What's Holding American Students Back? The SAT

[Young_Chitlin]

Coleman is taking a step in the right direction, but the SAT and ACT are still fundamentally about sorting by smarts. Imagine if hospitals evaluated incoming patients the way colleges evaluate applicants: Only the healthiest cases would be admitted. Thanks in part to the pernicious influence of published college rankings, schools have an incentive to entice more students to apply simply in order to reject them.



For the good of a country that’s losing its lead in the global race for knowledge, it would be more productive to expand opportunities for learning than to monkey with the tests that parcel out existing slots. Increased government funding of postsecondary education is one way to open the bottleneck and reduce the importance of standardized tests. Massive open online courses—MOOCs—are a more exciting answer. They’re cheap and highly democratic, and anyone can enroll at any time. A MOOC is all about the knowledge, not the credential. Which is the way it should be, right?

Sternberg, the formerly stupid first-grader, wound up running the University of Wyoming this fall after academic postings at Yale, Tufts, and Oklahoma State. At all three schools his research showed that measuring students’ creativity and practicality could predict their college success better than plain SAT scores could. The message: Real life is messy. You’re not given five answers to choose from. And America shouldn’t depend on something resembling an IQ test to rake geniuses from the rubbish.

 

[KNiGHTS]

Tenure and integration are the main problems.

Teachers have no incentive to do their jobs once they can't be fired, and integration gives a warped sense of who the smart people are to minorities bussed into majority white institutions. Blacks and other minorities that aren't Asian get the notion that intelligence is a "white only" thing because the intelligent kids who look like them are sprinkled across seven different schools because they stayed 10 feet out of the school zone, which ultimately leads those smart minority children to be ostracized for "acting white."

And since teachers also are so rarely exposed to the rare intelligent minority, they feel they need to figure out that child's "trick" to success by constantly trying to trip him or her up as opposed to congratulating him or her for succeeding, ultimately leading some smart minority children to give up and dumb down to just get a breather from the scrutiny.

The testing part is just another layer in a system that would've had this country on its face and ass fucked if we weren't blessed with two oceans for natural borders to keep the rest of the world at bay, passive neighbors to the north, and fucked up neighbors to the south.

 

[silverfoxx]

Powerful thread. I just emailed this to alot of people.

 

[Maximus Rex]

It isn't standardize tests, it's the fact that Americans don't take education seriously.

 

[silverfoxx]

It isn't standardize tests, it's the fact that Americans don't take education seriously.

That may be true but I also agree with the article. Im a product of what the article is preaching. All most all of my friends

Who scored high on these tests went to private schools. My mother was a single parent who couldn't afford to put me in a academic first school...so I went to the hoodiest of hood schools. Never a product of my environment, I really valued education and often studied and took classes for the ACT. But no matter what I practiced, I was NO WHERE prepared for them tests.

Had to get the scholarship for college the hard way....grind at a community college and then go where I wanted too. Today im one of the few blacks at my school who actually maintain and gives a fuck about their GPA.

 

[32DaysOfInfiniti]

I agree, but luckily i did well on that shit... Its terrible tho how once it is decided upon how well a kid can and cant learn, they are pretty much marked as that from K-12. Its rare that a SPED kid ever gets out of that program despite how un-special their deficiency may be

Being bored, hyperactive and uninterested is not the same as ignorant, slow or retarded

 

[antoseeg]

What's holding students back is lack of incentive. If there were guaranteed careers for getting certain scores on the sats, students would try harder to succeed.

 

[blakfyahking]

It isn't standardize tests, it's the fact that Americans don't take education seriously.

^^^^realest of real speech in this thread

it's simply a cultural issue in America