Hey, all!
First off, many thanks to Mandolin and Ampersand for inviting me to post here! I go by The Girl Detective (an homage to Kelly Link, queen of awesomeness) in the blogging world, and I usually write at Modern Mitzvot and my personal site. Interests include Jewish issues, Palestinian self-determination, feminism, academia, contemporary literature, video games, Battlestar, and any combination of the above. I currently teach freshman composition at two community colleges.
Last time the blogosphere heard from me – before I succumbed to a wave of final exams and Fall class prep – I only taught at one community college. The good news is I’ve picked up more work for the fall, and the better news is that I can quit my job as a private SAT tutor.
Oh, how I hate you, SAT.
About a month ago, Wake Forest University and Smith College announced that they’ll no longer be including the SAT among their application requirements. My alma mater made the same announcement a couple of years ago, and many other colleges have followed suit. This is very good news. SAT scores are pretty notorious for correlating more with income than with intelligence or scholastic achievement; a student who gets a 2350 is more likely to come from a middle to upper class family, and an A student from an impoverished or working class family will probably score lower. There are a few reasons for this disparity – non-college-track curricula at lower income schools, different dialects in different classes – and most liberals are at least vaguely aware that wealthier students have an unfair advantage. I didn’t realize how stark the disparity is, though, until I spent a year teaching upper-middle-class students strategies and tricks.
See, the SAT has nothing to do with academics. The SAT, as one of the trainers in my tutoring job informed us, tests you on how well you know the SAT.
Sure, they revamped it a few years ago, replacing the analogies with grammar questions and an essay. But the Educational Testing Service is a for-profit corporation, and their main objective is to make money. (NOTE: EJ points out in the comments that ETS is actually a nonprofit, and that the test is written by the College Board. I was going by what I was told by my company, but I should have checked it. Sorry about that.) The more times students take the SAT, and the more copies of the official study guide they buy, the more money ETS makes. This means that they write the questions in such a way that you often have to know ahead of time what traps to watch out for and what kind of answers they want. There are many questions that students are very unlikely to answer correctly if they can’t afford the $800 for a class, the $2-3000 for tutoring, or even the $20 for the study guide.
Take, for example, this Identifying Sentence Errors question:
Nearly all (A) of the editors of the magazine agree (B) that of the two articles to be published (C), Fujimura’s is the more exciting (D).
Students have choose the word or phrase that contains an error. If the sentence is fine as is, then the answer is E – No Error. Now, many of you probably know what the answer is above, but that’s because many of you are adults. Do seventeen-year-olds – even AP and private school students – know the correct answer to this question? Not until I show up at their house and give them extra grammar lessons. Most of my students choose D, because the wording sounds weird. We don’t normally say “the more exciting” – we say either “more exciting” or “the most exciting.” But you can only say “most” if there are three or more things being compared. Since there are only two articles, the correct answer is E.
How about this one:
The new system, which uses (A) remote cameras in the catching of (B) speeding motorboats (C), may undermine (D) the police department’s authority.
Students sometimes pause at “in the catching of,” but chances are they’ve heard that construction before. They’re used to academic English sounding fancier and more complicated than normal English, so they assume it’s correct. However, it’s an idiomatic error. The proper construction is “to catch.” The answer is B.
What really drives me crazy, though, are the pronoun questions:
When (A) a government agency encouraged the use of high-grade recycled office paper, they (B) helped increase the availability of (C) writing paper and envelopes made from (D) recycled paper.
Again, many of you probably caught the error immediately… but high school students often don’t know that when the subject of a sentence – in this case, the agency – is singular, then all pronouns pertaining to it must also be singular, even if the subject is a conglomeration of many other subjects. The answer is B; “they” should be “it.”
The tutoring company I work for has a money-back guarantee if students’ scores don’t go up at least a hundred points. They can do this because students’ scores usually go up about 400 points after ten weeks of private tutoring. We’re teaching them rules they’re not learning in school.
You’d think the essay would be a more accurate way to gauge a student’s ability, but even that’s not always the case. When I was in high school, I took the SAT II, which contained the essay section before they stuck it into the SAT. The prompt asked me if the individual is more important than society. (Or something like that.) I responded – quite eloquently, I think – by saying that, because society is made up of individuals, the individual and society are equally important. And I bombed. The graders are told to make sure essays argue one side or the other; any other response should result in a lower score. I got an A in my AP English class and went to a college known for its writing program, but according to my SAT II score, I was a terrible writer – because I didn’t have a tutor to tell me what exactly I was being tested on.
This is why lower income students get lower scores on the SAT – they just aren’t getting the extra help necessary to learn what the test wants. Which isn’t to say that it’s impossible to get a good score without extra help. But the statistics are pretty telling.
