Posted on 07/22/2014 4:30:55 AM PDT by LeoMcNeil
W. Lee Hansen, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin, has argued for affirmative action in grading. The distribution of grades should be based on race rather than merit according to the professor. One imagines that a certain percentage of minority and female students would be required to get A’s regardless of whether they actually achieved an A grade. It is unclear whether the same is true at the bottom of the grading scale, though considering the purposes behind the professor’s proposal it’s unlikely. This sort of proposal isn’t just racist and sexist against white men. It’s racist and sexist against the people it purports to help.
If affirmative action grading were to be put into place, white men would be limited in the number of A’s available. Thus competition between white men would increase for those limited A grades. The intellectual achievements of these men would increase, likely to the point where more deserved A grades. Unfortunately those grades wouldn’t be available to all of them as some A’s would be set aside for women and minorities who would be graded separately. Some white men would get B’s or even C’s who really did work deserving of an A. While they wouldn’t get the A grade, they would get the benefit of having put in the work for such a grade.
Meanwhile minorities and women would compete in their own competition for minority and women A’s. Most of this proposal is aimed at minorities, though one imagines it might apply to women in certain academic departments. The presumption of course is that minorities aren’t up to the intellectual challenges of college and that they can’t compete with whites. As such they need their own grading system in order to ensure they get A’s. By default the professor assumes the intellectual capabilities of a minority with an A grade are less than a white person with an A grade. After all the minority cannot even compete.
Minority drop out rates in college are much higher than whites. This is in part because of affirmative action. When schools admit minority students who are otherwise unqualified they’re setting that student up for failure. That student isn’t going to be able to keep up with the academic rigors of the school, they’re going to fall behind and drop out. If they don’t drop out, they’re going to get lower grades. This is so unnecessary for higher rated schools to do. A student unqualified at the University of Wisconsin may very well be qualified for a smaller, less academically rigorous school. Why set minorities up for failure with affirmative action?
Professor Hansen obviously sees the problem with affirmative action in admissions. Rather than acknowledge that affirmative action is bad for minorities, he compounds the problem by calling for affirmative action grading. Blacks and other minorities cannot earn A’s on their own, they have to have A’s taken away from white kids in order to get them. This move might keep minorities in school but they’ll suffer for it later. Eventually the free market is going to figure out that minorities with A’s haven’t really earned them. Those graduates will either find themselves fired from jobs that they aren’t really qualified for or they’re not going to get hired in the first place. Eric Holder will cry racism at that time but the racism occurred when those people were in college and were handed A’s because the professor assumed they weren’t capable of earning them on their own.
If that’s the case, why bother with getting an ‘education’ at all?
This is upsetting, to say the least :-(
Yet another uncomfortable sign of some sort of looming apocalypse.
Typical pointy-headed, addle-brained, drug-saturated, soporific libtard.
It would probably work ok in Liberal Arts courses, where they teach “gender studies”, “womyn’s studies”, “black history”, and other pretend and pretentious nonsense, but God help us if this kind of thinking ever prevails in Medical or Engineering schools.
Isn’t this a form of profiling?
Last i checked, profiling was against the Law - - - .
Yes, I look forward to driving over a bridge designed and built by someone who got a degree and job because of color, not intelligence.
you already have... trust me.
Just another reason I’like never let a Doctor or other “professional” from some “protected group” near me.
it does, trust me.
The obvious solution to this is to destroy the free market and institute government control of everything - something the Left is working on all fronts to achieve.
Suppose an employer is considering an applicant who has a diploma from this school. Is it worth the paper it is printed on? Does the race of the applicant and the GPA need to be RE-computed to READJUST for racial bias? How many turns around this liberal shibboleth do we make before all give it up as a bad joke?
THEN, consider a genuine work-a-holic minority student who has EARNED their credentials? What do they face in the light of this racial adjustment of grades? “Back to the plantation with you”, this is for the RACE not for the individual!
Maybe a little taste of what racism really is will hit a resounding note when an A grade goes to a black student who did nothing vs a white student who stayed up all night putting the finishing touches on an essay and studied on weekends for an exam.
Welcome to our world, kids.
Or having a surgical procedure done by one of these ‘graduates’
Affirmative action has already made the black unemployable, or at the very least suspect until they prove themselves in a real world environment. I know I wouldn’t hire one. After all, they didn’t earn their college scores.
I had a professor in school who only gave two grades, A’s and incompletes. He saw the whole grading system as pointless and this was his way of dealing with it. Made for a pretty good GPA but in the 30+ years since graduation nobody has been interested in my GPA.
This is funny... remember the affirmative action bake sale brouhaha?
http://dailybruin.com/2013/10/25/controversial-bake-sale-at-ucla-prompts-protest/
In subjects like Gender Studies and Black History, I assume the vast (vast) majority of students get As anyway. Not so in disciplines [note the difference in terminology] like Science and Engineering. Nothing would sink one of those programs faster than if employers or Grad schools lose confidence in the quality of the graduates.
The problem is that these Libtard ideas are the intellectual equivalent of weeds. On first blush, you dismiss it out of hand as crazy or impractical. Yet, a few years later, you look around and see it being embraced everywhere.
Good! Great! Love it! Sure! Right!
In response, every company, if they don’t already,
reinstate employment applicant examinations.
With a twist, have the examinations printed in
cursive fonts!
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