THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
March 9, 2001
Two Cheers for an End to the SAT
by Alfie Kohn
One imagines the
folks at the College Board blushing deeply when, a few years back,
they announced that the "A" in SAT no longer stood for "Aptitude."
Scarlet, after all, would be an appropriate color to turn while, in
effect, conceding that the test wasn't -- and, let's face it, never
had been -- a measure of intellectual aptitude. For a brief period,
the examination was rechristened the Scholastic Assessment Test, a
name presumably generated by the Department of Redundancy
Department. Today, literally -- and perhaps figuratively -- SAT
doesn't stand for anything at all.
It wasn't the
significance of the shift in the SAT's name that recently produced
an epiphany for Richard C. Atkinson, president of the University of
California. Rather, the tipping point in deciding to urge the
elimination of the SAT as a requirement for admission came last year
during a visit to the upscale private school his grandchildren
attend. There, he watched as 12-year-olds were drilled on verbal
analogies, part of an extended training that, he said in announcing
his proposal, "was not aimed at developing the students' reading and
writing abilities but rather their test-taking skills." More
broadly, he argued, "America's overemphasis on the SAT is
compromising our educational system."
Of course, it must
be pointed out that U.C., assuming its policy-making bodies accept
their president's advice, would not be the first institution to drop
the SAT. Hundreds of colleges and universities, including Bates,
Bowdoin, Connecticut, and Mount Holyoke Colleges, no longer require
the SAT or ACT. A survey by FairTest, a Cambridge, Mass.-based
advocacy group, reported that such colleges are generally
well-satisfied that "applicant pools and enrolled classes have
become more diverse without any loss in academic quality."
On balance, this
latest and most significant challenge to the reign of the SAT is
very welcome news indeed. There is a possible downside as well, but
we should begin by recognizing that even before colleges began
hopping off the SAT bandwagon, the assumption that they needed
something like the test to help them decide whom to admit was
difficult to defend, if only because of a powerful counterexample to
our north: No such test is used in Canada. But the more one learns
about the SAT in particular, the more one wonders what took Atkinson
so long, and what is taking many of his counterparts even longer.
Consider:
* The SAT is a
measure of resources more than of reasoning. Year after year, the
College Board's own statistics depict a virtually linear correlation
between SAT scores and family income. Each rise in earnings
(measured in $10,000 increments) brings a commensurate rise in
scores. Other research, meanwhile, has found that more than half the
difference among students' scores can be explained purely on the
basis of parents' level of education.
* Aggregate scores
don't reflect educational achievement. SAT results are still
sometimes used to compare one state with another or one year with
another. Unfortunately, not only is the test voluntary, but
participation rates vary enormously by state and district. The
researchers Brian Powell and Lala Carr Steelman, writing in a 1996
issue of the Harvard Educational Review, reported that those rates
account for a whopping 85 percent of the variance in scores; when
fewer students take the test, a state's results end up looking much
better. Similarly, even if it is true that average national scores
have declined over the decades (once we factor in the statistical
readjustment that took place in 1996), that is mostly because more
students, relatively speaking, are now taking the test.
* Individual scores
don't reflect a student's intellectual depth. The verbal section of
the SAT is basically just a vocabulary test. It is not a measure of
aptitude or of subject-area competency. So what does it measure,
other than the size of students' houses?
An interesting 1995
study with students at East Carolina University classified them as
taking a "surface" approach to their assignments (meaning they
memorized facts and did as little as possible); a "deep" approach
(informed by a genuine desire to understand and a penchant for
connecting current lessons with previous knowledge); or an
"achieving" approach (where performance, particularly as compared
with that of others, mattered more than learning). SAT scores turned
out to be significantly correlated with both the surface and
achieving approaches, but not at all with the deep approach. (That
finding has been replicated with the results of other standardized
tests taken by younger students, lending support to the criticism
that such examinations tend to measure what matters least.)
* SAT's don't
predict the future. A considerable amount of research, including but
not limited to a summary of more than 600 studies published by the
College Board in 1984, has found that only about 12 to 16 percent of
the variance in freshman grades could be explained by SAT scores,
suggesting that they are not particularly useful even with respect
to that limited variable -- and virtually worthless at predicting
how students will fare after their freshman year (and whether they
will graduate).
* SAT's don't
contribute to diversity. Far from offering talented minority
students a way to prove their worth, the overall effect of the SAT
has been to ratify entrenched patterns of discrimination. Maria
Blanco, a regional counsel with the Mexican American Legal Defense
and Educational Fund, remarked recently that the SAT "has turned
into a barrier to students of color," because it "keeps out very
qualified kids who have overcome obstacles but don't test very
well." Colleges looking to put together a racially and ethnically
diverse student body are, therefore, already likely to minimize the
significance of standardized-test scores.
Unhappily, though,
some people committed to affirmative action -- and even more who are
opposed to it -- have treated the SAT as a marker for merit and then
argued about whether it is legitimate to set scores aside. Should a
desire for equity sometimes override the desire for excellence? But
that question is utterly misconceived. SAT's, like other
standardized tests, do not further the cause of equity or
excellence. Such tests privilege the privileged and reflect a skill
at taking tests. Few people -- other than those who profit
handsomely from its administration -- will mourn the SAT when it
finally breathes its last.
*
And now the bad
news: Unless we are very careful, a long-overdue move to jettison
SAT scores may simply ratchet up the significance accorded to other
admissions criteria that are little better and possibly even worse.
