Posted on 11/17/2001 5:49:01 AM PST by Pharmboy
November 17, 2001
Usefulness of SAT Test Is Debated in California
By JACQUES STEINBERG
SANTA BARBARA, Calif., Nov. 16 — The battle for the SAT's future in California and perhaps other parts of the nation was joined here today when the leading educator opposed to the influential college entrance exam debated its usefulness with the head of the company that oversees it.
The president of the University of California, who has proposed that his college system no longer require applicants to take the main SAT test, and the president of the College Board, which administers it, spoke out in an effort to win the hearts and minds of the system's faculty members, who will play a crucial role in deciding whether to continue using the test.
The California system includes prestigious campuses at Berkeley and Los Angeles and is the SAT's largest customer. The respect it gets from the College Board — and the influence it carries with other systems across the country — was evidenced by the size of the delegation the board dispatched to a research conference on testing at the university's campus here. The College Board president, Gaston Caperton, arrived from his New York headquarters with eight top aides.
Nine months ago, the university president, Richard C. Atkinson, recommended that the California system, which is among the nation's largest, stop requiring its applicants to take the main SAT exam. He contended that the tests had distracted students from their primary subjects and made it more difficult for many black and Hispanic applicants to get accepted into top colleges.
Since then, just one other selective public or private institution — Hamilton College in upstate New York — has said it would follow suit. But that could change if the regents who govern the California system, which has 130,000 undergraduates, adopt Dr. Atkinson's proposal.
Before the 26-member Board of Regents can take up the president's proposal, the plan must be approved by a series of faculty committees, which are expected to act early next year. That is why today's forum was considered so important. The regents have said that if the president's proposal reaches their desks, they would take it up no later than next summer. If adopted, it could take effect as soon as the fall of 2003.
In addressing 300 professors, administrators and admissions officers this morning, most of them drawn from the system's eight undergraduate campuses, Dr. Atkinson argued that the main SAT exam, formally known as the SAT I, failed to assess what was most important to colleges.
"The SAT I sends a confusing message to students, teachers, and schools," Dr. Atkinson said. "It says that students will be tested on material that is unrelated to what they study in their classes. It says that the grades they achieve can be devalued by a test that is not part of their school curriculum."
Dr. Atkinson has proposed that the California system rely, temporarily, on another series of College Board exams, the SAT II's, which are intended to measure student achievement in specific subjects, rather than general aptitude or reasoning in mathematics, vocabulary, reading and other areas. But Dr. Atkinson has proposed that those exams, too, be phased out in favor of a series of new exams that would be designed specifically to test what California students learn in high school.
Mr. Caperton, saying he regarded California as a "bellwether" that was always "a year or two ahead of everyone else," urged the conferees to stick with both sets of SAT exams. When combined, he said, the SAT I and II provided the most accurate statistical snapshot of how a student thought and had performed in school.
"I tried to be nice when he said all those bad things about the SAT I," Mr. Caperton, a former governor of West Virginia, said of Dr. Atkinson.
Mr. Caperton argued that the SAT I had changed drastically since its start more than 50 years ago, and he likened its evolution to that of a Chevrolet over the same period. The SAT I, he said, was unmatched in its capacity to evaluate a student's "ability to think in words and numbers," which he called a "very critical part of getting an education in college and doing well in college."
Mr. Caperton delivered his remarks with some confidence, aware that his position enjoys the support of an overwhelming majority of the members of the College Board, a nonprofit consortium of 4,000 colleges and high schools that includes the California system.
Even so, Mr. Caperton drew fire from another front: Richard Ferguson, the president of ACT Inc., which produces a rival admissions exam, lobbied conferees to replace the SAT with his company's test, which, he said, was already achievement-oriented, and "the equivalent of five SAT II's."
California education officials began focusing in earnest on the disparities in the SAT scores of blacks and Hispanics when compared with those of whites after the regents voted in 1995 to bar race as a consideration in admission to the public university system.
For rest of article please click on Source above
Is that the normal SAT test, or the scholastic aptitude SAT test? (Do the New York NYT Times reporters know what acronyms mean?)
They hate the SAT because it leaves an evidence trail of their anti-white discrimination.
And colleges DON'T want to know this? Um, are they trying to get untalented students? At least they're not all government funded.
My friend in H.S. got a 1500 SAT. I had another friend in college who got a 1600. I was in freshman honors chemistry class of 150 at Case Western Reserve, where the requirement was an SAT math of 700. There are smart people out there--do you want them in your college or in another college? Obviously they won't go to a college with low standards.
And let's look at college as a business: you want to maximize your revenue and profit. The more students you get, the more money you get. The more research money you get, the more money you get. The more rich alumni you get, the more money you get. Students often want a good education (not always--sometimes the student doesn't pay the bill). Research is done on the backs of graduate students, directed by the faculty member. Grad students go where they can do the most interesting research. Faculty members want the smartest grad students. Rich alumni come from successful people who feel their college helped them in life. If college focuses on PC and not smarts, who would ever learn anything to make money? The policy advocated by this guy in CA seems to be self defeating.
No test or measurement of academic achievement is going to be a perfect predictor of college performance, of course. But I would submit that standardized tests provide a far more accurate yardstick than do grade point averages and high school class rank.
It would be politically incorrect, of course, but if I were in charge of admissions to a college, I'd take the pool of applicants who are prepared to pay full tuition (without expecting someone else to pick up the tab), and go straight down the list of SAT scores, highest first, until the entering freshman class was filled. This method would produce some "mistakes" of course, but I'd bet it would produce a student body far superior to those produced by the typical "need-blind, diversity conscious" selection process now in favor.
Selective colleges and universities have entering freshman classes of finite sizes. Admit a student with lower academic qualifications, and you are, by definition, discriminating against a more qualified applicant who got squeezed out. Particularly in the case of state schools, this is unacceptable, and I'm glad to see more and more people fighting back.
No I do not. And furthermore, I will not do a Google search for the answer because you obviously know it and will post it on this thread. I look forward to your reply.
And, you made the same mistake that the NY Times headline writer made that coloradan pointed out above: SAT test is redundant. But, we are not grading on this thread. ( ;-)
This idiot was making the case that a test that is given and graded blindly is biased but grades by teachers cannot be influenced by non-scholastic issues. It could never be bias against boys by teachers when they grade them. Unbelievable, huh?
I'm going to be taking the SAT soon, and a tip that I've read is that in the minority passage, to get some guaranteed points, always choose the most positive answer to the minority.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.