The SAT Revolution

In a cramped basement classroom in Berkeley, Calif., Kim Nunlist is unraveling the mysteries of the SAT. Nunlist, a 22-year-old undergrad with a serious tattoo and a score of 1470, waves the College Board's book of tips and practice tests in front of her class. Rip out the first 275 pages that explain how to answer SAT questions, she commands. "This is by the people who own the test; they do not want you to score well," she tells the class. "Do not pay attention to what they say. Pay attention to what I say."

Near the front of the room, Eryn Leavens stares intensely at a Princeton Review study guide. A high school senior, Leavens is determined to succeed on the standardized tests she despises. Nunlist asks her the answer to a sentence-completion item, in which she was asked to choose words to fill the blanks in a sentence. "Although on the surface the final draft appeared to the first draft, upon close inspection it was that major changes had been made." Leavens hesitates, then answers. "I picked C, but it didn't sound right." Nunlist agrees that the answer–"reproduce" and "apparent"–sounds weird, but it is correct. "They give you bad words for that reason," she says. "You have to pick the best answer. The best answer often stinks."

Nunlist has no illusions that what takes place in her classes can be called education. "It is bunk," she says. "I teach how to take a multiple-choice test." And what she teaches, she adds, is "completely inapplicable to the rest of life."

This is just what Carl Brigham feared. When Brigham, a psychologist, created the Scholastic Aptitude Test in 1926, he was a firm believer in intelligence testing. With IQ tests, he thought, he would be able to predict applicants' college grades, thereby selecting the students who would benefit most from higher education. But as his thinking evolved, Brigham began to worry that his test would lead teachers to focus on "linguistic skills" rather than literature and "disintegrated bits" of computation instead of mathematical concepts. His concerns went unheeded, and in the decades that followed the SAT only grew in power, becoming the pre-eminent gatekeeper for American higher education–as well as the stuff of sleepless nights for many a high schooler.

Now the era of intelligence testing is about to end. Thanks to an unprecedented assault from the head of the University of California system, the College Board (the nonprofit organization that owns the SAT) has begun its biggest overhaul ever of the test. The 340,000 students who took the SAT last weekend saw the same old kinds of questions. But by 2005 the board plans to strip out the analogies section, ask questions based on more-advanced math, and add a grammar and essay-writing test. "In many respects," says Ida Lawrence, the SAT program director, "it is a revolution."

Although the College Board's announcement in July was front-page news, the significance of the changes has remained largely unexamined. The inside story of the battle that began in California reveals just how great a philosophical shift the College Board has embraced. Rather than assess raw intelligence, the new SAT is intended to measure academic preparedness. "In its original form it was an IQ test," says Gaston Caperton, the College Board president. "What we have done is take the SAT and make it into something that tests reasoning and developed skill."

What they have done is taken hold of the diseased American education system at its root. For with these new changes, the SAT will effectively set education standards for the nation's high schools. But can the College Board do what a nation of education reformers couldn't?

In 1901, 978 young men and women applying to Columbia, Barnard, and New York University were the first to take "College Boards." In those early days, students sat for a series of grueling essay tests composed by college and high school teachers, in subjects including chemistry, Latin, history, mathematics, and physics. To complete the English exam, for instance, students had to write intelligently about books chosen from an assigned list of classics including Macbeth, The Last of the Mohicans, and Silas Marner.

This was still the dawn of American public education. Only about 6 percent of 17-year-olds in 1900 graduated from high school. Only 2 percent would go on to graduate from college; few of the rest of the nation's teenagers even aspired to do so. Most of those who went were white, wealthy, Protestant, and male, and the early entrance tests bespoke this world of privilege. Some colleges had specific reading lists, some had unique exams, and some admitted students on recommendations by private-school headmasters alone. To get into Yale, students had to take oral exams to test their mental "power."

The College Board was founded not just to standardize widely varying entrance requirements but also to shape what was taught in high school. "The College Board was the standard-setter for American education," says educational historian Diane Ravitch. "[It] said 'these are the works we want students to study.' "

The SAT promised to be just the opposite of those old College Boards. It was designed to measure innate intelligence, not what students had learned in school. The first champion of the SAT, Harvard University President James Bryant Conant, started a scholarship program in 1934 to bring bright men from humble Midwestern backgrounds to his college. Conant, according to Nicholas Lemann's 1999 book The Big Test, believed achievement tests like the College Boards favored wealthy students from fancy private academies. So to select his new scholars, Conant decided to use the test that Brigham had designed a few years earlier. Princeton and Yale joined in with similar scholarships that used the SAT. But it wasn't until World War II that the College Board was forced to drop its essay tests, which took too much time and too many graders, and adopt the SAT for all students. That was fine with Conant, not because he wanted to expand access to higher education; he believed that too many people already went to college. What he wanted to change was who got to go. He wanted to create a system where the country was led not by the children of privilege but by those with the greatest natural intelligence. The shift was not without consequences, says Ravitch: When the College Board gave up the essay tests for the SAT, she says, it also abandoned its oversight of what high schools taught.

