RACIST ANTIRACISM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA IS BACK – by John McWhorter – It Bears Mentioning

For one, as my colleague at the Atlantic Caitlin Flanagan has noted, the SAT was helping brown applicants in many ways. Contrary to common wisdom, the SAT has not been proven to be irrelevant to predicting students performance. A study of UC, specifically, showed that the SAT nicely predicts who will graduate and even tracks with GPA. Also, for students at schools not offering enough Advanced Placement courses to qualify for UC schools and such students are disproportionately brown: systemic racism, anyone? the SAT was a way of qualifying anyway.

How antiracist to pull the test out of the equation.

More to the point, the idea that if you don t get into Berkeley or UCLA you re doomed to a life selling apples on the street is fantasy. Here s a type of story you don t hear much at the University of California, San Diego the year before the preferences ban, one black student out of 3,268 freshmen made honors. A few years later, after students who once would have gotten into Berkeley or UCLA were now admitted to schools such as UCSD, one in five black freshmen were making honors, the same proportion as white ones.

That kids do better at schools that their grades and test scores prepared them for is 1) intuitive and 2) proven by this study by Peter Arcidiacono, Esteban Ausejo and Joseph Hotz, as well as another two I am aware of. Brown kids mismatched to their schools tend not to do well and to be unhappy.

How antiracist to pretend this isn t true.

via johnmcwhorter.substack.com

I’ve made my feelings about the SAT clear. I see it as one of the few semi-objective measures that give kids from the sticks a chance to compete fairly with kids from Exeter or Brearley. If we get rid of it and go with subjective, “holistic” measures of merit, we will just end up going back to the old system of cronyism, with race thrown in as one of the factors. The SAT system is the worst system to use, except for all the others.