The Unfortunate Standards of the SAT

A look through a students perspective of the outdated exam.

My mom’s last words after a phone call yesterday really caught me off guard. “What’s your former SAT tutor’s number? Your brother wants to start preparing.” My brother is 14. He just started puberty, learned to make his own bed, and started high school. But the scary truth of today’s generation is that, from early ages, we forget about learning and place too much attention on memorizing skills for standardized tests. These tests shape our whole future and make us go utterly broke in the mean time.

For the lucky few who don’t know what the SAT is, it’s a standardized test consisting of reading, writing, and mathematics. It’s designed to measure intelligence, but for most students it measures how well you memorize an SAT prep book. The consequence is brutal — this test creates students who are viewed as nothing more than their composite score. The complaints appear to be endless:

While the SAT might have started out as something to help the underprivileged gain college admission, it quickly turned into the exact opposite. Ones socioeconomic status matters in correlation to the SAT. As many know, most do not just take the SAT once without any preparation whatsoever. We hire costly tutors, buy preparation books, and take the test at least twice. And so, with no surprise, students with higher incomes perform better on the SAT.

You would think scores would increase due to the amount of money people spend on the SAT, right? Wrong. Students’ scores decrease annually. Since the addition of a writing portion worth 800 points in 2005, scores have lowered from an average 1518 to an average 1490. Length is all that matters to SAT scorers, not the content. Even Faulkner and Shakespeare would lose points. That means no Swarthmore for you, Shakespeare!

The College Board devised a ‘readiness benchmark’: a student who scores a 1550 out of 2400 on the SAT test has a 64% likelihood of receiving at least a B minus average during their first collegiate year. However, this benchmark is deemed false by a study that observed that college admissions and graduation rates between submitters and non submitters were ultimately the same.

So, how can we revise the way we categorize students? The College Board proposed its own brilliant solution by eliminating complex vocabulary words, making the essay optional, and making the math broader. They glorify this on their website, stating it is redesigned to “make sure it’s highly relevant to your future success.” That is, if you’re rich! This new SAT will correspond with the Common Core standards, which leaves those less fortunate, yet again, in the dust (shocker). It is almost inevitable that a student who was thoroughly taught the common core curriculum could score better on a test designed from that curriculum than a student who could not access said curriculum. This new method that the SAT is putting into place will not increase scores, but will presumably hurt them.

And so, I propose we say goodbye to the outdated College Board and SAT to make way for a freeform research essay in which students can write on their subject of choice. I know, allowing students to have freedom — it’s unheard of! This could allow for students to show admissions officers skills in areas where they are going to use in future college endeavors. The essay would be administered through a non profit organization online which could eliminate a test fee. Worry not — because preparation is not needed either — for your research will be done in the proctored time.

It would be administered through a high school classroom, just as the SAT, and would be three hours. The first hour is for researching your topic, getting a better understanding for it, and writing rough drafts on it. The last two hour are for actually typing the essay on a word processor.

The question, however, that I know will arise with most: how do we know students won’t plagiarize? The indicator that should be used for this is turnitin.com. ‘Turnitin’ is a website that detects plagarism. The websites should also be monitored to block those that are not a reliable source. I’m talking about you, FaceBook and Twitter.

Of course, there are doubts to this solution. Those in favor of the College Board believe that the SAT is the best indicator because of its benchmark that predicts the success results in upcoming students. Never mind the flaws, they say, it’s easy to work with!

While I admire their optimism, I don’t think the futures of students should be the place for that. However, I do understand people may be scared of my proposed solution as an indicator to college admissions. After all, how could an essay be a proper scale of intelligence or skills? A study shows just how by proving that certain grammar and language can actually correlate to a higher IQ — yes, science is awesome. By using this study as well as grading the essay on content and research can provide more than enough for a new, better indicator.

While the SAT is an institutionalized test that is used nationally, it’s becoming increasingly evident to people that it may not be the best and only indicator in students’ skills. It is important that we make changes to standardized tests because otherwise, before we know it, they’ll start making SAT preparation books for fifth graders.