We all know that I have had my fair share of problems with the College Board. Read: I fucking hate the College Board. In high school, this organization provided singlehandedly the bane of my existence. And I feel like the way they structure their exams is meant to completely discourage good scores of any kind, much less for the less fortunate.
Now, I know, I've said it again and again - I come from a place that is relatively low-income in terms of general residents. And my high school was hardly loaded for cash. Which is why I feel like the SAT as a whole is biased. This is the reasoning behind why analogies were slowly being eased out of the SAT reasoning portion of the exam.
Herrnstein and Murray concede this problem and give an excellent example of the built-in bias that IQ tests entail. This particular example was taken from the verbal analogy portion of the SAT (p. 281). RUNNER:MARATHON
(A) envoy:embassy
(B) martyr:massacre
(C) oarsman:regatta
(D) referee:tournament
(E) horse:stableAs Herrnstein and Murray explain, "The answer is oarsman:regatta--fairly easy if you know what both a marathon and a regatta are, a matter of guess work otherwise. How would a black youngster from the inner city ever have heard of a regatta?" (p. 281). But the real question is: What do the psychometricians have on their mind when they create such tests and from what conceptual scheme are they deriving their questions? Herrnstein and Murray go on to say that other more sophisticated tests have eliminated vocabulary bias (e.g., geometrical figures, etc.) and now measure reaction time and movement time, which give a more reliable figure to the G factor (p. 281-295). Again, this has been broken down according to ethnicity. Even with the limitations of test bias and the amendments to the new testing methods, there is widespread failure to note the unargued assumptions that go into the creation of these revised instruments. Without any solid theoretical framework, there are many inferences that one could make regarding the amount of time someone spends answering a question and the speed with which the hand moves to answer the question, not one of which would necessarily have anything to do with the phenomenon of intelligence or the category of race. The point applies to all tests including those that utilize geometric figures instead of vocabulary. The conceptual framework from which the tests were created can never be completely purified of the single-minded bias of the creators. Many have written about this problem; but perhaps the most famous is Stephen Jay Gould. In his The Mismeasure of Man, he states succinctly that "determinist arguments for ranking people according to a single scale of intelligence, no matter how numerically sophisticated, have recorded little more than social prejudice (Gould, p. 27-28, 1981). SOURCE
After all, the SAT test is supposed to be a good determination of how a student will fare in college. Except it's not. Standardized testing has almost no relation to classroom performance other than how to take a multiple choice test. I've certainly known hundreds and thousands of students who are good guessers and certainly beat my SAT score by around 1000 points. It's really all about the prep. And of course the wealthier kids can afford the best test prep there is and knock us all out of the park and go to the Ivies.
(Well, let's just be honest - rich kids don't even need to try to get into the Ivies, just gotta flash the bling that Daddy gives.)
Further, I think it's pretty ridiculous that the test is structured the way it is. You're cooped up in a high school room for roughly four hours. At 7:30 a.m. AT 7:30 IN THE MORNING ON A SATURDAY, THIS HAPPENS. To think that anyone could write a decent essay on the American flag at 7:30 am without food and having just been woken up is ridiculous. On a normal Saturday morning, basic functioning processes are near impossible much less at 7:30 a.m. Lest we forget that the whole college application process involves making yourself look like the prettiest showdog out there with the greatest number of activities. Some of us were out until 1 or 2 in the morning following some sort of marching band adventure, so thanks for that, College Board.
A HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS, people. A hundred million dollars is spent on this kind of thing. This is madness.
Is the SAT an IQ test?No.
Why isn't it an IQ test?
Because it doesn't measure IQ. It is used that way. And it was developed from the army IQ test. But even the College Board will refuse to say that this is an intelligence test. And I'd love to see them say it. I'd love to see them say anything because then you can attack it. But there's this kind of mushy response that when you work your way through it, there's sort of nothing left--'Well, it has a slight predictive validity to freshman year grades in college.' We spend a 100 million dollars a year for that? You know--your grades in high school predict college grades better than this and we didn't have to spend anything. (John Katzman, founder of The Princeton Review)
Well, education has always been about the Benjamins, if nothing else, and it's finally caught up with them. At least, it has in the court of public opinion.
