And college readiness does not mean ability to read and interpret 18th/19th century texts.
The point of the sat is to evaluate college readiness not your future as an English major. I’m all in favor of the new writing prompts, for example, or of including excerpts from college texts from subjects often taken during freshman year.
Here is what I’ve told my SAT prep juniors:
The new test may be harder than the old, it may be easier.
It doesn’t matter. You’re not competing with kids who took the old test.
Your actual scores don’t matter. What matters is your percentile. If the school you’re hoping for has 600 seats available, it’s going to fill those 600 seats. It doesn’t matter how low they have to go in terms of scores, they’re not going to let seats go empty because of the change in the exam.
So simply do better than everyone else. Don’t sweat the actual score.
There are plenty of elite bilingual students with US ctizenship. They are American. The world is is globalized. People move around. It’s not us and them.
Ethan Fromme is not difficult reading, IMO–far easier than many other classic texts and certainly simpler than many textbooks.
With regard to American universities and their primary mission being to educate American citizens, some things truly are just obvious on their face. I think it is safe to say this is one of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if one goes back into the early charter/mission statements of some of our schools that they had language such as this. Maybe some still do, but even if not I think it is only because it seems so apparent. I suspect that a quick survey of our college presidents would find wide agreement on this “issue”. Also, at least with regard to state (public) universities, many have minimum percentages of state residents that must be admitted. While technically every one of those could be a permanent resident that is not a citizen of the USA, that is absurd on its face and it would never occur to anyone to include wording in the legislation to prevent it. And obviously being a citizen of any one of the 50 states means being an American citizen, but not vice versa.
Maybe another factor that will convince you is that for admissions, it is against the law to discriminate against applicants based on race, sex, national origin, etc. I emphasize against because discriminating in favor is obviously a pending issue. However, it is not illegal in the least to discriminate based on citizenship. Any college, even state (public) universities, is free to reject every foreign national that applies, if they want. Since there is nothing in our public policy that is against this practice, it is logical to conclude that American universities, which all fall under this umbrella of public policy, are here primarily to serve American citizens. I would also point out that every private college is free to admit only foreign nationals if it wanted to. Can you even imagine such a thing, or even a school that had a policy of having at least 50% aliens? So there are numerous ways of more or less proving the obvious.
Due to our nature as a people, the history of our country, the independence of schools from the Federal government (at least in this regard), and no doubt other factors we have had a decent percentage of foreign nationals that we allow to come in on student visas, with almost no cases of blocking entry on a percentage of request basis except for financial issues. This has been true at least since the end of WWII or the early 1950’s, but I would be curious to know what percentage of foreigners there were before that, even at schools like Harvard and Princeton and Yale, where certainly there were some. But I think back in those days schools like Oxford and Cambridge and some of the more prestigious French and German schools might have been chosen preferentially. At least when Europe wasn’t destroying itself in wars.
One of the things we “insist” on, although not really all that much from my experience, is English proficiency and the ability to pass our tests in the same format as an American student would take it. Of course not all schools require the latter at all. But for those that do it seems eminently reasonable to me that they would use American standards, since as I said the primary tenet seems more than obvious. There should be no reason at the university level to have to make accommodations for those whose English is not sufficient to do well. If the schools choose to, then of course that is a very nice thing for them to do, but it certainly shouldn’t be seen as an obligation.
The issue for me is not about admissions. Admissions officers can make whatever policy they chose. Some universities like foreign students because they bring money. Many universities limit the percentage of foreign students. I have no problem with that.
My problem is test bias.
What is the SAT supposed to measure? The SAT is supposed to correlate with first year grades in college (in the US, obviously). When CB says that the SAT is a “valid” test, what it means is that we can use the SAT to predict a student’s university performance.
Systematic failure to correlate with first year college grades in the case of a specific group is TEST BIAS. It is a failure to meet the validity standard.
When the SAT underpredicts the first year US college grades of black students, this is called racism. CB takes steps to correct this.
When the SAT underpredicts the first year US college grades of female students, this is called sexism. CB takes steps to correct this.
When the SAT underpredicts the first year US colleges grades of bilingual students, what should we call this? Should we say, who cares about correctly predicting the US college grades of bilingual students because some of these students aren’t American, and maybe even the ones who are American aren’t “real” Americans? So instead of taking steps to correct test bias against bilingual students, CB makes a test that is going to have even more test bias against bilinguals?
Putting more idiosyncratic verbiage and idioms into the test is an ideological statement, not a measure of skills necessary for academic success in college.
This test sounds like a nightmare for my (American) dyslexic, dyscalculic, dysgraphic teen, and I’ve been reading classic literature to her since she was 5. I think we’ll be exploring the ACT.
I have one kid who took the last sitting of the old SAT in January and one who took the new PSAT in November. IMO, if you are evaluating college readiness, the new SAT is a better test for literacy. Discerning the meaning of words in context probably is a better evaluative indicator than testing your knowledge of vocabulary words in relative isolation. Writing a reasoned essay supported by a text resembles a college-level exercise more than a broad opinion-based prompt that requires the student to come up with evidence on the fly.
That doesn’t, of course, address the issue that some SAT questions are written very poorly and writing questions often provide an array of bad options that no decent writer would contemplate. Pick the one that’s least dreadful, dear.
Where does the College Board explicitly state that the SAT is supposed to correlate with first year grades???
