SAT Revision

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, this is Mark Hager calling from Charlottesville, Virginia.

Hi, Mark. Welcome to the show.

Well, I read about a month ago that the FET will be undergoing some dramatic changes. For instance, the test will only use words in common usage, and this surprised me. Seemed to be contrary to the notion that the breadth of a person’s vocabulary has a strong correlation with measures of success.

My question is simply a query to hear your opinions about the changes in the SAT and, more importantly, the value of a broad vocabulary and the correlation with success. I personally found that people I’ve met with impressive vocabularies are usually particularly interesting folks.

I agree.

Oh, yeah.

I agree with that last statement for sure. There’s a lot to unpack here. I’m going to drill right down to what I think the core of your issue is. And that is what you believe to be excluded from the SAT.

And what we know right now is only a list of two words have been given out in a press statement as possible words that would be excluded. No list of words has been announced. So we can assume any word that we want wouldn’t be on that list. And we can immediately go straight to thinking that they’re going to make some dumb mistake and leave out a lot of words that people should know. But we’re just guessing at this point.

Yeah, the words were synthesis and empirical, if I’m recalling correctly.

Well, no, those are the words that we’re going to include.

Right.

The ones that we’re going to exclude are depreciatory and membranous.

Oh.

So only two words. And here’s the crux of this, Mark. If you take these four words, these are the only four words that they’ve talked about. It’s two that they’re going to exclude and two that they’re going to include. And these are just examples of the longer list of both.

And you look at these in these large databases of language, the corpora, you find that the synthesis and empirical are highly correlated to academic studies across many disciplines. And these other two words are so rare that even somebody who reads a lot is unlikely to encounter them more than once every 10 years.

They’re talking about eliminating these words that belong to one discipline that you would never encounter unless you were in that discipline. And even then, you would only encounter it on very rare occasions. And that has been the problem. One of the problems with the SAT is it is assumed that you need this very specialized knowledge when it is a general purpose test for a general academic background.

Well, and the head of the college boards was drawn into a discussion about this online, and he was pointing out that there’s a difference between words that you learn through flashcards and words that you learn because you’re reading Pride and Prejudice, for example.

Right, right.

It reminds me of the debate over spelling bee words. You know, some of those words you’re just never going to see again, right? Or you never saw before. And the Scrabble words, like this whole vast list of words that you only know because they have high point scores.

But, Mark, overall, I agree with your general concerns. I don’t think there’s a dumbing down here. I think there’s a sharpening and a focus. I do agree that testing has to be taken with a giant grain of salt. It’s interesting to think how many schools are starting to slowly value the SAT and the ACT less and start to look at a student’s high school record, their extracurricular activities, and their personality, the things that are relayed by their behavior or their essay.

Mark, we’re going to take a look at this probably another year or two from now after the new test has been put in place, and we’ll see how people feel about it. This isn’t the first time that the SAT has been revised. I know when they first talked about these changes coming in October of last year, there was a lot of outcry then as well in October of 2013.

And there was a really interesting point made by an SAT tutor. He wrote, this was in The Atlantic, he said, the SAT reinforces many students’ mistaken belief that writing is an act of inspiration, giving rise to a sudden burst of activity that can be carried out only under extreme pressure. And for me, that underlies the problem with testing. It supposes that we are supposed to be able to regurgitate our knowledge in this kind of falsely structured environment that bears no resemblance to the real world.

Yeah, and I think one of the reforms that they’re talking about doing now is having the students make arguments that are more evidence-based rather than their own opinion about something like that.

Although the writing, the essay is now optional, right?

Right. It’s optional. It’s optional. But the material that would be in it is different.

Yeah. If you want something to be outraged about, Mark, how about this? They don’t grade on grammar or spelling. They grade on the structure of the essay.

How do they define structure?

Yeah.

Do you have a cohesive argument that’s built along an outline that has, you know, the intro and the supporting points and the conclusion and so forth?

Yeah.

Well, Mark, we’re going to keep an eye on this, and check in with us if you see further signs of deterioration, all right?

Okay.

Thanks very much.

All right.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Mark.

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