When University of California (UC) president Richard C. Atkinson proposed last year to scrap the SAT as a requirement for UC admission, the debate over standardized testing flared up once again. Atkinson argued that tests like the SAT do not provide a true measure of intellectual abilities. He recommended that the test be replaced by an achievement test that reflects a mastery of specific subjects in high school.

In response to Atkinson’s threat, the College Board accelerated its study of test improvements and announced that it is revising the SAT to enhance assessment of critical reasoning skills. Starting in spring 2005, the SAT will add a 25-minute written essay, will eliminate the verbal analogy questions, and will expand the math section to include more advanced math such as Algebra II. The complete test will be 35 minutes longer.

Other standardized tests, including the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) and the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), also have been a source of controversy. Critics claim these tests not only fail to encourage critical thinking but that they exhibit cultural, racial, and gender bias. Those in favor say that while standardized tests may not be perfect, they are useful in providing a reasonable measure of intellectual abilities and predicting a student’s success in school.

At Rice University, standardized tests have their share of supporters and detractors. Rice’s vice president for enrollment, Ann Wright, serves as a College Board trustee, but she says that the SAT is only one of many factors used to select students for admission to Rice. Academic achievement in high school and difficulty of courses attempted are both major influences in deciding who is accepted, and Wright’s office also looks at recommendations, activities, leadership, personal qualities, and special talents.

But even with the importance of these other factors, Wright believes that Rice will continue using the SAT. “The SAT is a good predictor of how well suited the student may be for the first year of college,” she says. “Standardized tests are useful in seeing how a student performed on one test that is given nationally. They usually verify what we see on the high school transcript.”

In addition, the test may identify late bloomers—students who have ability but who have been slow to get started in school and have a somewhat lower grade point average. “Another use,” Wright says, “is to help define abilities when we find substantial grade inflation or major differences in high schools across the country.” But, she adds, the SAT does not predict motivation or special abilities in specific areas, which is why the test must be used with other criteria. “We need all the tools available to determine the best fit for Rice.”

Wright does not view the SAT as being culturally biased but rather believes it reflects inequities in educational opportunities. “I have seen the research on how questions are tested with different ethnicities before they are used,” she explains. “I do believe that disadvantaged students don’t do as well, and the test results can reflect poor schooling. At one point, only wealthy students took advantage of coaching, but now, coaching is available to almost all students.”

While Wright believes that the SAT is a good resource for determining academic success, she also believes that the impending changes in the test will only improve it. The University of California system raised some good questions about standardized testing, she says, and the College Board has been responsive to the challenge. Adding a writing section to the SAT, she says, will show what kinds of practical writing skills students received in high school.

“ Too often, the essays we receive as a part of the application are polished and sometimes written by others or corrected many times in an English class,” Wright says. “Critical reading is an extremely important criterion, as is math. Basically, I believe that the approved changes will improve our knowledge of student abilities.”

The SAT is administered by the Educational Testing Service (ETS). With about 3,000 employees, ETS is the largest private educational testing company in the world. Nancy Stooksberry Cole ’64 was president of ETS for seven of the 11 years she worked there. She recently retired and lives in Colorado.

Cole says that the SAT was designed to measure the skills that will be used throughout college and that it has been doing that “amazingly well for a number of years.” No other predictors, she adds, have consistently done better. “The SAT is very valuable in getting a lot of reliable information with little time requirement,” she says.

But she cautions that standardized tests are not intended to be the sole qualifier for entrance into college. And she admits that the SAT does not measure creativity or motivation. “We haven’t figured out a way to measure creativity or motivation, and that’s why I really feel that supplemental information is very valuable for fairness.”

Being fair to all groups who take the SAT was a major concern for Cole at ETS. After earning a bachelor of arts degree in psychology from Rice in 1964, she did graduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she received a Ph.D. in psychology in 1968. She then went to work at American College Testing, a competitor of ETS, and did research in cultural bias in testing.

“ I studied the issue for many years and concluded that tests usually are not biased in any simple way,” says Cole. To ensure fairness, Cole explains, ETS statistically analyzes tests to identify particular questions that show unusual results between racial, cultural, or gender groups. Trained reviewers also inspect the tests for biased questions.

Defining what is bias poses another problem, Cole says. Differences among groups do not necessarily mean there is bias. For example, students who come from poor, less educated families that offer little support to their children usually don’t do as well on the SAT. The gender difference on the SAT shows the complexity further. On average, she explains, boys score higher than girls on the verbal and mathematics sections of the SAT, while girls score higher than boys in writing. So, emphasizing one section or another can give the appearance of gender bias.

But in general, Cole says, the SAT is pretty fair to all groups. “And the expansion of measures will help make it better.” The addition of the writing test is an excellent idea, she says, and was long overdue, since the SAT is one of the last admission tests to include a writing section—the GRE and GMAT began including writing tests several years ago.

