MCATs, Affirmative Action, and DEI, Oh My

[Jimmy Higgins]

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

It's possible that there are some actual racists in here. But I don't think that's the case.

Likewise. I see "racist" being used to describe anyone who doesn't agree with the left wing position on addressing discrimination. Just because our position would be detrimental to blacks doesn't mean our objective is to be bad to blacks.

Loren, I think you accidentally said something you didn't mean to say. I'll requote it.

Just because our position would be detrimental to blacks doesn't mean our objective is to be bad to blacks.

If memory serves, you've usually taken the stance that these policies are bad for blacks. But above, you seem to appreciate that some of these policies or what you deem are the policies but haven't actually demonstrated well, would benefit blacks.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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.

You're using a racist metaphor -- it's implying there's something wrong with being black. For shame! [/Politesse]

This one's racially based?? I thought "black" in this case was dirty with soot from fire.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

What you are suggesting amounts to expecting every applicant to any medtcal school to waive their requirement gets to privacy and to allow themselves to be subjected to intrusive and ill informed abd often bigoted examination of their academic record, personal information and much more—just to satisfy some people’s fears that unqualified black people are being allowed to become physicians.

1) How am I asking for any more violation of privacy than exists now?? Personality scores aren't a major intrusion??

2) I want the data anonymized before it ever reaches the selection panel. They'll never see the stuff to dig into it.

 

[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.

I don't think you understand the point.

We are saying what tribe (in this case race) someone is from is irrelevant and should have no basis in decision making. I am sure that's what he's referring to about "tribal" thinking.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that I believe you are earnest here, and truly want to reduce inter-group prejudice: in that case, how is using slurs conducive to that goal? It cannot be denied that words like "tribal", "primitive", "savage" and so forth are common terms among people of a certain race, class, and education. This is a post-colonial world. But being common does not make a word neutral. If you know that your choice of words upsets people, and there are plenty of alternatives available, why use it? If your goal is truly to mend fences, setting the field on fire is a weird first step.

 

[Toni]

What you are suggesting amounts to expecting every applicant to any medtcal school to waive their requirement gets to privacy and to allow themselves to be subjected to intrusive and ill informed abd often bigoted examination of their academic record, personal information and much more—just to satisfy some people’s fears that unqualified black people are being allowed to become physicians.

1) How am I asking for any more violation of privacy than exists now?? Personality scores aren't a major intrusion??

2) I want the data anonymized before it ever reaches the selection panel. They'll never see the stuff to dig into it.

It’s not really possible to make the data anonymous at the granular level you’re expecting. Because what would be required would be analysis on an individual school level. Medical school classes are small. There would be NO anonymity to gather data at the level you seem to feel entitled to in order to satisfy your insistence that white and Asian candidates are being turned away in favor of black and Hispanic students who make less good doctors. The numbers are too small.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

What you are suggesting amounts to expecting every applicant to any medtcal school to waive their requirement gets to privacy and to allow themselves to be subjected to intrusive and ill informed abd often bigoted examination of their academic record, personal information and much more—just to satisfy some people’s fears that unqualified black people are being allowed to become physicians.

1) How am I asking for any more violation of privacy than exists now?? Personality scores aren't a major intrusion??

2) I want the data anonymized before it ever reaches the selection panel. They'll never see the stuff to dig into it.

You are demanding information that you aren't privy to, in order to judge to a process you have no part of and understand even less, in order to solve a problem that really doesn't exist.

 

[laughing dog]

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

It's possible that there are some actual racists in here. But I don't think that's the case.

Likewise. I see "racist" being used to describe anyone who doesn't agree with the left wing position on addressing discrimination.

Of course you do. It permits automatic dismissal and eases the conscience.

Just because our position would be detrimental to blacks doesn't mean our objective is to be bad to blacks.

So? Shrugging one’s shoulders doesn’t change anything.

This comes down to yardsticks. They are aiming for equality of outcome, we are aiming for equality of opportunity.

I know you tell yourself that comforting falsehood.

 

[Toni]

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.

You're using a racist metaphor -- it's implying there's something wrong with being black. For shame! [/Politesse]

This one's racially based?? I thought "black" in this case was dirty with soot from fire.

The pot/kettle metaphor further hypocrisy dates back to Cervantes’ Don Quixote .

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Can you post the code?

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 is supposed to show something?!?! You introduce a source of noise that will remove some without any basis, of course it hits those with higher scores more.

