The Story Behind the SAT Overhaul - NYTimes.com Page | of 17 i | TheNew York Gimes — htto://nyti.ms/1ccH20z MAGAZINE The Story Behind the SAT Overhaul By TODD BALF MARCH 6, 2014 In July 2012, a few months before he was to officially take over as president of the College Board, David Coleman invited Les Perelman, then a director of writing at M.LT., to come meet with him in Lower Manhattan. Of the many things the College Board does — take part in research, develop education policy, create curriculums it is perhaps most recognized as the organization that administers the SAT, and Perelman was one of the exam’s harshest and most relentless critics. Since 2005, when the College Board added an essay to the SAT (raising the total possible score from 1,600 to 2,400), Perelman had been conducting research that highlighted what he believed were the inherent absurdities in how the essay questions were formulated and scored. His earliest findings showed that length, more than any other factor, correlated with a high score on the essay. More recently, Perelman coached 16 students who were retaking the test after having received mediocre scores on the essay section. He told them that details mattered but factual accuracy didn’t. “You can tell them the War of 1812 began in 1945,” he said. He encouraged them to sprinkle in little-used but fancy words like “plethora” or “myriad” and to use two or three preselected quotes from prominent figures like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, regardless of whether they were relevant to the question asked. Fifteen of his pupils scored higher than the goth percentile on the essay when they retook the exam, he said. Right around the time Coleman was appointed as the board’s next president, he read an article about Perelman’s research in The New York Times and decided to reach out to him, “Somebody takes a whack at the SAT, so what?” Coleman said when I met him in his office at the College Board headquarters near Lincoln Center last month. “They get some media coverage, it’s not that interesting, But this was a hitp://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/magazine/the-story-behind-the-sat-overhaul.htmleme=etal... 01/08/2015The Story Behind the SAT Overhaul - NYTimes.com Page 2 of 17 guy who devoted his lifetime to work you care about” — teaching students how to write — “and then looks at an instrument meant to celebrate writing and —” Coleman’s words trailed off. “I wanted to go beyond the news presentation of his claim,” he finally added, “to the depth of his claim.” Over the course of their two-hour conversation, Perelman told Coleman that he wasn’t opposed to an essay portion of the test, per se; he thought it was a good idea, if done well. But “when is there a situation in either college or life when you're asked to write on demand about something you've never once thought about?” he asked. “T’ve never gotten an email from a boss saying: ‘Is failure necessary for success? Get back to me in 25 minutes?” But that’s what the SAT does.” Perelman said that tutors commonly taught their students to create and memorize an all-purpose essay that contained the necessary elements for a top score — “a personal anecdote, a few historical references; Florence Nightingale seems a strangely popular reference.” When test day comes, they regurgitate what they've committed to memory, slightly reshaping depending on the question asked. But no one is actually learning anything about writing. Perelman was surprised, he told me, by the productive nature of their conversation, but ultimately he couldn't imagine that much would come of it. The College Board was a huge nonprofit organization, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue (in part from the nearly three million SAT tests it administers to high-school students each year), and despite intense criticism in the past, it had done little, in Perelman’s estimation, to bring about meaningful change. “His heart is in the right place,” Perelman recalled thinking at the time. “David Coleman actually believes in education.” But trying to change the way the College Board does business, Perelman said, is “like trying to turn around the Titanic.” There ‘was no way an institution as notoriously slow and defensive as Coleman's was going to do that, no matter who was at the helm. By the time he took over in October 2012, Coleman was well versed not just in Perelman’s critiques but also in a much wider array of complaints coming from all of the College Board’s constituencies: Teachers, students, parents, university presidents, college-admissions officers, high-school counselors. They all were unhappy with the test, and they all had valid reasons. Students despised the SAT not just because of the intense anxiety it caused — it was one of the biggest barriers to entry to the colleges they dreamed of attending — hitp://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/magazine/the-story-behind-the-sat-overhaul.html?eme=etal.... 01/08/2015‘The Story Behind the SAT Overhaul - NYTimes.com Page 3 of 17 but also because they didn’t know what to expect from the exam and felt that it played clever tricks, asking the kinds of questions they rarely encountered in their high-school courses. Students were docked one-quarter point for every