By Harvey Silverglate and Zachary Bloom At first blush, the ongoing cheating scandal at Harvard College appears to raise serious questions about academic integrity at that fabled institution. If the allegations that 125 students inappropriately shared notes and answers for a take-home exam in violation of the exam’s rules prove true, the result will be […]
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The most shocking thing about the Harvard cheating scandal was not that 125 students out of a class of 279 were found to have “committed acts of academic dishonesty” on an exam last spring, or even that the exam was for a course that was supposed to be an easy mark. It was that it […]
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Yesterday Harvard University announced its investigation of about 125 undergraduates who are believed to have improperly collaborated on a take-home final examination last spring. It is tempting to use this case to generalize about an Ivy League sense of entitlement, declining student morals in general, or perhaps the failure of Harvard and other universities to […]
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It’s no secret that most high school graduates are unprepared for college. Every year, 1.7 million first-year college students are enrolled in remedial classes at a cost of about $3 billion annually, the Associated Press recently reported. Scores on the 2011 ACT college entrance exam showed that only 1 in 4 high school graduates […]
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On March 14, Washington Post reporter Daniel de Vise, in his piece “Trying to assess learning gives colleges their own test anxiety,” reported that the University of Texas at Austin ranks very low in achievement of student learning. “For learning gains from freshman to senior year,” writes de Vise, “UT ranked in the 23rd percentile […]
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Cross-posted from National Association of Scholars. Cross-posted from National Association of Scholars. Fall 2011 has seen some major milestones for the SAT/ACT optional movement. DePaul University, for instance, initiated its first admission cycle sans test requirement. Clark University announced last month that it will offer test-optional admissions for the incoming class of 2013. In his […]
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Institutions from charter schools to the White House are pushing hard for more young people to go to college, but with almost half of students at four-year colleges destined to leave without a degree, a counter-trend is starting to take hold: a loose coalition of people in the credentialing, training, and grant-making businesses are working […]
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A well-publicized cheating scandal at Great Neck High School featured a criminal entrepreneur taking SAT tests for college-bound high school students. My colleagues in the Academy tell me cheating is endemic with papers written by “service” organizations and plagiarism a national contagion. Teachers are routinely engaged in “scrubbing” various tests in an effort to increase […]
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On Inside Higher Ed today “MathProf,” an anonymous poster, raised an original objection to multiple-choice tests: they are packed with lies. He said one student “pointed out to me that multiple-choice tests are inherently deceptive, featuring wrong answers deliberately designed to appear plausible. Is this really the skill we want to teach and reward: not knowledge, […]
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One of my colleagues here at the University of Texas–Austin, the economist Daniel Hamermesh, recently complained in his New York Times “Freakonomics” blog about the common practice in many departments of assigning no final exams. I wish he had applied his own craft to this situation. The lack of final exams is merely one symptom […]
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The sniping has begun about Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s great new book Academically Adrift. Predictably, people are saying the test instruments used (especially the Collegiate Learning Assessment or CLA but also the National Survey of Student Engagement or NSSE) are imperfect, they look at only a small number of relatively anonymous schools, etc. These […]
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I can’t recall a book on higher education that arrived with so much buzz, and drew so much commentary in the first two days after publication. The book is Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by Richard Arum, and Josipa Roksa (University of Chicago Press). Arum is a professor of sociology and education at […]
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On average black students do much worse on the SAT and many other standardized tests than whites. While encouraging progress was made in the 1970s and early 1980s in improving black SAT scores and reducing the black/white test score gap, progress in this direction came to a halt by the early 1990s, and today the […]
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Here’s how easy it is to find out whether Adam Wheeler, the 23-year-old who allegedly faked his way into Harvard, was the preternaturally accomplished young scholar he said he was: Google. That’s how I spent a productive half-hour after I found Wheeler’s resume posted on the New Republic‘s website. Wheeler had submitted the resume when […]
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In the year 2000, American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, CA, was one of the worst-performing middle schools in the state. Not a single student tested above the fiftieth percentile on state or national exams in math, and only eight percent of sixth-graders and 17 percent of eighth-graders passed that bar in reading (the […]
