From the issue dated July 12, 2002
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Debate Over the SAT Masks Perilous Trends in College AdmissionsBy LEE BOLLINGERHigher education always seems to generate controversy. Over the past decade, for example, we have seen enormous debate about rising tuitions, the scope of freedom
By far the most important controversy of the past several decades has been the constitutional-policy debates over affirmative action, or the effort to achieve diversity on our campuses by considering race and ethnicity as factors in the admissions process. But another significant debate about admissions policies has also recently emerged over the utility and social effects of the SAT. The president of the University of California, Richard C. Atkinson, brought the SAT to the forefront of national attention last year, when he proposed, at a meeting of the American Council on Education, that the California system no longer require the test for admission. He recommended that it be replaced with some group of SAT II or other achievement-oriented tests -- those that evaluate how well students have mastered specific subjects taught in high school. According to Atkinson, the SAT I pursues the futile and harmful goal of measuring an individual's "aptitude," or some general mental capacity. In his own words, he said: "Aptitude tests like the SAT I have an historical tie to the concept of innate mental abilities -- that such abilities can be defined and that it is possible to measure them. Neither notion has been supported by modern research." Atkinson has cited recent analyses of the predictive validity of the SAT I showing that it adds little to what achievement tests and grades already provide to admissions officials. But his principal objections to the SAT I appear to be that it has unfortunate and distorting consequences in our educational system, at both the high-school and college levels. Atkinson argues that the general testing of "aptitude" diminishes the significance of regular high-school courses and leads schools and students to waste valuable educational time in fruitless "prepping" for the test. And yet perhaps the most grievous injury of the SAT I, in his eyes, is that it undermines the ability of colleges and universities to judge students "on the basis of their actual achievements, not on ill-defined notions of aptitude." To a large degree, according to Atkinson, the SAT I is a test of "nature" -- something that students can do little or nothing about. Atkinson's comments have set in motion much public discussion and several significant changes. The College Board has just announced that it will revise the format and content of the test. It will add a writing section and more-advanced mathematics, and will eliminate the analogies section. Meanwhile, the University of California system, besides working with the College Board on its new test, is discussing with ACT, Inc. -- which also develops standardized tests -- the addition of a writing assessment to that exam. This is a helpful debate to have. Schools, educators, teachers, and students seem not to have a sense of the pedagogical rationale for the SAT I and the verbal and mathematical skills that it seeks to gauge. Is it really a test that purports to measure innate intellectual capacity? Or is it a test of some important intellectual capacities that can be learned and improved upon over time -- perhaps even by mastering what we regard as regular subjects and courses? Unfortunately, neither the College Board nor the Educational Testing Service, which engineered the SAT, has sent a consistent message about such matters. When the College Board and ETS created the SAT, they described the exam as an aptitude test and asserted that it was not subject to coaching. Later, the College Board and ETS said that the SAT was not an aptitude test but a test of reasoning skills. They changed the test's name from the Scholastic Aptitude Test to the Scholastic Assessment Test and then to simply the SAT, which did not stand for anything. Or, at least, the "A" was not to stand for anything -- presumably it stood for "anything but aptitude." Now they acknowledge that the test is coachable, but not nearly as much as some commercial coaches claim. But it is, they assert, eminently teachable. Indeed, they emphatically argue that it is not too coachable, but is highly teachable. My sense is that in this they are right: The best way to do well on the SAT is not to try to cram for it, but to be a good student over the long term -- by reading and writing as much as possible, learning to use language effectively, taking hard courses, thinking critically, and solving problems in and out of school. But it's hard to make the case that the public views and behaves toward the SAT in that way. One hears, at least anecdotally, that many high schools "teach to the test" -- they focus just on improving vocabulary and practicing on sample tests. At the very least, students should have a greater understanding that the intellectual capacities that the SAT seeks to test can best be learned by studying over an extended period of time -- not weeks but years. That might serve to mitigate the sense of hopelessness and despair -- of inherent unfairness. It is not a small point to say that how we go about selecting young people ought to err on the side of nurturing a sense of hope, not hopelessness. As educators and those responsible for administering the public trusts of colleges and universities, we must be concerned about perceptions of the SAT -- and the consequences of those perceptions. Equally important, we should identify and respond to the underlying issues and not simply to the articulated ones. On top of the annual frenzied concern about SAT scores during the admissions process, we have had the extraordinary, and highly unexpected, public response to Atkinson's proposal about the test. "I was unprepared," Atkinson says with evident understatement, "for the intense public reaction" to his remarks. Both The Washington Post and The New York Times carried articles on their front pages. But is all the commotion simply about the test itself? I doubt it. The SAT has become a symbol -- or, in the language of literary criticism, the objective correlative (that is, the object that correlates to the emotion) -- of all the anxieties, concerns, fears, and frustrations in the college-admissions system. The underlying issue, I am forced to conclude, is not, in fact, the test, but rather the nature, character, and degree of competition now endemic in college admissions -- and in higher education generally. Projecting all of our negative feelings onto the SAT is reminiscent of society's focus, a decade or so ago, on the rising costs of higher education. Those costs were, and are, a real and large concern, but that concern was laden with worries and anger about other issues, many of which reflected a widening cultural gap between the academy and the nation as a whole. Many people increasingly lost confidence in the academy. There was concern about political correctness, a sense of an excessive emphasis on research and graduate education at the expense of undergraduate education, and a feeling that faculty members were underworked and overindulged. Today, a more fundamental issue facing higher education is, in fact, the rise of a particular kind of competition among college applicants. That competition is, in some