Monday, March 28, 2005
WTFFF?
(This time it's "What the fucking fuck fuck?")
Admissions standards unfair! This time it's the National Merit Scholar program. It uses the PSAT to narrow its field of candidates. UC objects to this, because when dealing with all students in the whole fucking country using a standardized test is an unreasonable way to help determine qualifications.
From "Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools" and their chair, Michael Brown:
"We're not objecting that many, perhaps all, national merit scholarship awardees are excellent students," Brown said. "What we're criticizing is that a single test score makes this determination. We think that it’s unsupported by the evidence and highly problematic."
First off, the statement is untrue: a single test score does not make that determination. From Elaine Detweiler, National Merit Scholarship Corporation spokeslady:
From the 16,000 semifinalists, the 8,200 winners are chosen based on other criteria, including grades, writing samples, community activities and teacher recommendations, she said.
Secondly, the claim that it is "unsupported by the evidence" is odd, because these people absolutely refuse to acknowledge any evidence which suggests that people of different races perform differently, on average. That is, their claim is "no evidence says X, and any evidence that says X is clearly flawed, because we know that X is not true. How do we know X is not true? Well, because no evidence says X."
But [former administrator dude Patrick Hayashi] said the issue is selecting an academic standard that will do the least harm to disadvantaged students.
"Everybody knows there are inequalities in society," he said. "It's important not to legitimize inequalities on false grounds—that's what this does."
That is, "first we select the results we want, then we find an admission standard that gives us those results." You might wonder, then, why even bother with admissions standards? Just admit the results you want.
Ironically, despite his attempt to change the standards so it doesn't look like there is any inequality, he says that it is important not to legitimize those inequalities.
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