Author:
In Defense Of Intellectual Honesty
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Date Posted: 23:42:12 04/11/08 Fri
Asia,
I see that your sense of pride prevents you from giving me the satisfaction of seeing you use the W word in regards to the 31st percentile. I labor under no such restrictions and I will take this opportunity to tell you and any other readers who have followed this thread to this point, I was wrong about whether statistics from Barnard students are included in calculating Columbias minimum AI.
When you and I first began going back and forth on this topic, I made a few phone calls. Today, I finally heard back from somebody who knows the answers to the questions we have been debating. To wit, here is the unalloyed final determination:
1. Barnard student-athletes have their board scores and class rankings included in the calculation of Columbias Academic Index.
2. Columbias mens and womens sports teams must achieve an AI above the same minimum AI.
3. Columbias minimum AI is calculated using only the board scores and class rankings of Columbia University (i.e., CC and Fu) students.
Thus, I was wrong about Point Number 3. In my own defense, my source agreed with me that it is wholly inconsistent to include the statistics from Barnard student-athletes in calculating the AI, while excluding other Barnard women from setting the minimum AI which must be exceeded. But thats the way its done and I was wrong. More precisely, I guessed wrong.
To the Columbia supporters who posted earlier in this thread, given this new information, Columbias relevant admit rate for the purposes of discussing selectivity in Ivy sports is therefore not 12.9%. It is 10.0%, the combined admit for CC and Fu, but excluding Barnard.
After learning this new information, I went back to Columbias website. Interestingly, of the 282 women athletes wearing light blue, 39 (or 13.8%) are from Barnard, while only 13 (or 4.6%) are from the engineering school. So Barnard is actually three times as important as Fu in terms of contributing women to Lion sports teams.
Parenthetically, there is one single student-athlete from the School of General Studies. Of course, there is not a critical mass of General Studies students to include the GS in calculating the minimum AI. (And I do not know if GS students even earn degrees.) Following the same line of thinking, perhaps when originally setting the minimum AI policy, it was assumed that Barnard women would not participate in Columbia sports to a significant extent. If the percentage of women athletes from Barnard were to increase from 13.8% to, say, 29.6% (their proportion of the overall CC-Fu-Barnard student body), perhaps the minimum AI methodology would be revisited. As it is, as Observer posted on April 6, Barnard student-athletes are being held to a higher standard of academic achievement than their non-athlete peers.
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