The new SAT premiered this weekend, and the world is still spinning on its axis. Examinees seem more bored/numb than overwhelmed (although show me a teenager who isn't bored after three hours of anything not related to sugar, video games, or the opposite/most attractive sex.)
The columnists are the ones who are still having hissy fits, amazed that, even after all the changes, those who prepare for the SAT tend to do better than those who don't:
Remaining as the single largest flaw in an increasingly test-happy approach to education at all levels is that the SAT, new or not, still is basically unfair to those who either have not had the emphasis placed on it in more affluent public and private schools and whose parents can't afford the rising cost of buying a better score. Major U.S. prep schools build their endowments on making certain most of their students do well on the SAT and are admitted to the schools with the best reputations. They teach to it from the earliest grades. Now some of that is being adopted by public schools in wealthier districts. Left out, of course, are the inner-city high schools.
Got that? It's unfair that some parents give their kids all the scholastic advantages. It's unfair that some kids take advantage of great schools. It's unfair that some kids who pay money to help prepare themselves for the SAT might see an increase in their scores. All this and the assumption that the SAT measures nothing but test prep skills, to boot.
Here are two things that you'll never see mentioned in this kind of column:
1. That idea that real life, and not just the SAT, almost always favors the better-prepared, and
2. The idea that the entirety of the educational experience, from kindergarten to graduate school, tends to improve when there's more money involved.
Sure, we can quibble about funding allocations and whether or not people are idiots for paying high prices for test prep, but articles such as this one always boil down to, "It's unfair that some people have more money than others." This attitude is monstrously offensive to those students who have worked hard to improve their minds and do well on the SAT without benefit of tony prep school or expensive prep course. Notice that these types of columns don't treat those who do well as motivated individuals, only faceless pawns of the "unfair" system, as though having wealthy parents is both necessary and sufficient for doing well in academia.
Update: I can't believe I forgot to add, as part of my rejoinder to economics-obsessed columnists, this article from, appropriately enough, The Economist. Thanks to Mike McKeown for the link, who also sent excerpts (the article is subscription-only).
The old SATs were responsible for producing one of the great silent social revolutions in American history--the rise of the meritocracy. They helped to open America's universities to people who had nothing to recommend them but brains. And in the process they helped to turn those universities into the greatest educational institutions in the world. You fiddle with a mechanism that has such a history at your peril.Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the old SATs was that they did exactly what they were supposed to do...The result [of the implementation of the SAT] was both an academic and social revolution...Poorer children flooded into the universities as never before--and thence into the sort of jobs that had once been reserved for the Wasp elite. And richer children either had to survive on their own brain-power or else make do with less famous institutions. George Bush sailed into Yale in 1964, thanks to his family connections; but seven years later, when Yale had belatedly embraced the SAT revolution, his brother Jeb went to the University of Texas instead.
This is not to say that the old SATs were perfect. But many of the time-worn criticisms of them are either exaggerated or misplaced...Critics complain that a giant industry has developed to game the tests. But how can you stop people trying to boost their performance when so much hangs on getting into a good college? Critics complain that richer students do better, on average, than poorer ones. But has anybody ever developed tests that are better at finding bright children from disadvantaged backgrounds?
This article also points out that when colleges allow factors other than test scores to play a part in admissions, they are at greater risk of admitting students who are not prepared for the college work, and thus may actually be decreasing the number of successful-but-poor applicants. I've been saying that for a while, and it's nice to hear The Economist back me up.
Posted by kswygert at March 14, 2005 11:41 AM