Posted on 11/08/2019 6:40:32 AM PST by karpov
Social-justice organizations last week threatened the University of California with a lawsuit unless it halts the use of standardized testing in admissions, claiming the tests discriminate against minorities. Who knows what success they may have before a sympathetic judge. But the issue may be settled sooner as the political mood in the UC moves against testing. This shift could have baleful nationwide consequences.
Standardized tests have been a target of the left for decades, but in 2018 something changed. Dozens of colleges, most significantly the University of Chicago, have been dropping their standardized-test requirements. The number of students who take the SAT and ACT has been holding steady because enough schools still use them. Yet the UC is by far the largest university system in the country, and if it throws out testing the admissions landscape would fundamentally change.
Several UC regents are on record criticizing the test as unfair to the underprivileged. Governor Gavin Newsom, who appoints most regents, said last month that tests exacerbate “the inequities for underrepresented students.” A UC faculty task force will give recommendations early next year.
Anti-testing campaigners have been unable to explain how they would academically compare students across schools with different grading standards. They want to stamp out performance disparities on tests, but tackling the achievement gap requires improving education in poor areas. Standardized tests can seem frustrating and arbitrary, but so is the entire college admissions tournament, which weighs activities, personal characteristics, “character” and often race. Testing is at least objective.
The UC began using the SAT in 1960 consistent with its mission of finding talented students no matter where they came from, and it continues to enroll more low-income students than the Ivy League.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
You insert a copy of your Dem voter registration and select which flavor degree you want and out it prints.
All others must attend further indoctrination classes.
This may be the start of the actual collapse of higher education.
The more I see of the state I love, the sadder I get. The DemocRATS are talking it to H*LL in a Handbasket. And now my home state of Virginia is going the way of California.
God help us how we are ever going to recover from these DemocRATIC H*LL Holes.
Here in NJ some colleges became “SAT optional” because they’d rather have unqualified semi-literates than empty seats. Higher education has been dying a slow death since the end of the draft meant people didn’t need deferments anymore; even while expanding the quality of students - and teachers - has been declining.
It is just a business (learning is secondary - or irrelevant), and fewer young Americans want to go into debt to keep it alive. My school in NJ was filling with foreign students decades ago, and now some schools have reversed their de facto ban on white males because the schools became a joke.
For years the tests have been showing consistent results. Certain parts of the population do well, others OK, and others poorly. These differences appear on all kinds of tests, in all kinds of schools and businesses.
Rather than admit what the tests show, insane leftists throw out the tests.
I was in college decades ago, and one building was set aside for “remedial classes”; these were high school-level classes offered to preferred minorities to bring them up to college level (they received no credit for them). They were offered because few of those “preferred minorities” had the necessary high school classes to be admitted (but they’d received diplomas); whites and Asians without those basics were denied entry outright.
I don’t think the plan worked; when they realized they would spend a minimum of five years just to get a bachelors degree with no value (they couldn’t handle real college classes) many simply dropped out. My freshman and sophomore classes were much more diverse than the last two; fake students had already headed off to the “victims’ studies” departments, never to see real college students again.
There’s no reason the UC system can’t follow the rest of the California educational system in the race to the bottom. California’s K-12 system used to be among the best in the country. Now, depending on who’s doing the ranking, they’re in the bottom 15-25%.
How are whites expected to not be supremecist when dems constantly go out of their way to come up with new and improved methods to show that blacks are stupider than everybody to the point they would be unable to breath without a {white liberals} assistance. How do they get into college without IDs in the first place?
Smart employers and business recruiters read between the lines. College is just another clue. CA degrees are as valuable as a CO degree.Test scores are just another trap for the test prep industry. It is clear that parents will spend anything to get what they want.
3 + years ago one of our younger relatives was graduated with highest honors, from a top private school with 1 B and the rest all A’s.
She couldn’t get into any STEM program in a California University even with her excellent grades.
Her mother was told that, the B in French showed that she had problems dealing with courses she didn’t perceive as valuable. There were students all over California and out of state with straight A’s.
Her mother replied, “How many of those other students got straight A’s because they didn’t start a riot or carry a weapon to class.?”
The university counselor/whatever said that her mother was a racist.
Then, we told her mother to apply out of state schools.
They did and everyone where she applied would have accepted her. She accepted an offer from a top eastern private university with a $25 K/year scholarship.
When, we tell the story re the bias against her, a very large % of parents had the same story of how their excellent student/children were turned down.
Mediocrities everywhere, rejoice.
Parents will now have to send their kids to China or Russia to get an education.
What they ought to do is just judge the students on their physical appearance. If they like your looks, you're in. If they don't like your looks, too bad about you!
Or they could choose the students like high schools picked the cheer leaders. You know. The cute girls made it. The ones who weren't popular...too bad! Get lost!
“The UC began using the SAT in 1960 consistent with its mission of finding talented students no matter where they came from, and it continues to enroll more low-income students than the Ivy League.”
Eliminating standardized testing serves the goal of instituting new forms of privilege. Same story, different characters.
It's time for employers to bail out. Students will exit as soon as employers find other training and credentially systems.
credentially=credentialing.
If businesses were allowed to test applicants for literacy and math skills, without being sued if it turned out that different groups got different average scores, the educational scam would quickly collapse.
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