The Morning Rant: Let's Remove All Objective Assessment, Shall We? [Jay Guevara]

By Your Raving Roving Science Correspondent

The recent announcement by Harvard - following in the footsteps of the formerly great University of California - that it would not use SAT or AC scores in admission for the next five years dismayed me. Of course, this is just putting in the tip, because five years from now they'll put in the whole schlong, as anyone over six years old will instantly appreciate.

This will, of course, make admissions wholly subjective. There are several benefits to the educational bureaucracy at Harvard and UC.

First, it gives a LOT of clout to said bureaucracy, which normally eschews anything that will enhance its power. The bureaucracy will now have a free hand to admit whomever it wants. At UC, this has worked out to be free tuition to the favored minorities - some of whom previously could not pass the California high school exit exam, which required tenth grade English and eighth grade math proficiency, and so was done away with. ("Oh, so your life experience includes activity in an inner city youth group?" AKA a 'gang.' Welcome aboard!")

At the same time, UC has admitted a lot of Asian students to provide a fig leaf of academic excellence, and of course in many cases to score that good good overseas student tuition to cheer up UC's finances.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, it removes any objective standard for assessing the quality of the entering class. No more of those embarrassingly low SAT scores for those admitted from favored groups, nor those damningly high SAT scores for those admitted from the disfavored groups. No sir. Now they were just all admitted, and there's no way to quantify their suitably for admission. And when the attrition rate of the former group is astronomical, that just provides further grist for still more programs to overcome the obvious culprit, systemic racism.

So in this spirit, I make a modest proposal: we should eliminate the NFL Combine, in the spirit of promoting more diversity in the NFL, to make it look more like America. Timing sixty yard dashes is obviously racist, as it is having a disparate impact on white and Asian applicants. Ban stopwatches! Same thing with standing long jumps; tape measures are racist, too, and serve to keep out disadvantaged applicants for the NFL.

We need to move toward social justice across a broad front, and to fight such egregious systemic racism.

Who's with me?

posted by Open Blogger at 11:01 AM

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