reasons cause dropping out (or flunking Step 1 for that matter) in only a subset of cases, then the association between mediocre GPA/MCAT and dropping out for academic reasons is stronger, not weaker.

 

[Politesse]

So you think banks should be required to incur higher risk just to give more people in worse risk neighborhoods "fucking houses"?

Yes. Obviously. People need homes.

 

[Toni]

I’m going to type this very slowly and patiently: Please try to hear it in your head as I type this:

Typing it slowly and patiently doesn't change the fact that you're arguing against a strawman.

You're the one supporting reserving slots for people of the correct race. We aren't.

I've already said what I want: strip all racial information from applications.

No: YOU are the person who is insisting that persons of color fail to meet the threshold requirements for admissions to med school, which us demonstrably false.

Why don’t you believe that persons of color deserve to go to med school?

 

[ZiprHead]

But it's not the second half.

Now it's a new game, new players. Why should they be punished for the previous game they had no part in? You are punishing completely innocent people for having the wrong parents. The Constitution specifically prohibits this.

Denial of the generational effects of racism.

1) The Constitution still prohibits it.

2) Said generational effects have not been demonstrated. What you are seeing is socioeconomic, not racial.

Racism doesn't cause socioeconomic issues? Historians around the world are laughing at you.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

You do realize people drop out of school for all sorts of non-academic reasons.

There being non-academic reasons for dropping out does not weaken our claim. If anything, it strengthens it. If academic reasons cause dropping out (or flunking Step 1 for that matter) in only a subset of cases, then the association between mediocre GPA/MCAT and dropping out for academic reasons is stronger, not weaker.

Not necessarily. Suppose, for example, the primary reason that people drop out is economic. Suppose also that most of the correlation you observe for MCAT/GPA and drop out is due to economics correlation with MCAT and GPA. Then, in that instance, it's not the case. Have you looked into the economics and correlations with MCAT and drop out rate etc to investigate this?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I’d ask why you are assuming that black and Hispanic candidates are less qualified but we all know the answer .

Assuming racism doesn't make it so.

We are simply looking at the scores and not refusing to believe what they say.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

View attachment 55102

There are a couple ways to look at this.

1) OMFG!!! Blacks drop out about 250% more than whites!!! OMFFFFFGGFG!
2) Out of 1000 people, 977 whites don't drop out and 943 blacks don't drop out.

With these numbers, it makes one wonder, the importance of the MCAT other than being a basic screening tool.

The 250% is the relevant number. The other is being deceptive.

No it isn't. It's lying with statistics... even if it's unintentional. In reality, only 2.3% of whites drop out, and only 5.7% of blacks. The difference is not material.

This is the statistical equivalent of showing a vertical bar chart where the axis is set to 900 instead of 0 and saying "Look how big the difference is!" It's not big. It's not meaningful. It's noise.

Except we aren't. What you are describing would definitely be lying with statistics, but we aren't setting the axis wrong. We are examining the case that matters: failure. Any event can be modeled as a probability of happening, or a probability of not happening. You'll almost always gain more information from examining whichever number is smaller.

You're an actuary. Customer A has a 1 in 1,000 chance of dying next year. Customer B has a 2 in 1,000 chance of dying next year. Do you charge B .1% more for life insurance or do you charge them twice as much?

 

[Elixir]

Nobody disagrees that there was discrimination in the past. But that does not justify discrimination today.

Why not?

So you're admitting to discriminating.

I'm in no position to discriminate anyone.

Note that you're discriminating against those who have not even been accused of doing anything wrong. This is purely punishment for being of the wrong race. Why is it wrong if done to blacks but right if done to whites and Asians??

The ones that were discriminated in the past did nothing wrong too.

During the first half of the game one team has started on the fifty yard line, the other on the twenty. Now comes the second half and both teams must now start on the twenty. Is the game now fair?

But it's not the second half.

Now it's a new game, new players. Why should they be punished for the previous game they had no part in? You are punishing completely innocent people for having the wrong parents. The Constitution specifically prohibits this.

Great. Let’s start Team White on the opposing 20 yard line, like we always did prior to this horrible reverse discrimination that has made so being white makes it automatically true that you’re more likely to be poor if you’re white, than if you’re black or brown.

Oh, wait … the opposite is STILL the case. I guess black and brown people are just stupid. Right, Loren?

 

[laughing dog]

You're not citing any evidence here.

My position is you’ve not produced any “high quality evidence”. Still waiting. Instead of avoiding the question, produce some.

Nobody's challenged the numbers presented, all the discussion has been about their meaning.

One would think that means the numbers are not “high quality” evidence if their meaning is unclear.

The numbers say what they say. Nobody's questioning that they do. It's all about some mysterious other factor that makes Asians bad and blacks good that supposedly counters the difference. But nobody can point to it, nobody can present any supposed measurement of it. Just take it on faith that they're doing it right.

What on earth is the babble about mysterious factors making Asians bad and blacks good?

Those numbers are the result of a a complex socioeconomic system and admissions process. Their interpretation requires much more understanding about medical schools and applicants than your simple X>Y.

And finally, to paraphrase someone "just because racism against Asians and whites explains it" doesn't make it so.

 

[Toni]

I’d ask why you are assuming that black and Hispanic candidates are less qualified but we all know the answer .

Assuming racism doesn't make it so.

We are simply looking at the scores and not refusing to believe what they say.

Yeah, that’s not at all racist….