Woo woo! Two new SAT articles are out from the boys at the National Review online...
First, Mr. Stanley Kurtz takes a look at Britain's recent testing scandals and draws an ugly conclusion. Mr. Kurtz has recently argued that achievement tests are much easier to dumb down than aptitude tests, and Britain has apparently discovered that with their own A-level achievement tests:
For years, the British college-entrance achievement test, known as the "A-level," has been subject to creeping grade inflation. Twenty years ago, 68 percent of the pupils who took A-levels passed the test. Today that figure is greater than 94 percent. Twenty years ago, only seven percent of students taking A-levels got an "A." Today more than 20 percent receive A's.
As a result of this grade inflation, the better British universities are finding it difficult to choose their students. This has forced schools like Oxford and Cambridge to interview nearly every applicant personally — a task that is severely cutting into the research time of British professors.
Of course, forcing the top schools to interview every applicant personally is what the test critics want - for some reason, they see the highly time-consuming and subjective format of face-to-face interviews to be more valid and less susceptible to abuse than objective test scores. Or perhaps the test critics just envision a future where one's political beliefs and the color of one's skin carry more weight in college admissions than one's performance on a test of academic achievement.
But I digress. What's Britain doing about the collapse of the A-levels? Why, they're developing something that looks a lot like our old SATs:
With their scandal-ridden testing system now in freefall, the British are considering radical action. They believe they have found a new kind of test that will simultaneously preserve standards and maximize opportunity for students from lesser schools. And what is that test? The American SAT, of course.
It is extraordinary to see The London Times praising the American SAT for simultaneously safeguarding standards and expanding opportunity. The Times, for example, cites a study in which, of 630 teens from a poorly performing British school, only one received an A-level grade high enough to secure entrance to Oxford or Cambridge. Yet, of those same 630 students, thirty received aptitude test scores that would have gotten them into a top American university.
In other words, The London Times has discovered what Americans used to know — that the SAT test actually benefits "diamonds in the rough," students of high potential from poor schools.
I agree 100% with Mr. Kurtz that the testing critics do not so much disagree with any particular kind of test as with testing itself, but while the original form of the SAT was not as subject to dumbing down, the testing critics merely circumvented any usefulness the test had by setting different SAT standards for different groups of students. As long as the multiculturalists and other intellectually-dishonest educrats insist, all evidence to the contrary, that standardized tests of the SAT type are biased against minority test-takers, double standards will be set, and no test, not even an aptitude test, can live up to its original purpose.
Next up, Mr. Peter Wood has another take on the College Board's decision to stop flagging accommodated SATs given under extra time. No matter how many times I read an article about this policy change, this topic still makes steam come out of my ears. What a horrible example to set for the rest of the testing industry. Such a decision could not have been based on any psychometric evidence, because there's none to support erasing the distinction between accommodated tests and standard tests. None whatsoever.
I like that Mr. Wood makes sure to use the phrase, "the stigma of the asterisk," with appropriately-sarcastic italics in place. The asterisk that denoted non-standard test scores was, of course, never meant to stigmatize disabled test takers, and I doubt there's any evidence that it was ever used in that way by admissions officers. The recent lawsuit that provoked this change was filed by a disabled student who was rejected from two colleges after taking the SAT under extra time and with special equipment. If there's any evidence that the student was turned down solely because of the asterisk, rather than because of his lack of academic promise, I haven't seen it. Lots of applicants get turned down by two schools every year. Perhaps he didn't have the qualifications for admissions. Perhaps his undergraduate grades were poor. Perhaps the programs he applied to were so politically correct that Mr. Briemhorst's sex was a negative factor in the admissions decision. The point is, we don't know, because ETS settled the suit.
Sad to say, but ETS may have settled only because the anti-testing critics have become so prominent and politically correct nowadays that those of us who would have supported ETS's decision to fight this suit were drowned out in all the shouting. Supporters of testing are not prominent in the media, except in journals such as the National Review, so I would not be surprised if it was the case that ETS decided to cave in rather than risk a fight that could further damage their image.
What's more, the decision to stop flagging test given under extra time is just one more piece of evidence in a pattern of behavior by the College Board to undermine educational testing's integrity:
Thus the College Board's decision to cave in to the disability advocates is just another concession in a string of concessions to pressure groups that dislike the concept of a single, objective, and neutral measure of academic ability. Once upon a time, the College Board was an institution that higher education could count on to support academic standards, but no more. It has become dominated, like so much of higher education, by people unable to see and stand up for the principles they are entrusted to uphold. The lure of playing identity politics proved too strong; the gratification of winning praise from the advocacy groups too irresistible.
The case of the purloined asterisk really turns on the political power of disability groups that are indifferent to the educational damage that they are inflicting. If they cared, they would have linked their campaign to get rid of the asterisk with strong steps to ensure that "learning disability" diagnoses are restricted to those who have genuine disabilities, not just kids seeking an edge on the SATs. The problem, however, lies deep in the disability movement, which is as eager as an interest group to build its base.
In our culture of complaint, many Americans confronted with the fact that we are not good at some academic subject, would rather postulate a hidden brain dysfunction and demand accommodations from schools and colleges than attempt to overcome the difficulty by dint of repeated tries and hard work. In that sense, the "learning disability" movement has already shown itself an irresponsible force in our society. In its excesses, it undermines educational standards.
Mr. Kurtz and Mr. Wood have done a fine job. I hope that, unlike me and my over-worked self, you read these articles as soon as they were posted on Monday morning.