Charles Murray: Abolish the SAT

Over at the NYtimes.com, Charles Murray says that we ought to abolish the SAT in favor of the subject tests.

I took a lot of Advance Placement tests and a fair number of subject tests back at Milton Academy. On average, I did better on the subject tests because I was much more passionate about the material. I liked reading the history texts or the French texts, much more than the dull English texts. (There's only so much I can take of reading Native American poetry or some other multicultural text.)

The reason people's test scores on the subject tests tend to be greater predictors of college success would seem to a no-brainer: people do well in the subject matters they love. Hopefully, more focus on the subject tests will mean more subject tests and more students learning about wider topics.

I've always stood opposed to the monopoly and the stranglehold of ideas that the College Board maintains. With more tests, we get to test the many different kind of intelligences out there and can help better sort the rich intellectual diversity we're only beginning to tap.

Thinking About Identity

Many of you will remember the fake hate crime at CMC several years back. This past weekend I came across that old article written by Steve Sailer and in the wake of these retreats, I thought it a good way of framing the discussion.

With all the thinking I've been doing around issues of identity, I wonder if there's moral responsibility on the part of educators to cease creating divisons and in the case of the Asian American Advisory Board retreat to stop creating the paternalistic impression that non-white students have "special needs." No one has explained to me what those special needs are, but maybe the term itself is something designed to be overbroad.

I wonder if Steve Sailer, writing several years ago in The American Conservative was right.

He wrote:

The university's main concern appears to be to make students feel "comfortable," a word that reappears constantly in Claremont publications despite the obvious hopelessness of the project. The only way to make 19-year-olds feel comfortable is to wait 30 years while they sag into their well-padded maturities. Right now, they are teenagers and their surging hormones have far more important emotions for them to feel than comfort. Adults, however, who make careers out of encouraging kids to mold permanently self-pitying identities around their transient social discomforts have much to answer for.