Rethinking the SAT

The Future of Standardized Testing in University Admissions

Rebecca Zwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134000104
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Rethinking the SAT is a unique presentation of the latest thoughts and research findings of key individuals in the world of college admissions, including the president of the largest public university system in the U.S., as well as the presidents of the two companies that sponsor college admissions tests in the U.S. The contributors address not only the pros and cons of the SAT itself, but the broader question of who should go to college in the twenty-first century.

PART I

Standardized Tests and American Education: What Is the Past and Future of College Admissions Testing in the United States?

This section of the book contains the keynote speech by University of California President Richard C. Atkinson, the featured presentations by the presidents of ACT, Inc. and the College Board, and other chapters about the history, design, and purpose of admissions tests. The section opens with a chapter by Nicholas Lemann, author of The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999). Lemann gives a historical context for the recent debates about the SAT. He describes the ways in which the test was shaped by the development of intelligence tests in the early 1900s and by the ideas of James Bryant Conant. As President of Harvard University, Conant sought to use educational testing to admit a more intellectual student body. Although Conant hoped that the use of the SAT would be democratizing, Lemann is convinced that the impact of the SAT has been substantially negative, and he applauds Atkinson’s proposal to place a greater emphasis on achievement tests in university admissions.

Lemann’s chapter is followed by the contribution from Richard C. Atkinson, which appeared previously in Issues in Science and Technology, a publication of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the University of Texas; Atkinson presented a version of this article, “Achievement versus Aptitude in College Admissions,” at the UCSB conference. Atkinson takes a backward look at his February 2001 speech, in which he advocated the elimination of the SAT I as an admissions criterion. He notes that he was surprised by the amount of public reaction—and public misunderstanding—that followed his proposal. He is not, he points out, opposed to standardized testing per se. Instead, his proposal called for the use of tests that measure achievement in specific subject areas. Another of his goals is “to move all UC campuses away from admissions processes employing quantitative formulas and toward a comprehensive evaluation of applicants.” Atkinson argues that these changes will increase the fairness of UC admissions policy and will also have a beneficial effect on K–12 education.

In the two subsequent chapters, Richard Ferguson, President of ACT, Inc., and Gaston Caperton, President of the College Board, react to Atkinson’s recommendations. Ferguson makes the case that the ACT exam is, and always has been, achievement based, and that it is already substantially in line with Atkinson’s proposals. The ACT could be further augmented, Ferguson suggests, to be even better aligned with the college preparatory courses required of UC applicants. He explains the philosophy underlying the ACT, describes the curriculum surveys that are used in its development, and outlines the content of its four components: English, mathematics, reading, and science. Gaston Caperton discusses the history of the College Board and of the SAT. While acknowledging that the SAT has roots in intelligence testing, Caperton argues that comparing the original SAT to the modern SAT is like comparing “what a Chevrolet was 75 years ago and is today.” Today’s SAT, he says, “measures students’ ability to think and reason using words and numbers,” skills that are essential in college. Finally, Caperton calls for efforts to improve educational opportunity for all students “long before they sit for the SAT.”

The next two contributions, by Manuel N. Gómez and David F. Lohman, are commentaries on the presentations by Atkinson, Ferguson, and Caperton. Gómez makes a strong case for the use of achievement rather than aptitude tests in admissions. He cites UC’s own research on the relative predictive value of the SAT I: Reasoning Test and the SAT II: Subject Tests, and also makes note of the finding of Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson that “high-achieving minority students perform very differently on these tests depending on whether they are told the tests are measuring ‘intellectual ability’ or problem solving ‘not intended as diagnostic of ability.’” Gómez is concerned that the SAT does not level the academic bar, as sometimes asserted, and that it has taken on an exaggerated importance in the public mind. A different view is presented by David Lohman, who suggests that “aptitude tests that go beyond prior achievement have an important role to play in admissions decisions, especially for minority students.” He presents evidence that scores on “well-constructed measures of developed reasoning abilities” show smaller disparities among ethnic groups than scores on good achievement tests, and argues that tests of reasoning ability can help admissions officers to identify students who do not do well on curriculum tests but can succeed academically if they try hard. According to Lohman, the “problem with the current version of the SAT I may not be that it is an aptitude test, but that it is not enough of an aptitude test.”

