Making a test better by "dropping" the more "rigorous" questions?
If that doesn't set off your BS-detector, then nothing will.
I once participated in a screening process which revealed to me that the article Laz posted on this issue is dead-on correct. The school had a publication in which only students in the top ten percent gradewise (and a few others who won a writing contest) were invited to participate. The school itself required fairly high test scores for admission, but had about 15 percent of the spaces set aside for "qualified" minorities (those of African and non-Cuban Hispanic ancestry); the publication was selecting the students who, once admitted to the school, had excelled in their coursework or writing.
The test scores of those admitted to the school as "minorities" under this system were substantially lower than the test scores of those admitted under the regular process. The regular process included Asians, despite the fact that many (including my wife) had emigrated to the U.S. only ten years or so earlier at a time when they spoke no English. It included Cubans, despite the fact that they faced the same language barriers and potential discrimination as Mexicans. Despite overcoming these adversities, Asians and Cubans didn't get a break because .... well, because Asians and Cubans didn't need breaks because they would get in anyway.
But I digress. There was some angst at the school because in a ten year period, not a single student admitted under the Affirmative Action program had qualified as being in the top ten percent of the class and given the experience of working with the other top students on this publication. Some thought that unfair. Others went further, and called it "institutional racism." Never mind that the exams were all graded on a number system so that the professor would not know the identity (or race) of the student being graded. Never mind that the 15 percent of students in the "protected" minority groups wouldn't even have been at the institution unless the institution changed the rules to let them in despite a lower level of demonstrated proficiency in school (grades) and on the exam (test scores). If the result of the system was something besides racially proportionate representation, then (the reasoning went), the "institution" must be racist.
And so some in this group set out to change the result of the selection process ...ummm, I mean, to cleanse the instutition of its ugly racist tendencies. A quota was proposed: Let ten percent of the spots on this publication go to people in the Affirmative Action program. (Alternatively, this could be described as taking ten percent of the spots away from people who were doing well in the school and give them to people who were not doing as well.) Another system was proposed whereby (to satisfy the constraints of the Bakke decision) race would be taken into "account" in some nebulous fashion, but never quantified.
I argued against all of these "solutions" and said we should either do nothing (since the grading was already race-blind and therefore could not be discriminatory) or, at most, we should offer affirmative action students a boost of a quarter or half grade in their grade point average to enable them to compete for these positions more effectively.
The trouble was this. The grade point average for selection was normally around 3.6 or 3.7....an A minus. A half grade boost for these candidates would mean that anyone above a 3.2 (a low B-plus average) could participate if they were the "right" kind of minority. Fully forty percent of the class had a GPA at or above 3.2.
But it turned out that in the past ten years, such a system would have yielded no qualified candidates even if their grades were boosted by one half grade. That is, not a single candidate admitted under the affirmative action program was performing in the top 40 percent of the class, year after year after year. I was amazed to learn this, but on reflection it made sense. These candidates were scoring substantially lower on the admission test. They had in most cases lower grades than the other students. If those grades and scores mean anything, then we should expect the students with the lower qualifications to perform at a lower level. If whites or Asians or Cubans with lower scores had been admitted, they too would likely have struggled to compete.
The group ended up choosing the nebulous "take race into account" approach encouraged by Bakke. I voted against it to no avail. The following year, two minority students became the first in over a decade to join the publication. I later found out that neither was even in the top one half of their class. Neither had achieved even a B average in their coursework. They were there only because of their race.
And the institution felt that it had taken a large step to "cleanse" itself of racism.
The same people driving those decisions are now suggesting that we do away with the tests or dumb them down. My guess is that saner heads will ultimately prevail, and achievement oriented parents and alums (who control the purse strings) will rebel against this trend. |
