The New, Improved SAT

IN LATE JUNE, the trustees of the College Board voted unanimous approval for the most dramatic changes in the history of the SAT, the venerable admissions test that is a gatekeeper of so many American colleges. Beginning in March 2005, the analogy questions that have tormented test-takers since the first SAT in 1926 (untruthful is to mendacious as circumspect is to cautious, etc.) will be abolished. In their place will be more reading comprehension questions, similar to those that already make up most of the verbal test. The math section, which now tests arithmetic, geometry, and basic algebra, will add problems from advanced algebra, while the quantitative comparison questions (which is greater, 2x or x squared, etc.) will be dropped. Finally, a new, separately scored 50 or 60 minute writing test will be added, consisting of multiple choice questions on grammar and usage and a handwritten essay.

The immediate impetus for redesigning the SAT was the attack on the test launched early in 2001 by University of California president Richard Atkinson. Himself a cognitive psychologist and an authority on testing, Atkinson charged that the use of the exam was distorting educational priorities and practices. The SAT, he suggested, though intended to measure verbal and mathematical reasoning ability or aptitude independent of particular courses of study, in reality was more a measure of students' test-taking skills. Recounting a visit to his grandchildren's private school where he found 12-year-olds already being drilled weekly on SAT-type analogies, Atkinson argued that students were wasting valuable time inside and outside the classroom preparing for the test, time that could be better spent learning history or geometry or English.

Atkinson also asserted that analysis of three decades of undergraduate data at the University of California had shown that the SAT II subject tests, in conjunction with high school grades, were actually a slightly better predictor of success in college than the SAT, and that adding the SAT to the mix improved the predictive power by only a trivial increment. (Interestingly, the same data also seem to show that the SAT II writing test is the best single predictor overall.) Since the SAT II tests could thus be substituted for the SAT without any sacrifice of predictive validity, Atkinson recommended that the University of California system drop the SAT requirement in favor of the SAT II or similar achievement tests assessing mastery of specific college-preparatory subject matter.

Atkinson's bombshell was front-page news. Losing the University of California as a customer would have been a severe setback for the authority and predominance of the SAT--perhaps a fatal one. Indeed, several liberal opponents of standardized testing gleefully predicted that California's defection would prove to be the beginning of the end for the "Big Test." To many conservatives, on the other hand, Atkinson was not a hero but a villain. They suspected him of attempting an end run around Proposition 209, which had banned racial preferences in California's public colleges and universities.

On this view, liberal egalitarians were bent on killing the test because it stood in the way of achieving a politically correct ethnic mix on campuses; the attack on the SAT was the vanguard of an attack on all standards of merit. In truth, some of Atkinson's statements lent support to these suspicions. He did argue that the SAT was unfair or perceived as unfair to minorities and that it devastated the self-esteem of otherwise accomplished people; and he did plead in the long run for a less test-driven, "more holistic, more comprehensive" evaluation of candidates. (And, independent of the SAT controversy, recent University of California admissions preferences for those who have suffered various hardships or "life challenges" strike some critics as so selectively awarded as to constitute backdoor affirmative action.) But in hindsight it is clear that both liberal and conservative responses to Atkinson tended to fixate on the issue of abolishing the SAT, while ignoring his central demand: to replace aptitude tests with tests of achievement.

THOUGH THE COLLEGE BOARD initially reacted to Atkinson's attack with incredulity--President Gaston Caperton sputtered that dropping the SAT from college admissions would be like dropping grades--after reflection, the test-makers settled on a shrewder strategy of reforming the exam in order to preserve it. While it has never really been a pure test of aptitude or native intelligence independent of prior schooling (if a student has not learned basic algebra and geometry, no amount of aptitude will get him through the math), the SAT is nevertheless a direct descendant of early twentieth-century IQ tests, and has long been at pains to distinguish itself from its controversial ancestor. A gradual shift away from characterizing the exam as a test of intelligence or aptitude has been evident for many years. As the author David Owen has observed, "intelligence" has been a "dirty word" among the test-writers, "IQ" an "obscenity"; and in recent years, "aptitude has become almost as unmentionable as IQ."

Accordingly, the name "Scholastic Aptitude Test" was officially discarded in 1993, and the College Board now weirdly insists that "SAT is not an initialism; it does not stand for anything." (Likewise, the deliberately uninformative terms "SAT I" and "SAT II" now obfuscate a once clear distinction between tests of aptitude and tests of achievement.) Bringing this trend to a culmination, the College Board has essentially met Atkinson's challenge by recasting the SAT as an out-and-out achievement test of college preparatory reading, writing, and math. Since Atkinson now says he is "delighted" with the College Board's reforms, the SAT seems to be safe for the foreseeable future.

And the new SAT will be a better test than the current one, in several respects. Most important, it does not lower standards, it raises them. With the addition of a writing test and problems from second-year algebra, students will have to know more and do more. The new test will even last half an hour longer than the current three hours. How this new test, therefore, could be of use to anyone who seeks to weaken standards for the sake of racial preferences or "diversity" is hard to see.

