Executive summary: Take the SAT as a social challenge, not as an academic one.
ὁ ἄνθρωπος φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῷον – Aristotle, Politics I 1253a
Aristotle famously remarked that “man is by nature a political animal.” Exactly what this means has fueled debate and social dialog for centuries, but Aristotle does give us two clues as to what was on his mind. First, he points out that, alone among the animals, humans use speech to communicate not just pleasure and pain but also “right and wrong and the other moral qualities.” Second, he notes that humans are “born possessing weapons for the use of wisdom and virtue.” Aristotle contends that our speech and our innate capabilities find their highest expression in the “political partnership” between individuals and society. On this basis, it’s easy to see how the cultivation of speech and the strengthening of morals have defined “academic virtue” in the education of the young ever since.
Fast forward 2275 years to 1926, to find a more sophisticated society still seeking virtue at essentially the same wellsprings, but now equipped with a grading system and strong tools for statistical analysis. This was the year in which the SAT was born. At that time, the goal of testing individuals was to determine suitability for military service, so we can reasonably comment that the pursuit of the “political partnership” by assessing “academic virtue” was still very much alive. Indeed, the SAT was soon rapidly adopted by universities and colleges, who saw it as an additional measure (over and above high school test scores, existing admission tests, letters of reference and interviews) by which students could demonstrate their readiness for higher education and hence for future life. Subsequent generations have agreed. In the 35 years to 1961, the number taking the SAT multiplied by an amazing 100-fold, and went on to double again before reaching its modern level of about 1.7 million candidates per year.
There has been a mass of literature written and a great deal said about the SAT, ranging from high-end research through to unprintable opinion. Mercifully, so-called YA-Dystopian movies seem to have waned in the last 5-6 years, but there’s one treasure entitled The Thinning with the tag line “It’s like the SAT, except it kills you” that may interest anyone who has exhausted NetFlix and wants a sample of our cultural response to the test. So, against this background, what can we usefully say about the SAT phenomenon that hasn’t already been literally analyzed to death in one way or another?
Well, first we know that fashions come and go: in recent years, numbers taking the SAT have plunged up and down by up to 30% per year in the wake of COVID, test-taking scandals, lawsuits, reported errors in the test administration and plain ordinary variations in people’s preference for taking this kind of exam. The SAT is here to stay, but we can expect it to swing in and out of style. Second, we know for sure that something like the SAT will always be required to determine suitability for university admission. Let’s hope that the universities themselves don’t stray too far into this territory; the independence of the SAT has always been one of its strong points. And thirdly we should beware of finding something worse: if you hate the formality of the SAT exam, would you really prefer the less-transparent process of being judged on applications essays or solely on the ball-and-chain legacy of your 4-year high school transcript?
We should also remember that the SAT itself keeps changing, with the most recent revision having been in 2014 and with another set of changes scheduled for 2024 (when the test will be considerably shortened and re-architected to be taken on screens and tablets). Such changes mean that we can’t look upon the SAT as a fixed standard, not across societies with different technologies and certainly not across decades. Nor is it absolutely “fair” – how could it be when it keeps changing? Much more seriously, detailed statistical analysis (and subsequent legal action) have produced findings that aspects of the SAT systematically favor or disfavor students from certain demographic groups. Clearly, this must be fixed. If the SAT is to be of value to society, it must surely keep changing to reflect the values of society, and this may mean changing at an accelerating pace. Already, our ideas on what is worth testing, how to reduce bias in testing and what the test means have changed out of recognition since 1926. To illustrate, take a look at some questions from the 1926 test, and please reflect that the 8,040 students who tested on Wednesday June 23, 1926 were given just 97 minutes to attempt more than 300 of these beauties:
- A man spent one-eighth of his spare change for a package of cigarettes, three times as much for a meal and then had eighty cents left. How much money did he have at first?
A. $1.60; B. $2.40; C. $3.20; D. $2.00. - Which two numbers are next in the sequence: ⅛ ⅛ ¼ ¾ 3 ? ?
- Epilepsy is to carpenter as stuttering is to
A. tongue; B. minister; C. cure; D. stammering; E. fluttering
It’s tough to approach these questions without a lot of academic apprehension, let alone social distaste. Nowadays, indeed, students might find questions like these “totally” unfair from several perspectives, hard (if not impossible) to understand, and certainly very difficult to answer at speed. And yet there they were, helping to determine who would thrive in American society just 100 years ago. O tempora, o mores!
It is in this aspect, actually, that I mainly believe the SAT retains its value today: it continues to attempt to measure “academic virtue” independently and with the goal of assigning societal opportunity. It isn’t 100% fair (no test ever is), but taken with other academic indicators, it is still a reasonable predictor of future “success”. Preparing for the modern SAT is an interesting exercise in itself: the preparation can greatly improve a student’s perceptiveness and comprehension when reading passages of many types; it can certainly help a lot with baseline skills such as vocabulary, grammar and punctuation; it provides a probing test of understanding of topics from the early and middle levels of the high school math curriculum. SAT preparation takes about 3-6 months, during which time it challenges each student’s determination to strive towards a goal, and it presents students with a very interesting opportunity to observe and learn about themselves in relation to that challenge. And it needn’t be expensive: there are perfectly good, free SAT preparation tools around.
The current learning landscape in the US allows for a great diversity in student experiences during high school. Students can select from a wide range of subjects to study, can use a great cornucopia of tools that help with learning, and can have access to extraordinary opportunities for self-development through extra-curricular activities, through rich communication channels, through multimedia and virtualization, and through travel, to list only a few. The SAT, with all its faults, provides a standard by which increasingly diverse cohorts of students can be measured against each other. It isn’t very popular to talk about this aspect of examinations, but the hard fact is that tests are there to sift individuals precisely because this kind of separation is good for society. The modern world provides more opportunities than ever for an individual to “be themself”, to consume alone, to isolate, not to be judged and in effect to be “an Iland, intire of itselfe“ as John Donne puts it. The SAT, by contrast, is a call to arms, an opportunity to test yourself against your peers, a chance to experience and endure public assessment, a rite of passage towards the “political partnership” and a way to find out more about yourself. Those who want rid of it altogether maybe haven’t yet encountered another of Aristotle’s aphorisms:
a person who…does not need any part of a state because of self-sufficiency is either a beast or a god
The bottom line: Although the SAT is imperfect in several ways and out of fashion in some places, something like it will always be with us. Students should try it as a personal challenge. The experience may teach them more than they expect, and may help them to grow as individuals in relation to society.
