I recently retired as a college English teacher and have been volunteering every Saturday to help a 17-year-old African-American male prepare to take the SAT. We’ve been reading newspaper and magazine articles together and slowly going through The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
My tutee is bright, courteous, and motivated. He has been raised by his mother, who works hard and attends church. I enjoy our time together, and he seems disappointed when I bring our sessions to a close. Like my tutee, I too come from a working-class home in which no adult read; still, when I wasn’t playing ball, I usually had my nose in a book.
Again and again, I have been amazed by my tutee’s limited vocabulary and lack of what E.D. Hirsch Jr. calls “core knowledge.” When we began meeting, he had not the foggiest notion of where in the world Afghanistan is. The only country in Europe he could cite was “China.” He could not name an ethnic group. He had no idea of how to define a foot or a yard, even though he was on his school’s football team. Yet he has received decent grades and is certain to graduate. Among Baltimore public high schools, the one he attends has perhaps the best reputation.
Admissions officers at mid-level colleges, in the interest of improving diversity on their campuses, might consider my tutee a good prospect -- without a score on the SAT, the standardized exam that colleges commonly use for admissions decisions. Indeed, one day he might be a good prospect. But if he were in most college classrooms, he would experience enormous frustration. If his instructors did not flunk him out of concern for his self-esteem, they would substantially lower their standards and inflate their grades.
I tell this story to make the point that the SAT can play a major role in helping admissions officers make good decisions about applicants. It is a mistake to expect the scores to discriminate fairly on the basis of relatively small differences -- like 20 or even 50 points -- but scores that differ by 100 points are meaningful.
Yet the College Board has announced that it may revise the SAT and will make recommendations to its trustees later this month. Those plans to change the exam are largely the result of the campaign waged against it by Richard C. Atkinson, the president of the University of California system. It will be most unfortunate for higher education if the College Board yields and proceeds with changes.
The nature of the SAT became an issue after the 1996 approval of Proposition 209, California’s “Civil Rights Initiative,” which made illegal all preferential treatment in education and employment on the basis of race or ethnicity. Three years later, Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test -- which devoted a sizeable number of pages to sympathetic treatment of those who opposed Prop 209 -- argued that top scorers on the SAT become members of a national intellectual elite that black and Hispanic students, who tend not to score as high as white and Asian students on the test, are blocked from entering. Without racial and ethnic preferences to help minorities gain admission to college, it’s now important -- at least, it seems, to people like Lemann and Atkinson -- to get rid of the test itself.
Atkinson, like others who criticize the SAT, seems to believe that it measures inborn aptitude. Aptitude is usually taken to mean innate ability, or the ability you have from birth. There’s nothing you can do about that; the circumstances of your birth cannot be changed. The SAT, he says, tests students on material unrelated to what they study in their classes. In his view, the SAT measures promise, not accomplishment.
As someone who taught college English for 40 years, with at least half my classes being freshman courses, I can say that Atkinson is dead wrong -- at least about the verbal part of the SAT. If he were to sit down and take the test, he would be quickly disabused of the notion that any innate ability was being tested. The SAT indeed measures accomplishment -- what students have learned on their own as well as what they have learned in their classes. My guess is that colleagues in math departments would say something similar: that the math part is a good test of how much math a student learned in grade school and high school.
It’s true that SAT originally stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test,” and, for years, the College Board told those who took the SAT that scores on the test could not be improved with preparation or practice; the test was uncoachable. But once the test-prep industry took off, that notion was shown to be completely false. Scores on all parts of the SAT could be raised by intensive preparation. It was clearly proved that scores were not measures of innate ability.
Thus, in 1993 the College Board decided to change the name of the test. The new name was the “Scholastic Assessment Tests” -- an umbrella term for all college-admissions tests, including the SAT and the SAT II, or tests in particular subject areas. But, like Atkinson, the general public continues to think of the SAT as an aptitude test. (“Assessment” now has been dropped, and the abbreviation by itself is the official name.)
Today, rather than saying that the SAT is uncoachable, the College Board provides coaching on its Web site. It offers a free mini-SAT -- with questions, answers, and explanations for those answers -- and a predicted score on the full test. It also tells each student the areas where he or she needs help and provides further assistance with additional sets of questions, answers, and explanations that can be purchased for $10 to $29.95.
But the best way to prepare for the verbal part of the SAT is not through coaching and practice tests, whatever their price. Scores may rise through such preparation, but not nearly as much as they do through long-term, voluntary reading. Today the verbal section of the test consists of three sections -- critical reading, analogies, and sentence completion -- and all three essentially measure a student’s ability to read, reason, and understand intellectual discourse. That ability is learned, not inherited. To do well on any of the three sections, the student has to know what words mean.
