Don't look now, but there are more than a couple cracks in one of the Cathedral's foundational pillars, and some of them have progressed well beyond the hair line stage:
When everyone starts noticing that Harvard students, scoring around 2100 on the SAT in their junior and senior years of high school, consistently score around 1400 on the CLA+ as seniors in college, while state university students who scored 1500 going in regularly score 1000 going out, the gig is going to be up: Top universities don't churn out the smartest students because of the educational environments the students are exposed to at said universities, they churn out the smartest students because they admit the smartest students to begin with. It's an enormously costly, wasteful, anti-natal signalling charade, and the combination of both pre- and post-testing has the potential to go a long way in exposing it as such.
Harvard, Princeton, and Yale aren't shelling out the $35 for their graduates to take set for the test upon graduation:
This post-graduate testing should provide a legitimate, broad-based measure of how schools are doing. If Onett U is taking in 1500s and putting out 1100s, Twoson taking in 1800s and putting out 1200s, and Threed taking in 1500s and putting out 800s, we have reason to suspect that Onett is doing something right, Twoson is run of the mill, and Threed is infested with zombies. Prior to post-graduation testing, the consensus in this hypothetical scenario would be that Twoson is the 'best' school in Eagleland, when coupling a little empiricism with HBD-realism reveals that in fact Onett is employing the most epistemological approach.
Next spring, seniors at about 200 U.S. colleges will take a new test [CLA+] that could prove more important to their future than final exams: an SAT-like assessment that aims to cut through grade-point averages and judge students' real value to employers.The test is administered on a 1600-point scale, a la the old SAT scoring system, because the public is familiar with it. Parenthetically, and purely speculatively, I suspect the test's non-profit creator, The Council for Aid to Education, chose not to employ a 2400-point scale to match the current SAT scoring system as a means of signalling that this test should be taken more seriously than the softer new SAT is and should instead be treated like the old SAT was.
When everyone starts noticing that Harvard students, scoring around 2100 on the SAT in their junior and senior years of high school, consistently score around 1400 on the CLA+ as seniors in college, while state university students who scored 1500 going in regularly score 1000 going out, the gig is going to be up: Top universities don't churn out the smartest students because of the educational environments the students are exposed to at said universities, they churn out the smartest students because they admit the smartest students to begin with. It's an enormously costly, wasteful, anti-natal signalling charade, and the combination of both pre- and post-testing has the potential to go a long way in exposing it as such.
Harvard, Princeton, and Yale aren't shelling out the $35 for their graduates to take set for the test upon graduation:
The CLA + will be open to anyone—whether they are graduating from a four-year university or have taken just a series of MOOCs—and students will be allowed to show their scores to prospective employees. The test costs $35, but most schools are picking up the fee. Among schools that will use CLA + are the University of Texas system, Flagler College in Florida and Marshall University in West Virginia.Too much strain on the Ivies' endowments, surely. Better to use those war chests to set the Council for Aid to Education up for a Griggs v. Duke Power fall to shutter the whole approach before it is able to shed too much of the light of truth on all those self-serving pretty egalitarian lies. Indeed, the WSJ article reports on some people in industry who perspicaciously see this as a quicker, cheaper, and more reliable proxy for IQ testing (which they'd love to employ ubiquitously but know that doing so is fraught with all kinds of legal peril) than the current stew of collegiate resumes and GPAs is:
HNTB Corp., a national architectural firm with 3,600 employees, see value in new tools such as the CLA +, said Michael Sweeney, a senior vice president. Even students with top grades from good schools may not "be able to write well or make an argument," he said. "I think at some point everybody has been fooled by good grades or a good resume."While members of the Dark Enlightenment like to ridicule educational romanticism for being the reality-denying the monstrosity that it is, there are surely improvements to be made around the margins, not to mention optimal and sub-optimal methods of delivering material to students hoping to internalize it. In other words, pedagogy isn't pure junk.
This post-graduate testing should provide a legitimate, broad-based measure of how schools are doing. If Onett U is taking in 1500s and putting out 1100s, Twoson taking in 1800s and putting out 1200s, and Threed taking in 1500s and putting out 800s, we have reason to suspect that Onett is doing something right, Twoson is run of the mill, and Threed is infested with zombies. Prior to post-graduation testing, the consensus in this hypothetical scenario would be that Twoson is the 'best' school in Eagleland, when coupling a little empiricism with HBD-realism reveals that in fact Onett is employing the most epistemological approach.
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