Education: Inside The New SAT

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I put that question to David Lohman, a University of Iowa psychology professor who has studied the differences between achievement and aptitude tests. In a paper that will be published in the forthcoming book Rethinking the SAT, Lohman analyzed test scores for 6,300 11th-graders who in 2000 took two very different tests, the Iowa Tests of Educational Development (ITED) and the Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT), a standardized exam first published in 1971 that Lohman helped revise two years ago. The ITED is your basic achievement test: it assesses how well kids have learned such class exercises as setting up science experiments, reading social studies passages, and spelling. The CogAT, by contrast, is a test that measures verbal, quantitative and figural reasoning abilities, irrespective of any one curriculum. (In the quantitative section, for instance, a question asked students to figure out the next number in the following series: 2, 7, 11, 14, 16. You can get the answer without knowing much math. Notice that the numbers ascend by 5 (7 - 2), 4 (11 - 7), 3 (14 - 11) and so on. The answer is 17.)

When he compared ITED and CogAT scores by race, Lohman found something surprising to those outside his field: the gap between white and minority students was smaller on the reasoning test than on the achievement test. Whites did about the same on both exams, but the percentage of blacks who scored reasonably well (above the 70th percentile) was higher on the CogAT tests. Others have replicated such findings by comparing achievement and reasoning tests in earlier grades; one theory as to why minorities often score higher on the latter is that they attend poor schools that leave their potential untapped. "Indeed," writes Lohman in Rethinking the SAT, "the problem with the current version of the SAT"--which continues to show a racial score gap--"may not be that it is an aptitude test, but that it is not enough of an aptitude test."

So why is it becoming even less of one? Largely because Richard Atkinson, president of the University of California--the College Board's biggest client--wanted it to. Board president Caperton surely has his own ambitions, but it's unlikely he would have sought such radical changes if Atkinson hadn't spoken out against the SAT. In a February 2001 speech in Washington, Atkinson recommended that his university stop asking its 76,000 yearly applicants for SAT scores. It's hard to overstate the gravity of this moment for the College Board. If U.C. had followed through on the recommendation, the board could have lost a huge pool of students, who pay $28.50 each to take the SAT.

In his 2001 speech, Atkinson called for U.C. to "require only standardized tests that assess mastery of specific subject areas rather than undefined notions of 'aptitude.'" Why the switch? "Last year," he said, "I visited an upscale private school and observed a class of 12-year-old students studying verbal analogies in anticipation of the SAT. I learned that they spend hours each month--directly and indirectly--preparing for the SAT, studying long lists of analogies such as 'untruthful is to mendaciousness' as 'circumspect is to caution.' The time involved was not aimed at developing the students' reading and writing abilities but rather their test-taking skills."