SAT is to overkill
It took longer to wade through the reports, press releases, and media coverage of The College Board’s annual release of SAT scores than it would to take the darn test.
The College Board, already under siege what with the springtime scoring error scandal, mounted a full-court spin to explain the seven point average decline in scores. This was its “press packet:”:http://www.collegeboard.com/press/releases/150054.html
One 5-page press release
One 1-page overview
One 18-page profile of the test-taking members of the Class of 2006
One 12-page test trends report
One 1-page insert on the new writing test
One biography of the Duval Co., Fla. school superintendent
One 1-page overview of the new SAT
One page listing staff members at the press conference
One 3-page set of bios of three inspiring members of the Class of ‘06
One graph charting 30 years of math and verbal scores
Then it added to the cacaphony with the aforementioned press conference. I skipped listening on the phone. Including the guy from Duval County, there were eight people speaking. Telling them apart would have made my head hurt worse.
The New York State Education Department weighed in with a press release of its own pointing out that while New York test-takers’ SAT scores declined, “New York leads the nation in students achieving AP mastery.”
The Princeton Review’s press release said the College Board was on the defensive and trying to minimize the decline.
The release from the education reform group FairTest said the decline in scores and in the number of test-takers added to the College Board’s “mounting credibility problems.”
The press release from the author of a parents’ guide to the SATs talked about the importance of the test for college admission.
Armed with all these resources, the MSM reported at length about the decline, the controversies and the comparisons between their local scores and the national averages.
Once all the furor has died down, what have we got? There is a lot of “fascinating stuff”:http://www.collegeboard.com/press/releases/150054.html for policy wonks, particularly the ethnic and gender information on the kids who took the test and what else they were studying.
Open up the sea salt and take out a grain to sprinkle on everyone worried about the decline. The lines on that 30-year chart look awfully steady. Over the years, the students who took the tests have been rather consistent.
There was one fascinating thing about that chart, though. Back in the day, students did better on the verbal than on the math. A decade or so ago, it switched.
Does this mean we don’t need to listen any more to calls from policymakers and business leaders for programs to improve math and science education? I’m waiting to hear them on the need to improve reading and writing skills…
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Lost in all this media hype about the SATs is what the test is supposed to measure in the first place. Some people think it measures intelligence. Others that it measures academic ability. Still others that it should determine financial aid awards. But as Nicholas Lemann has pointed out in his definitive study of the SAT (The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, Farrar, Straus, 1999), the SAT’s were designed to predict one thing and one thing only, namely how well a student will do in his or her first semester of college. When it was developed there was indeed a good correlation between SAT scores and first semester success. But as Lemann writes, today the correlation between SAT scores and colleges success is minimal at best. The only thing those of us who have been in higher education know is that high SATs and doing well in a rigorous academic high school course of study probably is a good predictor of college success. But high board scores, by themselves, predict very little if anything. Still, when SAT scores drop, or tests are incorrectly scored, it’s a media event, complete with press releases and teleconference calls as this blog points out. American’s need to quantify everything, and the SAT meets this need even though it predicts little by itself.
What worries me most is that following a call by some in Congress to quantify college outcomes, Gaston Caperton, the entrepreneurial president of the College Board, which oversees the SAT tests, has suggested that his organization can come up with a national test, similar to the SATs, that will measure college accomplishment. Understanding the problems with the SAT on the one hand, and the great diversity of American higher education on the other, I think we should be very dubious about Mr. Caperton’s bold suggestion.
Lanning Taliaferro is right, however, about the decline in verbal and math abilities of our students. But we don’t need the SATs to tell us that.
Roger H. Martin
The problem is we dont have a national language. The other problem is computers are ruining our ability to communicate. I have been working with computers for over 20 years. It has greatly impacted how I think and communicate, and it is not for the better. We need to get back to basics and stop using the computer as a wheelchair and use it as a tool.