The next few decades were the heyday of intelligence testing. Educators believed the tests would improve teaching by efficiently sorting students into different ability groups. By the 1960s, almost all public-school children were given a group-administered IQ test. But the tests always had critics who were skeptical that intelligence was fixed or even measurable. Because blacks, as a group, scored lower than whites on the tests, some opponents argued that the assessments really reflected economic disadvantage, not intellectual difference.

Court decisions in the 1970s reinforced the criticism, restricting the use of IQ and tarnishing the image of intelligence testing. "There is some deep sense where IQ seems un-American," says Christopher Jencks, a Harvard professor and coeditor of The Black-White Test Score Gap. "It may be real, but it is not something we want to make a big fuss about." Today, individual IQ tests are still used to assess learning disabilities or measure mental retardation. But few public schools give group-IQ tests anymore, and educators are dumping the last of them to make way for new federally mandated achievement tests.

The Educational Testing Service, which was created to write and administer the SAT for the College Board, insists that its exam ceased being an IQ test as far back as 1946. That was the year many logic items were replaced with questions based on reading passages. Despite those changes, question styles that are staples of IQ tests, like analogies, remained on the SAT, and many students, parents, and teachers still think of the SAT as the last mass-administered intelligence exam. "I think the SAT tests cleverness," says Danny Jaye, the head of the mathematics department at New York City's prestigious Stuyvesant High School. "It is not a content test as much as it is an IQ test."

In fact, there is no consensus on what the SAT does measure. Though it was supposed to democratize American universities by sidestepping the hereditary aristocracy of wealth and replacing it with a fluid meritocracy of talent, that's not how things worked out, according to critics like Harvard University testing expert Howard Gardner. His recent experience using coaching guides to help his 17-year-old son, Benjamin, study for the SAT has underscored his view that test prep corrupts what the exam is supposed to gauge. Gardner says that when he took the SAT in the 1960s it was "an intelligence test skewed to measure the ability to get into college." "Now," he says, "it measures how good your tutor is."

The College Board says the SAT is a measure of students' ability to reason. "We want people to think out of the box," says Wayne Camara, a College Board vice president. By assessing students' ability to solve problems quickly, the board argues, the SAT helps predict freshman grades, thereby giving admissions officers a valuable tool (box, Page 56). "If you are trying to forecast what people will do in college," says Lawrence, the SAT's program director, "you need a test of reasoning."

But critics say that achievement tests like the SAT II writing exam are just as good or better predictors of college grades. "Reasoning," in their view, is just a euphemism for IQ. John Katzman, the founder of the Princeton Review test-prep company, contends that the SAT measures a very narrow kind of reasoning, the kind of mental quickness that is useful for solving crossword puzzles. The Princeton Review says that because the SAT does not measure the kind of problem solving that schools teach, the best way to prepare for the test is to memorize vocabulary and learn perfect exam-taking strategies. The company, which last year took in $69 million in revenue while making that argument, acknowledges that its lessons are educationally vacant. But that is not the company's fault, says Jeff Rubenstein, a Princeton Review assistant vice president. "The SAT inspires dysfunctional educational behavior," Rubenstein says. "Students shouldn't be memorizing words like lummox or malinger. They should be reading Dickens or Shakespeare."

In her Princeton Review class, Nunlist builds up her students' confidence by tearing down the College Board and ETS. On her whiteboard, she writes: "If 4x + 6=30,then 2x equals?" She turns to the class and asks, "Lauren, what did you get?" Lauren Steinberg looks at her workbook. "I got C," she says. C is 6. Nunlist cracks a half smile. "That is a prime way ETS will mess you up," she responds. "You are trained to solve for x so they ask you for 2x." The answer is D: 12. Steinberg, a 17-year-old senior at Albany High in Kensington, Calif., has a 1240 on the SAT. She wants to go to Berkeley, but her father worries her score is not high enough. So he enrolled her in Nunlist's $1,000 class, where Steinberg learns to master test tricks and hate the SAT. "It doesn't tell what you know," Steinberg says after her second week in class. "They are trying to trick you."

