Serendipity35

Standardized testing for college admissions is now more than 100 years old. In 1901, the first standardized tests were administered by the College Board for college admissions.

At that time, many universities had their own entrance exams, some requiring prospective students to come to campus for a week or more to take exams.

But different colleges meant different standards. Students needed to know what schools they were going to apply to in order to know what would be required. Some high schools offered separate instruction for students based on which colleges (or type of school) they hoped to attend.

Colleges on the other end might consider in admissions how well previous graduates of a particular high school had done, or might send faculty to visit high schools and rate them.

Most of us today are familiar with the SAT which we took for college admission, but that is 25 years further in the history until we arrive at that test.

From 1885 to 1900, groups including the National Education Association formed committees, discussed and argued and finally formed the College Board (initially as the College Entrance Examination Board) in the hope of standardizing curricula at high schools with a goal of making a college education accessible to a wider pool of applicants.

This may sound somewhat familiar to more modern efforts at standards, such as the current Common Core State Standards, including the standardized testing. Those first standardized college entrance exams (given to less than 1000 students) tested English, French, German, Latin, Greek, history, mathematics, chemistry, and physics.

They were essay tests, not multiple choice. They were read and scored by a team of experts in each subject. That first year, the readers sat at tables in the library of Columbia University. the grades were: Excellent, Good, Doubtful, Poor, or Very Poor. They were used for several decades but did not have wide acceptance.

We would classify those tests as achievement tests because they tested for students' proficiency in a subject. The College Board would next move to using aptitude tests meant to measure intelligence, though achievement test in specific subjects were still to be used for admissions testing.

I was surprised to read that the motivation to change was twofold. Since some high schools didn't teach some subjects (like ancient Greek) or prepare students specifically for college, an aptitude test should make the test more accessible for those students. But a much more surprising and less well known part of the history of the S.A.T. is that some proponents of aptitude/intelligence testing were college officials who were concerned about the rapid influx of immigrants being added to their student body.

A Columbia University dean worried that the high numbers of recent immigrants and their children would make the school "socially uninviting to students who come from homes of refinement," and its president described the 1917 freshman class as "depressing in the extreme," lamenting the absence of "boys of old American stock." These college officials believed that immigrants had less innate intelligence than old-blooded Americans, and hoped that they would score lower on aptitude tests, which would give the schools an excuse to admit fewer of them.

It was a small group of men who drove the use of standardized testing in America. In 1925, the College Board began to use a new, multiple-choice test. It was designed by a Princeton psychology professor named Carl Brigham. He modeled it on his work with Army intelligence tests.

This new test was known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test or simply the SAT and it was first offered in 1926. Currently, more than 1.6 million students take the SAT each year.

Students started taking a new SAT in March 2016. Most students in the class of 2017 and beyond will take the new SAT in the spring of 11th grade and again in the fall of 12th grade.

As I wrote earlier, students are already prepping for the new test, including prep online offered free by Khan Academy.

 

June 27, 2016: Dennis Cooper is on his computer and his Gmail suddenly reloads and he is logged out.

He tries to log back in and instead of his inbox there is a message saying his account had been disabled.

He checks his blog http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/ that he has been doing for 10 years on Blogspot, Google's blogging platform. The blog is gone.

The only information he has been able to get since comes from a link that was there saying that the suspension was due to a violation of Blogspot’s terms of service.

Lost blog. Lost mail. What violation? No clue.

Cooper does blog about sex - also death, violence, male escort tales and abandoned things, plus a “GIF novel” made up of GIFs found online. Maybe he did violate some term of service. If so, where is the warning, or explanation, or opportunity to export his content? 

He hasn't gotten any response to queries. he even had a lawyer contact Google. I have several blogs on Blogger and I don't like this. Plenty of others are angry or would like an explanation. If this happened to me, I couldn't afford a lawyer to battle Google. I wouldn't get articles about me or in my defense from newyorker.com or nytimes.com or theguardian.com.

