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Bucknell jumps onto the list of admission office scandals

Walter Sobchak, one of our faithful readers, drew my attention to an article by Scott Jaschik at InsideHigherEd about the scandal at Bucknell. Someone– it’s not clear who– left out groups of kids and boosted the average SAT score of admitted students between 7 and 25 points. Given that these groups weren’t very large (7-47 students) and some of the groups’ members had good scores, the others probably had some horrible scores. Real stinkers.

The new admission’s director decided to make a scandal out of it so his job will get a bit easier. He won’t have to compete with last year’s higher bar.

This practice is, as far as I can tell, fairly common. Schools look for any excuse to toss aside the unusual applicants. They might be minorities, athletes, or legacies. Maybe it’s just the art students. Who knows? I’m told they’re much stricter when they put average SAT scores in their bond prospectuses because those are legal documents. If you’re really curious, go look them up.

The real trick is to have a separate round of admissions, say in mid-summer. This is rarely publicized, but this is how they sneak the low SAT scores into the best colleges. By moving them to an entirely different admissions round, no one has to exclude anyone.

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This entry was written by admin and posted on January 30, 2013 at 11:47 am and filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

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2 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

  1. But those “selective” colleges have to maintain their appearance!

    Otherwise people would realize how low the bar is, and god forbid that people be made aware of the worthlessness of a degree from a formerly “selective and prestigious” school.

    1. Kevin Matchstick on January 30th, 2013 at 2:27 pm

  2. The best advice for understanding the information the CIC provides to USNews comes from the fictional Dr. Gregory House: “It’s a basic truth of the human condition, that everybody lies.”

    To understand the CIC you must know that the institution, not just the people who play roles in it, but the entire institution is entirely corrupt. The underlying source of its corruption is its need for ever growing revenue streams.

    One of the main sources of that revenue is the willingness of parents and students to borrow money on the most onerous terms available since the abolition of debt slavery.

    That willingness is in turn predicated on the lies that the CIC tells about the value of its services. And the CIC is ready, willing, able to lie to them and the rest of the American people.

    2. Walter Sobchak on January 30th, 2013 at 4:47 pm