And Then There's The Swimsuit Competition

"giving back to the community"

cripes.

when I went to high school I cant think of a single individual who "gave back to the community" including me. Im sure some did, but it took me about 20 years to do so once I had the time and finances and impetus.

if Ms Luo clocked in at a perfect score, that alone should sweep aside any pol. correct considerations.

but I guess not. perfection just doesnt cut it in a politically perfectly correct world. especially if you're asian.....

Lets see, busting your butt to get a perfect Math SAT score doesn't mean you even have a snowball's chance in hell of getting into MIT but Yale (or is that Harvard?) triumphantly announced that they had enrolled a former(?) Taliban official. I think the cheese has finally slipped off the cracker at the Higher Leaning Institution's wine and cheese social.

BTW, have a look at the related story (Califoria Asian enrollments) at the link site. Funny that the MSM didn't go to town on that one.

Can anyone give me a scientifically testable definition of an "Asian", or tell me where Asia begins and ends, or for that matter a scientifically testable definition of "race"? The whole "affirmative action" nonsense is a house of cards based on a load of emotional bunk. If she's a better candidate than her competitors for the school based on her performance up to now she should be admitted -- if not, she shouldn't. Who cares how many others "like" her are also applying for admission? Race based criteria for admissions and jobs make the basic statistical error of assuming that the population characteristics of the group apply to a given individual.

Most likely explanation is they fear she may have conservative tendancies, they're sniffing for her perception of "community" - "the collective".

"Giving back to the community", meaning that her talent was given to her by the community?

Exactly right anon: apt phrase, "sniffing for her perception of community" -- "the collective".

Not perfectly on topic, but I read a while back that Education departments in universities are doing values test of prospective teaching candidates. Same thinking.

Sadly, this phrase has been given legs in the corporate sector too with CSR (corporate social responsbility) -- the notion that a profit is a quantity taken AWAY from the community and preseumably put in a mattress -- that the company hasn't served the community by providing goods at the best possible price/value -- that the community did a favour to the successful company.

What a sad story. This girl is a genious and should be a shoo-in.

"Giving back to the community" is mumbo-jumbo for "we have to find an excuse".

"Too many Asians" tells all: Political ideology has determined that the entrance class to university should be racially divided in proportion to the racial mix of the population. So, we have to go begging for blacks and arabs while sticking it to asians and jews and the caucasians are in the middle.

This racialism is the result of the current ideologies ruling our elites. I am thinking China and the gang of four.

To paraphrase my previous post:

The elites, in the name of anti-racism, are being racist.

A couple of years ago a dean at the U of T told me that if admission was only based on marks, then 100% of the engineering faculty would be asian.
Whatever that means.
If the best thing you can say about someone is that they can do math, well, that's not much...

A) "Asian" immigrants do extremely well in math and hard sciences because their lower school curriculum wasn't watered down,

B) Usually "Asian" immigrants have seen actual poverty and work their butts off to avoid it,

C) "Asian" is not a politically correct victim group because of A and B, therefore they get crapped on almost as hard as white males by socially sensitive university types.

D) Any kid with the brains and the grit to score perfect on the SATs is probably not going to be a good "team player". Meaning she will be a problem for the faculty due to being smarter and harder working than they are. A born boat rocker.

Modern university education is not about excellence. Its about fitting in and not rocking the boat except in the approved ways.

Send your kids to welding school if you want them to learn something useful.

It's those damn Muslim admissions officers...oh wait...

MERIT should be the ONLY criterion.

MERIT should be the ONLY criterion.

I'm with the others...you nail it ...you win..

I suppose this means we still need SoW......arrggghh...puke...puke....

Syncro

"when I went to high school I cant think of a single individual who "gave back to the community" including me. "

My kids give back. Especially my Learning Disabled 18 year old. He did it because his parents do it. I volunteer all over the community and our business spends about 50% of time working on international standards without any compensation.

It is altruistic? No. But for a family without perfect SAT scores we've managed to get to do what we want, pretty well when we want, as a result of 'giving back.'

I need human contact rather than being stuck in the office at my desk (I should be a geriatric nurse, not doing admin for a consulting company but then my husband, who should be doing what he does would not be able to do it because he needs my support.) So I volunteer. A lot when I'm at home.

The standards work my husband does means he gets to develop new tools having worked with the best and brightest in the world. Which makes our mom & pop company the one people turn to when new standards are released. That opens up travel for both of us and pay at a global rate, not small-town Canada rate.

As for my son, at first he'd hop off the school bus early when he saw local seniors he liked outside. He'd help with the odd thing around their properties, chatting while he worked. They weren't judging him and school was so rough on him so he needed that 'down time'. His reputation that lead to a job being the arms and legs for a stroke victim. That taught him money was nice and he didn't want to work physically for the rest of his life. School then got more of his attention!

At school he did co-op (no pay) and learned more about fixing computers. That gave him access to parts at cost and he had a side business of building custom computers for people.

He'd help those same seniors learn computers and before long they were paying him good money for training and maintenance on their computers.

Finally, the place where he did his co-op hired him on because they needed him. He learned if you love your work you'll never 'work' another day in your life. He's now at college expanding his understanding of computers.

All because he gave back to the community.

In my recent experience (which may be skewed because we are rural) almost 50% of teens do give back. Just not in flashy or organized ways.

But that 'giving back' invariably makes our time on earth pretty fun.

If I were an MIT admissions person, I'd take any candidates who had perfect SAT scores.

To imply that a perfect SAT score is not enough is to say there is something very wrong with the SAT test.

So perhaps we are barking up the wrong tree here, the issue isn't whether the candidate is altruistic and/or Asian. The issue is why a perfect SAT score isn't enough.

" asians " are paying the price for defying liberal
cant - for at least the last 20 years we have been told that the education system is a racist, euro-centric structure that " people of colour " can only fail in ....
according to their world view this young woman is a " banana " - yellow on the outside, white inside and as such can be classified as "white" and denied admission.

In the looney left bizarro world view,perfect is no good because it shows others up and hurts their feelings.

I will withhold my opinion until I find the swimsuit pics. Where are they?

K: "If I were an MIT admissions person, I'd take any candidates who had perfect SAT scores.

To imply that a perfect SAT score is not enough is to say there is something very wrong with the SAT test. "

Bingo, although probably not in the sense you thought. First off, having taken SAT's (years ago, mind you), they are not the be-all and end-all of testing your intelligence. Most of the questions are multiple choice, and with a very little training, you can learn to eliminate one or two answers on most questions easily. In fact, there is an entire industry in the US based on prepping kids to write SAT's. And what sort of kids take these courses? Borderline white kids and the sons and daughters of immigrants (mostly Asian) who view a university education as the ticket to their childrens' success.

I say this as the father of two girls who have a white dad, and a Chinese mother. Even though both girls got mostly A's with a few B's in their early grades, my wife felt strongly that they needed more, and enrolled them in the Kumon program. For those who don't know, this is an after-school program where kids are given extra training and practice in a variety of subjects. My older girl takes math; my younger one takes English and math.

Each day, they have to complete (at home) a problem set of four to six pages, double sided, with anywhere from 10 (simple) to two (complex) problems per page. It's up to us parents to mark them (they give us an answer book), and once a week, they go to the centre for assessment and help if required.

I have to say, I think this program is great. It provides them with the one thing that modern education theory seems to think is useless: PRACTICE! (pardon my shouting). To me, it's supremely ironic that their music teachers insist they practice, their sports coaches insist they practice, but when it comes to intellectual activity "practice dulls the child", "practice instills hostility in the child towards the subject", etc., etc. When I was a boy, it was not unusual to have 100 arithmetic problems for homework. What the hell is wrong with practice?

Here's the results: both my girls are in the gifted program in York Region, which is limited to the top 2% of students. Even competing against the best in their classes, they get pretty much straight A's (to me, a "B" in gym is irrelevant..). My older girl, in grade 7, is doing Grade 10 level math (complex algebra, quadratic equations, etc.), and she finds her regular classwork "boring". My younger one feels about the same.

Like many parents, there's a part of me that feels this is "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" writ large. My wife is very smart, and I won scholarships to Upper Canada College, U. of T., and completed my MBA with honours. But I'll be the first to admit that Kumon has much to do with the girls' success. It forces a few things to happen:

1 - the girls have to do the work. I can't tell you how many times we have had literal screaming matches over the program. But, in the end, the work gets done. My older girl, after five years in Kumon, now just does it. My younger one still fights it occasionally, but those fights are becoming fewer. In the end, it establishes a discipline, which seems to be a dirty word in the educational establishment.

