Are SAT changes a marketing gimmick?
 

NO
Bernadette Henderson-Horner:
It's a wake-up call to grade inflators

As a student, I hated standardized tests. As an admissions counselor, I still have a disdain for reducing students to Saturday morning numbers--especially those students never taught the information they are being tested on. But for those students with Honors Calculus and AP English Literature on their transcripts, I now understand the need for an evolving, objective measure such as the new SAT.

I work for a nonselective university. We don't read essays, recommendations or resumŽs; we just check numbers. I've come to find that GPAs often reflect characteristics that don't predict a student's capacity for academic success. While willingness to try, show up and do extra credit speak to the character of an individual, these traits don't tell me whether a student should be placed in Honors Calculus or Pre-College Algebra her first semester at my school. The new SAT material will.

To be successful in college today, a student needs to be able to clearly argue a point in the moment. Scholars also need to know more than basic math. As GPAs inflate due to weighting for everything from Honors courses (that differ from the non-Honors courses only by the "H" placed in front of the standard monikers) to AP courses that students can (and increasingly do) opt out of the AP exam for, it is becoming burdensome to discern between those who mastered a subject at School A and students who merely received booster grade points for registering under a particular course title at School B.

I don't believe reputation--of the student, the rigor of the course or the notoriety of the institution--should be an automatic pass for any student's outright academic preparation. If students are challenging themselves beyond their learning curve by taking advanced courses, the new SAT will gauge the effect of that challenge. And the new SAT will single out students who are coasting through on the covert inflation present in averages where reputations are allowed to preclude top-percentile scholars from getting anything less than an "A" for very average performances.

We currently are cheating many students out of college degrees by placing them ill-prepared in courses that their GPAs and transcripts indicate they can handle. The new SAT, intermarried carefully with GPA, is an excellent counterbalance to subjective indicators for students with the course preparation for the test and serves as an honest measure of what students have taken from their instruction. Marketing gimmick, it is not. Wake-up call it is--particularly for those who wrongfully indicate the mastery of academic skills by allowing grade inflation to persist.

YES
Molly Carney:
It's all about keeping the biggest client happy

In my years as a teacher, nothing has frustrated me more than the SAT. Our system of higher education has mandated that it is a vitally important test, yet from an education standpoint, the SAT makes little, if any, sense.

The SAT is a test that does not measure anything I teach my students in the classroom. My local school board develops a curriculum; my principal tailors the curriculum to our school; and I gear my lesson plans to that curriculum. I spend 10 months of the year teaching skills essential to the study of history. Eventually my students will take the SAT, but it will not test them on anything they have learned in school.

The SAT does not measure knowledge, and it does not measure intelligence. The only thing the test measures is a student's ability to do well on it.

Nothing has driven this point home more than my experience as an instructor of SAT test preparation at the Princeton Review. The average student improves 140 points on the SAT after taking a Princeton Review course. The students who are able to take a preparatory class have an unfair advantage over the majority of students who cannot take such a course.

Now I see that the College Board is changing the SAT. When I first read that it was thinking of changing the test, I said, "Thank goodness! It's about time." But then I saw what the changes were going to be, and I just shook my head. They appear to be motivated solely to appease the College Board's largest client--the University of California--rather than to improve the test. The College Board cannot afford to lose its best customer. The decision to change the test is simply for the College Board's survival.

From an educator's point of view, it seems fair to say that the revamped exam's "improvements" range from the minor to the negligible. The biggest change to the exam is the addition of a new section: the SAT Writing Exam. Composed of multiple-choice grammar questions, as well as a written essay, this section promises to instill the most anxiety in young test-takers.

This new section seems to be similar to the SAT II writing test--on which Princeton Review students average a 137 point improvement in their scores.

The College Board's proposed changes to the SAT are a missed opportunity. Instead of creating a better test, the College Board has simply rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic.