Scholastic Aptitude Torment

Upon hearing about the College Board’s forthcoming revamp of the Scholastic Aptitude Test—otherwise known as the SAT—I was all ready to let loose a vitriolic broadside against the standardized college preparatory exam and the ways it ruins the final two years of your high school career.  That is, when it doesn’t also ruin the rest of your life along with them.

But then I stumbled upon an op-ed piece in the New York Times, titled, “Save Us From the SAT,” whose author, Jennifer Finney Boylan, essentially makes all my best points for me (and more interestingly, at that).

“The SAT is a mind-numbing, stress-inducing ritual of torture,” Boylan writes, with only the mildest of exaggeration.  “The College Board can change the test all it likes, but no single exam, given on a single day, should determine anyone’s fate.  The fact that we have been using this test to perform exactly this function for generations now is a national scandal.”

Boylan goes on to recount her own horror story of taking the infernal test when she was a high school junior—a drama that has her coming this close to lodging a fatally low score as a result of accidentally skipping one line of bubbles on the answer sheet.  (She realized her mistake with precious seconds to spare.)

On this, actually, I can do Boylan one better:  The year my own graduating class was subjected to the SAT, the College Board’s grading machines threw a fit and wound up miscalculating thousands of students’ scores, some by several hundred points in either direction.

College Board ultimately spotted, acknowledged and corrected its error, but it took five months to do so, and not before untold scores of college hopefuls (including several I knew personally) were put under the false impression that their dream school was suddenly out of reach, leading some to forego even applying to institutions they otherwise should’ve had every reason to think would accept them.

And so you had the fortunes of multitudes of students greatly disrupted or utterly destroyed, all because of some inane automated clerical error.

To Boylan’s point:  Even when scored correctly, why should one test carry so much weight and be able to inflict so much academic carnage along the way?  And if it’s true that actual college admissions officials do not take SAT scores as seriously as students are made to think, then why are students made to think it?

In the memorable phrasing of Captain Lionel Mandrake in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, “I would say, sir, that there was something dreadfully wrong somewhere.”

As outlined extensively by Todd Balf in the New York Times Magazine, the point of the SAT is to predict a high school student’s potential in college-level courses, and in a manner that can be fairly applied to every student in America.  The proposed changes, which are more dramatic than in the most recent face-lift in 2005, are a response to the College Board’s conclusion that the exam, in its current form, is neither fair nor a particularly accurate gauge of collegiate success.  The SAT disadvantages poor students, who cannot afford private tutors, and has shown not to correlate with one’s college GPA nearly as much as one’s high school grades do.

In point of fact—as a friend tartly put it years ago—the SAT is little more than a test of one’s ability to take the SAT.

I know this to be true because I had a private tutor of my own, and I can infer with high certainty that those sessions inflated my final scores to levels I would not have attained on my own.  Whether my “natural” SAT grades would have shut me out of my eventual school of choice, I have no idea.  That the mere fact of my parents’ relative wealth enhanced my academic and career prospects before I even picked up a pencil—well, the words “national scandal” could hardly be more germane.

To be sure, the fact that poor folks must often work exponentially harder than rich folks merely to keep pace in America is not solely a problem for the College Board.  It’s a problem for everyone, and has been since the dawn of the republic itself.

One of the finer moments of the new Mitt Romney documentary Mitt comes when the titular candidate acknowledges how his father, George, took a lifetime to reach the economic standing to which Mitt himself began.  It reminds us that any so-called “level playing field” in the United States is an aspiration, not a reality.

The proposed SAT tweaks—particularly the increased emphasis on logic and argument in justifying one’s answers—will probably leave us with a superior product than we currently have.

But they are still no match for the most sensible and just of the College Board’s options, which is to just get rid of the bloody thing once and for all.

No Free Rides

I did not follow the Oscar Pistorius murder case when it first broke, and in reading about the whole messy business in this month’s issue of Vanity Fair, the detail about the famed “blade runner” that struck me with the greatest force had nothing at all to do with the killing of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

“Although Pistorius didn’t meet South Africa’s individual 400-meter qualifying standard to compete in the 2012 Summer Olympics, he was approved, it seems, just because he was Oscar,” writes Mark Seal in his profile of the sprinter with two prosthetic legs.

Come again?

Yes, it’s true:  In the months preceding the 2012 London Games, Pistorius did not complete a key qualifying race in a good enough time (by his own country’s standards) to participate in the individual 400-meter event in London.  However, because he had qualified for the 4×400 relay and would be at the Olympics anyway—and, more to the point, because he was such a feel-good media sensation—South Africa asked the powers that be to allow Pistorius to run the individual race as well, and the request was granted.

For all my disinterest in most Olympic matters, this rather irritates me.

Yes, as a double amputee with seemingly superhuman physical abilities, Pistorius was undoubtedly a supremely inspirational figure and (prior to the murder charge) a peerless ambassador for his home country on the world stage.

Nonetheless, one would presume that if one does not meet the basic qualifications for inclusion in the Olympic Games, one does not get to participate in the Olympic Games.  Call me old-fashioned, but it seems only fair.

I am reminded (weirdly enough) of the SAT scandal from a few years back, in which an apparent computer glitch caused thousands of students’ SAT scores to be misreported—some students had scored better than they were originally told, while others scored worse.  In some cases, the discrepancy was several hundred points wide.

Once the College Board, which distributes the SAT, was made aware of its rather calamitous error, it rectified the problem thusly:  Those whose true scores were higher than originally reported were duly informed, while those who actually fared worse than they thought were allowed to keep the higher, false scores on their records.

This latter component of the College Board’s reparations has long struck me as supremely unjust.  Ostensibly, it was the College Board’s way of ensuring that no student would be punished for its own mistakes, as if to say, “Don’t worry; this one’s on us.”

The problem, however, is that many students were punished—namely, those whose SAT scores fell somewhere between the miscalculated group’s real and false ones, and who may well have been denied admission to their dream schools for that reason.

(For example:  Someone who scored 1700 found himself weighed against someone whose score was actually 1600 but, thanks to the computer glitch, was granted an 1800.  In the hyper-competitive world of college admissions, this can make all the difference in the world.)

If the SAT episode and the Pistorius episode have nothing else in common, what they share is this sense of passive injustice—of allowing certain people to sidestep the usual rules and regulations on their way to fame and fortune, while withholding the same privilege from others who might be equally, if not more, deserving.

This is what folks mean when they say, “The game is rigged.”  The rigging need not be overt or deliberate to warrant our attention or concern—indeed, it is precisely when injustices of this sort happen more or less by accident that we should most loudly and clearly register our disgust.

The danger of the proliferation of this peculiar practice—beyond the basic unfairness of it all—is the nasty sense of entitlement it engenders in its beneficiaries.

Once someone has been pulled through the E-Z Pass lane to success, enjoying the benefits of hard work without having worked hard, what is to stop him from thinking this won’t always be the case?

Murderer or not, Pistorius is most certainly guilty of an acutely unattractive sense of infallibility, reportedly saying upon being arrested, “I’ll survive.  I always win.”

And when someone witnesses such preferential treatment given to someone else—be it a fellow student or an Olympic athlete—what is he to make of this?  After a lifetime of telling our kids, “Hard work pays off,” are we prepared to permanently add the qualifier, “But dumb luck without hard work pays off even more”?

The harm falls on both sides, you see.  An uneven playing field is a comprehensive toxin on society, and we ought to try harder not to perpetuate it.