Race to the bottom

Following the first administration of the new SAT, the College Board released a highly unscientific survey comparing  8,089 March 2016 test-takers to 6494 March 2015 test-takers.   You can read the whole thing here, but in case you dont care to, here are some highlights: 75% of students said the Reading Test was the same as or easier than they expected. 80% of students said the vocabulary on the test would be useful to them later in life, compared with 55% in  March 2015. 59% of students said the Math section tests the skills and knowledge needed for success in college and career. Leaving aside the absence of  some basic pieces of background information that would allow a reader to evaluate just how seriously to take this report  (why were different numbers of test-takers surveyed in 2015 vs. 2016? who exactly were these students? how were they chosen for the survey? what were their socio-economic backgrounds? what sorts of high schools did they attend, and what sorts of classes did they take? what sorts of colleges did they intend to apply to? were the two groups demographically  comparable? etc., etc.), this is quite a remarkable set of statements. Think about it: the College Board is essentially  bragging   bragging about how much easier  the new SAT is. Had a survey like this appeared even a decade ago, it  most likely would be have been in  The Onion.  In 2016, however,  the line between reality and satire  is considerably more porous. To state  the obvious, most high school juniors  have not  ever taken an actual college class (that is, a class at a selective four-year college),  and it is exceedingly unlikely that any of them  have ever held a full-time, white collar job. They have no real way of knowing what  skills vocabulary, math, or otherwise will actually be relevant to their futures. Given that exceedingly basic reality, the fact that the College Board is touting  the survey  as being in any way indicative of the tests value is simultaneously hilarious, pathetic, and absurd. So,  a  few things. First,  Ive said this before, but Ill reiterate it here: the assertion that  the SAT is now more aligned with what students are learning in school overlooks the fact  that the entire purpose  of the test has been altered. The SAT was always intended to be a predictive test, one that  reflected the skills students would need in college. Unlike the ACT, it was never intended to be aligned with  a high school curriculum in the first place. Given the very significant gap between the skills required to be successful in the average American high school  and the skills necessary to be successful at a selective, four-year college  or university, there is a valid  argument to be made for an admissions test aligned with the latter. But regardless  of what one happens to think about the alignment issue,  to ignore it  is to sidestep  what should be a major component of the conversation surrounding the SAT redesign. Second, the College Board vs. ACT, Inc. competition illustrates the problem of  applying the logic of the marketplace to  education. In order to lure customers from a competitor, a company  must of course aim to provide those customers with an improved, more pleasurable  experience. That principle works very well  for a company that  manufactures, say, cars, or  electronics. If your customers are students and your product is a test, however, then the principle becomes a bit more problematic. The goal then becomes  to  provide students with a test that they will  like. (Indeed, if I recall correctly, when the College Board first announced the redesign,  the new test was promoted as offering  an improved test-taking experience.) What sort of test is that?   A  simpler test, of course. A test that inflates scores, or at least percentile rankings. A more gameable test: one on which it is technically possible to obtain a higher score by filling in the same letter for  every single question than by answering any of the questions for real. A test  that makes students feel good about themselves, while strategically  avoiding anything that might directly expose gaps in their basic knowledge   gaps  that their parents probably dont know their children possess and whose existence they would most likely be astounded to discover. (Trust me; Ive seen the looks on their faces.) Most of the passages on the English portion of the ACT are written  around a middle school level, as are the Writing passages on the new SAT. Unlike the ACT, which assigns separate scores to the English and Reading portions, the new SAT takes things a step further and combines Reading and Writing portions into a single Verbal score. As a result, the SAT allows students reading below grade level to hide their  weaknesses much more effectively. Indeed, Id  estimate that most of my ACT students, many of whom switched from the SAT because the reading was  simply too difficult, were reading  at somewhere between a seventh- and a ninth-grade level. Those students are pretty obviously  the ones  the College Board  had in mind when it redesigned the verbal portion. Forgive me for sounding like an old fogey from the dark ages of 1999 here, but should  a college admissions test really be pandering to these types of students? (Sandra Stotsky, one of two members of the Common Core validation committee to reject the standards, has suggested that the high school Common Standards be applied to  middle school students as a benchmark for judging whether  they are ready for  high school.) And for colleges,  do the benefits of collapsing the distinction between solid-but-not-spectacular readers  and the exceptional readers truly  outweigh the drawbacks? Those sorts of differences are not always captured by grades;  that is exactly what has traditionally  made the SAT useful.   