Angela
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We're in the midst of a scandal involving rich parents, many from California, breaking the law to get their kids into university.
One couple paid 500,000 dollars to get their two daughters into the University of Southern California. Coaches were bribed to get the girls accepted as athletes for the university crew team. ("Relaxed" academic standards are applied to athletes needed for university teams.) They even photoshopped pictures of the girls heads onto pictures of actual athletes. Meanwhile the girls had never been on a crew team.
The stupidity is beyond me.
For one thing, I wish the media would stop calling these "elite" schools. There's nothing "elite" about USC. They accept more than 50% of the applicants, for goodness sakes. These girls clearly are not academically gifted (surprise, surprise with an actress and a clothes designer for parents), and should either have gone to work or to a community college. Others, the children of people with presumably high enough IQs may have spent the four years of high school in a drug induced fog, and should have paid the price. However, what the parents clearly wanted was that bumper sticker on the car.
Some of the schools were indeed elite: Yale, Stanford. For those it seems that people were paid to take the standardized SAT exams for these dummies, and proctors were paid to let it happen, or for the exams to be corrected before submission.
This was a catastrophe waiting to happen. People were bound to notice at some point that these "scholar-athletes" were not on the teams. The high schools from which the kids came must have noticed that these lackluster students were getting bizarrely high SAT scores.
The sad thing is these kids in most cases would not be able to do the work and so would flunk out anyway eventually.
To take a "political" view of it, I'm actually glad this is happening. Perhaps it will put an end to the movement to do away with the SAT and ACT tests and to base acceptance on high school grades, sports, etc. Can you imagine the shenanigans that would go on? Even in the case of my own children, I knew that there was a little circle of parents who passed around tests taken by their older children to the younger ones to inflate their grades. That's not to mention the thousands of dollars spent on courses to help them do well on the SAT, which is legal, but which is a complete waste of money. The average increase in scores is 10-50 points, which is a pittance when each part of the 3 part test is 800 points.
The left's spin on these tests has been that the standardized tests have to be gotten rid of because they penalize minority black and Hispanic students. It would benefit the not so bright children of the rich too.
These tests are the only thing keeping the whole system semi honest. Of course, there's going to have to be a lot of monitoring even of the test proctors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD1_wc_cI2I
One couple paid 500,000 dollars to get their two daughters into the University of Southern California. Coaches were bribed to get the girls accepted as athletes for the university crew team. ("Relaxed" academic standards are applied to athletes needed for university teams.) They even photoshopped pictures of the girls heads onto pictures of actual athletes. Meanwhile the girls had never been on a crew team.
The stupidity is beyond me.
For one thing, I wish the media would stop calling these "elite" schools. There's nothing "elite" about USC. They accept more than 50% of the applicants, for goodness sakes. These girls clearly are not academically gifted (surprise, surprise with an actress and a clothes designer for parents), and should either have gone to work or to a community college. Others, the children of people with presumably high enough IQs may have spent the four years of high school in a drug induced fog, and should have paid the price. However, what the parents clearly wanted was that bumper sticker on the car.
Some of the schools were indeed elite: Yale, Stanford. For those it seems that people were paid to take the standardized SAT exams for these dummies, and proctors were paid to let it happen, or for the exams to be corrected before submission.
This was a catastrophe waiting to happen. People were bound to notice at some point that these "scholar-athletes" were not on the teams. The high schools from which the kids came must have noticed that these lackluster students were getting bizarrely high SAT scores.
The sad thing is these kids in most cases would not be able to do the work and so would flunk out anyway eventually.
To take a "political" view of it, I'm actually glad this is happening. Perhaps it will put an end to the movement to do away with the SAT and ACT tests and to base acceptance on high school grades, sports, etc. Can you imagine the shenanigans that would go on? Even in the case of my own children, I knew that there was a little circle of parents who passed around tests taken by their older children to the younger ones to inflate their grades. That's not to mention the thousands of dollars spent on courses to help them do well on the SAT, which is legal, but which is a complete waste of money. The average increase in scores is 10-50 points, which is a pittance when each part of the 3 part test is 800 points.
The left's spin on these tests has been that the standardized tests have to be gotten rid of because they penalize minority black and Hispanic students. It would benefit the not so bright children of the rich too.
These tests are the only thing keeping the whole system semi honest. Of course, there's going to have to be a lot of monitoring even of the test proctors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD1_wc_cI2I