Swim test is nothing to make waves about

It’s smart of Tsinghua University to make BA candidates pass a swimming test before they get their degree.

The test demands that candidates swim 50 meters with a stroke of their choice — breast, butterfly, back or freestyle.

In all fairness they should also permit the dog paddle, as it is what any nonswimmer defaults to in panic when thrown in at the deep end. They should also allow sidestroke, a variation of which — Combat Swimmers Stroke — is used by US Navy SEALS to master the art of coursing through the water stealthily.

Telling a beginner to feel free to use the butterfly stroke to pass their proficiency is like telling them to feel free to bench-press 500 pounds for their strength test. Butterfly is not only impossible, but people regularly get into difficulties trying to learn it.

When I got my BA, the core extracurricular skills required were Frisbee, eight ball, poker and darts (301 or 601), activities that also “do less harm to joints and muscles’’, as Liu Bo, Tsinghua’s head of sports science and physical education, said about swimming. They also allow participants to keep hydrated with their favorite electrolyte-laden beverage, along with a good cigar, if desired. Few sports can make that claim.

Liu also calls swimming “a requisite survival skill” that will stay with graduates for the rest of their lives. In the same spirit, MBA students should pass a golf proficiency test, at least to a double-bogey standard, and should all math PhDs be good at chess?

In 17th century England, “a swimming test” was used for an entirely different and heinous purpose — to find out if someone was a witch. The notorious Matthew Hopkins (1620-47) was responsible for the deaths of 300 women, many of whom he proved to be witches because when he threw them in the water, they floated. (Eventually, Hopkins flunked his own test and paid the going price).

Michael Massimino, a NASA astronaut from 1996 to 2014 who went into space twice and now teaches engineering at Columbia, told a reporter from the Hindu that when he finally got accepted to the astronaut program (after three rejections) the letter told him, somewhat ominously, to practice his swimming because he would be required to pass a “water survival test’’.

In all the myriad screenings and interviews he had been through, no one had ever mentioned swimming or even asked him if he knew how to swim, which he did not. He hated the water, but he wasn’t going to let it keep him from his goal of flying in space.

So he practiced all summer with his kids and when he reported with 43 other recruits to Johnson Space Center in Houston, first up was the swimming test. The trainers immediately identified the good swimmers and separated them from the bad.

“You strong swimmers and you weak swimmers are going to work together,” an instructor told them, “and you strong swimmers are going to get the weak swimmers ready to pass the test.”

It took Massimino three tries but he did it. And when he got out of the water, he said, “I had this great feeling of accomplishment. I felt like a super hero.”