SAT, ACT: College-Admissions Tests Are Holding American Students Back - Businessweek - 0 views
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The College Board—the nonprofit consortium of colleges, high schools, and other organizations that creates the SAT—has repeatedly jiggered the test to respond to critics, most obviously in 2005, when it added a writing section that boosted the highest possible score to 2400 from 1600
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Huge disparities remain. Asians score the highest on the test, and their average rose this past academic year even as the scores of all other ethnic groups fell.
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University of Wyoming President Robert Sternberg was stupid in elementary school. IQ tests said so. Knowing his scores, his teachers in the 1950s expected him to perform badly, and he agreeably lived down to their expectations. In fourth grade a teacher named Virginia Alexa saw something special in him and conveyed her high expectations. Almost overnight he became an A student.
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Coleman and his team are completing a major revision of the SAT to be unveiled in January 2014 and launched in the spring of 2015. He wants the test to “propel” students toward deeper learning of real things
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That means fewer abstruse vocabulary words (like “abstruse”) and essays that are based on documents so human graders can evaluate the correctness of their writers’ arguments, not just their style.
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The U.S. rode to economic supremacy with the world’s highest share of young college grads, but now its percentage of graduates at the typical age of graduation is behind those of Australia, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Sweden, and the U.K., the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says.
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The message: Real life is messy. You’re not given five answers to choose from. And America shouldn’t depend on something resembling an IQ test to rake geniuses from the rubbish.
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The SAT and its rival, the ACT, are part of the problem. Designed to ferret out hidden talent, the tests have become, for some students at least, barriers to higher education. Scores are highly correlated with family income; Harvard law professor Lani Guinier calls the SAT a “wealth test.”
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Since the earliest days of the republic, there have been two schools of thought about the merits of sorting students, as recounted in Nicholas Lemann’s 1999 book The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. Thomas Jefferson, who believed in a “natural aristocracy,” said that in Virginia all w
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New Englander Henry Adams was less disdainful of the rubbish. He said Jefferson’s natural aristocracy was no better than regular old aristocracy: “I would trust one as soon as the other with unlimited power.”
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The SAT was launched in 1926 as a variant of an intelligence test used in World War I to place soldiers and sailors. Harvard adopted it in 1934.
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The University of California long resisted using standardized tests but in 1968—swamped by more qualified applications than it could handle—began requiring applicants to submit SAT scores as a way to screen out lower achievers.
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Admissions officers at about 850 four-year colleges now make standardized tests optional for some or all of their applicants
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To be less cynical, the tests do stigmatize low scorers and distract people “from what they really need to do, which is mastering academic subjects in their high school,” says Wake Forest University sociologist Joseph Soares, whose school went SAT-optional in 2008.