Examined Life: The New Yorker - The Diigo Meta page

• 21 May 14
  

  Aaron Johnson

  S.A.T

  • Mrs. Holman for fifth grade, and when she quizzed the class on math equations, he would shout out the answers.
  • In high school, he would take over algebra class, and the other kids, passing him in the hall, would call him Teach.
  • One classmate, Aimee Rubin, was having so much trouble with math that she was in danger of being dropped from the National Honor Society. Kaplan offered to help her, and she scored a ninety-five on her next exam.
  • In 1946, a high-school junior named Elizabeth, from Coney Island, came to him for help on an exam he was unfamiliar with. It was called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, and from that moment forward the business of getting into college in America was never quite the same.
  • Unlike existing academic exams, it was intended to measure innate ability—not what a student had learned but what a student was capable of learning—and it stated clearly in the instructions that “cramming or last-minute reviewing” was pointless
  • He grilled her over and over, doing what the S.A.T. said should not be done. And what happened? On test day, she found the S.A.T. “a piece of cake,” and promptly told all her friends, and her friends told their friends, and soon word of Stanley H. Kaplan had spread throughout Brooklyn.
  • He renovated his basement, dividing it into classrooms. When the basement got too crowded, he rented a podiatrist’s office near King’s Highway, at the Brighton Beach subway stop. In the nineteen-seventies, he went national, setting up educational programs throughout the country, creating an S.A.T.-preparation industry that soon became crowded with tutoring companies and study manuals. Kaplan has now written a memoir, “Test Pilot” (Simon & Schuster; $19), which has as its subtitle “How I Broke Testing Barriers for Millions of Students and Caused a Sonic Boom in the Business of Education.” That actually understates his importance. Stanley Kaplan changed the rules of the game.
  • This is what the U.C. study disputed. It compared the predictive validity of three numbers: a student’s high-school G.P.A., his or her score on the S.A.T. (or, as it is formally known, the S.A.T. I), and his or her score on what is known as the S.A.T. II, which is a so-called achievement test, aimed at gauging mastery of specific areas of the high-school curriculum. Drawing on the transcripts of seventy-eight thousand University of California freshmen from 1996 through 1999, the report found that, over all, the most useful statistic in predicting freshman grades was the S.A.T. II, which explained sixteen per cent of the “variance” (which is another measure of predictive validity). The second most useful was high-school G.P.A., at 15.4 per cent. The S.A.T. was the least useful, at 13.3 per cent. Combining high-school G.P.A. and the S.A.T. II explained 22.2 per cent of the variance in freshman grades.
  • In fact, the study found that achievement tests were ten times more useful than the S.A.T. in predicting the success of students from similar backgrounds. “Achievement tests are fairer to students because they measure accomplishment rather than promise,” Richard Atkinson, the president of the University of California, told a conference on college admissions last month. “They can be used to improve performance; they are less vulnerable to charges of cultural or socioeconomic bias; and they are more appropriate for schools because they set clear curricular guidelines and clarify what is important for students to learn. Most important, they tell students that a college education is within the reach of anyone with the talent and determination to succeed.”
  • Seventy-five years ago, the S.A.T. was instituted because we were more interested, as a society, in what a student was capable of learning than in what he had already learned.
  • So confident of the S.A.T.’s reliability was E.T.S. that the basic technique it developed for catching cheaters was simply to compare first and second scores, and to mount an investigation in the case of any very large increase. E.T.S. was sure that substantially increasing one’s score could be accomplished only by nefarious means.
     

     
  • Students walking in to take the S.A.T. were often in a state of terrified ignorance about what to expect. (It wasn’t until the early eighties that the E.T.S. was forced to release copies of old test questions to the public.) So Kaplan would have “Thank Goodness It’s Over” pizza parties after each S.A.T. As his students talked about the questions they had faced, he and his staff would listen and take notes, trying to get a sense of how better to structure their coaching. “Every night I stayed up past midnight writing new questions and study materials,” he writes. “I spent hours trying to understand the design of the test, trying to think like the test makers, anticipating the types of questions my students would face.”
  • In reality, of course, if a student can eliminate even one obviously wrong possibility from the list of choices, guessing becomes an intelligent strategy.)
  • It had an ideology, and Kaplan realized that anyone who understood that ideology would have a tremendous advantage.

