Dumbing Down the SAT

National Review Online ^ | March 25, 2002 | Stanley Kurtz

[xsysmgr]

The very existence of intelligence differences in America is about to become a forbidden truth

s intelligence un-American? It didn't used to be. But the times they are a-changin'. The American belief in the fundamental equality of all human beings is our glory and our foundation. But American equality has always meant equality of opportunity and equality before the law. The problem since the Sixties has been that some now demand equality of result — and more. For many on the Left, even inequalities of intelligence and physical difference are now forbidden. Through gender-norming and the general degradation of standards, our armed forces have been pretending for years that the physical differences between men and women don't exist. The war may have changed that, as indicated by the Bush administration's reform of DACOWITS (the nest of feminists at the Pentagon that for a decade has undermined standards in the name of "gender equity"). But buried on page 10 of Saturday's New York Times (and in the second section of last Friday's Wall Street Journal) was news that the very existence of intelligence differences in America is about to become a forbidden truth.

Last year, Richard Atkinson, president of the nation's largest university system, the University of California, proposed dumping the SAT test. Atkinson justified the projected move with the claim that the SAT, as a measure of aptitude rather than achievement, was unfair to those who could maximize their potential through hard work in high school and college. But Atkinson's move was a transparent attempt to circumvent California's Proposition 209, which outlawed race preferences in admission to California's public colleges. (For more on this, see my "Academic Postmodernity & the SATs.")

Now, with Atkinson's proposal slowly but successfully working its way through the ruling bureaucracy of the University of California system, an intimidated College Board has announced a sweeping reform of the SAT, one that will turn it from an aptitude test into something much closer to an achievement test. This desperate attempt to head off a national stampede away from the SAT is a serious mistake. The feared stampede would probably never have materialized, and could in any case have been very effectively battled. More important, there is nothing wrong — and everything right — with colleges basing their admissions decisions, in part, on a clear measure of student aptitude.

College admissions offices already have measures of student achievement to work with — grades, and a wide range of achievement tests. Colleges do, and should, take these measures of achievement into account. The point of the SAT is to add something new and important to the mix — a test of general aptitude. An aptitude test actually works in favor of students who come from lesser high schools but have the potential to achieve at higher levels in college. By destroying the SAT as a measure of aptitude, all that is accomplished is the suppression of a real and significant dimension of difference among students. As usual, in other words, the truth is being sacrificed to political correctness.

The SAT's famous verbal analogies, for example, are slated to be significantly scaled back or cut out entirely. Why? Because those who know English as a second language are said to be disadvantaged by the analogies. They do better with vocabulary quizzes that rely on rote memorization. So the critical intellectual capacities revealed when someone is asked to actually compare and relate words instead of simply spit back memorized definitions, can no longer be measured for anyone — simply because we are afraid to disadvantage a few. The solution here is to return to an emphasis on English immersion for immigrants, not the destruction of a critical test for all Americans.

To measure achievement, the math portion of the test will now be significantly more difficult. The original SAT actually did not require a command of advanced math. Again, it was looking to see how well people confronted and manipulated mathematical challenges. But with the emphasis on aptitude gone, bright kids who might be able to master higher math if given the chance will actually be tougher to identify. Besides, math grades and math achievement tests already show who has mastered high level math. This is nothing but an attempt to manipulate the SAT test until the results come out the way the testers want them to. Since minorities tend to do less well on aptitude tests, the test itself must go.

No doubt, individual intelligence differences are in some measure heritable. But I do not believe that class or race differences on aptitude tests are genetically based. Certainly, researchers have never succeeded in disentangling the effects of early experience from test results. If poor or minority students test lower on the SAT's than others, the way to solve the problem is to improve the conditions of life for these children, not to pretend that aptitude differences among high school students don't exist.

