Two Cheers for an End to the SAT
One imagines the folks at the College Board blushing deeply when, a few years back, they announced that the “A” in SAT no longer stood for “Aptitude.” Scarlet, after all, would be an appropriate color to turn while, in effect, conceding that the test wasn’t — and, let’s face it, never had been — a measure of intellectual aptitude. For a brief period, the examination was rechristened the Scholastic Assessment Test, a name presumably generated by the Department of Redundancy Department. Today, literally — and perhaps figuratively — SAT doesn’t stand for anything at all.
It wasn’t the significance of the shift in the SAT’s name that recently produced an epiphany for Richard C. Atkinson, president of the University of California. Rather, the tipping point in deciding to urge the elimination of the SAT as a requirement for admission came last year during a visit to the upscale private school his grandchildren attend. There, he watched as 12-year-olds were drilled on verbal analogies, part of an extended training that, he said in announcing his proposal, “was not aimed at developing the students’ reading and writing abilities but rather their test-taking skills.” More broadly, he argued, “America’s overemphasis on the SAT is compromising our educational system.”
Of course, it must be pointed out that U.C., assuming its policy-making bodies accept their president’s advice, would not be the first institution to drop the SAT. Hundreds of colleges and universities, including Bates, Bowdoin, Connecticut, and Mount Holyoke Colleges, no longer require the SAT or ACT. A survey by FairTest, a Cambridge, Mass.-based advocacy group, reported that such colleges are generally well-satisfied that “applicant pools and enrolled classes have become more diverse without any loss in academic quality.”
On balance, this latest and most significant challenge to the reign of the SAT is very welcome news indeed. There is a possible downside as well, but we should begin by recognizing that even before colleges began hopping off the SAT bandwagon, the assumption that they needed something like the test to help them decide whom to admit was difficult to defend, if only because of a powerful counterexample to our north: No such test is used in Canada. But the more one learns about the SAT in particular, the more one wonders what took Atkinson so long, and what is taking many of his counterparts even longer. Consider:
* The SAT is a measure of resources more than of reasoning. Year after year, the College Board’s own statistics depict a virtually linear correlation between SAT scores and CONTINUE READING: Two Cheers for an End to the SAT (**) - Alfie Kohn