Obviously, the achievement gap is the omnipresent elephant in the room. Part of the problem, however, is the college admissions system poses such vastly different challenges for different types of students; theres no way for a single test to meet everyones needs.   Im not denying that for students aiming for elite colleges, the college admissions process can easily spiral out of control. Ive stood on the front lines of it for a while now, and Ive seen the havoc it can wreak although much of the time, that havoc also stems from unrealistic expectations, some of which are driven by rampant grade inflation. An 1100 (1550) SAT was much easier to reconcile with Bs  and an occasional C than  with straight As.   A  big part  of the stress, however, is simply a numbers game: there are too many applicants for too few slots at too few highly desirable schools. Changing the test wont alter  that fact.   If anything, a test that produces more high-scoring applicants will ultimately  increase stress levels because yet more students will apply to the most selective colleges, which will in turn rely more heavily on intangible factors. Consequently,  their decisions are likely to become even more opaque.   At the other extreme, the students at the bottom may in fact be  lacking basic academic vocabulary such as analyze and synthesize, in which case it does seem  borderline sadistic  to test them on words like redolent and obstreperous.   Its pretty safe, however, to assume that students in that category will generally not be applying to the most selective colleges. But in changing the SAT so that  the bottom students are more likely to do passably well on it, the needs of the top end up getting seriously short shrift. No one would argue that  words like analyze arent relevant to students applying to the Ivy League; the problem is that those students also need to know words like esoteric and jargon and euphemism and predicated. The easiest  way to reduce the gap between these two very disparate groups is of course to adjust to the test downward to a lower  common denominator while inflating  scores.  But does anyone seriously think that is a good solution? Lopping off the most challenging part  of the test, at least on the verbal side, will not actually  improve the skills of the students at the bottom. It also fails to expose  the students at the top to the kind of reading they will be expected to do. And even if the formerly ubiquitous flashcards disappear and stress levels temporarily dip, the  underlying issues will remain, and in one guise or another they will inevitably resurface.   Im not naive enough to think that the SAT redesign will have an earth-shattering effect on most high school students.  The students who have great vocabularies and read non-stop  for pleasure wont suddenly stop doing so because a handful of hard words are no longer directly tested on the SAT. The middling ones  who were going to forget all of those flashcards they tried to memorize will come out pretty much the same in the end. The ones who never intended to take the test will sit through it in school because they have no choice, but I know of no research  to suggest that are  more likely to complete a four-year degree as a result. Plenty of students whose parents initially thought Khan Academy could replace Princeton Review will discover that their children need some hand-holding after all and sign them up for a class especially if all of their friends suddenly seem  to be scoring above the 95th percentile. Not to mention the thousands of kids who  will ignore the red esign altogether and take the ACT, just as they intended to do in the first place. Rather, my real concern is about the message that the College Board is sending. Launching a smear campaign to rebrand  the type of moderately challenging vocabulary that peppers serious adult  writing as obscure might have been necessary to win back market share,  but  it was a cheap and irresponsible move. It promotes  the view  that a sophisticated vocabulary is something to be sneered at; that simple, everyday words are the only ones worth knowing. Even if that belief is rampant in the culture at large, shouldnt an organization  like the College Board have some obligation  to rise above it? It suggests that knowledge  acquired  through memorization is inherently devoid of value. It misrepresents  the  type of reading and thinking that college-level work actually involves. It exploits  the  crassest type of American anti-intellectualism by smarmily wrapping  it  in a feel-good blanket of social justice. And it  promotes the illusion that  student s can  grapple with adult ideas while lacking the vocabulary  to  either fully comprehend them or to articulate  cogent responses of their own.   What is even more worrisome  to me, however, is that the College Boards assertions about the new test  have largely been taken at face value. Virtually no one seems to have bothered to look at an actual recent SAT, or interviewed people who actually teach undergraduates  (as opposed to administrators or admissions officers), or even stopped to consider whether the evidence actually supports the claims   that whole critical thinking thing everyone claims to be so fond of.   And  that is a problem  that goes far, far beyond the SAT.