The fact that so many students need remedial classes seems to confirm the accuracy of the ACT and SAT benchmarks.It also drains resources from more academic pursuits.
These end-runs around real academic achievement allow administrators to continue pursuing their goals of access and graduation while ignoring poor student preparation and performance.
It’s time for universities to face reality: many students are not prepared for college-level material. Waiting for high schools to improve outcomes hasn’t worked. Universities must change their focus from access to achievement by raising admissions standards to meaningful levels and stopping the debasement of the curriculum and grading standards.
Sending unprepared students to college only sets them up for failure.
17.11.11
THE INFORMATION CONTENT OF THE COLLEGE BOARDS.
Say what you want in defense of access, or of holistic admission standards. A low score on the standard test is still an accurate predictor of academic difficulties, renorming notwithstanding.
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2 comments:
Grading standards are important. I'm just curious, what's your take on GREs as a standard for Graduate School? I find it rather insane that at a Graduate level, students are still asked to report scores for yet another standardized test created by the ETS people (and put the broke college grads at a disadvantage when they can't afford GRE prep). Applicants to UK schools are generally required to submit a well constructed research proposal as the main criteria for assessing writing skills, understanding of the field they wish to go into, etc. But they don't require standardized test scores.
The former director of graduate studies in my department relied very heavily on the mathematics GRE, because it was the only piece of a student's portfolio that both had some predictive value and comparability. Your argument from equity is persuasive in the case of a graduate program dealing only with domestic applicants (whether they be in the UK or the USA) but when the student dossiers look like the day's manifest at Ellis Island, you neither have the ability to look at the transcripts of promising kids from hardscrabble schools, because you don't know which of the overseas universities are hardscrabble, nor the opportunity to compare research prospectuses in a fair way.
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