Bring Back SAT Subject Tests
They aren't interchangeable with the AP exams and are good for students
Last week I was clearing out my closet, mostly getting rid of reams of now-useless paperwork from high school, when I found a bunch of my old SAT and AP prep books. I recalled my not-so-fond memories of the hours I spent poring over those pages, the prep sessions from Harvard’s CHANCE program that I went to every week with a friend, and the weekend afternoons spent taking practice exams.
I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed taking the SAT, but I do think that standardized tests are a net good for the education system, and I think that the College Board made a mistake in a recent decision about SAT Subject Tests.
The SAT is good
Quick caveat: I recently saw a tweet that said something along the lines of “everyone has a take on education policy because everyone went to school, even if most people aren’t very well informed about the current evidence on education policy.”
I myself am not super passionate about education policy and am therefore not read up on the latest research in the field. But I am aware that it has recently become popular to say that standardized testing is bad (and possibly racist). I disagree.
Andrew Sullivan has written a good article in defense of standardized testing, citing data showing that the SAT is a useful predictor of college grades, and noting that a UC study found that it helps disadvantaged kids:
Kids who would be otherwise lost in poverty or broken families or terrible schools are uniquely discovered by this test: a full 47 percent of the students admitted because of their SAT scores “were low-income or first generation students. These students would not have been guaranteed admission on the basis of their grades alone.” To repeat: almost half of the SAT places were from minority or poor kids, who would otherwise have been hidden from view. Why on earth would you surrender that tool?
While there are racial disparities that exist in SAT scores, Sullivan notes that these are likely caused by inequalities that begin before high school or college. In other words, black and Hispanic kids get lower average SAT scores than white or Asian kids because they’re more likely to grow up in poverty or go to bad schools, not because the test is racist.
The least bad option
Of course, standardized testing is far from perfect. Wealthy kids have advantages — their parents can pay for expensive test prep, they go to better schools, they don’t have to worry about holding down a job while studying. Standardized testing doesn’t fully capture a student’s abilities and performance, and can lead to “teaching to the test” instead of real learning. Perhaps the ideal alternative would be to use grades and detailed evaluations from teachers — preferably those who have known the student for a while — for college admissions.
But this approach suffers from several key flaws:
Scalability: It’s not practical to ask teachers to write detailed evaluations for all of their students. Let’s say a teacher has two classes, each of 20 kids. That’s 40 evaluations to write per year, on top of regular teaching duties. It’s just not a reasonable ask.
Standardization: As any student knows, different teachers grade differently. Some are light and give easy A’s, others are extremely strict. One teacher’s definition of an “excellent student” might be completely different than another’s. The fact is that if you’re using only grades and recommendations you’re not comparing apples to apples.
Personal biases: Related to the second point, relying only on teacher recommendations and grades opens up the system to human biases. Imagine a teacher who is racist and therefore gives worse grades and evaluations to minority students, or a teacher who does the same to conservative students. Both of these groups of students would be unfairly disadvantaged in this new system.
In contrast, standardized testing is easy to scale, devoid of personal biases, and is by definition standardized. And crucially, all of the advantages rich kids have in the college admissions process would be amplified under the alternative system. Rich kids can afford to hire tutors to help them boost their grades, boost their resumes with fancy extracurriculars, and can use family connections and leverage to secure better recommendation letters. To the extent that some amount of inequality is always going to exist, any education system is going to reflect that reality. Standardized testing reduces the impact of inequality of opportunity relative to a test-free world. In the status quo, everyone has to take the same test, rich or poor. So even if the SAT isn’t perfect, people agree that it’s a fairer system:
Subject Tests and AP exams aren’t fungible
Now that I’ve explained why I think that standardized testing is a net positive we can get back to the subject at hand (pun intended). Back in January, the College Board announced that it was discontinuing the SAT Subject Tests and the essay portion of the regular SAT. Their explanation:
We’re reducing demands on students. The expanded reach of AP and its widespread availability means the Subject Tests are no longer necessary for students to show what they know.
I have no problem with discontinuing the essay portion of the SAT — the quality of an essay is somewhat subjective and that goes against the whole point of standardized testing — but I disagree with the Subject Test decision.
Based on my personal experience, some Subject Tests are duplicative of the AP exams (e.g., US History and Biology). But there are clearly some subjects that are not covered in an AP exam — for example, the Math I and II Subject Tests cover very different material than the BC Calculus or Statistics AP exams. Being good at calculus doesn’t necessarily mean you’re good at algebra or precalculus, and these skills can have different applications. And of course, not every student has access to AP classes that they need to be prepared for AP exams.
Slimming down the Subject Test selection to eliminate duplicative options would have been great, but scrapping the tests entirely was a mistake.