By: Jennifer Karan, Executive Director of the SAT Program at the College Board
A recent poll on the Colorado Hometown Weekly website asked readers: “Has the emphasis on standardized testing improved or reduced the quality of education in public schools?”
Sadly, respondents were given the following false and reductive choices as answers:
- It has improved the education level by holding schools and educators accountable for student achievement.
- It has reduced the quality of education through the practice of teaching primarily to the test material.
The SAT is often included in these broad categorizations of standardized tests, but it really doesn’t belong there. The SAT was never intended to be nor should it be used as a stand-alone teacher evaluation tool. It is, at its essence, a college readiness evaluation of individual students and was created to democratize access to college for all students. In fact, the SAT encourages students to apply themselves: its results actually reinforce the critical role that high school course-taking patterns and academic rigor play in college-readiness; year in and year out, students who complete a core curriculum perform better on the SAT than those who did not. And it ultimately serves a neutralizer on the impact of grade inflation. Not only do grades and grading practices vary among schools, districts and states, the overall GPA of high school graduates has increased nearly half a point in the last decade, while college remediation and completion rates would suggest many of these students are not prepared for the rigors of college.
As a nation, we need to improve the dialogue we have about our educational system and what we want out of it. Perhaps a common goal upon which we can all agree is the need to increase the understanding of what our teachers do and what testing is designed to achieve.
