Attention Economy


Saturday, April 29, 2023

Standardized Tests and the Meritocracy Debate

The confusing future of standardized testing, explained.
https://www.vox.com/23700778/sat-act-standardized-tests-college-high-school

Can the Meritocracy Survive Without the SAT?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/sat-college.html
“… it seems pretty clear that many schools are really ditching the SAT in response to the following sequence of events: Asian American SAT scores rose to the point where elite colleges were accused of discriminating against Asian American applicants to maintain the racial balance they desired, this led to lawsuits, and those lawsuits seem poised to yield a Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action. So universities are pre-emptively abandoning a metric that might be used against them in future litigation, not for the sake of widening opportunity but just in the hopes of sustaining the admissions status quo”. 

Payoff-based College Admissions by Frederick M. Hess
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/storage/app/uploads/public/63a/3c2/deb/63a3c2deb56fc934667451.pdf
Elite universities present themselves as bastions of meritocracy. But they routinely offer the children and grandchildren of major donors an easy path to admission, even when those students wouldn't otherwise qualify. Worse yet, the donations that open these doors are tax-deductible, and therefore heavily subsidized by taxpayers. Some questions surrounding college-admissions policies are complex and profound, but this one is painfully simple: We should press college officials to mean what they say about opportunity and equity, and to spend less time strong-arming wealthy donors. But at a bare minimum, we should get taxpayers out of the business of subsidizing campus shakedown artists.