If UMB Students Were Tank Gunners or "Laptop Class of the World, Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but your Privilege!"
If UMB Students Were Tank Gunners or "Laptop Class of the World, Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but your Privilege!"
This month, the White Elites made a significant progress in their epic quest to replace proficiency, competency, and merit with costly college essays featuring “service trips to countries of the Third World” and other wakeboarding; if they win, their lazy kids’ positions on the social ladder will be nine-inch-nail secured, and no hard work or talent will ever be summoned from the Land of the Dead again. This time around, the elites exploited a “temporary” COVID-era policy. (And what could be a better way to establish a permanent rule than to promote a temporary emergency measure to a permanent status?) According to the Times Union:
[l]ast year's much lower [math and writing proficiency] test scores will be the new baseline, a scoring committee told the [New York State] Board of Regents1, calling it the "new normal" as it lowers the scores needed to be considered proficient in math and English2.
Throughout the country, the name of the ruling class’s game is to arrest the upward mobility of the talented African-Americans and Latinos with stellar SATs but low GPAs and to counter the competition against the hard-working Asians. Here is The Atlantic, on the University of California:
In 2018, about 22,000 students earned guaranteed admission to the UC [system] based on their test scores, meaning their high SATs compensated for low GPA… [M]ore than a quarter were Black, Latino, or Native American. The UC has now taken this lifeline away.
Aligning enrollment with [California demographics] would require cutting the share of [the Asian] students by almost two-thirds. It would mean getting right with contemporary concepts of anti-racism by reviving one of California’s most shameful traditions: clearing Asians out of desirable spaces3.
And The Atlantic again, on Harvard:
Harvard has sought ways to limit the number of Asian American students, just as it limited the number of Jewish students in the early 20th century. Harvard receives tens of thousands of applications and uses a numerical scale to compare them. On academic measures, Asian American applicants score higher on average than white, Black, or Latino applicants…[A]dmissions officers have routinely rated [the Asian applicants] lower on subjective attributes such as “integrity, helpfulness, courage, kindness, fortitude, empathy, self-confidence, leadership ability, maturity, or grit.”4
Putting race aside, eliminating the SATs, ACTs, GREs, SHSATs5, CAASPPs6, XYZs, and, “yes”, proctored ALEKS placement sends talented but poor kids of all races back to where they came from. A recent Free Press article says:
A 2016 study found that implementing a standardized testing requirement increased the number of poor and non-white kids in gifted programs…. Similarly, a British study found that when relying on their own impressions, teachers tended to view a kid from a low-income background as less academically competent even when they had the same test score as a rich kid. The objectivity7 of scores can serve as a useful corrective to the subjective nature of teacher evaluations8.
A small quote skipped from the middle of the The Atlantic quote above strengthens the point:
Almost half of [the admitted to the UC in 2018 high-SAT low-GPA] students were low-income…9
We understand that the elites want to keep their wealth and status. We are all humans after all. But, does the readiness of our country to defend itself ever worry them? Aren’t they afraid to die?
More specifically, does all of the above worry the DEI worshipers here, at UMass Boston?
It should! Shouldn’t it? Does it?
Abolishing SATs already allows students who (would) score between the 10th and 33rd SAT-MATH percentile (~330-460) to join UMass Boston. For comparison,
[i]n Vietnam, men recruited under between the 10th and 33rd ASVAB10 percentile threshold were 2.5 times more likely to die in combat11.
But little do the devoted followers of the NPR brahmins12 care: in the event of a war, if they serve at all, they will be drafted as politruks DEI managers. No risk to their lives whatsoever.
With no SATs, it will also be hard to tell a 20th SAT-MATH percentile (~420) student from a 55th (~540). However…
…[r]esearch on tank gunners found that replacing a gunner who scores around the twentieth [ASVAB] percentile with one who scores around the fifty-fifth percentile improves the likelihood of hitting a target by 34 percent13.
That is, our ability to fight may be impeded, but the elites will probably flourish under whatever master. See:
Forget the tank gunners. The Laptop Class will live forever:
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race14.
This is the same Board of Regents that made mathematics proficiency exam passable to anyone who answers C to all the questions.
Kathleen Moore, “NYS changes minimum scores for student proficiency in math, English”, Times Union, March 16, 2023.
Caitlin Flanagan, “The University of California Is Lying to Us”, The Atlantic, July 22, 2021.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, “The Affirmative Action That Colleges Really Need”, The Atlantic, October 26, 2022.
Still there, thanks to Eric Adams
They are back, thanks to the brave San-Francisco parents
Rob Henderson, “Dropping the SATs Hurts Poor Kids”, The Free Press, March 6, 2023.
The author of [8] tends to think that the “[i]nfluential members of society” will not bother getting rid of the ASVAB, as it is a “lower middle class” venture. We respectfully disagree: if “tests are unfair”, any test is unfair. But in any case, the ruling class incessant attempts to get rid of any assessment of scientific and engineering abilities already cost us a loss of 37 out of the 44 critical (read “defence”) technologies.
See Boston Brahmins on Wikipedia.