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Posted on 10/07/2002 6:19:59 PM PDT by shrinkermd
Earlier this year the College Board buckled to political pressure and agreed to turn the SAT into an achievement test. Although that move has been defended as a heightening of standards, I have argued that an achievement test is far more susceptible to dumbing down and grade inflation than an aptitude test.
It turns out we don't have to wait for proof of just how corruptible achievement tests are. At the very moment America is abandoning its unique and democratic test of academic aptitude, Britain's college entrance test has fallen into crisis. The British college-entrance exam — which is an achievement test — has been utterly corrupted by political pressure for equality of outcome. With their scandal-ridden testing system now in freefall, the British are considering radical action. They believe they have found a new kind of test that will simultaneously preserve standards and maximize opportunity for students from lesser schools. And what is that test? The American SAT, of course.
Incredibly, the British have invited Gaston Caperton, head of the College Board, for emergency consultations with Downing Street and the Education Department, at the very moment when Caperton himself has betrayed the SAT and, under political pressure, agreed to turn it into something closer to a British achievement test. The British are looking to Caperton as their savior, but in the British test meltdown, Caperton may be looking at our own country's unpleasant testing future.
For years, the British college-entrance achievement test, known as the "A-level," has been subject to creeping grade inflation. Twenty years ago, 68 percent of the pupils who took A-levels passed the test. Today that figure is greater than 94 percent. Twenty years ago, only seven percent of students taking A-levels got an "A." Today more than 20 percent receive A's.
As a result of this grade inflation, the better British universities are finding it difficult to choose their students. This has forced schools like Oxford and Cambridge to interview nearly every applicant personally — a task that is severely cutting into the research time of British professors. Recently, as a result, a few colleges decided to require aptitude tests based on the American SAT.
Last month, in the midst of the yearly debate over what to do about the accelerating grade inflation crisis of the A-levels, an extraordinary scandal broke. It seems that the head of the exam board at Oxford and Cambridge conspired with the government's own exam watchdog commission to tamper with the results of the A-levels. You might think he artificially inflated exam grades in response to political pressure, but in this case, the crime was the reverse.
Precisely because years of political pressure have turned A-level grade inflation into an open national scandal, the head of the Oxford and Cambridge exam board actually intervened to mark down the scores of the best students in Britain. His fear was that A-level grade inflation this year had gotten so out of hand that honest reporting of the actual national grades would have provoked another round of public outrage at retreating standards. To avoid that, Dr. Ron McLone, with the full knowledge of the government's own exam watchdog commission, secretly lowered the scores of the very best students in Britain, depriving them of a chance to gain positions at Britain's best schools.
Exposure of this outrage has put the A-level system into what may be its death throes. Tens of thousands of students may have to retake their tests, and public confidence in the testing system itself has been destroyed. Whereas before only a few schools were experimenting with American style aptitude tests, now Caperton has been invited to London, and the entire country may be about to convert to an SAT-style system.
It is extraordinary to see The London Times praising the American SAT for simultaneously safeguarding standards and expanding opportunity. The Times, for example, cites a study in which, of 630 teens from a poorly performing British school, only one received an A-level grade high enough to secure entrance to Oxford or Cambridge. Yet, of those same 630 students, thirty received aptitude test scores that would have gotten them into a top American university.
In other words, The London Times has discovered what Americans used to know — that the SAT test actually benefits "diamonds in the rough," students of high potential from poor schools. Those students may not have gotten the kind of education that allows them to excel on achievement tests, but they do have the smarts to succeed if given a chance.
In August, in response to a defense of the College Board's gutting of the SAT, I argued that an achievement test would be subject to political pressure, and death by a thousand cuts, whereas the old SAT aptitude test (if only we had the courage to defend it) would resist dilution and, in the end, benefit the disadvantaged. The British case proves my point about as clearly as any real-world example can. Unfortunately, with the College Board already having caved to pressure and made its decision, it may be too late to rescue America's SAT.
What all this shows is that the real problem is pressure for equality of results — both here and in Britain. It doesn't really matter whether we're talking about an aptitude test or an achievement test. The pressure just keeps coming. That's because what the critics really have a problem with isn't any particular kind of test — but testing itself. There is no remedy but to oppose this pressure with argument and action. Buying off critics by changing the test has only distorted our college entrance process and opened us to the nightmare that Britain is now living through. And by giving in to such pressure once, we invite it to return again. Inevitably, when the new SAT achievement test turns out not to be a magic bullet that gets every student into the college of his choice, the criticism will begin again.
Is it too much to hope that Gaston Caperton might return from his encounter with the British achievement test meltdown with his spine stiffened and a new determination to rescue the old SAT — the very test that Britain now wants? Yes, it is too much to hope. If he'd only had the guts to hold on under pressure, Caperton would right now have an unshakable answer to critics of the SAT. Cowardice has lost the battle that courage would surely have won.
Stanley Kurtz is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
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