Richard Sander: Standing up to Deceit in University Admissions:
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reportedly once said,
“One man who stopped lying could bring down a tyranny.”
Although admissions policy at American universities is not quite tyranny, it is surrounded by much deceit. In standing up to the deceit, one man has been more important and courageous than all others
And if the deceit is ever brought down, that man will deserve most of the credit.
His name is Richard Sander.
".....UCLA Law School felt very different.
....Like a hundred fictional travelers to new worlds that seemed at first to be utopias, I was gradually to discover that the law school had some disturbing hidden secrets.
One discovery was that race was closely linked to law school performance.
Almost all classes other than seminars used anonymous grading, but after grades were turned in, professors could get a “matching sheet” that linked exam numbers to names.
After my very first semester I was struck that my Hispanic, black, and American Indian students were mostly getting Cs in a class in which the median grade was a B-.
The pattern repeated the next semester--including even students who had impressed me in class.
Puzzled, I asked a senior colleague about the pattern.
Oh yes, she replied, shaking her head.
The minority students come in with weaker preparation.
......For instance, the law school had created an index that combined information about an applicant’s LSAT score, his undergraduate grades, and the difficulty of his college.
Whites were essentially guaranteed acceptance if they had a score of 820 or higher on the index and guaranteed rejection if they had a score of 760 or lower.
For African Americans and American Indians, however, the corresponding numbers were 620 and 550. Thus, for a 140-point range (620 to 760), a student would certainly be admitted if he were black yet certainly be rejected if he were white.
Although the gap in preparation was generally unknown to the students, the gap in classroom performance, as Sander discovered, was well known.
As he notes:
Once, when a student told me about his courseload, I observed that he was in a lot of tough classes graded on mandatory curves.
That was true, he responded, but a couple of them were “safeties.”
I asked him what that meant.
A little embarrassed, he said that was a term for a class that had enough black and Hispanic students to absorb the low grades on the curve.
His remark was breathtakingly cynical--and an oversimplification too. (The correlation between race and grades was by no means perfect.)
But it was hard to blame him, and I gradually learned that many students thought in those terms.
"Police say that Willie Gray, the boyfriend of Pearson's sister, killed him during a dispute when he returned home." (Via KGPE)
