“It’s outrageous. Just outrageous,” said Anita Bright, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at Portland State University in Oregon. “The students that are in the most academically vulnerable position when it comes to high-stakes testing are being particularly marginalized,” she said.
In a conference call with College Board staff on March 13, 2014, Deborah Hughes Hallett of the Harvard Kennedy School and Roxy Peck of California Polytechnic State University spoke out.
“Both of our committees have expressed concern about the quality of the items that are being brought to the SAT Committee for review,” they said during the call, according to a transcript. “These items have included many that are not mathematically sound, that have incorrect answers, or that are not accurate or realistic in terms of the given context.”
In a nearly 5,000-word letter from August 2014, one reviewer told College Board officials that he had “never encountered so many seriously flawed items” in the 20-plus years he had been screening math material for the organization.
That reviewer – a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee named Dan Lotesto – wrote of the math questions: “Why so many items with vocabulary issues, especially for ELL students?” ELL stands for English-language learners.
THE REDESIGNED SAT SEEMS TO BE FLAWED BEYOND COMPREHENSION. And it seems like we’re not just talking about one disgruntled employee anymore.
When will officials from the College Board speak out to address THESE MOUNTING CONCERNS AND SCATHING CRITICISMS?
An inspirational quote: “We are not perfect…We can and should do more.”
Nobody is perfect, but given the power that an organization has to redefine education and the impact it has on millions, it should indeed be expected to do more, not just say it “can and should do more.”
I wish that every college counselor and tutor would read these articles. Collectively they show what many of us have suspected: the New SAT was a rush job whose changes were intended to bring economic benefit to the College Board. While I hadn’t thought of the idea of light vs. heavy math questions, the idea now makes sense. It also explains in part why I had students who had made 32-34 on the ACT math but only got mid 600’s on the March and May SAT’s. Those students had mentioned the length of the problems as an issue that affected their timing. I am going to continue to recommend the ACT and only the ACT until further notice to my students, and I will forward these links to several professional college counselors with whom I regularly work.
The same problem is evident in the Smarter Balanced Common Core tests (common element: David Coleman). I’m a school board member for a small elementary district. One problem we see with the scores we are getting is that there are no true math scores. The math assessments test both reading and math. We would like to see whether our English learners (and we have a lot of Spanish-speaking families) are learning to work with numbers at their grade level (or at what grade level). If all the problems are complicated word problems, there is no subscore that gives us that information.
We’ve added some quick formative assessment tools that are common across the district to give us that data. But, the Common Core test take long enough to administer–it would be nice to get useful data out of them.
