The Economist On The New SATs

Parents Forum
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<p>there's a thoughtful article on the new SATs in the March 12 Economist that argues, in effect, that the new test is more achievement oriented than the old, with the more advanced Algebra, greater emphasis on "critical reading," the essay, and the removal of analogies shifting the emphasis to things that are focused on in higher quality high schools. By so doing, they say, rather than emphasizing "reasoning ability" the effect will be to favor the students from higher social strata, rather than the discovery of "children who had nothing to recommend them but brains." They interestingly argue that there is "good evidence" that minority students do better on analogies than on "critical reading." In effecting this shift, they conclude, the college board is reversing the original goal of the SAT, as conceived by James Conant and Henry Chauncey, to create a meritocracy in American higher education, and break the stranglehold of the WASP ascendancy on our top colleges, and ultimately, our culture. In doing this, they argue, the SAT produced a great,silent cultural revolution that has made our educational system the glory of the academic world. Instead, they conclude, the changes "may well go down in history [as helping ] to unravel the meritocratic principle--and to widen America's class divisions still further."</p>

<p>Any thoughts?</p>

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<p>I'm always intrigued by the econmist and its sweeping generalizations of class life in "The Colonies". :)</p>

<p>1) There are literally thousands of colleges that do not require the SAT, including a few top LACs. And, of those colleges that do require testing, they'll accept the ACT instead. Thus, his arguement is specious (my SAT vocab word for the day), IMO.</p>

<p>2) There is some evidence that suggests that analogies are more logic-oriented. BUT, to make it meaningful, i.e., bell curve material, CB has to use words off a very advanced vocab list. As a result, the analogies ended up being economically-biased. S/he that was middle class-rich and went to good schools get handed vocab books in middle school and continuing on thru HS. Poor districts are fortunate to have a handful of textbooks to share, but no funds for vocab books. That is why the former Pres of UC pushed to drop analogies. </p>

<p>3) The "advanced"' algebra is ~3-5 problems. A kid could miss them all, and still receive a fine score which would be acceptable to all but the top 100 colleges. (Of course, anyone applying to one of the most selective colleges needs at least 3 years of math....)</p>

<p>4) The new President & CEO of Disney, one of our Fortune 100 conglomerates, graduated from Ithaca College -- not H, not Y, not S, not MIT, not any top-ranked LACs.</p>

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<p>Idler, I'll have to look up that article. thanks for bringing it up. This is a very preliminary response to the points you highlight.
The argument that the old SAT helped minority students who had raw talent but a bad education has been made before.
I am ambivalent about the points raised in the article. It really depends on the uses that have been made of the SAT. Is it to identify students of promise? or to evaluate their college-preparedness?
To give an example: my S scored 660 on the SAT-V in 7th grade. He is a strong math student, and so it was no great surprise that he did very well in the analogy and sentence completion parts of the test. He did less well on the critical reading portion. Based on his analogy and sentence completion score, he showed, as a 7th grader, great promise. BUt he also showed, via his lower score in the critical reading portion, that he was not ready to handle college-level reading--even though he still scored above the national median for college-bound seniors.
It can be argued--and it has-- that promising students can excel in college provided that they get support. This may be why there is such a proliferation of remedial courses and resource centers that were unknown when I was in college.
It's good to identify students who show promise despite a poor educational environment. But in a way, the identification of a few could be said to help perpetuate the miseducation of the many, by leaving the status quo in k-12 essentially undisturbed.
What Caperton is trying to achieve is to raise standards in k-12 education; he is thus using the SAT for purposes other than just evaluation of college-readiness or talent identification. So he could be said to try to continue the work of Conant and Chauncey, but at a different level. Is the SAT the right vehicle for this? I don't know.</p>

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<p>bluebayou, I love your "Colonies" comment.</p>

<p>I do not have an empirical study to back this up. I merely observe from teaching minorities separately from low and high SES, that only minorities from high SES mastered (& enjoyed) the analogies. Minorities from less articulate & less educated households, & whose own education provided less verbal challenge & more of the verbal basics, struggled with analogies. And in my experience, the low-SES minorities did better on the critical reading than on the analogies. I'll grant you this is anecdotal, but it is why I find the Economist claims counter-intuitive. I'd have to see the "evidence" that is alluded to.</p>

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<p>Wow.</p>

<p>The CB apparently cannot do anything right. I thought part of the hype about the new SAT was that it would help minorities because it's more curriculum-focused rather than "reasoning"-focused. The "reasoning" ability is what one doesn't necessarily receive from school but might receive from a prep course, thus benefitting higher-income students.</p>

