<p>Lively reading!</p>
<ul>
<li><p>"The charges on which Deresiewics indicts students are trumped-up. ... [he] prestidigitates out of thin air."</p></li>
<li><p>"...Harvard selects at most 10 percent ... of its students on the basis of academic merit ... Harvard wants to train future leaders of the world, not the future academics of the world ... We want to read about our students in Newsweek 20 years hence (prompting the woman next to me to mutter "like the Unabomber") ... The rest are selected "holistically," based on participation in athletics, the arts, charity, activism, travel, and ... race, donations, and legacy status (since anything can be hidden behind the holistic fig leaf)"</p></li>
<li><p>"A skilled professional had to ... chauffeur her son to a resume-building "social action" assignment required by his high school. This involved driving the boy for 45 minutes to a community center, cooling her heels while he sorted using clothing for charity, and driving him back -- forgoing [her] income which, judiciously donated, could have fed, clothed, and innoculated an African village. The dubious "lessons" ... as an overqualified ragpicker are that children are entitled to treat their mother's time as worth nothing, and that the moral worth of an action should be measured by the conspicuousness of the sacrifice rather than the gain to the beneficiary."</p></li>
<li><p>" Benbow ... and Lubinski have tracked a large sample of precocious teenagers identified solely by high performance on the SAT, and found that when they grew up, they not only excelled in academia, technology, medicine, and business, but won outsize recognition for their novels, plays poems, paintings, sculptures, and productions in dance, music and theater."</p></li>
<li><p>"We do have this magic measuring stick ... it's called standardized testing. .. So why aren't [testing-based] alternatives like this even on the table? ... popular writers like Stephen Jay Gould and Malcolm Gladwell, pushing a leftists or heart-above-head egalitarianism, ... insisted that tests don't predict anything, ..., or that they do but only because affluent parents can goose their children's scores by .. test-prep courses. ... But all of these hypotheses have been empirically refuted. ... test scores ... predict a vast range of intellectual, practical and artistic accomplishments .. intuitive judgments based on interviews and other subjective impressions have been shown to be far worse. Test preparation courses ... increase scores by a trifling seventh of a standard deviation ... As for "SAT ... actually measures .. parental income..." this is bad social science. SAT correlates with parental income ... the correlation could simply mean that smart parents have smarter kids ... and .. have more intellectually demanding and thus higher-paying jobs. ... SAT ... really does measure .. aptitude. ... Sacket ... [showed] that SAT scores predict future university grades, ... whereas parental [socio-economic status] does not. ... McGue has shown ... that ... test scores track the [socio-economic status] only of their biological parents, not (for adopted kids) of their adoptive parents."</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Both Deresiewics and Pinker want changes -- it's just that they want them in opposite directions!</p>
<p>"If ... a university doesn't want a ... class composed solely of scary-smart kids, .. [they can] fill a certain fraction of the incoming class with the highest-scoring applicants, and select the remainder ... by lottery .. [and] pull up the number of minorities or legacies. .. it's hard to see how a simple, transparent, and objective formula would be worse thanthe eye-of-the-newt-wing-of-bat mysticism that jerks teenagers and their moms around and conceals unknown mischief."</p>