House of Eratosthenes

Elite colleges have been undermining their own efforts to diversify by giving much more weight to high SAT scores than they did before, according to an analysis of College Board data presented this morning at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association.

Over the past two or three decades, the share of freshman-class seats that elite colleges award to students with high SAT scores has risen significantly—and risen more quickly than the number of high scores, according to an analysis by Catherine L. Horn, an assistant professor of educational leadership and cultural studies at the University of Houston, and John T. Yun, an assistant professor of education at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

What’s interesting is, to me, the way the whole college-admission thing was explained when I was a kid, I was told this is how it’s supposed to work. You’re smart as a whip but your scores are low on this-test or that-test, nobody’s going to care how smart you are.

And in life I’ve found as you get further away from the actual work that needs to get done, this becomes more and more true. Officials who are in charge of promotions, hiring and admission, being insulated from the actual work that needs to get done, but needing some kind of data on which to base their decisions, will start to rely on one or several arbitrary testing mechanisms.

The researchers say that, by focusing so heavily on high scorers, the elite colleges they examined are ignoring promising minority students with lesser scores, increasing the competition for high-scoring minority students, and potentially “simply ‘pricing’ themselves out of the ‘market’ for a more diverse learning environment.” Especially among the most prestigious of the 30 institutions, it is hard to believe that putting less emphasis on high SAT scores would cause the institutions’ quality to suffer. [emphasis mine]

Well, well, well. Talk about a darker skin color, and suddenly the most entrenched eggheads start to sound exactly like me. All of a sudden…we need to explore ways in which a single score from a single test, even a prestigious and well-known test like the SAT, might not be telling the whole story.

Whatsamatta? Why can’t we just go off the test score and very little, or nothing, else? Isn’t “promising students with lesser scores” an oxymoron? After all, if a student is promising, the onus is on him or her to bring up that test score right?

Once again it looks like I’m in trouble with the prevailing viewpoint. Back when it said skills/promise/aptitude were all synonymous with the value of a test score, that did seem overly simplistic but I could see the logic in it. Then it said no, there might be more to the story than that. There was logic in that too. Nowadays, the answer is all-of-one or all-of-another, but before we figure out which one it is we need to know the skin color under discussion.

And I’m sorry, but I can’t see any logic to that whatsoever.

And isn’t it interesting…if there was an explanation behind the phrase “hard to believe that putting less emphasis on high SAT scores would cause the institutions’ quality to suffer,” the entire article would have been justified. Since there isn’t one, all we have here is a bunch of colleges making decisions based on test scores, which is what they are conventionally supposed to be doing — and an egghead researcher who doesn’t think that’s the way it should be done. And can’t, or won’t, say why.

He and I could be kindred spirits, if the soft bigotry was dropped. Tests, even the Scholastic Aptitude Test, are exercises in following instructions. When you’re talking natural aptitudes, the aptitude of following instructions is oppositional to the aptitude of figuring out what needs doing & doing it. So even without the skin-color bean-counting, we already have a big problem there — leaders of tomorrow are filtered in to the higher educational system based on their abilities to follow instructions, not to actually lead.

Now we’re getting all hip to the idea that the process may be broken and in need of a fix or two…but only within the context of “minority” concerns. And on that subject we’re going to talk about nothing but minority concerns. Aptitudes that may be useful in roles of responsibility, that are beyond the scope of the testing mechanism, are things that I’m injecting into the subject myself in my own comments. The article itself doesn’t make any mention of them.

So the problem here is that we may be going through the motions of embracing excellence when we’re actually embracing mediocrity. We may be…it seems the researchers don’t want to commit on that one way or the other. For example, I can’t possibly be the only one who thinks the statement “‘pricing’ themselves out of the ‘market’ for a more diverse learning environment” is bizarre in the extreme. There, again, the article approaches an explanation of what is meant by this, but doesn’t actually pursue such an explanation. What exactly is a “more diverse learning environment”? Is it an exercise in excellence, or mediocrity?

Three decades after Bakke, with that phrase being tossed around with such a frequency and to such an extent that it has become tired and worn, I’ve never heard anyone in any position of authority say which one it is. Is “diversity” the pursuit of a zenith, or of an average?

And as a general rule, when persons in positions of authority refuse to explain things, bad things are about to happen.

I think there are a few things here that are being conflated that should not be. Admittance to a first tier university is frequently determined by SAT scores. Those scores are assumed to indicate intelligence. It does not. It indicates scholastic aptitude. There may be a high overlap between the two but they do not follow automatically. Further, you touch on productivity and proficiency. Essentially; Getting Things Done. There is zero guarantee that your degreed person is going to be able to do that. Some of the smartest people I know are also among the laziest. A college degree essentially tells people that you know how to learn things.

Colleges and universities need a common benchmark for admissions. GPA’s from high school are essentially meaningless. Two schools within a mile of each other may be night and day. The valedictorian of the one may be ill-educated and even dumb while the neighboring school is rigorous and the same kid would be failing. (This happened in my hometown. Kid I knew was a straight A student at neighboring school and getting straight D’s in my school). Some high schools now have 17 valedictorians! The SAT is the Grand Equalizer.
- Duffy | 04/03/2008 @ 09:13
Yes, here is the tricky part about this thing called “education.” In most other fields of human endeavor, local control yields the best results. But education is taken to mean something that has a side effect of a grade-stamp on the processed material after it’s gone through the system…it takes on an “inspection” aspect, without a lot of people debating the merits of this. And that’s just fine with me. We need to know who has the talent for taking on extra responsibilities and who does not, and what better time to do it than the twelve to sixteen years beginning at age 5 when we need to be teaching kids the basics, as well as how to cope in the modern world.

In the area of NCLB, I start to part company with my fellow right-leaning libertarian-minded compatriots, for the reasons you’re exploring. This guy on the west coast has a GPA of 3.7, this lady in New Jersey has one of 3.35. What does that differential mean? Nothing…and it means next to nothing when one student graduates and the other student does not.In all other aspects of life, you propose a centralized authority and I can hand back a sound argument how & why this process would cause more harm than good. But not with this thing called “education.” There has to be a standard involved in the inspection process, and probably with the hardcore “education” process as well, or so much of the exercise is pointless.

I find it amusing, in a sad sort of way, how simplistically our diploma-guardians can be going through the motions of noodling this stuff through — until you talk about skin color diversity and then they can suddenly see all kinds of wrinkles, complications and permutations that they couldn’t see before, even when other folks (you & me & others) were pointing ’em out. That “D” word just suddenly wakes ’em up. But even then…what is diversity? What wonderful things is it supposed to accomplish, and for the benefit of whom exactly? How? They can’t say.
- mkfreeberg | 04/03/2008 @ 11:13

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Out of the Diversity Market?Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

Out of the Diversity Market?
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008