A true Scholastic Aptitude Test

As modern college students, we’re all familiar with standardized testing, likely more familiar than we’d prefer.

In high school, the SAT was the name of the game when it came to college. We all complained about it, prepared for it, took it and put the results on our college applications in hopes they would be the ticket to an acceptance letter.

But I could never shake the feeling that the multitude of tests I took throughout my junior year weren’t measuring my intelligence or even how much I had learned in high school. According to the College Board, that’s about to change.

On Wednesday, College Board President and CEO David Coleman announced the new SAT, designed for release in 2016, is constructed to produce scores that accurately represent the knowledge and skills we develop in primary and secondary school.

Coleman cited the disconnect between the SAT’s design and America’s high schools — it seeks to trip up students with deceptive questions and harbor “tricks” to raise scores that reveal weakness rather than assess strength.

The shift in focus of the new SAT is in its purpose. Instead of choosing a correct answer, the College Board is interested in the logic students use to justify their answers. A score will reveal how well a student can think critically with precise rationale, rather than how well a student can navigate each question’s illusion.

Another troubling aspect of the current SAT, reported recently by the Washington Post, is the correlation between a family’s wealth and the score that family’s student receives. Unsurprisingly, wealthy kids do quite well, while low-income kids do poorly.
In my hometown, where the overwhelming majority of graduates attended college, standardized testing was the means by which we were to achieve success. A high SAT score was the key to a good school and a bright future.

My hometown was also affluent, and expensive prep courses to achieve that elusive prestigious score were a given.

The first time I took the SAT, my score was average. My parents were willing to pay for a lengthy and expensive College Board prep course to teach me how to get a higher score, not by reviewing the material, but by learning the pitfalls and how to evade them.

My composite went up 350 points. I didn’t get smarter, I didn’t learn more. I was shown the tricks.

The sole reason my score was higher than another student’s is that I could afford the prep course, and that is a discriminatory outrage.

For a nation that so highly values a citizen’s ability to achieve regardless of the circumstances into which he or she was born, the new SAT’s realigned priorities are a huge step in the right direction. Exacerbating the advantage of the wealthy over the poor by validating a test on which high scores can literally be bought fundamentally defies the American dream.

“If there are no more secrets, it’s very hard to pay for them,” Coleman said.
Let’s start measuring high school graduates accurately by the strength of their critical thinking, not by their ability to buy a bag of tricks.

sbkissel@indiana.edu