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No easy answers | page 1, 2
"When you're using the SAT as a big old sloppy paintbrush, it's fine," said Paul Kanarek, who runs a West Coast franchise of the Princeton Review test-prep course. "I'm gonna argue that a kid who gets a 1,400 combined on the SAT is probably gonna do better than a kid who gets 1,000. I've got no objection there. But that's not how they use the test (at the University of California)." The University of California was sued last February for "discriminating" against a group of minorities who didn't get into the Berkeley campus under new admissions guidelines. Part of the suit complains that Berkeley made overly fine distinctions based on test scores. This, incidentally, is just the sort of legal vulnerability that the education department's pamphlet aims at showing educators how to avoid. But Kanarek goes further than the lawsuit's implicit criticisms: "UC should make the SAT optional because it tests babkes," he says. "That's a Jewish word meaning shit. Using the SAT to predict how well kids'll do in college is about as asinine a form [of prediction] as I can possibly think of. That is the reason I think the SAT should be dropped, because it doesn't help them figure out which kids are gonna do better in college." Of course, Kanarek is professionally biased. In addition to teaching logic and vocabulary, his classes train students to outsmart the test without necessarily knowing the material. Integral to Princeton Review's philosophy is the idea that SAT is a manipulative game to be undermined. For Kanarek it's a cause. Nothing, he says, would make him happier than not having to give test-prep courses. The SAT is "the mismeasurement of man; it is unfair to give it any significant weight whatsoever in determining whether a kid will be successful in college," he says. "The mismeasure of man" is a reference to Stephen Jay Gould's book on the besotted history of intelligence testing. It shows how claims for IQ tests changed with the political weather during the first part of the 20th century. First, in France, they were just tools for "identifying mildly retarded and learning-disabled children who needed special help," but not "for ranking normal children." Then American psychologists used them as intelligence thermometers in the Army to sort soldiers into different jobs. This idea of sorting carried into the SAT, which the College Board inaugurated in 1926. Although the test had not originally been conceived as a liberal tool, it became one when the GI Bill allowed millions of ex-soldiers to apply to college. Suddenly the SAT was helping undermine the upper-class hold on higher learning by replacing the laziest aristocrats at Harvard and other top colleges -- who counted on getting in just because they'd gone to the right boarding schools -- with members of an ambitious, burgeoning middle class. But even then, the number of applications a university had to cull was small compared to the number that now floods offices at the University of California every year, and no one was accepted or rejected exclusively based on their scores. In the meantime the basic theory behind measuring "aptitude" -- or inborn brain potential -- was debunked, and in 1994 ETS changed the name of SAT from "Scholastic Aptitude" to "Scholastic Assessment" Test. Now not even ETS claims the scores measure anything quantifiable about the human brain. "Do they measure your creativity? No. Do they measure your success in life? No. Do they measure how smart you are?" asks ETS spokesman Gonzalez, "Indirectly." And the idea that the tests might be good college-performance predictors is far enough in question for ETS to prod educators to read the scores "properly" (meaning, for the most part, heavily weighted with grade-point averages), as the Department of Education has done with its pamphlet. "SAT is meant to be used in combination with other factors, especially grade-point average, to predict success in the freshman year," Gonzalez explains. "That's all." What upset a lot of college officials about the Department of Education paper was the idea that over-weighting a test would not only expose them to lawsuits but might also get them into financial and legal trouble with the government. Despite all the SAT's apparent shortcomings, colleges have no better standard for immediately winnowing out thousands of student applications; and yet misusing the SAT, according to some of the pamphlet's language, might have amounted to a federal civil rights violation, which struck more than a few people as absurd. Members of the House of Representatives were so concerned they called Norma Cantú, assistant secretary for civil rights, (whose staff wrote the pamphlet), in front of a subcommittee at the end of June. She told the committee that since the pamphlet was still in draft form, its questionable language would be changed. "We are not trying to create new law," she said, and reassured the congressmen that the Clinton administration "supports the use of standardized tests." But Kanarek thinks the whole debate is off-base, and wants to see an investigation into serious alternatives to the SAT. "There's nothing wrong with a national standard," he explains, but so far a real conversation over the shape of a new one has been lacking, and in the meantime current tests are becoming more and more deeply entrenched. The state of California will spend $50 million over the next five years to coach students for the SAT, which is surely not what John Leo had in mind when he wrote that "better schools in minority neighborhoods" were needed to fix the test-score gap. "I certainly don't have the answer," Kanarek said. "But what a fun and engaging debate it could be, with some really bright academic minds -- we could have the opportunity to reinvent the way we admit people into college. Let's have that argument."
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