I've been reading about the history of the SAT test and am interested in discussing the pros and cons of the requirement from academic and cultural values perspectives. An increasing number of 4-year higher education institutions are becoming SAT optional or flexible, currently about 850*. That's significantly about 28% of the roughly 3000**.
I'm personally opposed to the requirement as I believe that success in high school, passion, extra-curricular activities and sometimes personal history (only when offered) are the best predictors of academic performance in college. A number just makes ranking and selection convenient, yet ranks what?
from an interview with Nicholas Lemann author of "The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy"
(Conant and Chauncey fathered the SAT)
*** "Do you think that Conant's vision or Henry Chauncey's vision has been corrupted or perverted? Or do you think it has been fulfilled?
I think if Conant were alive, and you asked what he would say. He would say, the system works in a certain way very, very well. What it does very, very well is produce highly trained professionals who are the best in the world. America has really good professors. It has really good doctors. It has really good scientists. It's very important to Conant to create a group of highly skilled technicians at the top of the society. That would be, I think, the thing he was proudest of.
I think there's no way he could look at America today and say, my dreams of a classless society have been--have been fulfilled. I think what would disappoint him is that the system turned out to be, you know, more friendly to the creation and preservation of inherited privilege than he dreamed. And much less friendly to the kind of, you know, big government, liberal society that he wanted to create.
How has test prep changed over the years?
When I was growing up in Louisiana, I was very vaguely aware of test prep, and nobody I knew took test prep. Nobody really worried that much about this whole process. In the world I'm in now on the East Coast, test prep is one of the Stations of the Cross for the upper-middle class of America. And it seems like everybody takes test prep. And everybody has a sort of testing awareness. Even shockingly little kids. There just is this culture of obsession about the SATs that is creepy and unhealthy. It really distorts education because it leads to a very instrumental view of education, that education is about what scores you get on these tests. And it kind of undervalues things like going off and reading a book.
Towns, particularly suburban towns, go insane over their average test scores. Not just SATs but other tests too. I live in a town where the good news is, everybody goes to public school, and the bad news, if it is bad news, is test scores are just supremely important. And the reason they're important is because of real estate values."
* http://www.fairtest.org/university/optional
** https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84
*** http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/interviews/lemann.html
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