Ucas to enforce 'name-blind' applications to tackle racial bias

I'm not sure it would be hard for someone to figure out my ethnicity from my scholastic achievements...

For instance, if you were to estimate the ethnic identity of people who make top marks in English and History, and choose to take European History and Latin as classes outside their major... what do you think 80-90% of them will be? Conversely, what about people who have records of ESOL classes, or didn't do as well in English?

You get the idea, right? They can essentially pick who they want by looking at patterns.

That would be fairly pointless on the part of any admissions tutor because it's pure guesswork and I doubt many of them would like to make decisions based on guesses as opposed to the more substantial evidence available to them (exam grades, entrance test scores etc.). They might very well not take people with low grades in English, but that wouldn't be discrimination -- the person being rejected might very well be from an ethnic minority but they would have been rejected for not having the required standard of English rather than because of their ethnicity.

Equally, it's possible that people who're ethnically from English-speaking countries might have a poor English grade. I've certainly known quite a few white British people who've got grades in English that wouldn't be acceptable to most universities and, should they be rejected for that, it would be based entirely on that in most cases, not on their ethnicity.

Fair point about certain qualifications being peculiar to certain regions though -- there would be little doubt about the ethnicity of somebody applying with Indian board examination results. At the end of the day, you cannot eliminate every single factor that might lead to discrimination but it's a step in the right direction.

Actually, there are groups in the US complaining that requiring English competency or only providing English-language instruction is racist, and claim that we're just "cherry-picking" ideal minorities that have assimilated well so we can "be comfortable".

Well, yes, of course it's possible, but statistically speaking, native monolingual English speakers tend to do better in English, and are more likely to be White.

Organisations that are in favour of positive discrimination and a quota system would likely oppose removing the data because they want them to be given special consideration for their background. Objective consideration wouldn't be considered "good enough".

what a stupid idea, leave things as they are

That's actually surprising; for a people more patriotic than British people (generally/on average), I would think Americans would have a more no-nonsense approach to integration. I do hope these groups are in the fringe and not the mainstream.

That's unfortunate about the rights groups. I really don't think that ethnic background should be a criteria for contextualisation. In fact, most British universities that I know of don't use that at all; they go by things like whether the person attends a poor-performing school and has, in that environment, done better than everybody else; or whether that person gets free school meals (which only those from poor backgrounds are entitled to); or whether they've been in social care and so on.

As far as that is concerned, under this new system, it's still perfectly possible to have an application form read, 'Candidate #06543 attends a school within the bottom 40 percent of English state schools by exam results and is in receipt of free school meals.' That seems fair to me. I don't much care if that hurts the feelings of anybody advocating positive discrimination. Again, the situation is probably different in America but British universities are always at pains to insist that every applicant is treated equally and as an individual and that there are no quotas (although there are for international applicants -- not along ethnic lines, I should add).

That would be fairly pointless on the part of any admissions tutor because it's pure guesswork and I doubt many of them would like to make decisions based on guesses as opposed to the more substantial evidence available to them (exam grades, entrance test scores etc.). They might very well not take people with low grades in English, but that wouldn't be discrimination -- the person being rejected might very well be from an ethnic minority but they would have been rejected for not having the required standard of English rather than because of their ethnicity.

Equally, it's possible that people who're ethnically from English-speaking countries might have a poor English grade. I've certainly known quite a few white British people who've got grades in English that wouldn't be acceptable to most universities and, should they be rejected for that, it would be based entirely on that in most cases, not on their ethnicity.

Fair point about certain qualifications being peculiar to certain regions though -- there would be little doubt about the ethnicity of somebody applying with Indian board examination results. At the end of the day, you cannot eliminate every single factor that might lead to discrimination but it's a step in the right direction.

When saying "poor English grade", just how poor are we talking? Just curious for my own sake.

As always the elephant in the room is aptitude differences. The UK has an enormous data set for IQ of secondary school pupils, from a test called the CAT (Cognitive Assessment Test):



The CAT shows that non-white pupils, taken as a whole, are slightly less intelligent than white pupils; that is, the white IQ is slightly above the mean of 100. However, there is enormous variation between different groups of non-whites. Indians perform about the same as whites, blacks and Pakistanis underperform whites, and Chinese outperform whites (note that the quantitative and non-verbal reasoning scores, in which non-whites do better than in verbal reasoning, are probably more representative because they tend to wash out the effect of English not being some pupils' first language).

Now the government is implying that the racial differences in admissions are due to prejudice rather than bulk differences in the candidates' actual performance. This hypothesis predicts that all these diverse groups of pupils with different aptitudes but all without traditional British names (including "white other groups" should do worse in admissions than pupils with traditional British names (including non-whites) to a similar degree. If in fact aptitude is the deciding factor, we would expect pupils with Chinese names to do better than pupils with traditional British names, who in turn should do better than pupils with Indian names (due to the small penalty they suffer on the verbal reasoning tests, probably due to ESL), who should in turn do better than pupils with Pakistani/Bangladeshi names, who should in turn outperform pupils with African and distinctively Afro-Carribean names.

In fact Afro-Carribeans, who have the worst aptitude scores, are probably no more likely to have non-British names than white pupils. Are they represented on-par with white pupils, or are they underrepresented? This is a strong test of whether universities are prejudiced based on racial hatred, or whether they discriminate correctly based on aptitude; in this case, underrepresentation of Afro-Carribeans would show that universities are less likely to be prejudiced.

It is so easy to conclusively prove or disprove whether universities are discriminating based on prejudice (e.g. names), or whether they are discriminating entirely appropriately based on aptitude differences, that I am not sure why these tests have not been carried out and the results published. If it turns out that universities do discriminate based on race (e.g. if Chinese are underrepresented relative to white British) then this seems like a limp response to a real problem. If in fact the government has performed this analysis and not found evidence of such discrimination, it's difficult to see why pursue this policy at all.

Firstly as a policy, it has no downside. There is no legitimate reason why university recruiters need to know the information. It is either being used illegitimately or it is not being used at all.

Secondly university selection is a complex mix of aptitude and attainment which to some degree involves universities making bets on the degree to which attainment does or does not correlate with aptitude (with different universities and different departments making different bets) and which to another extent involves a baseline of attainment regardless of aptitude.

Testing whether university admission is fair against a baseline of aptitude is irrelevant when universities are not seeking to recruit against pure aptitude.

That is quite apart from the big question of whether and to what extent IQ is environmentally driven.

It is great idea but there is still going to be an issue once it gets to interview stage.

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http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/oct/26/ucas-name-blind-university-applications-racial-bias



This sounds like a good idea to me. I must say, I was surprised that this wasn't already in place.

I also don't see why most job applications shouldn't have names removed to remove any sex or ethnicity bias, much as age, martial status and nationality are not included in CVs any more. Candidates should be identified by a number, which is then cross-checked against a list holding their name and contact details once the initial selection decisions have been made. Would give HR something actually useful to do.

What do you think?

I think its a great idea. Why should we keep things as they are if they are discriminating people, don't you want to stop that ?