Posted on 06/03/2014 8:14:03 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Every professor knows that you cant prevent students from cheating. Every safeguard can be overcome. Only the ethical makeup of a student will prevent him from cheating. The same is true of a university.
Unfortunately UCLA had its own sense of ethics which not only made cheating ethical and mandatory, but also made covering up that cheating equally ethical and mandatory.
Tim Grosecloses Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA exposes how the school dodged Californias ban on racial preferences. Groseclose, a professor of American Politics, saw the abuses up close while on the admissions oversight committee and his attempts to find the truth led him into a pitched battle with his own university.
Groseclose is not an opponent of affirmative action. Like his colleagues he believes in racial diversity and racial preferences. He did not however believe in breaking the law that had been made by Proposition 209 which banned racial preferences or in a UCLA admissions process that cheated even its own rules.
Cheating is a detailed and dizzying look at UCLAs admissions process. The complexity of the system allows colleges to dodge even the most explicit bans on racial preferences. UCLA was already using personal stories of hardship as admissions criteria. Had white students benefited from a system that allowed compelling personal stories of overcoming trials in the ghetto to outweigh a lack of academic achievements, UCLA would have faced the mother of all civil rights lawsuits.
But that still wasnt enough.
In a desperate drive for diversity, UCLA switched to a holistic process in which both the personal stories and the academic achievements were combined into a single score that reflected the applicants full spectrum of achievement.
More black readers were hired to help out while Asian readers were underrepresented. A process in which black students were repeatedly advantaged and given multiple chances worked to their benefit.
A Life Challenge Index increased admission chances for students who were single parents, poor or had gone to bad high schools. The graduation rate at UCLA is at 92%. For black men its at 74%, down from 84% in 2008, suggesting that UCLAs attempts at working around affirmative action with socioeconomic metrics led them to bring in a class of minority students less capable of graduating than before.
As academic institutions used to know, accepting unqualified students doesnt help them, it hurts them.
Every stage of the process led to further racial filtering and discrimination. The result was not diversity, but increasing admissions of African-American students at the expense of Asian students.
The holistic scores had been set up to give black students an advantage, but even that wasnt good enough and more explicit racial preferences had to be piled on to achieve demographic targets.
26% of African-American students with a holistic score of 3.0 were admitted compared to 3% of North Asian students. 20% of African-American students with a holistic score of 3.5 were admitted compared to 1% of North Asian students.
UCLAs own review process showed that a third of the black students admitted would not have qualified even based on the holistic scores. That was unsurprising since UCLAs admission process had become so unselectively racist that black students were being accepted at a 43 percent rate while the rates for white and Asian students were at 15 and 18 percent.
Without the holistic approach however 9 percent more Asian students and 33 percent fewer black students would have been admitted. With it, the number of black students rose dramatically, but the average SAT score for African-American students fell 45 points.
Even UCLAs Mare report showed that the final and supplemental reviews favored black over Asians students who were otherwise similarly qualified in both academic and life achievements. Instead of diversity, there was a racial rebalancing favoring some minorities at the expense of others.
The number of Native American and Latino students fell. The chance of admission for Vietnamese students tumbled from 28 to 21 percent.
This was the story that UCLA did not want told, not only because it was violating the law, but because numbers like these raise Asian opposition to affirmative action. The effort to overturn Proposition 209 ran into a roadblock from Asian voters worried that it would hurt their children and yet, as Groseclose demonstrates in Cheating, its impossible to stop unethical universities from cheating on race.
Opponents and supporters of affirmative action have noted that in the aftermath of a ban there would be an immediate fall in black and Latino enrollment, followed by a resurgence. This was accomplished through the use of structurally racial race neutral strategies intended to increase minority enrollment.
UCLA is unfortunately far from alone in gaming the system. It was merely copying Berkeley. In states where affirmative action was banned, universities replaced it with creative alternative strategies. Some, such as automatically admitting the top students in every high school class, an approach favored by Groseclose, are more meritocratic than others. But all the methods are backdoor affirmative action.
Diversity has become a more fundamental tenet of education than any other and Cheating provides an extensive recapitulation of how far colleges will go to preserve it. Its difficult to stop unethical students from cheating. Its even more difficult to stop unethical universities like UCLA from cheating.
The problem of affirmative action has become a problem of ethics and liberal lawlessness.
In Cheating, Tim Groseclose demonstrates that UCLA not only cheated, but that it lied about it. Six years after Groseclose began looking into UCLAs racial enrollments, after studies, papers and reports were issued and now a book, UCLA is still determined to go on doing its end run around Proposition 209.