So I’m glad that Wake Forest and Smith are discontinuing the requirement. The problem, though, is that the schools that are discontinuing it are, for the most part, expensive private schools. This means that the students who are applying there are usually the students who could afford SAT coaching anyway. To really level the playing field, all schools must drop their SAT requirements – especially state universities, which are the most affordable. Admissions committees are learning nothing from standardized test scores that they don’t learn from transcripts, sample essays, interviews, and personal statements.
While we wait for that to happen, though, lower income students need more access to outside help. There are some organizations, like 826 Valencia, that offer free SAT prep courses when qualified volunteers are available, but the more the merrier, right? So I’m ending this post with an invitation: leave a comment if you live in the Los Angeles or Orange County area and are interested in – or are already – teaching SAT prep. I’m not officially starting anything here – I just want to see how much interest there is, or if there are any groups I and others could join.
(cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot)
“In the catching of” is certainly clunky, and were I to run across it in editing something I would recommend changing it to “to catch,” but I’d hesitate to call it an “error.”
Wow. The SAT’s have gotten even more useless than they were when I was in HS. I figured out they were bunk when I got enlisted to teach test-taking strategies to one of my classmates, since I had already taken them for early admission and done very well. He had scored double 450’s (this was 1986). He was also an A student, and the #3 chess player in his division (Eastern Seaboard, youth).
I had never taken the classes or used the study guides, my skill came from years of standardized testing courtesy of my elder brother landing in a precocious youth program that then kept checking back with his younger siblings. I was rather shocked to discover how many test taking strategies most HS kids simply didn’t know. And even more shocked to realize that how much bunk that made the test for actually testing what it was supposed to.
Can I ask why the high schools don’t provide test tutoring? That confuses me, because in the UK test tutoring & coursework is pretty much all you do for the last 4 years of state education. Do the schools not benefit from helping students play the system? (Demolishing the system is clearly a better idea, but I’m curious as to why the schools aren’t in on the game as-is).
Thene, mine offered a few classes. But you’re not trying to do well, you’re trying to do better than everyone else. So if everyone gets a free hour a week of tutoring and you want to go to a good school you need to do more.
Girl Detective,
I know your speciality is the English side of things but do the test makers do similarily sneaky questions on the math portion? I took the SAT twice and took a couple practice SATs in school and with the prep software my parents scrounged up for me and until the last time I always scored significantly better on the grammar/reading section (no essay part when I took it) despite having a near perfect average in math all throughout high school and being the default leader on the math competition team (why yes I am that nerdy). Always drove me nuts.
I have to say, I love the SAT (apart from the recently added essay question). You don’t need tutoring to do well; you only have to be an avid reader to get a sense of what sounds right. Grades are contingent upon the whim of a teacher; a multiple-choice test is more objective.
Two things come to mind.
One of the top three stolen books from libraries was, at least a decade ago, the GED exam book. (Library Journal Oct 15 1996, p. 38.) SAT and ACT guides are right up there, as are, interestingly enough, various police officer exam guides.
When I was a lad, I applied for a job working as an SAT tutor. A few things struck me from the orientation session. The instructor was quite explicit in explaining that the SAT’s goal was to rank people; as long as ETS provides that nice, smooth normal distribution to colleges, that’s all they care about. New questions are (well, were at least) tested to see if results correlate with results from old questions. The whole thing is divorced from any actual skills; it’s grotesquely circular.
Additionally, the teaching method we were taught reminded me uncomfortably of people giving the Vector Marketing spiel. The whole thing was transparently a damned racket when I was involved. I am utterly unsurprised to learn that it remains as such.
Also, I definitely agree with this. Speaking as someone who actually did do really well on the SAT, this test always seemed to me to be saying “Congratulations, you know how to take a test well / weren’t sick the day you took the test / could afford to take the test multiple times.” Yeah, a person with a high score can be (and often are) legitimately “smart” but like you point out, someone with the means can end up getting a significantly higher score than someone who might be smarter but can’t afford prep.
but high school students often don’t know that when the subject of a sentence – in this case, the agency – is singular, then all pronouns pertaining to it must also be singular, even if the subject is a conglomeration of many other subjects.
A high school junior damn well ought to know that, or someone’s not doing their job. It seems to me that this is part of the purpose of the SAT, to see who knows such things and who doesn’t.
It’s not a surprise that SAT scores correlate to income – so does the ability to afford a house in a school district with good schools or private school tuition. I well imagine that family income correlates to higher education levels of the parents, which in turn probably correlates to a determination to ensure that their children get a good education.
It’s not the school’s problem that SAT scores correlate to income. What the schools are trying to do is to determine what a child’s academic levels are, what their critical thinking skills are, and to predict how well the kid will do in college in general and their school in particular. The fact that lower income kids don’t do as well on the test doesn’t invalidate this.
Admissions committees are learning nothing from standardized test scores that they don’t learn from transcripts, sample essays, interviews, and personal statements.
