THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 30, 1994 TAG: 9409290042
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Jennifer Dziura
LENGTH: Medium: 91 lines
IF YOU'RE A HIGH school student, or if your little brother Harvey is one, you may be interested to know that your or Harvey's SAT score may soon gain an additional 100 points.
Don't get too excited, though. What looks at first like a gift from the Exalted and Venerable Ivy League Fairy isn't going to save you from losing consciousness somewhere between the reading comprehension questions and the quantitative comparisons you've been studying so diligently. In fact, I think you might want to continue studying if you don't care to end up 45 years old, living with your parents and taking correspondence courses from Sally Struthers.
This October, the College Board will be handing out up to 100 free points to Harvey, you or pretty much anyone who shells out 20 bucks to answer PSAT questions like ``Parturition is to antifenestration as Scandinavia is to. .
The Scholastic Aptitude Test, or the SAT to anyone who has been inside a high school since the original Woodstock, is a standardized test of verbal and math skills, intended to judge the ability of high school seniors to succeed in college. Test takers earn scores ranging from 200 to 800 on each section. The Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, or PSAT, is a shorter test for juniors that determines who gets the huge fistfuls of cash floating around the National Merit Scholarship office.
It seems, however, that the very people who have convinced us that our future as productive members of society is contingent upon which of their little bubbles we fill in with our No. 2 pencils have decided the scoring is all wrong.
Thus, the College Board will soon alter its scoring systems, so the current national average scores of 424 verbal and 478 math will each become 500.
As this may sound like a nonsensical whim of a senile official somewhere, the College Board has reasons for its new policy.
One of these reasons is to prevent your little brother Harvey's precious little bubble of self-esteem from shattering because he thinks his combined verbal and math SAT score of 930 is below average, whereas the national average is in fact 902.
This is absolutely asinine. First of all, the very piece of paper by which the College Board informed Harvey of his 490 math score also states ``WHAT'S THE AVERAGE VERBAL OR MATH SCORE? Many people think it's 500. NOT true!'' If Harvey is unable to read this, he probably doesn't have much chance of getting into college anyway, so I'm not going to worry about it.
If it is indeed the role of standardized testing officials to be concerned with teenagers' self-esteem, then how do they plan on nurturing an aura of happy thoughts for students who really do score below average?
The primary reason, however, that the College Board provides for inflating SAT scores is that throughout the years, the students taking the test have become either more poorly educated or just really stupid. Because of this, the tables that the College Board uses to convert a student's raw score (the number of correct answers minus one-fourth the number of wrong answers) to the 200 through 800 scale are ``stretched'' at the high end and ``compressed'' at the low end. This means that if Harvey earned a 520 verbal score, Harvey's friend Cornelia could earn a 530 by answering three more items correctly than Harvey did. If Harvey, however, earned a verbal score of 730, and Cornelia answered three more items correctly, she would receive an 800. On the low end of the scale, Cornelia earned only 10 points for her three correct answers; on the high end, she earned 70.
One peculiar result of the screwed-up scale is that no one ever earns a verbal SAT score of 770, 780 or 790; one deviation from that perfect 800 means that the test taker receives a 760. This, of course, is bad. But the College Board's new scoring policy is, in some respects, like setting someone's face on fire to eliminate unwanted freckles.
I say this for two reasons. First, to merely distend SAT scores is to ignore why the scores, especially the verbal, declined in the first place. If an illiteracy problem is burgeoning in our schools, we should acknowledge and correct it; the College Board legitimizes such ignorance by doling out unearned points to any idiot with $20.
The adjusting of SAT scores punishes high scorers. The College Board officials themselves have professed concern over the fairness in the upper echelons of the score range by emphasizing the gap in the 750 to 800 scores. The new scoring, however, will magically transform a 730 verbal score to an 800, a label previously reserved only for perfect raw scores.
After the recentering, a student's score report will not even differentiate between a perfect 800 and a ``730'' 800. Many high scorers find it insulting to be grouped with individuals who actually deserve much lower scores.
High school junior David Leichtman of Virginia Beach, who scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of the SAT last May, says of the recentering, ``I think it's kind of dumb because it takes away from the meaning of a perfect score. They shouldn't just go passing out 800s to every Tom, Dick and Harry on the street.'' MEMO: Jennifer Dziura is a junior at Cox High School. by CNB