Re: WOT: Guilt


Larisa wrote:
Barry.P.Cotter@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Larisa wrote:

Which is unfair. Affirmative action will get you in, but once you're
there you don't get much in the way of special treatment, no separate
grading curves.

True; which means that you'll have a worse GPA than your white fellow
students; if you're less qualified to handle the work, you won't do as
well.

Not quite. I can make another lame ass argument, like work ethic not
being strongly correlated with IQ/SAT cores, but there's no reason to
believe those differ among races [1]

But here's the question; what do you call a person who graduated from
medical school at the absolute bottom of his graduating class - just
barely squeaked by? You call him "Doctor". Do *you* know what your
doctor's med school GPA was?

No, but I go by a better measure, word of mouth and professional
recommendation. Word of mouth got me to my current GP, and for any
specialists, my family is swarming with doctors and nurses, so I ask
them who would be agood person to go to. While I certainly have an
advantage, if you want to do the research you can, and even a barely
squeaking by doctor is perfectly adequate for the vast majority of
purposes. Besides, medicine is quite ridiculously hard. The Irish
system, with which I am most familiar has entry entirely based on
academic performance, a maximum of 600 points from school exit exams.
The points for the lowest college entry for medicine haven't dropped
below 550 in more than a decade and the majority of M.D.s still
graduate with a pass degree.

Or, if you go to a lawyer, do you know
what his or her law school GPA was? Since, due to affirmative action,
black doctors and lawyers *are*, in fact, highly likely to have done
worse in law school or med school, it is entirely reasonable to go to a
white doctor or lawyer.

This is the one where you should really, really do some professional
research, seeing as while you may be screwed, you still have more time
to do the research.

In the hypothetical situation that I had to choose a doctor/lawyer of a
particular speciality at random from a line up without talking to any
of them perhaps it would be rational to go for the no-black, but its a
really stretched hypothetical.

In fact, one can argue that black people are harmed by affirmative
action much more than white people or Asians.

Demonstrably untrue. The effects of affirmative actions are a wash in
terms of gross percentages for whites, it basically works out as taking
places from Asians and giving them to blacks

So just because it harms "only Asians", it is OK? Hmm.

Point out where I said that it was ok or withdraw the implied
criticism. If I was an Asian American this would piss me off greatly,
but Asian-American identity politics is very far from being the
political force that Black American is, for pretty obvious historical
reasons.

The average black student who makes it into Harvard has the scores to
make it into Columbia, by no means a bad school. At the top level, if
they make it in they're still the cream, though perhaps not of the same
grade.

I like the qualifier "though perhaps not of the same grade"; it's
exactly what I was talking about.

And what I'm saying is that affirmative action is a waste of time.
Look, at entry level, you could be justified, entirely rationally in
those prejudices, and in some public agencies, like the rampart scandal
in LAPD with Rafael Perez. But once you get to a certain level, you
actually have to be able to cut it, people in the main don't care what
colour your skin is, or your culture, they care about your performance.
Its like when the middle management get their kid a job straight out of
college that they're underqualified for. IN any competently run
organisation, they'll either prove capable, or sink, dragging some
portion of their parent's reputation with them.

His classmates and profs may figure it out - but what about potential
employers? If he becomes a doctor or a lawyer, what about potential
patients or clients? People who don't know him and thus *don't* know
that he was not, in fact, an affirmative action case?

As I said, in the long run the college you went to is irrelevant
compared to the scores you got. Look, you've convinced me that
affirmative action may be a net drag on black/minority graduates for
the first few years of their careers, and I think its a colossal waste
of money and teaching brainpower, seeing as its like Headstart, the
gains are small and disappear pretty quickly. i just don't think its a
part of an insidious effort to screw over minorities.

The GPA doesn't lie, racists are cutting themselves off from a part of
the recruiting pool, and like I said, within three years people go on
their previous work, not college.

And their previous work will be affected by their race as a result of
affirmative action. The GPA does not lie - but employers do not always
check your GPA. Racists are cutting themselves off from a part of the
recruiting pool, but thanks to affirmative action, it is the *least
accomplished* part of the recruiting pool that they're cutting off -
they benefit from their racist policies. As I was saying, if a very
bigoted, racist government wanted to devise a way to keep black people
down, they could not do better than affirmative action.
LM

No, what I was saying is that the statistical booster in earnings from
the college you went to is gone by the end of your third year of
fulltime work away from college. If you had the SAT to go to College X,
but chose instead to go to a college of lesser quality for budgetary or
other reasons, by three years after graduation your income income will,
on average have converged with what someone who got your scores and did
your equivalent qualification at College X gets, ceteris paribus.

As to the idea that the racists benefit by cutting themselves off from
the minority recruiting pool altogether, it doesn't wash. The absolute
number of non-minority useless twits is probably larger than the entire
minority population and certainly larger than the cream of the
minorities, the ones who would have gotten in, affirmative action or
no.

Jane wrote:
Barry.P.Cotter@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Which is unfair. Affirmative action will get you in, but once you're
there you don't get much in the way of special treatment, no separate
grading curves.

Mmm.

It depends.
[deletia]
There was a scandal about ten years back about a process called
"race norming," where students' work was judged on a curve only
including members of their own race, which can make a LOT of difference
to a final grade--an A for one race might be a C for another--and that
included at least one medical school in the California public
university system.

The thing is, once you start, you can't stop. Harvard is
reasonably safe because, yes, it picks kids who could have gone to
Columbia, and the spread isn't that wide, but as you get further down
the prestige line the differences in scores and grades gets wider, and
the mismatch also gets wider.

Okay, I am oficially gobsmacked. I still think this is an argument
against AA though, not an argument that its an insidious plot to
devalue the degrees of minority students who sweated blood to get a
degree they deserve.

.

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