The destruction of the SAT as an aptitude test is an epoch-making move. Reflecting this, the test itself will probably be renamed. (Since the "Scholastic Aptitude Test" will no longer be a reliable measure of aptitude.) But this epochal change is being slipped by the American public in exactly the way that the most controversial advances in affirmative action have been established in the past. Quiet executive orders and behind the scenes bureaucratic decisions are the strategies of choice for liberal elites, operating against the weight of public opinion, in the matters of racial preferences and gender norming. And now, a profound change in the meaning of the SAT has been buried in the middle of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. (The news pages of the Journal, by the way, are editorially quite separate from their conservative opinion pages.) And of course, instead of seeking out potential critics of the policy, the Times simply went for comment to Nicholas Lemann, a prominent advocate of affirmative action and critic of the SAT. This is a lesson in how press bias really works. Not only does the Times puff up stories on social changes that it likes by front-paging them, it downplays changes likely to arouse conservative opposition.

There was a time when Americans believed that finding and training the country's finest minds was in the national interest. Certainly, all American children ought to have access to quality education. But, ultimately, it is to our collective advantage as a nation to have a way of identifying students of high aptitude. And it is fairer to students themselves — especially those from lesser schools — to have a way of recognizing intellectual potential that has not yet come to the surface.

The irony is that support for destruction of the SAT test comes from a liberal elite that is itself the product of our educational meritocracy. Guilt about success combines here with a hidden craving for moral superiority over the benighted middle classes. Those in the middle — and many minorities as well — still believe in the principles of liberty and equality that created the meritocracy in the first place. But once again, the liberal elite, in a conversation amongst itself, is managing to turn our most basic values and practices inside out — with nary a peep from a public that would fight these changes if they were honestly told what is happening.

A proposed policy change from a powerful and extremely liberal university president (put forward with fundamental dishonesty about its real motives) brings pressure to bear upon the makers of the SAT test. In a panic at the prospect of losing the California system's business, the College Board buckles, and the only important national measure of student aptitude is destroyed. The news is buried in the middle of the weekend papers. In short, we have allowed a minority of Leftist intellectuals to commandeer our culture. Will anyone fight back?

Announcement: My pieces on NRO will now include an e-mail address for comments. I can't promise to answer everyone who writes, although I'll try to respond to as many messages as I can. I'll do my best, however, to read all of your comments.

Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the Hudson Institute.

[FreedominJesusChrist]

I do not understand why Liberals get so upset with this sort of stuff because the two racial groups who consistently score the highest on both the ACT and SAT tests are minorities: Jews and Asians. Enough said, Liberals have nothing going for them here with a complaint such as this.

[jurisdog]

Sorry, but vocabulary is not a sign of intelligence, its a sign of culture and upbringing. Unless and until the PARENTS and TEACHERS of the students that are scoring poorly on the SAT in groups are held accountable, I really have no problem with changing the test to measure objective indicators of intelligence (logic problems using plain english, and math, etc.)

[amstaff1]

What is so incredible, but not surprising about this is that the liberal left think it's the right that's the cause of the anti-intellectual movement in America today. Of course on this and so many other things, they haven't got a clue. Having lived in California for many years now but not a native, I'll never understand the hows or the whys behind that statement "As California goes, so goes the rest of the nation." My advise to anyone who wants to get something done but is not sure how to approach the subject, go to California, see how they do it there and then do the exact opposite and you'll have a good shot at success.

[El Sordo]

They only concern themselves with preferred minorities.

[Freee-dame]

Sorry, but vocabulary is not a sign of intelligence, its a sign of culture and upbringing.

The SAT is not an intelligence test. It's a measure of a person's readiness for academic achievement at the college level.

[umgud]

The cream will still rise to the top, but the curds will think they have too.

[toenail]

Why did Carl Brigham develop the SAT, and who supported him? To what ends?

---

I like one of John Taylor Gatto's comments:

School became jail-time to escape if you could, arenas of meaningless pressure as with the omnipresent "standardized" exams, which study after study concluded were measuring nothing real.
For instance, take the case of Bill Bradley. . .
	and George W. Bush,
two of the four finalists in the 2000 presidential race. Bradley had a horrifying 480 on the verbal part of his own SATs, yet graduated from Princeton, won a Rhodes Scholarship, and became a senator; Bush graduated from Yale, became governor of Texas, and president of the United States-with a mediocre 550. If you can become governor, senator, and president with mediocre SAT scores, what exactly do the tests measure?

