Saturday, May 18, 2019

SAT To Measure Whiteness…Seriously?






By Professor Doom




     The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) is a test which measures, at the risk of being patronizing, scholastic aptitude. For those very few colleges which still care about admissions, the SAT is often used to determine which students have the aptitude to survive a legitimate college program.


     No, it’s not a perfect test by any means, but with the massive cheating and grade inflation going in our public school system, it’s a useful tool, a weak but objective measure of how well the student is suited to study.


     Objective tools get in the way of power and wealth accumulation, and must be destroyed:


The SAT will assign a new score that factors in where you live and the crime level in your neighborhood



     Um…no? The whole point of the test is to measure the student, not the neighborhood the student comes from—or perhaps where the student claims to come from. The possibility there for “racing to the bottom” in student origin shouldn’t be overlooked, as it’ll be much easier to claim to be in a bad neighborhood than to study hard for months, after all.


       Why should “where you live?” and “crime level” be on the test? I mean, if you have that information already, just make it another part of admissions. As I pointed out above, the test is called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, not the Stupid Adversity Test…but the latter is what it will be now.


       How did this madness even get remotely on the table? Why aren’t campuses completely outraged at this debasement of a test which has worked well enough for decades?


      It’s easy enough to explain. Our campuses basically operate on the principle of edu-fascism, the merger of administrative and ideological interests. The administrative caste only wants growth, and anything which will allow a workaround of admissions restrictions is approved of by them. The ideological interests, of course, are fascinated with virtue-signaling.


       And so they both applaud their cooperation with this horrible evil thing they are doing. Evil? Yes, evil. Let me count the ways:


       First, this is evil because it’s hurting kids. The kids who get on campus because of a murder on their block instead of study are going to get creamed when they walk into a college course on a legitimate campus, and probably drop out after a semester or two of being some place where they shouldn’t be. Just as a lightweight boxer has no business going into the ring with a heavyweight but can have a fine career within their weight class, these kids would probably do much better on a campus more suited to their needs. Why do that to them? If the edu-fascists cared about the kids, they wouldn’t encourage this at all.


       Second, this is evil because it’s putting the kids into debt slavery. They won’t simply leave college after wasting a year of their lives, they’ll leave with $10,000 or so of inescapable debt, possibly much more. It’s evil and cruel to do this to them…but edu-fascists don’t care.


      Third, this is evil because it hurts the actually apt students on campus. The slow students will absolutely slow the class down…why should these innocent students who actually studied to come on campus be penalized? It’s evil to punish the innocent like this.


      Fourth, this is evil because it harms the alumni. The influx of unqualified students will invariably lead to a reduction in standards, in turn leading to a reduction in value of the degrees the alumni earned when the SAT was legitimate. Again, punishing the innocent is evil.


      I could go on with discussing how this affects the faculty, who will see their tireless work of preserving the schools against the plundering edu-fascists undermined at the core level by the SAT, or how this affects the parents who worked hard to get their kids to study, or how this cheats the people who made donations to what they thought was a legit school, or how this cheats all the kids who studied hard to do well on the SAT…you get the idea, any honest look at this change to the SAT would lead to condemnation as quintessential evil, but there will be none of that from the edu-fascists, who only care about money and power, or power and money, depending on whether we’re talking about admin or ideologues.


“…comes amid heightened scrutiny that colleges are facing over the admissions process and the diversity of their student bodies….”



     The most relevant scrutiny is how the admissions process is corrupted; the change to the SAT will simply allow for greater corruption. How incompetent must our leaders be to respond to corruption by adding to the corruption?


       “Diversity” is not a concern, and never should be at a university, which was built to support education and research. That said, Diversity as a goal could be justified if there was some research indicating Diversity somehow helped to achieve those goals. Seeing as, so far, every change to university policies to “increase diversity” has caused the institutions to further turn away from their explicit goals, I doubt such research will ever be produced.


       Nobody in control cares if there’s no evidence supporting it, and common sense destroys it, as more Diversity allows more student loan money to flow into edu-fascists pockets, so it always must be improved.


Students are scored on a scale of 1 to 100 based on data from records like the US census and the National Center for Education Statistics. According to the College Board, a score of 50 would be considered average, while a number above 50 indicates more hardship. 


The score takes into account information from the student's background, but it does not include race. 




     Au contraire! This will have everything to do with race. I promise the gentle reader, if this change becomes fully accepted, whites will assuredly score lower on this scale. White privilege, you see, so a white growing up in a crime-ridden neighborhood will still not endure as much hardship as a non-white (by this I mean not Asian as well, they’ll also get penalized for their ethnicity) in the same neighborhood.


      Nobody is stupid enough to believe that last line, and the people pushing it know it. If race isn’t a factor, how could this change possibly help Diversity? And thus I casually destroy the claim that the change isn’t about race.



Colleges will be able to see the number when considering applicants, but students themselves won't be told their scores.





     I reiterate that this change will increase the corruption in admissions, not reduce it. Why else would they make this new fudge-factor number secret?


      Asian students are upset because it’s become painfully obvious they’ve been discriminated against, to the point that they need higher test scores than “non-Asians” to get into top schools. The associated lawsuits are likely to work because those test scores are known by the Asians, proving their case. 


      This new system will allow for secret discrimination. Good luck with a lawsuit, now.


