An Erosion Of Standards

Feeling pretty good about those higher median scores on the newScholastic Aptitude Tests? Not so fast.

Thousands of college-bound seniors took the March SATs in a lastattempt to improve verbal and math assessment scores before theircollege acceptance decisions. And more than 1 million juniors willbegin their SAT sequence in May as they look toward graduation in1997.

Both groups benefit from higher scoring in the newly reformattedand recentered tests. But refining the test format meant we had todiscard a 69-year-old measuring standard. How will we cope with thefallout?In a College Board bulletin came the good news that most SATscores would "appear to rise" as a result of the recentering. Theyhave.Why? The significant improvements recently made in the test'sformat (for the first time since the 1926 inception test) requirednew norms to measure the results. So for students, the bad news isthat, despite the rise in their median score, individual test-takersat this 50th percentile level remain at that level even though theirscores have jumped.But the other bad news may be even more significant to us as acountry: We have abandoned what had developed into a useful nationalmeasuring standard. In 1926, the verbal and mathematical skillsassessed by the test provided median scores of 500 for those first10,000 students. By the 1962-63 school year, the verbal skillsmedian had dropped to 478. We are all aware of a continuing decline.What's happened? In general, today's parents - products of thefirst television generation - rarely read aloud to their children orserve as pleasure-reading role models; today's students spend farmore time watching TV and playing computer games than they do onhomework; and, for the young, the very concept of pleasure readinghas ceased to exist.What do college applicants face when jobs they seek withmultinational corporations depend on skills that must exceed those ofsomeone in the same field in another country - skills based,ultimately, on a foundation of verbal and mathematical reasoningabilities assessed by the SATs?How do we benchmark against the best schools in the rest of theworld when we have (unlike most other advanced societies) nomandatory national education exam and recently erased the onlynational benchmark we ever had?The recentering of SAT scores may have been necessary, but theconsequent illusory median jump from 420 to 470 to 500 is mistakenlybeing seen by many parents as "improvement," when in fact averageverbal and mathematical skills levels of college-bound test-takersare closer to the worst they've been in 70 years. And during those70 years, cognitive skills of the majority of students in otherindustrialized countries have passed ours.Fairness necessitated recentering the SATs, but someone erased acrucial benchmark.Lee Gaillard, an educator for more than 20 years, is a formerLake Forest resident who now lives in Philadelphia.