"Bob LeChevalier" <lojbab.TakeThisOut@lojban.org> wrote in message
news:n3u8q15ntjl6iupf4gcqs27qsepmgg80cf@4ax.com...
>>Perhaps, this "hardship" could be utilized as another tool for culling
>>incompetents among the applicants.
>
> Colleges aren't interested in "culling incompetents". Colleges are
> interested in maximizing their enrollments with people who will stay
> in college and keep paying tuition.
>
> The capacity of American colleges far exceeds the potential
> enrollment. The competition among better institutions is to get more
> successful students to attend. Success is NOT defined as dealing with
> silly "hardships", but in signing up, passing the classes signed up
> for, and re-enrolling for another term afterwards.
>
> SAT scores are designed to maximize the correlation with college
> freshman grades, not to "cull out" those you consider to be inferior.
Agreed. Colleges are big business entities, most run at a deficit in the
public sector. Education of their undergrads is but one byproduct.
BTW, the following is an article that you might have read about the SAT,
followed by readers' responses, pro or con (which I didn't post).
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/781016/posts
The SAT Revolution
U.S. News ^ | 11/11/2002 | JULIAN E. BARNES
Posted on 11/02/2002 1:50:29 PM PST by Pokey78
The new test spells the end of IQ-and big changes for American education
In a cramped basement classroom in Berkeley, Calif., Kim Nunlist is
unraveling the mysteries of the SAT. Nunlist, a 22-year-old undergrad with a
serious tattoo and a score of 1470, waves the College Board's book of tips
and practice tests in front of her class. Rip out the first 275 pages that
explain how to answer SAT questions, she commands. "This is by the people
who own the test; they do not want you to score well," she tells the class.
"Do not pay attention to what they say. Pay attention to what I say."
Near the front of the room, Eryn Leavens stares intensely at a Princeton
Review study guide. A high school senior, Leavens is determined to succeed
on the standardized tests she despises. Nunlist asks her the answer to a
sentence-completion item, in which she was asked to choose words to fill the
blanks in a sentence. "Although on the surface the final draft appeared to
the first draft, upon close inspection it was that
major changes had been made." Leavens hesitates, then answers. "I picked C,
but it didn't sound right." Nunlist agrees that the answer-"reproduce" and
"apparent"-sounds weird, but it is correct. "They give you bad words for
that reason," she says. "You have to pick the best answer. The best answer
often stinks."
Nunlist has no illusions that what takes place in her classes can be called
education. "It is bunk," she says. "I teach how to take a multiple-choice
test." And what she teaches, she adds, is "completely inapplicable to the
rest of life."
This is just what Carl Brigham feared. When Brigham, a psychologist, created
the Scholastic Aptitude Test in 1926, he was a firm believer in intelligence
testing. With IQ tests, he thought, he would be able to predict applicants'
college grades, thereby selecting the students who would benefit most from
higher education. But as his thinking evolved, Brigham began to worry that
his test would lead teachers to focus on "linguistic skills" rather than
literature and "disintegrated bits" of computation instead of mathematical
concepts. His concerns went unheeded, and in the decades that followed the
SAT only grew in power, becoming the pre-eminent gatekeeper for American
higher education-as well as the stuff of sleepless nights for many a high
schooler.
Now the era of intelligence testing is about to end. Thanks to an
unprecedented assault from the head of the University of California system,
the College Board (the nonprofit organization that owns the SAT) has begun
its biggest overhaul ever of the test. The 340,000 students who took the SAT
last weekend saw the same old kinds of questions. But by 2005 the board
plans to strip out the analogies section, ask questions based on
more-advanced math, and add a grammar and essay-writing test. "In many
respects," says Ida Lawrence, the SAT program director, "it is a
revolution."
Although the College Board's announcement in July was front-page news, the
significance of the changes has remained largely unexamined. The inside
story of the battle that began in California reveals just how great a
philosophical shift the College Board has embraced. Rather than assess raw
intelligence, the new SAT is intended to measure academic preparedness. "In
its original form it was an IQ test," says Gaston Caperton, the College
Board president. "What we have done is take the SAT and make it into
something that tests reasoning and developed skill."
What they have done is taken hold of the diseased American education system
at its root. For with these new changes, the SAT will effectively set
education standards for the nation's high schools. But can the College Board
do what a nation of education reformers couldn't?
America is put to the test
In 1901, 978 young men and women applying to Columbia, Barnard, and New York
University were the first to take "College Boards." In those early days,
students sat for a series of grueling essay tests composed by college and
high school teachers, in subjects including chemistry, Latin, history,
mathematics, and physics. To complete the English exam, for instance,
students had to write intelligently about books chosen from an assigned list
of classics including Macbeth, The Last of the Mohicans, and Silas Marner.
