MCATs, Affirmative Action, and DEI, Oh My

[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.

You insist there is something other that what we can test that makes the admissions fair. Thus you are the one claiming the mysterious factor--identify it!

I have done it a number of times - it's called experience and expertise of the personnel of the medical college. You're the one who makes the mysterious claim of unfair admissions.

 

[laughing dog]

But Don's explanation is basically a whitewash for discrimination.

How? Just because you don't understand it, doesn't make it invalid.

 

[laughing dog]

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.

And herein lies the problem that a lot of us have with the left. You want things to happen but you don't actually want to incur the costs, instead pushing them off onto some other so you can pretend they disappear.

And the problem with the humane people have with people like you is that you wish to ignore the problems of homelessness.

And when costs are pushed around like this they actually become bigger. It's attitudes like yours that caused the housing collapse.

Just because you believe it, doesn't make it so. Prove it.

 

[Toni]

Is there any doubt in your mind that Trump—and every other single major party POTUS/candidate chose his/her VP running mate from the pool of candidates limited to white males with the exception of Geraldine Ferrara and Sarah Palin? It was simply understood that the only candidate deemed suitable was white and male.

Why wasn’t that a problem?

VP is always a diversity pick. But neither "black" nor "female" have anything to do with qualifications for the job. He got backlash for saying the quiet part out loud.

Black and female had as much to do with job qualifications as white and male has had for the last 250 years or so.

You only heard the black and female part because you’re neither and because it was a distinct —and long overdue change.

I understand how it hurts to know that no one like you will even be considered for a job and I figure it must be a few thousand times worse if you are not white.

We heard it because it's blatant discrimination. I know your intentions are good but they're paving stones on that infamous road.

I’m sorry that you feel threatened by the change that people who look like you are no longer first in line.

I heard no complaints from you when Trump declared that he would nominate a woman and then chose Amy Coney Bryant.

 

[Toni]

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

It’s been discussed 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.

Does it not occur to you that academic ability is associated with parental socioeconomic status??

You keep treating a disparate outcome as proof of discrimination. In just about every case it actually means there's some sort of disparate input.

No, I know for a fact that academic ability is assumed to be associated with parents socioeconomic status. My family was on the lower edge of middle class. My siblings and I all had stellar SAT scores and GPAs. In college and as an adult, I have known/do know plenty of people from extremely modest means who are frankly, brillliant.

Parental socioeconomic status helps students afford to be able to sit for the SATs multiple times, and pays for cram classes designed specifically to boost SAT scores. It pays for more academically rigorous (or by reputation more academically rigorous) schools for students.

It also purchases a presumption of being smarter which matters a lot more than any of us would like it to. And it reduces the economic strain on students who may be less likely to have to work multiple jobs in order to pay for school or who may choose fields that will pay well because their families need their help.

It does not make students smarter. Just look at Donald Trump. First example that popped into my mind that everyone would know. Or RFK Jr. Or any of the Trump kids.

Just because it can be gamed to some degree and isn't a 100% prediction of ability doesn't make it not the best yardstick we have.

It’s not, though.

 

[Toni]

It is very possible to be an excellent test taker —and a less talented professional in any field you care to name.

You're not joking. I know I'm a bit biased... but some of the absolute worst practicing acturaries I've know breezed through exams like they were nothing. Great test takers, really crappy at doing the job. Some are good at both.

Doing well on tests doesn't guarantee success post exams. On the other hand... doing poorly on tests rarely results in success at the other end.

Exactly.

However, there is ZERO evidence that medical schools are admitting ANY students who do not meet their thresholds for admissions.

You somehow still believe that they do.

And that is where we seem to differ.

The problem is the evidence suggests they lowered the threshold so as to permit the admissions. Fox/henhouse!

There is evidence that part of the mission of medical schools changes, so it is reasonable that the admissions process changed. Your unnuanced approach takes that to mean lowering standards or discriminating against certain groups. A nuanced approach (as evidenced by Don's explanations which take into account many factors) takes that to mean that the admission process is much more nuanced and complex that meeting MCAT and GPA thresholds. Given the importance of the admissions task, and the high rate of completion, the evidence does not appear to meet your kneejerk analysis.

No high quality (or even low quality) evidence has been presented to indicate that the current process is educating and turning out less qualified or less effective medical personnel. Which also suggests your position is meritless.

But Don's explanation is basically a whitewash for discrimination.

