Word: atkinson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Admissions officers will always use hard-and-fast numbers to make decisions. But which numbers? U.C.'s Atkinson says California might develop its own test. Until it does, he suggests using scores on the SAT IIs, exams written by the same folks as the original SAT but focusing on specific subject matter. "Once you start testing kids on what they learned in science or social studies, then high schools can start improving how they teach these things," says Michael Kirst, a Stanford education professor...
...course, Florida and Texas lawmakers weren't attacking the SAT itself. They wanted to maintain diverse campuses even though affirmative action had been banned in their states. Conservatives suspect U.C.'s Atkinson has the same motive. Those who favor affirmative action have long wanted to ignore SAT scores, says Ward Connerly, a U.C. regent and anti-affirmative-action activist. (Atkinson has said he wasn't motivated by race.) Connerly believes moving away from standard measures like the SAT will mean colleges lose their fundamental goal of academic excellence. "Looking at a student's potential and the adversity they've overcome...
...somebody who doesn't follow the ins and outs of testing, the events of the past couple of weeks might seem contradictory. First the president of the University of California, Richard Atkinson, made a speech proposing dropping the SAT. It looked as if testing was going into ebb tide, right? Then, a few days later, George W. Bush began his first major address as President by proposing an enormous new federally mandated regime of standardized tests for public schoolchildren, with every student being tested in reading and math every year from third through eighth grade. This would be the first...
...answer is that there wasn't really any inconsistency between Atkinson's speech and Bush's, even though one man wants to abolish tests and the other wants to institute them, because the underlying idea is the same: to use tests as a tool to encourage students to master a set body of material in school...
...Atkinson was addressing a situation that Conant and Chauncey didn't imagine. The SAT, now with millions of takers a year, has become a national fetish. A large portion of the high school student and parent population believes it is the main determinant of admission to a selective college, which in turn is the main determinant of one's eventual socioeconomic status (both propositions that the test's makers heatedly deny). High school students and their parents also believe that scores on the all important test can be raised by spending hundreds, even thousands, of dollars on courses that teach...