Reining in the Test of Tests
Some say the SAT is destiny. Some say it's meaningless. Should it be scrapped?
Richard Atkinson is not typical of those who fret over the SAT, yet there he was last year poring over a stack of prep manuals, filling in the bubbles with his No. 2 pencils. When the esteemed cognitive psychologist, former head of the National Science Foundation and now president of the prestigious nine-campus University of California system, decided to investigate his long-standing misgivings about the nation's best known standardized test, he did just what many of the 1.3 million high school seniors who take the SAT do every year. Every night or so for several weeks, the 71-year-old Atkinson pulled out his manuals and sample tests to review and assess the sort of verbal and mathematical questions teenagers are up against.
Atkinson, a testing expert, didn't much like what he saw. There were too many confusing questions and obscure verbal analogies--the kind that require students to figure out that "untruthful" is to "mendaciousness" as "circumspect" is to "caution." Nor was he happy when he visited a Northern California private school last year and saw a class of 12-year-olds practicing for SAT exams--exams that were literally years away. Unlike many SAT critics, however, Atkinson is in a position to do something about the college admissions test: In a groundbreaking February 18 speech to the American Council on Education, he called for scrapping the SAT I (the formal name for the test) in UC's future undergraduate admissions decisions.
His proposal, which stands a decent chance of approval by the faculty and regents sometime in the next year, is already causing a huge stir on campuses nationwide. Indeed, it has rekindled long-standing arguments about the test that go far beyond California: Is the SAT overrated as a college-admissions tool and predictor of performance? Is it unfair to poor and minority students (critics have long called the test "culturally biased")--especially now that some universities have stopped giving admissions preferences to blacks and Hispanics, whose average SAT scores are much lower than those of whites and Asians? And, perhaps most fundamental, should colleges be picking students based on their acquired knowledge rather than general aptitude? The California system, Atkinson contends, should only use standardized exams directly linked to the material students have studied in school.
Scuttling chances. Esther Walling would be glad to see the SAT go. A college counselor at Jefferson High School in South Central Los Angeles, she says her low-income, Latino students generally do not test well on the SAT, although they are very capable. One of the school's stars, 17-year-old senior Pascual Ramos, has earned straight A's in nine rigorous Advanced Placement courses. But he only managed a combined score of 1080 on the SAT--above the national average of 1019 but well below what elite schools expect. He's applied to several UC schools as well as private universities such as Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, and--his dream campus--the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "I'll get into a couple of them," he predicts. "I only worry about my SAT scores."
It's the nebulous nature of the SAT that bothers many opponents. The test is "a big fuzzball," says testing specialist James Popham, an emeritus professor at UCLA who considers the exam a glorified IQ test. Not so, says the College Board, which sponsors the test. But the board hasn't helped clarify matters by executing a couple of rhetorical somersaults in recent years. In 1994 it changed the SAT's name from Scholastic Aptitude Test--the name since it was first developed in 1926--to the Scholastic Assessment Test. These days the official position is that the initials don't stand for anything.
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