With the May and June iterations of the SAT approaching fast, worried parents have been ringing my phone and bombarding my inbox looking for help. In business terms, this works out swimmingly for me, but it saddens me that ETS has so successfully oversold both colleges and parents on the predictive power of this test that my students get stuck for months, sometimes years, memorizing vocab lists and test-taking strategies instead of...well...learning stuff. A student who studies for several months physics, or French, or Chinese history, comes away in grave danger of actually knowing something about their subject. Months spent poring over sample SATs ensure that the student comes away knowing a lot about taking the SAT, a skill transferable to nothing.
Of course, hard, repetitive labor in the pursuit of meaningless rewards is a staple of life in the working world, so maybe the SAT serves a purpose in that it prepares students for the more soul-deadening aspects of adulthood. It certainly does say something about our culture that we spend so many billions of dollars to fund an educational enterprise designed to teach students nothing of consequence. But, what the hell. It's a living.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
SAT Panic Setting In
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2 comments:
You're quite right, students learn about passing tests and not anything else.
I was schooled in England and Poland - not for us multiple choice questions, the undoing of education.
Do multiple choice questions exist, because they're easier to grade? I think they ought to be taken out of education altogether.
I've never been a fan of multiple choice tests either, Wolynski, but the format is not my chief objection to the SAT. My chief objection is that students, parents, and the educational system spend billions of dollars and countless classroom and tutoring hours to an exam whose educational value is almost nil (because the test doesn't measure knowledge gained, and barely measures critical thinking skills). The test doesn't help university admissions officers determine who will succeed and who will fail in college any more reliably than a simple analysis of high school record, recommendations, and the application essay would. And there are opportunity costs to consider. An hour spent prepping for the SAT is an hour that could have been spent studying English Literature, history, physics, chemistry, or any of the worthwhile endeavors a curious mind can devote itself to. (True, it could also be used to veg out or play World of Warcraft, but let that pass.)
It just seems to me an awful waste of resources.
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