Don’s post seems to be a good screening tool for both reading comprehension and bias.

 

[Toni]

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.

Sure it can. But that's not the right question, you are assuming all socioeconomic issues are racism, but the success of Asians says otherwise.

It’s some Asians, not all Asian populations. I’ve seen some pretty ugly racism against Hmong people.

 

[scombrid]

Meanwhile the EPA is gone and the MAHA people are promoting quackery while encouraging the discharge of more toxic pollutants to the environment. Because you know, raw milk makes you immune to damage from measles, lead, PFAS, etc….

These GOP folks sure have awesome priorities.

 

[scombrid]

GOP floods the market with imported beef and then orders the Interior Department to kill off the wolves to help put the ranchers they fucked over with their stupid trade policy. But none of them are woke so it’s okay.

 

[Derec]

This actually makes me wonder something. If the problem is preferential treatment, then why does the discussion seem so overwhelmingly concerned with preferential treatment when the beneficiary is Black or Hispanic? White applicants lose positions to other White applicants all the damn time, and some of those people absolutely got an advantage that had nothing to do with being the most qualified person in the room. Legacy status, family connections, referrals, who you know, institutional connections, etc.

You ask a very good question actually. One reason is certainly availability of data. AAMC publishes MCAT and GPA of matriculants by race, but afaik not by e.g. parental income or physician parents. I would love to examine the latter, because I firmly believe that these things help students with subjective metrics (on which the Left wants to rely even more at the expense of objective academic metrics) much more than they do with objective ones.

But I think another reason is more important still. Disagreements fuel discussion. You won't find much disagreement about the preferences for those with connections being wrong. But the majority on this forum who openly support racial preferences (like ZiprHead) and those who deny they happen despite all evidence (e.g. Toni). So it's hardly surprising this generates a lot of debate on here.

Someone else loses that seat or job when that happens too. Yet nobody sees a rejected White applicant and immediately starts wondering which other White guy stole his spot through connections or preferential treatment. But let the person who got the opportunity be Black, Hispanic, or Asian, groups that together make up roughly 38% of the population, and suddenly everybody wants to know whose spot the ‘handout’ supposedly cost.

The known effect size contributes to it. If you look at the MCAT/GPA results, Asians accepted to med schools have better stats than blacks. The effect is somewhat less with whites, but still significant. So, why should we not talk about it, no matter the percentages?

I agree that things like AA/DEI are a pretty ridiculous and clumsy way of dealing with racism. America has historically been much better at trying to manage the effects of discrimination than actually bringing the hammer down on the people doing the discriminating. Hell, look at Reconstruction. We fought an entire Civil War, then turned around, pardoned a bunch of Confederate thugs and watched many of them walk right back into positions of political power.

A lot of mistakes were made in the aftermath of the Civil War. Pardoning Confederate soldiers and officers was done in order to heal the divisions, but I agree that it had a lot of negative consequences.

So instead of consistently slapping discriminatory behavior with the book, we eventually ended up with policies that basically say, “Okay, since we're not interested in stopping those people from discriminating, let's put something discriminating on paper to give black people a fair shot.”

It's like trying to drive out the Devil out with Beelzebub.

IMO, AA/DEI is treating the symptom instead of the disease.

And like most symptomatic treatment, long-term use has significant negative side-effects.
I think one big reason black and Hispanic performance keeps lagging is the idea that they should be given admissions with lower performance than other groups. Why work hard and achieve when you will get into college and med school with mediocre performance?
And what is especially Orwellian is that despite all evidence that blacks and Hispanics are let in with lesser academic performance, the myth is still that blacks have to be "twice as good" as others, when the reality is exactly opposite. Some people pretend it's still 1940s or something.

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. It not only sucks for whites and Asians who have to perform significantly better to have the same chance of getting it, but it also sucks for high achieving blacks and Hispanics because nobody knows for sure that they got where they are on merit vs. based on racial preferences. It's like being the nephew of the owner. He can be very competent, but people will still suspect that he got the position based on nepotism.

Especially considering all the white women enjoying its benefits.

Are women given a preference in medical school admissions? If so, then that's wrong as well.

 

[Derec]

Meanwhile the EPA is gone and the MAHA people are promoting quackery while encouraging the discharge of more toxic pollutants to the environment. Because you know, raw milk makes you immune to damage from measles, lead, PFAS, etc….

These GOP folks sure have awesome priorities.

