[A] strict meritocratic entry system can have its drawbacks, as the school has discovered. As undergraduate admission standards have shot ever further skyward, the student body has been something of an intellectual – and some would say cultural – monolith.

Yes, the students are unquestionably bright, but many are nerdy, high achievers consumed with one thing: marks. Consequently, the student body has become increasingly uni-dimensional, dominated by brainiacs void of any curiosity about all that university life can be.

The new admission requirements will include a survey that asks students to share "personal experiences that have shaped their lives" - according to UBC's associate vice-president and registrar, James Ridge, this is to tell them about students' "commitment, time-management skills, perseverance, important information that we had no way of collecting, let alone evaluating, before."

They insist that this change is not driven by motivations to alter its cultural composition, calling them "adverse demographic effects or unintended consequences". This change, even without the cultural undertones, is a huge one - while many smaller Canadian universities have been experimenting with various admission schemes, a change by UBC is monumental and unprecedented. By any measure, UBC is at least the second largest university in Canada, and there is no doubt that admission averages are ever-increasing. A policy change by them would affect tens of thousands of Canadian students.

On the other hand, one cannot help but draw comparisons to the infamous "Too Asian" article published by Maclean's Magazine last year in its ubiquitous Canadian University Guide. [Maclean's subsequently renamed the article and removed some offending quotes from the online version because it was so controversial.]

They wrote "that meritocratic process results, especially in Canada’s elite university programs, in a concentration of Asian students". They further point out that UBC has been actively examining the problem:

Universities have the potential of establishing real cultural change. It makes sense that the head of the Canadian university with perhaps the highest number of Asian students is the most candid and the most concerned. Indeed, Stephen Toope has, since his arrival in 2006 as UBC president, made the issue central to his agenda—including outreach and newspaper op-ed pieces touting the importance of making the university campus a meeting place not only of diversity but also of dialogue.

It is needless for me to point out that this type of thinking is dangerously close to crossing over into xenophobic territory. Indeed, Jeet Heer from the National Post aptly compared the impending battle against meritocracy at these perceived "Asian" schools to the situation at Harvard in the 1920s, when they feared that the increasing Jewish population would disturb the "character" of the school's Anglo-Saxon heritage:

Like the Jews at Harvard in the 1920s, “Asians” are portrayed as book smart but lacking in social skills. According to Maclean’s “Asians” are pushy and ambitious (“They tend to be strivers, high achievers and single-minded…”); unlike white students, “Asians” don’t appreciate that education involves “social interaction, athletics and self-actualization.” Because “Asians” have a “narrow” focus on academics, they “risk alienating their more fun-loving [white] peers.” Finally, “Asians” stick together and are balkanizing our culture by their failure to assimilate.

Is this not nearly the exact same reasoning UBC is using to adopt its new admission policy?

Ostensibly, UBC is recognizing the fact that high school marks are inflating, and that they are not the greatest indicator of future success. Not a lot of details were released about this vague new policy, but UBC's James Ridge says: "We are saying very clearly that even if you’ve got extraordinary marks, if you don’t have a personal profile that suggests that you have some other rich life experience to bring to the university, you may not get in".

What do these "rich life experiences" mean? Presumably, if they are trying to diversify their student population (after all their goal is to change something in the student composition), they don't mean to include any criteria that selects the same students they already select with the high grades. Does that preclude them from considering, say, immigration to Canada as a rich life experience? What about living a life balancing between two distinct cultures?

Let's examine what has happened in the US, where college enrolment has been "de-meritocratized" in favour of secretive full-profile selection criteria.

Jesse Washington from the Associated Press wrote a striking piece describing how elite American colleges have in effect discriminated against Asian-American students through their selection criteria and implicit racial quotas. On average, "Asian-Americans needed a 1550 SAT to have an equal chance of getting into an elite college as white students with a 1410 or black students with an 1100."

Is this a fair outcome? To many Asians, this is patently unfair. Such inherent unfairness has led to many half-Asians to hide their ethnicity and heritage from admission committees in order to be compared fairly with other non-Asian applicants.

But what about the rest of us, who can't hide behind a half-identity?

I can think of many reasons why UBC's new policy is backwards and ineffective; for now we will settle on three reasons based on my own experience.

1) High school grades do indicate performance - insofar as university grades are concerned

For all its talk about how grades are not indicative of future success, the drafters of the new policy clearly did not consider that high school grades are correlated with university grades. Universities are notoriously secretive about their grading practices and entrance averages. Nonetheless, it is clear from their internal studies that the correlation exists. At the University of Toronto Faculty of Applied Science, for example, the Working Group on Engineering Grading Practices wrote an internal report which demonstrated a strong correlation between entrance averages and first year grades.