---

[lds23]

Part of the problem is trying to push everyone through to college. It's not appropriate for everyone. But there's big money in it, so the education establishment couldn't care less.

I'd be happy if my kids were an electrician, a plumber, a doctor, a lawyer, and an auto mechanic!

[lds23]

I'm a big GWB supporter, but I just had to LMAO at that picture!

[FirstFlaBn]

Anecdotes do not evidence make.

[quebecois]

A couple of random thoughts:

1) This development will have terrible effects on certain groups who tend to do well on the SATs (due to a high mean intelligence). Jews, in particular, are drastically overrepresented at elite colleges, partly due to their high scoring on the exam. When this test is removed, they will recede into the mass of other applicants.

2) Long term, this will damage elite universities (esp the Ivy League). In the old days, those schools were at the top due to the social status of their students and alums. Nowadays, their status derives from the fact that they get the smartest students (The Bell Curve shows a wonderful graph in which the perceived quality of a school smoothly increases with the school's mean student SAT score). Without an ability to determine which students actually ARE the smartest, the elite schools will not be able to "cherry pick". Over time, this will erode thier reputation.

3) This change will damage the perception that is held by most members of our society in regards to the legitimacy of existing social and ecomomic strata. Basically, most folks in America think that those who go to elite schools and get high-paying jobs do so because they have a combination of work ethic/natural talent (read: intelligence). Folks think that anyone who works hard and is blessed with natural talent will move into that upper strata. This belief is essential to the continuance of our social system (which has large amounts of inequality). When the faith that this strata is equally applied via objective intelligence measurement erodes (and is replaced by some politicized mechanism of deciding who moves up and who doesn't)....the faith in the system goes down the tubes.

[xsysmgr]

I do not understand why Liberals get so upset with this sort of stuff because the two racial groups who consistently score the highest on both the ACT and SAT tests are minorities: Jews and Asians.

This comment has got to be tongue-in-cheek. The "Jews and the Asians" routinely succeed and reliably vote Democrat. The problem is the Liberal's favorite minority, the blacks, don't "routinely succeed," and so the Dem's are afraid they will no longer reliably vote Demo, hence more "equality" is required to assure their votes.

It has nothing to do with "equity", "fairness", "equality", or any of the other pablem the Dems spew: It's all about votes.

[Biblebelter]

What does graduating from an Ivy League school have to do with getting an education? An Ivy League diploma means that you were born into an elite or you were able to successfully jump through the elitist hoops. Bush is President not because he is educated, but because his father was a former President, CIA Director, and Ambassador to China. And his Grandfather was a somebody also. I personally think this country would be a better place without Ivy League elitist Presidents. No one ever accused Ronald Reagan of having an Ivy League education and he is by far the greatest President in my life time.

[Betteboop]

bump for later

[PoisedWoman]

Grades are no indication of brain power, given the fact that everyone now gets an A on everything to protect their precious self-esteem from taking hits. Also, kids who attend tough high schools may have lower grades than kids who graduate from walk-through high schools with straight A;s, though the kids from tougher schools with B averages actually know much more and are much better prepared for college. The SAT is necessary and should be as tough as possible.

[antidemocommie]

When you're inviting 3rd world countries to move to America, you can't expect them to be able to cut the proverbial mustard academically speaking, so you have to dumb everything down so they will "feel good" about themselves.

[FreedominJesusChrist]

You are correct in many aspects; it is true that Jews as a racial group, tend to vote Democrat, but there has been no credible evidence showing that Asians consistently vote Democrat. Rather, they have been shown to be very similiar to whites in terms of family values, family structure, and voting trends. For example, experts cannot say that whites vote one way or another, but rather that their economic status and social values are the biggest factor in calculating voting trends and not their race. Asians are found to be very similiar and their voting patterns are not as easily grouped together.