Desperate Need For Equality: AP Exam Performance

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at age four gave what was by all accounts a terrific piano recital, the first of many. In more recent times, Kit Armstrong (now 33) at age five duplicated Mozart’s feat. And you will have heard of several other similar instances.

Therefore, children (pre-teens) play the piano equally well as adults.

Right?

Equality, as we have sadly discussed innumerable times, is true, for some. They believe it implicitly (a locally true theory, a definition you recall from this post), and nothing can talk them out of it.

You’ve also heard me say, until you were sick of hearing it, that all of us excel at discovering evidence which fits beliefs we cherish. But that most of us are bad, or worse, at unearthing evidence which disconfirms our beliefs. Especially those beliefs which form (this terrible modern notion) “our identity.”

So that if you hold that people of all ages play the piano equally well, because Equality is true, what Mozart and Armstrong did at age 4 or 5 confirms your theory of Equality. You will acknowledge that not all children do in fact play as well as adults, but that is because, you reason, those children have not had the opportunities Mozart did. Give all children Equity in their musical upbringing, enforce a “level playing ground” in all of whatever aspects are necessary, and then Equality, the true state of the world, will reveal itself.

This is of course absurd. I don’t know anybody who holds this view about piano playing, but I would not say no one does. Because Equality is a powerful leveling force that can crush any peak in Reason. Find a dedicated Egalitarian, tell her the Mozart example, and even if she did not begin by believing in Equality in piano playing, she will in the end. Because Equality gnaws through Reason like a chainsaw through a two-by-four.

Blacks who take the Advanced Placement (AP) Exam do not score as well on average as whites. On average. Not all blacks take the AP test, nor do all whites. The “gap” is so-called because average white and black performance is large, and persistent. All attempts to remove it have failed.

Conclusion? Blacks and whites would score Equally well on the AP except for the black magic of “racism”. Because Equality is true.

There are no “racist” high school students; rather, no students can influence the exam via “racism”. And surely there are no “racists” at the College Board. So it can only be the black magic of “systemic racism”, a notional term that no one knows the meaning of. No one can point to just where it happens. Thus, it must be magic. A curse whites put on blacks, which causes them to score worse on average (and somehow causes Asians to score better).

That’s one view. The other is that of those blacks and whites who opt for the test, whites are better than blacks who take it, on average.

This only becomes interesting in those who require or honor AP test scores. Which is far from the most men: most do not care. So what if people score different? In olden days, people would look at differences in things like this, and in those rare times you could bring it to their attention, they would shrug and say, “Ok. And?”

The “And?” is only fascinating for those who hold with Equality. For those who know that the Unequal cannot be made Equal even the pure of heart, it holds zero interest. Just as not all can be tall, or beautiful, or play piano, not all can possess whatever kind of intelligence is required to succeed on the AP test. That’s life.

Now the big twist!

Suppose you today gathered all the child piano prodigies and put them into the same room as the adult masters. These people are all Equa in piano-playing ability. Because, of course, you only have best players in the room.

But does this room prove Equality in all children and adults? Can all children play as well as all adults, on average? In those who chose to take training, that is. Of course not; indeed, the idea is silly, risible. No one would make this mistake and suppose Equality holds because of this skewed sample. Right?

Here is the College Board gathering all the top blacks and putting them in a room with the whites (page 5 in their study):

The gap in performance between whites and blacks disappears, the College Board to their delight discovered, if you compare top performing blacks to top performing whites (the room gathering happens here in the statistical trick of “control“).

Golly.

So hungry were they for any evidence of Equality (which doesn’t exist) that made this ridiculous blunder. Which anybody not under the influence of the theory can see at an instant.

We must (you hear me say yet again) give up Equality.

For fun, here is another study that made the rounds last week. Experts held in a peer-reviewed paper that there were “no differences” between men who pretend to be women and women in athletics. See if you can spot how they did it.

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