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Title: More tangled than I thought
Review: A wonderful underscoring of the fact that these decisions are made by humans, not automatons. This, I suppose, is both good and bad: on the one hand, qualified applicants with some quality that doesn't necessarily manifest itself as anything special in test scores often still comes across to admissions officers. On the other hand, you get all sorts of biases, and admissions officers who hope to "discover" themselves in the applicant pool.One interesting observation. Many people who've reviewed this book have expressed near glee that the underqualified affirmative action admit went on probation and failed to return to Wesleyan. This is exactly what affirmative action has done to us: instead of bridging gaps of culture and inheritance, it pits us in some sort of imagined zero sum game where we actually start crowing over someone's misfortune.Steinberg is obviously sympathetic to affirmative action throughout, but he does an incredible job of displaying its pitfalls, too.
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