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You
had to think about it, right? Three and a half hours of that type
of thinking and you have the SAT. Filling in ovals with a No.
2 pencil is a rite of passage for college-bound American high-school
students. All of the information is in the booklet; it just takes
an educated and clever eye to pick out the answers. In the SAT
auditorium, people are thinking.
The
United States is hardly the only country in the world that has
some sort of exam at the end of standard education to determine
which students will continue to universities.
The
British system has the GCSE and the French have the Bac. The Japanese
have entrance exams. These exams all test students' recall of
their education. The fact that it is possible to study for the
SATs is considered a flaw in its design, but it is the only test
of its kind that makes being unprepared a value at all.
A
test that puts people in a series of new situations — in
the form of puzzles and passages of text — and asks them
to figure out solutions is testing a different set of skills than
one that asks them to remember facts or formulas they learned
and studied and for which they crammed. The SAT measures the ability
to follow directions, adapt and figure out tricks and puzzles.
So
the high schools that prepare teenagers for the SAT are different
than the ones that teach them toward memorization exams. American
high schools have shorter hours, fewer cumulative reviews and
hardly a nationally required canon of knowledge.
Students aren't expected to remember for physics everything they
learned in biology, because they're not being taught toward a
test of mastery. It doesn't matter whether they read The Great
Gatsby or Their Eyes Were Watching God, as long as they learn
how to read and analyze texts. They have free time outside of
school; they watch TV; play sports or music or video games; and
they discover their individual interests and values.
The
distinction between a test of memorization and a test of adaptability
is important when it is seen as the culmination of adolescent
education. We don't have a single body of information that all
of our adults need to know in order to be educated citizens.
Instead,
we have multiple choice tests and long vacations. Ideally, Americans
are educated to be adaptable, rational and free.
There
are plenty of statistics about how ignorant American children
are of the names of the presidents or the geography of our 50
states, but our non-canonical SAT has been in place since the
1920s , and in that time, the United States has become the world's
most powerful economic force. If the educational philosophy behind
it were completely invalid, there would have to be a complicated
excuse for the contributions of American-educated minds.
I
wouldn't say that our education system is unilaterally succeeding,
or that other countries necessarily would do well to take a page
from our book — only that what this country has done is fundamentally
different from other systems, and it has worked. American schools
still need fine-tuning and proper funding, but I believe they
get more right than wrong.
The
SAT is not being fine-tuned, it is being overhauled. The test
will be different in the spring of 2005. The analogies and quantitative
comparisons will be gone, and students will need a command of
two years of algebra and geometry, and the ability to write a
timed essay. These changes might "improve the alignment of
the test with current curriculum and institutional practices in
high school and college" but, by raising the bar, they also
move the test closer to an exam of a single canon.
The
old test has came under justified fire for a built-in bias toward
traditionally privileged groups, and for the famous possibility
to take classes and raise scores. The new SAT won't correct these
weaknesses; it will embrace them.
Introducing
an essay section might encourage schools to teach better writing
skills, but it effectively tests the quality of a student's school
more than an individual student's understanding. Similarly, asking
higher levels of math knowledge than cleverness with numbers might
get more students to take math classes, but teenagers from incompetent
or overcrowded schools only will fall further behind. It no longer
even will try to be a test of rationality.
The
new SAT moves closer to requiring a set of information that students
need to gain. The changes will require high schools to offer a
fixed curriculum to prepare their students. It will be that much
easier to take an expensive extra class to get better scores.
This shift does not take the SAT all the way to becoming a test
of memorization, but it is a leap in that direction.
Unlike
any other country in the world, we have picked out our elite members
by their ability to solve puzzles rather than their ability to
recite, for instance, the names of the kings of England since
William the Conqueror. Since the birth of the SAT, the test has
aspired to transparently select for intelligence rather than money.
The new SAT takes us closer to memorization and closer to buying
scores.
The
place the SAT has held gives it power over high school and college,
and that power has been used to allow an unusual approach to education.
Maybe it is because our education system was formed in a democracy
where any (white) boy could be president, or maybe because, these
days, children all can grow up to be voters, but we have been
educated to think, not memorize.
Changing
that fundamentally changes the meaning of an educated American
adult and an American citizen.
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