“Two people could look at the same facts and arrive at different conclusions,” he said. “That’s the judge’s call to make.”

The group initially filed the case against Harvard in 2014, and spent years in an ultimately successful battle to get access to tens of thousands of pages of internal Harvard admissions records, many of which were made public.

The three-week trial, which took place in the fall of 2018, riveted spectators because of the arcane secrets of Harvard admissions that it revealed. There was the existence of a “dean’s or director’s list” that included the children of wealthy donors who received special consideration in admissions. And there was the “lop list,” a list of students whom admissions officers felt could be cut at the last minute, to balance the composition of the class the way they wanted to.

The appellate brief argues that the judge gave too little weight to the statistical analysis of bias in Harvard’s admissions presented by the plaintiffs, and too much credence to the testimony of Harvard’s admissions officers, which the brief called “self-serving.”

“A defendant’s insistence that it does not discriminate, however credible or indignant, is not evidence in its favor,” the brief says.

In presenting the case, the plaintiffs argued that because the share of academically qualified Asian-American applicants was so high, Harvard resorted to using a subjective “personal” rating, which trafficked in stereotypes about Asian-Americans being quiet and studious, to winnow down the number it admitted. Harvard responded that descriptions like quiet and studious had been used for students who were not Asian-American as well, and that admissions officers looked not just at the larger group, but at more disadvantaged subsets of Asian-Americans, like Cambodians or Vietnamese.

Students for Fair Admissions has filed another affirmative action case against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which is scheduled to go to trial in May. It is a more classic case, arguing that the university could bring in more black and Hispanic students, albeit of slightly lower academic caliber, if it used race-neutral alternatives.