Michael Hynes, Superintendent of the Patchogue-Medford School District on Long Island in New York, writes here about the tyranny of the College Board, which rules over the lives of students by supplying expensive tests of limited value. He says it is time to slay the dragon.
“For the reader who doesn’t know what The College Board is: it is the ultimate gatekeeper and judge-jury-executioner for millions of students each year who dream to enter college and it literally is a hardship for many families due to the test taking expense.
“Schools and families have no other choice because there is no other game in town, aside from a student taking the ACT exam.
“The College Board claims to be a non-profit organization, but it’s hard to take that claim seriously when its exam fees for the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), Advanced Placement test (AP), services for late registration, score verification services and a multitude of other related fees are costing families and schools millions of dollars each year.
“Eleven years ago this “non-profit” made a profit of $55 million and paid nineteen College Board Executives’ salaries that ranged from three hundred thousand dollars to over one million dollars a year.
“That trend continues today.
“Cost aside, it is hard to fathom and understand how the College Board has claimed a monopoly-like status over our public school system.
“Over the years it has literally convinced school administrators, school board trustees, teachers, parents and students they can’t live without what they sell. They sell classes and tests to schools like Big Pharma sells pills to consumers.
“They sell as much as they can and jack up the prices just enough where most people won’t complain. They have convinced my beloved public education system, the university system and pretty much the solar system that if students don’t take the PSAT, the SAT and now multiple Advanced Placement tests during a child’s tenure in high school, then those students won’t be competitive and have the same opportunities to be successful in life as the ones who drink the College Board Kool-Aide.
“We bought this story hook, line and sinker without many of us asking the question…why and how did we let this get so out of control?”
Time to slay the dragon.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
““Schools and families have no other choice because there is no other game in town, aside from a student taking the ACT exam.”
I don’t buy that. First, there are over 800 no-test or test-optional colleges and universities, so families certainly have choices. As far as schools, who says schools have to force-administer these tests? I can see schools offering them at no expense for students who (a) are college bound, (b) can’t afford to pay for them themselves and (c) choose to take the tests. But on what planet should every high school student be forced to take the ACT or the SAT? And on what planet can schools claim they have no choice in the matter?
This comment is spot-on. Thank you.
The ACT is getting more market share every year so if a kid does have to take a standardized test, he or she can just take the ACT instead.
Every single school — from Harvard to flagship state universities to city colleges — accepts the ACT. And if you take the ACT, you don’t even have to take SAT subject tests at most schools. Just one exam.
I’ve been saying for quite some time on this blog that the College Board and its products are bogus.
Sadly, but routinely, superintendents and school boards cite SAT and AP scores as measures of “success.” Some – the real charlatans – even use those scores to get themselves awards or bonuses or promotions.
And yet, the founder of The Princeton Review, a test-prep company, had this to say about the SAT:
“The SAT is a scam…It has never measured anything. And it continues to measure nothing…does it measure intelligence? No. Does it predict college grades? No. Does it tell you how much you learned in high school? No. Does it predict life happiness or life success in any measure? No. It’s measuring nothing…”
Nicholas Lemann, author of The Big Test – all about the SAT – adds this:
“…every time somebody takes an SAT, it’s money to the ETS and the College Board. But there is something definitely weird about the psychological importance these tests have in America versus what they actually measure. And indeed, what difference do they make? Because, there’s two thousand colleges in the United States, and 1,950 of them are pretty much unselective. So, the SAT is a ticket to a few places.”
Research by college enrollment experts finds that the SAT predicts between 3 and 14 precent of the variance in freshman-year college grades, and nothing after that. As the president of a college enrollment consulting company put it, “I may as well use shoe size.”
The ACT is only marginally better.
Here’s how Bloomberg News described the “uses” and abuses of the SAT, in an article titled ‘Colleges Soak Poor U.S. Students to Funnel Aid to Rich:’
“U.S. colleges… are using financial aid to lure rich students while shortchanging the poor, forcing those most in need to take on heavy debt…To increase their standing on college rankings, more private colleges are giving ‘merit aid’ to top students, who are often affluent, while charging unaffordable prices to the needy…”
And here’s what’s even worse, as Matthew Quirk pointed out in The Atlantic:
“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…”
What about AP courses?
The research over the last decade is compelling. The National Research Council (2002) found AP math and science courses and tests to be “a mile wide and an inch deep” and inconsistent with research-based principles of learning.