If she's right, the trick's on ETS, because all this test strategizing may be making the SAT less good at predicting how students will do in college. University of California data show that achievement test scores are slightly better than SAT scores at predicting grades for the first year of college. Some researchers suspect the culprit is test prep. Wealthier students often get lots of coaching on the SAT (but not on the achievement tests, which typically cover the material students have learned in, say, freshman biology or junior-year U.S. history). "You can teach students how to raise their score on the SAT, but that is not improving their abilities or increasing their knowledge," says Michael Brown, a member of the University of California faculty committee that examined the SAT. "But to do better on an achievement test, you have to know the material, and preparation will entail increasing students' knowledge of the subject matter."

A glimpse of an alternate test-prep world could be seen in a course given by Princeton Review competitor Kaplan on a recent evening in midtown Manhattan. For most of the class, Meredith Moore, the teacher, reviewed the usual tricks. But when she turned to the critical-reading passages–which will grow more numerous on the new SAT–the tone changed. As the class read the passage about the discovery of penicillin together, Moore quizzed the students on why the author included a particular detail. They couldn't simply recite a time-honed test trick or memorized vocabulary word; they had to really understand what they had read. Viktor Hristov, a 17-year-old Bulgarian immigrant who lives in Astoria, Queens, signed up for the $900 course, hoping to raise his 1050 on the SAT by 300 points. But, he says, the classes are also helping him build longer-lasting skills. "I am learning to read faster and understand it better," he says. In other words, test-taking is inspiring him to learn something that is actually worth learning in the first place.

The next morning, Atkinson called his new deputy, Patrick Hayashi, into his office. "What the hell are these analogies?" Atkinson demanded. Thwack. He slammed his hand on the table: "What theory of cognitive development justifies this?" Hayashi, who had overseen admissions at Berkeley for 12 years, knew the SAT well. But he was reluctant to debate Atkinson or interrupt his rant. Hayashi held his tongue, and Atkinson pressed forward. "The SAT is based on concepts of intelligence no one holds anymore," he said. "This is a test based on the idea intelligence is immutable."

Atkinson did not like what the SAT seemed to measure, and he hated the behavior it inspired. He and Hayashi, who would soon become a College Board trustee, hit on a revolutionary idea. They knew that using an intelligence test led to drills in test tricks. So it followed that using a test that measured students' knowledge of a rigorous high school curriculum would force schools to make courses more challenging. They believed that by changing their university's admissions test they could change the behavior of both high school students and teachers. And they believed that dumping the SAT in favor of achievement tests would improve teaching at all California high schools.

Atkinson's skepticism about the SAT solidified when he learned that his 12-year-old granddaughter was being drilled in SAT anal-ogies at school. A few months later, in February 2001, he gave a speech calling on the University of California to drop the SAT in favor of achievement tests. At first, the College Board was skeptical about Atkinson's motives. Because Latino students tended to do well on the Spanish language exam, their achievement scores were better than their SAT marks. Some SAT defenders thought Atkinson was pushing for the achievement tests just to increase the numbers of Hispanic students at Berkeley and UCLA–an end run around the University of California regents' 1995 ban on affirmative action.

The College Board remained suspicious of Atkinson's motives until the two sides met at a November 2001 conference in Santa Barbara. There, Saul Geiser, Atkinson's research director, used university data to demonstrate that switching to achievement tests would not substantially change the racial makeup of UC's student body. ETS, College Board, and California researchers agreed that when used with high school grades, the SAT and SAT II achievement tests had a nearly equal ability to help predict college grades.

But Geiser went further, saying that the reason to use achievement tests went beyond predictive power. "They are the best chance we have of developing a rigorous high school curriculum where it does not exist," he said at the conference. After the meeting, the College Board came to see Atkinson's proposal as education reform, not racial gerrymandering. "That established a common cause," says James Montoya, a College Board vice president. "We all wanted to connect the SAT to what students are supposed to learn in school."

There was more to the College Board's change of heart than just a meeting of the minds. After Atkinson recommended dropping the SAT, a University of California faculty committee began talking with College Board officials about creating a new achievement test just to serve their state. As talks progressed, the committee became concerned that Stanford, Harvard, Yale, or other elite private schools might not accept a test unique to California. So they began to look closely at the ACT, a competitor to the SAT that was accepted by the University of California but little used by the state's students. "We were very interested in the ACT," says Dorothy Perry, the former committee chair. "They were very close to what we felt a test should be."

