A future determined in three hours A future determined in three hours (January 07, 2005)

Faulty SAT exam puts the pressure on

By Ashlee Choi

Now more than ever the infamous standardized test, namely the SAT, is making its existence evermore present. In the recent movie "The Perfect Score," a group of six high school students band together to steal the answers to the test, which they feel will unfairly determine their future and who they will become.

The students feel that the only way to decide fate is to beat the system itself. Teens here and across the country agree that the pressure to perform well on the college admissions test is so immense that they feel driven to extreme means to deal with it.

The release of this movie shows the significance of the ever-growing discontent with the test's validity and the developing awareness that universities are putting too much pressure on high schoolers today.

Not only does the test raise justifiable questions about its validity, but it fails to acknowledge that ethnic disadvantages may prevent minority students from performing at their optimal levels.

The test assumes all hopeful college-bound juniors and seniors are at the same level. It is a bad assumption. Statistics and surveys show that among minority students, such as Latinos and African-Americans, the majority of the students' parents haven't had a college education.

Researchers have found certain ethnic groups to have a disadvantage when taking the SAT. Middle-upper-class racial majorities pay for prep classes and study materials, but many others can't afford them and aren't encouraged to use them.

"Despite variable factors from one study to another, the net result across all studies is that score gains are directly attributable to coaching amount," stated the College Board in "Effects of Coaching on Scholastic Aptitude Test Scores." What happens to students who don't get coached?

The College Board also doesn't seem to acknowledge other aspects of common human nature, include learning disabilities and test anxiety. But each individual's goal to go to college is turning into a tough competition between every teenager throughout the nation.

The SAT remains a controversial issue among most high school students because it's unclear whether test actually measures skills that will be essential in college.

Despite studies and statistics which display correlation between success in the freshman year of college and the SAT, the test itself is more of a game to beat.

John Katzman, cofounder of the Princeton Review, acknowledged in David Owen's "None of the Above: The Myth of Scholastic Aptitude" that his prep class teaches students how to find the experimental section on the test, which doesn't factor in the final score, and fill it out randomly to save themselves time. But random answers make the pretest questions look harder than they are and therefore make future SAT questions easier.

This shady technique, Katzman said, shows that "the SAT is bull--."

The ambiguity of the SAT's intention is also in its name. The SAT used to stand for Scholastic Aptitude Test, but it was later changed to Scholastic Achievement Test. Now the letters don't stand for anything.

In a survey put together for the purpose of this article, Mountain View High School students and teachers were asked: 1) Do you feel that the SAT is valid in measuring success of the first year in college? And, 2) Do you feel that the SAT is biased in that it ignores socio-economic advantages?

Out of 43 students, 39 agree that the SAT is invalid in measuring success in college. Out of the same 43 students, 34 feel that the SAT is biased in that it ignores certain disadvantages such as socio-economic circumstances, learning disabilities and more.

Of the 20 teachers and administrators who responded to the survey, 11 agreed that the SAT is invalid in determining first-year success in college. And 12 said that the SAT is circumstantially biased.

But despite a growing societal pressure to score higher on a controversial test, our generation still has many academic opportunities to seize.
Ashlee Choi is a senior at Mountain View High School.

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