Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Monday, May 29, 2006
The SAT gets harder
Through Joanne Jacobs’ blog I found a very interesting Wall Street Journal column by David Kahn, a New York-based SAT prep tutor, who talks about how the test has changed in recent years to demand different skills from kids.
The bottom line? The SAT is harder today, demanding more reading skill than ever. And today’s scores really are not comparable to scores of the past, so we need to readjust our expectations.
I’m not sure I agree with all of Kahn’s conclusions.
For instance, he claims the test today does a better job of identifying what kids are well educated, declares that education quality in the U.S. had sunk since the 1960s and dismisses out of hand that cultural bias or changes in the test-taking pool have affected test scores over that time.
He offers no evidence to support these assertions, and I don’t think there is any data that can prove any of it. ETS itself has never claimed the SAT in any way measures how well educated a student is. The test has its roots in intelligence testing, which was an effort to measure innate intelligence not quality of education, and its goal today is to predict college readiness, which it does well only for some subsets of test takers.
And it is easily proveable that a far greater range of students, not just a small set of college bound kids, are part of the SAT pool today, which has to affect scores.
Even so, I can agree with him that the quality of education as a factor in SAT score declines may have been underplayed on some sides of this debate. Probably the quality of education, test changes, test bias problems and an expanding test-taking pool all play roles in the decline in SAT scores over time.
Still, I found Kahn’s analysis of the changes in the nature of SAT questions interesting, along with his claim that adults cannot compare the scores they got in their day with the scores their kids get today. And colleges, too, need to adjust expectations.
Do you know your own SAT score off the top of your head? For those with teenagers, have you compared their scores with yours and either been reassured or worried about the quality of education they received?
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