Remove the Biased SAT, Keep Standardized Testing.

The SAT: A Shadow of Its Former Self

Gone are the days of needing flashcards to study SAT vocabulary words to get into college. But it’s not just because more and more schools have decided to jettison standardized testing entirely. Today’s SAT has been dumbed down and manipulated over the past several decades to serve political ends. In its current form, the test has outlived its usefulness.

Florida Lawmakers Affirm the SAT’s Decline

Florida lawmakers have affirmed as much in a recent education bill that passed the Florida House unanimously Wednesday. The broad bill includes provisions that would allow an alternative standardized test, the Classic Learning Test (CLT), to compete with the SAT and ACT.

The first SAT offered by the College Board nearly a century ago consisted of difficult questions that evaluated mathematical reasoning skills and probed a student’s ability not only to remember the general meaning of a word but also to apply the subtle shades of meaning that enrich the English language. The famous SAT analogy questions used an eclectic selection of “SAT words” that rewarded students who spent more time reading books and less time playing the latest Xbox games.

But now, analogy questions are gone, and with more recent changes, the test rewards those who never crack open a book or daydream during math class. Now you can just use a calculator to solve a narrower and easier set of math problems. Taken together, the math and verbal will be cut down by a third when the all-digital SAT takes over in 2024.

“The digital SAT will be easier to take, easier to give, and more relevant,” College Board Vice President Priscilla Rodriguez explained, making clear the organization’s priorities.

This is the culmination of a decades-long watering-down process. In 1994, for example, the College Board grew ashamed of the idea that it had been testing “aptitude” all these years and banished the word. The “Scholastic Aptitude Test” was relaunched as the “Scholastic Assessment Test,” a tortured and repetitive phrase that was dropped a few years later as the organization decided that SAT no longer stands for anything.

The confusion continues to flow from the top. David Coleman has led the College Board since 2012, having completed his service as the architect of the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Common Core was an effort to nationalize the teaching curriculum in K-12 classrooms. The initiative leveled the playing field between states by lowering standards so everyone would perform equally poorly.

But not College Board. In 2020, the most recent data available shows Coleman paid himself a cool $2.5 million at the “nonprofit” to continue aligning its testing methodology with Common Core standards with the explicit goal of narrowing the difference in scores of the rich and the poor and engineering outcomes based on racial considerations. The path he has taken to accomplish this, as discussed above, has been to dumb down the test and even to enhance the presentation of certain students’ results over others through the now-abandoned adversity score program. The College Board continues to fumble about with pilot projects seeking to reestablish “relevance” to modern students.

The Classic Learning Test: A Necessary Alternative

And that’s what inspired me to create the Classic Learning Test as a necessary alternative. CLT is an assessment designed to cultivate wonder and joy in students, not to achieve modern political objectives. The exam is built around writings from history’s greatest minds from the