Posted on 03/11/2014 2:11:37 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
It turns out that SAT words were too abstruse.
The College Board is updating its iconic test yet again in ways that are indistinguishable from dumbing it down. The old vocabulary words are out, the math is easier, guessing is no longer punished in the scoring — and we’re supposed to believe that the test is better than ever.
The SAT, relied on heavily in college admissions, has long been attacked for not producing sufficiently egalitarian results. The multiple-choice test has been accused of everything from racism to classism. It is almost certainly the most hated exam in America, and the easiest way to placate the critics is simply to make it less exacting.
The last round of changes ten years ago eliminated the analogies (e.g., zenith : nadir :: pinnacle : valley) and instituted an essay. This was supposed to be an upgrade, but the mandatory essay is now being discarded. Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars describes it as “a decade-long experiment in awarding points for sloppy writing graded by mindless formulae.”
The new SAT will move away from what a reporter in the New York Times calls — obviously relying on his readers’ knowledge of old SAT vocabulary — “esoteric” words. Instead, the test will emphasize “evidence-based reading.” The head of the College Board says an example would be an excerpt from an old speech by Representative Barbara Jordan in which she said that the impeachment of Richard Nixon would divide people into two parties. Students taking the test would then have several choices for what Jordan meant by the word “party.” (Students answering a gathering to celebrate an occasion, or to drink with friends, will presumably get no credit.)
The SAT is called an instrument of privilege because students from higher-income families perform better. But parental educational attainment tracks with parental income, and highly educated parents will inevitably pass along their advantages to their kids. It is not in the power of the SAT to change this. As NR contributing editor Robert VerBruggen, of the website RealClearPolicy, writes, “Income gaps are evident on basically every academic measure we have.”
The changes and a partnership with the free online Khan Academy are supposed to frustrate the test-prep industry, which is taken to be another unfair advantage for rich kids. There are two fallacies here, though.
The first is that test prep makes an enormous difference in scores. It bumps them up by about 30 points on average (out of 1600). The second is that minority kids get no test prep. According to research cited by Inside Higher Ed, slightly higher percentages of black and Hispanic students than white students use test prep, and they make slightly higher gains on their scores on average.
The SAT is hardly perfect. It isn’t strictly an aptitude test: The more you read and the more math you know, the better you are going to do. Maybe we should go all the way and use achievement tests instead? But that has its own problems, as Howard Wainer of the University of Pennsylvania pointed out in his book Uneducated Guesses. How much does proficiency in one subject area weigh against another? And this doesn’t help if a student is in a rotten school that teaches nothing.
The SAT aims to predict first-year performance in college, with only modest success. The test explains about 24 percent of the variation in performance during the first year of college, while high-school GPA explains 34 percent, according to Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown University. But when the two are combined, they account for 41 percent of the variation. With its broader, more general approach, the SAT provides different information about students than either GPA or achievement tests. It is a useful tool.
At the end of the day, the problem isn’t the SAT, it’s ourselves. We have to do a better job raising and educating kids. That is much harder than complaining about the SAT, and the College Board can’t do it for us.
— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.
Why bother with the test. Why not just ask a few questions like: are you a minority. If yes, what combined (means added together)total score does your college choice require?
If answer to first question is no, proceed to part one.
How will they know if you guessed?
They didn’t know if you guessed but they punished you for guessing by deducting points for wrong answers. Under the new system they’ll give points for correct answers, but not deduct for wrong, so one can guess away.
I am so sick and tired of everything being dumbed down and made “non-competitive” supposedly to benefit blacks. They’re as smart or as dumb as anybody else, and they have to do what everybody else is supposed to do, have an idea of excellence and attempt to reach it. In fact, when challenged (as in the charter schools), they do as well as anybody else.
This benefits only the teachers in the public school system, who have yet another excuse for their failure to be able to teach (anybody of any color). Actually, some of the teachers may be fine and very sincere, but the entire union-oriented system is what prevents kids from learning.
“The SAT is called an instrument of privilege because students from higher-income families perform better.” Then explain to me why my son-in-law from a VERY low income family scored a 32 on his SAT? Oh right, it’s because he is white...
“Are yoo a minoraty? Add 200 points.”
When I took the SAT [admittedly a while back], I scored around 1500. Is 32 considered good now?
>> The SAT is called an instrument of privilege because students from higher-income families perform better.
Nothing to do with genetics of course.
What we need are equal results, not equal opportunities. We could just make it a lottery, to be completely fair. And then adjust the results when we don’t like what we get.
There are only two ways to get rid of the achievement gap.
You can make the test so easy everybody aces it = no gap.
You can make it so hard everybody fails = no gap.
Any test that actually measures something will have roughly the same gap.
Best movie, ever. It hit the pop-culture nail on the head so hard the liberals pulled it from the theaters.
I vaguely recall quotes about how only the well educated can be dumb enough to....
If your son-in-law scored a 32, it must have been on the ACT. The SAT scores run from 200 to 800 in each category.
Oops...the 32 was the ACT, sorry! On the SAT he scored ~2100. :)
Heh. I thought that maybe the SAT had really been dumbed down.
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