The College Board is getting ready to unveil a newly-redesigned version of the SAT and already the new test is under fire for its emphasis on reading. Critics say that by infusing the math section with more word problems and expanding the length of the passages in the reading section, the company has made it harder for certain students to do well on the test.
“Before, if you were a student from a family where English was not the first language, you could really excel on the math side. It may be harder in the administration of this new test to decipher that, because there is so much text on both sides of the exam,” Kaplan Test Prep vice-president Lee Weiss told the New York Times.
According to the Times, “some educators and college admissions officers fear that the revised test will penalize students who have not been exposed to a lot of reading, or who speak a different language at home – like immigrants and the poor.”
Sorry, but why is that a problem? Shouldn’t it be the point of the SAT to “penalize” students who can’t read? It’s a fairly significant condemnation of the public school system if kids are arriving in their junior year of high school without being “exposed to a lot of reading.” What the hell does income have to do with it? It doesn’t exactly cost a fortune to give your kid some books. Why is a poor American child able to do math but not able to read? Do these people even listen to themselves?
Again, from the Times:
The College Board has also been grappling with complaints that the old SAT, with its arcane vocabulary questions, correlated with advantages like parental income and education, and that whites and Asians performed better on average than blacks and Hispanics.
Yes, that’s clearly a problem, because we all know that blacks and Hispanics outshine whites and Asians on every other metric of academic achievement. Obviously, the “arcane vocabulary questions” are wholly to blame for the disparity in SAT results. Apparently, we must redesign the test over and over again until we close the gap, even if it means dumbing the questions down to SNL Celebrity Jeopardy level. Students can choose to take the test in English, take it in Spanish, or have it rapped to them by Kanye West. Equality!
If we’ve gotten to the point where testing a college-bound student’s ability to read is an example of systemic racism, then our country is headed for a steep decline. It’s not the job of the College Board to account for parents who were too busy popping out kids and sucking off the government teat to figure out where the public library was. Either we’re going to demand standards in our education system or not. But if we’re not, then let’s stop cloaking it in all of this liberal nonsense and just be honest about it.
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