What does the SAT predict?The sole scientific claim of the SAT is its capacity to predict first year grades. According to the technical studies done by the Educational Testing Service and College Board, the SAT predicts about one factor in six--one sixth of the difference between two kids' first-year grades. The predictive value declines after that--looking at four year grades or graduation rates. So even the test makers agree that five out of six parts of whatever it takes to predict how well you're going to do in your freshman year, is not their test.
It does correlate extremely highly with an IQ test. It was developed from the army IQ test...
That's part of the seedy under side of the SAT. The SAT was originally developed by straight out racists--eugenicists, people who thought my forbearers--not just people of color--were imbeciles and shouldn't be allowed in their country because they didn't know the language and couldn't score high on their test. I wouldn't suggest the current people who run those companies share those kinds of ugly views. But it's a self-reinforcing notion of defining intelligence as that which whatever the dominant group in society has. Ends up giving that group higher scores and lower scores. The fact that test scores correlate with test scores is rather meaningless. The tests are measuring the same set of factors. What's more important is whether the test accurately predicts how well you're going to do.
Bob Schaeffer, Public Education Director for FairTest
And for one last bit:
And what I was about to say earlier was that, with FairTest and others, they will say that what the test actually judges is quick strategic guessing with less than perfect information. Boys, for example, do better on the math portion of the SAT than girls. They routinely score 40 to 50 points higher. Many people say, well that's because girls are ignored in high school math. That may be true. And yet the girls do just as well in college when they take math courses as the boys, despite their lower SAT scores on the math portion. And when you interview the boys as to how they approach the test, the answer is they basically viewed it as a pinball machine. And the goal was speed and winning. And the girls on the other hand, wanted to work through the problems before they put down the answer. That, apparently, is not merit.
Somebody who wants to work through a problem before concluding with an answer, is not guessing and they're not fast. And so on some level, what we are confusing as a result of this over-emphasis on the testocracy--what we're confusing merit with is speed and the confidence to guess.
Lani Guinier, Prof., Harvard Law School
There's always been discussion of the SAT's potential to be gender-biased, especially on the Math/English front and I feel like this explores the issue well. The SATs are solely meant to rake in money, for the Ivies and for the College Board itself. You pay $40 essentially to take the test, much less $9 per school to send it out. This is what it was when I took the test three years ago - with the recession and inflation, who knows how much more it might be now? Granted, that a student will take the SAT on average twice and apply to three schools (which is meager - I know people who applied to 8), that's $134 per person. When you factor in that it's juniors and seniors who take the SAT, and let's use my HS statistics here, 793 students, that's a little over $106,000 from my high school ALONE. JUST for the SAT. Now, let's assume that number is stable for all the high schools across the country. Not private high schools, public high schools. That's over 2 billion. HOLY CRAP. Much less all the prep and the tests they do on the side that actually matter, like the AP exam.
Anyway, the College Board has just agreed to settle state investigations into its student loan system. Basically, the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut found that they discounted financial aid services for colleges that agreed to put their loans on lists of "preferred lenders." Oh, College Board. Oh, education, you reek of selflessness. (SOURCE.)
I don't know what's to be done, but I think it's important to note the growing movement of liberal arts colleges to stop abiding by the SAT. These kinds of standardized tests are no real measure for ability, as they claim, but just hint at who's a better guesser, a faster guesser, or has more test prep. Well, fantastic. As I did none of those, I'm pretty much screwed. And let's also take into consideration that SAT scores are the first wave of deciding college apps for the Ivies. There's certainly a line (I think it's 1950, with the new system of scoring) where everyone below gets shuffled off as a reject and everybody else's essays actually get read.
Now whether or not they admit this, I kind of believe it to be true.
Until the education system decides whether it's totally for profit or for its students, instead of this wishy-washy doing one but claiming another, then I don't think anything good can come of it.
