Zamfir: Yeah it’s harder to fudge in math, but it does happen there too. Where I am schools get money to enroll more women in engineering, grades be damned.
Yeah, and will they pass at university level? If they can’t cut it and got in on AA, 100% will flunk out.
Zamfir: But anyway there are millions of people in humanities where all kinds of fudging can be done pretty easily.
I went to university with a lot of people who muddled through with C’s. They weren’t stupid. They had IQ’s of ~100, which is average. But average IQ doesn’t cut it at a good university.
Furthermore, I got a Masters in Linguistics, and it was the hardest thing I ever did. I almost didn’t get it and had to fight them for it. And I have a 147 IQ, which is genius level. 1/1,000 people have a score that high. That’s .1% If there are 1,000 people in a building, I am smarter than everyone in that damned building, and even I had a hard time with that Humanities Masters.
They were not giving them out like candy; they made you work like a sleigh dog in the arctic to get it. They kicked your ass until you got the degree. They were not letting you out without a fight, and to say they had high standards is to put it mildly.
I resent this idea you have that MA’s are given out trivially, at least in my field. Bottom line is, in my field, if you didn’t have what it took, no way in Hell you got that degree. Not happening. You will flunk out.
Zamfir: Math grad students from Africa. Sure. But look at grades and IQ for Africans versus the rest of the world or Americans. If there really were lots I would be suspicious. There is a big IQ/grade/achievement gap there. Maybe they skimmed off the top of the African population. But why?
There are going to be lots of better qualified White or Asian applicants out there… Suggests some kind of bias.”
Yes, Africans are remarkably unintelligent but their genetic variability is so high that there are many extraordinarily smart Africans. And I have met some of them. One African I knew from Benin is literally one of the smartest people I have ever met. The Africans with degrees I met here in the US are smart as whips. I met an African Linguistics professor at Berkeley, and I hate to be redundant, but once again I felt like I was meeting the smartest person I had ever met. This man was insanely smart, so smart you wonder if he’s from the same planet as you are.
Yes, we are skimming the cream of the crop in Africa. Of course we are. We don’t let in many Africans, and a lot of the only ones we let in are “the Kenyan with a Masters Degree.” We reject 99% of African immigration requests. The Embassy people are all race realists, and they know what these people are like.
There are indeed quite a few brilliant mathematics students from Africa in our universities. This isn’t the first time I have heard of it. There are not lots of better qualified Asian and White applicants, and anyway his school is open enrollment, so no one gets turned down.
African immigrants have the highest IQ’s of any US immigrant group at 110. You never knew that, did you?
And if those Africans can’t cut it, they will flunk out. In math, you will flunk out real fast at university level if you can’t cut it. They don’t mess around.
