`DUMBING DOWN' SATs AND MORE

"SAT Scores Rise Strongly After Test Is Overhauled" read a recent Wall Street Journal headline. The continuation of the article carried the title "SAT Scores Post Strong Increase." Good news?

Hardly. The "higher" scores came from a "dumbed-down" test. Students now have an extra half hour to complete the "new" SAT. They now use electronic calculators and answer fewer questions in general and fewer multiple-choice math questions in particular. Reading passages now ask definitions from context. And the difficult antonym section, calling for linguistic and intellectual subtleties long lost, has been dropped entirely. More time, calculators added, fewer questions, definition from context and the antonym section cut entirely: hardly a recipe for excellence.

Here's the College Board rationale for the changes: "Students taking the SAT in the 1990s are substantially different from those who took the test in the 1940s when the scale was created. Continuing to force-fit their scores to a scale established for a very different group of students reduces the interpretive value of the score within the population for the sake of slavish consistency to the original scale and comparisons over time."

They'd like to be persuaded by exaggerations like "force-fit" and "slavish" and breeze past their statement that today's students are "substantially different" from those who took the test in 1940. I'd like you to be persuaded that they just admitted that the educational system's "substantially different" students are really "substantially deficient."

For years, "progressive" educators have vilified memorization and rote learning, with special venom directed at math tables and vocabulary. Surprised that the two areas of the test singled out for weakening are math and vocabulary?

Did scores on different tests rise as well? Look at the American College Test results, as reported by the Wall Street Journal: "Average test scores for the call of 1995 for the American College Test ... showed no rise at all." And the reporter also quoted senior researcher Walter Haney of Boston College, who noted that " ... the prime suspect for such an anomalous one-year change would be the change in the format of the test."

But there's more to "dumbing down" the SAT than merely weakening the test itself, just one part of a destructive and deceptive pattern. Emphasizing feelings and counterfeit self-esteem, outcomes-based education will produce less literate students who cannot possibly do well when tested on history or vocabulary, or almost anything else. An easier SAT would serve them well.

The history standards of the government's new Goals 2000 program, drenched in political correctness, highlight America's admitted faults and leave out much that remains positive. OBE students going through the Goals 2000 program wouldn't have much of a chance with the older, tougher SAT, but the easier version, plus the "recentering" changes scheduled for this year, will help disguise actual deficiencies.

Putting an artificially higher number on actually lower academic performance only highlights the problems facing American education. You can fiddle with the figures forever, but as long as education "professionals" refuse to be honest with taxpayers, matters can only worsen.

George Roche is the president of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Mich.