The ACT, founded in 1959 as the American College Testing Program, is the College Board's great rival and ideological opposite. The SAT measures students' ability to learn. The ACT measures what students have already learned. Though most colleges accept both, the SAT dominates the coasts and the ACT reigns in the heartland. Today, the ACT's developers regularly alter their test to match what schools teach. And some states, like Illinois, have begun to use the ACT to judge whether students have mastered state learning standards. That has led schools in Vienna, Elgin, and other Illinois towns and cities to take steps including beefing up their curriculum, adding extra reading-skills classes, and pushing students to take more-difficult classes earlier. That is precisely the kind of educational behavior Atkinson believes admissions tests should inspire.

The College Board had no intention of letting California become an ACT state. Californians make up 12.6 percent of the 2.2 million annual SAT test takers–a sizable chunk of the $141 million the College Board takes in from its college admissions tests each year. Faced with the possibility that its most important customer would leave for the competition, the College Board caved and began to talk about changing the entire SAT.

The group also came to see reform as a way to do more than just keep California, says Hayashi, the Atkinson deputy and College Board trustee. For a decade, the board had tried to change how people thought of the test by fiddling with the name. First it briefly changed the "A" in SAT from "aptitude" to "assessment." Then it declared that the initials stood for nothing at all. "No matter what they did," Hayashi says, "the legacy of the SAT as an aptitude test was a millstone that hung round their neck. This was a chance to get rid of it."

In June, the College Board trustees voted to drop analogies and quantitative comparisons, a question style that makes students look at two columns of numerical information and decide which is larger. The board said it would add more long passages to the verbal section and rename it "critical reading." A revamped math section would test more advanced coursework. Finally, the College Board decided to add a version of the writing achievement test, which includes an essay and multiple-choice grammar questions. A perfect score would rise from 1600 to 2400. Atkinson declared victory.

At Fremont High School in Oakland, Calif., not even teachers show up regularly for class. Most instruction consists of giving students worksheets and telling them to keep quiet. Only a third of entering freshmen graduate from Fremont in four years, and few of those go on to four-year colleges.

And yet there are Advanced Placement classes here, where kids learn organic chemistry and read Richard Wright's Native Son. And these kids want to go to college. Like the four students who are sitting in a classroom trailer anchored in the Fremont schoolyard one day, talking about the SAT. No different from students around the country, these four worry that college admissions officers will place too much emphasis on the SAT. "When I took it as a freshman, the analogies confused me," says Marlene Labastida, a senior.

For these students, AP classes are like a life raft in an ocean of failure. Though critics have long complained that a reliance on the SAT keeps out good students from bad schools, the tests' supporters say this is where the test is most needed. Looking at kids from schools like Fremont, college admissions officers often have a hard time judging whether an A average means the student is prepared for college-level work. That is where the SAT comes in. Labastida has a 1260, putting her at the 86th percentile nationwide and substantially ahead of her best classmates. Labastida's English teacher, Daniel Hurst, says her test score reflects real intellectual ability. "Marlene has a chance in life," he says. "There are always one or two absolute gems, like Marlene, who come in having read their whole lives, and they have a wonderful facility for language."

Despite California officials' certainty about the superiority of curriculum-based tests, some skeptics believe any alteration in the SAT could end up hurting applicants like Labastida. After the changes, the test may no longer spotlight "the diamond in the rough," says Rebecca Zwick, a former ETS researcher and author of Fair Game?, a new book about standardized testing. "There is a risk that by incorporating more advanced math, for example, it will make the test more sensitive to differences in schooling." Too often, she adds, "kids who go to school in poor areas do not have access to competent instruction."

California officials maintain that the idea that the SAT has a unique ability to find a diamond in the rough is a myth. For one thing, about 71 percent of students earn similar marks on the SAT I and on the writing and math achievement tests, according to the College Board. Labastida, for example, scored a 650 out of 800 on her writing achievement test and a 4 out of 5 on her AP History test. And according to California research, the SAT II achievement tests are actually better at finding diamonds in the rough than the SAT. Low-income students, overall, do better on the writing and math achievement tests than on the SAT. Geiser, the California researcher, compared students with high SAT scores and low writing and math achievement marks with students who scored high on achievements but poorly on the SAT. He found that the students in the second group had better high school grades, better college grades, and generally came from less wealthy backgrounds. In addition, those students who were admitted to UC with high SATs but low high school grades ended up earning generally poor marks in college. "Lazy underachievers in high school are lazy underachievers in college," Geiser says.

