SATs

As most of you know, the College Board is in the process of changing the types of questions on the SAT. The article below from Time magazine entitled "The SAT is Part Hoax, Part Fraud" was written by a college president. 

The bane of standardized test scores even reaches to Trinity in that secondary schools can use the scores to reduce the complex and unique learning profile of each one of our 6th graders into a one-dimensional, ranked and sorted admission tool.

I still remember meeting with my kids' college guidance counselors and based on their GPA and SAT scores getting a list of colleges that would most likely accept them.  (It was literally a list of colleges on a grid with my kid a dot on the sheet.)

We as teachers know that standardized tests do not measure many of the habits that lead to success, e.g., effort, interpersonal skills, ability to synthesize. However, we still live in a world where standardized test results hold greater sway and influence than they should—and I don’t think a changing the types of questions will make the SATs a better indicator of either current achievement/aptitude or future success.  

Enjoy the Easter weekend break!

Joe

As the president of a selective liberal-arts college, I can state without much hesitation that the SAT is part hoax, part fraud.

The College Board’s recently announced revisions to the SAT are too little, too late. It needs to be abandoned and replaced. Here’s why:

Poor prediction – High-school grades are much more helpful in showing how students will do in college, as long as wecontrol for each school’s curriculum and academic program.

Alignment – The SAT doesn’t measure what is taught in high school or what should be taught in high school, he contends.

Instructional usefulness – Students never find out which questions they got wrong and why. What purpose is served by putting young people through an ordeal from which they learn nothing? No baseball coach would train a team by accumulating an aggregate comparative numerical score of errors and well-executed plays by each player, rating the players and then sendingthem the results weeks later.

Multiple-choice questions – The SAT uses “a bizarre relic of long-outdated 20^th-century social-scientific assumptions and strategies.” In the real world, knowledge and skills are not about choosing the “correct” answer from a set of options. No scientist, engineer, writer, psychologist, artist, or physician pursues his or her vocation by getting right answers from a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity. The truth is that the only legitimate test is one in which a question is put forward and an answer is required with no options or hints.

Class bias – SAT scores closely track socioeconomic status. Nothing that is now proposed by the College Board breaks the fundamental role the SAT plays in perpetuating economic and therefore educational inequality.”

The ratings racket – Selective colleges use SAT scores to reject many deserving students and boost their ratings by admitting high-scoring students. The victims of this unholy alliance between the College Board (a rather lucrative nonprofit) and our elite institutions of higher education are the students – and our nation’s educational standards.

What we need is an entirely new generation of testing instruments that use modern technology not only to measure the performance of our students but also to teach them. We need to come up with one that puts applicants through a rigorous but enlightening process that reveals what they can and cannot do and what they know and do not know. Only then can we reverse the unacceptably low standard of learning among high-school graduates that we now tolerate and inspire prospective college students with the joy of serious learning.