Word: lemann
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...historical sense, Caperton's ambitious agenda for the big test is appropriate: 77 years ago, the exam began life as a tool of social change. The most significant early champion of the SAT was Harvard president James Conant, who, Lemann writes, disliked achievement tests because "they favored rich boys whose parents could buy them top-flight high-school instruction." Conant helped the SAT grow into the behemoth it is today precisely because it was different...
...battery of achievement tests the College Board offers in 18 subjects, including physics and Korean. Aptitude tests are harder to define. Many people seem to think of aptitude exams in general--and the old (or current) SAT in particular--as IQ tests, a notion subtly promulgated by Nicholas Lemann, the new dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, in his influential anti-SAT book, The Big Test (1999). Writing about early versions of the SAT, Lemann points out that "the bulk of the test was devoted to word familiarity, the eternal staple of intelligence testing." He correctly notes that...
...achievement tests rate classroom learning, aptitude tests assay something in between--developed abilities. Developed abilities are those nurtured through schoolwork, reading, doing crosswords, soaking up the arts, debating politics, whatever. These aren't inborn traits but honed competencies. Whereas early psychometricians, many of them racist, propagated what Lemann calls the dipstick theory--the idea that a test score is like a mark on a dipstick showing the raw amount of intelligence in your mental oil tank--the field outgrew that simplistic notion at least a generation ago. "I don't think anyone believes the SAT or even pure [IQ] tests...
...kinds of noise are now to be allowed. Take the writing section, which will be divided between multiple-choice questions on grammar and style, and an essay students must write on an assigned topic (see chart for an example). Historically, the SAT has had only multiple-choice items. As Lemann writes of the early rationale for the SAT, "Tests that require a student to write essays ... are highly susceptible to the subjective judgment of the grader and to the mood of the taker on the day of the test, so they have low reliability...
Klatell said Lemann was an ideal candidate to lead Columbia in this period of transition...