Even if the critics are right, Atkinson argues, designing a test just to find undiscovered "diamonds" is too narrow a goal. Instead, he says, the purpose of admissions tests should be to deliver the greatest high school educational benefit to the majority of American kids. "I want schools to improve," Atkinson says. "There are core ideas I want everyone to have mastered. . . . We need to get schools to teach the right curriculum."

But even if the College Board succeeds in getting American schools to change what they teach, is that the best method of reform? Using tests to shape curriculum inevitably narrows what is taught in school, says Christina Perez of the anti-testing group FairTest. "I am much more comfortable with universities and high schools deciding what students should learn rather than an external organization like the College Board," she says. "If schools focus on the material in the SAT, then they are missing out on a curriculum tied to students' lives and reflective of our society."

But like the College Board of a century ago, the leaders of today's organization once again believe they can use their admissions test to improve schools. "We have an uneven education system in this country, and we have to focus on making that better," Caperton says. When the latest national SAT averages were released in late August, he took pains to underline the connection between what high schools teach and what the SAT measures. Although math marks rose, verbal scores were stagnant. If performance is to improve, Caperton said, schools need to start teaching more writing and more grammar. It was a newly aggressive position for the College Board, one it would not have taken without Atkinson's push.

In September, a little more than a year and a half after Atkinson made his speech attacking the SAT, the University of California held a conference at Berkeley to tell guidance counselors about the changes to the test and college admissions. Wearing a blue blazer and turquoise-clasped bolo tie, Montoya, the College Board vice president, told the counselors they should take a new view of the test. "What we want," he said, "is that at the end of this all, when someone thinks of their SAT score, they do not relate it to being smart or not smart, but . . . to being prepared or unprepared."

Beth Pascal, a counselor from Burlingame High School near San Francisco, sat near the front of the lecture hall looking skeptical. Despite the new rhetoric surrounding the overhauled exam, she says, "a lot of kids feel it is a measure of their intelligence."

It will be tough to convince students that the new SAT is no longer a gauge of IQ. Reformers hope students see that the changes mean they can boost their scores–and reduce their testing anxiety–by taking rigorous classes, honing important life skills, and demanding more from their schools. Now, says William Fitzsimmons, a College Board trustee and dean of admissions at Harvard, "the pressure will be on schools." And if schools respond, the much-feared SAT will have done something to improve education for everyone.

"It will be tough to convince students that the new SAT is no longer a gauge of IQ. Reformers hope students see that the changes mean they can boost their scores–and reduce their testing anxiety–by taking rigorous classes, honing important life skills, and demanding more from their schools. Now, says William Fitzsimmons, a College Board trustee and dean of admissions at Harvard, "the pressure will be on schools." And if schools respond, the much-feared SAT will have done something to improve education for everyone."

Initially, the whole idea of the SAT was to give students from mediocre high schools a chance at the big schools on the basis of innate ability. If the new SAT has eliminated IQ, then what we have is a college preparatory achievement test. Quite naturally, private schoos will do the best.

For over 100 years IQ has been shown to correlate positively with academic success. They can take IQ out of the test, but can they take IQ out of the student? I think not.

The SAT is near and dear to my heart, so I enjoyed this article. True, the concept that intelligence and ability are innate and unchangable is flawed, but not completely. I think they err in not realizing they should measure both a students aptitude and achievement.

I always LIKED taking tests, especially multiple choice. It always seemed easy to me to eliminate the choices that were false and selecting the correct one. So I did well on the PSAT in 10th grade (99th percentile) and the SAT test in 11th grade (1973). (750 verbal, 720 math). It helped that I read fast (600 words per minute) and had a good memory. I also studied a list of 2000 vocabulary words before the test.

But apparently, a lot of people have test anxiety, read slowly and have a hard time making decisions. All of those things would kill you on the SAT, while not indicating your aptitude whatsoever. Aptitude should be tested through multiple choice tests, WITHOUT time limits. That'll take away the anxiety part and the reading and decision making part.

I think essays would be far better method of assessing achievement, and I'm sorry they ever got away from them for college entrance exams. Perhaps these changes will be good for measuring achivement now on the SAT--but I still think there is a place for aptitude testing.

Other other problem with the SAT changes is the loss of baseline measurements over the decades of SAT tests. I wonder how my 1973 tests measure against todays? That seems important to me.

It adds an essay writing test which on the surface sounds great. However, an essay is difficult to evaluate objectively.

As long as they don't ask the test taker's gender or race in the application, or rate on the basis of political orientation then a subjective component to evaluation may be considered as randomly unbiased.