ways, fueled by basic principles of supply and demand. While the number of high-quality colleges and universities has increased over the past half century, the number of students desiring to attend such institutions has grown much faster. Many more high-school students than ever before are concluding that a secondary-school education is simply not enough to win admission to the choice colleges. That trend should not come as a surprise, given that one's prospects in life, material and otherwise, improve exponentially with every degree obtained beyond high school. But, as is always true, the numbers tell only part of the story. Now more than ever, people believe that the ranking -- or the presupposed hierarchy of "quality" or "prestige" -- of the college or university one attends matters, and matters enormously. More than ever before, education is being viewed as a commodity. All the effects and consequences of the ever-escalating need to attend, or have one's children attend, the "right" college are plain for anyone to see. One can purchase the "right" house or the "right" car, but one cannot simply buy admission to the "right" college or university. And the college one attends is not like a social club that one can quit. Rather, it is one's "alma mater," a mark that, for better or worse, one carries for life. People believe, in an urgent way, that the college one attends will, as Robert Frost says, although ambiguously, make "all the difference." Within that worldview, it is natural that standardized-test scores have become the prominent lightning rod for everyone's admissions anxiety. After all, they are clear, crisp, and numerical -- and not subject to the whims of personal judgment. The large and fundamental problem is that we are at risk of it all seeming and becoming increasingly a game. What matters is less the education and more the brand. In this competitive struggle, we seek clarity. It is no wonder, then, that numerical rankings, like U.S. News & World Report's annual listings of "best colleges," should emerge to guide thousands of students and their parents. It is no wonder that those rankings should depend increasingly on numerical and quantifiable data, such as the average SAT scores of each institution's entering class. And it is no wonder that selective colleges and universities should themselves adjust their behavior over time, to some extent, to improve their status in the rankings and thereby improve their attractiveness to potential students. An institution might determine the size of a class, for instance, not based on educational considerations but on what size would yield the highest average standardized-test scores. Unfortunately, other examples abound. The tentacles of this competitive thinking have the potential to reach into every corner of the intellectual life of higher education. Colleges and universities, to be sure, should not be immune from competition. Enormous improvements can occur because applicants, students, faculty members, and others can walk away and go elsewhere. But not all forms of competition are equal. We must never forget that much of what makes colleges and universities special and, over the long run, socially important is both highly fragile and counterintuitive in a democratic, freemarket system. One of the most-negative aspects of the game atmosphere of college admissions is the sense of individual entitlement that grows naturally out of the process -- a sense that says, "If I have achieved these things, these scores, relative to my competitors, I deserve to be treated accordingly." Each person, according to that way of thinking, should be compared or ranked against every other person. The result is pressure toward homogenization within our institutions, instead of diversity, because everyone is measured by the same narrow yardstick. We in higher education have not done a good job of articulating our theories of education and of explaining how they relate to our admissions policies. We have not adequately made the case for why we have any admissions policy other than admitting the best and the brightest students we can find -- however that is defined, and not uncommonly by reference to SAT scores. Our society's narrow, atomistic perspective on admissions is tied intimately to the current debates about the constitutionality and educational wisdom of affirmative action, in which I have been, and am, an active participant. Fortunately, a federal appeals court recently upheld the University of Michigan Law School's use of affirmative action in admissions by ruling that it had a compelling state interest in achieving a diverse student body. And yet what concerns me deeply is that many people in our society still do not appreciate the educational and, indeed, the democratic importance of learning and thinking in a diverse, heterogeneous environment. A great benefit of the current debate over affirmative action is that it has permitted us to appreciate and to argue for the advantages that flow from diversity of all kinds -- not just racial and ethnic diversity. We have been able to situate racial and ethnic diversity at the core of a liberal education, which is where it properly belongs. The best way I know to make the point is to cite Shakespeare's art and its unquestioned inclusion in a liberal education. Why does everyone subscribe to this? Partly because, as many have observed over the centuries, Shakespeare had an uncanny genius for crossing into different characters' minds. Within a few lines, within a few minutes of a play, one has the distinct impression of a particular human being, one who thinks and feels and reacts in unique ways. That capacity for empathy is, in large part, what exposure in an educational context to diversity involves -- the opportunity to come to a greater understanding of others' points of view and how their life experiences might have caused them to be who they are and form the opinions that they hold. Racial diversity is particularly important because race remains, alas, the "American dilemma." But it is also important because grappling with race is a powerful metaphor for crossing sensibilities of all kinds, and crossing sensibilities is part of the core of Shakespeare's genius and of a great education. The character of competition that we face today in higher education involves the admissions process and also transcends it. Not all competition is bad, by any means, but some types of competition can fuel a distorted and oversimplified conception of what "quality" in education and research entails. It would be a great pity if one of the harsh consequences of that tendency were the elimination of our proud history of educational diversity in all its forms. That is why the debates about the validity and broader consequences of standardized tests like the SAT are of utmost importance. And that is why, in those discussions, it is critical that we consider how such tests affect societal attitudes about education and, most important, how the specific controversies over those tests are symptomatic of a far more profound set of underlying concerns. Lee Bollinger is the president of Columbia University and a former president of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. This article is adapted from a speech he presented at a conference of the College Board. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B11
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education