Only 2? :D

"Affirmative action" can take so many forms and mean so many things, and the history, considerations and implications involved are anything but simple and straightforward. That's one reason I look askance when someone says something like "I will never believe that affirmative action is a good solution."

I am way more on the side of affirmative action than against. And I believe once you add any sort of restricted selection into a process it is part of the human condition to want to select people "Like you." And therefore the people not like you need a little bit of a leg up to get offered the same opportunities.

I am concerned for the demise of affirmative action where it concerns women. Our status on an even playing field is tenuous at best right now. Yes, we don't seem to have a problem getting into college, but would that change if they didn't HAVE to accept women?

But I guess I've always believed that if you have 2 people who are "equally qualified" the spot should go to the person who would benefit greater from the leg up. And the stories that many people can come up with where the black kid buffoon got into college when the stellar but sadly rich and white kid didn't make the cut I think are way more rare than the stories would make them seem. Reverse discrimination is (IMO) verging on urban myth.

I was, admittedly, thinking more of race/ethnicity than social background/upbringing.

I agree with adpimiz. I would like to think I was accepted into Texas A&M on my own merits. I'm Hispanic, but my parents instilled in me the notion that I am not special...I'm just like everybody else. You have to work hard for the things that you want. Again, that's how I was brought up.

That being said, I was in NHS, involved in drama, Student Council, and debate. When I applied to Texas A&M, I applied to the Agriculture department. I was also involved in 4H for 10 years (raised livestock, 4H State, 4H Congress, etc). My acceptance could have been based on my ethnicity, but again, I'd like to think that good grades, hard work, and achievements in the area in which decided to major in, was enough to get me in. Then again, that was 17 years ago!

After college, I earned two master's degrees in which I neither asked for, nor received, any scholarships or aid because my ethnicity (I didn't for undergrad either).

Totally unrelated to the specific issue of UT, but to the larger issue of fairness in admission vs. perceived "diversity," here's an issue rumbling about in NYC:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20...-under-review/

Here's the TL;DR version: NYC has 9 specialized public high schools. One is an arts high school that requires a portfolio; the other 8 require an exam, taken in the 8th grade. The schools are extremely prestigious; one has the distinction of having more Nobel laureates than any other HS in the country. Unlike the rest of NYC's public high schools which, for the most part, are majority Black and Latino, the three most selective are majority Asian, with White, Black, and Latino students making up the rest. Socioecomically, the students come from more working class/middle class environments than the general public school population, which is more working class/poor.

Now, the NAACP has sued because they feel the test is obviously unfair to Black and Latino students, since they tend not to score so well. Apparently, there aren't cultural biases in this test like there are alleged to be in the SAT. The DOE offers a FREE summer-long prep course, which includes meals; many schools offer after-school prep for kids who can't do the summer program.

Most people have come forward saying that the test is perfectly fair, and the schools don't look at anything else but the test scores. So, what say you, GC population?

Even as a proponent of socioeconomic-based AA, I feel that the NAACP, like most of their lawsuits, doesn't have a leg to stand on with this one. Has anyone read about the firefighters' exams?

Can anyone give a specific example of how a test could be biased to someone of a particular race? I know there have been issues with standardized tests asking questions that may be biased towards economic status (ex. a math question involving an escalator would be confusing to someone from a poor and/or rural area where they have never seen an escalator) but how could a test possibly ask questions that favor an ethnicity?

It favors more a culture then an ethnicity. Since minorities tend to be in a lower social class then European Americans, there is a feeling that tests are biased against them since they are written form a certain social class.

I would really like a specific example here, as I'm having trouble understanding how there could be such a bias. I'm assuming this would have to be a problem (if it is truly a problem) on the reading/writing sections, because, for the most part, math is math. Though, I have noticed that names used in word problems are way more often traditionally ethnic names ("Ming, Raj and Lupita each have a bag of marbles...").

The standard example that I tend to see cited is an SAT question from about 20 years ago:

RUNNER: MARATHON :: A) envoy: embassy B) martyr: massacre C) oarsman: regatta D) referee: tournament E) horse: stable

The correct answer is C), but being able to answer that correctly arguably presumes knowledge of boating and regattas, which are typically associated with middle- and upper-class white culture and often are not within the cultural experience of, say, inner-city or poor rural students. Yes, the question could perhaps be answered by the process of elimination without specific knowledge of boating, but the point made is that the question and correct answer appear to assume a common base of knowledge that in reality may not be common to some cultural segments of the population.

I can't speak to what questions are like these days.

I did not know what a regatta was until I saw a Dawson's Creek episode in which one featured prominently. This has nothing to do with the topic at hand, except to say that it may also be a regional thing (or a WASP thing?), as I grew up both white and upper-middle class.

I say regional. I grew up off of the water and sailing is pretty popular there but I wouldn't expect a landlocked high school aged kid to know what a regatta is either.

This is known as overcompensation for Sally, Dick and Jane readers and everyone having similarly WASPy names up until around the 1970s-80s. (It doesn't really help promote diversity when the teachers can't pronounce the names, just FYI.)

I laugh at the "regatta" example since the Three Rivers Regatta here is basically a yinzerfest with boats and tribute bands. In other words, hardly an "upperclass" event.

Yinzerfest? Yep -- regional. :D

Okay, I'll bite, and I won't even use the word regatta in my example since y'all are turning your nose up at it. :p This is from Ji, Zhang, and Nisbett, 2004.

Let's say on a children's intelligence test they were given a list of words and asked to pick the two that "go together", a pretty straight-forward task:

A. Seagull
B. Squirrel
C. Tree

A. Monkey
B. Panda
C. Banana

A. Cow
B. Milk
C. Pig

A. Foot
B. Shoe
C. Hand

European American students are more likely to group based on taxonomic categorization: seagull and squirrel, monkey and panda, cow and pig, foot and hand.

East Asian students are more likely to group based on thematic categorization: squirrel and tree, monkey and banana, cow and milk, foot and shoe.

Of course, when people are talking about cultural biases in testing, they're usually less concerned with testing children. You'll see some of it in admissions testing, but a lot of the problems revolve around employee and personnel selection. Spearman's g, for instance, is a general intelligence measure that typically correlates highly with work performance, but using it will cause adverse impact for pretty much anyone who isn't a white male.

Interesting. I'm not EVEN close to being considered East Asian (definitely European) but I identified these groups thematically. It took me a second looking at each group to figure out how I was categorizing them, but I definitely separated them this way...

Do they mean East Asians who were raised over there or are they saying it's a racial thing? Because 4 of my daughters were born there and raised here from infancy and I have no idea how they'd respond.

I went thematic as well and I'm a wasp. Interesting.

Me too. I would absolutely be considered European and I identified thematically as well.

Ditto. But WhiteRose did say "more likely."

And carnation, I would think it would have to mean East Asian cuturally, because I would think a tendancy toward grouping one way or another would be a culturally-based, perhaps even language-based, tendancy.

Hunh. So our girls would supposedly lean towards our type of answers (white-Native American-black-Hispanic) rather than Asian.

[QUOTE=Also, does anyone know whether the plaintiff, Abigail Fisher, was in a sorority at LSU?[/QUOTE]

I read through all the messages in this thread but did not see an answer to this question, posed in the very first post.