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Posted on 10/12/2003 1:05:30 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
On Saturday, when 600,000 high school students open their SAT test booklets, one question they won't find is: Why are they required to complete this key college admissions exam within three hours?
The correct answer: Because the tests always have been strictly timed. Yet the College Board, which administers the test, concedes the time limit isn't intended to measure how students perform under deadline. Rather the restriction merely serves a logistical purpose. Providing more time would complicate efforts to book rooms and protect against cheating.
Because the College Board is wedded to a stopwatch system, it places unnecessary time pressures each year on more than 2 million students whose scores can have a major impact on their college careers. The approach also runs counter to the SAT's goal predicting how students will fare in colleges, which typically provide ample time to complete coursework and exams.
By clinging to timed SATs, the College Board also has inadvertently opened up a new way to game the test. Students with designated learning disabilities receive 90 extra minutes to finish the SAT. And starting this fall, colleges no longer will be informed which test takers get extra time, a change the College Board made after disability advocates threatened discrimination suits. But the new policy also creates an incentive to make bogus disability claims.
Test administrators admit that some families pay private psychologists to declare their children disabled. The College Board bases that finding on investigations of schools with large numbers of students receiving extra time. It may be a sign that students and their parents are seeking every edge in the intense competition to get into the nation's most prestigious colleges.
One way to thwart those who try to best the system would be to give everyone an extra 90 minutes. In fact, untimed tests are gaining acceptance among educators, who are more interested in measuring what students know than how quickly they recall it.
Some examples:
The Stanford 9 Developers of one of the most widely used student achievement tests in the country dropped time limits when they released the newest version, the Stanford 10, last January. Test experts at Harcourt Educational Measurement concluded there was no reason to put students under time pressure. Now teachers allow students to work as long as they are "actively involved" in completing the test.
Virginia's Standards of Learning The English, math, science and history tests of students in grades three, five and eight have been untimed since they first were given in 1998. At least six other states also have adopted untimed standards tests. The College Board says untimed SATs might create scheduling headaches for schools that provide test sites and for students with afternoon sports commitments. It says longer tests also could raise cheating problems if those who finish early start chatting or moving around testing rooms.
While those are valid concerns, they are minor compared with a more fundamental problem: a test that creates an opportunity for some to cheat and prevents others from fully demonstrating their abilities.
Turning off the clock can provide a fairer test for all students.
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Wow, there's a shock.
" One way to thwart those who try to best the system would be to give everyone an extra 90 minutes. "
OK....so what's next?
" Turning off the clock can provide a fairer test for all students."
Silly me, let's just give them a month or so. Waddya say Madame Cincinatus? It sounds fair to me. Let's give the little buggers all the time they need. Does sometime into the middle of their Junior year sound good to you?
Hell, why test them at all.
I would say we're going to hell in a handbasket, but I think that's giving the handbasket too much credit for speed.
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You have a good point. It only bruises their self-esteem and besides, it's just such a rude awakening for parents to learn their kids can't read, write or multiply (as in math) after paying taxes "for the children" all these years and pasting "I am the proud parent of ......" bumper stickers on their cars.
The Liberal establishment could not tolerate that. So they abolished the two levels and decreed that EVERYONE must get a Regents diploma. So now, obviously, the solution is to dumb down the test so that you just have to write your name to pass
The NEA is in cahoots with the Democratic Party to soak tax payers and support LIBERAL candidates.
Don't laugh, it will probably come to that.
Only extra credit? Why, how culturally insensitive of you. Minorities shouldn't even have to take the test!
That's a fallacious argument.The SAT's don't measure "what you know." That is, it doesn't test recall of specific facts. You won't see a question like "In what year was Lincoln assassinated?" or anything like it.
The verbal portion primarily measures reading comprehension, which, to discriminate (and I am using "discriminate" in the original, non-judgmental sense; that is, to make a distinction) among students, is time sensitive. Someone who can read a paragraph and correctly answer both factual and inferential questions in 60 seconds is a superior student to one who takes 60 minutes to perform the same task.
Similarly, on the math portion, one who is able to correctly solve a problem in algebra or geometry in a relatively short period of time, is generally a superior student compared to one who takes a longer period of time. The tests have always been designed to allow sufficient time for good students to complete the majority of the questions. It has had a good history of measuring what it is designed to measure--the aptitude of the student. It has been a very good predictor of success in college and, when coupled with a student's high school grade point average, the very best predictor. We've all known students who have gotten very high SAT scores (over 1400) and also those who have not fared very well (below 800). While there are probably some cases of the former flunking out during freshman year and the latter making dean's list, by and large, there are far more instances of high SAT scores correlating directly with good college grades.
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