A joyless rite of passage, the SAT is a source of dread that most adults get to ignore until they’re forced to confront it anew along with their high-school-age children. And as critics and reformers of the SAT have long pointed out, students would put down their pencils, close their booklets, exhale and instantly forget every ten-cent word and algebra formula. Indeed, the best motivation for SAT prep is that if your score is high enough to forego the dreaded retake, you can forget the whole thing ever happened.
In other words, it’s hard to get excited about the SAT. So it’s not a great surprise that this spring’s rollout of a new version of the standardized college admissions test came and went with little fanfare.
But as one of the historical innovations knitting together the vast and varied American experience, the SAT—although not as cool as the transatlantic telegraph line or the Eisenhower interstate system—is at least mildly interesting: From its first administration by the College Board in 1926, young aspirants suffering over the same multiple-choice exam lurched toward a more meritocratic future. And since the 1920s, the reach and significance of the exam only grew while the rise of social science and meritocratic amorality tracked America’s emergence as a global superpower.
In recent years, however, opposition to the SAT has followed a push for “more equal” testing standards. True egalitarianism, the argument goes, would mean a test that measures more than how many prep sessions a student can (afford to) put in. The SAT originally intended to level the playing field with its assessment of innate aptitude, but paid test prep disrupted the dream as early as 1938 when businessman Stanley Kaplan founded his tutoring service. Increasingly many colleges and universities no longer require the SAT and its chief competitor, the shorter, newer ACT. But with a metric so, well, standard as the SAT, the scores are hard for admissions departments to ignore. Most still accept and consider applicants’ scores along with other materials.
Critics of the SAT and ACT don’t think doing well on them should require any more preparation than showing up and paying attention for four years of high school. And in 2012, when every public school in America looked ready to embrace the Common Core standards, a truly egalitarian SAT seemed well within reach.
Indeed, the more egalitarian SAT assesses students’ mastery of skills and content in-line with the federally ordained Common Core standards. Common Core architect David Coleman, an education consultant but never a teacher, wrapped his work on the State Standards in 2012 to become president of the College Board, where he led the SAT redesign. According to a New York Times Magazine story on the State Standards’ shaping the new SAT, it was Coleman’s vision “to test the success of the newly defined standards through an exam that reflected the material being taught in the classroom.”
That was back in 2014. Since then, the Core standards have come under fire from parents (and teachers) who don’t recognize the contents of their kids’ workbooks; education experts who see a dramatic drop in curriculum quality and growing achievement gaps; and conservatives, many of whom consider the Core federal overreach. Some opponents see too little tech in the Core-aligned classroom while many others worry about the consequences of Core’s abandoning the Western canon.
Meanwhile, charter schools—which receive public funding but still determine, via “charter,” their own curricular standards—have continued to flourish in cities like New Orleans, where public schools had been failing and ravaged by corruption. Congress passed and the president signed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which, effective next year, will allow states to leave Common Core behind without risking the fiscal drain of lost incentives. ESSA will only require states to pick up some standardized test; which one is entirely of their choosing.
If the trend of states rejecting Common Core continues, as it stands to do under ESSA, the growing number of states adopting their own—or each other’s—standards spells the practical end of the old standardized tests lately aligned to new standards nobody wants anymore. It’s a far cry from Coleman’s visions for Common Core and the College Board.
As the SAT’s relevance fades further, two questions remain. First, regarding what might replace it, Heartland Institute’s Justin Haskins pointed out in Forbes that the emerging market for a new test welcomes cost-saving solutions. A forthcoming test tied to traditional college preparatory curricula, the Vector ARC test, will cater to states that repeal the Core standards.
And, second, as to whether anyone will mourn the SAT—I’m going to go ahead and say no.
Though the SAT was once known as the Standard Aptitude Test, its official designation has been the SAT since 1994. Any reference to the old name has been removed from this post.
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