Baylor Gets Scandal-y
Two days ago the Lariat published an editorial indicating Baylor was paying already-accepted incoming freshman $300 to retake their SAT plus $1000 a year in scholarship money if they scored at least 50 points higher.
The end result for Baylor: a 10 point increase in the average SAT score and a whole lot of surprisingly deep shit.
For the further reading see:
- Lariat: Faculty Pissed
- Lariat: We Made a Controversy!!!
- NY Times: Baylor May Have Cheated
- NY Times: Faculty Thinks Baylor Cheated
- Inside Higher Ed: Baylor is the Poster Child for SAT Misuse
UPDATE: Law schools do it too!!
The Law Blog referred me to the Tax Blog, and the Tax Blog referred me to a couple of ways other schools game the system.
posted by Jon Swanburg @ 9:15 AM
6 comments
6 Comments:
What kind of blows my mind is how cost-effective that system has been: a 10 point average boost for $363,300. That's nothing. If Baylor paid 10 kids with 1500 SAT scores $36,300 bucks each to come here it would only raise the average SAT score by 1 point. That's assuming you could buy 10 kids with 1500s such a small amount of money; Baylor offers 1500s $58,000 over 4 years to come. For that price, you'd only get 6, and that would only raise the average SAT score by two-thirds of a percent. In other words, as far as purchasing SAT scores goes, this is by far the best plan I've ever heard.
To summarize: this new plan is on the order of 15 times as effective as giving out scholarship money.
And I figured that out using the scholarship calculator on their website: http://www.baylor.edu/admissions/index.php?id=58778
First, not that I disagree, and not that it makes a material difference to your argument, but according to today's Lariat, the cost of the program amounted to $862,000.
http://www.baylor.edu/lariat/news.php?action=story&story=53791
Second, despite the initial efficiencies, it's bad precedent that inevitably leads to a prisoners dilemma.
Baylor gets the first mover advantage meaning every other school is worse-off if they do nothing and better-off if they do the same. This forces them to follow Baylor's lead and after awhile, every school is paying people to retake tests.
This makes every school worse off.
Whoever said it was $862,000 needs to check their math. They said that it's $300 if they retake it at all, and $1,000 if they do 50 points better. 861 took the test. That would mean that every one of them did 50 points or better. That's internally inconsistent, unless there's some hidden cost in the procedure ($500,000 in printing out the coupons, maybe?). My calculation was based on 861 kids taking the test, and 150 of them doing 50 points better (based on the articles you posted, such as the New York Times article at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/education/15baylor.html?_r=2&scp=2&sq=baylor&st=cse&oref=slogin&oref=slogin). So that's 150*$1,000 + 711*$300 = $363,300.
As for the merits of the project, I completely agree with you, the fact that the school is boosting its SAT scores that effectively for that cheaply should be a tip-off that something is wrong. It's like the University is taking steroids. They spent all that money, but the student body didn't change at all, it just spent another 3 hours taking a test. It's possible that some of the kids studied up for a couple hours, thinking the thousand bucks might be worth the time, but I'm not sure what that's really worth. In other words, yeah, I agree, Baylor gamed the system. And the SATs shouldn't be available for students that have already accepted a school.
If the system is broken, you game it to win. That's what I learned at the law school.
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