I remember how it was -- JR
The College Admissions Process Has Changed in a Big Way
The pandemic affected nearly every facet of life—college included. The changes are going beyond what seems to be an endless freeze on student loan payments and virtual learning. It's also upended the traditional admissions process, which of course, determines who has the privilege of stepping foot on campus.
And despite health restrictions getting rolled back in most places in the country, this looks to be a change that could last well beyond the pandemic.
According to the nonprofit that publishes the Common Application, only 4 percent of colleges now require applicants submit SAT or ACT test scores, which has long provided colleges and universities with a standard metric with which to evaluate academic ability and, in some cases, scholarship eligibility. And fewer than half of early applicants submitted them this fall.
This is a significant change from where things stood pre-pandemic.
The data point could mark a watershed moment in admissions, college advisers say, when a pandemic pause in SAT and ACT testing requirements evolved into something more permanent.
Just three years ago, 78 percent of applicants included test scores in their early Common App submissions, a round of admissions that ends Nov. 1.
The share of applicants reporting SAT or ACT scores plunged in 2020, as COVID-19 shuttered testing sites and drove hundreds of colleges to adopt “test-optional” admissions.
Many observers expected the testing requirement to return as restrictions lifted. It hasn’t.
“We’ve actually seen an increase in the share of colleges on the Common App that don’t require a test score,” said Preston Magouirk, senior manager of research and analytics at Common App.
More than 1,800 colleges are “test-optional” this year, including most elite public and private campuses, according to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, or FairTest.
Common App data shows that only 4 percent of colleges require test scores for applications this fall, down from 55 percent in pre-pandemic 2019. The group includes a handful of technical universities and Florida’s state university system. (The Hill)
Admissions experts don't think the trend will reverse course, either.
"I think it's harder to go back," Jed Applerouth, founder of Applerouth Tutoring Services in Atlanta, told The Hill. "When you go test-optional, you have the freedom to build the class you want to build."
While the "test-optional" movement began long before 2020—Bowdoin College started it back in 1970—it picked up steam in the 2000s "amid concerns about equity," according to The Hill.
The trend has also gone beyond undergraduate schools. A council of the American Bar Association voted last month to scrap the LSAT and other standardized testing requirements for admissions starting in 2025.
Diversity has emerged as a central focus of the current testing debate, with the ABA receiving nearly 120 public comments on the matter. Some have called the LSAT a roadblock to building a diverse legal profession while others argued that it is an equalizer that helps underprivileged aspiring lawyers.
Without the testing requirement, admissions offices might place more weight on undergraduate grade-point averages, recommendations or the prestige of an applicants' undergraduate university — which are more subjective factors that could hurt the chances of diverse candidates, the 60 law deans warned in their letter to the ABA. (Reuters)
The proposed rule change heads to a vote in February before the ABA's House of Delegates.
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'Just Enjoying All the Confusion': Deviant Elementary School Teacher Admits What the Real Agenda Is
Transgender music teacher Blaine Banghart works with elementary school students in the Caddo Parish district of Shreveport, Louisiana.
He has come under fire from concerned parents after proudly admitting in two early November Facebook posts that he’s “just enjoying all the confusion” he’s causing his students over his gender identity.
The nonbinary educator, whom students address as Mx. Banghart (not a typo), wrote, “I’m not allowed to tell kids I’m trans or non-binary or that I’m not a girl. I showed up today with a new haircut and presenting much more masc than usual. The kids are all confused and asking why I have a mustache if I’m a girl, if I’m Mr. Banghart now, why am I trying to look like a boy, etc.”
He continued, “I’m just ignoring questions/redirecting so I don’t get in trouble. Though some of the reactions are hurtful (I’m not mad — they’re kids and don’t mean harm), I’m mostly just enjoying all the confusion about ‘what’ I am. Wondering what they’re going to do when I have the mustache AND a skirt later this week lol.”
Funny, huh?
In a second post, Banghart said, “I just had a parent ask me my preferred adjectives because she wanted to comment on one of my photos, but she wanted to use words that I liked hearing for myself. That’s the kind of allyship that I need, A plus.”
This wasn’t the first time parents have spoken up about Banghart’s attire and his interactions with students. Fox News Digital reported that, during a Caddo Parish School Board meeting held in March, parents expressed concern about a video posted to TikTok in which he voiced his frustration over his “inability to be out at work.”
The district’s chief technology officer, Keith Hanson, defended Banghart at that meeting. According to Fox, Hanson said, “I have never spoken here as a citizen or parent of a student, but I am here today because this is important to me, my family and, most importantly, to her [Banghart]. Let everyone see on public record that there are good people here ready to defend other good people from vile, bigoted hate.”
It appears that Hanson is misconstruing Banghart’s motives. This so-called “educator” is openly admitting that he enjoys confusing children about gender and sexuality. And this may arguably be the left’s true agenda. It sure appears that way.
Banghart was hired to teach music to Caddo Parish elementary school students. Educating them on his perception of gender identity was never part of his job description. His delight over confusing young and impressionable students about his own gender dysphoria is contemptible.
The Western Journal reached out to the school district for comment. Here is their response: “Caddo Parish Public Schools cannot comment on personnel matters regarding individual employees of the school system.”
