A TEST BY ANY OTHER NAME

While it is admirable to encourage more Maine students to go on to college,

a plan to use the Scholastic Assessment Test instead of the Maine Educational Assessment to measure student achievement in 11th grade needs much more review.

The tests have very different purposes. The MEA is meant to measure how well students meet the state’s learning standards. The SAT, a national exam, is a predictor of how well students will do in college. To say that the tests are interchangeable is to undo years of effort spent devising Maine’s Learning Results and revising the MEA to serve as one measure of whether students are meeting those state-specific standards.

Recently, Education Commissioner Susan Gendron said she was 99.9 percent certain that the SAT will replace the MEA for the state’s 11th-grade students. A primary reason to make the change, she said, is to get more Maine students to go on to college. Having all students take the SAT would help them clear one more hurdle in the college application process while also getting some students to think about, for the first time, continuing their education beyond high school.

This is a worthy goal since Maine lags behind its New England neighbors in the number of residents with college degrees. Only 37 percent of Maine residents 25 and older have a college degree while the New England average is 45 percent. In order to meet the New England average by 2020, Maine will have to increase its population of college graduates by 40,000, according to the Maine Compact for Higher Education.

Currently, about 75 percent of Maine students take the SAT, well above the national average of less than 50 percent. Yet, only about half of Maine’s high school graduates go on to college. If taking the SAT is meant to encourage high school students to go to college, it is not working here. For those not intent on college, the SAT will likely remain as meaningless as the MEA. Students determined to get into top colleges also pay for private SAT tutoring sessions and are likely to get higher scores.

Worse, a hasty switch to the SAT sends the message that years of work on the Learning Results and then assuring that the MEA measured those standards was not necessary. Ditto with the federal No Child Left Behind standards that the MEA is also supposed to measure. It is hard to believe that a national college entrance exam will adequately measure whether students are meeting state and federal learning standards.

The College Board, the company that administers the SAT, paid for an alignment study and said it would. If this is true, the state could save money by using national standardized tests at all grade levels, something the department says it is not considering because it wouldn’t have the added benefit of boosting college aspirations.

Commissioner Gendron can make the switch to the SAT on her own. Considering the magnitude of this change, however, further consultation with the Legislature would ensure that Maine does not make a change it later regrets.