In the ToolBox Revisited (2006), a statistical analysis of the factors contributing to the earning of a bachelor’s degree, Clifford Adelman found that Advanced Placement did not reach the “threshold level of significance.”
The Sadler-Klopfenstein-edited book, “AP” A Critical Examination” (2010) lays out the research that makes clear AP has become “the juggernaut of American high school education,” but “ the research evidence on its value is minimal…Students see AP courses on their transcripts as the ticket ensuring entry into the college of their choice,”
In a 2012 piece in The Atlantic, former AP teacher and Boston U professor John Tierney wrote that AP courses are “one of the great frauds currently perpetrated on American high-school students. AP courses are a forced march through a preordained subject, leaving no time for a high-school teacher to take her or his students down some path of mutual interest.”
And, a 2013 study out of Stanford concluded that “some teachers and school staff worry so deeply about the negative impact of AP courses and feel so strongly that it thwarts their ability to develop deep thinkers and engaged learners, they’ve dropped their AP program in favor of home grown honors/advanced courses that are not affiliated with AP testing…”
More schools should follow suit.
Last month, our 11th grade daughter registered for the March SAT. The College Board asked her invasive questions about family wealth & education. These questions are optional and we advised her NOT to answer them….we were suspicious they would sell the information and wondered, too, if colleges would use SES as a qualifier. Now our suspicions are confirmed. Thank you for this information. Students and families should be advised not to answer these invasive & optional questions!
No one should ever forget that the current head of the College Board (David Coleman) used the recent Parkland school shooting to promote AP.
https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2018/02/22/college-board-ceo-david-coleman-uses-florida-school-shooting-to-promote-ap-courses/
At College Board, it’s all about money and everything is seen through that lens.
See also
College Board’s Insensitive Response To Parkland Tragedy Angers Members (Willard Dix)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/willarddix/2018/02/27/college-boards-insensitive-response-to-parkland-tragedy-angers-members/#733cebbb534b
Incidentally, some members of the College Board tried to distance themselves from Coleman’s remarks, but if they were really sincere, they would have demanded Coleman’s resignation.
I usually don’t fling around words like ‘sociopath’, but the Stoneman Douglas shooting got me reading up on the subject, courtesy of links posted by commenters at other posts here. Coleman’s words ring that bell – the 50% of young folks high on the callous-unemotional scale who do not go on to violent acts and may become successfully socialized adults. His socially-acceptable buzz-words manipulate the tragedy around to his “I-me-my” agenda & barely cloak the lack of empathy.
Shameless armchair analysis, I know, & could be way off the mark. The guy needs an editor.
Yeah, that was pretty reprehensible of David Coleman.
[AP courses] “thwart their ability to develop deep thinkers and engaged learners, they’ve dropped their AP program in favor of home grown honors/advanced courses that are not affiliated with AP testing…”
Translated into English this means that whatever agreement these colleges had with CB, now they want this piece of pie for themselves.
No, it is high schools that are dropping AP.
What happened in DC is exactly like what happened in Atlanta:
“NPR reported that Ballou High School’s principal, Yetunde Reeves, used IMPACT to coerce teachers to comply with her fraudulent scheme to take the school from 57 percent graduation to 100 percent college acceptance in one year. A survey of DCPS teachers showed that almost half experienced similar pressure.
Teachers were pressured by principals because principals were pressured by Henderson. In a leaked recording, Roosevelt STAY High School principal Eugenia Young tells her teachers about her meeting with Henderson:
“We basically were ripped a new a-hole as principals. So that means that I have to come and not rip you guys a new one, but I think I have to come in and be very firm,” said Young. “And it wasn’t a conversation, it was like, what was told to us, ‘You all suck. You all suck as principals,’ which means your teams are not doing what they need to do because, right now, our promotion rate to the next grade is horrible, which will affect our graduation rate. And you all know we move four points or five points this past year, the chancellor wants to move seven points. … Just like you’re sitting here with your head blown off saying, ‘You’re flipping the switch on me,’ that’s the same thing that I said. What then he said to me was, ‘We have the right to flip the switch.’ I said, ‘You know what? You’re exactly right. So let me figure it out with my team.’ Here’s the thing: We have to pass and promote.”
It reads like the Atlanta cheating scandal report.
In my opinion part of the reason the SAT so dominates colleges is because people who did well on the SAT genuinely believe it’s a measure of relative merit. They’re invested in the test score remaining a measure of merit.
