There was a time, not that long ago, when the SAT actually stood for something, but now, the pillar of standardized testing stands for nothing at all.
I am speaking literally, of course. The SAT was once the Scholastic Aptitude Test. A name that told you straight up what the test was all about. Then the SAT, joining the ranks of KFC, WW, and SAS simply became the SAT – no more, no less.
The need for rebranding the SAT was not quite on the same plane as the issues that brought us the Altria Group and Pearl Milling Company, but it was close. Aptitude was a loaded term, rife with connotations and incarnations from which the College Board wanted to distance itself and its test. (My guess is that the word test wasn’t scoring high with focus groups either, so perhaps the name change was a two-fer.)
But let’s put a pin in the rebranding and aptitude for now. I promise that we’ll circle back to it.
Extra! Extra! Read All About It!
I am writing about the SAT today, obviously, because the once-proud assessment program finds itself back in the news largely due to recent “controversial” decisions announced by Dartmouth and yale regarding its use.
There may have been a time in its early history when the newspapers of the day printed positive or feel-good stories about the SAT (perhaps in their afternoon editions), but that has not been my lived experience.
My first memories of the SAT in the news were stories from the 1970s and 1980s related to test bias and discrimination, my first exposure to those topics. Concerns about sex/gender bias trumped race/ethnicity concerns at the time, culminating in one of my all-time favorite assessment-related quotes. While ETS attributed score discrepancies to differences in the educational and socioeconomic backgrounds of female and male test takers and “feminists” (their word, not mine) blamed social conditioning…
Over the years, there were the obligatory stories and lawsuits about a rare error on the test.
Who can forget the time that excessive moisture apparently caused errors in processing the test.
And so it went, up until 2020 when California announced its decision to drop the use of the SAT for college admissions – an ignominious defeat for our standard bearer.
For the most part, these issues were external to the test and the College Board or the result of inadvertent errors. Who among us hasn’t written or approved a mathematics item that had something other than one and only one correct answer?
Then there were those other issues that were the results of internal decisions.
Finding the Center
There was the great recentering of 1990. The SAT 200-800 scale was (is) a critical part of its brand. It was commonly understood that a score of 500 was the “national average” even when it wasn’t. There may or may not have been other recenterings since 1990, but it doesn’t matter, the mystique was gone.
Then there was the addition of a Writing test. Next to the average score of 500, the other most distinguishing feature of the SAT was the combined Verbal and Math scale with its maximum score of 1600. In the largely compensatory world in which we live, a combined score of 1200 was pretty darn good no matter how you pieced it together and a score of 1400 (prior to recentering) was a magic number. The Writing test shifted the conversation to a 2400 scale, rendering meaningless our beloved, not to mention empirically tested, 1200 and 1400.
There were changes to scoring – no more penalties for guessing.
As we will get to shortly, there were changes to the content of the test.
And there were changes to the types of items included on the test.
The current SAT and 200-800 scale is to the previous SAT and 200-800 scale as…
A casual observer might pause to ponder the question, if you have gutted the meaning of your 200-800 scale, why continue to cling to it like Charlton Heston (and not a young Charlton Heston as Moses bearing the Ten Commandments).
Don’t pause too long, however, for a more interesting and significant question to ponder might be how these changes were received by the SAT’s client base.
No Person (or Test) Can Serve Two Masters
Steve Jobs may have had a knack for giving clients what they wanted and needed before they even knew they wanted and needed it, but as they say, I know the College Board, the College Board is a friend of mine, but the College Board is not Steve Jobs.
Let’s start with the Writing test and the SAT’s historical clients, college admissions offices. Based on personal observations made during two summers and a spring of college visits with my daughter, admissions officers had no idea what to do with the SAT Writing test. They hadn’t asked for it. They didn’t have a place for it within their carefully crafted and well-tested admissions models. They had their own essay questions.
Perhaps, however, the Writing test made sense because the College Board had a new client base in mind for the SAT: states and high school state testing.
I cannot offer a definitive reason why the College Board jumped into state testing with both feet after the initial its initial foray with Maine (can you say, SAT augmentation?), but the incursion into the SAT’s market by that other admissions test may have played a role in their ACTions.
I’ll be the first to admit that the College Board was up against it trying to compete in the state testing market with the young, sexy sales reps from the other company while it continued to rely on its wise, seasoned professorial types (think tweed, corduroy, patches on the sleeves, leather valises). For the record, that is not a sexist observation as it applies equally to the males and females representing both organizations.
So, what could the College Board do to make the SAT more attractive to states?
Cut To The Core
Arguably, the biggest change to the SAT, and the one with the greatest unintended consequences, was the shift in content to the Common Core (well most of the Common Core) based on the argument that the SAT should assess what’s taught in schools.
Makes perfect sense if you are trying to market a content-aligned test to the 46 states plus the District of Columbia who had jumped on board to adopt the Common Core State Standards.
The decision seems a little more dicey when the Common Core becomes a political third rail – standards by any other name, please.
The decision to assess what’s taught in schools becomes downright perplexing when considered from the perspective that it plays right into the hands of systemic racism, inequity, lack of educational opportunity, etc. We have decades of state assessment data to tell us which students are going to perform poorly on tests aligned to what’s taught in schools and we know the structural reasons why – even if we are loath to state them out loud.
A prime reason the SAT was developed in the first place was to identify students who may have lacked high-quality educational opportunities for whatever reasons but demonstrated the aptitude to succeed in college. Students who wouldn’t be found in the prep schools and feeder schools well-known to admissions officers. (I promised we would return to aptitude.)
Now the new and improved SAT simply told us which students had low achievement on the modified Common Core.
It was so much easier to make the claim that using SAT scores for high-stakes admissions decisions fit the textbook definition (2020 edition) of racist assessment policy. California did so. Others followed suit.
Making the SAT a high school achievement test may have been its death knell.
Saved By The Bell
Just as the sun appeared to be setting on our old friend, the Supreme Court stepped in and put an end to race-conscious admissions policies and practices. Admissions models had to be revamped.
Re-enter the SAT. Re-enter the concept of an adversity index – an innovation that was either the victim of ham-handed marketing the first time it was introduced by the College Board or an ingenious idea ahead of its time (hmm, very Steve Jobs like).
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s last minute stay of execution, the SAT lives to fight another day.
I, for one, hope that the College Board makes the best of it.
Embrace the Absurd 