The SAT has been, for decades, a rite of passage for American high school students. The test, which pupils typically take a few times in their final two years of school, assesses their reasoning skills in maths and language, assigning a score between 200 and 800 in each area. Generations of students have doggedly pursued the perfect score, 1600, or at least one high enough to get them into an elite college. When I took the SAT as a 16-year-old, it felt like a last chance: a way to get to college for someone who failed a maths or science class almost every semester of high school. The SAT is an essential rung of America’s meritocratic ladder — and a reliable source of stress among young people.
It’s significant, then, that in the past decade or so dozens of colleges have withdrawn their SAT requirement. Institutions such as Harvard and the entire University of California system, and dozens of others, have either gone test-optional, meaning students can submit their scores but are not required to, or rejected the test entirely. Sometimes, the alternative is to further emphasise GPA, or grade point average — that is, the average grades students earn in high school, often weighted according to the perceived difficulty of the course. In other tellings, the alternative is to embrace so-called “holistic admissions”, which means more emphasis on the essay that pupils submit, extracurriculars, and the “feel” of an application. Either way, this rejection of the test is couched in the language of social justice and equality, with anti-SAT crusaders insisting that the test is inegalitarian, racist, and obsolete.
With race-based affirmative action likely to be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court early next year, the question of diversity on campus is as live and laden with tension as ever. Diversity, in this context, means racial diversity specifically. It might seem odd to recommend an obscure academic book from 2018 as an essential read to understand this tension, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Measuring Success: Testing, Grades, and the Future of College Admissions is a collection of studies from the fields of educational measurement and psychometrics. It powerfully confirms the value of the SAT and similar entrance exams.
It’s essential to understand what kind of student was particularly well-served by the SAT: the kind who is bright and talented but who had failed to live up to their potential in class. These students tended to be the brilliant dreamers; they were the ones in possession of uncommon cognitive skills, but who performed poorly in knowledge-based exams because of bad time management, resistance to the indignities of organised education, or an inability to prioritise school over their own interests. For decades, excellent SAT scores got students into colleges that they wouldn’t ordinarily get into, creating opportunities to find diamonds in the rough who had perhaps never found their footing in school.
The students who the SAT disadvantaged, in contrast, were the grinders — those who were not particularly talented or gifted but who were able to get good grades through ingratiating themselves to teachers, studying maniacally, and always getting whatever points were available for effort. There’s no doubt that society needs both types of student, but the elimination of the SAT benefits only one sort.
There are many fundamental misconceptions that plague discussion of the SATs, and unfortunately, my long experience discussing the test tells me that most people’s ignorance is of the motivated kind. I got my PhD in English, but my focus was on the assessment of student learning and my dissertation was on tests of college learning. And what I learned during that process, and have had reinforced since, is that many people want to maintain myths about such tests out of a sense of resentment and naïve political concerns. This book helpfully dispatches with many common, but bad, arguments.
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