Michael of The Calico Cat blog - which has nothing to do with cats - wonders why a new SAT has been developed. As far as he's concerned, there was nothing wrong with the old one:
I take a break from writing about oil to write about the SAT. As you may be aware, the SAT was the subject of a cover article from Time magazine two weeks ago (yes, I know I'm a little late on this, but better late than never)...
Click here for my take on the aforementioned Time article.
It seems to me that the old SAT was working just fine, why do we need a new one? Of course there does seem to be a lot of people out there who dislike the SAT, but their reasons have never seemed very easy to fathom...
With the SAT being an important part of college admission, it shouldn't come as a surprise that upscale private schools are aiming to help their students do better on it. But surely the same will apply to the new SAT. So what's the point of changing it?
We need standardized testing, otherwise there would be no way to compare students from different high schools...Without standardized tests, elite colleges would wind up only taking students from elite high schools that they were familiar with, and students from high schools that were unfamiliar to the elite colleges would be at a severe disadvantage. Thanks to the SAT, a kid at a mediocre public high school can demonstrate that he's as equally qualified as a kid at a private prep school...
Many psychometricians have made this point. Few reporters have listened.
The new SAT will look less like an IQ test and more like a regular high school test. But there's no evidence that this will make the test more useful for selecting college students...
It's not as if people with high SAT scores and no other qualifications are sneaking undeservedly into Harvard and Yale. In fact, the opposite is true. A kid with a high SAT score but nothing else going for him (no extra-curricular activities and mediocre high school grades) will probably be rejected by Harvard and Yale.
I made that very same point in a response to an article a couple of weeks ago. Yet, the myth persists that people with rotten grades nonetheless get admitted to elite schools in huge numbers just because of high standardized test scores.
I find the graded essay to be the most worrisome part of the new SAT. Essays are much more difficult to grade than multiple choice questions. The cost of grading the SAT will increase, and the reliability will decrease. And college bound kids, instead of spending countless hours practicing analogies, will spend countless hours learning how to write in a way that the SAT graders will appreciate.
Dude. Thank you for repeating what I have said many a time. Of course, some might argue that kids learning to write in ways SAT graders will appreciate is an improvement over the current situation, but never mind. It's nice to see someone else point out the pitfalls of performance assessments.
Kids who want to do well on the new SAT will have to spend countless hours learning the "correct" way to write an SAT essay. I suspect that kids at non-college prep oriented high schools will be at a bigger disadvantage on the new SAT than on the old SAT. And the Time article suggests the same thing.
Those kids are currently at a disadvantage now anyway, because those kids are already less likely to learn how to write, period. At least now there will be more impetus for change in low-performing high schools that hope to send more kids to college. At least the new SAT sends the message that writing skills are important, and as I said before, I don't think it's by definition a bad thing that the SAT requirements might change what gets taught in schools.
Michael speculates that all of this is to try to help close the achievement gap, and he doesn't believe it will work. I said before that the new SAT might introduce more noise into the measurement, and might widen the score gap to boot. Will schools still be willing to stand behind the test if that's what happens?
Posted by kswygert at November 5, 2003 03:08 PM