Regent Chair Moore, still scrabbling for evidence that his less-then-shocking Admissions report is actually a surprise, has released several new charges.

It's possible that the lower-then-average GPA is a concern. But then, it's extremely possible that it isn't. GPAs vary incredibly widely based on majors. That's one big reason why the average GPA of the Greek System is higher then the GPA on average. Greeks probably don't tend towards the Engineering and Science majors that have lower GPAs on average. I wouldn't say that's anything to be especially proud of.

Even if GPAs are lower, it's likely that's an artifact of ESL or financial circumstances. For example, we already know that lower SATs are correlated with lower household income. We also know that lower household income is probably correlated with working second jobs to pay for college. And it's also probable that working second jobs is correlated with lower grades. Removing these causalities and controlling just for Low SAT --> Low GPA is going to be difficult.

I can say with confidence that Regent Moore is uninterested in examining these causalities, since he also makes the claim that low SATs lead to high dropout rates. How can you separate this from low SAT correlating with low household income and big family problems leading to higher dropout rates?

So in any case, before we establish that low SATs means low academic attainment and such, we're going to have to filter out a wealth of other explanatory variables. It's very basic statistics, and very bad scholarship to posit causalties before running the numbers. Do the math! It's fun!Email This Post!