Posted on 01/19/2016 11:44:10 AM PST by Citizen Zed
A growing number of colleges have made the SAT or ACT optional. And late last year, more than 80 colleges, including all eight in the Ivy League, announced the formation of the Coalition for Access, Affordability and Success, which is developing a website and application process intended in part to diversify student bodies.
Colleges are becoming more conscious of their roles - too frequently neglected - in social mobility. They're recognizing how many admissions measures favor students from affluent families.
They're realizing that many kids admitted into top schools are emotional wrecks or slavish adherents to soulless scripts that forbid the exploration of genuine passions. And they're acknowledging the extent to which the admissions process has contributed to this.
But they still need to stop filling so much of each freshman class with specially tagged legacy cases and athletes and to quit worrying about rankings like those of U.S. News and World Report. Only then will the tide fully turn.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
All will be fixed by using an entrance exam.
Thats all thats really necessary.
The whole rest of the world uses entrance exams for selective universities.
Big Academia likes costly textbooks (with low buyback pricing), monopolized testing, and ever rising tuitions (even with billions in endowment funds).
appropriate.
The Scarecrow recited the Pythagorean Theorem incorrectly.
Sorry, but ignoring SAT/ACT scores will just result in more kids getting in over their head at the better schools. And these same kids will be saddled with debt from the experience that they are less able to pay off. More sacrificial lambs at the altar of Diversity.
they just want to be able to admit whomever they want, refuse whomever they want, and not to have to adhere to any objective, consistent standards of admissions.
What, no lamenting of "artificial constructs" or "privilege"?
Perhaps we could have a nationwide entrance exam acceptable to most or all universities. It would test the students' preparation for and likelihood to succeed in achieving a Bachelor's Degree.
We might call it the Scholastic Aptitude Test.
Maybe we should so the same with the NBA, NFL and all pro-sports.
Sure it will. Dumbing down the de facto "entrance exam" SATs didn't accomplish the desired social engineering.
And don't forget how "race norming" on exams works so well, too. /sarc
The first thing they gotta do is learn to read.
If the exams are what is actually used for the admissions. But, of course, it won't be.
The SATs were intended to uncover talented students regardless of race and economics, and they do, but most of the talented people still have talented and successful parents. Bringing less talented kids in to compete with them just doesn’t work. We need an education system that has appropriate education for all our citizens. We need to invest in more vocational education and apprentice programs.
When college tuition is free (or nearly so) entrance exams are the only fair way to fill the limited number of available seats.
Of course, but that would not serve the needs or desires of "progressives".
The trouble with the SAT is that it isn’t fine grained or comprehensive enough for the top tier of universities. It is also not really good at distinguishing among majors.
Princeton could, for instance, have its own advanced math test for STEM applicants. That, and only that, would be a fair and relevant.
Nothing wrong with individual universities having their own tests for their own purposes; perhaps they could use the SAT as an “entrance to the Entrance Exam” test.
The GRE has subject area tests and a general test. SAT could do likewise.
The implication here is that the general admission standard of the school will decline as it will become (for all practical purposes) entirely subjective. Or rather, I suspect that the selective admission of favored minorities wont change much.
I suspect the real reason for the change is not to increase “diversity” so much as it is to discourage Asian applicants.
For liberals "diversity" means different skin colors, not different opinions.
Above some level, say 90 percentile, however, the SAT, at least, provides no valid basis for discriminating on ability because, sadly, the Princeton Testing Service is perfectly capable of generating questions that have no correct answer or, in fact, an answer which they presume to be correct, but is in fact wrong. As but one example, they have banished the subjunctive from English. Their essay section was graded by folks who believed that essays should be written according to a set pattern, without regard to style or intent.
And some of their deductive reasoning questions are based upon tacit assumptions that can be questioned and if someone makes a different assumption gets the wrong answer.
For instance, the topical sentence might be the best lead-in to an article, but another sentence that grabs the readers attention and gets him to read the article might be the best first sentence with the topical sentence further down.
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