Controversial Findings

Robert E. Klitgaard '68, special assistant to President Bok, knew parts of his confidential preliminary report on Harvard admissions would probably be controversial.

Earlier this week, he said the part of his report suggesting a relationship between aptitude tests and IQ tests was "a controversial result, and not everyone would agree."

But students and testing officials considered other parts of Klitgaard's 54-page report--an outline for a 300-to 400-page final version that he plans to finish in the next two months--more inflammatory.

Those points include statements to the effect that:

* women and minorities at top universities like Harvard often do not perform as well academically as their high aptitude test scores would predict;

* Jewish students do better academically than their scores would indicate;

*affirmative action may have undesirable results at universities like Harvard by creating student bodies with academic disparities between Blacks and white;

*it is not clear how the average student benefits from attending a college with a diverse student body.

A large portion of Klitgaard's report--which he said represented only his opinions and which Bok stressed did not represent official University policy--discussed aptitude testing.

The report stated that at the end of a distribution of aptitude test scores, "women perform slightly worse than their scores would predict; blacks also perform worse."

Klitgaard said this week he will provide data to support those statements in his final report, and added that what he sees as the underachievement of Blacks and women with respect to their test scores is "a bizarre result that's explainable statistically."

Based on those statements, the report continues, "An admissions policy at Harvard that took race into account in 'adjusting' the scores of blacks to reflect their later academic performance would adjust scores downward."

The report does not say anything else about the predictive capacity of women's and Jews' test scores, and Klitgaard said this week he had no Harvard data to support the statement that high test scores underpredict the academic performance of Jewish students. He added that the section on Jewish students will be "written down" in the final version.

Klitgaard also said this week he will probably not include the section on affirmative action, which he said was not the primary focus of the report.

In the preliminary version, however, he states that "in fields where high test scores seem to be a prerequisite for adequate performance, 'affirmative action' may imply remedial education rather than lower standards or greater recruitment efforts in very limited pools."

An associate professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Klitgaard said this week Bok asked him about a year ago to undertake a study of University admissions.

Bok said this week he requested the study because he "was concerned about various charges being made about admissions" and because "it seemed to me to be an interesting subject to take a look at."