The DEI triumverate is just about all we hear these days. One might think that learning and academic standards had been forgotten in this obsession.
Mostly, perhaps, but not entirely. In today’s Martin Center article, Wenyuan Wu writes about the decision by MIT to restore standardized testing in its admissions process.
She reminds us how colleges first broke away from merit-based admissions: “The movement away from merit-based considerations started with the holistic evaluation model, in which academic, nonacademic, and environmental factors are compounded to build a full profile of the applicant. Harvard invented the model nearly a century ago to limit Jewish enrollment. But even with capturing unmeasurable factors for holistic evaluations, the racial composition of student bodies at selective U.S. colleges and universities was still not squarely reflective of America’s general demographics.”
In recent years, the “diversity” mania has taken over, with standardized test scores being dropped in favor of “holistic” admissions, which allow officials to make decisions based on a host of subjective considerations, chiefly race.
MIT stated that it was reinstating the SAT to help with “equity.” Wu comments, “The competition to reclaim equity in its apolitical sense — a state of social organization that renders fairness on an individual basis — is supported by empirical evidence from the University of California’s Standardized Testing Task Force and countless anecdotal accounts of hard-working, first-generation, low-income students achieving their college dreams via the route of testing in. Ironically, the pro-testing advice from the UC Task Force was conveniently ignored by the UC Board of Regents, which finalized a decision to eschew ACT/SAT and other possible testing alternatives in late 2021.”
Will the move by MIT slow the anti-testing juggernaut? Let’s hope so. As Wu notes, “A bigger victim exists at the institutional level, where declining national academic performance would deteriorate further in an everything-goes, standard-free system.”