It’s hugely threatening to say it has questionable value as a measure of a person, because nearly everyone who attended an elite college relied to a greater or lesser on that score. Questioning the value of the SAT calls the entire merit structure into question, because elite colleges lead to elite jobs and all kinds of other social and economic benefits. If the measure is invalid then a good portion of our business and political leaders may not be as brilliant as they think they are 🙂
“because people who did well on the SAT genuinely believe it’s a measure of relative merit.”
Of course they do. Just as on the bottom end the people genuinely believe they are stupid.
As Wilson has noted:“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Oh I don’t know, is this really true? The people in my town hisch a zillion yrs ago saw SAT’s strictly as a hoop to jump thro, not a bona fide of intelligence/ success. There was a general understanding that some test well on such things & some don’t, that if your SAT’s weren’t outstanding but your grades were, & you had maybe acad awards &/or musical or athletic prowess, you’d still be a contender for selective colleges. Attitude seemed same among my kids & their friends (mid-20’s now). I think the shine is off (if there ever was one) & the push/ dominance is strictly an ed-industry/ bean-counter racket.
Go ask people what SAT stands for, and what it measures.
Actually, the acronym now stands for nothing. About what it measures too….except for family income.
I understand the anger towards systems dominated by standardized tests, but I’m afraid if we go back to discretionary measures for college acceptance colleges will be even less diverse than they already are.
There’s no guarantee that a review by college admissions boards will be any more fair or equitable or accurate when one removes the test score. That could be worse, especially in large public colleges where there are thousands of applicants.
This idea that there will be this nuanced, rigorous review of each student just isn’t going to happen at large state schools, let alone in something like a community college. There are too many applicants and not enough staff.
I read recently that colleges spend an average of 8 minutes reviewing each college application!
The “pre-screening” (pre-weeding), based on test scores and high school grades, probably now only takes a microsecond (or less) because it is done by computer.
Some day in the not too distant future, the entire process will be automated and a computer will make the final decision.
This is where education (and everything else) is moving.
Computers will soon determine what (if anything) we are worth.
And it probably won’t be very much.
The big question is, how do we slay the dragon? There are multiple stakeholders and forces at play.
As long as universities use test scores in admissions, students who want to get into those schools will need to take the tests. Schools that don’t offer the tests will be doing their students a disservice. Standardized tests are imperfect, but they are standardized–they provide a common measure with which to compare students from unlike academic backgrounds. College Board offers SAT, PSAT, and AP exams; the only real competition (of which I’m aware) are ACT and IB exams. I don’t know if the organizations behind the ACT and IB are more ethical than the College Board, but I’m inclined to think so. A lower-cost test maker could get into the mix, but to succeed they’d need to partner with universities and provide a different sort of test.
Some schools are going test optional, but so far not many. In the years that I’ve had kids applying to college, I’ve noticed a slight shift away from SAT subject tests, which I see as a good thing. Students have enough data points without subject tests (my kids chose not to apply to schools that required subject tests).
Elite universities are offering less and less credit for AP exams, which means that students who know where they want to go should check college guidelines for AP credit and plan strategically (i.e., take the tests that could translate into credit). State schools still tend to award AP credit generously. As overpriced as the tests are, they’re much cheaper than college tuition. College-bound students should keep taking advanced courses even if they don’t plan to take the AP tests.
Besides their array of tests, the College Board also makes money off of financial aid applications. FAFSA is free for families, but CSS Profile, the College Board product required by many schools, is not. But universities that use CSS Profile must value the information it provides.
Having worked in test prep while living in Long Island, I know that there’s a lot of pressure on kids to do well on standardized tests and get into good colleges. To slay the dragon, we have to change cultures and mindsets. Parents, teachers, principals, counselors, and students are all complicit in promoting the values of prestige and elitism.
In other places I’ve lived, high school is less competitive than it is on the east and west coasts. Most kids in the local high school are happy to attend state schools that accept 80-98% of applicants. The only test score a student needs is their ACT score, and since we use the ACT as the mandatory 11th grade test, every student takes it and families don’t have to pay for it. The only financial aid form is FAFSA. You can choose not to engage with the dragon that is the College Board.
Check with the website of FAIRTEST. About 1,000 colleges and universities are test-optional—including some in the top tier—and do not require the SAT or ACT. They know that the four-year GPA is a better predictor of college success than those tests.
