When it comes to get into college, a good score on your SAT is the magic ticket. Or is it? Carol Costello is taking a look at the changing standards for Standrdized Test in an "A.M. Original," "Educating America."
Never has one test cost so much angst. That's a-n-g-s-t, a feeling of anxiety.
"Are you nervous? Are you excited?"
"Oh, I'm so nervous."
Hence, this class designed to beat the test.
"And that's enough to guess E over D."
Parents pay The Princeton Review and other organizations anywhere from 600 to $8,000 for special classes or private tutors so their child can literally beat the SAT. 16-year-old McKenna Baskett from Missouri ......
"I got the gist of it."
......is spending her summer in SAT class.
"I'm really a bad test-taker and they're really hard questions, so I'm just hoping I can get through it."
Imagine, all of this a-n-g-s-t for a test that many say doesn't even measure how smart you are.
"There's a whole word list you can do."
Ed Carroll tutors students to take the test.
"There are people who think naturally and incorrectly that the SAT is a measure of intelligence and it never was. The only thing the SAT is really good at is predicting how well you do on the SAT."
Carroll says it's not that a student needs to take special courses to ace the SAT. But once a student realizes there are patterns involved, sort of like Sudoku, it's a whole lot easier.
"A squared plus B squared equals C squared. On this test the numbers that you will see most frequently, three squared plus four squared equals five squared. So if I tell students, three, four, five, that's what you need to know. You don't need to know all the terms and all the diff kinds of solutions. You need to know three, four, five."
"That's just wrong."
Laurence Bunin overseas the SAT for The College Board.
"The SAT is a test of the basic skills that one needs to succeed in college."
"Does it show you how smart a kid is?"
"Well, it shows you how much they've learned in school."
But many universities are now saying the SAT says very little about what a student can do. Some 850 of them have now made the SAT optional for most applicants including ten this year, some of them highly selective top tier liberal arts schools.
"Would you like to see the SAT go away?"
"I would love to see it go away."
"Am I clear?"
"Crystal."
Shawn Toler, principal at the KIPP school in Baltimore for inner city kids, says the deck is stacked against lower income children. They're generally not able to attend elite high schools or afford expensive tutors. According to the college board's own stat, in 2009, kids whose parents make up to $20,000 a year, scored an average 1,321 on a scale of 2,400. If a kid's parents makes above $200,000 a year, that score shoots up 381 points to an average of 1,702.
"What you're really seeing is that the playing field isn't fair. It's not the SAT that's the problem. It's any measure of educational achievement that's going to show the same thing."
But if the playing field isn't fair to begin with, educators like Principal Toler wonder why a perfect 2400 on the SAT seems to matter so much.
Keep in mind, universities use the SAT as just one indicator of what a child is capable of in college. They also use things like high school grades, activities and written essays. All of those things weigh in.
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