Report to the Board of Trustees and the Faculty of Smart University
What is the purpose of a college education at Smart University? Ultimately, it is to give students the necessary intellectual tools to become better learners when they leave the school. It is to enable the students to give back to the wider community in their future professions and lives. It is to teach Smart students to fish for a lifetime, not simply to feed a Smart student for a day-and ideally, for Smart students learn how to 'teach themselves' and others how to fish for knowledge and resources throughout their lives. At Smart, we do not provide a practical education like a trade school that seeks to merely hone an individual's ability at a specific series of tasks. Rather, we strive to provide a holistic atmosphere of enrichment to formulate the character of an undergraduate. The ultimate criteria of admission is to find the students who can take the most from our environment, and give the most back to campus during their four years of residence, and later to the world. We should seek studen
Even if the applicants are of the same level of ability and have the same determination to learn, the child of the professor will have had more intellectual opportunities to, for example, enrich his or her vocabulary on a daily basis. However, this would not fulfill the mission of diversity-we would lose many of our musicians and our athletes, as well as students without access to expensive test preparation courses, and simply many creative and fertile minds that think outside of the scantron box. Smart University could fill a class of students with perfect scores on the SATs or ACTs. Thus every student must be evaluated as an individual, and standardized tests should have a minimal role in admissions decisions. This raises the question of standardized testing. And yes, we would be a less diverse school given the bias of these tests towards students with a specific cultural and vocabulary background. Students that come from more economically and academically advantaged high schools have a clear advantage-to say nothing of students that make use of the commercial test preparatory industry, which is perhaps the ultimate beneficiary of this nation's mania for standardized exams. The child of a professor that grew up talking about Kant over the dinner table cannot be evaluated in the same way as a child from working-class parents. Creating a strong undergraduate class is more art than science. Ultimately, a child's grades, home environment, willingness to make the maximum use of the difficult courses and activities provided by his or her school and community are the best determination of his or her ability to take advantage of a Smart University education. Considering a student's racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic background is legitimate, if and only if the student has shown a strong wiliness to maximize his or her environmental opportunities. Creating a diverse class of interests and abilities, including the arts and athletics, is also important. A variety of different factors must be taken into holistic consideration to provide the admissions staff with the best, albeit imperfect methodology of creating an incoming class. ts that have strived to learn and profit the most from the environments in which they grew up and where they were educated.
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