Word: baylor
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This year, almost 900 first-year students at Baylor University in Texas retook their SATs. No, this was not a grading mistake. It was because Baylor wanted to boost its ranking in U.S. News and World Report’s list of “Best Colleges.” Baylor incentivized freshmen with $300 at the campus bookstore to retake their SATs and offered $1,000 a year in scholarship aid to those who raised their scores by at least 50 points. Though seemingly cavalier and unethical, programs like this are products of the bizarre and destruction nature...
There is plenty of blame to go around on this issue. Bribing students is not the business of universities. SAT exams are admissions test, intended to help admissions officers at colleges and universities select an incoming class. Not only is Baylor subverting the intent of the SATs, but it is also setting a terrible example for its students. As an institution of higher education, Baylor should be committed to academic integrity. There is nothing admirable about this extraordinary case of grade grubbing...
...Sociologists may need further research to determine how broadly the data should be interpreted. The Baylor study tested other statements that might indicate a similar belief in the supernatural intruding into everyday personal experience - "I heard the voice of God speaking to me"; and "I received a miraculous physical healing." But far fewer people claimed to have had those experiences. This raises the possibility that guardian angels, which famously support an industry of sentimental accessories, are just so darned attractive that they exist in a charmed belief niche of their...
...What's interesting about the Baylor findings on guardian angel experiences is that they cross all boundaries. They have scriptural writ (in Psalm 91 and elsewhere). They are clearly experiential. And guardian angels are a prominent part of Catholic belief that happens to float freely outside of a sacrament. The cross-spectrum legitimacy of the notion of angelic interventions may free Americans to engage in the kind of folk faith that is part of almost any religious system but is not always officially acknowledged...
...Randall Balmer, chairman of the religion department at New York's Barnard College, says that the Baylor angel figures are one in a periodic series of indications that "Americans live in an enchanted world," and engage in a kind of casual mysticism independent of established religious ritual, doctrine or theology. "There is," he says, a "much broader uncharted range of religious experience among the populace than we expect." Just possibly, Baylor has begun to chart...