My own experience with Google doing some evil was when - without warning and without any way to get an an explanation or recourse (Sound familiar?) - my Google Adsense account was suspended "for life." (read my post on that)  Why? Our best guess was that because we had been hit with a server attack, they viewed it as some way of boosting our ad "hits." 

What happened to Do No Evil and transparency, Google?

 

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a new report, "2026 The Decade Ahead," it has recently published. I haven't read it and I probably won't read it. My involvement in higher education is less involved these days, but more so, I'm not going to spend $149 for the digital version ($199 for paper) of the report. There are always predictions of where we are headed in technology, education and in general. Many are free and I don't know that the differences in accuracy between free and paid versions is significant.

People do pay for these reports, and there are companies built on the job of predicting. Today, predictive analytics is a whole field and industry that seems to do quite well crunching numbers. In this election year, that is certainly a popular game, though one I rarely find interesting or instructive. Usually, I find these predictions to be wrong, but it is rare for people to go back and check on them. Idea for (someone else's) blog post in 2026: Check back on this report. Set a calendar reminder. So, what changes are in store for higher education over the next 10 years? The Chronicle's teaser says that "evolutionary shifts in three critical areas will have significant consequences for students and institutions as a whole."

1. Tomorrow’s students will be significantly more diverse and demand lower tuition costs.

2. Faculty tenure policies will be reexamined as deep-seated Boomers retire.

3. How colleges are preparing students to succeed in an evolving global economy will be intensely scrutinized. 

My immediate observation is that all three of those shifts have been evolving for at least the past decade - if not for several decades and possibly for a century or two in some ways. Of course, the answers are hopefully in the details that come in the full report.  Did you read it? How about a comment for those of us without an expense account or purchase order?

 

 

Comments. We don't have them turned on here at Serendipity35 any more. We were pounded over and over with spammers and so we turned them off more than a year ago. 

I thought about that as a read this piece on The New Yorker site that suggests that if the Internet were to receive its own Ten Commandments, one of them would be “Thou Shalt Not Read the Comments.”

The author says that there are "few online experiences more dispiriting, more arduously futile, than the downward scroll into the netherworld of half-assed provocations and inanities that exists beneath the typical opinion piece or YouTube video."

I miss our comments. The good ones, not the spam. I still think that part of the reason anyone should blog is to get some feedback from the world. But because this blog has such a long tail of posts, we became a target to spammers. last month we had 1140635 hits and that makes us a place a spammer want to put his link to Viagra and Beats headphones and Gucci bags and all the other crap that got sent our way. I have news for spammers and marketers: Tim and I post our own legitimate ads on this blog's sidebar to Amazon and such and they don't generate enough revenue after a few months to even get the two of a burger and beer at McGovern's.

I suppose I am shouting into the abyss with these posts if I can't even hear an echo of a comment.

That makes me think of when I was an undergrad at Rutgers and did some time at the college radio station, WRSU. We were just moving the station from AM to FM then and I got my FCC license and learned how to run the board and all that. I have always loved radio. But as a rookie, you got the unenviable time slots early in the morning or late at night and you wondered if anyone was out there listening.

At the time we were running The National Lampoon Radio Hour which was a very funny series of sketches. It was Saturday Night Live on the radio (with some of the same people, like Bill Murray). It was created, produced and written by staff from National Lampoon magazine and it lasted for a little over a year back in 1973 and 1974.

It originally was a radio HOUR but at some point while I was on the air, they cut it to 30 minutes, supposedly because they couldn't afford or didn't have the time to put together enough material required for a one-hour show.

That first half-hour show made mention at the end that some wimpy radio stations were not going to play the second half of the hour because that was the part with all the dirty stuff. Of course, the show ended there. And the station got calls from angry listeners that were mad because they couldn't hear the second half and because the college station was too wimpy to play it. I was unable to convince these callers that there was no second half and that it was just another gag. It was one of the rare times I knew someone was out there listening.