Despite what Atkinson and other critics often charge, the current SAT is not racially biased, even though "underrepresented" (i.e. non-Asian) minorities do receive significantly lower average scores. But since the point of the SAT is to predict success in college, lower scores would constitute bias only if the test predicted poorer college grades than these minorities actually receive. In fact, as William G. Bowen and Derek Bok (proponents of both affirmative action and standardized testing) observe in their 1998 book, "far from being biased against minority students, standardized admissions tests consistently predict higher levels of academic performance than most blacks actually achieve." (Though seldom acknowledged in public debate, this "overprediction mystery" is familiar to psychometricians; the other side of the coin is that the SAT underpredicts the college performance of most Asians.) At any rate, given the racial sensitivities involved, not the least of the new curriculum-based test's advantages will be that it is unequivocally not a test of IQ or innate ability. If under the new exam minority scores continue to lag, it will be obvious that the reason is not that the SAT is a racially biased intelligence test but that the public schools are simply failing to give minority students the skills necessary for success in college.

AS ATKINSON'S ARGUMENT IMPLIES, at least two issues must be considered in the choice of a college admissions test. First, what kind of students does the test choose? And second, how does the test shape the education of those who take it? If it is inevitable that students will try to prepare for the test and that high schools will try to teach to it, the second question is no less important than the first. And here the new SAT is clearly superior.

If what is tested inevitably becomes what is taught, far better to have an admissions exam that reinforces the curriculum rather than undermines it or distracts from it. The current SAT diverts students' time and attention away from real learning to analogy drills, memorization of vocabulary, and sterile test-taking skills. It also devalues the high school curriculum, given the paramount importance that students and parents rightly suspect colleges place on the SAT. (Former Dartmouth assistant director of admissions Michelle Hernandez reports in her 1997 book that, contrary to the official line of virtually everyone, admissions committees are much more impressed by high SAT scores than by all A's on a high school transcript. "It used to surprise me that even the Director of Admissions would make excuses for students with extremely high scores [and B grades]. . . . 'With those scores I bet Caroline was just bored with her classes and her teachers. . . .' You would never hear the same argument for someone with a number-one rank and all low 500 scores. . . . I cannot overstate the importance of standardized testing, despite what admissions officers might tell you.")

Making the SAT a straightforward test of achievement in reading, writing, and math will send an unmistakable message about what is most important to colleges. Of course, the current SAT II tests already measure achievement (as do the advanced placement exams), but since only the most selective colleges require them, the great majority of students never take them. If the goal is to alter the incentives confronting all college-bound students, there is no better way than by reforming the SAT.

AS FOR THE OTHER ISSUE raised by the choice of admissions test--what kind of students are selected--one must ask: Even if the new test will be as good as or better than the old one at predicting success in college, will nothing valuable be lost in the break with aptitude testing? The classic rationale for an admissions test of aptitude rather than achievement is that it sifts out "diamonds in the rough": bright, promising students who have gone to mediocre high schools but who could flourish at a good college.

This was the rationale of James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard who in 1934 made the fateful choice to adopt the original SAT for admissions testing of scholarship students, and later persuaded other Ivy League schools to do the same. A self-described "American radical," Conant held that the essence of American democracy was the denial of the doctrine of hereditary privilege. But he was no egalitarian. An ardent believer in Thomas Jefferson's natural aristocracy of virtue and talents, Conant wanted to revolutionize not just Harvard but American education and American society by overthrowing the artificial aristocracy of wealth. (Convinced that genuine equality of opportunity required not just upward but downward mobility, Conant was, in his own phrase, "lusty in wielding the axe against the root of inherited privilege"; to the dismay of many Harvard men, he publicly favored a 100 percent inheritance tax.)

For Conant, it was essential that the scholarship boys who would spearhead the transformation of Harvard into a bastion of the natural elite be chosen without any regard to wealth or family, but solely on the basis of academic merit. And that merit, Conant insisted, could not be accurately measured by achievement tests, because those were manipulable by the rich. Performance on achievement tests is heavily affected by prior preparation and schooling. True merit, Conant held, was basic aptitude or intelligence, because that alone was untainted by artificial privilege. And Conant chose the SAT as his gateway test because he was persuaded that it was a genuine test of aptitude.

Contrast Conant's vision of the SAT as the great equalizer of opportunity with the very different reality of the exam today, and particularly the vast and expanding test prep industry. Though the College Board continues to assure parents and students that coaching for the SAT produces only meager gains--on average, just 26 points (out of a possible 1,600) more than the 43-point gain to be expected from simply taking the test again--the public apparently does not believe it. Around $100 million a year, by some estimates, is spent on test preparation materials and services, including those peddled by the College Board itself, now playing both sides of the street. Is it possible that all this money is spent in vain?