multiple- choice question they got wrong, requiring a time-consuming risk analysis to determine which questions to answer and which to leave blank. Teachers, too, felt the test wasn’t based on what they were doing in class, and yet the mean SAT scores of many high schools were published by state education departments, which meant that blame for poor performances was often directed at them. An even more serious charge leveled at the test was that it put students whose families had money at a distinct advantage, because their parents could afford expensive test-prep classes and tutors. Several years ago, an exasperated Mitch Kapor, a founder of Lotus Software, co-wrote an op-ed in The San Francisco Chronicle suggesting colleges should require mandatory disclosure by students and parents of “each and every form of purchased help,” as a way to level the playing field. When the Scholastic Aptitude Test was created in 1926, it was promoted as a tool to create a classless, Jeffersonian-style meritocracy. The exam, which purported to measure innate intelligence, was originally adapted from the World War I Army 1.Q. test and served as a scholarship screening device for about a dozen selective colleges throughout the 1930s. It was assumed that there was no way to effectively prep fora test geared to inborn intelligence, but as early as 1938, Stanley Kaplan began offering classes that promised higher scores. Today the company Kaplan founded and its main competitor, the Princeton Review, are joined by innumerable boutique firms (not to mention high-priced private tutors), all part of a $4.5-billion- a-year industry that caters largely to the worried wealthy in America who feel that the test can be gamed and that their children need to pay to learn the strategies. Coleman conducted a “listening thing” with his organization’s various frustrated constituencies. For the College Board to be a great institution, he thought at the time, it had to own up to its vulnerabilities. “Unequal test-prep access is a problem,” he said. “It is a problem that it’s opaque to students what's on the exam. It is a problem that the scoring is too complex. I knew some of the science behind the SAT and actually admired a lot of it. On the other hand, I felt that something really had to happen, because what had grown up around it” — the way in which the test evolved http://www.nytimes.cony/2014/03/09/magazine/the-story-behind-the-sat-overhaul.html?eme=etal... 01/08/2015The Story Behind the SAT Overhaul - NYTimes.com Page 4 of 17 from a vehicle to encourage meritocracy to a reinforcement of privilege in American education — “threatened everything.” It was clear, Coleman said, that no parents, whatever their socioeconomic status, were satisfied. The achievements of children from affluent families were tainted because they “bought” a score; those in the middle class cried foul because they couldn't get the “good stuff” or were overextended trying to; and the poor, often minority students, were shut out completely. A paper prepared in 2009 by Derek Briggs, the chairman of the Research and Evaluation Methodology program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, emphasized another cost to test prep beyond the $1,000-plus classes and the personal tutors: He called it an opportunity cost, meaning that time spent in the narrow pursuit of beating the test meant time away from schoolwork and extracurricular activities that are actually designed to prepare students to succeed in college. In addition to these educational (and moral) quandaries, Coleman had to grapple with what it meant for the College Board as a business to have the credibility of the SAT called into question. A growing number of colleges and universities, frustrated by the minimal change to the SAT when it was revised in 2005 and motivated by a report issued in 2008 by the National Association for College Admission Counseling (Nacac), began to eliminate the SAT and its competitor, the A.C.T., as admission requirements, following the lead of several small, liberal-arts colleges that did so years before. The authors of the Nacac report cited a University of California study, which characterized the SAT as a “relatively poor predictor of student performance” and questioned the tendency of colleges to rely on the SAT as “one of the most important admission tools.” (Many of the schools that dropped test requirements saw spikes in their applications, at least in the first year.) Around the time the report came out — and following the publication of “The Power of Privilege,” by the Wake Forest University sociology professor Joseph A. Soares, an account of the way standardized tests contributed to discriminatory admissions policies at Yale — Wake Forest became the first Top 30 national university in the U.S. News & World Report college rankings to announce a test- optional admissions policy. Follow-up studies at Wake Forest showed that the average high-school G.P.A. of incoming freshmen increased after the school stopped using standardized-test scores as a factor. Seventy-nine percent of its 2012 incoming class was in the top 10 percent of their high-school classes. Before going test- http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/magazine/the-story-behind-the-sat-overhaul.html?eme=ctal.... 01/08/2015