Says who? This is your idea? This is a belief of a few academics? Or is this a general consensus? I’d guess not the latter, since the vast majority of schools are still using SAT (or ACT) scores as part of their evaluation process. Yes, they use those other factors as well, but there’s issues with all of them. What can get you an “A” at one school is “B” level work at another. Sample essays and personal statements are not secure; someone could have written them for you. Lots of schools don’t have the alumni network or the admissions office infrastructure necessary to perform interviews of a significant number of their applicants. Standardized tests help fill in these holes. You don’t rely on them alone, you give them only a certain amount of weight. But they have a use.
The problem, though, is that the schools that are discontinuing it are, for the most part, expensive private schools. This means that the students who are applying there are usually the students who could afford SAT coaching anyway.
It also means that the parents of the kids applying probably have higher than median income, which in turn probably means they have higher education levels than median, which means they probably paid more attention to their kids’ education. Schools like this are dropping the requirement because it’s adding no value to their admissions process. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t add value to other schools’ admission process.
To really level the playing field, all schools must drop their SAT requirements – especially state universities, which are the most affordable.
Why is levelling the playing field important? What playing field are we talking about?
A school that has anybody with any wit running it’s admissions office knows about the problems with SAT’s and weighs that when they look at all the other factors. Nobody makes their decisions based solely on the SAT’s. But despite your assertion, apparently the vast majority of schools think it tells them things they need to know that they’re not getting from the other parts of the process. Why should they get rid of them?
This is why lower income students get lower scores on the SAT – they just aren’t getting the extra help necessary to learn what the test wants.
Certainly this makes some sense for writing an essay. It makes less sense when you’re talking about not knowing how to match up singular or plural pronouns with singular or plural subjects. And it makes no sense when you apply it to the math portions of the SAT, which I notice you don’t discuss at all.
See, the SAT has nothing to do with academics.
Really? It’s all tricks and techniques and has nothing to do with how well you did in English class? Nonsense. I’m sure that “strategies and tricks” enable kids to score higher than they otherwise would. But while I’m sure there are individual variations, I’ll wager that over the entire population that takes the SAT kids with higher English grades and who take higher level English classes get higher English SAT scores.
I’ll bet very serious money that this holds true for the Math SAT. There are very few tricks or strategies that will help you there.
Girl Detective, i found your post to be interesting, and i would agree with you on the whole that the SAT mainly measures a students ability to take a standardized test successfully. There are certainly flaws in the system.
however, i think your characterization of who is producing these tests is inaccurate and a bit misleading. The SAT is created by the College Board, a nonprofit organization. From their own website: “The College Board is a not-for-profit membership association whose mission is to connect students to college success and opportunity. Founded in 1900, the association is composed of more than 5,400 schools, colleges, universities, and other educational organizations. Each year, the College Board serves seven million students and their parents, 23,000 high schools, and 3,500 colleges through major programs and services in college admissions, guidance, assessment, financial aid, enrollment, and teaching and learning. Among its best-known programs are the SAT®, the PSAT/NMSQT®, and the Advanced Placement Program® (AP®). The College Board is committed to the principles of excellence and equity, and that commitment is embodied in all of its programs, services, activities, and concerns.” I have a friend that works at the College Board and know they have a lot of programs aimed at preparing lower income students for their tests, and they have programs that allow those students to take the test without paying the fee. Not that the system is perfect, but the College Board does not intend it to be the money machine you characterize it as.
ETS, which administers the test for the College Board in many locations, is a bit of a different story. Their website states that “ETS is a nonprofit, non-stock corporation organized under the education laws of the State of New York. Our work is supported through revenue from our products and services, as well as contracts and grants with government agencies, private foundations, universities and corporations. Our mission is to help advance quality and equity in education by providing fair and valid assessments, research and related services.” Not that ETS does not want to make money; they certainly do, and they probably do take advantage of the fact that the SAT has become so important to the college admissions process. but i think the more important point here is that ETS is not formulating the test- that’s the College Board, a 501c3. It’s a distinction that you did not make that i think is important.
The SAT is indeed of little value in elite schools which are already drawing on the highest academic achievers. Similarly, a test of whether you can lift a 50-pound sack of wheat is of little value in screening candidates for the US Olympic Weightlifting team.
At the middle levels, however, the SAT is an extremely good predictive tool, and is strongly correlated to successful completion of college-level academic programs. It costs us a lot of money and time to have college-level academic programs available to big percentages of the population – and while I personally feel we should err on the side of providing more opportunities to succeed rather than foreclosing options for people not likely to make it, at some point schools must draw lines and decide who they aren’t opening the doors to.
My own final alma mater was a decent state school, and I worked in its admissions department for a few years while a student. The basic admissions process was simple and fair: they have a matrix of high-school GPA and SAT or ACT test scores, with “admit/don’t admit/look closer” as the possible entries in the matrix. SAT of 1300, GPA of 2.0 – ok, you’re a genius who slacks off, but we’ll give you a chance. SAT of 800, GPA of 3.9 – ok, you’re maybe not the shiniest penny but it looks like you work really hard, so we’ll give you a chance too. And so on. SAT of 800, GPA of 1.5, sorry, no. Go do two years at the community college, demonstrate that something has changed, and then come back.
Opponents of the SAT seem to be people who are egalitarian in inappropriate contexts. Egalitarianism in political rights is a good starting assumption. Egalitarianism in the classroom, where it is individual merit and effort that have huge impacts on success and progress, not such a good idea.
I’m in LA (South Bay), and I’d be willing to donate some hours to the project you describe.
EJ, thanks for the clarification – I was going by what the trainers at my company told me, but I should have fact-checked that.
Ali, I don’t know anything about the math section, unfortunately.
“I know your speciality is the English side of things but do the test makers do similarily sneaky questions on the math portion? ”
YES. At least when I was in high school and then SAT tutoring, a lot of the math questions were posed so that if you looked at them correctly you would realize they were tricks and solve them quickly.
I hated SAT tutoring, which I did with an individual tutoring company rather than with the people that run the SAT, and which I quit after a few sessions. I’d go in and help some poor kid with hir flash cards, and sie would have memorized a partial and incomplete definition of a word, devoid of connotation, and then be surprised that sie couldn’t use it appropriately in sentences. I started telling them to read more so they could learn how words actually function instead of trying to take memorization short-cuts, but of course that would require actual learning rather than tricks, and might remove some of the class benefits associated with the SAT as it currently exists. Puke.
“Opponents of the SAT seem to be people who are egalitarian in inappropriate contexts.”
The SAT is a particularly good predictor of whose parents went to college. It correlates, IIRC, to performance in the first year, and not particularly well beyond.
I started telling them to read more so they could learn how words actually function instead of trying to take memorization short-cuts, but of course that would require actual learning rather than tricks,
There you go. Tricks help pick up some points, but overall your score is a function of how well educated you are.
I didn’t say the tricks didn’t help their SAT scores substantially. They did. I said the tricks didn’t educate them.
As someone who benefitted tremendously in college admissions due to the SAT, I have to admit that I’m of two minds. I understand how privilege plays a huge role in these outcomes, and I am not in favor of strict admissions criteria which mostly look at GPA and test scores. That’s pretty ridiculous. But I have to say that sometimes test scores can tell admissions officers things that other measures cannot. I had a very rough first few years of high school largely due to depression and undiagnosed disabilities, which I did not feel comfortable disclosing on an application. My cummulative high school GPA iwas on the very low side for the college I’m admitted to, and I think that a very high verbal SAT score–which I partially lucked into, no doubt–helped convince admissions officers that the GPA wasn’t necessarily representative of my abilities. I know that another similar school which places less emphasis on the scores probably would not have admitted me. Fair enough, but I’m glad, perhaps selfishly, that not all schools have this philosophy. Of course SAT scores are not really standardized when you take socio-economic factors into consideration, but other factors aren’t standardized either.
I agree that SAT tutoring sounds awful. Route memorization of vocabulary for testing purposes is of very little educational value. To me, the problem goes deeper than just the SAT for those reasons. Others on this thread have suggested providing SAT tutoring to disadvantaged students. I see some merit to that, but I think it’s better to provide a vastly better math, language arts, and foreign language curriculum from the very beginning. Getting more kids access to books which interest them throughout their life is important, too. I know colleges can’t change the entire system, though, so I’m glad that some of them are no longer requiring SATs. Still, I’m hesitant to cast test scores as entirely useless.
Alternatively, we could skip the obfuscating layer that the SAT represents and just go to a straight IQ test. That would defeat the tutoring != education aspect, since “tutoring” for an IQ test would be cognitive skills training, which is useful in and of itself.
I had the impression that ETS did pretty much write the test for College Board (their biggest client). ETS also has strangely large management salaries for a non-profit. I have no clue how long this will last, or if College Board has already started the process of destroying ETS.
Having also been an instructor (for both SAT and LSAT; considered and rejected it for MCAT) I partially agree with your points.
All of those tests certainly DO test for “test taking skill.” Not only do they require knowledge of test tricks, but the actual structure of the tests rewards, absent training, a very particular set of work and test taking habits. For example, speed: fast test takers generally get more points than do slow test takers, even if the slower people ted to be more accurate.
I have seen people’s scores increase significantly simply through my instruction while it was obvious that their underlying knowledge did not. And on a more personal level, I have always done insanely well on multiple choice tests… because, as it happens, I read about 5 times faster than most everyone else, and NOT because i am smarter or because I do better in school. I like my luck of the draw, but it’s obviously luck.
That said, I think that there are three questions which need to be distinguished:
1) does the SAT select for income, either directly or indirectly;
2) do the schools prefer the students who are selected by the SAT; and
3) do we want to allow the schools to maintain that preference?
I agree that the SAT selects for income. The examples given are puertinent and convincing, and–not that this matters–also match my anecdotal experience.
However, the “schools should drop the SAT” concept depends on the assumption that the income selection is not what schools want. That is much less clear. If schools WANT the things the SAT tests for–including, I note cynically, income–then they will continue to use the SAT.
It is an interesting question to really think about:
If you had to admit or hire two students and you knew nothing else about them but their SAT scores, would you take one over the other? (this is the logical equivalent of “all else being equal.”)
I would. I would hire the one with higher scores. I would figure that they might deserve their scores or might not, but it’s better than lower scores.
And unless your answer is “I would flip a coin” or “I would hire the lower scoring applicant” then it does, sort of, explain why colleges use the test, ya?
A high school junior damn well ought to know that, or someone’s not doing their job.
I didn’t. And I went to a large, rich, suburban school with tons of college prep courses that I did well in. I was in Honors and AP English classes all the way through HS. We spent, I always thought, a disproportionate amount of time dissecting the themes in a single novel then in any kind of technical writing skills or reading comprehension (which frankly, no matter what your opinion of the “great novels” by dead white guys, is more important and useful to the average person).
As someone who tests well, I didn’t find the SAT or the GRE to be testing what they purport to test.
But I don’t think this is so much about standardized testing then it is about public education and how it fails across class.
While I agree that using standardized testing scores are nothing more than an indicator of how well you know to take that particular test, I’m not convinced that high schoolers shouldn’t be expected to spot those kinds of mistakes. I learned how to parse and diagram sentences, and to calculate the value of x in algebraic equations, in the eighth grade. I realise that’s the privilege of having attended a private school, but I think that’s the level of education that should be made available to everyone, regardless of income. That was the whole point, after all, of public education right?
Also, The SAT is a particularly good predictor of whose parents went to college. It correlates, IIRC, to performance in the first year, and not particularly well beyond.
This is just speaking from my experience, but I got a 1330 on my SAT (back when the high score was a 1600) and a 33 on my ACT – and I still nearly failed out my first year (and my second, come to think of it). Compare that to my last year of college, when my GPA was consistently above a 3.5. That experience is part of the reason why I don’t think the SAT, or any other standardized test for that matter, is a particularly good indicator of how well one is likely to do in college.
Girl Detective writes:
… but high school students often don’t know that when the subject of a sentence – in this case, the agency – is singular, then all pronouns pertaining to it must also be singular, even if the subject is a conglomeration of many other subjects.
Ron F. writes:
A high school junior damn well ought to know that, or someone’s not doing their job.
10 points to anyone who can spot the irony!
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@MizDarwin – ^_^ Although I hear tell that “they” is making its (their?) way to acceptance as a third-person singular pronoun, used primarily when the gender of the antecedent is ambiguous or otherwise unclear.
I use “they” as singular all the time (as did Jane Austen and William Shakespeare), but I still wouldn’t do it in a sentence condemning people for not knowing subject/verb agreement!
And RonF’s comment about subject-verb agreement was specifically about the use of the pronoun “they,” as well.
Social science studies of IQ tests have proven that the IQ test does not test for an objective, untutored skill either.
@MizDarwin and Natasha – heh, no worries, I’m not defending RonF … although I suppose derailing the thread to talk about the merits of they becoming a singular pronoun isn’t too much better! Pregnancy brain ^^;
That’s true, Mandolin. IQ is not objective, nor wholly untutored. Objectivity being an unattainable goal in intrahuman comparison, the failure of this test among every other to attain it is undisturbing. The “tutoring” which can enhance IQ scores is tutoring in cognitive strategy and mental skills, general mental skills that are widely applicable and highly relevant to an individual’s functioning, also known as education. People who have gotten good educations tend to do better on IQ tests, because the good education has raised their IQ. Not by a huge amount; last time I looked it was something like 5 to 10 points.
But you can take someone with an IQ of 100 and spend a year training them on how to take IQ tests, while I take someone with an IQ of 150 and spend a year sitting on the beach reading Tom Clancy novels, and at the retest at the end of the year, my guy with the 150 will crush your guy with the 100, ceteris parabus. If we did that with the SAT, your guy could well come out on top. That’s why IQ would be a better measure; it’s measuring something that’s mostly innate. (There’s nothing wrong with measuring what the SAT measures, which is partially IQ, partially test-taking skill, and partially how good the schools you’ve been in have been – but we have better data for the last two factors and don’t need the SAT to get that information; if we want to know someone’s IQ, then we should test their IQ.)
