The SAT college admission test will no longer require a timed essay, will dwell less on fancy vocabulary and will return to the familiar 1600-point scoring scale in a major overhaul intended to open doors to higher education for students who are now shut out.It's not being changed to make it a better test, or to make it a better predictor of freshman year college success, or anything like that. It's being made easier so that even more unprepared students can take out even more college loans and go to schools from which they'll probably never graduate.
Just callin' it like I see it, here. I defy you to tell me how I'm wrong.
4 comments:
It's been all downhill since they dropped the analogies section - because of its rather draconian effect on scores.
Gee, I'll bet this has NOTHING to do with Coleman vowing to make the SAT more in line with his beloved CCSS and his pushing to make his tests competitive with the SMART and PARCC tests. So glad I am retiring-May 2015- and won't be bothered with this crap. Glad my grandkids are now living in Texas, which is going in the direction of fewer high-stakes tests and is not CCSS driven as of now.
I've read fairly extensively about this, and I don't think your conclusion is correct ... what the SAT rep said is that they were changing the test because they were finding that the new form of the test was not as successful at predicting college success as the old one was ... and, personally I agree. Weighting the test 1/3 to a single, short writing sample seems insane ... especially since just by sheer logistics, it must be graded on a completely holistic, superficial standard. That's why colleges use grades, and application essays. I don't have a problem with modernizing vocabulary, (e.g.: Scrivener ... knowing that only means you read a Melville short story...) or reducing or trying to reduce racial/socio economic bias (crack is to sidewalk can have two very different meanings) ... but, I DO have a problem with the elimination of analogies, which occurred before the expansion of the test, with much less fanfare ... because everyone hated them. Except for people, like me, who did very well with them ...perhaps coincidentally, I did really well in college. Correlation? Maybe. In any case, that's a legitimate cognitive skill, and I wish it were back in. What I wish they would change is reading comprehension ... read something designed to be completely tedious, then answer multiple choice questions that are either trivial, or subjective -- any MC question is, by definition, objective. You can't then use any sort of opinion in your questions ...
I think it's mainly for ease of grading. How much easier is it for a company to run answer sheets through a scanner than to have an actual person score an essay? The problem is that the college infrastructure is so invested in the testing paradigm at every level. A good friend of mine-one of the most gifted teachers I've ever known-proposed for his doctoral dissertation that high stakes testing was not an accurate predictor of college success. The board rejected it because so many of the professors at the state university are paid to write questions and training material for our state's testing system. On a national level I bet you can track which questions are formulated by which professor if you had a list in front of you. This makes it where the college system perpetuates testing because it has become part of the system itself. I am not opposed to testing, but I don't like tricks and I don't like feeling manipulated. Being a creative person, I can make a case for every word analogy the SAT offers. Where's the test that gauges that talent?
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