This was still the dawn of American public education. Only about 6 percent
of 17-year-olds in 1900 graduated from high school. Only 2 percent would go
on to graduate from college; few of the rest of the nation's teenagers even
aspired to do so. Most of those who went were white, wealthy, Protestant,
and male, and the early entrance tests bespoke this world of privilege. Some
colleges had specific reading lists, some had unique exams, and some
admitted students on recommendations by private-school headmasters alone. To
get into Yale, students had to take oral exams to test their mental "power."
The College Board was founded not just to standardize widely varying
entrance requirements but also to shape what was taught in high school. "The
College Board was the standard-setter for American education," says
educational historian Diane Ravitch. "[It] said 'these are the works we want
students to study.' "
The SAT promised to be just the opposite of those old College Boards. It was
designed to measure innate intelligence, not what students had learned in
school. The first champion of the SAT, Harvard University President James
Bryant Conant, started a scholarship program in 1934 to bring bright men
from humble Midwestern backgrounds to his college. Conant, according to
Nicholas Lemann's 1999 book The Big Test, believed achievement tests like
the College Boards favored wealthy students from fancy private academies. So
to select his new scholars, Conant decided to use the test that Brigham had
designed a few years earlier. Princeton and Yale joined in with similar
scholarships that used the SAT. But it wasn't until World War II that the
College Board was forced to drop its essay tests, which took too much time
and too many graders, and adopt the SAT for all students. That was fine with
Conant, not because he wanted to expand access to higher education; he
believed that too many people already went to college. What he wanted to
change was who got to go. He wanted to create a system where the country was
led not by the children of privilege but by those with the greatest natural
intelligence. The shift was not without consequences, says Ravitch: When the
College Board gave up the essay tests for the SAT, she says, it also
abandoned its oversight of what high schools taught.
The next few decades were the heyday of intelligence testing. Educators
believed the tests would improve teaching by efficiently sorting students
into different ability groups. By the 1960s, almost all public-school
children were given a group-administered IQ test. But the tests always had
critics who were skeptical that intelligence was fixed or even measurable.
Because blacks, as a group, scored lower than whites on the tests, some
opponents argued that the assessments really reflected economic
disadvantage, not intellectual difference.
Court decisions in the 1970s reinforced the criticism, restricting the use
of IQ and tarnishing the image of intelligence testing. "There is some deep
sense where IQ seems un-American," says Christopher Jencks, a Harvard
professor and coeditor of The Black-White Test Score Gap. "It may be real,
but it is not something we want to make a big fuss about." Today, individual
IQ tests are still used to assess learning disabilities or measure mental
retardation. But few public schools give group-IQ tests anymore, and
educators are dumping the last of them to make way for new federally
mandated achievement tests.
The Educational Testing Service, which was created to write and administer
the SAT for the College Board, insists that its exam ceased being an IQ test
as far back as 1946. That was the year many logic items were replaced with
questions based on reading passages. Despite those changes, question styles
that are staples of IQ tests, like analogies, remained on the SAT, and many
students, parents, and teachers still think of the SAT as the last
mass-administered intelligence exam. "I think the SAT tests cleverness,"
says Danny Jaye, the head of the mathematics department at New York City's
prestigious Stuyvesant High School. "It is not a content test as much as it
is an IQ test."
Measuring up, measuring down
In fact, there is no consensus on what the SAT does measure. Though it was
supposed to democratize American universities by sidestepping the hereditary
aristocracy of wealth and replacing it with a fluid meritocracy of talent,
that's not how things worked out, according to critics like Harvard
University testing expert Howard Gardner. His recent experience using
coaching guides to help his 17-year-old son, Benjamin, study for the SAT has
underscored his view that test prep corrupts what the exam is supposed to
gauge. Gardner says that when he took the SAT in the 1960s it was "an
intelligence test skewed to measure the ability to get into college." "Now,"
he says, "it measures how good your tutor is."
The College Board says the SAT is a measure of students' ability to reason.
"We want people to think out of the box," says Wayne Camara, a College Board
vice president. By assessing students' ability to solve problems quickly,
the board argues, the SAT helps predict freshman grades, thereby giving
admissions officers a valuable tool (box, Page 56). "If you are trying to
forecast what people will do in college," says Lawrence, the SAT's program
director, "you need a test of reasoning."
