John Katzman founded the Princeton Review in 1981 after graduating from college. He spent years mastering the SAT, teaching American students to “beat it.” Over thirty years he has come to the conclusion that the assesment is useless, suggesting is it time for a complete rethinking of testing in the school system, “Curricula should drive the test, not the other way around—after all, the goal of college admissions tests should be to assess how a student will perform in college, as well as whether that student learned a subject meaningfully.”
Read more about John Katzman’s vision for a new testing system in his recent msnbc op-ed.
Katzman – now the founder and CEO of Noodle – took YOUR questions directly from msnbc.com and msnbc social media. Check out his responses:
Juan Martinez on msnbc.com: How can you help me help my students on the SAT in Detroit?
Katzman: First, consider having them switch to the ACT, which is a better test. Every college accepts either.For either test, have your students use practice tests and questions from the official guide; other practice materials generally contain poorly researched items and will not prepare your students adequately. As you work through the various types of questions, consult with a good guidebook for technique. For the math section, focus your prep on middle school skills like fractions, ratios, and one-equation algebra.
BmBm237 on msnbc.com: The thing that really frustrated me about the SAT is that I spent all this time studying for it but didn’t feel like I really learned anything of value…I just learned how to take this test. How can we have a test that actually reflects what students know?
Katzman: You’re right – the SAT doesn’t promote good, relevant learning, and it won’t until we replace the College Board with a better organization. The College Board has created an admissions process that’s expensive, stressful, and ineffective, and this has worked well for them (and, admittedly, for the test prep industry). But this isn’t good for the very people this system should be serving: students. Over 60% of students will not graduate from the college where they start. College admissions testing should promote meaningful learning, and it should drive students to find the colleges that are actually right for them. Maybe this means that students take tests in the subjects that are compelling to them, and focus their learning on what they are passionate about (the AP tests are a good example of this working well).
Kathryn Slocum on msnbc.com: You have said the Common Core has the same problems as the SAT. What do you mean by that?
Katzman: The Common Core makes many of the same assumptions as the SAT. The first is that every student should learn the same things as every other student, and they should learn them at the same time. The second is that we can measure a subset of those skills and concepts without students and educators narrowing their studies to just those things. Generally, the people creating these standards and tests are not, themselves, accountable for the overall performance of the process. Currently, college admissions testing organizations are not accountable for the performance of their testing systems, and there is no evidence that the SAT has help more students get to the right colleges or excel in the subject areas that matter most to them. Similarly, there is no true accountability built into the Common Core. Will students in the U.S. rise dramatically in international standings in the next five years? If not, who will give us our billions of dollars back? Holly Tidwell on Facebook: How is [the SAT] it culturally biased?
Katzman: These tests exist to predict college performance. This is not easy to do for each individual student, and the track record of these tests is accordingly weak. But it’s much easier to predict the performance of a large group. One glaring example of bias is the SAT’s under-prediction of the performance of women in college. Even though women overall have better high school and college grades, they have always scored lower than men on the SAT. The new SAT makes the essay portion optional, and because women generally do better on that section than men, the under-prediction will be even worse than it is today. When you realize that the SAT could easily be calibrated so that women scored better on the test than men, you realize how arbitrary the whole thing is. The SAT similarly under-predicts the performance of minority students.









