As many of you know I am not a huge fan of standardized testing. Rather, I view it as one of the issues that for good or bad, we must acknowledge in dealing with college admissions.
However, each year a few more schools seem to join the ranks of those colleges that no longer require standardized testing. Now a new report joins those which have previously been critical of the use of the SAT in college admissions.
“Reflections on a Century of College Admissions Tests” is a new report out by Richard Atkinson, a former president of the University of California system and Saul Geiser, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.
While president of the University of California system, Richard Atkinson was instrumental in the threats to the College Board that the UC system would stop using the SAT unless changes were made. This was the precusor to the 2005 changes to the SAT.
This new report is significant in that the authors suggest that colleges should do away with the SAT and instead rely on SAT subject tests. Here is a quote from the abstract of the article:
Curriculum-based achievement tests are the fairest and most effective assessments for college admissions and have important incentive or “signaling effects” for our K-12 schools as well: They help reinforce a rigorous academic curriculum and create better alignment of teaching, learning, and assessment all along the pathway from high school to college.
The authors discuss a brief history of the SAT before discussing what they feel are the failings of the SAT including the 2005 revision. The authors make it clear that they are not opposed to standardized testing in college admissions but rather feel that a broad based test such as the SAT in unnecessary.
If you have an interest in learning more about this test that has been so influential in college admissions in the past 100 years, this is an interesting read.
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