Looking at mean SAT grades is close to irrelevant when your (supposed) strategy is to pick Top-N candidates. If for example every single person got exactly the mean score allotted to them by their race, you'd actually expect that the top 5.9% of universities would all be 100% Asian, the next 57.8% of universities would be purely "White (incl. Jewish)", the next 18.7% of universities purely Hispanic and bottom 12.1% purely Black.
By that math, every single slot in an ivy league school "belongs" to an Asian candidate and even a single white person is already over-representation.
(Didn't separate White from Jewish since they don't have mean scores for just Jewish, possibly they should be first according to the estimate in the text below, but that doesn't really matter for the point made)
> Looking at mean SAT grades is close to irrelevant when your (supposed) strategy is to pick Top-N candidates.
Not if the mean SAT score predicts how many students surpass some academic cutoff used by the universities. It's like predicting who will win a best-out-of-3 100m dash, when all you have are the runners' mean 100m times.
I find it baffling how people become incapable of the simplest inferences, and capable of the smallest nitpicks, when they don't like where the data leads.
By that math, every single slot in an ivy league school "belongs" to an Asian candidate and even a single white person is already over-representation.
(Didn't separate White from Jewish since they don't have mean scores for just Jewish, possibly they should be first according to the estimate in the text below, but that doesn't really matter for the point made)