In the next chapter, Ida Lawrence, Gretchen Rigol, Tom Van Essen, and Carol Jackson discuss the changes in the mathematical and verbal content of the SAT between 1926 and 2002. The 1926 SAT was a stringently timed exam that included seven verbal subtests and two math subtests. Since that time, many rounds of changes have occurred, including a substantial overhaul in 1994 that was based on the advice of a blue-ribbon panel, the Commission on New Possibilities for the Admissions Testing Program. The commission recommended that the content of the test “approximate more closely the skills used in college and high school work.” Reading passages grew longer and the associated questions became more analytical. Antonym items were eliminated. Another change was the introduction of some math questions that required students to produce their own solutions rather than select from multiple choices. Also, for the first time, the use of calculators was permitted on the math exams. The authors discuss the SAT changes planned for 2005, which are intended to enhance its curriculum alignment, in light of these previous modifications.

The following chapter, by Howard T. Everson, also discusses changes to the SAT, but in a different context: He proposes a design framework for future college admission tests. The time is right for considering such a framework, Everson argues, because of pressure from educational reformers as well as advances in computing and communications technology and the growing influence of cognitive psychology on assessment. He suggests that the use of more sophisticated cognitive and psychometric models could ultimately “provide descriptions of the students’ knowledge or ability structures, as well as the cognitive processes presumed to underlie performance.” Test results would therefore be more “diagnostic” in nature and could inform decisions about classroom instruction. Everson ends by describing some promising research efforts that are currently underway in the areas of writing assessment, tests of strategic learning ability, and measures of creative and practical intelligence.

In his commentary on Part I, Michael W. Kirst focuses on the “disconnectedness” of the K–16 education system. He points out that universities typically fail to consider the impact of admissions testing policy on secondary-school students and teachers. Likewise, secondary schools do not take into account the effect of proliferating K–12 assessments on post-secondary institutions. And there is no K–16 accountability system that brings the two disjoint groups of institutions together. Kirst calls for forums that will allow secondary and postsecondary educators and policymakers to deliberate together about assessment issues. He ends by describing some limited but promising programs that are underway in some states to promote linkage between secondary school and university educators.

A History of Admissions Testing

NICHOLAS LEMANN

I worked on my book, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, in relative isolation from 1992 until 1999, when it was published, and even after that I had the feeling that it was almost impossible to conduct the discussion that I had hoped for about the SAT and the issues surrounding it. So it is incredibly gratifying to be able to come to the state where much of the book is set and to find that, thanks to President Atkinson, a debate that should have occurred half a century ago has now been fully joined, and that I get to be a part of it.

I am not a professional educator, and I am also not a statistician or a psychometrician. Plenty of first-rate people in those categories are on the roster for this weekend’s conference. I don’t think it’s useful for me to focus on the specific content of the SAT or its predictive validity relative to other tests. Instead I think that I can contribute best by laying out the history of the big test and the ideas that underlay its growth. I do know more about that than most people here, because the Educational Testing Service, almost a decade ago, kindly granted me access to its extensive historical archive, and I then spent a great deal of time working there. Given the importance of the SAT, it was odd that, outside of a couple of in-house histories produced by ETS and the College Board, the story of how it came to be had never been told in book form. To the millions of people who took the test, it simply existed, like the air we breathe.

But of course nothing simply exists. Not only are tests constructed, like every other social institution; if they are as widely used as the SAT, their use has been constructed also. It is important that we understand how and why that happened—and it’s an interesting story, too.

The College Entrance Examination Board was founded 101 years ago. Its purpose, then as now, was to act as an interface between high schools and colleges, which was something both sides wanted, for somewhat different reasons. High schools like to be able to give their students the option of going on to a wide range of institutions of higher education, which is much easier if those institutions have a uniform admissions process. And universities like to ensure that their incoming students are prepared at a uniformly high level, which they can do in part by using admissions tests to influence the high school curriculum. The most notable difference between the College Board then and now was that at its founding, and for fifty years thereafter, it had a small membership mainly confined to northeastern elite boarding and private day schools and to the Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges into which they fed their graduates. The College Boards, as the board’s tests were called, were hand-graded essay exams based on the boarding school curriculum, which each student took over a period of several days.

