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.
> Yet, a few years later, you look around and see it being
> embraced everywhere.
See comment 10. Apparently it’s already happening.
They have already been doing that since the 1970s.
Ever wonder why we have never seen Obama’s college grades? Probably because most of them are ‘AA’.
Well, so far, not at the college where I teach.
Of course, employers will adapt. In computer science, many employers are increasingly not looking at college transcripts. Instead, they are looking at what you’ve actually done (programs, web sites, Iphone/Android apps, work on open source projects, etc).
Let’s call this economics professor what he really is - LAZY!
Think about it.
After the class shows up on the first day he can sit down and score every pop quiz, test, and final grade based on the racial quota grading scale. In fact, he could probably do away with quizzes and testing in any form since those results would be immaterial to the final grade.
Carried to its logical extreme - why have colleges at all?
Just issue everyone their PhD immediately after they receive their “I attended school” for 12 years certificate.
BTW - my end all argument against things like this is - would you want your child/grandchild operated on by a surgeon who got his grades, and medical degrees, based on racial/sexual quotas?
As the parent of a high school student, I become ever more convinced that with the exception of a few scientific or technical fields, a 4-year college education just makes one stupider.
I don’t buy for a minute the idea that suffering an intensive course of idiotic left-wing indoctrination while going tens of thousands of dollars into debt increases one’s earning capacity.
Maybe a 4-year college degree once had value, but I believe those days are past. I have two 4-year college degrees that I got in the 1970s, and I honestly can’t say that they have contributed to the value proposition that I have brought to the business of making a living over the past 35 years.
I’m not saying that education is unimportant. I’m saying that for the most part, the 4-year college experience no longer delivers an education.
> Instead, they are looking at what you’ve actually done
> (programs, web sites, Iphone/Android apps, work on open
> source projects, etc).
Which is why I tell everybody I know that’s interested in software as a career to get invovled with open source projects. Pick a project you like in an area of software development that interests you, look at the outstanding bugs and feature requests, pick one of those that interests you, and FIX or IMPLEMENT IT! Rinse and repeat.
Soon, you become a known entity among the project’s cognoscenti users, and you have real life accomplishments to present to prospective employers. It’s even possible that they will come looking for you.
You are 100% correct. I have gone back to finish up my degree after a long hiatus and am astounded by how prevalent that message is across all disciplines. Accounting, finance, management, business law all have the same message "White man bad" and the urgent need for "sustainability".
I am old enough to know this message is garbage, but to a young impressionable mind is a different story.
I suspect it will be the latter.
I worked for 35 years in high tech and have two experiences involving race that stick in my mind. I had a black employee that should have been fired. Details are not important but not only was this person a bad worker, he was a bad person. Anyway, HR freaked at the prospect of having to fire a black person. It took months and months to gather the documentation, witnesses accounts, events, dates/times etc. And after all that, all I was able to do was arrange a transfer for this person to another Dept. where he was put in the corner and nobody expected anything from him. It was not right.
The second case involved the summer intern program. Historically, the program hired the best Junior college engineers and scientists from the best universities in the nation; MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, etc. These kids were brilliant. I always had some back burner project that they could take on. They understood the scientific method, design, fabrication, instrumentation, data analysis and presentation. Some of them even walked out with a patent applicaiton at the end of the summer.
Now the problem: HR decided that the Summer Intren Program was now going to be an affirmative action program. I applied to get one of them as I usually did for the Summer Interns. It was a disaster. They knew nothing. Did not want to learn anything. Would not take direction or advice. And often would not come to work. I gave it two years and gave up. Never put in for one again.
Bingo! This part can't be emphasized enough. That is probably the biggest payoff in working open source--getting the good contacts. Plus, if you work for a proprietary software company, there is a very good chance you may not even be able to show your contribution to a potential employer. On the flip side, I've always thought that OSS projects were a little Marxist. I've seen a few software companies that tried to compete with them--its not pretty.
> I’ve always thought that OSS projects were a little Marxist.
They tend to be more Libertarian-anarchic. :)
I’ve been working with OSS for years. Yeah, there are some Marxists, but there are some REAL Constitutinal Conservatives walking heavy. :)
Most folks avoid talking politics in this environment, because we all realize we ain’t gonna convince one another. People change their worldview, indeed, but usually due to changes in circumstances, or in personal revelaton, or even in faith.
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