Each year when aspiring college students take the SAT, at least a few questions manage to stump even the best test takers. That’s the luck of the draw. This year, students have expressed outrage regarding a peculiar essay question that stumped them – not from an intellectual perspective, but because they don’t watch enough television.
Once again, the question has been raised of whether CollegeBoard formulates their tests in a fair manner or if critics are too eager to jump on the anti-SAT bandwagon.
On March 12, some versions of the SAT proposed the question “How authentic can [reality shows] be when producers design challenges for the participants and then editors alter filmed scenes?”
This lead to a New York Times investigation on SAT prompts since 2005. All of the prompts have shown a growing trend in questions that are centered on objects of popular culture – cell phones, the debilitating state of the media and now, reality television.
Even if they don’t realize it, CollegeBoard test designers are being influenced in a way that is detrimental to test takers nationwide.
The point of the SAT essay portion is to exemplify higher reasoning and the ability to organize thoughts on the basis of the question. If students can’t identify with the topic, which could be the case for those who can’t afford a television or simply refuse to watch “Real World Road Rules Challenge,” they won’t be able to perform as well as they would have otherwise.
CollegeBoard caters to students of all kinds and should take into account their available resources while constructing a test. This would be wise from a business standpoint as well, considering the company regularly comes under fire.
Of the many ways a person can demonstrate intelligence, analyzing relationships between reality television workers isn’t one of them. CollegeBoard’s failing attempts to modernize the SAT only point to the fact that the test is becoming irrelevant. Popular culture doesn’t have a place in education, especially if a person’s secondary education depends on it.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
If we construct tests based on the complaints of some students, we will be left with nothing but educational mush. Try finding out what the essay prompt was actually about – it was NOT about reality TV, it was about the relative merits of such programs. As for questions with which students can or cannot “identify” that’s just a road to nowhere. If a student cannot “identify” with, say, different political systems, then I guess asking a student to expound on the relative merits of communism and capitalism would also be out of bounds. Students and parents need to quit whining and grow up.