Admissions offices are pamphleteers of the prospective class struggle which hand out their literature to uninformed students who know little about what they are getting into besides heaps of debt. Such offices provide tours which walk the party line, and ask only for an applicant's submission.
Admissions offices have also learned the marketing lesson that the best commercial lighting is often artificial. For example, Claremont McKenna College revealed Monday that it had reported inflated SAT scores since 2005, a move seen as primarily motivated to improve its position in various rankings of U.S. colleges. The school is currently No. 9 on the U.S. News & World Report's list of best liberal arts colleges.
The fabrications - about 10-20 points on both sections of the 1600 point SAT - most likely had an impact wherever they were reported, including to academic and credit rating institutions and the Department of Education. Moreover, they must have affected, as any self-conscious student knows, Mr. Claremont McKenna's reputation and self-confidence.
But this incident is besides the points, for more bizarre is the acceptance of a college being graded by the scores of its students. It is not a vicious or virtuous cycle but a treadmill exercise in circular reasoning that colleges promote the high scores of accepted students who needed such numbers to get there in the first place. The self-promotion of an SAT score - as if colleges were good test-takers - is only one part of the larger feedback mechanism of college reputations. These reputations are built on tradition and cemented annually by rankings, creating among universities an oligarchy of prestige and endowment gifts which keep on giving.
Universities need to gather information about their students, and vice-versa. It is the fault of neither that there is essentially a monopoly among the two go-betweens which would give them credentials. For the universities, U.S. News & World Report is the gatekeeper, and for students it is the College Board, which runs the SATs and Advancement Placement, the "tests" we refer to in "teaching to the tests."
Skeptics will demand alternative, "holistic" measurements. But those familiar with Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic know that introducing new forms of rank will only lead to a ranking of the rankings. This regress leads to a re-evaluation at every higher level, the elevator not stopping until it hits the roof characterizing the monopolistic or totalitarian.
Surely students deserve additional options, a wish becoming reality by means of more financially or digitally accessible varieties of education. Online classes continue to open for enrollment, and students can take other tests or time off or hand-pick motor skills to woo an employer. But the nature of advancement is to keep turning in answers to some party in judgment. Students will keep taking the point-by-point methodology of U.S. News and World Report or whoever until they internalize their own values and become their own rankers.
There are enough compromises to be had without universities giving up a pride and honesty in intellectual inquiry to cater to multiple choices. The actions of Claremont McKenna are doubly damning not only because, like a bad-faith investor, the institution messed with data which was not its own, but because look how embarrassing it is for a liberal arts college to feel the need to do so.
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