Word: slack
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Ralph Nadar's organization to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have raised serious doubts about the test makers' claims, but policies here at Harvard and elsewhere haven't changed significantly as a result. Two leading critics of the SAT, and of ETS itself, are Harvard-affiliated doctors Warner V. Slack and Douglas Porter, who have combined their respective backgrounds in computer medicine and psychology to produce a detailed critique of the test and its administrators. Their most important research on the issue appeared last year in the Harvard Educational Review, but Slack began the campaign in 1977 with...
Armed with extensive statistical evidence, culled mostly from ETS's own studies, Slack and Porter have since used every opportunity to preach that message. They acknowledge that their appearances at academic conferences and on radio and television talk shows haven't as yet turned admissions offices upside down; but like other test reformers, they point to the five-year battle over disclosure and predict ultimate success...
...Slack, an associate professor of Medicine, serves as co-director of the Computer Medicine Laboratory at Beth Isreal Hospital, where Porter is a principal associate. They share, in Porter's words, "a keen interest in the formation and use of questions" and work together on ways to broaden the computer's ability not only to store and transfer medical information, but also to diagnose illness and prescribe treatment by communicating with patients and doctors...
They also share a general skepticism of exercises described as "aptitude" tests and advertised as being impervious to specific preparation. When ETS challenged Slack's 1977 article with the findings of "all known studies," Slack and Porter requested copies of said studies and went to work checking up on the claims of the Princeton, N.J.-based firm. "We went in assuming the research they did wasn't all that good," says Slack. "What we didn't know was that they had consistently misrepresented and omitted information...
...benefactors. Says Brian O'Connell, president of Independent Sector, a coalition of 335 corporations and philanthropies: "I'd hate to turn off a President who's trying to encourage voluntary activity, but he should not exaggerate: we can't pick up all the slack...