SAT, etcRe: Greater Confidence in Democrats, Poll Finds

Enrique Diaz-Alvarez enrique at anise.ee.cornell.edu
Thu Nov 11 07:25:44 PST 1999


Steve Grube wrote:


> ..... ETS really got it's start when the president of
> Harvard (Connant) had gotten fed up with the upper class
> twits that inhabited the university in the 20's and 30's and
> decided to use testing to begin a shift to academics.

Interesting. For all the flaws of the SATs, I have never understood the prejudice of what passes for the American left (I am not talking about anybody here) against standardized tests in general. I can't think of anything that levels the playing field between poor and rich as thoroughly as having to take the same test anonimously. If these tests had more weight in admissions here, I am convinced we'd see a lot fewer nitwits from Greenwich, CT and a lot more working and middle class folks on campus, since the weeding out of needful students would become more difficult.

Which brings another point. I have heard that Harvard rejects most students who score above 1500 on the SATs. I'd think it would be interesting to find the average parental income of those students (or those above some other performance level) and compare them to the average parental income of the entering freshman class. Has this been done?

-- Enrique Diaz-Alvarez Office # (607) 255 5034 Electrical Engineering Home # (607) 272 4808 112 Phillips Hall Fax # (607) 255 4565 Cornell University mailto:enrique at ee.cornell.edu Ithaca, NY 14853 http://peta.ee.cornell.edu/~enrique



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