Sat

The SAT and its Scores

I’m thinking of a number, it’s between 1400 and 2400; do you know what it is? It is seventeen hundred, and it happens to be my SAT score. Every high school senior has one of those numbers, and those numbers determine his ability to study and succeed in college (according to the College Board). The College Board claims that the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) is a standardized test (according to the College Board), which means that all high school students across the U.S. take the same test. On the surface this assumption seems true, but a closer look reveals test scores that are determined by factors such as money, gender, test anxiety and even race.

The SAT assumes that all students receive equal education and therefore must all be able to take the same test. The example of a high school in California shows that this is highly incorrect. According to an article written by Joe Boaler for the Phi Delta Kappan journal, in 2003 students at a low-income high school continuously did better on the district’s mathematics exam than students at wealthier schools in the same district. This should mean that these students should also receive higher scores on the SAT-9 exam, and yet, they have scored “significantly lower” on the exam, says Boaler. Boaler attributes this to the long, confusing wording, and the context of the questions, which students from low-income or foreign families may not understand. Boaler uses two examples to justify this claim. In the first example Boaler gives question which uses many technical terms about electricity that students who are new to the country or who are not technically inclined (girls, says Boaler) may not understand, thus creating anxiety. The other example was a question concerning the use of bank accounts and monetary terms giving preference to students who are familiar with those terms. In this example Boaler shows that the SAT is biased against low income families and people who are new to the country because those students are not familiar with the terms at hand and may not understand the question completely.

Another factor that relates to education that is should be examined to better understand the problems of the SAT, is the fact that in the U.S., the local taxes are the main source for funding of local public education and thus the level of education depends on the wealth of the people in the region. The problem here is obvious: schools located in poor areas receive less money than schools in rich areas, therefore giving weaker education to their students. Thus, students in these areas perform worse on different standardized tests. This problem continues because states give funding to schools whose students do better on standardized tests, hence creating a cycle of “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” Furthermore, many organizations offer classes that prepare students for the SAT, AP, or ACT, and here again, there are two problems: The first is that those courses cost money, and students who are not able to afford this are in an obvious disadvantage. If success in the test is something that depends on how many courses one can afford, than it is not really accurate, nor fair to the students who can not afford it.

The second problem becomes evident from the prep courses. If these tests are something one can study and prepare for, by using different techniques, then the tests are not an accurate measure of intellect, but rather a measure of who studied better. The article "Standardized Testing: Help or Hindrance?” from the University Business shows this by explaining that the exams are changing, and so “strategies to meet the college requirements are changing.” An aptitude test should not be something that one can study for and learn “tricks” to get across it, because than it does not test intelligence, but rather just how much one was able to study. A second example from an article for the Clearing House magazine Julia Barrier-Ferreira, a teacher, examines this problem of what she defines as “academic achievement now being limited to a single measurement: the standardized testing” (Barrier-Ferreira, Julia 138). In her article, Ferreira explains that the educational system has moved from teaching for the sake of intelligence to teaching for test scores. The problem here is that aptitude tests such as the SAT do not show great intellect or understanding in a wide variety of subjects, but rather mathematical and English knowledge, and the ability to sit still in a chair for five hours. Ferreira does not claim that the SAT and other tests are completely worthless, but rather that “the problem arises when these assessments are used as virtually the sole indicators of schools’ successes and failures.” (139) The SAT also does not take into account the major, well known problem, of test anxiety. In an article titled "Test Anxiety: A Multifaceted Study on the Perceptions of Teachers, Principals, Counselors, Students, and Parents." for the International Journal of Testing, the authors examine the effects of physical and psychological problems on the student taking the test. One of the main points that this article makes is that “numerous studies have surveyed teachers regarding the impact of standardized tests, producing similar overviews that low performance on these examinations is correlated with increased levels of anxiety and stress.” (Mulvenon, Sean, Stegman, Charles and Ritter, Gary 38) The article then goes into details of different studies and all of them have the conclusion is that factors such as illness, stress and text anxiety effect the performance of students on tests.

A last issue that will be helpful in examining the argument against standardized testing is the issue of race and gender. In an article for the New Scientist, author Kurt Kleiner brings indicates that girls do worse than boys on the SAT and PSAT. To attack the tests Kleiner claims that the excuses the College Board use to explain this phenomenon are the same excuses used in the late 1920’s and 1930’s by immigration tests, which turned out to be biased. Furthermore, while the SAT is set to predict the ability to perform during the first year of college, “the problem is that girls actually do slightly better than boys in their first year in college, despite their lower SAT scores.” (Kleiner, Kurt 49) One reasoning Kleiner uses, is a psychological difference in the strategy of answering multiple choice questions. While girls look over all the answers and think deeply about each one, guys pick the first one that seems right. Another example that demonstrates that the SAT is biased,