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This highlights a number of problems with our public education system in general. I think the problems with the SAT highlighted in the article are reacting to t
by exelius 12y ago
This highlights a number of problems with our public education system in general. I think the problems with the SAT highlighted in the article are reacting to these problems, not the other way around as the author seems to suggest.
* There is no standardized high school curriculum across schools, and even when curriculum is standardized, it is taught unevenly. It's hard to have a college entrance exam that covers a significant amount of content as a result, because it puts kids from poor areas at a huge disadvantage in even getting in to college. It's also very hard to identify which students are from good schools and which are from bad ones, so adjusting test scores to compensate isn't a solution.
* Teacher-student ratios in public schools do not lend themselves to the kind of one-on-one work it takes to become a good writer. Unless we're prepared to say "you have a better chance getting in to college because you went to a suburban school district", this can't be a huge part of the test. Writing ability as a high school senior is largely correlated to the amount of attention you got from your English teacher. If you're a good student in a bad school, you probably get very little attention because you're not acting up.
* There's already too much "teach to the test" as it is. Making the SAT yet another test where students have to cram and memorize content is not the solution.
There are plenty of standardized tests that cover content. The problem is that they are far too basic for college entrance purposes. Turning the SAT into a content-focused test does not solve a problem that colleges have; many colleges are not looking for the best students, but for a racially-diverse selection of the most teachable students. What schools should do (and many already do) is require students from lower quality schools to take a semester of remedial classes free of charge to get them up to speed with whatever the base assumption of prior knowledge is at that school.
- CamperBob2 12y agoWriting ability as a high school senior is largely correlated to the amount of attention you got from your English teacher. There's no way I'd ever buy that. Writing ability is largely correlated to the amount of time the student spends reading... reading novels, instruction manuals, technical books, Web pages, and cereal boxes. Teachers have almost nothing to do with it in my experience, and I think you'll find that any successful author will tell you exactly the same thing.
- exelius 12y agoIf you're talking about the ability to write a novel, I agree with you. But you have to learn how to get your thoughts down on paper in a way that is intelligible by other humans, and that's a technical skill that must be learned through repetition and critique. There's a basic technical skill to writing long form content, and many kids don't get it because their teacher doesn't have time to grade 140 papers.
- saint_fiasco 12y agoColleges aren't looking for successful authors. They look for people who communicate well in writing. I think the top writers didn't need attention from their English teachers, but the fairly good ones probably did.
- walshemj 12y agoActually no for some people its not as a dyslexic I can read very very well but my writing is much worse took me 4 years to get my basic English language O level.