<p>I think this talk about the tests being biased against low-income students (minorites tend to be in the low-income strata, unfortunately) is somewhat absurd. The rich students go to good, expensive schools and thus are better prepared for college, which is what is revealed in the CB's tests. I'm not saying that the SAT is a perfect measure of college preparedness. It certainly is flawed, but it does measure something necessary for college success even if it is just the ability to do well on tests.</p>

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<p>Interesting to me that the question of the length of the bathroom breaks is of far more interest to most than the larger issues this essay raises. </p>

<p>Marite, I haven't thought this through either, but I do think it is logical that the greater emphasis on achievment rather than reasoning ability favors those with better high school educations, and in this sense it reverses the original purposes of Conant and Chauncey, to identify "children who have nothing going for them but brains," focussing instead on those who are best "prepared" for college by their high school education. I think your son's 7th grade results are an interesting example, giving an early indication that he is Harvard material (we are talking about Conant) even though his education was at that point incomplete, as you'd expect in a 7th grader. I realize that Caperton et.al. seem to be on a mission to raise standards in k-12 education. The stranglehold that the AP program has on grades 10-12 curriculum is good evidence that they have the power to do this, though there remains a question whether it is a positive influence, and a question whether ETS and CEEB should have that power. I don't know, it's worth thinking about.</p>

<p>Sure, achievement and preparation are highly important, as measured by SAT 2s, the ACT, APs,the high school record, etc. Blue Bayou, the fact that some colleges (thousands, really?) do without the sat, and most accept the ACT is really beside the point, as is your comment that the chairman of Disney is an Ithaca grad. I'm really just talking about those contemptible top schools, and the original SAT mission to identify good candidates who did not have the benefit of a polished education. And maybe the test isn't really that different from the old one, but it is worth trying to identify the direction these changes might be taking us.</p>

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<p>Idler, I've been making this argument for a while. I don't have the source, but I have read elsewhere that, whether they "like" them nor not, the gap for analogies is smaller for URMs than for other parts of the test, for the reasoning the argument describes.</p>

<p>I know from my own experience that my kids did far better on the SAT 1 than on SAT 2's, because, I believe, the one tests reasoning ability while the other tests "achievement," and in our school system, a lot of what is on the 2's was not taught. And they have both, so far, excelled in selective schools, leading me to believe (from my sample of two ;) ) that ability to learn is more important than actual content already mastered.</p>

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<p>My take is that the unveiling of the SAT -no longer new SAT- is the perfect opportunity for many people to advance their theories on sociology, regardless of the correlation with the SAT. The topic of the article might be the SAT, but both the inexperience and lack of understanding of the test shows clearly through most articles. They present the changes in the SAT as a revolution of some sorts, showing that they did not understand the previous versions of the test nor the latest one. </p>

<p>In a typical fashion, those "journalists" present a situation in which the SAT becomes both judge and arbiter of the chances of admissions in college. We all know that the role of the colleges is to INTERPRET the scores, and massage the scores to reflect socio-economic and racial differences. That is why some students get accepted at the HYPS of this world despite lower scores. </p>

<p>While the result of a national standardized test might illustrate -or confirm- the differences in K-12 education, people who expect that a 4 hours test will change the entire educational system are simply delusional. </p>

<p>Bashing the SAT -and its recent changes- seems to make good press, but the topic also attracts many a poor journalist.</p>

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<p>Did you read the essay, Xiggi? Sorry I don't have the cut and paste talent to reproduce it, but I assure you your harsh comments don't apply in this case. Far from bashing the SAT, it makes an eloquent case for its historical importance. If you think the SAT hasn't had an enormous effect on the history of American higher ed, then you're the one that's "delusional," lad.</p>

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<p>bluebayou, your point's well taken, but many people think that entry into those super selective schools (the top 10, not 100), is the ticket to changing someone's life and getting enough URMs through them will change the culture. I don't know that I agree, but The Economist apprently does (this is hardly the first time the subject's come up in their pages). </p>

<p>And while they see us through some interesting filters, it's surprising how often their outsider's view of the US has a deep ring of truth to it, even if we can't always see it from where we're sitting.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
Did you read the essay, Xiggi? Sorry I don't have the cut and paste talent to reproduce it, but I assure you your harsh comments don't apply in this case. Far from bashing the SAT, it makes an eloquent case for its historical importance. If you think the SAT hasn't had an enormous effect on the history of American higher ed, then you're the one that's "delusional," lad.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Well, allow the lad to anwer. First, I do not have the habit to share my opinions without trying to see the many sides of an issue. To answer the first question, I did indeed read your comments as well as the quoted article. </p>

