For decades, aspiring college students have had to submit with their applications scores from standardized tests, such as the SAT or the ACT. Variation of test scores is inevitable—that’s the whole point of a standardized exam—and, just as May flowers follow April showers, each round of these exams brings inevitable questions about whether the tests are “fair.” This is a perennial topic of debate among educators.
Recently, the dispute has taken on a litigious edge, with accusations that prestige colleges like Harvard are playing fast and loose with standardized test scores as part of a stealth program of reverse discrimination. Statistically, Asian applicants score higher on the SAT than do white applicants, who themselves score higher than black and Hispanic applicants. Yet black and Hispanic students are admitted in greater numbers than would be predicted on the basis of those test scores, while Asians’ numbers are fewer than would be predicted.
Could it be that the standardized-testing industry is in on the whole “reverse discrimination” scam?When pressed on the matter, colleges have responded with bland platitudes about the “holistic” admissions process and the presumed “benefits” of a diverse student body. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court was unpersuaded by such hand-waving and told Harvard it had to stop. Since that ruling, colleges have been working out ways to sneak racial discrimination through the back door.
Now comes the news that ACT (the firm that governs and administers one of those standardized tests, the ACT exam) will be shortening examination times, reducing the number of questions, and no longer requiring students to complete the science portion of the exam. This follows similar action a few weeks previously by the College Board (which administers the SAT, the ACT exam’s principal competitor). Could it be that the standardized-testing industry is in on the whole “reverse discrimination” scam? If the tests reveal uncomfortable racial disparities, let’s make the tests easier!
There’s an uncomfortable fact here. Qualifying exams have always been tools of discrimination: That’s their purpose. The discrimination has taken various forms over the years, to be sure. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Harvard and the other Ivies crafted their own entrance examinations that were structured to favor students from a small group of feeder prep schools.
In the 1920s, the presidents of the Ivies got progressive religion and organized to have the same entrance exam for all their campuses. This was the origin of the SAT, which was first administered in 1926 and which aimed to facilitate merit-based admissions. To the Ivies’ dismay, however, this quickly led to a “Jewish problem,” because Jews tended to overpopulate the upper end of the exam score’s bell curve and were admitted in unexpectedly large numbers. This outcome put off wealthy donors and alumni, so Harvard introduced a new discriminatory filter: Not only would “merit” count but also “character,” with the latter defined so the scales could be tilted back in favor of the “right people.”
Lately, we have entered a regime where the discriminatory intent is now based on race, as well as shibboleths like “diversity is our strength” (the opposite is likely more true). All that has really changed is whose oxen are being gored, which are lately white and Asian applicants’. Is this discriminatory? Of course it is. It’s meant to be.
All that has really changed is whose oxen are being gored, which are lately white and Asian applicants’.Is standardized testing based on the twin presumptions of fairness and objectivity? Bollocks. Since its inception early last century, the standardized-testing industry has reflected the discriminatory preferences of its principal clients, colleges and universities. The recent changes, including the ACT’s decision to make its science test optional, have to be judged in that cold light. And it must be kept in mind that this is an industry. ACT was recently acquired by a private equity firm, which seeks to make the ACT exam a more competitive and profitable alternative to the SAT. Addressing concerns about ACT becoming a for-profit enterprise, the CEO of the firm has reassured everyone that ACT will not veer “one inch” from its mission, which was followed—promptly—by veering to make the science test optional.
What future veers lie in store for the ACT are helpfully provided by its main competitor. The Educational Testing Service (ETS), which administers the SAT, has laid out in some detail its intended future, which will not be so much in testing as it will be in “assessment.” The aim is to serve a broader clientele, such as employers, non-traditional or informal learners, and community-college goers, who might buy into a broader range of evaluation services besides just measuring what students have learned in school. As expected, there are predictable nods to bringing “equity” and “fairness” to these assessments. More importantly, assessments will now focus on “skills,” in particular “hard-to-measure skills.”
This brings us back to the ACT’s now-optional science exam. Science is the ultimate “hard to measure skill,” because it is not a skill but a philosophy of how to understand the natural world. It depends not only on a mastery of subject matter but also on an abiding curiosity tempered by a methodology of disciplined inquiry. Cultivating that ethic involves not just mastery of subject matter but also a deep knowledge of the history of science and a familiarity with the innumerable twists and turns in the path to our present scientific knowledge of the natural world. It also cultivates a humility of thought, so we can see why the remarkable individuals who have shaped our current thinking thought the way they did, as well as the potential flaws in our own ways of scientific thinking. To treat science as an assessable skill is to reduce science to a form of performance art.
One can’t really blame the testing industry for this: They are only following the market—in this instance K-12 science education, which increasingly teaches science precisely as if it were a performable skill. For at least two decades now, K-12 science education has been on a determined march to mediocrity, led by the Obama-era “Next Generation Science Standards” (NGSS).
To aspire to be scientists now, students no longer need to know science.The NGSS were intended to transform science education to meet the demands of a changing society. We’re now the next generation in, however, and they seem not to be doing very well at delivering on their promise. Even though the NGSS have been widely adopted (44 states), American students’ performance in college STEM majors has been stagnant at best, or frankly in decline. This has been the case despite sharply rising expenditures for STEM education. Nor have the NGSS managed to build a new generation of Americans for STEM careers, as they promised to do. Most current enrollees in American STEM graduate schools are foreigners, whose countries seem to be preparing them better for the future rigors of STEM careers than American schools are.
What’s gone wrong? The NGSS are not built so much on science itself but upon a model known as the “three dimensions of science learning.” It looks good on paper. “Crosscutting Concepts,” for example, explore “connections across the four domains of science.” Nothing wrong with that, really, but in building that complex web of connections between the three dimensions of the four domains of science, the NGSS have left little room for cultivating science’s distinctive attributes. To fit in all those connections, mastery of subject and disciplined curiosity have been diminished in favor of ill-defined concepts that have hollowed out K-12 science education. Into the vacuum have swarmed a variety of anti-science pathologies: appeals to authority, dogma, certitude, and hijacking science to political activism.
This is where science education is today. To aspire to be scientists now, students no longer need to know science. They only need to demonstrate what makes for a good performance of science. This benefits everyone—teachers, school boards, textbook publishers, education bureaucrats—except for talented students who are left poorly prepared for science careers. And American science is left the poorer for it.
In making its science test optional, ACT has caved to this pernicious trend.
J. Scott Turner is director of science programs at the National Association of Scholars. He is a member of the expert committee that drafted The Franklin Standards, an alternative to the NGSS produced by the National Association of Scholars and Freedom in Education.