What will we tell the (college aged) children?

by David Safier

Story after story has detailed cheating on standardized tests by K-12 teachers and administrators to raise schools' scores and rankings. Now comes the not-very-surprising fact that colleges have been cooking the books to raise their ratings on the U.S. News & World Report list of "America's Best Colleges." It's pretty much a given. Use selective data to rank a group of institutions, and the institutions will figure out a way to make those bits of data come out in their favor.

For example:

[C]olleges . . . have spent billions on financial aid for high-scoring students who don't actually need the money, motivated at least partly by the quest for rankings glory.

Students who need the financial aid don't get it so it can go to children of one percenters with higher test scores. Wonderful.

Baylor University . . . paid students it had already accepted to retake the SAT exam in a transparent ploy to boost the average scores it could report.

It seems worth noting that Baylor bills itself as a religious University.

Baylor students are a part of a Christian community of faith. There is a very active community of faith on campus, as well as multiple choices in the larger Waco community.

[snip]

Baylor is small enough to minister to and offer educational opportunities to the individual. From Welcome Week groups to faculty office hours to resident chaplains to specialized tutoring facilities, Baylor offers a place for students to connect and to be treated with the respect and dignity today's students expect and deserve.

Baylor's Center of Christian Ethics puts out a quarterly publication, "Christian Reflection: A Series in Faith and Ethics." I wonder if it has written about the ethics of bribing students to retake tests to boost the school's rating. (I might note, the school is also known for its political conservatism. Its president is Ken Starr, the Independent Counsel during the Clinton-era Monica Lewinsky scandal.)

One more school.

The latest example came last week at Claremont McKenna, a highly regarded California liberal arts college where a senior administrator resigned after acknowledging he falsified college-entrance-exam scores for years to rankings publications such as US News.

RELATED AIMS TEST INQUIRY: Does anyone know more about this? Someone mentioned to me recently that some Arizona high schools have students who have passed AIMS in their sophomore year retake the test as juniors and seniors to raise the school average, even though once you've passed it, you don't have to take it again. Is there any truth to that?