The University of California Board of Regents was recently criticized for its new admissions plan passed in February, which interest groups claim unfairly affects Asian & Pacific Islander applicants.

The plan, which eliminates the SAT II as a requirement to be considered, is intended to decrease the number of applications denied consideration for reasons that could be due to poor advising.

Recently, Asian American interest groups and legislators criticized the plan for what they say is a disproportionate and unfair effect on Asian & Pacific Islander applicants. According to a 2007 California Postsecondary Education Commission study, the plan could cause up to a 7 percent decrease in admitted Asian Americans while increasing the proportion of other groups. Interest groups urged the university to rescind the plan until further consideration and more public input could be sought.

Despite the criticism, the admissions change remains a fair and necessary modification to a policy that previously discounted qualified but poorly advised students for technical reasons.

Admissions policy in a public university shouldn’t be based on the effect it has on specific ethnic groups, as determined by a single study. It should be based on casting the widest net possible by considering as many qualified students as they can, resulting in the selection of the best pool of applicants regardless of ethnicity.

Furthermore, the criticism that the plan was rushed and secretive is unfounded. The faculty-generated plan was developed over a two-year process in the Academic Senate followed by an additional two years spent explaining and gaining support throughout the system.

The regents spent several meetings discussing the plan and even delayed the scheduled vote in order to slow the process and gain a better understanding. The issue also garnered widespread media attention in print, television and blogs before the vote. Anyone concerned or confused about the proposal was free to speak during public comment at any of the regents‘ meetings.

The plan was created and passed with the best intentions of promoting fairness, accessibility and openness – something all applicants can appreciate.

At some point in our lives we‘ve all heard that line that adults (the real ones, with jobs and houses and stuff) use to describe a student: “He‘s smart, he just doesn‘t apply himself.“ This brings to mind that stoner kid who owned the SATs because stoners are either really smart or really dumb. Or maybe those words describe you, because it‘s the perfect excuse for your GPA and no one ever wants to admit that they‘re stupid.

Confession: I am a slacker. I highlight. I skim. My parents think I study more than I actually do. In all honesty, the last book I ever actually read word-for-word was The Great Gatsby in tenth grade, because I think it‘s actually good. I never would have been able to stomach reading Pride and Prejudice line by line. Reading Shakespeare‘s English definitely requires a little more attention than the modern English that were used to. Reading my SOC reader is like using a highlighter to dig out golden nuggets of information.

The reason why I sometimes neglect to meticulously read my assignments boils down to a simple, rational fact: I do not find them interesting. That doesn‘t mean that I am not compelled by the subject matter; after all, I did have the luxury of choosing my own major. But I don‘t enjoy reading 30 pages of boring to come to either a) a conclusion that doesn‘t really exist or b) a conclusion that is unremarkable common knowledge.

It‘s kind of sad how many articles out there sound like they were written by some chump with a Ph. D and a huge thesaurus. Reexamining the essays you wrote for college applications serve as a somewhat painful token of what happens when people use big words to show that they are more intelligent than they actually are. Even if you are intelligent and use the words correctly, there‘s always the fact that superfluity is unnecessary and kind of annoying. There‘s no real point in taking 50 pages to state what you could say in five. It kills more trees and takes away precious Wii time.

Here‘s an example from a John Vasquez of Vanderbilt University:

“These suggestions merely scratch the surface and are meant to show that the territorial explanation can provide relevant and new approaches to peace for the post-Cold war era, making us aware that both the pitfalls of past practices and opportunities for peaceful solutions that we may not have considered because our latent theories of the causes of war did not recognize the importance and centrality of territorial disputes.“

He could just as easily say that his explanation might be useful in pointing out things that have been overlooked before.

It‘s not just a matter of language. It‘s the content as well. Too many Odyssey-long articles ultimately conclude that there is no firm statement to be made and the whole thing was just a collection of organized rants. Often, these revelations are mitigated with the ideas that maybe in a certain situation blah blah blah might possibly be valid.

Then there are the rants that make conclusions that Miley Cyrus could have told you, something like “less-educated people are more likely to work blue-collar jobs“ or “racial profiling is bad.“ It would be so much easier for everyone if the scholarly folk could just come out and say it. I swear I wouldn‘t think them any less scholarly.

I attribute this impatience in part to the technologically influenced natures of us Gen Y kids. Microwaves give us what we want ASAP. Neato CGI explosions in action films work overtime to capture our interest. This ultimately means that we get what we want when we want it and our interest/attention is harder to hold. Reading long dull passages in order to find the answer doesn‘t exactly fit in with that. I mean, really, we‘re the kind of people who make up abbreviations for everything like “OMG“ and “G2G“ – we like to cut corners.

The naysayers, no doubt, are surely rolling their eyes at my limited vocabulary and calling me out as a whiny, lazy simpleton who‘s just too inane to read at all. That‘s not true; I was once Little Miss Bookworm and still read recreationally. But if that‘s the perception I project, I guess I‘ll have to stick with it. That‘s me, Michelle Rick: Giving idiots a voice since 1987.

MICHELLE RICK is keenly aware that you fine people probably skimmed this column. Share the last good book you were assigned and actually read at marick@ucdavis.edu.

The recent World Chess Championship loss of American Grandmaster Gata Kamsky to the current world number one Veselin Topalov was, in many ways, a setback to the forward development of American chess and, in particular, a disappointment to Kamsky’s fans.

Yet what should have truly been disappointing was how inconsequential the match seemed.

In the past, as much as chess demanded individual intellect, it was also a competition between overarching national ideologies and cultural philosophies. For the observer, all the emergent dramas – the human emotion, national pride, absorbing intensity, trauma of unpredictability – those were majestic feelings as they were spectacles. At times, then, chess appeared to be less about two people competing than it was about the story of two conscripts battling for larger, underlying meaning.

