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Wednesday, April 29. 2009

The SAT isn't PoMo anymore

Does aptitude matter at all? Does ability matter? Does anything matter, except skin tone diversity? As far as I can tell, the anti-test movement in edn is all about skin tone.


Tests are designed to discern and to objectively measure ability and knowledge, to - and here's the word - discriminate the competent from the less so. Crazy thing is that the SAT was introduced precisely to provide objective measures to eliminate favoritism and to reward merit.

Posted by The Barrister in Education, Our Essays at 13:14 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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Just this morning I received an e-mail to the parents of the students at my youngest daughter's CT school, from whence she thankfully granulates in 3 weeks, informing me that they were becoming SAT neutral, was the term I think they used. I realize life there resembles a private club, but at $45K/yr., you'd think they could be a bit more selective!
#1 The Distributist (Link) on 2009-04-29 22:42 (Reply)
Just this morning I received an e-mail to the parents of the students at my youngest daughter's CT school, from whence she thankfully granulates in 3 weeks, informing me that they were becoming SAT neutral, was the term I think they used. I realize life there resembles a private club, but at $45K/yr., you'd think they could be a bit more selective!

Even with the SAT, there was a lot of arbitrariness in deciding who was going to be admitted to many schools. With the elimination of the SAT as a factor, all pretense at objectivity in admitting students is abandoned. All is now arbitrary. This way the cards are on the table. I hope that parents and students get the message and respond accordingly. Think of what happened to Antioch, which 40 years ago was a distinctively different but also highly regarded school. It ended up not highly regarded, and defunct.
#2 Gringo on 2009-04-30 02:35 (Reply)

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