New method of scoring will start in 2016.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), which is the foremost standardized test taken by US high school students as they matriculate on toward higher education, is getting its first major overhaul in nine years with help from the Khan Academy, a non-profit education service designed to help disadvantaged youths have a fair shot at gaining admission into the country’s top colleges.
The SAT is created, distributed, and scored by The College Board, a nationwide organization that also updates the exam from time-to-time to keep it fresh and to tailor it to the ever-evolving curricula of high schools across the nations. The biggest changes this time around are that the exam’s writing section is no long mandatory, the maximum score will go back down from 2400 to 1600 (800 points possible for each section, math and reading), the vocabulary on the exam will be a little more basic, and some of the higher-concept math problems will now be eliminated.
Calculator usage will be more restricted now, however, and the types of reading passages given to exam-takers will swing away from dense scientific readings like Darwin and more towards things like The Gettysburg Address, as educators feel government writings are what students really should know and be able to analyze.
Reading that, many people would think that the SAT just got a whole lot easier – no more essay, no more complicated vocabulary words, and no math problems higher than basic trigonometry. But the reason for this, says The College Board, is to level the economic playing field for all students taking the exam – a number that’s as high as 1.7 million per year.
Students who take the SAT often buy test preparation books, study guides, and enroll in classes to help them hone not only their verbal and mathematics skills, but also to learn the tools they need to identify the SAT’s patterns and essentially game the system. These books and classes are not expensive, and studies conducted by The College Board show that only a relatively small amount of test-takers – those belonging in the upper echelon, financially speaking – are able to afford these, thus giving them an unfair advantage over lower-class students.
Additionally, the influx of immigration into the US means that students who may be perfectly smart and capable of succeeding in college are unable to attend the schools they want because of the SAT, which demands that they know English words that most native speakers often have never heard of. By decreasing the difficulty of the vocabulary on the exam, making the essay section optional, but focusing more on reading comprehension and analytical thinking, The College Board hopes to give these students a better chance at achieving the scores they truly deserve.
That’s where the Khan Academy comes in, which was founded by New Orleans-born desi Salman Khan, the son of a parent from Bangladesh and another from Calcutta. Khan was valedictorian of his high school, scored a perfect 1600 on his SAT, went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees (in mathematics and electrical engineering & computer science, and in electrical engineering & computer science, respectively), and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was also his class’s president.
About a decade ago, while tutoring a relative of his, Khan discovered a way to create lessons for the Internet, by making videos and posting them on YouTube. In 2009, he quit his job to devote himself full-time to the idea of creating a YouTube channel solely for the purpose of tutoring kids in basic math and reading, eventually building up to the skills necessary for college entrance examinations.
That YouTube idea became the Khan Academy, which uses “digestible chunks” of 10 minute videos to tutor children from K-12 on the essential topics of math, reading, and science (biology, chemistry, physics). The main impetus behind creating the Khan Academy was to help children to who don’t have all the economic resources to get a tutor outside of school or attend a prep class for the SAT.
Khan was able to set up the organization via a $1.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a $2 million grant from Google. He has also become good friends with Bill Gates, and calls the Microsoft guru one of his mentors. Now that the Khan Academy has over 3,400 videos in its educational database, Khan believes that online learning really is the future.
“It’s going to become mainstream for people to say, ‘Why are we giving lectures in classrooms?’ ‘Can’t we use that time to do something more human, more interactive?'” Khan said in an interview last year with ABC News. Khan also said that while schools are largely responsible for what and how children learn, the parents should share some of that responsibility. “I think parents should engage in the content, learn it themselves, engage with the students on it and help the teachers.”
The College Board partnered up with Khan in re-shaping the SAT for its newest iteration, which will begin distribution of the new version in 2016. Both non-profit organizations saw the economic divide as a huge wall for several children, and decided that it was time to make the exam more accessible for the every-diversifying US.
But is such change good? It’s understandable to take away the writing section, as it was something that most students struggled with and a large number of colleges never even looked at to begin with. Advanced Placement (AP) courses are harder for African-American and Latino students to get into (or even have access to), according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. School curricula are starting to focus on different things, forcing the SAT to change what it asks. But why dumb down the math section? Why ask kids to know easier words on the reading section?
The argument is that none of this stuff matters, anyway. Why should a liberal arts student be made to know the Y-intercept of a parabola? Why should an aspiring engineer need to know 20 different Latin roots? Kids are learning these things just for the sake of passing the exam, then forgetting them altogether. Or, as mentioned earlier, they’re simply taking classes that teach them the tricks to skip the right questions, guess the right way, and come up with a decent score in each section.
Leveling the playing field because of the growing disparity in income in the US is a good reason to change the test. But should it come at the expense of making sure kids know concepts in math, reading and writing that they really ought to know? Rather than making the test easier, which is clearly what they’re doing, why can’t The College Board offer affordable classes for low-income students to teach them what they need to know? Instead of changing the criteria of the exam, why not make education for it more readily available?
To that end, The College Board is offering free online videos to help kids learn the concepts they need, undoubtedly taking a cue from the Khan Academy. And so far, students have welcomed the announced changes with open arms, with an ABC report showing many prospective college students loving the idea of having to only learn words that they’ll actually need to use at some point in their lives.
The real test will be if scores actually do improve significantly when students take it in 2016. Until then, we just play the waiting game, and students taking the exam this year and the next will still need to know those hard vocabulary words, that difficult math, and how to write an essay.
(Deepak Chitnis is a Staff Writer at The American Bazaar.)
To contact the author, deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com