Gullixson: The frustrating makeover of the SAT

As if life isn’t stressful enough for college-bound teens.

First, there’s the pressure to maintain bloated grade-point averages and accomplish something meaningful while enduring during those community service hours - like curing tuberculosis or building a hydroelectric dam in Botswana.

Then they need to figure out how to pay for college in an environment where costs are soaring along with student-loan debt, which, for the class of 2015, averaged about $35,000 per diploma.

All this while surviving the insanity of a competitive college-admissions environment that makes Wal-Mart on Black Friday look like Sunday Mass. It’s what author Malcom Gladwell refers to as the “Elite Institution Cognitive Disorder” - the parental preoccupation with getting their children into an Ivy League school, Stanford or UC Berkeley, while studies show that, if financial success is the objective, they would be better off going to a less-competitive university and ranking among the top 5 percent of students there. (More on this in a future column.)

Now, students have one more problem to deal with - wading through the fog of confusion surrounding the new SAT college entrance exam.

It’s something that is particularly frustrating for David Gruenbaum of Santa Rosa who has coached students on college entrance exams for 28 years. Gruenbaum, a graduate of the University of Chicago who partners with his wife in a college preparatory business called Ahead of the Class, said he has been a strong advocate of the SAT over the years. But his allegiance has waned with how the College Board has gone about throwing out the old SAT and developing a new one. (Students have their last chance to take the old SAT on Jan. 23. The new one debuts on March 5.)

Given some of the problems - including the decision to make the essay optional, the heavy emphasis on charts and graphs, the confusion around the new SAT scales and the general haste with which the exam was created - he is no longer encouraging students to make the SAT a priority, at least not until the problems are fixed.

“I’m jumping ship,” Gruenbaum said. “I’m going with what I think is the better test, and I’m leaning toward the ACT.”

As an example of his frustration, he pointed to a question in a new SAT sample test that includes a map of the United States showing whether residents of each state are more inclined to use the term “pop,” “coke” or “soda” as a term for a soft drink. The map shows that “soda” is used primarily in the middle and Western portions of the nation, “pop” in the Southern states and “coke” in the Northeastern and Southwest regions. The question asks, “The writer wants the information in the passage to correspond as closely as possible with the information on the map … In which sequence should the three terms for soft drinks be discussed.”

Answers include: A) pop, coke, soda. B) pop, soda, coke … and so on.

The answer itself is elusive enough. If one decided the best answer involved ranking, from most to least, those states using a particular term, the correct response would be B. If one answered geographically from north to south, or west to east, other answers would be correct.

But here’s the bigger problem. This question is not in the math or data-analysis section. It’s in the writing and language section.

“To have that be something that determines their English score just doesn’t make a lot of sense,” said Gruenbaum. “What does that have to do with grammar?”

Then there are the logistical problems with the test. In most cases, results of SAT tests are available within three weeks. This allows students time to work on their weak areas before taking the test again. But those who take the new SAT on March 5 are being told not to expect results until mid-May at the earliest. This would allow little time, particularly amid year-end finals and AP exams, to examine the results and take the test again on June 4. They instead would have to wait until the next test date - Oct. 1.

That’s not to say there aren’t positive aspects to the new test. Gone are the obscure vocabulary words that students will most likely never use or see again. Gone is the extra penalty for getting wrong answers, which encouraged students to leave questions blank even when they could have made an educated guess. And although the essay is now optional, students will be rewarded for critical thinking and supporting their arguments with evidence rather than sheer word volume.

At the same, this is just making the SAT more like, well, the ACT.

Which is why many tutors and counselors across the nation are advising students to skip the SAT, at least until the kinks are worked out. Why risk your educational future by allowing the College Board to use you as a guinea pigs for the new SAT?

“It’s just a messy situation,” said Gruenbaum. “This is the third (SAT) change I have been through, and this is the messiest.”

(Sophomores and juniors who took the PSAT, which is modeled on the new SAT, have already experienced this confusion firsthand. Although they took the test in October, they just got back their results last week. Meanwhile, they’re still waiting to hear what the scores, now based on a scale of 160 to 760 in math and reading/writing, mean in the long run.)

But what really ails the SAT and ACT remains unaddressed. The problem is they are “norm-referenced” exams, meaning they are designed primarily to rank students as opposed to determining how much they actually know about specific subjects. While some may argue this is what they are intended to do, the reality is students are living more and more in a “criterion-based” educational environment, in which they are most often tested on how much they know about a particular subject. This is particularly true of the new common core curriculum in California. In criterion-based testing, all students have a chance to do well if they all know the material. Not so with “norm-referenced” tests, which creates a bell curve on which every student is merely a point.

It’s one thing to want to know where our favorite basketball team is ranked. But this preoccupation with ranking students in the same fashion is having unhealthy consequences.

“Norm-referenced tests like the SAT and the ACT have contributed enormously to the ‘educational arms race’ - the ferocious competition for admission at top colleges and universities,” wrote Richard Atkinson, president emeritus of the University of California system, and Saul Geiser, a research associate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley, in a New York Times opinion piece in May. “They do so by exaggerating the importance of small differences in test scores that have only marginal relevance for later success in college.”

How do we stop this arms race? I don’t know. But it’s clear the new SAT is not the answer we’re looking for.

Paul Gullixson is editorial director for The Press Democrat. Email him at paul.gullixson@pressdemocrat.com.