Kind of, yes, and that is part of the point. It is ultimately why Bomb#20 doesn't even need my source code--he could write this simulation himself in five minutes. Let's look at the math here. We have a number of parameters (p₁, p₂, ... p_n) normalized to decimals between 0 and 1, weighted evenly into an average:
Score = 1/n*(p₁ + p₂ + p₃ + ... + p_n)

If p₁ is the MCAT, adding more parameters ( n ) mathematically dilutes the correlation between p₁ and the final score. As n approaches infinity, the correlation between the MCAT and the final score approaches zero.

BUT, admissions committees are not using infinite parameters; they are using a finite set of metrics highly relevant to the school's mission and yield projections. Some of these parameters might have weak correlations to the MCAT, or even inverse correlations. Take applicant "engagement," for example. You might expect it to be independent of the MCAT, but is it truly? How much genuine engagement does a high-MCAT applicant show toward a lower-tier school they view only as a safety? How well does a prestige-seeking applicant perform in an interview at a school whose core mission is serving underserved areas?

Adcoms legitimately evaluate these multiple variables. If we were studying the correlation between engagement and the final adcom score, we would consider the MCAT to be the confounding variable (or the "noise"). Therefore, I did not "introduce a source of noise without any basis"--I introduced variables that mirror how holistic admissions actually operate. While it is a simulation, the multi-variate framework is at least much closer to reality than assuming the MCAT drives absolutely everything.

The bottom line is that we already know confounding variables exist in this process. This simply underscores that treating systemic discrimination as the definitive explanation for the "noise" in the data is an assumption--one that ignores how multi-variate scoring actually works.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Leftist fantasy. Doesn't make it work. Dropping students from inferior schools into superior schools doesn't help. Even as early as grade school.

I don't know how we fix early education (because so much of it is parents and community), but that's where any fix has to be. Anything done later is painting over the rust.

Really.

I know quite a number of people who attended ‘mediocre schools’ who were National Merit scholars.

A good student can be in a poor situation and can benefit from being put in a better one. But rarely were they not a good student in the poor situation.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The one thing that's a little baffling is they chose to erase the Hispanic guy, rather than the White guy in the middle. Did Hispanic males drop below even White males on the progressive stack? Or maybe they thought the Hispanic guy was also White?!

Altering the Asian girl's face had to sting a little for her. I guess AI (or the photo editor) wasn't too fond of her chubby cheeks. I kinda liked her better the original way.

How is what you describe "DEI" in any way?

That's about making things look different than they are. You've heard of the token black guy? Looks like we have a token white guy here.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

"To add--we still do not know how much of the differences are due to matriculating to different schools with different thresholds. We observed how much Puerto Rico can affect the numbers. There isn't much data on the matriculation side of this."

Much of the data is unavailable to do this kind of analysis, especially school-specific. There are some interesting observations to be made, however, at a regional and state level. Some states (like West Virginia) and territories (like Puerto Rico) have acceptance rates higher than there are for the White and Asian cohorts. Compared to a state like California with elite MCAT scores and GPAs, those acceptance rates often shoot past California while those regions' MCATs and GPAs are not as good. These regions generally have small Asian populations, but sometimes large White populations or other demographics. The acceptance rate of California in general, while "high," is less than that of either White or Asian, even though the average scores are comparable. This is suggestive of regional bottlenecking discussed earlier, but I cannot really be certain because of the lack of data on exactly where people matriculate to and those demographic and score statistics for those schools. I kind of think that "mission fitness" or seeking diversity as a "public good" is interactive with regional bottlenecking, magnifying the effect. Still, I do not know how much specific schools with specific charters or merely voluntarily not going to schools with lower thresholds plays a role as well.

I will finish computing and show some numbers later.

I think the issue here is that you don't want to keep bedding the numbers. The numbers are telling us something that isn't unexpected, and appears reasonable. That better grades mean better acceptance rates. This entire thread has people who are woke beyond belief desperately trying to find data that implies the nation is unfair to whites and Asians. The data broadly says, better students do better. Trying to get SDs to a certain level is merely an exercise in skill at getting the results you want at some point.

Look again at what he's doing. He's finding the bias we are talking about, but making up a mission fitness parameter to balance it--but we have no evidence that it's relevant.

You mean he is modeling a potential metric or set of metrics that you've assumed was racial bias, and you are complaining that he is calling it something else. A person with very high MCATs and GPAs can rely solely on that. A person with lower values has to work harder at selling themselves as a viable candidate for medical school. That you think this is unreasonable is odd. Don2's look at it is far from unreasonable. Yes, race enters the picture at some point, but the weight it is being given doesn't appear to be anywhere near the Civil Rights violations being claimed. You and your ilk keep claiming you've proven racial bias to the extent that Asians are discriminated against. You keep saying judge the individuals, but damn entire races over average test scores. Your arguments have been more hollow than a cheap chocolate Easter bunny.