The CB only touts the SAT to be a measure of college READINESS. That is not the same thing as “first year grades”.
All those issues you bring up are worth discussion absolutely, and I would say even more worth discussion than what I wrote. But I am not sure why you addressed that towards me, since clearly I was responding to the other discussion as to whether American colleges/universities have as their primary mission the education of American citizens. I was, in fact, hoping to put it to bed. Once you accept that tenet, then one can focus more on the kinds of questions you ask. I certainly have opinions about what you are saying, and I suspect but don’t know that they largely align with your opinions. But I choose not to enter that discussion due to all the demands on my time. I simply wanted to (hopefully) make that other issue dormant.
I will simply say in a “drive-by” manner that because I believe that the mission is primarily to educate American citizens, I do not believe that the purpose of the test should be to make it “fairer” for foreign students. However, bilingual American citizens whose first language is not English do have every right to expect a fair test, or at least a fair shake at admissions such as ignoring the test in their case and using other factors. Because I agree that many of these students can succeed at high levels. If the CB does take steps to make the test fairer for those students and that happens to also make it “better” for foreign nationals, then great.
Some educators fear that the revised test — one of the biggest redesigns ever — will penalize certain students, like immigrants and the poor.
@fallenchrist
Sorry if I misinterpreted your post. Please accept my apologies.
Good bilingual students can do well on the SAT, so I don’t think waiving the test is necessarily the best option.
I found it interesting that the NY Times article mentioned this group, although probably the author was thinking mostly of poorer immigrants.
Here’s what the CB rep replied:
"Dr. Schmeiser said that despite educators’ fears, a preliminary study did not show the new test giving any disadvantage to Asians — who excel in math but do slightly less well than whites in reading. “We did look at how students of color and various races and ethnicities looked,” Dr. Schmeiser said. “It suggested the gap may be narrowing.”
CB clearly tried to tune the new test to perform in a certain way among the “hot potato” groups. But I doubt bilinguals as a group were tested.
The fact that there is no longer a penalty for guessing means that the gap between the lowest scorers and everyone else will automatically narrow. This was not even mentioned in the NYT article.
Another thing that was not mentioned was that the reading QUESTIONS are now easier. This means that kids who can handle the passages are going to find the test easier, not harder.
"Executive Summary
The College Board conducted a pilot predictive validity study to provide colleges and
universities with early information about the relationship between the redesigned SAT® and
college grades. Fifteen four-year institutions were recruited to administer a pilot form of the
redesigned SAT to between 75 and 250 first-year, first-time students very early in the fall
semester of 2014.
In June 2015, participating institutions provided the College Board with first-year
performance data for those students participating in the fall 2014 administration of the
redesigned SAT so that relationships between SAT scores and college performance could be
analyzed. Results of study analyses show that the redesigned SAT is as predictive of college
success as the current SAT, that redesigned SAT scores improve the ability to predict college
performance above high school GPA alone, and that there is a strong, positive relationship
between redesigned SAT scores and grades in matching college course domains, suggesting
that the redesigned SAT is sensitive to instruction in English language arts, math, science, and
history/social studies."
Correlation with first year college grades has been the CB standard of SAT validity for many years.
I agree there were far too many very high scores on the old test.
My sniff test says there will be MORE very high scores on the new test, not fewer, unless CB adds in some harder questions than those on the released practice tests and the October PSAT’s.
My guess is that CB does not want to do this because it would stretch out the hot potato distribution. Instead, the aim is to “narrow the gap” between hot potatoes.
NYU Abu-Dhabi? Georgetown Qatar?
What exactly did the score distribution for the PSAT look like?
I took the new PSAT and the wordiness on math sections seemed unnecessary. However, for certain types of problems, it did seem to test a more comprehensive knowledge of math in context. So, rather than telling students to perform a certain calculation, it described a scenario and asked for a certain thing regarding the scenario, which forced students to figure out what calculation to do.
On another note, removing vocab questions was a very good choice. Vocab questions were the most antiquated, useless part of the test. However, some reading questions on the PSAT did revolve around the meaning of a word, but you could use context and author’s tone to figure it out.
The new SAT essay is BS tho. Instead of testing students’ abilities to write, it now also tests reading abilities, among which are rhetorical analysis.
@rustroll - reading is just one small part of the essay scoring rubric.
(I think the new essay is a huge improvement, btw. The old one could be beaten with a good “madlibs”-style template, and even kids who couldn’t make complete sentences on their own could score 10-12 on it with proper training. The new one is much harder to game and represents some skills that are actually used in college.)
marvin100, it seems like all of high school and the college admissions itself has become a huge gaming process for middle to (especially) upper middle class parents who expend anything necessary to carve out a child who meets Harvard’s entry requirements. Are you suggesting this isn’t a good thing? Like there should be a way to prevent it? 
Haha, @lostaccount – well, I’m not sure it’s a good thing (I think anything that has such high stakes, perceived or real, will produce an “industry,” and the very preppable nature of this important test has had the predictable result), but I do think there are some things the CB can and should do to (A) make the test more fair, (B) make the test a better predictor of some measurable academic performance, and © prevent cheating. It’s © I’m most concerned about, as the CB’s policy of test recycling leaves the door open for the worst forms of cheating and it appears that won’t change with the new test (still only a few tests a year will be availabe as QAS–the only reason I can think of for that is the need to recycle them, although I earnestly hope there’s something I’ve overlooked!).