The article I chose to analyze is Monica Ellen Rizzo’s Master Thesis for her Master of Science in Education titled Redundancy, Discrimination, and Corruption in the Multibillion-Dollar Business of College Admissions Testing. My reason for choosing this paper is the way she presents her argument because she provides a personal reason why she is writing about the subject of college admissions testing and writes the paper very technically which is the way I prefer to think. Her goal for this paper is to show colleges that college admission testing puts extra stress on students and lowering the stakes will improve their lives. The thesis of her paper is “to examine the biases inherent in standardized college entrance exams, their validity as predictors of
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She begins by giving historical context for the origin of standardized testing and how it transformed into the ACT and SAT. Beginning with Socrates in the fifth century B.C.E., she explains how he believed that “the claim that worth can be assigned to individuals and groups by measuring intelligence as a single quality” (Rizzo 11). She then moves on to Samuel George Morton, who believed that the size of the skull determined your intelligence, but it especially favored white males. Morton’s work led to Frenchman Alfred Binet to develop a test that tested children for “retardation.” His test had three rules for use which specifically said “It is not a device for ranking normal children” (Rizzo 12). She then uses this context to add more support to her argument by saying that because college admission testing originated from Binet’s test then, every time someone normal takes the test the very rules of the test are broken. I see this last claim as a stretch because over a hundred years have passed since the creation of his test, and the purpose is
She begins by giving historical context for the origin of standardized testing and how it transformed into the ACT and SAT. Beginning with Socrates in the fifth century B.C.E., she explains how he believed that “the claim that worth can be assigned to individuals and groups by measuring intelligence as a single quality” (Rizzo 11). She then moves on to Samuel George Morton, who believed that the size of the skull determined your intelligence, but it especially favored white males. Morton’s work led to Frenchman Alfred Binet to develop a test that tested children for “retardation.” His test had three rules for use which specifically said “It is not a device for ranking normal children” (Rizzo 12). She then uses this context to add more support to her argument by saying that because college admission testing originated from Binet’s test then, every time someone normal takes the test the very rules of the test are broken. I see this last claim as a stretch because over a hundred years have passed since the creation of his test, and the purpose is