I'm simply unable to follow the flow of logic that gets you from my comment, which reflected the statement of an admissions officer, to your conclusion about how "people who think like me" would dismiss Asian kids.

The admission officer was describing someone who shows no passion towards anything, and only does it because they're supposed to - which often includes why they're applying to college, because they're supposed to. Is it an idiotic bias to think that someone without passion in a subject area will be less successful than someone with passion and direction?

In case you missed the earlier part of the comment, kids with high GPAs, test scores, etc. - the "grinder" you describe, regardless of race - fit into a different category of a likely successful student that they also look for. To elaborate though, there are lots of "grinders" and differentiation still matters. Are they grinding in math and CS, and also have a Github and contribute to OSS and are applying to the college of engineering? That's better than someone with super high scores but nothing else, because there are probably lots of other applicants with even higher scores. Competing on only one axis is hard.

Like it or not, in a limited resource like seats at a competitive school, admissions officers are looking for small signals. It may seem unfair, but it's what I was told.

And as for the evidence, I'm merely passing on the information I was told by the people making the decisions. They hold the evidence (if it's even an evidence-based decision) not me. Feel free to have your own discussions with them if you'd like, I've generally found admission officers to be extremely friendly and open about their criteria.

> your own idiotic biases

we don't talk like that here.

Counterpoint: box-checkers are no fun to have as classmates.

Counterpoint: universities are supposed to provide education (which doesn't mean fun isn't allowed but surely that's not the priority here)

A room full of box checkers is also worse for education. I want to have classmates that are willing to question the teacher, classmates that will spend time thinking beyond a class instead of cramming every trivial detail for an A+, classmates that will choose their classes based on what sounds interesting to them and not only what would look best on their resume.

These schools don't systematically reject all box checkers, it's just that there are so damn many of them the admit rate is going to be very low for box checkers if you want a class with diverse perspectives.

I also don't think it's a binary property, and to some extent is a product of how one spins their application. This is definitely a downside of the current system. But there are fundamental, educational reasons to not want your entire class consisting of students that poured every waking hour of high school into gaming the college app.

When I think of box-checkers, I think of the kind of classmates I had who could memorize things far better (or just put in more hours studying) than I ever could but would fall apart the moment you asked them to do something outside the happy path.