2 - the parents have to be involved. Someone has to mark the damn things! And, we're supposed to provide help when we can. I'm trained as an electrical engineeer (which means math, math, and more math, baby), and I can tell you, 20 years after leaving school, it's a pain when your kid wants help factoring fifth level polynominals. But, you knuckle down, and do your best to help. Even though this has led to some shouting matches (why my kids insist their teachers' way is the only way, and "my way" is wrong, even though it gets the right answer, infuriates me), I think in the long run, it strengthens the ties between us.

3 - It reinforces a culture of learning. My kids know that both their mom and I value educational achievement, and that we consider it more important than other activities like sports, dance, music, etc. (even though both girls are active in all those areas, they know those are secondary).

Bottom line - both girls do supremely well at tests and school. I have no doubt they will do well on SAT's if they decide to try for US schools (and my older girl, age 12, is currently torn between Princeton and Oxford (!!)). And, while egotistically, I like to think that's because they are my (and my equally smart wife's) kids, realistically, I have to acknowledge that Kumon has had a dramatic and positive effect on their performance.

For those who don't know, Richmond Hill is a suburb, a few miles north of Toronto's nominal northern limit of Steeles Avenue. Both my wife and I work in the city of Toronto proper. When we got married, nearly 20 years ago, Richmond Hill was mostly white, with an Italian/British mix. Today, it has doubled in population, with a large influx of Asian (mostly Chinese, but many other cultures as well) families.

If you go into a Kumon centre in Richmond Hill (and there are at least four that I know of), you will find that 90% or more of the students are Asian - Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Filipino, etc. To me, this is just reinforcement of the immigrant ideal (presented in how many books by Jewish authors of their mothers' insistence on getting an education?) that education will help their kids succeed. I wish that was the goal of white Canadian parents as well, but in practice, I don't see them stumping up either the cost or the time required for programs like Kumon.

But here's the thing: I love my two girls, and sometimes they startle me with their insights, but most of their success in school has to do with two things: they get more practice, and they get used to taking tests (Kumon requires "achievement tests" before a child can progress to the next level), both of which are anathema to the educational establishment. I would fully expect my girls to get great SAT marks, especially if they were sent on prep courses like Kaplan. But all this means is they are good at taking tests.

I truly hope my girls are smart enough to make some contribution to society. I am so proud of them, I'm fit to bust. But I'll be the first to say while 2400 on your SAT's is great, it's not much more than a pronouncement on your ability to take tests, and not a true measure of your intelligence. Taking tests and being creative are two different things, and being solely absorbed in academics as opposed to other areas of life does not guarantee being a superior intellect.

Let me take one final stab at this: if you were raising cattle, and you kept in-breeding your herd, at some point, they would become susceptible to disease or genetic defect. You need to bring in new blood periodically (which we all acknowledge is important in business and politics). As an engineering student at U of T in the 70's, I can tell you, half my class was Chinese, and that half rarely had any interaction with the white students. They had their own group, CESA, the "Chinese Engineering Students Association", which had their own parties, study groups, etc., no white people allowed. (I actually lampooned this in the Toike (the engineering newspaper) with an article about "WASPESA", headed by John Smith and Mary Brown, who would enjoy typical delicacies as shrimp cocktails and double martinis, etc.) These two solitudes did not mix, and thus we did not get the hybrids that would move the group forward.

Overall, the Asian culture emphasises education to a great degree over what I'll call "North American" culture. I see that in the 9:1 ratio of Asians over whites in Kumon, in cities where the Asian:white ratio is about equal. I see that in the far sterner attitudes taken in our, and our Asian friends' homes, regarding education, than in the homes of our white friends. I see that in the concentration of Asian students in the harder university disciplines such as engineering, medicine, and business, compared to the "softer" schools of arts, language, and history.

If we only took SAT scores as the sole reason for university admission, we would inevitably populate our best schools with a monoculture of kids who are good at taking tests, which I have seen empirically favours Asian students whose parents force/subsidise/encourage them to take tests. We have to use some other criteria as well to prevent our best schools from becoming homogeneous and bland.

The best solution, of course, would be to revamp elementary and secondary education so that drill, practice, and testing were the most important considerations; this would obviate all the advantages of Kumon-type programs, and, perhaps, restore the public's faith in universal government education. Personally, I'm not holding my breath.