The SAT separates sheep from goats

So the feds want to penalize Maine for using the SAT as a tool to assess students’ mastery of the state curriculum standards? Maybe somebody told the state commissioner of education this would happen and she didn’t pay attention, or nobody in Maine’s Department of Education knew any better and so gave her bad advice. Or – and this is becoming more common at all levels – the experts told the boss the truth, but she didn’t want to hear it because she’d already made up her mind.

The problem is actually pretty simple, if you can believe an educator would ever say something simply: The skills that states require in reading and math are pretty much the same everywhere in the country, although terms may vary a bit. But a test (such as a state curriculum assessment) designed to measure whether students have the full range of those skills is very different from a test (such as the SAT) designed to sort students from brilliant to incompetent, or from Harvard to state university.

Even though the two tests may cover many of the same objectives, to use one for the other is asking for big trouble. You’ll get numbers, all right, but you won’t really know whether they tell you what you wanted to know.

Why is this so? Well, since you want every student to master all the essential skills, from easy to hard, questions on a curriculum assessment test are designed and distributed among all critical objectives so that – theoretically – every student could get a hundred. The questions are designed to find out what skills the student has and doesn’t have, out of all the skills in your curriculum.

A sorting test like the SAT, on the other hand, is designed to separate sheep from goats. So a question that too many students get right, even though it may cover a basic and essential skill – why, that question gets thrown out because it got taught too well and too many students got it right.

In a way, the better job you did with the basics, the less likely those things are to show up on the test. To sort, you want a lot of questions that only the best students will get and the worst won’t. This aim means that a lot of basic stuff – which is the essential underpinning of your state requirements, and which average students do very well on – is under assessed, or not assessed at all.

But the tricky stuff – that gets assessed a lot.

So regardless of what Commissioner Susan Gendron may say, you can “align” a test with your state’s standards until the cows come home.

But if the test wasn’t meant to measure what you said you wanted to know, all those cows will turn out to be just so much bull.

Kenneth Bradford is a summer resident of Lord’s Cove, New Brunswick.