<p>As far as the second part, while not denying the historical importance of the SAT and its impact on admissions, I restricted my comment to the expected role of the SAT in changing our entire educational system by redefining the curriculum of K-12. I could go into more details about how unrealistic some of Caperton's views are, especially about his unrealistic expectations of the impact of a 25 minute essay test on improving the ability of high students to write. This would, however, go far beyond the scope of my reply. </p>

<p>Now, back to the article ... since it it not admissible to to reproduce the entire article, I will voice my exceptions to a few selected sentences, and this to point out the author's obvious lack of factual understanding or knowledge of the SAT. </p>

<p>.... IN A time-honoured academic ritual, on March 12th 330,000 16-17-year-olds will sit their Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs)
=== Scholastic Aptitude Tests is NOT the name of the 2005 test -and not the name of the 2004 test, for that matter.</p>

<p>... But this year the SATs will be a rather different animal
= There is only one test called SAT, no plural needed here </p>

<p>... They will put less emphasis on abstract reasoning and more on what pupils have learned in the classroom.
= why would there be less emphasis on abstract reasoning? </p>

<p>... Gone will be the old analogies
=== Analogies are gone, so I suppose that the author equates analogies with abstract reasoning. </p>

<p>...and in **will come **tests of reading comprehension and algebra.
=== In WILL come RC and algebra? Did the author bother to read past tests? Reading comprehension accounted for about 41 questions of 78 on the old SAT. The comment on the arrival of Algebra is not only comical but plain dumb. </p>

<p>... The new SATs will even include a compulsory essay. An examination that was originally intended to test raw ability is mutating into a test of academic achievement.
=== The author is now drawing a conclusion on ... must be the above fallacies</p>

<p>... And how can they claim to be fair when poor people and minorities do worse than rich people and whites?
=== It would be correct if the author had sai Under Represented minorities and not all minorities. Asians are minorities in the US, and all foreign testers are also minorities in the US context. </p>

<p>... The old SATs were responsible for producing one of the great silent social revolutions in American history?the rise of the meritocracy.
=== Were the old SATs responsible for this? </p>

<p>... turned the Education Testing Service into the arbiter of a huge system of educational opportunity.
=== Has the SAT ever been in a position to judge or decide a disputed issue or have the power to judge or ordain at will? Aren't the admissions committees not responsible for deciding who attends their schools? </p>

<p>... 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.
=== Didn't our President take the SAT before entering Yale? The author must have watched Dan Rather via satellite for his research. Had he taken the time to use google, he could have counted no less than 1,410,000 for a query of "George Bush SAT". </p>

<p>... Or else they admit minority students with ower SAT scores, only to see a disproportionate number of them drop out because they can't cope. If universities admitted students purely on the basis of their grades and test scores, as they should, the proportion of successful poor students would actually go up rather than down.
=== Didn't the author say that poor students do worse on the SAT? I assume that the "test scores" is used in a different context by the author. Would it not be nice to see the author quantify the term "disproportionate"? How large is this difference at schools such as Harvard, Princeton, or Amherst? For instance, nearly 19 out of every 20 black students who enter the highly competitive academic environment of Harvard, Princeton, Haverford, and Amherst go on to earn their diplomas. </p>

<p>... Perhaps Mr Atkinson, too, will be honoured for fine-tuning their successful system. But it is far more likely that he will go down in history as a man who helped to unravel the meritocratic principle?and to widen America's class divisions still further.
=== Atkinson's role will, indeed, earn few kudos. I'm glad I could agree on this with the author.</p>

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<p>Yes, I think the SAT played a key historical role in the transformation of our best colleges from bastions of the aristocracy to something more meritocratic. That's what it was designed to do, and it has clearly happened. Not the only factor, but key. Do you disagree with the essay's main premise that the new SAT (sorry, it's still the "new" SAT to me) shifts the emphasis more toward "achievement"? I think that's certainly debatable too, but I thought it was generally accepted that the new test puts more emphasis on reading comprehension, includes more advanced math, and eliminates analogies. The point about abstract reasoning has always been a sore point at ETS--that is why they dropped the "aptitude" from the SAT title years ago, and that's why they have always insisted that the SAT is not an IQ test, despite a very significant correlation between the results of the two tests. And yes, abstract reasoning is still important, but the drift seems arguably to be away from it toward "achievement," which favors those with better educationl backgrounds, i.e. the upper strata of society. Of course, admissions committees use more than SAT scores, we all know this. As the article points out, for example, they use legacy status, athletic ability, and race. They also use all the other things we frequently discuss here to build a diverse class. That does not change the essential use of the test to discover "children who have nothing going for them but brains." I believe the point the essayist makes about G.W. Bush is that he was admitted before Yale belatedly started paying attention to the SAT, which is why his younger brother went to Texas (not that GWB did that poorly on his SAT).
Xiggi, I bow down to your ability to master the SAT and provide useful study hints, but I think your critique is nitpicky and does not really address the issue the essay raises. The Economist does seem to be on a campaign lately to point out the subtle ways class is creeping into our classless society, and many people find what they say upsetting, but I guess I'm not one of them.</p>

