Posted on 02/02/2020 10:35:07 AM PST by karpov
As schools like the University of California consider dropping the SAT as a requirement for admission due to concern that the test is biased, they run up against another question with a potentially bigger impact for students and their families: Should they continue to use SAT scores to award scholarships?
Colleges and universities give out about $30 billion a year in merit aid, which is often based on a student’s SAT or ACT. An additional $2 billion in merit aid distributed by states hinges on standardized test scores.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts stopped using the test for merit scholarships last year, said Andrew Palumbo, dean of admission. Instead, the school is weighing grades, community service and leadership. The school has made the SAT optional for applicants since 2007.
“Using the tests doesn’t help us achieve our goals” of diversifying the student body, he said. Students who apply without the test are just as successful as undergraduates as peers who do submit the test, he said.
The College Board, the New York-based nonprofit that oversees the SAT, said it has worried for years about income inequality influencing test results. White students scored an average of 177 points higher than black students did and 133 points higher than Hispanic students did in 2018 results. Asian students scored 100 points higher than white students did. The children of wealthy and college-educated parents outperformed their classmates.
Those gaps don’t reflect bias in the test itself but the lopsided distribution of resources across K-12 schools, the College Board has said. The College Board gives schools data to see students’ socioeconomic profile and considered creating a score to reflect this, a plan it dropped amid public objection.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Not “front page news.” Not even news.
Define “fair.” Unless they can, the discussion is not merely meaningless, its misguided and misleading.
Blacks that I have known that were smart STEM wise were really very smart, but there was something else, they were ‘application smart’ and were adept in actually applying science and tech in very practical ways. There is a history of that, GW Carver for example. I read of a renown surgeon, can’t remember his name who pioneered multiple surgical techniques who gave much praise to his black surgical aide who created many of the tools the surgeon used in his work, many of the tools of which are in use now or their improved variations.
It’s not fair that whites are smart and do fancy things like pronounce and enunciate their words to gain an unfair advantage.
Yes 1000%
Keep engineering and medical schools, hard sciences. The rest can all be learned online and thru apprenticeships and experience. ( I say this as a parent who helped put our kids thru college and am very grateful they didnt get indoctrinated- not sure we would make the same decisions now, though, seeing how a lot of kids are turning out)
Yup - and they blame the IQ test on everything - bias, poor nutrition, money, etc.
Yes, let’s devalue the college degree as the educrats have devalued the high school diploma, so everyone gets a worthless certificate. Then the students whine that they can’t find good jobs.
Chances are those lower IQ students will take a bunch of stupid social justice, radical women history courses, black or hispanic history courses that will not get them a job. Then, they get unemployment or Medicaid where the rest of us will be supporting them.
Lot of kids graduating from HS today who enter college and have to retake math, english pre college courses and pass in order to take the college level courses.
SAT tests are certainly biased. They are also discriminatory by their very nature.
They have a bias against people who don’t know things and can’t reason their way through things, and help colleges discriminate between those who have learned things and those who have not.
In the last 50 years diversity and enforced opportunity have done enough to dumb down the nation to the point that it probably will not recover. We are on a downward spiral that is gaining speed as the vortex tightens.
Diversity has weakened the entire nation.
Scholarships are NOT awarded by merit. I can tell you that first hand.
My son was valedictorian of his class. My daughter was third in her class. Both were National Honor Society members. Both were on the Dean’s List at Purdue University.
NEITHER got a single penny of scholarship money.
NONE.
It was a disgusting, eye-opening experience for me. We were given a tour of the University of Michigan by a middle-eastern student who told us: “I had a D-average in high school.” He was going to Michigan on a free ride given to him by the university.
One counselor at Cornell told me — and I kid you not: “Valedictorian means nothing. There are over 20,000 valedictorians in the country every year.”
My son now works for a space company on the Mars mission rocket. My daughter works for one of the top biomedical firms in the world. They drove hard through elementary school, high school, and college, and were successful every step of the way through their own diligence. Not once did they get a single penny of scholarship money.
Diversity is wonderful when it includes multiple successful solutions to a problem.
Diversity is absurd when the diversity is based upon irrelevant criteria - such as skin color or phrenology - or fails to include discrimination between successful and non-successful.
You could get in trouble for saying those kinds of things.
We gots to hab diversity don cha no?
“Is It Fair to Award Scholarships Based on the SAT?”
Fair? No of course, it’s more fair towards scholarships to stupid kids. One’s that likely won’t even graduate. Or will get some ridiculous liberal arts degree and make $10 an hour serving fries.
I guess the point is that if Public School fails to dumb down kids and they managed to learn anyway, likely through being homeschooled, they will still be punished for doing well.
Looks like *somebody* forgot what the initials of the test actually stand for.
Because of such concerns most colleges already have significantly dumbed down the curriculum and behavioral standards.
An unpleasant, simple truth.
Wow, did YOU take it in the shorts...
My daughter is a HS senior, sounds like yours.
All AP/Honors, NHS, Dance Honor and Theater Honor Societies.
Been accepted for Biomedical Engineering at Drexel, Rutgers, U-Delaware, Penn State, Catholic University with serious merit scholarship offers.
Hard to figure out, because she was born here, Celtic/North Atlantic Islander racial category, parents are married, non-oppressed, etc.
With two humps to their curve, it looks like the American Indians have a fair number of Elizabeth Warren’s cousins in their teepee.
The two humps have more to do with small sample size than reality.
They’re fine if they get into Harvard. Knew a prof there over 20 years ago who was directly told that she would not be failing anyone from certain key demographics.
The suicides in college in Cambridge tend to come from MIT, with those Asian students who were able to ace their classes until they hit the big time.
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