FROM DUMB TO DUMBER IN THREE GENERATIONS: THE ELIMINATION OF STANDARDIZED TESTING FOR AMERICAN COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES
Vol. I | Issue. 55 | January 3, 2022
The SAT was developed in 1926 by Dr. Carl Brigham. It was initially used by a handful of Northeastern colleges and universities to screen applicants to determine whether or not they possessed the basic tools to succeed in higher education. At that time, a college education meant something. Students attending college existed in a privileged and rarefied universe. Even then, however, most institutions of higher learning presented their students with a core curriculum. That curriculum was comprised of a structured program where a student couldn't graduate unless they mastered the basics of math, science, literature in the form of great books including the foundational works of Western civilization.
The Ivy League, then as now, was an athletic conference. However, at that time, the winner of the Harvard Yale football game was more important than the size of their respective libraries, or how many Nobel Prizes were snatched by their graduates.
There is no doubt that these institutions were filled with unqualified imbeciles, who were admitted due to their legacy status, and/or family donor gifts giving the unqualified the keys to the Ivy gates. However, they did do something back then that is almost unheard of today; they flunked the unqualified dummies out.
Those who did not have the tools to succeed were bounced. Today, no college wants to bounce its dummies, and besides with tuition at $50k+ per year, why not let them stay as long as they want? Now, there are curricula for the stupid, the aimless, and the lazy.
The SAT in its salad days from 1926 through the end of WWII, was not used competitively (i.e. the applicant with the highest score has the best chance to get in). It was used as a triage instrument making certain that the applicant possessed the basic reading and math skills to succeed.
Then it all changed… The Ivy League, with its WASP-dominated quota system, realized that the Post-War era required that those institutions seek out the best brains they could find. They did so through their public sense of responsibility knowing that if America were to remain at the apex of world leadership, that they would need to do so.
That is when the SAT morphed from an instrument setting a floor on basic academic skills to the competitive juggernaut that we have come to know and that bad testers have hated for over 70 years.
What happened next? A little something called meritocracy kicked in. Smart Jews and other excluded ethnicities started displacing dumb Kennedys, Rockefellers, and even Fords.
The quota systems that were in place once Academic meritocracy kicked in made it much easier to find a minion than it was when Jews were relegated to 2-5% of the average Ivy student body. Of course, the dummies could still buy their way in, and sadly, that's the way of the world, but the prevailing ethos became one of meritocracy.
Once the geniuses came in, the fortunes of Ivy League sports waned to the point of inconsequence. However, the academic excellence at these institutions skyrocketed.
Once America's elite institutions of higher education realized that in order to achieve and maintain their excellence they needed to seek out the best brains they could, they created the finest university system in the world.
That excellence is now on the verge of destruction… Virtually every Ivy League school and most other institutions of higher learning have eliminated all standardized testing requirements for the foreseeable future.
They have used the Pandemic as their rationale, that it's too much of a challenge for students to get to testing centers, etc. That of course is b*llsh*t.
Nope, they have eliminated standardized testing as a cave-in to the pressures of the sick woke pressure of the Left, who have claimed that standardized testing is racist. For that matter any admissions process that considers anything but your racial grievance status is illegitimate.
As we all know, “math, all non-CRT literature, and science are all racist” and must be eliminated from the classroom.
I'm sure you are all wondering what now? Do I send my kids to Harvard?
That will likely pose a conundrum for you.
If your child is a math-science genius, you may have to send them to trade school… Unless something changes, there is a good chance that those Ivy-covered gates will be closed to them.
Sadly if this trend fails to reverse, the Ivy League will have bad sports and bad academics. To think that it took these schools to have gone from dumb to dumber in only three generations!
-Emes