Baylor is getting criticized for offering students $300 to re-take their SAT exams, with $1000 for improving their scores 50 points or more. The university, facing ridicule, has stopped the practice. See Baptist School ‘Goofed’ in Offering Perks for SAT Retakes.
Baylor wants higher scores to elevate its academic reputation so that it will show up better on the U.S. News & World Report list of top colleges. According to the article, Baylor’s average SAT score is around 1200. Speaking of which, at Patrick Henry College, where I teach and am provost, our average SATs are around 150 points higher.
We have the reality of first-rate students, a superb curriculum, a world-class faculty, and off-the-charts academic quality. Our reputation is often formed by people who don’t like us much, who are put off by our Christian identity and who are alarmed by our prospects (mediocre Christian colleges being no threat), so stories about us are filled with distortions (we are NOT theocrats trying to take over the world). If we go by reality, PHC deserves to be on that U.S. News list of top colleges and way up in the rankings, and I’m working to make it happen. Not by cooking the books or manipulating the data but by getting out the facts.
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