When the Bush administration first announced the No Child Left Behind Act, I didn’t really care beyond thinking, “Whew, good thing I’m graduating.” Alas, you’d think I’d have learned by now that those currently in power never met a tax dollar they didn’t want to spend or a child they didn’t want to test. They’ve used up all the children (and the dollars, but that’s a different story), so now they’re moving on to young adults.

According to an article in The New York Times, the United States Commission on the Future of Higher Education is thinking it might be advantageous to have a standardized test for college students to evaluate writing, critical thinking and problem-solving skills. I could probably end my column right here, because none of the people who read this newspaper could possibly think standardized testing in college is a good idea without definitely bringing their sanity into question. But, to be fair, I’ll enumerate some of these supposed advantages so we can better disagree with them. Proponents of testing college students say it’s necessary to help high school seniors and their parents choose a college that’s really worth their money. They say it would help graduate schools effectively select students. And it would provide an objective way to compare colleges and hold them accountable. Well, it’s been a few years since I went through the college-selecting process, but I seem to recall having an abundance of information to help me out. It came in thick books and annual rankings and pamphlets that poured out of the mailbox every day. And in the end, I made my decision based on cost and vague aesthetic preferences anyway. As for graduate schools, it would help them out to have a standardized test. That’s why they already have one, the GRE. However, it’s the idea of equating an entire university with a single number that is really disheartening. Such scores would at least verify my conviction that Ivy League and private elite colleges aren’t really that much better than state schools, especially in proportion to the cost. But, as a rule, self-righteousness is never worth the cost.

Standardized tests create stratifications where none exist. No one is 11 points smarter than anyone else. Real achievements in math and science will speak for themselves. History doesn’t record the names of any brilliant test-takers, and it doesn’t care that Thomas Edison and Ben Franklin were poor students. Albert Einstein was a good student, but he did poorly on standardized tests and failed a college entrance exam.

Confining education and intelligence to a mere number should be insulting to any person with a little of either one. Quantifying a person’s abilities renders us all as less than human. Understandably, there must be some sort of evaluation system, but this system must resist oversimplification or lose all its value. We had a joke in my dorm last fall that the best way to spot a freshman was to look for the people who still sorted their laundry and discussed SAT scores. That’s the charm of college; everyone stops comparing and caring about an arbitrary number.

This has always been the main virtue of higher education. You play by the curriculum rules for 13 long years, and then you get the freedom to actually learn about what interests you for the sake of being a more knowledgeable person. If that doesn’t sound quite like reality, we should at least be striving for this ideal instead of throwing it aside for artificial standards. Bringing the standardized testing ethic to the universities is a bold step in a bad direction.