Replace the SAT

In August, the College Board announced that for the first time since the early 1990s average SAT scores in reading and math had declined two years in a row. The announcement caused hand wringing in the news media and among pundits. Have students scores dropped because the new and expanded SAT exam is too lengthy and demanding? Could the decline be attributed to the increasing numbers of low-income and minority students taking the test, as the College Board claimed? Or as USA Today asked last year when the scores initially fell, “Are today’s kids getting dumber?”

But theres a bigger question that we should all be asking: Why are we as a society not encouraging colleges to use a different and better measure of achievement than the SAT when making admissions decisions? The exam, which aims to predict a student’s success in college, is not tied to state, much less national standards, not tied to high-school curricula, and can be easily gamed. Higher-income students have a major advantage over their peers taking the SAT, because they can afford expensive test preparation courses that teach students tricks to get better scores. The College Board denied these effects in the past, but has softened that stance now that it markets its own test preparation products.

Misguided

As Nicholas Lemann wrote in his history of the SAT entitled The Big Test, the original promoters of the exam were overly idealistic about how the exam could help widen the doors of college opportunity. Higher education leaders like Harvard University President James Bryant Conant thought the board exams that students were taking at the time to gain admission to college — which tested on standards tied to high school standards — gave too much of an advantage to wealthy students attending private high schools, because they received a vastly superior education than others. Higher education leaders like Harvard’s Conant favored using standardized intelligence exams, like the IQ test, that were designed to measure a student’s innate ability to learn, rather than reflect the superior schooling wealthy students were receiving.

But instead of erasing class advantages, the SAT’s has served only to reinforce them. As Lemann wrote:

For decades, ever since Walter Lippmans attacks on IQ testing back in the 1920s, critics of aptitude tests had been pointing out that the scores, rather than radically ripping aside the veil of social class to reveal the pure individual merit that lay behind it, on the whole favored prosperous youths and penalized poor ones. The SAT correlates with parental income about as well as with college grades. Therefore, these tests helped to replicate the class system from generation to generation, not to upend it.

Critics of aptitude tests have long complained that the assumptions underlying questions on the verbal part of the exam disadvantage low-income and minority students, such as those that assumed a familiarity with words like “regatta.” While the College Board has worked hard to address these concerns, affluent students have a tremendous advantage in that they are able to afford years of practice exams and expensive tutors. Taking SAT preparation courses that promise to help raise test scores by hundreds of points has become de rigueur for students from prosperous suburbs desperate to get into the most elite colleges. These types of programs are out of reach for most low-income, first generation students.

Counterproductive

The SAT also contributes little to the country’s longstanding efforts to improve the academic performance of its secondary school students so they will be better prepared for college and work. Because the SAT is not tied to standards or curricula, it doesn’t incentivize high school students to work harder in school or schools to do a better job instructing them. In fact, preparing for the SAT actually diverts students’ attention away from their studies, as they focus their attention on trying to beat the test.

We are not alone in holding this view. Recently, conservative social scientist Charles Murray — with whom we seldom agree — expressed similar sentiments in an article he wrote called “Abolish the SAT.” Murray says colleges should stop looking at SAT scores and instead focus on the results of students’ subject area achievement tests. “If achievement test scores are getting all of the parents’ attention in the college admissions process, the courses that prepare for those achievement tests will get more of their attention as well, and the pressure for those courses to improve will increase,” Murray states. Hear, hear.

While replacing the SAT with standardized subject-area achievement tests may be an improvement, there may be a better idea that will make college admissions more fair while contributing substantially to the country’s education reform efforts. We will explore that idea at a future date. For now though, let’s agree with Murray on a much bigger point. In arguing for the elimination of the SAT, he wote, “nothing important would be lost by doing so. Much would be gained.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.