Mrs. Jensen
English 101-014
14 November 2012
The SAT Put to the Test
Thesis: The ETS is negligent towards the statistics that show that the SAT is not a fair way of measuring a students academic worth and thus should be replaced or remodeled, because there are better and easier ways of measuring learning ability, biased to the lower class children that take them, and not the first choice of information that colleges are interested in when enrolling students.
I. School faculty should realize how difficult differentiating ability from the outcome of good education can be; standardized tests are fraught with inherent weaknesses and should be either updated or replaced with a more accurate way of measuring a students true ability.
A. School faculty argues that although even though the SAT is an inaccurate predictor relative to a students GPA, it can increase accuracy of prediction when used combined with them.
B. There have been alternates to the SAT that have been claimed to be more accurate and reliable than standardized testing.
II. People from the “No Child Left Behind” program argue that the SAT is extremely biased towards lower class students in regards to how much more help the upper class students receive in preparation to the SAT. A. The SAT test applicants who score higher tend to be the students who are in upper class families because they can afford to pay for the expensive tutoring that is extremely beneficial. B. Faculty and school board officials argue that the students learn 80% percent of everything tested on the SAT is learned in the classroom.
III Majority of schools and scholarships that are in major competition for students to get accepted into hold the an applicant’s SAT score extremely high and for those students who were not able to make an outstanding score on the SAT are not able to receive assistance for their future. A. Colleges that weight the SAT heavily aren’t necessarily in the wrong in selecting the most highly
Cited: Cloud, John. "Should SATs Matter?" Time. 4 Mar. 2001: 1-4. Web. 25 Oct. 2012. Crouse, James and Dale Trusheim. The Case Against the SAT. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988. Print. Elert, Glenn. "The SAT Aptitude or Demographics?" Hypertextbook. N.p., 5 May 1992. Web. 25 Oct. 2012. Soares, Joseph A. Sat Wars: The Case for Test-Optional College Admissions. New York, Teachers College Press, 2012. Print.