University Bribes Students to Retake SAT
Competition between colleges for students is as tough as it ever was and with the economic downturn, it will definitely get tougher. But this seems ridiculous.
My friends at Ethics Newsline brought a story to my attention that is almost unbelievable. It turns out that Baylor University has been paying students who are already admitted and attending the school to retake the SAT. Just sitting in the room for the exam can win you a $300 textbook credit and raising your score by 50 points wins you $1,000 in scholarship money. Considering that SAT scores can easily vary by 50 points from sitting to sitting, this is a good bet for any incoming student.
Why would Baylor want its already-admitted kids to retake the SAT? The SAT is a major part of the US News & World Reports college ranking system. Baylor’s got a strategic plan called “Baylor 2012″ that evidently includes a cornerstone goal that it will do better on the US News rankings. They’re on their way, according to The Lariat, the student newspaper. Baylor’s average score SAT went from 1,200 to 1,210.
Baylor’s vice president for marketing, John Barry, first told the New York Times that there’s no problem because any other college could have done it too: “Every university wants to have great SAT scores. Every university wants to be perceived as having a high-quality class. We all wanted that. Were we happy our SAT scores went up? Yes. Did our students earn their scores? Yes they did.”
Some critics of standardized testing in general are pouncing on this because they say it reveals how evil they are. I don’t see it that way. The SAT is just a tool. So are the US News rankings. Baylor was misusing one tool to game the other — that doesn’t make the tools wrong, it makes Baylor wrong. Indeed, according to the influential Inside Higher Ed, Robert Morse (the U.S. News “ranking czar”) made clear that the magazine “disapproves of any educational policy designed solely to manipulate the ranking.”
This episode shows how careful leaders have to be when they set goals because staff throughout the organization might think that reaching the goal is the most important thing, not how you get there. In some areas, that can work. Schools? Not so much.
College is expensive. If they can afford a $300 book credit, et al, why not just lower their prices to improve the value? Oh, wait, they’re trying to gouge the students for as much as they can. I forgot. What was I thinking?
O/T but I want to sprinkle this everywhere especially in light of Biden’s interview with the FL reporter.
Important distinction that NEEDS to be made over and over again between now and Nov. 4.
When Obama talks about reducing taxes for 95% of working Americans he is only talking about income taxes. He is not talking about payroll taxes which is where the funding for new programs will come from.
The nationalized health care plan the Dems are salivating about is a 7% payroll tax, the new retirement plan to replace our 401k’s is a 5% payroll tax, and the wage insurance is a 1% payroll tax for a total new tax burden of 13%. Add that to the current 6% Social Security payroll tax and the 1% (or more) Medicare payroll tax and we’re looking at a payroll tax burden in excess of 20% which is not subject to the deductions the income tax is.
No one is exempt from payroll taxes so Obama is simply lying.
Who’s behind this program? Sounds like ACORN.
This is why I rarely mention that Baylor is my alma mater. From when I attended thirty years ago to now, I am so disgusted with their decline. Good going guys at the Lariat. Now you know why some alumni don’t feel like donating to a university that so obviously has lost it’s moral compass.
shameful
I’m an alum of Baylor and I too have watched with dismay how “Baylor 2012″ has changed the face of the school I loved. I’ve been very vocal about the rush to become a research institution at the expense of the teaching, which had long been a standard at Baylor. Baylor has had 20,000 or more freshmen applications each year for the past several years (for only 3,000 or so slots) — and they can’t find high enough scores among those? It’s one thing for a student to want to retake the SAT in order to raise their scores – I did it when in high school – but to pay them is so obscene. Baylor, wise up. You’ve become something you were never meant to be.