But critics say that achievement tests like the SAT II writing exam are just
as good or better predictors of college grades. "Reasoning," in their view,
is just a euphemism for IQ. John Katzman, the founder of the Princeton
Review test-prep company, contends that the SAT measures a very narrow kind
of reasoning, the kind of mental quickness that is useful for solving
crossword puzzles. The Princeton Review says that because the SAT does not
measure the kind of problem solving that schools teach, the best way to
prepare for the test is to memorize vocabulary and learn perfect exam-taking
strategies. The company, which last year took in $69 million in revenue
while making that argument, acknowledges that its lessons are educationally
vacant. But that is not the company's fault, says Jeff Rubenstein, a
Princeton Review assistant vice president. "The SAT inspires dysfunctional
educational behavior," Rubenstein says. "Students shouldn't be memorizing
words like lummox or malinger. They should be reading Dickens or
Shakespeare."
In her Princeton Review class, Nunlist builds up her students' confidence by
tearing down the College Board and ETS. On her whiteboard, she writes: "If
4x + 6=30,then 2x equals?" She turns to the class and asks, "Lauren, what
did you get?" Lauren Steinberg looks at her workbook. "I got C," she says. C
is 6. Nunlist cracks a half smile. "That is a prime way ETS will mess you
up," she responds. "You are trained to solve for x so they ask you for 2x."
The answer is D: 12. Steinberg, a 17-year-old senior at Albany High in
Kensington, Calif., has a 1240 on the SAT. She wants to go to Berkeley, but
her father worries her score is not high enough. So he enrolled her in
Nunlist's $1,000 class, where Steinberg learns to master test tricks and
hate the SAT. "It doesn't tell what you know," Steinberg says after her
second week in class. "They are trying to trick you."
If she's right, the trick's on ETS, because all this test strategizing may
be making the SAT less good at predicting how students will do in college.
University of California data show that achievement test scores are slightly
better than SAT scores at predicting grades for the first year of college.
Some researchers suspect the culprit is test prep. Wealthier students often
get lots of coaching on the SAT (but not on the achievement tests, which
typically cover the material students have learned in, say, freshman biology
or junior-year U.S. history). "You can teach students how to raise their
score on the SAT, but that is not improving their abilities or increasing
their knowledge," says Michael Brown, a member of the University of
California faculty committee that examined the SAT. "But to do better on an
achievement test, you have to know the material, and preparation will entail
increasing students' knowledge of the subject matter."
A glimpse of an alternate test-prep world could be seen in a course given by
Princeton Review competitor Kaplan on a recent evening in midtown Manhattan.
For most of the class, Meredith Moore, the teacher, reviewed the usual
tricks. But when she turned to the critical-reading passages-which will grow
more numerous on the new SAT-the tone changed. As the class read the passage
about the discovery of penicillin together, Moore quizzed the students on
why the author included a particular detail. They couldn't simply recite a
time-honed test trick or memorized vocabulary word; they had to really
understand what they had read. Viktor Hristov, a 17-year-old Bulgarian
immigrant who lives in Astoria, Queens, signed up for the $900 course,
hoping to raise his 1050 on the SAT by 300 points. But, he says, the classes
are also helping him build longer-lasting skills. "I am learning to read
faster and understand it better," he says. In other words, test-taking is
inspiring him to learn something that is actually worth learning in the
first place.
The revolution from without
One night in the fall of 1999, Richard Atkinson sat down to take the SAT. As
president of the 174,000-student University of California system, Atkinson
wanted to learn more about the test that helped determine who would study at
his school. One of the nation's most respected cognitive psychologists, he
had a long interest and expertise in educational testing. In the 1960s, in
fact, Atkinson had helped found a company that produced computer-based tests
for elementary-school children.
The next morning, Atkinson called his new deputy, Patrick Hayashi, into his
office. "What the hell are these analogies?" Atkinson demanded. Thwack. He
slammed his hand on the table: "What theory of cognitive development
justifies this?" Hayashi, who had overseen admissions at Berkeley for 12
years, knew the SAT well. But he was reluctant to debate Atkinson or
interrupt his rant. Hayashi held his tongue, and Atkinson pressed forward.
"The SAT is based on concepts of intelligence no one holds anymore," he
said. "This is a test based on the idea intelligence is immutable."
Atkinson did not like what the SAT seemed to measure, and he hated the
behavior it inspired. He and Hayashi, who would soon become a College Board
trustee, hit on a revolutionary idea. They knew that using an intelligence
test led to drills in test tricks. So it followed that using a test that
measured students' knowledge of a rigorous high school curriculum would
force schools to make courses more challenging. They believed that by
changing their university's admissions test they could change the behavior
of both high school students and teachers. And they believed that dumping
the SAT in favor of achievement tests would improve teaching at all
California high schools.
