Designing affirmative action policies under uncertainty

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• dc.contributor.author Hertweck, Corinna
• dc.contributor.author Castillo, Carlos
• dc.contributor.author Mathioudakis, Michael
• dc.date.accessioned 2023-07-31T07:15:13Z
• dc.date.available 2023-07-31T07:15:13Z
• dc.date.issued 2022
• dc.description.abstract We study university admissions under a centralized system that uses grades and standardized test scores to match applicants to university programs. In the context of this system, we explore affirmative action policies that seek to narrow the gap between the admission rates of different socio-demographic groups while still accepting students with high scores. Since there is uncertainty about the score distribution of the students who will apply to each program, it is unclear what policy would have the desired effect on the admission rates of different groups. We address this challenge by using a predictive model trained on historical data to help optimize the parameters of such policies. We find that a learned predictive model does significantly better than relying on the ideal parameters for the last year. At the same time, we also find that a large pool of historical data yields similar results as our predictive approach for our data. Due to the more complex nature of the predictive approach, we conclude that a simpler approach should be preferred if enough data is available (e.g., long-standing, traditional university programs), but not for newer programs and other cases in which our predictive strategy can prove helpful.
• dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
• dc.identifier.citation Hertweck C, Castillo C, Mathioudakis M. Designing affirmative action policies under uncertainty. J Learn Anal. 2022;9(2):121-37. DOI: 10.18608/jla.2022.7463
• dc.identifier.doi http://dx.doi.org/10.18608/jla.2022.7463
• dc.identifier.issn 1929-7750
• dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10230/57734
• dc.language.iso eng
• dc.publisher Society for Learning Analytics Research
• dc.relation.ispartof Journal of Learning Analytics. 2022;9(2):121-37.
• dc.rights © 2022 Journal of Learning Analytics. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
• dc.rights.accessRights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
• dc.rights.uri http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• dc.subject.keyword Algorithmic fairness
• dc.subject.keyword affirmative action
• dc.subject.keyword predictive analytics
• dc.title Designing affirmative action policies under uncertainty
• dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
• dc.type.version info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion