Feed: Slashdot
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Title: Dumbing Down the SAT Bodes Poorly for Education
Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/09/03/1662...
The SAT is billed as "a great way to find out how prepared students are for
college." If that's true, recent changes to its format offer an unflattering
assessment of the country's aspiring scholars, Bloomberg's editorial board
wrote Wednesday. From the piece: [...] Then the pandemic hit. As in-person
exams became impractical, hundreds of schools dropped their testing
requirements. The SAT and its main competitor, the ACT, lost millions of
dollars in revenue. Although both recently started offering digital options,
schools have been slow to reinstate their requirements. Today, more than 80%
of schools remain test-optional. "If students are deciding to take a test,"
as one College Board executive put it, "how do we make the SAT the one they
want to take?" To anyone familiar with American teenagers, the company's
answer should come as no surprise: Make the test easier. The newly digitized
format allows a calculator for the entire math section and drastically cuts
reading comprehension. Gone are the 500- to 750-word passages about which
students would answer a series of questions. Instead, test takers read 25- to
150-word excerpts -- about the length of a social media post -- and answer a
single question about each. [...] An effort by the College Board to
reemphasize the benefits of deep reading -- for critical thinking, for self-
reflection, for learning of all kinds -- might go a long way toward restoring
some balance. It should build on efforts to incorporate college prep into
school curricula, work with districts to develop coursework that builds
reading stamina for all test takers, and consider reducing the cost of its
subject-specific Advanced Placement exams that continue to test these skills
(now $99), in line with the SAT ($68). Schools, for their part, should
recommit to teaching books in their entirety.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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