The war against standardized tests has far more to do with black students performing disproportionately poorer on them. Many people are unwilling to acknowledge the multitude of cultural and socioeconomic factors responsible for that and instead want to simply chalk it up to racism. And so there's a war against any admissions policy that results in disproportionate racial outcomes, until we're left with admissions policies that are openly racist in order to achieve race-based results.
> And so there's a war against any admissions policy that results in disproportionate racial outcomes
Except legacy admissions and pay-to-play donations. After all, pedigree and wealth are merit (or proof thereof) - no need for pesky test scores in the face of such overwhelming evidence.
I don't think people truly care about legacy admissions and pay-to-play as long as it's fair. Put a big banner under the admissions page with clear criteria for the donation thresholds necessary and people would be fine with that. It's the hypocrisy and pretense that it's a fair meritocratic game that people cannot stand. The universities are trying to prevent brand dilution while shouting racism the moment people accuse them of having an unfair admissions process.
Can we agree that legacy admission should be completely done away with? The only people I think would be opposed would be the managers of the endowments and fundraising (and legacy beneficiaries, who are smaller in number).
None of that changes what the poster you were replying to was getting at. The opposition to standardized testing was entirely due to the performance of _some_ minorities and entirely political.
> Many people are unwilling to acknowledge the multitude of cultural and socioeconomic factors responsible for that and instead want to simply chalk it up to racism.
How many of those cultural and socioeconomic factors were almost directly related to racism though?
Considering Asians were discriminated enough against to have a law just against them + internment camps and still excel in the USA should tell you something. It's that we get very high "quality" Asian immigrants to the USA who are better than average citizens of their home country.
Racist policies against Asians in California have pretty deep history.
Yet Asians do well in California schools.
"The California Alien Land Law of 1913 (also known as the Webb–Haney Act) prohibited "aliens ineligible for citizenship" from owning agricultural land or possessing long-term leases over it, but permitted leases lasting up to three years.[1][2][3]....... The law was meant to discourage immigration from Asia, and to create an inhospitable climate for immigrants already living in California.[7][8][9]"
Cubefox is being downvoted but for those unaware, there's still a lot of disagreement amongst experts in the role of genetics vs environment in determining G. There is undoubtably though, a huge amount of political and social stigma surrounding the topic. Hence the green username - I daren't touch this topic with a ten foot pole.
The study "Survey of expert opinion on intelligence: Intelligence research, experts' background, controversial issues, and the media", Table 3 in particular, makes a good illustration.
That possibility can be debunked using a simple fact - Nigerian Americans perform comparable to Asian Americans.
On top of that, most Nigerian Americans tend to be Yoruba and Igbo, just like the ancestors of most African Americans.
Unless you mean the genetic factor is caused by English and Scotch Irish Americans, as most African Americans have around 20% white ancestry, which was caused by sexual relations (mostly non-consensual).
Yet English and Scotch Irish Americans perform within the White average.
Alternatively, genetic based arguments don't make sense when humans are almost virtually identical, and the fact that race is inherently arbitrary - are the Kardashians white? If yes, then is Recip Tayyip Erdogan white? If yes, then is Ayatollah Khamenei white? If yes, then is Hamid Karzai white? etc.
Clearly, racial and genetic factors don't make sense.
Instead, economic and social factors make more sense (poor people do worse at exams due to less resources, sadly most African Americans are poorer than other similar groups due to historical traumas).
Why is it that these kinds of accounts on HN always seem to have been made in 2021?
> That possibility can be debunked using a simple fact - Nigerian Americans perform comparable to Asian Americans.
Do you have a source for that?
> Instead, economic and social factors make more sense (poor people do worse at exams due to less resources, sadly most African Americans are poorer than other similar groups due to historical traumas).
Results of trans-racial adoption studies contradict this theory:
> [...] In transracial adoption studies, such as the the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, the familiar average IQ gaps between children of different races typically remain even after their adoption by high-IQ white upper-middle class parents able to provide optimal environments. Studies show that by the end of childhood, Asian adoptees end up with higher average IQs than white adoptees, white adoptees with higher IQs than mixed-race (mixed black-white) adoptees, who end up with higher average IQs than black adoptees. [...]