I do not question that universities should do a better job preparing students for careers after graduation, and certainly it would help if students had greater interpersonal and leadership skills. But that is an entirely different matter, and is only marginally related to entrance requirements. The evidence clearly shows that the meritocratic system produced its intended results: it selects students who are most able to succeed in their chosen academic program.

I would argue that to get the results that UBC wants, it should be changing its curriculum, not its entrance requirements. At best, their new policy must be accompanied by curriculum change, or else they are setting up their new students for failure - those entering with lower averages are probably not going to magically out-perform their more academically-inclined peers.

2) The underlying assumption that students with more well-rounded applications will become better leaders is flawed

All of this change is precipitated by a flawed assumption that a high academic achiever can only possess "book smarts" and that they make poor leaders because they lack social skills. This is clearly implicit in their reasoning, when they say that they want to help attract more students to extra-curricular activities such as student government.

I take great exception to this stereotype, and I have worked my ass off during my undergrad to break through this stereotype of the "hard working Asian student". Yes, I entered my undergrad with a 95% average, and I did end up graduating with Honours from Engineering. Yet, I found the time to participate in a multitude of activities that us "overachievers" (usually used pejoratively in this context) aren't supposed to be doing.

Student government? How about all four levels of University Governance? Division-level (EngSci Club), Faculty-level (Engineering Society), University-level (UTSU), and Governing Council (Academic Board) - I've served on all of them.

I've run student events, led "musical" groups, participated in competitions, partied with other schools, attended conferences, took photographs for yearbooks, and wrote for newspapers.

And yet, I did none of this in high school. My application would have been as vanilla as they come - I had grades, I had the prerequisite courses, and I applied to engineering, with their 90% admission averages. Did I participate in sports? Barely. Did I volunteer for a hospital? No. Did I start a charity? No. Did I join a political cause? No.

By logical extension of UBC's policies, I probably would become one of those borderline applicants, because I showed absolutely no demonstrable interest for involvement and no definitive "rich life experiences".

In fact, the predictive value of my high school extra-curricular activities was next to zero. If they are so concerned about the lack of predictive value of grades, they should be far more concerned about the impossible task of trying to map out someone's future based on one's "life experiences" at age 18.

Why did I get involved in these things? I didn't feel any sense of compulsion from career aspirations, or leadership development. I did it because I thought it was fun. I felt there was an opportunity to try new things, and to become a more well-rounded person. Would this have been self-evident for any reader of my Grade 12 application form? Highly doubtful.

I am not alone - hundreds of my peers are in the exact same situation. Selection based on high school experiences is far more arbitrary than grades, and all else being equal, say nothing about the individual student.

This brings me to my last point.

3) Using "life experiences" as a factor masks the fact that for many students, there are no such opportunities

A second fundamental assumption of UBC's new policy is that all high school students have equal opportunity to participate in and gain "rich life experiences" (which are unfortunately poorly defined). This is especially unfair to lower income and immigrant families.

For many first and second-generation children of immigrant families (like myself and many others), we are taught the importance of schooling and the importance of grades. Most of us are fed a steady diet of extra math classes, piano lessons, and language schools (stereotypical, but possibly true). Between these activities, there is not much time to engage in the community, volunteer for charities, or travel to exotic places.

Certainly, I don't see how I could have fit any more into my schedule, while meeting parental academic expectations of "90s or else". So, should students who are forced by family tradition and expectations (based largely on "immigrant" values) to succeed academically be punished for actually succeeding?

Moreover, let's forget racial discrimination for a moment, and discuss class discrimination. What if your parents were divorced, you had to take care of the household, and you had to hold down a part time job? Are these also "rich life experiences", or do they really mean rich when they say "rich"? Clearly, lower income families suffer from enough hardships already - why add another layer? What if I can't afford the opportunity cost of volunteering, or the actual cost of organized sports and competitions? What if I simply can't afford the time or spare the inconvenience of gaining said "rich life experiences"? Should I also be disadvantaged by these admission policies?

Conclusion

This has been an unusually long post, but let me conclude by restating my main points.

UBC's new admission policy, at best, seeks to justify enrolment of a more diverse student body based on arbitrarily defined "well-roundedness". At worst, it systematically institutionalizes implicit discrimination into the system.

It is difficult to escape the parallels between the perceived problem of "Asianness" at the university and the issues the new policy purportedly seeks to address.

It has been shown in the US, where many schools have adopted "holistic approaches", it has become increasingly difficult for Asians to gain admission on an equal footing as "non-Asian" students.

Finally, the problems the policy seeks to address are either non-existent or misguided: 1) high school grades do in fact correlate to academic success in university, 2) lack of life experiences prior to university does not indicate future failure, and 3) the policy institutionalizes inherent biases in society.

