SAT Makers Finally Decide To Make Changes

After years of criticism from colleges and universities that the SAT I is anachronistic and an over-emphasized predictor of students' success, The College Board has finally agreed to make radical changes in the 50-year old test. The major impetus for change was the University of California Regents' expected decision to not require freshman applicants to submit a standardized test score such as the SAT I or ACT. The president of the College Board, Gaston Caperton, has acknowledged that the U.C. system is a "bellwether" and always "a year or two ahead of everyone else," and has a fought a losing battle in public relations since early 2001, when the president of the University of California, Richard C. Atkinson, first proclaimed that the university ignore the test.

Anounced just this past May, the following changes will take place on the SAT I in 2005: The math portion of the SAT I would cover three years of high school, rather than two; longer reading passages would be added, considered more appropriate to a college prep curriculum; and a writing test will be added, including both a multiple-choice section on grammar as well as a twenty-minute essay. Word analogies will be dropped. In the past, Dr. Caperton had insisted that "There is nothing wrong with the current test . . . When you're the best the only way you stay the best is continuing improving what you're doing." Meanwhile, Bob Schaefer, a spokesman for the Cambridge, Massachusetts based organization known as FairTest, has scoffed at the College Board's efforts. "They're just trying to put some polish on a tarnished product," Schaefer said. Grading the new SAT I will take a lot of person power if the hired administrator of the test, the Educational Testing Service, applies the same procedure that the organization has used for the SAT II writing test. Two readers grade the essays on the SAT II, and if they disagree, an arbiter makes a final decision.

Meanwhile, parents and students across the country continue to voice their displeasure with states' standardized tests. In New York State, Scarsdale students were threatened with punishment if they boycotted this spring's round of tests. Richard P. Mills, the state education commissioner, gave the order. A more peaceful movement in New York has been the growth of alternative schools and their desire for students to substitute student portfolios for Regents Exams in math, social studies, and science. No waivers will be issued for the English Regents Exam. The Humanities Prepatory Academy in Manhattan is one leading proponent of the portfolio system. Vincent Brevetti, principal of the school, says when students plunge into a topic, they develop advanced skills by evaluating conflicts in evidence and methods.

In Harwich, Massachusetts, an eighth grade social studies teacher was suspended for refusing to give a state exam. The teacher, James Bougas, pointed out that the state-wide tests "include topics outside the curriculum" and that "low scores can reflect family hardship, not lack of effort or teaching. . . ." The Marin County, California school system will be ineligible for state bonuses because more than twenty percent of the students there did not take the recently administered standardized tests. Legislators canceled tests in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin after parents protested. . . . Locally, test courses are growing like weeds for seventh and eighth graders trying to gain admission to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, which annually graduates more than a hundred National Merit Semi-Finalists. The school admitted approximately 13% of its 3000 applicants in 2001. (Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, ccnnfyi.com)