Quote:
Originally Posted by AmeliaG
(Post 20009237)
Those scores seem implausibly low for where Bush and Clinton went to school.
I don't think those are disclosed, just because someone is president, so I'd need to see a credibly source to believe it. If it were true, I'd want to know how the heck they got into Yale and Georgetown.
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Here Amelia, read this
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Governm...-Scores-Grades
Only 450 students applied to transfer to Columbia in 1981 and sixty-seven were admitted, according to the Columbia Spectator, compared to 650 applicants just four years before.
If Obama?s SAT scores were near the average of the transfer students entering Columbia in the fall of 1981, he would have scored significantly lower than George W. Bush, whose combined math and verbal scores were 1206 out of a possible 1600 points (as revealed by the New Yorker in 1999).
In his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama describes himself as an unfocused high school student whose mother scolded him for being a "loafer" (142). He describes his attitude toward his studies at Occidental as ?indifferent? (146), calling himself a ?bum? who abused drugs (138) and who was notorious for partying all weekend (165).
That has raised questions about how Obama earned a place at Columbia in 1981, paving the way to Harvard Law and beyond. Indeed, like much else in his biography, Obama seems to have fictionalized the process through which he gained admission to Columbia. Obama writes in Dreams: "[W]hen I heard about a transfer program that Occidental had arranged with Columbia University, I?d been quick to apply"(172).
However, there is no record of such a "transfer program" existing at either Columbia or Occidental.
Breitbart News spoke to an official source at the Registrar?s Office of Occidental College, who confirmed that there has only been one transfer program between Occidental and Columbia--one that fed students into Columbia?s School of Engineering and Applied Science (known today as the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science).
Obama, who was not an engineering student, would not have been eligible for that program.
The official also pulled Occidental?s records between 1970 and 1990, and found no transfer program with any other Columbia University program.
In addition, Breitbart News spoke with Phil Boerner, who transferred to Columbia from Occidental in 1981, and graduated from Columbia in 1984. He was Obama?s roommate in New York, and is one of the few Columbia students to recall Obama. Boerner, speaking by telephone, denied there was a ?transfer program.?
?You can transfer colleges at any time,? Boerner said, emphasizing that he was not speaking for Obama. ?There was no formal arrangement between the two schools.?
It is possible that Obama benefited from Columbia?s affirmative action program, which the university had recently defended in an amicus curie brief to the Supreme Court in the celebrated Bakke case (1977). Columbia joined several other elite universities in defending the use of race as a factor in college admissions. The brief had argued that ?minority status must be considered independently of economic or cultural deprivation.?
Given that 1981 turned out to be a relatively easy year to enter Columbia as a transfer student, and the fact that Obama was applying as a transfer student from a private college in California, as well as a minority student, Obama likely would have stood out among applicants, regardless of his scores and grades.
Yet because Obama has never released his academic records, it is impossible to know whether he would have qualified for admission as a first-year student or in a typical transfer year.
The only way to know is for Obama to release his records, transcripts and test scores--from Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard. Why Obama has not done so remains a mystery--unless he has something else to hide.
