Email This StoryEditorial: Freshmen given preferential treatment in SAT testing
Oct. 14, 2008
 Claire Taylor/Lariat Staff |
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This deal is unfair to the upperclassmen at Baylor. Every college student could use an extra $300 to pay for books or the chance to knock $1,000 off each year's tuition, but only this year's freshmen received that opportunity. For the students who came before, once the deadline to retest had passed, the scores they had were the scores that stuck. They couldn't earn a higher scholarship package.
The original deadline for this year's freshmen to submit their SAT scores was February. Baylor decided to dismiss that deadline when it sent an e-mail with the offer to students to retest in the summer. If Baylor is going to offer this opportunity to one class, it should offer it to every class. We all had to take standardized tests to get in here, and we all have to pay large sums of money to continue going here, so we should all get the chance to retake the test for the same benefits.
Since students don't really have any use for SAT scores once they are accepted into college, it seems Baylor's motives for the retesting opportunity were purely selfish.
Baylor officials say the reason for the extended deadline was to motivate students to get as much scholarship money as they could. The reason for the incentives was to motivate more students to take advantage of the testing, officials said. While officials can claim these reasons for encouraging freshmen to retake the SAT, it seems that the real motive was to increase the school's rankings in reports such as those in U.S. News and World Report.
This year's freshman class had an average SAT score of 1200, 19 points lower than the freshman class of 2007 and 13 points lower than that of 2006. Academic standings like SAT scores are known to have an effect on a school's rankings, which may explain why Baylor's ranking dropped a spot, from 75 to 76, this year.
A better solution to this problem is simple: Don't admit low-scoring students into Baylor. Dr. Reagan Ramsower, vice president for finance, said Baylor had a goal of 3,000 students to admit for this year's freshman class, and to meet that quota, Baylor had to recruit more students with a middle-ranking academic index. Baylor should focus on recruiting the best students and not solely on increasing the size of the student body. Baylor officials are choosing quantity over quality, and to compensate for the dip in rankings, they are making shady back-door deals.
The offer to the freshman class may have seemed more legitimate if Baylor officials had done it in the open instead of trying to handle it behind closed doors.
Members of Student Government were unaware of Baylor's decision to pay students for higher SAT scores until months after the incentives had been offered. The Baylor officials that the Lariat spoke with couldn't name exactly where the decision had come from but said it came from the "higher-ups" in Pat Neff. Many of these officials did not agree with the idea.
Baylor officials also could not tell the Lariat where the money to pay for these incentives came from. There were 861 students who took advantage of the offer, receiving the $300 credit to the bookstore. That's $258,300. Of the 861, 151 scored the extra 50 points or more to receive the $1,000 added to their scholarship packages or achieved a higher scholarship level. That's at least another $151,000. Altogether, that's $409,300 that had to come from somewhere, potentially students' tuition.
Baylor needs to be more open with information like this, so it can be held accountable for decisions that may be made with students' money.
Read Baylor's e-mail to the freshmen here.
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