| The most striking factor that emerges from the survey is the strong belief
among science and engineering faculty members that finding well-prepared
underrepresented minority students is difficult and poses a serious challenge
to the goal of diversifying graduate education. Is this a misconception,
or are minority students in general receiving a weaker preparation than
majority students? Obviously, some minority students are extremely well
prepared for graduate studies by any criteria at some of the finest schools
in the country, but we must prepare more of our nation’s
underrepresented minority students so that they can be identifiably strong
by traditional assessment measures — undergraduate grades, board scores,
etc. Until then, we must learn to assess the talent and potential for graduate
work of students who may have a weaker preparation (e.g. a couple of C’s
on an undergraduate transcript that can be explained by extenuating circumstances)
or who don’t score as well on traditional admissions criteria. Even
though many of the surveyed faculty members saw under-preparation as a challenge
to diversity at the graduate level, it is important that faculty not turn
away from potential solutions because they see this as a “K-16 problem,”
rather than something that they, with a little more support from the university
and funding agencies, could also help to address. Elsewhere Tapia points
out that misusing traditional admissions criteria, especially standardized
tests, prevents the nation from tapping into a large part of its human resources’
creativity and leadership (Tapia,
1998).
Consider another story. A student comes to a strong university as an undergraduate from a weak high school in the barrio. Because of under-preparation, the student makes a couple of C’s in his undergraduate courses. A faculty member has him in his classes, gets to know him well enough to see his talent and creativity, and encourages the student to go on to graduate school. The student applies to several elite schools, but because of his board scores and undergraduate GPA, only his undergraduate school accepts him. The student excels in graduate school, excels in industry, and eventually becomes an extremely well-respected scientist. This minority scientist easily could have been lost through our traditional evaluation system if there hadn’t been a faculty member at his undergraduate institution that believed in him, encouraged him, and advocated for him. Once again, this is a true story that happened at a particular university, but there are many students who fall into this category all over the country, and the nation cannot afford to lose them over the twenty years that it will take to “fix” the K-16 educational system of underrepresented minority students. |
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Updated:
October 20, 2003
Copyright © September 2003 Richard Tapia, Cynthia Lanius and Baine Alexanders