Carl Brigham, the inventor of the SAT was a eugenicist. He conceived the test for the military and, to his credit, disowned it five years later, rejecting eugenics at the same time. However several Ivy League schools had begun to use it as a measure of applicant acceptability. For almost seventy years most American colleges have used it or the similar ACT as an essential part of their screening processes, thought some colleges are beginning to rely upon it less.
The SAT, as with standardized tests generally only measures a certain kind of intelligence; it does it in an impersonal way; it attempts to make common assumptions about the college potential of a hugely varied group of teenagers in a one-size-fits-all fashion; and it drives high school juniors and seniors to spend hundreds of hours preparing for it at the expense of school study or other areas of interest. The founder of the Princeton Review writes: "What makes the SAT bad is that it has nothing to do with what kids learn in high school. As a result, it creates a sort of shadow curriculum that furthers the goals of neither educators nor students. . . The SAT has been sold as snake oil; it measured intelligence, verified high school GPA, and predicted college grades. In fact, it's never done the first two at all, nor a particularly good job at the third."
Yet students who don't test well or who aren't particularly strong at the kind of reasoning the SAT assesses can find themselves making compromises on their collegiate futures---all because we've come to accept that intelligence comes with a number. We've come to define intelligence too narrowly.
--
Regards,
John Jenkins
865-803-8179 cell
Gatlinburg, TN
Email: jrjenki@gmail.com
Website: http://www.greenbriersolutions.com
Blog: http://littlepigeon.blogspot.com/
"Hail to the Chief" was written for James Madison because he was so short that no one ever noticed when he entered the room.
No comments:
Post a Comment