Here’s a quick quiz:
The SAT is _____________ measure a student’s academic potential.
a) a blunt tool that claims to
b) an imprecise tool that purports to
c) a test created by The College Board, a firm that possesses a monopoly on college admissions tests, which purports to
d) a fatuous waste of time that purports to
For any student who has had to prepare for and suffer through the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), a recent conference held in Seattle to discuss the value of the test and its proper role in the college admissions process is cause for celebration. Many of the 5,500 conference participants agreed with Harvard Dean of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons’s presentation, which laid out the findings of a commission he led to study the use and misuse of standardized tests in the college admissions process. According to the article in the New York Times, the commission found that the SAT was “‘incredibly imprecise’ when it comes to measuring academic ability and how well students will perform in college.” According to the commission, one of the reasons the test is imprecise is because test prep courses can often raise students’ scores dramatically, giving wealthy students an unfair advantage over the rest.
But that’s not the end of it.
In my view the test is imprecise because it cannot substantively (as opposed to statistically) distinguish between two students with similar scores–whether they have had equally good test preparation or not. The SAT is very good at identifying two types of students: the very intelligent and the unintelligent. A student who receives a 1600 combined score, whatever their high school grades may be, has intellectual ability. A student who gets a 200 combined score, on the other hand, is probably pretty dumb. But you don’t need to give an idiot the SATs to figure out they’re an idiot, and anyway, most of us score somewhere in the middle. What’s the difference between a student who receives a 1100 combined score and another who gets a 1300? The answer: maybe three or four questions.
More troubling is that the centrality of the SAT in college admissions sends students the message that there is only one right answer (or one ‘best answer,’ which–on a standardized test–is a distinction without a difference) to important questions. This is the most pernicious effect of the test and particularly deleterious because a bright mind should know that only the most trivial questions have a single solution. When, year after year, we reward a new group of students who have a gift for solving problems that have appeared in basically the same form for decades, isn’t it possible that the smart students we are promoting all think alike? Over time, this dynamic perpetuates itself, and could result in a form of “high level mediocrity.”
How did the SAT become so important? One reason could be the self-perpetuating cycle I mentioned above, but I suspect that over the years the SAT rose in importance as our secondary schools fell in quality. This, combined with grade inflation, made it too difficult for admissions people to figure out what a candidate knew. For a while, the SAT must have given them a way to do a reality check. In 2008, however, we know our secondary schools are lacking in some pretty big ways. Instead of encouraging students to memorize vocabulary words and attend costly test prep courses, we should be reforming our schools.
By the way, the correct answer is C.