Anticipating Likely Consequences of Lottery-Based Affirmative Action

Objectives. To better understand the consequences of whole or partial reliance on test scores as a screening mechanism for college or university admissions or for job placement or promotion. Methods. We introduce a simple hurdles/threshold model to study one particular mechanism that has been recently proposed to generate a ‘‘compromise’’ between race-normed or gender-normed standards for acceptance, on the one hand, and the decision to select those with the highest score regardless of race or gender, on the other—a method we call lottery-based rules with minimum thresholds of acceptance. Results. We show the factors that determine how close acceptance rates for the disadvantaged group under lottery-based methods will be to the acceptance rates under either race-normal or pretest-score-based mechanisms. Conclusions. We argue that the likely consequences of using this method are not nearly as attractive as they might first appear to reformers.