FairTest has been a watchdog for the testing industry for many years.
The latest news is that the SAT will be overhauled (again), this time to align it with the Common Core standards.
No big surprise, since the head of the College Board, David Coleman, was the lead player in developing the Common Core standards.
Fairtest reports that more than 800 colleges and universities no longer require the SAT for admission.
A test coaching industry has grown up to prep students for the SAT.
Thus, one’s SAT scores have become, more than ever, an indicator of a family’s ability to pay for test prep.
The FairTest newsletter reports:
“Responding to the College Board’s ongoing failure to address the exam’s flaws, the number of schools dropping the SAT has surged. Since 2005, nearly 90 colleges and universities have eliminated testing requirements for all or many applicants. That brings the total to more than 800. The test-optional list now includes 140 institutions ranked in the top tier of their respective categories by U.S. News & World Report.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Our school is going with the SAT battery of tests for the Common Core. It makes sense now. If colleges stop requiring the SAT, they’ll make high schools require it. SOMEBODY needs to require their tests or they’ll be out of work.
The demise of the SAT (greatly welcome by this parent) is another indicator in my mind that our public school system is even more important than ever before. I’m in favor of growing public school education while investing our public resources into hiring more teachers, raising their pay levels while expanding curriculum offerings to boost opportunities for skills development. Maybe college should be delayed by several years?
Let’s admit it, the trillion-dollar plus debt that students/families now owe in tuition fees is outrageous. It’s preventing generations of students and their families from becoming economically stable while creating even more poverty. The middle class has been reduced to a figure of speech for describing the “working” poor. I’m not against going to college but I’m no longer certain that it’s the next step after high school graduation.
It’s all about $$$. Corp cannot afford to lose the college testing industry. Student debt is out of control, but lucrative for many companies and banks.Teaching provides an out for many college graduates by working for TFA and their student debts go away, if they make it through teaching. Then they can go on to a ‘real’ profession. The money made off public school children could pay for private boarding school in Switzerland for every child in the USA. But, it is only making fat cats fatter.
Small differences in SAT scores do not seem to be informative. Large differences, however, seem to be correlated with retention and faster graduation.
Interesting list…
Sent from my iPad
Of course, there will be a new test! And testing companies will be paid to develop it and score it. And there will be books and courses and more money coming out of the coffers of taxpayers and parents. The more change, the better for these people.
I enjoy how amazed my students are when I tell them that I never took SATs and yet somehow went to college, grad school, and have a rewarding professional life anyway.
Yes, I also never took SATs and yet somehow went to college, grad school (4.0 GPA), and have a rewarding professional life anyway.
No need for an SAT or ACT exam at my university. All that is required for automatic is a C average in high school. If a students is unable to achieve that, a sufficiently high ACT score will work or graduation in the top third of the high school class. We have a 93% acceptance rate and about 80% of our students make it past the first year.
Google helped me learn that there are over 7,000 institutions of higher education in this country (the list includes online institutions). The FairTest site actually lists 850 institutions (Including some online) that do not require ALL of their students to take the SAT. Over two hundred of these institutions listed consider the SAT scores under certain conditions. So no, the test has not gone away.
It SHOULD go away, though.
College enrollment specialists say that their research finds the SAT predicts between 3 and 15 percent of freshman-year college grades, and after that nothing. As one commented, “I might as well measure their shoe size.” Matthew Quirk reported this in “The Best Class Money Can Buy:”
“The ACT and the College Board don’t just sell hundreds of thousands of student profiles to schools; they also offer software and consulting services that can be used to set crude wealth and test-score cutoffs, to target or eliminate students before they apply…That students are rejected on the basis of income is one of the most closely held secrets in admissions; enrollment managers say the practice is far more prevalent than most schools let on.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/11/the-best-class-money-can-buy/4307/2/
At my institution ACT scores do a reasonably good job predicting persistence. Perhaps that is because we enroll students with a far grater range of scores than most colleges or universities.
Schools and teachers are inundated with curricular and testing mandates. It’s all about to get even worse with the onset of the Common Core Standards, and the value-added evaluations (funded by Bill Gates) that accompany the standards testing.
And yep, you guessed it. The College Board –- maker of the PSAT, SAT, and AP -– is “a strong advocate for and played an active role in the development of the Common Core State Standards…the College Board helped draft the standards.”
And – another big surprise! –– the College Board finds that all of its products are in “strong alignment” with theCommon Core standards. How do we know that? Why, the College Board “studied” it and said so.
Yeah, the same College Board that recently hired David Coleman, former McKinsey consultant and treasurer of disgraced former DC chancellor Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst, as its new president. And the very same College Board that hired Stefanie Sanford, former policy director for Texas Governor Rick Perry and “director of advocacy” for the Gates Foundation. In hiring her, Coleman praised her “remarkable track record of delivering results” and her “success in building…partnerships based on shared data and evidence.”
The ultimate purpose of the Common Core standards is to “best” position the U.S. “to compete successfully in the global economy.”
But the U.S. already IS internationally competitive. The World Economic Forum ranks nations each year on competitiveness. The U.S. is usually in the top five (if not 1 or 2). When it drops, the WEF doesn’t cite education, but stupid economic decisions and policies.
For example, when the U.S. dropped from 2nd to 4th in 2010-11, four factors were cited by the WEF for the decline: (1) weak corporate auditing and reporting standards, (2) suspect corporate ethics, (3) big deficits (brought on by Wall Street’s financial implosion) and (4) unsustainable levels of debt.
Last year (2011-12), major factors cited by the WEF are a “business community” and business leaders who are “critical toward public and private institutions,” a lack of trust in politicians and the political process with a lack of transparency in policy-making, and “a lack of macroeconomic stability” caused by decades of fiscal deficits, especially deficits and debt accrued over the last decade that “are likely to weigh heavily on the country’s future growth.” The WEF did NOT cite public schools as being problematic to innovation and competitiveness.
And this year (2012-13) the WEF dropped the U.S. to 7th place, citing problems like “increasing inequality and youth unemployment” and, environmentally, “the United States is among the countries that have ratified the fewest environmental treaties.“ The WEF noted that in the U.S.,”the business community continues to be critical toward public and private institutions” and “trust in politicians is not strong.” Political dysfunction has led to “a lack of macroeconomic stability” that “continues to be the country’s greatest area of weakness.”
But the corporate “reformers,” who profess allegiance to “research” and “data,” just keep ignoring what the research and data show.
There’s a reason for that.