Much has been said about the difference between politicians and engineers. This is a debate that has gone on for ages. Why do Engineers not engage in public debates? Is it because engineers do not know about public policy?

When I sit around my engineering peers, and discuss politics, I often get noncommittal responses and shrugs of indifference. There are never any heated debates about politics, and never any emotionally charged tirades about one’s favourite political party. Engineers do not seem to be interested in public policy.

Mostly, this is because engineers don’t connect to politicians. They feel like politicians don’t make a difference. Like talking to a less intelligent friend, engineers find discussions with politicians useless – they spend much of their time explaining technical concepts without getting much progress. By the time an engineer figures out a way to get the politician to understand the technical details, the politician has long since lost interest.

Their goals, of course, are also different. Despite the public claim that politicians are supposed to serve “the people”, there are countless instances where special interest groups and lobbyists manage to sway politicians to a direction away from the majority view. These political battles create endless red tape – the kind of bureaucracy that engineers despise. Such an efficient workplace would instantly turn off an engineer.

Engineers find public policy important, but do not have time to deal with the implementation of the policies. The fundamental difference between engineers and politicians working on public policy is the time scale. Politicians, by nature of their job, think only in terms of years. Promises on public policy often happen in 5?year election cycles, and then get pushed aside when they are actually in office. Meanwhile, engineers and scientists have to deal with technology that changes on a constant basis – for example the tech sector progresses in maybe 6?month cycles, much faster than the politicians. By the time public policy is able to get past all the red tape, the science world has already leaped eons ahead.

So why bother with public policy? Politicians will always be playing catch?up anyway. There isn’t much reason to explain technical concepts to politicians and have to wait for them to accept technological progress. Perhaps the whole concept should just be scrapped: instead, let scientists and engineers do whatever they want to advance the field of science and technology, and let the public reap the benefits directly, without going through the government.

(Click for a larger version!)

For those who are unfamiliar with Calculus, it is a small strand of mathematics that essentially studies the rates of change of variables, but is often extended to include broader concepts such as functions and relations and equations on the Cartesian plane. Its ideas have been around since the ancient Greeks, but were not formalized in the 17th century by Newton and Leibniz. It has been used since the 17th century by various fields of science and mathematics to solve difficult problems and develop new concepts.

Early in the 2005-2006 school year, the Ontario Ministry of Education held a review of the secondary school curriculum in Ontario, particularly in the mathematics area. Among the most notable changes was the removal, or indeed, substantial reduction, of calculus from the grade 12 curriculum. The primary reasons given for the sweeping changes in the grade 12 math program were that dropout rates were increasing, enrollment into certain mathematics courses (particularly the infamous Geometry and Discrete Mathematics) were decreasing, and rates of failure in grade 12 Calculus were increasing. The proposals also noted that there was 'not enough time' to teach Calculus in a 4-year high school system, and that the subject was only necessary for careers in engineering, science, political science or physics. These proposals not only do not make any sense for the advancement of education, but will also hinder the future of Ontario's workforce.

First, the allegation that Calculus is too difficult a course for high school students is ridiculous. Calculus has been around at the high school level for several decades. Ask your parents, and they have probably sat through a Calculus class, or at the very least, had the option of doing so during their high school years. Calculus is also offered worldwide in high school, and in almost every other province in Canada. So what has changed in the last few years in Ontario that has caused an increase in the failure rate of Calculus students? Well, to answer that question, we will not look at the Calculus course, but at the foundations of mathematical education in Ontario. In Ontario, mathematics is often unfairly treated as an extraneous subject that is 'feared' by students. This attitude of education has caused a dramatic lag on the teaching of mathematical concepts in early education. Simple concepts of counting, addition, and subtraction are often left out in kindergarten and are sometimes taught as late as the second grade, usually out of fear from the teachers that students will find the subject "too difficult" for them. In turn, there is a cascading effect on the rest of the student's life in school. By the time students reach the sixth grade, they have learned only the bare basics of mathematics, but have developed a culture of fear around the subject. Back to Calculus, the subject itself requires a few mathematical concepts to have been learned by the student. They include an understanding of equations, functions, the Cartesian plane, and the ability to manipulate algebraic expressions. These skills are not very difficult to master, and generally do not require much conceptualization on the part of the student once it has been taught. Therefore, it is not much of a stretch to say that these concepts should have been taught from grades 9 through 11. Unfortunately, because of the culture of fear of mathematics and the delay of its teaching, students are still learning about fractions and division in grades 9 and 10. Thus, it is easy to see how students are going into Calculus without the necessary skills, and will naturally find the subject difficult. Calculus teachers are left with no other choice but to reteach these concepts and skills, thus leaving no time for the actual "calculus" part of the course. The fault in the system here is that mathematics is being dragged along the curriculum too slowly at the elementary level, leaving students wholly unprepared for the real world of math by the time they reach high school. Therein lies the biggest problem in the approach to this problem by the Ministry of Education - instead of starting at the root of the problem, they are only attacking the symptom, and the fatal flaw remains. Indeed, a change from the bottom up would take some time and considerable effort, but with the advancement of the modern world, it is inevitable that changes will happen, and if the current trend continues, Ontario's education system will lag far behind the rest of the world, and schools will not be prepared for the future.

