3 ms·
For years, there has been strong criticism of reliance on standardized tests, as there are quite a few people who "just don't test well". This extends the flaw
by mises 7y ago
For years, there has been strong criticism of reliance on standardized tests, as there are quite a few people who "just don't test well". This extends the flawed philosophy of attempting to condense a complicated question into a single statistic to an even more complicated question. My parents worked very hard to get me into a good school. I was one of the poorest in my neighborhood, and our house was one of the smallest. The college board did not have access to my parents' actual incomes.
To answer your question, I think many will suffer, though they must not necessarily. I would have objected long before; ethnicity should never be a consideration. Why? Because people are not statistics. When thinking on statistics, you can't use them to judge one individual case, only to make predictions about a population. That means while these predictions or introduced biases are generally true, some people get screwed. We, as a society, are set up to work differently. Look at our justice system: a very high burden of proof means that we believe it better for ten guilty men to walk free than for one to go to jail. I would argue the same premise applies here: it is better for ten people to judged without race (though availability of opportunity can be a consideration) and result in a somewhat unfair distribution than for one unprivileged person to be kept out of college because he's the wrong race. In other words, I would rather we don't tinker with the ratio based on race than for one poor white kid out of Appalachia to have his score "adjusted" down and his application turned down.
I guess both are unjust, but one has injustice as the result of intervention, and the other has injustice as the result of non-intervention.
There was a skit by a comedian years ago called "Modern Educayshun", which predicted this almost exactly. That was comedy then.