The words that turn up on the SAT are not obscure or archaic. They are words that routinely appear in metropolitan dailies, weekly news magazines, or any serious nonfiction book. If a student listened with any regularity to network news broadcasts, many of these words would be heard. Words from a reading section of the SAT could include: obscure, kudos, ascends, prevail, vulnerable, pollutant, endure, humane, legitimate, partisan, delegate, significant. On a given night, Dan Rather might use all of them.
The SAT is structured so that the average score is 500. Scores on the verbal portion tell a lot. Students who score above 500 on the verbal part read more than those who score below it. They read much more than their assigned school reading. They read newspapers and magazines. They will have read at least a few challenging books. They don’t switch to another channel when news comes on. The college whose average SAT is well above 500, if the SAT is required of all applicants, has students who enjoy reading and ideas, and who, as a result, have accumulated much general knowledge.
Students who don’t do well on the verbal section of the SAT usually don’t read anything that they aren’t assigned to read in school. Most of those students would not be able to read with understanding any article in this newspaper. They would not be able to understand most of what appears in Sports Illustrated. It is shocking to realize the kinds of words that those who score lower than 500 -- almost all of whom will graduate from high school -- are unlikely to know.
Most students regard the analogies section as the hardest part of the verbal section of the SAT. But if you know what the words mean, the analogous relationships are not so difficult to see. Here are some relationships that the under-500 students are likely to miss: venerate: disdain; script: director; stethoscope: physician; irrigation: water.
The sentence-completion section asks students to fill in the blanks with the most appropriate or logical words. Which word is missing in the following sentence? “Everyone in town knew that he would __________ questions about his past; they were used to seeing him fall silent if asked anything about himself.” Is the missing word “evade,” “enjoy,” “mutilate,” “project,” or “digress”? We need to know these words just to function as educated citizens today.
What drives opponents of the SAT is the fact that black and Hispanic students do not score as well as white and Asian students. While debunking the value of the SAT, Atkinson claims that the SAT II -- the achievement tests in subject areas -- are fairer to students because they measure accomplishment rather than promise. Achievement tests, he says, tell students that a college education is within the reach of anyone with the talent and the determination to succeed.
In effect, Atkinson is saying that all the pages turned by the curious child who regularly reads do not represent accomplishment. Yet in turning all those pages, the child who reads not only has gained a vocabulary that will always be of value, but he or she has learned how the world works and has gained all kinds of core knowledge. He or she has learned about city life and rural life, about family dynamics, about aspects of business, geography, and history. The SAT measures that kind of accomplishment.
Atkinson also has deceived himself into thinking that it is possible to do well on history, literature, and chemistry tests without having a good vocabulary. Undoubtedly, the SAT favors children of the upper middle class, but so does the SAT II. The only significant difference is that the high-school courses that prepare students for the SAT II are open to all students. And although the test-prep courses outside school may be beyond the means of lower-income students, they now often have a test-prep course available to them as part of their schools’ curriculums.
When I taught reading and writing to college freshmen, I knew what to expect from students whose verbal scores fell within the 400s, 500s, or 600s. I knew what could be read with ease and understanding, as well as what would cause frustration. When students with lower scores were asked to read an essay by George Orwell or Virginia Woolf, they became frustrated and seriously misread those texts. Only high scorers could deal with a well-written history textbook. Most students with a score lower than 500 would give up after a chapter or two.
Certainly, an occasional lower-scoring student is determined to succeed. He or she tolerates the frustration of being inadequately prepared for the academic rigor of higher education and makes the dictionary his or her best friend. The exceptional low scorer is strongly self-motivated and does not have to be pushed. She does good work in college and goes on to become a member of the country’s intellectual elite. Admissions officers need to understand that one of their most important jobs is to assess -- through personal interviews with an applicant, teacher recommendations, the student’s achievements or admissions essay, or any other means -- whether such determination is likely to be forthcoming. They must be able to spot those low scorers who, in fact, can perform well.
Meanwhile, although Atkinson has argued that the SAT is not as good a predictor of college success as the SAT II, and that admissions officers make a mistake when they give significant weight to SAT scores, the remedy is not to chuck the test. The remedy is to be more alert to what an SAT score is saying. It is saying this: On the day of the test, this is what a student’s reading and reasoning abilities were. Those abilities have been learned over the course of years of reading and education and usually do, in certain ways, suggest how successful a student will be at performing college-level work.
In that fundamental way, the current SAT serves a useful purpose. It should be left alone.
Paul Marx is a professor of English emeritus at the University of New Haven.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B10