Jeremiah Quinlan, the school's dean of undergraduate admissions, told the Wall Street Journal that Yale has nearly doubled the number of low-income students and those who are first in their families to attend college to about 20% of new students.

"This (adversity score) is literally affecting every application we look at," Quinlan told the Journal. "It has been a part of the success story to help diversify our freshman class."

--the gentle reader should note how the admin’s title is very nearly twice as long as his name, and thus he should be fired immediately as per my guidelines for reducing excess administrators on our campuses. Yes, that guideline is capricious and I further capriciously applied it, but seeing as these people advocate for capricious admissions guidelines, it’s certainly fair.




Note carefully how “…help diversify our…class” once again simply assumes such diversification is a good thing, will help Harvard to better reach its goals of education and research by destroying them. Again I ask for a study showing that making the SAT bogus is going to help. 


I should also point out that tests like the SAT have been testing on strange things, the better to represent the indoctrination going on in our public school system. I don't comment much on what's going on in our public schools, so I'll let a friend describe it:


History is written by the victors...and the "victors" in academia are the SJWs...and thus, the new version of "history" will be their own.

….Last month, a buddy's high school daughter was panicking about her upcoming AP History exam….My buddy is upset because he's flipped through her book and its full of "modern" biases, coy wordings and outright inaccuracies. It isn't a high school history text. It's an indoctrination manual. But here's the rub. In order for his daughter to excel in her AP class, she must memorize these "new truths" and regurgitate them back to her SJW teachers and on her AP exam.

…If you love history or literature, you should covet the old texts while they still exist…


---"Robert, an ex-teacher in California, 10 years in special education"





     Just as in the 2016, the Left controlled the media, the schools, the internet, and social media, and still couldn’t win the election, leading to the massive “Trump-Russia hoax” and general mass insanity rather than just face the reality of a lost election, we’re seeing the same thing in our schools. 


      Despite the warping of “history,” the debasement of education in our schools to the point that our typical high school graduates read at the 7th grade level…they can’t accept the reality that not all people do all things with all the same ability. Rather than face reality, they’ll insert insanity into the SAT. What will happen here is what has happened with everything else they touch: it gets destroyed as people walk away. The SAT was the premier college entrance exam, but I strongly suspect that will not be the case in just a few years.



www.professorconfess.blogspot.com











     




10 comments:

  1. This lunacy's totalitarian basis is plain enough for an alert kindergartener to note. I was 1 such in September 1966 thanks to my casually educated parents who had already ingrained deference to causation in me. A week or so before kindergarten they explained most emphatically that formal schooling was of 2 kinds: an objective body of instrumental knowledge every one of sense accepts because it is demonstrably true & every thing else which is subjective, slanted, highly colored, emotion based, tainted by vested interest, arrogantly foisted on the world by winners of acute clashes &-or otherwise compromized so unreliable as a source of valid information. They insisted that if I suspected any thing a teacher claimed could be of the second type I ask them before reaching a conclusion. They presciently further said I would very soon be able to tell when facing an attempt to manipulate or deceive me, how soon I found amazing. The first day of kindergarten the teacher who had a class of about 25 asked how many of us could already read; about 1/2 dozen of whom I was 1 each raised his hand. I strongly intuited her dis-pleased expression was over how the few literates incommoded her not for the sake of the many waiting instruction. As an aside she did nigh nothing in 9 months to teach reading or help a literate read better; I improved my reading myself. Then she let the kitten from the bag: she pontifically said most of us assumed we were there to learn to read, write, figure & grasp science, history & civics so we would be fit citizens per what our parents, grand-parents, clergy & other elders had told us. Well, she continued, all that was surely important but the core reason our new generation had to be schooled so assiduously was modern society was already changing & the public school system had to prepare us for even more change whether that suited our elders, fully invested in an older stabler world, or not. That was when I realized she was doing right from the chute just what my parents had striven to warn me was nigh. Thenceforth I was very cagy about receptivity to teachers' claims. So glad to be old.

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  2. The ACT has been the better test for 25 years. Never forget that the SAT added 100 points to scores back in 1994 to "renormalize" them.

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    1. I semi-agree. I always preferred the SAT, but there's no argument it's time has passed. Perhaps I should just look at this as merely a desperate ploy to gain relevance.

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    1. Nope. I chose a pseudonym in honor of the many professors who speak out anonymously against what's happening in higher ed, and I've had the nickname Doom since before the old computer game came out.

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  4. Unwilling to settle for allegedly better; perfect test needed. This adversity scoring lunacy is the application in America of the communist Chinese dangan which has been an aspiration of the Gramscian & frankfort school statists who have plagued the west a century. Like fabians they move slow but steady to net cumulative effect. Once they are willing to be stark as they are becoming they are highly confident of success. Prepare for engineered mass chaos of the spartacist type in immediate post-first world war Bavaria. Munich was saved from communism by some rather coarse fellows as too few respectable people were willing to do what was demanded. Before I was a Ron Paul libertarian I was a Franco authoritarian so I know my stuff.

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  5. Math is racist. Science is racist. Literature is racist.
    History is definitely racist.

    Reality is racist.

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  6. As I long ago realized, any white person who claims not to be a racist is either a liar or a fool.

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  7. We are so tired of this emphasis on a failed race it is sickening. I thought blacks wanted equality but it seems that they never could compete equally so now they want their own watered down classes and any rule that will destroy the school systems and dumb them down for the sake of blacks who never will meet civilized standards.

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