The Monday Excerpt: Word Games

Every Monday I will post a brief excerpt from my upcoming book, Choose Wisely: the SAT, the ACT, and You.  This is good for you because you get to read, for free, what other people will have to pay for later.  This is good for me because it means I have to actually write the book if I'm going to have anything to post!  So, win-win.


This week's excerpt is the beginning of the chapter in which I discuss the origins of the SAT.  It cuts off right where it starts to get interesting... but over the next few weeks I will post the shocking and exciting continuation!


Word Games

Here's a multiple choice question you won't see on the SAT:

1. What does “SAT” stand for?

(A) Scholastic Aptitude Test

(B) Scholastic Assessment Test

(C) Standardized Achievement Test

(D) Stupid Annoying Test

(E) SAT

The correct answer is (E). That's right: the acronym “SAT” is not actually an acronym at all, since it stands for nothing. Or rather, it stands for itself: three meaningless letters with great brand recognition. As we'll see, this circularity applies not only to the name but to the test itself. The SAT measures how good you are at the SAT, not how smart you are or how much you know.

It wasn't always this way. “SAT” originally did stand for “Scholastic Aptitude Test”, and some very smart people believed that it was going to make top-notch college educations available even to poor or otherwise disadvantaged students, so long as these students were blessed with aptitude.  Aptitude is usually described as "inherent ability" in order to contrast it with achievement, education, or knowledge.  Aptitude is nature, not nurture -- or so they say.  The people who nationally implemented the SAT bet that there were thousands of high-aptitude students languishing in Podunk or Palookaville, far beyond the ken of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.  Those students never got the chance to develop their potential because the coddled, prep-schooled, east-coast elite filled up the seats at America's best colleges.  The SAT was supposed to open up the Ivy League to middle America.

Nowadays, not even College Board claims that the SAT measures aptitude.  The boldest claim they are willing to make is that the SAT has some predictive validity for first year college grades (although it doesn't even do that as well as high school GPA).  Nevertheless, the SAT does predict one thing about students extremely well: how wealthy their parents are.  Some people, such as Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, view this correlation as a matter of smart (and therefore wealthy) parents passing on their good genes to their kids.  Others, such as Bob Schaeffer of fairtest.org, say that it merely reflects the fact that wealthier kids go to better schools and can afford more test prep.  But everybody agrees that the SAT has become what it was designed to combat: yet another way for the privileged to pass their privileges onto their children.

In order to understand how the good intentions of the early test makers got so royally screwed up, we must go back to where it all began.  Please sharpen your #2 pencils and prepare yourself for:

A Brief History of the SAT (in Multiple Choice Format)

2. Which of the following played a role in the development of the SAT?

(A) The United States Army

(B) Eugenics

(C) Communism

(D) A sixth-grader in Florida

(E) All of the above

As much as I would like to say that communists were entirely responsible for the SAT, the answer is (E): all of the above.  Don't you wish that actual SAT questions were more like this?