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The Value of Standardized Testing
It has become fashionable in the world of higher education to advocate eliminating the requirement that prospective students take the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) or the ACT and then submit their scores to the admissions offices of the colleges and universities to which they apply. Janet Napolitano, the President of the University of California (UC), has even proposed that at Berkeley, UCLA, and the other elite institutions in the California system such scores be ignored altogether.
The faculty senate at UC has come down on the other side after conducting, at Napolitano’s direction, an extensive study of the question focused on the utility of the tests and on the question of whether they are a source of racial discrimination. The faculty study concluded that the tests have been useful for distinguishing those who could profit from the courses of study at these elite schools from those who could not and that the existing racial disparities in their student bodies had to do chiefly with poor preparation and not with the tests themselves.
What, you might ask, is this all about? The answer is simple enough. High school grades no longer mean much. Grade inflation has ensured that. The SAT and ACT tests may not be infallible. There are able people who do poorly on standardized tests, and these examinations reveal little about the grit and determination of those who score well. But, on the whole, they do a pretty good job of measuring what they purport to measure – the quality of the young person’s preparation for college and his or her aptitude. And in the aggregate, as the faculty senate at UC discovered, they do an excellent job of predicting academic success.
The same can be said for the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and for the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). Forty-six years ago, when I was a graduate student at Yale, the history department’s Director of Graduate Studies, a Bahai from Iran, did a study seeking to find out whether there was a clear correlation between GRE scores and academic success in the department’s Ph.D. program. And, lo and behold, he found that this was so.
So why have universities, such as the University of Chicago, made the SAT and ACT optional? And why has Janet Napolitano rejected the recommendation of the UC faculty senate?
The answer is simple. If one requires that prospective students submit SAT or ACT scores, one cannot practice “affirmative action” – a euphemism for systematic racial discrimination – without it being obvious that one is doing so. The lawsuit brought against Harvard by an Asian-American coalition has embarrassed that venerable institution, and embarrassment of that sort we cannot have.
The shenanigans now being contemplated by college and university administrators all over the country have nothing to do with a genuine concern for the well-being of African-American and Hispanic students. They have to do solely with virtue-signaling.
The truth is that “affirmative action” harms its supposed beneficiaries. Long ago, back in the 1940s, as Gail Heriot once pointed out to me, a series of studies were done testing whether athletes of talent recruited by elite institutions with little regard for their scholastic aptitude profited from the education on offer at these institutions. The conclusion reached was that they had actually been damaged. They could not compete with their fellow students, they associated almost solely with one another, and they tended either to fail and drop out or to major in the least demanding fields: sociology, education, playground management, exercise science, and the like. Had these young people attended less elite schools, as their less athletically-talented academic peers sometimes did, they would have had an opportunity to make up for poor preparation in high school and they might well have prospered (as many of their peers did).
I mention these particular studies – because the athletes in question were white. What pertained to them in the 1940s pertains today to African-American and Hispanic students inadequately prepared for high-level college work who are recruited by our elite institutions. At less demanding schools, those like them do compete, they make up for lost time, they advance, and many of them enter the professions.
This is no secret, and the college administrators intent on allowing high school students to apply without taking standardized tests are not ignorant. They merely want to signal to their peers that they are virtuous, and they do not care what harm they do to the supposed beneficiaries of the policies that they want to institute.
The people who run most of our institutions of higher learning are profoundly corrupt. For the better part of a century, for the sake of pleasing their alumni and their teams’ fans, they have averted their gaze from the damage they have inflicted on the athletes they recruit and then shamelessly exploit. For a long time now, they have taken advantage of minority students for a similarly cynical purpose. Now they have hit on a scheme for concealing their lack of scruples. You have to admire their cheek.
Published in Education
Not true in the case of my family. We all aced the SATs, and we did not consciously prepare for them, although we all took at least 2 years of Latin in high school because our mom had told us it was a blast. We grew up listening to our parents do trivia quizzes, and inherited an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient, uh, trivia. We were good students when we wanted to be.
Well, I wasn’t so much watching it as I was passing through the room where family members were.
As always, what’s-her-face was ostensibly open-mindedly engaging with people who believe that the process was unfair. There was some talk of data which suggests the existence of disparities, etc.
At one point there was a young man who spoke substandard English who agreed that the process was “totally unfair.” Later in the segment, there was a youngster who claimed to be suffering from a nervous breakdown outside of a library – this one’s English was slightly better; but the repeated, unnecessary use of the word “literally” made me dubious that the crippling pressure of taking standardized tests was really to blame for this one’s mediocre scores.
I graduated from a public university recently. I think faculty and administrators tend to go along with the idea because they are incredibly bored in their profession, and attribute that boredom to the same thing they always do: outdated standards.
It’s odd though. My progressive professors all really liked me. I grew up in that kind of background and knew how to dance around the debate in a way that didn’t expose me entirely. (Although, I did really tick one American History professor when I brought Dr. Rahe’s Soft Despotism to his office during his available hours.)
My point is that the cerebral stagnation of most classrooms is palpable – I mean, it’s just dull! Unfortunately, the people who are most responsible for this decline are the exact ones who are still trying to solve it. I was a remarkably mediocre student through high school, and, like a lot of young people nowadays, I was more intelligent than I was capable of illustrating. Thankfully, I had the kind of mother who wouldn’t have even entertained the thought of calling a teacher on my behalf. As a result, when I finally decided I wanted to educate myself, I did so.
I’m afraid to say that I believe Dr. Rahe’s reduction is right. These people use young black and Latino students the way most people use drapery.
One of my room mates did crossword puzzles for the MCAT to improve his vocabulary. I don’t know if it helped. He did not get into medical school but got a PhD in ichthyology and was Curator of Fishes in the Australian Natural History Museum in 2000.
Well, because that is the currency. If AP is more, let’s say valued at 1.25, while a regular class is 1, then the grade in the AP should be inflated.
Unfortunately, what happens is, non-AP classes penalize the class rank calculations, so that any kid vying for a high rank won’t participate in any course but AP.
Of course, schools are rated on how many AP, what scores, how many go to college, SAT, college/career ready (now starting in grade 5).
It is so distorted. So many Kids calculate their worth by their rank, their GPA, and how many AP they have, and where they go to college. Kids are applying to 8-12 colleges, and paying all those application fees.
It is no wonder they are weeping snowflakes, since they are treated like academic capital.
It Breaks my heart to see young people so very misguided by school staff that use the kids as pawns in district ratings.
Ah, but they can get 2 years tuition room and board out of the mediocre ones.
Oh yes, if you aren’t in AP, “well, then, shine my shoes.”
The school district in which our children went to high school (early 2000s) did not weight the AP classes for GPA or for valedictorian determination. The girl who became valedictorian had her eye on that position from the beginning of high school, and intentionally did not take AP classes so she didn’t risk her GPA by taking harder classes. (She was a neighbor and friends with our daughter.)
Standardized tests are important for one reason: grading standards differ at every high school.
Some high schools are hard graders.
Some are easy graders.
The SAT and the others ‘level’ the playing field.
NFL draft picks have to take the Wonderlic test.
The Epoch Times reports:
Ivy league schools have a Good Ol’ Boy network Southern politicians would envy. I imagine Wadsworth J. Woosterhaus IV will always get a job because of his Harvard degree alone. If he turns out to be incompetent, he’ll either be moved to a safe position, or urged to run for office . . .
The reason the SAT was created was to help colleges find ‘diamonds in the rough’, in other words, find smart students who do not come from privilege