So you don’t have to.

Highlights:

And while I happened to know that some of them gained admission on special terms meant to make up for their social disadvantages, I didn’t resent them for this. Not at all. . . . What’s more, the poorer and browner of my classmates — particularly the women — seemed to study twice as hard as I did, clocking endless hours in the library and forgoing weekend parties for late-night cram sessions.

Congratulations to Kirn for not resenting people who did nothing wrong, though I’m not sure why he would resent them. After all, he got in. The people who resent affirmative-action beneficiaries are the ones who didn’t get in and think they would have otherwise.

Also, Kirn seems to be right about minorities’ study habits; according to this study, blacks are less likely to miss classes (though it would have been nice of him to provide the data instead of making me look it up). However, the point of college is to learn, not to study hard in and of itself. If we use affirmative action to let in less-able students of one race or another, they’ll have to study more to gain the same amount of knowledge. As it is, the extra hours aren’t closing the gap as measured by GPA.

A system of advancement by aptitude, by statistical measurements of mental acuity, doesn’t concern itself with determination and courage, but if the world were truly fair, it would.

Yup. And high-school GPA captures determination a little. If you can find a way to do this more reliably, let me know.

This argument could go on forever (and has), but there’s a way out of it, I think, which even my most exacting Princeton professors might not find entirely idiotic. The premise of this solution is that all systems that seek to rank human beings according to “merit” — an inherently complex idea — will inevitably fall short of fully accounting for what merit consists of in the real world. As such, these systems, like our Constitution, should be subject to amendment from time to time, since no definition of merit lasts forever.

Wow! He not only gave us the fresh insight that standardized tests aren’t 100 percent perfect, he solved the problem! We just need to create a system where we can do things like change tests and experiment with different formulas for letting people into college! I mean, it’ll be hard, because the ACT and SAT have been carved in stone since 1446 B.C., but eventually we’ll get there!

The orthodox combination of high-school transcripts and SAT scores that allowed me into Princeton wasn’t, I found out after I was admitted, a guarantee of my ability to make the most of its academic offerings.

That’s the hard road you have to travel before it dawns on you that “high-school GPA plus SAT” does not equal “100 percent predictor of outcomes.” I imagine in Kirn’s next piece he’ll give us a formula that works better.