The efficiency gains, the satisfaction to individuals, and the improvements in human welfare that come from sorting and educating people in accordance with their ability are so enormous that it is unlikely that society is ever going to abandon the concept of mental stratification. That being the case, we should find the best tools for assessing mental ability, as well as the best tools for improving skills across the board, and use them.
Not to mention the awful problems that people with disabilities have had in regards to access to the SAT and other standardized tests.
If you use any sort of accomodation (for instance, I had an official proctor read the test to me and fill in the bubble sheet for me, as I am visually impaired) your score gets “tagged.” A statement will be printed along with your scores that indicate that you took the test under nonstandard conditions. This in essence, tips off college admissions people that you have a disability ahead of time, and also effectively invalidates your score. For example, people with disabilities whose scores on the PSAT qualified them as National Merit Finalists weren’t officially recognized as so due to the tagging.
I am a good test-taker for whatever reason. I have always been able to bluff my way through a test and get a high score no matter what my true academic abilities were. For example, I never had an aptitude for the hard sciences. I got a D (barely) in one semester of chemistry and then dropped out in highschool. I never took physics. When I took the ACT as a junior, I got a near perfect score on the science portion. It was like a 33 if I remember correctly. (Average score being about 20). It was ridiculous. According to that test, I should have been a science major, which would have been disasterous. I think I am just good at gleaning a lot from a small amount of hints (much practice as a vision/hearing impaired person). Or guestimating. I got a perfect score in guestimating.
Oh, and as a former special ed teacher who was trained to administer IQ and other intelligence assessment tests, they aren’t much better as far as reliability and validity. And anyway, IQ is not necessarily a great predictor of college success anyway. We all know that some people can breeze through college and never pick up a book. Others will study their asses off and will pull through eventually. So, with IQ testing (assuming it could ever be reliable) you would just be disqualifying a potential pool of very resourceful and hardworking people in exchange for some smart people who may or may not be able to problem-solve their way out of a paper bag when challenged.
While I agree with the overall sentiment of your post, I strongly disagree with your assessment of the sample questions. Those are exactly the sorts of things I feel a high school graduate should know. Students should be reading books in their English classes, reading textbooks and newspapers in their other classes, and (one would hope) reading for fun on their own. If they pay attention and have some measure of reasoning skills, they’ll be able to tell (as I could, having never received any kind of formal grammar training) which parts of those sentences don’t sound right. And I would think that students who read for fun and have decent reasoning skills are exactly what most colleges are looking for, so performance on the test would be very telling.
I found what you said about the essay questions very interesting, though. Ever since I took my SAT 12 years ago, I’ve always wondered why I scored so poorly on the essay portion of my test, when I considered myself a good essay writer and scored pretty darn near 700 on my verbal portion. I suppose I must have broken one of those “instant markdown” rules.
Are there any statements out there from actual college admissions officials that are using SAT scores as to what value they get from them? Because it seems to me that calling the SAT useless when so many colleges apparently DO find them useful is a bit odd.
Tangential to the topic, but:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-08/ucl-tc081808.php
Does income correlate with scholastic achievement or with preparedness for college? That’s the question we need to be looking at, and if the answer is yes, that’s the problem we need to fix. Say you have two populations of students, A and B. A has spent its K-12 school career in inner-city schools staffed by inexperienced and/or at best marginally competent teachers, i.e. those who had few career options; B has always attended private schools and/or public schools in upscale suburbs. As a result, B is prepared for college, while A is woefully unprepared, and their respective transcripts, interviews, essays, test scores, and any other assessment methods anyone dreams up will reflect that disparity. The cure is not to let A into college anyway — unless you want a bunch of dropouts with low self-esteem and dim job prospects — but to address its academic deficiencies with catch-up programs and to get to work on the schools that failed it in the first place.
All that said, I’d be pleased to volunteer as an SAT tutor if I lived near LA, but unfortunately I don’t. If anyone knows of such an effort in Massachusetts, by all means let me know.
(dons editor hat)
As a professional editor, I have to agree with Stentor: in the catching of is awkward, yes, ungrammatical, no.
A high school junior damn well ought to know that, or someone’s not doing their job.
If Ron had written “…someone’s not doing his job,” he’d have been accused of ingrained sexism; if he’d written “…someone’s not doing her job,” he’d have been accused of stereotyping schoolteachers as female. I’ve become resigned to the use of they as a singular gender-neutral pronoun when it’s unavoidable, but in this case I’d write “…or that high school isn’t doing its job.”
Speaking of which, a high-school junior damned well ought to know that in English no possessive pronoun ever contains an apostrophe. Singular third-person possessive pronouns are his, her, its. None contains an apostrophe. To judge by blogs, less than half of the adult US population knows this, and seeing it’s used as a possessive pronoun is driving me daily closer to the edge.
Ahem. (deep breath)
(doffs editor hat)
Thank you. I feel better now.