Essay topics should be chosen free of politics or identity profiling. For example, a committee should reject an essay topic dealing with affirmative action.

What topics would be fair game?

Funny, I can't think of one topic that would ensure a person's political leanings would remain private.

So much for that idea.

This says more about the subjectivity and foolishness of those being quoted than it actually does about education (achievement) levels and educational aptitude (I.Q.) levels.

Of course, there never was any reason to abandon I.Q. testing. And the idea that trying to make the students go beyond the most simple level of analysis to a slightly higher one is designed to "trick" the students into doing poorly, is paranoid and delusional. The only trick is to try to force a test of analytic ability. There is nothing wrong with that.

The reality is this. The Educational establishment has been increasingly dominated by compulsive egalitarians since the 1950s. So long as this domination continues, there is absolutely no way to fix the public school system. The compulsions of the educators make that absolutely impossible. We are dancing in circles, with no one willing to accept the fact that children differ in potential, and we should be seeking the best way to understand those differences in the interests of all, not dancing around them in ever more frantic efforts to find a formula for more convincing denial.

"believed that too many people already went to college. What he wanted to change was who got to go. He wanted to create a system where the country was led not by the children of privilege but by those with the greatest natural intelligence"

Doesn't that capture the essence of the error, even of the Educationalist moderates. Implicit in the quotation, is the idea that the high achievers in traditional America were "children of privilege," buying the Marxist concept of social injustice. But in societies such as the American, the high achievers are on average going to be those "with the greatest natural intelligence." Yes there are exceptions in every generation. And in traditional America, the opportunities are there for them to rise--and generation by generation, they have risen. Cooking the measures are not the reason; although the psychology of blaming the measures has become a reason for poor children not to even try.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site

This has nothing to do with what the student wants, or what business wants. It's the colleges who determine whether the SAT test is a requirement, hence they are ETS's real customer. It's the colleges who have decided they want a different measurement tool. Instead of "smart" students, they now want "prepared" students.

Based on the new SAT, colleges will select from the subset of "smart" students who made some effort, the subset of average-IQ students who worked hard, and the subset of below-average-IQ students who really applied themselves.

This doesn't seem all bad, but why the colleges did this is beyond me. Their brochures make it seem that college is more about diversity than about getting an education. Maybe colleges want to get out of the business of remedial education.

For over 100 years IQ has been shown to correlate positively with academic success. They can take IQ out of the test, but can they take IQ out of the student? I think not.

Great comment! I agree. They have turned this into an achievement test. I cant see how the 'disadvantaged kids' from lousy schools are going to have a better chance with this, when it will be more keyed off of school-based knowledge, and I predict more complaints from the 'usual suspects', so long as certain groups get lower average scores.

In the end, it wont make a difference as to who gets into college. the smart, motivated kids will do what it takes to get over the hurdle. unmotivated kids who cant rise to the challenge wont. and so it goes.

In 1965 I took the SAT. It really didn't matter because I had an athletic, football free ride any way. I was a cocky SOB, and I just decided that I was one of the "special" ones. I didn't study, and I played football. Then I flunked out, and flunked out totally. The United States Army picked up my option, as fast as you can imagine.

For the next three years, of my young life, I learned about honor, I learned about responsibility, I learned about dedication. I learned how to be a man. I was right in the middle of a war, and I was a Ranger, and I was Doc. I went from being a kid to being a man faster than you can wipe your ass. I decided to go into medicine in a hell hole, half way around the world. I asked myself, do you have the brains, hell, you never had them before? Do you have the sheer intelligence, the IQ to do this? Then I answered myself. I'll do more than it takes, and I'll do what has to be done. I don't care, this is more important than anything that I've ever done. Go get it, and win!

I tried to get into medical school and I failed. I was a 3.875 undergrad that was denied admission because of my age. But, I had to go for 2 oral interviews, that means they were considering. The 3 years I spent in the service cost me, but it cost them more. I am a medical professional in a branch of medicine that has the most promise to human kind. I am a former Associate Professor of medicine, and I have a cirriculum vita that is a "short" 12 pages. I have followed my dream and I have made people well, I have improved the treatment of patients. Don't feel sorry, I won. I fulfilled my passion, science and medicine. Don't ask me my IQ, I just don't know, and I really don't want to know.

