The phrase that keeps popping up is ‘mediocre student’. Well, no, not a mediocre student, because people with lower grades were admitted and she was not. So, not ‘mediocre student’ unless all students with lower marks are also mediocre.

The reason you don’t know what to say is that your brain wants to hold simultaneously “she is mediocre” and “people who are in that school deserve to be there” and “some people who are there are there for subjective reasons unrelated to achievement” as simultaneously true and that just does not logically work out. So…

Yes. I do.

I’m not sure what you are getting at. It’s not a conspiracy theory that her lawsuit was paid for by a third party, an anti-affirmative action crusader. That’s a matter of public record.

I agree a university shouldn’t be limited to objective criteria. In that universe, though, it’s ridiculous to say someone is ‘mediocre’. By what measurement? It’s meaningless, because it’s subjective. It’s an opinion.

Your last paragraph is pure conjecture. How in the world do you know what she was thinking?

I understand completely what happened w.r.t. the 10% thing.

Yes, life is unfair, but that’s a little ridiculous to hear when someone is saying that she didn’t “have what it takes”. If “having what it takes” is subjective anyway, how can you tar her as not having worked hard enough or whatever?

We cannot assume that because her lawsuit solely focused on AA, that AA pisses her off the most about this situation. For one possible explanation: She wasn’t paying cash money for the suit.

Do you simply count extracurricular activities? How do you measure between volunteering in a difficult, self-sacrificing way versus being, say, a champion tennis player? Etc.

I’ve heard this but it never made sense to me. Help me to understand as a white person by way of opposite example: What would be an example of, say, a SAT test question that the average black student would get correct more often than a white person?

Yet is what we have to work with. We can’t say that she didn’t have the “chops” as measured by grades. If we are going to go subjective on test scores and etc., maybe she had more “real chops” relative to others who were admitted, if her school was more challenging than realized.

Please note that I said “partly”.

Please note that I said “partly”.

Common mistake here. “Because she didn’t speak about other factors, and only filed suit about AA, we can conclude that she’s _only_ miffed about the AA angle.” Logically unsound. One of many possibilities is there simply was no legal grounding for which to sue on strict meritocracy grounds.

The root reason that people disagree over this is that there is a conflict between whether a school should admit based on objective qualifications (test scores) or some combination of objective and subjective (are you a minority? are you a legacy?) criteria. Obviously you fall into the latter camp, so it’s dissonance…

This is bizarre. You do realize that there are people who got in, of all races, with lower scores, correct? So why should she receive a message of “you did not earn it”. Because there is a POINT process that takes into account a host of other qualifications of which race is one. By your own logic her parents could…

There is this meme that she only cared about race in her lawsuit and so she thinks that everybody else with lower grades who got in is “fine”.

Well, the victim is not around to appreciate the long sentence, so why actually doesn’t the perpetrator “deserve leeway”? Are they likely to reoffend? What interest is served?

This is _always_ true, never moreso than with tabloids.