Posted on 09/21/2003 6:42:37 PM PDT by ancientart
When I was in high school, the honor roll was dominated by beautiful young ladies. The homecoming queen and her princesses were always near the top of the list, as were many of the cheerleaders. Why was it that the prettiest girls in the school were also the smartest?
Well, they weren't. Appearance, personality and the ability to fit in socially often gave these girls an advantage over equally able peers when it came to getting good grades. Likewise athletic, outgoing, middle-class guys tended to get better grades than their less socially-adept classmates.
Because of hidden (and difficult to overcome) biases in our high school grading system, there are many bright and talented students whose abilities aren't fairly reflected by their high school rank. For these students especially, the SAT college entrance test was once a blessing.
The SAT tended to level the academic playing field. A good SAT score sometimes helped the shy, overlooked student get a scholarship rather than a less talented but more gregarious peer. A good score sometimes helped a poor, underprivileged kid get a college spot that would otherwise have gone to a less-talented graduate of an elite prep school. Over and over again, the SAT uncovered academic ability that not even the student in question realized they had.
For years, the SAT served talented students well by opening doors of opportunity that would otherwise have been closed to them. It served also as a solid predictor of college success and a valuable tool for college admissions officers. Further, the SAT (though not designed for this purpose) provided a fairly objective way of looking at overall trends in American education.
But what the SAT told us was often uncomfortable. Men tended to do better than women. Whites tended to do better than blacks. And overall scores were going down, down, down - a sign the something was seriously wrong with American education. And since we were uncomfortable with many of the things the SAT told us, the great cry went up: change the test!
Unfortunately, the College Board (makers of the SAT), eager to protect their enormously profitable business, succumbed to pressure. Decreasing SAT scores made high schools look bad: time to dumb down the test. The SAT was "recentered," arbitrarily raising all scores. Students were allowed to use calculators for the math portion of the exam and given a longer time in which to complete the exam. The exam's verbal portion was dumbed down by eliminating English usage questions and adding a subjectively graded essay.
Well, lo and behold, SAT scores are up! And the defenders of the educational status quo are crowing. Andrew Porter of Vanderbilt University boasts, ''To have scores higher than 35 years ago and to be testing a larger and more diverse student body than was tested 35 years ago is pretty darn impressive - whether they're ready for college or not."
It's a great achievement to have kids who aren't prepared for college score well on a college aptitude test? Well, this is what we've come to.
And that is the great problem with the supposedly objective world of educational testing. In response to No Child Left Behind legislation, American schools are about to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on standardized tests. But he who pays the piper calls the tune. The testing companies know full well that they're going to have to produce results that please their customers. And while, right now, the most widely used achievement tests are fairly reliable, it's almost certain that the testing companies won't be any better than the College Board at resisting the pressure to dumb-down their tests. And pretty soon we'll be able to boast that our kids' achievement test scores are way up - whether they've learned anything or not.
Thanks for the post....the above quote about says it all. We are in deep doo doo academically.
Red
The changes to the SAT resulted in a shift up of approximately 50 points verbal and 50 points in math. I found this out after thinking for a few years "wow - things are so competitive now - I wonder if I would still get in where I attended (Ugrad and grad)" - then I found out about the extremely un-publicised change in scale and test method. When a current 700 = an old 650 - it all makes a bit more sense.
Do you happen to know - did they change other tests such as the GMATS of MCATS as well?
I haven't heard about GMAT or MCAT changes. Don't know much about either exam. Sorry.
Lowering the standard is a classic liberal move. Seeing it done for the first time by my high school principal was an eye-opener for me and a valuable lesson in how the world works.
But in a larger sense, the real tragedy is that once admitted to (very expensive) college, the students get just more of the same PC stuff. They don't seem to get an education any more so much as a rearrangement of their prejudices.
I'd hate to send my kids to college these days for the kind of crap they are exposed to.
Having been a poor underprivileged kid, I never believed this for an instant because my parents taught me better. I'm a member of the last true American generation, IMO. In fact, my mother said so (she was a teacher), "You know there's something not quite right with the next generation." All of the older folks agreed, and they were right.
America is headed toward dictatorship, because the general populace is getting lazier and dumber. I really wonder if human beings as a species can really handle democracy. I'm beginning to think not.
That was Lincoln's question in the Gettysburg address, "Now we are involved in a great civil war testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure." Before the American experiment with democracy, the general consensus was that people could not be left free and self-governing for any great length of time.
What's fascinating is how, more than 150 years ago, writers like de Tocqueville anticipated exactly the sort of problems we were going to have in trying to preserve democracy. See de Tocqueville's What Sort of Despotism Democracies Have to Fear
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