Word: atkinsons
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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...
Last week U.C.'s faculty and regents started what will be a long, fiery debate over his proposal. Since Atkinson began attacking the test, college administrators across the U.S. have reopened old fights about the SAT and started new ones. President John Peters of Northern Illinois University says the reaction of the hundreds of college officials to the speech was "extremely positive"; he plans to suggest a review of his school's standardized-test requirements at the next faculty meeting. The Georgia board of regents is reviewing admissions criteria, as are the University of Texas, the University of Massachusetts...
...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...