11 Comments
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LR's avatar

Harvard will simply provide greater weight to the essays, so they can continue their crusade of "diversity" and "equity" over merit.

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William Bell's avatar

... and personal photos

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Nancy Lawrence's avatar

It should be based on merit --- inequities in education should be addressed at the K-8 level.

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Steve Witherspoon's avatar

It's my understanding that there is a line in the Supreme Court ruling that's something like this,

"nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life”

If that line, or something like it, is in the ruling then it's likely to be exploited as a loophole.

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Steve Witherspoon's avatar

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling on affirmative action is a start but I think they should have gone further, much much further. It’s my opinion that it should be illegal, nation wide, to ask any question on any application regarding the race of an applicant regardless of the type of application.

https://stevewitherspoon.home.blog/2022/10/31/the-supreme-court-of-the-united-states-should-strike-down-affirmative-action/

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Martin Luther King Jr.

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Michel Brisebois's avatar

Democrats always put race before anything else...they preach inclusion and diversity, but deliver the opposite. Affirmative action has always been racist in my opinion.

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Steven Brizel's avatar

We can expect the academic establishment which is strongly committed to DEI, the intellectual child of affirmnative action, to concoct means to avoid the impact of this decision

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Cara Catanzaro's avatar

I'll tell you how they will respond. They'll just continue to do it anyway.

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William Bell's avatar

I fear that this decision will precipitate abandonment of reliance on standardized testing of g-loaded skills such as reading comprehension as a criterion for college admission. Which would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

It would be far better, IMO, to base admissions on such test scores and use race-based double standards to achieve a desired level of racial/ethnic diversity than to ignore test scores and rely instead on grades, recommendations, essays (e.g., "What I Did During Summer Vacay to Save the Planet, Promote Equity, and Befriend Third-World POCs" ), legacy status, and personal photos and other indications of racial/ethnic identity to achieve the desired mix more surreptitiously. Relying largely on standardized test scores with "affirmative action" double standards produces a student body with the most intellectually capable white applicants, the most intellectually capable black applicants, and the most intellectually capable Latino and American-aboriginal applicants. Ditching standardized testing and relying instead on more subjective and less g-loaded criteria, while producing the desired racial/ethnic mix by other, more covert means will produce student bodies with lower mean intelligence in every racial/ethnic group.

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Evan J.'s avatar

Your ignorance is astounding! Fact is standardized testing has >always< favored affluent over the marginalized communities. Which is the better student? The affluent student with average grades who (probably because of his parents) takes prep courses for the tests. Or the student in a marginalized community who studied hard to get decent grades with no test prep courses. This is what Affirmative Action was supposed to address

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Walter Lacayo's avatar

The way I see it, is that most Universities, especially those who are consider Ivy league , will find clever ways to surpass what the Supreme Court of the United States have decided upon. If laws can easily be avoided, then truly we live in a lawless nation. Look as to what is going on now. Well let's see, supreme court judges have been threatened including invading the neighborhoods these people live in, by order to force them to change their decision . Yet no one went to jail. NEED I SAY MORE?

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