|
Letter: What if the sick took an entrance exam?
Op-Ed · July 30, 2015
After reading in an area newspaper a surprising opinion piece by ACT President Jon Erickson that was titled “ACT an important evaluation of college readiness,” I am starting to think that my higher education from days before there were college entrance exams may have started to wear so thin that my capacity for reality testing has slipped far behind what is acceptable for decision making in these standardized-testing times.
Such standardized tests are proffered to be much superior in whittling down the long list of applicants to an eminent university to the select few (or fewer depending on how enrolment is going) to be admitted, and to do so in a manner much superior to the flip of a coin or just opening the doors to see who shows up. And on exiting with a diploma in hand, those that have now been let in to such a university have their sheepskin accepted for employment by business and industry as a standardized measure that the bearer will well fit into the profiteering motives of the organization until the hired get pink-slipped out for having become too obsolescent, or elevated within to a level of incompetence which via a flip of the coin in a board room may one day make them CEO, drawing in so much money that some of it can be given to the CEO’s alma mater to construct a campus building in his and family name — with the children growing up and on to better attend Harvard or Yale instead.
Were medical emergency facilities to employ like testing they could reject those whose trauma most needed lifesaving attention that might spoil the facilities survival record, and only admit for treatment those that needed it the least. Patients treat for hangnails would be on discharge awarded something honorably equivalent to a college graduate’s Phi Beta Kappa Key.
Oh, but back to that CEO who is the featured speaker at the dedication of the monumental building constructed in honor of his having attended such a fine university; the CEO considers himself to have been fortunate to have even been admitted and then grandly turned out to be such a success, and he now displays some chuckle-arousing humility by contending: “I was just dying to get in” — which might have also come from the muted lips of an emergency room trauma victim that had been rejected for treatment on the basis of a low entrance-exam score.
Entry into college in my old school days was much like that for getting oneself into a cemetery, you just showed up and they did with you what they could.
Sam Osborne,
West Branch
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