Ask yourself why any reputable, educational institution should use a standardized test that has so little predictive value to make decisions about which students will be chosen as potential attendees at their institution?
“Elite universities are offering less and less credit for AP exams” – because more and more wealthy foreigners, mostly Chinese, are paying full ride. Some pay as much as $300K for the whole adventure.
“State schools still tend to award AP credit generously.” – I wonder whether CB paid to these colleges upfront, or maybe the colleges figured out that it is better to lose tuition for a couple of courses but get more students in, and THEN charge them tuition, board, books, parking…
“As overpriced as the tests are, they’re much cheaper than college tuition.” – True.
“College-bound students should keep taking advanced courses even if they don’t plan to take the AP tests.” – I am not sure what is the point in a class that is not tested, in terms of getting a college credit. In fact, some students who are capable of self-prep, forgo the classes but take as many tests as they can to save on college tuition.
There are lots and lots of kids who were taking AP classes to look good but not taking the AP tests. Some school divisions have now forced the tests on students, or they fail the class.
But ask kids why they take AP classes and most will tell you, to “look good” so they can get into a “good” college.
“how do we slay the dragon?”
Refuse to participate. Pretty simple, eh!
I do think this is a key point in the metro-NY-NJ suburbs where you and I both live. Not elitism per se, more a product of anxiety that one’s kids won’t be able to survive fierce competition and find a viable career here [near us!].
Long ago (mid-’90’s) we asked a fam friend/ fin mgr how to plan our $ so that our then-little kids could attend fine private colleges like our alma maters. She told us the inflation of tuition/costs made that a poor investment – the factors that made it possible for our middle-class parents to do it were gone – look for high value for your $ at state unis & small lower-cost colleges, otherwise you will blow thro savgs, borrow against your retirement needs, debt-encumber your kids.
Most families we know found practical solutions: 2-yrs comm coll credits transferrable to state coll; delaying start &/or postponing grad w/yrs of work/savg; AA only for a tech job; several friends made world travel/ enrichment possible by teaching Engl abroad for a few yrs. Beyond that, we have a number of nbrs whose families pool property resources: the next gen cares for aging parents in the paid-off home & raises their own family there, housing other offspring until their fledgling businesses get off the ground, etc.
Ultimately the dragon will be slayed that way – the CollegeBd beast starves for lack of mainstream belief in the 4-yr-elite-college>success illusion.
We could go the way of a national test. They do that in countries around the world. Every high school graduate takes it. Make or break.
What do you propose we do with the broken ones?
Again Usually Right, your suggestion is dead wrong. See my postings on Wilson’s work on standardized testing to begin understanding why using the COMPLETELY INVALID results of these tests for anything can only result in “vain and illusory” decisions.
Another pressure on colleges to depend on these tests is the movement toward funding on the basis of graduation rate. Colleges want students who can succeed, otherwise they will not get state funds.
“Slay”
Now, that is a word I understand. LOL :o)
Unless colleges agree to accept anyone who applies, they have to use some sort of the screeing. They either need to screen applicants themselves using whatever criteria they come up with, which may or may not include subject testing, or they may oflload this job to someone else. In the absense of a common national college-entry test the colleges use the next best thing: a de-facto testing monopoly, the College Board. ACT is an underdog which tries to get a piece of the testing pie, and I am laughing at the commenters who believe that ACT is less vile than the College Board, why, because it is a newcomer? Just wait when it grows up.
This country is built on screwing other people for profit. Without free public healthcare there are insurance companies, hospitals and doctors who charge arm and leg for their services. Without freely accessible public curricula there are private publishing companies who charge $200 per textbook. There will always be someone who will profit from providing “valuable service”, this is how this country works, and most people accept it because challenging the status quo would mean to them waking up the spectre, and the spectre is scaaaaaary.
More students take the ACT than SAT
NEITHER IS NECESSARY
Unless you want to know parent income which the tests reflect
Our daughter was and still is a nervous test taker who seldom scores high enough to be above average or the norm. No matter how much I tried to lower her stress level by telling her tests were only one factor in admissions for most colleges and not at all for some.
Still, she didn’t score high on her SAT test when she was in high school ready to graduate and was stressed out that she wouldn’t get into one of the universities that was on her top five list.
But in the end, she was accepted to Stanford and graduated from Stanford in 2014.
Back before Stanford’s acceptance letter, I called Stanford and asked them how important SAT (or another test was) and I was told not that important and that other factors were considered more valuable than a SAT score.
