ALPERN AT LARGE- I guess it's time to go into grumpy old man mode, now that those ivory tower geniuses have decided to overhaul the SAT college entrance exam. Is it just me, or is the College Board to be trusted in eliminating the mandatory essay requirement, and is it OK to doubt the Board's credibility altogether?
The SAT is something that strikes fear and terror in the hearts of all college-bound students and their families. Yet those who confront it and succeed on the test, inevitably know that the test (for all its flaws) does have some predictability as to who will--and who will not--succeed in college.
I realize that there are those among us who either test better than others, or who get their feelings hurt when they don't score as well as they'd like on a test like the SAT, but we need the SAT.
One's GPA is arguably the best predictor of how a student will do in college, but there is also the need to determine what real-world skills and capabilities a student has coming out of high school (and there are plenty of high-scoring high school students that aren't as capable as they think they are).
But the College Board, by making the SAT essay optional, has really hurt the ability of students who have linguistic or writing deficiencies to succeed in a world where literacy is both more critical and essential than ever...while more and more Americans (both native-born and of all socioeconomic backgrounds) are so busy tweeting and texting that they've become functionally illiterate. That essay has a function!
Yet I don't want to be too tough on the College Board--their choice to eliminate calculators is a good one, and perhaps their choice to eliminate some of the most obscure words on the verbal portion of the exam.
But my memories are still with me, as they are with most of you who are reading this:
I remember being shocked (when I was in high school) by the words I was expected to know for the verbal portion of the SAT, and knew that if anyone used them in high school, I'd get a whupping and nerd-labelling from my classmates I'd never forget.
I also remember that those words were used all the time in college and the professional world!
I remember learning that math needed a bit of review, but ultimately it only needed the preparation from a good teaching experience in high school...but the verbal needed lots of memorization from Barron's review books bought at bookstores. In other words, the verbal portion of the examination didn't test one's high school experience like the math portion did.
I remember thinking that the Kaplan and other expensive prep courses really disciminated against the poor.
Yet poor or otherwise, those who chose not to step up to the challenge of the SAT had very BIG problems in college and graduate school.
In the end, if one has a testing problem, or other problem...they fight their way through it and get whatever help they need to achieve what must be achieved (although the resources for this clearly are less available to students from certain neighborhoods than others).
I also remember when colleges were affordable...and they are increasingly not.
I also remember when colleges made it possible for students to graduate in 4-5 years...and they are increasingly not.
So we're now in a world where we need WRITERS. Both scientists and artists need to learn proper, written English--which is often much harder to learn and write than spoken English--which is why it confounds me that the essay of the SAT is now optional (why--political correctness?).
My two cents is that self-respecting colleges need to make it clear that THEY value the essay, because they DON'T want freshmen who couldn't write a noun-verb-predicate sentence or a written opinion to save their souls.
The complaints I have with our overpriced, out-of-touch modern-day Academia are just too long to list. But the saddest thing about the loss of credibility of modern-day Academia is that when the College Board does this, I'll never know whether it's to dumb down the college population for politically correct purposes or to level the playing field between students from wealthy and poor families.
Or is that just the grumpy old man in me?
(Ken Alpern is a Westside Village Zone Director and Boardmember of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11 Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at [email protected]. He also does regular commentary on the Mark Isler Radio Show on AM 870, co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us . The views expressed in this article are solely those of Mr. Alpern.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 20
Pub: Mar 7, 2014
