As Good as We Pretend to Be

A few days ago, this story appeared on Yahoo! (and very likely elsewhere), about a senior admissions official at Claremont McKenna College who has been falsifying SAT score reports to U.S. News and World Report and other places for several years. The inflation of scores was apparently not extreme (10-20 points), but may have increased the liberal arts college's desirability and (perhaps) ranking among other colleges, leading to increased revenue for the school. The official has resigned and the school has launched a formal investigation.

Though not as severe, the case is reminiscent of the Atlanta Public School scandal that unfolded last summer, when it was revealed that "at least 178 teachers and principals in Atlanta Public Schools cheated to raise student scores on high-stakes standardized tests." One wonders what kind of incentive students have to do well, when officials will fudge things to make both themselves and the students look better. In both cases the cause probably involves money, but there also seems to be a sense, at least in the Atlanta case, that the teachers were acting for what they believed to be positive ends. I won't start the argument about the (legitimate/illegitimate/high/low/) importance of standardized testing in secondary school, but all of this does seem a lot of time wasted that could have been spent actually teaching students. Perhaps no one attended Claremont McKenna because of its students' test scores, but the school will certainly have the stain of dishonesty on it for several years now.