Federal and State civil rights investigators pore over businesses and schools searching for racially discriminatory conspiracies against African-Americans, but they have failed to find these conspiracies. Instead they have had to invent them and sue over disparate impact. But the vast majority of disparate impact claims are not the result of a calculated racial policy. Nor do investigators claim that they are.
However the disparate impact of covert affirmative action in colleges like UCLA is a calculated conspiracy and civil rights investigators wont touch its blatant discriminatory impact on Asian students.
Cheating reveals the process UCLA used to engage in racially discriminatory admissions policies that had an adverse impact on every race except African-Americans. And its only one of many colleges that have been doing the same thing.
The greatest civil rights lawsuit of our generation would drag these racist policies out of the shadows and into the light.
Once upon a time an education was part of the meritocracy---earned by dint of hard work and study.
Now its lib/prog leap frog----graduating marginal people who can't even read or write on the backs of conscientious students. Once intellectually rigorous colleges routinely dumb down the curricula, entrance exams, grad standards to accommodate these know-nothings.
Looks like UCLA does not even recognize the recent USSC decision negating affirmative action. How can the kids learn when UCLA officials cant read, or comprehend either?
A news clip WRT recent dumbing down of SAT’s had a latino mother speaking Spanglish that she paid thousands (guess she earned all that money flipping hamburgers /sarc) to have her son coached-—but he still could not answer the questions.
So they had to dumb down the test b/c these people know nothing about American culture, and, more likely, don’t want their kids being forced to learn it.
The Third World is here.
"New School".
And the end result is seen every day when Americans try to engage in business transactions (or even worse, government transactions) with these dumbed down "graduates" after they are employed. It's oftentimes difficult doing business with affirmative action products representing large corporations in the private sector, yet alone the same dumbed-down grads employed by government bureaucracy.
The book reviewed in this Daniel Greenfield article should make for interesting reading for all, particularly for UCLA alums. It demonstrates how screwed up American universities have become, which in turn in a major factor in the decadence of the entire society.
bump
Any of us could have written this column, and my tag line is as old as the hills.
Now. Name one conservative, or even any conservative voters, who have ever addressed the indoctrination and strangle hold on public education and academia?
It is on no ones agenda, platform, or lips, EVER. Crickets.
This would include ALL our conservative favorites.
Crickets.
When these dumbed down and vindictive people work for the government, then you can have real problems with them,
because they have a man with a gun standing behind them saying you have to do what they say and put up with their abuse.
A gelding is still a horse. It is big, strong and fast. It can still bite and kick when it feels threatened. A book exposing universities as the maker of intellectual geldings, which will be read by intellectual geldings who have forgotten the pain of their intellectual castration, and are in fact grateful to the universities that mutilated their minds and called it “education” will cause said geldings to feel threatened and bite and kick and bray like asses.
The alumnus will not respond well. Stupid people hate being called stupid, and do not respond with logically valid, coherent lines of reasoning.
Great post/thread.
The indoctrination of children with a mob spirit-under the category of “social adjustment”-is conducted openly and explicitly. The supremacy of the pack is drilled, pounded and forced into the student’s mind by every means available to the comprachicos of the classroom, including the contemptible policy of grading the students on their social adaptability (under various titles). No better method than this type of grading could be devised to destroy a child’s individuality and turn him into a stale little conformist, to stunt his uniformed sense of personal identity and make him blend into an anonymous mob, to penalize the best, the most intelligent and honest children in the class, and to reward the worst, the dull, the lethargic, the dishonest.
Still more evil (because more fundamental) is the “discussion” method of teaching, which is used more frequently in the humanities than in the physical sciences, for obvious reasons. Following this method, the teacher abstains from lecturing and merely presides at a free-for-all or “bull session,” while the students express their “views” on the subject under study, which they did not know and have come to school to learn. What these sessions produce in the minds of the students is unbearable boredom.
But this is much worse than a mere waste of the student’s time. They are being taught some crucial things, though not the ostensible subject of study. They are being given a lesson in metaphysics and epistemology. They are being taught, by implication, that there is no such thing as a firm, objective reality, which man’s mind must learn to perceive correctly; that reality is an indeterminate flux and can be anything the pack wants it to be; that truth of falsehood is determined by majority vote. And more: that knowledge is unnecessary and irrelevant, since the teacher’s views have no greater validity than the oratory of the dullest and most ignorant student-and therefore, that reason, thinking, intelligence and education are of no importance or value. To the extent that a student absorbs these notions, what incentive would he have to continue his education and to develop his mind? The answer may be seen today on any college campus.
p.13 Comprachicos
http://www.slideshare.net/crdixon/aynrandthecomprachicos
Thanks justiceseeker93.
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