Education: Inside The New SAT

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Like so many disconcerted 11th-graders, Atkinson had been driven round the bend by analogies--which are, not coincidentally, banished from the New SAT. But some academics are now offering an elegy for the analogy: "Analogical thinking is at the very foundation of how we make use of old knowledge to understand new things," says Lohman. "It may take a long time to understand how our solar system is set up, but if someone could use that information to help you understand the structure of an atom, it speeds the process up...When we learn, we have to do this again and again. Students listen to a lecture and say, 'How did that relate to what I know?'" O.K., but isn't Atkinson right that students should spend more time reading than studying word lists? Probably, though it depends on what they read and how well they study the word lists. To this day, I remember learning the word apathy on a list I studied while preparing for the SAT. Because I had gone to a rural Arkansas junior high that assigned a romance novel in eighth-grade lit, poring over the word list three years later was actually helpful.

A cognitive psychologist, Atkinson has no specialized training in psychometrics, though he has researched mathematical models of memory. He says he favors achievement over aptitude tests partly because his university's research shows that the SAT II subject-based tests are just as good at predicting success at U.C. as the regular SAT. "When I saw that data," he says, "that was the nail in the coffin." But according to an exhaustive 2002 College Board study, the most accurate predictor of success in college--at U.C. and everywhere else--is a combination of high school grades, SAT scores and SAT II scores. The changes Atkinson has wrought may alter instruction at the "upscale private school" he talked about in his speech, but they may be corrosive, psychometrically speaking, for the rest of the nation.

Consider the new reading section of the SAT, which will feature, for the first time, at least one fiction passage on every test. In January, after they began perusing novels to find excerpts, text hunters at Educational Testing Service (ETS), the Princeton, N.J., firm that the College Board pays to write SAT questions, put together a list of books to be avoided when picking passages. On the list were 40 or so titles often assigned in good English classes--novels such as Animal Farm, Catch-22 and Native Son. ETS had a solid psychometric rationale for shunning the books: reading-comprehension questions should measure a student's ability to analyze something new, not something already assigned in English class.

However, when the board's Reading Development Committee met in May, its chair, retired English teacher Joan Vinson of Dallas, argued against excluding those books. "These books are included in some of the best literature out there," Vinson said. "Also, if we're trying to align the SAT more with school curricula, that's something we can't do if we exclude these books." Other committee members heartily agreed that passages from William Faulkner and James Joyce--authors typically assigned only in the best schools--should also be considered for inclusion. Students who have already read these authors will have a clear advantage over those who haven't.