Atkinson's skepticism about the SAT solidified when he learned that his
12-year-old granddaughter was being drilled in SAT anal-ogies at school. A
few months later, in February 2001, he gave a speech calling on the
University of California to drop the SAT in favor of achievement tests. At
first, the College Board was skeptical about Atkinson's motives. Because
Latino students tended to do well on the Spanish language exam, their
achievement scores were better than their SAT marks. Some SAT defenders
thought Atkinson was pushing for the achievement tests just to increase the
numbers of Hispanic students at Berkeley and UCLA-an end run around the
University of California regents' 1995 ban on affirmative action.
The College Board remained suspicious of Atkinson's motives until the two
sides met at a November 2001 conference in Santa Barbara. There, Saul
Geiser, Atkinson's research director, used university data to demonstrate
that switching to achievement tests would not substantially change the
racial makeup of UC's student body. ETS, College Board, and California
researchers agreed that when used with high school grades, the SAT and SAT
II achievement tests had a nearly equal ability to help predict college
grades.
But Geiser went further, saying that the reason to use achievement tests
went beyond predictive power. "They are the best chance we have of
developing a rigorous high school curriculum where it does not exist," he
said at the conference. After the meeting, the College Board came to see
Atkinson's proposal as education reform, not racial gerrymandering. "That
established a common cause," says James Montoya, a College Board vice
president. "We all wanted to connect the SAT to what students are supposed
to learn in school."
There was more to the College Board's change of heart than just a meeting of
the minds. After Atkinson recommended dropping the SAT, a University of
California faculty committee began talking with College Board officials
about creating a new achievement test just to serve their state. As talks
progressed, the committee became concerned that Stanford, Harvard, Yale, or
other elite private schools might not accept a test unique to California. So
they began to look closely at the ACT, a competitor to the SAT that was
accepted by the University of California but little used by the state's
students. "We were very interested in the ACT," says Dorothy Perry, the
former committee chair. "They were very close to what we felt a test should
be."
The ACT, founded in 1959 as the American College Testing Program, is the
College Board's great rival and ideological opposite. The SAT measures
students' ability to learn. The ACT measures what students have already
learned. Though most colleges accept both, the SAT dominates the coasts and
the ACT reigns in the heartland. Today, the ACT's developers regularly alter
their test to match what schools teach. And some states, like Illinois, have
begun to use the ACT to judge whether students have mastered state learning
standards. That has led schools in Vienna, Elgin, and other Illinois towns
and cities to take steps including beefing up their curriculum, adding extra
reading-skills classes, and pushing students to take more-difficult classes
earlier. That is precisely the kind of educational behavior Atkinson
believes admissions tests should inspire.
The College Board had no intention of letting California become an ACT
state. Californians make up 12.6 percent of the 2.2 million annual SAT test
takers-a sizable chunk of the $141 million the College Board takes in from
its college admissions tests each year. Faced with the possibility that its
most important customer would leave for the competition, the College Board
caved and began to talk about changing the entire SAT.
The group also came to see reform as a way to do more than just keep
California, says Hayashi, the Atkinson deputy and College Board trustee. For
a decade, the board had tried to change how people thought of the test by
fiddling with the name. First it briefly changed the "A" in SAT from
"aptitude" to "assessment." Then it declared that the initials stood for
nothing at all. "No matter what they did," Hayashi says, "the legacy of the
SAT as an aptitude test was a millstone that hung round their neck. This was
a chance to get rid of it."
In June, the College Board trustees voted to drop analogies and quantitative
comparisons, a question style that makes students look at two columns of
numerical information and decide which is larger. The board said it would
add more long passages to the verbal section and rename it "critical
reading." A revamped math section would test more advanced coursework.
Finally, the College Board decided to add a version of the writing
achievement test, which includes an essay and multiple-choice grammar
questions. A perfect score would rise from 1600 to 2400. Atkinson declared
victory.
Diamonds in the rough
At Fremont High School in Oakland, Calif., not even teachers show up
regularly for class. Most instruction consists of giving students worksheets
and telling them to keep quiet. Only a third of entering freshmen graduate
from Fremont in four years, and few of those go on to four-year colleges.
And yet there are Advanced Placement classes here, where kids learn organic
chemistry and read Richard Wright's Native Son. And these kids want to go to
college. Like the four students who are sitting in a classroom trailer
anchored in the Fremont schoolyard one day, talking about the SAT. No
different from students around the country, these four worry that college
admissions officers will place too much emphasis on the SAT. "When I took it
as a freshman, the analogies confused me," says Marlene Labastida, a senior.
