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Admissions Dean Argues SAT is For Immediate Release: 
Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid RICHMOND, Ind. — Sometimes it’s the little things that are the most telling, like a seemingly simple change in an organization’s Web address. When, for example, members of the College Board recently decided to update that body’s Web suffix from “.org” — traditionally used by public interest and non-profit groups — to the more commercial appellation “.com,” Jeff Rickey took it as another sign of what’s gone wrong with the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). “They’ve made this transition from being a service organization to big business,” says Rickey, dean of admissions and financial aid at Earlham, and himself a member of the College Board that annually administers the SAT to hundreds of thousands of college-bound high school juniors and seniors. He is one of a group of approximately 250 high school counselors and college admissions officials worldwide who in December, following the most recent sitting for the SAT, sent a letter to College Board President Gaston Caperton requesting significant changes in SAT testing procedures. Two problems concern the co-signers of the letter to Caperton, Rickey says: the length of time required to complete the exam and, especially, the Board’s insistence that students hoping to improve their results on any given section of the test cannot retake just that portion but must sit again through the entire exam. “It’s far too long a period of time for young people to have to do it,” says Rickey of the SAT’s current duration — roughly four hours under normal circumstances and more than six hours (over two days) for some students with special needs. Minimal breaks and restrictions on food that students may consume while taking the test, adds Rickey, echoing a major point of the letter to the College Board president, mean individual scores may be compromised by factors such as fatigue and hunger. Based on comments he’s heard from students, parents and even test proctors, the author of the letter, Brad MacGowan, Ed.D., a college counselor at Newton North High School in Massachusetts, has described the present SAT experience as “almost cruel and inhumane punishment.” Based on recent personal history, Rickey has no quarrel with that characterization. “One of my motivations for signing the letter was our son, David, who took the first administration of the new test last March,” explains Rickey. “He got home and just collapsed. So, I was definitely kind of holding that experience in the back of my mind when I heard from Brad.” A Waste of Time As a group, the signers of the letter to the College Board president have suggested that the three sections of the SAT — critical-reading, mathematics, and an essay — be administered separately, contending that such a move “will benefit all of the people involved; proctors, test center coordinators, the colleges receiving the scores, and especially students.” If the College Board would allow students to take just a part of the test each time, Rickey says, “then theoretically they would be totally fresh for all three pieces and the resulting scores would be a better reflection on real student ability.” He adds isolating the three sections also would open the door to the possibility of students wanting to try to improve specific scores being able to retake only that part or those portions of the test in which they’re interested. As constituted today, the SAT requires students wishing to retake any portion of the test to retake the whole thing. “Just as a hypothetical, if you have a student who racks up two 800s on the critical reading and math portions of the test but manages only a 6 [out of 12] on the essay and wants to try again, why make him or her retake the entire test?” poses Rickey. With 95 percent of colleges and universities choosing to look at a prospective student’s highest scores for each section no matter how many times the test is taken, “that’s just a waste of students’ time,” he concludes. “But, unfortunately, it’s what the College Board has figured out is the way to make the most money,” says Rickey, who also is a member of the advisory board for The Education Conservancy, a non-profit organization established in 2004 and committed to helping students and their parents overcome “commercial interference” in the college admissions process. He says that during the College Board’s transition from service organization to big business, the New York-based operation has built up “incredible surpluses” from annual revenues of “hundreds of millions” of dollars. “Even though I’m a member of the College Board, speaking from this particular point of view, I can’t say that I feel like much of an owner in the College Board,” Rickey says. However, he is not without hope that the situation might improve. Responding to a recent query on the subject by a reporter from The Chronicle of Higher Education, a spokeswoman for the College Board said the proposals made in the letter to Board President Caperton are “seriously being looked at.” And another College Board official has indicated the organization’s SAT Committee will discuss the matter at its next meeting in the spring. For his part, though, Rickey suspects it will be financial considerations, again, that finally “get the elephant to move.” For years, relates Rickey, the SAT resisted adding a writing component because of questions over how a writing section would be scored, who would do the scoring and, in particular, what those additions to the test would cost. “Then several years ago the University of California system was so dissatisfied with the SAT, because it didn’t measure writing, that the whole system was going to drop the SAT and move to the ACT. Now, that’s an elephant making a big move, so naturally the Board reconsidered and added the essay portion in the new test. “I think the same thing may happen here. Five years from now there’ll be some other change in market conditions. I don’t expect it will be because of this letter, but something else will happen and there’ll be another re-shift. Hopefully, it will be toward something that better serves the students who have to take the SAT.” — EC — Contact: Kevin Burke, director of media relations
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Earlham
College · 801 National Road West · Richmond,
Indiana 47374-4095 |