The SAT? It tests our credulity
We base college admissions decisions on a test peppered with trick questions, and pretending it's a measure of intelligence.
I went to bed early Sunday night and got a good, sound sleep.
Monday morning, I ate a bowl of "Smart Start" cereal and downed a mug of strong coffee. I turned off the phone, put the dog outside and sat down at my kitchen table with two sharpened pencils. I set the timer on my oven for one hour.
Then I cracked open a sample SAT subject exam.
It's the sort of test that almost 300,000 high school students take every spring to shore up their applications to elite universities, which require these additional achievement tests. Now it seems to be headed for the chopping block at the University of California because of concerns that the test is of little use in admissions decisions in this era of standardized-testing frenzy.
I've always figured the subject tests were a better measure of college readiness than scores on the basic SAT -- which say more about family income than whether a student has what it takes to succeed. But the subject tests always seem to take a back seat.
I wanted to see how I would do, so I got a sample literature exam -- one of 17 subject choices -- from the Princeton Review, which runs test prep courses for high school students. The test had seven passages to analyze, and 60 multiple-choice questions to answer.
It started like this:
"Maman-Nainaine said that when the figs were ripe Babette might go to visit her cousins down on the Bayou-Lafourche where the sugar cane grows. Not that the ripening of figs had the least thing to do with it, but that is the way Maman-Nainaine was."
OK. In the news biz, that's an "anecdotal lede;" a way to draw your reader in. But this went on for 43 lines.
I read the passage twice, trying to find the answers to questions about the symbolism of ripening figs and what motivated Maman-Nainaine and Babette to disagree.
Then I blew through the rest of the exam, deciphering a poetic ode to a man's dead wife, a British farce that relied on references to Galatea and Pygmalion, a fable about God and a blade of grass . . .
I filled in my last bubble and checked the timer. I'd finished with 14 minutes left on the clock. I rechecked a couple questions I felt uncertain about, then faxed the test to Princeton's Encino office. Harvard, here I come, I thought.
Thirty minutes later my score arrived online. I'd gotten 42 questions right. And 18 wrong.