GOP floods the market with imported beef and then orders the Interior Department to kill off the wolves to help put the ranchers they fucked over with their stupid trade policy. But none of them are woke so it’s okay.

Lost IIDB members ...

 

[laughing dog]

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.

 

[bilby]

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.

Indeed. The reason for the existence of such schemes is simply to give the lie to the absurd claims by racist hirers that no black people are qualified.

Nobody is saying they must hire an unqualified black person; They are being told that it stretches credibility beyond breaking point to claim that fewer than x qualified black candidates exist, where x is generally a rather smaller number than would be expected based on demographics.

If one in seven Americans are black, and you are looking for a hundred Amerucans to enter your medical school, but claim that you can't even find three who are qualified to do so, then you are a racist liar.

Medical school admissions (unlike NBA team selection), are not and cannot be about finding the hundred best, most elite, most effective physicians in the whole wide world. They are about finding people who are adequately able to learn to be good physicians.

AA/DEI is calling out racists on their lies.

"We don't let blacks in, because none are qualified" is not a fact, it's an excuse for racism. Even in the unlikely event that you could precisely rank applicants, it is absurd to expect that none of the top n, where n is the number of places on the course, would be black; But as you cannot rank applicants to that level of precision anyway, it is absurd squared.

If it is really truly honestly true that there are fewer suitably qualified black applicants to medical school than there are places reserved for such applicants, then the way to correct this is to improve the opportunities for black students to become qualified, not to just take in whites and asians only.

Unless you believe that there is some inherent racial characteristic that makes black people incapable of being good physicians. Which would be a fundamentally racist belief (even if it were true, which it is not).

 

[ZiprHead]

AA/DEI is calling out racists on their lies.

Exactly why they hate it.

 

[Derec]

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.

 

[Derec]

You and your ilk cannot explain any reduction in white men’s chances without screaming discrimination. The notion that the world does not revolve around white men is inconceivable to you.

White men's (or Asian women's for that matter, or any other combo) chances should not be lower than any other demographic group's. Nobody here is advocating that white men should be first in line, or get in with lower scores. But neither should the reverse be true.

 

[Derec]

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.

 

[laughing dog]

You and your ilk cannot explain any reduction in white men’s chances without screaming discrimination. The notion that the world does not revolve around white men is inconceivable to you.

White men's (or Asian women's for that matter, or any other combo) chances should not be lower than any other demographic group's. Nobody here is advocating that white men should be first in line, or get in with lower scores. But neither should the reverse be true.

Your obsession with scores and only scores ignores all other factors . Since admission rates for white men and Asians are higher than other groups, it their chances are higher already.

 

[Derec]

There isn't some one-trick-pony "metric" that can magically tell you whether someone is a good candidate for medical school or not.

Of course there isn't. But if you want to get rid of or deemphasize MCAT and GPA you have to replace their part in the admissions framework with something else.

Thank god you aren't sitting on any of these committees! Racism aside, you don't seem to understand how university application processes work in the slightest.

First of all, what I am saying here is not racist in the slightest. Second, this has nothing to do with my understanding of the admissions process but with your strawman version of it.

It's not a question of "a-ha, this number is higher than x, they must be brilliant!"

It may not prove brilliance, but somebody who scores 510 shows significantly higher levels of academic preparedness and reasoning skills than somebody who scores 500.

 

[Derec]

I am not. I am just suggesting that there is no reason to assume other metrics are distributed in such a way that they largely cancel the different MCAT/GPA trends in absence of racial preferences on the part of adcoms.

Essentially you are arguing that MCT and GPAs are the only things that matter for admission to medical school and that any another “metric” (including one you don’t have access to ) leads to discrimination away from white men and/or Asians.

No. I am not saying that MCAT and GPA are the only things that matter. I am saying that if there is a marked difference between admitted students of different groups, then either there is some other difference between these groups that compensates for the MCAT/GPA difference, or else there is racial/ethnic discrimination. Logically, there is no third option. And since nobody has proposed any such difference, the latter is the reasonable conclusion. Especially since we know that academic institutions have been hell-bent to apply different standards to different racial groups for decades. For example, the Bakke vs. UC Regents SCOTUS case was about UC Davis medical school applying a crude quota to get in more black students. Since SCOTUS disallowed that, colleges and med schools alike have used all sorts of tools in order to effect racial preferences in their admissions process. For example, University of Michigan gave all black applicants 20 extra points (out of 150 points attainable) on the admissions scorecard.