Over 4,000 students who took the SAT in October did not get credit for their test scores. The company that scores the test reports that high humidity caused the scoring problem according to CNN Online. So now, those students are wondering if they were rejected from their pick school because of the scoring snafu. And, I suppose thousands more will forever claim they could have been Ivy League grads if the scoring would have been correct. And schools who weight SAT heavily as a criterion for who gets in are reviewing those they rejected and maybe even those they didn’t.
Although I don’t know anyone who took the SAT this year, I feel bad for those who did and now are wondering if their SAT score is real. Our culture is preoccupied with evaluating people according to numbers. Even public schools are driven by test scores, where classroom teachers are teaching to the test. Schools are using merit-based pay schedules to motivate teachers to higher standards (funny, most of the teachers I know are motivated by their passion for the education of children, but that’s another post for another day.)
School budgets are heavily impacted by raising test scores. The Minnesota Legislature this year is considering legislation that would require schools to spend 70% of their budget on classroom expenses – although there is a fair amount of inconsistency in what a classroom expenditure is. All this leads to school libraries being starved out of existence, if they are not swiftly eliminated altogether. If literacy skills were used as a measure of academic achievement, libraries would fare quite differently. Unfortunately, learning to learn, with the school library as the research lab, is not supported by the dependence on test scores to evaluate the quality of education. . . . very sad . . .