Lu, I’m an editor by trade as well. When you finally crack and decide to go on the killing spree, drop me a note. I have a van that can hold a LOT of weapons and ammo.
Yep, a lot of people (myself included) are starting to use “they” and “their” as 3rd person singular so as to avoid sex stereotyping and constructions like “his/her” or neologisms like “hir” and “sie” (I think that’s the intent of those, anyway). I admit that it’s unsatisfactory. It may be in the end that we should have a neologism.
Mea culpa on the apostrophe on the possessive pronoun. I could have written “… or someone is not doing …” or “someone isn’t doing …”. I considered but then deliberately avoided using “… or that high school isn’t doing it’s job” because the high school could very well be doing their job – the problem may be that either the student or his or her parents (or both) aren’t doing their job. A phenomenon that’s too common, IMNSHO.
The one that has me considering reaching for the ammunition is when people use ” ‘s ” to denote a plural.
Lu, if you live anywhere near Boston I would think that you could find someone at the offices of the Boston Public Schools that would know of such a thing. They probably have schools in their lower-income areas that use such for their students. I hope ….
LOL, Robert! I see that Ron is assisting you by nudging me toward the brink.
(someone’s not doing is fine. In this case the ‘s is short for is.)
Good point about Boston, Ron. I don’t live that close, but there are other places that probably have similar problems. Good point also that school, student and parents all have to be on the same page, as it were, for learning to happen. This is another way that family income boosts students’ chances: higher-income parents are more likely to 1) know where apostrophes go 2) care 3) have the time and energy to transmit that knowledge.
LOL, Robert! I see that Ron is assisting you by nudging me toward the brink.
(someone’s not doing is fine. In this case the ‘s is short for is.)
Good point about Boston, Ron. I don’t live that close, but there are other places that probably have similar problems. Good point also that school, student and parents all have to be on the same page, as it were, for learning to happen. This is another way that family income boosts students’ chances: higher-income parents are more likely to 1) know where apostrophes go 2) care 3) have the time and energy to transmit that knowledge.
(I tend to think that there is such a thing as native or inborn intelligence, or rather intelligences: different people have different natural talents for languages, math, spatial perception, and so on. I also think that it’s very much a case of “use it or lose it”: the more those talents are called upon, the stronger they get. Here again the higher-income kid benefits.)
Funny thing about that, Lu. The middle school that my kids went to has a mix of wealthy and working-class families sending their children to it. It was revealed (long story – administrators lost their jobs over this) by our local high school that of the 9 middle schools that feed our local high school our middle school kids appeared to be the worst prepared.
I was at a Scouting function working with some Webelos Scouts – that would be 4th – 6th grade. Many of their mothers were present. At one point some Boy Scouts were working with the Webelos, and I walked over to the moms. They were busy discussing the middle school. One of the moms was on the School Board for the middle school. They were all decrying the education their kids were getting.
I demurred. I offered that my kids were doing well (and, in fact, both got decent grades; one has an electrical engineering degree and the other is a second-semester senior in mechanical engineering). The mother who was on the school board spun around to face me and said “But YOU have EXPECTATIONS!” She explained that many of the parents seemed unconcerned about how their kids did as long as they didn’t flunk out; a C average seemed good enough for them. Whereas she well knew (we’d known each other for a while) that bringing a C home in our household was cause for concern.
Now, there are vanishingly few minorities or illegal aliens or other groups of people in my elementary school district that the prevalent stereotype would hold as being irresponsible regarding their children’s academic performance. We have very few really poor families. White working class folks are supposed to be a groups that puts pressure on their kids to get good grades, but it seems that many in my school district bite the bullet and put real constraints on their kids if they don’t perform.
[ rant ]
Too many parents won’t say “No” to their kids and stick to it. There was an article in the Trib a while back where kids were discussing what techniques they used to break down their parents. One kid said that if he really wanted something, he knew that if he asked for it 7 times he would get it. If my kid did that, sometime around #2 or #3 he or she would find that Bad Things Would Happen. I know this happens in our area because often when in the Troop we tell kids “No” they start to ask the same thing repeatedly expecting that we’ll give in. The opposite occurs. It’s a general observance in Scouting around us that we Scouters are often the first people that the kids encounter that a) tell them “No” and b) mean it. Fits have been pitched.
I decided that I would not buy my kids an Xbox or similar video machine. Sure, they’d play Grand Theft Auto at their buddy’s house, but they wouldn’t be spending study time at home doing it, and they’d have to find some more imaginative recreational activity as well. I remain convinced that if parents wouldn’t buy them and would toss their kids outside more (or tell them to read for recreation) they’d have a more well-rounded and educated child.
[ /rant ]
BTW, Lu, if you just want to get someone’s attention I suggest a shotgun with the barrel cut down to the legal minimum and loaded with rock salt. Scares the hell out of them, but they will most likely survive to actually apply the lesson.
