Anyone who has taken the SAT remembers the analogies that have been the miserable mainstay of the college admissions exam: “gullible is to dupe . . . as submissive is to control.”
But the Scholastic Assessment Tests of the future will have none of that if the College Board, which administers the SAT, goes along with recommendations to be presented Thursday for radically altering the exam, an annual source of anxiety for 2.1 million high schoolers.
Partly in response to growing criticism over the test’s perceived bias against minorities, immigrants and poor students, the College Board is considering a major overhaul of the SAT, introducing an essay question, eliminating the use of analogies and adding a third year of high school math questions.
The SAT is a comprehensive exam used by colleges and universities around the country. The College Board also administers the SAT II subject tests, but no variation of those exams is under consideration.
Educators are divided over whether the changes will address concerns that the test is biased toward wealthy students who can afford high-priced test coaching.
But the changes have apparently appeased concerns raised by the University of California system and its president, Richard Atkinson, who caused an uproar last year when he proposed eliminating the use of the SAT in admissions.
University of California faculty members, who have been consulted on the proposed changes, view them as a positive step but have yet to issue a formal opinion, said Lavonne Luquis, a spokeswoman for the state’s university system.
California is the SAT’s biggest client, with 162,000 students taking the test in 2001. In Illinois, 15,041 students took the SAT in 2001; students applying to state universities here are more likely to use scores from the American College Test (ACT).
The proposals for changes will be voted on by the 31 trustees of the College Board, which is made up of high school guidance counselors and teachers, college administrators, writing instructors and leaders of education groups.
Bernard Phelan, an advanced placement instructor at Barrington High School and the only Chicago-area trustee of the College Board, welcomes the changes. Although he anticipates that some of the revisions will face scrutiny Thursday, he expects the bulk of them to be approved.
“My hope is that schools will look at this and say, `How can we better teach writing?'” said Phelan, who teaches advanced placement writing courses and has graded the SAT II, a writing exam required by some colleges. “This whole business of having students write and write often is really important.
“I just think it’s a good step in the right direction. It will be a more rigorous test but at the same time one that’s accessible to more students. The litmus test here is, can schools rise to the occasion?”
Some local educators also embrace the changes, including Rebecca Dixon, Northwestern University’s associate provost for enrollment. Dixon, who headed the Midwestern regional office of the College Board in the 1980s, said NU does not believe that the SAT contains an inherent bias, but she still supports the revisions.
`No spell check or thesaurus’
NU already asks its applicants for an essay, but there are always concerns about how much of it may have been altered or corrected by coaches and relatives. College Board officials would make copies of the SAT essay responses available to admissions officers.
“We would be glad to have both,” Dixon said. “The essays we require take time, and the students can correct them and spend as much time on them as they want to. By contrast, on a timed writing exam there’s no question as to who wrote this essay. It will be the student, and their mother would not have been there to check the spelling and there will be no spell check or thesaurus.”
Some critics say the changes would do little to correct the test’s problems.
“The benefits to the proposed changes are going to come to the test preparation companies. They’re drooling over this,” said Christina Perez, a spokeswoman for FairTest, a test reform group in Massachusetts. “As far as educational benefits, we see no benefits. There’s no reason to believe it will do a better job of predicting college performance. It will be just as coachable and biased.”
Some test preparation companies admitted the changes would be good for business.
“The SAT changes are pretty great for us,” said Seppy Basili, vice president of Kaplan Inc., a leading test preparation company. “Parents are nervous about this, and in this particular case writing does freak students out. It’s about getting them familiar with the format and knowing what to expect. We expect we’ll be seeing more students and we’ll certainly be able to prepare them.”
Yacht is to regatta
Others wonder whether changes in the test can ever address concerns over a cultural bias in the exam.
“Everybody is always mystified as to how on earth a standardized test can be biased, but it absolutely can, on a number of different levels,” said Melissa Hendrix, executive director and assistant vice president of the Chicago office of the Princeton Review test preparation company.
She said one example was a question on an SAT that used the analogy “yacht is to regatta.”
“That’s a bias not just on a socioeconomic basis, but it can also be on a geographic basis,” Hendrix said. “This has not been a curriculum-based test. Regardless of your socioeconomic background, this is not a test based on what you learn in school.”
The SAT came under fire in California after voters in 1996 passed Proposition 209, which banned race- and gender-preference programs at public universities and in government agencies. There was a dramatic drop in the admission of African-American, Hispanic and American Indian students, and the university system has struggled to recover the number of minorities they once enrolled.
Calling the overemphasis on SAT scores the “educational equivalent of a nuclear arms race,” California’s Atkinson asked a group of faculty members to consider a replacement for the SAT in February 2001. He said then that concerns over bias in the test could not be overlooked.
But College Board officials argue that the fact that poor and minority students do not typically perform as well on the SAT has little to do with the test.
“What it points out is the inequities in the American education system,” said Don Jacob, a spokesman for the College Board. “You’re shooting the messenger if you blame the test for that.”
Still, Jacob said College Board officials were concerned about the growing criticism and that the University of California’s president forced them to act more quickly to make changes.
The proposal to eliminate the analogies section comes partly from English instructors, who felt analogies sometimes called for background knowledge that had no relationship to high school curriculum, Jacob said. A writing sample is considered a better measure of a student’s overall verbal skills, he said.
A third year of math skills is also being considered to measure Algebra II skills that many college-bound students are exposed to.
If the changes are approved, the College Board will face a tight deadline to get the new test formulated. The new test would first be administered in March 2005.
With or without the SAT
No matter what the College Board decides Thursday, it seems certain that the controversies over the SAT may not subside. Nearly 400 colleges have stopped requiring the SAT out of concern that it gives wealthy students an unfair advantage.
Locally, Columbia College and Northeastern Illinois University do not require a standardized test for admission.
But other university officials can’t imagine being without the SAT.
“I don’t think [the majority of] colleges are going to back away from entrance tests because there’s so many applicants and so many high schools all over the world and there’s so much grade inflation that the SAT remains the common denominator for all applicants,” NU’s Dixon said. “We can trust that test to be the same measure wherever it is taken.”
