Test culture

New England Journal of Higher Education, The, Winter 2001 by Earls, Alan R

Standardized Minds: The High Price of America's Testing Culture and What We Can Do To Change It, Peter Sacks, Perseus Books, 2000, $17.50

There is much to like and much that is familiar in Standardized Minds, a polemical swipe at just about every type of standardized test ever devised. Sacks, a self-described journalist and essayist, makes a compelling case that the history of standardized tests is one of thinly disguised efforts to legitimize elites. From the 19th century Social Darwinists to the early 20th century work of Alfred Binet (the Frenchman whose name later graced the Stanford-Binet IQ tests), the early days of testing seem, in the light of today, to be reprehensible for their narrow concept of what constitutes intelligence. Unfortunately, in the end, Sacks doesn't do enough to show that the alternatives he proposes would be fairer.

Sacks is so certain that testing is all more or less bunk that he says having parents who drive a Volvo is a better predictor of college and life success than scores on standardized tests. But observations like these offer little help in more fairly providing access to college.

Sacks marshals considerable anecdotal evidence pointing to test results that seem to be disconnected from reality. For instance, he cites the case of Nancy Schneing, a Fulbright Scholar and experienced technical communication consultant with a doctorate in physics from MIT, who was locked out of public school teaching in Massachusetts because she failed the reading section of the controversial Massachusetts Educator Certification Test. Sacks also tells of individuals who made a success of life despite being effectively excluded from higher education by standardized tests, thereby seeming to confound the very point of such tests.

Though Sacks doesn't mention the controversial WAS test in Massachusetts or other specific testing regimes in New England, he does examine testing problems in other test-obsessed regions. Tacoma, Wash., for instance, hired a test-happy public school superintendent and got a startling rise in test scores, the result, according to Sacks, of the alltoo-common tendency to "teach to a test." Moreover, once the temporary stimulus of achieving the target scores in the first year was removed, Tacoma scores fell.

Then, there was the so-called Lake Wobegon study, named for Garrison Keillor's fictional town where "all the kids are above average." In the late 1980s, West Virginia physician John Jacob Cannell had grown concerned about a pattern he saw among his patients: children having problems with schoolwork but managing to score well on the state's standardized tests. West Virginia was proud of the fact that its third- and fifth- graders were scoring higher than 60 percent of their peers nationwide. But other measures of achievement didn't seem to match. Relatively few West Virginia students attended or completed college and per-capita income in the state was among the lowest in the nation. Cannell grew curious and looked at the tests. He found that 32 other states administering similar tests were also claiming "above the national average" scores-a bit of fuzzy math. The study Cannell launched was followed by a more rigorous RAND analysis that found many aspects of the testing system to be troubling and pseudoscientific.

"In a very real sense, public schools playing the test-score game is something of an educational fraud hoisted [sic] on taxpayers. True and lasting achievement is not likely to budge with quick fixes," writes Sacks.

Sacks provides valuable and accessible fodder for testing opponents. The book's jacket features praise from within the New England region included Walter M. Haney, professor and senior research associate at the Center for the Study of Testing, Boston College, which focuses on how educational standards, assessments and tests can be used more fairly, and William C. Hiss, vice president for administration services at Bates College, one of the first prestigious colleges to drop the SAT as an admissions requirement.

The author's discussion of Bates is particularly interesting. The Lewiston, Maine, college began gravitating toward an SAT-free admissions policy after growing unease over how requiring high SAT scores fit with the institution's liberal-minded goals. Admissions officers then began to notice evidence that Bates was frightening off many capable students who simply couldn't deliver a combined score of 1200 or above. Furthermore, examination of student performance after admissions revealed that testing was not predictive for between onequarter and one-third of those actually admitted.

What ultimately killed the testing requirement at Bates, Hiss told Sacks, was the suspicion that "we were throwing young people into the arms of Kaplan or the Princeton Review."

In 1984, Bates made SAT verbal and math scores optional for applicants, though it still required some SAT subject tests-and test scores were requested after admission for research purposes. The results bore out the hopes of Hiss and others: lower-scoring students who opted out of the SAT requirement fared just as well at Bates as those with higher scores who chose to submit them as part of the application process. Based on that evidence, Bates went fully test-optional in 1990, relying exclusively on grades and other measures to determine admissions.