The Foreign Service Journal, June 2014

62 JUNE 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT Time Will Tell Is the College Board earnest in its com- mitment to helping students of all income levels do better both on the SAT and in their college years?The answer is a quali- fied yes. “I believe that David Coleman is sincere in his attempt to construct a better SAT,” says Professor Les Perelman, a former director of writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Writing and Comparative Media Studies. His published paper, “Mass Market Writing Assessments As Bullshit,” detailed his own students’ experiments with using “made- up facts” in their SAT essays and receiving top scores. Perelman believes an assessment test similar to the British A-levels, which gener- ally employ writing skills in a Q-and-A format, would be a much better predictor of college success than either the SAT or the ACT, however. And that is perhaps the biggest ques- tion of all: Are these tests even necessary for college admission? After all, more than 800 colleges do not require the SAT or ACT from their applicants, and the list is growing. As Perelman points out, “The person NOTE: The 2016 changes do not affect the SAT 2 subject tests. These subject tests are a good way to demonstrate knowledge in specific subjects, such as biology or psychology, and are best taken at the same time the student is fin- ishing up honors, Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate course- work in the same subject, while knowledge is still fresh. For more information on the SAT 2 subject tests, go to www.collegeboard.org. who created the SAT, Carl Campbell Brigham, the secretary of the College Board in the early 20th century and a professor of psychology at Princeton, repu- diated it in the 1930s.” Bob Schaeffer, public education direc- tor for the National Center for Fair &Open Testing, believes the announced changes are merely cosmetic. “Rather than improve the measurement quality of the SAT, most of the upcoming adjustments seem