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CER and Education In The News
WATERED DOWN VERSION: SAT losing credibility as Yardstick
By Jeanne Allen
Special to the Atlanta Journal, September 20, 2000
For years, SAT scores were a critical component of college admissions because they reflected a student's aptitude and what he or she had learned. Students depended largely on a good outcome from the SATs to help them get into a good college.
But over the past several years, the SAT has become far less reliable. Starting in 1995, when the College Board recentered the scoring to create an artificial average, the test has undergone several changes that make it only a superficial barometer of student aptitude.
This year, the College Board announced that the SATs reached a 30-year high. That wasn't very difficult considering it had taken quite a plunge in the late '70s and early '80s, rose slightly, dipped again and then inched up in the '90s.
The growth of SATs in the '90s, to the point where the average verbal and math scores are 505
and 514 respectively, owes largely to several mitigating factors:
First, the test kids take today is unlike the test taken pre-1996. Remember those challenging questions that required students to figure out the answer to problems such as "Bush is to Gore as Republican is to ______________?" Well, they're all gone. Such demonstrations of logic and reasoning were relegated to a bygone era.
Remember the challenge of a solid 90 minutes of math? Gone, as well. Now students get 60 minutes of math, and they may use a calculator the whole time. It reminds me of those open-book tests some of us were given in high school and college. We always knew we had lazy teachers when they gave us open-book tests. How difficult is it to find the reason for the American Revolution when your book is wide open?
Another thing happened to the SAT last year. The Wall Street Journal reported that the authors of the SAT had been testing different demographic groups to determine how well they perform on various questions. If women or African-Americans, for example, fared less well on certain math questions, those questions were purged.
This purging of questions on which certain subgroups show deficiency demonstrates that rather than hold all children to high standards, the SAT was lowered to reflect the poor education that some children receive.
Finally, the scores of top-scoring students who always do well on these tests and who attend great colleges because of their performance have actually declined. And, as in previous years, the College Board reported that grade inflation is alive and well in America's schools. In 1990, 4 percent of students reported grade averages of A-plus, and those students averaged 622 on the verbal portion and 631 on math. This year, 7 percent of students reported an A-plus average --- but their SAT scores dropped to 610 and 628 for the verbal and math portions of the test. In fact, between 1975 and 1995, the number of college-bound students who scored above 600 on the verbal test slipped by 36 percent.
Moreover, for all that's been made of the slight gains in minority achievement, the reality is that the gap has increased: Since 1996, the black-white achievement gap has increased three points in math, two points in verbal scores.
The result? The modern SAT is a mere shell of the powerhouse indicator it once was. Yet even in its watered-down version, scores continue to drop --- whether they be among society's top performers or those who are most in need of help.
Once again in American education, the producers have won and the consumers have lost, and the academic direction that once seemed so clear now seems aimless. Whither (or perhaps wither) the SAT.
Jeanne Allen is president of the Center for Education Reform, a national, independent, nonprofit advocacy group. Its Web site is www.edreform.com.
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