[ironjunkie]

I said this here before, but this is exactly what is going all over the world whenever "affirmative actions" are used.

The only difference is that in this specific case, they decided to use a clear different required test score in order to apply the unfair advantage at selection.

In most other places, specifically in the US they use soft, improvable information (such as an "essay") to cover their base and make it non-obvious that the selection process is unfair. The most famous case would be the Asian discrimination case at Harvard, weirdly everyone is mostly ok with that one

[cbolton]

A more important difference is that affirmative action is generally used to favor under-represented demographics (or equivalently, to disfavor over-represented demographics). In this case it looks like they disfavored women while they were already under-represented! I'm not quite sure of this but that's what another article [1] suggests:

In 2010, before the measure was allegedly introduced, female student participation was about 40%.

The newspaper reported that after the two-round application process earlier this year, only 30 female applicants were accepted to study, versus 141 men.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-45108272

[PurpleBoxDragon]

>A more important difference is that affirmative action is generally used to favor under-represented demographics

That may be the intent, but in practice it also hurts certain underrepresented groups. For example, among all Asians, if you break down the demographic further by nationality, you'll find some groups strongly over represented and other groups strongly underrepresented. Affirmative actions applied to Asians as a whole hurts the groups which are already underrepresented, and while it hurts Asians in general compared to all other demographics, it helps over represented Asians compared to underrepresented Asians.