Education

I was looking through Hispanic Pundit (man, that's a well-designed blog, isn't it?) and read this post in which he links to an interesting question raised by Charles Murray, the IQ guru and controversialist. HP chose a different quote, but I think this one sums up the article best:

Conant’s cause was as unambiguously liberal in the 1940s as income redistribution is today. Then, America’s elite colleges drew most of their students from a small set of elite secondary schools, concentrated in the northeastern United States, to which America’s wealthy sent their children. The mission of the SAT was to identify intellectual talent regardless of race, color, creed, money, or geography, and give that talent a chance to blossom. Students from small towns and from poor neighborhoods in big cities were supposed to benefit—as I thought I did, and as many readers of the american think they did.

But data trump gratitude. The evidence has become overwhelming that the SAT no longer serves a democratizing purpose. Worse, events have conspired to make the SAT a negative force in American life. And so I find myself arguing that the SAT should be ended. Not just deemphasized, but no longer administered. Nothing important would be lost by so doing. Much would be gained.

It seems odd that what's considered a tool of the privileged had, as its original goal, to level the playing field between rich and poor. I'm not an equality fetishist, but I see the harm to our country if talent isn't recognized and exploited and would therefore like to see the universities choose the most fair testing method at their disposal (my own kids will be assessed in seven years). The article is longish and the issues raised worthy of a series of posts, however, some thoughts:

1. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what criteria is used in universities. Those who wish to play the game will do so. So, if Harvard announces that it will choose its freshmen based on high school seniors' ability to walk on their arms, you'll start seeing pushy parents walking their toddler and holding him by his foot instead of his hand.

2. Grades alone will not suffice. "Ability" won't suffice either. Grades measure, in the best scenario, how hard one works or how much one applies themselves. In the worst case, they measure how well you play the student game.

Ability measurements of the SAT-IQ type quantify raw intelligence, but you know plenty of smart people who waste their brains on WoW and whom you wouldn't hire to wash your cat.

I suppose Murray wants to replace the SAT-aptitude type tests with achievement tests. The difference is that an SAT test measures raw smarts (no, Kaplan or Princeton won't raise your score that much), while an achievement test quantifies how much you've learned.

SAT-Find the length of C in the triangle ABC.
Achievement: What is the Pythagorean theorem?

Either way, again, I don't see any solution to the sad fact that people of privilege will usually do better. That's why people try to become privileged in the first place, no?