Stanford’s Selection Process doesn’t even mention these tests. Look for yourself.
“We review applications holistically, focusing on academic excellence, intellectual vitality and personal context.”
https://admission.stanford.edu/apply/selection/index.html
Our daughter graduated from high school as a scholar-athlete with a 4.65 GPA, but she was much more than just that, and Stanford must have seen that in her application.
From what I understand from the conversation I had with someone working in Stanford’s admission office, the only use of test scores was as a tiebreaker when applications were equal because of the fact that:
“Stanford’s admission rate drops to 4.69 percent. A total of 1,318 high school seniors received letters of acceptance to Stanford’s Class of 2020 on Friday. An additional 745 early action students were accepted in December. The 2,063 admits came from a pool of 43,997 applicants, the largest in Stanford’s history.Mar 25, 2016”
This “holistic approach” is exactly the sort of crap that I abhor, because one does not know where and what sort of grease you need to put on to squeeze through the admission process. Is it the GPA? Is it the SAT score? Is it being a member of a school football team, or a marching band? Does being a quarterback instead of a receiver give more points? Does participation in street sweeping or beach cleaning or some weekend hospital work help? What if one were a female half-black half-native American lesbian one-legged cheerleader, would it give more points than taking honors classes?
“Much more than just that”, right. Not only it is not enough to simply have good grades in high school, they intentionally do not publish their criteria, this is maddening. Screw them with their “holistic approach”.
Lummox,
The SAT and ACT are not indicators of college success. The best indicators are high school GPA. You may not believe it, but I have posted numerous studies confirming this to be the case.
Diligence over a four-year period counts for more than guessing the right answer on a multiple choice exam.
So, you disagree with Stanford’s admission policies.
Standford is ranked annually as one of the top five universities in the world and it is a privately owned university, not a public university. Obviously, they know what they are doing.
I’m glad that Stanford’s leadership thinks for itself and does not agree with your misguided thinking. Individuals cannot be defined by a test score. Individuals are much more complex than a number and the only way to judge them is holistically as a whole person.
The SAT and ACT are hardly the “next best thing.”
Don’t know why my post isn’t show up but I think most of you all know what it might be about:
“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Say No as much as you want, while the Chinese are gaming the system: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/section/cheat-sheet/
On the other hand, it is not clear who is gaming whom, because the American colleges became increasingly dependent on the Chinese students, who pay up to $300K for a degree. I guess, to keep the Chinese believing in the value of SAT and paying, College Board has to ensure that the Americans take it too, and that the colleges use it during admission process, at least nominally.
The College Board is not about what’s best for students or educators. It’s about the bottom line. Money
Heaven foreffinbid “The Chinese are coming, the Chinese are coming, the Chinese are coming. . . .
I’m waiting for the Martians
So you, Gruff, have no response to the substance of Wilson’s and my critique. Oh well, what’s new. Haven’t gotten a substantive response to what Wilson and I have shown in about the complete invalidity of standardized testing in 15 years of looking and/or asking for a critique, rebuttal or refutation.
By coincidence, the TEA local paper arrived today with an article about our own particularly worthless end of course tests here in Tennessee. Seems the highest performing school,district in the state has only a proficient level of about 46% according to the state test, but those same students go to college and succeed at a high rate. This is perfectly in harmony with the assertion I have read here that the PARCC and its imitations are aligned with the most advanced of students. Average students get to internalize failure (Swacker, above), while a few people who are very lucky to have been born into wealth and stability get to internalize superiority, equally pernicious.
If by “succeed” you mean they get their diploma, then I would not oppose. But what knowledge have they gained? Twenty-eight percent of regularly admitted Cal State freshmen are placed in remedial math – this is low-grade Cal State, not Berkeley, where the number is even higher. To simplify enrollment and to boost graduation rates, they do not place low-performing students into remedial classes anymore – a good news on the one hand for those who don’t need it, but on the other hand, any dufus can now go to college.
This is all they are interested in – money. Pay, and they will graduate you, you will “succeed”.
Hey, guess what test is used to place students in “remedial” classes? Maybe the college uses its own, but both the College Board and the ACT produce placement tests. And they are just as poor as the SAT and the ACT tests.
Not to mention the cost of hiring a tutor so that your kid(s) will be even MORE “competitive”. Which leaves people with less money that much LESS “ competitive”.
Going on two decades of salivating greed at the helm of the ship.