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Candace de Russy’s January 7 post here, “Hate-America Sociology,” understandably attracted a lot of attention. It cited a 10-question Soc 101 quiz at an unnamed eastern college, complete with accusatory leftish questions and some simple-minded answers by a student who drew a mark of 100 for agreeing with the politics of his professor. A few […]
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Test prep pioneer Stanley H. Kaplan, who died this week at the ripe old age of 90, was a living embodiment of the roller coaster changes that have roared through the college admissions scene over the last three decades. He also set the stage for students, and later colleges and universities, to game the system. […]
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Average scores on the SAT dipped a bit for high school seniors who graduated in the class of 2009, and the usual suspects—our friends at the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FAIR) are already using the lower scores to attack the whole idea of standardized testing, a platform that includes not only the […]
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Students applying for college admission now face a new reality—the SAT is increasingly optional at our colleges and universities. The test-optional movement, pioneered by FairTest, a political advocacy group supported by George Soros and the Woods Fund—now list 815 schools that do not require SAT scores. That number may seem impressive, but it includes institutions […]
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Yale made a sound decision yesterday. It said applicants must report all SAT scores, not just the highest of the three or four that some would-be Yalies take. That was the long-term policy of the College Board until last June, when Board officials announced they would let test-takers decide which scores to report. The stated […]
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Peter Salins’s October 15 essay here , “Does the SAT Predict College Success?,” attracted attention from many quarters, including the New York Times. Today the Times’s op-ed page published a fresh version of the Salins piece, which reported that at the State University of New York (SUNY), the colleges that decided to require higher SAT […]
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A just-released study from the University of California-Berkeley’s law school points out that the Law School Admissions Test, a sort of SAT for applicants to law school, focuses lopsidedly on takers’ cognitive skills while overlooking key non-cognitive traits possessed by successful lawyers. And no, that doesn’t mean an aptitude for ambulance-chasing or filing phony class-action […]
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Who are the smartest graduate students? You’ve probably already guessed that one: physicists. Second down in the brains ranking are mathematicians, then computer scientists, then economists and practically any sort of engineer. Such are the results of an analysis made in 2004 by Christian Roessler, a lecturer in economics at the University of Queensland, in […]
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Many conservatives are groaning over a major new report from a commission of higher education luminaries calling on colleges to de-emphasize the SAT for college admissions. The catcalls from the right erupted after the National Association of College Admission Counseling suggested that colleges should rethink their reliance on the SAT for admissions. Wrongheaded, de-evolutionary, politically […]
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The Shark provides a list of the top five Law School “Admissions Innovations” of 2008, with analysis. The ludicrous Baylor case is ranked one, but I hadn’t heard of several of the others. Take #3 University of Michigan Law School’s Wolverine Scholars Program admits University of Michigan undergrads who have at least a 3.8 GPA […]
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Baylor University has taken U.S. News list hucksterism to a new level, in granting students a $300 bookstore credit for retaking the SAT, and a $1000 per-year merit aid increase for improving their score by at least 50 points. That’s called buying your way up the list.
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Fewer and fewer high school students are taking the SAT exam these days—possibly because fewer colleges are requiring the submission of SAT scores as part of the admissions process. According to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest), an organization that admittedly opposes standardized tests, only 46 percent of graduating seniors in the […]
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“Scores Stable as More Minorities Take SAT” said the headline on today’s Washington Post story reporting the annual account of average SAT scores. Good news, right? No, just bad news presented in happy talk. “Class of ’08 Fails to Lift SAT Scores,” was the Wall Street Journal’s more accurate version of the story, which raised […]
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So, which news stories about the College Board’s new report on the addition of a writing section to the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) do you believe? Here’s the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “The results echo preliminary findings, released in April, that the new exam is just about as good as high school grades – and in some […]
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What are we to make of the decision by a growing number of “highly selective” colleges to scrap the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) as a criterion for college admission, something brought to our attention recently when another pair of semi-elite schools (Smith and Wake Forest) joined these ranks? The New York Times story of May […]
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