The Pursuit of Knowledge: Speeches and Papers of Richard C. Atkinson

College Admissions and the SAT:A Personal Perspective

165 College Admissions and the SAT: A Personal Perspective April 2004 My intent in this paper is to offer a personal perspective on the events that led to a major change in the college admissions test known as the SAT. The new test will be in place for all students —nationwide—who must take the SAT as part of the admissions process for the college class entering in the fall of 2006. Hopefully, this account will be useful to those trying to change policies and practices deeply entrenched in our society. Before I begin, let me introduce some terminology. By the term standardized test, I mean simply a test administered under controlled conditions and carefully monitored to prevent cheating . I will also use the terms aptitude test and achievement test. Achievement tests are designed to measure mastery of a speci fic subject. In contrast, aptitude tests are designed to predict an individual’s ability to profit from a particular type of training or instruction. For example, an algebra test given at the end of a course would be classified as an achievement test, whereas a test given prior to the course—designed to predict the student’s performance in the algebra course—would be classified as an aptitude test. In actual practice, the distinction between achievement and aptitude tests is not as neat as these definitions might suggest, but the conceptual difference is useful. After World War II, colleges and universities in the United States gradually adopted standardized tests as part of their admissions process. The test that was most widely selected was the Scholastic Aptitude Test, known as the SAT. Some schools used the American College Testing program [ACT], but most institutions , particularly the more selective ones, chose the SAT. The College Board (the nonprofit organization that owns the SAT) has made a series of changes in the test since its inception. The original SAT became the SAT I—a three-hour test that continued to focus on verbal aptitude but added a quantitative section covering mathematical topics typically taught in grades one through eight. In addition, the College Board developed twenty-three one-hour SAT II tests designed to measure a student ’s achievement in specific subjects such as physics, chemistry , history, mathematics, writing, and foreign languages. Most colleges and universities required just the SAT I, but some required the SAT I plus two or three SAT II tests. Today, when the SAT is mentioned in the media, the reference is invariably to the SAT I. The test has become a key factor in determining who is admitted—and who is rejected—at the more selective institutions. My concerns about the SAT date back to the late 1940s, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. Many of the Chicago faculty were outspoken critics of the SAT and 166 / Achievement versus Aptitude College Admissions and the SAT / 167 viewed it as nothing more than a multiple-choice version of an IQ test; they argued forcefully for achievement tests in the college -admissions process. Their opposition may have been influenced to some degree by school rivalry: the leading force behind the SAT at that time was James B. Conant, the president of Harvard University. Eventually, Chicago adopted the SAT, but not without controversy. In the years after leaving the University of Chicago, I followed the debates about the SAT and IQ tests with great interest . I knew that Carl Brigham, a psychologist at Princeton who created the original SAT, modeled the test after earlier IQ tests and regarded it as a measure of innate mental ability . But years later he expressed doubts about the validity of the SAT and worried that preparing for the test distorted the educational experience of high school students. Harvard’s President Conant also expressed serious reservations about the test later in his life. When students asked me about IQ testing, I frequently referred them to Stephen Jay Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man, published in 1981. It is a remarkable piece of scholarship that documented the widespread misuse of IQ tests. I knew both Dick Herrnstein at Harvard and Art Jensen at U.C. Berkeley personally and kept track of their controversial work on IQ. And, of course, I was a long-term member of the faculty at Stanford University, where the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales were developed. Over the intervening years...