TESTING, MULTIPLE CHOICE

Members of the Legislature’s Education Committee should have a strong sense of the extensive process a statewide test endures before it is allowed to stand as a measure of student achievement. Today, when they are expected to consider whether to allow the use of the SAT as an assessment to proceed or be delayed for further consideration, they should ask whether it has undergone such a process. If not, a delay is warranted or the option of using the SAT in a pilot should be explored.

Education Commissioner Sue Gendron wants Maine’s 17,000 11th-graders to stop taking the Maine Educational Assessment each April, as they have been doing for the last three decades, and use instead the SAT as a measure of how much they have learned in English, math and, starting next year, science. It is a major shift the commissioner said is necessary because the SAT is often necessary for college admission and she wants more Maine high-school graduates to enter college.

The SAT, however, has largely been a predictive test rather than an assessment. Its role has been to determine how well a student is likely to do in college freshmen courses. It’s easy to see the overlap in the goals of assessing what has been learned in high school and predicting college success, but testing for one is not the same as testing for the other. Last month, the American Counseling Association said using the SAT as an assessment tool would create an ethical problem for school counselors.

“It is unethical for a counselor to use a test for a purpose other than the one for which it was designed,” wrote the group’s president, Patricia Arredondo. “The SAT is, was, and has always been a predictive test, not an assessment of current knowledge attainment.” The Maine Counseling Association, not surprisingly, comes to the same conclusion.

On Friday, College Board Vice President Wayne Camara wrote that SAT performance has been shown repeatedly to be related to student high-school grades, course rigor, student self-perception of ability, college grade-point average, college grades and graduation. Whether this also means it accurately measures what 11th-graders have learned is for the committee to discover today.

The SAT would be administered on a Saturday – April 1 – including to students who have not been taking courses preparing them for college work. Whether they show up, how well they are able to apply what they have learned to concepts on the test and how their ability to demonstrate knowledge on the SAT compares with their MEA performance are all open questions. Rather than have anyone assume they know what the answers will be, a one-year pilot program, with federal blessing, would give school counselors and teachers a forum to review how the test went and what changes might be needed to improve it.

Many educators doubt the switch to the SAT should go even as far as a pilot project. They will have a chance to make their case at the hearing, as will the department. The message committee members should begin with is that the MEA was constructed specifically for Maine, specifically as an achievement test and evolved over many years of fine-tuning. It’s not perfect, but it is valuable and not something to cast aside without careful consideration of what would replace it.