Imagine some of these students competing in the real world 20 years from now with individuals who’ve been educated in more traditional school systems. They will be insisting that men can get pregnant and that sometimes doctors are wrong when they determine the sex of a newborn baby. This will put them at a serious disadvantage.
Gender ideology, the idea that gender is a fluid construct rather than an undeniable biological fact, has made its way into just about every part of our culture. The pandemic forced the public to face wokeism head-on. Parents became aware, some for the very first time, of how deeply the woke worldview had already infected public school curricula.
The left has celebrated the transgender movement in the United States unabashedly, praising gender-confused individuals for their courage and passing policies to cement “gender identity” into our legal code as well as our national discourse.
This pathetic bow to the woke will not end well. What if some of these individuals have been misdiagnosed? What if, rather than suffering from gender dysphoria, they are actually struggling with trauma, depression or something else?
How far will it go? A middle school parent with whom I chatted recently said her children’s public school has normalized “furries.” She told me: “Furries go to school acting like cats or dogs. They literally meow or woof, and their teachers must treat them like animals. They have their own litter box in the bathroom and everything.”
It almost makes me pine for the days of bullying. Imagine how middle school students would have dealt with a “furry” 10 or 15 years ago. But, I suppose, if children are allowed to decide their gender, why not let them decide their species as well?
This is a dangerous ideology and, if left unchecked, the consequences for America’s children, adults and society as a whole will be grievous.
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What I Saw Attending College in ‘The People’s Republic of Boulder’
Decades ago, KGB spy Yuri Bezmenov defected to America and exposed a four-step plan the Soviets engineered to bring down the United States: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization. Demoralization was the first and most critical step, and it involved infiltrating the institutions upon which our society was built.
Although the Soviet Union is long gone, demoralization is still occurring in the United States, but it’s coming from within, especially from our academic institutions. I know this firsthand because I almost became another demoralized, nihilistic American youth until I learned to turn my left-leaning college experience to my benefit.
I attended the University of Colorado Boulder—in a place so far ideologically left that Coloradans jokingly refer to the town as “The People’s Republic of Boulder.” On the surface, it looked like a typical college campus with sororities, fraternities, and students busily rushing around campus trying to get to their destinations. Students had that adventurous attitude that comes with being away from home for the first time.
However, I was able to quickly pick up on the subliminal messaging in my introductory classes intended to push students toward the left. And the messaging became increasingly more blatant and extreme as my undergraduate career progressed.
For example, my Sociology 101 professor delivered his lectures as if he were matter-of-factly lecturing on various theories, thinkers, and ideas of the field, but he skillfully and ever so cunningly was steering 400 students to think as Marx did.
I specifically remember how he got almost the entire class to agree with his proposition that employees and employers are inherently in conflict with each other because while one group is interested in trying to increase its compensation, the other is actively attempting to lower it. Of course, there was absolutely no mention of thinkers such as Thomas Sowell who thoroughly debunked that Marxist viewpoint.
What was most alarming to me as a 19-year-old college student was just how unthinkingly my peers accepted the professor’s argumentation without much, if any, challenge.
By the time I became a senior in college, I witnessed a professor declare to the class his allegiance to Foucauldian ideology (i.e., an oppressor versus oppressed worldview expressed by power dynamics) by stating, “I’m a Michel Foucault fanboy.” When this professor suggested that being white automatically made a person a racist, my classmates simply nodded their heads, accepting such nonsensical statements as truth.
What solidified all this indoctrination in such young impressionable minds was when my fellow students were generously rewarded with high scores for their repetition and slow acceptance of the leftist worldview. This is how the process of demoralizing thousands of young people at just one of the many “places of higher learning” throughout our nation takes place.
With the nonstop bombardment of woke messaging coming at college students, how can they possibly hope to maintain the will to keep pursuing their degrees, let alone keep their sanity?
The answer lies within a human being’s power of interpretation. According to the ancient stoics, the only things in the world that we have total control over are our own actions, our reactions to outside stimuli, and the way we interpret our experiences. This wisdom is directly applicable to—and necessary for—the survival and thriving of an open-minded college student.
Although I had a choice to view my college experience as a dreadful slog through the thick mire of extreme leftist ideology with its divisive messaging, I decided to treat this experience as an opportunity to learn as much as I could about what makes people so possessed with such a negative worldview. In other words, I treated my college years as an observational research project.
I attended each class with this mindset, and, in a very short time, I was able to make my classes significantly more interesting—all because of how I chose to think about them.
This is what my advice is to students sitting in a classroom right now, trying to keep their eyes open because they’re so bored of being on the receiving end of incessant propaganda: Remain critically engaged without becoming sentimental about well-crafted messaging directed to arouse feelings of guilt or inadequacy. Also, view your experience as an opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes look at how the process of demoralization works in practice.
For those who reject this extreme ideology because of its destructive nature that divides people into “us versus them” categories, treat this as an opportunity to learn about how and what your ideological opponents think and what their plans for the future are.
In other words, do what the ancient Chinese warrior-philosopher Sun Tzu would do: The more you look at it from their perspective, the more you are preparing yourself to effectively counter your opposition—and the better you are preparing yourself to win on the ideological battlefield.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/11/29/how-i-turned-my-left-leaning-college-experience-to-my-benefit
***********************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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