Completely underwear gnome.

Where's the mapping between mission fitness and the scores?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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

It's possible that there are some actual racists in here. But I don't think that's the case.

Likewise. I see "racist" being used to describe anyone who doesn't agree with the left wing position on addressing discrimination. Just because our position would be detrimental to blacks doesn't mean our objective is to be bad to blacks.

Loren, I think you accidentally said something you didn't mean to say. I'll requote it.

Just because our position would be detrimental to blacks doesn't mean our objective is to be bad to blacks.

If memory serves, you've usually taken the stance that these policies are bad for blacks. But above, you seem to appreciate that some of these policies or what you deem are the policies but haven't actually demonstrated well, would benefit blacks.

Look at the repeated complaints about whites previously going to the front of the line and complaining about the loss of privilege. Now we have the exact same situation the other way around. Blacks are being given a pass to the front of the line. Removing that will be detrimental for them. But that doesn't make it not the right thing to do. There should be no pass to the front of the line.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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.

I don't think you understand the point.

We are saying what tribe (in this case race) someone is from is irrelevant and should have no basis in decision making. I am sure that's what he's referring to about "tribal" thinking.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that I believe you are earnest here, and truly want to reduce inter-group prejudice: in that case, how is using slurs conducive to that goal? It cannot be denied that words like "tribal", "primitive", "savage" and so forth are common terms among people of a certain race, class, and education. This is a post-colonial world. But being common does not make a word neutral. If you know that your choice of words upsets people, and there are plenty of alternatives available, why use it? If your goal is truly to mend fences, setting the field on fire is a weird first step.

Why are you calling "tribal" a slur? We are not taking it as a synonym for "primitive" or "savage", "Tribal" thinking is about my group over other groups rather than looking at the whole of society. Do you have a more modern word to take it's place?

 

[Bomb#20]

Can you post the code?

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.

... It is ultimately why Bomb#20 doesn't even need my source code--he could write this simulation himself in five minutes. Let's look at the math here. We have a number of parameters (p₁, p₂, ... p_n) normalized to decimals between 0 and 1, weighted evenly into an average:
Score = 1/n*(p₁ + p₂ + p₃ + ... + p_n)

If p₁ is the MCAT, adding more parameters ( n ) mathematically dilutes the correlation between p₁ and the final score. As n approaches infinity, the correlation between the MCAT and the final score approaches zero. ...

I did write a simulation myself in five minutes, and then I tuned its parameters until it approximated the applicant and matriculant statistics in the table linked upthread, at which point it clearly showed Asian students needed higher MCATs than NA students to have the same chance of admission*. It sounds like your simulation by construction makes that impossible, so I asked for your code to see if your model also reproduces the statistics in the table. If you don't want to post it I can work from your description, no worries. Three questions then: How did you account for MCAT and GPA being correlated? What were the standard deviations of your other simulated parameters? And did you also use normal distributions for your other simulated parameters? (The AAMC constructs the MCAT to be normally distributed.)

Here's the thing. What you said makes sense -- as n goes to infinity, the difference in mean MCAT scores between Asian and Black matriculants will naturally approach the difference in mean MCAT scores between Asian and Black applicants, so if you saw 7.0+ that's just what's to be expected given the data in the table. But another thing also happens as n goes to infinity: the difference in mean MCAT scores between Asian matriculants and Asian applicants will naturally approach zero; and likewise the difference in mean MCAT scores between Black matriculants and Black applicants. Based on the table, that doesn't happen in real life. So in the asymptotic limit your model can't be correct. But of course we aren't at the asymptotic limit. So we need to check what happens when n=5, using your model's actual distributions for your other simulated parameters.

(* My upthread example of an Asian and NA student with 509 MCAT scores turned out to only show a slight difference in admission probability -- the difference is much more pronounced at lower scores.)

 

[laughing dog]

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

It's possible that there are some actual racists in here. But I don't think that's the case.

Likewise. I see "racist" being used to describe anyone who doesn't agree with the left wing position on addressing discrimination. Just because our position would be detrimental to blacks doesn't mean our objective is to be bad to blacks.

Loren, I think you accidentally said something you didn't mean to say. I'll requote it.

Just because our position would be detrimental to blacks doesn't mean our objective is to be bad to blacks.

If memory serves, you've usually taken the stance that these policies are bad for blacks. But above, you seem to appreciate that some of these policies or what you deem are the policies but haven't actually demonstrated well, would benefit blacks.