In New York, where the competition to gain entry to elite colleges seems to have reached an unparalleled frenzy, the typical private school student now prepares for the SAT by studying one-on-one with a private tutor. Tutors with a reputation for eliciting significantly higher scores can command fees of hundreds of dollars an hour. The most successful such tutor in the city currently charges $565 for 50 minutes (most tutors get a lot less) and has all the work he can handle. For families who can afford it, total fees to prepare one student for the SAT can amount to several tens of thousands of dollars. (Comparable sums are spent on professional admissions counselors to "package" the student and supervise the applications; the current market leader in New York charges a flat fee of $28,995.) And, despite what the College Board would have people believe is possible, parents are not paying all this for only modest increases. Score gains in the range of 100 to 300 points--enough to make a difference at Princeton or Duke or Berkeley--are expected and more often than not accomplished.

However things may have worked in the past, the reality that higher SAT scores can now readily be bought makes a mockery of the equal-opportunity case for aptitude testing. Conant was wrong: Either the SAT was not and is not an aptitude test, or aptitude tests can be coached for, or both. "Diamonds in the rough" are now more likely to be among the losers, those who cannot afford coaching or who continue to believe the myth that since it is supposed to be an aptitude test, you really cannot study for it.

Competition under the new SAT will be fairer, at least in that everyone will know that the college entrance exam is an achievement test and that the best preparation truly is studying hard in a demanding high school and reading and writing as much as possible. Still, as long as there is unequal access to excellent college preparatory schools, equal opportunity as Conant conceived it will not be realized. Coaching will continue under the new SAT, since parents naturally want to give their children every possible advantage. But by calling attention to the deficiencies of so many public schools, the new test should at least fuel pressure for the reforms (including school choice and vouchers) necessary to rectify or ameliorate them.

Indeed, short of a second Sputnik, it is hard to think of a single event or innovation that could do more to enlist the interested efforts of students, parents, and high schools on behalf of more rigorous standards. When the SAT begins to test writing, especially, parents will insist that schools do much more to teach it, and as a result colleges may soon see fewer freshmen for whom standard written English is practically a foreign language. And at least in one key respect, the new writing test will become an indispensable equalizer: Since application essays nowadays are increasingly edited, if not ghost-written, by professionals, the writing sample will provide colleges with invaluable evidence of exactly what the candidate can do without assistance. All in all, then, the new SAT must be seen as an advance for educational quality and equal opportunity.

"As the author David Owen has observed, "intelligence" has been a "dirty word" among the test-writers, "IQ" an "obscenity"; and in recent years, "aptitude has become almost as unmentionable as IQ.""

The above quote is the problem in my opinion. In addition, please see the excerpt below from Atkinson's Atwell lecture in February 2001.

"Many parents who can afford the fees enroll their children in SAT preparation courses. Last year alone, an estimated 150,000 students paid over $100 million for coaching provided by the Princeton Review, Stanley Kaplan, and the like.

"Given attempts of some individuals and institutions to gain any advantage, fair or foul, is it any wonder that leaders of minority communities perceive the SAT to be unfair? These concerns are often dismissed as sour grapes, as special "ethnic pleading." The response by defenders of the SAT is, "Don't shoot the messenger." They argue that the lower performance of Blacks and Hispanics reflects the fact that Blacks and Hispanics tend to be clustered in poor schools, offering outdated curricula taught by ill-prepared teachers.

"Minority perceptions about fairness cannot be so easily dismissed. Of course, minorities are concerned about the fact that, on average, their children score lower than white and Asian American students. The real basis of their concern, however, is that they have no way of knowing what the SAT measures and, therefore, have no basis for assessing its fairness or helping their children acquire the skills to do better.

"Most troubling of all, SAT scores can have a profound effect on how students regard themselves. All of us have known students who excelled in high school, students who did everything expected of them and more, suddenly doubt their accomplishments, their abilities, and their basic worth because they scored poorly on the SAT.

"Anyone involved in education should be concerned about how overemphasis on the SAT is distorting educational priorities and practices, how the test is perceived by many as unfair, and how it can have a devastating impact on the self-esteem and aspirations of young students.

"However, while there is widespread agreement that overemphasis on the SAT harms American education, there is no consensus on what to do or where to start. In many ways, we are caught up in the educational equivalent of a nuclear arms race. We know that this overemphasis on test scores hurts all involved, especially students. But we also know that anyone or any institution opting out of the competition does so at considerable risk.

"Change is long overdue."

When the SAT begins to test writing, especially, parents will insist that schools do much more to teach it, and as a result colleges may soon see fewer freshmen for whom standard written English is practically a foreign language.

I don't believe this will be the outcome. Essays will be judged in part by the ideas expressed. Proper ideas get better scores (it's always this way). Expectations for language skills will be dropped down to an embarassing level. Or whites will be found to have better scores than blacks, so the written essays will be dropped.

I believe the hard data (long available) is that SAT scores really do correlate with a student's ability to succeed in college. Since SAT scores thus point out inherent differences between the races (Asians do very nicely) it is important to abandon SAT tests. We must adopt some system which will provide us with no meaningful information. Then colleges will be able to make the best possible choices on admitting students.

Gag me.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.