An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

I forget the max GPA in our class, it was somewhere between 4 and 5, but I don't think it was the theoretical max you could get if you took as many AP classes as possible and got A's in all of them.

Colleges weren't stupid about it, either, though. My brother had a lower GPA since he went to a smaller school with very few AP classes available, but did better relative to that curriculum than I did relevant to mine's, and he got more scholarship offers and quicker admission offers at the schools we both applied to. Even though my SAT was 10 points higher.

>Wisdom is about using your abilities and knowledge not just for your own selfish ends and for people like you. It’s about using them to help achieve a common good by balancing your own interests with other people’s and with high-order interests through the infusion of positive ethical values.

The author is essentially arguing that "intelligence" should be redefined to include not only practical problem-solving abilities, but a specific set of moral values. He is arguing that it is acceptable to reject an otherwise excellent college candidate because they're a nihilist or an objectivist or a nationalist, so by his standards are "unwise" or "lacking in ethical intelligence".

Right now, America is in the midst of a vast rebellion against the scientific consensus. Millions of Americans reject essential and well-proven scientific theories, in large part because they believe that academia is a highly politicised liberal institution. They don't believe the data and they don't trust the objectivity of the people who collected it. I very much doubt that making college admission contingent on holding a certain set of ethical beliefs will help to challenge that view.

Conservatives are vastly under-represented in academia and have been for many decades. Many conservative students and academics feel that they are actively discriminated against on an institutional level. Whatever your political beliefs, this should be deeply concerning to you, if only because of the ammunition that it hands to the likes of Trump.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674059092

Both are regularly conflated with postmodernism, but neither is intrinsically postmodernist - relativism predates it by approximately forever, and (contemporary) critical theory is a child of the postmodernism of the 1980s and 1990s (with origins in the late 1930s).

There are good reasons to be skeptical of both, but it's a gross exaggeration to say that they've "poisoned" the humanities. My experience as a philosophy major has been full of extreme (and deserved) skepticism towards relativism. Critical theory has grown in popularity, but it's nowhere near the boogeyman that many (including my peers in STEM!) seem to make of it.

Individuals vary, of course, but "postmodernism" never took over the liberal arts. It's just another school of thought, and not a particularly popular one at that.

Edit:

[1]: I don't want to give the impression that most (or even any) relativists believe that all truths are relative. This would, again, be a tremendous mischaracterization - most are not interested in challenging empirical truths.

Instead, most relativists are skeptical about the absoluteness of moral truths. I happen to be a (somewhat firm) moral realist, so that's all very silly to me. However, it's the difference between a completely incoherent view (all truths are relative) and a coherent view that I think is probably incorrect (moral truths are not absolute).

It turns out, a bunch of students got together, created a club, and each member was called a "President." The best part is that if an employer ever checked, any member could honestly say "yes, he's a President in that club."