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“a bizarre relic of long-outdated 20th-century social-scientific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.
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