In 1905 Alfred Binet first administered his famous intelligence test in Paris. Very quickly, here in California, intelligence-test promoters led by Lewis Terman of Stanford University began pushing for the widespread use of an adapted version of Binet’s test in American schools. Terman, not Binet, is responsible for the notion that every person has an innate, numerically expressible “intelligence quotient” that a test can discern. His primary interest was in identifying the very highest scorers and then making sure they were given special educational opportunities. One such opportunity was the chance to be among the handful of young Americans who then finished high school and went on to college, with the idea that the society would then get the full benefit of their talents. The idea of identifying and specially training a new, brainy elite was not new to Terman; you can find essentially the same idea in Plato’s Republic, in Thomas Jefferson’s correspondence with John Adams, and in many other places. The idea of using a standardized test to begin this process was not new either. Future Chinese mandarins were being selected by examination more than a thousand years ago, and systems of selection by examination for aspiring government and military officials swept across western Europe in the nineteenth century. What was new was the idea of using IQ tests—as, supposedly, a measure of general intellectual superiority, not mastery of a particular body of material or suitability to a particular task—as the means of selection.

During the First World War, the early psychometricians persuaded the United States Army to let them administer an IQ test to all recruits. This was the first mass administration of an IQ test, and the results were used, in that era when eugenicist ideas were conventional wisdom, to demonstrate the danger that unrestricted immigration posed to the quality of our national intellectual stock. One person who produced such work was Carl Brigham, a young psychologist at Princeton University who also went to work on adapting the Army Alpha Test for use in college admissions. In 1926—by which time, to his immense credit, he had loudly renounced his commitment to eugenics—the College Board experimentally administered Brigham’s Scholastic Aptitude Test for the first time.

In 1933 James Bryant Conant became president of Harvard University. Conant, though a Boston-bred Harvard graduate descended from Puritans, rightly considered himself to represent, in class terms, a departure from the Brahmin Harvard presidents before him. He had grown up middle-class in Dorchester, not rich in Back Bay, and he was a true modern academic, a research chemist. Conant saw before him a Harvard College that had become the property of a new American aristocracy, which in turn had been created by the aging, for a generation or two, of the immense industrial fortunes that had materialized in the decades following the Civil War. Harvard was dominated by well-to-do young men from the Northeast, who had attended private schools and who hired servants and private tutors to see to their needs while they went to football games and debutante balls. I want to avoid caricature here—it is wise to remember that the Harvard of that era produced many remarkable figures, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to T. S. Eliot to Conant himself, and that its sociologically undiverse students were imbued with a respect for open competition—but it is true that Harvard and colleges like it tended to define undergraduate merit primarily in terms of nonacademic, nonquantifiable qualities like “character,” which evidently was not usually found in students who went to public high schools.

Conant decided to begin to change Harvard’s character not through a frontal assault, but by starting a small pilot program called the Harvard National Scholarships, under which a handful of boys from the Midwest would be chosen on the basis of pure academic promise and brought to Harvard on full four-year scholarships. The problem was how to select them, since they presumably would not be in range, academically or even geographically, of the College Boards. Conant gave two young assistant deans—Wilbur Bender, later Harvard’s dean of admissions, and Henry Chauncey, later president of ETS—the task of finding a way of picking the Harvard National Scholars. Bender and Chauncey went around and met all the leading figures in the then-new field of educational testing, and quickly settled on Carl Brigham and his Scholastic Aptitude Test as the answer to their problem. As Chauncey told me the story, when they went to Conant and suggested that the SAT be the means of selection of Harvard National Scholars, Conant wanted to know if it was in any way an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Part I: Standardized Tests and American Education: What Is the Past and Future of College Admissions Testing in the United States?
• Part II: College Admissions Testing in California: How Did the California SAT Debate Arise?
• Part III: Race, Class, and Admissions Testing: How Are Test Scores Related to Student Background and Academic Preparation?
• Part IV: The Predictive Value of Admissions Tests: How Well Do Tests Predict Academic Success for Students from a Variety of Backgrounds?
• Author Index
• Subject Index