When I was a kid I snuck across the road and raided a fruit orchard to get some apples. Mr. Farmer directed some rock salt in my general direction. I never told Mom and Dad because their reaction would have been to say “Why were you stealing fruit?” and whacking me. Whereas today Mom and Dad would have called a lawyer to sue the farmer and probably a psychiatrist or a counselor for me.
Somehow I think a shotgun would be overkill, so to speak, if all I’m trying to do is get people to stop putting an apostrophe in possessive its. I’ll keep it in mind, though.
Thing is, it’s not just, maybe not even primarily, a matter of expectations, it’s a matter of environment. Or maybe I should say it’s a matter of day-to-day assumptions and expectations in a particular environment. Since birth my daughter has seen her dad and me read a lot, use computers, look up words in the dictionary, do simple calculations in our heads, play word and math games, and discuss politics, science, literature, and other random topics. We’ve never dumbed anything down, and we’ve encouraged her to participate in all of this. For example, one of our favorite rainy-day vacation activities is Mad Libs; she learned basic parts of speech at about six so that she could play too. (I think they just got to them last year in school, in sixth grade.) I remember her being surprised at around seven to discover that her friend up the street didn’t know what a noun was. It helps that she’s a bright kid, but her academic talents get nurtured every day without our even thinking about it. In our town the majority of kids are in a similar situation. (Things get very intense in high school. I briefly considered sending her to my prep-school alma mater in the hope that it would be less cutthroat.)
We also tell her all the time that everyone has things they naturally do well and things they have to work on, and we expect her to work on her weaker things and not give up. (I’ve seen a couple of articles recently about a study comparing how American and Japanese schools teach math; in Japan a kid will go to the board to work a problem and stay there until they get it right, with help from the other kids as needed. No one laughs or calls them stupid if they don’t get it immediately. American teachers are more interested in getting the right answer and moving on, whether most of the kids understand or not. Americans tend to think of math as something you’re good at or not, and if not there’s no point in beating your head against it.)
Her elementary school (from which she just graduated) doesn’t even give grades, but she knows she’s expected to do all of her homework and hand it in on time, and she knows she can come to us for help if she needs it. She also knows how to look things up if we’re not around, or if (as is usually the case) she’d rather do as much as she can on her own. In junior high they do give grades, so it’ll be a big transition, but she and we know she can handle it.
And, yeah, parents these days are too permissive. We’re lucky that she’s generally very caring, hence unlikely to violate the Golden Rule, but she wouldn’t get away with the fruit-stealing either. She called me from the mall today (where her sitter had taken her and her brother) to ask if she could get her ears pierced. I said no, for the umptieth time. (We originally said she had to wait till she was 15. We’ll probably bend that, as long as she demonstrates responsibility and maturity and taking good care of her stuff, which in the past has been a “need to work on” area.)
As Lu says, at some point we need to focus on what people know (or don’t know.)
As it happens, I am currently interviewing people. The resumes and cover letters run the gamut: of competence some are almost illegible, while others are focused and clear. Similarly, some applicants adhere exactly to my (intentionally complex) application requirements, while others do not do so.
Surely the reasons for that variance are widespread. I am certain that some applicants have wasted golden opportunities, while other applicants are making the absolute best of what they have. I am sure that some of my best applicants have managed to reach their goals only because, in privilege-speak, they have gotten a head start in the first place.
But from a hiring standpoint none of that matters. Someone is either competent or less so, and I am not especially concerned about why. Sure, there are side issues (I would prefer not to hire a slacker) but by and large I am judging people on how they write–and how they present, and how they speak, and what they do, right now, for a living.
Another thing that strikes me: we’ve all seen the statistics on single-parent families. I wonder if one of the difficulties is simply that if there’s only one adult in the house, there’s no conversation going on, hence the kids aren’t exposed to as much language or as many ideas. (And, of course, a single parent has less time to help with homework or play word games, but I’m thinking specifically about how the environment changes when there are two adults interacting.)
Don’t assume that a person doesn’t know the rule just because they make an error. I’m forever apostrophising possessive “its”, then correcting later, if I am able to. Ditto there/their/they’re
My guess is that such errors that we see here are more errors of haste and editing than of lack of knowledge.
You’re probably both right. That particular one is so ingrained in me that I can’t imagine getting it wrong (and I was lucky enough to be born with the spelling gene), but there are other errors I can and do easily make.
If I see someone always make the same mistake, though, I tend to assume that they don’t know the rule, and I do know people who confess to being perennially confused by its/it’s. The thing about all possessive pronouns’ lacking apostrophes only recently occurred to me (believe it or not), and it seems like an easy way to remember which form to use.
I totally agree with the association between the lower SAT score and the student from lower income-family. In Korea, many students willing to go to universities in States spend substantial amount of money on SAT hagwons, which basically teach students how to score good on SATs.