Word: atkinson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Then, in a Feb. 18 speech to his fellow college presidents, the psychologist who runs the University of California suggested something radical: Scrap the thing. Richard Atkinson says the test hurls kids into months of practicing word games and math riddles at the expense of studying chemistry or poetry. He wants to make SAT scores an optional part of the application for all 90,000 kids who want to go to U.C. each year. "The SATs have acquired a mystique that's clearly not warranted," he proclaims. "Who knows what they measure?" Those of us who wanted to stick...
...scores were the most important element. Because of the substantial gap among the races on the SAT, the schools could maintain a substantial minority presence only by explicitly setting test scores aside - which led to a revolt, culminating in a successful state ballot initiative against affirmative action. Surely Atkinson proposed abolishing the sat in the hope of diminishing some of the nearly unbearable pressures that the adoption of it had generated...
...Atkinson did not propose abolishing all standardized admission tests and allowing students to get in to the University of California on high school grades alone. He proposed, instead, replacing the SAT with standardized achievement tests that measure students' mastery of specific subjects they have learned in high school. This will preserve the medicinal power of the SAT - its ability to spot a potential future Nobel prizewinner languishing in an obscure high school, which was Conant's main interest - while substantially reducing its harmful side effects...
...President Bush proposed a regime of achievement tests for the elementary and middle school grades all over the country, and president Atkinson proposed a regime of achievement tests for high schools in California. It's all the same idea. Half a century ago, Conant and Chauncey created, in the SAT, national education standards for the most gifted and best educated few. Now Bush and Atkinson are proposing to create national education standards for the many...
...left out of the testing boom, the $400 million test-prep industry is also expanding. One might have expected John Katzman, founder and CEO of The Princeton Review, one of the two leading SAT-prep companies, to be at least a little concerned by University of California president Richard Atkinson's push to abolish the SAT. In fact, Katzman is ecstatic, calling the SAT "a vestige from another era" that "should be discarded at the first possible moment." It's a position he can afford to take, as his company, which is in the process of going public, recently launched...