Bribe Your Way Into Yale

Quite the story going around now, about the wealthy advancing from merely making large donations to universities to outright bribing the schools into admitting their less than capable children.

The linked article is about how the elite hates standardized tests, and quotes a tweet from one ultraprivileged individual (who is too cool to use capital letters):

a casual reminder that lots of upper middle class parents (perfectly legally) improve their kids’ SAT scores by paying tutors to teach them to game the system. mine did. my math score jumped almost 200 points, which i promise reflected no similar increase in my command of *math*
without that systemic leg up, i doubt i would have gotten into yale, from which i graduated with honors etc. i was exactly the same applicant pre & post tutoring. i just looked different on paper. well aware most of my peers’ families could not afford to give them that advantage.

Well, 200 points is not actually enough to swing an average SAT score to Yale-bound levels.  But she needed it, because Yale had minimal standards, even for someone part of Hollywood royalty.

From the article:

And it’s likely that many commentators will use this event as an opportunity to attack the SAT and the ACT. Progressives view test-based admissions as inequitable because some marginalized groups are significantly underrepresented among the pool of top-scoring college applicants.

I've long rejected the idea that these standardized tests are biased against certain groups.  I'm willing to be proven wrong, and this is how you would demonstrate that the exams are biased:

1. Come up with three standardized tests to measure intelligence.
2. Have experts in the fields say that these are all tests designed to measure intelligence.
3. Say that on test 1, group A will outperform group B.  On test 2, group A and group B will score about the same.  On test 3, group B will outperform group A.
4. Demonstrate these assertions by actual members of group A and group B taking these three tests.

The article continues:

But millionaires and elites also hate standardized admissions tests, because their children’s admission to top colleges is contingent upon test scores.

So true!