University of Wyoming President Robert Sternberg was stupid in elementary school. IQ tests said so. Knowing his scores, his teachers in the 1950s expected him to perform badly, and he agreeably lived down to their expectations. In fourth grade a teacher named Virginia Alexa saw something special in him and conveyed her high expectations. Almost overnight he became an A student. He went on to earn a bachelorâs degree from Yale University and a doctorate in psychology from Stanford, and later served as president of the American Psychological Association. Not so stupid after all. âMy entire future trajectory changed as a result of just one teacher,â Sternberg writes in a 2010 book, College Admissions for the 21st Century.
He worries about âstupidâ students who donât have a Virginia Alexa looking out for them. Itâs not only IQ tests that defeat students, he says. Itâs also the SAT and ACT, the college-admissions tests that he says areâcontrary to their developersâ assertionsââbasically IQ tests in disguise.â Sternberg says he thinks college applicants should also be asked to demonstrate their creativity, practical intelligence, and even wisdom, qualities which are in shorter supply than cleverness. âIf you look at why this country is so screwed up,â he says, âitâs not because the people running it have low SATs.â
The U.S. rode to economic supremacy with the worldâs highest share of young college grads, but now its percentage of graduates at the typical age of graduation is behind those of Australia, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Sweden, and the U.K., the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says.
Meanwhile, Americans who donât go to college lack the skills they need for middle-class jobs as plumbers, welders, electricians, and health workers. âThe skills gap in America has nearly reached a crisis point,â Jorge Ramirez, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, told Bloomberg Businessweek earlier this year.
The SAT and its rival, the ACT, are part of the problem. Designed to ferret out hidden talent, the tests have become, for some students at least, barriers to higher education. Scores are highly correlated with family income; Harvard law professor Lani Guinier calls the SAT a âwealth test.â Type âSATâ into Amazon.com (AMZN), and youâll have to scroll past more than 200 test-prep volumes before you get to one book thatâs a history or critique of the test. Because the SAT and ACT are now thought of as yardsticks of ability, students who do poorly on them are markedâor mark themselvesâas failures. Overreliance on the SAT and ACT threatens to make Americaâs institutions of higher education even more elitist, adding to income inequality and harming U.S. competitiveness. The irony is that these were the very ills the tests were designed to combat.
Since the earliest days of the republic, there have been two schools of thought about the merits of sorting students, as recounted in Nicholas Lemannâs 1999 book The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. Thomas Jefferson, who believed in a ânatural aristocracy,â said that in Virginia all white boys and girls should get a free public education from ages 6 to 8, after which âtwenty of the best geniusesââboys onlyââwill be raked from the rubbish annually and be instructed, at the public expense.â
New Englander Henry Adams was less disdainful of the rubbish. He said Jeffersonâs natural aristocracy was no better than regular old aristocracy: âI would trust one as soon as the other with unlimited power.â
Jeffersonâs side, the sorters, won. The SAT was launched in 1926 as a variant of an intelligence test used in World War I to place soldiers and sailors. Harvard adopted it in 1934. The University of California long resisted using standardized tests but in 1968âswamped by more qualified applications than it could handleâbegan requiring applicants to submit SAT scores as a way to screen out lower achievers. By this past academic year almost 1.7 million students took the SAT, and about 1.8 million took the faster-growing ACT.
Lately the influence of the tests has generated a backlash. Admissions officers at about 850Â four-year colleges now make standardized tests optional for some or all of their applicants, according to FairTest, a nonprofit watchdog. A certain amount of self-interest is at work: If weak students donât submit scores, then average reported scores go up and their schools ascend in the annual U.S. News college ranking. To be less cynical, the tests do stigmatize low scorers and distract people âfrom what they really need to do, which is mastering academic subjects in their high school,â says Wake Forest University sociologist Joseph Soares, whose school went SAT-optional in 2008.
Jay Rosner, executive director of the Princeton Review Foundation, once analyzed rarely disclosed âitem-levelâ data from old SATs and found a troubling pattern. The College Board drops questions if they tend to be answered incorrectly by students who otherwise do well on the testâor if they tend to be answered correctly by students who otherwise do poorly. That seems like an admirable attempt to control quality, but it reinforces the status quo: Questions that white and Asian males donât do particularly well on are systematically shorn from the tests.
The College Boardâthe nonprofit consortium of colleges, high schools, and other organizations that creates the SATâhas repeatedly jiggered the test to respond to critics, most obviously in 2005, when it added a writing section that boosted the highest possible score to 2400 from 1600. Huge disparities remain. Asians score the highest on the test, and their average rose this past academic year even as the scores of all other ethnic groups fell.
The College Boardâs president, David Coleman, is a member of the educational elite with a strong do-gooder streak. As a student at Yale he started a program for students to tutor low-income pupils at New Havenâs Hillhouse High School. Coleman and his team are completing a major revision of the SAT to be unveiled in January 2014 and launched in the spring of 2015. He wants the test to âpropelâ students toward deeper learning of real things. The test will be based on what students study in school and not âshrouded in mystery,â he says. That means fewer abstruse vocabulary words (like âabstruseâ) and essays that are based on documents so human graders can evaluate the correctness of their writersâ arguments, not just their style. âIt is not different in a flashy, strobe-light way,â Coleman says. âI hope it will be greeted almost with a sense of relief.â
Coleman is taking a step in the right direction, but the SAT and ACT are still fundamentally about sorting by smarts. Imagine if hospitals evaluated incoming patients the way colleges evaluate applicants: Only the healthiest cases would be admitted. Thanks in part to the pernicious influence of published college rankings, schools have an incentive to entice more students to apply simply in order to reject them.
For the good of a country thatâs losing its lead in the global race for knowledge, it would be more productive to expand opportunities for learning than to monkey with the tests that parcel out existing slots. Increased government funding of postsecondary education is one way to open the bottleneck and reduce the importance of standardized tests. Massive open online coursesâMOOCsâare a more exciting answer. Theyâre cheap and highly democratic, and anyone can enroll at any time. A MOOC is all about the knowledge, not the credential. Which is the way it should be, right?
Sternberg, the formerly stupid first-grader, wound up running the University of Wyoming this fall after academic postings at Yale, Tufts, and Oklahoma State. At all three schools his research showed that measuring studentsâ creativity and practicality could predict their college success better than plain SAT scores could. The message: Real life is messy. Youâre not given five answers to choose from. And America shouldnât depend on something resembling an IQ test to rake geniuses from the rubbish.