For many college students, the SAT is a part of the college application process they'd rather forget. Those who felt stressed by mere math and verbal questions will be glad to know that they completed the SAT before the College Board decided to add additional material to the exam.
According to the College Board, possible additions include a writing sample and multiple choice questions in the writing section, reducing the analogy section, and including more advanced math like trigonometry and algebra II. Experts in the field of test taking and college admissions say that these changes have little academic purpose, and that they instead serve purely political and financial functions.
Professor of Child Development David Henry Feldman, an authority on the history and development of standardized tests, believes that the SAT is not the best measure of a student's academic abilities. He doesn't think the changes will improve the effectiveness of the SAT I. According to Feldman, the SAT was designed to predict the grades of freshmen at elite colleges. Those who scored high on the test would supposedly do well in college, and higher scores were supposed to indicate higher intelligence.
"If first-year grades represent intelligence, then the SAT is a decent measure," Feldman said. "I think most of us would agree that intelligence encompasses more than how you do as a freshman, though."
Feldman sees the changes as a response to the University of California President Richard Atkinson's threat to eliminate the SAT as a requirement for admission. The College Board has acknowledged that this criticism affected the decision to revise the SAT I test. If the University of California drops the SAT I test as an admissions requirement, the College Board will experience a drop in the number of test takers.
"The possible changes in the test are... driven by business considerations and have little to do with changing perspectives on the nature of intelligence," Feldman said. Howard Greene, president and founder of Educational Consulting Centers, Inc and premier personal educational counselor, agrees the changes being considered have a purely financial basis.
"They're really basically reacting to the potential loss of a significant number of test takers, especially if the California system stops taking the SAT I," Greene said. "They're non-profit but they're driven by the membership and the number of people who take these tests." The University of California system is the largest public university system in the US and generates more SAT test takers than any other system. It has threatened to create its own test for admissions to replace the SAT.
Chiara Coletti, Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs for the College Board, denies that the change is a business decision.
"There are really no losses to us," she said. "The SAT II is something [the UC system] would want to use more of. A test all of their own is something we could help them develop and they certainly invited us to do so."
Coletti claims that the changes are actually financially detrimental to the College Board, as opposed to being a way of keeping the bottom line steady.
"If we change the SAT as we may well do, it will be very expensive for us... because developing tests is a very costly thing," she said. "It's enormously expensive; however, that's never stopped the College Board from changing its tests."
Tufts Dean of Admissions David Cuttino is disappointed in the failure of the College Board to involve its membership in the creation of this proposal. Cuttino says that as a member of the College Board, he has been given as much information about the proposed changes as anyone who reads the newspapers and visits the College Board web site has been given.
"The board has made an announcement without engaging its membership, so we're all left wondering what we are really talking about," he said. "So what you'd like to have are proposals that have some documentation and study behind them that reflect why you want to move in this direction or what you're trying to fix."
Cuttino says that the College Board has not shown its members any regression analysis on testing or any evidence that the new test will maintain the statistical validity of the previous format of the SAT. Cuttino has not had the opportunity to speak with the College Board directly about this issue, but has had some brief conversations with people involved in the College Board.
"We're hoping to be able to bring together a group of people to try to engage this conversation so we can have an understanding not only of what's being discussed, but also the possibility of raising a voice," Cuttino said.
According to Coletti, a writing sample was considered as far back as 1990. The proposal to create a writing sample portion of the test was defeated because some members of the College Board felt that minority students who speak English as a second language would be at a disadvantage. Coletti does not believe this to be an issue.
"There are organizations that say [any standardized] testing is detrimental to students who speak English as a second language," Coletti said. She added that she does not believe testing should be eliminated for this brand of reasoning.
But Greene believes that the writing sample will create a significant obstacle for high school students who speak English as a second language and for disadvantaged students whose high schools may not offer opportunities for extensive writing.
"Anyone for whom English is a second language will find writing is the single hardest task," Greene said.
By adding these sections, which are intended to focus more on classroom learning, the College Board will create a test that closely resembles the ACT and overlaps with the SAT II writing test, according to Greene. Greene believes that in the end, problems with standardized testing could be alleviated by eliminating the SAT I completely, and focusing on the SAT II.
"The SAT I has very little correlation with predicting college success," he said. "The SAT IIs have more positive predictive value."
Greene added that when he served as an associate director of admissions at Princeton University, there was an unofficial policy that greater emphasis should be placed on the SAT II's than the SAT I.
"The SAT II's really do reward students who have worked hard and taken an enriched high school curriculum," Greene said. "The SAT I doesn't have any real value in showing that."
Cuttino agrees that the SAT IIs reflect solid academic performance, but added that students from advantaged backgrounds who attend higher caliber high schools tend to perform better on the SAT II tests than do minority students and disadvantaged students.
"The advantage of the SAT Is is for students who have aptitude but may not have had the same kind of opportunities as other students," he said. "What is the achievement of the student? That is the best indicator. It tells you about willingness to take advantage of opportunities."