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<p>Remember that this whole thing is about money. CB was about to lose its biggest customer - the University of California system. They needed to do something - AND FAST! No time to study what would work, what would be fair, would could be well administered, what would aid colleges in parsing applications. None of that. They needed to keep their customer, while finding something that in the long run might serve their (financial) purposes better.</p>

<p>This is only the first of what will be MANY changes ahead, and not necessarily a permanent one.</p>

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<p>Idler:</p>

<p>Indeed, my S's 7th grade SAT score showed academic promise. But had he achieved the same SAT-V as a junior rather than a 7th grader, I would have been concerned as to his college-preparedness given the percentage of errors he made on the critical reading portion of the test. This despite the fact that his SAT-V was quite respectable, even for a high school senior.
What I am trying to suggest is that the old SAT tried to be both about identifying raw talent and evaluating college-preparedness. But short of breaking down the global score, it was not really possible for colleges to know which was which. It still is not possible to do so, although the new SAT tilts more in the direction of college preparedness.</p>

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<p>The College Board makes one AND ONLY ONE claim for the SAT - it serves as a predictor of first-year college performance. It is not about aptitude, intelligence, achievement, preparedness, critical thinking, or anything else (except as they might be associated with first-year college performance.) Don't claim for it more than the authors/publishers do themselves.</p>

<p>The problem was, as the University of California realized after a 5-year study, is that it didn't even do that, for minority students. Both African-American and Hispanic students did much, much better at the UCs in their first year, upon admission, than their SATs predicted.</p>

<p>Now the CollegeBoard people are running scared (as the game has been uncovered.)</p>

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<p>global=verbal, right? It's far from perfect, I agree it tries to do both, and can't be used in isolation. I've always wondered how useful the very early administration is. Still, there's no denying that it uncovered some raw talent.</p>

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<p>Mini:</p>

<p>What SAT stands for has undergone several changes, to the point that the acronym does not stand for anything anymore. College preparedness is another way of saying that a student can handle college work in the first year. I'm not suggesting that the SAT is necessarily a good predictor of that. Indeed, my S's performance on the SAT suggests the contrary: a score of 660 on the SAT-V, while respectable, could mask a real weakness that would have a direct effect on the ability of a student to handle college-level reading.
Btw, the critical reading portion was introduced during the time I served on an advisory committee of the CB, where I was an outspoken critic of the SAT as it was.</p>

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<p>Mini is correct....the UC hijacked the SAT, for better or worse. </p>

<p>Based on UC studies in the late '90s and early 2001, researchers claim that the SATII's were a better predictor of UC college success than the SATI's. Thus, the Regents double-weighted the SATII's for admission-eligibility. (This also had an obvious effect of increasing eligibility of non-native speakers since one SATII language was now equal in weight to the SATI m+v.) In the meantime, then President Atkinson convinced the Regents that kids should not spend their time memorizing vocab lists in grade school solely to prepare for the SAT analogies. He postulated, rightly, I think, that those vocab lists were more likely to show up in suburban and wealthy districts than they were in inner-city LA, Fresno, Bakersfield, or rural districts. Therefore, UC threatened to write its own test, more on achievement lines, unless CB changed its test. And the rest is history-in-the-making.</p>

<p>Thus, while the analogies may have had something to do with reasoning, one can only show one's connection logic if one has knowledge of the words themselves. Since many inner city kids don't even have access to textbooks or libraries in this state, reading..... </p>

<p>Idler:</p>

<p>I'd love to see any data which indicate that the SAT has had an impact on meritocracy at those "contempitble" schools, at least in the last 20 years. </p>

<p>Even the CB admits that this test can be prepped for and since test scores correctly nearly perfectly with income....I would submit that the SAT in an of itself, helps to perpetuate the class society, not the other way around.</p>

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<p>"That does not change the essential use of the test to discover "children who have nothing going for them but brains.""</p>

<p>My guess is that the 2005 SAT will exacerbate the gap between the have-lots (educational and financial) and the have-less, but we will have to wait to see the data when it is released.</p>

<p>Regarding the original article - I don't think it was very well researched.</p>

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<p>Bluebayou: (love the screen name, it inspired me to download the Linda Ronstadt song, it's heavenly) I don't know about 20 years, but if you go back 50 you would certainly find a different social class makeup at those schools. How much can be attributed to SAT is debatable, but it was a big factor.</p>