excuses, excuses...

That being said, I still know this:

"according to research done by the tests' manufacturers, class rank and/or high school grades are still both better predictors of college performance than the SAT I."

better yet?

"The U.S is the only economically advanced nation to rely heavily on multiple-choice tests. Other nations use performance based assessment where students are evaluated on the basis of real work such as essays, projects, and activities. Ironically, because these nations do not focus on teaching to multiple-choice tests, they even score higher than U.S. students on those kinds of tests."-from FairTest.org

My whole point is just that we seem to be more and more a society that makes excuses for our shortcomings instead of taking actions to improve ourselves, and taking responsibility to learn from our weaknesses. This is well stated by Michael R LeGault in Th!nk,

"Yet, on a much broader scale, the huge, unprecedented boom in various learning disabilities is in keeping with America's transformation from a self-reliant culture to a culture of dependency...a shift in philosophical values, away from the common acceptance of that view that one's shortcomings are a result of flawed character or lack of initiative and toward the idea of a self in which one's flaws are a product of hardwired maladies and disorders. Thus, peoples excesses--food, gambling, shopping--are not problem behavior caused by lack of self-control, but addictions. One common explanation for poor scores on exams is a type of panic syndrome..."

And its sad enough that this exists in soon to be epidemic proportions, but the implications of this attitude and its exponential growth are what is scary:

"The explosion of the therapy culture, the learning disability industry, and the self-esteem movement can only harm the prospects for improving critical and creative thinking in America. With an educational system chiefly focused on the political aims to maintain the status quo, suppress guilt, modify behavior, and attend to the needs of slow learners, how realistic is it to expect excellent, inspired teaching? If everyone is automatically special, what incentive is there to devote extra time studying to obtain a B instead of a C, or an A rather than a B? Low expectations and mediocrity breed more of the same. If I'm labeled as having a learning disorder, it says right there in black and white, certified, I'M IMPAIRED! THINKING IS A BIG PROBLEM FOR ME.
So perhaps the quickest way out of this mess is to recognize and admit we are all suffering from one learning disorder or another, low self-esteem, or a composite of afflictions. This statement is not intended to be dismissive of the serious effect disorders such as autism, dyslexia, or even ADD-like symptoms can have on learning. Nonetheless, it is true that some of us are better at history than math, or memorizing rather than spatial visualization, or cooking rather than home repair...
The human mind's ability to critically reason is the essence of our self-reliance and, ultimately, freedom. Self-reliance and freedom are universally associated with the American way of life. If we continue to feed the feel-good monster it will very happily and contentedly devour that way of life."

you can count on more to come...