Standardized tests do have some merit, says Richard Tapia, the Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics. Tapia’s efforts to get more minorities into the science and engineering fields have earned him the Giants in Science Award from the Quality Education for Minorities Network and a Lifetime Mentor Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The flaw in standardized tests, he says, is in how you interpret them. “The misuse of standardized tests, in particular the SAT and GRE,” he says, “is the underrepresented minorities’ worst enemy in gaining admittance into college.”

The problem in using these tests, Tapia believes, is that admission officers make too much “noise” about the scores at the upper end of the SAT and GRE. “They are meaningless,” he says. “I think it is fair to say that someone in the 20th percentile of the SAT and GRE has a significantly lower chance of succeeding than someone in the 80th percentile, but I don’t think that someone who scores 1600 on the SAT is that much different than someone who scores 1550 or 1500 or, for that matter, 1300.”

Once a student reaches a certain level in the SAT, Tapia says, such as 1100, the chance of them doing well in college is very high. Tapia has even seen students with SAT scores of 900 who have graduated summa cum laude, pursued law or graduate degrees, and led distinguished careers. That shows, he says, that standardized tests, especially the GRE, do not reflect a student’s drive or creativity, which is a very desirable trait in graduate students. “You don’t want people who can just excel in normal course work,” he says, “but who have no ideas when it comes to their dissertation.” Thus, he concludes, standardized tests have to be used in a “very guarded way,” supplemented with other sources of information.

There are a number of standardized tests at the diagnostic level that can help people gauge how a healthy child is developing, says Linda McNeil, professor of education and co-director of Rice’s Center for Education. But, she says, “diagnostic uses of standardized tests are the only ones that I find being more frequently used for helpful purposes rather than harmful ones.”

McNeil is an expert in standardized testing at the primary and secondary levels. She is the author of Contradictions of School Reform: Educational Costs of Standardized Testing (Routledge, 2000) and has spent a considerable amount of time researching the effects of the Texas state-mandated TAAS, which will change next year to the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS).

Standardized tests in primary and secondary schooling, she explains, are being used much like the standardized test used in the “factory school” at the turn of the century. In 1915, the United States experienced a boom in teenage population and had to find an economical way to educate them. So, McNeil says, school districts hired factory efficiency experts and developed a testing method that was borrowed from the United States Army, which created the first standardized test to help in enlisting huge numbers of people during World War I. “The first uses of standardized testing in education,” says McNeil, “were to sort students according to their ability and assess them as raw material to be used in modernizing America through industrial production.”

In 1990, Texas implemented the TAAS to measure students’ performances, but four years later, says McNeil, state officials expanded the use of the test to rate schools and their principals. A test that was supposed to raise the academic standards was suddenly being used as an accountability system. This so-called Texas accountability system created more problems than solutions, McNeil claims. “The first problem is that it ties the assessment of children on a single indicator to the adult’s job security and pay. It’s an upside-down system of accountability.”

Based on her research, McNeil believes that the TAAS is hurting the educational system on several levels. It is reducing the quality and quantity of the curriculum, she says. “Because this is a single indicator accountability system, principals are told it doesn’t matter if they are doing great things, but that they will be judged only on improving their schools’ TAAS scores every year.”

TAAS practice tests, she adds, are replacing the curriculum. “Children are being cheated out of a rich literature and a chance to really think through mathematical concepts, and they are being taught to write in a formula style,” she says. Minority students are especially hurt by the TAAS, McNeil believes, because it is common to devote more class time to practicing the test in traditionally low-performing schools, which are attended by poor minority students.

The second casualty of the TAAS, says McNeil, is the role of the teacher. More and more, teachers are asked to set aside content knowledge in order to get their students prepared for the TAAS. “We are driving out many of our intellectual teachers,” she says, “because they do not want to be in a setting where they are asked to fake it, to go through motions that they know are not educational for the kids.” Yet another victim of the TAAS is the democratic governance of schooling. The accountability system that the TAAS has engendered, McNeil says, usurps the role of community voice in schools and leaves the development of children and the substance of education to testing experts.

In short, McNeil believes that the TAAS is a ticket to nowhere. “From the beginning, Thomas Jefferson’s idea was that the purpose of an education was to grow active citizens—people who could question, people who could throw off tyranny,” says McNeil. “He wanted our children to hold common civic values and social concerns that would enable them to bind the community and country together. In many cities around the country, parents, teachers, and even school districts are refusing to let testing control their schools. They are working to hold on to a more authentic education for their children.”

Standardized testing will not be going away any time soon; it has become such an integral part of our society that any attempts to scrap it would be futile. Even so, questioning the relevance and methodology of the SAT and other tests may be beneficial. While UC did not succeed in eliminating the test as an admission requirement, for example, it has accomplished the monumental task of forcing changes that will make the SAT a more equitable test. After all, if we have to live with standardized tests, we should strive to ensure their fairness for all college-bound students.