For these students, AP classes are like a life raft in an ocean of failure.
Though critics have long complained that a reliance on the SAT keeps out
good students from bad schools, the tests' supporters say this is where the
test is most needed. Looking at kids from schools like Fremont, college
admissions officers often have a hard time judging whether an A average
means the student is prepared for college-level work. That is where the SAT
comes in. Labastida has a 1260, putting her at the 86th percentile
nationwide and substantially ahead of her best classmates. Labastida's
English teacher, Daniel Hurst, says her test score reflects real
intellectual ability. "Marlene has a chance in life," he says. "There are
always one or two absolute gems, like Marlene, who come in having read their
whole lives, and they have a wonderful facility for language."
Despite California officials' certainty about the superiority of
curriculum-based tests, some skeptics believe any alteration in the SAT
could end up hurting applicants like Labastida. After the changes, the test
may no longer spotlight "the diamond in the rough," says Rebecca Zwick, a
former ETS researcher and author of Fair Game?, a new book about
standardized testing. "There is a risk that by incorporating more advanced
math, for example, it will make the test more sensitive to differences in
schooling." Too often, she adds, "kids who go to school in poor areas do not
have access to competent instruction."
California officials maintain that the idea that the SAT has a unique
ability to find a diamond in the rough is a myth. For one thing, about 71
percent of students earn similar marks on the SAT I and on the writing and
math achievement tests, according to the College Board. Labastida, for
example, scored a 650 out of 800 on her writing achievement test and a 4 out
of 5 on her AP History test. And according to California research, the SAT
II achievement tests are actually better at finding diamonds in the rough
than the SAT. Low-income students, overall, do better on the writing and
math achievement tests than on the SAT. Geiser, the California researcher,
compared students with high SAT scores and low writing and math achievement
marks with students who scored high on achievements but poorly on the SAT.
He found that the students in the second group had better high school
grades, better college grades, and generally came from less wealthy
backgrounds. In addition, those students who were admitted to UC with high
SATs but low high school grades ended up earning generally poor marks in
college. "Lazy underachievers in high school are lazy underachievers in
college," Geiser says.
Even if the critics are right, Atkinson argues, designing a test just to
find undiscovered "diamonds" is too narrow a goal. Instead, he says, the
purpose of admissions tests should be to deliver the greatest high school
educational benefit to the majority of American kids. "I want schools to
improve," Atkinson says. "There are core ideas I want everyone to have
mastered. . . . We need to get schools to teach the right curriculum."
The future of testing
But even if the College Board succeeds in getting American schools to change
what they teach, is that the best method of reform? Using tests to shape
curriculum inevitably narrows what is taught in school, says Christina Perez
of the anti-testing group FairTest. "I am much more comfortable with
universities and high schools deciding what students should learn rather
than an external organization like the College Board," she says. "If schools
focus on the material in the SAT, then they are missing out on a curriculum
tied to students' lives and reflective of our society."
But like the College Board of a century ago, the leaders of today's
organization once again believe they can use their admissions test to
improve schools. "We have an uneven education system in this country, and we
have to focus on making that better," Caperton says. When the latest
national SAT averages were released in late August, he took pains to
underline the connection between what high schools teach and what the SAT
measures. Although math marks rose, verbal scores were stagnant. If
performance is to improve, Caperton said, schools need to start teaching
more writing and more grammar. It was a newly aggressive position for the
College Board, one it would not have taken without Atkinson's push.
In September, a little more than a year and a half after Atkinson made his
speech attacking the SAT, the University of California held a conference at
Berkeley to tell guidance counselors about the changes to the test and
college admissions. Wearing a blue blazer and turquoise-clasped bolo tie,
Montoya, the College Board vice president, told the counselors they should
take a new view of the test. "What we want," he said, "is that at the end of
this all, when someone thinks of their SAT score, they do not relate it to
being smart or not smart, but . . . to being prepared or unprepared."
Beth Pascal, a counselor from Burlingame High School near San Francisco, sat
near the front of the lecture hall looking skeptical. Despite the new
rhetoric surrounding the overhauled exam, she says, "a lot of kids feel it
is a measure of their intelligence."
It will be tough to convince students that the new SAT is no longer a gauge
of IQ. Reformers hope students see that the changes mean they can boost
their scores-and reduce their testing anxiety-by taking rigorous classes,
honing important life skills, and demanding more from their schools. Now,
says William Fitzsimmons, a College Board trustee and dean of admissions at
Harvard, "the pressure will be on schools." And if schools respond, the
much-feared SAT will have done something to improve education for everyone.
>> Stay informed about: More SAT Dumb-Down Coming 
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