The College Board, the non-profit organization that administers the SAT examination, has announced that the exam will go digital and will be “easier to take, easier to give, and more relevant”. Relevant to what, you ask? Well, that may indeed be the most difficult question SAT-takers will have to answer.
As reported in the WSJ, greater than 76% of colleges no longer mandate an entrance examination, making the test optional. Apparently woke higher education has predictably decided that the tests are biased against lower income students and students of color. You know by now the way this plays out; the conclusion is that the test naturally favors white people of privilege. Yeah, you people. All this despite statistics that show Asians, regardless of their wealth, inconveniently appear to be unaffected by their socio-economic status or their color, and consistently outperform their white-skinned counterparts. Just ask Harvard. And this reduction in using this time honored yardstick is according to FairTest, yet another non-profit organization that has been pushing for a “more limited use of standardized tests”. Interestingly, the WSJ reported that Bob Schaeffer, the executive director of FairTest, called this change to the SAT “nothing more than a marketing ploy” that “wouldn’t make the test more fair or valid for assessing college readiness.” Uh-huh. So what exactly would make the test fair or valid, Bob? Or are standardized tests to be abolished completely? And if so, how exactly are students going to be evaluated for admission to university? Is this new test indeed a marketing strategy to compete against the ACT, or is this simply a dumbing down of the examination to make it more inclusive? And by inclusive, I mean to satisfy the new requirement that equality is not enough, but equity must be satisfied. Recall the distinction: equality implies equal opportunity and access to become qualified, whereas equity implies equal results, regardless of qualification. An important distinction and a dangerous proposition.
Well, to answer that, consider first the explanation of changes to the SAT from Priscilla Rodriguez, vice-president of College Readiness Assessments at the College Board. Really, that’s a thing. Again to the WSJ: “the new test will take about two hours, down from three. Reading passages will be shorter and will be followed by a single question, and math problems will be less wordy. Calculators will be allowed for all math questions.” You’ve got to be kidding. Is this test specifically designed to bring up the scores of kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder? Is this in response to our remote-educated, Covid-cloistered generation, unable to sit still long enough to take an exam, unable to focus on a simple paragraph well enough to answer more than one question, unable to cope with a complex word problem and completely devoid of basic math skills? Is this a test for college admission or to be a cashier at WalMart? It’s embarrassing.
Is this perhaps another attempt by the left to guarantee equal outcomes for all? Equity versus equality. A friend of mine, a surgeon, related this story to me about his experience with the equity discussion, I will allow him to tell it:
“I once had the pleasure of spending time with enlisted men in our armed services at a training facility down south. I was, at the time still completing my schooling. In a clerical error, I was assigned to a dorm room with two enlisted men when I was supposed to be assigned to officer’s quarters. I didn’t know, and having been a student used to dormitories, I thought nothing of it. We weren’t separated by color, but our socio-economic gap was wide. I was from the middle-class northeast, university educated. They were both mechanics, with high school educations, white boys, from poor rural America, the deep South. They had enlisted right out of high school. They were my age, bright, remarkably astute, and despite one of them having a virtually unintelligible southern drawl, we got along handsomely. One evening after consuming far too much beer, one of them opined: “you know, if I grew up where you did, I could be a doctor.”
“Maybe” I answered, “did you ever try?
“I never really thought about college and I wasn’t much of a student”, he answered, “I was always good with my hands.”
“Never too late”, I answered.
“Naw, I just didn’t have the opportunity,” he said.
But was it opportunity, or commitment, or a matter of ambition? Was it his family not instilling that in him, or no one to point the way? We mulled over that for a while.
“And some of it may just be talent that got me here”, he finally suggested, “I was always a good mechanic, and you must’ve been good at science.”
“That may have a lot to do with it, getting channeled into what you’re good at”, I said. “For example, I don’t think I could do your job as well as you. I like to think I could grasp it intellectually, but I don’t have that mechanical aptitude.”
“I never really thought of it that way”, he said.
I continued, “Its interesting that people would like toconsider everyone to be intellectually equal, yet readily acknowledge that there are stark differences between us physically. I could have access to all the training and facilities of an Olympic sprinter, but I do not have the physical attributes to ever become one, no matter how hard I try. Further, I may not have the drive, the commitment, the mental toughness to ever reach that level of achievement. Why isn’t it considered the same for intellect?”
We thought about that for a while. And so it was that two slightly inebriated twenty-somethings from two vastly different backgrounds had come to a consensus. You can be whatever you want to be in America, but there has to be some way of making an assessment, of figuring out if you have the potential and the ability to succeed at something.And that goes for both the student and the admissions committee. The SAT has been that standard, flawed as it may be, for college admissions. What possibly can replace it? Surely not race based admissions. And socio-economic indicators are equally as absurd. This fascination with race as a determinant has reached all the way to the White House where Biden has proclaimed the qualifications for the next Supreme Court justice to be female and Black above all. And is this good for America, good for our future? Of course not. Do you want your surgeon to have been chosen by their race or their talent in the health sciences? Do you want the engineer responsible for the safety systems on your aircraft to be chosen because of their diversity or their excellence in their field? Do you want your children’s teachers selected on the basis of their woke ideology or their academic excellence? Do you want your President chosen…….oh, never mind.
If anyone is even questioning whether China will overtake us in the new world order, I think the SAT just answered the question for you. With the teacher’s union running our schools like their own personal fiefdom, academics overshadowed by Covid restrictions, trans-gender bathrooms, personal pronouns, critical race theory, and a rigorous curriculum supplanted by the convenience of remote learning, we are producing perhaps the most ill-prepared generation in our history to cope with an increasingly complex world. And when these pampered,intellectually stunted children come of age, will we be ableto separate the wheat from the chaff? Not with these testing standards. They will be selected for higher education based not on their merit but some squishy algorithm of community and likeability coupled with the color of their skin and a warped definition of what constitutes privilege. They will be selected to be the doctors of tomorrow, the CEOs, the supposed innovators, the engineers, chosen not by their technological prowess but by some bizarre social construct. Have the Chinese shortened their school days or the length of a school year? Do they take summers off and send their students home without homework on the weekends? Are they concerned with new definitions of gender and diversity or are they more concerned with providing their students with a solid foundation in STEM and the ability to critically read and write? You already know the answer to that. Let’s hope those are the questions on the new SAT.
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