It isn’t fair, dear readers, that Yours Truly is taller, stronger, more virile, intelligent, handsome, humorous, magnificent and humbler than you. I was born that way.

These esteemed and desirable traits naturally give me advantages you won’t share. Such as in the ability to mouth off and pay the price.

Or to do well on tests.

Naturally, those who do not possess the same traits, or have them to the same glorious degree, will not tend to do as well on these tests.

And that isn’t fair. Not if we desire to correct and insure against “inequities”.

One way to guarantee the better do worse is the Kurt Vonnegut Harrison-Bergeron solution of weighing the better down—using literal weights. Fog their brains through medication. Put obstacles in their path. Dissuade and penalize them officially.

It’s not that these tactics are spurned, or even disliked. But they do require effort and aren’t cheap to implement.

A better solution is to eliminate tests, grades, and any sort of contest where the better can lord it over others. Define standards down or eliminate them entirely.

Example one: “UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ just announced her support of dropping the SAT and ACT as an admissions requirement. Says research has convinced her the tests ‘really contribute to the inequities’ of the system.”

This Carol lady is right. The SAT and ACT when used as admissions requirements do indeed tend to contribute in a rough but direct causal way to the ‘inequities’ of the system. Better people will on average achieve higher scores and more admissions. Measures taken of the system when standards are in place will not show the required Diversity and Equality.

One can, as Harvard does, penalize better people à la Vonnegut. This keeps East Asians matriculations down to manageable levels. But penalizing causes noticing, and noticing causes lawsuits and other publicity difficulties. Expensive, even if Harvard wins.

How much simpler to dump the tests altogether!

Example two: Meritocracy’s Waterloo?

Social-justice organizations last week threatened the University of California with a lawsuit unless it halts the use of standardized testing in admissions, claiming the tests discriminate against minorities… Standardized tests have been a target of the left for decades, but in 2018 something changed. Dozens of colleges, most significantly the University of Chicago, have been dropping their standardized-test requirements. The number of students who take the SAT and ACT has been holding steady because enough schools still use them. Yet the UC is by far the largest university system in the country, and if it throws out testing the admissions landscape would fundamentally change. Several UC regents are on record criticizing the test as unfair to the underprivileged. Governor Gavin Newsom, who appoints most regents, said last month that tests exacerbate “the inequities for underrepresented students.” A UC faculty task force will give recommendations early next year. Anti-testing campaigners have been unable to explain how they would academically compare students across schools with different grading standards. They want to stamp out performance disparities on tests, but tackling the achievement gap requires improving education in poor areas. Standardized tests can seem frustrating and arbitrary, but so is the entire college admissions tournament, which weighs activities, personal characteristics, “character” and often race. Testing is at least objective.

SJWs, the irksome Newsom, the University of Chicago bosses, like that lady Carol, are right. Their argument is unassailable. Testing—contests in the any shape or form—causes disparities and inequities.

Tests (contests) are designed to produced disparities and inequities!

Ensuring, highlighting, demarcating, recording, broadcasting and using disparities and inequities is the very nature of contests. This is why we have them.

This is why there is no argument whatsoever that can be used against SJWs about keeping testing. They will win every one, eventually. They will get their way and eliminate standards of every kind. They will cause entropy, which is death.

If you want to beat death, then you must argue for disparities and inequities. You must argue against the false gods of Diversity and Equality. You must acknowledge and fight for the idea that inequality is better than equality, that disparities are not a great evil but a great good.

Now the title promised worldwide. This is a true statement. Western Europe was a given. But how about thought-to-be-based Singapore? NTU aims to admit 50% of its students using broader criteria.

“NTUS’s new holistic approach means that our professors are investing more time, resources and manpower to interview and assess individual students.”

This tendency to eliminate standards is already well with us, but the use heretofore has been to deny declining standards. Now standards themselves are declared immoral.

Statistical Bonus!

A bad argument against testing is that it does not correlate against eventual success, like class grades. This is dumb. Suppose we only allow the top 1% of test takers into a university. The class grades of these people will indeed show little correlation with their entrance test scores. Test instead everybody, entrants and the barred, and presto!, the correlation comes roaring back. I leave it as a homework problem to explain this.

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