"Anti-SAT"

Armed with your graphing calculator and two freshly sharpened number two pencils you wait outside your local high school on a Saturday morning. Other students awkwardly wait with registration tickets and ids in hand, awaiting to enter on what might be the biggest game of their lives; the test that determines perhaps what college they get into, maybe where their lives will lead. You’ve done all that you can do. You registered on time, you have taken the PSAT, maybe you even studied for countless hours the techniques and “tricks of the trade” of taking “the big test”, and, most importantly, you have managed to get up before noon on a Saturday morning only to drive to school and take a test- you already should be proud of yourself. Once inside the building, organized havok takes place as masses of confused, tired teenagers try to find their way to testing rooms. Once in the correct room, it is only a matter of waiting for stragglers to show up before you start your 3 hr journey of filling in bubbles. Does this situation sound familiar?

It should. Obviously we have all had to take the SAT or else we would not be here. An SAT score is a requirement on the JMU application.

You may ask yourself, why do we take SATs? I have thought about this subject a lot, considering that I have had to take the test myself a few times, along with SAT II subject tests and other standardized tests. While trying to find a reason to justify the test, I just found more and more reasons to discount it. While researching I asked myself two questions: what is the original intention behind the SAT and was this goal met? and what has become of the SAT today?

First of all, to understand the intentions of the SAT it is important to know a little history of the test itself. The SAT was created by Carl Brigham, a professor of psychology at Princeton. He had been developing IQ tests for army recruits before World War I and was now beginning to use the Army IQ test for college use, administering the SAT for the first time in 1926. At the beginning of World War II, old college admission tests were replaced by the SAT and all applicants took it. By the end of WWII, a nonprofit organization, otherwise known as the Educational Testing Service (ETS), was established. The function of the ETS was to oversee administration of the test at several locations in the country. Although Brigham had been the first to develop the test, he did not approve the formation of the ETS. Brigham stated "a big, new testing agency that had to survive financially on fees paid by the takers of its test, would inevitably be devoted mainly to protecting and promoting the tests, rather than to evaluating and improving them". Despite this warning, the ETS is still around.

Brigham stands correct. Every time you take the SAT, you pay a fee. And yet, you have no choice, you must take the test if you plan on attending college. If anything, it seems as though the SAT has turned into a money-making machine, capitalizing on those who wish to get into big name colleges.

The SAT has clearly deviated from it initial state. When it was first administered in 1926, the SAT was called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, the word "aptitude" meaning that the test measured an innate ability, rather than knowledge acquired through schooling. Today, the test administered by the College Board is still called SAT, but the name is just an acronym, with the letters no longer standing for anything. This illustrates the uncertainty that has surrounded what exactly the SAT measures. Also, even though the design of the SAT was based on the IQ test, the SAT today cannot be called an IQ test. "When these tests were originally developed," said Harvard social policy professor Christopher Jencks,"people really believed that if they did the job right they would be able to measure this sort of underlying, biological potential. And they often called it aptitude, sometimes they called it genes, sometimes intelligence."

But, according to the College Board, the SAT now does not measure any innate ability.

Because the SAT was devised as a tool to identify talented students from underprivileged backgrounds, it was thought of as a test that would measure an innate ability referred to as "aptitude," but if the SAT no longer measures any “innate ability,” so, what does it measure?

Despite the fact that the SAT has evolved into a different test than its parent test, the SAT test itself has a number of flaws. As you may know the SAT consists of seven timed sections. All the questions are multiple choice, except fifteen math questions. With having this format the test "only measures the outcome of a thought process, not the steps along the way". Another problem is that test questions are independent from material taught in high school. Students have to spend extra time preparing for the test which they could otherwise be spending on studying or improving their GPA. The types of questions are different from what students normally face in class. Exams in high school are focused on a specific topic in a certain subject, while the SAT tests general topics in math and English. Students in school are tested objectively on the course work while the SAT tests are subjectively testing students on topics that they are suppose to be familiar with. According to the test, all eleventh graders are supposed to know high-level vocabulary and interpret reading passages be very subjective at times. People interpret reading material differently. What are the chances they interpret it correctly by answering the questions right?

Also, preparation for the test makes a difference. There are books, tutors, private tutors, classes, practice tests, and even cds that are available- all with a price tag. These prep materials are helping students raise their scores significantly. Colleges have no way of telling who has been tutored and who has not gone to SAT prep classes, giving students, who enroll in these class, an advantage over students who did not enroll in classes. So are those who do not have the money to pay for this PREP material disadvantaged? Are we really setting a fair ground for testing people’s true capabilities?

Further, the SAT is a standardized test that tells college little to nothing about the test taker. It only shows how many questions one can get right in a very short period of time. The SAT test focuses too much on quantity. The test takers' personal traits and abilities are much more important than the number of test questions answered correctly. Florida State admissions chief John Barnhill summed up this point very nicely when he stated "the SAT doesn't measure heart." The test in fact underrates talented people with poor test taking skills.

Brigham's prediction was correct.

The ETS spends more time trying to persuade more students to take the test than making improvements. Most students are under the impression that SAT is the only thing that will determine whether they go to college or not. Obviously, there are different ways to get into college, but most students don’t realize that. How can this test, controlled by an incompetent "nonprofit" organization, be used to decide someone's future? It shouldn’t and cannot. Nearly all colleges and universities select students based on SAT scores. These scores supposedly predict students' academic levels and promote diversity on the national level. Unfortunately, the test promotes elitism. The test predetermines, in a sense, what college a person will go to and how they will do before they even get there. A student’s capabilities go far beyond how they do on a 3 hr test. In an article titled, “Is the SAT a fair Test?,” by Alexander Chuang, Alexander writes of this injustice: “This is as unfair, like assuming there is water on Mars without stepping foot on it and looking. No one test truly measures someone's intellectual and economic future.”

SATs, although they are supposed to serve as a “common yardstick” for comparing grades at different schools, they do not succeed in their goal. As John Katzman, president and founder of the Princeton Review, said on an interview for PBS, “You do need some way to judge an A at this school or this teacher versus an A at this school or this teacher. But there are lots of common yardsticks. Again, you could use blood type. You could use height. Anything is a common yardstick. What you have to say is, fine, it's common. But it is useful? And there are lots of tests that are more useful than the SAT that are also common.”. Even if SATs were to represent one’s intelligence to a small degree, is it worth 100 million dollars a year prepping for it?