Education: Inside The New SAT

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What's the difference? Achievement tests gauge mastery of subject matter; your U.S. history final was an achievement test. The SAT IIs are a battery of achievement tests the College Board offers in 18 subjects, including physics and Korean. Aptitude tests are harder to define. Many people seem to think of aptitude exams in general--and the old (or current) SAT in particular--as IQ tests, a notion subtly promulgated by Nicholas Lemann, the new dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, in his influential anti-SAT book, The Big Test (1999). Writing about early versions of the SAT, Lemann points out that "the bulk of the test was devoted to word familiarity, the eternal staple of intelligence testing." He correctly notes that the exam directly descended from IQ tests given by the U.S. Army in the early part of the past century.

But he also says that the "SAT has changed remarkably little over the years," which is true only in the most basic sense: it still examines verbal and mathematical skills. Even so, the question types have changed dramatically. The first Scholastic Aptitude Test, which was given on June 23, 1926, included "Artificial Language" and logic sections that would seem bizarre to today's SAT takers. (A practice question asked students to translate a gibberish sentence--"OK entcola kon"--based on a given lexicon.) Similarly, IQ tests look quite different from the SAT. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the most widely used IQ test, asks funny little questions like "In what two ways is a lamp better than a candle?"

If IQ tests try to probe innate abilities, and if achievement tests rate classroom learning, aptitude tests assay something in between--developed abilities. Developed abilities are those nurtured through schoolwork, reading, doing crosswords, soaking up the arts, debating politics, whatever. These aren't inborn traits but honed competencies. Whereas early psychometricians, many of them racist, propagated what Lemann calls the dipstick theory--the idea that a test score is like a mark on a dipstick showing the raw amount of intelligence in your mental oil tank--the field outgrew that simplistic notion at least a generation ago. "I don't think anyone believes the SAT or even pure [IQ] tests are--or have ever been--a pure measure of intelligence," says Zwick, the former SAT Committee chair and author of Fair Game? The Use of Standardized Admissions Tests in Higher Education (2002). "There is not a test that is completely independent of environmental experience or experience in the schools."