The learned folks at the University of Texas would have had every right two decades ago to take my college application and toss it into the nearest wastebasket.

My SAT scores were abysmal.

I'd never tested well, and it would be years before I'd find out I have some kind of processing disorder that makes me read at a snail's pace. Back then, all I knew is that I'd never gotten more than midway through a standardized test before the five-minute warning. I'd simply begin randomly bubbling in the remainder - B, B, B, B.

Fortunately, UT cut me some slack. You could call it a bad-test-taker's form of affirmative action.

They looked beyond the test score, at the whole person. And they found a few redeeming qualities. More A's than B's. Drum major. An editor of the school paper. A decent essay. First in the family to apply for college. And I was in the top 10 percent of my Seguin High class in the days before that designation triggered automatic admission into a state school.

I got in. I got a job at the Daily Texan. And the rest is history.

I sometimes think about that journey when I read about Abigail Fisher's legal saga.

She seems to have a sense of entitlement about getting into the state's most prestigious state school that I never had. And a closer look at her case shows that entitlement is unfounded.

Fisher, the cinnamon-haired cello player from Sugar Land who has for six years been challenging the legality of UT's affirmative action policy, apparently isn't deterred by yet another unfavorable ruling last month, this time by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

A three-judge panel upheld UT's policy, but, last week, Fisher asked the full court to hear it.

Fisher, who is white, argues that UT discriminated against her by denying her admission in 2008. Her grades weren't strong enough to qualify for the top 10 percent of her high school class, which would have guaranteed automatic admission.

Instead, she fell into the same category as roughly a quarter of UT's applicants, who are judged by a complex formula of factors. Those include grades and test scores and a separate set of factors UT calls the "personal achievement index," which include essays, extracurricular activities, honors, work experience, socio-economic status, public service, language spoken at home, family responsibilities, and yes, race and ethnicity.

Under this system, race isn't the only factor. It isn't even the most important factor. All else being equal, a white child of a single mom who has to hold a part-time job after school to make ends meet would likely score better in the formula than a wealthy black applicant with married parents.

Fisher and her attorneys argue that race should never be considered at all, even as a factor of a factor of a factor.

And that's where the debate usually hovers - both in court and in the media. But a closer look at the details in Fisher's case undercuts her argument that, but for race, she would have qualified based on merit.

A point not well taken

Fisher, who applied to UT several years after I did, faced a process made much more competitive by the Texas Legislature's passage of the so-called "Top 10 Percent" rule.

And, as ProPublica's Nikole Hannah-Jones has pointed out, Fisher's scores - 3.59 grade point average and 1180 SAT score - weren't impressive in that kind of environment. According to court records, UT considered those scores "relatively low." Hannah-Jones reported that UT's rejection rate that year for the remaining 841 openings "was higher than the turn-down rate for students trying to get into Harvard."

So, Fisher may not have gotten into UT even if she were black. And even if she did well on every other personal achievement factor.

It's a point even Edward Blum, who has represented Fisher, can't knock down completely, although he says it's impossible to prove.

"The use of race may have prevented Abby from attending," Blum, of the Project on Fair Representation, told me Thursday. "The use of race may not have prevented Abby from attending."

He says it as though it's an after­thought, but it is an astounding admission when you consider Fisher's entire argument is based on the assumption that she was robbed of her dream of becoming a legacy student at the state's flagship university because a less qualified minority got her seat.

UT did offer provisional admission to some students with lower academic scores And how many were minorities? A grand total of five. How many were white? Forty-two.

There were also 168 black and Latino students with Fisher's grades or better who were denied admission the same year.

Abby Fisher no Rosa Parks

Fisher also turned down the university's offer to start out at another school in the system and transfer to UT her sophomore year if she earned a 3.2 GPA. I asked Blum why, if she longed to attend UT-Austin, she turned the offer down.

His answer was, again, astounding.

"It's like saying to Rosa Parks, 'Well, just go sit in the back of the bus for a while,' " Blum said. "No one whose civil rights are violated should tolerate having to do something that you know other people don't have to do because they're a different color or they're a different religion or they're a different ethnicity."

The experience of a white girl growing up in the Houston suburbs bears no resemblance to Parks' experience as a black woman in 1950s Alabama.

Unlike basic public transportation, admission into the state's flagship isn't an entitlement, even if your daddy went there.

I could have easily ended up with a rejection letter from the only school I applied to. I would have been shattered. But I would have gotten on with my life.

I wouldn't have filed a lawsuit blaming someone else for my shortcomings.

Fisher likes to say admissions should be based solely on merit. But she needs to realize, even if that were the case, she wouldn't necessarily have made the cut.