Florida’s public universities will now permit the Classic Learning Test in admissions, offering a conservative-backed alternative to the SAT and ACT. Florida is now the first state university system in the country to allow for the Classic Learning Test (CLT), which has gained recent popularity among the state’s Christian and charter schools.
The classical education model — not to be confused with “classics” or “classical humanities” — focuses on a return to “core values” and the “centrality of the Western tradition.” The Florida state university system’s board of governors on Friday approved the test for use in undergraduate admissions.
I don’t live in the US. Due to historical/religious reasons, the government here doesn’t do standardised testing in schools and gives schools quite a lot of freedom. Graduate from the worst school and you can still go to university (with some exceptions for stuff like med, but I digress).
What my university did, is simply schedule a really horrible statistics course on the monday morning, first year, first semester, course book thicker than the bible. Same thing for most courses. You’re studying German? Enjoy learning advanced grammar at 8AM. You’re studying history? Roman history with a side of Latin at 8AM. The overfull auditorium emptied within weeks as people dropped out.
Maybe universities in Florida should do something similar. Rather than refusing students, have them quit. Certainly a financially disastrous way to learn the limits of the power of prayer and the relevance of the bible to statistics, but the Lord works in mysterious ways.
And as any fitness business will testify after the month of january, it’s an excellent business model having the majority who drop out subsidise those who don’t. Really allows you to improve the level of service you can offer those who don’t quit.
I don’t understand how this works.
Are they funneling people from the worst schools into these weed-out classes? Because that doesn’t sound fair at all.
No. Everyone gets a weed-out class.
It functions as a defacto entrance exam. Like a navy SEALs bootcamp where everyone’s allowed to enter, but those dumb or deluded enough to think they can make it, run away screaming once they finally realise they don’t have what it takes.
Certainly better than having the weed-out classes later on in your studies, especially when you’re writing your (graduate?)master’s thesis/research.
Oh okay. I think when I was learning Spanish I was taught about some international universities that had extremely difficult entry exams as another to weed out a ton of applicants. The cost of attending was relatively low.
I thought that was a good model, too.