Kathleen Parker March 7, 2014

When the going gets tough, well, why not just make the going easier?

This seems to be the conclusion of the College Board, whichadministers the dreaded SAT college entrance exam. Recently announced“improvements” to the test are designed, say board officials, to bettergauge what students study and learn in high school. Shouldn’t take toolong.

Thus, the new SAT will take less time and consist ofmultiple-choice questions as follows: (a) yes; (b) no; (c) maybe; (d)none of the above.

Fine. Perhaps I exaggerate (pardon the multiple syllables) just a tad. But one does fear that such tweaking is really a stab at greater market share — many students have turned from the SATto ACT — and an adjustment to the fact that student scores have beenfalling.

Owing to what, one wonders? Surely not the gradual degradation of pre-college education.

By making the test more “accessible,” board officials theorize, morestudents will be able to attend college, where, presumably, they willflourish. The test no longer will include fancy words, otherwise knownas a rich vocabulary, or require a timed essay. The math section will be adapted so that people who aren’t so good at math, including but notlimited to future journalists, can pretend they are.

These tweaksare a shame inasmuch as educators lose measures that provided criticalinformation. The essay, for instance, wasn’t a call to Emersonianexcellence but was a way of determining whether a student can compose acoherent sentence — you know: subject, verb, all that stuff — not tomention whether one can think. If a person can’t write a series ofsentences to express a cogent thought, does that person really qualifyfor a college education? For what purpose?

The most entertainingtest area — the analogy — was eliminated in 2005. Again, too hard?Analyzing analogies was not aimed at tripping up lower-income studentswho otherwise would be Fulbright-bound but of evaluating cognitiveability. Can the kid think?

Critics of the SAT maintain that thetest is biased in favor of students from wealthier families. We all want a level playing field and equal opportunity for children. This isfundamental to who we are. But if we truly want to improve everyone’schance at eventual employment and success, the playing field needs to be plowed and seeded well before the harvest of standardized testing.

It starts with schools and teachers, and everybody knows it.

Yet today grades are inflated to assuage low student self-esteem andjustify flaws in curricula and instruction. In this setting, it seemsthat rigorous standardized testing is more crucial than ever. As for the income differential in comparing test scores, outcomes have more to dowith access to good schools and teachers than whether certain wordsaren’t common among lower-income students.

Does anyone reallythink that asking a college-bound student to know the difference between punctilious and punctual is a function of income-related bias? Onewould hope that college-bound students are both of these.

It isindeed unfair that children from less prosperous homes often are stuckwith the schools they get, while students from more prosperous familieslive in areas with better schools or can attend a private school oftheir choosing. Financially better-off students also have greater access to preparation courses, which the College Board helpfully will beginoffering online without charge.

But there are other confoundingfactors that contribute to inequality as measured by testing. Moreprosperous students also tend to be beneficiaries of educated familiesthat provide a ­learning-rich environment. Inestimable is the immenseadvantage of growing up in a house full of books and witnessing parentswho read them.

We can’t make the world perfectly equaloutcome-wise, but we can keep trying to improve opportunity throughbetter schools and teachers. This is where the real challenges lie, butthis, too, is perhaps too hard. Making tests easier so that more willpass becomes a far more accessible solution.

Periodic revision of standardized testing may be justified and, in some instances, evenlaudable. A new SAT focus on founding documents and their authors is one welcome shift. As to whether the new test will be useful in advancingcapable students who, for whatever reason, weren’t able to demonstratetheir abilities through testing — time will tell.

But saying students are ready for college doesn’t make it so.

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