It’s like a month of miracles! (The pessimist in me is concerned that a good month now will mean we’re all doomed come election month.)

First the Unigo.com thing, and now this. I’m too involved with doing my happy dance (similar to the Snoopy dance, only it’s much more cerebral when I do it) to write intelligently about the NACAC’s ass-kicking report on the backward-thinking, wretched evilness that is the use of standardized test scores as a means to measure high school students’ intelligence, aptitude, and whether they are deserving of admission to a particular college or university.

I’ve written several times about my intense hatred and disdain for the test prep industry, the misuse of standardized tests, and the high-pressure hoops high school students are forced to jump through (in an accelerated, advanced, and gifted manner) by their parents and the college admissions process.

The following are my favorite bits from the NY Times article about the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) and the commission they put together to research the effectiveness/worth of using the SAT and the ACT as sorting hats in the college admissions game.

The commission’s report, the culmination of a yearlong study led by William R. Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, comes amid growing concerns that the frenzy over standardized college admissions tests is misshaping secondary education and feeding a billion-dollar test-prep industry that encourages students to try to game the tests.

“It would be much better for the country,” Mr. Fitzsimmons said in an interview, “to have students focusing on high school courses that, based on evidence, will prepare them well for college and also prepare them well for the real world beyond college, instead of their spending enormous amounts of time trying to game the SAT.”

Mr. Fitzsimmons’s group, which was convened by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, also expresses concerns “that test scores appear to calcify differences based on class, race/ethnicity and parental educational attainment.” The report calls on admissions officials to be aware of such differences and to ensure that differences not related to a student’s ability to succeed academically be “mitigated in the admission process.”

“Society likes to think that the SAT measures people’s ability or merit,” Mr. Fitzsimmons said. “But no one in college admissions who visits the range of secondary schools we visit, and goes to the communities we visit — where you see the contrast between opportunities and fancy suburbs and some of the high schools that aren’t so fancy — can come away thinking that standardized tests can be a measure of someone’s true worth or ability.”

Thank you! This is what I’ve been yammering on about for years. The tests began as equalizers and have been transmogrified into exactly the thing they were designed to plow through. They used to be a way for the financially challenged kid from the non-college-educated family to show he had what it took to attend college. Now the college admissions process is back to being a money game, and the kids with the most financial backing tend to win.

And lest you think I’ve been doling out such vast quantities of ill will for the SAT and the ACT and their effed-up circus of college admissions pain because I blew it on said tests, let me reassure you that is not the case. I did nothing to prepare for either test and kicked ass on both of them because: (a) I’m white; (b) English is my first language; (c) my family are all educated bookworms; and (d) I went to public school, which, as far as I can tell, is the best training ground for excelling in the standardized test arena.

Previous Posts in Which I Express My Disdain:

College Admissions—Looking Good Only On Paper
Private College Counselors
Inequality In College Admissions
Media Frenzy Around High Pressure College Admissions
Acceptance
Testing Season Begins
Awesome Parent
Wake Forest University Drops SAT Requirement
The Newly Unfabulous SAT
The SAT Is Not Good
An Excellent Argument For Abolishing the SAT

Posted by Alexa Harrington