Granby01033

The College Board is an odd institution. It is voluntary and non-profit, yet not without self-interest. Although this association supposedly represents the interests of its members, students, teachers, high schools, and colleges, it sometimes confuses them with consumers, marketing and promoting its  products to them regardless of their actual value.

A case in point is the SAT Program. The SAT offers little or no benefit to most educators or students. Colleges, one could argue, find them valuable for admissions, but for students with below average scores, the test actually reduces their chance of admission to college. The tests offer little value to most students.

Even as a criteria for admission to college, the SAT have limited usefulness. Originally conceived as an intelligence test (the Scholastic Aptitude Test), the SAT’s original purpose was to identify a “natural aristocracy” of intelligent high school students who would have been denied admission to elite colleges because they came from a non-elite high school or had parents who hadn’t attended those same colleges. The SAT was originally implemented to grant scholarships to students with high IQs. 

The College Board has since backed off on that claim that the SAT measures intelligence. This retreat is reflected in the name of the test itself. Once called, the Scholastic Aptitude Test, aptitude being a synonym for innate intelligence, it is now referred to as merely the SAT.

In terms of measurement, the SAT is valid only as a predictor of a student’s grades in the first year of college. Period. The test doesn’t measure intelligence. It also doesn’t do a very good job predicting a student’s grades in the first year of college. It’s correlation coefficient is .35. A perfect correlation coefficient would be 1. If the correlation between SAT scores and first year college grades were a 1, every test score would accurately predict every test taker’s grades.  Point 35 isn’t particularly strong correlation. 

Even more puzzling is the misuse of College Board statistics, which it encourages in its yearly releases of aggregate data, even though it warns against this misuse. The College Board writes:

it is important to note that many College Board tests are taken only by particular groups of self-selected students. Therefore, aggregate results of their performance on these tests usually do not reflect the educational attainment of all students in a school, district, or state.

Yet the Boston Globe, and just about every other major media outlet, reports changes in aggregate scores as if they are meaningful.

SAT scores for Massachusetts high school graduates rose this year on all three sections of the college entrance exam, far outpacing the national average.

Graduates in the Bay State scored an average of 525 on the math section, a three-point increase from last year, and 514 on the critical reading section, a one-point climb. Scores on the writing section, introduced two years ago, rose two points to 513, according to statistics released yesterday by the College Board.

Nationally, scores held steady, with average scores of 502 in reading and 515 in math, for a combined 1,017. Writing scores also remained unchanged at 494. SAT scores are reported on a scale from 200 to 800. The survey consisted of scores of high school graduates.

 In all fairness to Globe education reporter Peter Schworm, who does a good job reporting on education, it doesn’t help that Mitchell Chester, the state’s commissioner of elementary and secondary education, misuses the scores to compare Massachusetts with other states:

“These results put us at the top of the country, which is where we belong, but we cannot rest until we take steps to address and close our achievement gaps. It is critical that all of our students - regardless of race - make steady progress in school and view college as an essential next step in their lives after high school.”

No wonder America is so uneducated about education.

–Mb