I thought some of you younger guys that haven't had to take the SAT might be interested in this article.
BYE-BYE SAT
By Maggie Gallagher
The academic establishment (most notably in the outward visible form of University of California President Richard Atkinson) has declared war on the Scholastic Assessment Test. The Princeton Review Board, which owns and produces the SAT, has obligingly agreed to commit hara-kiri: Bye-bye SAT.
Something called the SAT will linger around for a while. But the test's 50-year reign as an instrument of democratization of America's elite universities has clearly come to a crashing end.
Why? Because at public colleges, the SAT has increasingly proved a fatal barrier to affirmative action. To admit enough black (and to a lesser extent, Latino) students, universities had to accept minority applicants with far lower SAT scores than white or Asian students. Judges began to balk at such blatant racial classifications in a government institution. University administrators such as Atkinson could read the writing on the wall.
So Atkinson announced the University of California system no longer wants to rely on the old grades-plus-SAT formula. "It seems only right that students should be judged on what they have accomplished in four years of high school, not on how they rate on an ill-defined measure of aptitude or intelligence," said Atkinson. The Princeton Review Board announced it is changing the format of the SAT, eliminating or reducing those pesky analogies that measure something -- call it intelligence, call it cognitive ability, call it academic aptitude -- academia once valued but is now embarrassed by. In the future, the SAT will become less of an aptitude and more of an achievement test, like dozens of other tests designed to measure academic knowledge, not academic ability.
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BYE-BYE SAT
By Maggie Gallagher
The academic establishment (most notably in the outward visible form of University of California President Richard Atkinson) has declared war on the Scholastic Assessment Test. The Princeton Review Board, which owns and produces the SAT, has obligingly agreed to commit hara-kiri: Bye-bye SAT.
Something called the SAT will linger around for a while. But the test's 50-year reign as an instrument of democratization of America's elite universities has clearly come to a crashing end.
Why? Because at public colleges, the SAT has increasingly proved a fatal barrier to affirmative action. To admit enough black (and to a lesser extent, Latino) students, universities had to accept minority applicants with far lower SAT scores than white or Asian students. Judges began to balk at such blatant racial classifications in a government institution. University administrators such as Atkinson could read the writing on the wall.
So Atkinson announced the University of California system no longer wants to rely on the old grades-plus-SAT formula. "It seems only right that students should be judged on what they have accomplished in four years of high school, not on how they rate on an ill-defined measure of aptitude or intelligence," said Atkinson. The Princeton Review Board announced it is changing the format of the SAT, eliminating or reducing those pesky analogies that measure something -- call it intelligence, call it cognitive ability, call it academic aptitude -- academia once valued but is now embarrassed by. In the future, the SAT will become less of an aptitude and more of an achievement test, like dozens of other tests designed to measure academic knowledge, not academic ability.
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