Bell Curve

754 Notes to pages 437-45 156. Bishop has developed these arguments in several studies: Bishop 1988b,1990a, 1990b, 1993a, 199313.57. Bishop 1993b (p. 20) cites the example of Nationwide Insurance, whichin the single year of 1982 sent out over 1,200 requests for high school transcriptsand got 93 responses.58. Bishop 1988a, 1988b, 1990a, 1993a, 1993b.59. Bishop 1990b.60. Ibid.61. The Wonderlic Personnel Test fits this description. For a description, seeE. E Wonderlic & Associates 1983. The value of a high school transcriptapplies mainly to recent high school graduates who have never held a joh,so that employers can get a sense of whether this person is likely to cometo work every day, on time. But after the first job, it is the job referencethat will count, not what the student did in high school.62. The purposes of such a program are primarily to put the federal governmentfour-square on the side of academic excellence. It would not appreciablyincrease the number of high-scoring students going to college.Almost all of them already go. But one positive side effect would he to easethe financial burden on many middle-class and lower-middle-class parentswho are too rich to qualify for most scholarships and too poor to send theirchildren to private colleges.Chapter 191. Quotas as such were ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in the famous Bakkecase.2. Except as otherwise noted, our account is taken from Maguire, 1992.3. A. Pierce et al., "Degrees of success," Washington Post ,May 8,1991, p. A3 1.4. Seven COFHE schools provided data on appl~cants and admitted students,but not on matriculated students. Those schools were Barnard, Rryn Mawr,Carleton, Mount Holyoke, Pomona, and Smith. The ethnic differences inscores of admitted students for these schools were in the same range as thedifferences for the schools shown in the figure on page 452. Yale did notsupply any data by ethnicity. Data are taken from Consortium on FinancingHigher Education 1992, Appendix D.5. "Best Colleges," U.S. News B World Report, Oct. 4, 1993, pp. 107-27.6. Data for the University of Virginia and University of California at Rerkeleyare for 1988 and were obtained from Sarich 1990 and L. Feinherg,"Black freshman enrollment rises 46% at U-Va," Washinnon Post, December26, 1988, p. Cl.7. The figures for standard deviations and percentiles are based on theCOFHE schools, omitting Virginia and Berkeley. The COFHE Redbookprovides the SAT scores for the mean, 25th percentile, and 75th percentileby school. We computed the estimated standard deviation for the combinedSATs as follows:Estimated standard deviation for each test (Verbal and Math): given thescores for the mean and any percentile, the corresponding SD is given by(x-m)/z, where x is the score for the percentile, m is the mean, and z isthe standardized score for that percentile in a normal distribution. Twoseparate estimates were computed for each school, based on the 25th and75th percentiles. These two estimates were averaged to reach the estimatedstandard deviation for each test.The formula for estimating -- the standard deviation of combined tests isJF+i + 2 o, +, , where r is the correlation between the two testsand a represents the standard deviation of the two tests. The correlationof the verbal and math SATs as administered to the entire SAT populationis .67 (Donlon 1984, p. 55). The correlation for elite schools is muchsmaller. For purposes of this exercise, we err on the conservative side bycontinuing to use the correlation of .67. We further err on the safe sideby using the standard deviation for the entire student population, whichis inflated by the very affirmative action admissions that we are analyzing.If instead we were to use the more appropriate baseline measure, thestandard deviation for the white students, the Haward standard deviation(known from unpublished data povided by the Admissions OFfice)would be 105 instead of 122. For both reasons, the analysis of the gap betweenminority and white students in the COFHE data is understated.To give an idea of the magnitude, our procedure underestimated theknown black-white gap at Harvard by 14 percent.8. The Berkeley figure for Latinos is an unweighted average of Chicanos andother Latino means.9. Scholars who have tried to do work in this area have had a tough time obtainingdata, up to and including researchers from the Office for CivilRights in the Department of Education (Chun and Zalokar 1992, note, p.108).10. The Berkeley figure for Latinos is an unweighted average of Chicanos andother Latino means. For Davis, only a Chicano category is broken out. Virginiahad no figure for Latino students.11. Chun and Zalokar 1992.12. Committee on Minority Affairs 1984, p. 2.13. Chan and Wang 1991; Hsia 1988; Li 1988; Takagi 1990; Bunzel and Au1987.