One night in the fall of 1999, Richard Atkinson sat down to take the SAT. As president of the 174,000-student University of California system, Atkinson wanted to learn more about the test that helped determine who would study at his school. One of the nation's most respected cognitive psychologists, he had a long interest and expertise in educational testing. In the 1960s, in fact, Atkinson had helped found a company that produced computer-based tests for elementary-school children. The next morning, Atkinson called his new deputy, Patrick Hayashi, into his office. "What the hell are these analogies?" Atkinson demanded. Thwack. He slammed his hand on the table: "What theory of cognitive development justifies this?" Hayashi, who had overseen admissions at Berkeley for 12 years, knew the SAT well. But he was reluctant to debate Atkinson or interrupt his rant. Hayashi held his tongue, and Atkinson pressed forward. "The SAT is based on concepts of intelligence no one holds anymore," he said. "This is a test based on the idea intelligence is immutable."

I also dispise analogy tests where the words are completely worthless. But, it sounds to me like this guy's a bit miffed because the test kicked his ass.

...essays would be far better method of assessing achievement...

That may be true, but the cost of grading them in any fair way would be prohibitive.

The way essays are graded now (or last time I checked, in an optional SAT writing test) is a disgrace.

They have to hire a bunch of temp workers, probably teachers making a few extra bucks. They give them a sample of a grade-5 (best) essay, then give them all an enormous pile of students' essays. They can only spend maybe one minute on each test.

Also, the model essay they provide reads like a bunch of nonsense written by someone who doesn't have a clue what good writing is, but knows how to snow his teachers.

I can write a piece of junk right now they would consider good writing:

While many experienced beer drinkers prefer Miller Lite due to the fact that the taste is superior, there are also those who elect to consume the beverage because of the lesser amount of filling sensation it provides. To illustrate and better illuminate how this apparent dichotomy can lead to both increased consumption as well as interpersonal conflicts...

(and so on, I think you get the idea.)

I agree that you and I could do a good job of grading the students' essays. But to be fair, I might need to take a few minutes on each test. And then we'd have to get together on each test to see if we agree. No doubt there will be many essays we'll give different grades to, and probably some that we'll disagree by a lot. What's fair to do, just average the two grades?

But the biggest problems are these:

This isn't like one teacher who has maybe thirty, or maybe one hundred essays to grade and a few days to do it. More like there's a pile of a million essays to go through and one day to do it. There's no choice other than flying through them as fast as possible.

The other problem is that after a few hours (actually probably much less) of reading essays, my brain will be so sick of them I'll never want to see an essay again. There's no way I could fairly grade any essay after I've just read a few hundred in a few hours. (Especially not at the crummy wages they pay.)

...Individuals smart enough to avoid the tricks are likely to do well in school, and life...

Well, there are good tricks and there are bad tricks.

In the example given in the article, I got the algebra question wrong. Even after reading it twice, I said the answer is "6". On the third time I realized those tricksters fooled me by asking for "2x".

Well, fine, so my "math aptitude" score went down. I've got a master's degree in engineering and I've used algebra and calculus daily at work for years. If you want to know how good I am at math, ask the question and don't try to trick me. If you want to know if I'm naive, then go ahead and use tricks. It seems to me that colleges should like to know how good you are at math, not how easily you are tricked.

That being said, however, there *are* tricks that I would approve of. That would be those that exposed those whose learning was superficial, and did not deeply understand the concept being tested.

...They are trying to trick you...

I wonder how many freepers would get this question right:

Who never served as Vice President of the United States?

a) Richard Nixon
b) Adlai Stevenson
c) Lyndon Johnson
d) Harry Truman
e) none of these - they all were vice presidents.

The correct answer is, of course, b) Adlai Stevenson. Anyone familiar with politics of the fifties and sixties would know that.

That is, unless you don't mean the Adlai Stevenson that everyone always refers to, and you mean his obscure grandfather, Adlai Stevenson, who *did* serve as vice president.

In that case, the correct answer is e) none of the above.

What’s the definition of black person? Most “white” and “black” Americans are blends so there’s no telling anymore. Is Tiger Woods a black person in your opinion? As families branch out it’s getting more and more difficult to hyphenate Americans.

The affirmative action liberals are getting sneakier and sneakier as this article shows. There’s no indication what they’re honestly up to with changing the SAT. What’s bad about achievement tests is that high school girls in general outscore boys. Yet 10 years later boys are much more valuable to industry, as is shown by their higher incomes, in general. Today the majority of college graduates are women, yet they continue to earn substantially less in the free market. Should we be directing an increasing percentage of our limited resources on women at the expense of men? If the goal is return on investment this change does not make sense.