Atkinson suggested that, at least in the short run, colleges might
switch to the SAT 2, better known as achievement tests. While that
may be a step forward in some respects, it may have the effect of
creating a standardized, exam-based high-school curriculum that
could squeeze out other kinds of teaching. That is already beginning
to happen as states impose their own exit tests: Teachers feel
compelled to cover vast amounts of content, often superficially,
rather than letting students discover ideas.
The more ominous
threat, though, is that, as the SAT fades, it will be replaced by
high-school grades. There is a widespread assumption that less
emphasis on scores as an admissions criterion has to mean more
emphasis on grades, as though nature has decreed an inverse
relationship between the two. But for grades to be given more
emphasis would be terribly unfortunate. On the most obvious level,
grades are unreliable indicators of student achievement. A "B" from
one teacher or school doesn't equate to a "B" from somewhere else;
in fact, some studies have shown that a given assignment may even
receive two different grades from a single teacher who reads it at
two different times. Most people know that is true; tests like the
SAT are more dangerous because they are falsely assumed to be
objective.
What is far more
disturbing about even the current emphasis on grades, let alone the
prospect of enhancing their significance, is the damage they do when
students are led to compulsively groom their transcripts.
Researchers have
found three consistent effects of focusing attention on traditional
grades. First, interest in the learning itself tends to decline.
Many studies have shown that the more people are rewarded for doing
something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had
to do to get the reward. While it's not impossible for a student to
be concerned about getting high marks and also to enjoy playing with
ideas, the practical reality is that there is a negative correlation
between a grade orientation and a learning orientation.
Second, focusing on
grades tends to reduce the quality of students' thinking. One series
of studies by the researcher Ruth Butler found that graded students
were significantly less creative than those who received only
qualitative feedback. The more the task required creative thinking,
in fact, the worse the performance of students who knew they were
going to receive a grade. In another experiment by two University of
Rochester researchers, reported in 1987, students who were told they
would be graded on how well they learned a social-studies lesson had
more trouble understanding the main point of the assigned text than
did students who were told that no grades would be involved. Even on
a measure of rote recall, the graded group remembered fewer facts a
week later.
Finally, concern
about grades often reduces a student's preference for challenging
tasks. Those who cut corners -- who choose short books, undemanding
projects, and "gut" courses -- are not being lazy so much as
rational; they are responding to the imperative to bring up their
grade-point averages.
If it's worrisome
that SAT coaching sessions take time away from meaningful
intellectual pursuits, then it's worse that an admissions policy
that causes students to become obsessed with grades could undermine
the intellectual value of virtually everything they do in high
school. Indeed, it can create intellectual dispositions that persist
in and beyond college. From that perspective, complaints about
"grade inflation" are a spectacular exercise in missing the point.
The problem isn't that too many students are getting A's; the
problem is that too many students are getting the idea that the
whole point of school is to get A's.
The only thing worse
than placing added emphasis on the G.P.A. is placing added emphasis
on relative G.P.A. Some state systems now want to guarantee
acceptance to all students in a top percentage of their class. Here,
the emphasis is not merely on performance (as opposed to learning),
but on victory. A considerable body of data demonstrates that
creating competition among students is decidedly detrimental with
respect to achievement and motivation to learn. The urgent question
should not be whether high-school class rank is correlated with
college grades, but whether secondary schools can maintain (or
create) a focus on intellectual exploration when their students are
forced to view their classmates as obstacles to their own success.
*
Where does all this
leave us? Those willing to ask the truly radical questions about
college admissions might consider an observation offered 30 years
ago during a public lecture at the Educational Testing Service by
the psychologist David McClelland. Rather than asking what criteria
best predict success in higher education, he asked whether colleges
should even be looking for the most-qualified students. "One would
think that the purpose of education is precisely to improve the
performance of those who are not doing very well," he mused. "If the
colleges were interested in proving that they could educate people,
high-scoring students might be poor bets because they would be less
likely to show improvement in performance."
Many of us will find
that challenge too unsettling, preferring that we continue to admit
those students who will probably be easiest to educate. But even if
we are looking for the "best" students, we ought to see G.P.A.
numbers and SAT scores as a matched set of flawed criteria.
Grades-and-tests, at best, will predict future grades-and-tests.
Although some would dispute that, there is good evidence that grades
don't predict later-life success, in occupational or intellectual
terms. In the 1980's, a review of 35 studies, published in the
American Educational Research Journal, concluded that academic
indicators (grades and tests) from college -- never mind high school
-- accounted for less than 3 percent of the variance in eventual
occupational performance as judged by income, job-effectiveness
ratings, and job satisfaction. Moreover, those indicators had no
predictive power whatsoever for M.D.'s and Ph.D.'s.
When Mount Holyoke
College, after a lengthy study by faculty members, announced last
year that it would stop requiring students to submit SAT scores, the
president, Joanne Creighton, did not limit her criticism to that
test. "There has been a kind of reductionism in higher education,
reducing students and institutions to numbers," she said. Similarly,
Atkinson said that he had recommended "that all campuses move away
from admission processes that use narrowly defined quantitative
formulas and instead adopt procedures that look at applicants in a
comprehensive, holistic way."
Doing so will not be
an easy sell, if only because it is faster and therefore cheaper for
universities that hear from tens of thousands of applicants to
continue reducing each one to a numerical formula, rather than to
weigh each as an individual. A move from SAT to G.P.A. -- or SAT 1
to SAT 2 -- will merely fine-tune the formula. That would be a pity,
because the attention given Atkinson's proposal has provided us with
an opportunity to confront larger and more lasting issues.
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