Look at the repeated complaints about whites previously going to the front of the line and complaining about the loss of privilege. Now we have the exact same situation the other way around. Blacks are being given a pass to the front of the line. Removing that will be detrimental for them. But that doesn't make it not the right thing to do. There should be no pass to the front of the line.

How exactly are “blacks are being given a pass to the front of the line” when their acceptance rate is LOWER than that of whites or Asians?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Can you post the code?

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 is supposed to show something?!?! You introduce a source of noise that will remove some without any basis, of course it hits those with higher scores more.

Kind of, yes, and that is part of the point. It is ultimately why Bomb#20 doesn't even need my source code--he could write this simulation himself in five minutes. Let's look at the math here. We have a number of parameters (p₁, p₂, ... p_n) normalized to decimals between 0 and 1, weighted evenly into an average:
Score = 1/n*(p₁ + p₂ + p₃ + ... + p_n)

If p₁ is the MCAT, adding more parameters ( n ) mathematically dilutes the correlation between p₁ and the final score. As n approaches infinity, the correlation between the MCAT and the final score approaches zero.

Of course.

BUT, admissions committees are not using infinite parameters; they are using a finite set of metrics highly relevant to the school's mission and yield projections. Some of these parameters might have weak correlations to the MCAT, or even inverse correlations. Take applicant "engagement," for example. You might expect it to be independent of the MCAT, but is it truly? How much genuine engagement does a high-MCAT applicant show toward a lower-tier school they view only as a safety? How well does a prestige-seeking applicant perform in an interview at a school whose core mission is serving underserved areas?

Adcoms legitimately evaluate these multiple variables. If we were studying the correlation between engagement and the final adcom score, we would consider the MCAT to be the confounding variable (or the "noise"). Therefore, I did not "introduce a source of noise without any basis"--I introduced variables that mirror how holistic admissions actually operate. While it is a simulation, the multi-variate framework is at least much closer to reality than assuming the MCAT drives absolutely everything.

The bottom line is that we already know confounding variables exist in this process. This simply underscores that treating systemic discrimination as the definitive explanation for the "noise" in the data is an assumption--one that ignores how multi-variate scoring actually works.

So? All you're showing is that burying the signal in noise makes it less accurate. In order to justify adding those other parameters you need to show that they contribute more than they take away.

Fundamentally, you are showing that discrimination can't be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. Exactly the same situation we were in before when it was the other way around. Why did that warrant action but this does not?

 

[Bomb#20]

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.

You're using a racist metaphor -- it's implying there's something wrong with being black. For shame! [/Politesse]

This one's racially based?? I thought "black" in this case was dirty with soot from fire.

It was a joke -- I was making fun of Poli seeing a racist lurking behind every curtain.

 

[Bomb#20]

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.

I don't think you understand the point.

We are saying what tribe (in this case race) someone is from is irrelevant and should have no basis in decision making. I am sure that's what he's referring to about "tribal" thinking.

No, I was referring to Toni's ingroup/outgroup mentality leading her to make incorrect inferences about Derec's thought processes. Whether race should be taken into account in decision making I'll leave to others to debate. As Mark Twain said, "Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please."

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I think the issue here is that you don't want to keep bedding the numbers. The numbers are telling us something that isn't unexpected, and appears reasonable. That better grades mean better acceptance rates. This entire thread has people who are woke beyond belief desperately trying to find data that implies the nation is unfair to whites and Asians. The data broadly says, better students do better. Trying to get SDs to a certain level is merely an exercise in skill at getting the results you want at some point.

Look again at what he's doing. He's finding the bias we are talking about, but making up a mission fitness parameter to balance it--but we have no evidence that it's relevant.

You mean he is modeling a potential metric or set of metrics that you've assumed was racial bias, and you are complaining that he is calling it something else. A person with very high MCATs and GPAs can rely solely on that. A person with lower values has to work harder at selling themselves as a viable candidate for medical school. That you think this is unreasonable is odd. Don2's look at it is far from unreasonable. Yes, race enters the picture at some point, but the weight it is being given doesn't appear to be anywhere near the Civil Rights violations being claimed. You and your ilk keep claiming you've proven racial bias to the extent that Asians are discriminated against. You keep saying judge the individuals, but damn entire races over average test scores. Your arguments have been more hollow than a cheap chocolate Easter bunny.

Completely underwear gnome.

I'm not even certain how you can state that. I didn't say X gets you Z through undefined process Y. I said applicants with lower scores need to sell themselves harder. That really couldn't possibly be any less controversial of a statement.

Where's the mapping between mission fitness and the scores?

Where is the mapping between racial discrimination and the scores?