Recently, Calculus has been used as a convenient excuse for students dropping out of school, due to its irrelevance to the students and its level of difficulty. This is no more convincing than the student's popular "I left my homework at home" excuse. It may be true that dropout rates are increasing in high school, but this fact is completely independent of students taking the Calculus course. In Ontario, Calculus is only offered as a '12U' course, meaning it is geared towards more hard-working, intelligent students aiming towards post-secondary education in university. In any graduating class, the number of students heading towards university and college are about the same (although the trend is leaning towards the university side of things due to parental and educational pressure). The system is designed in such a way (like it or not) that only the more academically inclined half of students from grades 9 and 10 move on to grade 11 and 12 'U' level courses. Generally, students who drop out of high school are failing courses, and by the same token, if a student has bad grades during their first two years of high school, they are strongly encouraged against or even prevented from taking 'U' level courses in the senior years. Thus, although it is more difficult to prove statically due to the lack of information at this level, it is probable that of the students who drop out, only a very low percentage have taken Calculus, and were not influenced by the subject. The reasons behind the dropout of students vary, but they will not be discussed in the space of this text.

The extent of use of Calculus in various fields has been debated by the Ministry of Education and their study, and they have come up with only a short list of careers that require the study of the strand of math. Those include engineering, science, political science, and physics. As a Calculus student, I find that list highly selective and is a gross misinterpretation of the flexibility of Calculus. In fact, many concepts and skills learned in Calculus are essential to business, medicine, and even certain arts, like architecture. Those who believe otherwise do not understand the essential concepts behind Calculus and do not realize its power. It is inconceivable that students will enter university programs without learning any calculus, even though it is an integral part of modern science. Where I will concede to changes in the curriculum is in its focus, but I will propose an alternate method of changing grade 12 math. Currently, Calculus is the focus of the grade 12 mathematics curriculum, and the main mathematics courses in grades 9 through 11 all gear students toward grade 12 Calculus. Although Calculus is very powerful and can be used for a great many purposes, it should still remain an optional course reserved for students who are interested in the subject, or have a need for it in the career path they choose (particularly for computing, engineering, physics, and mathematical studies). In place of Calculus, a fourth grade 12 university level mathematics course should be implemented. This course would include in it the concepts of algebra, equations, graphical analysis, and more real-world applications of mathematics, which could mean a movement of the current grade 11 finance unit into this new grade 12 course. Other changes to grade 12 math could potentially include the removal of the last unit of Geometry and Discrete, as it overlaps with the Data Management course and is often not taught, and the movement of Conic Sections into the grade 12 Geometry & Discrete course. These changes would allow teachers in grade 11 to focus on the development of vital mathematical skills required for all of the grade 12 math courses, and allow more time in earlier grades to cover geometric and algebraic concepts that have been neglected in the current curriculum (these include Euclidean Geometry and trigonometry). The choice of four different grade 12 mathematics courses for university-bound students with the new focus on the algebra skills course would make much more sense than cramming many unrelated concepts into the Advanced Functions and Introductory Calculus course as it is being done currently, and would leave Calculus as the third or fourth math course behind the new proposed Algebra course and the current Data Management course, the latter of which has had a reputation of being the 'easiest' of the three current senior math courses, and is often taken by students in grade 11. The Calculus course and the Geometry & Discrete course would thus be left only for stronger math students and those who are motivated for a challenge. This solution allows more flexibility and choices for the average student, while both reducing the focus on Calculus as well as keeping the course available for students who require it.

Moving forward, it is important for Ontario's Ministry of Education to realize that removing Calculus from the curriculum will not solve the problems they have identified themselves. The problem should be attacked at its root, that is, the culture of fear that has developed around mathematics, even with its simplest concepts and skills, especially in early education. Without a solid foundation of the concepts behind math, it is inevitable that students will find Calculus and its related subjects hard to understand. The focus of Calculus in the grade 12 curriculum should be reduced, and deferred to a new course which will encompass and bring to a closure all the algebraic skills that will be useful in practically every career path. Calculus should be kept as a third or fourth senior mathematics course, for students who still need it for their post-secondary education or have strong interest in the subject.