And that is the problem: The very values that characterized the greatest chess matches are increasingly dislodged in the age of mechanical computation. With the invention and improvisation of chess programs, chess as a sport is in danger of losing its fundamental qualities. For a game that has persisted and lasted for centuries, a critical part of human history is under the threat of extinction. Chess risks becoming inconsequential.

Often, chess is about hierarchy and class. The rooks and bishops can seem impersonal, bastions of high privilege available to the very few, their rank condescending and their stature intimidating. For the learner, this order is menacing and distant.

But chess is also about redeeming human qualities. Through a focused resolve and unrelenting search for answers, chess can be bent to one’s will and skill. The greatest competitors internalize and master their fears, then transform their nervousness into vigorous moves; in turn, the pieces energize and influence. At its essence, thus, chess contains the intrinsic potential to emerge as a harmonic interplay of pawns and pieces, their inter-structural seamlessness acting and reacting with swift coordination. The play emerges as an art form.

Furthermore, for the chess player, life is embodied and captured in this interaction. The dynamism of chess offers a glorious permanence against the postmodern world that frequently seems more provisional. In the minds of some, the finality of the pieces‘ linear relationships can even be preferable to the more arbitrary vagaries that shape human relationships.

Computers have now displaced these human qualities. Through absolute precision, the element of unpredictability has been digitally removed. Instead, with the clarity of a perfect oracle, every move is now engineered toward exaction and perfection. The intangible factors that belie the grandest historical chess matches – the magnitude of the occasion, the sense that something critical is happening, the confluent conditions that provoke action – are surreally disposed by a machine that recognizes no human qualities.

History is a transcript of significant human meaning, its annotation often the consequence of important events allied to defining acts. For many, insight into chess is a venture into a realm that seems forbidden, secretive and transitory. One peeks into the future, seeing what has yet to transpose, envisioning what has yet to happen. That clairvoyance is exciting and exhilarating; this creates meaning, as players get to shape their own personal destinies. Chess players become masters of their own directions.

For chess to come under assault; that is frightening – it endangers not only a game that is valued, but also a way of life that people utilize to construct their own histories and imprint their identity. The invention of chess-playing programs has ultimately emerged as a battle for the soul of chess – and of national identities, cultural phenomena and individual worth.

Preserve chess by supporting National Master (NM) James Heiserman’s lecture on “Middlegame Strategy” at the Chess Club tomorrow! Contact ZACH HAN at zklhan@ucdavis.edu for more information.

The education system has failed to teach students what the truth means and why it matters.

As an analogy for this failure, imagine a student entering college, Sarah, who has previously been under the watchful eyes of her over-protective parents. Throughout her life, Sarah was a victim to her parents‘ strict regime; any sort of revolt would lead to a series of punishments and looks-of-disappointment. In college, newly endowed with freedom, she breaks all the rules. Drugs, theft and unprotected sex are common occurrences in this formerly innocent square – sound familiar?

We’ve all heard this story before, but haven’t really analyzed why it’s so recurrent.

The problem is in the way Sarah’s parents taught her the rules; they created a disassociation between the rules and its rationale. By placing unrelated consequences to each broken rule, the parents trained Sarah to believe that the only rationale behind following the rules is to not get punished. Therefore, whenever she isn’t caught by her parents, in her eyes, nothing wrong happened. She never developed the ability to reason by herself why it’s in her best interest to follow certain rules.

Similar to Sarah’s parents, the schools threaten students to retain information with unrelated punishments. The consequence of not memorizing the atomic structure of boron is a few less points on the exam. Of course, scientists who memorize boron’s atomic structure do so for a completely different reason. Similar to Sarah, most students never learn how to reason on their own the rationale behind the information they are learning. As long as knowing the information leads them to higher scores, they don’t care to acknowledge why they’re learning what they’re learning.

Schools try to teach students the most accurate models of reality known to date; the most accurate models are conventionally described as “true.” The accuracy i.e. truth of a model is determined by how well it makes predictions relative to other models.

For example, consider two models that we can posit to explain why people get sick: Demons and germs. Say, demons run around in your body punching your organs and that’s why people get sick. Germs, on the other hand, have no supernatural properties and explain why people get sick with a causal description. We can choose to believe either demons or germs, but why do most of us choose germs?

When we adopt the model of germs, we can not only explain why people get sick, but can also predict the sickness‘ duration, future symptoms, possible cures, contagiousness, etc. The demon model, however, can’t predict any of those things; for that matter, it can’t predict anything at all. Even if demons really do cause sickness, even if all of life is one big illusion, the germ model is still the most useful for now.

In short, the most accurate models of reality do more for you than stop your curiosity or comfort your mind.

Unfortunately, most people aren’t able to grasp how profound and useful accurate models are. Because of school’s constant decoupling between a model and its accuracy, students are trained to memorize accurate models only long enough to get a passing grade. And for the models they do believe in, accuracy is not a prerequisite. Not only does this create the tendency for students to have false models, but it stops them from questioning the accuracy of models they currently believe in. Students may never question the validity of what they are being taught. Worse, they may reject everything they are taught that conflicts with their prior beliefs.

Schools should give tests that force students to come up with their own models of reality. A good grade on these tests will depend on the predictive power i.e. accuracy of their models. For example, students can be told about a phenomenon like water boils faster in higher elevations. Then, without memorizing the question beforehand, they’d have to write the best possible explanation for why the phenomenon is true. They probably won’t get the right answer, but will learn why some answers are better than others.

LIOR GOTESMAN hopes your education doesn’t stop when class is over because school is overrated. Contact him at liorgott@gmail.com.