  • Critics of the S.A.T. have long made a kind of parlor game of seeing how many questions on the reading-comprehension section (where a passage is followed by a series of multiple-choice questions about its meaning) can be answered without reading the passage. David Owen, in the anti-S.A.T. account “None of the Above,” gives the following example, adapted from an actual S.A.T. exam:

      1. The main idea of the passage is that:
     A) a constricted view of [this novel] is natural and acceptable
     B) a novel should not depict a vanished society
     C) a good novel is an intellectual rather than an emotional experience
     D) many readers have seen only the comedy [in this novel]
     E) [this novel] should be read with sensitivity and an open mind
     

     

    If you’ve never seen an S.A.T. before, it might be difficult to guess the right answer. But if, through practice and exposure, you have managed to assimilate the ideology of the S.A.T.—the kind of decent, middlebrow earnestness that permeates the test—it’s possible to develop a kind of gut feeling for the right answer, the confidence to predict, in the pressure and rush of examination time, what the S.A.T. is looking for. A is suspiciously postmodern. B is far too dogmatic. C is something that you would never say to an eager, college-bound student. Is it D? Perhaps, but D seems too small a point. It’s probably E—and, sure enough, it is.
  • .A.T.s—like virtually all standardized tests—rank their math questions from easiest to hardest. If the hardest questions came first, the theory goes, weaker students would be so intimidated as they began the test that they might throw up their hands in despair. So this is a “hard” question
  • Today, Hawkes’s anti-Semitism seems absurd, but he was by no means the last person to look to aptitude tests as a means of separating ambition from brains.
  • where you end up can be predicted by how much you practice.”
  • Sloboda found another striking similarity among the “musical” children. They all had parents who were unusually invested in their musical education. It wasn’t necessarily the case that the parents were themselves musicians or musically inclined. It was simply that they wanted their children to be that way. “The parents of the high achievers did things that most parents just don’t do,” he said. “They didn’t simply drop their child at the door of the teacher. They went into the practice room. They took notes on what the teacher said, and when they got home they would say, Remember when your teacher said do this and that. There was a huge amount of time and motivational investment by the parents.”
  • how hard you work and how supportive your parents are have a lot more to do with success than we ordinarily imagine.
  • Ability cannot be separated from effort.
  • In other words, the determination and hard work that propel someone to the top of his high-school class—even in cases where that high school is impoverished—are more important to succeeding in college (and, for that matter, in life) than whatever abstract quality the S.A.T. purports to measure.
  • Kaplan writes of one student who increased his score by three hundred and forty points, and ended up with a Ph.D. and a position as a scientist at Xerox. “Debbie” improved her S.A.T. by five hundred points, got into the University of Chicago, and earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Arthur Levine, the president of Teachers College at Columbia University, raised his S.A.T.s by two hundred and eighty-two points, “making it possible,” he writes on the book’s jacket, “for me to attend a better university than I ever would have imagined.” Charles Schumer, the senior senator from New York, studied while he worked the mimeograph machine in Kaplan’s office, and ended up with close to a perfect sixteen hundred.
  • “One mother wanted her straight-A son to have an extra edge, so she brought him to my basement for years for private tutoring in basic subjects,” Kaplan recalls. “He was extremely bright and today is one of the country’s most successful ophthalmologists.” Another student was “so nervous that his mother accompanied him to class armed with a supply of terry-cloth towels. She stood outside the classroom and when he emerged from our class sessions dripping in sweat, she wiped him dry and then nudged him back into the classroom.” Then, of course, there was the formidable four-foot-eight figure of Ericka Kaplan, granddaughter of the chief rabbi of the synagogue of Prague. “My mother was a perfectionist whether she was keeping the company books or setting the dinner table,” Kaplan writes, still in her thrall today. “She was my best cheerleader, the reason I performed so well, and I constantly strove to please her.” What chance did even the most artfully constructed S.A.T. have against the mothers of Brooklyn?
  • He loved the S.A.T. He thought that the test gave people like him the best chance of overcoming discrimination. As he saw it, he was simply giving the middle-class students of Brooklyn the same shot at a bright future that their counterparts in the private schools of Manhattan had.

  23 more annotations...

• 23 Apr 10
  

  Ilyssa Weiss

  SATACTPrep

• 30 Dec 07
  

  Clay Burell

  On Stanley Kaplan, the SAT and ETS, and the test-prep biz.

  assessment education politics

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