This article is as dishonest as it gets. The writer, Barnes, talks as if it were evil and forbidden to test IQ, so that anytime he says that some test component is essentially an IQ test, the reader is supposed to respond, "Boo, hiss." Note that he cites only anti-testing, affirmative action hustlers: Nicholas Lemann, Richard Atkinson, and Howard Gardner.

The writer keeps quoting people who say that IQ testing is "un-American." He never uses the word "merit," because he's anti-merit. IOW, he's the anti-American one.

The writer also misrepresents the history of the SAT. Among other things, he never mentions the role of the Jews. Around 1922, first Harvard, and then all traditional liberal arts colleges, decided that too many Jews were on campus. They introduced a numerus clausus quota system, in order to cut the number of Jews they were admitting by as much as 90 percent. When merit alone was the standard, Jews were flooding onto these campuses. Conant, who became Harvard's president much later, supported the merit principle, and hence was opposed to the anti-Jewish quotas. The SAT was supposed to find talented candidates, regardless of whether they were the right religion, ethnicity, or had attended the "right" schools.

The writer of this article, Barnes, hates the merit principle, and thus wants to destroy the SAT. He would have felt right at home on American campuses during the 1920s.

The whole point of the SAT "reform" is to admit more unqualified black and Hispanic students to the UC system, without breaking California state law. It won't work, but then, Atkinson -- who runs UC -- spits on the law, on merit, and on honesty.

....essays would be far better method of assessing achievement...

That may be true, but the cost of grading them in any fair way would be prohibitive.

The way essays are graded now (or last time I checked, in an optional SAT writing test) is a disgrace.

At the City of University of New York, I was one of those temps. (The rest of the time, I was a full-time adjunct prof who earned part-time pay.) We were trained to give passing grades for work that was illiterate or which was clearly the product of cheating. While I believe that it is possible to have objective writing standards, and to train graders to recognize what counts as passing, failing, good or superlative work, that is never going to happen. In practice, whenever educators call for substituting essay exams for multiple choice or fill-in tests, it is in order to fudge the results.

...The writer, Barnes, talks as if it were evil and forbidden to test IQ, so that anytime he says that some test component is essentially an IQ test, the reader is supposed to respond, "Boo, hiss."...

The writer points out that it's test maker that insists that the SAT is not an IQ test.

So, therefore, if it *does* test IQ then I would "boo" the test as not measuring what it's supposed to measure.

The test is a worthless scam. Everyone should read the book, "None Of The Above" by David Owen. Owen goes behind the scenes and exposes the truth behind the SAT.

..."Although on the surface the final draft appeared to _____ the first draft, upon close inspection it was _____ that major changes had been made." Leavens hesitates, then answers. "I picked C, but it didn't sound right." Nunlist agrees that the answer--"reproduce" and "apparent"--sounds weird, but it is correct. "They give you bad words for that reason," she says. "You have to pick the best answer. The best answer often stinks." [end article quotation]

Classic exchange between a dumbed-down teacher and a dumbed-down student.

LOL. Isn't it frustrating that people who think "reproduce" and "apparent" are bad, stinky words are unable to do well on the S.A.T.? There has got to be something wrong with the test!

(I had to reply on this thread because the duplicate you posted on was locked.)

Here's the passage:

"Although on the surface the final draft appeared to reproduce the first draft, upon close inspection it was apparent that major changes had been made"

I'm not saying that this is the worst example of poor writing in the SAT test. I've seen much worse. And, I'll agree that, in a correct-English way, this is a perfectly good sentence that makes some sense.

However, what the article just says that it "sounds weird". It might not sound weird to you, but it might to someone else.

The word "reproduce" is just not used well here. Every draft, by definition, "reproduces" the previous one. I might say, "The 5th edition of my algebra textbook reproduces the 4th edition, but with many more sample problems and illustrations."

Instead of "reproduce", they should have said "identically reproduce" or "closely reproduce", whichever one they meant.

And the word "apparent" in inappropriate here also. Saying "after close inspection it was apparent" is like saying "after thinking about the problem for six months the answer was obvious."

I might not say the passage sounds "weird", but it *is* bad writing, and I can understand someone getting confused or puzzled reading it.

And what is it supposed to measure? I have no problem with the test measuring IQ. But then, I don't buy into the deterministic, hereditarian IQ philosophy. I think maybe you're trying to distinguish between types of ability that cannot be distinguished.

The SAT's problem is that ETS is trying to placate people who believe that all testing should be scrapped, and applicants admitted to college based solely on their race or ethnicity. The only way ETS will make its critics happy, would be to go out of business.

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The new test spells the end of IQ–and big changes for American education