It’s a scene most of us are familiar with: students trudging around school holding a box of vocabulary cards in one hand and a coffee in the other to help keep them awake during after school study sessions.
The College Board announced changes to its SAT in March to curb these practices. Starting 2016, the new SAT will make the essay writing portion voluntary, bringing the total score for the critical reading and math sections back down to 1600, and replacing the oft-criticized vocabulary section with words commonly used in high school-level literature.
The College Board may have the interests of lower-income students at heart; however, I doubt the changes will do much to prevent ambitious students with parents willing to fund their classes from getting a leg up on the competition.
Test centers, instead of being somehow intimidated into closing shop and solemnly swearing not to provide further assistance, will simply wait until the College Board releases its first batch of official tests and then revise as necessary.
The problem isn’t with the testing centers giving students the means to succeed, because there’s honestly nothing wrong with wanting to improve one’s score; the problem is that the test is easy to teach.
Those classes give students packs of vocabulary words to study, which become nothing more than a word, its part of speech, a clipped definition and two example sentences. It’s true that testing centers can still teach to the new words, but the chance of students who haven’t had packets of practice to succeed is higher.
Additionally, including shorter passages in the critical reading section would benefit many test takers, even those who have spent hundreds of dollars. The questions that ask students to divine seemingly nonsensical details about the author’s life should be replaced with those that would check their understanding better.
None of this is to say that the College Board hasn’t done anything to level the playing field. Their partnership with Khan Academy to provide free lessons that anyone can access, shows a devotion to doing more for those who can’t pay.
The system may not reach equality in terms of performance, but if the College Board continues to find ways to help financially disadvantaged students by introducing programs such as that with Khan Academy, it will be a step in the right direction for the future of standardized testing.