When I was young, 4 or 5 let's say, I played T-ball. At 5 years old, the coaches believed we were too fragile to handle loss, so they never told us who had won. At the end of the game, right after a celebratory juice box, we would gather together and the coaches would invariably tell us the game was tied. Bedlam would break out; at 5 years old, we were extremely competitive and we knew damn well we had not tied. We could only count up to 10, but even at our tender age, it seemed improbable that we would have tied another game. Nevertheless, the coaches kept telling us we had broken even. The result? Every kid you ask will swear their T-ball team was undefeated and league champion because, well, we were all champions back then. This was barely acceptable in T-ball and, unfortunately, rather than rolling back the "T-ball treatment," we are applying it to other parts of daily life - perhaps against our better judgment.
Providence College made news a while back because it's are one of the first top-tier schools to have stopped requiring SAT scores. My question is why? Is it because it's not fair to those who don't test well? Isn't that really just punishing those who do test well? I had believed that the point of requiring the SAT was to ensure that the students a college accepts are well-rounded. They asked for the GPA to check if you had a work ethic, and then they checked the SAT to test your basic reasoning skills.
And you know what else? The SAT works. I scored very poorly on the math section of my SAT because I'm not very good at math, and I was too lazy to try and do better. I have to live with that, and I had to deal with the consequences. If a person scores poorly on the verbal section because he or she watched MTV instead of picking up a book, then so be it. Those who are going to college know the game and know the rules, so it is up to them to find their way. Why should a college have to change their criteria to cater to anyone?
Like it or not, we live in a capitalist society. The cream is supposed to rise to the top. Rather than pretend we are all cream with phony standards, let's work on making it a truth. I believe that helping hands should be offered. If people want to improve themselves, there should be a way for it to happen. I was lucky enough to be able to afford an SAT math tutor who increased my score 90 points, opening up a whole new range of options that never seemed possible. Everyone should have that chance. Equality of opportunity, not of outcome, is what we should be working toward.
I have realized that I could never be an engineer, despite a rather astute eye for design, simply because I could never do the calculations necessary. And despite the many times I have wished upon a shooting star, and the incalculable amount of quarters I donated to wishing wells across the country, I will never play Major League Baseball. "Why me?" I ask myself sometimes - I had the talent, I had the drive - but it isn't true. Thousands of kids worked harder and wanted it more, and that's why I won't get what I want - and more likely than not, neither will they. This is a hard fact of American culture: You have to work hard, really hard, to win. Nothing is handed to you, and we shouldn't work to change that. Success will be when this country offers its people a way to achieve great things without cheapening the standards. Until we do that, we can only be content to imagine our own equalities and allow our weaknesses to flourish.
Charlie Szold is a freshman in the School of Public Affairs and a conservative columnist for The Eagle.
