It would have been a success story if Fullerton High School senior Fernando Rojas, the son of Mexican immigrants whose schooling stopped in the eighth grade, was accepted to college. But the 17-year-old achieved a surprising clean sweep — he was accepted to every Ivy League school.
Sunday, June 07, 2015
You Know What The Problem With Affirmative Action Is?
I read this story and wondered what the kid's SAT score was. Its absence is glaring:
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6 comments:
Reminds me of this story from a couple of years ago:
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-c1-cal-freshmen-20130816-dto-htmlstory.html
>> School had always been his safe harbor.
>> Growing up in one of South Los Angeles' bleakest, most violent neighborhoods, he learned about the world by watching "Jeopardy" and willed himself to become a straight-A student.
>> His teachers and his classmates at Jefferson High all rooted for the slight and hopeful African American teenager. He was named the prom king, the most likely to succeed, the senior class salutatorian. He was accepted to UC Berkeley, one of the nation's most renowned public universities.
>> A semester later, Kashawn Campbell sat inside a cramped room on a dorm floor that Cal reserves for black students. It was early January, and he stared nervously at his first college transcript.
>> There wasn't much good to see.
>> He had barely passed an introductory science course. In College Writing 1A, his essays — pockmarked with misplaced words and odd phrases — were so weak that he would have to take the class again.
>> He had never felt this kind of failure, nor felt this insecure. The second term was just days away and he had a 1.7 GPA. If he didn't improve his grades by school year's end, he would flunk out. <<
A spectacular student in a terrible neighborhood in L.A. goes off to Berkley and nearly flunks out. Missing in the article is his SAT or ACT scores, which should have been an early heads up that all was not right in his world.
It was a glaring omission.
I'm hoping it was very high.
In reality there are probably several Korean, Vietnamese, Pakistani and Indian kids in my school who scored as high or higher.
Those kids ended up in places like University of Texas, Ohio State and Northwestern-nice schools but not Ivies.
One of my students turned down Yale for RISD.
I ask parents their kids SAT score when they mention they have gotten into a certain school. Those who say they don't know, I wonder about that since it is so stressful to get into a good college, why wouldn't the parents know. This fluff piece from the AP just confirms the blinders that everyone who failed the SAT wears. Yes I did just ask for the SAT score for the AP writer/editor. It is either very low or 2400, a perfect snow job on readers.
Fernando Rojas probably has SAT scores lower than the average Ivy League freshman student.
As do roughly 1/2 the incoming class.
He also won a national level competition (http://www.speechanddebate.org/aspx/documents/newsDetail.aspx?newsid=164&navid=&pnavid=) in an event (speech and debate, sub-event: Poetry Reading) that the Ivy League schools care about.
I don't see this specific case as any more of an AA admit than these schools admitting good Lacrosse players who have SAT scores that are poor for the Ivy League.
I'd love to know what percentage of Ivy League admits are purely academic. My guess is that it is around 30%, the rest being legacy, AA, athletic, other talent, foreign, rich, etc. But the schools most certainly aren't going to advertise this
-Mark Roulo
Not only is his SAT or ACT score missing, but his GPA is too. Never saw such an article without one or more of those numbers.
Mark Roulo:
We see the same thing at our kid's highly-ranked private high school, but from the other side. Yes, the school sends a good chunk of kids to the ivies, but when you look closer they are 1) wealthy/big donors, 2) legacies, 3) top athletes.
The number of kids from our school who get accepted to the ivies based on their academic records plus "holistic" measures is much smaller than advertised, and probably isn't any better than a good public school.
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