A new story by South China Morning Post has pulled back the veil on a very sinister practice surrounding the SAT scores and race.
According to the Post, Princeton University has set into place a series of predetermined qualifiers to the demographics taking the most popular college aptitude test in hopes of attending its prestigious halls – in the name of obtaining the ever-fleeting vestige of “diversity” the liberal left always seems to equate to vacuous, obvious ethnic quotas, the Ivy League school has apparently limited its acceptance rates of qualified Asian applicants while artificially boosting those of their White and Black counterparts – even when said applicants scores lower on the test.
Ann Lee, an admissions counselor from Arcadia, CA explains this process by pointing out Princeton’s system for reading the SAT scores unevenly across racial groups.
From scmp.com:
“[Princeton] uses the term ‘bonus’ to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant’s race is worth. She points to the first column.
African-Americans received a ‘bonus’ of 230 points, Lee says.
She points to the second column. ‘Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.’
The last column draws gasps.
Asian-Americans, Lee says, are penalised by 50 points – in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.
‘Do Asians need higher test scores? Is it harder for Asians to get into college? The answer is yes,’ Lee says.”
This practice in and of itself is not exactly news, as suspicion of such unfair treatment of Asian applicant has been publicly obtainable for at least a decade in the form of lawsuits from wronged students. But, this begs a very pertinent question: must “diversity” be so imperative to prestigious schools so as to come at the expense of revering true excellence? Has political correctness gotten to the point where we now punish individuals for simply being unlucky? To be born in a racial demographic that happens to statistically score higher academically in the U.S. is now cause to be discriminated against? Is this really the great vision of post-racial America Dr. King dreamed of?
It has been argued before that Asians have an unfair advantage over their fellow minorities due to some inexplicable ability to outperform them. Setting aside the ignorant claim that this apparent advantage is somehow genetic (it isn’t), we must ask ourselves if gaming the system against the statistically better performers is even fair in and of itself – I would argue this is not at all the case, and that true equal treatment would be to stop dividing people up into racial boxes in an attempt to obtain some faux sense of enlightenment or diversity. How about we simply take people as individuals and reward them as such? Is that so hard?
